Crow Blue

Fish

Fernando had a letter, just one, from Manuela, the young woman he had met on the Araguaia River. And whose name wasn’t really Manuela, of course, just as his name wasn’t really Chico. Her name was Joana. The letter was signed with an M.

It was from late 1971. Neither Chico or Manuela knew it, but a few months from then a guerrilla by the name of Pedro, who had left the Araguaia with his pregnant wife, would be arrested in Fortaleza trying to obtain a new copy of his ID.

Pedro was thinking about resuming his law degree. While being tortured by the Federal Police, he would invent things and switch names (the town of Xambioá, where the guerrillas also circulated, would become Shangri-La), but would end up dropping clues about the guerrillas’ training centers. His torturers already knew, as he would say later, that the Brazilian Communist Party was present in the region.

He was to be the first casualty in the story of the repression of the guerrilla movement. He would attempt suicide in his cell, cutting the veins in his arms. But they wouldn’t authorize him to die.

Pedro and his wife, known by the codename Ana, left the Araguaia because she had fallen pregnant. The Party’s orientation was to get an abortion. She didn’t accept it, and he decided to go with her. They left as fugitives, took a bus, got help from friends. After going underground in Fortaleza, it occurred to him to go down to the Department of Political and Social Order and apply for a new copy of his ID card.

The information they got from Pedro would circulate through the agencies of repression, until a dragnet of army, navy and air force agents was set up. Later versions, from the communists themselves, blamed Regina, another fighter who left the Bico do Papagaio region that same year and never returned, for having led the military to the guerrillas. She had supposedly told her family in São Paulo everything, and they had blown the whistle.

At any rate, with information from one or the other or both, Operation Fish I was born.

I read up on fish and found out that they don’t sleep. I had never thought about it before, about how fish sleep. They don’t. They merely alternate between states of wakefulness and rest. The rest period consists of an apparent state of immobility, in which the fish maintain their balance with very slow movements. Because they don’t have eyelids, their eyes are always open. Some species lie on the ocean floor or riverbeds, while smaller ones hide in holes so they won’t be eaten as they are resting.

And: In 2003, Scottish scientists from the University of Edinburgh discovered that fish can feel pain [citation needed]. Wikipedia.

In the case of the Brazilian Armed Forces, however, the fish that lent its name to the operation was merely to evoke the image of the dragnet. To bring in subversive fish. Red fish who wanted — what? To make Brazil into Cuba? (No, the Cuban Revolution had been based on the foco theory of guerrilla warfare, which had failed in Bolivia, Argentina and Peru. According to the Brazilian Communist Party, focalism underrated the importance of the Party, was based on individual acts of heroism and was thus idealistic and petty-bourgeois.)

The region is still known as Bico do Papagaio, even though other things have changed since then on the map of Brazil.

The name (“Parrot’s Beak”) comes from the shape of the Araguaia River as it flows into the Tocantins, where three Brazilian states meet. In the years that Chico and Manuela spent there, they were Pará, Maranhão and Goiás. They are now Pará, Maranhão and Tocantins, because of the reformulation of the states. But Bico do Papagaio is still there. The land has been flayed and the borders altered, but the rivers haven’t changed course or dried up. The mountains are in the same place.

You go chop firewood in the forest, then bring it to the base, Comrade César told Manuela, a few days after they had arrived. It’s physical training. You stay in shape and carrying firewood is like carrying weapons or the body of a wounded companion. And nobody’ll think anything of it; we’re just chopping firewood.

(What on earth were women doing getting caught up in politics, and becoming guerrillas to boot, in an era in which they were still expected to stay confined to the home and domestic life? Communist whores. That was the nickname they heard in the torture sessions. Against the homeland there are no rights.)

At night, César would sometimes pick up a guitar and sing something by Noel Rosa. Chico didn’t sing, as he was chronically tone-deaf, but he watched Manuela from afar. Manuela felt his moist stare within the walls of the hut, and it felt nice, magnetized, pointed — just as he pointed his guns at a target and never erred. Chico never erred, ever.

What are you doing here, girl? He went and sat by her in the clearing, where a camp fire was lit to keep the mosquitoes at bay.

The same as you.

You’re so young.

And you’re not?

Their hands were cracked and blistered. Their clothes were dirty and their skin covered in insect bites. The forest animals were making noise. The firewood that Manuela had chopped that morning crackled on the camp fire. The crackling was almost hypnotic. But Chico and Manuela wouldn’t be hypnotized by the fire and its crackling, because their attention wasn’t on the camp fire.

You’re pretty, said Chico.

