Crow Blue (18 page)

Do you think much about it?

I used to. Not so much anymore.

Don't you like to think about it?

At this stage, it doesn't make much difference. You know? Thinking about it or not thinking about it.

We stayed there like that, awake and silent for a while, listening to Carlos breathe. Listening to the noises from the highway. A digital clock with scarlet letters on the bedside table showed 23:11.

Could you pass me a beer? Fernando asked.

I got a beer from the dwarf fridge that was snoring with its dwarf asthma next to my bed. Fernando opened the can with a metallic sneeze and took a sip.

Do you want me to tell you the things I never told your mother?

I was quiet and listened. For a good while, I just listened.

I never asked Fernando why he decided to talk that night. If, by any chance, he had decided to indemnify my mother for the things he hadn't told her by telling her daughter. But if I asked he probably would have said: at this stage, it doesn't make much difference.

 

I was awoken shortly after 8am by Carlos tugging on my big toe. I felt like hitting him. But I just grumbled and pulled my foot up and rolled over to keep sleeping.

He and Fernando were already up, dressed and groomed. Fernando was wearing the birthday T-shirt. The coffee-maker was making coffee as it always did, as it was condemned to do for countless guests, day after day, gurgling and blowing out steam on the counter between the toothbrushes. The coffee came in sachets, the sugar and sweetener in little packets.

I knew it must be time to get up. We ate a trio of bagels in the motel foyer on Styrofoam plates and used plastic knives to spread on the cream cheese and jam that came in tiny individual plastic packa­ges. We drank a little processed juice from Styrofoam cups and more coffee in other Styrofoam cups. By the time we had finished we had three Styrofoam plates, six Styrofoam cups, three plastic knives, three plastic spoons, a few empty packets of sugar and some empty cream cheese and jam packages to throw in the trash. After that, we had a car to get from the workshop and a trip to resume.

Las Animas bordered on New Mexico. At the top of Raton Pass, Carlos wanted to stop, get out of the car and take photographs at the state border. Then he asked Fernando what New Mexico had to do with Mexico.

Camino Sin Nombre

 

We met June in Santa Fé a day late. Fernando had let her know that the car had broken down. Late that Sunday morning, there were tourists in the main square buying silver and turquoise jewelry made and sold by the Indians. Women in fur coats and leather boots strolled about in pairs, followed by men in cowboy hats, who paid for the things their wives bought and carried the bags.

The Indians spread out their earrings and necklaces and bracelets on colorful blankets, on designated sidewalks, next to the wall of the Palace of the Governors. They also wrapped themselves in colorful blankets if it was cold, and some ate the food they had brought from home.

In the surrounding area, the stores inhabited adobe constructions. They sold Native American art and Rolex watches.

June's father, she told us later, was a descendent of the Zuni nation. June's mother was an English linguist who had gone to New Mexico to study the Zuni language, Shiwi'ma, an isolated indigenous language according to scholars. She didn't find any answers, but she found a man she liked (who wasn't fluent in Shiwi'ma, because he had grown up outside of the pueblos, but who had his own particular, paralinguistic
attractions).

June's mother returned to England with June's father by her side and June in her belly.

But after New Mexico, England seemed excessively wet, excessively tame. Subtle. European. June learned to play the piano, June's father got a job, and June's mother continued to study isolated languages.

One fine day, as if it had been agreed upon from the outset, they sold or gave away everything they had, crossed the Atlantic and returned to New Mexico. They passed through the portal that returned them to that climatic and visual violence as one might recover their name or soul. June started teaching piano, put on a little weight and then a little more, and years later inherited her parents' home in Santa Fé. She didn't speak the Zuni language, but she had studied Latin at school, in Oxford.

We arranged to meet at a gas station. Carlos read aloud EXCLUSIVE PARKING FOR TEXACO AND 7-ELEVEN CUSTOMERS. He grew worried because we were taking up a parking spot and we weren't Texaco or 7-Eleven customers. Fernando told him not to worry. But he kept glancing around suspiciously. Perhaps he imagined a police officer was going to come and warn us about our offence and ask to see our
papeles
, as he drummed on the car with his club – like in the movies. Carlos would break into a cold sweat, then he'd cry and then he'd be deported. Like in the movies.

June pulled up next to us. We watched as that enormous, dark-skinned woman got out of her green pickup and leaned over to rest her forearms in Fernando's open window. But she looked at me before she looked at him, and said, in a British accent: Suzana's daughter. Only then did she look at Fernando and say: Suzana's ex-husband. And then, at the back seat: and their little friend. We'd best go indoors somewhere to chat a little. It's cold today. Though you folks from Colorado aren't afraid of the cold. And she smiled, and her smile came with twin dimples, one in each cheek. Aren't you lot hungry? Do you want to have lunch? There's this place I know, it's my treat.

She didn't seem to remember that none of us were, in essence, from Colorado. Our address was there, but that was all. June was wearing a flannel shirt with tiny blue flowers on it and a long, thick skirt. She told us we could follow her. She went back to her green pickup, and as we watched, her backside swayed under her skirt, back and forth, confident and magnificent.

Carlos asked how she knew that we were who we were, quite impressed. And he loved June immediately, for everything: because she smiled, because she had dimples, because she knew that we were who we were. But above all for having said that he was from Colorado. That was what Carlos felt in the pit of his stomach, in his bones, under his nails, in everything that in him served as roots. In Colorado, some people had bumper stickers that said NATIVE. Once Carlos had sworn to me that when he grew up and got his
papeles
and had a car he was going to buy one of those bumper stickers. Because that was how he felt: NATIVE, with mountains in the background. And June had known it just by looking at him, which was enough to make him love her at that very instant.

