Nowhere People (2 page)

A few kilometres further down the road and refusing to admit that, for a moment, his nerve had failed him and that the sight of the girl had struck him like almost nothing else in his life, Paulo imagines that some lorry (even though not a single vehicle has passed him going in the opposite direction) must have stopped already and offered her a lift. He goes on for a few hundred metres, pulls over, turns off the engine. Takes a deep breath, twists round towards the back seat of the Beetle, pulls off the dark grey cloth covering the various bags holding the clothes from the theatre company, opens one, takes out a white face towel that looks unused, a sweater and a pair of tracksuit bottoms, size S. He also finds a little retractable umbrella in the worst sort of green, a luminous lime colour. He looks ahead, then again into the rearview mirror, starts the engine, switches the indicator left and gets back onto the southbound lane, keeping his speed slow because of the storm that is getting ever stronger and the worn-out tyres which threaten to send the vehicle skidding on the water. He feels put out, a feeling that gets worse as the number of kilometres increases: three hundred and sixty, three hundred and sixty-one, three hundred and sixty-two, sixty-three, four, five, six, three hundred and sixty-seven. (He hadn’t realised he had driven so
far.)

She is in the same place, in the same position. He tells himself to take care, not to startle her. She looks up and gets to her feet, picks up her plastic bags, taking a few steps back as she realises that the car is going to pull over. He stops beside her, lowers the window halfway while trying to appear as unthreatening as possible, asks her to get in (as though addressing a foreigner with an incomplete grasp of Portuguese), says he’ll give her a lift, perhaps up to the nearest petrol station or the highway police watch-post. She doesn’t answer, looking him straight in the eye. He insists, but she remains fearful. ‘It’s not going to work, these types of good intentions just do not work … ’ he mutters quietly before picking up the umbrella and getting out of the car. As soon as she sees him opening the door, she crosses the road. Once on the other side she begins to walk hurriedly south. For a moment he stops where he is, there in front of the Volkswagen, watching her move away (the rain and its weight cover him with deafness and mineral obliteration). He returns to the Beetle, takes the towel and the items of clothing and, cursing uninterruptedly, without any clue what he might lose or gain by doing this, he leaves the car and goes after
her.

If, to make matters worse, the National Highway Police were to pull over wanting to know what all this was about, Paulo would say he had no very clear reason. He would confide to them that, these last three years, almost everything he’d done had been done out of a contagious inertia, a blind freedom that needed to be exercised urgently not only for himself, but for all the Brazilians who, having lived through the height of the military regime, now need to promise themselves that they can be just and emancipated and happy, and so much so that they will accept the most obvious determinism by which enemies can be easily recognised and by which the truth is a discovery that is on your side, comfortable, destined to hold out against all things. A line of argument that, if uprooted, placed into the context of a tv comedy show, would be just as useless and pathetic as silence, or as finding that, at such a moment, upon realising that the headlights were still on and the Beetle’s engine running, the sensible thing to do might be to walk the hundred, hundred-and-something metres back to the car and turn off the lights, shut off the engine, find a suitable plastic bag in which to wrap the pieces of clothing and the towel, lock the doors, put the key away in his trouser pocket, and only then, with the reassurance of the police authorities (and the applause of the studio audience) resume his chasing after the Indian girl. He stands transfixed in this anguish of speculation and, when he refocuses, he looks south and is surprised at how far she has already got (he’ll really have to make an effort if he is to catch up with her). He looks back at the car. Now, holding the umbrella with the same hand that has the clothes, sets off at a faster pace until, once he has come very close to her, he spots how the Indian girl is looking discreetly over her shoulder and slowing down, and a few metres before he reaches her she turns abruptly towards him. He waits a moment, catching his breath, holding out the umbrella and bits of material for her to take. ‘I’m just trying to help.’ He points his index finger at the things he is holding in his other hand and then points at her. ‘It’s dry clothes … Dry clothes … ’ She takes them, and the umbrella, too. ‘I can take you to some shelter, but if you don’t want to, that’s fine, I’ll leave you here. I’m going back to the car,’ he gestures with his thumb. ‘If you want a lift, if you want me to take you,’ he emphasises this, ‘just come with me’
–
and he uses his fingers to mime a person walking towards the car. The Indian girl looks right at him. In the middle of all that rain, he feels
–
just glancingly
–
that they won’t come to any solution. And he tries for the last time. ‘My name’s Paulo … What’s yours?’ She doesn’t reply. He imagines that perhaps she can’t hear him properly, because there’s this distance between the two of them and the noise of the rain on the nylon surface of the umbrella. He realises there is nothing left for him to do, turns back towards the car. He walks twenty metres or so before looking back: she is following him. When he reaches the vehicle he gets in, leaving the passenger door open. She stops beside the car and gets in a muddle trying to close the umbrella. He wonders whether or not he ought to help her and just waits. Then she sits down beside him, her breathing hurried, her eyes fixed ahead of her. A few moments later she closes the door, he starts up the engine and pulls out slowly towards the north. In the eight-kilometre stretch to the restaurant they sit in silence. He keeps his window lowered (because he himself needs to be unthreatening) and the inside of the car gets wet from the
rain.

