Crow Blue

Corvus corax, Corvus brachyrhynchos

When Fernando, her future husband and future ex-husband, went to live in the Amazon, to rehearse and stage the guerrilla war, my mother was nine years old and was moving with her geologist father to another country. The fact that this other country had dangerous ties to the military coup in Brazil and with everything that Fernando, gun in hand, was fighting, was curious, nothing else. How could Suzana have imagined, at the age of nine, a former communist guerrilla as a husband?

Not that she knew these words intimately, not that she knew their meaning. All she knew was what her father told her: that the communists were bad people.

She saw an astronaut from her new country plant her new country’s flag in lunar soil, in the month of July. She thought it strange and beautiful. She had heard of Woodstock and the jungles of Vietnam, but they were at the periphery of her interests, and it made no difference to her when Nixon addressed the “silent majority” in a request for support for the war. She didn’t consider herself silent, suspected she wasn’t part of the majority and didn’t know exactly what war was. Besides which she was only nine, and she wasn’t entirely sure that Nixon was addressing nine-year-old girls in his speech.

One day she secretly looked at photos of the village of My Lai in Life magazine — when the massacre finally came to light, to then disappear from public consciousness, with only the occasional short-lived outbreak of remembering.

The bodies, that pile of mangled bodies. Vietnamese: women, the elderly, children. Babies. Strange words: civilians tortured, raped, beaten, mutilated, because they were suspected of hiding Vietcong among them. (She knew what Vietnamese were, not Vietcong. She asked her father, without mentioning Life. Communists from those parts, he said.) Burned houses. Dead, mutilated domestic animals. She wondered if domestic animals could also be communists. Perhaps in Vietnam. Perhaps their owners trained them for it. To recognize non-communists by their smell and attack them. The cows with their hooves and horns. The dogs with their teeth. And so on.

She found out later that Lieutenant William Calley, who had led the My Lai massacre, served only three and a half years house arrest of his original life sentence. The memorial in My Lai, Vietnam, listed more than five hundred dead, with ages ranging from one to eighty. In Suzana and her father’s new country, some were indignant that Calley was the only one punished. Even Vietnam War veterans. Others considered him a patriot and a hero, because in a war, after all, you respond to enemy fire as best you can. Even when there is no enemy fire. The answer needn’t need to follow the question — and the ends, of course, justify the means.

My mother told me about the color photographs of My Lai in Life magazine and about Nixon talking to the astronauts on the moon. It was while we were on holiday in Barra do Jucu. We were on the beach and it was night. She was holding a can of beer and telling me things from when she was a child. I don’t remember all of them. I remember that night, the cool breeze and my hot skin; I remember the color of the beer can, I remember the sky and the stars over Barra do Jucu and the photos that I hadn’t seen in Life magazine and the speech that I hadn’t heard Nixon deliver. But at any rate, between the things you remember and those you don’t, between the things you know and those you don’t, you have to plug the holes with whatever is at hand. And perhaps any attempt to know someone else is always that, your hands trying to shape three-dimensionality, your desire and incompetence putting together a scrapbook to bring to life someone who is dead, a friend, a mysterious lover who goes over to the window at first light and stands there gazing into space, without uttering a word. An unsociable child, a terse teacher, a humorless workmate who stares at you with a deadpan face when you tell an irresistible joke. People you don’t know or with whom you don’t feel comfortable. Everyone.

According to the photos, my mother’s legs and arms went on forever, and so did her hair. Her face was Latino and ordinary.

My face is Latino and ordinary. I look at the photograph in the passport with which I entered the United States of America nine summers ago.

I see my mother in my own eyes. Missing her no longer inhibits my life. Thinking about who she might have been. What she might have looked like. It’s no longer a myth.

I saw my mother in my own eyes for the first time when I was flicking through my passport, organizing the things in my backpack as I touched down in Denver. Nine years ago. The woman next to me told me to use lots of moisturizer.

At the airport I passed a girl who was crying. She was wearing an orange dress with a tiny flower print. She had curly blonde hair. Her eyes were red and there were circumstantial wrinkles on her forehead. She was quite young. Then I caught a little train to the other side of the airport and got off when a voice on the PA system said welcome to Denver and some other things that I didn’t understand.

