I left my pain with my mother. Or rather, I should say, my mother took my pain when she left me. Left me with nothing but my body. A body that doesn’t feel pain. A body that doesn’t know how far its bones can bend before they are broken. A body that will starve before it feels hunger. My mother took herself, and my pain, and left me to be taken by an American family. I was given a new name and new clothes and a new country.
My mother left me and I was given a new mother. New Mother gave me peace in place of pain. New Mother did not take, only gave. I held New Mother’s gifts inside my body until it was full. People assume peace is light, like goose down. But peace can be heavy and hard, like river stone. People fight and kill for peace. I do not fight because I feel no pain and therefore do not have anything to fight for.
I am waiting outside my school, Ijamsville High, the first time I see Old Mother. I wonder what breadcrumbs of my essence have led her way home to me, across oceans, to this tiny Maryland town. I do not think of myself as a home but perhaps Old Mother does. Perhaps I am the only place Old Mother does belong, which is why she has chosen to appear to me.
Old Mother is mine and I am hers, which is perhaps why I am the only one who can see her. But even if I belong to her and she belongs to me, Old Mother does not belong in this place, in this new country, in this new American family. How can two mothers fit in the place of one? That is not how families are built here, in America. There can only be one mother.
I do not know how I know Old Mother is Old Mother. I was taken when I was a baby, but sometimes babies remember things they are not supposed to. Old Mother is standing just beyond the edge of the woods, her features shrouded by shadow and her legs severed by wide, leafy ferns. I am waiting for New Mother to pick me up from soccer practice. I play soccer because I am told that is what all Brazilians do, though I do not think of myself as Brazilian any more than I think of myself as American. Countries are like mothers and neither wants me.
From the forest, Old Mother tries to say something, but I do not understand. It is a whisper, too soft to travel the necessary distance. The indistinct sounds curve and slope through the air. By the time their movement reaches my ear, I feel only the chill of their non-meaning.
A few minutes later, New Mother arrives in her car. I slip into the passenger seat. How was your day at school, she asks.
• • •
My body feels no pain but there are other things I feel. I have skin to feel touch. A tongue to taste words. A heart to feel the rush of blood. I feel the rush of blood across my skin the second time I see Old Mother. Because I feel no pain, I like to guide the blade of broken glass across my thigh. I like the high of bloodletting. I like the rush of blood from brain to open wound. I think Old Mother likes it, too, because when I see her out of my bedroom window, she is smiling. She is standing on the lawn behind our house, in the strands of light that leak into the outside dark like little snakes escaping from their eggshells. Even at a distance I can see her broken, crooked teeth slipping through her gummy grin.
New Mother knocks on my door. I am not worried she will find me. New Mother only knocks, never enters. This is America. In America we are individuals. Our space is our own. Our selfhood is something to be respected. We do nothing without permission. My blood is my own and New Mother does not have permission to see it.
Come, she says, dinner is ready. Her voice is muffled by the door that divides us.
I tell her that I will be right there, and listen as her footsteps recede down the hall. I wrap my leg in gauze I hide beneath my bed with all my favorite shards. The red and white cursive of what was once a Mexican Cola. Half-a-handle of Father’s old beer mug. The clean, straight lines of a window shattered by an errant soccer ball. Remnants of a Snapple bottle. Lingering bits of a container for artisan cantucci. After dressing my wound, I dress myself then follow New Mother to the dining room and sit at the table where she is already seated.
At the head of the table sits New Father. I am told there is no Old Father because Old Father left Old Mother abandoned. If Old Father had not left Old Mother, then perhaps Old Mother would not have left me and taken my pain and I would not have been given to this American family. Because of this I simply call New Father, Father, though perhaps this is not fair.
I look through the window behind Father to see if I can glean what Old Mother thinks is fair. She is closer now, just outside the window, but I cannot understand what she is feeling. She wears the same slanted smile as before, though now her palms are placed upon the window. She does not look at Father or New Mother. She does not recognize their existence any more than they recognize hers. She looks at me and I stare at her.
Father asks me questions, the same rudimentary ones he always asks. Will you start as goaltender for the Varsity team? How are you enjoying the novel you are reading for English class? In what ways can we help you do better in Math? I push around the food upon my plate, unwilling to consume what is before me. I answer his questions with the same rudimentary answers I always do. Yes, I will start as goaltender at this Saturday’s game against East Appalachia Prep, but Coach will only play me because I am tall. Yes, I am enjoying the reading very much. We are reading Mark Twain. Huckleberry Finn. My teacher insists we say the word. He only looks at me when he reads the book aloud. No Father, there is nothing you can do to help. I will learn my math on my own, like a good, independent, American child. I will try harder. I promise I will be the child you always wanted me to be.
