Crow Blue

Camino Sin Nombre

We met June in Santa Fé a day late. Fernando had let her know that the car had broken down. Late that Sunday morning, there were tourists in the main square buying silver and turquoise jewelry made and sold by the Indians. Women in fur coats and leather boots strolled about in pairs, followed by men in cowboy hats, who paid for the things their wives bought and carried the bags.

The Indians spread out their earrings and necklaces and bracelets on colorful blankets, on designated sidewalks, next to the wall of the Palace of the Governors. They also wrapped themselves in colorful blankets if it was cold, and some ate the food they had brought from home.

In the surrounding area, the stores inhabited adobe constructions. They sold Native American art and Rolex watches.

June’s father, she told us later, was a descendent of the Zuni nation. June’s mother was an English linguist who had gone to New Mexico to study the Zuni language, Shiwi’ma, an isolated indigenous language according to scholars. She didn’t find any answers, but she found a man she liked (who wasn’t fluent in Shiwi’ma, because he had grown up outside of the pueblos, but who had his own particular, paralinguistic attractions).

June’s mother returned to England with June’s father by her side and June in her belly.

But after New Mexico, England seemed excessively wet, excessively tame. Subtle. European. June learned to play the piano, June’s father got a job, and June’s mother continued to study isolated languages.

One fine day, as if it had been agreed upon from the outset, they sold or gave away everything they had, crossed the Atlantic and returned to New Mexico. They passed through the portal that returned them to that climatic and visual violence as one might recover their name or soul. June started teaching piano, put on a little weight and then a little more, and years later inherited her parents’ home in Santa Fé. She didn’t speak the Zuni language, but she had studied Latin at school, in Oxford.

We arranged to meet at a gas station. Carlos read aloud EXCLUSIVE PARKING FOR TEXACO AND 7-ELEVEN CUSTOMERS. He grew worried because we were taking up a parking spot and we weren’t Texaco or 7-Eleven customers. Fernando told him not to worry. But he kept glancing around suspiciously. Perhaps he imagined a police officer was going to come and warn us about our offence and ask to see our papeles, as he drummed on the car with his club — like in the movies. Carlos would break into a cold sweat, then he’d cry and then he’d be deported. Like in the movies.

June pulled up next to us. We watched as that enormous, dark-skinned woman got out of her green pickup and leaned over to rest her forearms in Fernando’s open window. But she looked at me before she looked at him, and said, in a British accent: Suzana’s daughter. Only then did she look at Fernando and say: Suzana’s ex-husband. And then, at the back seat: and their little friend. We’d best go indoors somewhere to chat a little. It’s cold today. Though you folks from Colorado aren’t afraid of the cold. And she smiled, and her smile came with twin dimples, one in each cheek. Aren’t you lot hungry? Do you want to have lunch? There’s this place I know, it’s my treat.

She didn’t seem to remember that none of us were, in essence, from Colorado. Our address was there, but that was all. June was wearing a flannel shirt with tiny blue flowers on it and a long, thick skirt. She told us we could follow her. She went back to her green pickup, and as we watched, her backside swayed under her skirt, back and forth, confident and magnificent.

Carlos asked how she knew that we were who we were, quite impressed. And he loved June immediately, for everything: because she smiled, because she had dimples, because she knew that we were who we were. But above all for having said that he was from Colorado. That was what Carlos felt in the pit of his stomach, in his bones, under his nails, in everything that in him served as roots. In Colorado, some people had bumper stickers that said NATIVE. Once Carlos had sworn to me that when he grew up and got his papeles and had a car he was going to buy one of those bumper stickers. Because that was how he felt: NATIVE, with mountains in the background. And June had known it just by looking at him, which was enough to make him love her at that very instant.

It still hadn’t snowed in Santa Fé and everything was a uniform, thirsty brown. The trees were scrawny. June took us to a restaurant far from the tourist center and said everything’s crowded because of the holiday. What do you want? A soda? I’m going to order something a little stronger, and she and her dimples laughed, and when the very young, thin waiter with several piercings in his ear came to take our order she named the wine she was going to have in her semi-British accent. Then she told us, by way of an explanation that we hadn’t asked for, that she needed a glass of wine to celebrate, and didn’t Fernando want one too? Maybe they could get a bottle? And after the waiter had taken the order she sighed. How lovely to see you. How lovely to see you. And she held my two hands with her two hands on top of the table. Her big, fat, soft hands. My small, thin, rough hands.

