Crow Blue, page 16
He saw Manuela in the distance and it was the last time he saw Manuela.
She kept going and he stayed were he was. He could have taken a step, and it would have been the first of many more, as he accompanied the group headed for the Military Police post. All he had to do was lift up his foot and put it down a little further away; it was a step and didn’t require training or philosophy and he’d known how to do it since he was a child. Communist guerrillas took steps, dictators took steps, men and women and old people and children in Brazil, in China, in Albania, in the United States, in Cuba and in Bolivia and even on the moon took steps. But he stayed where he was for a time which was a potholed asphalt road slicing through his life from east to west. From the Atlantic to the Peruvian border. And the longer he stood there, Chico knew, an unforeseen decision was being sealed – unforeseen and, in the pit of his stomach, more shameful than the military’s shameful inability to do away with that group which, for any number of reasons, should have been exterminated a long time ago. They, the guerrillas, were ghosts walking through the forest, believing (believing?) in another world. They were already ghosts. If he had gotten close to Manuela again, he might have seen through her skin. She was possibly already losing ownership of her body, as it was obvious that she would, sooner or later. Like him. Like all of them.
Chico never got close to Manuela again. Being the skillful woodsman that he was, he found his way out of there, far from there, far from everything, himself included.
The killing would begin the following month. The hunt for the guerrillas and the extermination of all of them. The military would pick them off one by one. Perhaps Chico sensed it. Perhaps he only suspected it. Feared it. Gave up.
Chico didn’t hear the detachment commander’s shouts that morning. He didn’t see the soldiers coming out of the post amidst flames and smoke. He didn’t see them being evicted. Chico didn’t see Manuela looking for him, the rest of the detachment too but especially Manuela, looking for him. Manuela, who had been his companion during such a troubled time, and who would be one of the missing of the Araguaia Guerrilla Movement, a presumed pile of bones among the presumed piles of bones buried in unknown places, a question mark in the official history of the country in the decades to come. How could Chico have imagined it all? Chico never had news of her again – and it was with a bitter aftertaste that he heard that love song, when he heard it. Como é que você não me diz quando é que você me faz feliz? Onde é que vamos morar? (Why won’t you tell me when you are going to make me happy? Where are we going to live?) It was with a bitter aftertaste that he harbored his certainty of her uncertainty: Had Chico been captured? Killed? Had he deserted? (No, Chico wouldn’t have deserted. Chico wasn’t the sort. He had been to the Peking Military Academy. He was good with weapons. And other things.)
Chico made a quick stopover in Goiânia. He said goodbye to his mother and left. He never set foot in Brazil again. Six months later he was serving draft beers in a London pub, and singing out loud when he felt like it, and off-key if he had to.
Vista del Mundo
June had said that we should look up Isabel in Albuquerque. There was a time when my mother’s house on San Pablo Street became a confluence of worlds, friends of diverse origins, Spanish students, English students, Portuguese students, with Spanglish reverberating within the walls of the 1950s house – vintage, they would say today – as music by Noel Rosa and Milton Nascimento played in the background. My mother would have been the owner of a vintage house, promoted to the “charming” category by the passage of time. Without her having gone to any effort, without her having paid for the privilege. June used to visit my mother’s house sometimes, back then, with her Queen’s English and her royal consort. According to June, Isabel also used to frequent my mother’s house. They held parties almost daily.
Not long before you were born, June explained. Isabel was Suzana’s English student. They ended up becoming friends. Isabel had recently arrived from Puerto Rico and was studying theatre. And she knew how to make mojitos and margueritas.
So she’s an actress?
No, said June.
And she didn’t say anything else. The things June didn’t say were another kind of chatter. If she suddenly went vehemently quiet, there was no room for you to ask her a thing.
Later Isabel went back to Puerto Rico for a few years, she went on. But she’s been back in Albuquerque for a while now and would love to meet you. All of you.
