Crow Blue

Man’s wolf

My father. the idea still sounded almost fanciful. A treasure hunt. A pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. What if I made it to the end of the rainbow and the pot of gold was really filled with second-rate chocolate coins, the sort that taste like wax? What if the rainbow had no end?

Perhaps my father was an optical phenomenon too. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. The dispersion of sunlight. The “X” that marked the location of the treasure on the map but which was maybe a silent hole that someone had beat me to. A joke. A hoax.

My father might be: in prison, dead, traveling, exiled, in a hospital or mental institution, living on the streets, on an island in the Caribbean, on a military base in Bulgaria, on a scientific base in Antarctica, in a Buddhist monastery in the Philippines, looking at paintings and smoking a pipe on a bridge in Paris.

My father might be too old, too young, weird, too good-looking, too thin, brilliant, aloof, bald, good-humored, too fat, extroverted, religious, hairy, ugly, very learned, short-sighted, athletic, kind of quarrelsome, bearded, successful, very musically talented. My father might have fathered other daughters and other sons.

I mentally listed off the possibilities as I made coffee, certain that my father would allow himself to be divined in any of them. It made me a little anxious. Anxiety is a hostile feeling that grips your stomach with crooked, cold, possessive fingers.

The coffee, a Brazilian brand bought in the store that sold Brazilian products, dripped into the pot. The toast toasted in the toaster. The house, snuggled up in drawn curtains and closed doors, smelled of coffee and toast.

Fernando was asleep and perhaps my father’s faces, or my mother’s face, were in his dreams. Or the faces of that Amazonian war which, I had yet to find out, he would never forget. He would forget his phone number, his address, his own name, and the sound of his own voice before he would forget that. When the enemy advances, you withdraw, and when you have to withdraw sometimes you stumble.

He was asleep and I was making the coffee that would sit there in the artificial heat of the electric coffee-maker for too long until all of its integrity was suffocated in the taste of burnt straw. I drank the coffee fresh and ate my toast and got my backpack and jacket.

In late October Carlos and I went trick-or-treating in the neighborhood wearing black capes and masks with bulging eyes and devilish expressions. When I got home, Fernando was sitting in the living room in the dark, hands crossed behind his head. He was listening to an old Brazilian song from before I was born and perhaps before he was born, which I recognized because my mother used to listen to it too.

Who’s that?

Noel Rosa, he replied.

Hmm.

I sat next to him. I reached into the bag of candies and picked one at random.

Want one? I asked.

He said yes. I picked something else at random and we sat there in the dark eating sickly-sweet candies with artificial fruit flavorings, as I thought about the song that my mother also used to listen to and he thought some thoughts all of his own.

Suddenly I looked at him and thought that his wrinkles, even in the weak light coming from outside, were all deeper, more pronounced, and that the skin of his face was like wet clothes hanging on a coat hanger.

I touched my own face with both hands. I ran my fingertips around my eyes, across my forehead.

At what moment did you realize that you were starting to age? Was there already some kind of sign at the age of thirteen, a miniscule wrinkle, a tiny valley beginning to be eroded where previously there had only been a plain? There was a fine fuzz above my upper lip. I had to start removing it. My mother used to use a hair removal cream and would have a white moustache for eight minutes, once a month. Then she would wash it off and the area would be a bit red for a few hours. The cream had a strange smell, a mixture of floral essence and science lab.

When’s your birthday, Fernando? I asked.

Today, he said.

What?

Today, October 31.

Seriously? Halloween?

I wondered if that was why the lines in his face were deeper — because it was his birthday. Maybe these things didn’t happen progressively but in waves, in cycles, and when it was your birthday your body realized it had to keep pace with the number indicative of your age, give or take a year. As if it was suddenly woken by an alarm clock and, still groggy, with heavy eyes, went off to go about the business of aging. To then lie down again and wait until it was time to age a little more.

The next day I invited Carlos to go with me to look for a present for Fernando. We bought a yellow T-shirt that didn’t look like anything Fernando would wear. But he wore it that very same day, and took Carlos and me out for pizza and Carlos and I drank ginger ale and he had a Mexican beer in a glass mug with a wedge of lemon on the edge. He took the lemon and squeezed it into the beer and then left it bobbing there, which I found a little repugnant, because it made me think of refuse, trash cans and stinky organic leftovers.

