by Paulo Scott
The woman and his father are not getting along. Donato can’t help them. Henrique won’t leave São Paulo, and it would appear that she has got a job at a university in Rio de Janeiro. Donato thinks it will be good when they swap around the visiting arrangements and he and his father go to spend a bit of time with her in Rio. Donato leaves the owl on his desk and from time to time when he stages a battle between it and another toy the owl always wins. The photo of him with Rener (which he only takes out of the drawer on these occasions) is the referee.
Years later, Luisa and Henrique finally work it out. She moves to São Paulo.
The Rainha trainers are the most basic black indoor-football type. To a lot of his classmates Donato is stuck-up, to others he’s the victim of total brainwashing by a stepfather who’s a Nazi (when they apply this adjective to him, they obviously don’t consider the fact that a Nazi, a Nazi white man, would never adopt an Indian boy). At the age of ten he is probably the only child in his year immune to the consumer temptations typically experienced by his age group. Henrique took every precaution to clarify the meaning of the word capitalism for him, the way it works and is organised, even the psychology behind this term, and the reason why wealth is scarce and human needs unlimited, and how this is the most important rule of all, even if there are fraudsters who promise that it isn’t. His teachers talk a lot about liberty and fraternity; whenever they can they illustrate the economic repercussions of these two choices, Mr Lavirmes is one of the ones who makes a point of not hiding the fact that the school’s pupils are candidates for future leaders of their countries, stressing that it’s no use studying if you don’t know the social implications of what you’re studying. On the whole, this kind of lesson does not mean much to most of the pupils. To Donato, these concepts and explanations make more sense when they coincide with his father’s: when there isn’t enough for everyone it’s necessary to have realistic criteria for dividing up what there is, what you have, what you can get. Price. Donato likes this word – short, direct and reliable – because it is practical and has been a part of his vocabulary forever, he understands what it represents, whether in the supermarket, at the stationer’s, picnicking in the park, on the football pitch, in clothes, on the trips he takes with Henrique around Brazil, in the cars that used to so fascinate him and no longer do, in the shopping he does with Luisa; for weeks the only thing Luisa has done has been to shop. Donato knows many things, but he does not really know what the future is. The future is still Henrique’s choice. Donato knows he needs to learn to think, he knows he needs to study and he needs discipline, he knows intelligence is worthless if you don’t have discipline. Donato doesn’t feel bad and he doesn’t compete and he doesn’t secure alliances with his classmates; he steers clear of the traditional games of hierarchy, of the worldly magnetism of the three or four students who are more confident than he is, the inevitable captains, the rangers who one moment bring the group to a place of perfect harmony, to a companionship that has a muscular concision to it, to an almost martial brusqueness, and the next moment to the worst of discords, to arguments, to progressive stages, to absolute distancing, to acts of revenge and – not to ignore what is merely a statistical likelihood – to real conflict, a fight, a haymaker punch, trip, kick, hook, headbutt, blood. Donato is a zero. Neutral territory. Switzerland. He has become used to being an object of mild curiosity to other people both within and outside school. At his classmates’ birthday parties he would suffer a little when there were other children who didn’t know him and who weren’t quite sure what to do when they came across an Indian. Sometimes it was good and hilarious, at other times less so. Little Rener learned to profit from this socially. Black French girls are at an advantage over Brazilian Indian boys. Donato is the main attraction at her birthday parties, every year she reinvents her friend’s story, about how they met, about him being a kind of shaman who will avenge his people, who is only among the white people to learn how to master them, practically a Buddha (her mother is a Buddhist and she knows everything about the religion), an Avenging Buddha. Donato is horribly embarrassed but, playing along as best he can with Rener’s pathological need to embellish, he appears each time in the most exotic outfit he can manage. This time, they agreed, he would wear a dark suit, white shirt, red tie and a badge saying ‘ASK ME HOW’. Rener is in a pink dress. Someone commented that the only thing missing was a garland of flowers in her hair and another said that it wasn’t a birthday, it was a wedding. Neither Henrique nor Rener’s parents suspected the little performance that their children put on every year, but Luisa noticed their arrangement and kept their secret. It was she, in fact, who hired the suit when Donato asked her