Nowhere People

Before dawn. The phone rings just once. ‘Hello … ’ says Donato. ‘Were you asleep?’ Luisa asks. ‘I slept a bit, but I’d woken up.’ ‘Are you the guy in the costume?’ ‘I am.’ ‘I don’t know what to say … What’s going on?’ She hears him yawning down the line. ‘I’ll start with the latest news. I’ve received a summons to attend a Minor Offences Court.’ ‘What do they want from you?’ ‘I’m not really sure. There are a few articles from the Penal Code they refer to in the summons, but I don’t know what they mean.’ ‘I’m going to have to stay another month here in Goiânia. Which is why I want you to come here. I’ll buy your ticket as soon as I get off the phone, and after this hearing we’ll stay here together until the day I go back to Porto Alegre.’ ‘If you buy a ticket you’ll just be wasting your time, Luisa, your time and your money, because I’m not leaving Porto Alegre.’ ‘You’re going mad,’ Luisa lets slip. ‘Maybe I am. Let’s just check, on the fingers of my hand. One, the only woman I’ve ever had in my life is my stepmother; two, to prove the thesis of free will of the father who raised me I became the most un-Indian Indian you’ve ever seen; three, I grew up satisfied with the false story that my biological mother abandoned me; four, I have a biological father out there somewhere, someone I’m absolutely terrified of meeting; five, I can’t stop thinking about Maína, about the road where she lived … I don’t even know what right I have to have survived this long … ’ Luisa will hear the rest of this without saying a word (she will just listen). Tomorrow she has to wake up early because she is on a thesis defence panel and she hasn’t even finished reading the thesis, which, by the by, is not very good. Things really are turned upside down. Time is running out, but she’s happy in Goiânia and she has absolutely no desire to see him again (she feels free), she has absolutely no desire to come back.

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important days