Fernando’s house on Jay Street in Lakewood, Colorado, slowly became my house too, by habit. By custom. By osmosis. We never wondered if I’d leave or stay after all the Clarifications. I finished the school year as a so-so student and entered the following school year. And the next school year, which I also finished so-so, and then the next. There was just one subject in which my grades were honestly good and, at the end of the day, I had the Denver Public Library librarian to thank for it. However, she wasn’t present to get teary-eyed and receive the applause of other teary-eyed people. After I gave my thanks I felt kind of silly. Like a politician on an election campaign, trying to say the nice things that people like to hear. But it was already done. Every now and then I’d go swimming with Fernando, and we’d come home smelling of chlorine and hang towels smelling of chlorine in the bathroom. One fine day I realized that it didn’t matter what country I was in. What city I was in. Other things were important. Not these.
I never again forgot Fernando’s birthday and the year after the yellow T-shirt year Carlos and I bought him a bottle of Belgian beer (with the help of a cooperative adult) and then, the next year, we bought him some perfume from Carlos’s favorite store — a skateboarders’ store, although he, Carlos, wasn’t a skateboarder. Nor was he predestined to become one.
The winters became my winters and the summers my summers. So to speak. The in-between seasons stopped being a luxury and became, in the autumn, the rake that I use to rake up the leaves in front of the house and, in the spring, the flower that blooms in front of the house where I could have sworn nothing would survive the snow storms. And the flower blooms even if I don’t look after the garden (I don’t look after the garden). My customary, everyday things, like sleeping or cleaning my ears. When I learned to drive, I took Carlos to ride down the river in Boulder, with our backsides in tire tubes.
A little over a year ago I laid Fernando to rest. He died without guerrillas, wives or lovers. In his memory flowed rivers such as the Araguaia and the Thames and the cascading rivers in the mountains of Colorado, and the Rio Grande, which cuts through Albuquerque. But rivers find their way to the sea, and fresh waters become salty and peopled with sea creatures and their shells.
Fernando’s body gave out one day as he was drinking coffee, during a break at work, and the whole thing went. His body spluttered like the motor of an old Saab, and it kept on spluttering, and then he started dying and continued dying until he was officially dead, which I was told by an Indian doctor with lowered eyes and tight, condolent lips.
I buried him, an ex-Fernando under the earth. And together with him, his ex-life and his ex-memories which, regardless of whether he shared them or not, would always be his alone and no one else’s. Which he felt in the forest, which he felt in the London pub, which he felt sliding over the frozen mud in Peking. Which he felt when he embraced Manuela/Joana, Suzana, Isabel. Which he felt before and after those embraces. When he deserted these women or was deserted by them (to desert: to leave empty or alone, abandon, withdraw from; to forsake one’s duty or post with no intention of returning). What he thought, what he planned and didn’t do, what he promised and didn’t deliver, what he did without any foreplanning, what he didn’t hope for and got anyway.
A little over a year ago Carlos’s parents moved to Florida, where Dolores, their disgraced runaway daughter, had become a prodigal daughter who kept twin cars with HIS (XO) and HERS (XO) license plates in her garage in Tallahassee. The sex of the cars causes a certain discomfort, I imagine, when Dolores’s father and his moustache need to go out and only HERS is in the garage. Dolores’s mother doesn’t drive, so is spared any similar grief. But maybe the father has already bought himself a car with a regular license plate, with letters and numbers without meanings.
A little over a year ago Carlos crossed the street and came to live in this house, because he had promised never to leave Colorado or be far from me. So, while his parents got ready to move and sold furniture and bought one-way tickets to Florida, he got his things and transferred them here. He is a tall young man of eighteen. He still hasn’t been back to El Salvador. Sometimes he asks to borrow my car and goes up into the mountains, like any native, intimate with the earth, the climate and its sharp changes, lamenting the avalanche that killed two unwary tourists (but who told them to go? You don’t mess with the Rockies, he always says). I moved into the room that used to be Fernando’s and Carlos moved into mine and with these minor migrations we stayed.
Nick, my schoolmate, kissed me once at a party. It felt weird for the first fifteen seconds, then it didn’t. Our tongues got used to it, our teeth stopped being obstacles, and soon I wasn’t thinking about tongues or teeth, but about other things with a sudden, desperate urgency.
The next year his family moved, he left the school, and at some point he must have reconsidered his political ideas because I heard recently that he’d become a marine.
At the same party where Nick kissed me, I was hanging a little earlier with a group of three girls from school, and at one point I went to straighten one girl’s necklace and said I think it’s better like that, and she said I don’t need information from South America.
I remember her sweet, precise, scalpel-like voice. I don’t need information from South America.
When Nick kissed me, I almost asked what a kiss from South America tasted like. But it was an empty question. It was a fleeting question, on which I chose not to dwell.
I have seen my father a few times. I went to Abidjan to visit him and his family. We talked a little about my mother. Not much. Besides me, the two of them didn’t actually have much in common. Not even memories. I don’t think they had even missed each other. I went to visit him twice with tickets that Fernando bought for me and I stayed fifteen days each time. Daniel came here last year, on a business trip to the United States. We went out for a few beers. It was nice to go out for a few beers with my father. I paid the bill. He didn’t want to let me but I insisted and said that he was my guest and added, with a lack of originality that was possibly touching, that the next time we’d have dinner at a French restaurant and everything. From time to time we talk on the phone. From time to time I talk to Florence on the phone. The last time I could hear Norbert’s vacuum cleaner on the other end of the line. I never heard anything else about Isabel.
I have a job at the Denver Public Library — but not as a security guard. I sold Fernando’s 1985 Saab and bought a Saab fifteen years younger because I don’t know anything about cars and at least Saab was a familiar name. I’m not the talkative type. But people no longer hear an accent when I speak.
Would I have done things differently, if it were up to me — if I’d had choices, if I’d had a card deck of lives and could have chosen one instead of another? I would have. Not everything. I’d have changed just one detail, only one, at the end of a scene that took place over two decades ago.
My version would be like this:
The highways are an adventure in December in this part of the world. Fernando was on the road for much more than the usual six hours between cities on Interstate 25. There was snow and ice on the road. He left behind Trinidad, former residence of Bat Masterson and, in those days, the world sex change capital thanks to the operations conducted by the famous Dr. Stanley Biber. He passed a sign saying WELCOME TO NEW MEXICO LAND OF ENCHANTMENT and saw in his rear-view mirror a sign saying WELCOME TO COLORFUL COLORADO, with the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the west.
When he arrived in Albuquerque I was in my room dreaming pint-sized dreams, dreams that were the size of my life, that fit easily through the bars of the crib. He and my mother embraced with the force of how deeply they missed one another. He went to bed with her. Later, after midnight, she made some soup and they sat in front of the Christmas tree to sip it.