Crow Blue, page 12
Carlos spent that night with us, after asking his father for permission, and asked if we could stay up until midnight. We watched TV and played cards and before midnight he had already fallen asleep on the couch with his mouth open, snoring softly. We put a pillow under his spiky hair, took off his glasses and covered him with a blanket.
The next day, a Sunday, Fernando went out early. I didn’t know why. Maybe he had gone for a swim at the public swimming pool – the one that was indoor and heated and thus didn’t stay closed to the public for eight months of the year. It was more or less his version of a social life. He would swim a couple of miles amidst other semi-sub-aquatic arms and legs and would come home smelling of chlorine and hang a towel smelling of chlorine in the bathroom.
He left a note on the table. It didn’t explain anything. It just said LOOK OUTSIDE. Carlos was still asleep, so I carefully opened the front door of the still-groggy house.
Outside a white film had settled over all things: trees, cars, roofs, the street, sidewalks. Tiny, fuzzy, pallid objects were floating down from the sky, noiselessly and almost weightlessly. Some even rose again in the air, halfway down, as the faintest current of air flicked them up invisibly. Then they drifted down again. Then up again. Like children at a party. I crouched down, scooped up a handful of the whipped cream that had piled up at the front door and squeezed it. The cold hurt. The air cut my face; it entered my nostrils and lungs with tiny knives. Everything allowed itself to be covered by that substance that until then, for me, had only existed in films and books, an anti-tropical substance.
When the red Saab pulled up in front of the house a short time later, Carlos and I were outside, captivated by that climatic phenomenon that, historically, had so little to do with us.
My ears hurt and my cheeks hurt. My face was red and my nose was running. There was a first-time joy inside me, a kind of euphoric calm. I was the boy from the country who gazes at the ocean and wonders how it doesn’t overflow. I was the peasant who stares at a skyscraper and wonders how it doesn’t fall down. And Carlos looked at me, immensely happy at my happiness, and told me that it had been like that for him the first time too.
I think we’re going to have to buy those boots now, said Fernando as he passed. He smelled of chlorine. He grabbed a handful of snow and rubbed it on my head, and I protested without protesting.
That night I dreamed of the cold. It was a harsh cold, the cold of a world that scoffed at the naked bipeds who thought they were the boss of it. It was a whole, chaste cold. Without the convenience of heated homes. A cold without contours, without seasons and counter-seasons; just cold. I wasn’t part of the dream. Neither was Fernando, or Carlos, or his family, or my possible father, or my mother, or anyone. The cold didn’t need people to dream it up.
That morning a plateau of snow had appeared in front of the house. The snow conspires with the desert. Things lose their contours and the all-white sky sticks to the all-white roof, making worlds coincide, annulling distances. There is something of a unifying dream in it, like Esperanto. There were no longer any colors. Everything was the silent accumulation of the snowflakes that fell, tiny and incessant, as tenaciously as death takes over a body. But we were alive, and inside the house the comfort and warmth felt prodigal. Or insulting.
Fernando put his coffee mug on the table. He pulled on his boots, got a wide shovel and said I’m going outside to clear the white shit off the sidewalk.
I thought he’d apologize for saying shit, but he didn’t.
A few days in a row of insistent snow (and a snow storm on the Thursday that left everyone stranded in their houses, schools closed, Fernando unable to go to work) had turned bald slopes into runs that children plumped out in colorful jackets slid down on colorful sleds. That was when Fernando came home with the red plastic sled and, promising me that I wasn’t going to die, pushed me down the slope.
I opened my mouth on the way down and swallowed enough snow to perform a kind of self-baptism. From then on I was one of them. I was the same. I was just another girl in a light purple waterproof jacket, and black rubber boots lined with synthetic fur. And jeans stiff with cold to which snow bandages stuck. And mittens. And a stocking hat with two braids at the sides. The jacket and boots were from an outlet but they were good quality, although it felt strange to have all those textures between my skin and the world. I now existed in layers.
The air became hard again, but the essence of this hardness was different. At any rate, I needed to accept that there was rarely any middle ground in that place. And at any rate what mattered was that now I was one of them, yes: analogous, comparable to, like. In a prosaic fraternity of jacket-encased bodies sliding down smooth white slopes, amidst awe-inspiring spills and war cries. I too uttered cries, I too took spills, I too.
Carlos closed his eyes and I said open your eyes, Carlos, it’s no fun with your eyes closed, and in one of his spills he lost his glasses and we desperately hunted for a long time until we saw an arm sticking out of a mound of soft snow like a periscope.
The pine trees dotted around us reminded me of the plastic Christmas trees that my mother and I used to decorate with cotton in December. The sky was blue, but the sun was angled. It got into my eyes from underneath, almost, as if its rays were flexible. It bumped into the mountains at five o’clock. Airplanes left white tracks in the sky, and distant trails of sound, which arrived with a delay.
Fernando and I arranged the trip to New Mexico for the end of November, when I had a week off school for Thanksgiving.
