Authors: Adriana Lisboa
It was English and Spanish because she’d lived in the United States, in Texas and New Mexico, for twenty-two years, and if there’s one thing that twenty-two years in a place will impose on you it is mastery of the local language, even if you don’t have any special talent for it.
My mother had learned English formally at school. Spanish, informally, with the
tejanos
.
And I learned both from my mother, submitting to her lessons with a resistance that was never any match for hers.
¿Es el televisor?
No, senõr (señorita, señora), no es el televisor. Es el gato.
Once upon a time there were four little Rabbits, and their names
were –
Flopsy,
Mopsy,
Cottontail,
and Peter.
(Later on I saw Peter Rabbit in supermarkets at Easter. I remembered my mother. I also remembered Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail, who were very good little rabbits and thus escaped life’s punishments, though they lacked Peter’s heroic charm.)
The mothers in my family die young. By the age of nine my mother had lost her mother and gone to Texas with her geologist father. A work opportunity for him, which he’d gotten through his contacts’ contacts’ contacts.
My mother grew up in Texas. One day (she never told me why, and somehow I didn’t think I should ask) she severed ties with her father and moved to New Mexico.
My mother liked severing ties with men and disappearing from their lives. The tendency began there, with my geologist grandfather.
She found a little house in Albuquerque, near Route 66, with its old-fashioned charm, more than a decade before I was born. One of those little adobe houses, with a flat roof resting on wooden beams that ran horizontally through the walls.
She still lived in this house when I was born. We lived there until I was two. I visited it much later, with Fernando and Carlos, my improbable pair of travel companions, one icy November day. It was a small house of the most absolute simplicity, as if it had sprung from the ground itself.
My mother made her living teaching English to Mexicans migrating back to New Mexico – some time after the Americans had migrated there, as she liked to say. Who was foreign there, who was a local? What language did the land speak? (In essence, it didn’t speak English or Spanish, because the people who were there when the explorers and conquistadores arrived were Navajo and Anasazi and Ute. And others. And others before them. But none with the surnames Coronado or Oñate, no one known as Cabeza de Vaca. Or Billy the Kid.)
My mother also taught Spanish to Americans. University students sometimes sought her out. Some, very few, wanted to learn Portuguese. By this time it was the least fluent of her three languages. But because of her students she delved into Brazilian music and films and books. The few Americans interested in Brazil made my mother rediscover Brazil, perhaps a little clumsily at first, with the awkwardness of the prodigal child who returns home with their hands in their pockets and drooping ears. But who a short time later are crossing their feet on the table and flicking cigarette butts into corners.
I don’t remember my early childhood in Albuquerque, of course. When I travel back in time, it feels as though I was born in Rio de Janeiro. More specifically, on Copacabana Beach – right there on the sand, among the pigeons and the litter left behind by beachgoers. I think of Copacabana. I close my eyes and even if I’m listening to
Acoustic Arabia
and burning Japanese Zen-Buddhist temple incense, what reaches my senses is a faint whiff of sea breeze, a faint taste of fruit popsicles mixed with sand and salt water. And the sound of the waves fizzing on the sand, and the popsicle vendor’s voice under the moist Rio sun.
I remember the light, my fingers digging tunnels and building castles in the wet sand, patiently. There were other children around, but we were all the beginning, middle and end of our own private universes. We played together, that is, sharing space in a kind of tense harmony, but it was as if each child were cocooned in his or her own bubble of ideas, sensations, initiatives, and state-of-the-art architectural projects involving wet sand and popsicle sticks.
So I was born at the age of two on Copacabana Beach, and it was always summer, but a summer wedded to water, and my tools for changing the world – for altering it and shaping it and making it worthy of me – were a little red bucket and a yellow sieve, spade and rake.
And further along was a horizon to which I gave no thought. The imaginary line where the sky and sea parted company, liquid to one side, not liquid to the other. A kind of concrete abstract.
I left the horizon in peace and preferred to dream of islands, which were real, and which maybe I’d be able to swim to if I ever got serious about swimming, and which were separated by a world of different shadows, a world where speeds and sounds were different, where animals very different to me lived. A world of fish, of algae, of mollusks, of crow-blue shells – like those I would read about in a poem, much later. A whole other life, another register, but a human being could actually swim between them, observe them, dive to the ocean floor in Copacabana and touch the intimacy of the sand, there, so far from the popsicle sticks and volleyballs and
empada
vendors. The intimacy that was completely alien to the usual chaos of the neighborhood of Copacabana, where people hurried along or dawdled with the elderly gait of the retired or mugged or got mugged or queued at the bank or lifted weights at the gym or begged at traffic lights or pretended not to see people begging at traffic lights or looked at the pretty woman or were the pretty woman with the tiny triangles of her bikini top or tallied up prices on the supermarket cash register or picked up litter from the sidewalks and streets or tossed litter on the sidewalks and streets or sold sex to tourists or wrote poems or walked their dogs. The drama of the city didn’t even figure in the subconscious of the ocean floor. It wasn’t important or relevant. It didn’t even exist there.
The horizon was the theme of those who yearned for the impossible. So they could keep on yearning, I guess. I’ve always thought it was complacent to search for something you’re never going to find. Pondering the poetry and symbolism of the horizon wasn’t for me. I preferred to ponder islands and fish.
Or, better yet, the architecture of the castle I was building that morning, which was not going to crumble this time. I was making some improvements to the project, which had already failed several times.
There were children and adults around me; I was aware of their existence more or less peripherally. We could get along well if we didn’t bother one another, if we interacted as little as possible. The beach was large and free of charge, the sun was for everyone.
