There were practical strategies for doing this. I had a pile of books in English on my bedside table, authors whose given names were always abbreviated to two (sometimes three) letters before the surname. And they weren’t just JK or JRR or CS. The librarian suggested other initials. Big people’s books, she said. As a result I also started reading poems, which were even more difficult, by the likes of WH, TS and WB, which at first seemed like a separate language within the English language — something ciphered, in code.
One day I came across a line at the end of a poem that said thousands have lived without love, not one without water. And I thought it made sense. I thought the poem made sense, even when it didn’t, even when it was a tangle of words.
I read ferociously, like a trained athlete during the Olympics, and from these experiences extracted the mortar for that new exoskeleton. I also watched TV ferociously.
But the question popped out as Fernando was fixing the toilet and I was looking on, sitting on the edge of the bathtub.
I was there to offer help, as a scrub tech perhaps, but he didn’t seem to need my help, so instead I offered him a question.
That question. How did you end up here?
I thought maybe he didn’t want to talk about it. Fernando didn’t seem like the kind of person who kept the past in colorful photo albums to show visitors. He didn’t look at me.
Your mother didn’t tell you.
My mother didn’t tell me much about you. She didn’t talk much about the things that had happened in her life before. Before me.
A few moments of silence.
I met your mother in London. I was working in a bar and one day she came in with her American boyfriend. They were on vacation. At some point she came up to the bar to get two more beers and she said you’re not from here, your accent is different, and I decided I was going to steal her from her American boyfriend before I even knew that besides being American like him she was also Brazilian like me.
And did you steal her?
He looked at me. Don’t flush it for an hour until it’s dry.
OK.
Fernando left the bathroom and I followed him. He opened the fridge and took out a beer.
Those were hard times in London, he said. I wasn’t there sightseeing. I was there because I couldn’t stay in Brazil. That was way before you were born. You’re lucky. Those were hard times.
He took a swig of beer. I opened the cupboard and got out the packet of extra-cheesy cheese crackers that were covered in a kind of dust that left my fingers dirty.
Want some?
He took a handful and dirtied his fingers with the extra-cheesy cheese cracker dust.
Of course I stole your mother from her American boyfriend. I went to great lengths. For him, things were guaranteed. She was his girlfriend, not mine. So I had to fight for her. And that’s why I followed Suzana here to the United States.
It was the first time in a month that he had said my mother’s name.
Later, you know how life is (no, I didn’t know), you wake up one day and you’re fifty years old and you’ve lost that urge to do things, to wander around, to look for a place in the world because the truth is that the world is a pretty fucking wild place. It’s not worth it. It doesn’t make any difference.
He took another swig of beer.
The doorbell rang. Fernando went to open it, responded in monosyllables for two minutes to something a woman was telling him. He came back with a pamphlet, which he tossed on the table and I read out of the corner of my eye, in simultaneous translation. Does God really care about us? Will there ever be an end to war and suffering? What happens to us when we die? Is there any hope for the dead? How can I pray and be heard by God? How can I find happiness in this life? There was a photo of an Arab with a moustache and a plump white man wearing glasses and a tie, both sitting with their legs crossed on an oriental rug, both smiling, nattering over an open Bible.
Fernando cleared his throat.
Sorry I said fucking. I’ve been meaning to tell you, I’ve been making some phone calls and I’ve managed to find an old friend of your mother’s who lives in Santa Fé. She might be able to help us track down Daniel.
It was the first time in a month that he had said my father’s name. Through the open window, I heard the woman with the God pamphlets talking to our neighbor, who had hair the color of fire and who was answering very loudly in her Hispanic English.
Fish
Fernando had a letter, just one, from Manuela, the young woman he had met on the Araguaia River. And whose name wasn’t really Manuela, of course, just as his name wasn’t really Chico. Her name was Joana. The letter was signed with an M.
It was from late 1971. Neither Chico or Manuela knew it, but a few months from then a guerrilla by the name of Pedro, who had left the Araguaia with his pregnant wife, would be arrested in Fortaleza trying to obtain a new copy of his ID.
Pedro was thinking about resuming his law degree. While being tortured by the Federal Police, he would invent things and switch names (the town of Xambioá, where the guerrillas also circulated, would become Shangri-La), but would end up dropping clues about the guerrillas’ training centers. His torturers already knew, as he would say later, that the Brazilian Communist Party was present in the region.
He was to be the first casualty in the story of the repression of the guerrilla movement. He would attempt suicide in his cell, cutting the veins in his arms. But they wouldn’t authorize him to die.
Pedro and his wife, known by the codename Ana, left the Araguaia because she had fallen pregnant. The Party’s orientation was to get an abortion. She didn’t accept it, and he decided to go with her. They left as fugitives, took a bus, got help from friends. After going underground in Fortaleza, it occurred to him to go down to the Department of Political and Social Order and apply for a new copy of his ID card.
The information they got from Pedro would circulate through the agencies of repression, until a dragnet of army, navy and air force agents was set up. Later versions, from the communists themselves, blamed Regina, another fighter who left the Bico do Papagaio region that same year and never returned, for having led the military to the guerrillas. She had supposedly told her family in São Paulo everything, and they had blown the whistle.
At any rate, with information from one or the other or both, Operation Fish I was born.
I read up on fish and found out that they don’t sleep. I had never thought about it before, about how fish sleep. They don’t. They merely alternate between states of wakefulness and rest. The rest period consists of an apparent state of immobility, in which the fish maintain their balance with very slow movements. Because they don’t have eyelids, their eyes are always open. Some species lie on the ocean floor or riverbeds, while smaller ones hide in holes so they won’t be eaten as they are resting.
And: In 2003, Scottish scientists from the University of Edinburgh discovered that fish can feel pain [citation needed]. Wikipedia.
In the case of the Brazilian Armed Forces, however, the fish that lent its name to the operation was merely to evoke the image of the dragnet. To bring in subversive fish. Red fish who wanted — what? To make Brazil into Cuba? (No, the Cuban Revolution had been based on the foco theory of guerrilla warfare, which had failed in Bolivia, Argentina and Peru. According to the Brazilian Communist Party, focalism underrated the importance of the Party, was based on individual acts of heroism and was thus idealistic and petty-bourgeois.)