Adriana Lisboa - Crow Blue

One day, years later, I visited June’s house in Santa Fé once again. Her two dogs had died. She lived alone with her piano and her O’Keeffean skulls hanging on the walls. Coyotes roamed about outside. Perhaps they were the same ones. Or perhaps those ones had been run over or killed with a shotgun and other coyotes had come to replace them.

That day, June told me about Isabel.

She never did become an actress as she wanted, June said. But you saw how pretty she was. A little short, perhaps, but pretty. When she met her husband, she was working in one of those clubs, in Albuquerque, as a dancer. You know, taking her clothes off.

I didn’t know.

That was where she met her husband, and he wanted her to stop working, and he bought that house, and married her, and you know the rest of the story.

Do you think she regrets it?

What?

Stopping working at the club.

She could have gone back.

I imagined (how not to?) Isabel dancing in the club in Albuquerque. Taking off her clothes, piece by piece, according to a deconstruction of decorum that hierarchically determined which piece had to come off first and which piece had to be last. The body twisting around itself and exposing itself in tiny doses, until it was entirely exposed (at which point the show ended, because the fun was in the process, otherwise she could have climbed up onto the stage buck naked). It must have been a sight. I’m not surprised that the guy who became her husband saw her there and wanted to take her home for free private sessions. That he wanted to rob the rest of humanity of the privilege.

I imagined him corroded with jealousy by Isabel’s past, while she accepted naturally the fact that he had been and was still perhaps a frequenter of strip clubs. Was his new wife, up in Seattle, also an ex-stripper?

But for four nights Fernando had slept in the same bed with Isabel. For four nights he had sunk his rough fingers into her dark, wavy hair — her hair as dark as crow-blue shells and shell-blue crows — and had sunk his fingers into her hips, her dark hips, two big waves that were aligned with other waves that were aligned with other waves in wavy depths that at some point would arrive (would they?) at her essence. At her essence that was wavy, dark, blue, marine, ancestral like the Colorado sea and young like a young stripper dancing in a club in Albuquerque, the HOT AIR BALLOONING CAPITAL OF THE WORLD.

For four nights she had laughed with him in the same bed, slept with him in the same bed, lain awake with him in the same bed, sunk her fingers into his arms and his back and dreamed of a pair of coyotes outside and dreamed of a time when the Colorado sea covered it all and there were no coyotes wandering through Santa Fé because Santa Fé was underwater. Like the abandoned car carcasses when the river was full. She had dreamed of fish swimming through the windows of the future car carcasses in the future full river. She had dreamed of Mesozoic mollusks evolving at the bottom of the Colorado sea and dreamed in turn of future science museums. But maybe those were my dreams and Isabel’s dreams on those nights were of the order of secrets, the unfathomable. Like the Mesozoic mollusks that vanished from the planet without a trace, a mark, a fossil, a message.

Maybe those four nights were enough and anything else was superfluous, and she and Fernando would have undone the magic of those four nights with the wand of routine if they had turned into four months or four years or multiples of that.

Maybe those four nights weren’t enough but any philosophy of love involving impulsive sacrifices is one hundred percent stupid when put in practice. Saying certain things is beautiful. Living them out, not necessarily.

I know that Isabel and Fernando talked on the phone a few times. I also know that shortly after that long weekend she returned to Puerto Rico. She returned for good, as she had told us she might. She and Fernando talked on the phone a few times, until they stopped talking, like a noise that disappears into the distance and you don’t know exactly when you stopped hearing it.

I turned fourteen that December. I turned fifteen twelve months later. And I turned other ages, sixteen, seventeen — the process follows an incredible logic. Eighteen. Etc.

I returned to Rio de Janeiro once, to visit Elisa. Things were the same and different. Seven years had passed since I had left and perhaps the city’s cells had already been replaced with others. The city was the same and it wasn’t. The city was different and it wasn’t.

There were other generations of mollusks on the ocean floor in front of Copacabana Beach. I don’t know how long a mollusk lives. They were probably the grandchildren and great grandchildren of the mollusks of my childhood. At any rate, we were friends. Friends that had never met personally. Friends of friends, like in online social networks.

There were young children building sandcastles in the sand. There were their mothers. Depending on the place, tourists. Depending on the place, prostitutes.

Bodies were still jogging in the sun, muscular or flaccid or old or young. Men still wore tight speedos. Not all of them.

Fernando’s house on Jay Street in Lakewood, Colorado, slowly became my house too, by habit. By custom. By osmosis. We never wondered if I’d leave or stay after all the Clarifications. I finished the school year as a so-so student and entered the following school year. And the next school year, which I also finished so-so, and then the next. There was just one subject in which my grades were honestly good and, at the end of the day, I had the Denver Public Library librarian to thank for it. However, she wasn’t present to get teary-eyed and receive the applause of other teary-eyed people. After I gave my thanks I felt kind of silly. Like a politician on an election campaign, trying to say the nice things that people like to hear. But it was already done. Every now and then I’d go swimming with Fernando, and we’d come home smelling of chlorine and hang towels smelling of chlorine in the bathroom. One fine day I realized that it didn’t matter what country I was in. What city I was in. Other things were important. Not these.

I never again forgot Fernando’s birthday and the year after the yellow T-shirt year Carlos and I bought him a bottle of Belgian beer (with the help of a cooperative adult) and then, the next year, we bought him some perfume from Carlos’s favorite store — a skateboarders’ store, although he, Carlos, wasn’t a skateboarder. Nor was he predestined to become one.

The winters became my winters and the summers my summers. So to speak. The in-between seasons stopped being a luxury and became, in the autumn, the rake that I use to rake up the leaves in front of the house and, in the spring, the flower that blooms in front of the house where I could have sworn nothing would survive the snow storms. And the flower blooms even if I don’t look after the garden (I don’t look after the garden). My customary, everyday things, like sleeping or cleaning my ears. When I learned to drive, I took Carlos to ride down the river in Boulder, with our backsides in tire tubes.

A little over a year ago I laid Fernando to rest. He died without guerrillas, wives or lovers. In his memory flowed rivers such as the Araguaia and the Thames and the cascading rivers in the mountains of Colorado, and the Rio Grande, which cuts through Albuquerque. But rivers find their way to the sea, and fresh waters become salty and peopled with sea creatures and their shells.

Fernando’s body gave out one day as he was drinking coffee, during a break at work, and the whole thing went. His body spluttered like the motor of an old Saab, and it kept on spluttering, and then he started dying and continued dying until he was officially dead, which I was told by an Indian doctor with lowered eyes and tight, condolent lips.