Free Crow Blue by Adriana Lisboa Page A

Katmai National Park, in Alaska. It lasted thirteen summers. In the end, he was killed and eaten by a bear. Tim’s disfigured head was found at the camp site. His arm with the still-ticking watch. A piece of his spine. The remains of his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, too. This happened a year after I arrived in the United States. I was a fourteen-year-old girl and he was a forty-six-year-old guy. A possible life and a possible death.
    Fernando left home and went to study guerrilla warfare techniques in Peking, then he moved to the Faveira guerrilla base on the Araguaia River. This happened two decades before I was born. It was a possible life and a possible death, both deeply interconnected, like during Tim Treadwell’s summers. Like during the last summer of Amie Huguenard, who was possibly thinking of leaving Tim and his black clothes and his Prince Valiant hair and his obsess­ion with bears. Grizzlies. Ursus arctos horribilis .
    Fernando had been so many places after leaving home that he could no longer remember the way back. Of course: home wasn’t there anymore, therefore the way back couldn’t be either. And it wasn’t that home was everywhere now – no, that’s for citizens of the world, those who travel for sport. For those who have never commando-crawled through the frozen mud in China and never run the risk of being devoured by bears in Alaska. It wasn’t that home was everywhere: home wasn’t anywhere.
    We’ll get by, Fernando told me over the phone.
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    My former classmates sent me emails from Rio de Janeiro, having forgotten the mourning period they had imposed on me when I was still among them. How are things in the United States? Are the guys really good-looking, with blond hair and blue eyes? Are you going to go to Disneyland? Are you going to go to Hollywood? Is it true that the kids take guns to school and every now and then go around shooting everyone? Is it true that people only eat hamburgers and pizza and only drink Coca-Cola? Is it true that American girls have really big boobs?
    Aditi Ramagiri would ask me: What’s it like in Brazil? Is it true that you live in the middle of the jungle? Is it true that it’s really violent and dangerous, a nation of corrupt politicians and drug dealers? What language do you speak – Brazilian?
    I’d ask Aditi Ramagiri: What’s life like in India? Is it true that there’s a river there where people throw their dead and bathe and wash their clothes, all at the same time? Is it true that your family decides who you’re going to marry? What language do you speak – Indian?
    We got by. I got by at school, in the first week, trying to act cool. And for some reason the other kids decided to think I was cool.
    Rio de Janeiro? Cool! What the heck are you doing here, dude?
    I couldn’t say, well, dude, what I’m doing here, what the heck I’m doing here is trying to see if I can find my dad, he’s got to be somewhere, my mom died a year ago and I’m living with her ex-husband who’s my dad on my birth certificate but he isn’t my real dad.
    So I’d shrug and keep to myself but the other kids thought I was cool and Aditi Ramagiri, who was popular, thought I was cool and we became friends and she made me see how Jake Moore was a loser.
    When I told her just half of my story (the maternal half) her eyes grew genuinely misty and she hugged me and thought I was even cooler. After all, it wasn’t everyone whose life had the dramatic ingredient of having lost their mother at the age of twelve, and it wasn’t every day that you had the opportunity to bring this dramatic ingredient into your life via a friend, without having to experience it first-hand.
    Once I went to a debating championship with Aditi. She was on the school debate team and almost every weekend had to participate in these events, in which people had to argue consistently and coherently in favor of something