Crow Blue (5 page)

Like others, he was convinced, as he would tell me later – me, who was so far removed from that whole story – that the military dictatorship in Brazil could be overthrown only if the people took up weapons. Elections? A possibility that didn't exist. The path of peaceful transition wasn't a path. The revisionists could say what they wanted: the fact was that parties would splinter and new parties, who believed in the people's armed struggle, would come into being and a long war to free the Brazilian people would ensue. It would take place above all in the countryside, its initial strategy being guerrilla warfare.

Hence the course in Peking: in the name of the people's war. In the name of the communist revolution in South America's largest country, following the Chinese example. And while Horseshoe
Chico was learning guerrilla warfare techniques in China, the Brazilian Armed Forces were learning techniques for fighting the Domestic Enemy, including more and better torture methods, in the United States and Europe. And nowadays everyone knows about it all. But things have a distinctive face when you are living through the post-things years. When you were born so many years later. When you need people to enlighten you, to explain, to tell you that the obviousness that ended up being archived really was obvious. The ugly truths went to the restroom and touched up their makeup. (At school, during Brazilian history lessons, everything was tedious, distant and slightly implausible. I watched the pigeons outside as the teacher was saying that during the 1960s. That during the 1970s. The 1970s for me were
That 70s Show
on the channel that showed foreign TV programs.)

Chico was good with weapons.

He was also good with women.

Both had appeared in his life very early. He had studied target-shooting in the interior of his home state of Goiás when he was still an adolescent. He was a natural. There was some kind of metaphysical union between him and the target. The bullet obeyed. The bullet knew resistance was futile.

Around the same time he fell in love with the first prostitute of his life, at the exact instant in which she took his hand and placed it on her cleavage. He asked her to marry him. She smiled at him in a half benevolent, half this-is-nothing-new-to-me way, and asked: how old are you? Seventeen. Liar, she said. I swear, he lied. And she didn't say anything else. That wasn't anything new to her either. In fact, most things were nothing new to her and everything was more of the same. Including kids who lied that they were seventeen when it was obvious that they were fifteen, if that.

He didn't actually say
prostitute
. He just described her one day, after a few beers, as a girl who worked in one of those places where there are girls, and my imagination filled in the rest, fishing meanings out of his silence, hanging in the air like those speech balloons in cartoons. He said he liked her, and I pictured her cleavage and thought it may really have been like that, just as I have pictured some other things over the years. After all, if people didn't provide me with details, I had the moral right to provide them myself.

 

At any rate, unfortunately, Horseshoe
Chico's two talents didn't always agree to live in harmony in his future. Back then he was just Fernando, a kid who was full of energy and talked non-stop, useful qualities when he entered the University of Brasilia to study geography and got involved in the People's Action movement. He went to jail once or twice too. But he didn't learn to keep his mouth shut and watch the proud genesis of the Brazilian Economic Miracle (which was only miraculous for a while, and not for everyone, as he explained to me, but there was no question about it: everyone knew how painful, intensely painful, often mortally painful it was to challenge the military-uniformed status quo).

Almost four decades later, he still knew Chairman Mao's words off by heart: When the enemy advances, withdraw. When he stops, harass. When he tires, strike. When he retreats, pursue.

Not that things of this sort were still part of his life when I went to live with him almost four decades later.

Everything had a price. Doing something. Not doing something. Advance, withdraw, stop, harass, pursue.

Everything already had a price when he was commando-crawling through the frozen mud in Peking, during the training that was supposed to take six months and ended up taking over a year. It had a price when he attended night classes in political theory, interpreted by two Chinese comrades whom he secretly nicknamed Ping and Pong – a vice of the good humor that, back then, was almost an illness and wouldn't let go of him under any circumstances, not even on the coldest night of the Chinese winter and with serious subjects under discussion.

Everything already had a price when, on the journey back, the group of fifteen resistance fighters
broke up in order to return to Brazil.

Saying that everything already had a price already had a price.

Chico entered Brazil across the Bolivian border, on foot, after passing through Europe. He stopped off in several Brazilian cities. He visited his mother in Goiânia, his widowed seamstress mother who was infinitely worried about the things her son was involved in and there was no point in him saying, in his best Maoist tone of voice, that he was doing it for her too. I'd rather you got a job, she would say, got married, gave me a couple of grandkids (not Maoists, she might have added), had barbeques (idem) on Sundays and didn't disappear without a word for so long.

She didn't know about the weapons, or Peking, and only suspected that her son's disappearances had something to do with politics. Worse than that, with communists, those bearded, inflamed men. She didn't know her son was one of them. Beard notwithstanding.

Chico met afterwards with the party leaders, worked in a country town in Bahia for a while and arrived in São João do Araguaia, in the state of Pará, on a summer's day, three years after boarding that plane to Peking.

 

Pará was a whole country. It was the size of a country. Pará was almost big enough for two Frances. Three Japans. Two Spains and a bit. More than one thousand, six hundred Singapores. In that vastness in Brazil's north, to which Brazil itself was oblivious, lived two million people when Chico set foot there for the first time.

It rained on the land, which was muddy and slippery, where shoes sank in and became stuck and came up sporting extra clods of mud on their soles when he lifted his feet.

It rained on the river, the Araguaia, the “River of the Macaws.”

It rained on the forest: the wild, superhuman Amazon, which the communists believed would be a friend of the rebels, hell for the Armed Forces – an area fertile for planting subversion, as an army report would conclude.

The rain made Chico's clothes stick to his body, his hair to his forehead.

He glanced to one side and even though it wasn't one hundred percent appropriate at the time he decided to have a chuckle at the water dripping from the straight black hair of the young woman the guerrillas had come to collect in Xambioá, along with him, to take to that piece of nowhere where they were now arriving, strangers to one another, strangers to everyone else, strangers to the place, strangers, period.

