migration after the plague and the bombs and the cold, gray fallout (we just ended up with something like seasons, but the poor North Americans! I know there are still some people who live in New York, but I’d die if I had to wear thermal underwear every day).
So the real reason is my mamãe. Mother.
Her grandfather was English, someplace way north. Toronto, I think, or Glasgow. One of those lost cities. He had a daughter from before he even met my great-grandmother, and her name was April.He kept a few pictures of her and somehow they survived. They’re flat, but otherwise bright and clear. April is about my age in them, and she’s wearing weird clothes, a blue robe and a square hat with some sort of fringe. Mother says it’s a graduation photo, and that’s what they would wear centuries ago. April doesn’t look a thing like me: She has straight blonde hair, her skin is milk pale like most North Americans, and her lips are thin, but in her eyes I think I can see a little of my mother. They are wide and stare straight ahead, like a sword that could pierce you. They’re not eyes that make many friends, and they don’t really care.
A few years after that photo was taken, my great-grandfather and April became refugees, escaping from the wars and the piles of corpses and the cold, which was worse back then. They hear about this city in what was Brazil, a new pyramid city, built from a Japanese design, called Palmares Três. Not too many people were escaping to Bahia back then, let alone white North Americans. But for some reason, April loved Brazil. That’s the part of the story where Mother gets a little misty-eyed, don’t ask me why. Mother and her immigrant stories. Apparently, April had been studying Portuguese in school, and she was obsessed with classical music, though I guess it wasn’t classical back then. And she convinced her father that they should escape south. The other North Americans were heading to their west coast (just in time for an atomic bomb to hit San Francisco, naturally), and some of them even tried to go overseas to West Africa or East Asia. But April wanted samba, Mother says, she wanted a city of women, because men had done so much to destroy the world. So she and my great-grandfather went to Bahia.
It took them two years, mostly on foot, and a lot of the time there were wars and natural disasters they couldn’t push their way through. But they came as some of the very first registered immigrants. The city wasn’t even half built yet. But if I go to the public library, I can access their names on the registries. There’s even a photo of the two of them, and April looks so different in that one it frightens me. Her skinis darker — still too pale for Palmares Três, but she doesn’t look quite so strange. Her hair is short, almost not there at all, and so ragged I think she hacked it off with a machete. And her eyes, those stare-straight-ahead eyes, they are brittle as glass. They are a wall keeping back so much pain that I took one look at the photo and turned off the array.
I guess that’s why Mother doesn’t keep that one in the family album.
April and her father lived in what would be Palmares Três for about six months. Then boatloads of refugees from the wars in São Paulo and Rio came up the coast, and there was a debate about what to do with them. By this time everyone knew there wasn’t a cure for the Y Plague, and Palmares Três hadn’t had any big outbreaks. My great-grandfather wanted to stay in the city and keep it quarantined. April wanted to help the refugees. They had a huge argument, Mamãe says, and then April left to deliver food and supplies. The Aunties back then had decided to let the refugees stay out on the largest of the islands in the bay. I don’t remember what they called it before, but now, of course, we call it A Quarentena. The quarantine.
She died out there. No one is really sure how. I didn’t understand this for a long time, because she was
So the real reason is my mamãe. Mother.
Her grandfather was English, someplace way north. Toronto, I think, or Glasgow. One of those lost cities. He had a daughter from before he even met my great-grandmother, and her name was April.He kept a few pictures of her and somehow they survived. They’re flat, but otherwise bright and clear. April is about my age in them, and she’s wearing weird clothes, a blue robe and a square hat with some sort of fringe. Mother says it’s a graduation photo, and that’s what they would wear centuries ago. April doesn’t look a thing like me: She has straight blonde hair, her skin is milk pale like most North Americans, and her lips are thin, but in her eyes I think I can see a little of my mother. They are wide and stare straight ahead, like a sword that could pierce you. They’re not eyes that make many friends, and they don’t really care.
A few years after that photo was taken, my great-grandfather and April became refugees, escaping from the wars and the piles of corpses and the cold, which was worse back then. They hear about this city in what was Brazil, a new pyramid city, built from a Japanese design, called Palmares Três. Not too many people were escaping to Bahia back then, let alone white North Americans. But for some reason, April loved Brazil. That’s the part of the story where Mother gets a little misty-eyed, don’t ask me why. Mother and her immigrant stories. Apparently, April had been studying Portuguese in school, and she was obsessed with classical music, though I guess it wasn’t classical back then. And she convinced her father that they should escape south. The other North Americans were heading to their west coast (just in time for an atomic bomb to hit San Francisco, naturally), and some of them even tried to go overseas to West Africa or East Asia. But April wanted samba, Mother says, she wanted a city of women, because men had done so much to destroy the world. So she and my great-grandfather went to Bahia.
It took them two years, mostly on foot, and a lot of the time there were wars and natural disasters they couldn’t push their way through. But they came as some of the very first registered immigrants. The city wasn’t even half built yet. But if I go to the public library, I can access their names on the registries. There’s even a photo of the two of them, and April looks so different in that one it frightens me. Her skinis darker — still too pale for Palmares Três, but she doesn’t look quite so strange. Her hair is short, almost not there at all, and so ragged I think she hacked it off with a machete. And her eyes, those stare-straight-ahead eyes, they are brittle as glass. They are a wall keeping back so much pain that I took one look at the photo and turned off the array.
I guess that’s why Mother doesn’t keep that one in the family album.
April and her father lived in what would be Palmares Três for about six months. Then boatloads of refugees from the wars in São Paulo and Rio came up the coast, and there was a debate about what to do with them. By this time everyone knew there wasn’t a cure for the Y Plague, and Palmares Três hadn’t had any big outbreaks. My great-grandfather wanted to stay in the city and keep it quarantined. April wanted to help the refugees. They had a huge argument, Mamãe says, and then April left to deliver food and supplies. The Aunties back then had decided to let the refugees stay out on the largest of the islands in the bay. I don’t remember what they called it before, but now, of course, we call it A Quarentena. The quarantine.
She died out there. No one is really sure how. I didn’t understand this for a long time, because she was
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