Fernando looked like an extraterrestrial in the yellow T-shirt and I think he knew it, but he wore it with conviction that day and on several other occasions. Every time Carlos saw him in the yellow T-shirt he’d say: La camisa de cumpleaños. And Fernando would pat his head, and he would then smooth down his hair, as if it was possible to mess up his eternal crew cut. Carlos was visibly pleased by that moment of male camaraderie, comments about the shirt, pats on the head that were a variation of pats on the back, adapted to their height and age difference. The yellow made Fernando look one hundred percent wrong, and that didn’t bother him, or me, or Carlos.

During the birthday pizza, Carlos wanted to know how old Fernando had turned. Fifty-seven, said Fernando.

You old, said Carlos. How say old in portugués?

Velho, said Fernando.

Velho, said Carlos imitating him, laughing. He thought the word was funny. Velho, he repeated. And he apparently liked the idea of Fernando being old. He reached across the table with his fat little hand and placed it on Fernando’s. I like you así mismo. I not care you are velho. Eres mi amigo. My friend. How say friend in portugués?

Amigo, I said.

Ah! He was pure happiness. He was always pure happiness when he discovered words that were the same in his language and ours. When he came across yet another of our many Latin intersections. Amigo en portugués, amigo en español. Qué bueno.

He was wearing a red sweatshirt that was a little too small for him, with a baseball on it. Carlos was forever surrounded by the balls of sports he didn’t play.

Chico and Manuela were living together when the war began in April of 1972. By this time they had already been transferred from Faveira to the Chega com Jeito base.

For Pedro, the first guerrilla captured, the war was something completely different and had begun earlier. When he tried to kill himself in his cell he didn’t slash his wrists: he had learned in his training that it rarely killed anyone. Instead, he made deep cuts in the veins near his elbows, using razors which had ended up in his hands he didn’t know how.

He survived (fascists!) and was tied to the bed. But in the forest he used the legitimate perturbation resulting from his condition (Now you’re going to experience the torture methods we learned in Vietnam, an officer told him) to disorient the agents of repression: tripping, glassy eyes. He had been taken back to the Araguaia to recognize the guerrilla training sites. In the home of his godchild’s parents, who lived in the region, the officers confirmed: you’re a liar! How can you christen a child if you’re a communist and communists don’t believe in God? In prison in Xambioá (which wasn’t the beautiful Xangri-La in the middle of a Himalayan valley), in a cell without a toilet, he heard a woman’s screams that seemed to be coming from a torture session. Bluffing, they told him they were the screams of Tereza, his wife. Pedro was given electric shocks in the cuts in his arms. On one occasion they held a knife to his eye and said repeat that you are a communist. He was strung up from the ceiling naked. He kept on surviving. After all, as a clergyman had once said, you don’t get confessions with bonbons.

In the outside world, the war began and Fernando was in the war. The same Fernando who would one day spread out a dog-eared map of New Mexico and a dog-eared map of Colorado in front of me on the dining table. So much time, so many lives woven into time; is man man’s wolf?

I look at my arms without scars and think about cuts and electric shocks. And I wonder how lives turned inside out and people turned inside out find their right-way-out again.

They don’t. They become cousins of the tree that was born on a steep slope, its trunk forever crooked and its leaves growing towards the sun, believing, because that’s what leaves do. They become cousins of the stray dog that eats the food that someone gives it one day because that’s what dogs do. In Lakewood, Colorado, there were no stray dogs. In Copacabana there were and they were almost always ugly and always did everything with urgency; they urgently lived that life that was limited to urgently living that life without pet shops. If you set a plate of food on the ground and made it obvious that you weren’t going to kick them if they approached, the strays of Copacabana would come, but they wouldn’t eat. They would devour. In seconds. Whatever the food and whatever the amount. Is man also the wolf’s wolf? The dog’s wolf? When the army invaded the Chega com Jeito base and news reached the Gameleira base, one of the first things they did in their retreat was to kill the camp dog so it wouldn’t attract the soldiers’ attention with its barking.

The war started for Fernando, who was Chico in that place on that day. Fish III was the name given to the anti-guerrilla operation, whose aim was to conduct an armed invasion of the “TARGET” in order to capture, neutralize and/or destroy the enemy (the “TARGET” being a particular region where they suspected that there were subversive elements).