I answer his questions, and all the while Father thinks I am looking him in the eye, but I am not. I am staring at Old Mother and she is staring at me, listening. When I am finished with the questions, she glides over to the door that leads to the patio. Father says something to New Mother. They are no longer paying attention to me. I turn my head to keep Old Mother’s gaze locked in mine. She curls her dusty fingers around the handle of the door. Her nails are long and filled under with grime.
Old Mother is not American. Old Mother does not believe in the supreme value of ownership. Old Mother does not ask for permission. She does not knock. She turns the handle and enters.
• • •
Old Mother spends her nights observing me in bed. Sometimes I sleep, most nights I do not. I stare at Old Mother and she stares back at me. We spend our nights uncommunicative, but that does not mean we are silent. Old Mother mouths words across my bed sheets but all I hear is a multisyllabic hiss. I, in turn, whisper words back at her and see the same blank expression of misunderstanding.
We never touch. One night, in an attempt to bridge the gap between us, I reach across my bed to grab ahold of her hand. Old Mother recoils before our fingers lace and for the first time I see something akin to fear rush across her face. My hand stays locked in the air and Old Mother recedes into nothing. I wonder where she goes when she is not here.
The next night she does not come, and I spend the wakeful hours shrouded in her absence. I wonder if I have lost her forever, a second time. I did not feel the first loss so much because I had no memory of the losing, only the vague sensation of not having something that once was there. The second loss is felt quite potently. The vanishing is more pronounced, its harsh syllables guttural in the silence of darkness.
After the sun rises, I go in search of her. I walk to the soccer fields beside my school where she first appeared to me. I stare into the ferns and the thick trunks of alder, cedar, and oak escaping into the sky. I see only shadow. I meander around the neighborhood, peer through alleyways and windows. Nothing.
I trek to a nearby strip mall which contains the local grocery, a paints store, a record shop, and an indistinct chain restaurant. There is nothing else on this road for miles but trucks making their way down the highway toward the Blue Ridge Mountains and further west. It is dangerous to walk along the road next to the blur of rushing semis, so I follow the treaded path trampled through the forest by the neighborhood children. When I arrive, I enter the record shop, which I visit quite often. The staff and regulars know me though we have silently agreed to know each other only at a distance. The clerk nods as I walk by.
Near the front, I find a magazine containing an interview with the musician, Caetano Veloso. Though Old Mother is nowhere to be found, a sudden warmth washes over my skin. I open the issue and flip to the interview in which Caetano describes the influence of anthropophagy on the Tropicália movement. Antropofagia. Cultural cannibalism. We were eating The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix, he says. Is that what I am doing now as I read this article? Cannibalizing? Antropofagia. The need to feed on that which makes you, you. Tupi, or not Tupi, that is the question. To consume not only one’s body but their history, their language, their strengths and weaknesses, their ways of being.
I buy the magazine, plus a few CDs, and head home.
That night, I lay in bed alone. I raise my forearm and bite into the flesh, softly at first but progressively clenching with more pressure until my tongue tastes the salty iron of blood and spit. I close my eyes and let the taste linger on my tongue as I relax my jaw and lick the wound.
When I open my eyes, I find Old Mother at her usual place at the foot of the bed. The second loss, it seems, is not a loss at all. I am startled but not frightened. To be frightened is to fear the presence of pain. I do not feel pain and so I cannot be frightened. I only wish this gap between us could close. I do not take my eyes off her for the rest of the night. Old Mother does not blink a single time.
• • •
I decide I will spend my days studying. Not the math that I promised Father I would do so that I could be the child he always wanted, but Portuguese. Old Mother stalks me as I walk from class to class. She stands over me as I sit at my desk, peering down at the open math textbook I hold in my hands. Within it, I hide a Portuguese dictionary from the eyes of my teacher. A kind of forbidden knowledge.
Within the dictionary, I learn that in Portuguese the word romance means novel. Novel, as in a story. Romance, as in love. Novel, as in something new. New love. Love, where before there was only its absence. A new love story.
My math teacher says something I do not hear. She repeats my name and I raise my startled head. She asks me a question I do not know the answer to, would never have known the answer to, even if I had been paying attention. I tell her that I do not know in hope that she will move on to someone else, but she does not.
My teacher is not a bad teacher. I can tell she cares deeply about her job. She wants me to understand the world as she does, in a way that can be explained through the smallest common denominator. My teacher sees the world in binary. Things that either are or are not. Alive or dead. Peace or pain. There is no place for Old Mother and me in her world. I insist that I do not know the answer she wants from me.