He stops in the space furthest to the left, a few metres from the toilets. The Indian girl gets out of the car. She seems surer of herself; she seems to have understood when he said that it would be better if she put on the dry clothes. She goes off to change. And from the back seat of the car he takes his law-trainee rucksack, pulls out the only t-shirt that’s fit to wear, a pair of shorts, a pair of sandals, too, and heads straight for the toilets. He takes longer than he meant to. When he comes out, he looks around in every direction trying to spot the girl. He sees no indication that she’s already come out. He goes into the restaurant. To the right there’s a snack counter. Savoury snacks from the oven, ham and cheese rolls, slices of cake, all displayed under glass covers. He chooses a seat near the window, far from the other customers, he asks for a cup of coffee with milk. His order is served. He tells the guy behind the counter that he’ll be back in a moment, he goes outside. She’s standing beside the CRT payphone wearing the clothes he gave her. He gestures for her to come in, she stays just where she is, out of place. He approaches, takes the carrier bags and the umbrella from her left hand and, when he tries to take the stack of newspapers and magazines that she is holding squeezed against her chest, she resists. Then he gently takes hold of her wrist and leads her in with him to where he’d been sitting. ‘Do you want a coffee?’ She declines with a shake of her head. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to insist, ‘A Coca-Cola?’ ‘Yes,’ she says (speaking to him for the first time). He orders the soft drink and a serving of buttered toast from the waitress who has taken the man’s place, an affected woman who has planted herself in front of them as though she were the manager of the place or even the owner. She doesn’t seem up for any friendly chitchat. ‘Name’ says the Indian girl, ‘Maína.’
Christ
, he thinks,
she doesn’t even speak Portuguese properly.
When the waitress returns with the order, she dumps the plate with the toast down on the tablecloth. Paulo makes a point of saying thank you. Maína remains immobile, holding on to the stack of papers. After a few moments, in which she takes no initiative, he pours the drink into the glass just recently put there and pushes the plate towards her. ‘It’s for you. You must be hungry, right?’ She puts the newspapers and magazines down on the chair next to her, picks up the half-slice of toast, takes her first bite. ‘What’s all that for?’ Paulo asks, pointing his index finger towards the pile of newspapers and magazines. ‘On the road … was throw away,’ she replies as soon as she has swallowed. ‘You like reading?’ he asks. ‘Got them … ’ she hesitates as she speaks, ‘keep … learned at school. Speaking Portuguese … little … read little. No much practice.’ He sees how beautiful the girl is, how graceful her face, even when she is uneasy. ‘And how old are you?’ he goes on. She replies with a shy smile, says nothing. ‘Your age?’ he insists. ‘I’m twenty-one … ’ holding all his fingers stretched out, twice, plus his index finger on its own. ‘And you?’ he points at her. ‘How old?’ He isn’t coming across as threatening. ‘Fourteen,’ she replies.
What am I doing?
he thinks, aware that the waitress-manager has brought about a small revolt in their surroundings and now the fourteen customers, all of whom look like Italian immigrants, are staring in his direction, judging him, having already made a note of the Beetle’s license plate, ready to report him should news break of the misfortune to befall that Indian girl, any Indian girl, in the coming days.
God, talk about naivety, Paulo
. ‘Too bad,’ he says to himself, as he watches her eat and recalls the seminar on the fortieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that he took part in last year (he was very interested in the young woman who organised it, a Uruguayan militant from Amnesty International) and the panel on which a tribal chief described the terrible living conditions of the indigenous ethnic groups in the southern part of the country. The chief used the expression ‘the Calvary of the indigenous ethnic groups’ before talking about the ludicrous number of families living alongside the highways because of conflicts within the villages, because of a shortage of land, because of a lack of space. Paulo hadn’t the faintest idea that this was precisely the case of the Indian girl sitting in front of him
now.

