Nowhere People

He stops in the space furthest to the left, a few metres from the toilets. The Indian girl gets out of the car. She seems surer of herself; she seems to have understood when he said that it would be better if she put on the dry clothes. She goes off to change. And from the back seat of the car he takes his law-trainee rucksack, pulls out the only t-shirt that’s fit to wear, a pair of shorts, a pair of sandals, too, and heads straight for the toilets. He takes longer than he meant to. When he comes out, he looks around in every direction trying to spot the girl. He sees no indication that she’s already come out. He goes into the restaurant. To the right there’s a snack counter. Savoury snacks from the oven, ham and cheese rolls, slices of cake, all displayed under glass covers. He chooses a seat near the window, far from the other customers, he asks for a cup of coffee with milk. His order is served. He tells the guy behind the counter that he’ll be back in a moment, he goes outside. She’s standing beside the CRT payphone wearing the clothes he gave her. He gestures for her to come in, she stays just where she is, out of place. He approaches, takes the carrier bags and the umbrella from her left hand and, when he tries to take the stack of newspapers and magazines that she is holding squeezed against her chest, she resists. Then he gently takes hold of her wrist and leads her in with him to where he’d been sitting. ‘Do you want a coffee?’ She declines with a shake of her head. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to insist, ‘A Coca-Cola?’ ‘Yes,’ she says (speaking to him for the first time). He orders the soft drink and a serving of buttered toast from the waitress who has taken the man’s place, an affected woman who has planted herself in front of them as though she were the manager of the place or even the owner. She doesn’t seem up for any friendly chitchat. ‘Name’ says the Indian girl, ‘Maína.’ Christ, he thinks, she doesn’t even speak Portuguese properly. When the waitress returns with the order, she dumps the plate with the toast down on the tablecloth. Paulo makes a point of saying thank you. Maína remains immobile, holding on to the stack of papers. After a few moments, in which she takes no initiative, he pours the drink into the glass just recently put there and pushes the plate towards her. ‘It’s for you. You must be hungry, right?’ She puts the newspapers and magazines down on the chair next to her, picks up the half-slice of toast, takes her first bite. ‘What’s all that for?’ Paulo asks, pointing his index finger towards the pile of newspapers and magazines. ‘On the road … was throw away,’ she replies as soon as she has swallowed. ‘You like reading?’ he asks. ‘Got them … ’ she hesitates as she speaks, ‘keep … learned at school. Speaking Portuguese … little … read little. No much practice.’ He sees how beautiful the girl is, how graceful her face, even when she is uneasy. ‘And how old are you?’ he goes on. She replies with a shy smile, says nothing. ‘Your age?’ he insists. ‘I’m twenty-one … ’ holding all his fingers stretched out, twice, plus his index finger on its own. ‘And you?’ he points at her. ‘How old?’ He isn’t coming across as threatening. ‘Fourteen,’ she replies. What am I doing? he thinks, aware that the waitress-manager has brought about a small revolt in their surroundings and now the fourteen customers, all of whom look like Italian immigrants, are staring in his direction, judging him, having already made a note of the Beetle’s license plate, ready to report him should news break of the misfortune to befall that Indian girl, any Indian girl, in the coming days. God, talk about naivety, Paulo. ‘Too bad,’ he says to himself, as he watches her eat and recalls the seminar on the fortieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that he took part in last year (he was very interested in the young woman who organised it, a Uruguayan militant from Amnesty International) and the panel on which a tribal chief described the terrible living conditions of the indigenous ethnic groups in the southern part of the country. The chief used the expression ‘the Calvary of the indigenous ethnic groups’ before talking about the ludicrous number of families living alongside the highways because of conflicts within the villages, because of a shortage of land, because of a lack of space. Paulo hadn’t the faintest idea that this was precisely the case of the Indian girl sitting in front of him now.