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 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).