Crow Blue

Behind the headlands is a bay

Fernando was known as Horseshoe Chico when he arrived at the Peking Military Academy in the 1960s. In those days he had no way of imagining, not even in his wildest fits of creativity, Colorado, the red 1985 Saab, a girl called Vanja.

I never did find out where he got the codename from. How Fernando became Chico and got a Horseshoe to boot. It was one of the things he didn’t tell me in the time we lived together, and wasn’t among the papers that he let me examine, with a shrug — those insufficient letters and random notes that he kept in a wooden El Coto de Rioja wine crate in the back of his wardrobe, together with manuals for electrical appliances, old photos, an incomplete deck of cards and some expired coupons.

But he told me that shortly after disembarking in China and being greeted by an official retinue, in January 1966, he and the rest of the group of fifteen Brazilian Communist Party resistance fighters were invited to go to the opera.

The Peking Opera didn’t seem like an opera. Not that Fernando knew anything about operas, but he imagined fat ladies singing in high voices, double-chins wobbling with the effort and fleshy white cleavages spilling over necklines (if someone were to prick the singer’s breast with a pin there might be a magnificent operatic explosion, pieces of soprano falling onto the most expensive seats in the house). There in Peking, the spectacle was something else; a mixture of acrobatics, mime, dance, singing and theater. The actor-singers had painted masks over their faces and clothes covered in colors and sparkles and things dangling from their backs and hair and they sang in a completely different way to anything he had heard in his twenty-two years of life.

But Chico wasn’t in Peking to watch performances, even though the opera, as long as it dealt with communist themes (anything else was subversive), was part of the revolutionary machine.

His journey to Mao Tse-Tung’s China had begun ten months earlier, with a well-defined objective: to learn guerrilla warfare techniques together with fourteen other resistance fighters.

From Brasilia, where he lived, he had gone to São Paulo and then to Rio de Janeiro, where he spent some time trying to cover his own footsteps, and from there he had gone on to Paris, where he did the same, and then on to Peking.

Like others, he was convinced, as he would tell me later — me, who was so far removed from that whole story — that the military dictatorship in Brazil could be overthrown only if the people took up weapons. Elections? A possibility that didn’t exist. The path of peaceful transition wasn’t a path. The revisionists could say what they wanted: the fact was that parties would splinter and new parties, who believed in the people’s armed struggle, would come into being and a long war to free the Brazilian people would ensue. It would take place above all in the countryside, its initial strategy being guerrilla warfare.

Hence the course in Peking: in the name of the people’s war. In the name of the communist revolution in South America’s largest country, following the Chinese example. And while Horseshoe Chico was learning guerrilla warfare techniques in China, the Brazilian Armed Forces were learning techniques for fighting the Domestic Enemy, including more and better torture methods, in the United States and Europe. And nowadays everyone knows about it all. But things have a distinctive face when you are living through the post-things years. When you were born so many years later. When you need people to enlighten you, to explain, to tell you that the obviousness that ended up being archived really was obvious. The ugly truths went to the restroom and touched up their makeup. (At school, during Brazilian history lessons, everything was tedious, distant and slightly implausible. I watched the pigeons outside as the teacher was saying that during the 1960s. That during the 1970s. The 1970s for me were That 70s Show on the channel that showed foreign TV programs.)

Chico was good with weapons.

He was also good with women.

Both had appeared in his life very early. He had studied target-shooting in the interior of his home state of Goiás when he was still an adolescent. He was a natural. There was some kind of metaphysical union between him and the target. The bullet obeyed. The bullet knew resistance was futile.

Around the same time he fell in love with the first prostitute of his life, at the exact instant in which she took his hand and placed it on her cleavage. He asked her to marry him. She smiled at him in a half benevolent, half this-is-nothing-new-to-me way, and asked: how old are you? Seventeen. Liar, she said. I swear, he lied. And she didn’t say anything else. That wasn’t anything new to her either. In fact, most things were nothing new to her and everything was more of the same. Including kids who lied that they were seventeen when it was obvious that they were fifteen, if that.

He didn’t actually say prostitute. He just described her one day, after a few beers, as a girl who worked in one of those places where there are girls, and my imagination filled in the rest, fishing meanings out of his silence, hanging in the air like those speech balloons in cartoons. He said he liked her, and I pictured her cleavage and thought it may really have been like that, just as I have pictured some other things over the years. After all, if people didn’t provide me with details, I had the moral right to provide them myself.

