Crow Blue (15 page)

They bought a second television, so they could each watch their programs without any conflicts. And she didn't even need to work anymore. She could stay at home looking after the kids, when kids came along.

But before kids came the ex-chambermaid and ex-waitress's mother and father, whom she brought out from Colorado and installed in the spare bedroom.

Then all the mutual hurt
melted away in the cheery Florida sun, which was so different to the semiarid Colorado sun, so much better, so much more humanitarian. The Colorado sun used a whipping stick and had downward-curving lips, between literal mountains of wrinkles. The Florida sun served orange juice processed with a smile, in sandals and shorts, very informal. And it didn't aspire to be Icelandic in the winter.

The family would find happiness there. But eight years earlier no one had any way of knowing it.

Corvus corax, Corvus brachyrhynchos

 

When Fernando, her future husband and future ex-husband, went to live in the Amazon, to rehearse and stage the guerrilla war, my mother was nine years old and was moving with her geologist father to another country. The fact that this other country had dangerous ties to the military coup in Brazil and with everything that Fernando, gun in hand, was fighting, was curious, nothing else. How could Suzana have imagined, at the age of nine, a former communist guerrilla as a husband?

Not that she knew these words intimately, not that she knew their meaning. All she knew was what her father told her: that the communists were bad people.

She saw an astronaut from her new country plant her new country's flag in lunar soil, in the month of July. She thought it strange and beautiful. She had heard of Woodstock and the jungles of Vietnam, but they were at the periphery of her interests, and it made no difference to her when Nixon addressed the “silent majority” in a request for support for the war. She didn't consider herself silent, suspected she wasn't part of the majority and didn't know exactly what war was. Besides which she was only nine, and she wasn't entirely sure that Nixon was addressing nine-year-old girls in his speech.

One day she secretly looked at photos of the village of My Lai in
Life
magazine – when the massacre finally came to light, to then disappear from public consciousness, with only the occasional short-lived outbreak of remembering.

The bodies, that pile of mangled bodies. Vietnamese: women, the elderly, children. Babies. Strange words: civilians tortured, raped, beaten, mutilated, because they were suspected of hiding Vietcong among them. (She knew what Vietnamese were, not Vietcong. She asked her father, without mentioning
Life
. Communists from those parts, he said.) Burned houses. Dead, mutilated domestic animals. She wondered if domestic animals could also be communists. Perhaps in Vietnam. Perhaps their owners trained them for it. To recognize non-communists by their smell and attack them. The cows with their hooves and horns. The dogs with their teeth. And so on.

She found out later that Lieutenant William Calley, who had led the My Lai massacre, served only three and a half years house arrest of his original life sentence. The memorial in My Lai, Vietnam, listed more than five hundred dead, with ages ranging from one to eighty. In Suzana and her father's new country, some were indignant that Calley was the only one punished. Even Vietnam War veterans. Others considered him a patriot and a hero, because in a war, after all, you respond to enemy fire as best you can. Even when there is no enemy fire. The answer needn't need to follow the question – and the ends, of course, justify the means.

 

My mother told me about the color photographs of My Lai in
Life
magazine and about Nixon talking to the astronauts on the moon. It was while we were on holiday in Barra do Jucu. We were on the beach and it was night. She was holding a can of beer and telling me things from when she was a child. I don't remember all of them. I remember that night, the cool breeze and my hot skin; I remember the color of the beer can, I remember the sky and the stars over Barra do Jucu and the photos that I hadn't seen in
Life
magazine and the speech that I hadn't heard Nixon deliver. But at any rate, between the things you remember and those you don't, between the things you know and those you don't, you have to plug the holes with whatever is at hand. And perhaps any attempt to know someone else is always that, your hands trying to shape three-dimensionality, your desire and incompetence putting together a scrapbook to bring to life someone who is dead, a friend, a mysterious lover who goes over to the window at first light and stands there gazing into space, without uttering a word. An unsociable child, a terse teacher, a humorless workmate who stares at you with a deadpan face when you tell an irresistible joke. People you don't know or with whom you don't feel comfortable. Everyone.

 

According to the photos, my mother's legs and arms went on forever, and so did her hair. Her face was Latino and ordinary.

My face is Latino and ordinary. I look at the photograph in the passport with which I entered the United States of America nine summers ago.

I see my mother in my own eyes. Missing her no longer inhibits my life. Thinking about who she might have been. What she might have looked like. It's no longer a myth.

I saw my mother in my own eyes for the first time when I was flicking through my passport, organizing the things in my backpack as I touched down in Denver. Nine years ago. The woman next to me told me to use lots of moisturizer.

At the airport I passed a girl who was crying. She was wearing an orange dress with a tiny flower print. She had curly blonde hair. Her eyes were red and there were circumstantial wrinkles on her forehead. She was quite young. Then I caught a little train to the other side of the airport and got off when a voice on the PA system said welcome to Denver and some other things that I didn't understand.

 

My mother was quite young when she met Fernando in a London pub, she on vacation with her American boyfriend, he with pints of beer in his hands instead of weapons. There he was: drifting, an anomalous fish in a tank of distant beings. There he was: an apparition, a miracle, his body alive and whole, which, for obvious reasons, it shouldn't have been. There he was, singing English music in a low voice and off-key because a while ago he had stopped caring if he sang out of tune.

He saw her and decreed the continuation of the world, the extension of time. The incorruptibility of the heart, which has its own methods and its own ethics, like any other muscle, come to think of it. He saw her and thought he needed, desperately, something to think about.

