Crow Blue (19 page)

With the capture of some of the guerrillas, the Army learned things. It discovered, for example, that at night the communists listened to Tirana Radio, from Albania, and Peking Radio, from China. Both broadcast programs in Portuguese with recent news about the Araguaia Guerrilla Movement and left the military perplexed: how on earth did the information get to them? Back at home, the censured press only said what was convenient. But Brazilian Communist Party activists in the cities graffitied walls exalting the guerrilla war and letting everyone know that it was alive and well.

In September, Brazil commemorated the 150th anniversary of its independence from Portugal. With green and yellow flags, there were street celebrations and military orchestras.

In September, a guerrilla from Detachment C wrote a letter to his parents.
May the fascist generals froth with hatred. The revolution is a reality and the people will win. My dear parents, I can't wait for the day to arrive when I can walk into our house, embrace you at long last and say: Here is the triumphant revolution
.

In September, the
Estado de São Paulo
, which received a list of forbidden topics on a daily basis, got around the censorship in an entirely unexpected way. The guerrilla war wasn't on the list one day, so the newspaper published a story entitled “In Xambioá, the struggle is against guerrillas and underdevelopment”:
While the joint forces of the Army, Navy and Air Force have approximately five thousand men hunting guerrillas in the jungles of the left bank of the Araguaia River, the Army initiated yesterday, simultaneously, in Xambioá and Araguatins, in the state of Goiás, on the right side of the river in the far north of the state, a Civic-Social Action designed to take assistance to the entire population of the area.
Two days later, the story made the
New York Times
.

The Brazilian Armed Forces had five thousand men hunting a few dozen guerrillas in the forest. By now they also knew that the communists were practicing jungle survival techniques, learning to get their bearings from the sun, stars, and landmarks. Learning to commando crawl in the forest, to recognize edible fruits, to hunt. They knew they were practising target shooting, learning to ambush and storm, studying the enemy. The enemy was studying the enemy, a semantic knot that no one noticed.

Chico wasn't up on these numbers, nor did he know that the guerrillas who had been caught were all sent to the Criminal Investigations Platoon in Brasilia. It was a place where physical and psychological torture methods had been finely tuned. The torturers had PhDs in dragging confessions (which, after all, one doesn't get with bonbons) out of people. Naked and hooded men and women were trussed up and tied to poles where they were variously tortured, held underwater until they almost drowned, and even given electric shocks on their genitals.

According to the Geneva Convention, guerrillas are goners, a military officer once said to a prisoner in Xambioá.

Now totally stripped of any aspiration to Xangri-Lá, Xambioá, that hamlet with a population of no more than three thousand, was often where it began.

One guerrilla from Detachment C, for example, even before she was sent to Brasilia, discovered hell there on the banks of the Araguaia, the River of the Macaws. Where the forest should have been her second mother, where the population was supposed to support the guerrillas rather than betray them. Stripped naked, she was punched and kicked in a circle of thirty men. When she was about to black out, she was taken to the river, where they held her head under until she almost drowned. Still wet, she was tortured with electric shocks. Communist whore. They took her to the river again. And so on. In the intervals, they threw her into a hole, where the pain and bleeding stopped her from sleeping. According to the Geneva Convention, guerrillas were goners.

In Xambioá, the army controlled everything and the mayor was thankful. I've never had it as easy as I do now, he said. How marvelous that the terrorists had chosen to go there, because it was the only way for a piece of progress to get there too. Highways, medicine. Problems between farmers and squatters resolved in record time. I need a twenty-mile highway ready within two months said General Antonio Bandeira, commander of the 3rd Infantry Brigade, to the chief engineer of the Goiás Highway Department. The engineer replied that it wouldn't be possible: there wasn't enough equipment and two months wasn't enough time. You don't understand, said the general. The highway must be ready in two months because I'm going to travel along it with my troops. How you do it is your problem.

In September, the rainy season was about to start. Again. Cyclical and indifferent. On the right side of the Araguaia River, in the then state of Goiás, the Civil-Social Action vaccinated more than five thousand locals against yellow fever, and almost three thousand against smallpox. They pulled four thousand teeth. They gave talks on citizenship, hygiene, eating habits, held celebrations, ceremonies, gymkhanas, sporting competitions and even created a youth club after coming to the conclusion that there wasn't much to do in those parts. They donated flags, painted schools, built septic tanks. On the other side of the river, in the state of Pará, dentists attended two hundred locals and doctors saw one thousand, six hundred.

 

The program lasted eight days. Just as it had all begun, it ended. Eight was also the number of guerrillas killed in the month of September, during Operation Parrot. Among them, João Carlos Haas Sobrinho, a.k.a. Juca, a member of the Military Commission. Before the eight guerrilla deaths in September there had been five others, according to the army, and they had captured more than ten.

Although General Bandeira didn't want it to, the operation ended in early October, by the deadline. The only reason it hadn't been more successful, in his opinion, was because there were too few soldiers for too much forest. The combat area stretched across 3,475 square miles of forest – which they even bombed with napalm in three places. The troops were withdrawing from the Araguaia, leaving behind platoons in three different places with orders to
obtain as much information as possible in order to get a picture of the situation
.

The communists saw the army's retreat as flight. It was a maneuver to avoid demoralization. A mimeographed announcement declared the Guerrilla Forces' intention to go on fighting, and their confidence that they would win.
Death to those who persecute and attack the residents and fighters of the Araguaia!