It still hadn't snowed in Santa Fé and everything was a uniform, thirsty brown. The trees were scrawny. June took us to a restaurant far from the tourist center and said everything's crowded because of the holiday. What do you want? A soda? I'm going to order something a little stronger, and she and her dimples laughed, and when the very young, thin waiter with several piercings in his ear came to take our order she named the wine she was going to have in her semi-British accent. Then she told us, by way of an explanation that we hadn't asked for, that she needed a glass of wine to celebrate, and didn't Fernando want one too? Maybe they could get a bottle? And after the waiter had taken the order she sighed. How lovely to see you. How lovely to see you. And she held my two hands with her two hands on top of the table. Her big, fat, soft hands. My small, thin, rough hands.

 

We ate nachos that came in a compact mountain and I noticed that Fernando picked out the jalapeños with uncommon avidness. Carlos ordered a milkshake that he couldn't finish. The wine softened June, made her less anxious and talkative, as if it had reduced her rotation speed on a dial. But none of her three table companions was particularly talkative, so it was good to be able to count on her to prevent any likely silences.

After her first glass of wine, we talked about my mother. After the second, we talked about my father. Carlos's eyes bulged. He didn't know that Fernando was my father on my birth certificate (I had been introduced in the neighborhood as a niece). Nor did he know that I had a missing father somewhere on the planet, and that this trip was, in essence, a search.

June explained the unusual situation with the patience of a fourth-grade teacher to the boy who was used to unusual situations.

He nodded his head when he understood, when the revelations stopped elbowing one another in his head and harmonized in their places, fitting together with soft clicks. He held my arm and said he hoped we found my father. I hope we find
tu papá
. How say
papá
en portugués
?

June and Fernando polished off the bottle of wine and it became clear to us all that they might order a second and then a third. They didn't. I looked at the thin waiter with piercings in his ear before we left and thought about Nick, whose name was still scribbled on my jeans, next to the drawing of Shah Jahan's diamond.

 

June wandered the streets of downtown Santa Fé with us, reciting facts and dates with the proficiency of a newly graduated tour guide, zealous and eager to do her job. Living it to the fullest. We went to her house when it started getting dark and too cold. The air was treacherous. It hurt inside my nose. It burned my face. It anesthetized my lips and made us all talk as if we were slightly drunk or just back from the dentist.

She lived on a street named Camino Sin Nombre. Her house had lots of colors inside it and was also inhabited by a pair of mastiffs – Georgia and Alfred. (The O'Keeffe and Stieglitz were inferred by many, but not us, and so June explained about the woman who liked to paint flowers and animal skeletons, and the man who fell in love with the woman who liked to paint flowers and animal skeletons and who photographed her with her hair down in a white shirt. Carlos looked at some reproductions in a book and said that the Georgia lady was a good painter but that he thought those mountains were a bit weird in that painting, they didn't look like real mountains, they looked like little Play-Doh mounds, and why did she paint such big flowers, he personally didn't think flowers were all that interesting.)

June made a dinner that filled the house with warm smells. She put on music and hung invisible hooks in the air that brought us together, threads looped over a crochet needle. We were a world of compatibilities, we were joined, we were equivalent to one another – and where we weren't, we compensated for one another.

One of June's talents: the four of us were suddenly a large, improbable, multinational family, full of different languages and different accents in the same languages. Our ages were rather incompatible in theory, our preoccupations and occupations likewise, our pasts perhaps identified us as animals of different species, the result of distinct evolutionary processes, and yet there we were. All easy laughter. When no one was looking, I took a swig of wine from Fernando's glass and thought it tasted like grapes with wood and alcohol. It was yucky. And I wondered if you had to swallow liters of grapes with wood and alcohol in order to train your palate or if it changed with age. If one fine day you just woke up liking sex, politics and alcoholic beverages.

The heating in June's house was in the floor – Carlos and I quickly discovered it, the pleasure of walking barefoot on that large, warm, earthy plate. And we quickly realized that, like the painter Georgia, June also liked animal skeletons. There were two skulls in her living room and a small one in the bathroom. The two in the living room had wrinkled horns. The one in the bathroom didn't. While Carlos and I performed a spoof of a ballet on the warm floor, the two old mastiffs watched, perhaps with the vague memory of having done that too at some stage, accompanying other children, in a time when the world had less joint pain.

June went outside for a smoke and Fernando went with her, both holding their drinks. As they were leaving I heard her say: the day before yesterday I saw two coyotes over there.

Later, when I woke up to go to the bathroom, June and Fernando were still talking in the living room, and laughing a lot, and there was a different smell in the air – a sweet smell, which wasn't from a cigarette or incense. I had occasionally smelled it before in Barra do Jucu, during the holidays, at my mother's friends' house. Always after the children were all in bed.

I stopped and listened to Fernando's laughter, that extemporaneous laughter softened by the marijuana, velvety, honest. I remembered my mother's laughter, which was high-pitched and always easy. I closed the bathroom door, sat on the toilet, rested my elbow on the low window and cried a little, and outside there were perhaps two coyotes, treading light and agile in a world all their own.

 

Tropical forests, like the great recessive Amazon, are intense organisms. Life and death multiply there all the time, simultaneous, Siamese. One spoonfeeds the other. They do it at a routine, everyday pace, without a fuss. A habit that has almost nothing to do with the avatar of death that Fernando had learned to recognize and fear in the forest, when he went by the name of Chico.

In the forest I will be the tree, I will be the leaves, I will be the silence.

In mid-1972, the Armed Forces decided to set up their Civic-Social Actions. They planned vaccination campaigns against syphilis and yellow fever, distributed food by helicopter. The Ministry of Education decided to send money to local schools. The locals were able, thanks to the Civic-Social Actions, to do extravagant things, like get ID cards. Also in this time military repression in the Araguaia region was handed over entirely to the Planalto Military Command.