He goes into the club, Enigmas, having promised the bouncer (Gregório ‘the Grinder’, an old acquaintance from his skateboarding days in the Marinha do Brasil park) that he won’t touch the Domecq that he’s carrying and which is now suitably stored away in the law-trainee rucksack on his back. He’s come here to find Lugosi, the youngest of the place’s resident DJs; though there’s only three years’ difference between them (she is eighteen) and despite his friend’s complete alienation from politics, they have cultivated this friendship for the tough times, as they like to say to each other. The nightclub, an LGBT hangout of no great consequence, has in the last year been attracting rent boys (the rent boys who, thanks to an agreement between the club owners, are not allowed into Peter Pan Seven, Polio Garage or Silhouette Cocktail), models of both sexes who are already starting to lose their looks and their jobs and — this is the decisive factor — employees from other clubs on their nights off. Three factors which, in combination with other trends and rumours, meant that Enigmas had quickly gained a reputation as a place that promised a good time, attracting the attention of all kinds of punks and lovers of The Cure and The Smiths. Lugosi could take a lot of the credit for popularising the place, with her goth muse attitude and her ability to choose just the right tracks to play when everyone’s fed up having made a big difference. A lot of her friends who are regulars at the Taj Mahal, always up for blowing a load of cash on a night out, even if they don’t have all that much cash to blow in the first place, began to show up at Enigmas once she started there.
It’s early. There’s no one on the dance floor. Lugosi is with her latest old-beautiful-perfect-boyfriend, Castro Two: both of them bored, they’ve just eaten a portion of chips at the table next to the decks. ‘Sweetie, go get us some cigarettes over at the petrol station, tell them I’ll settle up tomorrow,’ she orders her boyfriend as soon as she sees Paulo approaching, ‘and take as long as you like, ok?’ Castro Two (yes, there had been a Castro One, even if Castro Two didn’t know this) gets up, greets Paulo without a handshake and heads for the door. ‘These boys of yours are looking more and more like girls, Lugosi,’ he teases her even before saying hello. ‘I screw androgyny, you know,’ and she moves along so he can sit beside her. ‘Well, of all people … ’ she takes the initiative. ‘Yeah well, you’re always saying I never come to hear you doing your DJ thing. So I came. So here I am, girl … And, well … ’ he tries to disguise his haggard expression and his own drunkenness. ‘So what’s up?’ She knows he isn’t here just in passing. ‘I quit the internship and I quit the Party, all on the same day: today,’ and he takes a chip from the cardboard tray. ‘But there’s more … ’ Lugosi raises her index finger like a well-behaved schoolgirl asking permission to speak. ‘And could I guess what this “more” might be?’ she ventures. ‘Feel free. I’ve got all night,’ he says, and this time takes several chips. ‘Is it the Indian girl you took to the Baltimore?’ and she gives him an ironic look, her face a caricature of someone who’s just said something she oughtn’t. Paulo shows no sign of surprise, he gestures to the waiter to come over, calm in his drunkenness. ‘How do you know about the Indian girl?’ he asks. Lugosi takes a cigarette from her pocket. ‘I’m right, aren’t I?’ she says, and picks up a box of matches from the table and puts it in his hand. ‘It was your friend Titi, she told me. I asked her what you’d been up to and she said she met you at the entrance to the cinema with a frightened little Indian girl.’ Paulo strikes the match and brings it toward Lugosi to light her cigarette. ‘She’s nearly fifteen, and I’m falling for her.’ He blows out the flame (in that moment he thinks how it’s only with Lugosi that he can speak so candidly). ‘Nearly fifteen?’ she says. ‘It feels like millennia since I was nearly fifteen.’ The waiter arrives. ‘Get us a couple of gin-fizzes, Diego,’ Lugosi asks. The waiter gives her an anything-else-bitch look, and getting no answer he turns his back and walks away. ‘You fucked her already?’ Lugosi asks. ‘It isn’t that simple … ’ he tries to slow Lugosi down. ‘She barely speaks Portuguese, she lives in a tent on the side of the highway … It’s a pretty sorry sight.’ Lugosi gets up, goes into the space reserved for the DJ, mixes one track into the next, sits back down with Paulo. ‘I get it, she’s the Tarzan of the Minuane tribe and you’re her Jane-in-breeches … Ha ha ha … ’ She pats him on the head. ‘You’ve outdone yourself, old man,’ (she rarely spares him). ‘And all that today. Fucking hell. This is a day that’s going down in history,’ she mocks. ‘Nope … That’s a good one … It’s your Independence Day … Weren’t you saying it doesn’t make sense any more to do that stuff you do for the Party, that in law the only thing that made sense was the philosophy and stuff, that it’s been ages since you’ve been in love … ’ He interrupts her. ‘I’m not in love … ’ The waiter arrives with the cocktails. ‘Sorry, but you are. You’re in love, and you’re trying to get over the Christian guilt they shoved up your ass when you were nine and taking your First Communion. You want to have this girl, which is fair enough … I lost my virginity when I was twelve to a guy who was eighteen, did you know that?’ she says and holds her own tab out to the waiter. ‘This first round is on me.’ The waiter makes a note of the drinks and goes. ‘I have no idea what can have happened to you. I can imagine how weird it must be getting involved with someone who’s so different … But the passion in your eyes, that’s definitely there … I know you, sweetheart, I know you very well.’ Paulo takes the drinks and passes one to his friend. They clink glasses. He downs the cocktail in one go, he doesn’t really appreciate the taste of alcoholic drinks; when he drinks it’s with the specific intention of getting a buzz as quickly as he can. He turns towards Lugosi; she looks back at him without blinking, serious, with her light skin and very short black hair, just the way all actresses in horror films ought to be. Wordlessly, Paulo tells her that things are really getting out of hand, which is why he’s going to do everything he can to understand Maína, confounding all expectations that might still exist about this middle-class guy, perhaps intelligent, perhaps with a future in some promising profession, the son of civil servants from the upper levels of the Federal Civil Service, both recently retired, a perfect little type from a class with serious ambitions to climb the social ladder. Wordlessly, Lugosi tells him not to expect any great advice from this girl from Higienópolis, the poorly daughter of lecturers at the Federal University, who has been diagnosed with depression and who has already enrolled at three different universities, each time dropping out in the middle of the first semester, and who supports herself, or kids herself that she is supporting herself, playing in clubs. Wordlessly, he will tell her it’s good to be there having a drink with her, and, still wordlessly, Lugosi will tell him he’s just as complicated as any of these other twenty-something guys who read too much and think too much and believe they know what a girl wants even if in practice they do not. And an hour and a bit from now, when the Enigma’s clientele are starting to fill up the dance floor, she’ll ask if he wants to split a tab of LSD that the boyfriend of a friend sent over from Los Angeles in a box of flick books (not to go into just how square she and her friend think he is for being so unnecessarily scared when it comes to popping a pill from time to time; he won’t even smoke a joint, like a good little doctor, losing out on the chance to understand what’s really missing from this world of ours), and, not hearing her, he’ll be amused when she puts on ‘Relax’, that Frankie Goes to Hollywood song full of double entendres, accepting the little slip of paper that she will put in his mouth.