Crow Blue (11 page)

 

One day I discovered a poem called “The Fish.” It was pretty difficult. It was in one of those (pretty difficult) anthologies of American poetry that the librarian gave me to read, full of literary honesty and belief in the future. And which I read thinking that it was all going to be transferred to my brain, lodge there and make me a different person (better, if possible: I worked hard at it and had a sponsor), just as the TV had taught me other basic survival techniques.

A few years later, having reread the poem called “The Fish” many more times, the axis of my feelings shifting a little more with each reading, I decided it was my favorite. My Poem. Of all of the ones I'd sweated over in the pages of the anthologies in Denver Public Library.

I discovered that the author, Marianne, was the daughter of an engineer-inventor by the fine name of John Milton Moore (I'd like to be called John Milton Moore if I were a man. Evangelina Moore doesn't work, but Marianne Moore does. That is the name of the author of my favorite poem and it is a lovely name). Her father was committed to an institution for the mentally ill before she was born. I didn't find anything about her mother; she was just John's wife and was named, quite appropriately, Mary. Marianne liked boxing and baseball.

When I read the “The Fish,” I was transported to a world of colors, of primordial movements. It contained crabs like green lilies and submarine toadstools.

And a turquoise sea of bodies. And crow-blue shells.

And a “sun split like spun” that was nice to repeat over and over, bringing with it an image of submerged shards of sunlight, shafts of sunlight. SUN SPLIT LIKE SPUN SUN SPLIT LIKE SPUN SUN SPLIT LIKE SPUN. Sun split like spun glass.

It had nothing to do with the studies by scientists at the University of Edinburgh revealing that fish can feel pain [citation required]. Not least because it was written well before them.

It also had nothing to do with the operations conducted by the Brazilian Armed Forces on the banks of the Araguaia River.

Those were other fish. The woman who wrote “The Fish” was dying when the Armed Forces trailed their dragnets for subversives through the Brazilian Amazon. And she had nothing to do with it. Just as no fish had anything to do with it. The story that was unraveling on the banks of the Araguaia was a human story. The fish only lent it their name.

Involuntarily, I might add – like confiscated savings accounts.

May I pet your dog?

 

I liked the expression “smooth sailing” the first time I came across it. I tried to find the best translation in Portuguese but nothing was quite right. It meant easy progress. But the expression itself evoked boats, the sea and calm surfaces and took me back to the time when that made immediate sense.

“Smooth” was the satiny quality of the water, “sailing” was the verb for the sail that puffed out with the wind and crossed entire oceans.

The moment the English teacher at school congratulated me on my efforts and summed it all up in that “smooth sailing,” I clearly saw myself in a sailboat making the tiniest tear in a perfectly silken sea, a progressive boat, a boat as pure and optimistic as the shoals of fish swimming beneath it.

I left school along liquid corridors, and the concrete of the sidewalk was liquid.

So I sailed. In a single expression the English teacher had defined my first few weeks in an entirely landlocked state, without any contact with any beach or any ocean.

In terms of water, in Colorado, I had seen the reservoirs where people sailed around in circles on Sundays. Cascading rivers in the folds of the mountains, on which people practiced turbulent sports – navigating downstream in yellow boats that looked like giant kitchen sponges or in pointy kayaks. I never suspected that all that water would grow thin and lock itself away in ice in the months to come, storing its liquidity in the slow metabolism of hibernation.

But I sailed on calm seas, that is, I made easy progress, that is, I was being successful in my daily attempts to not trip up.

Boats that sail on calm seas know no gravel, no loose stones in their path, they know no feet. Their mobility is made of waves and wind. With the right waves and the right wind the sailboat slips along free of metaphysics. Like a first-grade equation.

 

Daniel, my father's name, was a valid name in several languages, I discovered to my delight. Daniel was Daniel in English, Portuguese and Spanish, the three languages I had contact with every day, there in Lakewood.

The plump man in the blue shirt and tie in the Jehovah's Witnesses pamphlet would no doubt be able to explain the biblical origins of the name. All I knew was that it had belonged to someone who at some stage had had something to do with lions, according to legend. I didn't even know if he had fought them and won, with some intrinsically spiritual moral to be learned, or lost, with some intrinsically spiritual moral to be learned.

I suspected that Daniel didn't suspect that he had a thirteen-year-old daughter named Vanja, who was a citizen of two countries and lived in harmonious linguistic chaos, a daughter who spoke English at school, Portuguese at home and Spanish with the neighbors.

And I sensed that I needed to maintain that smooth sailing towards Daniel. Life needed to become an orderly series of tasks. More or less like a sailor's day-to-day life must be. An orderly physical world full of calculations and angles that is needed for a boat to sail.

The same orderly physical world where hungry lions kill Daniel, where disinterested lions spare Daniel – it's hard to say. There are the between-the-lines in all stories. Some gods like bloody martyrs (in the style of Tim Treadwell and his bears in Alaska), others don't really care.

But at any rate I suspected that Daniel didn't suspect that I existed.

 

After a few phone calls, Fernando had finally located some people. Among them, that old friend of my mother's who lived in Santa Fé. But couldn't Daniel have been located with a telephone book too? He could have, if there weren't lots of Daniels with the same surname all over New Mexico and if Daniel still lived in New Mexico and if he happened to be listed.

But maybe he had crossed the border and was now in Arizona or Texas or even Colorado, or in Mexico even, on the other side of an even more borderly border, or in British Columbia or Argentina (why not?), or virtually anywhere else in the world. Or maybe that specific Daniel no longer existed, and there were just his namesakes scattered across the globe, a one-man diaspora.

