Crow Blue (13 page)

I wasn't used to maps, but there was something intriguing about them. Sitting there, in Fernando's living room, at night, a mapable world didn't seem possible. It was all an abstraction – different highways, borders, states and countries, towns with names like Ojo Caliente or Fairplay. But those abstractions were really there, situated in very specific, localizable places, hence maps, and that was the intriguing part. If I got in a car and followed those tiny yellow veins and continued following the tiny yellow veins portrayed by other maps I would come across different borders, states and countries, towns with names like Fairplay and Ojo Caliente, and Juárez if I continued, and Chihuahua and Zacatecas. And if I carried on, overland, I would pass through Mexico City and Oaxaca, and then there would be Guatemala City and Tegucigalpa, Managua, Alajuela, Panama City, Medellín, Bogotá, and suddenly I would see Amazonian Brazil before me. Continuing, there would be the Araguaia and its memory and its forgetting of a guerrilla army, and from there, crossing another three states, I would arrive once again at Copacabana Beach and its Atlantic mollusks dreaming blue dreams at the bottom of the sea.

In all of these places, all of them, there were many Daniels and many fathers of thirteen-year-old girls. Some had possibly even gone astray.

I'd like to go to New Mexico, I said, without even realizing I'd spoken, which is why I was surprised when Fernando shrugged and said we can go.

Can we visit the house I used to live in? (The house I used to live in: a character in a fairytale. An imaginary being.) Can we visit this June lady?

Why not?

I looked at him and in my throat I asked, without letting my voice out: Why are you doing all this?

Mentally, he answered: Because you asked me to.

Then I looked away. Neither of us was very fond of sentimental words, even sentimental words that weren't actually spoken, that laid in wait. The mere potential, the simple possibility that something of the sort might exist threatened to make the world mushy and sappy, and in a mushy, sappy world people don't live, they just slip about and complain.

Man's wolf

 

My father. the idea still sounded almost fanciful. A treasure hunt. A pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. What if I made it to the end of the rainbow and the pot of gold was really filled with second-rate chocolate coins, the sort that taste like wax? What if the rainbow had no end?

Perhaps my father was an optical phenomenon too. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. The dispersion of sunlight. The “X” that marked the location of the treasure on the map but which was maybe a silent hole that someone had beat me to. A joke. A hoax.

My father might be: in prison, dead, traveling, exiled, in a hospital or mental institution, living on the streets, on an island in the Caribbean, on a military base in Bulgaria, on a scientific base in Antarctica, in a Buddhist monastery in the Philippines, looking at paintings and smoking a pipe on a bridge in Paris.

My father might be too old, too young, weird, too good-looking, too thin, brilliant, aloof, bald, good-humored, too fat, extroverted, religious, hairy, ugly, very learned, short-sighted, athletic, kind of quarrelsome, bearded, successful, very musically talented. My father might have fathered other daughters and other sons.

I mentally listed off the possibilities as I made coffee, certain that my father would allow himself to be divined in any of them. It made me a little anxious. Anxiety is a hostile feeling that grips your stomach with crooked, cold, possessive fingers.

The coffee, a Brazilian brand bought in the store that sold Brazilian products, dripped into the pot. The toast toasted in the toaster. The house, snuggled up in drawn curtains and closed doors, smelled of coffee and toast.

Fernando was asleep and perhaps my father's faces, or my mother's face, were in his dreams. Or the faces of that Amazonian war which, I had yet to find out, he would never forget. He would forget his phone number, his address, his own name, and the sound of his own voice before he would forget that. When the enemy advances, you withdraw, and when you have to withdraw sometimes you stumble.

He was asleep and I was making the coffee that would sit there in the artificial heat of the electric coffee-maker for too long until all of its integrity was suffocated in the taste of burnt straw. I drank the coffee fresh and ate my toast and got my backpack and jacket.

 

In late October Carlos and I went trick-or-treating in the neighborhood wearing black capes and masks with bulging eyes and devilish expressions. When I got home, Fernando was sitting in the living room in the dark, hands crossed behind his head. He was listening to an old Brazilian song from before I was born and perhaps before he was born, which I recognized because my mother used to listen to it too.

Who's that?

Noel Rosa, he replied.

Hmm.

I sat next to him. I reached into the bag of candies and picked one at random.

Want one? I asked.

He said yes. I picked something else at random and we sat there in the dark eating sickly-sweet candies with artificial fruit flavorings, as I thought about the song that my mother also used to listen to and he thought some thoughts all of his own.

Suddenly I looked at him and thought that his wrinkles, even in the weak light coming from outside, were all deeper, more pronounced, and that the skin of his face was like wet clothes hanging on a coat hanger.

I touched my own face with both hands. I ran my fingertips around my eyes, across my forehead.

At what moment did you realize that you were starting to age? Was there already some kind of sign at the age of thirteen, a miniscule wrinkle, a tiny valley beginning to be eroded where previously there had only been a plain? There was a fine fuzz above my upper lip. I had to start removing it. My mother used to use a hair removal cream and would have a white moustache for eight minutes, once a month. Then she would wash it off and the area would be a bit red for a few hours. The cream had a strange smell, a mixture of floral essence and science lab.

When's your birthday, Fernando? I asked.

Today, he said.

What?

Today, October 31.

Seriously? Halloween?

I wondered if that was why the lines in his face were deeper – because it was his birthday. Maybe these things didn't happen progressively but in waves, in cycles, and when it was your birthday your body realized it had to keep pace with the number indicative of your age, give or take a year. As if it was suddenly woken by an alarm clock and, still groggy, with heavy eyes, went off to go about the business of aging. To then lie down again and wait until it was time to age a little more.

