Adriana Lisboa - Crow Blue

June and Fernando polished off the bottle of wine and it became clear to us all that they might order a second and then a third. They didn’t. I looked at the thin waiter with piercings in his ear before we left and thought about Nick, whose name was still scribbled on my jeans, next to the drawing of Shah Jahan’s diamond.

June wandered the streets of downtown Santa Fé with us, reciting facts and dates with the proficiency of a newly graduated tour guide, zealous and eager to do her job. Living it to the fullest. We went to her house when it started getting dark and too cold. The air was treacherous. It hurt inside my nose. It burned my face. It anesthetized my lips and made us all talk as if we were slightly drunk or just back from the dentist.

She lived on a street named Camino Sin Nombre. Her house had lots of colors inside it and was also inhabited by a pair of mastiffs — Georgia and Alfred. (The O’Keeffe and Stieglitz were inferred by many, but not us, and so June explained about the woman who liked to paint flowers and animal skeletons, and the man who fell in love with the woman who liked to paint flowers and animal skeletons and who photographed her with her hair down in a white shirt. Carlos looked at some reproductions in a book and said that the Georgia lady was a good painter but that he thought those mountains were a bit weird in that painting, they didn’t look like real mountains, they looked like little Play-Doh mounds, and why did she paint such big flowers, he personally didn’t think flowers were all that interesting.)

June made a dinner that filled the house with warm smells. She put on music and hung invisible hooks in the air that brought us together, threads looped over a crochet needle. We were a world of compatibilities, we were joined, we were equivalent to one another — and where we weren’t, we compensated for one another.

One of June’s talents: the four of us were suddenly a large, improbable, multinational family, full of different languages and different accents in the same languages. Our ages were rather incompatible in theory, our preoccupations and occupations likewise, our pasts perhaps identified us as animals of different species, the result of distinct evolutionary processes, and yet there we were. All easy laughter. When no one was looking, I took a swig of wine from Fernando’s glass and thought it tasted like grapes with wood and alcohol. It was yucky. And I wondered if you had to swallow liters of grapes with wood and alcohol in order to train your palate or if it changed with age. If one fine day you just woke up liking sex, politics and alcoholic beverages.

The heating in June’s house was in the floor — Carlos and I quickly discovered it, the pleasure of walking barefoot on that large, warm, earthy plate. And we quickly realized that, like the painter Georgia, June also liked animal skeletons. There were two skulls in her living room and a small one in the bathroom. The two in the living room had wrinkled horns. The one in the bathroom didn’t. While Carlos and I performed a spoof of a ballet on the warm floor, the two old mastiffs watched, perhaps with the vague memory of having done that too at some stage, accompanying other children, in a time when the world had less joint pain.

June went outside for a smoke and Fernando went with her, both holding their drinks. As they were leaving I heard her say: the day before yesterday I saw two coyotes over there.

Later, when I woke up to go to the bathroom, June and Fernando were still talking in the living room, and laughing a lot, and there was a different smell in the air — a sweet smell, which wasn’t from a cigarette or incense. I had occasionally smelled it before in Barra do Jucu, during the holidays, at my mother’s friends’ house. Always after the children were all in bed.

I stopped and listened to Fernando’s laughter, that extemporaneous laughter softened by the marijuana, velvety, honest. I remembered my mother’s laughter, which was high-pitched and always easy. I closed the bathroom door, sat on the toilet, rested my elbow on the low window and cried a little, and outside there were perhaps two coyotes, treading light and agile in a world all their own.

Tropical forests, like the great recessive Amazon, are intense organisms. Life and death multiply there all the time, simultaneous, Siamese. One spoonfeeds the other. They do it at a routine, everyday pace, without a fuss. A habit that has almost nothing to do with the avatar of death that Fernando had learned to recognize and fear in the forest, when he went by the name of Chico.

In the forest I will be the tree, I will be the leaves, I will be the silence.

In mid-1972, the Armed Forces decided to set up their Civic-Social Actions. They planned vaccination campaigns against syphilis and yellow fever, distributed food by helicopter. The Ministry of Education decided to send money to local schools. The locals were able, thanks to the Civic-Social Actions, to do extravagant things, like get ID cards. Also in this time military repression in the Araguaia region was handed over entirely to the Planalto Military Command.

With the capture of some of the guerrillas, the Army learned things. It discovered, for example, that at night the communists listened to Tirana Radio, from Albania, and Peking Radio, from China. Both broadcast programs in Portuguese with recent news about the Araguaia Guerrilla Movement and left the military perplexed: how on earth did the information get to them? Back at home, the censured press only said what was convenient. But Brazilian Communist Party activists in the cities graffitied walls exalting the guerrilla war and letting everyone know that it was alive and well.

In September, Brazil commemorated the 150th anniversary of its independence from Portugal. With green and yellow flags, there were street celebrations and military orchestras.

In September, a guerrilla from Detachment C wrote a letter to his parents. May the fascist generals froth with hatred. The revolution is a reality and the people will win. My dear parents, I can’t wait for the day to arrive when I can walk into our house, embrace you at long last and say: Here is the triumphant revolution .

In September, the Estado de São Paulo , which received a list of forbidden topics on a daily basis, got around the censorship in an entirely unexpected way. The guerrilla war wasn’t on the list one day, so the newspaper published a story entitled “In Xambioá, the struggle is against guerrillas and underdevelopment”: While the joint forces of the Army, Navy and Air Force have approximately five thousand men hunting guerrillas in the jungles of the left bank of the Araguaia River, the Army initiated yesterday, simultaneously, in Xambioá and Araguatins, in the state of Goiás, on the right side of the river in the far north of the state, a Civic-Social Action designed to take assistance to the entire population of the area. Two days later, the story made the New York Times .

The Brazilian Armed Forces had five thousand men hunting a few dozen guerrillas in the forest. By now they also knew that the communists were practicing jungle survival techniques, learning to get their bearings from the sun, stars, and landmarks. Learning to commando crawl in the forest, to recognize edible fruits, to hunt. They knew they were practising target shooting, learning to ambush and storm, studying the enemy. The enemy was studying the enemy, a semantic knot that no one noticed.

Chico wasn’t up on these numbers, nor did he know that the guerrillas who had been caught were all sent to the Criminal Investigations Platoon in Brasilia. It was a place where physical and psychological torture methods had been finely tuned. The torturers had PhDs in dragging confessions (which, after all, one doesn’t get with bonbons) out of people. Naked and hooded men and women were trussed up and tied to poles where they were variously tortured, held underwater until they almost drowned, and even given electric shocks on their genitals.