Nowhere People

Thirteen years old. Usually he sits all the way over to the right, at the fourth desk from the front. He spends the twenty-five minutes of his break almost always in the same way. The final destination is the library. The itinerary is simple: the bell rings, he waits a minute till most of the class have left, he takes the CD player Henrique gave him out of his rucksack, he always brings a pearl from his collection of more than a thousand discs that are kept in his living room (today he has brought Surfer Rosa by some guys called Pixies, a pretty old band who inspired Nirvana, the supreme rulers of the universe). Then he takes his regular walk around the playground under the covered walkways. He will spend a minute or two with the groups of boys, always small groups, with whom he gets along; one of these groups is made up of Américo, Ramon and Julián, this latter a Bolivian, pale and feeble, with grey-blue eyes, a potential candidate for his best friend. He doesn’t waste more than five minutes on this circuit, for the time being he moves on to his small daily dose of obsession moment: tracking down Rener wherever she is, even if it’s just for a glance and a wave from afar. Since last year they’ve been in different classes, it’s one of the school’s strategies, to mix up the classes in order to increase the students’ sociability. This time he didn’t need to look for her. She runs over with a CD to give him, it’s Serge Gainsbourg’s Love on the Beat, she says this is who he should be spending his time on and not with the Nine Inch Nails of this world (he doesn’t even like Nine Inch Nails). Donato looks at her gratefully, puts the CD in his jacket pocket, asks whether she might want to go with him to the library, she laughs and says that if she ever chooses to trade her break on a sunny day for the library he should have her locked up in a madhouse, she gives him a kiss on the cheek and returns to her circle of girlfriends. Donato walks, then, to the start of the corridor that leads out of the school, turns left and walks on to the library. This is his refuge. Saying hello to the two women working at the counter and the head librarian is his refuge, mixing up the names on the spines of the books is his refuge, thinking that he understands the poems by Brazilian writers is his refuge, that he understands Walt Whitman and Camões, who are not well served in the classroom, is his refuge. Refuge. Here he has the sensation that he is not wasting time and (squeezed together in the corridors with the other students, the interested ones and the ones who most probably have just adopted a strategy of invisibility like his) he also has the sensation of possessing some kind of autobiographical authority. Here he doesn’t need to submit himself to trials of strength, charisma, leadership, shrewdness, humour, popularity, here he doesn’t need to discover how much he resembles his classmates, the future leaders of their countries, here in the impersonality of the iron shelves and the silence that has seeped into the rest of the furniture, he spends the only minutes in which he allows himself to feel afraid.