Nowhere People by Paulo Scott Page A

your attention,’ he shouts, as if he were being strangled, and sits. At the other tables there are musicians from the blues band who were on earlier in the evening, a company whose play is on the bill at midnight from Thursdays to Saturdays at the Arena Theatre, two people from the group who will be coordinating Luiz Inácio da Silva’s presidential campaign. A few couples in clinches. There is, in short, that kind of harmony in the air (the sharing of a fleeting victory). And at that moment Paulo is a man of steel, he’s proud of his bearing, of his courage and his health, he has no doubt that if he had money in his pocket for a taxi he’d go off to find Maína. He’d spend several days there trying to work out the secret of getting used to having so little. And at that moment, Paulo discovers what he is going to do with the money from the office. Tomorrow afternoon he’s going to seek out one of those companies that specialise in pre-fab homes, he will get costings, then he will tell Maína. Paulo is at NATO, he has his arms stretched out across the top of the table, his hands with fingers laced together, his eyes lost in an unseemly gladness, and everyone around him knows that he is not his usual self.

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on the way
    Maína had said it wasn’t his problem when Paulo returned to the subject of building the wooden room, five by four, so the girls could all sleep more comfortably, saying that he would use the money from the office to do this. ‘It’s the government’s problem, not yours,’ was her short answer, which she followed by putting her hand over his mouth to stop him going on. She looks at the time on her watch (when Paulo gave it to her, she said it didn’t feel right getting so many presents from him), she looks towards the north, spots the Beetle approaching. By her count, this is the eleventh time they meet. As soon as he has steered the car over, she runs to his window, she makes a point of showing him the calendar she has drawn up on the last page of the exercise book. He opens the door, she gets in. He drives to the usual place. When they stop by the grocery shop to collect the key, he is told that the owner has replaced it for a different one, that he has changed the padlock for a bigger one, determining that from that moment on – and this was the day before yesterday – no one was allowed to get onto the property without written authorisation. Paulo asks Maína whether she wants to go to Porto Alegre. She says yes. Yes, of course.
    They are in Paulo’s house, in the little room next to the garage at the back of the property, the place his mother used to paint her pictures, do her clothing designs, sew, all this before the slipped disc at the end of last year that made her stop indefinitely (she’s talked ever since about boxing up those things and getting the place done up). As soon as they came inside, Maína ran over to the pile of magazines on top of the table, one of those tables that designers use, or architects. She’d never seen magazines like them, they had huge pages inside, pages that unfold, till they end up as big as a road sign. On each page there are a lot of scribbled lines, drawings made up of different coloured dots that almost muddle your vision. Paulo hands her a pair of scissors saying she can cut out anything she likes, do whatever she likes, and that’s what she does. She also uses some large sheets of paper and pieces of cardboard that are hanging on the wall. He goes over to one of the bookcases, takes out a plywood box, puts it down on the table, asks Maína to look, opens it. Inside are a dozen little glass jars with classroom gouache, oil paint, different-sized brushes. He shows her how to use the paints, he finds a large roll of sticky tape, says that he’ll try and find his sister’s old camera, the kind that develops the photos instantly (Maína doesn’t really understand what he means by developing the photos instantly). Paulo is some time coming back.