He decided to laugh at the forest's thick rain drooping from her eyelashes, which made her blink a lot.

And she ended up laughing too, even if it wasn't one hundred percent appropriate at the time. She laughed at the dirty, worn t-shirt stuck to the thin kid's chest, and laughed because she didn't know anything: where she was, what exactly she was going to do there under the generic name of guerrilla training, where that thin kid was from. His hands were calloused. His arms were firm. Her hands were the elegant hands of a student from Rio, much more accustomed to books than to the jungle. She had smuggled some nail polish and nail polish remover with her in her bag. And a wad of cotton.

The young woman would discover that Chico knew how to use a hoe. That he was good with weapons.

And other things.

When the enemy advances, withdraw. When he stops, harass. When he tires, strike. When he retreats, pursue.

The young woman went by the codename Manuela. She had left Rio de Janeiro not knowing her final destination. When she arrived in the forest, she was given a large knife and a revolver. She would live in a crude shack
together with a group that included the thin kid. It was the Faveira guerrilla base, Detachment A.

She would learn to sleep in a hammock, use a revolver and work the land. Her elegant hands would cease to be elegant. The nail polish and nail polish remover would never be used. She would help set up a small school in a nearby village and would start to teach there. She would grow fond and then very fond of the thin kid, who wasn't a kid, as he was twenty-five, two years older than her (fine, but he looked like a kid).

One day he told her about Peking, the frozen mud, the children playing in the snow, the opera, the farms and factories that he had visited (fine, but he still looked like a kid).

Deep in the forest, their neighbors were squatters: people who had fled the drought in Brazil's northeast, which lacked the wealth that fell here in abundance – the rainwater that muddied the ground, that stuck to the soles of Chico's worn shoes and that ran from Manuela's damaged, glamourless hair, falling as only Amazonian rain knows how to fall. Real
rain
rain, spilling all over the word, over every letter, over all of the preconceived ideas that you might have of rain, flooding them, warping them, drenching them and leaking through the cracks, showing you that if until that point you had referred to some other meteorological phenomenon as rain, you would have to rethink. Reconsider.

The squatters would arrive and occupy a piece of land in the middle of that no man's land. They would fell some trees, build a hut to live in and stay on.

The squatters thanked the rain for the rain; they thanked the rain gods, any thing or being, imaginary or not, physical or metaphysical in nature, that meant this: water in excess, the land on which to catch it.

 

A little over a year from then, General Médici affixed a bronze plaque to a tree trunk in the municipality of Altamira, inaugurating the great highway, which would go down in history as the most monumental public work conceivable by the military regime. The plaque said:
On these banks of the Xingu, deep in the Amazon jungle, the President of the Republic begins the construction of the Trans-Amazonian Highway, a historic start to the
conquest of this gigantic green world
.

It was forty degrees that day. The general had hung the Brazilian flag from a tree (everything was improvised in those parts, it seemed) and listened to a military band play the national anthem, after being greeted by the three thousand inhabitants of Altamira. Later, the felling of a 160-foot tree marked the beginning of work on the future highway. The president was deeply moved.

His transport minister was also happy. He had an apple of his eye and the apple of his eye was a bridge: in addition to the highway slicing through Brazil from the Atlantic to the Peruvian border, in the southeast of the country Colonel Andreazza was building a structure, planned almost a century earlier,
over Guanabara Bay to connect the cities of Rio de Janeiro and Niterói. The bridge had an enormous advantage over the highway: it would be finished. Better yet, the work wasn't inaugurated in the middle of the jungle, but amid civilization, and in the presence of two of the most civilized exponents of the civilized world possible: Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip.

A lot of people died during the construction of the Rio-Niterói Bridge. Legend has it that the dead stayed there, at the bottom of the bay, and the bridge was built over their bodies. If this is true, anyone driving over it is crossing a sad informal cemetery where cadavers rub shoulders with fish and concrete. The rumbling of the traffic overhead and the slight vibration of the heavy structure reaches their impotent, deafened ears. In their interrupted thoughts echo memories of the salty smell of the sea and the salty smell of the bay's humid air, crisscrossed by gulls and planes. With or without legends, the bridge was completed, with all the boring into the ocean floor and other monumentalities befitting the largest country in South America.

In Altamira, the tree trunk with the plaque commemorating the inauguration of the Trans-Amazonian Highway is known as the “President's Tree.” There is some vegetation growing over it. Nearby is the municipality of Medicilância, but most of the population doesn't know who Médici was.

To me, he was (yet) another name in a history book, on a list of past presidents that we had to memorize. Someone who had called the shots in Brazil when my mother was still a child. When I wasn't even an idea, or a wish, or a danger, when I wasn't even holding a number waiting for someone to say off you go, it's your life now, it starts in five minutes.

It was as if Fernando and I were from different countries.

 

In forty years, an unimaginable number of things can happen. A fraction of them actually do. People are born, die, sing songs called “Me & Bobby McGee,” don't sing them, more people are born, more people die, several disappear from the map without a trace. Trans-Amazonian highways inaugurated with great pomp are never finished, and the size of the wound can even be seen from outer space. Jeep drivers and motor cyclists often travel it in pursuit of mud and excitement. National football teams become three-time world champions, then four-time world champions, then five-time world champions, knowing that it still isn't everything and that history goes on. Eclipses take place. Tidal waves, earthquakes and hurricanes stir up many parts of the planet. Amazon forests start being cleared, non-governmental organizations emerge in their defense. Amazon forests continue being cleared to the order of one Belgium a year, basically for cattle farming. The miracle of the transubstantiation of forest into beef. (Soy? It too is transubstantiated. It is exported and becomes cattle fodder in rich countries.)