At any rate, unfortunately, Horseshoe Chico’s two talents didn’t always agree to live in harmony in his future. Back then he was just Fernando, a kid who was full of energy and talked non-stop, useful qualities when he entered the University of Brasilia to study geography and got involved in the People’s Action movement. He went to jail once or twice too. But he didn’t learn to keep his mouth shut and watch the proud genesis of the Brazilian Economic Miracle (which was only miraculous for a while, and not for everyone, as he explained to me, but there was no question about it: everyone knew how painful, intensely painful, often mortally painful it was to challenge the military-uniformed status quo).

Almost four decades later, he still knew Chairman Mao’s words off by heart: When the enemy advances, withdraw. When he stops, harass. When he tires, strike. When he retreats, pursue.

Not that things of this sort were still part of his life when I went to live with him almost four decades later.

Everything had a price. Doing something. Not doing something. Advance, withdraw, stop, harass, pursue.

Everything already had a price when he was commando-crawling through the frozen mud in Peking, during the training that was supposed to take six months and ended up taking over a year. It had a price when he attended night classes in political theory, interpreted by two Chinese comrades whom he secretly nicknamed Ping and Pong — a vice of the good humor that, back then, was almost an illness and wouldn’t let go of him under any circumstances, not even on the coldest night of the Chinese winter and with serious subjects under discussion.

Everything already had a price when, on the journey back, the group of fifteen resistance fighters broke up in order to return to Brazil.

Saying that everything already had a price already had a price.

Chico entered Brazil across the Bolivian border, on foot, after passing through Europe. He stopped off in several Brazilian cities. He visited his mother in Goiânia, his widowed seamstress mother who was infinitely worried about the things her son was involved in and there was no point in him saying, in his best Maoist tone of voice, that he was doing it for her too. I’d rather you got a job, she would say, got married, gave me a couple of grandkids (not Maoists, she might have added), had barbeques (idem) on Sundays and didn’t disappear without a word for so long.

She didn’t know about the weapons, or Peking, and only suspected that her son’s disappearances had something to do with politics. Worse than that, with communists, those bearded, inflamed men. She didn’t know her son was one of them. Beard notwithstanding.

Chico met afterwards with the party leaders, worked in a country town in Bahia for a while and arrived in São João do Araguaia, in the state of Pará, on a summer’s day, three years after boarding that plane to Peking.

Pará was a whole country. It was the size of a country. Pará was almost big enough for two Frances. Three Japans. Two Spains and a bit. More than one thousand, six hundred Singapores. In that vastness in Brazil’s north, to which Brazil itself was oblivious, lived two million people when Chico set foot there for the first time.

It rained on the land, which was muddy and slippery, where shoes sank in and became stuck and came up sporting extra clods of mud on their soles when he lifted his feet.

It rained on the river, the Araguaia, the “River of the Macaws.”

It rained on the forest: the wild, superhuman Amazon, which the communists believed would be a friend of the rebels, hell for the Armed Forces — an area fertile for planting subversion, as an army report would conclude.

The rain made Chico’s clothes stick to his body, his hair to his forehead.

He glanced to one side and even though it wasn’t one hundred percent appropriate at the time he decided to have a chuckle at the water dripping from the straight black hair of the young woman the guerrillas had come to collect in Xambioá, along with him, to take to that piece of nowhere where they were now arriving, strangers to one another, strangers to everyone else, strangers to the place, strangers, period.

He decided to laugh at the forest’s thick rain drooping from her eyelashes, which made her blink a lot.

And she ended up laughing too, even if it wasn’t one hundred percent appropriate at the time. She laughed at the dirty, worn t-shirt stuck to the thin kid’s chest, and laughed because she didn’t know anything: where she was, what exactly she was going to do there under the generic name of guerrilla training, where that thin kid was from. His hands were calloused. His arms were firm. Her hands were the elegant hands of a student from Rio, much more accustomed to books than to the jungle. She had smuggled some nail polish and nail polish remover with her in her bag. And a wad of cotton.

The young woman would discover that Chico knew how to use a hoe. That he was good with weapons.

And other things.

When the enemy advances, withdraw. When he stops, harass. When he tires, strike. When he retreats, pursue.

The young woman went by the codename Manuela. She had left Rio de Janeiro not knowing her final destination. When she arrived in the forest, she was given a large knife and a revolver. She would live in a crude shack together with a group that included the thin kid. It was the Faveira guerrilla base, Detachment A.

She would learn to sleep in a hammock, use a revolver and work the land. Her elegant hands would cease to be elegant. The nail polish and nail polish remover would never be used. She would help set up a small school in a nearby village and would start to teach there. She would grow fond and then very fond of the thin kid, who wasn’t a kid, as he was twenty-five, two years older than her (fine, but he looked like a kid).

