Nowhere People

A child aged five barefoot in the sand, standing in front of the sea for the first time and directly under the noonday sun of a baking summer day like this one, needs a good while to understand what his eyes, unable to see clearly at distance, can make out. Which is why as Henrique bodysurfs the waves of Siriú beach, Donato remains petrified at the vastness of the turquoise horizon which outweighs any other image or object that gets in front of it, subtracting any image or figure to enter its enormity, just as he subtracts Henrique, on this their first trip outside São Paulo. The nanny has come along, too, sitting next to him on the back seat of the five-door Ipanema, making up stories while Henrique drives cautiously alone up front. Donato does whatever he can to be adorable during their playtime, and again when they colour in pieces of paper with a felt-tip pen, constructing Brazilian Air Force jets out of them, which right now are crammed into the wicker bag beside the blue bucket and the green rake on the strange solidity of the sand. Playing along with her games was, he found, a way of not being in the way; it was how he cooperated with Henrique, being cooperative, accepting the possibility of freeing himself from the blurred memories — indiscriminately shot through with lapses — that will soon cease to exist, of finding happiness in their cohabitation and accepting it as the counterpoint to something that is the palpable part of solitude (of a solitude that has also been his), yes, a thousand times yes, cooperating, being cooperative, inventing a kind of succinct order in this, a recreation that will be useful in every future, near or far, feeding the desire that one day, in one such future, he would be able to ignore it, since, like any other child, what Donato really wants is sheer normality and the normality of fear that comes with the destruction — the unrealisable destruction — of the televisual images in his head (the insignificant thing in the midst of which he recognises a foolproof code to bring him happiness, every day), pocket-sized monsters that become bigger monsters, spheres with the entire future of humankind and the universe depending on them, blows, fleeting in indescribable clothes, stimuli oscillating between the initial yellow and the most tragic red, and, then, all of a sudden, someone, someone he can’t make out, takes hold of him under his armpits and lifts him more than a metre in the air, and now he’s no longer looking at the sea (there is only the impenetrability of the sky) and he feels a reverse electricity running through him absurdly slowly as though gravity were propagating itself within another person, planted, uprooted and replanted in another person, and it isn’t a good match, it doesn’t fit, with the vertiginously fast and strange situation that is really a weight filling his chest, a cartoon at that precise moment when the guy’s plane has run out of fuel and is falling, under the potent emphasis of a Japanese soundscape; now, the culmination of the sky gives him the impression of being frozen in blue before his eyes, it’s distressing, a lack of completeness carrying the shock that he was not able to conceive and that (with another, a worse electricity) happens again when, as part of the same action, his feet sweep up to the height of his head, and he tries to scream, but his voice does not come out (and if it did come out, it would surely be someone else’s, the person he needs to be and whose speech is decisive, it’s the command from the pocket-sized monsters turning into bigger monsters), it is trapped in his stomach and surrounded by ways of giving up, and there’s no way to go any higher which is why now his body moves in a different way, and in the trajectory between all these moments, and still with difficulty, he, Donato, understands what it is to fall. ‘But Nato, you weigh a ton … ’ he hears a woman’s voice and, before thinking that his feet are about to touch the ground, he realises that he’s going up again, going up as though he were attached to springs, and he keeps moving, launching up in an acrobatic take off, like characters on tv, free, asking himself whether this is what life is like, whether these will be his powers and this his heroic initiation, twisting a hundred and eighty degrees before returning to the firm hands that catch him before he tumbles and keep him at the height of the woman’s face, the kind of woman from the television, but whom he cannot identify, just as he could not identify her voice. ‘Heavy and huge, my little Indian … ’ The woman looks right at him. ‘You don’t recognise Luisa,’ she says and finally brings him back to the ground. ‘I’ve brought you a present,’ and takes from the bag she has across her chest a carved wooden owl, some fifteen centimetres high. Donato says nothing, but he recognises the object that was once his toy. He holds out his little arms, almost jumps onto her, holding her tight with an aggression that is not his own (as though everything around him were diminishing in significance), and turns back towards the dunes and stays like that, immobile, intoxicated by the scent of wood, of vine-extract paint, of the earth and the fat that are still encrusted in it, and an anxiety comes to him that is mixed in with a televisual certainty of inhabiting the solid shape of the owl, flying within it just like the flying animations that he watches every morning on the tv in the living room of his father’s house, he wants to fly, to wind his way along the fibres of carved white cedar. The woman runs one of her hands over his head, with the other she waves to Henrique, who has already seen her, and asks: ‘Is Henrique giving you a lot of trouble, Juruna boy?’ The child is still dazed, trying in his own way to remember what the voice of the owl was like, the feminine voice that was inside the owl (or surrounding it), but the owl is mute and every moment more diminished in familiarity. ‘You don’t remember Luisa any more, do you? … Shame. Fourteen months is an eternity, I know … But you haven’t forgotten the owl. That’s good … ’ The woman looks back towards Henrique, he’s walking out of the sea now. ‘A new life … ’ She touches the tip of Donato’s nose and, without another word, walks over towards the edge of the water. Donato looks at the owl, then at the people who are nearby (there aren’t many, most of them sitting under their parasols), his gaze stops on the nanny, she’s about five metres away and wearing sunglasses, it’s impossible to know which direction she’s looking in, whether she has seen him or not. And he freezes, he can’t manipulate the details or draw them out, he cannot even retain them. Somewhere not too far from that seaside, very probably in Garopaba, there are tv sets turned on (Donato doesn’t know this) and on them a paediatrician is being interviewed on the midday news. Obligingly, she is explaining that a child’s motor functions, whether through movement or through touch, are what he uses to reinforce his visual attention, allowing him to explore and provoke his surroundings. Donato does not manipulate his surroundings, he doesn’t provoke his surroundings. Donato merely reflects upon being at the wonderful height of those dunes further off to his right, just like drawings, sandy giants, monsters offering up their breastplates, which might be where the bulk of the memories are to be found that he is not finding in the wooden owl. Henrique and the woman are keeping themselves occupied twenty-something metres from where Donato is standing. They are talking about him, even if he doesn’t realise it, because he has his back to them (and also because he’s no more than a child), articulating his thought as he has never before articulated it, spending the minutes as he has never spent them, before walking towards the vulnerability of that quite new landscape, before keeping his eyes fixed on the dunes, trying out a few steps, looking at the oblivious nanny, dropping the owl in the sand, and running, really running.