Crow Blue

Ursus arctos horribilis

In August, I started going with Fernando every now and then to the Denver Public Library, where he worked as a security guard. We would walk a little way, catch the bus, then walk some more to the block delimited by Broadway, Bannock Street and 13th and 14th avenues. The red 1985 Saab stayed in the garage. Parking was expensive near the library.

I quickly discovered that I hated reading books in English (my mother’s lessons hadn’t included books), that it was really quite difficult, that speaking and understanding a language reasonably well are no guarantee of instant fluency or pleasure in reading, and that I would have to do it.

I’d have to do it anyway, at school, so I might as well try to arrive there a little less green. I spoke English. I understood English. And people would have to take their hats off to me.

I chose books I didn’t know by their titles. I set several aside before the end of the first chapter. Those that interested me I took home and continued reading when I wasn’t helping with the cleaning or in the kitchen (where little help was required because almost everything that Fernando bought was half-ready or frozen), or skating around the neighborhood or just watching TV — my favorite activity.

Watch TV, said Fernando. It’s good for picking up English.

His TV set didn’t have purple smudges. I watched TV feverishly, trying to catch every bit of slang. After an hour I’d have a headache. Reading wasn’t a good pain killer. Sometimes washing pots and vacuuming the living room was. Cleaning the windows.

I liked cleaning the windows of Fernando’s house and was sorry there weren’t more of them; it would have been great if the house were floor-to-ceiling glass. The noise of the moist paper on the glass was comforting. It was of the order of practical things, of useful, honest things without anything grandiose about them. It was a good, simple activity. My mother would have approved. She would have cleaned the windows too, if she had been there.

I imagined her married to Fernando — it was a little difficult, the image, but I tried hard and something came of it. Thinking about my mother and Fernando married was almost like watching a film: two entirely strange people acting out a scene in a time when I didn’t even exist, with strange gestures and wearing clothes that were already out of fashion, until a director said cut. Two people who lived together for the duration of a film screening.

A few times a week Fernando would go out, when he wasn’t working at the library, to clean people’s houses. A good way to make some extra money, he explained. I spend three hours cleaning someone’s house and I take home seventy dollars. Tax-free. And no one bothers me. I’m my own boss and the whole thing is between me and the carpet, me and the windows, me and the bathroom sinks and toilets and tiles. Not bad.

I thought Fernando didn’t like people. As a security guard, at the library, he always maintained a professional, distant air — which mustn’t be too hard, I guess, when you are a security guard. People don’t tend to come up to you to chat. His uniform commanded respect, official-looking and imbued with power, and his strong arms and surly face completed the picture.

I wondered what Fernando thought about for hours and hours on end, just standing there, not talking to anyone. At other times, he had carpets, windows and toilets for company. He had his own equipment: a vacuum cleaner, the most efficient products, a kit developed through years of experience. He would put everything in the back of the red Saab and drive off for another few hours of not interacting with humanity.

For me, considering all this, his relationship with my mother left the realm of films and became a cloud of ectoplasm exhaled from a medium’s nostrils. That is, a phenomenon I had heard of but couldn’t really believe in. My mother liked parties and people; she liked cooking for lots of friends and having house guests; she liked dancing. She liked sticking her head out the window of her Fiat 147 and singing “Me & Bobby McGee” at the top of her lungs. How could she ever have taken an interest in this guy?

I asked the question in a bold gesture at dinner (it was that New Orleans-style food, which came pre-mixed and seasoned in a little box and all you had to do was add water and boil it for twenty-five minutes and I was already an expert at it): Have you changed a lot since you were married to my mother?

He shrugged.

No one changes. You just get used to things. You adapt.

He said it without bitterness. Fernando came across as being exactly what he appeared to be. Which could mean two things: that he was exactly what he appeared to be. Or that he was a talented liar, the worst kind — the sort that lie to themselves, with so much conviction and effort that they end up believing it, and then when they tell other people their lies they think they are actually telling the truth.

But this was a supposition made months later. I still didn’t know Fernando well enough to think anything except that what he had said at dinner was hogwash. That my mother would never have taken an interest in him if he had been, at thirty-six, the same man that he appeared to be at fifty-something. That the whole story that no one changes, etc., was just something you trotted out in conversation. That one of them had certainly changed, and a lot, and I suspected it hadn’t been my mother.

