Crow Blue by Adriana Lisboa Read Free Book Online Page A

They have never witnessed tidal waves or earthquakes or hurricanes. Nor do they dream of moist Amazon forests where communist guerrillas once ventured, got wet, got dirty, fell in love, fired guns, got shot, were taken prisoner, hauled off to torture sessions and then buried here and there after they were dead.
    And one fine day, deep in the innocence of youth, one of those blue Rio de Janeiro days, far from Altamira and São João do Araguaia, one of those days when the city wakes up and looks in the mirror and decides OK, today I’m going to be postcard perfect, on a day like this the mother of one such Evangelina goes to her daughter, calmly and seriously, and tells her something.
    It starts like this:
    Vanja, let’s go out for an ice-cream.
    Vanja leaps up from the front of the television. She pushes the button to turn off the set, which is already quite old and has a purplish smudge in the upper left-hand corner. It is as if it were growing ill, the poor TV. One day the purplish smudge is going to spread across the entire screen and the televised world will be uniformly purple.
    Suzana, her mother, doesn’t say much. They go out for an ice-cream. Vanja wants one of the new flavors, that caramelized milk one coated in chocolate and almonds. It is one of the most expensive, but Suzana says OK. (Strange. Vanja is suspicious.)
    The two of them walk down to the beach promenade. They pass the beggar who lives on the corner of Rua Duvivier with his dog. The dog wags its tail. Vanja likes the dog. Suzana doesn’t. Suzana belongs to that percentage of humankind that prefers cats to dogs and John Lennon to Paul McCartney.
    There’s something I need to tell you, says Suzana, when they sit on a bench facing the beach, the afternoon stretching their elastic shadows towards the sea. The sea has a magnet that attracts things, and people, and their shadows. Sometimes it regurgitates remains. Sometimes it doesn’t.
    Vanja is eleven. Suzana, thirty years older.
    In a little paper bag is a jumble of names and words: Albuquerque, Copacabana, London, Araguaia, LIFE. IS. GOOD. Amazon Colorado Guerrilla. Texas. American Boyfriend Nowhere . Some of the words have to do with the present, others come from the past, others may belong to some future. They’re there, tangled. It is a little paper bag that Vanja is going to take, unwittingly, in her suitcase of important things, when she travels back to the country where she was born and where the slogan is: life is good. The words and names in the paper bag slowly detach from Suzana, belong to her less and less. So much so that she doesn’t even mention them, although she knows they are there.
    The important thing that she needs to tell her daughter is the only entirely predictable one, except that it is going to happen a little before its time. She explains. Talks. Then listens. She answers all questions. The questions are neverending, until they end. And with them the postcard-perfect afternoon and the need for answers.
    Everything is going to be the same as before, Suzana says, after a time. Vanja wants to dive down to the ocean floor where strangely-colored molluscs live strange lives.
    That night, Vanja and her mother don’t say goodnight.
    Can I sleep in your bed? asks Vanja.
    Suzana says yes. At bedtime, she is wearing a white t-shirt without a bra and Vanja notices her nipples beneath the fabric. She raises her hands to her own chest. Almost nothing, yet, besides a slight swelling that she isn’t sure if it really exists or if it is her imagination. She thinks her mother is beautiful, even if she has wrinkles around her eyes and the skin under her chin is beginning to get a little loose. She hugs her mother, with all those wrinkles, with folds of fat in undesirable places, when they lie down to sleep.
    Everything is going to be the same as before.
    Nothing is going to be the same as before and they know it.
    Â 
    My mother explained everything to