Crow Blue, page 17
Isabel appeared in a white kimono, the kind used by people who practise martial arts, tied with a green belt. I didn’t know if it put her down at the bottom of the hierarchy, up at the top or somewhere just so-so. Over it she was wearing a waterproof jacket that was very thick and very green.
She walked into the coffee shop where we had arranged to meet, picked her way through the people until she got to our table and hugged me. We were almost the same height. Then she shook Fernando’s hand with martial-arts vigor and Carlos’s hand with the same martial-arts vigor.
She sat down and looked at the enormous slice of chocolate cake that Carlos was eating and asked what’s that? Can I have a taste? And Carlos cut a (small) piece off with his fork and held it up to her mouth and thought it was funny. Him, a boy, feeding a grown woman. There was chocolate with chocolate filling and chocolate icing and pieces of chocolate negligently smeared around the Salvadorian boy’s mouth, but they disappeared politely into the Puerto Rican woman’s mouth.
And she said I’m always starving after practice.
And Carlos asked if she did judo or karate and she said aikido. And he said he’d never heard of it. And she said I’ll take you down later so you can see what it’s like.
We chatted. She and Fernando had two cups of coffee each. His without sugar. Hers with a full spoonful. We talked about places: Rio de Janeiro, Albuquerque, Colorado, Puerto Rico. We talked about people: me, my mother, my foster aunt, Carlos (we didn’t talk about Fernando).
Do you want to be an actress? I asked at some point.
I used to, she said. Before. But it didn’t end up happening.
But you studied theatre. June told us.
For a while. I came here to go to college.
So if you’re not an actress, what are you?
And she held her palms up and tilted her head to one side in a pantomime gesture.
I’m not anything.
But Carlos exclaimed, from his podium, that she did aikido (even though he didn’t know what aikido was, but it sounded Japanese and serious). A person who does aikido and wears aikido clothes can’t not be anything – was his argument.
And she laughed and said I’d like to have you all over for dinner at my place. Can you come? I bought some things that we used to make at your mother’s place – at your place (and she turned to me and then to Fernando, who could claim that possessive adjective to different degrees and for different reasons). For old times’ sake.
The old times were just that, old times. Times gone, past, yesteryear, a long time ago. Back when the “in” thing was for Isabel and my mother’s friends to get together in the house on San Pablo Street, when Fernando wasn’t part of Suzana’s life anymore and I had yet to be. So the old times were also pages from another calendar – and I thought again about what Pope Gregory had taken (I confess that I was kind of obsessed with the story: the omnipotence of a man of the cloth who stole time).
But we were there, we were with Isabel and having dinner with her seemed to be an imperative of the new times, more than an homage to the old. And at any rate she was enchanting. And at any rate we didn’t have anything else to do.
We followed her car from the coffee shop in Nob Hill to the suburb of Vista del Mundo, where she lived, in an enormous house that was one hundred percent contrary to anything that I might have imagined for her and her aikido clothes and green belt and green jacket, and her thin wrists and thick hair. It was enormous and looked a lot like the confectioner’s houses I had seen in Denver’s wealthy suburbs. It was a placid color in an undefined pastel tone and there was a cypress on each side of the door, like little green soldiers with conical bodies.
Isabel made mojitos for Fernando and herself and I noticed his relief at having the glass to put his hand on, and the rum to sip. It hadn’t been an easy day.
You live in a very big house, he said – and perhaps added mentally: for someone who isn’t anything.
It’s not mine.
And she went over to the sound system to put on some music. I couldn’t understand why adults only half-answered so many things. Maybe it was a mature, civilized habit and I should just get used to it. I was going to turn fourteen the following month. Fourteen was at least a nose in the adult world. And I had to unlearn all the codes I had learned to make way for others. Curiosity, for example: children had a gift for curiosity. Adults kept it chained up. In adults, curiosity shook paws, fetched balls and played dead.
