Crow Blue (25 page)

That night, as the coyotes roamed around outside, Fernando and Isabel disappeared into the room she was sleeping in, and no one asked any questions, and everyone thought it was fine. And we were so different to one another that the differences were annulled; we were a big uniformity in multiple forms.

On the Monday after the holiday, Fernando went to work at the Denver Public Library. I went to school. Carlos went to school.

That afternoon, Fernando had a cleaning job to go to.

Jay Street

 

Would Fernando have liked Isabel to move to Colorado? I don't know. Would Isabel have liked to move to Colorado – or for Fernando to move to New Mexico, or to have moved with him to Puerto Rico or somewhere else in the world? I don't know.

None of it happened, because sometimes things are the wrong answers to the questions we ask, or the right answers to the questions we forget to ask. (There is no wisdom in this. It wasn't my grandmother who taught me – not least because I never met one of them, and I presented myself to the other one when I was almost fourteen years old and lacked the ears for teachings that she never seemed interested in passing on anyway.)

Perhaps neither Fernando nor Isabel suggested a move. Demonstrated their willingness. Like the water that you don't offer someone because you don't know they're thirsty, and the water that the thirsty person doesn't ask for because they don't want to impose, full of bourgeois ceremony. (Strange as it may seem, it was my mother who taught me that, adding: only be ashamed of things that are shameful, otherwise you're wasting your time. Shyness is unnecessary and boring.)

One day, years later, I visited June's house in Santa Fé once again. Her two dogs had died. She lived alone with her piano and her O'Keeffean skulls hanging on the walls. Coyotes roamed about outside. Perhaps they were the same ones. Or perhaps those ones had been run over or killed with a shotgun and other coyotes had come to replace them.

That day, June told me about Isabel.

She never did become an actress as she wanted, June said. But you saw how pretty she was. A little short, perhaps, but pretty. When she met her husband, she was working in one of those clubs, in Albuquerque, as a dancer. You know, taking her clothes off.

I didn't know.

That was where she met her husband, and he wanted her to stop working, and he bought that house, and married her, and you know the rest of the story.

Do you think she regrets it?

What?

Stopping working at the club.

She could have gone back.

I imagined (how not to?) Isabel dancing in the club in Albuquerque. Taking off her clothes, piece by piece, according to a deconstruction of decorum that hierarchically determined which piece had to come off first and which piece had to be last. The body twisting around itself and exposing itself in tiny doses, until it was entirely exposed (at which point the show ended, because the fun was in the process, otherwise she could have climbed up onto the stage buck naked). It must have been a sight. I'm not surprised that the guy who became her husband saw her there and wanted to take her home for free private sessions. That he wanted to rob the rest of humanity of the privilege.

I imagined him corroded with jealousy by Isabel's past, while she accepted naturally the fact that he had been and was still perhaps a frequenter of strip clubs. Was his new wife, up in Seattle, also an ex-stripper?

But for four nights Fernando had slept in the same bed with Isabel. For four nights he had sunk his rough fingers into her dark, wavy hair – her hair as dark as crow-blue shells and shell-blue crows – and had sunk his fingers into her hips, her dark hips, two big waves that were aligned with other waves that were aligned with other waves in wavy depths that at some point would arrive (would they?) at her essence. At her essence that was wavy, dark, blue, marine, ancestral like the Colorado sea and young like a young stripper dancing in a club in Albuquerque, the HOT AIR BALLOONING CAPITAL OF THE WORLD.

For four nights she had laughed with him in the same bed, slept with him in the same bed, lain awake with him in the same bed, sunk her fingers into his arms and his back and dreamed of a pair of coyotes outside and dreamed of a time when the Colorado sea covered it all and there were no coyotes wandering through Santa Fé because Santa Fé was underwater. Like the abandoned car carcasses when the river was full. She had dreamed of fish swimming through the windows of the future car carcasses in the future full river. She had dreamed of Mesozoic mollusks evolving at the bottom of the Colorado sea and dreamed in turn of future science museums. But maybe those were my dreams and Isabel's dreams on those nights were of the order of secrets, the unfathomable. Like the Mesozoic mollusks that vanished from the planet without a trace, a mark, a fossil, a message.

Maybe those four nights were enough and anything else was superfluous, and she and Fernando would have undone the magic of those four nights with the wand of routine if they had turned into four months or four years or multiples of that.

Maybe those four nights weren't enough but any philosophy of love involving impulsive sacrifices is one hundred percent stupid when put in practice. Saying certain things is beautiful. Living them out, not necessarily.

I know that Isabel and Fernando talked on the phone a few times. I also know that shortly after that long weekend she returned to Puerto Rico. She returned for good, as she had told us she might. She and Fernando talked on the phone a few times, until they stopped talking, like a noise that disappears into the distance and you don't know exactly when you stopped hearing it.

 

I turned fourteen that December. I turned fifteen twelve months later. And I turned other ages, sixteen, seventeen – the process follows an incredible logic. Eighteen. Etc.

I returned to Rio de Janeiro once, to visit Elisa. Things were the same and different. Seven years had passed since I had left and perhaps the city's cells had already been replaced with others. The city was the same and it wasn't. The city was different and it wasn't.

There were other generations of mollusks on the ocean floor in front of Copacabana Beach. I don't know how long a mollusk lives. They were probably the grandchildren and great grandchildren of the mollusks of my childhood. At any rate, we were friends. Friends that had never met personally. Friends of friends, like in online social networks.

There were young children building sandcastles in the sand. There were their mothers. Depending on the place, tourists. Depending on the place, prostitutes.

Bodies were still jogging in the sun, muscular or flaccid or old or young. Men still wore tight speedos. Not all of them.