to. She knows he is a boy of few words, she knows that when he speaks them he pronounces each one as correctly and emphatically as he can, an impostor playing the role of child (prevaricating in between lapses to hide his reptilian failure to take off). He is condemned to a process of rigorous selection, down to the very commas; condemned to calibrating the air in his lungs, to their tightening, so precociously familiar with the pressures of an extensive vocabulary, because rarities are to hand much more readily than the copious babble of the day-to-day. And this is nature playing one of her dirty tricks. When he started to stutter (almost at the same time as he decided not to) he realised that the everyday was his worst enemy. His whole body seemed to resist what should have been elementary, a simple occurrence; in order to tame it he needed to take it by surprise, use routes that caused shock, surprise, and hope that this surprise might be quicker and more dynamic than the bluntness of his tongue and his brain, his diaphragm and his hands. His hands. He heard it on a tv programme once: only people who are insecure or those who are not very persuasive need their hands to express themselves, to get where they want. Donato needs his hands, but he won’t allow himself any shortcuts, he’s sure Henrique wouldn’t allow them either. Donato devotes himself to difficult words and generally to whatever is difficult, that is where his levers are; he almost never found them when he was a child. At Rener’s parties, he hardly talks to people (his stammering is not revealed), he lets his friend talk for both of them. Those who already know him, already familiar with the dynamics of the games, just help out here and there, supplying the attention necessary to make the story invented by the famous Brown Sugar a bit more credible. At the end of the party, dressed as bride and groom, as the others said, the two of them laugh at themselves, she hugs him and promises that one day they will own a circus troupe, and he just promises that he’ll fix something even more striking for next year. Everything is yet to come.
Resignation. Separation. The three of them at the table in the flat in São Paulo. Luisa and Henrique are arguing more than ever. Donato thinks Luisa is always trying to compete with Henrique (and he thinks this is fair), but he doesn’t really understand too well what is happening between the two of them. And the argument is all set to become a row. Luisa is trying to persuade Henrique not to invest everything they’ve got in this project he has invented and which has been dragging its heels, in terms of financial return, since ninety-six, when the internet was still feeling its way into the world and even more so in Brazil, when the global network of computers was a curiosity orbited by shots in the dark (it was not long since access had become available on a commercial scale, it was not long since the green-and-black screens had been abandoned and the graphic possibilities for interaction via monitor had expanded). His idea was to create a ‘hub for distributing specialised information, on a subscription basis, to corporations, social groups, new investors, political agents,’ information based on research and surveys aimed at those who are seeking ‘new, alternative strategies for economic development and social interaction’ – that was what Donato read in one of the prospectuses that are always scattered around Henrique’s study. It was vital to make the most of this new tool to democratise discourse and analysis and to make money. His father imagined that, if there were a sufficient number of subscribers in Brazil and abroad, he could
make the company self-sustaining in two years. This did not happen. His ambitions, however, continued to grow and to push him towards ever-greater injections of money. As he had stopped doing consultancy work there was no other source of income. In the second year of the enterprise, Luisa joined as a partner, half-half, with the money from the settlement in advance of her parents’ inheritance. An ultimately traumatic outlay when her parents discovered her intentions for the money, and later, with the appalling performance of the project, almost a reason for breaking off family relations. Henrique talked about returning the money, but Luisa was furious at her parents’ interference; that, however, was almost a year ago – today it’s Henrique she is furious with, for not recognising that it is time to stop. He says he will continue with his trips to try and sign up new subscribers and new partners, he will travel the whole of Brazil if need be, he’ll try new contacts in Europe, some foundations, the universities, some visionary out there, some philanthropist. A visionary like you, says Luisa, provoking him, like the thousands of others set to lose a lot of money trying to guess at the future of the internet. This is the moment when Donato excuses himself, gets up and goes to his room. On the wall beside his bed is the drawing he did years ago, it came out well, in it you can see the three of them, well dressed, smiling, but not holding hands.
