Nowhere People

by Paulo Scott

  With the story he drafted at the desks in the library, Donato wins the school’s playwriting competition. His prize is the money to stage his play, Crucial Two One, at the end-of-year party. He has little more than three months to choose his actors, rehearse, sort out a set. He never imagined he would do it, it was the first time he had entered. If Rener had been in Brazil he’d have got her to play the lead in the story, which takes place in an indeterminate future and an indeterminate place, where a government, an indeterminate government, has developed a way of resuscitating people which will guarantee them twenty-one more hours of life. The service is offered through a monopoly and proves to be one of the most effective ways of securing money for the public coffers: as the price is high, only the rich can afford the procedure, and the first condition imposed by the government on whoever buys it is that in the first seven hours of their extra life, they will fulfil their obligations to the Internal Revenue Service, to the public exchequer, undergoing a cross-examination under the effects of a drug which, for those seven hours, will make them unable to lie, and also that they will resolve any lawsuits under way with any private firms that have an agreement with the programme. Any buyer who, on his own account, is not in a position to shoulder the total cost of the service can be sponsored by other people, thereby being at the service of these sponsors for half of the fourteen remaining hours – this method tends to be bought by large firms to obtain information and secrets from their executives who would otherwise die without revealing them.

  He gets a lift from Julián’s mother as far as Avenida Paulista. He said he’d get the metro but decides to walk; he likes strolling down Doutor Arnaldo when he is feeling calm. Luisa will be thrilled at the news; it was she who took him to see his first children’s play. He gestures to the guard to open the main gate of the complex. He takes the key out of his rucksack, opens the door. It’s cleaning day today, so the silence is strange (Friday is the day Luisa makes a point of staying home to organise her work). He opens the kitchen windows, the late afternoon light invades the room, the kind of light that makes the city better, showing up the crockery in the sink, the cereal box and the dirty ceramic bowl, just as he had left them that morning. He finds his phone, calls Luisa. ‘Hi, can you talk?’ he asks. ‘Yes,’ she replies, drily. ‘Dona Leila hasn’t been,’ he tells her. ‘I know … ’ She is shaken (but he still hasn’t noticed). ‘I’ve got good news. I won the playwriting competition … ’ he says. ‘Huh?’ She doesn’t seem to be hearing him properly. ‘The one at school … You and Henrique said … ’ – he is euphoric. ‘Great … ’ she interrupts him. ‘You’re at home, right?’ says Luisa. ‘Yes,’ no longer euphoric. ‘I’ll see you there, then.’ She hangs up without even saying bye. He knows he’ll have to clear up the kitchen so he doesn’t waste any time: he takes the rubbish from the bin, puts it outside. When he comes back in, he turns on the radio and the television (a recent habit); it’s not ten minutes before he hears the radio bulletin with an update on the turboprop plane carrying a number of businessmen that disappeared from air-control radar around eleven in the morning on a flight from Teresina to Brasília. It’s enough to make him squeeze the dishcloth in his fists without drying them properly and, trying to control his breathing, pick up his phone to talk to Luisa.

  The body was one of the last to be found by the recovery team. After the many bureaucratic procedures had been seen to, it was sent to São Paulo. The coffin remained closed for the two hours of the wake. Luisa said she was not going to tell anyone, let alone pay for a death notice in the newspaper. ‘It’s not Henrique’s style.’ It was not her style. Donato did not ask to see what was left of his stepfather, nor did he go along when they buried him, he just sat outside the Gethsêmani snack bar imagining the mayhem if they’d had to bury him in Porto Alegre. An impressive number of friends showed up. He wondered what would make someone drop all their obligations and go to a wake at three in the afternoon, if he himself, the son, the adopted son of the only child of a couple, already deceased, is able to feel nothing but the enormous desire not to be there.

