Crow Blue, page 18
Afterwards he found out that the guerrillas who stayed in the area dispersed and then regrouped, trying to throw the enemy off their trail. But none of it did any good.
He also found out that a report from the Army Information Center, with the word SECRET (a word that was a hallmark of much of what went on in those days in that region, and would continue to be so for some time) stamped across the top said: To Cease Operation “MARAJOARA” before the enemy has been completely destroyed could allow them to rise up again, with even greater vigor and experience. It could even provide them with proof of the viability, in BRAZIL, of guerrilla warfare in the countryside as an instrument in the struggle for power.
In early 1974 a member of the guerrillas’ Military Commission fled the forest – ngelo Arroyo, Chico and Manuela’s former commander at Detachment A. (He fled but insisted, back in São Paulo, that the armed struggle on the Araguaia should continue. Less than three years later, he was hunted down and murdered by the forces of repression.) Other members of the Central Committee, such as João Amazonas and Elza Monerat, hadn’t been in the Bico do Papagaio region for quite some time.
In February, Osvaldão, another who had been there from the beginning, who was the communists’ immortal warrior, was killed. His body was exhibited in local settlements. The immortal one was dead. Brought down by a woodsman. Then they made his body disappear. The military would finish exterminating the guerrillas with Operation Cleanup – a simple, crystal-clear, honest name that required no interpretation.
General Geisel, who took office that same month, said that the whole business of killing was regrettable, but it couldn’t have been any different.
And with that the killings went on. And on. They needed to kill and then kill the deaths, so to speak. They needed to kill history. To kill the memory and a certain inconvenient awareness.
They all died, one by one. Some simply went missing, but missing was one of the codenames of death. It was another way to pronounce it.
Among the missing, among those who no one knew how they had died and where they were buried, was Manuela. She was captured one day when she went to visit a local woman who used to collaborate with the guerrillas, in search of food. Famished, thin, sick, barefoot, covered in sores and insect bites, Manuela spent the night at the woman’s house and woke up surrounded by soldiers. That was the last anyone heard of her. Her parents grew old and died without ever knowing what happened to her.
The last guerrilla was executed in October. Walkíria Afonso Costa, a.k.a. Walk, was captured in Xambioá.
To erase their own footprints, the military decided to dig up the bodies, which were compromising, and burn them in the forest, which they did using tires and gasoline.
In the country’s unofficial, confidential history, the Araguaia guerrilla war was over.
In São Paulo, ngelo Arroyo continued to believe in the strategy of armed struggle in the countryside. In the second half of 1976, he traveled to other regions of the country in search of alternative scenarios for the fight. He visited the states of Rondônia, Acre and Mato Grosso, and sailed down the Amazon. He was machine-gunned down two days after the party’s Central Committee met in São Paulo in December of that year, a meeting in which he continued to insist on the guerrilla movement.
Florence gazed at me. We came here because during the time she spent with your son Suzana fell pregnant, and at the end of the year she had a daughter.
Florence gazed at me as June, whose words still rang in the air, and Fernando, whose expectation resounded even higher, gazed at Florence and Carlos kneaded his ball of clay as if he were trying to pulverize it. To transmute earth into fireworks. To see dancing lights explode in the air and ricochet off sculptures and items of pottery.
Florence looked at me and asked, is it true?
I saw her eyes moving slowly within their orbits. I saw the wrinkles around her eyes growing longer and deeper, the genesis of a new mountain range in swift animation. Unstable plates were moving inside her, in a subterranean heart, amidst cold underground water and corridors of hot lava.
Why didn’t you call me first?
We did, said June. A few weeks ago.
I must have heard your message – I listen to them at least once a week. But I’m a bit absent-minded. I think I’ve already told you that. And even if I didn’t, you must have noticed. One notices such things.
It doesn’t matter, said June.
No, said Florence. It doesn’t.
And then, having obtained whatever it was that she needed, she turned to June and Fernando and said thank you for coming and for trusting me.
