Crow Blue

May I pet your dog?

I liked the expression “smooth sailing” the first time I came across it. I tried to find the best translation in Portuguese but nothing was quite right. It meant easy progress. But the expression itself evoked boats, the sea and calm surfaces and took me back to the time when that made immediate sense.

“Smooth” was the satiny quality of the water, “sailing” was the verb for the sail that puffed out with the wind and crossed entire oceans.

The moment the English teacher at school congratulated me on my efforts and summed it all up in that “smooth sailing,” I clearly saw myself in a sailboat making the tiniest tear in a perfectly silken sea, a progressive boat, a boat as pure and optimistic as the shoals of fish swimming beneath it.

I left school along liquid corridors, and the concrete of the sidewalk was liquid.

So I sailed. In a single expression the English teacher had defined my first few weeks in an entirely landlocked state, without any contact with any beach or any ocean.

In terms of water, in Colorado, I had seen the reservoirs where people sailed around in circles on Sundays. Cascading rivers in the folds of the mountains, on which people practiced turbulent sports — navigating downstream in yellow boats that looked like giant kitchen sponges or in pointy kayaks. I never suspected that all that water would grow thin and lock itself away in ice in the months to come, storing its liquidity in the slow metabolism of hibernation.

But I sailed on calm seas, that is, I made easy progress, that is, I was being successful in my daily attempts to not trip up.

Boats that sail on calm seas know no gravel, no loose stones in their path, they know no feet. Their mobility is made of waves and wind. With the right waves and the right wind the sailboat slips along free of metaphysics. Like a first-grade equation.

Daniel, my father’s name, was a valid name in several languages, I discovered to my delight. Daniel was Daniel in English, Portuguese and Spanish, the three languages I had contact with every day, there in Lakewood.

The plump man in the blue shirt and tie in the Jehovah’s Witnesses pamphlet would no doubt be able to explain the biblical origins of the name. All I knew was that it had belonged to someone who at some stage had had something to do with lions, according to legend. I didn’t even know if he had fought them and won, with some intrinsically spiritual moral to be learned, or lost, with some intrinsically spiritual moral to be learned.

I suspected that Daniel didn’t suspect that he had a thirteen-year-old daughter named Vanja, who was a citizen of two countries and lived in harmonious linguistic chaos, a daughter who spoke English at school, Portuguese at home and Spanish with the neighbors.

And I sensed that I needed to maintain that smooth sailing towards Daniel. Life needed to become an orderly series of tasks. More or less like a sailor’s day-to-day life must be. An orderly physical world full of calculations and angles that is needed for a boat to sail.

The same orderly physical world where hungry lions kill Daniel, where disinterested lions spare Daniel — it’s hard to say. There are the between-the-lines in all stories. Some gods like bloody martyrs (in the style of Tim Treadwell and his bears in Alaska), others don’t really care.

But at any rate I suspected that Daniel didn’t suspect that I existed.

After a few phone calls, Fernando had finally located some people. Among them, that old friend of my mother’s who lived in Santa Fé. But couldn’t Daniel have been located with a telephone book too? He could have, if there weren’t lots of Daniels with the same surname all over New Mexico and if Daniel still lived in New Mexico and if he happened to be listed.

But maybe he had crossed the border and was now in Arizona or Texas or even Colorado, or in Mexico even, on the other side of an even more borderly border, or in British Columbia or Argentina (why not?), or virtually anywhere else in the world. Or maybe that specific Daniel no longer existed, and there were just his namesakes scattered across the globe, a one-man diaspora.

The old friend of my mother’s who lived in Santa Fé taught piano and was called June. It had been over ten years since she’d last seen Daniel, as she explained to Fernando. She told him that he had moved to San Antonio, in Texas, and then they had lost touch. Emails, that kind of thing? She had tried, said Fernando. She had written to a few people, but hadn’t heard back yet. We’d have to wait a little.

After a few moments of silence:

Why didn’t you ever ask your mother where your father was?

Because I didn’t need to know. Because I don’t think she knew. Because I don’t think she would have wanted to tell me. I don’t know. Why did you and she stop talking?

Because we didn’t have any reason to keep talking to each other.

Didn’t you have anything to talk about? Didn’t you care about each other anymore?

We didn’t have anything to talk about. We didn’t care about each other anymore. That must have been it.

He was chopping kale. I picked up a piece of kale that had fallen on the ground and put it back on the chopping board. And I dared to ask: Why did you have to leave Brazil?

