Crow Blue (23 page)

Then we went back to the car and I considered the expedition to my early childhood over.

 

There wasn't much else to do besides leave. Put those events in our pockets and leave. Celebrate Thanksgiving with June and her senile dogs the next day, and spend the two days after the next day at her place on Camino Sin Nombre, and scale the map again with our noses pointing north and the hope that the Saab wouldn't decide to break down again.

Yes, of course, there were the Next Steps, and they were frighteningly toilsome. I searched my soul for energy, determination, courage, patience and other honorable sentiments. Other military-salute sentiments, the sort that make up the marrow of heroes.

But the next day and the day after that and the day after that still had something to say, before the rest of my once-again-post-New-Mexican life could begin. There was still, at least, a localizable vestige of my mother in Albuquerque, and that vestige was called Isabel and we were going to meet her.

 

Isabel appeared in a white kimono, the kind used by people who practise martial arts, tied with a green belt. I didn't know if it put her down at the bottom of the hierarchy, up at the top or somewhere just so-so. Over it she was wearing a waterproof jacket that was very thick and very green.

She walked into the coffee shop where we had arranged to meet, picked her way through the people until she got to our table and hugged me. We were almost the same height. Then she shook Fernando's hand with martial-arts vigor and Carlos's hand with the same martial-arts vigor.

She sat down and looked at the enormous slice of chocolate cake that Carlos was eating and asked what's that? Can I have a taste? And Carlos cut a (small) piece off with his fork and held it up to her mouth and thought it was funny. Him, a boy, feeding a grown woman. There was chocolate with chocolate filling and chocolate icing and pieces of chocolate negligently smeared around the Salvadorian boy's mouth, but they disappeared politely into the Puerto Rican woman's mouth.

And she said I'm always starving after practice.

And Carlos asked if she did judo or karate and she said aikido. And he said he'd never heard of it. And she said I'll take you down later so you can see what it's like.

We chatted. She and Fernando had two cups of coffee each. His without sugar. Hers with a full spoonful. We talked about places: Rio de Janeiro, Albuquerque, Colorado, Puerto Rico. We talked about people: me, my mother, my foster aunt, Carlos (we didn't talk about Fernando).

Do you want to be an actress? I asked at some point.

I used to, she said. Before. But it didn't end up happening.

But you studied theatre. June told us.

For a while. I came here to go to college.

So if you're not an actress, what are you?

And she held her palms up and tilted her head to one side in a pantomime gesture.

I'm not anything.

But Carlos exclaimed, from his podium, that she did aikido (even though he didn't know what aikido was, but it sounded Japanese and serious). A person who does aikido and wears aikido clothes can't not be anything – was his argument.

And she laughed and said I'd like to have you all over for dinner at my place. Can you come? I bought some things that we used to make at your mother's place – at your place (and she turned to me and then to Fernando, who could claim that possessive adjective to different degrees and for different reasons). For old times' sake.

The old times were just that, old times. Times gone, past, yesteryear, a long time ago. Back when the “in” thing was for Isabel and my mother's friends to get together in the house on San Pablo Street, when Fernando wasn't part of Suzana's life anymore and I had yet to be. So the old times were also pages from another calendar – and I thought again about what Pope Gregory had taken (I confess that I was kind of obsessed with the story: the omnipotence of a man of the cloth who stole time).

But we were there, we were with Isabel and having dinner with her seemed to be an imperative of the new times, more than an homage to the old. And at any rate she was enchanting. And at any rate we didn't have anything else to do.

We followed her car from the coffee shop in Nob Hill to the suburb of Vista del Mundo, where she lived, in an enormous house that was one hundred percent contrary to anything that I might have imagined for her and her aikido clothes and green belt and green jacket, and her thin wrists and thick hair. It was enormous and looked a lot like the confectioner's houses I had seen in Denver's wealthy suburbs. It was a placid color in an undefined pastel tone and there was a cypress on each side of the door, like little green soldiers with conical bodies.

Isabel made mojitos for Fernando and herself and I noticed his relief at having the glass to put his hand on, and the rum to sip. It hadn't been an easy day.

You live in a very big house, he said – and perhaps added mentally: for someone who isn't anything.

It's not mine.

And she went over to the sound system to put on some music. I couldn't understand why adults only half-answered so many things. Maybe it was a mature, civilized habit and I should just get used to it. I was going to turn fourteen the following month. Fourteen was at least a nose in the adult world. And I had to unlearn all the codes I had learned to make way for others. Curiosity, for example: children had a gift for curiosity. Adults kept it chained up. In adults, curiosity shook paws, fetched balls and played dead.

I looked around at that house that was bigger than Isabel. Everything was more than necessary, as she appeared to live alone. There was too much floor, too many windows, too much furniture for just one person.

We would have dined in Vista del Mundo with Isabel, who had gone upstairs to her room and come back ten minutes later in civilian clothes with wet hair, hair that was very curly and hung in the air exactly like the questions that we all wanted to ask about her life (present, past) but weren't sure if we should. And before the clock struck midnight we all would have been in our motel-room beds and Carlos would have written up every stage of the dinner at Isabel's place in his notebook, beginning, middle and end. And I would have bathed and also taken care to dry my hair better this time, and it's possible Fernando would have listened to Mexican soccer commentators on TV.

But Carlos and his chocolate cake were conspiring, in silence, in his stomach. They were planning a small guerrilla war. A mini-revolution.

 

He started complaining of nausea at 7.23pm after eating tortilla chips with guacamole. At 8.11pm, he started throwing up tortilla chips with guacamole (together with the chocolate cake, the main conspirator).