There was an inversion in that, I thought. She was the one who was trusting us. She was the one who was doing us the favor of believing, in a world of unbelievers and the mistrustful. She was the one who was accepting a tiny revision brought to her on a tray with tea and ginger cookies. A new member of the family on a plate, to use as a sugar substitute.
But Florence took my hands in hers, and it was as if our hands were also exchanging words, looks, completing phone calls that had gone astray. My small, thin, rough hands. Her long, knotty hands, with age spots.
Isabel came with us when we returned to June’s house after that night in Vista del Mundo, in Albuquerque. I was going to celebrate Thanksgiving for the first time in my life, without really knowing what it was that we were celebrating, together with my Salvadoran friend, my mother’s Brazilian ex-husband, my mother’s old friend made-in-the-UK, my mother’s former Puerto Rican student and the two old mastiffs. And the next day, now familiarized, we would look like a rehashed hippie community. And in the middle of the night I would see the pair of coyotes, the Canis latrans, which were thin, with long legs and pointy ears. The aloof, nocturnal pair.
On the Sunday, we would head back north. To Colorado, Lakewood and the house on Jay Street. Isabel would take a bus back to Albuquerque. And things would silently migrate out of themselves and become other things that no one imagined they would. Things would revolutionize themselves, slowly and quietly.
They say that the cells of your body are replaced every seven years, such that you continue to be the same person but, at a cellular level, you have become another, if you compute both extremes. The idea sounds strange, because the cells aren’t all replaced at once, so after seven years you won’t have a fully-recycled body. But at the same time you will.
Things I had hoped would happen didn’t, things I hadn’t hoped would happen did, and some things I’d never thought about – like visiting the Ivory Coast – thought about me of their own accord.
But in those days at June’s house in Santa Fé we all laughed together and told stories about other times and other places, and sang songs from other times and other places (and from our time and our places) and looked at photographs. One morning we went to visit the Chimayo sanctuary, where the woman said me puedes ayudar un dólar por favor (I gave her the dollar and Fernando ignored her, asking in a low voice how I could fall for it but it was my money and my problem).
That night, as the coyotes roamed around outside, Fernando and Isabel disappeared into the room she was sleeping in, and no one asked any questions, and everyone thought it was fine. And we were so different to one another that the differences were annulled; we were a big uniformity in multiple forms.
On the Monday after the holiday, Fernando went to work at the Denver Public Library. I went to school. Carlos went to school.
That afternoon, Fernando had a cleaning job to go to.
Jay Street
Would Fernando have liked Isabel to move to Colorado? I don’t know. Would Isabel have liked to move to Colorado – or for Fernando to move to New Mexico, or to have moved with him to Puerto Rico or somewhere else in the world? I don’t know.
None of it happened, because sometimes things are the wrong answers to the questions we ask, or the right answers to the questions we forget to ask. (There is no wisdom in this. It wasn’t my grandmother who taught me – not least because I never met one of them, and I presented myself to the other one when I was almost fourteen years old and lacked the ears for teachings that she never seemed interested in passing on anyway.)
Perhaps neither Fernando nor Isabel suggested a move. Demonstrated their willingness. Like the water that you don’t offer someone because you don’t know they’re thirsty, and the water that the thirsty person doesn’t ask for because they don’t want to impose, full of bourgeois ceremony. (Strange as it may seem, it was my mother who taught me that, adding: only be ashamed of things that are shameful, otherwise you’re wasting your time. Shyness is unnecessary and boring.)
One day, years later, I visited June’s house in Santa Fé once again. Her two dogs had died. She lived alone with her piano and her O’Keeffean skulls hanging on the walls. Coyotes roamed about outside. Perhaps they were the same ones. Or perhaps those ones had been run over or killed with a shotgun and other coyotes had come to replace them.
That day, June told me about Isabel.
She never did become an actress as she wanted, June said. But you saw how pretty she was. A little short, perhaps, but pretty. When she met her husband, she was working in one of those clubs, in Albuquerque, as a dancer. You know, taking her clothes off.
