Crow Blue (8 page)

Your father lives in the United States, he confirmed.

Yes, I said, and in principle I wasn't lying.

He's Brazilian, the officer confirmed once again. I don't know why he kept repeating things that were in the documents: I was the daughter of Suzana and Fernando, both Brazilians, she an American citizen too, dead a year earlier, hence my trip to the United States. It was all in the documents and he asked me to confirm it all before wishing me a good trip.

 

Officially, Fernando was my father and legal guardian. When my mother fell pregnant to my real father, an American, she disappeared from his life, and when I was born in New Mexico she phoned her ex-husband Fernando, who lived to the north in the state of Colorado, six hours away by car.

In those days he didn't live in Lakewood, but in Aurora, another Denver suburb. He drove down and registered me the next day as his daughter, in Albuquerque. He told my mother to take care of herself. Then he drove back. They had been divorced for four years and he possibly knew her well enough that she didn't have to explain anything:

That she didn't want any ties to her daughter's real father.

That she didn't want her daughter to grow up without a father's name on her birth certificate.

That she didn't dare ask anyone else.

That sometimes life was a bit complicated.

I have no idea what happened between the two of them after that. All the information I have is that later that same year, 1988, Fernando went to Albuquerque to spend Christmas with me and my mother. He stayed in the adobe house, which only had two rooms – mine and my mother's.

Maybe he slept on the living room couch.

The highways are an adventure in December in this part of the world. Fernando was on the road for much more than the usual six hours between cities on Interstate 25. There was snow and ice on the road.

He left behind Trinidad, former residence of Bat Masterson and, in those days, the world sex change capital thanks to the operations conducted by the famous Dr. Stanley Biber. He passed a sign saying WELCOME TO NEW MEXICO LAND OF ENCHANTMENT and in his rear-view mirror saw a sign saying WELCOME TO COLORFUL COLORADO, with the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the west.

I don't know if, when he arrived in Albuquerque, I was in my room dreaming pint-sized dreams, dreams that were the size of my life, that fit easily through the bars of the crib. I don't know if he and my mother embraced with the force of how deeply they missed one another, or thought they missed one another, or needed to miss one another because missing often keeps you company. I don't know if he went to bed with her, or if she just made some soup or tea and they sat in front of the Christmas tree to sip the soup or tea and then she helped him spread some sheets and a blanket over the living room couch.

The following year he didn't go to Albuquerque at Christmas. And two years later my mother and I returned to Brazil. It was supposed to be for good.

In her case, it was.

 

A curious phenomenon happens when you have been away from home for too long. Your idea of what home is – a city, a country – slowly fades like a colorful image exposed to the sun on a daily basis. But you don't quickly acquire another image to put in its place. Try: act like, dress like, speak like the people around you. Use the slang, go to the “in” places, make an effort to understand the political spaces. Try not to be surprised every time you see people selling second-hand furniture and clothes and books from their garages (the sign on the street corner announces: garage sale), or the supermarkets offering tons of pumpkins in October and tolls for sculpting them, or corn mazes. Pretend that none of it is new to you.

Do it all, act like.

I met Brazilian immigrants who tried to forget they were Brazilian. They got themselves American partners, American child­ren, American jobs, and stored the Portuguese language in some hard-to-access place in their throats and only took pride in their origins when someone spoke praisingly of samba or capoeira (the latter too, in its origin, the martial art of the displaced, of the expatriated, of those torn from their homes). Or the Gracie brothers' Brazilian jujitsu. Apart from these things, Brazil was crap. And getting worse and worse. Worse and worse. (Don't you read the news? Did you see what the drug lords did in São Paulo?)

In the beginning, I thought it was a survival strategy. Maybe it was. Or maybe it was just permeability. After a while, it is hard to remain unaffected. To keep dreaming in Portuguese when the other sixteen hours of the day you are surrounded by
American co-workers, American sales assistants, the Mexican postman who talks to you in English, American radio stations, American TV.

Perhaps (another hypothesis) it was the disease of Latin American immigrants in the first world: the desperate need to embrace the rich country with all their might and say I want a piece. My story isn't just mine. It's yours too. For example: where does your cocaine come from? The meat on your barbecue? The illegal wood in your shelves? Your story isn't just yours. It's mine too. Our American dream. After all, America is a chunk of land that stretches from the Arctic Ocean down to Cape Horn, isn't it?

Although Brazilians have always positioned themselves very clearly in this story: hold on, we are not Hispanic immigrants. Take a look at our faces. We're actually quite different in terms of biotype and we don't speak Spanish. We speak Portuguese. POR. TU. GUESE. (At school, I had to put my ethnic group on a form. The options were: CAUCASIAN. HISPANIC. NATIVE AMERICAN. ASIAN. AFRICAN-AMERICAN. Where was I in all that?)

Perhaps (last hypothesis) it was all just cordiality. It isn't polite to speak in front of other people in a language they don't understand and to be a person they don't understand. One of the biggest complaints of American citizens who are opposed to immigration is that the immigrants don't learn English. But studies show, as Mr. Atkins taught us at school, that it is the opposite: English is assimilated very quickly, and the immigrants' mother tongues are slowly forgotten. It is a fact and Mr. Atkins left no room for doubt, as he hammered the table with his index finger. Mr. Atkins liked to hammer the table with his index finger, driving his statements into the world emphatically and forever.

Cordiality. Necessity. Shame. Curiosity. Ambition. Admiration. The desire to be equal. To belong. Whatever.

