Plush toys? Silly, useless collectors of dust mites. I could donate them to a silly, useless child and the dust mites would be well deserved.
And so on.
My warm-weather clothes, ninety percent of my wardrobe, would only be useful part of the year. My cold-weather clothes wouldn’t stand up to the cold: a sweatshirt for freezing-cold temperatures?
But what exactly were freezing-cold temperatures? I opened Elisa’s freezer, closed my eyes and inhaled a frost-free world, trying to imagine it. Minus five? Wind chill factor of minus twenty? Was it true that your nose and ears could freeze and fall off? Your fingertips? (I recently discovered in the magazine Men’s Talk that there are worse things and that the people who climb Mount Everest have to face minus ninety degrees Fahrenheit. I learned this in a column written by a man who defined himself as an orthodox Flamengo supporter, who plays the drums, loves beer and women — in that order — and is a doctor in his spare time. In other sections of the magazine were articles such as: Mystery solved: why women always go to restrooms in pairs. Tips for pairing food and wine on New Year’s Eve. How to invest in real estate faster than you think possible.)
How many closed shoes do you have? Elisa asked.
Two, these two pairs of sneakers, but one hurts me.
Elisa sighed. What size are you?
Six.
She went into her room and came back with a pair of imitation-leather shoes with low heels.
Take these, they’re a seven but they’ll fit. If you have an important occasion and can’t wear sneakers.
I couldn’t imagine what important occasion I might have. Fernando worked as a security guard at a public library. In his spare time he made a bit of extra cash as a cleaner. He wasn’t married and he didn’t have any kids. I doubted that important occasions were a part of his everyday life. But Elisa, my mother’s foster sister, wanted me to take the pair of heels anyway.
You never know, she said.
One year ended in July and another began in July, but they weren’t connected to one another. There were twelve months between the two that weren’t on the calendar. Kind of like those ten days Pope Gregory XIII yanked out of the month of October in order to institute the calendar that we have all come to follow — we being, at least: me, Elisa, my mother when she was alive, and the immigration official at Atlanta Airport and the woman in the skirted bathing suit at the public swimming pool in Lakewood, and also the man with blond eyelashes and his slender consort and their smiles full of sexual innuendos and their knees touching under the water. I had studied Gregory XIII and his calendar at school; part of that onslaught of what seemed like random information that they shoveled on to us during long hours that turned into weeks that turned into months that turned into the next school year. I don’t know what the pope did with those ten stolen days. Maybe they are in the same non-place as the twelve months in which I lived with Elisa, crowned by that packing of suitcases, or rather, suitcase, and the stripping away of all excesses. At some stage close to the end of those twelve months, I packed my suitcase with the important things, which had already shrunk to the barest minimum, and waited for Fernando’s phone call.
I never did use the shoes that Elisa gave me. To be honest, I didn’t like them, the gold buckles in the corner. Besides which, they really were too big for me: there was a one-centimeter gap between my heels and the backs of the shoes if my big toes were touching the front of them. When I walked, the heels would slap up with a brief delay, like flip-flops.
I really didn’t care for heels anyway. I didn’t at the age of thirteen, and I still don’t at twenty-two. Elisa’s shoes are still untouched in my wardrobe to this day. I don’t like high heels. What’s more, at twenty-two I still wear a size six.
Lakewood, Colorado. A strange place. But its strangeness didn’t bother me, because that Denver suburb was, to me, a mere stepping-stone. Something I was using to achieve an objective. A bridge, a ritual, a password that you utter before a door and wait for someone to open it, while you tap your feet on the sidewalk, looking around for the sake of it. Being there was being in transit, and Lakewood and I had no relevance in each other’s lives.
Alone at home, those first few afternoons, I looked out the window and saw the immensity of the sky nudged by the mountains in the west. There was some green, but it was so paltry that, for me, it didn’t count. As far as I was concerned, green was either exuberant and dense or it wasn’t green. I didn’t consider those stunted little desert plants green. The trees on the street seemed useless, an unsuccessful attempt to prove something unprovable; the air swallowed them, the space swallowed them.
Before, I was accustomed to walking along under trees. I moved along Copacabana’s dirty, narrow streets and bulging sidewalks with a canopy of leaves overhead all year round. Now, I found myself in a semiarid city where the streets were wide and clean and there was no shade to be found.
Before, it was exaggerated tropicality, with relative humidity somewhere in the vicinity of eighty percent. Perfect for cockroaches. The cockroaches were so happy in Rio de Janeiro, that easy, welcoming place. Now, the relative humidity was about thirty percent.
And there was the waterless, sterile heat, which left my body dry and my skin like a sheet of paper. Use lots of moisturizer, a woman on the plane told me. I rubbed in moisturizer three or four times a day. All over my body, face and lips. At night it hurt to breathe.
You get used to it, said Fernando.
That was something Fernando knew a lot about. Getting used to things. After a time I would look at him and see the man-who-got-used-to-things.
He could work as a farm laborer in São João do Araguaia, he could survive behind the bar of a London pub and in the dry air of Lakewood, Colorado. He could survive entire armies and half-lived love affairs. Women who disappeared. Women for whom he needed to disappear. Crossing borders and ideologies. He could even survive me and my sudden reappearance, popping out of a box like one of those clowns with a spring for a neck. And he could say OK, as he had done. There was something heroic about it.
I soon noticed that the dryness of the air had some advantages. For example, I could leave my bath towel bunched up any old which way after a shower, and what in Rio de Janeiro would have remained tenaciously in the folds, evolving into a stench and finally mold, in that lascivious commitment to life, that embarrassing explosion of fecundity and virility of the tropics, in Colorado quickly rose up to the heavens and was no more, and the towel would sit there, dry and stiff, a makeshift statue.
In Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro, there were cockroaches, almond trees, mosquitoes, salty air, pigeons. Churches. Mundial Supermarket. McDonald’s. In Lakewood, Colorado, there were rabbits, prairie dogs, crows. Churches. SuperTarget. McDonald’s.
I decided to be absolutely, unflinchingly courageous. Whatever my life was, happy or unhappy or none of the above, it was my business. Besides which, these categories seemed as untrustworthy as ‘important’ had been when I was packing my suitcase. I was going to do whatever had to be done and it wasn’t going to be my dry nose at night that was going to make me feel sorry for myself, after everything that had happened. No way. My situation was osseous; it was of the order of structures, without flesh, without glaze. I fit in a thirteen-year-old body and all of my material belongings now fit in a suitcase weighing twenty kilos. And everything was guided by the potential shadow of the past — a midday shadow, that you don’t see, but which knows how to conceal itself in things, ready to start leaking out across the ground as soon as the planet turns a little to one side.