In Rio, my mother also taught English and Spanish. And Portuguese to foreigners. She said it was a Wild-Card Profession and she said it like she meant it. Anywhere in the world, there would always be people wanting to learn English and/or Spanish. And Portuguese – Portuguese would increase its sphere of influence after Brazil showed the world what it was made of.
You’ll live to see it, she’d say, straightening her back and lifting her chin as she spoke, as if defying the very air in front of her to contradict her.
When we went to live in Brazil, she became a nationalist. An advocate of all things Brazilian, among them the language we had inherited from our European colonizer and acclimatized, and which she came to consider the most beautiful in the world.
It was the 1990s and she
voted in the presidential elections
. All Brazilians of age
voted in the presidential elections
. They were still getting used to this degree of democracy, but they’d get there one day, she’d say. We’ll get there. If I hadn’t been such a small child at the time, I might have asked how, if the first thing that the first democratically elected president in three decades had done, on his first day in office, was to confiscate the money in people’s savings accounts. He promised it would be returned at a later date. This happened a year before we returned to Brazil and my mother hadn’t felt the brunt of it, but Elisa no doubt ranted and raved and uttered swear words that I could have memorized for future reference if I’d been present and able to understand her. But, at the end of the day, they were adults and should have known what they were doing, electing, confiscating, swearing.
My mother and I never returned to Albuquerque together. In fact, we never returned to the United States together.
Firstly, because she no longer got paid in US dollars for her lessons, and in Brazil human resources were pretty cheap, even perfectly trilingual human resources, so the trip was too expensive for our new green and yellow more-or-less-underpaid pockets.
Secondly, because my mother wasn’t one to retrace her steps. When she left, she left. When she walked out, she walked out.
In the long summer holidays, we always went to Barra do Jucu, in the state of Espírito Santo, where my mother had friends. We’d climb into her Fiat 147 and some seven hours later we’d arrive, weary and happy, and along the way my mother would listen to music and sing along, and we’d stop at diners that smelled of grease and burnt coffee to use restrooms that smelled of urine and disinfectant, where a very fat employee sat crocheting and sold crocheted doilies
and underwear next to a cardboard box that said TIPS PLEASE.
My mother would play Janis Joplin and turn up the volume and stick her head out the window of her Fiat 147 and sing along:
Freedom’s just another word
.
.
.
Even when I didn’t understand the words, I was hypnotized by my mother’s trance. She seemed like another woman, which fascinated and frightened me. Her voice had a hoarseness exactly like Janis Joplin’s and I wondered why some people became Janis Joplin and others became my mother.
You sing just as well as Janis Joplin, I once told her.
The only thing we have in common is that her dad worked for Texaco, she replied. You know. Oil.
When I was informed that Janis Joplin had died in 1970, almost two decades before I was born, I was indignant. I had thought Janis Joplin was my contemporary, and that she was singing “Me & Bobby McGee” somewhere on the planet, while my mother, who was everything Janis Joplin hadn’t been, who was her opposite, her antimatter in another dimension, was sticking her head out the window of the car that wasn’t a Porsche painted in psychedelic colors and belting out what she could to the scalding-hot asphalt of the highway.
In Barra do Jucu, my mother sometimes went out dancing at night, or to meet someone for a few beers.
Two of these someones became boyfriends who lasted a few summers. One of them came to visit us in Rio. The other one lived in Rio, was a surfer and had a five-year-old boy whom I envied, secretly and angrily. In Rio and Barra do Jucu, my mother’s boyfriend started teaching me to surf, but then things between them ground to a halt. He called me for a few months to ask how things were going and to try to discover, between the lines, if my mother had met someone else, and if this someone else seemed more likable than him, and why. I became the surfer’s ally, but it was no good. One day he stopped calling, and I stopped surfing.
My mother’s friends in Barra do Jucu also had young kids. We liked to watch the crabs in the mangrove swamp right behind the house – the crabs held a terrible fascination for me and, though horrified and disgusted, I couldn’t keep my eyes off their slow, muddy walk, those lone monks in their long meditative trances. The other kids and I changed from pajamas into beachwear and from beachwear into pajamas, after a hose-down at the end of each day. Someone always butted in with a bar of soap and a bottle of shampoo: growing up is a drag. But I was violently happy there, and returned from Barra do Jucu when the holidays were over with skin the color of dark wood, almost like the jacaranda table in our living room.
Elisa used to call me her little caramel girl. Elisa was my mother’s foster sister.
My family’s genealogy is confusing and simple at the same time. My grandmother brought up Elisa as if she were her own daughter. Later my mother was born and then my grandmother died, and when my mother went to Texas with my grandfather, Elisa stayed in Rio. She was all grown up, sixteen years old, and had a job and a fiancé who would never become her husband but was a fiancé nonetheless, which was better than nothing. Unlike his real daughter, she never severed ties with the man who had brought her up, though she never saw him again either, because there was an entire continent between them, and when my retired-geologist Brazilian grandfather died of a Texan snakebite on Texan soil at the age of sixty-seven, she was the one who broke the news to my mother, all the way from the southern hemisphere.
Elisa was the daughter who had accidentally sprung from the womb of
my mother’s mother’s maid. There was no father in the picture. The mother died in childbirth.
I’ll bring her up, said my grandmother, and that was how Elisa came into the family.
But she’d always be the maid’s daughter, and this original sin, this hybridism with the dark world of the servant class, in a caste system deeply rooted in Brazilian society from day one, set her apart from my mother, who went to the United States, while Elisa stayed behind after my grandmother’s death. If she nursed any hurt feelings like tiny secret jewels at the bottom of a drawer, she never let on to me. Later she studied to be a nurse and got a job in the public service
and broke off her engagement because her fiancé kept stalling. According to Elisa, it was better to be alone than in a dead-end relationship.