The old friend of my mother's who lived in Santa Fé taught piano and was called June. It had been over ten years since she'd last seen Daniel, as she explained to Fernando. She told him that he had moved to San Antonio, in Texas, and then they had lost touch. Emails, that kind of thing? She had tried, said Fernando. She had written to a few people, but hadn't heard back yet. We'd have to wait a little.

After a few moments of silence:

Why didn't you ever ask your mother where your father was?

Because I didn't need to know. Because I don't think she knew. Because I don't think she would have wanted to tell me. I don't know. Why did you and she stop talking?

Because we didn't have any reason to keep talking to each other.

Didn't you have anything to talk about? Didn't you care about each other anymore?

We didn't have anything to talk about. We didn't care about each other anymore. That must have been it.

He was chopping kale. I picked up a piece of kale that had fallen on the ground and put it back on the chopping board. And I dared to ask: Why did you have to leave Brazil?

The knife thudded against the chopping board as he chopped. Plac. Plac. Plac.

They were after me.

The police?

The army.

What had you done?

Some things.

Wrong things?

In their opinion, yes. Those were hard times.

I didn't know if I should shake Fernando to get him to spit out what he ended up telling me over the months to come, as ice covered the cascading rivers and the reservoirs, and afterwards, as the ice melted and swelled the cascading rivers and the reservoirs of the following summer. To get him to tell me about firearms and that other woman (Manuela/Joana) before London and my mother, before Lakewood, Colorado, and well before Vanja. The woman from the letter that lived in the seclusion of the wooden El Coto de Rioja wine crate.

But the idea of shaking Fernando was still sort of frightening. The idea of taking hold of those mounds of muscle and rattling them, as if I had any right to his life. I didn't. The fact that I was there just because he had once given me the gift of his name on my birth certificate was already a big deal.

 

When I think about Fernando today, nine years after those first few weeks in Lakewood, I remember his arms. That was where the real Fernando, his soul, his personality must have lived. The arms that were only a hypothetical force during his daily hours as a security guard at Denver Public Library, cat claws inside a cat's paws. The arms that I saw removing marks from windows and dust from surfaces and trash from other people's floors on so many occasions. The arms that had once tensed with the weight of a weapon – I don't know the weight of a weapon, I don't know the weight that you add to a weapon or subtract from it depending on the purpose with which it is picked up. The arms that I knew had wrapped around my mother's body, 360 degrees (love, a weapon, arms that disarm), and the body of that other woman before my mother and London and New Mexico and Colorado. The arms hard at work over a frying pan making
farofa
with the kale and the manioc flour bought in a store that sold Brazilian products. The arms that came home holding a red plastic sled when the first days of snow in early November held the promise of slippery slopes. The arms that pushed me down the slippery slopes while on the inside I was stiff, raw panic. The arms that learned to overcome their own inability to hug someone else's daughter in a goodnight ritual that in theory didn't even need to exist. The arms that closed the door after answering the Jehovah's Witness woman for the second and third time (had he read the pamphlet? Bible in hand, she wanted to know if he had any questions. And he didn't have the courage to say that the pamphlet had ended up in the trash, and he said he still hadn't had time to read it). The quiet arms that held my math book as the muscles in his face tensed with concentration.

 

We'd have to wait, as June from Santa Fé had said and as Fernando had repeated.

I didn't have any other commitment besides that one, to wait.

Five days a week I went to school. Two days a week I didn't. And meanwhile, I waited.

Five days a week I ate lunch at the same table as Aditi Ramagiri and her friends, in the school cafeteria, and one lusterless Wednesday I looked differently at a boy called Nick during math class, and the lusterless Wednesday became the great Mogul, Shah Jahan's diamond, said to be missing since the seventeenth century and which I had just found, somewhat awkwardly.

I would have to wait.

One day, as I was passing a light-blue house on my way back from school, our Salvadorian neighbors' son was standing on the sidewalk. He was a short, stocky boy, with a funny face.

He said hi in Spanish.
Hola.

I answered.

He asked
¿Como te llamas?

Vanja, I said.
¿Y tu?

Carlos.

Carlos wasn't an appropriate name for a child, I thought. Maybe all the Carloses in the world had been born adults. Except him, with his Ninja Turtles T-shirt and an American football in his little hands.

¿Juegas?
I asked, pointing at the ball with my chin.

No,
he said, simply.

Yo tampoco.

Two days later he knocked on Fernando's front door holding a book in English for children a lot younger than himself. Carlos's spoken English was very poor. And he could barely read at all. The book had a dozen phrases and huge drawings of cars, motorbikes, airplanes, buses, ambulances, fire engines and other motor vehicles that slid through the world with ease, grace and fossil fuels.

I asked how old he was.

Carlos looked at me with his chubby face, almond-shaped eyes behind glasses and short, spiky hair, and said nine. He handed me the book and asked if I could read it to him.

I offered him a glass of
guaraná
. From the store that sold Brazilian products.

We sat on the couch a palm's breadth apart. I began to read.

Carlos wanted to quickly skip to the next page to see the next picture.

I explained: Carlos, you have to pay attention, dude.

I started running my finger under the words as I read. Carlos began imitating them. A few minutes later, he perched his hand on my forearm and left it there, like a warm, slightly sweaty little bird. I wasn't sure if he really understood the words or if he was just pretending, if it was merely a strategy to keep me reading.