Crow Blue

Crotalus atrox

She was the one who had taught me English and Spanish. It was what she knew how to do. If she’d been a yoga teacher, she’d have spent twelve years teaching me yoga, and if she’d worked on the land I’d have had a hoe before I’d even learned to talk. It was what she knew how to do, and she thought it a waste not to pass on to me, for free, as an inheritance, some kind of knowledge.

It was English and Spanish because she’d lived in the United States, in Texas and New Mexico, for twenty-two years, and if there’s one thing that twenty-two years in a place will impose on you it is mastery of the local language, even if you don’t have any special talent for it.

My mother had learned English formally at school. Spanish, informally, with the tejanos.

And I learned both from my mother, submitting to her lessons with a resistance that was never any match for hers.

¿Es el televisor?

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

Once upon a time there were four little Rabbits, and their names

were —

Flopsy,

Mopsy,

Cottontail,

and Peter.

(Later on I saw Peter Rabbit in supermarkets at Easter. I remembered my mother. I also remembered Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail, who were very good little rabbits and thus escaped life’s punishments, though they lacked Peter’s heroic charm.)

The mothers in my family die young. By the age of nine my mother had lost her mother and gone to Texas with her geologist father. A work opportunity for him, which he’d gotten through his contacts’ contacts’ contacts.

My mother grew up in Texas. One day (she never told me why, and somehow I didn’t think I should ask) she severed ties with her father and moved to New Mexico.

My mother liked severing ties with men and disappearing from their lives. The tendency began there, with my geologist grandfather.

She found a little house in Albuquerque, near Route 66, with its old-fashioned charm, more than a decade before I was born. One of those little adobe houses, with a flat roof resting on wooden beams that ran horizontally through the walls.

She still lived in this house when I was born. We lived there until I was two. I visited it much later, with Fernando and Carlos, my improbable pair of travel companions, one icy November day. It was a small house of the most absolute simplicity, as if it had sprung from the ground itself.

My mother made her living teaching English to Mexicans migrating back to New Mexico — some time after the Americans had migrated there, as she liked to say. Who was foreign there, who was a local? What language did the land speak? (In essence, it didn’t speak English or Spanish, because the people who were there when the explorers and conquistadores arrived were Navajo and Anasazi and Ute. And others. And others before them. But none with the surnames Coronado or Oñate, no one known as Cabeza de Vaca. Or Billy the Kid.)

My mother also taught Spanish to Americans. University students sometimes sought her out. Some, very few, wanted to learn Portuguese. By this time it was the least fluent of her three languages. But because of her students she delved into Brazilian music and films and books. The few Americans interested in Brazil made my mother rediscover Brazil, perhaps a little clumsily at first, with the awkwardness of the prodigal child who returns home with their hands in their pockets and drooping ears. But who a short time later are crossing their feet on the table and flicking cigarette butts into corners.

I don’t remember my early childhood in Albuquerque, of course. When I travel back in time, it feels as though I was born in Rio de Janeiro. More specifically, on Copacabana Beach — right there on the sand, among the pigeons and the litter left behind by beachgoers. I think of Copacabana. I close my eyes and even if I’m listening to Acoustic Arabia and burning Japanese Zen-Buddhist temple incense, what reaches my senses is a faint whiff of sea breeze, a faint taste of fruit popsicles mixed with sand and salt water. And the sound of the waves fizzing on the sand, and the popsicle vendor’s voice under the moist Rio sun.

I remember the light, my fingers digging tunnels and building castles in the wet sand, patiently. There were other children around, but we were all the beginning, middle and end of our own private universes. We played together, that is, sharing space in a kind of tense harmony, but it was as if each child were cocooned in his or her own bubble of ideas, sensations, initiatives, and state-of-the-art architectural projects involving wet sand and popsicle sticks.

So I was born at the age of two on Copacabana Beach, and it was always summer, but a summer wedded to water, and my tools for changing the world — for altering it and shaping it and making it worthy of me — were a little red bucket and a yellow sieve, spade and rake.

