Crow Blue (4 page)

As for me, when someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up the only things that occurred to me were occupations that took place on a strip of sand with waves breaking against it.
Empada
vendor? Thus, the years spent in Copacabana and Barra do Jucu, with the powerful machine known as the Fiat 147, suited me one hundred percent. And except for a living Janis Joplin, I wanted for nothing, ever.

But there were still the Spanish and English lessons. This way you’ll get work anywhere in the world, my mother used to say.

And I’d mentally recite:

¿Es el televisor?

No, señor (señorita, señora), no es el televisor. Es el gato.

I didn’t want to work anywhere in the world explaining to people that cats weren’t TVs. But putting up resistance to the transmission/imposition of knowledge was pointless.

My mother told me stories about her mother. About her father she only said the barest minimum.

I imagined my grandmother as a very thin woman with tiny feet who collected postcards from places with suggestive names like Hanover and Islamabad. She had a cat that lay in her lap and bit everyone else. An eccentric cat, who preferred his teeth to his claws. One day the cat fell out the apartment window and died, splayed across
the sidewalk. People said the cat had committed suicide.

My mother told me that she’d told them that cats don’t commit suicide.

How do you know? I asked her.

Cats don’t commit suicide, she repeated.

I imagined my grandfather in a cowboy hat, selling his geological knowledge to oil companies in Texas. And one day getting bitten by a lethal rattlesnake called
Crotalus atrox
. He had a blue suit jacket and a roll of fat at the nape of his neck.

My grandparents had names. My grandmother was Maria Gorete, a name I’ve never seen on anyone else. There must be other Maria Goretes in the world. But for me ‘Maria Gorete’ is synonymous with ‘grandmother’, and a specific grandmother. My grandfather, her husband, was Abner, which was something biblical, with the usual biblical grandiosity.

Maria Gorete and Abner were Elisa’s foster parents and my mother Suzana’s parents for real. They were my grandparents for real, even though I never met them. And not the grandparents of the children that Elisa never had.

This was my family tree until I was thirteen years old. One man and four women across three generations. Odd arithmetic, tied up like colorful handkerchiefs inside a magician’s top hat. A family tree lacking roots, which in the place of certain branches only had vague gestures, indications, suggestions, forget-about-its.

If you look at it from another point of view, however, things were very simple.

After all, sometimes people vanish.

But sometimes other people go looking for them. They pull their colorful handkerchiefs out of their top hats, dragging out rabbits, doves and even a burning torch, to the audience’s astonishment.

Maria Gorete, my grandmother, liked to play with dolls even as an adult. She liked to sing a song about a lamb, which never failed to make my mother cry.
I used to have a little lamb, Jasmine was her name.
Her wool was fleecy white, and when I called she came.
When she had visitors over and wanted to show off her daughter, Maria Gorete would say: Do you want to see her cry? And she’d sing.
A hunter in the flowering fields
(my mother’s eyes would already be brimming over)
shot her down one day.
And Maria Gorete would recite:
When I got to her she was dead, and I cried in dismay.

And my mother would cry.

How cute, visitor no. 1 would say.

She’s so sensitive, visitor no. 2 would say.

No, she’s just silly, Maria Gorete would say.

My mother would tell me this story and I secretly agreed with Maria Gorete: how silly to cry over a lamb in a song. But my mother always cried again when she sang the song to me and I knew that she wasn’t asking my opinion and that it was better not to say anything. Besides which, I also thought it was silly of Maria Gorete to play with dolls as an adult. And I thought it was the height of silliness for Maria Gorete to show off her daughter to visitors by making her cry, and over such an unworthy thing. I decided they deserved each other.

Maria Gorete fell ill and died. Two years before Janis Joplin. My mother inherited her dolls, and later, when she was living in the United States and thought she was too big to play with dolls, she donated them all to a Presbyterian orphanage in Dallas. All but one, Priscila, which she kept and, when I was deemed big enough, gave to me as a present. Which was a mistake. I wasn’t big enough and did Priscila’s makeup with a pen. Washing her was useless. She was left with a smudged, end-of-party look for the rest of time.

The day I arrived from Brazil, I hung the clothes I had in the closet. There weren’t many. In the front entrance of Fernando’s house in Lakewood, Colorado, there was a closet for coats and shoes. I put Elisa’s heels, which I was never going to use, in it. The heels half-closed their eyes and there they stayed, like a Hindu ascetic going to meditate in a cave.

When you come inside, take your shoes off, Fernando told me. That way the house stays clean for longer.

Then he went to his room and came back with a bag.

Here, Evangelina, I bought these for you. They’re to wear around the house.

In the bag was a pair of checkered slippers that were fleecy on the inside. I thought they looked like granny slippers, but I didn’t say anything.

They’re not for now, of course, he said. They’re for when it gets cold.

You can call me Vanja, I said.

Fernando’s house had two bedrooms. He got the sofa bed ready for me in the spare bedroom. Later on we’ll have to buy you a coat and some boots, he said. There’s a shop with some good stuff at the outlet. But it doesn’t have to be right away.

It didn’t have to be ever. It was unimaginable that at some point I was going to feel cold there. Boots? He had to be kidding.

But contrary to all of my expectations and everything that pointed to a new world one hundred percent untouched in its desert rigidity, it started to rain every now and again.

The first rain fell during the night. I woke up and everything was wet, but it didn’t last. The sun re-confiscated all of the water on the ground, on the heroic plants. And it was as if nothing had happened. It was as if someone had committed a faux pas at dinner and everyone present had forgotten it in a hurry.

