Crow Blue, page 8
Chico knew. When he returned from the forest and read the letter from Manuela, who was burning up with fever but recovered from the malaria and recovered again all the times she got sick, he already knew.
You might be willing to lay down your life for the Party and its ideals (you have to in order to be a part of the Guerrilla Forces, otherwise when you realize you aren’t it’s too late). But to lay down love, not necessarily.
The woodsman who had studied in China, maker of weapons, a communist since he was a teenager, the man with a boy’s face and firm arms who wasn’t afraid of anything, who even before going to the Araguaia had been unable to get a job anywhere because of his sullied record (against the homeland there are no rights), thought it was possible to have both. The Araguaia Guerrilla Forces and the girl who went by the codename Manuela, who thought she was going to die of malaria.
Come on, Manuela. You’re going to be fine.
A week later she was teaching again in the school created and run by the guerrillas, for children who had nothing, who only had what their families were able to take from the benevolence of the land and the rivers, the children of the squatters who feared the land-grabbers who were on the side of the power.
Brazil only remembered that infinite no man’s land when the no man’s land became a question of national security, in that era when Trans-Amazonian Highways came into being. But it wouldn’t solve its problems, not even in the next half-century.
One of the things that Manuela couldn’t have known when she was teaching those children was that in the future Bico do Papagaio would continue to be a poor region, abandoned by the government, and would be the setting for violent conflicts sparked by the coexistence of farmers, loggers, landless workers, prospectors, Indians, slave workers, gunmen and drug traffickers.
Years later, a police chief by the name of Hitler Mussolini would frequent the region, trying to deport Dominican friars fighting for the rights of local rural workers.
In that future, police officers would hold second jobs as security guards on big farms. Slave workers would labor under the watch of armed men and would sleep locked up in sheds. One adolescent girl rescued by investigators had no idea that she could be paid for her work. It hadn’t occurred to her. She was fourteen years old and had been working since she was five.
The Party didn’t want the guerrillas to have amorous dallyings. But what if they weren’t dallyings? Some comrades appeared to be celibate. Others were married. And others were indeed in relationships that had been born there, in the middle of the forest, as they practised shooting or first aid.
So, one day when Manuela went to cut wood in the forest, Chico went with her. To help.
Como é que você se chama? Quando é que você me ama? Onde é que eu vou lhe falar? Como é que você não me diz quando é que você me faz feliz? Onde é que vamos morar? (What is your name? When will you love me? Where will I talk to you? Why won’t you tell me when you are going to make me happy? Where are we going to live?)
Chico wasn’t going to sing the song, tone-deaf as he was, but he could think it, since thoughts don’t go off-key.
He could think it as he thought about Manuela. As he caught Manuela in a hug. Come here, girl. And she laughed. I thought I was going to die. How silly. (Who said “how silly,” him or her?) I really like you too. (This was definitely him.)
That dense forest that blocked everything, that even blocked the sunlight. Once Chico dreamed that he was entering the forest and it was pitch-black. He couldn’t see a thing. In the middle of the day. But the forest is our second mother! And in the middle of the forest you can hug and kiss someone you like, someone you think you really like, a lot, and sing songs mentally so as not to run the risk of going off-key. And later you can even sing a few lines of the song out loud, despite your voice and tone deafness. Just a few lines. Remove your clothes and reveal a body that is weak and strong at the same time. Ugly and beautiful. Very thin. Times two. A lot of insect bites. Calluses. Scars. Warmth, desire. All of it. Then put your clothes back on, hoist the firewood onto your back and take it to where it needs to be taken. As if it were weapons. As if it were a wounded companion.
One day I discovered a poem called “The Fish.” It was pretty difficult. It was in one of those (pretty difficult) anthologies of American poetry that the librarian gave me to read, full of literary honesty and belief in the future. And which I read thinking that it was all going to be transferred to my brain, lodge there and make me a different person (better, if possible: I worked hard at it and had a sponsor), just as the TV had taught me other basic survival techniques.
