Crow Blue, page 7
I read ferociously, like a trained athlete during the Olympics, and from these experiences extracted the mortar for that new exoskeleton. I also watched TV ferociously.
But the question popped out as Fernando was fixing the toilet and I was looking on, sitting on the edge of the bathtub.
I was there to offer help, as a scrub tech perhaps, but he didn’t seem to need my help, so instead I offered him a question.
That question. How did you end up here?
I thought maybe he didn’t want to talk about it. Fernando didn’t seem like the kind of person who kept the past in colorful photo albums to show visitors. He didn’t look at me.
Your mother didn’t tell you.
My mother didn’t tell me much about you. She didn’t talk much about the things that had happened in her life before. Before me.
A few moments of silence.
I met your mother in London. I was working in a bar and one day she came in with her American boyfriend. They were on vacation. At some point she came up to the bar to get two more beers and she said you’re not from here, your accent is different, and I decided I was going to steal her from her American boyfriend before I even knew that besides being American like him she was also Brazilian like me.
And did you steal her?
He looked at me. Don’t flush it for an hour until it’s dry.
OK.
Fernando left the bathroom and I followed him. He opened the fridge and took out a beer.
Those were hard times in London, he said. I wasn’t there sightseeing. I was there because I couldn’t stay in Brazil. That was way before you were born. You’re lucky. Those were hard times.
He took a swig of beer. I opened the cupboard and got out the packet of extra-cheesy cheese crackers that were covered in a kind of dust that left my fingers dirty.
Want some?
He took a handful and dirtied his fingers with the extra-cheesy cheese cracker dust.
Of course I stole your mother from her American boyfriend. I went to great lengths. For him, things were guaranteed. She was his girlfriend, not mine. So I had to fight for her. And that’s why I followed Suzana here to the United States.
It was the first time in a month that he had said my mother’s name.
Later, you know how life is (no, I didn’t know), you wake up one day and you’re fifty years old and you’ve lost that urge to do things, to wander around, to look for a place in the world because the truth is that the world is a pretty fucking wild place. It’s not worth it. It doesn’t make any difference.
He took another swig of beer.
The doorbell rang. Fernando went to open it, responded in monosyllables for two minutes to something a woman was telling him. He came back with a pamphlet, which he tossed on the table and I read out of the corner of my eye, in simultaneous translation. Does God really care about us? Will there ever be an end to war and suffering? What happens to us when we die? Is there any hope for the dead? How can I pray and be heard by God? How can I find happiness in this life? There was a photo of an Arab with a moustache and a plump white man wearing glasses and a tie, both sitting with their legs crossed on an oriental rug, both smiling, nattering over an open Bible.
Fernando cleared his throat.
Sorry I said fucking. I’ve been meaning to tell you, I’ve been making some phone calls and I’ve managed to find an old friend of your mother’s who lives in Santa Fé. She might be able to help us track down Daniel.
It was the first time in a month that he had said my father’s name. Through the open window, I heard the woman with the God pamphlets talking to our neighbor, who had hair the color of fire and who was answering very loudly in her Hispanic English.
Fish
Fernando had a letter, just one, from Manuela, the young woman he had met on the Araguaia River. And whose name wasn’t really Manuela, of course, just as his name wasn’t really Chico. Her name was Joana. The letter was signed with an M.
It was from late 1971. Neither Chico or Manuela knew it, but a few months from then a guerrilla by the name of Pedro, who had left the Araguaia with his pregnant wife, would be arrested in Fortaleza trying to obtain a new copy of his ID.
Pedro was thinking about resuming his law degree. While being tortured by the Federal Police, he would invent things and switch names (the town of Xambioá, where the guerrillas also circulated, would become Shangri-La), but would end up dropping clues about the guerrillas’ training centers. His torturers already knew, as he would say later, that the Brazilian Communist Party was present in the region.