But she wasn’t there to confirm it, so I stayed quiet. Another thing she had taught me was to mind my own business.

Which I followed to the letter with Fernando.

In the beginning, at least.

When Fernando called Elisa’s house and asked to speak to me, he had probably had time to rehearse his words. He had had time to chew over, swallow and digest the information in my letter, which was a lot, and serious.

I imagined him arriving home at the end of a normal afternoon and getting his correspondence from the letterbox in his little garden — one of those square letterboxes that I had only seen in cartoons.

An envelope with dangerously Brazilian green and yellow trim. Inside it, news about the woman he had been married to for six years and whom he hadn’t seen or spoken to or heard of for so long that maybe he wondered if she had really existed.

She had really existed, said my letter, but didn’t anymore, at least not in the way we tend to understand existence in terms of the spongy substance that we carry around on the ends of our necks. I could think of at least one way in which my mother continued to exist a little, and to certify it all I had to do was touch my own skin. Nothing particularly transcendental or esoteric or mystical, no ectoplasm-sneezing mediums: my own skin. Me. I was her, a little, wasn’t I?

Maybe Fernando thought similarly. He called me and said he was very sorry to hear the news and asked how I was with a forwardness that was somewhat excessive, perhaps rehearsed. Then he told me the barest essentials about his life, where he worked (as a security guard at the Denver Public Library), that he lived alone and that yes, I could stay with him for a while until — until things were resolved, or moving along.

Neither of us knew how things were going to be resolved, or even how they were going to move along, or how we were going to move them along, because without a gesture they would most certainly stay the way they were. But I would attend the public school in Lakewood for a while and he would help me as much as he could.

Depending on what happened, well, depending on what happened I would return to Brazil later. To Elisa’s place in Copacabana. It was curious how the central people in my life were now all peripheral. My mother’s foster sister. My mother’s ex-husband.

I don’t know if Fernando could have guessed, at that moment, during that trans-hemispheric phone call, how much he was capable of. He would be surprised. But the future was (and is, and always will be) a mutating thing, the fruit of successive forks in the road, and I was already beginning to suspect that making plans was an embarrassingly useless habit.

I have a little money, I said. My mother left it. It isn’t a lot, but I’ll be able to help out.

Where one eats, there’s always room for one more, he said. The school is public. We’ll get by.

You’re brave, Elisa told me, when I hung up. And I must be crazy.

I looked at her and didn’t say anything but I thought lots of things. You didn’t have to be brave to do what I was doing. In fact, you’d have to be brave to stay where I was, a fixed point in space, nurturing like a sick little animal the idea that nothing had changed, that nothing was different, walking along the same streets, keeping up the same habits, faking myself.

What if I went with you. I’ll go with you, she said.

She glanced sideways, clasped her hands together.

It isn’t possible, I can’t go with you. What about my work? I think it’d be better if you waited a while longer. A year or two.

I didn’t say anything.

I now know that if I hadn’t done what I did I would have turned to stone in that life, a bone that heals crooked. That was the window that pre-empted the impulse, the right moment to jump unseen into the cargo train as it passed, if that were the only way to take off into the world, and if I had to take off into the world. Nothing about it even remotely resembled irresponsibility or courage or spirit of adventure.

It wasn’t an adventure. It wasn’t a holiday or fun or a pastime or a change of scenery; I was going to the United States to stay with Fernando with a very specific objective in mind: to look for my father.

A person looking for something or someone basically has two possible outcomes on the horizon: they can find what they are looking for or not find what they are looking for.

I knew this. But when I made my decision and wrote the letter to Fernando and waited for his phone call with my only suitcase ready and then got on the plane that would fly in a north-westerly direction, at that moment finding or not finding my father was still just that, two possibilities of the same size, and I would deal with whatever I had to deal with when the time came.

Elisa sighed.

I can’t go with you.

Then she cried a little.

Your mother should have got back together with Fernando when you were born. Fine, she didn’t want to be with your father, she didn’t have to stay with him, it was just a fling, you know? But Fernando was a nice guy. I’m sure she liked him.

She cried a little more.

Your mother was silly. She always found fault with everyone. No one was good enough, no one was right. That’s why she ended up alone.