In December, the commander of the guerrillas, Maurício Grabois, would send a letter to the party leaders in São Paulo.
We were not isolated (unlike Che in Bolivia), nor did the enemy manage to give the peasants and other inhabitants of the region a false image about us
, he would write, among other positive assessments.

And he would sign off:
Big hugs. A Happy New Year to everyone. 1973 will be a year of victories.

 

Any special reason why your mother named you Evangelina?

June was washing up after breakfast and I was helping her.

You know, she continued. Evangelina, evangelism.

I shrugged.

Not that she told me. I think it was just because she liked it. And because it isn't very common. She didn't want me to have a really common name. The same as a whole bunch of other people at school, you know?

As I said this, I remembered the poem a former classmate in Brazil had made up:
A Vanja e o suco de laranja. A Vanja derrama a canja no suco de laranja. A Vanja gosta de canja com suco de laranja.
(Vanja and the orange juice. Vanja spills chicken soup in her orange juice. Vanja likes chicken soup with orange juice.)

Do you have any kids?

I have one, said June. He lives in Kansas.

What does he do there?

He's a musician. He plays the bassoon in the Topeka Symphony Orchestra.

I glanced sideways at June. Maybe she would allow me more questions and even more personal ones. She was the one who had broached the subject.

He was still very little when his father and I got divorced. He was in kindergarten and was an absent-minded kid who was always falling over. He'd fall off the swing at school, he'd fall off his bike, he'd fall down the stairs. Once he broke his two front teeth. Could you put this in the cupboard there please? On the bottom shelf.

And you never married again? I asked.

She cleared her throat. A moment of silence.

I lived with someone for a while. For a good while. Almost fifteen years. But then it ended. As everything does.

Did he leave?

She.

I closed the cupboard door after putting away the jar of ground coffee. I looked at June and said ah, I understand.

The girls at school thought it was gross. A woman with another woman. Not much was said about a man with another man – that was a different kettle of fish, what they did was their problem. But what if your best friend suddenly tried to kiss you and touch your breasts? Or if you suddenly felt inclined to kiss your best friend? Gross gross gross gross gross they would say over and over, as if it were a mantra that could protect them from such great evil. One day I talked to Nick about it. He asked me if I felt like kissing my best friend. No, I said, shrugging, and he said what a shame, that would be really sexy.

What about you? Do you like anyone?

There's a guy at school, I said.

June pointed at the name written on my jeans. Nick?

He's an eco-anarchist.

Really now?

Yep.

And how does an eco-anarchist see things?

I'm not really sure. He lent me a book but I haven't opened it yet.

On the couch, Fernando looked like he was reading the newspaper. Maybe he was. Carlos came back from the bathroom smelling of aftershave. Among his toiletries, which he kept in a clear plastic bag, was a bottle that said
L'Oreal Men's Expert Comfort Max Anti-Irritation After Shave Balm with SPF 15 Sunscreen
.

Let's take the dogs for a walk, said June.

I took Alfred by the collar, Carlos took Georgia and Fernando stayed on the couch, reading the newspaper. The two dogs were old and always sleepy. We walked down Camino Sin Nombre to Martinez Lane, Acequia Madre and Camino Don Miguel, looping back to June's house. Alfred is going to die soon, she said, and I looked at Alfred and thought he knew it too. But time would prove them both wrong. Georgia died first, a few months after our visit. Alfred lived for another two years.

Redondo Road

 

The highway was attached to another highway and then another. It was strange to think about it. Strange and comforting. Of course: there would always be the discontinuity of a dead-end road, here and there. Of a road or street that didn't lead anywhere, that died in a quay or a pasture or a wall of rock. This too was foreseen on maps. One day in the future I would see a tunnel through a mountain in Colorado, near Clear Creek Canyon Road: a tunnel abandoned when the highway was rerouted, black, a mouth excavated in the rock with a wooden fence blocking the bottom. An ex-route.

My father's mother lived on Redondo Road, in Jemez Springs. Our destination, some sixty-five miles from Santa Fé. That was why our highway, on that occasion, needed to be attached to others.

Carlos went with June in her green pickup, allowing him plenty of time with his love at first sight. He wanted to talk to her, hear her talking in that funny English of hers, in her elegant Queen's English, which made him think of jewelry and capes and red velvet. We passed enormous casinos run by the Indians and drove up into the mountains where pine trees grew thankfully, one hundred percent bound to their mountain reality. Much of New Mexico was desert. But not there. We reached Los Alamos and June pulled over to the side of the road. She got out of the car and came to our window.

Los Alamos, she said, you know. And she looked at Fernando and then at me. Did you tell her? We're going to pass through a security gate. They might pull us over, they might not.

No one asked us to stop at the security gate – in fact, there wasn't anyone in any of the cabins – and Fernando provided me with the historical connections that I didn't have, Los Alamos, the Manhattan Project, the atomic bomb, and when he crossed a road called Oppenheimer Drive he explained who Oppenheimer was and said that he had quoted Hindu scripture after the first explosion in New Mexico:
Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds
.

It had snowed in Los Alamos. Amid the pine trees there were pale trails of semi-melted snow. I was wearing my sunglasses with the pink and blue frames, and was thinking of the name Oppenheimer. Heimeroppen. Meroppenhei. Enheioppmer.

Now, this woman, this Florence lady, my father's mother, is she expecting us?

No, replied Fernando. But I imagine that people show up at her house from time to time. It's a studio. I don't know what these things are like. I don't know any artists.

I imagine her studio as a large room with a really big dirty table and pieces of newspaper everywhere. Maybe she's hung her favorite poem on the wall. To feel inspired.