After you have been away from home for too long, you become an intersection between two groups, like in those drawings we do at school. You belong to both, but you don't exactly belong to either. Your memory of home is always old, always out of date. People are listening to such-and-such a song all the time in Brazil: it plays on the nightly soap, it plays on the radio. Six months later you accidentally stumble across the song, like it, and its huge prior popularity feels like a kind of betrayal. It is as if people were telling each other secrets and you were always being surprised by old news. The people from group A consider you somewhat different because you also belong to group B. The people in group B eye you a little suspiciously because you also belong to group A. You are something hybrid and impure. And the intersection of the groups isn't a place, it is just an intersection, where two entirely different things give people the impression that they converge.

For example, I'd go buy a sandwich and would place my order as carefully as possible, remembering my mother's perfect English, arranging each vowel and consonant in my mouth with feng shui attention to detail. A few instants later the girl at the cash register would ask me where I was from. Damn: how is it that other people can hear your accent if you can't? My tongue was perfectly retroflexed for my r's and touched the inside of my top front teeth ever so softly for my th's. What was missing?

Later I realized that life away from home is a possible life. One of many possible lives.

Timothy Treadwell decided to be a grizzly
man and went to live in Katmai National Park, in Alaska. It lasted thirteen summers. In the end, he was killed and eaten by a bear. Tim's disfigured head was found at the camp site. His arm with the still-ticking watch. A piece of his spine. The remains of his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, too. This happened a year after I arrived in the United States. I was a fourteen-year-old girl and he was a forty-six-year-old guy. A possible life and a possible death.

Fernando left home and went to study guerrilla warfare techniques in Peking, then he moved to the Faveira guerrilla base on the Araguaia River. This happened two decades before I was born. It was a possible life and a possible death, both deeply interconnected, like during Tim Treadwell's summers. Like during the last summer of Amie Huguenard, who was possibly thinking of leaving Tim and his black clothes and his Prince Valiant hair and his obsess­ion with bears. Grizzlies.
Ursus arctos horribilis
.

Fernando had been so many places after leaving home that he could no longer remember the way back. Of course: home wasn't there anymore, therefore the way back couldn't be either. And it wasn't that home was everywhere now – no, that's for citizens of the world, those who travel for sport. For those who have never commando-crawled through the frozen mud in China and never run the risk of being devoured by bears in Alaska. It wasn't that home was everywhere: home wasn't anywhere.

We'll get by, Fernando told me over the phone.

 

My former classmates sent me emails from Rio de Janeiro, having forgotten the mourning period they had imposed on me when I was still among them. How are things in the United States? Are the guys really good-looking, with blond hair and blue eyes? Are you going to go to Disneyland? Are you going to go to Hollywood? Is it true that the kids take guns to school and every now and then go around shooting everyone? Is it true that people only eat hamburgers and pizza and only drink Coca-Cola? Is it true that American girls have really big boobs?

Aditi Ramagiri would ask me: What's it like in Brazil? Is it true that you live in the middle of the jungle? Is it true that it's really violent and dangerous, a nation of corrupt politicians and drug dealers? What language do you speak – Brazilian?

I'd ask Aditi Ramagiri: What's life like in India? Is it true that there's a river there where people throw their dead and bathe and wash their clothes, all at the same time? Is it true that your family decides who you're going to marry? What language do you speak – Indian?

We got by. I got by at school, in the first week, trying to act cool. And for some reason the other kids decided to think I was cool.

Rio de Janeiro? Cool! What the heck
are you doing here, dude?

I couldn't say, well, dude, what I'm doing here, what the heck I'm doing here is trying to see if I can find my dad, he's got to be somewhere, my mom died a year ago and I'm living with her ex-husband who's my dad on my birth certificate but he isn't my real dad.

So I'd shrug and keep to myself but the other kids thought I was cool and Aditi Ramagiri, who was popular, thought I was cool and we became friends and she made me see how Jake Moore was a loser.

When I told her just half of my story (the maternal half) her eyes grew genuinely misty and she hugged me and thought I was even cooler. After all, it wasn't everyone whose life had the dramatic ingredient of having lost their mother at the age of twelve, and it wasn't every day that you had the opportunity to bring this dramatic ingredient into your life via a friend, without having to experience it first-hand.

Once I went to a debating championship with Aditi. She was on the school debate team and almost every weekend had to participate in these events, in which people had to argue consistently and coherently in favor of something even when they were really against it.

This time it was a private Catholic school in Littleton. I was outside the classroom with Aditi, waiting for her turn. Five kids arrived. An Asian boy and his friend, who wasn't Asian, sat next to me. In front of me sat an Asian girl with the strangest body shape I had ever seen. She was wide. Not fat, but wide. With a wide face. She was wearing a dress. Next to her was a black girl wearing a metal necklace with a crucifix hanging from it. On the other side was a white girl wearing a metal necklace with a pendant that I couldn't tell what it was.

Suddenly the Asian girl said OK, I was late to the last round of the debate because I had to use the bathroom! and someone told me there was a bathroom over by the lockers.

And the girl with the crucifix necklace said, there's a closer one.

And the Asian girl, shouting, said, I know! but they told me to go to the other one! so I went over to the lockers and it was a maze, and finally I found the bathroom! then, after I'd peed, I came out and saw two doors! there were two doors! the door I had come through and another one next to it! and the door I had come through didn't have a door handle on the inside and the other one was locked! I couldn't get out!

I wanted to say something. I looked around. But the one who spoke was Aditi.

I hate this school. It's scary.

Really? Why? We love it! Because we see Jesus everywhere and we're Catholic.

Well, to begin with, it looks like a kindergarten, and secondly, I keep thinking I'm going to hell, said Aditi.