Crow Blue

Canis latrans

It has been said that coyotes, like crows, mediate between life and death and are common characters in mythology. They are extremely adaptable, omnivorous mammals and will eat almost anything available: rabbits, mice and squirrels, as well as birds, frogs and snakes, as well as insects and fruits, as well as carrion. In urban areas, the contents of trash cans and dog food. They have been known to attack domestic pets. In general, they hunt at night. In the wild, their average life span is six to eight years. They are found throughout Central America and most of North America, from Panama in the south as far as Canada and Alaska in the north. They sometimes starve to death, or fall victim to disease, or are caught in traps, or are killed by other animals, or are run over by cars. Some coyotes live alone, others in pairs, yet others in packs — which usually consist of a pair of adults, yearlings and cubs. Coyotes with a different scientific name smuggle illegal immigrants from Mexico into the United States.

In mythology, the coyote has the power of transformation. Sometimes it is a thief, as it is for the Hopi Indians. Sometimes it is the creator of humanity, as it is for the Navajos, or of the earth, as it is for the Miwoks. Sometimes it is the creator of death, as it is for the Chinook people: once upon a time Coyote and Water traveled to the world of the dead to bring their wives back, during an era in which death didn’t exist for humans, only animals. As he was bringing the dead wives back in a box, however, Coyote couldn’t help himself and opened it to see his wife. In so doing, he released the spirits of the dead and death itself. Which came to be a part of human life, so to speak.

When we returned to June’s house in Santa Fé, after our two nights in Albuquerque, I saw the pair of coyotes in the dry riverbed. June came and got me in the middle of the night and took me to see them, from a distance.

In the dry riverbed there were also the carcasses of abandoned cars. Here and there, a kind of shy, seasonal junkyard. When the river came back to life, it would swell and the abandoned car carcasses would grow cold under the new water; another year, another river, the same river, a different river. Later the river would dry up again and they would be exposed once more, a little uglier, a little older, a little more carcass-like.

Over the years, my curiosity about Isabel’s life was satisfied. Not that she had secrets. She was like my mother in that respect: she answered all questions. Except that, unlike my mother, she almost always said only what was necessary. She was rather martial and quiet. She came across as capable of beating up anyone who gave her a hard time in the street. But she never got into unnecessary arguments.

During the dinner at her place in Albuquerque, she told us part of her story. The second part. I pieced her life together from back to front, like someone following footsteps from their point of arrival to their point of departure.

So you live here alone? I asked, and if I was indiscreet it was too late, but everyone forgives children for that, and at the age of thirteen I was still in the comfortable position of being able to choose the situations in which I wanted to be considered a child and those in which I didn’t, and to behave accordingly (there has to be some advantage in being thirteen).

Yes, she said, and the tortilla chips crackled in her mouth. But this house belongs to my ex-husband. He’s got another one.

Another house?

Another house, another wife, another family.

In Albuquerque? Fernando asked, plucking up the courage.

In Seattle. He and his wife have a five-year-old boy.

How long have you been divorced?

Three years.

We were sitting at the table, four people at a table for eight, and I looked at the empty chairs, which looked like sad, speechless guests with lowered eyes. Half of the table was alive; the other half wasn’t. Half of the table had plates, glasses, cutlery, tortilla chips; the other half didn’t.

Three years, Fernando repeated.

Your math isn’t wrong. My ex-husband always was a proactive kind of guy.

And just as Fernando was maybe about to apologize on his behalf and mine, for the overly Brazilian habit of wanting to know too many details about other people’s lives, she let out a hearty, sincere cackle, and the three of us smiled and only then did Carlos ask what proactive meant.

It’s like this, said Isabel. A guy who first chooses his new wife, then has a child with her, then gets a job and a house in another city, and only then leaves his old wife, is proactive.

Ah. I get it.

Carlos smiled, feeling smart for perceiving all the logic of that sequence. And it was an impeccable sequence. And logical.

Isabel smiled too, and I looked for traces of the bitterness that sometimes accompanies the jokes that adults make about themselves and didn’t find any.

But the house isn’t mine. One day I’m going to leave here, this house, this city. One day I think I’ll go back to Puerto Rico. I’ll go back again. The problem is that when I leave Puerto Rico I want to return, and when I return I want to leave again.

And Carlos said that he was going to return to El Salvador one day too, but just to visit, because now he was a Coloradoan. Or a Coloradan. Or whatever the name was. He was a non-native NATIVE. With mountains in the background.

I came here when I was eighteen, said Isabel. Then I went back to San Juan. Then I came back here again. I started working, met my husband, stopped working.

She shrugged.

