Nowhere People

The seventeenth of December. Two recent polls have confirmed the low popularity and almost total lack of approval of Margaret Thatcher among the British people. Steven Soderbergh, aged twenty-six, has shot the film Sex, Lies and Videotape in five weeks spending little more than a million dollars. The Berlin Wall no longer exists, and the front page of every newspaper is quite certain: the western world will never be the same again. The mausoleum housing Lenin’s body in Moscow is closed for renovation. The French are still going through their endless programme of commemorations for the two hundredth anniversary of the Revolution. A few hours from now, according to today’s issue of the Observer magazine, a cartoon called The Simpsons will air for the first time on American tv. Paulo has already lost track of how long he has been in London: the tally of days does not reflect what he has already experienced here. He has lost the habit of speaking Portuguese (common though it is to meet people from Brazil, Portugal, Mozambique, Angola, even some from East Timor and Macao); he has become a squatter, not the altruistic kind but one of those who break into buildings they find empty on council estates and transfer possession for prices that vary between eight hundred and two thousand pounds. He negotiates with people who don’t dare to take a risk themselves, who are in London to work, to save and send money back to their family in some godforsaken place in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the western part of South America. He works alone; eventually he hires two look-outs, guys from Camberwell. He never breaks into places for Brazilians, he doesn’t want to get a reputation among Brazilians (whatever it might be), there’s nothing to be gained by that. Brazilians talk too much. He won’t do break-ins for Italians or Argentines, either. Since the end of October he has been buying Brazilian weeklies from a little shop in Bayswater. News from Brazil doesn’t help him to live better (those months when he kept himself distant were the good ones), yet he needs it. How else would he know that, at the start of November, a favela in São Paulo rechristened Nova República had collapsed under the weight of more than forty metres of rubble from the landfill being built next to it? (Nova República’s former name was Núcleo Getsêmani; the change of name was due to the euphoria experienced in the wake of Tancredo Neves’ victory in the electoral college, bringing to a close, according to the political scientists, the country’s military dictatorship.) Whole families were buried forty metres under. Nova República is in Morumbi, one of São Paulo’s richest neighbourhoods, home of the tv presenter Silvio Santos, who did everything he could to run as a candidate in the presidential race and who did end up being a candidate for a few days but was unable to remain in the contest following a decision by the Electoral Court. The residents knew that such a disaster was imminent. Those who survived said they’d had nowhere else to go. Paulo can’t forget the news, this particular piece of news, and still asks himself how it’s possible that some people should be so fixed in one place. Paulo can’t sleep. It is election day. Paulo is standing outside the Brazilian consulate in London, he is drunk enough to have gone there in search of news. People are waving Workers’ Party flags on the pavement outside the building, the liveliest are shouting slogans, they say the Workers’ Party doesn’t need to pay for its militants because the party’s militancy works from the heart, the time has come for a change, the time has come for a decent minimum wage, for honesty and transparency, time for the workers to choose the country’s direction. Paulo could have arranged things so that he would be eligible to vote, like those people are doing, but the deadline lapsed, he let it lapse. He can’t get involved, nothing new about that, and he cannot tear himself away from the consulate. All that joy, all that hope: love, love locked up in manly breasts, like it says in the anthem. Paulo was always impressed at the number of people who became militants motivated by love. There is barely any traffic on that street, the only activity being that of the Brazilians, the sound of the conversations in Brazilian Portuguese that fill up the gaps between the buildings. Paulo stays until voting closes (arms crossed, unnoticed, contrite), he stays till people have dispersed, he stays till not many others have stayed, in conversation with one another as though what they said really could affect what was going to happen from now on.