Because we didn’t have any reason to keep talking to each other.
Didn’t you have anything to talk about? Didn’t you care about each other anymore?
We didn’t have anything to talk about. We didn’t care about each other anymore. That must have been it.
He was chopping kale. I picked up a piece of kale that had fallen on the ground and put it back on the chopping board. And I dared to ask: Why did you have to leave Brazil?
The knife thudded against the chopping board as he chopped. Plac. Plac. Plac.
They were after me.
The police?
The army.
What had you done?
Some things.
Wrong things?
In their opinion, yes. Those were hard times.
I didn’t know if I should shake Fernando to get him to spit out what he ended up telling me over the months to come, as ice covered the cascading rivers and the reservoirs, and afterwards, as the ice melted and swelled the cascading rivers and the reservoirs of the following summer. To get him to tell me about firearms and that other woman (Manuela/Joana) before London and my mother, before Lakewood, Colorado, and well before Vanja. The woman from the letter that lived in the seclusion of the wooden El Coto de Rioja wine crate.
But the idea of shaking Fernando was still sort of frightening. The idea of taking hold of those mounds of muscle and rattling them, as if I had any right to his life. I didn’t. The fact that I was there just because he had once given me the gift of his name on my birth certificate was already a big deal.
When I think about Fernando today, nine years after those first few weeks in Lakewood, I remember his arms. That was where the real Fernando, his soul, his personality must have lived. The arms that were only a hypothetical force during his daily hours as a security guard at Denver Public Library, cat claws inside a cat’s paws. The arms that I saw removing marks from windows and dust from surfaces and trash from other people’s floors on so many occasions. The arms that had once tensed with the weight of a weapon — I don’t know the weight of a weapon, I don’t know the weight that you add to a weapon or subtract from it depending on the purpose with which it is picked up. The arms that I knew had wrapped around my mother’s body, 360 degrees (love, a weapon, arms that disarm), and the body of that other woman before my mother and London and New Mexico and Colorado. The arms hard at work over a frying pan making farofa with the kale and the manioc flour bought in a store that sold Brazilian products. The arms that came home holding a red plastic sled when the first days of snow in early November held the promise of slippery slopes. The arms that pushed me down the slippery slopes while on the inside I was stiff, raw panic. The arms that learned to overcome their own inability to hug someone else’s daughter in a goodnight ritual that in theory didn’t even need to exist. The arms that closed the door after answering the Jehovah’s Witness woman for the second and third time (had he read the pamphlet? Bible in hand, she wanted to know if he had any questions. And he didn’t have the courage to say that the pamphlet had ended up in the trash, and he said he still hadn’t had time to read it). The quiet arms that held my math book as the muscles in his face tensed with concentration.
We’d have to wait, as June from Santa Fé had said and as Fernando had repeated.
I didn’t have any other commitment besides that one, to wait.
Five days a week I went to school. Two days a week I didn’t. And meanwhile, I waited.
Five days a week I ate lunch at the same table as Aditi Ramagiri and her friends, in the school cafeteria, and one lusterless Wednesday I looked differently at a boy called Nick during math class, and the lusterless Wednesday became the great Mogul, Shah Jahan’s diamond, said to be missing since the seventeenth century and which I had just found, somewhat awkwardly.
I would have to wait.
One day, as I was passing a light-blue house on my way back from school, our Salvadorian neighbors’ son was standing on the sidewalk. He was a short, stocky boy, with a funny face.
He said hi in Spanish. Hola.
I answered.
He asked ¿Como te llamas?
Vanja, I said. ¿Y tu?
Carlos.
Carlos wasn’t an appropriate name for a child, I thought. Maybe all the Carloses in the world had been born adults. Except him, with his Ninja Turtles T-shirt and an American football in his little hands.
¿Juegas? I asked, pointing at the ball with my chin.
No, he said, simply.
Yo tampoco.
Two days later he knocked on Fernando’s front door holding a book in English for children a lot younger than himself. Carlos’s spoken English was very poor. And he could barely read at all. The book had a dozen phrases and huge drawings of cars, motorbikes, airplanes, buses, ambulances, fire engines and other motor vehicles that slid through the world with ease, grace and fossil fuels.
I asked how old he was.
Carlos looked at me with his chubby face, almond-shaped eyes behind glasses and short, spiky hair, and said nine. He handed me the book and asked if I could read it to him.
I offered him a glass of guaraná. From the store that sold Brazilian products.
We sat on the couch a palm’s breadth apart. I began to read.
Carlos wanted to quickly skip to the next page to see the next picture.
I explained: Carlos, you have to pay attention, dude.
I started running my finger under the words as I read. Carlos began imitating them. A few minutes later, he perched his hand on my forearm and left it there, like a warm, slightly sweaty little bird. I wasn’t sure if he really understood the words or if he was just pretending, if it was merely a strategy to keep me reading.
You shouldn’t get too close to people, Fernando had told me. The Brazilian habit of hugging and kissing everyone. If you want to greet someone, shake their hand. That’s how things work around here.
In Rio de Janeiro, people are always bumping into one another. You bump into people in supermarket aisles, in queues, on the sidewalk, in the bus, in the metro. You don’t get out of the way when other people need to pass you. Other people don’t get out of the way when you need to pass them. We go around saying excuse me and forging paths with our own bodies. Licença, we say, sometimes, and sometimes with so little effort that the word disappears into us and becomes an indistinct ss-ss. We are forever hugging and kissing people we have known for ten years and people we have just met and we say hi darling to everyone. We pat dogs that are being walked by their owners. At the very most, we ask does he/she bite? after verifying which pronoun to use by looking under the animal’s legs for a pair of testicles or the lack thereof. If the owner says he/she doesn’t bite, we plunge our fingers into his/her fur without asking permission, stroke his/her ears, tickle his/her belly. And it’s nice, and the world is essentially made up of surfaces rubbing against one another and an exchange of heat.
Here you ask permission first if you want to pet someone’s dog, Fernando told me the first time I saw two bubbly golden retrievers with fur that was better cared for than my hair and I threw myself at them and they corresponded with legitimate passion and the owner gave me a dirty look. Say: May I pet your dog? I repeated it mentally so I wouldn’t forget it: May I pet your dog?
Carlos and I finished reading the book and I asked what he had liked the most and he said the ambulance. Then he asked for some more guaraná, a word that he pronounced perfectly. From that day on, Carlos became my afternoon companion. And I, his afternoon companion.