I’m not proud of it. I’m thirty-four and what have I done with my life? Nothing. I live in his house, I live on the money he gives me. But I’m going to do something soon. I’m going to do something. Soon.

Be an actress? I asked.

And she looked at me with warmth in her eyes and crushed more tortilla chips with guacamole between her teeth.

Yeah, who knows? Maybe I’ll be an actress.

Then she took the twig of mint out of her glass and ate it and said to Fernando I’m going to make another two mojitos. The food must be just about ready.

And when she got up and went into the kitchen Fernando turned his head and followed her with his eyes and I remembered the oh-so-common Rio character: the guy-looking-at-a-woman’s-ass-as-she-goes-past. My mother used to say that we women should also look at men’s asses as they go past. Which made me more comfortable about collating my penile statistics (left/right) at the beach. Although I would have done it anyway. But Fernando kept staring even after the ass and its owner and her long colorful skirt turned and stood in profile at the kitchen counter, and when they bent over to get mint leaves from the drawer in the refrigerator, and when the owner of the ass’s arms scaled the top cupboard to get clean glasses and tossed the contents of the dirty glasses down the sink and turned on the garbage disposal, which went rrrrwmnwww, and stacked the dirty glasses in the dishwasher.

For a moment Fernando forgot that Carlos and I existed, and I looked at Carlos in search of solidarity. And that was when Carlos said he was feeling a bit weird. A bit nauseous.

After Operation Anaconda came Operation Marajoara. It started in October 1973. At first there were three hundred soldiers, all plainclothes, to fight what they estimated to be sixty-three guerrillas (the real number at that point was fifty-six).

In one week, Operation Marajoara had already reduced this number by four, all taken by surprise as they were preparing chunks of meat from two recently-slaughtered pigs. One of the men killed was the leader of Detachment A.

In its early days Operation Marajoara arrested a lot of locals, drove some crazy from the beatings they gave them, and set fire to houses and fields. People who refused to cooperate were punished. Sometimes they were placed head-down in barrels of water. Stuffed into one of those holes they used in Vietnam, with barbed wire over the top. Hung by their testicles.

The rainy season didn’t intimidate the operation. It would continue throughout that October, and would see out the year on the Araguaia.

Soon afterwards another guerrilla, said to be very beautiful, was caught. She was shot in the leg first, and a soldier approached her and asked her name. And she said guerrillas don’t have names, you bastard. I fight for freedom. And all of the soldiers in the patrol, almost ten of them, pumped the beautiful guerrilla full of bullets. Want freedom? There you go.

And soon after that another guerrilla was killed. He was found by his companions without his head — a trophy sent to the army base in Xambioá.

It became a fad and another combatant was decapitated after he was killed by soldiers.

Things weren’t going so well for the communists. Several subsequent actions were unsuccessful. They still didn’t have enough weapons or ammunition and many guerrillas no longer had any shoes. There were casualties and there were also deserters.

In the beginning the guerrillas had no idea of the size of the new military offensive. Little by little they learned. And that was how they spent Christmas of 1973, six years after they had moved into the region: listening to helicopters overhead. In other encounters with the forces of repression, throughout December, more of them were killed, including members of the guerrillas’ Military Commission — and among them the commander general, Maurício Grabois, who went by the codename Mário.

Fernando, who was no longer Chico and was now far away, didn’t know anything about it. He found out afterwards.

Afterwards he found out that the guerrillas who stayed in the area dispersed and then regrouped, trying to throw the enemy off their trail. But none of it did any good.

He also found out that a report from the Army Information Center, with the word SECRET (a word that was a hallmark of much of what went on in those days in that region, and would continue to be so for some time) stamped across the top said: To Cease Operation “MARAJOARA” before the enemy has been completely destroyed could allow them to rise up again, with even greater vigor and experience. It could even provide them with proof of the viability, in BRAZIL, of guerrilla warfare in the countryside as an instrument in the struggle for power.

In early 1974 a member of the guerrillas’ Military Commission fled the forest — Ângelo Arroyo, Chico and Manuela’s former commander at Detachment A. (He fled but insisted, back in São Paulo, that the armed struggle on the Araguaia should continue. Less than three years later, he was hunted down and murdered by the forces of repression.) Other members of the Central Committee, such as João Amazonas and Elza Monerat, hadn’t been in the Bico do Papagaio region for quite some time.

In February, Osvaldão, another who had been there from the beginning, who was the communists’ immortal warrior, was killed. His body was exhibited in local settlements. The immortal one was dead. Brought down by a woodsman. Then they made his body disappear. The military would finish exterminating the guerrillas with Operation Cleanup — a simple, crystal-clear, honest name that required no interpretation.

