Crow Blue (14 page)

The military was preparing “Civic-Social Actions,” to mask the real reasons for its presence there and to try to win over the population, in a tug-of-war with the social work carried out by the communists. With Operation Fish IV, in May, the military intended to correct the mistakes of past operations and obtain more information on the enemy's identity, numbers and location. Officers from the army, navy and air force and the Pará military police were given the task of infiltrating the population.

 

That month the first military officer was killed by the Araguaia guerrillas: twenty-six-year-old Corporal Odílio Rosa. With a bullet in his groin, in a surprise brook-side encounter, when everything seemed calm and the forest was almost pleasant, almost comfortable, set against a naïve symphony of insects and birds with no political leanings.

On one side, four army officers and the woodsman who was accompanying them. On the other, two communist guerrillas. In that first confrontation, the guerrillas Osvaldão and Simão fired two shots. One hit Sergeant Morais and the other killed Corporal Rosa, whose body was left in the forest for a week before it was retrieved.

The surprise factor and numerical advantage, according to the Armed Forces, explained the defeat. The report also attributed the difficulty of removing Corporal Rosa's body to a supposed death threat made by the subversives to anyone who tried to retrieve it.

Along came Operation Fish V, whose mission was to retrieve the body.

The military decided on the ostensive deployment of troops in the region. This time they had observation planes and helicopters. Three platoons and a detachment of paratroopers headed for the Araguaia.

In that month of May the guerrillas also issued their first official announcement. It didn't mention the Party or the training that had been taking place in the forest for some years. But it announced the creation of the Union for Freedom and the Rights of the People, the ULDP.

The people united and armed will defeat their enemies.

Down with land grabbing!

Long live freedom!

Death to the military dictatorship!

For a free, independent Brazil!

Somewhere in the Amazon, May 25, 1972.

Commanders of the Araguaia Guerrilla Forces

 

Then Chico felt fear, for the first time. And he learned the art of mistrust.

He didn't know he had it in him. Maybe because he'd never looked death square in the face before, eye to eye. He had heard about it, heard descriptions of it, passed by it and perhaps even brushed past it unwittingly (scuse me, sorry) and kept walking, with the long strides and sunny whistle of the self-assured. Meanwhile, death, in a hat and overcoat, turned and frowned at that unconcerned individual's back. But to look straight at it and find its eyes wide open, undisguised, with the unspeakable inside them, to get through
that unfair fight, now that was something else. For the first time he told Manuela that he didn't think the guerrillas would win.

They're too strong, said Chico.

Don't lose heart. They don't know their way around the forest. We've been here much longer. (Could it be that, of the two of them, she, who didn't have the Peking Military Academy under her belt, who didn't know how to make weapons, would be the one to tame her fear like a snake charmer, to walk over hot coals and sleep on a bed of nails?)

It doesn't matter, said Chico. They hire woodsmen. People sell themselves for next to nothing.

People sold themselves for next to nothing. The first guerrilla was killed not long afterwards, as a result of a tip-off from a peasant known as Cearensinho. Sent to his house to get a roll of tobacco, the guerrilla Jorge ran into the army and was machine-gunned down. Cearensinho had been considered a friend.

They're too strong, said Chico. By the end of May the army had more than two hundred men in the region. Not that Chico was up on the numbers.

By the end of May the army also had a list of five prisoners in a document entitled
Special information no. 1
. Among them, a boat man and farmer who was found hanged in his cell, a “known communist,” a “lawyer” and another two men about whom nothing was said. It didn't mention the arrests of a further four inhabitants of the region or the capture of four guerrillas.

The ULDP (or “the terrorists of southeastern Pará”) wrote a manifesto containing twenty-seven demands. Among them were:
Land for farming and legal titles. Reduction of taxes for rural labor and small businesses; tax exemption for small and medium-size farmers; an end to police participation in tax collection. Medical assistance in all districts, with itinerant clinics in boats and trucks. The creation of schools in villages, on the banks of the major rivers and near plantations; the building of boarding schools for children from distant locations. Protection for women; in the event of divorce, the right to part of the couple's estate and domestic possessions; pregnancy care; practical courses for the training of midwives. Work, schooling and physical education for young people; soccer and basketball fields, athletics tracks and recreation centers. Respect for all religious beliefs, with permission to practise all forms of shamanism and Spiritism. The employment of a good portion of taxes in the construction of highways, the paving of streets, the installation of electric and water facilities, the maintenance of schools and medical services. Plans for urbanization and development in cities and towns; aid for the building of homes; incentives for the creation of libraries and radio stations. Respect for the property of others, without harm to society; support for progressive private initiatives, small and medium-size factories and craftwork.

 

Some time later, the army would use the Corporal Rosa Clearing as a symbolic place for the summary execution of guerrillas. And it was only more than three decades later that it was brought to light in the newspapers, when the army's former guides broke their silence during searches for the bones of the missing.

I read a comment online: Why don't they start using the Clearing again? But do the job properly this time. It's our only chance to live in a decent country.

I read another comment: The army did what it HAD TO DO GIVEN THE circumstances at the time. Speaking of which, it's time they did it again to take down the corrupt band of thieves who've taken over Brasilia!

I read another comment: Only cowards and criminals are afraid of the truth. It's definitely the case of those who are so opposed to shedding light on the facts about the executions on the Araguaia. Those cowards are obviously worried about having to explain themselves to their children, grandchildren and friends when they discover that the image of hero and protector of the Homeland that they had of them is false; they're really just a bunch of sadistic torturers.

