nobody reads the unexpected the fossil and the grip
The VW camper van used by FUNAI and the state government to take Maína to the medical centre at Barra do Ribeiro is running late. White and hollow, the construction behind her has never been occupied. Maína forbade her sisters from going into that place. Five months and the ingrained dirt growing in the pre-fab building. Five months since that morning when she arrived and found nobody there but the military policeman (and his 250cc motorcycle with the engine running) scribbling in a notepad, standing in front of their tent. A tall, impatient man with red hair, overburdening them with questions, refusing them the information they needed. It was only afterwards, when he was talking about what had happened, that he took a step back and turned, pointing down at an angle so that they would see the puddles of blood less than two metres away. (Amniotic, consumed in their land.) It’s all done now (although the image of all that blood remains confused). Five months to reach this moment when she is wearing the leotard, the dirty one that could have been washed but hadn’t been. She likes the way the pink matches the creamy colour of the ice cream that dripped onto the top of her chest and spread down over her stomach. When was that, actually? And when exactly had those things happened that made her think she had the power to say and act as she wanted? Madness. She will never have it. There was an exchange: the change is in her body; the successful natural selection of her yolk (no need even for a doctor), reproduction, birth, Jupiter protecting the earth with its perfect gravity, attracting towards it all the attacks from stray heavenly bodies, in spite of the colonial and foreign massacres, this spectacular immunity, the building of her youth against the clinical prescriptions around the sensation, that recurring sensation that the bladder, the hips, the base of the spine and everything else will collapse (cartilage already becoming bone, the seed already sucks up the liquid around it, swallows, hiccups, the liver and kidneys are already functioning, the seed already has a sex and already urinates). Nobody dares tell her that pregnancy is a good thing. What she finds bewildering are the cramps, unpleasant and tight, at night-time, in her calves. She needs to know. Go away when she remembers that she supported him. Go she says without being completely aware of it. Sometimes she repeats it — and makes herself ashamed — albeit repeating it to herself, not really even to herself. Her belly is her sisters’ plaything, the guest when they play make-believe, sharing out the food that is no more than mud, leaves, twigs, gravel, little crumbled pebbles. The leotard is her belly’s favourite piece of clothing. The belly is the life that Maína has to live. And she realises: she has been on her feet there for a long time. She walks over to the other side of the road, sits in the shade of the trees, stretches out her legs, looks up at the Durepox-grey of the sky, runs her hands over her ankles. Her feet are swollen in a way they haven’t been before, she feels broad, overloaded. Looking up at the sky, just staying still looking up at the sky, used to be the best way of not needing anything else. She listens to the noise of the camper van’s 1800cc engine, the deceleration and the downshift before the brakes kick in. The driver, an old man puffed up and proud, doesn’t get out to open the door. ‘Hey you, girl, get a move on, we’re running late.’ Maína looks at her hands, the way the colouring of her skin has changed a bit, she takes hold of the door handle, turns it. ‘What the hell are you playing at?’ the driver admonishes her. ‘What kind of beggar’s clothes are those you’re in? You look like some circus girl … ’ he says, making a point of behaving like an unreconstructed gaucho from another decade. ‘That doctor, you know she isn’t going to like that at all. If we weren’t late I’d make you change your clothes right away.’ Maína opens the door of the van. There are two small Indians sitting right at the back and an old Indian lady in the middle row, the same row she sits in as the van continues through the other encampments. And during the journey Maína remembers for the first time the moment when, still in a state of shock, she moistened her index finger in one of the pools of blood, then walked over to the white room and, without her feet touching the front steps, wiped her finger against the door, cursing it, damning it once again. The camper van enters the bounds of the city. Maína’s attention gets caught up by the roads in the city that she knew when she was six years old, where she watched her first tv and heard her first radio, when she began to register all the objects that the grown-ups handled, when she realised there was a whole world made specially for her not to be able to get into. The driver demands some complicity when he explains the time for their return, when he will be waiting with the camper van parked round the back of the health centre. The building is different, it’s been painted. Emerald green, that’s the colour. The nine Indians go into the waiting room, there is plenty of space, and there is the enormous poster hanging on the wall opposite the windows with the face of an entreating Christ, exaggeratedly blond, even his beard, his eyes very blue, under which is written ‘
Love your neighbour as yourself.’ To love (a verb that’s always trying to switch direction). Everybody must love their neighbour. The doctor who will see her, the assistant who speaks Guarani and Portuguese, the permanently nasty driver, the hospital employees, the whole of Barra do Ribeiro, everybody. She is the second person to be seen. They take her blood pressure, measure her height, her weight, ask questions, ask her to go behind the metal screen, take off the leotard, cover herself up in the smock that’s almost the same shade of green as they used for the front wall of the health centre, they say to come into the doctor’s surgery. She sits in one of the two chairs that are at the only table in the room. The doctor arrives the next minute, she’s young, and she doesn’t hide her unease at the sight of the adolescent girl she is going to have to examine. Politely (and availing herself of the simultaneous interpretation from the assistant), after introducing herself, she asks whether Maína has been feeling any pain, any discomfort. Maína tells her about the cramps. The doctor jots something down in the notes resting on the blotter on the table, says she’ll show her some stretching exercises that will help her with the muscle contractions. As soon as the assistant translates it, Maína shakes her head. There are other questions, some of them identical to those which came before, and they are answered only with nods and shakes of the head until the doctor, changing her tone of voice, asks whether Maína is in touch with the child’s father. Maína doesn’t wait for the assistant to translate, she replies in Portuguese that she doesn’t know who the father is. The doctor puts down her pen, rests her hands on the blotter, looks at the assistant, asks her to leave the room for a few minutes. She gets up out of her chair, walks around the table, sits down beside Maína. Using even simpler words, she wants to know whether everything is all right. Maína remains silent, squeezing the hem of the gown, she can’t blame other people, it’s her, only her; she is the pivot who struggles with the normality that is so costly to find, and to maintain, for her mother and sisters, doomed to put up with the hormonal see-sawing of her own body for a few months longer. The doctor remains in silence for a few moments and then starts speaking again, about the risk of possible venereal disease, she starts a subtle bit of preaching (though now using friendly words that Maína does not understand) on the many types of sexual coercion and violence. Maína interrupts her saying she just wants the baby to be alive, and healthy. The doctor says that’s what she’s there to ensure. If there had been a script for this meeting, and if there were also an alternative script, both would have now ceased to make any sense. Maína sits closer to the edge of the chair and asks from what age the child will start having memories that would last for the rest of its life. The doctor says she hasn’t quite understood the question. Then, speaking more directly, Maína asks until what age the child can stay with its mother without — once it’s big, say about fifteen — being able to remember what she looks like, her voice, her smell. The doctor wants to know why she is asking. Maína says she has a lot of reasons, and also a lot of questions. The doctor says she is allowed to ask them. And then Maína asks about the likelihood of dying during childbirth, asks about what could go wrong and make her die during childbirth: the child living, her dying. The doctor stares, says awkwardly that everything is going to be fine, listing the tests she is going to have to do (she will no longer look at her). Maína can’t help but let out a sigh that should only have happened once she had left that place, left that room, finished having that conversation; she will give this doctor she has just met the collaboration she has denied Paulo, to whom, on the first and only chance they got to meet after the imprisonment (however much Paulo tried to explain, it was with this that she associated his disappearance), she told him not to get out of the car, not even to turn off the engine, and deliberately using words as rudimentary as the first time they had met, she asked him to find himself some other distraction and get out of her life.