Living by the side of the BR-116, without her older sister, who vanished from her life more than a year ago, trying to keep her spirits up, weaving baskets out of
cipó
vines, playing as best she could with her two younger sisters, allowing each day to be overtaken by the next, going unnoticed (even since becoming the target of her mother’s increased attention, for having twice attempted suicide: the first time, a little over two years ago, the week after a friend who lived in a neighbouring encampment had died for reasons as yet unexplained on a Sunday night when he had apparently gone off for a football match between the local teams; and the second, less than six months ago, when she was sure that she could not bear their difference from the non-Indians, that she would become a melancholy adult just like her mother). Now and again she hears of her forebears and of the indigenous people’s resistance in the lands to the south. She even heard this from three non-Indian, Guarani-speaking students who used to show up from time to time at the village (in the days when her family still lived in the village). She looks around her, she sees no resistance at all. Her little sister is playing in the soot, in the dust from the rubber tyres. She goes as far as contemplating how she might kill her before the girl is able to understand her own misfortune. She would have no remorse because she knows
–
and Maína does everything she can to believe it
–
that she would be going to a better
life
. Maína believes in the soul, even though she herself cannot imagine what the abstraction that reveals the soul must be like. Every night she dreams of someplace different, where there are no grown-ups or, at least, no adults like her father who took off when she was nine years old. Without him, things got complicated for her mother and the four children; they had to leave the village. Maína doesn’t know quite what to do: she has never been in a restaurant like this restaurant; she has never been in a restaurant at all. A few weeks earlier Maína had started to feel afraid, that’s why she ran away. Once Maína dreamed the image of God, he had a fragile body and came out of his hiding place to be with her. For a moment Maína thought this guy might be God or a spirit. What non-Indian would stop on the road and treat her this well? She finishes the snack that he’s ordered for her. Now she just needs to use a few words to make him understand that she wishes to get back into the raincloud-coloured car and accompany him wherever he would like to take her, even if it takes hours, the whole day, until she has invented a language that will work for them both, a language from the place of God and the spirits that like to pass themselves off as non-Indians, until she manages to close her eyes tight and (perhaps repeating the choice made by her older sister) disappear.

The road sign read ‘
START OF ROADSIDE INDIGENOUS CAMP (NEXT 28 KM
)’, and Paulo has already asked her three times where she would like to get out. She limits her replies to the same gesture with her hand to keep on going. So this time, which would be the fourth time, Paulo indicates right, pulling the car over in front of one of the huts. ‘Sorry, you’re going to have to get out.’ He articulates the words carefully and deliberately. She doesn’t reply. ‘I can’t take you any further,’ he says. She doesn’t budge. ‘Come on, Maína. You know it isn’t safe to be going around, just … ’ he can’t find the words, ‘just around like this, with a stranger. It’s dangerous.’ He gets out, walks around the car, opens her door. ‘You can keep the clothes. I just … ’ And she interrupts him. ‘Give lift to the city. Then I comes back alone. I come back, you let me.’
Well, Paulo, you begged her and now you’ve got what you asked for.
‘It’s just I can’t … ’ Without getting up, she says a choked please. Paulo looks around them, doesn’t see anyone, the hut they had stopped alongside gives every indication of being empty, no sign of activity. The girl is at a breaking point, weakened into an absolute conviction that she must run away and that if she fails at this moment she will end up in some other car or headed for some worse destiny. The moments pass; they are part of a test that intoxicates him. This morning when he turned on the hotel radio tuned to a local FM station they were playing a hit by Legião Urbana:
every day when I wake up, I no longer have the time that’s gone.
The same line that for much of the journey he’d had in his head and which is now the imaginary soundtrack getting in the way of his making a decision. His clothes dampening, the rain propels him on.
But I have so much time, we have all the time in the world.
There can’t be many things worse than her spending the rest of her adolescence and her life stuck on the verge of that filthy road. His house in Porto Alegre is empty, his parents are away, his sister is spending the whole year on an exchange in the United States. He closes the passenger door, resolved to bring her back tomorrow morning at the latest (that’s when the imaginary voice of Renato Russo starts belting out the chorus).