Paulo Scott - Nowhere People

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 resentful 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 director.’ 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.