And further along was a horizon to which I gave no thought. The imaginary line where the sky and sea parted company, liquid to one side, not liquid to the other. A kind of concrete abstract.

I left the horizon in peace and preferred to dream of islands, which were real, and which maybe I’d be able to swim to if I ever got serious about swimming, and which were separated by a world of different shadows, a world where speeds and sounds were different, where animals very different to me lived. A world of fish, of algae, of mollusks, of crow-blue shells — like those I would read about in a poem, much later. A whole other life, another register, but a human being could actually swim between them, observe them, dive to the ocean floor in Copacabana and touch the intimacy of the sand, there, so far from the popsicle sticks and volleyballs and empada vendors. The intimacy that was completely alien to the usual chaos of the neighborhood of Copacabana, where people hurried along or dawdled with the elderly gait of the retired or mugged or got mugged or queued at the bank or lifted weights at the gym or begged at traffic lights or pretended not to see people begging at traffic lights or looked at the pretty woman or were the pretty woman with the tiny triangles of her bikini top or tallied up prices on the supermarket cash register or picked up litter from the sidewalks and streets or tossed litter on the sidewalks and streets or sold sex to tourists or wrote poems or walked their dogs. The drama of the city didn’t even figure in the subconscious of the ocean floor. It wasn’t important or relevant. It didn’t even exist there.

The horizon was the theme of those who yearned for the impossible. So they could keep on yearning, I guess. I’ve always thought it was complacent to search for something you’re never going to find. Pondering the poetry and symbolism of the horizon wasn’t for me. I preferred to ponder islands and fish.

Or, better yet, the architecture of the castle I was building that morning, which was not going to crumble this time. I was making some improvements to the project, which had already failed several times.

There were children and adults around me; I was aware of their existence more or less peripherally. We could get along well if we didn’t bother one another, if we interacted as little as possible. The beach was large and free of charge, the sun was for everyone.

In Rio, my mother also taught English and Spanish. And Portuguese to foreigners. She said it was a Wild-Card Profession and she said it like she meant it. Anywhere in the world, there would always be people wanting to learn English and/or Spanish. And Portuguese — Portuguese would increase its sphere of influence after Brazil showed the world what it was made of.

You’ll live to see it, she’d say, straightening her back and lifting her chin as she spoke, as if defying the very air in front of her to contradict her.

When we went to live in Brazil, she became a nationalist. An advocate of all things Brazilian, among them the language we had inherited from our European colonizer and acclimatized, and which she came to consider the most beautiful in the world.

It was the 1990s and she voted in the presidential elections. All Brazilians of age voted in the presidential elections. They were still getting used to this degree of democracy, but they’d get there one day, she’d say. We’ll get there. If I hadn’t been such a small child at the time, I might have asked how, if the first thing that the first democratically elected president in three decades had done, on his first day in office, was to confiscate the money in people’s savings accounts. He promised it would be returned at a later date. This happened a year before we returned to Brazil and my mother hadn’t felt the brunt of it, but Elisa no doubt ranted and raved and uttered swear words that I could have memorized for future reference if I’d been present and able to understand her. But, at the end of the day, they were adults and should have known what they were doing, electing, confiscating, swearing.

My mother and I never returned to Albuquerque together. In fact, we never returned to the United States together.

Firstly, because she no longer got paid in US dollars for her lessons, and in Brazil human resources were pretty cheap, even perfectly trilingual human resources, so the trip was too expensive for our new green and yellow more-or-less-underpaid pockets.

Secondly, because my mother wasn’t one to retrace her steps. When she left, she left. When she walked out, she walked out.