My mother was quite young when she met Fernando in a London pub, she on vacation with her American boyfriend, he with pints of beer in his hands instead of weapons. There he was: drifting, an anomalous fish in a tank of distant beings. There he was: an apparition, a miracle, his body alive and whole, which, for obvious reasons, it shouldn’t have been. There he was, singing English music in a low voice and off-key because a while ago he had stopped caring if he sang out of tune.

He saw her and decreed the continuation of the world, the extension of time. The incorruptibility of the heart, which has its own methods and its own ethics, like any other muscle, come to think of it. He saw her and thought he needed, desperately, something to think about.

He had needed something to think about for years and had only just realized it. He needed a territory in which to hew trails in order to recognize himself again. It had been years since he’d felt the familiar weight of a weapon. It had been years since he’d felt the need to love a woman except for the purposes of subsistence, merely to avoid the armlock of loneliness.

Things were swamped by a white desert that came from inside him and spread outwards, a contagious, viral desert, where sounds were diffuse, flavors were shallow, sight was limited.

And life was a contradiction of terms: years earlier he had left his life behind in order to stay alive, and this functional, illogical equation gave him daily electric shocks in the open wounds that he didn’t have from the suicide that he hadn’t tried to commit.

Perhaps it would be like this forever and perhaps merely existing wasn’t enough, even with custom-made shoes and thermostat-regulated temperatures. But he saw Suzana and talked to her, and if desire and the desire for happiness were fake, there was only one way to find out.

You’re not from here. Your accent is different, she told Fernando.

He looked at the girl with the Latino face and American voice and said, trying to sound as British as possible, that she wasn’t from there either and her accent was different too.

She turned around and he said in Portuguese but you’re the most beautiful woman in this place.

She wasn’t. That’s why she didn’t hear him. But she came back later for more beers and said your face is really Brazilian.

And she came back the next day, after a fight with her American boyfriend. And later she and Fernando got drunk together with the objective of turning the world into something fluid, and as the sun tried to rise through a drifting London fog they fell asleep fully dressed and drunk in one another’s arms and woke up thirsty and with headaches and it was only then that they undressed each other. And it was only then that Suzana felt enormously guilty about the boyfriend, and Fernando accepted the fact that he’d have to follow her to the United States. Like someone receiving a list of duties on the first day of a new job.

On the other end of the line, Elisa cried almost every time. That’s why I preferred letters. Every two weeks I remembered to fill two sheets of paper with a handful of consistent information about school, home, the weather, the ultimate team, the mutant trees rusting the sidewalks and the neighbor’s back yard, the books, Fernando, Aditi, Carlos at some point, Nick at some point, the dentist at some point, my father’s mother at some point.

I was hoping to save some money to come visit you at Christmas but it’s a bit hard.

On the other end of the line she’d cry a little.

Tell me you’re OK.

I’m fine, Elisa.

Then she’d ask to speak to Fernando and they’d talk for an average of four minutes.

Every two weeks I received a letter from Elisa talking about work, home, the beach, the weather, at some point a man she’d met — the son of an elderly woman I’m caring for, he seems like a decent person and he’s asked me out to dinner on Saturday. I don’t know if I’ll accept his invitation. I think I’ll accept it but I’ll let him ask again so he won’t think I’m too available, you know. Men like it when we play hard-to-get. If you’re too easy it’s no fun.

Carlos peered at the letter. He pointed at the Portuguese word for “work,” trabalho, mouthed the Spanish trabajo, and grinned. He pointed at the word for “time,” tempo, and mouthed tiempo. He asked me what filho meant. Hijo, I said, and he was a little disappointed by the lack of obvious similarities.

I asked Carlos if he had grandparents. He nodded and I noticed that the lenses of his glasses were filthy.

Give me those.

I washed his glasses with dishwashing liquid in the kitchen sink and dried them on the tea towel.

He told me he had two sets of grandparents and that when he was big he was going to visit them but that at the moment he couldn’t leave America because if he did he wouldn’t be able to return. He could only leave the day he had papeles. His father had explained it to him. It was important to stay in America and get papeles. His father had told him that it would be easier if he studied, so he was studying. Hard.

The image of a crow stared at us from the computer screen. Carlos had to do a school project about some kind of bird, and he’d chosen the crow.

He asked me if I knew that crows were really intelligent. And if I knew that some crows also ate dead animals. And that many species had become extinct after humankind colonized places like New Zealand and Hawaii.