I looked around at that house that was bigger than Isabel. Everything was more than necessary, as she appeared to live alone. There was too much floor, too many windows, too much furniture for just one person.
We would have dined in Vista del Mundo with Isabel, who had gone upstairs to her room and come back ten minutes later in civilian clothes with wet hair, hair that was very curly and hung in the air exactly like the questions that we all wanted to ask about her life (present, past) but weren’t sure if we should. And before the clock struck midnight we all would have been in our motel-room beds and Carlos would have written up every stage of the dinner at Isabel’s place in his notebook, beginning, middle and end. And I would have bathed and also taken care to dry my hair better this time, and it’s possible Fernando would have listened to Mexican soccer commentators on TV.
But Carlos and his chocolate cake were conspiring, in silence, in his stomach. They were planning a small guerrilla war. A mini-revolution.
He started complaining of nausea at 7.23pm after eating tortilla chips with guacamole. At 8.11pm, he started throwing up tortilla chips with guacamole (together with the chocolate cake, the main conspirator).
Because of those unruly, restless foods, and Carlos’s stomach’s desire to return them as one might return faulty merchandise, we ended up spending the night at Isabel’s house. After midnight, after a febrile Carlos had vomited enough and gone to bed, and I had gone to bed too, to dream memories of houses that I didn’t remember, I felt thirsty and got up, almost sleepwalking, to get a glass of water. The door of the next room, where Fernando should have been sleeping, was ajar. I glanced through the crack and even in the leaden half-light I could see that his bed was untouched and the room empty.
I wondered if maybe I shouldn’t get that drink of water from the kitchen. I could have a drink from the bathroom sink, which was on the same floor as the bedroom. I was rather dubious as to what I might find in a house with doors ajar and men missing. But because my curiosity still wasn’t a well-trained Labrador, I went downstairs anyway. Silently and slowly.
On the curve of the stairs, I craned my neck to peer into the living room and there they were, dancing to the sound of almost inaudible music, their bodies so close together that I felt embarrassed for seeing what I wasn’t supposed to be seeing. And I went back to the bedroom before I could see anything else, like a kiss, like one of them sliding their hand down the other’s back, like an opening in a blouse being explored by five fingers and a breast being found by those fingers. No, I didn’t want to see any of that. And no, I didn’t want to think about any of that either, but unfortunately thoughts are different: their freedom paralyzes ours. Thoughts do as they please.
WHAT FLORENCE DIDN’T FIND IN ME: 1) My father’s eyes. They couldn’t be found because, as I discovered later, he had blue eyes, and mine are brown. 2) Reasons not to believe me. As she was staring at me, I thought about mummies and how the ancient Egyptians used to remove the brains of their dead by stuffing hooks through their noses during the process of mummification. Perhaps she was trying, in those silent instants that lasted a few seconds that lasted a few decades, not to extract parts of me (courage? cheek?) for posterior embalmment but to appraise my trustworthiness using a method of her own. Which didn’t involve hooks threaded through my nostrils, but two equally penetrating eyes and a prolonged absence of words. 3) The granddaughter she had always prayed for.
WHAT FLORENCE DID FIND IN ME: 1) The granddaughter she hadn’t always prayed for – and surprises, in my opinion, have their charm. They’re a kind of bonus. For example: you buy two packets of cookies in the supermarket and when you go to pay you discover that there’s a special promotion that day: buy two packets of those cookies and get a packet of instant lemonade for free. 2) Some invisible, unspeakable merit which, faced with her two available options (putting me in contact with Daniel or not putting me in contact with Daniel), made her choose the former. 3) Something in my smile, a millimeter of curvature of my lips, that she would process over the following years until she told me one day, definitively: you have your father’s smile.
