Nowhere People Read Online Free

hears of her forebears and of the indigenous people’s resistance in the lands to the south. She even heard this from three non-Indian, Guarani-speaking students who used to show up from time to time at the village (in the days when her family still lived in the village). She looks around her, she sees no resistance at all. Her little sister is playing in the soot, in the dust from the rubber tyres. She goes as far as contemplating how she might kill her before the girl is able to understand her own misfortune. She would have no remorse because she knows – and Maína does everything she can to believe it – that she would be going to a better life . Maína believes in the soul, even though she herself cannot imagine what the abstraction that reveals the soul must be like. Every night she dreams of someplace different, where there are no grown-ups or, at least, no adults like her father who took off when she was nine years old. Without him, things got complicated for her mother and the four children; they had to leave the village. Maína doesn’t know quite what to do: she has never been in a restaurant like this restaurant; she has never been in a restaurant at all. A few weeks earlier Maína had started to feel afraid, that’s why she ran away. Once Maína dreamed the image of God, he had a fragile body and came out of his hiding place to be with her. For a moment Maína thought this guy might be God or a spirit. What non-Indian would stop on the road and treat her this well? She finishes the snack that he’s ordered for her. Now she just needs to use a few words to make him understand that she wishes to get back into the raincloud-coloured car and accompany him wherever he would like to take her, even if it takes hours, the whole day, until she has invented a language that will work for them both, a language from the place of God and the spirits that like to pass themselves off as non-Indians, until she manages to close her eyes tight and (perhaps repeating the choice made by her older sister) disappear.
    The road sign read ‘ START OF ROADSIDE INDIGENOUS CAMP (NEXT 28 KM )’, and Paulo has already asked her three times where she would like to get out. She limits her replies to the same gesture with her hand to keep on going. So this time, which would be the fourth time, Paulo indicates right, pulling the car over in front of one of the huts. ‘Sorry, you’re going to have to get out.’ He articulates the words carefully and deliberately. She doesn’t reply. ‘I can’t take you any further,’ he says. She doesn’t budge. ‘Come on, Maína. You know it isn’t safe to be going around, just … ’ he can’t find the words, ‘just around like this, with a stranger. It’s dangerous.’ He gets out, walks around the car, opens her door. ‘You can keep the clothes. I just … ’ And she interrupts him. ‘Give lift to the city. Then I comes back alone. I come back, you let me.’ Well, Paulo, you begged her and now you’ve got what you asked for. ‘It’s just I can’t … ’ Without getting up, she says a choked please. Paulo looks around them, doesn’t see anyone, the hut they had stopped alongside gives every indication of being empty, no sign of activity. The girl is at a breaking point, weakened into an absolute conviction that she must run away and that if she fails at this moment she will end up in some other car or headed for some worse destiny. The moments pass; they are part of a test that intoxicates him. This morning when he turned on the hotel radio tuned to a local FM station they were playing a hit by Legião Urbana: every day when I wake up, I no longer have the time that’s gone. The same line that for much of the journey he’d had in his head and which is now the imaginary soundtrack getting in the way of his making a decision. His clothes dampening, the rain propels him on. But I have so much time, we have all the time in the world. There can’t be many things worse than her