Nowhere People

‌

Luisa and her reason

Nineteen ninety-three (Luisa never returned to Rio de Janeiro).

The doctor they interviewed weeks earlier at the meeting with representatives of the National Association for Indigenist Action in Porto Alegre spoke emphatically about that Indian girl, aged seventeen or eighteen, called Maína, about how they really needed to meet her in order to understand properly what it is that modern life is doing to the current generation of Indians in Rio Grande do Sul, to people who have never before had to live with all this technology and so little space and such poor conditions. They no longer have the recipes for medicines and traditions for healing from decades past, they don’t have places where they can find leaves, roots, herbs, there is no jungle and there is no countryside, there is only this relationship of always failed rapprochements, and the distrust they feel about accepting the medicines offered to them by non-Indians. ‘You people have a translator, don’t you?’ the doctor asks. ‘You should start in the villages, but do also speak to the ones who live on the roadside, do speak to the younger women, they have a lot more to say, specially the one I mentioned. Don’t forget, write it down.’ And Luisa wrote it down. Luisa has been telling Henrique that they need to hire an Indian secretary. Henrique, who is actually Henrique Magalhães Becker, eleven years older than her and a trained geographer with two master’s degrees, in Human Geography and Statistics, and two doctorates, in Management and Geography, her professor in one of the extra modules she made herself attend during the master’s since she wasn’t getting as involved in the Porto Alegre social scene as she had planned and as a result had plenty of time left to devote to her studies; Henrique, the man of multiple allegiances, confident and practical, who, in that first semester of nineteen ninety-one (and already three seminars into the module by the time she came to give her presentation) became the love of her life. And she, Luisa Vasconcelos Lange, did not rest until she had managed to take him to bed, until she had made him fall in love with her and hold her hand in front of the other master’s students and professors on the postgraduate course and invite her, as soon as she had defended her dissertation with honours, to live with him in his house, which, as the only grandchild, Henrique had inherited from his maternal grandfather, a narrow building on a long strip of land with a great patio, a barbecue, two plum trees and a vegetable garden round the back; number eight hundred and thirty-nine Cristovão Colombo, near the corner with Ramiro Barcelos. The problem isn’t with the Indians they are going to interview. The translator is excellent, a white boy currently doing a master’s in Language and Literature at the Santa Catarina Federal University, but, hard-working as he might be, he won’t be able to help them map out the Indians’ profile in the minute detail — using audiovisual media to make a documentary record — that they have been hired by the Getúlio Vargas Foundation to provide, mapping the broadest picture they can of the status of the Kaingang and Guarani Indians in Rio Grande do Sul, an undertaking that will require three months of intensive fieldwork and a further two tackling data, recent bibliographies, press cuttings, surveys in partnership with public institutions, and the preparation of documents and reports. Luisa still has not understood why Henrique agreed to take this project on, the money is not much compared to what he is used to earning, she imagines he took the opportunity to give himself a break from the work he has been doing for big corporations; he won’t earn what he hoped to, but he will be able to travel around the state, understand the lives of a people about whom nobody ever talks (he once said to Luisa that despite his Germanic biotype he has Indian blood; his great-grandfather, a Chilean Indian, was abandoned at the entrance to a farm in the south of Chile, brought up by a family of Spaniards as though he were their biological son, and ended up on the border of Uruguay and Rio Grande do Sul, where he married an Italian widow who owned an inn and with whom he had four children, among them a daughter with very light skin, Henrique’s grandmother, who came to study in Porto Alegre, married a businessman from the Lageado neighbourhood and had just one child: his father); this was the closest he came to what could be called a break from the consultant’s routine he has devised for himself.