And she hugged me, and her smell had Vibrant Notes of Peach, Gold Raspberry and Patchouli, as explained in the commercial for the perfume she was wearing. I saw it all the time on the purple TV.

Then she took my head in her hands and brushed the hair off my forehead.

Fernando will take good care of you. He’s a nice guy. He always was a nice guy. Your mother should have got back together with him. I’m going to save up to come visit you at Christmas.

In the years following that summer, I met entire families of Latin immigrants, legal and illegal, who made their living as cleaners.

I never met Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez, but I heard about her, the seventeen-year-old Mexican girl who died of heat stroke while picking grapes in the fields of California, without anyone offering her water or shade. It was in the month of May. The year, 2008. Maria Isabel’s core body temperature reached 108 degrees.

Fernando had been a legal resident of the United States for almost thirty years, but he had never applied for citizenship, unlike my mother. I asked why and he told me that it was because it was a laborsome process. He made some extra money cleaning for seventy dollars. Each cleaning job took two to three hours.

In Rio de Janeiro, the cleaning lady who came to clean our apartment in Copacabana once a week earned half that and was there from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon. She would arrive with fresh bread from the bakery, for which my mother would reimburse her. She would stop cleaning to have lunch in the kitchen listening to the radio and then she’d wash the dishes and make a cup of coffee and smoke a cigarette and gossip and take a quick nap. Every now and then she’d sew a button back onto my clothes or let down a hem (my mother was a disaster with a needle and thread). She’d come by bus from São Gonçalo and the trip took about an hour. Before starting to work for private clients like us, she used to clean the parking lot of a shopping center in Barra da Tijuca, where her monthly wages couldn’t even buy her a dress. The sun was hot. I don’t know what her core body temperature was, but she ended up having to quit. She was sixty years old.

After examining Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez’s body, the doctors discovered that she was two months pregnant. She was picking grapes for wine.

At the airport in Rio, Elisa and I ate pães de queijo, the mini cheese buns, and drank guaraná. She was admirably strong until twelve seconds before we had to say goodbye.

The Federal Police officer asked for my authorization to travel and my birth certificate.

Your father lives in the United States, he confirmed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

That she didn’t dare ask anyone else.

That sometimes life was a bit complicated.

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

Maybe he slept on the living room couch.

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

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

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

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

In her case, it was.

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

Do it all, act like.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I hate this school. It’s scary.

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

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

We don’t necessarily believe in hell.

Look at our necklaces! I’ve got a cross.

I’ve got the Holy Ghost.

I never did get what the Holy Ghost is, said Aditi.

Well, said the white girl. It’s pretty complicated. It’s like this: Jesus, God and the Holy Ghost are the same thing. That is, not even our most knowledgeable thinkers and philosophers can understand it properly.

For example, said her friend. Imagine an elephant with green spots. The elephant is Jesus, the elephant’s soul is God, and the elephant’s spots are the Holy Ghost.

The others laughed. That’s not exactly what we believe in.

A week later I joined the ultimate frisbee team. I had never imagined such a sport even existed, but I discovered I had a surprising talent for it. It was played with one of those discs they used to call frisbees that we can’t call frisbees anymore because some manufacturer registered the name.

How did you end up here, I heard myself asking as Fernando was fixing the toilet.

I had been putting off the question for a month. Four weeks, during which he made phone calls when he got back from work, looked up people he used to know whom he didn’t know anymore, asked questions, moonlighted as a detective. He had hunches, suspected, supposed. And he didn’t uncover anything worthy of note, not a smidgeon of a clue, no bread trail in the forest. Why do people have to cover up their former lives so well?

During those weeks we didn’t speak much: about the past, about the present, about the future. When school started, in mid-August, I began to ask him for help with my homework. He was the available adult.

He would look at the math problems and scratch his head and sigh, and he’d say, I studied math in Portuguese, Vanja.

And I had to translate the problem; I had to help him first so that he could then help me.

The bulky finger of his bulky hand would underline the numbers, and in that domestic setting, sitting next to me at the table with the dirty dishes still in the sink, wearing reading glasses, Fernando seemed like an insect shedding its exoskeleton and revealing a soft, almost fragile interior.