Fernando told me that the guerrillas fled. It was a narrow escape. From the forest, they actually saw the army surrounding the main house, helicopter and everything.

In the following days, the army found other bases, further south. They didn’t catch anyone there either, but they seized homemade bombs, ammunition, food, medicine, a sewing machine, clothes, backpacks. As well as, of course, subversive literature. The army moved with difficulty through the forest. The only helicopter they had at the time was out on loan.

They were suspicious of a man moving a little too fast along a trail one morning. They stopped him and asked for explanations, the explanations weren’t enough and the man, who was really the guerrilla Geraldo, was arrested, beaten, held underwater and forced to stand on open cans. On his person they found a note that said C: army in the area. cmdr. B. He was doomed. In Brasilia, a few days later, they found out that Geraldo was really José Genoino Neto, a communist who had been underground for four years. For three of which he had been living there, on the Araguaia, preparing the guerrilla forces.

The military was preparing “Civic-Social Actions,” to mask the real reasons for its presence there and to try to win over the population, in a tug-of-war with the social work carried out by the communists. With Operation Fish IV, in May, the military intended to correct the mistakes of past operations and obtain more information on the enemy’s identity, numbers and location. Officers from the army, navy and air force and the Pará military police were given the task of infiltrating the population.

That month the first military officer was killed by the Araguaia guerrillas: twenty-six-year-old Corporal Odílio Rosa. With a bullet in his groin, in a surprise brook-side encounter, when everything seemed calm and the forest was almost pleasant, almost comfortable, set against a naïve symphony of insects and birds with no political leanings.

On one side, four army officers and the woodsman who was accompanying them. On the other, two communist guerrillas. In that first confrontation, the guerrillas Osvaldão and Simão fired two shots. One hit Sergeant Morais and the other killed Corporal Rosa, whose body was left in the forest for a week before it was retrieved.

The surprise factor and numerical advantage, according to the Armed Forces, explained the defeat. The report also attributed the difficulty of removing Corporal Rosa’s body to a supposed death threat made by the subversives to anyone who tried to retrieve it.

Along came Operation Fish V, whose mission was to retrieve the body.

The military decided on the ostensive deployment of troops in the region. This time they had observation planes and helicopters. Three platoons and a detachment of paratroopers headed for the Araguaia.

In that month of May the guerrillas also issued their first official announcement. It didn’t mention the Party or the training that had been taking place in the forest for some years. But it announced the creation of the Union for Freedom and the Rights of the People, the ULDP.

The people united and armed will defeat their enemies.

Down with land grabbing!

Long live freedom!

Death to the military dictatorship!

For a free, independent Brazil!

Somewhere in the Amazon, May 25, 1972.

Commanders of the Araguaia Guerrilla Forces

Then Chico felt fear, for the first time. And he learned the art of mistrust.

He didn’t know he had it in him. Maybe because he’d never looked death square in the face before, eye to eye. He had heard about it, heard descriptions of it, passed by it and perhaps even brushed past it unwittingly (scuse me, sorry) and kept walking, with the long strides and sunny whistle of the self-assured. Meanwhile, death, in a hat and overcoat, turned and frowned at that unconcerned individual’s back. But to look straight at it and find its eyes wide open, undisguised, with the unspeakable inside them, to get through that unfair fight, now that was something else. For the first time he told Manuela that he didn’t think the guerrillas would win.

They’re too strong, said Chico.

Don’t lose heart. They don’t know their way around the forest. We’ve been here much longer. (Could it be that, of the two of them, she, who didn’t have the Peking Military Academy under her belt, who didn’t know how to make weapons, would be the one to tame her fear like a snake charmer, to walk over hot coals and sleep on a bed of nails?)

It doesn’t matter, said Chico. They hire woodsmen. People sell themselves for next to nothing.

People sold themselves for next to nothing. The first guerrilla was killed not long afterwards, as a result of a tip-off from a peasant known as Cearensinho. Sent to his house to get a roll of tobacco, the guerrilla Jorge ran into the army and was machine-gunned down. Cearensinho had been considered a friend.