He had needed something to think about for years and had only just realized it. He needed a territory in which to hew trails in order to recognize himself again. It had been years since he'd felt the familiar weight of a weapon. It had been years since he'd felt the need to love a woman except for the purposes of subsistence, merely to avoid the armlock of loneliness.

Things were swamped by a white desert that came from inside him and spread outwards, a contagious, viral desert, where sounds were diffuse, flavors were shallow, sight was limited.

And life was a contradiction of terms: years earlier he had left his life behind in order to stay alive, and this functional, illogical equation gave him daily electric shocks in the open wounds that he didn't have from the suicide that he hadn't tried to commit.

Perhaps it would be like this forever and perhaps merely existing wasn't enough, even with custom-made shoes and thermostat-regulated temperatures. But he saw Suzana and talked to her, and if desire and the desire for happiness were fake, there was only one way to find out.

You're not from here. Your accent is different, she told Fernando.

He looked at the girl with the Latino face and American voice and said, trying to sound as British as possible, that she wasn't from there either and her accent was different too.

She turned around and he said in Portuguese but you're the most beautiful woman in this place.

She wasn't. That's why she didn't hear him. But she came back later for more beers and said your face is really Brazilian.

And she came back the next day, after a fight with her American boyfriend. And later she and Fernando got drunk together with the objective of turning the world into something fluid, and as the sun tried to rise through a drifting
London fog they fell asleep fully dressed and drunk in one another's arms and woke up thirsty and with headaches and it was only then that they undressed each other. And it was only then that Suzana felt enormously guilty about the boyfriend, and Fernando accepted the fact that he'd have to follow her to the United States. Like someone receiving a list of duties on the first day of a new job.

 

On the other end of the line, Elisa cried almost every time. That's why I preferred letters. Every two weeks I remembered to fill two sheets of paper with a handful of consistent information about school, home, the weather, the ultimate team, the mutant trees rusting the sidewalks and the neighbor's back yard, the books, Fernando, Aditi, Carlos at some point, Nick at some point, the dentist at some point, my father's mother at some point.

I was hoping to save some money to come visit you at Christmas but it's a bit hard.

On the other end of the line she'd cry a little.

Tell me you're OK.

I'm fine, Elisa.

Then she'd ask to speak to Fernando and they'd talk for an average of four minutes.

Every two weeks I received a letter from Elisa talking about work, home, the beach, the weather, at some point a man she'd met – the son of an elderly woman I'm caring for, he seems like a decent person and he's asked me out to dinner on Saturday. I don't know if I'll accept his invitation. I think I'll accept it but I'll let him ask again so he won't think I'm too available, you know. Men like it when we play hard-to-get. If you're too easy it's no fun.

 

Carlos peered at the letter. He pointed at the Portuguese word for “work,”
trabalho
, mouthed the Spanish
trabajo
, and grinned. He pointed at the word for “time,”
tempo
, and mouthed
tiempo
. He asked me what
filho
meant.
Hijo
, I said, and he was a little disappointed by the lack of obvious similarities.

I asked Carlos if he had grandparents. He nodded and I noticed that the lenses of his glasses were filthy.

Give me those.

I washed his glasses with dishwashing liquid in the kitchen sink and dried them on the tea towel.

He told me he had two sets of grandparents and that when he was big he was going to visit them but that at the moment he couldn't leave America because if he did he wouldn't be able to return. He could only leave the day he had
papeles
. His father had explained it to him. It was important to stay in America and get
papeles
. His father had told him that it would be easier if he studied, so he was studying. Hard.

The image of a crow stared at us from the computer screen. Carlos had to do a school project about some kind of bird, and he'd chosen the crow.

He asked me if I knew that crows were really intelligent. And if I knew that some crows also ate dead animals. And that many species had become extinct after humankind colonized places like New Zealand and Hawaii.

(Where's New Zealand? he asked. I went to get an atlas and opened it in front of him. It's far away. You have to cross the ocean to get there. I covered the name on the map with my finger. What's this ocean called? I tested him. He gave a start and answered Pacific! with a nervous, credulous cry. While he was there he also observed that New Zealand was also far away from Brazil and El Salvador, where his grandparents were awaiting his visit the day he had
papeles
. Then he asked me if I thought there were any boys from New Zealand who didn't have
papeles
in Colorado.)

Carlos told me that there were the
cuervos
that
los gringos
call
crows and the
cuervos
that
los gringos
call ravens. Not the same. See: here
los
raven,
Corvus corax
. Here
los
crow,
Corvus brachyrhynchos
.

According to the library book, the raven is a meditative, aloof individual that you find in deserts, in the tundra, on plains and in forests, in large, open, more or less unoccupied spaces. It is a large black bird with a wedge-shaped tail and feather necklace. It mates, though it is not known if it does so for life. There are signs that couples last at least a year. Both parents care for their young, many of which die in their first few years of life. According to research, individuals living in the wild can live for as many as thirteen years. In captivity, as many as eighty (in the Tower of London, where their wings are clipped in the name of tradition, so they can come and go but not too much, the oldest lived until it was forty-four). It does not migrate, but can travel short distances to avoid climatic extremes. It doesn't live in flocks. It prefers solitude or, at the most, lives in pairs. It likes to hover in the sky, as if the air were a large unmarked plain and it weighed nothing. It eats practically everything: fruit, shoots, cereals, insects, amphibians, birds, reptiles, carrion. It even eats other animals that eat carrion. It would seem that the
Corvus corax
is a serious bird that respects life and death.