We spent the night in a motel chosen for its price. Carlos decreed that it was muy bueno. Very good. The heated pool was a little bigger than the one at the motel near Starkville, and the towels were whiter. The bedroom was better lit, the bedspreads newer and the watercolors on the walls less faded.
That night we didn’t talk. Fernando turned on the TV, selected a Mexican channel and watched a soccer game and Carlos wrote down the Highlights of the Day in a notebook that Florence had given him as a present. In his shaky scrawl, he wrote the motel in Albuquerque is very good. And he showed me, pleased with himself. He had brought some more tourist brochures from the reception and read to me that Albuquerque had OVER THREE HUNDRED YEARS OF HISTORY. He asked if we could buy some scissors and glue the next day, because he wanted to cut those things out and stick them in his notebook.
I looked at the brochure. The Albuquerque area was inhabited by Native Americans for hundreds of years. The current city was founded in 1706, when Governor Francisco Cuervo y Valdez wrote a letter to the Duke of Albuquerque telling him that he had found a village on the banks of the Rio Grande. From that time on, the city – named after the duke – grew from a small settlement into a wealthy metropolis with over eight hundred thousand inhabitants. Come visit the city where the people and culture are
Fernando?
What?
What’s this word here?
He glanced at the brochure. Enmeshed.
What does enmeshed mean?
Imagine a net, a mesh. If something’s enmeshed it’s like it’s caught in a net. Tangled.
And he demonstrated by interlacing the fingers of both hands, without taking his eyes off the television.
Enmeshed was a funny word. I tested it in my mouth, in a whisper. Come visit the city where the people and culture are enmeshed in the fabric of time and history.
I thought about it. Was it possible for the people and culture of a place not to be enmeshed in the fabric of time and history? Was there a people or a culture without time or history? But it was just a tourist brochure and tourist brochures, I was learning, hadn’t been written to make sense. The words had to be pretty. So did the photos. The photos in the tourist brochure of Albuquerque were pretty and showed a bunch of dry chilies hanging from a veranda, a couple riding bicycles on a mountain trail (their helmets didn’t have rear-view mirrors), and a lot of hot air balloons in the blue sky of the HOT AIR BALLOONING CAPITAL OF THE WORLD.
Carlos finished writing what he needed to write in his notebook, put his brochures away, turned off the bedside lamp and fell asleep with his head on my shoulder. I closed my eyes. I drifted off, lulled by the low volume of the TV on which a Mexican sports commentator was narrating the plays of the game so fast I couldn’t keep up. Before my eyes closed, I saw the walls changing colors.
Fernando held my hand as we walked around Florence’s dry garden and looked at the sculptures without paying attention. It was the only time that he and I walked along holding hands. He held my cold little hand with his cold large hand and at a glance, genetics aside, we could have been father and daughter.
Then we entered Florence’s studio and there was the spirit of things in progress there. The studio was a place in the gerund, a place where things left their crude state, being produced, becoming. Florence kept the pottery that she sold in a large cupboard with glass doors and invited us to have a look and gave me and Carlos a lump of clay each.
For you to make something with. Anything at all.
Carlos stared seriously at the misshapen lump of clay in his hand, creased his forehead and started kneading and tugging on it to see if maybe something would come out of there of its own accord. A spontaneous sculpture. I took my piece and started rolling it in my hands. All my creativity was able to produce, at that moment, was a ball. Something disobliged to have angles, a round artifact. A globe of earth.
Florence?
Yes?
It was June who had spoken. Florence, she repeated, we need to talk to you.
Talk? Florence smiled and shook her head a little and her hair shook on her head. OK, let’s talk.
And she pulled up a chair and June and Fernando sat on a couch covered with an old wool blanket. Carlos and I remained standing, a slight distance away, playing with the lumps of clay in our hands. Florence sat on the chair, her body leaning slightly forward, hands in her lap with her fingers interlaced.