The knife thudded against the chopping board as he chopped. Plac. Plac. Plac.

They were after me.

The police?

The army.

What had you done?

Some things.

Wrong things?

In their opinion, yes. Those were hard times.

I didn’t know if I should shake Fernando to get him to spit out what he ended up telling me over the months to come, as ice covered the cascading rivers and the reservoirs, and afterwards, as the ice melted and swelled the cascading rivers and the reservoirs of the following summer. To get him to tell me about firearms and that other woman (Manuela/Joana) before London and my mother, before Lakewood, Colorado, and well before Vanja. The woman from the letter that lived in the seclusion of the wooden El Coto de Rioja wine crate.

But the idea of shaking Fernando was still sort of frightening. The idea of taking hold of those mounds of muscle and rattling them, as if I had any right to his life. I didn’t. The fact that I was there just because he had once given me the gift of his name on my birth certificate was already a big deal.

When I think about Fernando today, nine years after those first few weeks in Lakewood, I remember his arms. That was where the real Fernando, his soul, his personality must have lived. The arms that were only a hypothetical force during his daily hours as a security guard at Denver Public Library, cat claws inside a cat’s paws. The arms that I saw removing marks from windows and dust from surfaces and trash from other people’s floors on so many occasions. The arms that had once tensed with the weight of a weapon — I don’t know the weight of a weapon, I don’t know the weight that you add to a weapon or subtract from it depending on the purpose with which it is picked up. The arms that I knew had wrapped around my mother’s body, 360 degrees (love, a weapon, arms that disarm), and the body of that other woman before my mother and London and New Mexico and Colorado. The arms hard at work over a frying pan making farofa with the kale and the manioc flour bought in a store that sold Brazilian products. The arms that came home holding a red plastic sled when the first days of snow in early November held the promise of slippery slopes. The arms that pushed me down the slippery slopes while on the inside I was stiff, raw panic. The arms that learned to overcome their own inability to hug someone else’s daughter in a goodnight ritual that in theory didn’t even need to exist. The arms that closed the door after answering the Jehovah’s Witness woman for the second and third time (had he read the pamphlet? Bible in hand, she wanted to know if he had any questions. And he didn’t have the courage to say that the pamphlet had ended up in the trash, and he said he still hadn’t had time to read it). The quiet arms that held my math book as the muscles in his face tensed with concentration.

We’d have to wait, as June from Santa Fé had said and as Fernando had repeated.

I didn’t have any other commitment besides that one, to wait.

Five days a week I went to school. Two days a week I didn’t. And meanwhile, I waited.

Five days a week I ate lunch at the same table as Aditi Ramagiri and her friends, in the school cafeteria, and one lusterless Wednesday I looked differently at a boy called Nick during math class, and the lusterless Wednesday became the great Mogul, Shah Jahan’s diamond, said to be missing since the seventeenth century and which I had just found, somewhat awkwardly.

I would have to wait.

One day, as I was passing a light-blue house on my way back from school, our Salvadorian neighbors’ son was standing on the sidewalk. He was a short, stocky boy, with a funny face.

He said hi in Spanish. Hola.

I answered.

He asked ¿Como te llamas?

Vanja, I said. ¿Y tu?

Carlos.

Carlos wasn’t an appropriate name for a child, I thought. Maybe all the Carloses in the world had been born adults. Except him, with his Ninja Turtles T-shirt and an American football in his little hands.

¿Juegas? I asked, pointing at the ball with my chin.

No, he said, simply.

Yo tampoco.

Two days later he knocked on Fernando’s front door holding a book in English for children a lot younger than himself. Carlos’s spoken English was very poor. And he could barely read at all. The book had a dozen phrases and huge drawings of cars, motorbikes, airplanes, buses, ambulances, fire engines and other motor vehicles that slid through the world with ease, grace and fossil fuels.

I asked how old he was.

Carlos looked at me with his chubby face, almond-shaped eyes behind glasses and short, spiky hair, and said nine. He handed me the book and asked if I could read it to him.

I offered him a glass of guaraná. From the store that sold Brazilian products.

We sat on the couch a palm’s breadth apart. I began to read.

Carlos wanted to quickly skip to the next page to see the next picture.

I explained: Carlos, you have to pay attention, dude.

I started running my finger under the words as I read. Carlos began imitating them. A few minutes later, he perched his hand on my forearm and left it there, like a warm, slightly sweaty little bird. I wasn’t sure if he really understood the words or if he was just pretending, if it was merely a strategy to keep me reading.

