Nowhere People

Months have passed since that time on the beach, the woman has a name, but the name is not spoken by him very often (it’s a name that still does not fit in the apartment where he lives with Henrique and the new nanny, a name he still does not want). She, the woman, can’t decide whether to come and live with them in São Paulo, she’s asked for a bit of time to think about it, whether she is really going to leave Rio de Janeiro, the kind of life it is possible to have only there. Donato knows how to listen to her, he learns a lot from listening to her talk, she is quick and unpredictable, Henrique is not as unpredictable. Which is why it is Cássia, the personal assistant Henrique employed when they rented the Sumaré apartment, who takes him in today for his first day at pre-school. Sending him to a bilingual institution is perhaps the better and cheaper option, but by enrolling him in this one, where English is the main language and seventy per cent of the places are given to the children of foreigners living in Brazil, Henrique believes he is making sure the child will suffer less. Donato will learn English and improve his Portuguese at the same time, he will have to cope alongside other children who are also having to adapt. Henrique, his father, is not sure about this decision, but he wants the best opportunities for the son he has chosen. It wasn’t easy getting the letter of enrolment, Donato will know that one day. If Henrique had not been advising a group of north American industries with an interest in the improvement of Brazil’s patent law, a group whose spokesperson is the vice-president of the school’s parent-teacher association, it is unlikely that the headmistress would have made an exception. Of course, there are requirements, a number of requirements that are far from simple. As the admissions coordinator emphasised, the school management’s greatest fear is that Donato should end up holding back his fellow students’ progress. So they agreed that he should receive intensive coaching outside classes to compensate for his linguistic deficiencies, and at the end of May he would undergo an assessment. The word change is one of the words Donato understands best. Hardly taking into account his young age (as an Olympic gymnastics trainer would, for example, with his kids, or the teacher of a prodigy just out of nappies in search of possible musical genius), Henrique told him that a full life demands big changes, he said that everything is ready, but that the change will require commitment from them both. Donato feels his love and really tries hard to follow him. And when the taxi stops outside the school, Cássia asks the driver to wait for her, she will pay afterwards, she knows they’re late, she walks with Donato to the reception desk where there is a young woman who speaks to them in English, the welcome greeting makes Cássia uncomfortable (she is quite clever, able, but her English isn’t that good) and makes her say merely, unsure whether her Portuguese is being understood, that Donato is a new pupil. The young woman immediately starts speaking Portuguese with quite a heavy, strange foreign accent, excusing herself saying that the children there, on the whole, have a good grasp of English and it was only force of habit that stopped her from welcoming them in Portuguese. Cássia cups Donato’s cheeks with her two hands and wishes him good luck. Donato briefly smiles back at her. The girl from the school takes him by the shoulder and leads him towards the classroom. They walk along corridors. They stop outside the room where his lesson is taking place, his chaperone knocks on the door. It’s not long before there is an opening, and he sees his future classmates sitting in groups around hexagonal tables. The teacher looks at him and smiles. The young woman from reception goes in with him, the teacher has already been briefed about the particularities of this new student and, at least this time, she addresses him in Portuguese. After announcing his name to the rest of the pupils, she shows him where he is going to sit. The table she is pointing to has three children at it (it is the only table in the room that isn’t full), he doesn’t look at their faces, the one who is next to him, a girl with black skin, touches his arm and says in a French accent that her name Rener, but her nickname is Brown Sugar, he looks at her with a smile and, in Guarani, says it is good to be there, the girl also smiles and says his hair is a lovely colour. The teacher walks round handing out blank paper and crayons, the one he gets is dark grey. It is his first assignment, and he completes it easily because all he has to do is do the same as the other three at the table. The minutes fly by. Half the morning had passed and it was break time and all the children went to an enclosed playground, where there were toys that needed to be played with in twos or threes, team against team. Most of them behaved as though this was all theirs, it was their property, as though they had practised the night before or were using some kind of telepathy, because they were so exact and integrated as they coordinated their activities on the seesaws, on the slide, on the monkey bars, on the rocking beam, on the swings, on the jungle gym, and on the wireframe rockets, the same pieces of equipment that appear in the background of the photo of the whole class taken at the end of that same morning after the teacher handed them small jigsaws to assemble and stick onto a piece of card as homework (in the photo, Rener is looking straight at him, she’s beautiful, slender, completely unembarrassed; she insists that it was that day she gave him the nickname Curumim, from the Tupi-Guarani word meaning a boy, but that is not true). That morning was the closest it was possible to get to the phrase ‘group bonding’ in the whole of that year of nineteen ninety-five. It was only the following day, when the teacher handed out more complex activities to do, that he understood that it wouldn’t work simply to watch what was happening and copy it. As the weeks passed, language quickly stopped being a rarely used tool. And on the day of the assessment, overloaded with unknown words, with gaps that had no tactile equivalents, Donato understood that he needed to be exactly as his father wanted.