Free Crow Blue by Adriana Lisboa

And getting worse and worse. Worse and worse. (Don’t you read the news? Did you see what the drug lords did in São Paulo?)
    In the beginning, I thought it was a survival strategy. Maybe it was. Or maybe it was just permeability. After a while, it is hard to remain unaffected. To keep dreaming in Portuguese when the other sixteen hours of the day you are surrounded by American co-workers, American sales assistants, the Mexican postman who talks to you in English, American radio stations, American TV.
    Perhaps (another hypothesis) it was the disease of Latin American immigrants in the first world: the desperate need to embrace the rich country with all their might and say I want a piece. My story isn’t just mine. It’s yours too. For example: where does your cocaine come from? The meat on your barbecue? The illegal wood in your shelves? Your story isn’t just yours. It’s mine too. Our American dream. After all, America is a chunk of land that stretches from the Arctic Ocean down to Cape Horn, isn’t it?
    Although Brazilians have always positioned themselves very clearly in this story: hold on, we are not Hispanic immigrants. Take a look at our faces. We’re actually quite different in terms of biotype and we don’t speak Spanish. We speak Portuguese. POR. TU. GUESE. (At school, I had to put my ethnic group on a form. The options were: CAUCASIAN. HISPANIC. NATIVE AMERICAN. ASIAN. AFRICAN-AMERICAN. Where was I in all that?)
    Perhaps (last hypothesis) it was all just cordiality. It isn’t polite to speak in front of other people in a language they don’t understand and to be a person they don’t understand. One of the biggest complaints of American citizens who are opposed to immigration is that the immigrants don’t learn English. But studies show, as Mr. Atkins taught us at school, that it is the opposite: English is assimilated very quickly, and the immigrants’ mother tongues are slowly forgotten. It is a fact and Mr. Atkins left no room for doubt, as he hammered the table with his index finger. Mr. Atkins liked to hammer the table with his index finger, driving his statements into the world emphatically and forever.
    Cordiality. Necessity. Shame. Curiosity. Ambition. Admiration. The desire to be equal. To belong. Whatever.
    After you have been away from home for too long, you become an intersection between two groups, like in those drawings we do at school. You belong to both, but you don’t exactly belong to either. Your memory of home is always old, always out of date. People are listening to such-and-such a song all the time in Brazil: it plays on the nightly soap, it plays on the radio. Six months later you accidentally stumble across the song, like it, and its huge prior popularity feels like a kind of betrayal. It is as if people were telling each other secrets and you were always being surprised by old news. The people from group A consider you somewhat different because you also belong to group B. The people in group B eye you a little suspiciously because you also belong to group A. You are something hybrid and impure. And the intersection of the groups isn’t a place, it is just an intersection, where two entirely different things give people the impression that they converge.
    For example, I’d go buy a sandwich and would place my order as carefully as possible, remembering my mother’s perfect English, arranging each vowel and consonant in my mouth with feng shui attention to detail. A few instants later the girl at the cash register would ask me where I was from. Damn: how is it that other people can hear your accent if you can’t? My tongue was perfectly retroflexed for my r’s and touched the inside of my top front teeth ever so softly for my th’s. What was missing?
    Later I realized that life away from home is a possible life. One of many possible lives.
    Timothy Treadwell decided to be a grizzly man and went to live in