He was to be the first casualty in the story of the repression of the guerrilla movement. He would attempt suicide in his cell, cutting the veins in his arms. But they wouldn’t authorize him to die.
Pedro and his wife, known by the codename Ana, left the Araguaia because she had fallen pregnant. The Party’s orientation was to get an abortion. She didn’t accept it, and he decided to go with her. They left as fugitives, took a bus, got help from friends. After going underground in Fortaleza, it occurred to him to go down to the Department of Political and Social Order and apply for a new copy of his ID card.
The information they got from Pedro would circulate through the agencies of repression, until a dragnet of army, navy and air force agents was set up. Later versions, from the communists themselves, blamed Regina, another fighter who left the Bico do Papagaio region that same year and never returned, for having led the military to the guerrillas. She had supposedly told her family in São Paulo everything, and they had blown the whistle.
At any rate, with information from one or the other or both, Operation Fish I was born.
I read up on fish and found out that they don’t sleep. I had never thought about it before, about how fish sleep. They don’t. They merely alternate between states of wakefulness and rest. The rest period consists of an apparent state of immobility, in which the fish maintain their balance with very slow movements. Because they don’t have eyelids, their eyes are always open. Some species lie on the ocean floor or riverbeds, while smaller ones hide in holes so they won’t be eaten as they are resting.
And: In 2003, Scottish scientists from the University of Edinburgh discovered that fish can feel pain [citation needed]. Wikipedia.
In the case of the Brazilian Armed Forces, however, the fish that lent its name to the operation was merely to evoke the image of the dragnet. To bring in subversive fish. Red fish who wanted – what? To make Brazil into Cuba? (No, the Cuban Revolution had been based on the foco theory of guerrilla warfare, which had failed in Bolivia, Argentina and Peru. According to the Brazilian Communist Party, focalism underrated the importance of the Party, was based on individual acts of heroism and was thus idealistic and petty-bourgeois.)
The region is still known as Bico do Papagaio, even though other things have changed since then on the map of Brazil.
The name (“Parrot’s Beak”) comes from the shape of the Araguaia River as it flows into the Tocantins, where three Brazilian states meet. In the years that Chico and Manuela spent there, they were Pará, Maranhão and Goiás. They are now Pará, Maranhão and Tocantins, because of the reformulation of the states. But Bico do Papagaio is still there. The land has been flayed and the borders altered, but the rivers haven’t changed course or dried up. The mountains are in the same place.
You go chop firewood in the forest, then bring it to the base, Comrade César told Manuela, a few days after they had arrived. It’s physical training. You stay in shape and carrying firewood is like carrying weapons or the body of a wounded companion. And nobody’ll think anything of it; we’re just chopping firewood.
(What on earth were women doing getting caught up in politics, and becoming guerrillas to boot, in an era in which they were still expected to stay confined to the home and domestic life? Communist whores. That was the nickname they heard in the torture sessions. Against the homeland there are no rights.)
At night, César would sometimes pick up a guitar and sing something by Noel Rosa. Chico didn’t sing, as he was chronically tone-deaf, but he watched Manuela from afar. Manuela felt his moist stare within the walls of the hut, and it felt nice, magnetized, pointed – just as he pointed his guns at a target and never erred. Chico never erred, ever.
What are you doing here, girl? He went and sat by her in the clearing, where a camp fire was lit to keep the mosquitoes at bay.
The same as you.
You’re so young.
And you’re not?
Their hands were cracked and blistered. Their clothes were dirty and their skin covered in insect bites. The forest animals were making noise. The firewood that Manuela had chopped that morning crackled on the camp fire. The crackling was almost hypnotic. But Chico and Manuela wouldn’t be hypnotized by the fire and its crackling, because their attention wasn’t on the camp fire.
You’re pretty, said Chico.
She laughed.
Stop kidding around.
I’m serious.
She looked at Chico, who had studied at the Peking Military Academy, who knew how to use (and make) weapons and would come to be one of the most skillful woodsmen in the detachment.
