Crow Blue (7 page)

Among the echoes of her lazy vowel one could hear: go home, silly girl, your letter's been posted.

Ursus arctos horribilis

 

In August, I started going with Fernando every now and then to the Denver Public Library, where he worked as a security guard. We would walk a little way, catch the bus, then walk some more to the block delimited by Broadway, Bannock Street and 13th and 14th avenues. The red 1985 Saab stayed in the garage. Parking was expensive near the library.

I quickly discovered that I hated reading books in English (my mother's lessons hadn't included books), that it was really quite difficult, that speaking and understanding a language reasonably well are no guarantee of instant fluency or pleasure in reading, and that I would have to do it.

I'd have to do it anyway, at school, so I might as well try to arrive there a little less green. I spoke English. I understood English. And people would have to take their hats off to me.

I chose books I didn't know by their titles. I set several aside before the end of the first chapter. Those that interested me I took home and continued reading when I wasn't helping with the cleaning or in the kitchen (where little help was required because almost everything that Fernando bought was half-ready or frozen), or skating around the neighborhood or just watching TV – my favorite activity.

Watch TV, said Fernando. It's good for picking up English.

His TV set didn't have purple smudges. I watched TV feverishly, trying to catch every bit of slang. After an hour I'd have a headache. Reading wasn't a good pain killer. Sometimes washing pots and vacuuming the living room was. Cleaning the windows.

I liked cleaning the windows of Fernando's house and was sorry there weren't more of them; it would have been great if the house were floor-to-ceiling glass. The noise of the moist paper on the glass was comforting. It was of the order of practical things, of useful, honest things without anything grandiose about them. It was a good, simple activity. My mother would have approved. She would have cleaned the windows too, if she had been there.

I imagined her married to Fernando – it was a little difficult, the image, but I tried hard and something came of it. Thinking about my mother and Fernando married was almost like watching a film: two entirely strange people acting out a scene in a time when I didn't even exist, with strange gestures and wearing clothes that were already out of fashion, until a director said cut. Two people who lived together for the duration of a film screening.

A few times a week Fernando would go out, when he wasn't working at the library, to clean people's houses. A good way to make some extra money, he explained. I spend three hours cleaning someone's house and I take home seventy dollars. Tax-free. And no one bothers me. I'm my own boss and the whole thing is between me and the carpet, me and the windows, me and the bathroom sinks and toilets and tiles. Not bad.

I thought Fernando didn't like people. As a security guard, at the library, he always maintained a professional, distant air – which mustn't be too hard, I guess, when you are a security guard. People don't tend to come up to you to chat. His uniform commanded respect, official-looking and imbued with power, and his strong arms and surly face completed the picture.

I wondered what Fernando thought about for hours and hours on end, just standing there, not talking to anyone. At other times, he had carpets, windows and toilets for company. He had his own equipment: a vacuum cleaner, the most efficient products, a kit developed through years of experience. He would put everything in the back of the red Saab and drive off for another few hours of not interacting with humanity.

For me, considering all this, his relationship with my mother left the realm of films and became a cloud of ectoplasm exhaled from a medium's nostrils. That is, a phenomenon I had heard of but couldn't really believe in. My mother liked parties and people; she liked cooking for lots of friends and having house guests; she liked dancing. She liked sticking her head out the window of her Fiat 147 and singing “Me & Bobby McGee” at the top of her lungs. How could she ever have taken an interest in this guy?

I asked the question in a bold gesture at dinner (it was that New Orleans-style food, which came pre-mixed and seasoned in a little box and all you had to do was add water and boil it for twenty-five minutes and I was already an expert at it): Have you changed a lot since you were married to my mother?

He shrugged.

No one changes. You just get used to things. You adapt.

He said it without bitterness. Fernando came across as being exactly what he appeared to be. Which could mean two things: that he was exactly what he appeared to be. Or that he was a talented liar, the worst kind – the sort that lie to themselves, with so much conviction and effort that they end up believing it, and then when they tell other people their lies they think they are actually telling the truth.

But this was a supposition made months later. I still didn't know Fernando well enough to think anything except that what he had said at dinner was hogwash. That my mother would never have taken an interest in him if he had been, at thirty-six, the same man that he appeared to be at fifty-something. That the whole story that no one changes, etc., was just something you trotted out in conversation. That one of them had certainly changed, and a lot, and I suspected it hadn't been my mother.

But she wasn't there to confirm it, so I stayed quiet. Another thing she had taught me was to mind my own business.

Which I followed to the letter with Fernando.

In the beginning, at least.

 

When Fernando called Elisa's house and asked to speak to me, he had probably had time to rehearse his words. He had had time to chew over, swallow and digest the information in my letter, which was a lot, and serious.

I imagined him arriving home at the end of a normal afternoon and getting his correspondence from the letterbox in his little garden – one of those square letterboxes that I had only seen in cartoons.

An envelope with dangerously Brazilian green and yellow trim. Inside it, news about the woman he had been married to for six years and whom he hadn't seen or spoken to or heard of for so long that maybe he wondered if she had really existed.

She had really existed, said my letter, but didn't anymore, at least not in the way we tend to understand existence in terms of the spongy substance that we carry around on the ends of our necks. I could think of at least one way in which my mother continued to exist a little, and to certify it all I had to do was touch my own skin. Nothing particularly transcendental or esoteric or mystical, no ectoplasm-sneezing mediums: my own skin. Me. I was her, a little, wasn't I?

