Crow Blue, page 15
When June had called her a few weeks earlier, it had been like that. A message. A number for Florence to please call back. Florence had listened to the message, registered a group of numbers without any internal logic, and seconds later they had probably broken up like drops of water splattering on the ground, returned to their molecular state, without any other commitment or consequence.
I called a few weeks ago, June said, as Florence was offering us tea (I like to receive everyone that comes to visit my studio with a cup of tea; it’s so nice when people come all the way out here – a smile).
Florence clasped her hand. June’s soft, chubby hand in Florence’s long, knotty hand, with its age spots. Forgive me, my dear. I must have heard your message, I always listen to my messages, at least once a week – a smile – but sometimes I forget to write them down, and then I end up forgetting them. She tapped on her temple with her index finger. I’m a little absent-minded, she said.
And when we walked in and met Norbert, who then left with his vacuum cleaner, she suggested that we have a seat and went to get the tea. She brought a blue teapot and a collection of mismatched cups. All made by her, she announced. Here she had used melted glass. This one here was already quite old, one of the first cups she had made when she was still living and studying in Mexico. Then she looked at me and with a start I suddenly wondered if she had met my mother. Did my mother’s relationship with this woman’s son include family gatherings? If so, how long would it take for her to recognize my mother in me?
Sugar, anyone? Honey?
Then she talked, with her eyes wandering through the air, about when she was young and lived in Mexico and met her first husband and then they both went to live in the Ivory Coast, and his name was Jesus. Her first husband. A good man. Her two children had been born in Abidjan. And after living in Mexico and the Ivory Coast she had never again been able to live in a cold climate.
In Vermont with Norbert, for example, she said. It’s all very beautiful there, but I need the sun. Norbert wanted me to move to Vermont when we met. I said no. I told him he had to choose. Vermont or me.
Carlos had gotten up and gone to play with the cat. I asked its name and Florence said Salmon, and Carlos thought it was funny for a cat to have a fish name.
So where are your kids these days?
It was Fernando who asked the question, and only I knew that his voice was shaking on the inside, under his mantle of casualness and politeness. Only I knew that his voice was a trap. Three pairs of eyes trained themselves on Florence, trying not to look anxious.
They’ve gone back to Africa. My son’s been in Abidjan for six years now. My daughter’s been in Luanda for more than ten. Her husband is from there. Would anyone like some more tea? Have some ginger cookies. I made them yesterday.
How stupid, I thought. How stupid to leave Copacabana and go live in a suburb of Denver and wait months and travel hundreds of miles in a crappy old car to find a woman in a house tucked away in the mountains of New Mexico only to discover that my father lived in Africa. That he was a whole Atlantic away. That he was on a continent which, outside of the classroom, I had rarely thought about in my thirteen years of life, on a continent that had nothing to do with me or my mother, or Barra do Jucu, or Janis Joplin.
I was phenomenally angry at myself for the idea, for the letter, I was angry at the post office employee for having sent the letter properly and at the letter for not having gotten lost in the post, I was angry at Fernando for the nice little phone call, I was angry at Carlos for existing and having that stupid family of his and for not being able to speak English properly after a year in the country that he and his stupid family worshipped, I was angry at Florence for the triviality of her words and her la-la land, and for having a husband who collected vacuum cleaners. I was angry at the tea. I was angry at the Indians and their jewelry in Santa Fé and at the women who bought the Indians’ jewelry in Santa Fé and even more at their rich, pot-bellied husbands. I was genuinely abysmally angry at the librarian at the Denver Public Library, who had suggested all that poetry to me as if I had some kind of aspiration to become an intellectual. As if anyone needed it. That pile of difficult lines written by men and women who didn’t have anything else to do. I was angry at WH, TS and WB, and very angry at Marianne and her dumb fish. I was angry at my mother for dying and at myself for having been left behind, for staying on in my compulsory life, unable to escape the teachers’ pity and my classmates’ teary eyes. I felt a compact, vehement anger for playing on the ultimate team and being Aditi Ramagiri’s friend and having Nick’s name written on my jeans. I was angry at Shah Jahan and his damned missing diamond.