General Geisel, who took office that same month, said that the whole business of killing was regrettable, but it couldn’t have been any different.

And with that the killings went on. And on. They needed to kill and then kill the deaths, so to speak. They needed to kill history. To kill the memory and a certain inconvenient awareness.

They all died, one by one. Some simply went missing, but missing was one of the codenames of death. It was another way to pronounce it.

Among the missing, among those who no one knew how they had died and where they were buried, was Manuela. She was captured one day when she went to visit a local woman who used to collaborate with the guerrillas, in search of food. Famished, thin, sick, barefoot, covered in sores and insect bites, Manuela spent the night at the woman’s house and woke up surrounded by soldiers. That was the last anyone heard of her. Her parents grew old and died without ever knowing what happened to her.

The last guerrilla was executed in October. Walkíria Afonso Costa, a.k.a. Walk, was captured in Xambioá.

To erase their own footprints, the military decided to dig up the bodies, which were compromising, and burn them in the forest, which they did using tires and gasoline.

In the country’s unofficial, confidential history, the Araguaia guerrilla war was over.

In São Paulo, Ângelo Arroyo continued to believe in the strategy of armed struggle in the countryside. In the second half of 1976, he traveled to other regions of the country in search of alternative scenarios for the fight. He visited the states of Rondônia, Acre and Mato Grosso, and sailed down the Amazon. He was machine-gunned down two days after the party’s Central Committee met in São Paulo in December of that year, a meeting in which he continued to insist on the guerrilla movement.

Florence gazed at me. We came here because during the time she spent with your son Suzana fell pregnant, and at the end of the year she had a daughter.

Florence gazed at me as June, whose words still rang in the air, and Fernando, whose expectation resounded even higher, gazed at Florence and Carlos kneaded his ball of clay as if he were trying to pulverize it. To transmute earth into fireworks. To see dancing lights explode in the air and ricochet off sculptures and items of pottery.

Florence looked at me and asked, is it true?

I saw her eyes moving slowly within their orbits. I saw the wrinkles around her eyes growing longer and deeper, the genesis of a new mountain range in swift animation. Unstable plates were moving inside her, in a subterranean heart, amidst cold underground water and corridors of hot lava.

Why didn’t you call me first?

We did, said June. A few weeks ago.

I must have heard your message — I listen to them at least once a week. But I’m a bit absent-minded. I think I’ve already told you that. And even if I didn’t, you must have noticed. One notices such things.

It doesn’t matter, said June.

No, said Florence. It doesn’t.

And then, having obtained whatever it was that she needed, she turned to June and Fernando and said thank you for coming and for trusting me.

There was an inversion in that, I thought. She was the one who was trusting us. She was the one who was doing us the favor of believing, in a world of unbelievers and the mistrustful. She was the one who was accepting a tiny revision brought to her on a tray with tea and ginger cookies. A new member of the family on a plate, to use as a sugar substitute.

But Florence took my hands in hers, and it was as if our hands were also exchanging words, looks, completing phone calls that had gone astray. My small, thin, rough hands. Her long, knotty hands, with age spots.

Isabel came with us when we returned to June’s house after that night in Vista del Mundo, in Albuquerque. I was going to celebrate Thanksgiving for the first time in my life, without really knowing what it was that we were celebrating, together with my Salvadoran friend, my mother’s Brazilian ex-husband, my mother’s old friend made-in-the-UK, my mother’s former Puerto Rican student and the two old mastiffs. And the next day, now familiarized, we would look like a rehashed hippie community. And in the middle of the night I would see the pair of coyotes, the Canis latrans, which were thin, with long legs and pointy ears. The aloof, nocturnal pair.

On the Sunday, we would head back north. To Colorado, Lakewood and the house on Jay Street. Isabel would take a bus back to Albuquerque. And things would silently migrate out of themselves and become other things that no one imagined they would. Things would revolutionize themselves, slowly and quietly.

They say that the cells of your body are replaced every seven years, such that you continue to be the same person but, at a cellular level, you have become another, if you compute both extremes. The idea sounds strange, because the cells aren’t all replaced at once, so after seven years you won’t have a fully-recycled body. But at the same time you will.

Things I had hoped would happen didn’t, things I hadn’t hoped would happen did, and some things I’d never thought about — like visiting the Ivory Coast — thought about me of their own accord.

But in those days at June’s house in Santa Fé we all laughed together and told stories about other times and other places, and sang songs from other times and other places (and from our time and our places) and looked at photographs. One morning we went to visit the Chimayo sanctuary, where the woman said me puedes ayudar un dólar por favor (I gave her the dollar and Fernando ignored her, asking in a low voice how I could fall for it but it was my money and my problem).

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.