(Where’s New Zealand? he asked. I went to get an atlas and opened it in front of him. It’s far away. You have to cross the ocean to get there. I covered the name on the map with my finger. What’s this ocean called? I tested him. He gave a start and answered Pacific! with a nervous, credulous cry. While he was there he also observed that New Zealand was also far away from Brazil and El Salvador, where his grandparents were awaiting his visit the day he had papeles. Then he asked me if I thought there were any boys from New Zealand who didn’t have papeles in Colorado.)

Carlos told me that there were the cuervos that los gringos call crows and the cuervos that los gringos call ravens. Not the same. See: here los raven, Corvus corax. Here los crow, Corvus brachyrhynchos.

According to the library book, the raven is a meditative, aloof individual that you find in deserts, in the tundra, on plains and in forests, in large, open, more or less unoccupied spaces. It is a large black bird with a wedge-shaped tail and feather necklace. It mates, though it is not known if it does so for life. There are signs that couples last at least a year. Both parents care for their young, many of which die in their first few years of life. According to research, individuals living in the wild can live for as many as thirteen years. In captivity, as many as eighty (in the Tower of London, where their wings are clipped in the name of tradition, so they can come and go but not too much, the oldest lived until it was forty-four). It does not migrate, but can travel short distances to avoid climatic extremes. It doesn’t live in flocks. It prefers solitude or, at the most, lives in pairs. It likes to hover in the sky, as if the air were a large unmarked plain and it weighed nothing. It eats practically everything: fruit, shoots, cereals, insects, amphibians, birds, reptiles, carrion. It even eats other animals that eat carrion. It would seem that the Corvus corax is a serious bird that respects life and death.

According to the book, the crow is an equally black bird that you find in open spaces with trees nearby. It also feels at home in urban spaces — in suburbs, parks, coastal towns. Its feathers are lustrous. Iridescent. It is smaller than its raven cousin. It has strong claws and, when young, blue eyes, that later darken. When it is born, it is fed by its parents and older siblings. It can live for up to fourteen years in the wild. In captivity it lives for an average of twenty years. In the crow’s complex social system, adults stay fairly close to the place of their birth and often don’t mate, instead helping to take care of other crows’ young. Sometimes they migrate in flocks. The Corvus brachyrhynchos is omnivorous. It eats insects and their larvae, carrion, mice and frogs and rabbits, eggs stolen from smaller birds’ nests, fruits and nuts and cereals, and anything it can find in an unwatched trash can.

Carlos’s mother was still in hospital but according to him she would be home on Monday. She would arrive thinner, with dark little valleys under her eyes and two invisible hands pushing her shoulders down and forward, aging her, subordinating her. And she would say she wanted to return to San Salvador, but she would say it without shouting, because by now she had learned how dangerous it was to resort to too many decibels and attract the neighbors’ attention, in a place where people really do call the police and the police really do come. A few days later, she would invite the persistent pamphlet lady into her house and talk about god. She would argue that if god really existed she would be back in San Salvador. With her daughter. And the pamphlet lady would talk about the inscrutability of His designs. Later, in Florida, Carlos’s mother would recover her faith and forgive god.

Carlos printed out the bird photographs that he found during his research. The big Corvus corax, solitary and remote, ravens. The Corvus brachyrhynchos, crows, with their cooperative souls and knack for trash cans. Then he hugged me and said he missed his sister and asked me for some guaraná.

I gave him a little and told him that with any luck he’d soon be able to go visit his sister in Florida. As soon as things settled down a little.

And he told me that sure, why not, but that afterwards he’d come back. He wanted to live and die in Colorado and if possible close to me.

Then he asked Fernando, who was watching us from the couch, if he thought I was going to die four years before him because I was four years older than him. And Fernando replied that things didn’t work like that. And Carlos thought about it for a moment and said, like someone handing down a sentence, that it was true, he was right.

Carlos spent that night with us, after asking his father for permission, and asked if we could stay up until midnight. We watched TV and played cards and before midnight he had already fallen asleep on the couch with his mouth open, snoring softly. We put a pillow under his spiky hair, took off his glasses and covered him with a blanket.

The next day, a Sunday, Fernando went out early. I didn’t know why. Maybe he had gone for a swim at the public swimming pool — the one that was indoor and heated and thus didn’t stay closed to the public for eight months of the year. It was more or less his version of a social life. He would swim a couple of miles amidst other semi-sub-aquatic arms and legs and would come home smelling of chlorine and hang a towel smelling of chlorine in the bathroom.