A few years later, having reread the poem called “The Fish” many more times, the axis of my feelings shifting a little more with each reading, I decided it was my favorite. My Poem. Of all of the ones I’d sweated over in the pages of the anthologies in Denver Public Library.
I discovered that the author, Marianne, was the daughter of an engineer-inventor by the fine name of John Milton Moore (I’d like to be called John Milton Moore if I were a man. Evangelina Moore doesn’t work, but Marianne Moore does. That is the name of the author of my favorite poem and it is a lovely name). Her father was committed to an institution for the mentally ill before she was born. I didn’t find anything about her mother; she was just John’s wife and was named, quite appropriately, Mary. Marianne liked boxing and baseball.
When I read the “The Fish,” I was transported to a world of colors, of primordial movements. It contained crabs like green lilies and submarine toadstools.
And a turquoise sea of bodies. And crow-blue shells.
And a “sun split like spun” that was nice to repeat over and over, bringing with it an image of submerged shards of sunlight, shafts of sunlight. SUN SPLIT LIKE SPUN SUN SPLIT LIKE SPUN SUN SPLIT LIKE SPUN. Sun split like spun glass.
It had nothing to do with the studies by scientists at the University of Edinburgh revealing that fish can feel pain [citation required]. Not least because it was written well before them.
It also had nothing to do with the operations conducted by the Brazilian Armed Forces on the banks of the Araguaia River.
Those were other fish. The woman who wrote “The Fish” was dying when the Armed Forces trailed their dragnets for subversives through the Brazilian Amazon. And she had nothing to do with it. Just as no fish had anything to do with it. The story that was unraveling on the banks of the Araguaia was a human story. The fish only lent it their name.
Involuntarily, I might add – like confiscated savings accounts.
May I pet your dog?
I liked the expression “smooth sailing” the first time I came across it. I tried to find the best translation in Portuguese but nothing was quite right. It meant easy progress. But the expression itself evoked boats, the sea and calm surfaces and took me back to the time when that made immediate sense.
“Smooth” was the satiny quality of the water, “sailing” was the verb for the sail that puffed out with the wind and crossed entire oceans.
The moment the English teacher at school congratulated me on my efforts and summed it all up in that “smooth sailing,” I clearly saw myself in a sailboat making the tiniest tear in a perfectly silken sea, a progressive boat, a boat as pure and optimistic as the shoals of fish swimming beneath it.
I left school along liquid corridors, and the concrete of the sidewalk was liquid.
So I sailed. In a single expression the English teacher had defined my first few weeks in an entirely landlocked state, without any contact with any beach or any ocean.
In terms of water, in Colorado, I had seen the reservoirs where people sailed around in circles on Sundays. Cascading rivers in the folds of the mountains, on which people practiced turbulent sports – navigating downstream in yellow boats that looked like giant kitchen sponges or in pointy kayaks. I never suspected that all that water would grow thin and lock itself away in ice in the months to come, storing its liquidity in the slow metabolism of hibernation.
But I sailed on calm seas, that is, I made easy progress, that is, I was being successful in my daily attempts to not trip up.
Boats that sail on calm seas know no gravel, no loose stones in their path, they know no feet. Their mobility is made of waves and wind. With the right waves and the right wind the sailboat slips along free of metaphysics. Like a first-grade equation.
Daniel, my father’s name, was a valid name in several languages, I discovered to my delight. Daniel was Daniel in English, Portuguese and Spanish, the three languages I had contact with every day, there in Lakewood.
The plump man in the blue shirt and tie in the Jehovah’s Witnesses pamphlet would no doubt be able to explain the biblical origins of the name. All I knew was that it had belonged to someone who at some stage had had something to do with lions, according to legend. I didn’t even know if he had fought them and won, with some intrinsically spiritual moral to be learned, or lost, with some intrinsically spiritual moral to be learned.
