Ben, in the World

He said to Teresa, ‘When am I going home?’

Teresa knew that he had been in London, and that probably was what he meant, but she said cautiously only that she was sure Alex would take him home.

‘I want to go home,’ said Ben, ‘I want to go home now.’

When Teresa had finished tidying and cooking she brought Ben fruit juice and sat beside him, with her glass of juice. He hoped that she would put her arm around his shoulders so that her soft black hair would fall on him, and she did. ‘Poor Ben,’ she said. ‘Poor Ben. I am sad for you.’

‘I want to go home.’

Teresa wanted to go home too, and, like Ben, hardly knew where the place was she could rightfully call home.

This was her story. She had been born in a poor village in the north-east of Brazil where now drought was killing animals and filling the fields with dust. She remembered dryness and hunger and watching their neighbours leave for the south, for Rio, Sao Paulo. Then her father said they must leave, they would all die if they stayed: father, mother, and four children, the eldest Teresa. For part of the way they were on a bus, but then it was a question of a bus or eating. They walked for days, eating bread and stolen maize from fields which were getting greener as they went south. Then they were in a crowded favela outside Rio, where houses were built one above another up a hillside, and where the higher you were the better, because of how sewage washed downhill when it rained. With their last money they made a shelter of plastic sheets on sticks, and below them were shacks like theirs and better houses, between paths that were becoming the sharp gashes of erosion. There was no money left. The father, together with the other poor men, tried to get work, fought for any work at all, and sometimes did get work for a day or two. They were hungry, they were desperate. Then something began which Teresa did not at first understand, though she did know the girls from the favelas earned money with their bodies. Her father said nothing, her mother said nothing, but she could read their faces, which said that she could feed this family of six people. Teresa spoke to the girls who were already feeding their families. They hung around the barracks where soldiers came out at evenings, or went to cafes where the petty criminals were. Most of these girls took it for granted they were low, they were rubbish, and that they could hope for nothing better. To get higher meant money for a good dress and shoes, and the moment there was money in their hands it went to their families. Teresa was a clever girl, clear-sighted, and she had no intention of remaining a soldiers’ whore. At the start she went with another girl, to see how things went, and easily attracted a soldier who took her standing against a wall, and gave her enough reais