Maína 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 paint tin down beside the other empty ones, the brush in the glass jar of solvent, his back is aching, his right arm is throbbing. He’s not sure they are going to finish before it gets light. Putting another guaraná seed in his mouth, running the first brushstrokes along the top of the doorframe they had left for last, Passo Fundo says with certainty, yes, they will finish it. The two of them look at each other through the four-paned window whose two frames were lowered, with the opening at the top. It’s an hour and a half since Passo Fundo told him that Maína was waiting for him. Here is this somewhat hopeless guy, perhaps the one guy Paulo likes most of all. The two of them look at each other like characters who have grown old, or who are trying to grow old more quickly than anyone else (there’s no war, no disaster) and the end of a decade is looming. ‘I’m going in, Passo Fundo.’ He looks at his watch. ‘We can start again in two hours, ok?’ The friend waves his paintbrush in a gesture of blessing and then, immediately, with the same hand sweeping the air, gestures to him to go on, to go, get out of here. Maína is awake, she seems to have washed, she’s in the dungaree dress he brought her in the very early days (and which she still hadn’t worn for him to see). Hair combed and held to one side in her barrette. Paulo tries to make conversation, but Maína immediately invites him to lie with her in the igloo tent, and when she kisses him so enthusiastically he realises that she’s been drinking. He asks for a couple of minutes to fill the basin and splash some water on his face, his arms, his hair, takes advantage of the moment to brush his teeth and change his t-shirt (he knows the girl won’t care about this, it just seems a good time to do it, now that she’s being all friendly, which she has made a point of not being these past seventy-two hours). In the tent he unrolls the extra camping mattress. Maína doesn’t wait, she throws herself in clumsily, unbalancing him. She laughs. He laughs. He tries to find her face, with the tips of his fingers he finds one of her breasts. He kisses her. He takes off her clothes. Like a young husband, he assumes the cautiousness she didn’t ask for, he brushes his lips over her legs, drawing them out. She is holding handfuls of earth (he guessed at this because of her closed fists, it was confirmed a minute later) and now, in a journey of her own, she scratches granules, clumps, pigments, dried mud, strands, scrapings against his arms, bringing the extra dust to his hair. They have come to a point where nobody can reach them. Nothing matters. It doesn’t matter that the Minister of the Army had stated categorically right there in the Chamber of Deputies itself that indigenous culture is not respectable; that Paul McCartney said Madonna and Michael Jackson lack musical depth; that a terrorist bomb brought down the monument to William and Walmir and Carlos, murdered in November last year, in a confrontation with the army in the Volta Redonda Factory; that the English writer Anthony Burgess, eager to regain the attention lavished on his A Clockwork Orange, accused Pope John XXIII of having being the most dangerous man of the century; that a fight is being stirred up between Brazil’s General Workers’ Union and the Unified Workers Central; that Asteroid 1989FC with its alarming eight hundred and fifteen-metre diameter has come too close to the earth thereby causing justifiable concern the likes of which we hadn’t seen for decades; that two hundred and sixty kilometres of electric fencing along the border between Hungary and Austria has been taken down resulting in the first significant break in the so-called Communist Iron Curtain; that cold fusion has been announced to much boasting and then subsequently denied again with much embarrassment; that the ascent of Fernando Collor de Mello’s candidacy to the presidency has been so vertiginous; that Colonel Oliver North was condemned for the clandestine sale of arms to the Iran of the Ayatollahs by officials in Ronald Reagan’s government in the Iran-Contra scandal; that the Argentines elected the Peronist Carlos Saúl Menem as their president; that Ruy Guerra’s feature film Kuarup was booed in Cannes; that Brazil was placed by the White House on the list of trading partners disloyal to the United States. Nothing. Nothing matters. And turning her body she moves into a sixty-nine that doesn’t work out (it’s just over-excitement), her mouth grasping for his skin, his hair, taking his cock in her mouth, hurting him with her teeth. He holds her and moves her body into a position in which he can embrace her but she gets up onto his thighs, gets him to enter her, moving, shuddering. Passo Fundo had said to him just minutes earlier: fifteen isn’t as young as all that, you get girls of thirteen starting families in Dublin’s Northside, girls of fourteen who run away from their homes on the Santa Catarina coast, eloping to marry the eighteen-year-old boys they’ve fallen in love with, it’s tradition; twelve-year-old mulatta girls get pregnant by their first boyfriends in Rio de Janeiro’s North Zone, gypsy girls marry at thirteen. It’s tradition. Fifteen years old. It’s not a problem. Passo Fundo is sure of it. Crazy. Nothing matters. Maína shudders. He comes hard after the weeks of waiting. Maína wraps herself round him. Paulo feels her heart beating strongly against his chest. (The world is turning at just the speed Paulo wants it to turn.) They have never been so uninhibited with each other before. She says she feels great. He says it’s the drink. She says it isn’t correct to be complicated. It isn’t right, he corrects her. Maína lets go of him, slides off to the side, swears she’ll do whatever he wants: if he is planning to live with them for a time, she will do everything she can to help him adapt, she will accept his agitation (that’s what he hears her say) and whatever good he can do them here on the side of the road. Who knows, what she wants might really be too complicated for him (he is bigger than her world, and if he weren’t lost in his ideas and feelings he wouldn’t be here). She says that if he wants they could improvise a school and show that there can be an escape from living in this ridiculous way. He asks Maína to rub his back a little, the pain has increased all of a sudden, and he says that then she should sleep.