The next day I invited Carlos to go with me to look for a present for Fernando. We bought a yellow T-shirt that didn't look like anything Fernando would wear. But he wore it that very same day, and took Carlos and me out for pizza and Carlos and I drank ginger ale and he had a Mexican beer in a glass mug with a wedge of lemon on the edge. He took the lemon and squeezed it into the beer and then left it bobbing there, which I found a little repugnant, because it made me think of refuse, trash cans and stinky organic leftovers.

Fernando looked like an extraterrestrial in the yellow T-shirt and I think he knew it, but he wore it with conviction that day and on several other occasions. Every time Carlos saw him in the yellow T-shirt he'd say:
La camisa de cumpleaños
. And Fernando would pat his head, and he would then smooth down his hair, as if it was possible to mess up his eternal crew cut. Carlos was visibly pleased by that moment of male camaraderie, comments about the shirt, pats on the head that were a variation of pats on the back, adapted to their height and age difference. The yellow made Fernando look one hundred percent wrong, and that didn't bother him, or me, or Carlos.

During the birthday pizza, Carlos wanted to know how old Fernando had turned. Fifty-seven, said Fernando.

You old, said Carlos. How say old in
portugués
?

Velho
, said Fernando.

Velho
, said Carlos imitating him, laughing. He thought the word was funny.
Velho
, he repeated. And he apparently liked the idea of Fernando being old. He reached across the table with his fat little hand and placed it on Fernando's. I like you
así mismo
. I not care you are
velho
.
Eres mi amigo
. My friend. How say friend in
portugués
?

Amigo
, I said.

Ah! He was pure happiness. He was always pure happiness when he discovered words that were the same in his language and ours. When he came across yet another of our many Latin intersections.
Amigo en portugués, amigo en español. Qué bueno
.

He was wearing a red sweatshirt that was a little too small for him, with a baseball on it. Carlos was forever surrounded by the balls of sports he didn't play.

 

Chico and Manuela were living together when the war began in April of 1972. By this time they had already been transferred from Faveira to the Chega com Jeito base.

For Pedro, the first guerrilla captured, the war was something completely different and had begun earlier. When he tried to kill himself in his cell he didn't slash his wrists: he had learned in his training that it rarely killed anyone. Instead, he made deep cuts in the veins near his elbows, using razors which had ended up in his hands he didn't know how.

He survived (fascists!) and was tied to the bed. But in the forest he used the legitimate perturbation resulting from his condition (
Now you're going to experience the torture methods we learned in Vietnam
, an officer told him) to disorient the agents of repression: tripping, glassy eyes. He had been taken back to the Araguaia to recognize the guerrilla training sites. In the home of his godchild's parents, who lived in the region, the officers confirmed: you're a liar! How can you christen a child if you're a communist and communists don't believe in God? In prison in Xambioá (which wasn't the beautiful Xangri-La in the middle of a Himalayan valley), in a cell without a toilet, he heard a woman's screams that seemed to be coming from a torture session. Bluffing, they told him they were the screams of Tereza, his wife. Pedro was given electric shocks in the cuts in his arms. On one occasion they held a knife to his eye and said repeat that you are a communist. He was strung up from the ceiling naked. He kept on surviving. After all, as a clergyman had once said, you don't get confessions with bonbons.

In the outside world, the war began and Fernando was in the war. The same Fernando who would one day spread out a dog-eared map of New Mexico and a dog-eared map of Colorado in front of me on the dining table. So much time, so many lives woven into time; is man man's wolf?

I look at my arms without scars and think about cuts and electric shocks. And I wonder how lives turned inside out and people turned inside out find their right-way-out again.

They don't. They become cousins of the tree that was born on a steep slope, its trunk forever crooked and its leaves growing towards the sun, believing, because that's what leaves do. They become cousins of the stray dog that eats the food that someone gives it one day because that's what dogs do. In Lakewood, Colorado, there were no stray dogs. In Copacabana there were and they were almost always ugly and always did everything with urgency; they urgently lived that life that was limited to urgently living that life without pet shops. If you set a plate of food on the ground and made it obvious that you weren't going to kick them if they approached, the strays of Copacabana would come, but they wouldn't eat. They would devour. In seconds. Whatever the food and whatever the amount. Is man also the wolf's wolf? The dog's wolf? When the army invaded the Chega com Jeito base and news reached the Gameleira base, one of the first things they did in their retreat was to kill the camp dog so it wouldn't attract the soldiers' attention with its barking.

The war started for Fernando, who was Chico in that place on that day. Fish III was the name given to the anti-guerrilla oper­ation, whose aim was
to conduct an armed invasion of the “TARGET” in order to capture, neutralize and/or destroy the enemy
(the “TARGET” being a particular region where they suspected that there were subversive elements).

Fernando told me that the guerrillas fled. It was a narrow escape. From the forest, they actually saw the army surrounding the main house, helicopter and everything.

In the following days, the army found other bases, further south. They didn't catch anyone there either, but they seized homemade bombs, ammunition, food, medicine, a sewing machine, clothes, backpacks. As well as, of course, subversive literature. The army moved with difficulty through the forest. The only helicopter they had at the time was out on loan.

They were suspicious of a man moving a little too fast along a trail one morning. They stopped him and asked for explanations, the explanations weren't enough and the man, who was really the guerrilla Geraldo, was arrested, beaten, held underwater and forced to stand on open cans. On his person they found a note that said
C: army in the area. cmdr.
B.
He was doomed. In Brasilia, a few days later, they found out that Geraldo was really José Genoino Neto, a communist who had been underground for four years. For three of which he had been living there, on the Araguaia, preparing the guerrilla forces.