I felt like a stage actress on opening night. I was backstage applying makeup, getting dressed, mentally going over my lines, warming up my voice, Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, a peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked, if Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, then where’s the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked, as I had seen my mother’s friend’s actor friend do once backstage at the Glaucio Gill Theatre in Copacabana. (Moments later I saw him on the stage, transfigured: confident and handsome in the limelight. It had to be possible.)
The dog-eared maps of Colorado and New Mexico were reinforced with sticky tape. They left the drawer and migrated to the glove box of the Saab.
Fernando went to Carlos’s house personally to ask his parents for permission to take him with us, at my insistence (he’ll be so lonely, Fernando, a whole week with no school, and do you think his folks are going to take him out anywhere?).
Carlos’s eyes shone as if someone had switched them on. But his eternal concern led him to ask if he needed papeles to go to New Mexico, and if he did, what should he do.
His father’s moustache said, in tight-lipped Spanish, that Carlos shouldn’t go around saying things like that. People turned other people in (no, he wasn’t referring to us – of course not – we were friends – but Carlos had a loose tongue). And if that were to happen, if someone were to turn them in, they would have to leave. LEAVE. And worse, they’d have to leave Dolores behind, because now she was in Florida leading a different life. And they might never see Dolores again if they had to leave for some reason. Carlos’s mother started to sniffle and covered her face with her hands. Fernando cleared his throat and stared at the wall. Carlos was immediately gripped with panic, apologized and never uttered the word papeles again.
At that moment he grew a little more, confirming my theory that that was how things went, in bursts, in spasms, and not in arithmetic continuity. All of the metaphors for growth – the steps on a ladder, a road with curves here and there – were sheer nonsense. It all really happened in fits and starts, like when I was on the plane going to the United States and at some point they told us to fasten our seatbelts because we were going to hit some turbulence, and suddenly that aerial pachyderm which, according to Americans, had been invented by the Wright brothers started to shake in the middle of the sky. It shook as if there were potholed asphalt beneath it, like on certain stretches of the highway between Rio de Janeiro and Barra do Jucu.
In the blink of an eye, a cloud, a sister who leaves home with her boyfriend, a sentence someone says involving papeles and suddenly you are older. Depending on the turbulence, maybe it is possible to go to bed at the age of forty and wake up sixty.
My mother should have stayed married to you, I told Fernando the night before we left, as we were eating the pasta that I had prepared myself with a sauce with Paul Newman’s face on the label.
How do you know that she was the one who ended it?
Was it you?
I stared at him with a pair of perplexed eyes and he laughed.
No. It was her. Suzana was the one who ended it. After a while it’s not important anymore, who ended it, who didn’t. At any rate, things with her were like that. Wonderful while they lasted. But they didn’t last long.
He cut his pasta with his knife, as my mother had taught me not to do. You roll it up on your fork like this, she used to say. It was quite a bit of work. When I saw Fernando cutting his pasta with his knife I decided to cut mine too. Etiquette was silly.
Your mother had some cycles, I think. Seasons. From time to time she needed to change essential things in her life and sometimes these essential things involved other people.
Was it the same with my father?
I don’t know if it was the same with your father. She and I were married on paper, you know. She changed her surname and everything. On our wedding day she wore a white dress and a flower in her hair, and we went to a beer garden to celebrate with her friends. We were married for six years. I think she only spent a few months with Daniel.
In the spaces between Fernando’s words, in his gestures, in the way his eyebrows danced above his eyes like lizards doing ballet, I realized that he wanted to lay claim to at least that: the position of most-important-man.
The man Suzana had married wearing a white dress and a flower in her hair.
Were you jealous?
’Course not. I never even met Daniel. I moved here to Colorado when your mother and I split up. The next week. I spent a few days in the hotel, over in Albuquerque, and then I came. I got a job in Aurora.
Doing what?
One thing or another.
Six years is quite a long time.
That depends. It can be a long time or it can be almost nothing.
Did you still love her?
He didn’t look at me. He shrugged and said yes.
Then you must have been jealous.
Maybe. It’s possible.
I sighed. I didn’t know if we should be having this conversation. I cut some more pasta and put it in my mouth.
My mother was kind of complicated, I said.
She was, said Fernando.
Las Animas
On the map the Interstate 25 led honestly south, until it ran into the dotted line where Colorado met New Mexico, eye to eye, foreheads aligned.
We had five or six hours of driving ahead of us. We stopped to fill the tank at the first gas station and Carlos wanted to buy some chocolate with some of the twelve dollars of spending money he had brought with him. Fernando bought three bottles of water and a bag of really bad salsa chips. The packet said: MADE WITH REAL AVOCADOS AND TOMATOES. But they tasted like anything but real avocados and tomatoes. I bought a pair of slightly embarrassing sunglasses with pink and blue frames. Then I waited for the sun to come out so I could wear them. But the morning was taking its time, as if dragging itself out of an autumn night with wintry aspirations was slow and a little painful.
Carlos had telephoned the previous evening to list off the items in his suitcase and ask if I agreed. His mother had helped him choose them, but he wanted to be extra-super-sure that his suitcase contained everything necessary. He didn’t want to have to reuse underwear or socks on such an important trip.
