by Paulo Scott
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 anniv
ersary 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).
In Novo Hamburgo the rain is easing a bit and that should make things easier, but the coordinates Manoela has given him are not exact (the assistant’s house isn’t where she marked it on the map she drew on a piece of paper with the Pelotas hotel logo on it; nobody knows the alley she marked, swearing it couldn’t be easier to find). Beaten-earth roads, the wrong directions taking Paulo down increasingly steep and pot-holed slopes, getting further and further away from the built-up part of town. He has a phone number for Manoela’s assistant, but he hasn’t seen a payphone to call from in several minutes. Things are only no worse because the little Indian girl smiles peacefully each time he turns to her, as though the whole mess were completely normal, and because they are in a car whose rear wheel traction stops them from skidding on that muddy track. They might already have fallen into one of the ditches if they were in, say, a VW Passat or a Chevy Opala. He gives up and goes back to the convenience store where he asked for directions the first time. He calls the assistant. He wasn’t far, as it turned out, his mistake had been taking one turning too early. On the other end of the line the girl makes a point of telling him that the place he’d ended up in wasn’t the best place to get lost, it’s definitely the most dangerous part of the city, the so-called ‘Valmerão Pass’. He goes back to the main road, takes the correct turning. The assistant is waiting for them outside the house with a huge yellow umbrella, she notices that the Indian girl is wearing items of clothing belonging to the group and says only that she can return them any time she wants. Paulo returns the back seat of the car to its normal position. He tells Maína to sit there because the upholstery is dry. She shakes her head to indicate that she isn’t going to move.
The car is in the parking space in front of the house. Paulo and Maína go in the side door. Paulo takes her straight to the bathroom, turns on the light, shows her where the towels are, says he’ll be back in a minute. He walks through the house wondering what he can offer her to wear, he raids his sister’s wardrobe (the two of them are nearly the same size), takes a pair of jeans, knickers, socks, the black All-Star trainers with little skulls like the ones you see on pirate flags – his sister said she was going to give them to a charity shop – and an AC/DC t-shirt. He goes back to the bathroom, hands over the clothes, switches on the electric shower, sets it to what he thinks is a pleasant temperature, shows her how to lock the bathroom door from the inside and says he’s going to make something for them to eat. In the fridge he finds the pan with the spaghetti he made on Friday. He heats it up on the stove. He opens a can of tuna, he mixes mayonnaise and ketchup and garlic paste in a shallow jar, opens a litre bottle of Coke. He lays out a tablecloth, plat
es, cutlery and all the rest. He waits for her to come out of the bathroom. They eat in silence. She finishes the food on the plate and then, unprompted, helps herself to more. He goes to his room, collects all the issues of Trip magazine he can find, six in total, and leaves them with her. He says to choose whichever ones she wants. He looks at his watch: nine-thirty. There’s still time for a quick shower. He goes up to his father’s study to check whether anyone has left a message on the answering machine, listens to Adrienne’s message inviting him to a party tonight at the flat she shares with Serginho and Carlos. He goes downstairs, has his shower. When he comes back into the pantry, Maína has the magazines open on the table and she is looking at the pictures of the Trip girls. Without a word he clears the plates, goes out into the yard, walks over to the garage, gets two sheets of clean plastic like camping groundsheets, covers the car seats, which smell of wet dog, comes back, tells Maína to leave the magazines there, but she prefers to hold on to them all. Paulo picks up a tote bag belonging to his sister, one of the many she has bought and never used, puts the magazines inside, closes up the house, gets into the car and only then begins to hurry so that they will arrive in time for the ten o’clock showing at the Baltimore.
They are going to see the remastered print of Fantasia, the Walt Disney animation. First he bought sweet popcorn from old Pestana, whose little cart is right at the door to the cinema; the old man loves telling the unwary that in the sixties he was an employee of the Piratini Steel Company and one of the sixty thousand activists from the so-called Group of Eleven set up in sixty-three by Brizola to bring about the socialist revolution in Brazil. He says he’s read every book by Tolstoy translated into Portuguese and, invariably, he ends the conversation with a mild rant on the evils of alcohol (the damage it does to the liver and the pancreas, the disarray it causes to a routine, to social composure) despite the fact that he is quite evidently an alcoholic himself. Naturally, as he has known Paulo for some time (and he can recognise when he’s unlikely to find an opening for his tired old digressions), the old man doesn’t even start his litany, though as he hands the bag of popcorn to Maína he does say that she is a true jewel of the Brazilian El Dorado.