I didn’t know.
That was where she met her husband, and he wanted her to stop working, and he bought that house, and married her, and you know the rest of the story.
Do you think she regrets it?
What?
Stopping working at the club.
She could have gone back.
I imagined (how not to?) Isabel dancing in the club in Albuquerque. Taking off her clothes, piece by piece, according to a deconstruction of decorum that hierarchically determined which piece had to come off first and which piece had to be last. The body twisting around itself and exposing itself in tiny doses, until it was entirely exposed (at which point the show ended, because the fun was in the process, otherwise she could have climbed up onto the stage buck naked). It must have been a sight. I’m not surprised that the guy who became her husband saw her there and wanted to take her home for free private sessions. That he wanted to rob the rest of humanity of the privilege.
I imagined him corroded with jealousy by Isabel’s past, while she accepted naturally the fact that he had been and was still perhaps a frequenter of strip clubs. Was his new wife, up in Seattle, also an ex-stripper?
But for four nights Fernando had slept in the same bed with Isabel. For four nights he had sunk his rough fingers into her dark, wavy hair – her hair as dark as crow-blue shells and shell-blue crows – and had sunk his fingers into her hips, her dark hips, two big waves that were aligned with other waves that were aligned with other waves in wavy depths that at some point would arrive (would they?) at her essence. At her essence that was wavy, dark, blue, marine, ancestral like the Colorado sea and young like a young stripper dancing in a club in Albuquerque, the HOT AIR BALLOONING CAPITAL OF THE WORLD.
For four nights she had laughed with him in the same bed, slept with him in the same bed, lain awake with him in the same bed, sunk her fingers into his arms and his back and dreamed of a pair of coyotes outside and dreamed of a time when the Colorado sea covered it all and there were no coyotes wandering through Santa Fé because Santa Fé was underwater. Like the abandoned car carcasses when the river was full. She had dreamed of fish swimming through the windows of the future car carcasses in the future full river. She had dreamed of Mesozoic mollusks evolving at the bottom of the Colorado sea and dreamed in turn of future science museums. But maybe those were my dreams and Isabel’s dreams on those nights were of the order of secrets, the unfathomable. Like the Mesozoic mollusks that vanished from the planet without a trace, a mark, a fossil, a message.
Maybe those four nights were enough and anything else was superfluous, and she and Fernando would have undone the magic of those four nights with the wand of routine if they had turned into four months or four years or multiples of that.
Maybe those four nights weren’t enough but any philosophy of love involving impulsive sacrifices is one hundred percent stupid when put in practice. Saying certain things is beautiful. Living them out, not necessarily.
I know that Isabel and Fernando talked on the phone a few times. I also know that shortly after that long weekend she returned to Puerto Rico. She returned for good, as she had told us she might. She and Fernando talked on the phone a few times, until they stopped talking, like a noise that disappears into the distance and you don’t know exactly when you stopped hearing it.
I turned fourteen that December. I turned fifteen twelve months later. And I turned other ages, sixteen, seventeen – the process follows an incredible logic. Eighteen. Etc.
I returned to Rio de Janeiro once, to visit Elisa. Things were the same and different. Seven years had passed since I had left and perhaps the city’s cells had already been replaced with others. The city was the same and it wasn’t. The city was different and it wasn’t.
There were other generations of mollusks on the ocean floor in front of Copacabana Beach. I don’t know how long a mollusk lives. They were probably the grandchildren and great grandchildren of the mollusks of my childhood. At any rate, we were friends. Friends that had never met personally. Friends of friends, like in online social networks.
There were young children building sandcastles in the sand. There were their mothers. Depending on the place, tourists. Depending on the place, prostitutes.
Bodies were still jogging in the sun, muscular or flaccid or old or young. Men still wore tight speedos. Not all of them.
