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stopped a few metres on, took off their helmets, laughed at her. The day, which had been lovely and sunny, clouded over. Hurt, the apple looked sad, sadder even than the girl , that’s how he wrote it down. And she will watch the leaves on the trees and she won’t know when his leg has gone to sleep and the time has come for them to go.
    Many days passed (as in any relationship, theirs created its own idiosyncrasies). There had already been a fifth meeting and a sixth, this is now the seventh, when he picks her up on the road and, in the gap between her opening the door and sitting in the passenger seat, he says, ‘Saturday’s fucking awesome, isn’t it, Maína?’ and they look at one another without a couple’s complicity but a couple just the same, without his immediately noticing the lipstick on her mouth, the cosmetic pink. Unlike the other times, Maína doesn’t have the bag full of papers and magazines to show him what she has read, only the exercise book and the four-colour pen that he brought the last time they met, along with the packs of batteries for the radio cassette player and a pink leotard that he saw in the window of Petipá, the gym-wear shop at the top of Protásio Alves, and bought for her. The exercise book now has Maína’s handwriting in green, a colour that makes the letters on the paper look as if they haven’t been written, as if they could simply be wafted away. Paulo has brought bags of savoury snacks, cans of Budweiser, mineral water, cans of Coke; Maína’s crazy about soft drinks. They have a picnic. She has prepared two stories for him to write down. He says he’s all ears. She laughs at the all ears and, without hesitating over the inaccuracies, she starts to tell the tale she has imagined. The first story tells of all the fooling around that happened between Indian men and women in the days when the land had no owner. The other is about an old Indian woman who spent her days on the road gathering up loose pages from newspapers and magazines that had been carried over on the wind, until one day, the day she was bitten by a lizard who wore a blazer (that was the word Paulo chose), she built a bonfire with all the paper she’d collected, and when the flames had grown till they reached the height of a man, a man who could embrace her, she put them on and, hankering after an impossible kinship, disappeared. Maína gathers all her things up from the ground, waits for Paulo to finish writing. Almost twenty minutes later, he hands her the exercise book, she moves closer and contrives a kiss on the mouth, then takes her clothes off. She gets into the Beetle, straight onto the back seat, asks him to get in too. Paulo walks slowly towards the car, sits next to her. Maína tries to kiss him, he evades her. There are consequences, more than he could have foreseen. She says a few words in Guarani; he puts his arms around her. Then he takes off his t-shirt and gives it to her to put on. Silence and the impossibility of a conclusion, although the insistence and the doubts will no longer appear on the pages of the exercise book she has dropped on the grass.
    * * *
    Another day. Maína’s sisters cannot guess who the man is who’s getting out of the car with those plastic bags in his hands. He tries to talk to the older one, but she doesn’t understand what he’s saying. Maína recognises his voice, she comes out of the tent and, making no attempt to hide her happiness at seeing him, says she had only been expecting him in two days’ time. Paulo hands over the bags with packets of biscuits, cornflower snacks and soft drinks for her. ‘I’ve brought some junk food,’ he says. Maína wants to know what junk means. Without waiting for a reply she goes back to the tent. Paulo follows her. He goes into the tent and sees the straw mats covering the floor, the wooden crates with cleaning products, clothes, pans, everything improvised, a table with a stack of six Duralex plates, a can of cooking