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 balanced 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.
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.