They’re too strong, said Chico. By the end of May the army had more than two hundred men in the region. Not that Chico was up on the numbers.

By the end of May the army also had a list of five prisoners in a document entitled Special information no. 1. Among them, a boat man and farmer who was found hanged in his cell, a “known communist,” a “lawyer” and another two men about whom nothing was said. It didn’t mention the arrests of a further four inhabitants of the region or the capture of four guerrillas.

The ULDP (or “the terrorists of southeastern Pará”) wrote a manifesto containing twenty-seven demands. Among them were: Land for farming and legal titles. Reduction of taxes for rural labor and small businesses; tax exemption for small and medium-size farmers; an end to police participation in tax collection. Medical assistance in all districts, with itinerant clinics in boats and trucks. The creation of schools in villages, on the banks of the major rivers and near plantations; the building of boarding schools for children from distant locations. Protection for women; in the event of divorce, the right to part of the couple’s estate and domestic possessions; pregnancy care; practical courses for the training of midwives. Work, schooling and physical education for young people; soccer and basketball fields, athletics tracks and recreation centers. Respect for all religious beliefs, with permission to practise all forms of shamanism and Spiritism. The employment of a good portion of taxes in the construction of highways, the paving of streets, the installation of electric and water facilities, the maintenance of schools and medical services. Plans for urbanization and development in cities and towns; aid for the building of homes; incentives for the creation of libraries and radio stations. Respect for the property of others, without harm to society; support for progressive private initiatives, small and medium-size factories and craftwork.

Some time later, the army would use the Corporal Rosa Clearing as a symbolic place for the summary execution of guerrillas. And it was only more than three decades later that it was brought to light in the newspapers, when the army’s former guides broke their silence during searches for the bones of the missing.

I read a comment online: Why don’t they start using the Clearing again? But do the job properly this time. It’s our only chance to live in a decent country.

I read another comment: The army did what it HAD TO DO GIVEN THE circumstances at the time. Speaking of which, it’s time they did it again to take down the corrupt band of thieves who’ve taken over Brasilia!

I read another comment: Only cowards and criminals are afraid of the truth. It’s definitely the case of those who are so opposed to shedding light on the facts about the executions on the Araguaia. Those cowards are obviously worried about having to explain themselves to their children, grandchildren and friends when they discover that the image of hero and protector of the Homeland that they had of them is false; they’re really just a bunch of sadistic torturers.

I read another comment: What bugs me is paying money for these excavations. It should be paid for by the Brazilian Communist Party and cohorts who took the irresponsible from their homes, coaxed, indoctrinated, trained and made them into fanatics, then gave them weapons so they could play at being Che Guevara, all at the orders of the cruelest of dictators, Fidel Castro.

June called me last night, said Fernando. You were already in bed. She apparently knows someone who knows where Daniel’s mother is.

Daniel’s mother. An absolutely entirely new universe. While searching for my father, I had stumbled across a grandmother who was one hundred percent alive, material, tangible, with definite coordinates. And I hadn’t the faintest idea what that meant. Suddenly my life began to fill with potential relatives. Could it be that I had a whole series of aunts, uncles, cousins, great aunts and uncles, second cousins? A family tree as happy as an oak, replete with branches and leaves and fruit? I’d never thought about it.

According to this person, Daniel’s mother lives near Santa Fé. Her name is Florence and she’s an artist.

An artist grandmother to boot. I mentally sketched a portrait of a very thin old hippie, with braids in her gray hair and a batik blouse.

Can you call her?

Well, to start with, June still hasn’t got her phone number. But even if I did call her what would I say? Hi Daniel’s mom, you don’t know me, but I’m here with your son’s teenage daughter. Could you by any chance tell me if he’s alive and, if he is, where he is at the moment?

Outside was the noise of that weird contraption, that reverse vacuum cleaner that they used to clean the dry leaves from the streets, piling them up in compact little hills.

Sorry, said Fernando. But stop and think about it. What would you or I say on the telephone to Daniel’s mother?

What do we do, then?

I’m not sure. I’ll think about it. June offered to help. I have a cleaning job to go to. Wait for me for lunch, I won’t be long.

He opened the door, looked out at the street and stopped for a moment. I wonder why there’s a police car in front of Carlos’s house?