She laughed.

Stop kidding around.

I’m serious.

She looked at Chico, who had studied at the Peking Military Academy, who knew how to use (and make) weapons and would come to be one of the most skillful woodsmen in the detachment.

She said: You know what they say about Osvaldão, that he’s immune to danger?

Yeah.

I think you must be too. I think it’s thanks to people like him and you that this is all going to work out.

Osvaldão, the commander of Detachment B, the most popular leader among the guerrillas and adored by the locals too, wasn’t immune to danger. When the military finished him off years later they hung his body from a helicopter so there would be no doubts. But who could have predicted this, at that point in time? Osvaldão seemed indestructible. He was a six-foot-tall black man and former boxing champion. He liked to help. He made friends.

At that point in time, before Pedro was captured and before the first military campaign on the Araguaia, everything was going to work out.

At that point in time, the Party believed the population was going to get involved. The 1969 resolution said: There is no other alternative for Brazilians: to rise up in arms against the backward army and the imperialist Yankees or forever have to endure the country’s reactionaries and foreign looters.

But why that, Fernando? Why go into the middle of the forest, far from everything, without contact with anyone, I asked one day. Weren’t you studying to be a geographer? Why didn’t you stay there, studying to be a geographer in Brasilia, it was in Brasilia, wasn’t it? You could have gotten involved in politics there in Brasilia, couldn’t you?

Fernando looked at me. The bus barely jiggled on Denver’s smooth streets.

Do you really want to talk about this?

I did. I wanted to know everything that had happened to him, I wanted to see those ghost-days of his past in front of me, before my eyes, I wanted to know if the ghosts really did any haunting or if they were just ghosts for lack of an alternative.

I really did want to talk about that subject. Lots of people didn’t, they thought it was best kept out of the official history, but sometimes questions gnaw at you like insects. And they really do gnaw, patient little silverfish scuttling between letters, numbers and stamps in the guerrilla files kept secret by the Armed Forces. Where was the missing son, and under what circumstances had he disappeared? Where was his cadaver buried, and how had his healthy body become a cadaver?

Were there no rights against the homeland? As time passed, the parents of those who went missing on the Araguaia also died, one by one. They died one by one without ever knowing what had happened to their guerrilla son, to their guerrilla daughter.

But as the commanders of the Armed Forces told their subordinates during the repression of the guerrilla movement, the orders were to watch, listen and stay quiet.

Ideally, the guerrillas should disappear, an old widow forgotten in her room. Closed windows, closed door, a tiny, frail heart beating behind flaccid muscles, drooping breasts, wrinkled skin. She had been nothing, didn’t represent anything, what use was there in rubbing salt into the wound? The military group Terrorism Never Again would come to define it as:

A truly small residual group’s adventure.

An illegal, underground party’s deranged, incoherent idea to start a people’s war without the support of the people, in order to impose socialism on them.

A Quixotic group’s actions, further jeopardizing themselves, lost in the jungle and in the tangle of their own errors.

A few decades later, in the south of Pará, where Fernando used to live, there is no more forest. Back when it was still there, Brazil’s official history was called the “Brazilian Miracle.”

One of the most sensational things of all, in those days, was the Brazilian National Team’s recent victory in the FIFA World Cup, in which it had become world champion for the third time. Oh, the 1970 World Cup! It was a team that had Pelé, Gérson, Jairzinho, Tostão, Rivelino, and Carlos Alberto Torres as captain. A team that has never been rivaled anywhere at any point in history. After missing out in England in 1966, why not raise the Jules Rimet Cup in all its glittering gold in Mexico’s Azteca Stadium? Why not? Even if some clairvoyant supporter had known that the cup would be stolen and melted down years later, it wouldn’t have diminished Brazil’s excitement over the victory in the slightest.

Which ran parallel to other national sentiments. My history teacher may have explained this on one of those days when I was watching the pigeons outside, the dirty pigeons of Copacabana and their cooing and occasional deformed feet. But it was Fernando who summed it up for me, as the bus barely jiggled on Denver’s smooth streets. The economic policy of the dictatorship brought down inflation and unemployment, and the country grew. (It would all get out of hand when an oil crisis came along to put a dampener on things. In the year of the military coup, Brazil’s foreign debt was little more than three billion dollars. By the end of the military dictatorship, in 1985, when General Figueiredo asked everyone to forget him, it was over ninety billion.) At the same time, the country was told that the cake had to rise first before everyone could have a piece. And that was how minimum wages plummeted mid-Miracle. And the poorest members of the population became even poorer. In the mid-1970s, more than half of the Brazilian population was under- or malnourished.

