Although he is recovering well, his leg still hurts, a lot.
‘Ah, mon cher monsieur! Per’aps monsieur will ’ave anozzer leetle glass of our verrry expensif wine?’ Fabio kids around with him, catching Paulo at just the moment when he is watching Tom Waits and the journalist out the corner of his eye. ‘What’s up, Fabinho? Weren’t you heading out?’ asks Paulo. ‘So the thing is, man, Etienne, that anorexic fag, asked me to stay till it’s time to cash up,’ and, taking the nearly empty glass from Paulo’s hand, Fabio wipes the cloth over the granite surface of the bar. ‘You’re going to have to stay? Well then, take it easy.’ Paulo shifts position on his stool, which is tall and doesn’t have footrests. ‘Yeah. Another hour and a half. Bastard manager. Well, I suppose it’s just tough shit, this is my job. I’ll give you some more wine,’ Fabio mutters. ‘Don’t bother. I’ll make the most of the fact that I’m at a loose end and you’re doing this overtime, I’ll go by the anti-apartheid vigil outside the South African embassy. Apparently there are these two big-shot militants who’re going to talk about the negotiations to end Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment.’ He gets down from the stool with no footrests. ‘Son-of-a-bitch South African government, this whole segregation thing, I just don’t get it,’ says Fabio without ever losing his elegant, Italian movie-star pose (an absolute prerequisite for getting a job at the Pelican). ‘You get segregation everywhere, Fabinho, theirs is just more brazen than the others,’ he muses, ‘or rather, it’s the first one I’d like to see brought to an end. So look, keep your very expensive wine for some other day. Today our business is with some Mexican beer courtesy of Drake, right?’ Picking Fabio up at work was to have been part of the arrangement for going together to the exclusive party for friends of the staff at Bar Sol, the restaurant everyone wants to work at because, besides being a fun place to serve, it’s far and away the bar where the customers, most of them American tourists, leave the best tips. Fabio was invited to work there by Drake, who has a Brazilian mother and an English father and has worked at the restaurant ever since it first opened and always manages to get himself back in work there when he decides to come over from Brazil and spend a few months in the city. ‘We’ll talk at Bar Sol, Paulo … And watch out for any trouble, those gatherings outside the South African embassy sometimes end up in confrontations with the police.’ Paulo puts on his jacket. ‘So I just ask for Drake, right?’ and he gives one last glance at Thomas Alan Waits, one of the few idols in his life right now. ‘Yeah, he’ll be expecting you.’ Paulo turns, heads off towards the door. On the street, he turns left down St Martin’s Lane, which will take him straight to the South African embassy.
The people who are not on the pavement directly outside the building have positioned themselves across the road on the paved central area of Trafalgar Square. The young black man wearing a white shirt buttoned up to his neck and holding a microphone turns towards the embassy, he says: ‘Nelson Mandela is still in prison, but he won’t be for long.’ The people clap. Paulo is with them now, already feeling the effects of the wine he drank hurriedly at the Pelican. He finds it surreal how explicit they are, these manifestations of belief in the possibility of Mandela being released without bargaining before he dies. It isn’t, for him, a question of witnessing what could perhaps be part of a significant historical process; he is there out of curiosity. As it happens, he lied when he was questioned at the immigration counter, saying he was here as a tourist and that he wouldn’t stay longer than twenty days in the United Kingdom; he did that out of curiosity. He drinks with people he doesn’t know, some of them even younger than him, people from all over the world, he does this out of curiosity. He drinks until things get dangerous, out of curiosity. He hangs out with people who are rich and spoiled, with Turks playing football in Hyde Park on the weekend, people who live it up because they’re in London and then become the domesticated little wives of other people who make a point of complaining nastily and telling their friends that their domesticated little wives can’t cook properly and don’t swallow their sperm when they suck their huge cocks, with couples from Madeira with their totally incomprehensible Portuguese, he does all this out of curiosity. He walks alone, in the early hours, from the centre to the north of the city, to Willesden Green, having dropped home the waitresses from Ireland, or Poland, or Jamaica, whom he has been trying to hook up with, even if it’s only for a week, spending every night at their place, he does it out of curiosity. He goes into Stanford’s, the best map shop in the world, some people say, and looks at the huge maps they have framed on the walls, especially the one that shows the southern hemisphere in the upper part of the mappa mundi, out of curiosity. Curiosity, just curiosity, curiosity is what’s new now nothing matters man and everyone can go to hell cause now I don’t give a fuck and I want to see if this shit catches fire once and for all. Amid excuse mes and sorrys he makes his way over towards the speaker, undoubtedly more emphatic and positive than the middle-aged gentleman who had come before him. He watches him, comparing. It’s as if it were decades ago, as if he had himself never spoken in public, never needed to be charismatic and to convince a group of students, at times in gatherings of more than twenty thousand people, to hate their university vice-chancellors, and members of the Ministry of Education, and foundations run by private universities whose accounts and tax exemptions are never made quite clear enough. He feels odd, not only the dizziness of the wine, it’s the dreams and the hope that he can’t bear. Such haste, his own haste. So much that it made him stagnate. He hasn’t been interested in trying to think. It’s the first time he has stopped and paid attention to something important since arriving in London. He doesn’t know which struggle is worth it. Where, after all, is this nineteen eighty-nine happening if not in London, New York, Tokyo? Life is moving on. He’s in his early twenties and feels like an old man, though not old enough (feeling like an old man isn’t usually the same as nothing matters any more, though it has been). And the wine having its effect, there isn’t a drug that takes you apart in quite the same way. He thinks. She sent him away. Maína’s fragility was never weakness. This inability to feel real passion, the way some people seem to feel it without making the least effort. Now he realises (as he is overtaken by a feeling of nausea, a nausea that will force him to get out of there) or he assumes: however much he does, he won’t be able to get involved again.