I felt like screaming. Like picking up the teacup and smashing it against the white wall. A new Big Bang that wouldn’t beget any universes – just a handful of ceramic fragments that someone would sweep into a dustpan. A Big Bang without universal pretensions, like an outlet for a god’s bad mood.
But I didn’t scream or throw the teacup. I remained silent, as Florence delivered a slow monologue like someone remembering a dream, talking about her work, her sculptures, her pottery, and suggested that we go and see the sculptures in the garden while it was still light out, and then she would show us her studio. Lots of things were for sale and she accepted cash or checks, but not credit cards unfortunately.
Fernando held my hand as we headed out into the garden and sparse snowflakes twirled in the white sky, undecided as to their destination. The weather disobeyed meteorology. But the snowflakes disappeared on the ground. They didn’t come to be presences.
Fernando held my hand with a squeeze that wasn’t loose or tight, and as we walked around the garden and looked at the Woman Chicken and other sculptures we wondered, all of us, each in the dialect of our own thoughts, how we would tell Florence the real reason for our visit. And whether she would be upset or happy or suspicious, or none of the above.
Probably none of the above.
It was already night when we left the house on Redondo Road. June got into her green pickup and placed the half-dozen ceramic tea cups she had bought, wrapped in several sheets of newspaper and stacked in a plastic bag, on the passenger seat next to her.
June would take the same route back to Santa Fé, where Alfred and Georgia were waiting for her, perhaps already a little upset at her long absence. She would pass through Los Alamos and cross Oppenheimer Drive; she would pass the Indians’ brightly lit casinos and neon signs.
Fernando, Carlos and I would continue south after leaving Redondo Road, along the modest State Road 4. We would pass through Jemez Pueblo and reach San Ysidro, where the road emptied into another, and we would pass through Zia Pueblo and continue on to the intersection of I-25, the omnipresent Interstate 25. And we would see other Indians’ brightly lit casinos and neon signs. And at some point we would be in Albuquerque. I was holding a two-dimensional ceramic creature. A lizard, perhaps. A creature made by Florence.
I don’t sell these ones. I make them as a pastime, she had said. Pick one.
Florence’s studio was a large room with a really big dirty table and pieces of newspaper everywhere. But she hadn’t hung her favorite poem on the wall. Maybe she didn’t have a favorite poem. Maybe she didn’t read poems.
I picked the perhaps-lizard. Which was now arriving in Albuquerque with me – the same Albuquerque where I had been born and which I was revisiting with a strange reverence, the reverence reserved for reencounters with people and places we don’t remember anymore.
Anaconda
On Fridays, my mother used to get her nails done and would come home complaining about the smell of the nail polish. On Saturdays, she used to go to the street market and would come home complaining about the smell of the fish. On Tuesdays, she used to go to the supermarket and would come home complaining about the price of things.
Sometimes I would go with her to the manicurist and the manicurist would paint my nails pink. I didn’t complain about the smell of the nail polish.
After my mother died, I wondered if all these places would save her a space for a while. The space that she would have occupied in the queue at the supermarket. The lettuce or the potatoes that she would have bought at the street market. The potential brushstrokes of nail polish in the bottle. I wondered if the space that a person occupies in the world survives the person themself. If the stage remains set for a while, the props ready, the cue repeated several times, waiting for the person to come on again. And if the connections are only undone slowly, the threads breaking, the lights switching off, the person dying slowly for the world after they have died for themself. If there are two deaths, one intimate and individual, the other public and collective, two deaths that happen at different paces.