I came to the conclusion that the saint who had worked the miracle had worn a wire halo covered with gold paper, like the ones we had once made for a Christmas play at school. The miracle-working saint levitated standing on a plank and when he tried to strike up a conversation with the plants and animals, the plants and animals didn’t understand a thing.

During Operation Fish I, the residents of São João do Araguaia talked to the army about a group of people from São Paulo who were living in Faveira.

The investigators wore plain clothes and were under orders to keep that first phase of the operation absolutely secret. They left with a few names, a few suspects and a few certainties.

One of the certainties was that the enemy was better equipped for confrontation than they had thought, and that reinforcements were required.

Operation Fish II would come next. To watch, investigate, arrest, interrogate.

They conducted searches in Faveira and seized ammunition and a boat. They staked out a point on the Trans-Amazonian Highway where they thought they might surprise a certain suspect by the name of Joca. Who had bought land in Faveira and started receiving people whom he introduced to the locals as members of his family: a certain Dona Maria, a certain Cid, a certain Mário, a certain Luiz. A man of Japanese descent, a blonde woman. A couple called Beto and Regina.

This Joca had a large, diverse family, as they had discovered in Operation Fish I.

The military considered the hypothesis that they were inoffensive hippies, disenchanted with urban life, only to quickly discard it. They suspected that Joca was an experienced guerrilla from the National Liberation Action by the name of João Alberto Capiberibe.

And it was indeed him. But they never imagined that Dona Maria was Elza Monerat, a veteran communist who was almost sixty years old. Or that Mário and Cid were Maurício Grabois and João Amazonas, of the Brazilian Communist Party’s central committee and former federal deputies.

The agents on the Trans-Amazonian Highway stakeout waited for Joca to appear. He no longer lived in Faveira, but according to locals he visited once a month, took care of whatever he needed to and then returned to an unknown place in the middle of the forest (The forest is our second mother!), passing along the Trans-Amazonian.

The agents waited for five days. In vain. You see, information also traveled in the opposite direction.

Manuela’s letter to Chico, a piece of paper that later took up residence in the wooden El Coto de Rioja wine crate, at the back of a wardrobe in a suburb of Denver, was written before all this.

Manuela was bedridden with malaria and thought she was going to die. She ached all over, from head to foot. She vomited. Shook with fever. Other comrades had already been through it and worse things and were still there, but she felt so bad that she didn’t think she’d make it. The suffering in her own body seemed more complex and specific than in other people’s bodies.

In those parts it was common for people to die of malaria, yellow fever, leishmaniasis. Comrade Regina, who had been in Faveira a year earlier, had had brucellosis, anemia, fallen pregnant by her boyfriend Beto, and had an abortion as per the Party’s orientation. The abortion wasn’t carried out properly and she was finally granted leave to go get treatment elsewhere.

The fetus was still in her belly. She never returned.

Chico was working in the forest when bedridden Manuela thought she was going to die. He had been away for over a week.

You’re not going to die, said Comrade Inês.

But her body no longer seemed to have the will to live. In her letter to Chico, Manuela wrote, with revolutionary flair: I admire you so much. Your strength, your ability. If I don’t make it, please find a way to notify my parents in Rio de Janeiro. Tell them that I never regretted coming here. Dying sick in a bed isn’t the same as dying in a war against the enemies of the people, it is true, but even so I don’t regret it. I also want to say that I really like you. I wish life were different. You know. Really different. Completely different.

Chico knew. When he returned from the forest and read the letter from Manuela, who was burning up with fever but recovered from the malaria and recovered again all the times she got sick, he already knew.

You might be willing to lay down your life for the Party and its ideals (you have to in order to be a part of the Guerrilla Forces, otherwise when you realize you aren’t it’s too late). But to lay down love, not necessarily.

The woodsman who had studied in China, maker of weapons, a communist since he was a teenager, the man with a boy’s face and firm arms who wasn’t afraid of anything, who even before going to the Araguaia had been unable to get a job anywhere because of his sullied record (against the homeland there are no rights), thought it was possible to have both. The Araguaia Guerrilla Forces and the girl who went by the codename Manuela, who thought she was going to die of malaria.

Come on, Manuela. You’re going to be fine.

A week later she was teaching again in the school created and run by the guerrillas, for children who had nothing, who only had what their families were able to take from the benevolence of the land and the rivers, the children of the squatters who feared the land-grabbers who were on the side of the power.

Brazil only remembered that infinite no man’s land when the no man’s land became a question of national security, in that era when Trans-Amazonian Highways came into being. But it wouldn’t solve its problems, not even in the next half-century.

