Nowhere People (11 page)

The seventeenth of December. Two recent polls have confirmed the low popularity and almost total lack of approval of Margaret Thatcher among the British people. Steven Soderbergh, aged twenty-six, has shot the film
Sex, Lies and Videotape
in five weeks spending little more than a million dollars. The Berlin Wall no longer exists, and the front page of every newspaper is quite certain: the western world will never be the same again. The mausoleum housing Lenin’s body in Moscow is closed for renovation. The French are still going through their endless programme of commemorations for the two hundredth anniversary of the Revolution. A few hours from now, according to today’s issue of the
Observer
magazine, a cartoon called
The Simpsons
will air for the first time on American tv. Paulo has already lost track of how long he has been in London: the tally of days does not reflect what he has already experienced here. He has lost the habit of speaking Portuguese (common though it is to meet people from Brazil, Portugal, Mozambique, Angola, even some from East Timor and Macao); he has become a squatter, not the altruistic kind but one of those who break into buildings they find empty on council estates and
transfer
possession for prices that vary between eight hundred and two thousand pounds. He negotiates with people who don’t dare to take a risk themselves, who are in London to work, to save and send money back to their family in some godforsaken place in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the western part of South America. He works alone; eventually he hires two look-outs, guys from Camberwell. He never breaks into places for Brazilians, he doesn’t want to get a reputation among Brazilians (whatever it might be), there’s nothing to be gained by that. Brazilians talk too much. He won’t do break-ins for Italians or Argentines, either. Since the end of October he has been buying Brazilian weeklies from a little shop in Bayswater. News from Brazil doesn’t help him to live better (those months when he kept himself distant were the good ones), yet he needs it. How else would he know that, at the start of November, a
favela
in São Paulo rechristened Nova República had collapsed under the weight of more than forty metres of rubble from the landfill being built next to it? (Nova República’s former name was Núcleo Getsêmani; the change of name was due to the euphoria experienced in the wake of Tancredo Neves’ victory in the electoral college, bringing to a close, according to the political scientists, the country’s military dictatorship.) Whole families were buried forty metres under. Nova República is in Morumbi, one of São Paulo’s richest neighbourhoods, home of the tv presenter Silvio Santos, who did everything he could to run as a candidate in the presidential race and who did end up being a candidate for a few days but was unable to remain in the contest following a decision by the Electoral Court. The residents knew that such a disaster was imminent. Those who survived said they’d had nowhere else to go. Paulo can’t forget the news, this particular piece of news, and still asks himself how it’s possible that some people should be so fixed in one place. Paulo can’t sleep. It is election day. Paulo is standing outside the Brazilian consulate in London, he is drunk enough to have gone there in search of news. People are waving Workers’ Party flags on the pavement outside the building, the liveliest are shouting slogans, they say the Workers’ Party doesn’t need to pay for its militants because the party’s militancy works from the heart, the time has come for a change, the time has come for a decent minimum wage, for honesty and transparency, time for the workers to choose the country’s direction. Paulo could have arranged things so that he would be eligible to vote, like those people are doing, but the deadline lapsed, he let it lapse. He can’t get involved, nothing new about that, and he cannot tear himself away from the consulate. All that joy, all that hope: love, love locked up in manly breasts, like it says in the anthem. Paulo was always impressed at the number of people who became militants motivated by love. There is barely any traffic on that street, the only activity being that of the Brazilians, the sound of the conversations in Brazilian Portuguese that fill up the gaps between the buildings. Paulo stays until voting closes (arms crossed, unnoticed, contrite), he stays till people have dispersed, he stays till not many others have stayed, in conversation with one another as though what they said really could affect what was going to happen from now
on.

