Nowhere People

Two in the afternoon. Donato wakes up, goes down to the kitchen, fills a glass with water, drinks it and immediately spots the brown envelope in the middle of the living room. He walks over to it, picks it up off the floor. On the side that had been face down were the words: ‘TIME TO GROW UP.’ He opens it: inside there’s a two-page letter. There is an apology first. Then a set of instructions. He is to go up to her bedroom, get the suitcase that is still closed with the airline company tag attached, open it. She says in one of the lines that follow that perhaps he should start with the exercise book and then move on to the DVD, since there’s no television or Betamax video-player on which to watch the tapes that are there, nor a tape-deck to play the cassettes. There are also the two letters, one of which had been addressed to her and the other to Henrique. Everything about his biological mother and about the three-year-old him.

He opens the exercise book, reads as far as he can. He goes back to the Polaroid photograph, looks at the two of them: Maína and Paulo. Her face hidden behind the mask, the face that appeared in the edited footage on the DVD (Luisa explained in the letter that she had transferred them from the Betamax tape to a DVD in Recife (Recife as a place of transit) and then edited them to leave only the minutes in which Maína appears. If he wants to see the rest he will have to get hold of a machine for copying the tapes, which are now museum pieces) and a few drawings that are in the exercise book. His face is also in a drawing in the exercise book, but it’s any old face, there’s no way of knowing. Donato gets the computer, inserts the DVD into the drive. In her letter Luisa says the footage was recorded when Maína was a little younger than he is today. He sees her moving, smiling anxiously: he can barely keep his eyes on the monitor. She is beautiful, the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. Biological mother. Mãe. The voice he tried so hard to hear in the wooden owl. He opens his Gmail and writes to Luisa. ‘You have no idea how much I hate you for this.’

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vagueness

He had to go to a place called Galeria do Rosário to get hold of a Sony machine (which according to the shop assistant was made in nineteen eighty-eight) and also a ten-inch colour television. He was doing the right thing because transferring the tapes to DVD would have been more expensive. He watches; he finds nothing worthwhile, except for the minutes showing the three women, his grandmother and his two aunts, the place by the roadside, where they might still be today, although he suspects not.

It wouldn’t be hard to find Paulo. In the exercise book there are the contact details for this woman called Angélica in Pelotas. One thing might lead on to another, they might meet, but Donato thinks not.

He buys a cheap tape-recorder. Paulo’s voice appears in just a few places on the cassette; it’s a considerate sort of voice. Paulo’s voice will become a kind of nightmare within his nightmares. Waking up alone at home in the middle of the night will be a sort of training for dealing with his own cowardice (while it is transforming into something else, into a duty he will have to fulfil), everything is only a question of learning. That’s something he’s good at. Paulo’s voice is outside the owl.

He walks the city. He reads the exercise book over and over again. He reads the letters that Maína left for Henrique and Luisa. It was Maína who asked Luisa not to give him the material till he was older, she was the one who asked Henrique to adopt him and never to reveal to him the way she had decided to die (he already knows, Luisa has told him in the penultimate paragraph of the letter). He studies whatever he can find in the way of books, dissertations, theses, newspaper and magazine articles about the Guarani people in the state. It takes him nearly a month. In that time, during which he doesn’t answer Luisa’s phone calls or respond to her emails, he starts feeling a nostalgic longing that, having no object, he never imagined anyone could possibly feel.

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extract of a nightmare between two grown-up people