Thirteen years old. Usually he sits all the way over to the right, at the fourth desk from the front. He spends the twenty-five minutes of his break almost always in the same way. The final destination is the library. The itinerary is simple: the bell rings, he waits a minute till most of the class have left, he takes the CD player Henrique gave him out of his rucksack, he always brings a pearl from his collection of more than a thousand discs that are kept in his living room (today he has brought Surfer Rosa by some guys called Pixies, a pretty old band who inspired Nirvana, the supreme rulers of the universe). Then he takes his regular walk around the playground under the covered walkways. He will spend a minute or two with the groups of boys, always small groups, with whom he gets along; one of these groups is made up of Américo, Ramon and Julián, this latter a Bolivian, pale and feeble, with grey-blue eyes, a potential candidate for his best friend. He doesn’t waste more than five minutes on this circuit, for the time being he moves on to his small daily dose of obsession moment: tracking down Rener wherever she is, even if it’s just for a glance and a wave from afar. Since last year they’ve been in different classes, it’s one of the school’s strategies, to mix up the classes in order to increase the students’ sociability. This time he didn’t need to look for her. She runs over with a CD to give him, it’s Serge Gainsbourg’s Love on the Beat, she says this is who he should be spending his time on and not with the Nine Inch Nails of this world (he doesn’t even like Nine Inch Nails). Donato looks at her gratefully, puts the CD in his jacket pocket, asks whether she might want to go with him to the library, she laughs and says that if she ever chooses to trade her break on a sunny day for the library he should have her locked up in a madhouse, she gives him a kiss on the cheek and returns to her circle of girlfriends. Donato walks, then, to the start of the corridor that leads out of the school, turns left and walks on to the library. This is his refuge. Saying hello to the two women working at the counter and the head librarian is his refuge, mixing up the names on the spines of the books is his refuge, thinking that he understands the poems by Brazilian writers is his refuge, that he understands Walt Whitman and Camões, who are not well served in the classroom, is his refuge. Refuge. Here he has the sensation that he is not wasting time and (squeezed together in the corridors with the other students, the interested ones and the ones who most probably have just adopted a strategy of invisibility like his) he also has the sensation of possessing some kind of autobiographical authority. Here he doesn’t need to submit himself to trials of strength, charisma, leadership, shrewdness, humour, popularity, here he doesn’t need to discover how much he resembles his classmates, the future leaders of their countries, here in the impersonality of the iron shelves and the silence that has seeped into the rest of the furniture, he spends the only minutes in which he allows himself to feel afraid.
Luisa said it would be a complete waste of time going up the Pão de Açucar on a cloudy day like this one in Rio de Janeiro. Donato knows she’s taking unfair advantage of her right to reorganise the outing agreed by the three of them. Her threadbare excuse is her perpetual migraine, she says she woke up at five and didn’t go back to sleep. The reason, looking at the situation objectively, is solely and exclusively the fact of Henrique having been called in as a last-minute replacement for a Mexican analyst at a think tank in Teresópolis, a private meeting to come up with public policy suggestions organised by a group of young businessmen from Minas and Rio (the money’s good, in the financial crisis he is going through there was no way he could say no) and, because of this, he is prevented from returning before Thursday, that is, three days from now. Now the itinerary is up to her. Donato doesn’t want to think about this too much, he has a map, he knows which buses he needs to take. He never puts himself on a collision course with Luisa, he just ducks, weaves, leaves little notes. In spite of the occasional embarrassments caused by his stutter, he considers himself at a great advantage to the rest of the social universe: he is better informed than most of the adults around him and entirely confident as regards his inability to make mistakes caused by absent-mindedness, an excess of pride, resentment or vanity. He leaves a note at the hotel reception, takes the circular-route bus at Leblon towards Gávea, Jardim Botânico, Humaitá, Botafogo. He gets off at Voluntários da Pátria, the main street in Botafogo, walks to Rua das Palmeiras, to the big house numbered fifty-five. He goes in. He walks around the courtyard, there’s a stylised thatched hut that has been set up right near the entrance on the left of the main building, he spots the class of children aged around nine who are probably starting one of those guided tours and joins the group. The teacher, a really young redhead, looks at Donato, says nothing. They go into a hall with an exhibition of ceramic objects, pieces representing Asurani art made by the people of that name who live in Médio Xingu, about a hundred kilometres from the city of Altamira in the state of Pará. The guide’s little jokes make up for his weak presentation, rather unconvincing and lacking relevant information even for a gang of students from any old municipal public school. All is going well until the teacher emphatically states that the greatest mistake made by the white man was to remove the Indian from his habitat and because of this ‘we all have to fight for Indians to return to their natural state, living in harmony with nature … ’ Before she has finished, Donato raises his hand. This throws her, there’s a moment of doubt (you can see it in her eyes) and she gestures to him that he may speak. He says that she is wrong, it would be best to take every last savage they can find in the forest and civilise him, give him a real chance to ‘ensure his dignity in today’s world without needing favours from anyone, before the process of decimation has been completed.’ He concludes by saying that the past will never come back. The teacher is stunned; two students immediately ask ‘miss, what’s decimation?’, and, fortunately, the guide launches into one of his comedy routines and Donato goes off to explore other parts of the Museum of the Indian less propitious to his enthusiasm.