He left a note on the table. It didn’t explain anything. It just said LOOK OUTSIDE. Carlos was still asleep, so I carefully opened the front door of the still-groggy house.

Outside a white film had settled over all things: trees, cars, roofs, the street, sidewalks. Tiny, fuzzy, pallid objects were floating down from the sky, noiselessly and almost weightlessly. Some even rose again in the air, halfway down, as the faintest current of air flicked them up invisibly. Then they drifted down again. Then up again. Like children at a party. I crouched down, scooped up a handful of the whipped cream that had piled up at the front door and squeezed it. The cold hurt. The air cut my face; it entered my nostrils and lungs with tiny knives. Everything allowed itself to be covered by that substance that until then, for me, had only existed in films and books, an anti-tropical substance.

When the red Saab pulled up in front of the house a short time later, Carlos and I were outside, captivated by that climatic phenomenon that, historically, had so little to do with us.

My ears hurt and my cheeks hurt. My face was red and my nose was running. There was a first-time joy inside me, a kind of euphoric calm. I was the boy from the country who gazes at the ocean and wonders how it doesn’t overflow. I was the peasant who stares at a skyscraper and wonders how it doesn’t fall down. And Carlos looked at me, immensely happy at my happiness, and told me that it had been like that for him the first time too.

I think we’re going to have to buy those boots now, said Fernando as he passed. He smelled of chlorine. He grabbed a handful of snow and rubbed it on my head, and I protested without protesting.

That night I dreamed of the cold. It was a harsh cold, the cold of a world that scoffed at the naked bipeds who thought they were the boss of it. It was a whole, chaste cold. Without the convenience of heated homes. A cold without contours, without seasons and counter-seasons; just cold. I wasn’t part of the dream. Neither was Fernando, or Carlos, or his family, or my possible father, or my mother, or anyone. The cold didn’t need people to dream it up.

That morning a plateau of snow had appeared in front of the house. The snow conspires with the desert. Things lose their contours and the all-white sky sticks to the all-white roof, making worlds coincide, annulling distances. There is something of a unifying dream in it, like Esperanto. There were no longer any colors. Everything was the silent accumulation of the snowflakes that fell, tiny and incessant, as tenaciously as death takes over a body. But we were alive, and inside the house the comfort and warmth felt prodigal. Or insulting.

Fernando put his coffee mug on the table. He pulled on his boots, got a wide shovel and said I’m going outside to clear the white shit off the sidewalk.

I thought he’d apologize for saying shit, but he didn’t.

A few days in a row of insistent snow (and a snow storm on the Thursday that left everyone stranded in their houses, schools closed, Fernando unable to go to work) had turned bald slopes into runs that children plumped out in colorful jackets slid down on colorful sleds. That was when Fernando came home with the red plastic sled and, promising me that I wasn’t going to die, pushed me down the slope.

I opened my mouth on the way down and swallowed enough snow to perform a kind of self-baptism. From then on I was one of them. I was the same. I was just another girl in a light purple waterproof jacket, and black rubber boots lined with synthetic fur. And jeans stiff with cold to which snow bandages stuck. And mittens. And a stocking hat with two braids at the sides. The jacket and boots were from an outlet but they were good quality, although it felt strange to have all those textures between my skin and the world. I now existed in layers.

The air became hard again, but the essence of this hardness was different. At any rate, I needed to accept that there was rarely any middle ground in that place. And at any rate what mattered was that now I was one of them, yes: analogous, comparable to, like. In a prosaic fraternity of jacket-encased bodies sliding down smooth white slopes, amidst awe-inspiring spills and war cries. I too uttered cries, I too took spills, I too.

Carlos closed his eyes and I said open your eyes, Carlos, it’s no fun with your eyes closed, and in one of his spills he lost his glasses and we desperately hunted for a long time until we saw an arm sticking out of a mound of soft snow like a periscope.

The pine trees dotted around us reminded me of the plastic Christmas trees that my mother and I used to decorate with cotton in December. The sky was blue, but the sun was angled. It got into my eyes from underneath, almost, as if its rays were flexible. It bumped into the mountains at five o’clock. Airplanes left white tracks in the sky, and distant trails of sound, which arrived with a delay.

