Caio Major

Pois é: as vezes coisas fizer claro, when you become a ghost. You see in new ways, um novo jeito. My language skills have been slipping, português overtaking english since I died. Brazil tries to pull me back, though I continue to love Ronald Reagan, that will never change. I never did love Hitler, despite what minha filha–my daughter thought when she discovered a copy of Mein Kampf among my possessions. I read that book out of morbid curiosity, like most men of my generation I was compelled by the war, toward the end of my life World War II books were the only ones that held my interest. Looking back, I suspect that my mother’s ghost, her Jewish blood another secret meus filhos descrobado só depois meu morto, then judged me in death for hiding this fact from them, compelled me to purchase it. That would have been the kind of dark joke she (minha mãe) would have liked. Mein Kampf and my Jewish ancestry were discovered close together por meus filhos, a link thus imagined between the two, my (eles imaginam) fascismo secreto a bleak byproduct of internalized self-hatred. He voted Republican despite being Latino, elas disseram de mim, shaking their heads. It makes a sad amount of sense that he looked up to Hitler despite being Jewish. Mentiras! I tell you the truth now: Eu me amava na vida, I carried myself com orgulho—pride, nunca hated myself, never. E por que um fantasmo mentiria? What reason do I have to lie to you? Prometo, I did not read that book as a Hitler fan.

As vezes coisas fizer mais fácil, easier to accept. Por exemplo: my granddaughter becoming my grandson. I was dead by then, haunting the family while Adriana called around to introduce himself as Adriano, he was relieved that I hadn’t lived to see this. She knew I would have expressed disgust, like her uncle, meu filho—Carlos and eu, embora tenhamos brigado por muitas coisas, exchanging punches in the last years of my life like we hadn’t since he was a teenager, nonetheless shared certain beliefs, the right beliefs. He followed me to death not long after being disgusted by Adriano’s identity, mas quem sabe, my timeline could be wrong, the years blur when you are dead. De qualquer forma, nunca encontrei o fantasmo de meu filho, I can’t find him e não sei, I don’t know where his ghost is hiding. Perhaps he is hiding from me, fearing a rematch, now that my ghost has taken the form of my body at its strongest and most virile.

Ghosts’ stories inevitably grow circular, I cannot tell a story straightforward, particularmente em inglês. Ainda assim, I’m getting there. Com Adriano, I have come to appreciate having one grandson, no granddaughters. It helps that Adriano has been working out. No grandson of mine should have skinny weakling arms! Verdade, my fitness obsession did not grant me long life, though our strangely-mutual obsession has helped my ex-wife, aquela vaca, outlive me, I remember all those years we spent doing resentful and furious yoga on opposite sides of greater Los Angeles, her on the Disney side, me in Glendale, trying to co-parent while hating each other’s guts. Verdade, I expected all that yoga to help me live forever, or at least into my nineties, como aquela vaca, a avó de my grandchildren. Mas não deu certo para Vovô, cancer got me early. 

O que…? Sim, Adriano, I was saying. Adriano is a man now and I’m proud my line ends with a grandson. A trans neta would be a different story, ne? Even with my ghostly understanding, I would send todo de minha fúria fantasmagórica, haunting to the best of my malevolent abilities, if he’d been born Adriano then put on lipstick and declared, Eu sou Adriana. Não! Longe demais, “a bridge too far.”    

It gets boring, spending all your ghostly hours searching for Ronald Reagan on the astral plane, so the other day I tired of haunting his presidential library and drifted over to Syracuse to check in on Adriano. Look at all the markers of masculinity he has achieved: a beautiful (white!) wife, a dog, biceps I can stand to look at, a non-shameful bench press. I care less for his literary achievements, but I suppose I am happy for him in his MFA program, studying os grandes homens machistas, revering Roberto Bolaño, Raymond Carver, Gabriel García Márquez, even that rascal David Foster Wallace, I’ve run into him haunting Syracuse too, we’ve played tennis together. At least meu neto reads male authors!

Today, I haunted a corner as Adriano argued in the classroom, defending some book about immigrants, a book I’m sure I would have hated. Immigration stories always paint us as pussified weaklings, not as virile characters possessed of patriotic spirit! I was still alive when Adriano, Adriana then, was getting his undergrad degree, and back then she would have succumbed to emotion in any debate, perhaps even cried girlish tears. But now, empowered by testosterone, he articulated himself sem emoção, sem fraqueza feminina, with humor and confidence but no feminine quaver in his voice. He won the debate as well as the respect of his male classmates and professor, they listened as they would to any man. He glanced my way as the discussion moved on, como se ele me visto, meeting my eyes, sensing my presence.

Adriano, I wish I had lived to teach you what you won’t let yourself learn about manhood. Há muitas lições que você e sua mente fraca, your weak mind with its stubborn solidarity with the weaker sex, will never let yourself touch, tal como: how horny women get when you’re the only man in their yoga class, how to cheat on your wife without caring when you get caught, how to throw a punch or fire a gun—you’re scared for your rights como um travesti, so you’ve wondered if you should learn how to use a gun, but when Carlos se matou, shooting himself in the head em um morte masculina, you decided you could never allow yourself to own a gun. I would have scoffed at this and told you to man up, when I was alive, mas como um fantasmo, I can see where you’re coming from: I am in no hurry to see you join me during a depressive episode. Ainda não encontro seu tio, meu filho, I cannot find my son among the dead, and I have searched. Como se um fantasmo, I am less guarded than in life, I can admit that the disappointment of losing Carlos perhaps led me to Adriano, the last man whose veins carry my blood.  

I followed Adriano as he walked home after class. He was thinking of me, de certa forma, he was thinking about macho men he did not want to become. He was troubled by the respect he’d so easily commanded. He was looking a gift horse in the mouth! De cavalo dado, não se olha o dente, Adriano, you pussy-ass bitch. Sim, fantasmos can pick up slang, even those as old (but virile!) as me. 

Adriano was thinking of me, Mein Kampf hidden in my bedroom closet, and the Jewish ancestry that went undiscovered until his mother got her DNA tested. He was thinking of self-hatred’s warping power and shadow selves, e meus deus, sério? He was thinking about whether or not he was still a good feminist, para com isso, neto, don’t ruin this for me. 

I dismiss his theories on my “self-hatred,” but Jung’s shadow self, isso está interessante. Do ghosts have shadow selves? Talvez, mas não, I have no Jewish shadow self, isso vou negar, sempre forever deny. If travestis have shadow selves, is the shadow their born gender or the gender they become, or is it always a man, always machismo coming out on top, or from beneath? Adriano, you’re smarter than you used to be, and your feminist mentors will tell you this is because you have now seen gender from both sides. But as a ghost, como seu fantasmo, I will tell you what I know to be true: you are wise because men are wiser than women. You are now superior. E você vai ouvir o meu voz, you will hear my voice in your ear as you walk, with its echoes of Ronald Reagan and Mein Kampf and Roberto Bolaño and David Foster Wallace, whether you wish to hear me or not.

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