Canis latrans
It has been said that coyotes, like crows, mediate between life and death and are common characters in mythology. They are extremely adaptable, omnivorous mammals and will eat almost anything available: rabbits, mice and squirrels, as well as birds, frogs and snakes, as well as insects and fruits, as well as carrion. In urban areas, the contents of trash cans and dog food. They have been known to attack domestic pets. In general, they hunt at night. In the wild, their average life span is six to eight years. They are found throughout Central America and most of North America, from Panama in the south as far as Canada and Alaska in the north. They sometimes starve to death, or fall victim to disease, or are caught in traps, or are killed by other animals, or are run over by cars. Some coyotes live alone, others in pairs, yet others in packs – which usually consist of a pair of adults, yearlings and cubs. Coyotes with a different scientific name smuggle illegal immigrants from Mexico into the United States.
In mythology, the coyote has the power of transformation. Sometimes it is a thief, as it is for the Hopi Indians. Sometimes it is the creator of humanity, as it is for the Navajos, or of the earth, as it is for the Miwoks. Sometimes it is the creator of death, as it is for the Chinook people: once upon a time Coyote and Water traveled to the world of the dead to bring their wives back, during an era in which death didn’t exist for humans, only animals. As he was bringing the dead wives back in a box, however, Coyote couldn’t help himself and opened it to see his wife. In so doing, he released the spirits of the dead and death itself. Which came to be a part of human life, so to speak.
When we returned to June’s house in Santa Fé, after our two nights in Albuquerque, I saw the pair of coyotes in the dry riverbed. June came and got me in the middle of the night and took me to see them, from a distance.
In the dry riverbed there were also the carcasses of abandoned cars. Here and there, a kind of shy, seasonal junkyard. When the river came back to life, it would swell and the abandoned car carcasses would grow cold under the new water; another year, another river, the same river, a different river. Later the river would dry up again and they would be exposed once more, a little uglier, a little older, a little more carcass-like.
Over the years, my curiosity about Isabel’s life was satisfied. Not that she had secrets. She was like my mother in that respect: she answered all questions. Except that, unlike my mother, she almost always said only what was necessary. She was rather martial and quiet. She came across as capable of beating up anyone who gave her a hard time in the street. But she never got into unnecessary arguments.
During the dinner at her place in Albuquerque, she told us part of her story. The second part. I pieced her life together from back to front, like someone following footsteps from their point of arrival to their point of departure.
So you live here alone? I asked, and if I was indiscreet it was too late, but everyone forgives children for that, and at the age of thirteen I was still in the comfortable position of being able to choose the situations in which I wanted to be considered a child and those in which I didn’t, and to behave accordingly (there has to be some advantage in being thirteen).
Yes, she said, and the tortilla chips crackled in her mouth. But this house belongs to my ex-husband. He’s got another one.
Another house?
Another house, another wife, another family.
In Albuquerque? Fernando asked, plucking up the courage.
In Seattle. He and his wife have a five-year-old boy.
How long have you been divorced?
Three years.
We were sitting at the table, four people at a table for eight, and I looked at the empty chairs, which looked like sad, speechless guests with lowered eyes. Half of the table was alive; the other half wasn’t. Half of the table had plates, glasses, cutlery, tortilla chips; the other half didn’t.
Three years, Fernando repeated.
Your math isn’t wrong. My ex-husband always was a proactive kind of guy.
And just as Fernando was maybe about to apologize on his behalf and mine, for the overly Brazilian habit of wanting to know too many details about other people’s lives, she let out a hearty, sincere cackle, and the three of us smiled and only then did Carlos ask what proactive meant.
It’s like this, said Isabel. A guy who first chooses his new wife, then has a child with her, then gets a job and a house in another city, and only then leaves his old wife, is proactive.
Ah. I get it.
Carlos smiled, feeling smart for perceiving all the logic of that sequence. And it was an impeccable sequence. And logical.
Isabel smiled too, and I looked for traces of the bitterness that sometimes accompanies the jokes that adults make about themselves and didn’t find any.