Rener had invited him round to hers for this pasta with tomato sauce over two weeks earlier, she was sure today would be a difficult day for him, and because she said she could no longer bear to keep meeting him in bars, and because he’s got to stop living off Twix and Coke. Paulo knows exactly what she thinks. He walks up the stairs in the building in Elephant and Castle, stops outside the flat. Rener is the closest he has managed to get to family these past months; it’s been hard to be with her. He knocks three times. She says to wait a moment. She opens the door, her right eye is bruised and there’s a cut on the left side of her forehead. ‘Hi,
brésilien
,’ she greets him without any awkwardness. ‘What happened, Rener?’ He’s surprised. ‘Looking pretty cute, aren’t I?’ she says ironically. ‘Brand new Halloween makeup, I’ve had it on since Friday. Three mammoth sons of a Lebanese businessman, the owner of a house we went into on Wednesday, appeared out of nowhere and threw some punches.’ She pulls him inside and closes the door. ‘There were three of us there, me and a couple, still messing around with the electrics so that the rest of their family could move in as soon as possible. They caught me unawares. Three against three, it wasn’t hard for them to get us out of there. I ended up leaving my tools behind, my Walkman was left behind, they lost their things, too. I misjudged it. I wasn’t careful enough. I learned my lesson. I’ve already drawn a line under it … Want some wine?’ And suddenly Paulo feels as though he’s in a patch of quicksand from which he will never be able to escape. ‘What they did isn’t right, Rener. Let me have the address of the house, I’ll go there tomorrow and fetch the stuff that belongs to you and the couple.’ He walks straight over to the bottle of gin by the herbs next to the oven. ‘If you think I’m going to let you go there, you’re crazy. What’s done is done.’ She takes a glass from the cupboard and passes it to him. ‘Ok, we’ll discuss this later.’ He knows now isn’t the time to insist. ‘Any news of the elections back home?’ she asks, changing the subject. ‘I ended up going to the Brazilian consulate … ’ he replies. ‘And?’ He pours the gin. ‘I wasn’t in the mood to talk to any of the people who were there cheering the parties on … To be honest, I found the whole thing a bit embarrassing … ’ He puts the bottle back in its place. Silence falls between them. ‘The sauce is ready, I made it myself … ’ She takes the initiative: ‘I’ll prepare the pasta then you get to eat the best spaghetti with tomato sauce in Elephant and Castle.’ Without bothering to raise the glass in a toast, Paulo drinks the gin. He knows she doesn’t approve of what he’s been doing, he knows that in this kitchen he is the official representative of
the Dark Side
. ‘Let’s get drunk,
francesa
. Save the pasta for another day. I’m not hungry.’ She puts the pan back in the cupboard. ‘You can’t quite stomach it. That’s what you mean.’ She takes his hand and leads him over to the sofa in the living room. ‘You drink your gin, I’ll smoke my hashish, I’ll have a few sips of the expensive wine that you ignored, and let’s go to bed,’ she says. ‘So be it,’ he retorts. ‘Do you think your candidate stands a chance?’ she asks. ‘I don’t think so. Oh, I don’t know … ’ He takes off his boots, puts his feet up on the pouffe. ‘What do you know about Trotskyism, Rener?’ he asks. ‘The same as everyone else. It’s the name given to the doctrine invented by an embarrassed communist who tried playing at revolution and didn’t have the balls to confront Uncle Stalin. In short: a wimp,’ is her reply. ‘I was a Trotskyite in Brazil, and the more time goes on the less I know what that meant. I’ve been thinking … ’ She interrupts him. ‘You think too much, Paulo,’ she says. It’s strange hearing this. ‘I think I’m just as competitive as the guys I used to attack back in the days when I was a militant. Sometimes it’s like I only started being a militant because I wanted to be different, I needed to be on show, I needed attention. I’m empty, Rener, hollow.’ She laughs. ‘Hollow men,’ and she pays him a compliment, ‘I don’t think you’re one of them, Paulo.’ He gets up to fill his glass. ‘I’m rich, did you know that?’ This time he will get a few ice cubes. ‘I don’t want to talk about that. You will always be welcome here so long as we don’t talk about that,’ she warns him. He comes back into the living room, turns on the ceiling light, he can see better: her face is all smashed up. What little physical attraction had remained (when, last time, he had to make an effort to deal with her issues with sex) was no longer there. There’s no doubt they are friends, in so far as each has a lot of tolerance for the other. There is a strange and uncommon trust between them. They talked about what happened on Friday. Rener smokes her joint, while she tells him the details. He fills her glass with more wine, asks all he needs to know to find out where the house is. She lets down her guard, tells him what she really felt about the violence she suffered. He doesn’t put his arms around her. First she says the name of the street and then the house number. The conversation continues, she says that he could have been her great ally. It is different to how he imagined it, they end up fucking, and Rener offers no resistance when he puts his cock in her vagina.