Fernando and I arranged the trip to New Mexico for the end of November, when I had a week off school for Thanksgiving.

I felt like a stage actress on opening night. I was backstage applying makeup, getting dressed, mentally going over my lines, warming up my voice, Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, a peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked, if Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, then where’s the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked, as I had seen my mother’s friend’s actor friend do once backstage at the Glaucio Gill Theatre in Copacabana. (Moments later I saw him on the stage, transfigured: confident and handsome in the limelight. It had to be possible.)

The dog-eared maps of Colorado and New Mexico were reinforced with sticky tape. They left the drawer and migrated to the glove box of the Saab.

Fernando went to Carlos’s house personally to ask his parents for permission to take him with us, at my insistence (he’ll be so lonely, Fernando, a whole week with no school, and do you think his folks are going to take him out anywhere?).

Carlos’s eyes shone as if someone had switched them on. But his eternal concern led him to ask if he needed papeles to go to New Mexico, and if he did, what should he do.

His father’s moustache said, in tight-lipped Spanish, that Carlos shouldn’t go around saying things like that. People turned other people in (no, he wasn’t referring to us — of course not — we were friends — but Carlos had a loose tongue). And if that were to happen, if someone were to turn them in, they would have to leave. LEAVE. And worse, they’d have to leave Dolores behind, because now she was in Florida leading a different life. And they might never see Dolores again if they had to leave for some reason. Carlos’s mother started to sniffle and covered her face with her hands. Fernando cleared his throat and stared at the wall. Carlos was immediately gripped with panic, apologized and never uttered the word papeles again.

At that moment he grew a little more, confirming my theory that that was how things went, in bursts, in spasms, and not in arithmetic continuity. All of the metaphors for growth — the steps on a ladder, a road with curves here and there — were sheer nonsense. It all really happened in fits and starts, like when I was on the plane going to the United States and at some point they told us to fasten our seatbelts because we were going to hit some turbulence, and suddenly that aerial pachyderm which, according to Americans, had been invented by the Wright brothers started to shake in the middle of the sky. It shook as if there were potholed asphalt beneath it, like on certain stretches of the highway between Rio de Janeiro and Barra do Jucu.

In the blink of an eye, a cloud, a sister who leaves home with her boyfriend, a sentence someone says involving papeles and suddenly you are older. Depending on the turbulence, maybe it is possible to go to bed at the age of forty and wake up sixty.

My mother should have stayed married to you, I told Fernando the night before we left, as we were eating the pasta that I had prepared myself with a sauce with Paul Newman’s face on the label.

How do you know that she was the one who ended it?

Was it you?

I stared at him with a pair of perplexed eyes and he laughed.

No. It was her. Suzana was the one who ended it. After a while it’s not important anymore, who ended it, who didn’t. At any rate, things with her were like that. Wonderful while they lasted. But they didn’t last long.

He cut his pasta with his knife, as my mother had taught me not to do. You roll it up on your fork like this, she used to say. It was quite a bit of work. When I saw Fernando cutting his pasta with his knife I decided to cut mine too. Etiquette was silly.

Your mother had some cycles, I think. Seasons. From time to time she needed to change essential things in her life and sometimes these essential things involved other people.

Was it the same with my father?

I don’t know if it was the same with your father. She and I were married on paper, you know. She changed her surname and everything. On our wedding day she wore a white dress and a flower in her hair, and we went to a beer garden to celebrate with her friends. We were married for six years. I think she only spent a few months with Daniel.

In the spaces between Fernando’s words, in his gestures, in the way his eyebrows danced above his eyes like lizards doing ballet, I realized that he wanted to lay claim to at least that: the position of most-important-man.

The man Suzana had married wearing a white dress and a flower in her hair.

Were you jealous?

’Course not. I never even met Daniel. I moved here to Colorado when your mother and I split up. The next week. I spent a few days in the hotel, over in Albuquerque, and then I came. I got a job in Aurora.

Doing what?

One thing or another.

Six years is quite a long time.

That depends. It can be a long time or it can be almost nothing.

Did you still love her?

He didn’t look at me. He shrugged and said yes.

Then you must have been jealous.

Maybe. It’s possible.

I sighed. I didn’t know if we should be having this conversation. I cut some more pasta and put it in my mouth.

My mother was kind of complicated, I said.

She was, said Fernando.