Perhaps Fernando had heard, before me and somewhere else, my mother complaining about the smell of the nail polish, the smell of the fish and the price of things. Perhaps she had scolded him about leaving coffee cups around the house and perhaps he had scolded her for forgetting to give him a message. Perhaps they had both woken up several mornings not speaking to one another. Perhaps he had placed his finger lightly on Suzana’s neck to feel the blood pulsing there. Perhaps she had traced his eyebrows with her fingertips.
One day he told her about the past. About weapons. About Brasilia, Peking, the River of the Macaws. One day she told him about the past. About the lamb in the song. About her mother’s dolls. About the dead cat sprawled across the sidewalk.
One day she told him about her father and Texas, but only some of it. One day he told her about the girl he had met on the banks of the Araguaia, but only some of it. She told him that she had severed ties with her father and moved to the next state. Without a penny to her name. He told her that he had been fond of the girl who had fought beside him in the guerrilla war. Fernando knew how to make weapons. Suzana knew how to leave men. Fernando had studied at the Peking Military Academy. Suzana had donated her mother’s dolls to a Presbyterian orphanage in Dallas. Fernando had a letter from his guerrilla girlfriend, which he had kept almost by accident. Suzana had a photo of her mother. And one day they had lain down in bed with their memories, their ghosts, their deaths.
Do you promise? asked Suzana before she fell asleep.
Promise what? he asked.
Promise first and I’ll tell you afterwards.
I promise.
And she looked at the digital clock on the bedside table and saw that it was the next day.
Now tell me what I promised, said Fernando.
But she didn’t. She allowed her head to sink between two pillows and closed her burrow with the blanket and snuggled into sleep, into the happiness of sleep, into the inconsequence of sleep. And since Fernando never found out what he had promised, he had to improvise the keeping of the promise.
For this reason, and this reason alone, he stayed on in the United States when he and my mother broke up, a state’s distance away, where he could get in his car and drive for six hours to, for example, register as his daughter the daughter who wasn’t his. For this reason he was there every time she called him and left every time she asked him to. For this reason: for her.
And when she returned to Brazil he stayed put, according to the promise he had improvised and, improvising, kept.
He stayed put, like a property, a house, something that you don’t uproot and cart about, in your pocket, your suitcase, your backpack. A structure built on the earth, heavy, sealed, protected from the weather, prepared for the extreme cold and the extreme heat, capable of closing doors and windows to the wind, capable of closing curtains to the eyes of passersby.
In case she decided to return some day.
And every day that she didn’t decide to return was added to the previous day like a calendar that you put together yourself, to which you add pages, and suddenly he took it all and stashed it in the wooden El Coto de Rioja wine crate and put it at the back of the wardrobe and thought it no longer made any difference. Staying, leaving. It wasn’t an issue anymore.
Someone mentioned a position as a security guard at Denver Public Library, right in the center of town, that clean, airy, functional place where books were shelved, catalogued, where people went like informal pilgrims to consult or borrow the books. A security guard at a library felt like something of a formality to him. A position in the world that was mere protocol. He figured that libraries weren’t violent places, requiring security. He couldn’t imagine library-goers being thieves or attackers or troublemakers.
At the entrance was an inscription with the words of Jorge Luis Borges: I have always imagined Paradise as a kind of library. There should be no need for security guards in a place with such a paradisiacal statute.
But you never know.
The job was there. And Fernando was there to try and get the job.
Years later, as the red 1985 Saab convalesced in a mechanic’s workshop near Starkville, in Las Animas Country, almost on the Colorado-New Mexico border, Fernando asked me: do you want me to tell you the things I never told your mother?
I was quiet and listened. For a good while, I just listened. I never asked Fernando why he decided to talk that night. If he had decided to indemnify my mother for the things he hadn’t told her by telling her daughter.
Whatever his reason, the story that hadn’t been told started on the first anniversary of the Araguaia Guerrilla Movement.
The anaconda is the second-largest snake in the world. In the Amazon, it can reach twenty-six feet in length. People are afraid of the anaconda, but it avoids human beings. Most of the time.
