Crow Blue (6 page)

In forty years, girls called Evangelina appear in the world. They grow up in front of the sea in Copacabana. They suspect almost nothing. They have never seen eclipses. They have never witnessed tidal waves or earthquakes or hurricanes. Nor do they dream of moist Amazon forests where communist guerrillas once ventured, got wet, got dirty, fell in love, fired guns, got shot, were taken prisoner, hauled off to torture sessions and then buried here and there after they were dead.

And one fine day, deep in the innocence of youth, one of those blue Rio de Janeiro days, far from Altamira and São João do Araguaia, one of those days when the city wakes up and looks in the mirror and decides OK, today I'm going to be postcard perfect, on a day like this the mother of one such Evangelina goes to her daughter, calmly and seriously, and tells her something.

It starts like this:

Vanja, let's go out for an ice-cream.

Vanja leaps up from the front of the television. She pushes the button to turn off the set, which is already quite old and has a purplish smudge in the upper left-hand corner. It is as if it were growing ill, the poor TV. One day the purplish smudge is going to spread across the entire screen and the televised world will be uniformly purple.

Suzana, her mother, doesn't say much. They go out for an ice-cream. Vanja wants one of the new flavors, that caramelized milk one coated in chocolate and almonds. It is one of the most expensive, but Suzana says OK. (Strange. Vanja is suspicious.)

The two of them walk down to the beach promenade. They pass the beggar who lives on the corner of Rua Duvivier with his dog. The dog wags its tail. Vanja likes the dog. Suzana doesn't. Suzana belongs to that percentage of humankind that prefers cats to dogs and John Lennon to Paul McCartney.

There's something I need to tell you, says Suzana, when they sit on a bench facing the beach, the afternoon stretching their elastic shadows towards the sea. The sea has a magnet that attracts things, and people, and their shadows. Sometimes it regurgitates remains. Sometimes it doesn't.

Vanja is eleven. Suzana, thirty years older.

In a little paper bag is a jumble of names and words:
Albuquerque, Copacabana, London, Araguaia, LIFE. IS. GOOD. Amazon Colorado Guerrilla. Texas. American Boyfriend Nowhere
. Some of the words have to do with the present, others come from the past, others may belong to some future. They're there, tangled. It is a little paper bag that Vanja is going to take, unwittingly, in her suitcase of important things, when she travels back to the country where she was born and where the slogan is: life is good. The words and names in the paper bag slowly detach from Suzana, belong to her less and less. So much so that she doesn't even mention them, although she knows they are there.

The important thing that she needs to tell her daughter is the only entirely predictable one, except that it is going to happen a little before its time. She explains. Talks. Then listens. She answers all questions. The questions are neverending, until they end. And with them the postcard-perfect afternoon and the need for answers.

Everything is going to be the same as before, Suzana says, after a time. Vanja wants to dive down to the ocean floor where strangely-colored molluscs live strange lives.

That night, Vanja and her mother don't say goodnight.

Can I sleep in your bed? asks Vanja.

Suzana says yes. At bedtime, she is wearing a white t-shirt without a bra and Vanja notices her nipples beneath the fabric. She raises her hands to her own chest. Almost nothing, yet, besides a slight swelling that she isn't sure if it really exists or if it is her imagination. She thinks her mother is beautiful, even if she has wrinkles around her eyes and the skin under her chin is beginning to get a little loose. She hugs her mother, with all those wrinkles, with folds of fat in undesirable places, when they lie down to sleep.

Everything is going to be the same as before.

Nothing is going to be the same as before and they know it.

 

My mother explained everything to me that day, with our shadows stretching out in front of us on the Copacabana beach promenade, towards the sea, at the entrance to the bay. Behind the headlands is a bay that appears to have been painted by the supreme painter-architect of the world, God, our Lord, (said Father Fernão Cardim, the Portuguese Jesuit priest, five centuries earlier).

My mother spoke calmly, carefully and seriously, and I put away the information like an item of clothing that you only use from time to time – a scarf, for example, in Rio de Janeiro – but which you know is there, at the back of the wardrobe, waiting for you.

She knew I needed that information. And she would never have forgiven herself if she hadn't told me first-hand what would soon be evident and self-explanatory. If I became aware of the facts not through her but through her disease, that inconvenient visitor sitting on the couch talking about unpleasant matters. That fountain of faux pas. It would be a kind of betrayal if the disease were to call me aside and say, with a glass of whisky in its hand: hey, you there, did you know
.
.
. ?

My mother always answered all of my questions, so that any censorship was up to me: if I didn't want to know something, all I had to do was not ask. It wasn't always an easy decision. At times I would have preferred not to have all that autonomy regarding my own maturity. I would have preferred that certain choices had already been made at the factory and came with a sticker indicating the appropriate age group. Like at the movies. But my mother was my mother.

And that's the way it was, until the following year. I turned twelve. My breasts suddenly sprang out under my blouse, like employees late for work. My mother died as she had said she would, and it didn't take long as she had told me it wouldn't, and afterwards nothing was the same as before, as we both knew it wouldn't be.

 

It was in the month of July. And if the following year was displaced, there wasn't anything strange about that. There was a struggle going on, an internal battle: not to feel sorry for myself, in spite of all the sighs of “poor little thing” that I heard coming from heedless mouths.

I didn't feel poor or little. Something had happened, and the thing had two different appearances depending on which way you looked at it. My mother had also told me all of this.

It could be an antediluvian monster of sadness, something solid and unbearably heavy, with paws of lead, breath reeking of sulfur and beer, something that grabbed and silenced me, that reduced me to a heart that kept beating for lack of any other alternative. I could drag around a pair of bureaucratic feet and a pair of bureaucratic eyes, staring into space, my clothes hanging somewhat crooked on my body and greasy hair flopping across my forehead.

