She had really existed, said my letter, but didn’t anymore, at least not in the way we tend to understand existence in terms of the spongy substance that we carry around on the ends of our necks. I could think of at least one way in which my mother continued to exist a little, and to certify it all I had to do was touch my own skin. Nothing particularly transcendental or esoteric or mystical, no ectoplasm-sneezing mediums: my own skin. Me. I was her, a little, wasn’t I?
Maybe Fernando thought similarly. He called me and said he was very sorry to hear the news and asked how I was with a forwardness that was somewhat excessive, perhaps rehearsed. Then he told me the barest essentials about his life, where he worked (as a security guard at the Denver Public Library), that he lived alone and that yes, I could stay with him for a while until — until things were resolved, or moving along.
Neither of us knew how things were going to be resolved, or even how they were going to move along, or how we were going to move them along, because without a gesture they would most certainly stay the way they were. But I would attend the public school in Lakewood for a while and he would help me as much as he could.
Depending on what happened, well, depending on what happened I would return to Brazil later. To Elisa’s place in Copacabana. It was curious how the central people in my life were now all peripheral. My mother’s foster sister. My mother’s ex-husband.
I don’t know if Fernando could have guessed, at that moment, during that trans-hemispheric phone call, how much he was capable of. He would be surprised. But the future was (and is, and always will be) a mutating thing, the fruit of successive forks in the road, and I was already beginning to suspect that making plans was an embarrassingly useless habit.
I have a little money, I said. My mother left it. It isn’t a lot, but I’ll be able to help out.
Where one eats, there’s always room for one more, he said. The school is public. We’ll get by.
You’re brave, Elisa told me, when I hung up. And I must be crazy.
I looked at her and didn’t say anything but I thought lots of things. You didn’t have to be brave to do what I was doing. In fact, you’d have to be brave to stay where I was, a fixed point in space, nurturing like a sick little animal the idea that nothing had changed, that nothing was different, walking along the same streets, keeping up the same habits, faking myself.
What if I went with you. I’ll go with you, she said.
She glanced sideways, clasped her hands together.
It isn’t possible, I can’t go with you. What about my work? I think it’d be better if you waited a while longer. A year or two.
I didn’t say anything.
I now know that if I hadn’t done what I did I would have turned to stone in that life, a bone that heals crooked. That was the window that pre-empted the impulse, the right moment to jump unseen into the cargo train as it passed, if that were the only way to take off into the world, and if I had to take off into the world. Nothing about it even remotely resembled irresponsibility or courage or spirit of adventure.
It wasn’t an adventure. It wasn’t a holiday or fun or a pastime or a change of scenery; I was going to the United States to stay with Fernando with a very specific objective in mind: to look for my father.
A person looking for something or someone basically has two possible outcomes on the horizon: they can find what they are looking for or not find what they are looking for.
I knew this. But when I made my decision and wrote the letter to Fernando and waited for his phone call with my only suitcase ready and then got on the plane that would fly in a north-westerly direction, at that moment finding or not finding my father was still just that, two possibilities of the same size, and I would deal with whatever I had to deal with when the time came.
Elisa sighed.
I can’t go with you.
Then she cried a little.
Your mother should have got back together with Fernando when you were born. Fine, she didn’t want to be with your father, she didn’t have to stay with him, it was just a fling, you know? But Fernando was a nice guy. I’m sure she liked him.
She cried a little more.
Your mother was silly. She always found fault with everyone. No one was good enough, no one was right. That’s why she ended up alone.
And she hugged me, and her smell had Vibrant Notes of Peach, Gold Raspberry and Patchouli, as explained in the commercial for the perfume she was wearing. I saw it all the time on the purple TV.
Then she took my head in her hands and brushed the hair off my forehead.
Fernando will take good care of you. He’s a nice guy. He always was a nice guy. Your mother should have got back together with him. I’m going to save up to come visit you at Christmas.
In the years following that summer, I met entire families of Latin immigrants, legal and illegal, who made their living as cleaners.
I never met Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez, but I heard about her, the seventeen-year-old Mexican girl who died of heat stroke while picking grapes in the fields of California, without anyone offering her water or shade. It was in the month of May. The year, 2008. Maria Isabel’s core body temperature reached 108 degrees.
Fernando had been a legal resident of the United States for almost thirty years, but he had never applied for citizenship, unlike my mother. I asked why and he told me that it was because it was a laborsome process. He made some extra money cleaning for seventy dollars. Each cleaning job took two to three hours.
In Rio de Janeiro, the cleaning lady who came to clean our apartment in Copacabana once a week earned half that and was there from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon. She would arrive with fresh bread from the bakery, for which my mother would reimburse her. She would stop cleaning to have lunch in the kitchen listening to the radio and then she’d wash the dishes and make a cup of coffee and smoke a cigarette and gossip and take a quick nap. Every now and then she’d sew a button back onto my clothes or let down a hem (my mother was a disaster with a needle and thread). She’d come by bus from São Gonçalo and the trip took about an hour. Before starting to work for private clients like us, she used to clean the parking lot of a shopping center in Barra da Tijuca, where her monthly wages couldn’t even buy her a dress. The sun was hot. I don’t know what her core body temperature was, but she ended up having to quit. She was sixty years old.
After examining Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez’s body, the doctors discovered that she was two months pregnant. She was picking grapes for wine.
At the airport in Rio, Elisa and I ate pães de queijo, the mini cheese buns, and drank guaraná. She was admirably strong until twelve seconds before we had to say goodbye.
The Federal Police officer asked for my authorization to travel and my birth certificate.
Your father lives in the United States, he confirmed.
Yes, I said, and in principle I wasn’t lying.
He’s Brazilian, the officer confirmed once again. I don’t know why he kept repeating things that were in the documents: I was the daughter of Suzana and Fernando, both Brazilians, she an American citizen too, dead a year earlier, hence my trip to the United States. It was all in the documents and he asked me to confirm it all before wishing me a good trip.
Officially, Fernando was my father and legal guardian. When my mother fell pregnant to my real father, an American, she disappeared from his life, and when I was born in New Mexico she phoned her ex-husband Fernando, who lived to the north in the state of Colorado, six hours away by car.