But the house isn’t mine. One day I’m going to leave here, this house, this city. One day I think I’ll go back to Puerto Rico. I’ll go back again. The problem is that when I leave Puerto Rico I want to return, and when I return I want to leave again.
And Carlos said that he was going to return to El Salvador one day too, but just to visit, because now he was a Coloradoan. Or a Coloradan. Or whatever the name was. He was a non-native NATIVE. With mountains in the background.
I came here when I was eighteen, said Isabel. Then I went back to San Juan. Then I came back here again. I started working, met my husband, stopped working.
She shrugged.
I’m not proud of it. I’m thirty-four and what have I done with my life? Nothing. I live in his house, I live on the money he gives me. But I’m going to do something soon. I’m going to do something. Soon.
Be an actress? I asked.
And she looked at me with warmth in her eyes and crushed more tortilla chips with guacamole between her teeth.
Yeah, who knows? Maybe I’ll be an actress.
Then she took the twig of mint out of her glass and ate it and said to Fernando I’m going to make another two mojitos. The food must be just about ready.
And when she got up and went into the kitchen Fernando turned his head and followed her with his eyes and I remembered the oh-so-common Rio character: the guy-looking-at-a-woman’s-ass-as-she-goes-past. My mother used to say that we women should also look at men’s asses as they go past. Which made me more comfortable about collating my penile statistics (left/right) at the beach. Although I would have done it anyway. But Fernando kept staring even after the ass and its owner and her long colorful skirt turned and stood in profile at the kitchen counter, and when they bent over to get mint leaves from the drawer in the refrigerator, and when the owner of the ass’s arms scaled the top cupboard to get clean glasses and tossed the contents of the dirty glasses down the sink and turned on the garbage disposal, which went rrrrwmnwww, and stacked the dirty glasses in the dishwasher.
For a moment Fernando forgot that Carlos and I existed, and I looked at Carlos in search of solidarity. And that was when Carlos said he was feeling a bit weird. A bit nauseous.
After Operation Anaconda came Operation Marajoara. It started in October 1973. At first there were three hundred soldiers, all plainclothes, to fight what they estimated to be sixty-three guerrillas (the real number at that point was fifty-six).
In one week, Operation Marajoara had already reduced this number by four, all taken by surprise as they were preparing chunks of meat from two recently-slaughtered pigs. One of the men killed was the leader of Detachment A.
In its early days Operation Marajoara arrested a lot of locals, drove some crazy from the beatings they gave them, and set fire to houses and fields. People who refused to cooperate were punished. Sometimes they were placed head-down in barrels of water. Stuffed into one of those holes they used in Vietnam, with barbed wire over the top. Hung by their testicles.
The rainy season didn’t intimidate the operation. It would continue throughout that October, and would see out the year on the Araguaia.
Soon afterwards another guerrilla, said to be very beautiful, was caught. She was shot in the leg first, and a soldier approached her and asked her name. And she said guerrillas don’t have names, you bastard. I fight for freedom. And all of the soldiers in the patrol, almost ten of them, pumped the beautiful guerrilla full of bullets. Want freedom? There you go.
And soon after that another guerrilla was killed. He was found by his companions without his head – a trophy sent to the army base in Xambioá.
It became a fad and another combatant was decapitated after he was killed by soldiers.
Things weren’t going so well for the communists. Several subsequent actions were unsuccessful. They still didn’t have enough weapons or ammunition and many guerrillas no longer had any shoes. There were casualties and there were also deserters.
In the beginning the guerrillas had no idea of the size of the new military offensive. Little by little they learned. And that was how they spent Christmas of 1973, six years after they had moved into the region: listening to helicopters overhead. In other encounters with the forces of repression, throughout December, more of them were killed, including members of the guerrillas’ Military Commission – and among them the commander general, Maurício Grabois, who went by the codename Mário.
Fernando, who was no longer Chico and was now far away, didn’t know anything about it. He found out afterwards.