Or it could be something that happened among the myriad of things that happen all over the world in every instant, and at the same time there are traces of snow among the cactuses on a mountain in New Mexico, and a child in Jaipur drops a plate on the ground and the plate breaks, and a cat sneezes in Amsterdam and an ant loses its balance on a leaf in the Australian outback and kids graffiti a mural in Rio or in New York or in Bogotá. And my life would go on because I was the boss of it, not it of me.

Or maybe it was none of the above and I just needed a niche of quietness, of things not happening, a long, lasting moment, a moment that was the size of several moments, as many as necessary, that allowed me to be quiet, without having to name the things that I didn't want to name.

To stay there. Still. As if I had become a vase of plastic flowers on a shelf. The sort that requires no care at all. The sort that has no beauty, quality, singularity, scent, nothing. Something that can exist in the world with the courtesy of reciprocal indifference: I won't get in your hair if you don't get in mine.

And at school people were kind and helpful and looked at me with charity-tea eyes. And I'd walk past them and maybe they wondered what I was thinking, never imagining that I wasn't thinking anything. That I didn't want to think anything. That I didn't want their cards or flowers, or to be let off tests; that all I wanted was to pretend I was transparent, and if possible for them to pass right through me without even noticing.

 

I went to live with Elisa, my mother's foster sister, and she got it. She was the only one. Elisa let me lose as much weight as I wanted, sleep as much as I wanted and have as much insomnia as I wanted. Elisa let me not talk as much as I wanted. And she let me celebrate my thirteenth birthday with our octogenarian neighbors and then take a piece of cake to the beggar and his dog on the corner of Rua Duvivier. I squatted down next to the beggar and his dog and I noticed that the beggar had brown eyes and the dog had green eyes and in the eyes of both were things I had never read about in encyclopedias.

Elisa helped me when, at a given moment, I said, I want to call Fernando.

What Fernando, she asked, forgetting who he was and thus unaware of the importance that he had come to have in my life.

Fernando, my mother's ex-husband, I said.

 

No one knew Fernando's whereabouts. Someone thought he still lived in the United States, where he delivered pizzas or perhaps worked in a lunch bar selling Amazonian hamburgers. Or whatever it was that Brazilian immigrants did in the United States. Maybe he played golf or went skiing in his spare time. Maybe he wore a floral shirt in Miami or designer sunglasses in Los Angeles. Someone thought they had seen him just the other day on Leme Beach (looking older, pot-bellied).

A whole network of contacts, of Joe-Blow-who-knows-so-and-so's-brother-Joe-Schmoe-who-was-Fernando's-friend, was established. Half of Copacabana Beach was now mobilized in search of Fernando.

It couldn't be that hard to locate him, and he was the person – the only person – who could help me. Even almost two decades after he and my mother had broken up, and she had disappeared from his life, as she liked to do with all men.

It was a question of personal responsibility. My personal responsibility. And the inclusion of Fernando as a character in a story that at first had nothing, or almost nothing, to do with him. But which ended up being as much his as it was mine.

One fine day his name came up like that, an image gate-crashing a dream, and the memory that I didn't have came in its wake. Where might Fernando be, Fernando from the old days, whose face, to be honest, I couldn't remember (nor did I have any way to), who might he be today, how old might he be?

The network of informants closed in on him. Fernando was fifty-something and lived in Lakewood, a suburb of Denver, Colorado, far from the sea, from all beaches, in the west of the United States of America.

I looked it up on the map. I liked the name Colorado. It was a rectangular state flanked by other rectangular states. On the map, there were fungus-shaped mountains crossing Colorado from north to south. Green shadows indicating forests and a large brown smudge indicating the plains. To get to the ocean and its shells I could go to California or the Gulf of Mexico. It looked a little far.

Elisa argued with me, then she stopped arguing. We hadn't had any contact with Fernando for such a long time. Yes, my mother had been married to him, but she was ridiculously young when they tied the knot. And I needed to think, think hard. Whether or not my objective was reasonable, so to speak. But at one point she looked me straight on, in the eyes, and sighed.

My great-grandmother had her first baby at the age of thirteen, I told her.

I hope you don't intend to do the same.

At my age, my mother already knew how to drive, I said. She learned in her dad's pickup. I mean your dad's. Both of your dad's. I mean.

Someone got Fernando's address, but no one managed to get his phone number. From the look of things, he wasn't in the phone book. Maybe he didn't have a phone? So I wrote a letter, hoping he still lived at 94 Jay Street.

Before opening the envelope, Fernando had no idea of the identity of the person who owned the hand behind the round handwriting, with balls instead of dots over the i's. And the surname was too common to immediately set in motion the cogs of the past and the gears of recognition in his memory and produce an experimental fruit.

Or maybe he was bowled down by instant recall, that leaped up in his chest and caused him to raise his hand and lift his Colorado Rockies cap in a gesture of reverence, revealing a perfectly circular bald patch. I never found out. He never told me.

On the envelope with green and yellow trim around the edges I wrote our names and addresses – his, Fernando's, the addressee, in his house in Lakewood, Colorado, and mine, Evangelina, the sender's. The letter would be posted in Brazil, the distant South American cousin that had so little in common with its North American cousin, except for the quirks of their continental dimensions.

I took the green and yellow trim of the Brazilian envelope to the post office on Rua Ronald de Carvalho, watched to make sure it was stamped properly, paid and started waiting right then and there, resting my chin on my interlaced fingers, my nose almost touching the greasy glass partition.

Next, said the post office employee in a slack voice, stretching the “e” over my head, beyond my anxiousness, and directing a pair of dead-fish eyes
at the man behind me in the queue.