I suspected that Daniel didn’t suspect that he had a thirteen-year-old daughter named Vanja, who was a citizen of two countries and lived in harmonious linguistic chaos, a daughter who spoke English at school, Portuguese at home and Spanish with the neighbors.
And I sensed that I needed to maintain that smooth sailing towards Daniel. Life needed to become an orderly series of tasks. More or less like a sailor’s day-to-day life must be. An orderly physical world full of calculations and angles that is needed for a boat to sail.
The same orderly physical world where hungry lions kill Daniel, where disinterested lions spare Daniel – it’s hard to say. There are the between-the-lines in all stories. Some gods like bloody martyrs (in the style of Tim Treadwell and his bears in Alaska), others don’t really care.
But at any rate I suspected that Daniel didn’t suspect that I existed.
After a few phone calls, Fernando had finally located some people. Among them, that old friend of my mother’s who lived in Santa Fé. But couldn’t Daniel have been located with a telephone book too? He could have, if there weren’t lots of Daniels with the same surname all over New Mexico and if Daniel still lived in New Mexico and if he happened to be listed.
But maybe he had crossed the border and was now in Arizona or Texas or even Colorado, or in Mexico even, on the other side of an even more borderly border, or in British Columbia or Argentina (why not?), or virtually anywhere else in the world. Or maybe that specific Daniel no longer existed, and there were just his namesakes scattered across the globe, a one-man diaspora.
The old friend of my mother’s who lived in Santa Fé taught piano and was called June. It had been over ten years since she’d last seen Daniel, as she explained to Fernando. She told him that he had moved to San Antonio, in Texas, and then they had lost touch. Emails, that kind of thing? She had tried, said Fernando. She had written to a few people, but hadn’t heard back yet. We’d have to wait a little.
After a few moments of silence:
Why didn’t you ever ask your mother where your father was?
Because I didn’t need to know. Because I don’t think she knew. Because I don’t think she would have wanted to tell me. I don’t know. Why did you and she stop talking?
Because we didn’t have any reason to keep talking to each other.
Didn’t you have anything to talk about? Didn’t you care about each other anymore?
We didn’t have anything to talk about. We didn’t care about each other anymore. That must have been it.
He was chopping kale. I picked up a piece of kale that had fallen on the ground and put it back on the chopping board. And I dared to ask: Why did you have to leave Brazil?
The knife thudded against the chopping board as he chopped. Plac. Plac. Plac.
They were after me.
The police?
The army.
What had you done?
Some things.
Wrong things?
In their opinion, yes. Those were hard times.
I didn’t know if I should shake Fernando to get him to spit out what he ended up telling me over the months to come, as ice covered the cascading rivers and the reservoirs, and afterwards, as the ice melted and swelled the cascading rivers and the reservoirs of the following summer. To get him to tell me about firearms and that other woman (Manuela/Joana) before London and my mother, before Lakewood, Colorado, and well before Vanja. The woman from the letter that lived in the seclusion of the wooden El Coto de Rioja wine crate.
But the idea of shaking Fernando was still sort of frightening. The idea of taking hold of those mounds of muscle and rattling them, as if I had any right to his life. I didn’t. The fact that I was there just because he had once given me the gift of his name on my birth certificate was already a big deal.
When I think about Fernando today, nine years after those first few weeks in Lakewood, I remember his arms. That was where the real Fernando, his soul, his personality must have lived. The arms that were only a hypothetical force during his daily hours as a security guard at Denver Public Library, cat claws inside a cat’s paws. The arms that I saw removing marks from windows and dust from surfaces and trash from other people’s floors on so many occasions. The arms that had once tensed with the weight of a weapon – I don’t know the weight of a weapon, I don’t know the weight that you add to a weapon or subtract from it depending on the purpose with which it is picked up. The arms that I knew had wrapped around my mother’s body, 360 degrees (love, a weapon, arms that disarm), and the body of that other woman before my mother and London and New Mexico and Colorado. The arms hard at work over a frying pan making farofa with the kale and the manioc flour bought in a store that sold Brazilian products. The arms that came home holding a red plastic sled when the first days of snow in early November held the promise of slippery slopes. The arms that pushed me down the slippery slopes while on the inside I was stiff, raw panic. The arms that learned to overcome their own inability to hug someone else’s daughter in a goodnight ritual that in theory didn’t even need to exist. The arms that closed the door after answering the Jehovah’s Witness woman for the second and third time (had he read the pamphlet? Bible in hand, she wanted to know if he had any questions. And he didn’t have the courage to say that the pamphlet had ended up in the trash, and he said he still hadn’t had time to read it). The quiet arms that held my math book as the muscles in his face tensed with concentration.
