Crow Blue by Adriana Lisboa Read Free Book Online Page B

me that day, with our shadows stretching out in front of us on the Copacabana beach promenade, towards the sea, at the entrance to the bay. Behind the headlands is a bay that appears to have been painted by the supreme painter-architect of the world, God, our Lord, (said Father Fernão Cardim, the Portuguese Jesuit priest, five centuries earlier).
    My mother spoke calmly, carefully and seriously, and I put away the information like an item of clothing that you only use from time to time – a scarf, for example, in Rio de Janeiro – but which you know is there, at the back of the wardrobe, waiting for you.
    She knew I needed that information. And she would never have forgiven herself if she hadn’t told me first-hand what would soon be evident and self-explanatory. If I became aware of the facts not through her but through her disease, that inconvenient visitor sitting on the couch talking about unpleasant matters. That fountain of faux pas. It would be a kind of betrayal if the disease were to call me aside and say, with a glass of whisky in its hand: hey, you there, did you know . . . ?
    My mother always answered all of my questions, so that any censorship was up to me: if I didn’t want to know something, all I had to do was not ask. It wasn’t always an easy decision. At times I would have preferred not to have all that autonomy regarding my own maturity. I would have preferred that certain choices had already been made at the factory and came with a sticker indicating the appropriate age group. Like at the movies. But my mother was my mother.
    And that’s the way it was, until the following year. I turned twelve. My breasts suddenly sprang out under my blouse, like employees late for work. My mother died as she had said she would, and it didn’t take long as she had told me it wouldn’t, and afterwards nothing was the same as before, as we both knew it wouldn’t be.
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    It was in the month of July. And if the following year was displaced, there wasn’t anything strange about that. There was a struggle going on, an internal battle: not to feel sorry for myself, in spite of all the sighs of “poor little thing” that I heard coming from heedless mouths.
    I didn’t feel poor or little. Something had happened, and the thing had two different appearances depending on which way you looked at it. My mother had also told me all of this.
    It could be an antediluvian monster of sadness, something solid and unbearably heavy, with paws of lead, breath reeking of sulfur and beer, something that grabbed and silenced me, that reduced me to a heart that kept beating for lack of any other alternative. I could drag around a pair of bureaucratic feet and a pair of bureaucratic eyes, staring into space, my clothes hanging somewhat crooked on my body and greasy hair flopping across my forehead.
    Or it could be something that happened among the myriad of things that happen all over the world in every instant, and at the same time there are traces of snow among the cactuses on a mountain in New Mexico, and a child in Jaipur drops a plate on the ground and the plate breaks, and a cat sneezes in Amsterdam and an ant loses its balance on a leaf in the Australian outback and kids graffiti a mural in Rio or in New York or in Bogotá. And my life would go on because I was the boss of it, not it of me.
    Or maybe it was none of the above and I just needed a niche of quietness, of things not happening, a long, lasting moment, a moment that was the size of several moments, as many as necessary, that allowed me to be quiet, without having to name the things that I didn’t want to name.
    To stay there. Still. As if I had become a vase of plastic flowers on a shelf. The sort that requires no care at all. The sort that has no beauty, quality, singularity, scent, nothing. Something that can exist in the world with the courtesy of reciprocal indifference: I won’t get in your hair if you