  Luisa has been on medication for more than a week and it would probably be wise to refrain from any activities that require good reflexes, such as driving Henrique’s Honda Civic, in which the two of them are now sitting, travelling at more than a hundred and twenty kilometres per hour down Anhanguera. She holds the steering wheel and drives as if it were her own car. He watches her: her movements and the expression in her voice make her seem a stranger, a stranger he wouldn’t know how to deal with. She says she is not going to accept a settlement, she says they have to trust the Brazilian legal system. ‘If someone made a mistake, no doubt about it, they’re going to pay.’ Donato looks out at the landscape racing past the hard shoulder, tries to avoid the complicity of his presence with Luisa’s, just as he has always intuitively avoided his informal kinship to her all these years; he tries to avoid it before, as well as becoming a stranger, she becomes disdainful (because of their having reconciled in such an abrupt and Siamese way). ‘Your father’s Porto Alegre friends are going to want to kill me,’ she says. Donato doesn’t reply, but turns back to look at her (letting his silence seem an ill-at-ease way of keeping the peace). So she goes on: ‘They don’t all read the papers, they don’t all pay attention to disasters, they aren’t all working on the assumption that I might think they will be out of our lives for good now … ’ She rolls her window all the way down, sticks her head out. This lasts just a few seconds. When she returns to her proper sitting position, she sighs, a sigh of satisfaction. ‘I need to get some petrol.’ She drives on for a few kilometres, indicates right, leaves the road, enters a Texaco service station. ‘I’m not sure I’m going to be able to stay in this city … ’ She stops beside one of the fuel pumps. There’s an attendant gesturing to her to move the car up to the pump in front. ‘I’ll have to get out,’ Donato tells her. ‘Wait. I have a proposition to make … ’ she says, before putting the car into gear and starting up slowly. ‘You graduate from high school,’ and she brakes again, stopping the car just before the pump, ‘and in January we’ll … ’ Donato unlocks the car door. ‘What’s it to be, miss?’ the pump attendant asks her. ‘I need to go to the toilet,’ Donato says and opens the door. ‘Just a moment … ’ she gets confused. ‘Excuse me a moment, Luisa, sorry … ’ Donato says and gets out of the car. ‘I’ll wait here for you,’ she says. He walks over towards the convenience store and disappears from view. ‘Petrol – the Super … Fill it up,’ she tells the attendant. He fills the tank, checks the oil. The boy is taking his time. Luisa pays with a credit card and, when she is thinking about heading over to the shop, to check that he’s all right, she is surprised by the sight of the girl in the Texaco uniform. ‘Miss, sorry to bother you, but the young man who arrived with you asked me to tell you that he’s got a taxi home and he’ll meet you there.’ The girl is looking over towards the convenience store. ‘Could you tell me whether he … never mind.’ The pump attendant asks whether she wants her windscreen cleaned, but she barely hears him. She’s going to drive to Avenida Lorena, call up a girlfriend (but which?), get a coffee at Suplicy, then a drink, two, three and find some hotel to stay at, so Donato is left alone to understand just as quickly as possible what it means to look after yourself; but she is playing this scenario out in her head in order to lessen the pain not of having lost the man she has lived with for more than fifteen years and loved unconditionally, but of having been abandoned by the only person who could have been there with her, supporting her with a bit of decency through the distress of not being able to imagine how to wake up tomorrow morning and from where to wrench the strength to admit that from here on in there would be absence, a new absence, a solid block which refused to fit into reality.

  Donato chose to wait seventy-two hours before resorting to the police for help or seeking out whatever acquaintances he could think of. He lost track of how many times he called her phone. He clung on to this remorse and, inside himself, to a rese
ntful interpretation of everything that had happened so far. He doesn’t know what to do, he doesn’t have the strength, he doesn’t even have any spontaneity. He has already waited more than a minute. The voice on the other end said it was from the São Patrício Clinic, informing him that one Dr Nelson would speak to him shortly. On the holding message, a voice saying that the institution offers a welcoming hospital environment, and the techniques and staff suited to the treatment of people who find themselves suffering from emotional troubles, guaranteeing the best clinical conditions for their most rapid recovery. The doctor picks up, explains that Luisa sought them out for voluntary admittance, she has been medicated and she’s doing well, sorry not to have called earlier but when she checked herself in she only supplied contact details for her mother in Rio de Janeiro, and had just asked that they notify Donato a few minutes ago. Donato asks if he can speak to her, the doctor says that a nurse will call him within twenty minutes and will connect him to the patient. He notes that they will only be able to talk for five minutes, to stop her getting too tired. Finally the doctor says he can visit her tomorrow afternoon, just for forty minutes, and if ‘everything goes according to plan’ she will be out in a fortnight. The minutes pass and the time he’s spent waiting reaches a bit over an hour. The phone rings, the voice says hi and asks how are things. He says he’s ready to leave the city, that he can finish his third year somewhere else and they’ll never need to set foot in São Paulo again. She sighs and says he’s crazy to think about transferring from such a good school, he’s got to graduate. As he listens to her, he thinks he’s going to have to get empty cardboard boxes from the supermarket to pack up the books, clothes, pictures, films, CDs belonging to Henrique; to make the ghost of his father dissipate before she gets back. Then he focuses back on what she’s saying and excuses himself, he says hurriedly that he will definitely visit her tomorrow (and he’s cruelly taken up by the idea that he has the lucidity the other person needs, and this is something new, a new power, unearned, unjustifiably grown-up).