She said: You know what they say about Osvaldão, that he’s immune to danger?
Yeah.
I think you must be too. I think it’s thanks to people like him and you that this is all going to work out.
Osvaldão, the commander of Detachment B, the most popular leader among the guerrillas and adored by the locals too, wasn’t immune to danger. When the military finished him off years later they hung his body from a helicopter so there would be no doubts. But who could have predicted this, at that point in time? Osvaldão seemed indestructible. He was a six-foot-tall black man and former boxing champion. He liked to help. He made friends.
At that point in time, before Pedro was captured and before the first military campaign on the Araguaia, everything was going to work out.
At that point in time, the Party believed the population was going to get involved. The 1969 resolution said: There is no other alternative for Brazilians: to rise up in arms against the backward army and the imperialist Yankees or forever have to endure the country’s reactionaries and foreign looters.
But why that, Fernando? Why go into the middle of the forest, far from everything, without contact with anyone, I asked one day. Weren’t you studying to be a geographer? Why didn’t you stay there, studying to be a geographer in Brasilia, it was in Brasilia, wasn’t it? You could have gotten involved in politics there in Brasilia, couldn’t you?
Fernando looked at me. The bus barely jiggled on Denver’s smooth streets.
Do you really want to talk about this?
I did. I wanted to know everything that had happened to him, I wanted to see those ghost-days of his past in front of me, before my eyes, I wanted to know if the ghosts really did any haunting or if they were just ghosts for lack of an alternative.
I really did want to talk about that subject. Lots of people didn’t, they thought it was best kept out of the official history, but sometimes questions gnaw at you like insects. And they really do gnaw, patient little silverfish scuttling between letters, numbers and stamps in the guerrilla files kept secret by the Armed Forces. Where was the missing son, and under what circumstances had he disappeared? Where was his cadaver buried, and how had his healthy body become a cadaver?
Were there no rights against the homeland? As time passed, the parents of those who went missing on the Araguaia also died, one by one. They died one by one without ever knowing what had happened to their guerrilla son, to their guerrilla daughter.
But as the commanders of the Armed Forces told their subordinates during the repression of the guerrilla movement, the orders were to watch, listen and stay quiet.
Ideally, the guerrillas should disappear, an old widow forgotten in her room. Closed windows, closed door, a tiny, frail heart beating behind flaccid muscles, drooping breasts, wrinkled skin. She had been nothing, didn’t represent anything, what use was there in rubbing salt into the wound? The military group Terrorism Never Again would come to define it as:
A truly small residual group’s adventure.
An illegal, underground party’s deranged, incoherent idea to start a people’s war without the support of the people, in order to impose socialism on them.
A Quixotic group’s actions, further jeopardizing themselves, lost in the jungle and in the tangle of their own errors.
A few decades later, in the south of Pará, where Fernando used to live, there is no more forest. Back when it was still there, Brazil’s official history was called the “Brazilian Miracle.”
One of the most sensational things of all, in those days, was the Brazilian National Team’s recent victory in the FIFA World Cup, in which it had become world champion for the third time. Oh, the 1970 World Cup! It was a team that had Pelé, Gérson, Jairzinho, Tostão, Rivelino, and Carlos Alberto Torres as captain. A team that has never been rivaled anywhere at any point in history. After missing out in England in 1966, why not raise the Jules Rimet Cup in all its glittering gold in Mexico’s Azteca Stadium? Why not? Even if some clairvoyant supporter had known that the cup would be stolen and melted down years later, it wouldn’t have diminished Brazil’s excitement over the victory in the slightest.
