At that moment he grew a little more, confirming my theory that that was how things went, in bursts, in spasms, and not in arithmetic continuity. All of the metaphors for growth — the steps on a ladder, a road with curves here and there — were sheer nonsense. It all really happened in fits and starts, like when I was on the plane going to the United States and at some point they told us to fasten our seatbelts because we were going to hit some turbulence, and suddenly that aerial pachyderm which, according to Americans, had been invented by the Wright brothers started to shake in the middle of the sky. It shook as if there were potholed asphalt beneath it, like on certain stretches of the highway between Rio de Janeiro and Barra do Jucu.
In the blink of an eye, a cloud, a sister who leaves home with her boyfriend, a sentence someone says involving papeles and suddenly you are older. Depending on the turbulence, maybe it is possible to go to bed at the age of forty and wake up sixty.
My mother should have stayed married to you, I told Fernando the night before we left, as we were eating the pasta that I had prepared myself with a sauce with Paul Newman’s face on the label.
How do you know that she was the one who ended it?
Was it you?
I stared at him with a pair of perplexed eyes and he laughed.
No. It was her. Suzana was the one who ended it. After a while it’s not important anymore, who ended it, who didn’t. At any rate, things with her were like that. Wonderful while they lasted. But they didn’t last long.
He cut his pasta with his knife, as my mother had taught me not to do. You roll it up on your fork like this, she used to say. It was quite a bit of work. When I saw Fernando cutting his pasta with his knife I decided to cut mine too. Etiquette was silly.
Your mother had some cycles, I think. Seasons. From time to time she needed to change essential things in her life and sometimes these essential things involved other people.
Was it the same with my father?
I don’t know if it was the same with your father. She and I were married on paper, you know. She changed her surname and everything. On our wedding day she wore a white dress and a flower in her hair, and we went to a beer garden to celebrate with her friends. We were married for six years. I think she only spent a few months with Daniel.
In the spaces between Fernando’s words, in his gestures, in the way his eyebrows danced above his eyes like lizards doing ballet, I realized that he wanted to lay claim to at least that: the position of most-important-man.
The man Suzana had married wearing a white dress and a flower in her hair.
Were you jealous?
’Course not. I never even met Daniel. I moved here to Colorado when your mother and I split up. The next week. I spent a few days in the hotel, over in Albuquerque, and then I came. I got a job in Aurora.
Doing what?
One thing or another.
Six years is quite a long time.
That depends. It can be a long time or it can be almost nothing.
Did you still love her?
He didn’t look at me. He shrugged and said yes.
Then you must have been jealous.
Maybe. It’s possible.
I sighed. I didn’t know if we should be having this conversation. I cut some more pasta and put it in my mouth.
My mother was kind of complicated, I said.
She was, said Fernando.
Las Animas
On the map the Interstate 25 led honestly south, until it ran into the dotted line where Colorado met New Mexico, eye to eye, foreheads aligned.
We had five or six hours of driving ahead of us. We stopped to fill the tank at the first gas station and Carlos wanted to buy some chocolate with some of the twelve dollars of spending money he had brought with him. Fernando bought three bottles of water and a bag of really bad salsa chips. The packet said: MADE WITH REAL AVOCADOS AND TOMATOES. But they tasted like anything but real avocados and tomatoes. I bought a pair of slightly embarrassing sunglasses with pink and blue frames. Then I waited for the sun to come out so I could wear them. But the morning was taking its time, as if dragging itself out of an autumn night with wintry aspirations was slow and a little painful.
Carlos had telephoned the previous evening to list off the items in his suitcase and ask if I agreed. His mother had helped him choose them, but he wanted to be extra-super-sure that his suitcase contained everything necessary. He didn’t want to have to reuse underwear or socks on such an important trip.
Such an important trip: for the surprise-reasons nestled in the days to come, waiting for their moment to leap out. Panting trapeze artists with drums beating down below.
Carlos didn’t know anything. We hadn’t told him anything about anything. But the trip was important according to his own personal parameters. It was an event. It was the first time in his life, for example, that he had been away from his itinerant family.
It was a little after seven o’clock. Fernando had hauled me out of bed at six-thirty and pushed me out of the house at seven. It was still dark when I got up. In the merciless cold that preceded the dawn, the world was full of placid suspense; supernatural minus the ghosts. It turned its face unhurriedly toward the sun that would appear when it had to, no sooner, no later.
We stopped the Saab in front of Carlos’s house, before a mosaic of sparse plant-life and small puddles of hard snow. Carlos walked down to the street holding hands with his dad. His face was solemn: he was perhaps a brave little soldier setting out to save the nation. A pre-hero in a stocking hat and gloves. He smelled vaguely of aftershave. As we greeted one another, pale steam came out of our mouths. The sky was a two-dimensional, milky, dull surface.
The two adults made pale, steamy comments about the weather. There was no snow predicted for that week and it was going to be a good week, and the roads would be good. The red Saab rumbled quietly, its motor running, a testament to its serenity and discipline.
Carlos’s dad told us to have a good time and to call to check in. The two adults shook hands, Carlos jumped into the car and the moon remained steadfast in the colorless sky, entirely oblivious to whatever was going on beneath it.
After a little while, Carlos asked to see the map and was elated when he realized that before getting to Santa Fé we would pass through Las Vegas.
Fernando had to explain that it wasn’t the Las Vegas he was thinking of, which was in Nevada not New Mexico, and Carlos lowered his eyes to the map again, vaguely disappointed.
Then, mentally inaugurating an improbable chapter of tourism in our lives, he suggested that we go to the real Las Vegas the next time there was a long weekend. Or to New York, another city he’d heard a lot about.
Half an hour later, he was asleep in the back seat of the Saab, lying down with his knees pulled up to his tummy, glasses crooked on his forehead.
The Saab broke down near Starkville, in the county of Las Animas. We were about twenty minutes from the state border. Fernando swore in Portuguese and Carlos may have understood him. We had traveled two hundred miles in three and a half hours, taking into account the pee-stop we had made outside Pueblo.
At the beginning of the trip, Carlos slept for over an hour, while I tracked the Saab’s freefall down the map. We left Castle Rock and Larkspur behind us. In front of the Air Force Academy at the entrance to Colorado Springs, I noticed that the highway took on the name Ronald Reagan Highway. Pikes Peak loomed above us, a proudly tall mountain in a land of tall mountains. We left the city and its Saturday morning behind.