Crow Blue by Adriana Lisboa Page A

unraveling on the banks of the Araguaia was a human story. The fish only lent it their name.
    Involuntarily, I might add – like confiscated savings accounts.

May I pet your dog?
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    I liked the expression “smooth sailing” the first time I came across it. I tried to find the best translation in Portuguese but nothing was quite right. It meant easy progress. But the expression itself evoked boats, the sea and calm surfaces and took me back to the time when that made immediate sense.
    â€œSmooth” was the satiny quality of the water, “sailing” was the verb for the sail that puffed out with the wind and crossed entire oceans.
    The moment the English teacher at school congratulated me on my efforts and summed it all up in that “smooth sailing,” I clearly saw myself in a sailboat making the tiniest tear in a perfectly silken sea, a progressive boat, a boat as pure and optimistic as the shoals of fish swimming beneath it.
    I left school along liquid corridors, and the concrete of the sidewalk was liquid.
    So I sailed. In a single expression the English teacher had defined my first few weeks in an entirely landlocked state, without any contact with any beach or any ocean.
    In terms of water, in Colorado, I had seen the reservoirs where people sailed around in circles on Sundays. Cascading rivers in the folds of the mountains, on which people practiced turbulent sports – navigating downstream in yellow boats that looked like giant kitchen sponges or in pointy kayaks. I never suspected that all that water would grow thin and lock itself away in ice in the months to come, storing its liquidity in the slow metabolism of hibernation.
    But I sailed on calm seas, that is, I made easy progress, that is, I was being successful in my daily attempts to not trip up.
    Boats that sail on calm seas know no gravel, no loose stones in their path, they know no feet. Their mobility is made of waves and wind. With the right waves and the right wind the sailboat slips along free of metaphysics. Like a first-grade equation.
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    Daniel, my father’s name, was a valid name in several languages, I discovered to my delight. Daniel was Daniel in English, Portuguese and Spanish, the three languages I had contact with every day, there in Lakewood.
    The plump man in the blue shirt and tie in the Jehovah’s Witnesses pamphlet would no doubt be able to explain the biblical origins of the name. All I knew was that it had belonged to someone who at some stage had had something to do with lions, according to legend. I didn’t even know if he had fought them and won, with some intrinsically spiritual moral to be learned, or lost, with some intrinsically spiritual moral to be learned.
    I suspected that Daniel didn’t suspect that he had a thirteen-year-old daughter named Vanja, who was a citizen of two countries and lived in harmonious linguistic chaos, a daughter who spoke English at school, Portuguese at home and Spanish with the neighbors.
    And I sensed that I needed to maintain that smooth sailing towards Daniel. Life needed to become an orderly series of tasks. More or less like a sailor’s day-to-day life must be. An orderly physical world full of calculations and angles that is needed for a boat to sail.
    The same orderly physical world where hungry lions kill Daniel, where disinterested lions spare Daniel – it’s hard to say. There are the between-the-lines in all stories. Some gods like bloody martyrs (in the style of Tim Treadwell and his bears in Alaska), others don’t really care.
    But at any rate I suspected that Daniel didn’t suspect that I existed.
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    After a few phone calls, Fernando had finally located some people. Among them, that old friend of my mother’s who lived in Santa Fé. But couldn’t Daniel have been located with a telephone book too? He could have, if there weren’t lots of Daniels with the same surname all over New Mexico and if