Fernando’s house on Jay Street in Lakewood, Colorado, slowly became my house too, by habit. By custom. By osmosis. We never wondered if I’d leave or stay after all the Clarifications. I finished the school year as a so-so student and entered the following school year. And the next school year, which I also finished so-so, and then the next. There was just one subject in which my grades were honestly good and, at the end of the day, I had the Denver Public Library librarian to thank for it. However, she wasn’t present to get teary-eyed and receive the applause of other teary-eyed people. After I gave my thanks I felt kind of silly. Like a politician on an election campaign, trying to say the nice things that people like to hear. But it was already done. Every now and then I’d go swimming with Fernando, and we’d come home smelling of chlorine and hang towels smelling of chlorine in the bathroom. One fine day I realized that it didn’t matter what country I was in. What city I was in. Other things were important. Not these.
I never again forgot Fernando’s birthday and the year after the yellow T-shirt year Carlos and I bought him a bottle of Belgian beer (with the help of a cooperative adult) and then, the next year, we bought him some perfume from Carlos’s favorite store – a skateboarders’ store, although he, Carlos, wasn’t a skateboarder. Nor was he predestined to become one.
The winters became my winters and the summers my summers. So to speak. The in-between seasons stopped being a luxury and became, in the autumn, the rake that I use to rake up the leaves in front of the house and, in the spring, the flower that blooms in front of the house where I could have sworn nothing would survive the snow storms. And the flower blooms even if I don’t look after the garden (I don’t look after the garden). My customary, everyday things, like sleeping or cleaning my ears. When I learned to drive, I took Carlos to ride down the river in Boulder, with our backsides in tire tubes.
A little over a year ago I laid Fernando to rest. He died without guerrillas, wives or lovers. In his memory flowed rivers such as the Araguaia and the Thames and the cascading rivers in the mountains of Colorado, and the Rio Grande, which cuts through Albuquerque. But rivers find their way to the sea, and fresh waters become salty and peopled with sea creatures and their shells.
Fernando’s body gave out one day as he was drinking coffee, during a break at work, and the whole thing went. His body spluttered like the motor of an old Saab, and it kept on spluttering, and then he started dying and continued dying until he was officially dead, which I was told by an Indian doctor with lowered eyes and tight, condolent lips.
I buried him, an ex-Fernando under the earth. And together with him, his ex-life and his ex-memories which, regardless of whether he shared them or not, would always be his alone and no one else’s. Which he felt in the forest, which he felt in the London pub, which he felt sliding over the frozen mud in Peking. Which he felt when he embraced Manuela/Joana, Suzana, Isabel. Which he felt before and after those embraces. When he deserted these women or was deserted by them (to desert: to leave empty or alone, abandon, withdraw from; to forsake one’s duty or post with no intention of returning). What he thought, what he planned and didn’t do, what he promised and didn’t deliver, what he did without any foreplanning, what he didn’t hope for and got anyway.
A little over a year ago Carlos’s parents moved to Florida, where Dolores, their disgraced runaway daughter, had become a prodigal daughter who kept twin cars with HIS (XO) and HERS (XO) license plates in her garage in Tallahassee. The sex of the cars causes a certain discomfort, I imagine, when Dolores’s father and his moustache need to go out and only HERS is in the garage. Dolores’s mother doesn’t drive, so is spared any similar grief. But maybe the father has already bought himself a car with a regular license plate, with letters and numbers without meanings.
A little over a year ago Carlos crossed the street and came to live in this house, because he had promised never to leave Colorado or be far from me. So, while his parents got ready to move and sold furniture and bought one-way tickets to Florida, he got his things and transferred them here. He is a tall young man of eighteen. He still hasn’t been back to El Salvador. Sometimes he asks to borrow my car and goes up into the mountains, like any native, intimate with the earth, the climate and its sharp changes, lamenting the avalanche that killed two unwary tourists (but who told them to go? You don’t mess with the Rockies, he always says). I moved into the room that used to be Fernando’s and Carlos moved into mine and with these minor migrations we stayed.
