Free Nowhere People by Paulo Scott Page B

looks at her watch. Nearly ten o’clock at night. She has left the tent open so that they know she will be staying awake for as long as they’re painting. That thing that Paulo said earlier (just before his friend arrived) is stuck in her head: about camping out there for a few weeks teaching her sisters to speak and read Portuguese, as well as some other children who might be in nearby encampments. She said it wouldn’t work: he doesn’t know a word of Guarani, the routine on an encampment is entirely different to anything he can imagine. She can’t handle his being available like this, his dedication, with those surprises coming ever more frequently while his gestures and attitude – electric, sure of himself – move him too quickly away from the day and time when she adored him most. Paulo is moving further away because he’s unable to be in the present. The present is a burden, it cannot function as a useful tool. ‘Hello.’ She hears the voice from somewhere out in the darkness. ‘Could you get me a glass of water?’ She notices the shine of the twisted metal, the buttons and keys of the visitor’s wind instrument. ‘Yes,’ she answers and gets a cup to give him some water. ‘Sorry to trouble you. I brought a bottle with me but it’s finished.’ Maína was afraid that, being a friend of Paulo’s, he would be like Leonardo (it took her days to realise just how rude Leonardo had been). ‘Don’t tell Paulo,’ panting again and again as though about to cough, ‘but I have trouble breathing in the smell of paint for too long … The way he is, always doing everything just right, and the way he’s so concerned about other people, he wouldn’t have let me come and help … You do understand what I’m saying, don’t you?’ She nods her head. He drinks. ‘Do you like music, Maína?’ he asks. ‘I like it a lot,’ she says. He drinks the last gulp, hands back the cup. ‘I’ll play something for you, then, it’ll help me get some new air into my lungs.’ He brings his right hand to his forehead; ‘Just give me a minute.’ She watches him run over towards Paulo’s igloo tent and return with a bottle. ‘Vodka. To warm my throat up,’ and he takes a swig directly from the bottle, then puts it down at his feet. He plays. The music is like nothing else: earthy, weighty the way the sound of a flute can never be, it spreads. He takes his time, barely adding any variations to the melodic arc and the turns it takes. A few cars go by, sporadically, but in no way affecting her hearing. Maína approaches Passo Fundo, picks up the vodka at his feet, pours a little into the cup he has used moments ago. She tastes it. Drinks the lot. Pours herself some more. She walks over to the edge of the road, she feels herself capable of softening it (and when the next headlamps come she wonders – from the old habit she has of just wondering – about covering them over completely even if it’s just a momentary collision, blinding them, forging a new being against the wooden room that will be there for ever). She doesn’t want to understand how everything ended up like this, she lets him play, thinking this will help to master the bad feelings. It’s only when the music stops that she forgets about the road, the hypnotic trance, and turns back towards the tent. Noticing that he is packing the instrument up to go back to his painting, she asks Passo Fundo to tell Paulo to come and speak to her as soon as he can, and thanks him.
    The day before yesterday, as they were walking over towards the tiles and wooden slats, Maína asked about the car. Paulo changed the subject, saying to himself that he was not going to tell her about how the money he’d received from the firm hadn’t been enough to cover the cost of the building works (the lawyers didn’t accept the sum he had calculated; he was only an intern), which was why he’d had to sell the Beetle. He comes down the three steps of the ladder, puts the empty