  Luisa’s decision to adopt renewed the feeling of complicity between the two of them. The series of appearances before the judge, the Public Ministry, the Children’s and Youth Supervisory Council, meant that they behaved perfectly to show off the solid structure of their new family. Assessments are awkward, they encourage those being assessed not to take them seriously. They are standing, now, outside the civil registry office. They have come to the city centre specially to get the certificate on which, from here on in, will appear the names Luisa Vasconcelos Lange and Donato Henrique Lange Becker (his name has four names now). It takes just a few minutes, as it is the end of the working day and there are no longer queues at the windows. Minutes from now he will sit down with her at the table of a popular restaurant in Higienópolis and they will order a bottle of Pol Roger Brut Reserve. The real extravagance will begin, however, when she orders a second bottle of the same champagne and challenges him to join her; he is after all just about to graduate with honours, very possibly with the highest average in his year, to première a play, as both playwright and director, and to move away with her far from São Paulo. He doesn’t hesitate, he allows the waiter to fill his glass. The head waiter is going from table to table holding out a bag of round, numbered chips in imitation mother-of-pearl, one for each customer, referring to the establishment’s week-long twenty-sixth birthday celebrations by way of justifying the interruption. There are two draws per evening for the chance to win one night in a luxury suite at the Paulista Plaza on Alameda Santos. Once he is sure everybody has been given one, the waiter randomly draws exactly the number that is in Luisa’s hand. She asks Donato to make himself known, to shout something: he is the man of the house, after all. The head waiter approaches and hands them an envelope which explains that the night at the hotel can be used at any time and includes consumption of up to a hundred reais of food and drink. She asks whether it would be valid for that very night. He straightens himself up and immediately assures her that it would. She asks him to fill their glasses and she proposes a toast, another one. They finished eating the lobster in pitanga sauce and she ordered a tiramisu for dessert accompanied by two glasses of Kir Royale, and then he suggested that the two of them go straight from there to the Paulista Plaza. She smiled with tense lips and let out a why not? As they drove down Avenida Paulista, looking at the buildings from the back seat of the taxi, she said that the two of them would never be coming back here, that a few weeks from now there would be no more São Paulo ever again. In the hotel they were given a suite on the penultimate floor. They had no luggage, which didn’t stop the bellboy from accompanying them to their room with the twin single beds they had requested, and showing them how all the gadgets worked. The hotel employee withdraws. The two of them are sat on the sofa, the lights turned out, sharing their exhaustion. The brightness of the buildings thickens in the polluted air and is enough to light them up, leaving room for doubt about where their boundaries are. Then the accident. Coming closer. Donato moves his first kiss against Luisa’s mouth. She witnesses his awkwardness, his determination to discover, and is left wordless, confused, distressed.

