But there were still the Spanish and English lessons. This way you’ll get work anywhere in the world, my mother used to say.
And I’d mentally recite:
¿Es el televisor?
No, señor (señorita, señora), no es el televisor. Es el gato.
I didn’t want to work anywhere in the world explaining to people that cats weren’t TVs. But putting up resistance to the transmission/imposition of knowledge was pointless.
My mother told me stories about her mother. About her father she only said the barest minimum.
I imagined my grandmother as a very thin woman with tiny feet who collected postcards from places with suggestive names like Hanover and Islamabad. She had a cat that lay in her lap and bit everyone else. An eccentric cat, who preferred his teeth to his claws. One day the cat fell out the apartment window and died, splayed across the sidewalk. People said the cat had committed suicide.
My mother told me that she’d told them that cats don’t commit suicide.
How do you know? I asked her.
Cats don’t commit suicide, she repeated.
I imagined my grandfather in a cowboy hat, selling his geological knowledge to oil companies in Texas. And one day getting bitten by a lethal rattlesnake called Crotalus atrox. He had a blue suit jacket and a roll of fat at the nape of his neck.
My grandparents had names. My grandmother was Maria Gorete, a name I’ve never seen on anyone else. There must be other Maria Goretes in the world. But for me ‘Maria Gorete’ is synonymous with ‘grandmother’, and a specific grandmother. My grandfather, her husband, was Abner, which was something biblical, with the usual biblical grandiosity.
Maria Gorete and Abner were Elisa’s foster parents and my mother Suzana’s parents for real. They were my grandparents for real, even though I never met them. And not the grandparents of the children that Elisa never had.
This was my family tree until I was thirteen years old. One man and four women across three generations. Odd arithmetic, tied up like colorful handkerchiefs inside a magician’s top hat. A family tree lacking roots, which in the place of certain branches only had vague gestures, indications, suggestions, forget-about-its.
If you look at it from another point of view, however, things were very simple.
After all, sometimes people vanish.
But sometimes other people go looking for them. They pull their colorful handkerchiefs out of their top hats, dragging out rabbits, doves and even a burning torch, to the audience’s astonishment.
Maria Gorete, my grandmother, liked to play with dolls even as an adult. She liked to sing a song about a lamb, which never failed to make my mother cry. I used to have a little lamb, Jasmine was her name. Her wool was fleecy white, and when I called she came. When she had visitors over and wanted to show off her daughter, Maria Gorete would say: Do you want to see her cry? And she’d sing. A hunter in the flowering fields (my mother’s eyes would already be brimming over) shot her down one day. And Maria Gorete would recite: When I got to her she was dead, and I cried in dismay.
And my mother would cry.
How cute, visitor no. 1 would say.
She’s so sensitive, visitor no. 2 would say.
No, she’s just silly, Maria Gorete would say.
My mother would tell me this story and I secretly agreed with Maria Gorete: how silly to cry over a lamb in a song. But my mother always cried again when she sang the song to me and I knew that she wasn’t asking my opinion and that it was better not to say anything. Besides which, I also thought it was silly of Maria Gorete to play with dolls as an adult. And I thought it was the height of silliness for Maria Gorete to show off her daughter to visitors by making her cry, and over such an unworthy thing. I decided they deserved each other.
Maria Gorete fell ill and died. Two years before Janis Joplin. My mother inherited her dolls, and later, when she was living in the United States and thought she was too big to play with dolls, she donated them all to a Presbyterian orphanage in Dallas. All but one, Priscila, which she kept and, when I was deemed big enough, gave to me as a present. Which was a mistake. I wasn’t big enough and did Priscila’s makeup with a pen. Washing her was useless. She was left with a smudged, end-of-party look for the rest of time.
The day I arrived from Brazil, I hung the clothes I had in the closet. There weren’t many. In the front entrance of Fernando’s house in Lakewood, Colorado, there was a closet for coats and shoes. I put Elisa’s heels, which I was never going to use, in it. The heels half-closed their eyes and there they stayed, like a Hindu ascetic going to meditate in a cave.
When you come inside, take your shoes off, Fernando told me. That way the house stays clean for longer.
Then he went to his room and came back with a bag.
Here, Evangelina, I bought these for you. They’re to wear around the house.
In the bag was a pair of checkered slippers that were fleecy on the inside. I thought they looked like granny slippers, but I didn’t say anything.
They’re not for now, of course, he said. They’re for when it gets cold.
You can call me Vanja, I said.
Fernando’s house had two bedrooms. He got the sofa bed ready for me in the spare bedroom. Later on we’ll have to buy you a coat and some boots, he said. There’s a shop with some good stuff at the outlet. But it doesn’t have to be right away.
It didn’t have to be ever. It was unimaginable that at some point I was going to feel cold there. Boots? He had to be kidding.
But contrary to all of my expectations and everything that pointed to a new world one hundred percent untouched in its desert rigidity, it started to rain every now and again.
The first rain fell during the night. I woke up and everything was wet, but it didn’t last. The sun re-confiscated all of the water on the ground, on the heroic plants. And it was as if nothing had happened. It was as if someone had committed a faux pas at dinner and everyone present had forgotten it in a hurry.
The second was in the afternoon, a fine rain, and I had the impression that it gave up and evaporated halfway between the clouds and the earth. A weird rain, that didn’t wet the ground.
The third was a storm that lasted nineteen minutes, accompanied by lightening and thunder. I observed the miracle from the window, fascinated.
It’s raining quite a bit this summer, said Fernando. One Saturday, when everything was dry again, he got his red 1985 Saab and took me down Highway 93, hugging the mountains, to the city of Boulder. Along the way I saw a drag racing track. In Boulder, he bought two tire tubes and blew them up at a gas station and we rode down a section of the river with our backsides in the holes, hollering and overturning on the rocks and grazing our knees.
Then I sat in the shade by the river’s edge and watched skaters, uniformed cyclists, Labradors and a bum with dreadlocks go past.
One day I went to my future school on roller skates and for the first time I felt real fear, the sort that can send shivers through you even when outside waves of heat are lifting up off the asphalt like something supernatural. It was the hottest time of day and the public school was closed for the holidays, and its muteness evoked something secret and dangerous. Maybe military research was carried out or political prisoners were arbitrarily held in there.
One morning, a month from then, I walked through those doors together with new and old students. I was still in my early teens, but I already suspected that adolescence was basically a declared war between me and adulthood.