Another school year has passed. They are both fourteen (Rener is just three months his elder) and this meeting on the staircase that goes to the teachers’ car park has not been prearranged. Donato’s face is turned towards the alcove framed with very light quartz stones with a statue of Our Lady of Lourdes in one of the far corners and is still stunned at the news that Rener will be leaving Brazil in eighteen days’ time and, along with her parents, will be going back to live in France. Stop being such a hick, Curumim. You’ll learn to get by on your own, she says. He turns his face towards her. I know how to get by, Rener. It’s just, I … I kind of … I’m going to miss you, I’m really going to miss you a lot. She responds with a melancholy smile. This whole time we’ve balanc
ed each other out, haven’t we? He nods. You’ve helped me not to become the school’s walking freak show. She looks grateful. And you’ve given me grief to keep me from becoming the local Naomi Campbell, she says, her lips quivering. Exactly, he says. Rener’s eyes fill with water. Don’t worry, I’ll be all right … There’s only two more years. They both know two years is too long. But pay attention, Donato, drying the tears that are flowing down her cheeks, it’s time for you to learn how to play the game better. He frowns. Better than I play now, Brown Sugar? I’m a complete goody-goody, I always do everything just right. She gives his shoulder a gentle shove. That’s not what I’m talking about. Being like that is only going to open doors for you in the future, she says. So what are you talking about, then? She looks down. About how blind you are to things that are going on around you … your naivety, your passivity, your … leaning her elbow on her knees and clasping her hands together in front of her. Leaving this school, getting far away from you, it’s going to be a relief. I’m sorry to be telling you … almost in a whisper. But what … he tries to interrupt her. She doesn’t let him. I’m sorry to be telling you like this. Really, I’m just sad and I’m taking it out on you … still in a low voice. Rener, Rener, Rener … She lifts her head and looks at him. Look, Curumim … Since the first day of pre-school I’ve liked you … And that feeling of affection has taken so many different shapes, in so many ways, that sometimes I’ve doubted whether it really exists. Even my girlfriends … I swear on my life, I never told anybody a thing … even they know I’ve always liked you … and they know I’ve always protected you … Or do you think you escaped from being one of the school punchbags because you’ve got nice eyes? Hmph! Anyone messing with you would have to mess with me … You even called me Mônica for a bit, like in the comics, remember? she says. I used to get furious, didn’t I? He agrees. And she gives him another gentle shove. How many times did I make English Douglas ask you to play football with them at break time … I’d even insist that you had to play up front, never in goal. Donato considers telling her about the poems he wrote for her, but instead says: the older guys always did like you. There are at least twenty poems. See what comes from being the school skating champion … He memorised one in which he calls her Dino. I always suspected as much, Rener. I mean, you pulling the strings. Hiding in the shadows. Poems don’t belong in the world of Rener. Women know how to do that kind of thing. I confess it was really fun, the cretins in our year respected me not only because I was, let’s put it this way, irresistible, but also because the guys in the years above did whatever I told them, including intimidating, with all the subtlety of a builder’s mallet, any younger ones who stepped out of line. Ah, my Parisian blood … It’s not my fault that’s what I’m like. And what do you feel now? About the cretins? A dinosaur within a poem. Please, Sugar, don’t start … Hardly anything has changed … Everything has changed … You know … I’ve gone out with Mark, and Gabriel, I’ve fooled around with two other guys … I’ve never kissed anyone, he admits. Really? … Why am I not surprised? And he moves forward (three spaces at once). I like you, Rener, really like you. This year was hard, loads of things I hadn’t had to deal with before became important and I discovered I had no idea how to handle them. You live to study, she says. Isn’t that what we’re here for? I still don’t know for sure … Now I’m going back to France and I’m going to have to start from scratch … I know I won’t adapt … And he surprises her: I love you, Brown Sugar … Since when? Donato doesn’t reply, he can’t be as frank as she is. Three or four minutes pass without either of them saying a single word. A group of their classmates is walking towards them, approaching casually; after all Rener and Donato are like two sides of the same coin. Rener notices and gets up to meet them. Donato stays where he is, he knows Rener will take the group far away, because that is her way of protecting him and, right now, of torturing him for what he’s done, too. He knows that he will need to find some new reasons for being in this school. He should have kissed her. He should have stopped her getting up.