  It’s terrible when you discover yourself to be meticulous and methodical in the extreme and you discover, too, belatedly, that the person at the top of your list of the school’s greatest stage talents suffers from terrible insecurity about his actual capacity to get up on stage, make it count, face the terror, just put it all out there and perform as he has done so well in rehearsals. First it was the cold that rendered him voiceless, then he discovered it was flu, then it developed into mild sinusitis and then severe sinusitis, then acid reflux, then those palpitations in the left side of his chest, which are clearly baseless given that he, Vicente Fino, is evidently thin, healthy and has no history of heart attacks or anything of the sort in the family. You go all in, you take a risk, because after all he, the play’s male lead, Little Vicente Fino, again, is an anxious little Jewish fag, and charismatic, with a big fucking face like a startled donkey able to rearrange itself into any expression, just as representative of a minority as you are, Adopted Trapped Donato, you who are an Indian, just like the most Indian of Indians, with that unmissable Indian face, like you find in the documentaries by those brothers, the Vilas-Boas, and who had the wretched fortune of being brought up by a white man, a pale little deceased white man, full of ideas that ultimately, tragically, ended up unrealised, like this play which has created so many expectations and that at this moment looks set not to happen. You haven’t stuttered this much in months, because everything happened without your being the centre of attention, and now you’ve spent the last fortnight in the midst of a tempest, the true Prospero with a tempest shoved up his ass, and you’re stuttering like a lunatic. Now it’s five-twenty in the afternoon, the auditorium doors open at seven and, apparently, the play is to start at seven-thirty tonight on the dot, because after the performance come the party and the drinking. The problem is that the Great Vicente Fino is at the ear, nose and throat doctor, he has no voice and, according to his mother (who at the moment, as one would expect, is with him), has a thirty-nine degree fever. The prognosis (you’ve just hung up): Vicente will not go on. And there’s not a blessed soul alive who knows all the lines, only you know all the lines, no one will be such a sucker as to expose himself and become the scapegoat if everything goes wrong. The worst thing is knowing that most of the audience will be there because of Vicente. They are his friends, including some from outside school, who actually appreciate theatrical lunacies. You, take his place? No, you’ll stammer, you won’t manage any fluency at all, you’ll slow down the pace of the dialogue, which is the play’s trump card. And Kika comes into the room without knocking. ‘Sorry to barge in like this, but I have to say something … Can I?’ Kika’s face is very close to yours. The breath that comes out of her mouth is the best that anyone could ever produce. Fuck, Kika really knows how to come on to you. ‘Go ahead.’ Kika has lovely eyes. ‘I know you’re the di
rector.’ Kika has quite some breasts. ‘And you,’ he replies, ‘do the lighting and the sound.’ Kika has a fringe like Regina Duarte from when Regina Duarte was young and hot and was called Brazil’s sweetheart. ‘The thing is, you’re going to have to take Vicentinho’s part,’ Kika says. Focus, Donato, this is not the time. ‘I’m not an actor,’ he argues. ‘But it’s the only way … Wear a mask … It won’t make any difference. What matters are the lines.’ Kika is so very good at moving those lips. ‘You’re forgetting how they’re done,’ he ventures. Kika might put out for him one day. ‘How they’re done?’ says Kika raising her sexy arms. ‘How the lines are said … I’ll ruin everything’ (and ladies and gentleman, the person who has just spoken is the Director, Adopted Donato, who still has the nerve to fantasise about Kika sucking his cock at a time like this). ‘Forget about how they’re said,’ says Kika. ‘Why did I have to invent this damn play?’ says the director. ‘We can do a dramatic reading,’ says Kika. ‘Kika, give me two minutes to think, here, alone.’ Kika opens the door. Would you believe it, this pert ass of Kika’s? ‘The whole cast is outside … ’ Turn round further, Kika. ‘What an utter cock-up … ’ Just turn around now, Kika. ‘You haven’t got two minutes, you have to perform … Wear a mask, it’ll work, I’ll ask Alessandra to track down one that covers everything from your top lip upwards.’ Like, so that it, that lip, can help me go down on you, Kika? ‘What difference would that make?’ the director asks. ‘Oh, no idea, it’s just something you use … You adopt a persona … ’ Kika, Kika, Kika. ‘Don’t talk to me about personas.’ The director gets annoyed. ‘But Jung … ’ Kika provokes him. ‘Oh, Kika, please … now is not the time for Jung.’ ‘Well, then?’ and she gives a smile, the deadliest of Kika’s weapons. ‘Tell them to find the mask.’ Donato gives in. Donato wasn’t even smitten with Kika like this, but today Kika is too much. Kika leaves, Donato sits down at the table on which the pages of dialogue are scattered, the scenes, the acts, with technical cues, the play’s key moments, he opens the elastics round his folder, puts all that paper inside, puts it in his bag. He goes out to talk to the group of actors, he stutters almost the whole time, but his words link together into a strong lecture about the text he wrote and about the critical contribution of everyone there towards making the result so much better than he had imagined. Bit by bit he realises that he is managing to calm everyone down, to ensure at least a minimal degree of unity. Alessandra appears with two masks made by a friend of hers called Guilherme Pilla, they are plastic masks that leave the lips and jaw completely exposed, likewise the eyes. Donato tries on the first and feels so comfortable that he doesn’t even bother with the second.