Such an important trip: for the surprise-reasons nestled in the days to come, waiting for their moment to leap out. Panting trapeze artists with drums beating down below.
Carlos didn’t know anything. We hadn’t told him anything about anything. But the trip was important according to his own personal parameters. It was an event. It was the first time in his life, for example, that he had been away from his itinerant family.
It was a little after seven o’clock. Fernando had hauled me out of bed at six-thirty and pushed me out of the house at seven. It was still dark when I got up. In the merciless cold that preceded the dawn, the world was full of placid suspense; supernatural minus the ghosts. It turned its face unhurriedly toward the sun that would appear when it had to, no sooner, no later.
We stopped the Saab in front of Carlos’s house, before a mosaic of sparse plant-life and small puddles of hard snow. Carlos walked down to the street holding hands with his dad. His face was solemn: he was perhaps a brave little soldier setting out to save the nation. A pre-hero in a stocking hat and gloves. He smelled vaguely of aftershave. As we greeted one another, pale steam came out of our mouths. The sky was a two-dimensional, milky, dull surface.
The two adults made pale, steamy comments about the weather. There was no snow predicted for that week and it was going to be a good week, and the roads would be good. The red Saab rumbled quietly, its motor running, a testament to its serenity and discipline.
Carlos’s dad told us to have a good time and to call to check in. The two adults shook hands, Carlos jumped into the car and the moon remained steadfast in the colorless sky, entirely oblivious to whatever was going on beneath it.
After a little while, Carlos asked to see the map and was elated when he realized that before getting to Santa Fé we would pass through Las Vegas.
Fernando had to explain that it wasn’t the Las Vegas he was thinking of, which was in Nevada not New Mexico, and Carlos lowered his eyes to the map again, vaguely disappointed.
Then, mentally inaugurating an improbable chapter of tourism in our lives, he suggested that we go to the real Las Vegas the next time there was a long weekend. Or to New York, another city he’d heard a lot about.
Half an hour later, he was asleep in the back seat of the Saab, lying down with his knees pulled up to his tummy, glasses crooked on his forehead.
The Saab broke down near Starkville, in the county of Las Animas. We were about twenty minutes from the state border. Fernando swore in Portuguese and Carlos may have understood him. We had traveled two hundred miles in three and a half hours, taking into account the pee-stop we had made outside Pueblo.
At the beginning of the trip, Carlos slept for over an hour, while I tracked the Saab’s freefall down the map. We left Castle Rock and Larkspur behind us. In front of the Air Force Academy at the entrance to Colorado Springs, I noticed that the highway took on the name Ronald Reagan Highway. Pikes Peak loomed above us, a proudly tall mountain in a land of tall mountains. We left the city and its Saturday morning behind.
Haven’t you ever wanted to go back to Brazil? I asked Fernando.
I’ve thought about it a few times.
So why haven’t you ever gone back?
There isn’t much for me in Brazil.
What do you mean, there isn’t much for you in Brazil? You’re from there. You left because you had to.
Truth be told, Vanja, I wasn’t forced to leave. I left because I wanted to. I know I once told you that, that I had to leave. But no one sent me away, and other people in the same situation stayed. They’re still around. Some are in the government. They paid a price, of course. But I did too.
Fine, but if you didn’t leave you might have had problems. With the police. The army, I mean. You said so yourself.
He sighed.
If I were in Brazil today I might very well be working as a security guard and cleaner too. Who knows. But life would be a little more difficult.
You could do something else. Maybe you’d be in the government too. Imagine! You might be a federal deputy, a minister.
He laughed.
I don’t know if I’d want to do anything else. Or if I’d be able to. Maybe serve beers in a bar.
That’s not the only thing you’ve done in your life. You studied geography.
I did a year of geography.
But you’ve done other things.
Sure. I attended the Peking Military Academy. And I was a communist guerrilla. That’s the most important part of my CV.
I didn’t say anything.
After a time he added: I don’t need to tell you that these things have to stay between us, right?
He didn’t. We overtook a car carrier transporting a cluster of cars with dents in different places and to different degrees. One of them was missing its front bumper, which made it look like a mutilated face, the sort you see close-up in horror movies, a bulging headlight like an eye in a bed of live flesh. I liked talking to Fernando.
A black car overtook us. There was a National Rifle Association sticker on the back window, with an eagle perched on two crossed rifles against a red background.
There is something intermediary about deserts. Many travelers have said it. It is as if they weren’t destinations, just routes. Great inhospitable landscapes where you don’t dawdle, you just travel from one more affable point on the map to another. And yet people live there. People live in the world’s deserts and arid and semiarid wildernesses. In these places between parentheses. Where all things – sounds, distances – inhabit other semantics. It seems like a desperate gesture. Or perhaps an abandonment.
I hate this place, Nick once told me.
What place? School?
Colorado.
You hate it? Why?
You walk and there’s nothing. You drive for hours and hours and there’s nothing. Just some bushes on the ground. I wish I lived somewhere where there were trees.
