Luisa comes into the bedroom without turning on the light, she walks over to him, lies down in what little space is free on the mattress and puts her arms around him from behind. He doesn’t wake up. She notices the strong smell of chlorine in his hair. She squeezes him tighter without getting any reaction. She partially uncovers him and kisses his sweaty back (sweaty because he’s covered himself in an eiderdown on this baking hot night). She shouldn’t have come to the bedroom, being there goes against everything she had planned, but nothing matters now, she slides the palm of her hand over his body, letting the minutes pass. She wants his temperature to stick to her hands and she wants there to be no past between them; that is when she lets go of him and moves away, but at the moment she rests her hand on the floor in order to get up he pulls her back and kisses her on the mouth. She turns her back on him, but doesn’t leave the bed, her clothes and the cover are preventing their two bodies from touching. He hugs her, she doesn’t move, tears roll down her face, smear her makeup, she feels his hard-on pressing against the top of her left thigh and she lets it be. ‘I’m going with you to the airport,’ he says. ‘Please, this madness has already gone too far.’ Luisa has never been so sad. ‘But … ’ he tries to argue with her. ‘Shhh … ’ she cuts him off. ‘Mum … ’ And she insists: ‘Shhh …’
Two in the afternoon. Donato wakes up, goes down to the kitchen, fills a glass with water, drinks it and immediately spots the brown envelope in the middle of the living room. He walks over to it, picks it up off the floor. On the side that had been face down were the words: ‘TIME TO GROW UP.’ He opens it: inside there’s a two-page letter. There is an apology first. Then a set of instructions. He is to go up to her bedroom, get the suitcase that is still closed with the airline company tag attached, open it. She says in one of the lines that follow that perhaps he should start with the exercise book and then move on to the DVD, since there’s no television or Betamax video-player on which to watch the tapes that are there, nor a tape-deck to play the cassettes. There are also the two letters, one of which had been addressed to her and the other to Henrique. Everything about his biological mother and about the three-year-old him.
He opens the exercise book, reads as far as he can. He goes back to the Polaroid photograph, looks at the two of them: Maína and Paulo. Her face hidden behind the mask, the face that appeared in the edited footage on the DVD (Luisa explained in the letter that she had transferred them from the Betamax tape to a DVD in Recife (Recife as a place of transit) and then edited them to leave only the minutes in which Maína appears. If he wants to see the rest he will have to get hold of a machine for copying the tapes, which are now museum pieces) and a few drawings that are in the exercise book. His face is also in a drawing in the exercise book, but it’s any old face, there’s no way of knowing. Donato gets the computer, inserts the DVD into the drive. In her letter Luisa says the footage was recorded when Maína was a little younger than he is today. He sees her moving, smiling anxiously: he can barely keep his eyes on the monitor. She is beautiful, the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. Biological mother. Mãe. The voice he tried so hard to hear in the wooden owl. He opens his Gmail and writes to Luisa. ‘You have no idea how much I hate you for this.’
vagueness
He had to go to a place called Galeria do Rosário to get hold of a Sony machine (which according to the shop assistant was made in nineteen eighty-eight) and also a ten-inch colour television. He was doing the right thing because transferring the tapes to DVD would have been more expensive. He watches; he finds nothing worthwhile, except for the minutes showing the three women, his grandmother and his two aunts, the place by the roadside, where they might still be today, although he suspects not.
It wouldn’t be hard to find Paulo. In the exercise book there are the contact details for this woman called Angélica in Pelotas. One thing might lead on to another, they might meet, but Donato thinks not.
He buys a cheap tape-recorder. Paulo’s voice appears in just a few places on the cassette; it’s a considerate sort of voice. Paulo’s voice will become a kind of nightmare within his nightmares. Waking up alone at home in the middle of the night will be a sort of training for dealing with his own cowardice (while it is transforming into something else, into a duty he will have to fulfil), everything is only a question of learning. That’s something he’s good at. Paulo’s voice is outside the owl.
He walks the city. He reads the exercise book over and over again. He reads the letters that Maína left for Henrique and Luisa. It was Maína who asked Luisa not to give him the material till he was older, she was the one who asked Henrique to adopt him and never to reveal to him the way she had decided to die (he already knows, Luisa has told him in the penultimate paragraph of the letter). He studies whatever he can find in the way of books, dissertations, theses, newspaper and magazine articles about the Guarani people in the state. It takes him nearly a month. In that time, during which he doesn’t answer Luisa’s phone calls or respond to her emails, he starts feeling a nostalgic longing that, having no object, he never imagined anyone could possibly feel.
extract of a nightmare between two grown-up people
It was a very big house. The light coming in through the open windows made the walls even whiter, emptier. The forty-four-year-old man who introduced himself as Spectre was carrying a tray of sweets he said he’d bought in the German patisserie on the street where he lives. He was there to talk. There was this growing hatred, this antagonism between the two of them. There was no point having prolonged arguments, no point in acts of chivalry, in diatribes, in rebellion. Spectre was finally beginning to understand that there was no way of predicting what was going on in the head of this guy: the Guy. The Guy, who was either some kind of lunatic or in possession of the most colossal naivety. Spectre was determined to defeat him through exhaustion. The card he had hidden up his sleeve was the city, the city that inspired revenge: revenge was perhaps the only way to make it listen to them. There were clothes scattered around the room and wooden masks on the mattress. In a white t-shirt and jeans, Spectre was unable to contain his excitement. The Guy explained that he did not have a plan, that it was merely a personal, painful process and that he still didn’t know how long he would keep it up. Spectre listened. The brightness of the day abated and then the temperature dropped, too; Spectre opened the parcel of sweets and asked the Guy to fetch them something to drink. It could be anything. The Guy got up, went to the kitchen, brought a bottle of whisky and another of mineral water. He put the glasses down on the wrapping paper from the patisserie. Spectre smiled awkwardly, forcing an innocence that did not come naturally to him. They drank, they ate. Spectre waited (even while waiting he could make progress). It got completely dark and then the Guy turned on the light, Spectre poured out another two whiskies, almost twice the size of the two previous rounds, and ventured that this escapade needed some record kept and that they could start right away. We will only exist if we accept each other, said Spectre, drunk now, having downed what remained in his glass. ‘It’s time for you to go,’ the Guy informed him. Spectre stood up suddenly, took off his trainers, took off his jacket (the two of them are in identical outfits) leapt onto The Guy and tore off his face. ‘I knew it was a beautiful face,’ said Spectre with a twisted tongue, ‘very, very, very beautiful,’ already moving away from the Guy with his face in his hand. ‘Give that back,’ said the Guy, quite without aggression. ‘No, I shan’t give it back … Here it is, yoo-hoo … come and get it … ’ The two of them were the same height; Spectre was not all that strong but he was sure that wouldn’t make any difference. The Guy did not attack him (he would have been well within his rights to do so by the rules of chivalry). ‘You’re a spoilsport,’ Spectre grumbled. Then the Guy, who was the owner of the house, the very big house, walked over to the door and opened it. ‘Bye,’ he said. ‘I’ll behave,’ Spectre promised, and gave him back the face. The Guy closed the door and there the two of them were, two ghosts in a house with white walls, neither of them knowing what was going through the other’s head.