Crow Blue by Adriana Lisboa Page B

Daniel still lived in New Mexico and if he happened to be listed.
    But maybe he had crossed the border and was now in Arizona or Texas or even Colorado, or in Mexico even, on the other side of an even more borderly border, or in British Columbia or Argentina (why not?), or virtually anywhere else in the world. Or maybe that specific Daniel no longer existed, and there were just his namesakes scattered across the globe, a one-man diaspora.
    The old friend of my mother’s who lived in Santa Fé taught piano and was called June. It had been over ten years since she’d last seen Daniel, as she explained to Fernando. She told him that he had moved to San Antonio, in Texas, and then they had lost touch. Emails, that kind of thing? She had tried, said Fernando. She had written to a few people, but hadn’t heard back yet. We’d have to wait a little.
    After a few moments of silence:
    Why didn’t you ever ask your mother where your father was?
    Because I didn’t need to know. Because I don’t think she knew. Because I don’t think she would have wanted to tell me. I don’t know. Why did you and she stop talking?
    Because we didn’t have any reason to keep talking to each other.
    Didn’t you have anything to talk about? Didn’t you care about each other anymore?
    We didn’t have anything to talk about. We didn’t care about each other anymore. That must have been it.
    He was chopping kale. I picked up a piece of kale that had fallen on the ground and put it back on the chopping board. And I dared to ask: Why did you have to leave Brazil?
    The knife thudded against the chopping board as he chopped. Plac. Plac. Plac.
    They were after me.
    The police?
    The army.
    What had you done?
    Some things.
    Wrong things?
    In their opinion, yes. Those were hard times.
    I didn’t know if I should shake Fernando to get him to spit out what he ended up telling me over the months to come, as ice covered the cascading rivers and the reservoirs, and afterwards, as the ice melted and swelled the cascading rivers and the reservoirs of the following summer. To get him to tell me about firearms and that other woman (Manuela/Joana) before London and my mother, before Lakewood, Colorado, and well before Vanja. The woman from the letter that lived in the seclusion of the wooden El Coto de Rioja wine crate.
    But the idea of shaking Fernando was still sort of frightening. The idea of taking hold of those mounds of muscle and rattling them, as if I had any right to his life. I didn’t. The fact that I was there just because he had once given me the gift of his name on my birth certificate was already a big deal.
    Â 
    When I think about Fernando today, nine years after those first few weeks in Lakewood, I remember his arms. That was where the real Fernando, his soul, his personality must have lived. The arms that were only a hypothetical force during his daily hours as a security guard at Denver Public Library, cat claws inside a cat’s paws. The arms that I saw removing marks from windows and dust from surfaces and trash from other people’s floors on so many occasions. The arms that had once tensed with the weight of a weapon – I don’t know the weight of a weapon, I don’t know the weight that you add to a weapon or subtract from it depending on the purpose with which it is picked up. The arms that I knew had wrapped around my mother’s body, 360 degrees (love, a weapon, arms that disarm), and the body of that other woman before my mother and London and New Mexico and Colorado. The arms hard at work over a frying pan making farofa with the kale and the manioc flour bought in a store that sold Brazilian products. The arms that came home holding a red plastic sled when the first days of snow in early November held the promise of slippery slopes. The arms that pushed me down the slippery slopes while on the inside I was stiff, raw panic. The arms that learned to overcome their