Toward the front of the classroom, another student raises her hand. The arm is slender and opaquely white, like porcelain. I have known the student for a long time. I have known her since elementary school. I know the way she thinks. She sees things much like my teacher. To her, the world is a series of questions to be answered. Correct or incorrect. She correctly answers the question I could not. I wonder what sort of points she gets for this. The teacher looks dismayed, as if her very purpose had been stolen from her. As if this student never had to be taught any of this.
• • •
At home I study, too. I carve the words into my skin so that I won’t forget. On one thigh I cut the words, Eu sou. On the other I cut the words, Eu estou. I am. I am. Eu sou Brasileiro. Eu estou Brasileiro. Eu sou Americano. Eu estou Americano. Permanence or temporality? What bounds are there that not even language can contain?
Old Mother watches me tear myself open. She remains silent, unspeaking. Unable to answer the questions I am unable to articulate. There is pain behind her smile. There is pain behind her every movement. Old Mother is a pillar of pain. I am a pillar of peace. Together we stand like Lot and his wife if he had turned first in the vain hope that she would not. What horrors has she seen? What Sodom? What Gomorrah has Old Mother kept from me?
I cannot say because this is not my story. This is not my pain. I have no pain and so I have no story.
Eu estou Americano.
Eu estou Brasileiro.
I carve only the subject and the verb. To say anything more would be grammatically incorrect. I am. I am. To say anything more would be untrue. I am impermanent. Nebulous. Undefined.
Eu sou Americano.
Eu sou Brasileiro.
I look up from the words on my leg to observe Old Mother’s shape. Ela é o fantasma. She too is impermanent. Ela é o espirito. This thing that I cannot touch. This body that is not a body. Ela é o espectro. Her presence is a paradox, as is mine. Together we are two fractured parts that cannot assemble a whole. I am a ghost of her. My body contains the lingering features of her brown eyes; her dense, coily hair; her ashen, caramel skin. But these features are not hers, they are mine.
This is not Old Mother’s home. She does not belong here. But do I? I look at the posters of soccer players and punk bands on my wall. I look at the collection of CDs and books on the shelf. I look at the clothes, the litter, the various objects strewn around the floor of my room. Do these objects really contain the essence of me? Is my spirit here? Does this room hold my soul?
• • •
New Mother and Father begin to notice that something is off. When driving me home from my soccer game, Father notes my poor play. You seemed like your head was elsewhere, he says to me. I am in the backseat and so I only see his eyes through the rearview mirror. New Mother is in the passenger seat beside him. She throws him a look I don’t think I was supposed to see and isn’t one that I understand. It is something like reproach but without the venom.
I do not want to respond. I want to recede into the leather until I am as lifeless as the car. But I know that my refusal will only foster more questions, so I shake my head and say something generic. It wasn’t our night. The ball didn’t bounce our way. Unlucky.
Father nods. New Mother turns back and smiles. You’ll get ’em next time, she says.
You can’t win ’em all, Father adds.
I could not care less about winning or losing. Who is better? Who is worse? Yet another binary that does not belong to me.
Once, my coach told me that Pelé referred to soccer as o jogo bonito, the beautiful game. Futebol-arte. The thing that separated him from the rest of the world was his belief that the game was an art form. That the competition between two diametrically opposed sides was an illusion disguising the field’s confluence of dance.
We are dancing around the question, my parents and I. The question they do not know how to ask and which I cannot answer. Though we share our words in common, I cannot speak their language any better than I can Old Mother’s. Nor can they speak mine. This chasm yawns between us in the car’s silence. New Mother shares another glance with Father, softer this time. Father keeps his eyes peeled on the road ahead of him. He does not look to see what is behind.
When we arrive at home, New Mother asks if I would like something to eat. I tell her no and make to go upstairs. Father stops me and tells me I should eat something, but New Mother exchanges that look with him again. Father receives the sentiment. Their communication is seamless. I cannot reach them the way they reach each other. I think they realize this too. I can see the pain of this knowledge in the way they look at each other. I do not feel pain, yet somehow I can understand that, at least.
Father relents, releasing me to go upstairs to my room. Old Mother is there, waiting for me. I try to speak to her. I use all the Portuguese phrases I can conjure with my juvenile understanding of the language. Nothing works. Old Mother remains still and mute.
Giving up, I lie down on my bed and close my eyes, try to feel the apparition of her. In the darkness, I sense her leave the foot of the bed and gently lie down next to me. A heat emanates from her non-body. I ease my muscles into the blanket of her warmth. Together, we lie side by side, not touching, but almost.