One day he told her about Peking, the frozen mud, the children playing in the snow, the opera, the farms and factories that he had visited (fine, but he still looked like a kid).

Deep in the forest, their neighbors were squatters: people who had fled the drought in Brazil’s northeast, which lacked the wealth that fell here in abundance — the rainwater that muddied the ground, that stuck to the soles of Chico’s worn shoes and that ran from Manuela’s damaged, glamourless hair, falling as only Amazonian rain knows how to fall. Real rain rain, spilling all over the word, over every letter, over all of the preconceived ideas that you might have of rain, flooding them, warping them, drenching them and leaking through the cracks, showing you that if until that point you had referred to some other meteorological phenomenon as rain, you would have to rethink. Reconsider.

The squatters would arrive and occupy a piece of land in the middle of that no man’s land. They would fell some trees, build a hut to live in and stay on.

The squatters thanked the rain for the rain; they thanked the rain gods, any thing or being, imaginary or not, physical or metaphysical in nature, that meant this: water in excess, the land on which to catch it.

A little over a year from then, General Médici affixed a bronze plaque to a tree trunk in the municipality of Altamira, inaugurating the great highway, which would go down in history as the most monumental public work conceivable by the military regime. The plaque said: On these banks of the Xingu, deep in the Amazon jungle, the President of the Republic begins the construction of the Trans-Amazonian Highway, a historic start to the conquest of this gigantic green world.

It was forty degrees that day. The general had hung the Brazilian flag from a tree (everything was improvised in those parts, it seemed) and listened to a military band play the national anthem, after being greeted by the three thousand inhabitants of Altamira. Later, the felling of a 160-foot tree marked the beginning of work on the future highway. The president was deeply moved.

His transport minister was also happy. He had an apple of his eye and the apple of his eye was a bridge: in addition to the highway slicing through Brazil from the Atlantic to the Peruvian border, in the southeast of the country Colonel Andreazza was building a structure, planned almost a century earlier, over Guanabara Bay to connect the cities of Rio de Janeiro and Niterói. The bridge had an enormous advantage over the highway: it would be finished. Better yet, the work wasn’t inaugurated in the middle of the jungle, but amid civilization, and in the presence of two of the most civilized exponents of the civilized world possible: Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip.

A lot of people died during the construction of the Rio-Niterói Bridge. Legend has it that the dead stayed there, at the bottom of the bay, and the bridge was built over their bodies. If this is true, anyone driving over it is crossing a sad informal cemetery where cadavers rub shoulders with fish and concrete. The rumbling of the traffic overhead and the slight vibration of the heavy structure reaches their impotent, deafened ears. In their interrupted thoughts echo memories of the salty smell of the sea and the salty smell of the bay’s humid air, crisscrossed by gulls and planes. With or without legends, the bridge was completed, with all the boring into the ocean floor and other monumentalities befitting the largest country in South America.

In Altamira, the tree trunk with the plaque commemorating the inauguration of the Trans-Amazonian Highway is known as the “President’s Tree.” There is some vegetation growing over it. Nearby is the municipality of Medicilância, but most of the population doesn’t know who Médici was.

To me, he was (yet) another name in a history book, on a list of past presidents that we had to memorize. Someone who had called the shots in Brazil when my mother was still a child. When I wasn’t even an idea, or a wish, or a danger, when I wasn’t even holding a number waiting for someone to say off you go, it’s your life now, it starts in five minutes.

It was as if Fernando and I were from different countries.

In forty years, an unimaginable number of things can happen. A fraction of them actually do. People are born, die, sing songs called “Me & Bobby McGee,” don’t sing them, more people are born, more people die, several disappear from the map without a trace. Trans-Amazonian highways inaugurated with great pomp are never finished, and the size of the wound can even be seen from outer space. Jeep drivers and motor cyclists often travel it in pursuit of mud and excitement. National football teams become three-time world champions, then four-time world champions, then five-time world champions, knowing that it still isn’t everything and that history goes on. Eclipses take place. Tidal waves, earthquakes and hurricanes stir up many parts of the planet. Amazon forests start being cleared, non-governmental organizations emerge in their defense. Amazon forests continue being cleared to the order of one Belgium a year, basically for cattle farming. The miracle of the transubstantiation of forest into beef. (Soy? It too is transubstantiated. It is exported and becomes cattle fodder in rich countries.)

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.

Among the echoes of her lazy vowel one could hear: go home, silly girl, your letter’s been posted.