Adriana Lisboa - Crow Blue

She knew I needed that information. And she would never have forgiven herself if she hadn’t told me first-hand what would soon be evident and self-explanatory. If I became aware of the facts not through her but through her disease, that inconvenient visitor sitting on the couch talking about unpleasant matters. That fountain of faux pas. It would be a kind of betrayal if the disease were to call me aside and say, with a glass of whisky in its hand: hey, you there, did you know. .?

My mother always answered all of my questions, so that any censorship was up to me: if I didn’t want to know something, all I had to do was not ask. It wasn’t always an easy decision. At times I would have preferred not to have all that autonomy regarding my own maturity. I would have preferred that certain choices had already been made at the factory and came with a sticker indicating the appropriate age group. Like at the movies. But my mother was my mother.

And that’s the way it was, until the following year. I turned twelve. My breasts suddenly sprang out under my blouse, like employees late for work. My mother died as she had said she would, and it didn’t take long as she had told me it wouldn’t, and afterwards nothing was the same as before, as we both knew it wouldn’t be.

It was in the month of July. And if the following year was displaced, there wasn’t anything strange about that. There was a struggle going on, an internal battle: not to feel sorry for myself, in spite of all the sighs of “poor little thing” that I heard coming from heedless mouths.

I didn’t feel poor or little. Something had happened, and the thing had two different appearances depending on which way you looked at it. My mother had also told me all of this.

It could be an antediluvian monster of sadness, something solid and unbearably heavy, with paws of lead, breath reeking of sulfur and beer, something that grabbed and silenced me, that reduced me to a heart that kept beating for lack of any other alternative. I could drag around a pair of bureaucratic feet and a pair of bureaucratic eyes, staring into space, my clothes hanging somewhat crooked on my body and greasy hair flopping across my forehead.

Or it could be something that happened among the myriad of things that happen all over the world in every instant, and at the same time there are traces of snow among the cactuses on a mountain in New Mexico, and a child in Jaipur drops a plate on the ground and the plate breaks, and a cat sneezes in Amsterdam and an ant loses its balance on a leaf in the Australian outback and kids graffiti a mural in Rio or in New York or in Bogotá. And my life would go on because I was the boss of it, not it of me.

Or maybe it was none of the above and I just needed a niche of quietness, of things not happening, a long, lasting moment, a moment that was the size of several moments, as many as necessary, that allowed me to be quiet, without having to name the things that I didn’t want to name.

To stay there. Still. As if I had become a vase of plastic flowers on a shelf. The sort that requires no care at all. The sort that has no beauty, quality, singularity, scent, nothing. Something that can exist in the world with the courtesy of reciprocal indifference: I won’t get in your hair if you don’t get in mine.

And at school people were kind and helpful and looked at me with charity-tea eyes. And I’d walk past them and maybe they wondered what I was thinking, never imagining that I wasn’t thinking anything. That I didn’t want to think anything. That I didn’t want their cards or flowers, or to be let off tests; that all I wanted was to pretend I was transparent, and if possible for them to pass right through me without even noticing.

I went to live with Elisa, my mother’s foster sister, and she got it. She was the only one. Elisa let me lose as much weight as I wanted, sleep as much as I wanted and have as much insomnia as I wanted. Elisa let me not talk as much as I wanted. And she let me celebrate my thirteenth birthday with our octogenarian neighbors and then take a piece of cake to the beggar and his dog on the corner of Rua Duvivier. I squatted down next to the beggar and his dog and I noticed that the beggar had brown eyes and the dog had green eyes and in the eyes of both were things I had never read about in encyclopedias.

Elisa helped me when, at a given moment, I said, I want to call Fernando.

What Fernando, she asked, forgetting who he was and thus unaware of the importance that he had come to have in my life.

Fernando, my mother’s ex-husband, I said.

No one knew Fernando’s whereabouts. Someone thought he still lived in the United States, where he delivered pizzas or perhaps worked in a lunch bar selling Amazonian hamburgers. Or whatever it was that Brazilian immigrants did in the United States. Maybe he played golf or went skiing in his spare time. Maybe he wore a floral shirt in Miami or designer sunglasses in Los Angeles. Someone thought they had seen him just the other day on Leme Beach (looking older, pot-bellied).

A whole network of contacts, of Joe-Blow-who-knows-so-and-so’s-brother-Joe-Schmoe-who-was-Fernando’s-friend, was established. Half of Copacabana Beach was now mobilized in search of Fernando.

It couldn’t be that hard to locate him, and he was the person — the only person — who could help me. Even almost two decades after he and my mother had broken up, and she had disappeared from his life, as she liked to do with all men.

It was a question of personal responsibility. My personal responsibility. And the inclusion of Fernando as a character in a story that at first had nothing, or almost nothing, to do with him. But which ended up being as much his as it was mine.

One fine day his name came up like that, an image gate-crashing a dream, and the memory that I didn’t have came in its wake. Where might Fernando be, Fernando from the old days, whose face, to be honest, I couldn’t remember (nor did I have any way to), who might he be today, how old might he be?

The network of informants closed in on him. Fernando was fifty-something and lived in Lakewood, a suburb of Denver, Colorado, far from the sea, from all beaches, in the west of the United States of America.

I looked it up on the map. I liked the name Colorado. It was a rectangular state flanked by other rectangular states. On the map, there were fungus-shaped mountains crossing Colorado from north to south. Green shadows indicating forests and a large brown smudge indicating the plains. To get to the ocean and its shells I could go to California or the Gulf of Mexico. It looked a little far.

Elisa argued with me, then she stopped arguing. We hadn’t had any contact with Fernando for such a long time. Yes, my mother had been married to him, but she was ridiculously young when they tied the knot. And I needed to think, think hard. Whether or not my objective was reasonable, so to speak. But at one point she looked me straight on, in the eyes, and sighed.

My great-grandmother had her first baby at the age of thirteen, I told her.

I hope you don’t intend to do the same.

At my age, my mother already knew how to drive, I said. She learned in her dad’s pickup. I mean your dad’s. Both of your dad’s. I mean.

Someone got Fernando’s address, but no one managed to get his phone number. From the look of things, he wasn’t in the phone book. Maybe he didn’t have a phone? So I wrote a letter, hoping he still lived at 94 Jay Street.

Before opening the envelope, Fernando had no idea of the identity of the person who owned the hand behind the round handwriting, with balls instead of dots over the i’s. And the surname was too common to immediately set in motion the cogs of the past and the gears of recognition in his memory and produce an experimental fruit.