You shouldn’t get too close to people, Fernando had told me. The Brazilian habit of hugging and kissing everyone. If you want to greet someone, shake their hand. That’s how things work around here.

In Rio de Janeiro, people are always bumping into one another. You bump into people in supermarket aisles, in queues, on the sidewalk, in the bus, in the metro. You don’t get out of the way when other people need to pass you. Other people don’t get out of the way when you need to pass them. We go around saying excuse me and forging paths with our own bodies. Licença, we say, sometimes, and sometimes with so little effort that the word disappears into us and becomes an indistinct ss-ss. We are forever hugging and kissing people we have known for ten years and people we have just met and we say hi darling to everyone. We pat dogs that are being walked by their owners. At the very most, we ask does he/she bite? after verifying which pronoun to use by looking under the animal’s legs for a pair of testicles or the lack thereof. If the owner says he/she doesn’t bite, we plunge our fingers into his/her fur without asking permission, stroke his/her ears, tickle his/her belly. And it’s nice, and the world is essentially made up of surfaces rubbing against one another and an exchange of heat.

Here you ask permission first if you want to pet someone’s dog, Fernando told me the first time I saw two bubbly golden retrievers with fur that was better cared for than my hair and I threw myself at them and they corresponded with legitimate passion and the owner gave me a dirty look. Say: May I pet your dog? I repeated it mentally so I wouldn’t forget it: May I pet your dog?

Carlos and I finished reading the book and I asked what he had liked the most and he said the ambulance. Then he asked for some more guaraná, a word that he pronounced perfectly. From that day on, Carlos became my afternoon companion. And I, his afternoon companion.

Carlos didn’t have papeles. Neither did his mother. Or his father or sister. They had arrived in the United States as tourists, though they weren’t tourists, a little more than a year earlier. Their visas had expired and they hadn’t returned to El Salvador.

Carlos’s sister worked as a chambermaid in a hotel in the tech center. She said she was going to save money to study medicine at Harvard. When I move to Massachusetts, she would say, I’m going to room with someone from med school and I’m going to have a red couch in my apartment.

Carlos’s father worked as a waiter in a Mexican restaurant.

Carlos’s mother didn’t work. One day Fernando told me that she couldn’t work. That woman’s unstable. Haven’t you ever noticed? She has some kind of problem. I don’t know what it is, but it must be something serious. That woman’s unstable.

I thought he was joking. He wasn’t.

I find an open question in Yahoo. What can we brazilians do to end this latin invasion of brazil especially são paulo?

And another question: what do you guys think of all the bolivians who’ve been flocking to são paulo recently? many of them don’t have visas and take jobs that should go to unemployed brazilians, and our slack government doesn’t do a thing.

Someone replies: Bolivians are no less, no more human than you. If they want to work, God bless whomever gives them a job.

Someone replies: Unfortunately, Brazil has always been a refuge for every kind of crook, ever since the days of the empire. And nothing has changed. Government? What’s a government for again?!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Hahaha.

Someone replies: There really are a lot of them. Until a few years ago, they say there were 50,000 Bolivians in SP, but by last year the number had grown to almost 300,000!!!!!!! (99.9 % illegal). And that was just in the city of SP — imagine how many there are in the whole of Brazil. . My cousin lives in Belenzinho — if you walk down the street on the weekend, you don’t see a single Brazilian, just Bolivians, and there are more every day! I’m not against immigrants, but the growth of the Bolivian population in SP is scary!

Someone replies: Brazil’s always been “the world’s trash can.” Nothing is controlled here and the Bolivians know it. If it were a European country, they’d be afraid to walk down the street and get caught in a “razzia.”

Someone replies: There are illegal immigrants all over the world my friend. What about the millions of illegal Brazilians in the US, who even commit petty crimes? He who lives in a glass house shouldn’t throw stones!

Another question. Why did German immigrants chose Brazil as their destination?

Someone replies: Because in the days when they started emigrating to Brazil our country was the one that offered the most support for those who wanted to work and move up in life, and besides, the German’s aren’t stupid, they know our country is one of the best in the world

Someone replies: Easy to get in and mulattas dancing samba in bikinis.

Carlos didn’t have permission to use the computer at his house and came over almost every day after school to ask me if he could play on ours. Only after you’ve done your homework, I said the first time he asked. And if Fernando says it’s OK. It’s his computer, not mine.

Carlos went home. But as soon as the Saab pulled up at the curb he came and rang the doorbell again, holding up his homework to show me that he’d done almost everything and that he’d only left one thing blank — could I help him with it? What’s the difference between its and it’s? And then could he play on the computer?

