Read Online Crow Blue by Adriana Lisboa - Free Book Online

normal afternoon and getting his correspondence from the letterbox in his little garden – one of those square letterboxes that I had only seen in cartoons.
    An envelope with dangerously Brazilian green and yellow trim. Inside it, news about the woman he had been married to for six years and whom he hadn’t seen or spoken to or heard of for so long that maybe he wondered if she had really existed.
    She had really existed, said my letter, but didn’t anymore, at least not in the way we tend to understand existence in terms of the spongy substance that we carry around on the ends of our necks. I could think of at least one way in which my mother continued to exist a little, and to certify it all I had to do was touch my own skin. Nothing particularly transcendental or esoteric or mystical, no ectoplasm-sneezing mediums: my own skin. Me. I was her, a little, wasn’t I?
    Maybe Fernando thought similarly. He called me and said he was very sorry to hear the news and asked how I was with a forwardness that was somewhat excessive, perhaps rehearsed. Then he told me the barest essentials about his life, where he worked (as a security guard at the Denver Public Library), that he lived alone and that yes, I could stay with him for a while until – until things were resolved, or moving along.
    Neither of us knew how things were going to be resolved, or even how they were going to move along, or how we were going to move them along, because without a gesture they would most certainly stay the way they were. But I would attend the public school in Lakewood for a while and he would help me as much as he could.
    Depending on what happened, well, depending on what happened I would return to Brazil later. To Elisa’s place in Copacabana. It was curious how the central people in my life were now all peripheral. My mother’s foster sister. My mother’s ex-husband.
    I don’t know if Fernando could have guessed, at that moment, during that trans-hemispheric phone call, how much he was capable of. He would be surprised. But the future was (and is, and always will be) a mutating thing, the fruit of successive forks in the road, and I was already beginning to suspect that making plans was an embarrassingly useless habit.
    I have a little money, I said. My mother left it. It isn’t a lot, but I’ll be able to help out.
    Where one eats, there’s always room for one more, he said. The school is public. We’ll get by.
    You’re brave, Elisa told me, when I hung up. And I must be crazy.
    I looked at her and didn’t say anything but I thought lots of things. You didn’t have to be brave to do what I was doing. In fact, you’d have to be brave to stay where I was, a fixed point in space, nurturing like a sick little animal the idea that nothing had changed, that nothing was different, walking along the same streets, keeping up the same habits, faking myself.
    What if I went with you. I’ll go with you, she said.
    She glanced sideways, clasped her hands together.
    It isn’t possible, I can’t go with you. What about my work? I think it’d be better if you waited a while longer. A year or two.
    I didn’t say anything.
    I now know that if I hadn’t done what I did I would have turned to stone in that life, a bone that heals crooked. That was the window that pre-empted the impulse, the right moment to jump unseen into the cargo train as it passed, if that were the only way to take off into the world, and if I had to take off into the world. Nothing about it even remotely resembled irresponsibility or courage or spirit of adventure.
    It wasn’t an adventure. It wasn’t a holiday or fun or a pastime or a change of scenery; I was going to the United States to stay with Fernando with a very specific objective in mind: to look for my father.
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    A person looking for something or someone basically has two possible outcomes on the horizon: they can find what they are