Anaconda was the name of the operation that the army initiated in April of 1973. It was a plan to gather intelligence. Its objective wasn’t to launch offensives against the enemy, but espionage, using the same methods to infiltrate the population as the guerrillas had used.
In the three preceding months, the dictatorship had killed four members of the Brazilian Communist Party’s Central Committee in the cities. The dismantling of the party prevented new guerrilla reinforcements from being sent to the region.
Nevertheless, the atmosphere among the guerrillas was one of euphoria, and they wanted to believe that the inhabitants of the region would join the armed struggle. Their work with the local population continued. After several months, the guerrillas’ Military Commission managed to re-establish contact with Detachment C, the most deeply affected by Operation Parrot. After some restructuring and under the orders of a new commander, Detachment C, in its first raid on property, occupied the farm of a land-grabber and government informer. They confiscated a sum equal to that which the farmer had obtained selling the guerrillas’ possessions after one of their camps had been occupied by the army.
The threat of reprisal spread among the locals who had betrayed the guerrillas. One such local, Pedro Mineiro, was executed in his own home, after being judged by the Revolutionary Military Tribunal. Another peasant by the name of Osmar was also captured, judged and executed.
For a while, Chico’s hopes were renewed. It was hard not to take heart amidst the celebrations of the armed movement’s first anniversary. The locals helped out with clothes, shoes, food. They listened to Tirana Radio with the guerrillas, attended meetings, and eleven of them ended up joining the cause.
But the fear that you once felt is a vaccine in reverse: it predisposes you to illness. It waits, in ambush. Like an anaconda ready to devour its prey, ready to wrap around it and drag it to the river or, with scientific precision, squeeze it a little more every time it exhales, until it is no longer possible for it to fill its lungs with air. The anaconda has no venom. Its weapon is oppression.
In Operation Anaconda, there were explicit orders for there to be no military action. Unless they were lucky enough to find Osvaldão, the black giant who commanded Detachment B. The ophidian information network in the Araguaia region turned captains, lieutenants, soldiers and sergeants into rural workers, malaria control sprayers, tavern-goers, Land Reform Agency inspectors, traveling salesmen. But it wasn’t easy. The operation that should have taken two months took five.
In September, a group of guerrillas from Detachment A arrived at daybreak at a Military Police post on the Trans-Amazonian Highway. They surrounded it. After shouting for the soldiers to surrender, which they didn’t, the detachment commander ordered the guerrillas to open fire. The post went up in flames. The soldiers came out and surrendered. After being interrogated in their underwear and threatened with execution, they were evicted. The loot taken by the guerrillas included weapons, ammunition, uniforms and boots, and their success was recounted in a communiqué to the inhabitants of the region.
Manuela was among the guerrillas who took part in the operation. Chico should have been.
But there was a moment, before daybreak, as the Araguaia communists were heading for what was to be their first successful military offensive, when Chico stopped. The others continued on, believing in their feet and hands and eyes and weapons, and Chico stopped.
No one saw him. The sky was still dark in a winter that had barely ended, in the heart of a forest that Trans-Amazonian Highways bled awkwardly, without talent, without conviction. Somewhat embarrassed, knowing perhaps that they would never be more than sketches of highways.
Chico thought about Peking. He thought about the opera, and the painted masks on the faces of the singer-actors. He thought about their difficult voices, which made curves that were different to those of the singers he knew. He thought about his Chinese interpreters, and the many nights and many days he had spent in that faraway country, then he thought no more.
He saw Manuela in the distance, from behind, her hair tied back, the hair that had once belonged to a Rio student versed in language and literature, nail polish and special shampoos and who was now versed in hoes, knives and guns. She was much thinner than when she had arrived here, that rainy day, yet another rainy day. Beneath her dry skin covered in sores were new muscles for new skills. And Chico thought about how people’s bodies were adaptable: to cold, to heat, to fear, to hunger, to work. To hoes, knives and guns.
