Nowhere People

Luisa has been on medication for more than a week and it would probably be wise to refrain from any activities that require good reflexes, such as driving Henrique’s Honda Civic, in which the two of them are now sitting, travelling at more than a hundred and twenty kilometres per hour down Anhanguera. She holds the steering wheel and drives as if it were her own car. He watches her: her movements and the expression in her voice make her seem a stranger, a stranger he wouldn’t know how to deal with. She says she is not going to accept a settlement, she says they have to trust the Brazilian legal system. ‘If someone made a mistake, no doubt about it, they’re going to pay.’ Donato looks out at the landscape racing past the hard shoulder, tries to avoid the complicity of his presence with Luisa’s, just as he has always intuitively avoided his informal kinship to her all these years; he tries to avoid it before, as well as becoming a stranger, she becomes disdainful (because of their having reconciled in such an abrupt and Siamese way). ‘Your father’s Porto Alegre friends are going to want to kill me,’ she says. Donato doesn’t reply, but turns back to look at her (letting his silence seem an ill-at-ease way of keeping the peace). So she goes on: ‘They don’t all read the papers, they don’t all pay attention to disasters, they aren’t all working on the assumption that I might think they will be out of our lives for good now … ’ She rolls her window all the way down, sticks her head out. This lasts just a few seconds. When she returns to her proper sitting position, she sighs, a sigh of satisfaction. ‘I need to get some petrol.’ She drives on for a few kilometres, indicates right, leaves the road, enters a Texaco service station. ‘I’m not sure I’m going to be able to stay in this city … ’ She stops beside one of the fuel pumps. There’s an attendant gesturing to her to move the car up to the pump in front. ‘I’ll have to get out,’ Donato tells her. ‘Wait. I have a proposition to make … ’ she says, before putting the car into gear and starting up slowly. ‘You graduate from high school,’ and she brakes again, stopping the car just before the pump, ‘and in January we’ll … ’ Donato unlocks the car door. ‘What’s it to be, miss?’ the pump attendant asks her. ‘I need to go to the toilet,’ Donato says and opens the door. ‘Just a moment … ’ she gets confused. ‘Excuse me a moment, Luisa, sorry … ’ Donato says and gets out of the car. ‘I’ll wait here for you,’ she says. He walks over towards the convenience store and disappears from view. ‘Petrol — the Super … Fill it up,’ she tells the attendant. He fills the tank, checks the oil. The boy is taking his time. Luisa pays with a credit card and, when she is thinking about heading over to the shop, to check that he’s all right, she is surprised by the sight of the girl in the Texaco uniform. ‘Miss, sorry to bother you, but the young man who arrived with you asked me to tell you that he’s got a taxi home and he’ll meet you there.’ The girl is looking over towards the convenience store. ‘Could you tell me whether he … never mind.’ The pump attendant asks whether she wants her windscreen cleaned, but she barely hears him. She’s going to drive to Avenida Lorena, call up a girlfriend (but which?), get a coffee at Suplicy, then a drink, two, three and find some hotel to stay at, so Donato is left alone to understand just as quickly as possible what it means to look after yourself; but she is playing this scenario out in her head in order to lessen the pain not of having lost the man she has lived with for more than fifteen years and loved unconditionally, but of having been abandoned by the only person who could have been there with her, supporting her with a bit of decency through the distress of not being able to imagine how to wake up tomorrow morning and from where to wrench the strength to admit that from here on in there would be absence, a new absence, a solid block which refused to fit into reality.