In the long summer holidays, we always went to Barra do Jucu, in the state of Espírito Santo, where my mother had friends. We’d climb into her Fiat 147 and some seven hours later we’d arrive, weary and happy, and along the way my mother would listen to music and sing along, and we’d stop at diners that smelled of grease and burnt coffee to use restrooms that smelled of urine and disinfectant, where a very fat employee sat crocheting and sold crocheted doilies and underwear next to a cardboard box that said TIPS PLEASE.

My mother would play Janis Joplin and turn up the volume and stick her head out the window of her Fiat 147 and sing along:

Freedom’s just another word. .

Even when I didn’t understand the words, I was hypnotized by my mother’s trance. She seemed like another woman, which fascinated and frightened me. Her voice had a hoarseness exactly like Janis Joplin’s and I wondered why some people became Janis Joplin and others became my mother.

You sing just as well as Janis Joplin, I once told her.

The only thing we have in common is that her dad worked for Texaco, she replied. You know. Oil.

When I was informed that Janis Joplin had died in 1970, almost two decades before I was born, I was indignant. I had thought Janis Joplin was my contemporary, and that she was singing “Me & Bobby McGee” somewhere on the planet, while my mother, who was everything Janis Joplin hadn’t been, who was her opposite, her antimatter in another dimension, was sticking her head out the window of the car that wasn’t a Porsche painted in psychedelic colors and belting out what she could to the scalding-hot asphalt of the highway.

In Barra do Jucu, my mother sometimes went out dancing at night, or to meet someone for a few beers.

Two of these someones became boyfriends who lasted a few summers. One of them came to visit us in Rio. The other one lived in Rio, was a surfer and had a five-year-old boy whom I envied, secretly and angrily. In Rio and Barra do Jucu, my mother’s boyfriend started teaching me to surf, but then things between them ground to a halt. He called me for a few months to ask how things were going and to try to discover, between the lines, if my mother had met someone else, and if this someone else seemed more likable than him, and why. I became the surfer’s ally, but it was no good. One day he stopped calling, and I stopped surfing.

My mother’s friends in Barra do Jucu also had young kids. We liked to watch the crabs in the mangrove swamp right behind the house — the crabs held a terrible fascination for me and, though horrified and disgusted, I couldn’t keep my eyes off their slow, muddy walk, those lone monks in their long meditative trances. The other kids and I changed from pajamas into beachwear and from beachwear into pajamas, after a hose-down at the end of each day. Someone always butted in with a bar of soap and a bottle of shampoo: growing up is a drag. But I was violently happy there, and returned from Barra do Jucu when the holidays were over with skin the color of dark wood, almost like the jacaranda table in our living room.

Elisa used to call me her little caramel girl. Elisa was my mother’s foster sister.

My family’s genealogy is confusing and simple at the same time. My grandmother brought up Elisa as if she were her own daughter. Later my mother was born and then my grandmother died, and when my mother went to Texas with my grandfather, Elisa stayed in Rio. She was all grown up, sixteen years old, and had a job and a fiancé who would never become her husband but was a fiancé nonetheless, which was better than nothing. Unlike his real daughter, she never severed ties with the man who had brought her up, though she never saw him again either, because there was an entire continent between them, and when my retired-geologist Brazilian grandfather died of a Texan snakebite on Texan soil at the age of sixty-seven, she was the one who broke the news to my mother, all the way from the southern hemisphere.

Elisa was the daughter who had accidentally sprung from the womb of my mother’s mother’s maid. There was no father in the picture. The mother died in childbirth.

I’ll bring her up, said my grandmother, and that was how Elisa came into the family.

But she’d always be the maid’s daughter, and this original sin, this hybridism with the dark world of the servant class, in a caste system deeply rooted in Brazilian society from day one, set her apart from my mother, who went to the United States, while Elisa stayed behind after my grandmother’s death. If she nursed any hurt feelings like tiny secret jewels at the bottom of a drawer, she never let on to me. Later she studied to be a nurse and got a job in the public service and broke off her engagement because her fiancé kept stalling. According to Elisa, it was better to be alone than in a dead-end relationship.

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.