We ate nachos that came in a compact mountain and I noticed that Fernando picked out the jalapeños with uncommon avidness. Carlos ordered a milkshake that he couldn’t finish. The wine softened June, made her less anxious and talkative, as if it had reduced her rotation speed on a dial. But none of her three table companions was particularly talkative, so it was good to be able to count on her to prevent any likely silences.

After her first glass of wine, we talked about my mother. After the second, we talked about my father. Carlos’s eyes bulged. He didn’t know that Fernando was my father on my birth certificate (I had been introduced in the neighborhood as a niece). Nor did he know that I had a missing father somewhere on the planet, and that this trip was, in essence, a search.

June explained the unusual situation with the patience of a fourth-grade teacher to the boy who was used to unusual situations.

He nodded his head when he understood, when the revelations stopped elbowing one another in his head and harmonized in their places, fitting together with soft clicks. He held my arm and said he hoped we found my father. I hope we find tu papá. How say papá en portugués?

June and Fernando polished off the bottle of wine and it became clear to us all that they might order a second and then a third. They didn’t. I looked at the thin waiter with piercings in his ear before we left and thought about Nick, whose name was still scribbled on my jeans, next to the drawing of Shah Jahan’s diamond.

June wandered the streets of downtown Santa Fé with us, reciting facts and dates with the proficiency of a newly graduated tour guide, zealous and eager to do her job. Living it to the fullest. We went to her house when it started getting dark and too cold. The air was treacherous. It hurt inside my nose. It burned my face. It anesthetized my lips and made us all talk as if we were slightly drunk or just back from the dentist.

She lived on a street named Camino Sin Nombre. Her house had lots of colors inside it and was also inhabited by a pair of mastiffs — Georgia and Alfred. (The O’Keeffe and Stieglitz were inferred by many, but not us, and so June explained about the woman who liked to paint flowers and animal skeletons, and the man who fell in love with the woman who liked to paint flowers and animal skeletons and who photographed her with her hair down in a white shirt. Carlos looked at some reproductions in a book and said that the Georgia lady was a good painter but that he thought those mountains were a bit weird in that painting, they didn’t look like real mountains, they looked like little Play-Doh mounds, and why did she paint such big flowers, he personally didn’t think flowers were all that interesting.)

June made a dinner that filled the house with warm smells. She put on music and hung invisible hooks in the air that brought us together, threads looped over a crochet needle. We were a world of compatibilities, we were joined, we were equivalent to one another — and where we weren’t, we compensated for one another.

One of June’s talents: the four of us were suddenly a large, improbable, multinational family, full of different languages and different accents in the same languages. Our ages were rather incompatible in theory, our preoccupations and occupations likewise, our pasts perhaps identified us as animals of different species, the result of distinct evolutionary processes, and yet there we were. All easy laughter. When no one was looking, I took a swig of wine from Fernando’s glass and thought it tasted like grapes with wood and alcohol. It was yucky. And I wondered if you had to swallow liters of grapes with wood and alcohol in order to train your palate or if it changed with age. If one fine day you just woke up liking sex, politics and alcoholic beverages.

The heating in June’s house was in the floor — Carlos and I quickly discovered it, the pleasure of walking barefoot on that large, warm, earthy plate. And we quickly realized that, like the painter Georgia, June also liked animal skeletons. There were two skulls in her living room and a small one in the bathroom. The two in the living room had wrinkled horns. The one in the bathroom didn’t. While Carlos and I performed a spoof of a ballet on the warm floor, the two old mastiffs watched, perhaps with the vague memory of having done that too at some stage, accompanying other children, in a time when the world had less joint pain.

June went outside for a smoke and Fernando went with her, both holding their drinks. As they were leaving I heard her say: the day before yesterday I saw two coyotes over there.

Later, when I woke up to go to the bathroom, June and Fernando were still talking in the living room, and laughing a lot, and there was a different smell in the air — a sweet smell, which wasn’t from a cigarette or incense. I had occasionally smelled it before in Barra do Jucu, during the holidays, at my mother’s friends’ house. Always after the children were all in bed.

I stopped and listened to Fernando’s laughter, that extemporaneous laughter softened by the marijuana, velvety, honest. I remembered my mother’s laughter, which was high-pitched and always easy. I closed the bathroom door, sat on the toilet, rested my elbow on the low window and cried a little, and outside there were perhaps two coyotes, treading light and agile in a world all their own.

Tropical forests, like the great recessive Amazon, are intense organisms. Life and death multiply there all the time, simultaneous, Siamese. One spoonfeeds the other. They do it at a routine, everyday pace, without a fuss. A habit that has almost nothing to do with the avatar of death that Fernando had learned to recognize and fear in the forest, when he went by the name of Chico.

In the forest I will be the tree, I will be the leaves, I will be the silence.