Then he makes her some tea to have with the aspirins and runs his fingers through her hair until she sleeps. Now it’s two in the morning and he isn’t sleepy. The chronic discomfort that begins, and focuses, in his back, above his lumbar region, gradually spreads. He gets out of bed and leaves the room carrying his clothes with him, very careful not to wake her. He pulls the bedroom door to, trying to do it fast enough for the hinges not to creak. He puts on his trousers, his shirt, his socks. He does the washing up that had been left in the kitchen sink. He puts on his trainers, his jacket, sits on the sofa, waits. He can’t remember what he did at the beginning of the week, the only thing he can remember without any difficulty is walking for hours through the city’s suburbs, boarding buses at random and getting off in the most unlikely places, trying to get to know it, to learn it by heart. He doesn’t always manage to learn it. Identical streets, identical houses, only the full mailboxes to tell them apart, the curtainless windows showing the empty rooms, curtains that are never opened, lights that are left on day and night, lights that are never turned on, lawns and flowers, bushes in gardens and unpruned trees. Hours he spends lying down listening to the same track on a CD. The time that never stops. The growing inattention, the growing impulse towards explosion and robbery. He cries and he can barely breathe for the guilt. Rener is patient enough to let him pretend. The words he has said to Rener, the conversations, were what remained of his dream. The future of Brazil never troubled him as much as it did this afternoon. He feels old (and Passo Fundo is no longer nearby to feel old with him). He wants the life that the Indian girl on the side of the road re-awoke. He couldn’t quite stomach it, and he still can’t.

Half past five in the morning. The dawn cold sharpens. Paulo gets up from the sofa, opens the apartment door, leaves. He walks to the Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre, waits for the bus that will take him to Camberwell. Before six he arrives at the house of the two people who usually help him with the occupations; he knocks on the door till they wake up. He offers each of them two hundred pounds, saying he needs back-up on a collection visit that he needs to pay before ten o’clock. They accept his proposition, Paulo says he will be back at eight, they go back to sleep. Paulo stops in at a 7-Eleven, picks up a Twix and a Mars drink. He takes the bus out to the squat in Chelsea that he broke into two months ago to be his permanent residence, his private place, his perfect place; quality carpet, central heating, excellent paintwork on the walls, the type of luxury few people have.
Life doesn’t get any better
is what goes through his head, it’s in the nature of this strategy to feel as though he’s playing the game, to be crazier than his
opponents
. (Deep down he’s just the same and he doesn’t notice.) He goes into his flat. He puts the Public Enemy cassette into the tape deck, presses play. He turns the volume up to four (never annoy your neighbours). He changes. He gets his workmen’s boots with the steel toe-caps, the knuckleduster he received as a recent part-payment, a cap and his shades. He puts
guaraná
powder in what’s left of his chocolate drink. He covers it, shakes it, drinks. He consults the cheap watch that he bought in Brixton, similar to the one he gave Maína. He puts the watch in his pocket. He gets two oversized plastic laundry bags. He goes out. He walks along the Thames as far as the Tate Gallery, takes the bus back to Camberwell. He arrives half an hour before the agreed time. He buys a Twix in the little shop opposite the bus stop. He looks at the newspaper headlines as he eats it. Nothing about Brazil. He goes back out onto the pavement, walks to the nearest public payphone. He calls his parents’ house. The telephone rings until the answering machine kicks in. ‘Hi … It’s Paulo. You ok? I was calling to find out about the elections … And to say my
holiday
here is going great … ’ He doesn’t say anything for a few seconds. ‘Just to say I’m fine, I don’t need anything … ’ and remains silent until the recording comes to an end and, a moment later, the line goes
dead.