Nowhere People

It’s much more difficult than Maína had imagined, she will need clinical monitoring, other consultations like this one, this fifth consultation since Donato was born. She can barely control her impatience. Her difficulty communicating with the doctor, the same woman with whom Maína had been so cooperative at first, the doctor who, after asking Maína to turn off the radio cassette player, writes puerperal condition in large block letters on a little consultation slip and leaves it on the table for her. And this, like all the gestures that came before it, takes no account of the dread that Maína felt for the first few hours of the child’s life: the revulsion she felt as she held him in her arms. There has to be some other reason besides the expulsion of the placenta and the reaction this provokes in the nervous system, in the pituitary-hypothalamus axis, because of the sudden drop in hormone levels. This, too, was noted down, but not on the same bit of paper, not in today’s consultation. Nothing can explain Maína’s desire to harm the baby. Every single day: probationary days. Months waiting for the recontraction of the uterus. In search of moderation. Paying no attention to the doctor, she presses her son to her chest and tells him in Guarani that it’s time to find a way out. She says goodbye, knowing how hard the doctor is struggling to get over her ineptitude for attending to indigenous girls. If she could, she would never see her again. In the car park the driver grants her permission when Maína says she’s going to the ice cream place. ‘Fifteen minutes’ (in this space before meeting up with the FUNAI official in order to register the birth). She crosses the street, walks up to the entrance of the shop, climbs the steps. She goes straight over to the counter, shows the money she has brought (she is not a beggar), points to the tub of vanilla ice cream: one scoop, in a cone. She sits at the table by the little wall that separates the table area from the pavement; she has chosen the spot that any other customer would have chosen. She rearranges the baby in her lap. She smears his lips with the icy-cold mass. At this moment three schoolgirls make a noisy entrance. One of them stops, makes a face and approaches. Maína behaves as if to her equals and, as soon as they have introduced themselves, asks if the girl would like to hold Donato. The schoolgirl thanks her, says she isn’t really that good with children. Maína laughs and says, lying, that nothing could be easier than holding a child.

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three

The fifth of March, nineteen ninety-two, the sky is the best shade of blue, the Minuane wind that usually sweeps across the Southwest at this time of year still hasn’t made its aggressive appearance, the leaves are holding onto a green that as yet shows no signs of tiring. The number of cars starts to dwindle until there are just a few on the road (and only heading towards Porto Alegre). Now there isn’t a single car passing the encampment, and the BR-116 is a landscape taken from a magazine, and for the first time since Donato was born Maína is able to hear the tranquillity without the interruption of engines and wheels putting tonnes and tonnes of pressure on the tarmac. She puts some trainers on her son (he needs to get used to them). They head towards the middle of the road to look out at the horizon. They play. If any vehicle were to approach they would hear the sound from kilometres away. The little boy moves away from her hand and from one moment to the next, without any help, and as he has never done before, he runs off towards the south, runs until he feels he’s too far from his mother. They will stay there several minutes. Perhaps no one will tell them that a lorry carrying dangerous chemicals has overturned at the exit to one of the bridges further up and the highway police have had to stop the traffic in both directions. And she softens as she watches him: he cannot help but contrast with that damn horizon.

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honour words