Your work is very beautiful, June continued, appointing herself spokeswoman of the group, and cleared her throat. Very beautiful. But that’s not why we came here.
Florence was listening, very attentive and interested, as if we were about to give her a far-reaching explanation of the butterfly effect or antimatter.
We came here because of that little girl over there.
The faces all turned towards me and I, not knowing what to do, did nothing and kept rolling my ball of clay.
Some time ago, in the late seventies, Vanja’s mother came to live in New Mexico, June continued. She was quite young. Her name was Suzana. She had come here from Brazil when she was still a child, with her father, after her mother died.
June spoke slowly. With her smile fading slightly at the lack of sense in those words, Florence listened.
Some time later, a few years later, Suzana married Fernando (and June placed her hand on his shoulder, but quickly removed it, as if she had committed an indiscretion, a faux pas). And later they broke up. And she had a short relationship with another man. Your son Daniel. It didn’t last long. I don’t know if you ever met her. Probably not.
Florence was beginning to understand. She showed it by nodding. A relationship with her son Daniel. Short. Didn’t last long.
When was that? she asked.
They spent some time together in early 1988, said Fernando. It’s been almost fourteen years. She lived in Albuquerque, on San Pablo Street Northeast.
I was surprised by Fernando’s instant math. But maybe he knew those numbers off by heart. Maybe he knew that (other) story off by heart, a compulsory talent he wished he didn’t have.
Yes, said Florence, Daniel lived in Albuquerque at that time. But I only remember meeting one girlfriend of his, from his time in Albuquerque, and she wasn’t called Suzana. She was Ashley. Or Audrey. Or Abigail. Something like that, that started with an A. It’s been a long time.
Florence understood, but she didn’t understand everything.
We came here, June continued, because during the time she spent with your son Suzana fell pregnant, and at the end of the year she had a daughter.
And everyone looked again at that little girl over there, life model, guinea pig, a bizarre specimen with some deformity or shocking dysfunction visible to whoever went to the trouble of looking.
The obvious question, that I (dysfunctional) had never thought of: what guarantee was there that I really was the daughter of that woman’s son? One could only be sure of such things by resorting to the cold protocol of science. What guarantee was there that that whole story – Suzana, Albuquerque, short relationships – was true? We might have been a bizarre troupe of experimental con artists, trying to see if we could convince innocent old ladies with our heterogeneous accents and cock-and-bull stories involving dubious paternities and abnormal disappearances.
But she got up and came over to me. She gazed into my eyes. She forgot whatever it was that usually danced in the aerial space just over her forehead. She forgot Fernando, June and Carlos.
Is it true? she asked me.
Of course Florence was looking for Daniel in me. And I wondered if I too would have seen him in my passport photo if I had known him, if I would have reencountered him in the genetic amalgam of my face, or if my mother didn’t need men even for that. Not even to lend a little of their biotype to her daughter. I wondered what Florence was seeing there in her trance, as she stared at that speechless thirteen-year-old oracle, rolling a ball of clay in her hands.
And I felt strange. I, who had always refused impossible projects (like the horizon seen from Copacabana), had devoted myself to one that was almost that: a fairytale father, a father scattered across the globe by myself in a number of potential places – all of them beyond the horizon seen from Copacabana. Of course: among all of the potential places I hadn’t listed the Ivory Coast. And yet there was less ocean and sky between Rio de Janeiro and the Ivory Coast than between Rio de Janeiro and the western United States.
If I set sail by boat from Copacabana, all I’d have to do was travel straight in a northeasterly direction to arrive at the Ivory Coast. If I arrived very secretively, a smuggler of myself, I wouldn’t even need a passport, I wouldn’t even need to stop at an immigration official’s booth and go through the tedious border protocol.