I still didn’t know what subjects I could broach with him. Maybe all subjects. I had twelve hundred pages of questions about my mother, about him and my mother, about my father and my mother, about New Mexico, about the scenes acted out before I was born. I wanted to know why people chopped and changed between lives like that, and changed cities, and changed countries, and took out new citizenships or didn’t take out new citizenships. Why, in this chopping and changing, old loves dropped off the face of the earth, and old loves transubstantiated into friendships dropped off the face of the earth. And why fathers dropped off the face of the earth.

Perhaps there was a tacit agreement between Fernando and me that a little silence was necessary for a while; that we had to be somewhat monastic and observe a kind of non-action. Maybe it was time for me to remodel myself; maybe I too had (must have had) that soft, albino interior that insects have under their exoskeletons. Maybe I needed to take that slimy interior and, after having managed to protect it from other people’s fulminating pity, mould it now into some shape with which I could re-identify.

There were practical strategies for doing this. I had a pile of books in English on my bedside table, authors whose given names were always abbreviated to two (sometimes three) letters before the surname. And they weren’t just JK or JRR or CS. The librarian suggested other initials. Big people’s books, she said. As a result I also started reading poems, which were even more difficult, by the likes of WH, TS and WB, which at first seemed like a separate language within the English language — something ciphered, in code.

One day I came across a line at the end of a poem that said thousands have lived without love, not one without water. And I thought it made sense. I thought the poem made sense, even when it didn’t, even when it was a tangle of words.

I read ferociously, like a trained athlete during the Olympics, and from these experiences extracted the mortar for that new exoskeleton. I also watched TV ferociously.

But the question popped out as Fernando was fixing the toilet and I was looking on, sitting on the edge of the bathtub.

I was there to offer help, as a scrub tech perhaps, but he didn’t seem to need my help, so instead I offered him a question.

That question. How did you end up here?

I thought maybe he didn’t want to talk about it. Fernando didn’t seem like the kind of person who kept the past in colorful photo albums to show visitors. He didn’t look at me.

Your mother didn’t tell you.

My mother didn’t tell me much about you. She didn’t talk much about the things that had happened in her life before. Before me.

A few moments of silence.

I met your mother in London. I was working in a bar and one day she came in with her American boyfriend. They were on vacation. At some point she came up to the bar to get two more beers and she said you’re not from here, your accent is different, and I decided I was going to steal her from her American boyfriend before I even knew that besides being American like him she was also Brazilian like me.

And did you steal her?

He looked at me. Don’t flush it for an hour until it’s dry.

OK.

Fernando left the bathroom and I followed him. He opened the fridge and took out a beer.

Those were hard times in London, he said. I wasn’t there sightseeing. I was there because I couldn’t stay in Brazil. That was way before you were born. You’re lucky. Those were hard times.

He took a swig of beer. I opened the cupboard and got out the packet of extra-cheesy cheese crackers that were covered in a kind of dust that left my fingers dirty.

Want some?

He took a handful and dirtied his fingers with the extra-cheesy cheese cracker dust.

Of course I stole your mother from her American boyfriend. I went to great lengths. For him, things were guaranteed. She was his girlfriend, not mine. So I had to fight for her. And that’s why I followed Suzana here to the United States.

It was the first time in a month that he had said my mother’s name.

Later, you know how life is (no, I didn’t know), you wake up one day and you’re fifty years old and you’ve lost that urge to do things, to wander around, to look for a place in the world because the truth is that the world is a pretty fucking wild place. It’s not worth it. It doesn’t make any difference.

He took another swig of beer.

The doorbell rang. Fernando went to open it, responded in monosyllables for two minutes to something a woman was telling him. He came back with a pamphlet, which he tossed on the table and I read out of the corner of my eye, in simultaneous translation. Does God really care about us? Will there ever be an end to war and suffering? What happens to us when we die? Is there any hope for the dead? How can I pray and be heard by God? How can I find happiness in this life? There was a photo of an Arab with a moustache and a plump white man wearing glasses and a tie, both sitting with their legs crossed on an oriental rug, both smiling, nattering over an open Bible.

Fernando cleared his throat.

Sorry I said fucking. I’ve been meaning to tell you, I’ve been making some phone calls and I’ve managed to find an old friend of your mother’s who lives in Santa Fé. She might be able to help us track down Daniel.

It was the first time in a month that he had said my father’s name. Through the open window, I heard the woman with the God pamphlets talking to our neighbor, who had hair the color of fire and who was answering very loudly in her Hispanic English.