Until one morning the thermometer showed 43 degrees Fahrenheit. The day before it had been 86. I opened the door to a strange, gray, two-dimensional sky. A brown rabbit was peering at me from the straggly strip of grass, not sure if it should flee or not. Staring out the side of its head, like all of the other creatures for whom the world offers itself in double, one for each eye, and whose attention is always split schizophrenically. The rabbit sat there chewing the grass with its whiskers bobbing up and down, in its little tuft of existence, uncertain as to the potential threat I posed, which it assessed with its left eye.

I got a jacket, suspicious of that revolution of temperatures. Unsure if it was for real. At school, as I waited for class to start, I drew a diamond on my jeans with a pen. The great multifaceted Mogul, the King of the World’s enormous diamond.

Nick passed me and said hey and I answered hey without looking up to feign disinterest. Later he asked me for my pen and asked if he could draw something on my jeans too, OK, I said, and he drew four letters, NICK, and told me he was an eco-anarchist.

That was the day the season changed officially, said the teachers.

I thought it was curious. Watching the seasons change was a little luxury. Like playing cricket or going to Greece. The trees all decided that, being autumn, they had to do something. Turn yellow, for example, or start dropping leaves on the ground. And the streets would become thick carpets between street sweeper visits over the following weeks, the re-offending leaves challenging passersby. Old things, or more than old, dead things, the disincarnated leftovers of summer. Leaves that would engender critters underneath them. Actually, they wouldn’t, because the dryness of the place hardly allowed any critters to come into being in this manner; they had to be pretty tough there. One day I saw a man ride his bicycle through the leaves, churning up a small rustling, fire-colored wake behind him.

In Rio de Janeiro I had seen almond trees changing color. But there were no almond trees in Lakewood, Colorado. I saw aspens and read in the dictionary that the translation was faia preta or choupo or álamo. I thought it was strange that it could have three names in Portuguese. The maple had only one: bordo. And Fernando didn’t know the names of the other trees — not even the one that would soon be red all over, like a flaming torch wedged into the sidewalk.

When we went on an autumn outing — an expedition to the corn maze — the radio station was holding a fundraising campaign. Show your support by calling such-and-such a number and making your donation NOW. Keep the public radio on the air.

A woman with a husky voice identified herself and said she was a pianist and that she was there to declare her support and ask YOU to do as she had done, calling such-and-such a number and making your donation. Then the chocolatey-voiced announcer said he was going to play a track from the husky-voiced pianist’s latest CD. And he reminded listeners: if you appreciate this music, if you want to keep it alive, call such-and-such a number and make your donation now. Then the husky-voiced woman came on playing the piano, accompanied by drums and a double bass. The piano, like the pianist, seemed a little husky too, and it was nice to listen to it/her as I snuggled into myself and my jacket, in the front seat of the car.

Fernando was wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt.

Aren’t you cold?

No. You get used to it.

I turned to the back seat. Carlos seemed like a miniature person, not a child, but a miniature person, under the seatbelt. His eyes, enlarged by his thick glasses, shone, and he said, almost shouting: ¡Yo entiendo un poco el portugués!

Fernando had a cleaning job to do and Carlos and I were going along too on the condition that we wouldn’t get in the way, and Fernando would take us to the corn maze afterwards.

Another thing that happens when you have been away from home for too long is that you learn about new things in the new place via the new language and soon the tongue you speak is a strange combination of your native syntax and a two-faceted vocabulary. I didn’t say labirinto no milharal, in Portuguese. I said “corn maze.” When I knocked on Carlos’s door and invited him to come with us he said yay, qué bueno, corn maze, and ran off to ask his mother. As if she wouldn’t let him.

Aditi Ramagiri, my friend with the Indian face and name who had been born in Columbus, Ohio, who a short time later would become one of the school’s biggest pot-heads and a prolific producer of weed cookies, said she wouldn’t be able to invite me to her birthday party because her mother only let her invite people who had already been to her house at least five times or whose house she had already been to at least five times. The party was that Saturday. I envisaged Veronica Crump and Leslie Yang and Jessica Martinez and Betty Tajul-Amar at Aditi’s birthday party, all of them eligible under Mrs. Ramagiri’s five-times rule.

I mentioned it to Fernando at lunch, between mouthfuls of the couscous that came in a yellow box and was ready in five minutes. He grumbled something with his mouth full, in English, that I didn’t understand. And said he was going to take me to the corn maze and that it would be much better than what’s-her-name-that’s-right-Aditi-Ramagiri’s damned party.