One of the things that Manuela couldn’t have known when she was teaching those children was that in the future Bico do Papagaio would continue to be a poor region, abandoned by the government, and would be the setting for violent conflicts sparked by the coexistence of farmers, loggers, landless workers, prospectors, Indians, slave workers, gunmen and drug traffickers.

Years later, a police chief by the name of Hitler Mussolini would frequent the region, trying to deport Dominican friars fighting for the rights of local rural workers.

In that future, police officers would hold second jobs as security guards on big farms. Slave workers would labor under the watch of armed men and would sleep locked up in sheds. One adolescent girl rescued by investigators had no idea that she could be paid for her work. It hadn’t occurred to her. She was fourteen years old and had been working since she was five.

The Party didn’t want the guerrillas to have amorous dallyings. But what if they weren’t dallyings? Some comrades appeared to be celibate. Others were married. And others were indeed in relationships that had been born there, in the middle of the forest, as they practised shooting or first aid.

So, one day when Manuela went to cut wood in the forest, Chico went with her. To help.

Como é que você se chama? Quando é que você me ama? Onde é que eu vou lhe falar? Como é que você não me diz quando é que você me faz feliz? Onde é que vamos morar? (What is your name? When will you love me? Where will I talk to you? Why won’t you tell me when you are going to make me happy? Where are we going to live?)

Chico wasn’t going to sing the song, tone-deaf as he was, but he could think it, since thoughts don’t go off-key.

He could think it as he thought about Manuela. As he caught Manuela in a hug. Come here, girl. And she laughed. I thought I was going to die. How silly. (Who said “how silly,” him or her?) I really like you too. (This was definitely him.)

That dense forest that blocked everything, that even blocked the sunlight. Once Chico dreamed that he was entering the forest and it was pitch-black. He couldn’t see a thing. In the middle of the day. But the forest is our second mother! And in the middle of the forest you can hug and kiss someone you like, someone you think you really like, a lot, and sing songs mentally so as not to run the risk of going off-key. And later you can even sing a few lines of the song out loud, despite your voice and tone deafness. Just a few lines. Remove your clothes and reveal a body that is weak and strong at the same time. Ugly and beautiful. Very thin. Times two. A lot of insect bites. Calluses. Scars. Warmth, desire. All of it. Then put your clothes back on, hoist the firewood onto your back and take it to where it needs to be taken. As if it were weapons. As if it were a wounded companion.

One day I discovered a poem called “The Fish.” It was pretty difficult. It was in one of those (pretty difficult) anthologies of American poetry that the librarian gave me to read, full of literary honesty and belief in the future. And which I read thinking that it was all going to be transferred to my brain, lodge there and make me a different person (better, if possible: I worked hard at it and had a sponsor), just as the TV had taught me other basic survival techniques.

A few years later, having reread the poem called “The Fish” many more times, the axis of my feelings shifting a little more with each reading, I decided it was my favorite. My Poem. Of all of the ones I’d sweated over in the pages of the anthologies in Denver Public Library.

I discovered that the author, Marianne, was the daughter of an engineer-inventor by the fine name of John Milton Moore (I’d like to be called John Milton Moore if I were a man. Evangelina Moore doesn’t work, but Marianne Moore does. That is the name of the author of my favorite poem and it is a lovely name). Her father was committed to an institution for the mentally ill before she was born. I didn’t find anything about her mother; she was just John’s wife and was named, quite appropriately, Mary. Marianne liked boxing and baseball.

When I read the “The Fish,” I was transported to a world of colors, of primordial movements. It contained crabs like green lilies and submarine toadstools.

And a turquoise sea of bodies. And crow-blue shells.

And a “sun split like spun” that was nice to repeat over and over, bringing with it an image of submerged shards of sunlight, shafts of sunlight. SUN SPLIT LIKE SPUN SUN SPLIT LIKE SPUN SUN SPLIT LIKE SPUN. Sun split like spun glass.

It had nothing to do with the studies by scientists at the University of Edinburgh revealing that fish can feel pain [citation required]. Not least because it was written well before them.

It also had nothing to do with the operations conducted by the Brazilian Armed Forces on the banks of the Araguaia River.

Those were other fish. The woman who wrote “The Fish” was dying when the Armed Forces trailed their dragnets for subversives through the Brazilian Amazon. And she had nothing to do with it. Just as no fish had anything to do with it. The story that was unraveling on the banks of the Araguaia was a human story. The fish only lent it their name.

Involuntarily, I might add — like confiscated savings accounts.