Fernando's house on Jay Street in Lakewood, Colorado, slowly became my house too, by habit. By custom. By osmosis. We never wondered if I'd leave or stay after all the Clarifications. I finished the school year as a so-so student and entered the following school year. And the next school year, which I also finished so-so, and then the next. There was just one subject in which my grades were honestly good and, at the end of the day, I had the Denver Public Library librarian to thank for it. However, she wasn't present to get teary-eyed and receive the applause of other teary-eyed people. After I gave my thanks I felt kind of silly. Like a politician on an election campaign, trying to say the nice things that people like to hear. But it was already done. Every now and then I'd go swimming with Fernando, and we'd come home smelling of chlorine and hang towels smelling of chlorine in the bathroom. One fine day I realized that it didn't matter what country I was in. What city I was in. Other things were important. Not these.

I never again forgot Fernando's birthday and the year after the yellow T-shirt year Carlos and I bought him a bottle of Belgian beer (with the help of a cooperative adult) and then, the next year, we bought him some perfume from Carlos's favorite store – a skateboarders' store, although he, Carlos, wasn't a skateboarder. Nor was he predestined to become one.

The winters became my winters and the summers my summers. So to speak. The in-between seasons stopped being a luxury and became, in the autumn, the rake that I use to rake up the leaves in front of the house and, in the spring, the flower that blooms in front of the house where I could have sworn nothing would survive the snow storms. And the flower blooms even if I don't look after the garden (I don't look after the garden). My customary, everyday things, like sleeping or cleaning my ears. When I learned to drive, I took Carlos to ride down the river in Boulder, with our backsides in tire tubes.

A little over a year ago I laid Fernando to rest. He died without guerrillas, wives or lovers. In his memory flowed rivers such as the Araguaia and the Thames and the cascading rivers in the mountains of Colorado, and the Rio Grande, which cuts through Albuquerque. But rivers find their way to the sea, and fresh waters become salty and peopled with sea creatures and their shells.

Fernando's body gave out one day as he was drinking coffee, during a break at work, and the whole thing went. His body spluttered like the motor of an old Saab, and it kept on spluttering, and then he started dying and continued dying until he was officially dead, which I was told by an Indian doctor with lowered eyes and tight, condolent lips.

I buried him, an ex-Fernando under the earth. And together with him, his ex-life and his ex-memories which, regardless of whether he shared them or not, would always be his alone and no one else's. Which he felt in the forest, which he felt in the London pub, which he felt sliding over the frozen mud in Peking. Which he felt when he embraced Manuela/Joana, Suzana, Isabel. Which he felt before and after those embraces. When he deserted these women or was deserted by them (
to desert: to leave empty or alone, abandon, withdraw from; to forsake one's duty or post with no intention of returning
). What he thought, what he planned and didn't do, what he promised and didn't deliver, what he did without any foreplanning, what he didn't hope for and got anyway.

A little over a year ago Carlos's parents moved to Florida, where Dolores, their disgraced
runaway daughter, had become a prodigal daughter who kept twin cars with HIS (XO) and HERS (XO) license plates in her garage in Tallahassee. The sex of the cars causes a certain discomfort, I imagine, when Dolores's father and his moustache need to go out and only HERS is in the garage. Dolores's mother doesn't drive, so is spared any similar grief. But maybe the father has already bought himself a car with a regular license plate, with letters and numbers without meanings.

A little over a year ago Carlos crossed the street and came to live in this house, because he had promised never to leave Colorado or be far from me. So, while his parents got ready to move and sold furniture and bought one-way tickets to Florida, he got his things and transferred them here. He is a tall young man of eighteen. He still hasn't been back to El Salvador. Sometimes he asks to borrow my car and goes up into the mountains, like any native, intimate with the earth, the climate and its sharp changes, lamenting the avalanche that killed two unwary tourists (but who told them to go? You don't mess with the Rockies, he always says). I moved into the room that used to be Fernando's and Carlos moved into mine and with these minor migrations we stayed.

Nick, my schoolmate, kissed me once at a party. It felt weird for the first fifteen seconds, then it didn't. Our tongues got used to it, our teeth stopped being obstacles, and soon I wasn't thinking about tongues or teeth, but about other things with a sudden, desperate urgency.

The next year his family moved, he left the school, and at some point he must have reconsidered his political ideas because I heard recently that he'd become a marine.

At the same party where Nick kissed me, I was hanging a little earlier with a group of three girls from school, and at one point I went to straighten one girl's necklace
and said I think it's better like that, and she said I don't need information from South America.

I remember her sweet, precise, scalpel-like voice. I don't need information from South America.

When Nick kissed me, I almost asked what a kiss from South America tasted like. But it was an empty question. It was a fleeting question, on which I chose not to dwell.

I have seen my father a few times. I went to Abidjan to visit him and his family. We talked a little about my mother. Not much. Besides me, the two of them didn't actually have much in common. Not even memories. I don't think they had even missed each other. I went to visit him twice with tickets that Fernando bought for me and I stayed fifteen days each time. Daniel came here last year, on a business trip to the United States. We went out for a few beers. It was nice to go out for a few beers with my father. I paid the bill. He didn't want to let me but I insisted and said that he was my guest and added, with a lack of originality that was possibly touching, that the next time we'd have dinner at a French restaurant and everything. From time to time we talk on the phone. From time to time I talk to Florence on the phone. The last time I could hear Norbert's vacuum cleaner on the other end of the line. I never heard anything else about Isabel.

I have a job at the Denver Public Library – but not as a security guard. I sold Fernando's 1985 Saab and bought a Saab fifteen years younger because I don't know anything about cars and at least Saab was a familiar name. I'm not the talkative type. But people no longer hear an accent when I speak.