• • •
I begin to consume as much Brazilian culture as I can find. I scour the record shop for CDs, new and old, video stores for foundational cinema, bookstores for classic literature. I watch City of God and Black Orpheus in Portuguese (but with the subtitles on). I discover Jorge Ben and Gilberto Gil. I read Captains of the Sands and try to imagine the grains beneath my naked feet melting into glass.
I could be swallowed by the sheer mass of what I do not know. I realize I am built far more by absence than I am by substance. That I am defined by the outline of what I am not, what I do not possess. I could spend lifetimes consuming all the versions of what I could have been and I still would not be able to make myself whole.
Yet I cannot stop the consumption. I learn to make moqueca, though I fail to find palm oil. I watch videos on capoeira and mimic the sweeping legs and swaying movement of arms. The absence does not fill but I cannot stop myself from feeding it. This undefinable need has become a cancer that has spread to every organ. Despite all efforts, I cannot carve it out of me, and I do not know how much longer until this hunger consumes what little of me is left.
After spending an afternoon at the library reading about notorious cangaçeiros, I walk through the front door of my house and find New Mother and Father sitting on the couch watching TV. Jeopardy. Father’s arm is around New Mother’s shoulder. New Mother’s head rests on Father’s. Together, they look peaceful. I think of all the things that made them and how much they must want to pass those things on. Not because they are selfish, but because they truly wish what’s best for me.
But their peace is not my peace. New Mother looks back at me as I remove my shoes. She smiles. How was your day, she asks. The same question she always asks. But she is genuine. She wants to know. Unlike so many other parents, she truly does care how my day has been, yet like so many other children, I do not know what to tell her. It was okay, I say. It was fine.
Father asks if I would like to join them in front of the TV. I tell them I will be up in my room. New Mother seems disappointed at my answer but shares a look of understanding before turning back around toward the screen.
In my room, I take the box of glass from beneath my bed and place it on my lap as I sit atop the mattress.
Old Mother stands in front of me. She looks me over curiously, observing the bags beneath my eyes, the droop of my shoulders, the way my body sags toward the floor. I am wasting away, unable to realize what unknown thing will nourish me.
I open the box and take out a shard. A clear, clean fragment of window that is as sturdy as it is sharp. I roll up my sleeves, expose the tender flesh of my arms. My wrists are unblemished, smooth, soft. A canvas I have saved for just the right moment. Soon, I will join you, Old Mother, I think.
I lower the shard of glass till it rests upon the radial artery, but before I can press down Old Mother stops me. Her fingers around my wrist burn. It is not a dull warmth but a searing sharpness, and yet there is a gentleness to her movements. Deliberately, she pries my hand away from my wrist and lets it fall back into my lap. I look up at her face in confusion. She turns her head and her eyes fall on the magazine I had purchased days before, now sitting on my bedside table.
I pick it up and turn back to the interview with Caetano Veloso. Antropofagia. Cultural cannibalism. History. Language. Strength. Weakness. Being. As I reread the words, I think about how my tastes have developed. My palate can only be engineered by what is available to taste and I have spent my life sated by complacency.
Yet here I am now, no longer sated. Complicit, perhaps, but no longer complacent. Old Mother raises her arms and offers her own wrists to me. I hesitate. I still do not understand her as much as I wish to, but I understand her enough. I take the glass and place it on her skin. She nods. She mouths something I do not hear. I lower my head to the task and slide the shard up the river of her veins.
Old Mother exhales, a breath of excruciation or relief. A black, syrupy torrent escapes the wound. Old Mother raises her wrist to my lips. I taste metal at the edges of my mouth. I open my lips wider and inhale the blood into me. As I do, the ecstasy of pain floods my entire body. Every hair is a needle piercing my skin. My nails are little knives digging into my palms. My bowels roil. Acid rises into my throat. My bones feel as though they are splintering apart.
I grab hold of Old Mother’s wrist. I bare my teeth. I widen my jaws and clench down on the sinews and tendons. I gnaw at muscle until I hit bone, and then chew until the bones splinter. I tear the skin down her palms and take each finger into my mouth. Some I snap into pieces, others I slide down my throat whole.
I cannot stop. I am in agony and enamored by it. Old Mother’s mouth is locked open in a guttural moan. A raw mixture dribbles down her chin as I continue to gorge myself on her. Her hands, her elbows, her shoulders. Her calves, knees, thighs. I pull her down onto the ground. I split apart her neck, her breasts. I tear open her stomach and shovel her innards into my own.
I eat and eat and eat.
I cannot be filled.
• • •