The second was in the afternoon, a fine rain, and I had the impression that it gave up and evaporated halfway between the clouds and the earth. A weird rain, that didn’t wet the ground.

The third was a storm that lasted nineteen minutes, accompanied by lightening and thunder. I observed the miracle from the window, fascinated.

It’s raining quite a bit this summer, said Fernando. One Saturday, when everything was dry again, he got his red 1985 Saab and took me down Highway 93, hugging the mountains, to the city of Boulder. Along the way I saw a drag racing track. In Boulder, he bought two tire tubes and blew them up at a gas station and we rode down a section of the river with our backsides in the holes, hollering and overturning on the rocks and grazing our knees.

Then I sat in the shade by the river’s edge and watched skaters, uniformed cyclists, Labradors and a bum with dreadlocks go past.

One day I went to my future school on roller skates and for the first time I felt real fear, the sort that can send shivers through you even when outside waves of heat are lifting up off the asphalt like something supernatural. It was the hottest time of day and the public school was closed for the holidays, and its muteness evoked something secret and dangerous. Maybe military research was carried out or political prisoners were arbitrarily held in there.

One morning, a month from then, I walked through those doors together with new and old students. I was still in my early teens, but I already suspected that adolescence was basically a declared war between me and adulthood.

Later I discovered it wasn’t really like that; more the simple, mundane fact that my ideas were suddenly clear in my mind, and in my mind only, while everyone else made one mistake after another.

Everyone else wore the wrong clothes, listened to the wrong music and said the wrong things at the wrong time, read the wrong books, drove the wrong way, sniffled and used toothpicks, had family lunches on Sundays, got married, got divorced, died, was born, and check out the moustache on that man, and check out that woman in those awful soccer-players’ shorts.

My messianic wave came and went, for lack of disciples, or the wrong marketing strategy. It was destined to be brief. But before I realized that I personified a secular combination of Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad and Deepak Chopra, and then succumbed to the weight of responsibility and gave it all up, Fernando had already let me know what he thought about school and its dangers.

Careful about this thing of being popular, he said. Run from the word. Popular. Also run from the word loser. Don’t say these things. Don’t think them. Don’t divide the world into popular and unpopular people, winners and losers. All that crap.

Then he apologized for saying crap.

After three weeks of school Aditi Ramagiri and I were already saying how Jake Moore was a loser. A big time loser. A mega-loser. Such a complete and utter loser that there was no possible salvation for him. It wasn’t even worth growing up and becoming an adult. He’d be a loser as an adult too. I don’t remember exactly why, but I remember that when Jake Moore went past, Aditi and I would look at one another and whisper: loser.

I found out on my own, a little later, that the opposite of loserhood, the disease that all losers have, was my dentist. He had a photo of his whole family on his desk. They all wore matching clothes – in red and white, against a backdrop of snow-covered pine trees, in a Christmas pose. It was the first time I had seen a family all together for a thematic photograph. They were all blond, good-looking and smiling. Especially smiling, obviously.

That photo made me feel embarrassed: I had no family. I was American too, according to my papers, but in essence I was really a Latin product. It was on my face – and the rest of me – with all that insistent melanin in my skin. And I wore a jacket from an outlet to top it off. Almost all of my clothes were from outlets. The styles that would definitely be in the no-no columns of fashion magazines.

But there was hope. The photo seemed to suggest that if he was my dentist maybe one day I’d have teeth like his family’s, and teeth like his family’s could deliver me from all evil and make me of use to the world. Janis Joplin’s good aspects plus my mother’s good aspects, carefully selected.
Life is Good.

Meanwhile, the mollusks in the sea at Copacabana drowned out the world in their crow-blue shells. And crows flew over the city of Lakewood, Colorado. Shell-blue crows.

Behind the headlands is a bay

 

Fernando was known as Horseshoe
Chico
when he arrived at the Peking Military Academy in the 1960s. In those days he had no way of imagining, not even in his wildest fits of creativity, Colorado, the red 1985 Saab, a girl called Vanja.

I never did find out where he got the codename from. How Fernando became Chico and got a Horseshoe
to boot. It was one of the things he didn't tell me in the time we lived together, and wasn't among the papers that he let me examine, with a shrug – those insufficient letters and random notes that he kept in a wooden El Coto de Rioja wine crate in the back of his wardrobe, together with manuals for electrical appliances, old photos, an incomplete deck of cards and some expired coupons.

But he told me that shortly after disembarking in China and being greeted by an official retinue, in January 1966, he and the rest of the group of fifteen Brazilian Communist Party resistance fighters
were invited to go to the opera.

The Peking Opera didn't seem like an opera. Not that Fernando knew anything about operas, but he imagined fat ladies singing in high voices, double-chins wobbling with the effort and fleshy white cleavages spilling over necklines (if someone were to prick the singer's breast with a pin there might be a magnificent operatic explosion, pieces of soprano falling onto the most expensive seats in the house). There in Peking, the spectacle was something else; a mixture of acrobatics, mime, dance, singing and theater. The actor-singers had painted masks over their faces and clothes covered in colors and sparkles and things dangling from their backs and hair and they sang in a completely different way to anything he had heard in his twenty-two years of life.

But Chico wasn't in Peking to watch performances, even though the opera, as long as it dealt with communist themes (anything else was subversive), was part of the revolutionary machine.

His journey to Mao Tse-Tung's China had begun ten months earlier, with a well-defined objective: to learn guerrilla warfare techniques together with fourteen other resistance fighters.

From Brasilia, where he lived, he had gone to São Paulo and then to Rio de Janeiro, where he spent some time trying to cover his own footsteps, and from there he had gone on to Paris, where he did the same, and then on to Peking.