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.
Or maybe he was bowled down by instant recall, that leaped up in his chest and caused him to raise his hand and lift his Colorado Rockies cap in a gesture of reverence, revealing a perfectly circular bald patch. I never found out. He never told me.
On the envelope with green and yellow trim around the edges I wrote our names and addresses — his, Fernando’s, the addressee, in his house in Lakewood, Colorado, and mine, Evangelina, the sender’s. The letter would be posted in Brazil, the distant South American cousin that had so little in common with its North American cousin, except for the quirks of their continental dimensions.
I took the green and yellow trim of the Brazilian envelope to the post office on Rua Ronald de Carvalho, watched to make sure it was stamped properly, paid and started waiting right then and there, resting my chin on my interlaced fingers, my nose almost touching the greasy glass partition.
Next, said the post office employee in a slack voice, stretching the “e” over my head, beyond my anxiousness, and directing a pair of dead-fish eyes at the man behind me in the queue.
Among the echoes of her lazy vowel one could hear: go home, silly girl, your letter’s been posted.
Ursus arctos horribilis
In August, I started going with Fernando every now and then to the Denver Public Library, where he worked as a security guard. We would walk a little way, catch the bus, then walk some more to the block delimited by Broadway, Bannock Street and 13th and 14th avenues. The red 1985 Saab stayed in the garage. Parking was expensive near the library.
I quickly discovered that I hated reading books in English (my mother’s lessons hadn’t included books), that it was really quite difficult, that speaking and understanding a language reasonably well are no guarantee of instant fluency or pleasure in reading, and that I would have to do it.
I’d have to do it anyway, at school, so I might as well try to arrive there a little less green. I spoke English. I understood English. And people would have to take their hats off to me.
I chose books I didn’t know by their titles. I set several aside before the end of the first chapter. Those that interested me I took home and continued reading when I wasn’t helping with the cleaning or in the kitchen (where little help was required because almost everything that Fernando bought was half-ready or frozen), or skating around the neighborhood or just watching TV — my favorite activity.
Watch TV, said Fernando. It’s good for picking up English.
His TV set didn’t have purple smudges. I watched TV feverishly, trying to catch every bit of slang. After an hour I’d have a headache. Reading wasn’t a good pain killer. Sometimes washing pots and vacuuming the living room was. Cleaning the windows.
I liked cleaning the windows of Fernando’s house and was sorry there weren’t more of them; it would have been great if the house were floor-to-ceiling glass. The noise of the moist paper on the glass was comforting. It was of the order of practical things, of useful, honest things without anything grandiose about them. It was a good, simple activity. My mother would have approved. She would have cleaned the windows too, if she had been there.
I imagined her married to Fernando — it was a little difficult, the image, but I tried hard and something came of it. Thinking about my mother and Fernando married was almost like watching a film: two entirely strange people acting out a scene in a time when I didn’t even exist, with strange gestures and wearing clothes that were already out of fashion, until a director said cut. Two people who lived together for the duration of a film screening.
A few times a week Fernando would go out, when he wasn’t working at the library, to clean people’s houses. A good way to make some extra money, he explained. I spend three hours cleaning someone’s house and I take home seventy dollars. Tax-free. And no one bothers me. I’m my own boss and the whole thing is between me and the carpet, me and the windows, me and the bathroom sinks and toilets and tiles. Not bad.
I thought Fernando didn’t like people. As a security guard, at the library, he always maintained a professional, distant air — which mustn’t be too hard, I guess, when you are a security guard. People don’t tend to come up to you to chat. His uniform commanded respect, official-looking and imbued with power, and his strong arms and surly face completed the picture.
I wondered what Fernando thought about for hours and hours on end, just standing there, not talking to anyone. At other times, he had carpets, windows and toilets for company. He had his own equipment: a vacuum cleaner, the most efficient products, a kit developed through years of experience. He would put everything in the back of the red Saab and drive off for another few hours of not interacting with humanity.
For me, considering all this, his relationship with my mother left the realm of films and became a cloud of ectoplasm exhaled from a medium’s nostrils. That is, a phenomenon I had heard of but couldn’t really believe in. My mother liked parties and people; she liked cooking for lots of friends and having house guests; she liked dancing. She liked sticking her head out the window of her Fiat 147 and singing “Me & Bobby McGee” at the top of her lungs. How could she ever have taken an interest in this guy?
I asked the question in a bold gesture at dinner (it was that New Orleans-style food, which came pre-mixed and seasoned in a little box and all you had to do was add water and boil it for twenty-five minutes and I was already an expert at it): Have you changed a lot since you were married to my mother?
He shrugged.
No one changes. You just get used to things. You adapt.
He said it without bitterness. Fernando came across as being exactly what he appeared to be. Which could mean two things: that he was exactly what he appeared to be. Or that he was a talented liar, the worst kind — the sort that lie to themselves, with so much conviction and effort that they end up believing it, and then when they tell other people their lies they think they are actually telling the truth.
But this was a supposition made months later. I still didn’t know Fernando well enough to think anything except that what he had said at dinner was hogwash. That my mother would never have taken an interest in him if he had been, at thirty-six, the same man that he appeared to be at fifty-something. That the whole story that no one changes, etc., was just something you trotted out in conversation. That one of them had certainly changed, and a lot, and I suspected it hadn’t been my mother.
But she wasn’t there to confirm it, so I stayed quiet. Another thing she had taught me was to mind my own business.
Which I followed to the letter with Fernando.
In the beginning, at least.
When Fernando called Elisa’s house and asked to speak to me, he had probably had time to rehearse his words. He had had time to chew over, swallow and digest the information in my letter, which was a lot, and serious.
I imagined him arriving home at the end of a normal afternoon and getting his correspondence from the letterbox in his little garden — one of those square letterboxes that I had only seen in cartoons.
An envelope with dangerously Brazilian green and yellow trim. Inside it, news about the woman he had been married to for six years and whom he hadn’t seen or spoken to or heard of for so long that maybe he wondered if she had really existed.