In mid-1972, the Armed Forces decided to set up their Civic-Social Actions. They planned vaccination campaigns against syphilis and yellow fever, distributed food by helicopter. The Ministry of Education decided to send money to local schools. The locals were able, thanks to the Civic-Social Actions, to do extravagant things, like get ID cards. Also in this time military repression in the Araguaia region was handed over entirely to the Planalto Military Command.

With the capture of some of the guerrillas, the Army learned things. It discovered, for example, that at night the communists listened to Tirana Radio, from Albania, and Peking Radio, from China. Both broadcast programs in Portuguese with recent news about the Araguaia Guerrilla Movement and left the military perplexed: how on earth did the information get to them? Back at home, the censured press only said what was convenient. But Brazilian Communist Party activists in the cities graffitied walls exalting the guerrilla war and letting everyone know that it was alive and well.

In September, Brazil commemorated the 150th anniversary of its independence from Portugal. With green and yellow flags, there were street celebrations and military orchestras.

In September, a guerrilla from Detachment C wrote a letter to his parents. May the fascist generals froth with hatred. The revolution is a reality and the people will win. My dear parents, I can’t wait for the day to arrive when I can walk into our house, embrace you at long last and say: Here is the triumphant revolution.

In September, the Estado de São Paulo, which received a list of forbidden topics on a daily basis, got around the censorship in an entirely unexpected way. The guerrilla war wasn’t on the list one day, so the newspaper published a story entitled “In Xambioá, the struggle is against guerrillas and underdevelopment”: While the joint forces of the Army, Navy and Air Force have approximately five thousand men hunting guerrillas in the jungles of the left bank of the Araguaia River, the Army initiated yesterday, simultaneously, in Xambioá and Araguatins, in the state of Goiás, on the right side of the river in the far north of the state, a Civic-Social Action designed to take assistance to the entire population of the area. Two days later, the story made the New York Times.

The Brazilian Armed Forces had five thousand men hunting a few dozen guerrillas in the forest. By now they also knew that the communists were practicing jungle survival techniques, learning to get their bearings from the sun, stars, and landmarks. Learning to commando crawl in the forest, to recognize edible fruits, to hunt. They knew they were practising target shooting, learning to ambush and storm, studying the enemy. The enemy was studying the enemy, a semantic knot that no one noticed.

Chico wasn’t up on these numbers, nor did he know that the guerrillas who had been caught were all sent to the Criminal Investigations Platoon in Brasilia. It was a place where physical and psychological torture methods had been finely tuned. The torturers had PhDs in dragging confessions (which, after all, one doesn’t get with bonbons) out of people. Naked and hooded men and women were trussed up and tied to poles where they were variously tortured, held underwater until they almost drowned, and even given electric shocks on their genitals.

According to the Geneva Convention, guerrillas are goners, a military officer once said to a prisoner in Xambioá.

Now totally stripped of any aspiration to Xangri-Lá, Xambioá, that hamlet with a population of no more than three thousand, was often where it began.

One guerrilla from Detachment C, for example, even before she was sent to Brasilia, discovered hell there on the banks of the Araguaia, the River of the Macaws. Where the forest should have been her second mother, where the population was supposed to support the guerrillas rather than betray them. Stripped naked, she was punched and kicked in a circle of thirty men. When she was about to black out, she was taken to the river, where they held her head under until she almost drowned. Still wet, she was tortured with electric shocks. Communist whore. They took her to the river again. And so on. In the intervals, they threw her into a hole, where the pain and bleeding stopped her from sleeping. According to the Geneva Convention, guerrillas were goners.

In Xambioá, the army controlled everything and the mayor was thankful. I’ve never had it as easy as I do now, he said. How marvelous that the terrorists had chosen to go there, because it was the only way for a piece of progress to get there too. Highways, medicine. Problems between farmers and squatters resolved in record time. I need a twenty-mile highway ready within two months said General Antonio Bandeira, commander of the 3rd Infantry Brigade, to the chief engineer of the Goiás Highway Department. The engineer replied that it wouldn’t be possible: there wasn’t enough equipment and two months wasn’t enough time. You don’t understand, said the general. The highway must be ready in two months because I’m going to travel along it with my troops. How you do it is your problem.

In September, the rainy season was about to start. Again. Cyclical and indifferent. On the right side of the Araguaia River, in the then state of Goiás, the Civil-Social Action vaccinated more than five thousand locals against yellow fever, and almost three thousand against smallpox. They pulled four thousand teeth. They gave talks on citizenship, hygiene, eating habits, held celebrations, ceremonies, gymkhanas, sporting competitions and even created a youth club after coming to the conclusion that there wasn’t much to do in those parts. They donated flags, painted schools, built septic tanks. On the other side of the river, in the state of Pará, dentists attended two hundred locals and doctors saw one thousand, six hundred.