I read another comment: What bugs me is paying money for these excavations. It should be paid for by the Brazilian Communist Party and cohorts who took the irresponsible from their homes, coaxed, indoctrinated, trained and made them into fanatics, then gave them weapons so they could play at being Che Guevara, all at the orders of the cruelest of dictators, Fidel Castro.

 

June called me last night, said Fernando. You were already in bed. She apparently knows someone who knows where Daniel's mother is.

Daniel's mother. An absolutely entirely new universe. While searching for my father, I had stumbled across a grandmother who was one hundred percent alive, material, tangible, with definite coordinates. And I hadn't the faintest idea what that meant. Suddenly my life began to fill with potential relatives. Could it be that I had a whole series of aunts, uncles, cousins, great aunts and uncles, second cousins? A family tree as happy as an oak, replete with branches and leaves and fruit? I'd never thought about it.

According to this person, Daniel's mother lives near Santa Fé. Her name is Florence and she's an artist.

An artist grandmother to boot. I mentally sketched a portrait of a very thin old hippie, with braids in her gray hair and a batik blouse.

Can you call her?

Well, to start with, June still hasn't got her phone number. But even if I did call her what would I say? Hi Daniel's mom, you don't know me, but I'm here with your son's teenage daughter. Could you by any chance tell me if he's alive and, if he is, where he is at the moment?

Outside was the noise of that weird contraption, that reverse vacuum cleaner that they used to clean the dry leaves from the streets, piling them up in compact little hills.

Sorry, said Fernando. But stop and think about it. What would you or I say on the telephone to Daniel's mother?

What do we do, then?

I'm not sure. I'll think about it. June offered to help. I have a cleaning job to go to. Wait for me for lunch, I won't be long.

He opened the door, looked out at the street and stopped for a moment. I wonder why there's a police car in front of Carlos's house?

 

The next day we found out that Carlos's sister, who worked as a chambermaid in a hotel in the tech center and intended to study medicine at Harvard, had quit her job and gone to Florida with her boyfriend.

What's she going to do there? I asked Fernando, after he had a brief chat with Carlos's dad. (Fernando never would have gone to Carlos's dad to ask about the whys and wherefores of the presence of the police car, or anything else, but they had run into one another in the street, and Carlos's dad had told him the story as if he were a political prisoner anxious to cooperate and avoid torture.)

I have no idea. He didn't say and I didn't ask. His wife was hysterical. The neighbor called the police. In a nutshell.

Did they arrest her?

He laughed. No, they didn't arrest her.

And, after a time, he added:

The neighbor shouldn't have stuck her nose in and called the police.

Are they going to send them back to their country?

Not that I know of, said Fernando.

That morning I studied math, finished reading a book and wrote the report I had to write, got in a mess with the facial hair removal cream and trimmed my hair a little in front of the mirror. Then I went to Carlos's house. He was sitting very quietly on the floor, in front of the TV.

Carlos, tu amiga Vanja
, announced his dad's moustache. I didn't see his mother.

Carlos looked at me, still serious. It was the seriousness of children who are suddenly a little less children. Pokémons slid across the TV screen in the company of Japanese children with giant eyes and pointy hair.

Hola
, he said. And he held out a packet of potato chips and asked if I wanted some.

I sat down in front of the Pokémons. Carlos slowly slid his fingers through the carpet and held my hand. Then he smiled when the Japanese boy with giant eyes shouted Pikachu, I choose you! and asked me if he could come over and play on Fernando's computer when the cartoon was over.

Outside, a rare
heavy rain was impregnating the semiarid world with a strange element. And the moisture hung in the air: perplexity. A semicolon between two states: dry and very dry.

It's always strange when it rains in places like this. It feels like something has gone wrong, like some prior agreement has been violated. And then the rain moves on and its memory migrates into plump-leaved plants that flourish in another sense of the verb flourish.

 

Carlos's hysterical mother had no way of knowing, in fact, none of us did, that her golden future lay with her runaway daughter.

The ex-chambermaid from the hotel in Denver's tech center and ex-future Harvard student hadn't gone to Florida for nothing.

After spending several years serving watery coffee and bacon and eggs in a diner, she would say goodbye to her excessively jealous boyfriend and succumb to the routine attempts at seduction of a regular customer. Who frequented the establishment not for its watery coffee or its bacon and eggs (which were almost as bad as the coffee), but because of the young brunette with a smile full of the whitest teeth: that contrast was the most beautiful thing the regular had ever seen. She would smile whenever he said something funny, and he learned to say funny things just to see her smile. It was all goofy, prosaic and sincere. And he would return, every day, like an obsessed cinephile returning to see daily sessions of his favorite film.

Unlike her, and her excessively jealous boyfriend, and their families, the regular customer had
papeles
. Better yet: he was a gringo. American, with American parents and Irish grand­parents. So what if he was twenty-something years older than her? He had a three-bedroom house in Tallahassee, with a new television and a lovely lawn that he cut regularly with his electric Black & Decker lawnmower.

When the illegal Salvadoran immigrant and the gringo got married, they put a second car in the garage and the two cars had matching colors and personalized number plates HIS XO and HERS XO. It had been her idea. She liked the way gringos used “X” and “O” to indicate kisses and hugs (she wasn't sure of the order). Putting kisses and hugs on the bumper was a way of fraternizing with the world. Socializing her happiness in HIS and HERS license plates.