We’d have to wait, as June from Santa Fé had said and as Fernando had repeated.
I didn’t have any other commitment besides that one, to wait.
Five days a week I went to school. Two days a week I didn’t. And meanwhile, I waited.
Five days a week I ate lunch at the same table as Aditi Ramagiri and her friends, in the school cafeteria, and one lusterless Wednesday I looked differently at a boy called Nick during math class, and the lusterless Wednesday became the great Mogul, Shah Jahan’s diamond, said to be missing since the seventeenth century and which I had just found, somewhat awkwardly.
I would have to wait.
One day, as I was passing a light-blue house on my way back from school, our Salvadorian neighbors’ son was standing on the sidewalk. He was a short, stocky boy, with a funny face.
He said hi in Spanish. Hola.
I answered.
He asked ¿Como te llamas?
Vanja, I said. ¿Y tu?
Carlos.
Carlos wasn’t an appropriate name for a child, I thought. Maybe all the Carloses in the world had been born adults. Except him, with his Ninja Turtles T-shirt and an American football in his little hands.
¿Juegas? I asked, pointing at the ball with my chin.
No, he said, simply.
Yo tampoco.
Two days later he knocked on Fernando’s front door holding a book in English for children a lot younger than himself. Carlos’s spoken English was very poor. And he could barely read at all. The book had a dozen phrases and huge drawings of cars, motorbikes, airplanes, buses, ambulances, fire engines and other motor vehicles that slid through the world with ease, grace and fossil fuels.
I asked how old he was.
Carlos looked at me with his chubby face, almond-shaped eyes behind glasses and short, spiky hair, and said nine. He handed me the book and asked if I could read it to him.
I offered him a glass of guaraná. From the store that sold Brazilian products.
We sat on the couch a palm’s breadth apart. I began to read.
Carlos wanted to quickly skip to the next page to see the next picture.
I explained: Carlos, you have to pay attention, dude.
I started running my finger under the words as I read. Carlos began imitating them. A few minutes later, he perched his hand on my forearm and left it there, like a warm, slightly sweaty little bird. I wasn’t sure if he really understood the words or if he was just pretending, if it was merely a strategy to keep me reading.
You shouldn’t get too close to people, Fernando had told me. The Brazilian habit of hugging and kissing everyone. If you want to greet someone, shake their hand. That’s how things work around here.
In Rio de Janeiro, people are always bumping into one another. You bump into people in supermarket aisles, in queues, on the sidewalk, in the bus, in the metro. You don’t get out of the way when other people need to pass you. Other people don’t get out of the way when you need to pass them. We go around saying excuse me and forging paths with our own bodies. Licença, we say, sometimes, and sometimes with so little effort that the word disappears into us and becomes an indistinct ss-ss. We are forever hugging and kissing people we have known for ten years and people we have just met and we say hi darling to everyone. We pat dogs that are being walked by their owners. At the very most, we ask does he/she bite? after verifying which pronoun to use by looking under the animal’s legs for a pair of testicles or the lack thereof. If the owner says he/she doesn’t bite, we plunge our fingers into his/her fur without asking permission, stroke his/her ears, tickle his/her belly. And it’s nice, and the world is essentially made up of surfaces rubbing against one another and an exchange of heat.