The program lasted eight days. Just as it had all begun, it ended. Eight was also the number of guerrillas killed in the month of September, during Operation Parrot. Among them, João Carlos Haas Sobrinho, a.k.a. Juca, a member of the Military Commission. Before the eight guerrilla deaths in September there had been five others, according to the army, and they had captured more than ten.

Although General Bandeira didn’t want it to, the operation ended in early October, by the deadline. The only reason it hadn’t been more successful, in his opinion, was because there were too few soldiers for too much forest. The combat area stretched across 3,475 square miles of forest — which they even bombed with napalm in three places. The troops were withdrawing from the Araguaia, leaving behind platoons in three different places with orders to obtain as much information as possible in order to get a picture of the situation.

The communists saw the army’s retreat as flight. It was a maneuver to avoid demoralization. A mimeographed announcement declared the Guerrilla Forces’ intention to go on fighting, and their confidence that they would win. Death to those who persecute and attack the residents and fighters of the Araguaia!

In December, the commander of the guerrillas, Maurício Grabois, would send a letter to the party leaders in São Paulo. We were not isolated (unlike Che in Bolivia), nor did the enemy manage to give the peasants and other inhabitants of the region a false image about us, he would write, among other positive assessments.

And he would sign off: Big hugs. A Happy New Year to everyone. 1973 will be a year of victories.

Any special reason why your mother named you Evangelina?

June was washing up after breakfast and I was helping her.

You know, she continued. Evangelina, evangelism.

I shrugged.

Not that she told me. I think it was just because she liked it. And because it isn’t very common. She didn’t want me to have a really common name. The same as a whole bunch of other people at school, you know?

As I said this, I remembered the poem a former classmate in Brazil had made up: A Vanja e o suco de laranja. A Vanja derrama a canja no suco de laranja. A Vanja gosta de canja com suco de laranja. (Vanja and the orange juice. Vanja spills chicken soup in her orange juice. Vanja likes chicken soup with orange juice.)

Do you have any kids?

I have one, said June. He lives in Kansas.

What does he do there?

He’s a musician. He plays the bassoon in the Topeka Symphony Orchestra.

I glanced sideways at June. Maybe she would allow me more questions and even more personal ones. She was the one who had broached the subject.

He was still very little when his father and I got divorced. He was in kindergarten and was an absent-minded kid who was always falling over. He’d fall off the swing at school, he’d fall off his bike, he’d fall down the stairs. Once he broke his two front teeth. Could you put this in the cupboard there please? On the bottom shelf.

And you never married again? I asked.

She cleared her throat. A moment of silence.

I lived with someone for a while. For a good while. Almost fifteen years. But then it ended. As everything does.

Did he leave?

She.

I closed the cupboard door after putting away the jar of ground coffee. I looked at June and said ah, I understand.

The girls at school thought it was gross. A woman with another woman. Not much was said about a man with another man — that was a different kettle of fish, what they did was their problem. But what if your best friend suddenly tried to kiss you and touch your breasts? Or if you suddenly felt inclined to kiss your best friend? Gross gross gross gross gross they would say over and over, as if it were a mantra that could protect them from such great evil. One day I talked to Nick about it. He asked me if I felt like kissing my best friend. No, I said, shrugging, and he said what a shame, that would be really sexy.

What about you? Do you like anyone?

There’s a guy at school, I said.

June pointed at the name written on my jeans. Nick?

He’s an eco-anarchist.

Really now?

Yep.

And how does an eco-anarchist see things?

I’m not really sure. He lent me a book but I haven’t opened it yet.

On the couch, Fernando looked like he was reading the newspaper. Maybe he was. Carlos came back from the bathroom smelling of aftershave. Among his toiletries, which he kept in a clear plastic bag, was a bottle that said L’Oreal Men’s Expert Comfort Max Anti-Irritation After Shave Balm with SPF 15 Sunscreen.

Let’s take the dogs for a walk, said June.

I took Alfred by the collar, Carlos took Georgia and Fernando stayed on the couch, reading the newspaper. The two dogs were old and always sleepy. We walked down Camino Sin Nombre to Martinez Lane, Acequia Madre and Camino Don Miguel, looping back to June’s house. Alfred is going to die soon, she said, and I looked at Alfred and thought he knew it too. But time would prove them both wrong. Georgia died first, a few months after our visit. Alfred lived for another two years.