But before kids came the ex-chambermaid and ex-waitress’s mother and father, whom she brought out from Colorado and installed in the spare bedroom.
Then all the mutual hurt melted away in the cheery Florida sun, which was so different to the semiarid Colorado sun, so much better, so much more humanitarian. The Colorado sun used a whipping stick and had downward-curving lips, between literal mountains of wrinkles. The Florida sun served orange juice processed with a smile, in sandals and shorts, very informal. And it didn’t aspire to be Icelandic in the winter.
The family would find happiness there. But eight years earlier no one had any way of knowing it.
Corvus corax, Corvus brachyrhynchos
When Fernando, her future husband and future ex-husband, went to live in the Amazon, to rehearse and stage the guerrilla war, my mother was nine years old and was moving with her geologist father to another country. The fact that this other country had dangerous ties to the military coup in Brazil and with everything that Fernando, gun in hand, was fighting, was curious, nothing else. How could Suzana have imagined, at the age of nine, a former communist guerrilla as a husband?
Not that she knew these words intimately, not that she knew their meaning. All she knew was what her father told her: that the communists were bad people.
She saw an astronaut from her new country plant her new country’s flag in lunar soil, in the month of July. She thought it strange and beautiful. She had heard of Woodstock and the jungles of Vietnam, but they were at the periphery of her interests, and it made no difference to her when Nixon addressed the “silent majority” in a request for support for the war. She didn’t consider herself silent, suspected she wasn’t part of the majority and didn’t know exactly what war was. Besides which she was only nine, and she wasn’t entirely sure that Nixon was addressing nine-year-old girls in his speech.
One day she secretly looked at photos of the village of My Lai in Life magazine — when the massacre finally came to light, to then disappear from public consciousness, with only the occasional short-lived outbreak of remembering.
The bodies, that pile of mangled bodies. Vietnamese: women, the elderly, children. Babies. Strange words: civilians tortured, raped, beaten, mutilated, because they were suspected of hiding Vietcong among them. (She knew what Vietnamese were, not Vietcong. She asked her father, without mentioning Life. Communists from those parts, he said.) Burned houses. Dead, mutilated domestic animals. She wondered if domestic animals could also be communists. Perhaps in Vietnam. Perhaps their owners trained them for it. To recognize non-communists by their smell and attack them. The cows with their hooves and horns. The dogs with their teeth. And so on.
She found out later that Lieutenant William Calley, who had led the My Lai massacre, served only three and a half years house arrest of his original life sentence. The memorial in My Lai, Vietnam, listed more than five hundred dead, with ages ranging from one to eighty. In Suzana and her father’s new country, some were indignant that Calley was the only one punished. Even Vietnam War veterans. Others considered him a patriot and a hero, because in a war, after all, you respond to enemy fire as best you can. Even when there is no enemy fire. The answer needn’t need to follow the question — and the ends, of course, justify the means.
My mother told me about the color photographs of My Lai in Life magazine and about Nixon talking to the astronauts on the moon. It was while we were on holiday in Barra do Jucu. We were on the beach and it was night. She was holding a can of beer and telling me things from when she was a child. I don’t remember all of them. I remember that night, the cool breeze and my hot skin; I remember the color of the beer can, I remember the sky and the stars over Barra do Jucu and the photos that I hadn’t seen in Life magazine and the speech that I hadn’t heard Nixon deliver. But at any rate, between the things you remember and those you don’t, between the things you know and those you don’t, you have to plug the holes with whatever is at hand. And perhaps any attempt to know someone else is always that, your hands trying to shape three-dimensionality, your desire and incompetence putting together a scrapbook to bring to life someone who is dead, a friend, a mysterious lover who goes over to the window at first light and stands there gazing into space, without uttering a word. An unsociable child, a terse teacher, a humorless workmate who stares at you with a deadpan face when you tell an irresistible joke. People you don’t know or with whom you don’t feel comfortable. Everyone.
According to the photos, my mother’s legs and arms went on forever, and so did her hair. Her face was Latino and ordinary.
My face is Latino and ordinary. I look at the photograph in the passport with which I entered the United States of America nine summers ago.
I see my mother in my own eyes. Missing her no longer inhibits my life. Thinking about who she might have been. What she might have looked like. It’s no longer a myth.
I saw my mother in my own eyes for the first time when I was flicking through my passport, organizing the things in my backpack as I touched down in Denver. Nine years ago. The woman next to me told me to use lots of moisturizer.
At the airport I passed a girl who was crying. She was wearing an orange dress with a tiny flower print. She had curly blonde hair. Her eyes were red and there were circumstantial wrinkles on her forehead. She was quite young. Then I caught a little train to the other side of the airport and got off when a voice on the PA system said welcome to Denver and some other things that I didn’t understand.
My mother was quite young when she met Fernando in a London pub, she on vacation with her American boyfriend, he with pints of beer in his hands instead of weapons. There he was: drifting, an anomalous fish in a tank of distant beings. There he was: an apparition, a miracle, his body alive and whole, which, for obvious reasons, it shouldn’t have been. There he was, singing English music in a low voice and off-key because a while ago he had stopped caring if he sang out of tune.
He saw her and decreed the continuation of the world, the extension of time. The incorruptibility of the heart, which has its own methods and its own ethics, like any other muscle, come to think of it. He saw her and thought he needed, desperately, something to think about.
He had needed something to think about for years and had only just realized it. He needed a territory in which to hew trails in order to recognize himself again. It had been years since he’d felt the familiar weight of a weapon. It had been years since he’d felt the need to love a woman except for the purposes of subsistence, merely to avoid the armlock of loneliness.
Things were swamped by a white desert that came from inside him and spread outwards, a contagious, viral desert, where sounds were diffuse, flavors were shallow, sight was limited.
And life was a contradiction of terms: years earlier he had left his life behind in order to stay alive, and this functional, illogical equation gave him daily electric shocks in the open wounds that he didn’t have from the suicide that he hadn’t tried to commit.
Perhaps it would be like this forever and perhaps merely existing wasn’t enough, even with custom-made shoes and thermostat-regulated temperatures. But he saw Suzana and talked to her, and if desire and the desire for happiness were fake, there was only one way to find out.
You’re not from here. Your accent is different, she told Fernando.
He looked at the girl with the Latino face and American voice and said, trying to sound as British as possible, that she wasn’t from there either and her accent was different too.