The next day we found out that Carlos’s sister, who worked as a chambermaid in a hotel in the tech center and intended to study medicine at Harvard, had quit her job and gone to Florida with her boyfriend.

What’s she going to do there? I asked Fernando, after he had a brief chat with Carlos’s dad. (Fernando never would have gone to Carlos’s dad to ask about the whys and wherefores of the presence of the police car, or anything else, but they had run into one another in the street, and Carlos’s dad had told him the story as if he were a political prisoner anxious to cooperate and avoid torture.)

I have no idea. He didn’t say and I didn’t ask. His wife was hysterical. The neighbor called the police. In a nutshell.

Did they arrest her?

He laughed. No, they didn’t arrest her.

And, after a time, he added:

The neighbor shouldn’t have stuck her nose in and called the police.

Are they going to send them back to their country?

Not that I know of, said Fernando.

That morning I studied math, finished reading a book and wrote the report I had to write, got in a mess with the facial hair removal cream and trimmed my hair a little in front of the mirror. Then I went to Carlos’s house. He was sitting very quietly on the floor, in front of the TV.

Carlos, tu amiga Vanja, announced his dad’s moustache. I didn’t see his mother.

Carlos looked at me, still serious. It was the seriousness of children who are suddenly a little less children. Pokémons slid across the TV screen in the company of Japanese children with giant eyes and pointy hair.

Hola, he said. And he held out a packet of potato chips and asked if I wanted some.

I sat down in front of the Pokémons. Carlos slowly slid his fingers through the carpet and held my hand. Then he smiled when the Japanese boy with giant eyes shouted Pikachu, I choose you! and asked me if he could come over and play on Fernando’s computer when the cartoon was over.

Outside, a rare heavy rain was impregnating the semiarid world with a strange element. And the moisture hung in the air: perplexity. A semicolon between two states: dry and very dry.

It’s always strange when it rains in places like this. It feels like something has gone wrong, like some prior agreement has been violated. And then the rain moves on and its memory migrates into plump-leaved plants that flourish in another sense of the verb flourish.

Carlos’s hysterical mother had no way of knowing, in fact, none of us did, that her golden future lay with her runaway daughter.

The ex-chambermaid from the hotel in Denver’s tech center and ex-future Harvard student hadn’t gone to Florida for nothing.

After spending several years serving watery coffee and bacon and eggs in a diner, she would say goodbye to her excessively jealous boyfriend and succumb to the routine attempts at seduction of a regular customer. Who frequented the establishment not for its watery coffee or its bacon and eggs (which were almost as bad as the coffee), but because of the young brunette with a smile full of the whitest teeth: that contrast was the most beautiful thing the regular had ever seen. She would smile whenever he said something funny, and he learned to say funny things just to see her smile. It was all goofy, prosaic and sincere. And he would return, every day, like an obsessed cinephile returning to see daily sessions of his favorite film.

Unlike her, and her excessively jealous boyfriend, and their families, the regular customer had papeles. Better yet: he was a gringo. American, with American parents and Irish grandparents. So what if he was twenty-something years older than her? He had a three-bedroom house in Tallahassee, with a new television and a lovely lawn that he cut regularly with his electric Black & Decker lawnmower.

When the illegal Salvadoran immigrant and the gringo got married, they put a second car in the garage and the two cars had matching colors and personalized number plates HIS XO and HERS XO. It had been her idea. She liked the way gringos used “X” and “O” to indicate kisses and hugs (she wasn’t sure of the order). Putting kisses and hugs on the bumper was a way of fraternizing with the world. Socializing her happiness in HIS and HERS license plates.

They bought a second television, so they could each watch their programs without any conflicts. And she didn’t even need to work anymore. She could stay at home looking after the kids, when kids came along.

But before kids came the ex-chambermaid and ex-waitress’s mother and father, whom she brought out from Colorado and installed in the spare bedroom.

Then all the mutual hurt melted away in the cheery Florida sun, which was so different to the semiarid Colorado sun, so much better, so much more humanitarian. The Colorado sun used a whipping stick and had downward-curving lips, between literal mountains of wrinkles. The Florida sun served orange juice processed with a smile, in sandals and shorts, very informal. And it didn’t aspire to be Icelandic in the winter.

The family would find happiness there. But eight years earlier no one had any way of knowing it.