Maybe Fernando thought similarly. He called me and said he was very sorry to hear the news and asked how I was with a forwardness that was somewhat excessive, perhaps rehearsed. Then he told me the barest essentials about his life, where he worked (as a security guard at the Denver Public Library), that he lived alone and that yes, I could stay with him for a while until – until things were resolved, or moving along.

Neither of us knew how things were going to be resolved, or even how they were going to move along, or how we were going to move them along, because without a gesture they would most certainly stay the way they were. But I would attend the public school in Lakewood for a while and he would help me as much as he could.

Depending on what happened, well, depending on what happened I would return to Brazil later. To Elisa's place in Copacabana. It was curious how the central people in my life were now all peripheral. My mother's foster sister. My mother's ex-husband.

I don't know if Fernando could have guessed, at that moment, during that trans-hemispheric phone call, how much he was capable of. He would be surprised. But the future was (and is, and always will be) a mutating thing, the fruit of successive forks in the road, and I was already beginning to suspect that making plans was an embarrassingly useless habit.

I have a little money, I said. My mother left it. It isn't a lot, but I'll be able to help out.

Where one eats, there's always room for one more, he said. The school is public. We'll get by.

You're brave, Elisa told me, when I hung up. And I must be crazy.

I looked at her and didn't say anything but I thought lots of things. You didn't have to be brave to do what I was doing. In fact, you'd have to be brave to stay where I was, a fixed point in space, nurturing like a sick little animal the idea that nothing had changed, that nothing was different, walking along the same streets, keeping up the same habits, faking myself.

What if I went with you. I'll go with you, she said.

She glanced sideways, clasped her hands together.

It isn't possible, I can't go with you. What about my work? I think it'd be better if you waited a while longer. A year or two.

I didn't say anything.

I now know that if I hadn't done what I did I would have turned to stone in that life, a bone that heals crooked. That was the window that pre-empted the impulse, the right moment to jump unseen into the cargo train as it passed, if that were the only way to take off into the world, and if I had to take off into the world. Nothing about it even remotely resembled irresponsibility or courage or spirit of adventure.

It wasn't an adventure. It wasn't a holiday or fun or a pastime or a change of scenery; I was going to the United States to stay with Fernando with a very specific objective in mind: to look for my father.

 

A person looking for something or someone basically has two possible outcomes on the horizon: they can find what they are looking for or not find what they are looking for.

I knew this. But when I made my decision and wrote the letter to Fernando and waited for his phone call with my only suitcase ready and then got on the plane that would fly in a north-westerly direction, at that moment finding or not finding my father was still just that, two possibilities of the same size, and I would deal with whatever I had to deal with when the time came.

Elisa sighed.

I can't go with you.

Then she cried a little.

Your mother should have got back together with Fernando when you were born. Fine, she didn't want to be with your father, she didn't have to stay with him, it was just a fling, you know? But Fernando was a nice guy. I'm sure she liked him.

She cried a little more.

Your mother was silly. She always found fault with everyone. No one was good enough, no one was right. That's why she ended up alone.

And she hugged me, and her smell had Vibrant Notes of Peach, Gold Raspberry and Patchouli, as explained in the commercial for the perfume she was wearing. I saw it all the time on the purple TV.

Then she took my head in her hands and brushed the hair off my forehead.

Fernando will take good care of you. He's a nice guy. He always was a nice guy. Your mother should have got back together with him. I'm going to save up to come visit you at Christmas.

 

In the years following that summer, I met entire families of Latin immigrants, legal and illegal, who made their living as cleaners.

I never met Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez, but I heard about her, the seventeen-year-old Mexican girl who died of heat stroke while picking grapes in the fields of California, without anyone offering her water or shade. It was in the month of May. The year, 2008. Maria Isabel's core body temperature reached 108 degrees.

Fernando had been a legal resident of the United States for almost thirty years, but he had never applied for citizenship, unlike my mother. I asked why and he told me that it was because it was a laborsome process. He made some extra money cleaning for seventy dollars. Each cleaning job took two to three hours.

In Rio de Janeiro, the cleaning lady who came to clean our apartment in Copacabana once a week earned half that and was there from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon. She would arrive with fresh bread from the bakery, for which my mother would reimburse her. She would stop cleaning to have lunch in the kitchen listening to the radio and then she'd wash the dishes and make a cup of coffee and smoke a cigarette and gossip and take a quick nap. Every now and then she'd sew a button back onto my clothes or let down a hem (my mother was a disaster with a needle and thread). She'd come by bus from São Gonçalo and the trip took about an hour. Before starting to work for private clients like us, she used to clean the parking lot of a shopping center in Barra da Tijuca, where her monthly wages couldn't even buy her a dress. The sun was hot. I don't know what her core body temperature was, but she ended up having to quit. She was sixty years old.

After examining Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez's body, the doctors discovered that she was two months pregnant. She was picking grapes for wine.

 

At the airport in Rio, Elisa and I ate
pães de queijo
, the mini
cheese buns, and drank
guaraná
. She was admirably strong until twelve seconds before we had to say goodbye.

The Federal Police officer asked for my authorization to travel and my birth certificate.