Nowhere People полностью

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.