Because of those unruly, restless foods, and Carlos's stomach's desire to return them as one might return faulty merchandise, we ended up spending the night at Isabel's house. After midnight, after a febrile Carlos had vomited enough and gone to bed, and I had gone to bed too, to dream memories of houses that I didn't remember, I felt thirsty and got up, almost sleepwalking, to get a glass of water. The door of the next room, where Fernando should have been sleeping, was ajar. I glanced through the crack and even in the leaden half-light I could see that his bed was untouched and the room empty.

I wondered if maybe I shouldn't get that drink of water from the kitchen. I could have a drink from the bathroom sink, which was on the same floor as the bedroom. I was rather dubious as to what I might find in a house with doors ajar and men missing. But because my curiosity still wasn't a well-trained Labrador, I went downstairs anyway. Silently and slowly.

On the curve of the stairs, I craned my neck to peer into the living room and there they were, dancing to the sound of almost inaudible music, their bodies so close together that I felt embarrassed for seeing what I wasn't supposed to be seeing. And I went back to the bedroom before I could see anything else, like a kiss, like one of them sliding their hand down the other's back, like an opening in a blouse being explored by five fingers and a breast being found by those fingers. No, I didn't want to see any of that. And no, I didn't want to think about any of that either, but unfortunately thoughts are different: their freedom paralyzes ours. Thoughts do as they please.

 

WHAT FLORENCE DIDN'T FIND IN ME: 1) My father's eyes. They couldn't be found because, as I discovered later, he had blue eyes, and mine are brown. 2) Reasons not to believe me. As she was staring at me, I thought about mummies and how the ancient Egyptians used to remove the brains of their dead by stuffing hooks through their noses during the process of mummification. Perhaps she was trying, in those silent instants that lasted a few seconds that lasted a few decades, not to extract parts of me (courage? cheek?) for posterior embalmment but to appraise my trustworthiness using a method of her own. Which didn't involve hooks threaded through my nostrils, but two equally penetrating eyes and a prolonged absence of words. 3) The granddaughter she had always prayed for.

 

WHAT FLORENCE DID FIND IN ME: 1) The granddaughter she hadn't always prayed for – and surprises, in my opinion, have their charm. They're a kind of bonus. For example: you buy two packets of cookies in the supermarket and when you go to pay you discover that there's a special promotion that day: buy two packets of those cookies and get a packet of instant lemonade for free. 2) Some invisible, unspeakable merit which, faced with her two available options (putting me in contact with Daniel or not putting me in contact with Daniel), made her choose the former. 3) Something in my smile, a millimeter of curvature of my lips, that she would process over the following years until she told me one day, definitively: you have your father's smile.

Canis latrans

 

It has been said that coyotes, like crows, mediate between life and death and are common characters in mythology. They are extremely adaptable, omnivorous mammals and will eat almost anything available: rabbits, mice and squirrels, as well as birds, frogs and snakes, as well as insects and fruits, as well as carrion. In urban areas, the contents of trash cans and dog food. They have been known to attack domestic pets. In general, they hunt at night. In the wild, their average life span is six to eight years. They are found throughout Central America and most of North America, from Panama in the south as far as Canada and Alaska in the north. They sometimes starve to death, or fall victim to disease, or are caught in traps, or are killed by other animals, or are run over by cars. Some coyotes live alone, others in pairs, yet others in packs – which usually consist of a pair of adults, yearlings and cubs. Coyotes with a different scientific name smuggle illegal immigrants from Mexico into the United States.

In mythology, the coyote has the power of transformation. Sometimes it is a thief, as it is for the Hopi Indians. Sometimes it is the creator of humanity, as it is for the Navajos, or of the earth, as it is for the Miwoks. Sometimes it is the creator of death, as it is for the Chinook people: once upon a time Coyote and Water traveled to the world of the dead to bring their wives back, during an era in which death didn't exist for humans, only animals. As he was bringing the dead wives back in a box, however, Coyote couldn't help himself and opened it to see his wife. In so doing, he released the spirits of the dead and death itself. Which came to be a part of human life, so to speak.

When we returned to June's house in Santa Fé, after our two nights in Albuquerque, I saw the pair of coyotes in the dry riverbed. June came and got me in the middle of the night and took me to see them, from a distance.

In the dry riverbed there were also the carcasses of abandoned cars. Here and there, a kind of shy, seasonal junkyard. When the river came back to life, it would swell and the abandoned car carcasses would grow cold under the new water; another year, another river, the same river, a different river. Later the river would dry up again and they would be exposed once more, a little uglier, a little older, a little more carcass-like.

 

Over the years, my curiosity about Isabel's life was satisfied. Not that she had secrets. She was like my mother in that respect: she answered all questions. Except that, unlike my mother, she almost always said only what was necessary. She was rather martial and quiet. She came across as capable of beating up anyone who gave her a hard time in the street. But she never got into unnecessary arguments.

During the dinner at her place in Albuquerque, she told us part of her story. The second part. I pieced her life together from back to front, like someone following footsteps from their point of arrival to their point of departure.

So you live here alone? I asked, and if I was indiscreet it was too late, but everyone forgives children for that, and at the age of thirteen I was still in the comfortable position of being able to choose the situations in which I wanted to be considered a child and those in which I didn't, and to behave accordingly (there has to be some advantage in being thirteen).

Yes, she said, and the tortilla chips crackled in her mouth. But this house belongs to my ex-husband. He's got another one.

Another house?

Another house, another wife, another family.

In Albuquerque? Fernando asked, plucking up the courage.