It didn’t really matter if this woman believed me (us) or not. She could shoo us out of there and tell us never to come back, opportunists that we were. And I would shrug as effortlessly as Fernando did, his habitual effortlessness. And I would leave there and never return and she could think what she wanted of me (us). I felt as if I’d entered the wrong movie theater and instead of finding an exciting science fiction film I’d come across a romantic comedy or a musical. I hate musicals. I definitely didn’t know what I was doing there anymore: in Florence’s studio, on Redondo Road, in Jemez Springs, in New Mexico, in the United States, in the northern hemisphere; I didn’t even know what I was doing on the third ball orbiting the sun. Everything was strange and I felt strange with that woman staring at me through her milky eyeballs.
And she stared and stared and kept staring. Until she found what she was looking for.
When I woke up in the motel in Albuquerque, I was alone. There was a note in Carlos’s handwriting in Portuguese (dictated, of course) on the bedside table. WE’VE GONE TO BRAEKFAST. WE DIDNT WANT TO WAKE YOU. WE’LL BRING A BAGEL. I had gone to bed with wet hair (where was my mother to tell me I shouldn’t do that? In what recess of my memory?) and an egg of hair had appeared on the right side of my head. I wet it in the sink. I combed it. It made no difference. I forgot about it and went out to find Fernando and Carlos.
They were eating breakfast in silence, staring at the huge TV on the wall in front of a group of squalid little tables. A politician was talking about politics on the TV.
You’ve got an egg on your head, said Fernando. Carlos laughed.
We drove around Albuquerque ceremoniously. Fernando was quieter than usual. Carlos jotted down the names of streets and any information that struck him as relevant in his notebook. We went to San Pablo Street Northeast and I was dismayed to discover that I remembered nothing of the house where I had spent the first two years of my life. Nothing. Zero.
It was like a slice of earth that had been removed from the ground. It had a dry garden in front of it just like Florence’s dry garden, but smaller. It had a dry tree. We got out of the car and wandered down the block aimlessly. It wasn’t as cold there but it was still cold and I pulled my stocking hat (which I’d put on to cure my messy hair) down over my ears.
There wasn’t the slightest recognition in me. Fernando could have been telling me a big lie, showing me a house chosen at random, and it wouldn’t have made any difference.
But there was recognition in him and it wasn’t easy and I knew it.
Did houses purge themselves of their former inhabitants with the arrival of their new inhabitants? Or were there several layers of ghosts in their memories, like layers of wallpaper? Did houses have memories?
Even if they didn’t, adult men did. Fernando had lived in that house with my mother for six years. Fernando had slept in that house with my mother for six years, and woken up, and looked at the dry tree when it was dry in the winter and when it was green in the summer and in all of its in-between stages. He had walked through those rooms for two thousand days. He had opened the door as he got home from work (which made me realize that I didn’t know what his job had been). He had closed the door as he left for work. And one day he had closed the door for the last time and it hadn’t been as he left for work.
Do you want to take a photo? Fernando asked.
I said yes and he took his old camera out of his jacket pocket and told Carlos and me to stand in front of the house (when we got the film developed, we would see that I had my eyes closed and Carlos’s mouth was a bit crooked, because he was about to say something or run his tongue over his parched lips).
Then we went back to the car and I considered the expedition to my early childhood over.
There wasn’t much else to do besides leave. Put those events in our pockets and leave. Celebrate Thanksgiving with June and her senile dogs the next day, and spend the two days after the next day at her place on Camino Sin Nombre, and scale the map again with our noses pointing north and the hope that the Saab wouldn’t decide to break down again.
Yes, of course, there were the Next Steps, and they were frighteningly toilsome. I searched my soul for energy, determination, courage, patience and other honorable sentiments. Other military-salute sentiments, the sort that make up the marrow of heroes.
But the next day and the day after that and the day after that still had something to say, before the rest of my once-again-post-New-Mexican life could begin. There was still, at least, a localizable vestige of my mother in Albuquerque, and that vestige was called Isabel and we were going to meet her.