I wanted to say that it wasn’t Aditi’s fault. I wasn’t mad at her. I wasn’t even mad at Mrs. Ramagiri, customs are customs, rules are rules, each family has its own, and Fernando grumbled something else with his mouth full, in English, that I didn’t understand.

In the back seat, as the husky-voiced woman’s husky piano played between bursts of fundraising, and Fernando drove the red Saab towards the corn maze, Carlos sucked on his juice box a little more and said: More portugués, por favor.

I was the one who got us out of the corn maze. Fernando left it all up to me. Carlos was nervous, with the nervousness of all young children about to see the Big Bad Wolf try to trick Little Red Riding Hood for the billionth time. What big eyes you have, etc. The drama is there even when they know the ending off by heart. And they suffer just the same. And in this manner children test the world, make sure that it really will answer the same question the same way every time. And they conclude that it will. Yet another false campaign promise of the adult world. Yes, Carlos, we are coherent. Grow up and see for yourself.

Carlos walked down the corridors of the maze hewn in the corn field as if he could really get lost there, and for all time. He held my hand. And looked into my eyes from time to time, as if checking to see how reliable I was.

I did what he expected of me: I pretended that the danger was real and on our heels, death waving at us in a corn field in a suburb of Denver sponsored by Starbucks, the First Bank of Colorado and Spicy Pickle. As if we were in a Stephen King novel or a film adaptation of a Stephen King novel.

The afternoon fell and the temperature was dropping and now even Fernando had resorted to a jacket. Carlos’s cheeks were red. So it really was true that climatic revolutions annihilated the broad, horizontal heat of July, of August. It really was true that September came and at the end of that month it was autumn and with autumn things changed interests, like lovers who were already a bit bored of one another.

Fernando was always looking at some place that seemed strange and faraway. Fernando seemed strange and faraway. But that was him in general.

Later, back at home, Fernando spread out a dog-eared map of New Mexico and a dog-eared map of Colorado on the dining table. He joined them at the border. They were so worn that their folds were faded and had already torn in some places. He showed me where Albuquerque was. He explained the distances, traced the highways with his fingers. He talked about the winter I was born. He didn’t like Interstate 25 but it was the quickest route to Albuquerque. The prettiest was the U.S. 285, which left the southwestern tip of Denver’s urban cluster and wound its way into the mountains. I read the names of the cities it passed through. Fairplay, Poncha Springs, Saguache, Monte Vista, Alamosa, Antonito. And in New Mexico, Tres Piedras, Ojo Caliente, and the capital, Santa Fé.

I wasn’t used to maps, but there was something intriguing about them. Sitting there, in Fernando’s living room, at night, a mapable world didn’t seem possible. It was all an abstraction — different highways, borders, states and countries, towns with names like Ojo Caliente or Fairplay. But those abstractions were really there, situated in very specific, localizable places, hence maps, and that was the intriguing part. If I got in a car and followed those tiny yellow veins and continued following the tiny yellow veins portrayed by other maps I would come across different borders, states and countries, towns with names like Fairplay and Ojo Caliente, and Juárez if I continued, and Chihuahua and Zacatecas. And if I carried on, overland, I would pass through Mexico City and Oaxaca, and then there would be Guatemala City and Tegucigalpa, Managua, Alajuela, Panama City, Medellín, Bogotá, and suddenly I would see Amazonian Brazil before me. Continuing, there would be the Araguaia and its memory and its forgetting of a guerrilla army, and from there, crossing another three states, I would arrive once again at Copacabana Beach and its Atlantic mollusks dreaming blue dreams at the bottom of the sea.

In all of these places, all of them, there were many Daniels and many fathers of thirteen-year-old girls. Some had possibly even gone astray.

I’d like to go to New Mexico, I said, without even realizing I’d spoken, which is why I was surprised when Fernando shrugged and said we can go.

Can we visit the house I used to live in? (The house I used to live in: a character in a fairytale. An imaginary being.) Can we visit this June lady?

Why not?

I looked at him and in my throat I asked, without letting my voice out: Why are you doing all this?

Mentally, he answered: Because you asked me to.

Then I looked away. Neither of us was very fond of sentimental words, even sentimental words that weren’t actually spoken, that laid in wait. The mere potential, the simple possibility that something of the sort might exist threatened to make the world mushy and sappy, and in a mushy, sappy world people don’t live, they just slip about and complain.