Which ran parallel to other national sentiments. My history teacher may have explained this on one of those days when I was watching the pigeons outside, the dirty pigeons of Copacabana and their cooing and occasional deformed feet. But it was Fernando who summed it up for me, as the bus barely jiggled on Denver’s smooth streets. The economic policy of the dictatorship brought down inflation and unemployment, and the country grew. (It would all get out of hand when an oil crisis came along to put a dampener on things. In the year of the military coup, Brazil’s foreign debt was little more than three billion dollars. By the end of the military dictatorship, in 1985, when General Figueiredo asked everyone to forget him, it was over ninety billion.) At the same time, the country was told that the cake had to rise first before everyone could have a piece. And that was how minimum wages plummeted mid-Miracle. And the poorest members of the population became even poorer. In the mid-1970s, more than half of the Brazilian population was under- or malnourished.
I came to the conclusion that the saint who had worked the miracle had worn a wire halo covered with gold paper, like the ones we had once made for a Christmas play at school. The miracle-working saint levitated standing on a plank and when he tried to strike up a conversation with the plants and animals, the plants and animals didn’t understand a thing.
During Operation Fish I, the residents of São João do Araguaia talked to the army about a group of people from São Paulo who were living in Faveira.
The investigators wore plain clothes and were under orders to keep that first phase of the operation absolutely secret. They left with a few names, a few suspects and a few certainties.
One of the certainties was that the enemy was better equipped for confrontation than they had thought, and that reinforcements were required.
Operation Fish II would come next. To watch, investigate, arrest, interrogate.
They conducted searches in Faveira and seized ammunition and a boat. They staked out a point on the Trans-Amazonian Highway where they thought they might surprise a certain suspect by the name of Joca. Who had bought land in Faveira and started receiving people whom he introduced to the locals as members of his family: a certain Dona Maria, a certain Cid, a certain Mário, a certain Luiz. A man of Japanese descent, a blonde woman. A couple called Beto and Regina.
This Joca had a large, diverse family, as they had discovered in Operation Fish I.
The military considered the hypothesis that they were inoffensive hippies, disenchanted with urban life, only to quickly discard it. They suspected that Joca was an experienced guerrilla from the National Liberation Action by the name of João Alberto Capiberibe.
And it was indeed him. But they never imagined that Dona Maria was Elza Monerat, a veteran communist who was almost sixty years old. Or that Mário and Cid were Maurício Grabois and João Amazonas, of the Brazilian Communist Party’s central committee and former federal deputies.
The agents on the Trans-Amazonian Highway stakeout waited for Joca to appear. He no longer lived in Faveira, but according to locals he visited once a month, took care of whatever he needed to and then returned to an unknown place in the middle of the forest (The forest is our second mother!), passing along the Trans-Amazonian.
The agents waited for five days. In vain. You see, information also traveled in the opposite direction.
Manuela’s letter to Chico, a piece of paper that later took up residence in the wooden El Coto de Rioja wine crate, at the back of a wardrobe in a suburb of Denver, was written before all this.
Manuela was bedridden with malaria and thought she was going to die. She ached all over, from head to foot. She vomited. Shook with fever. Other comrades had already been through it and worse things and were still there, but she felt so bad that she didn’t think she’d make it. The suffering in her own body seemed more complex and specific than in other people’s bodies.
In those parts it was common for people to die of malaria, yellow fever, leishmaniasis. Comrade Regina, who had been in Faveira a year earlier, had had brucellosis, anemia, fallen pregnant by her boyfriend Beto, and had an abortion as per the Party’s orientation. The abortion wasn’t carried out properly and she was finally granted leave to go get treatment elsewhere.
The fetus was still in her belly. She never returned.
Chico was working in the forest when bedridden Manuela thought she was going to die. He had been away for over a week.
You’re not going to die, said Comrade Inês.
But her body no longer seemed to have the will to live. In her letter to Chico, Manuela wrote, with revolutionary flair: I admire you so much. Your strength, your ability. If I don’t make it, please find a way to notify my parents in Rio de Janeiro. Tell them that I never regretted coming here. Dying sick in a bed isn’t the same as dying in a war against the enemies of the people, it is true, but even so I don’t regret it. I also want to say that I really like you. I wish life were different. You know. Really different. Completely different.
