Magical Realism for Non-Believers

by Fajardo, Anika

  The house was at one end of a single-lane bridge where cars and camionetas waited for their turn to cross, and with my father’s radicalized ideals and my mother’s midwestern upbringing, we would have lived in a sort of comfortable isolation in our traditional town. I would have been a happy child, pampered and loved.

  My parents would not have been happy. The nights my father spent locked in his taller painting away the hours would have made my mother silent in loneliness, wishing for her Minnesota parents, her brothers, her American girlfriends. She and I would have tiptoed around the drafty casa, where she scrubbed clothes by hand over a large, rough stone, until my father emerged, splattered in paint, exhausted and self-congratulatory.

  My mother would have flown into an occasional rage that would have been borne of legitimate frustrations. My father and I would have sought refuge in flowers and walks on sun-dappled trails. He would have set up a miniature easel next to his own, and we would have painted pastoral scenes side by side until my mother’s soprano rendition of “Blowin’ in the Wind” came floating up into the hills above our house. My father and I would have marched home through the high-altitude jungle to kiss and make up, the picture of familial bliss for another couple of days.

  If I would have been living in Popayán when I was eight, I would have been there when an earthquake hit our town, and I would have been with my cousins buying bread in the panadería. There would have been a tremble and great rush as if the ocean were suddenly overtaking the coastal mountains. The moment when my primo Renzito was struck by falling fragments from the ovens would have been repeated over and over in my childhood nightmares. The brick missed his head—gracias a Dios—but the scar on his shoulder would have always been a reminder of the earth moving. My auntie would have rushed us out into the dust-filled plaza, and, when it was over, the equatorial sun would have laughed at the debris nature had left us.

  Even though my family would have been the only non-Catholics, we would have gone to gawk at the Pope when he came to bless our devastated town. I would have remembered very little of the visit from el Papa, only the crowds and the vendors selling hand-painted plaques in the shape of his hat. My father wouldn’t have bought me one, and since I would have been unaccustomed to being told no, my hot, selfish tears would have made the people around us assume we had lost loved ones in the terremoto. My mother would have found this to be another reason she should never have left the United States.

  By fifteen, I would have come back from a visit to the United States to find that my best friend’s hermano had been killed by guerrillas. The brother would have been just seventeen. He would have saved up for a motocicleta and would have taken off on a rosy October morning to drive into the páramo. He and his amigos would have been young, beautiful boys with short, black buzz cuts and would have started la universidad the next year. I would have been half in love with one of the hermano’s friends, although I never would have admitted it. And when all seven boys, mistaken for military, were shot in the knees before being shot dead in the back, I would have imagined them, as I do now, face down on a winding mountain road, the shiny coffee leaves and giant sugar cane shading the bikes, which lay abandoned on the gravel, a vicious guerrilla killing that would have made no sense to me or to the families in the pueblo.

  When I went to a big midwestern university—assuming I even went to college—my accent would have been stilted and cautious. Even though my mother would have spoken English to me had we stayed in Colombia, there would have been holes in my vocabulary, experiences that set me apart. I wouldn’t have had a quinceñera, but I wouldn’t have gone to prom either. I would have earned As in English class at la colegia, but I would have strained to understand the subtitled episodes of Saved by the Bell, which I would have watched not on a looming color TV in the basement of the house on Edgerton but on a small black-and-white tele at the foot of my parents’ bed.

  At home in Colombia, I would always have been viewed as the outsider. My skin would have been lighter than the other muchachos in our neighborhood. My German legs and ankles, clearly descended from my mother’s Anglo Saxon roots, would have made me self-conscious in front of my Colombian amigas—girls with the slender bodies of indios.

  And whenever I visited my mother’s family in the United States, I would have found myself even more of an outsider. I would have been pasted with labels: Hispanic, foreigner, Latina, minority. My English would have been grammatically exact but colloquially forced, and my Spanish wouldn’t have been like the more familiar drawn-out rhythm of mexicanos.

  If I somehow had still met my future husband, and if I had brought this gringo back to Colombia to meet my parents, my father would have given him a Colombian kiss on the cheek and then called him “dude” to show he was cool. My mother would have been standoffish but secretly relieved that I was marrying an American.

  But my newlywed life in the United States would have found me as confused as my mismatched parents. I would have pined for the humidity of the valleys and the crisp air of las montañas. I would have spent my money on long-distance phone calls to friends in Bogotá, Quito, Cartagena. I would have found myself simultaneously homesick and at home. I would have discovered that my handsome esposo didn’t always understand my accented English, didn’t like the sancocho or deathly sweet café con panela I prepared for him. We would have had to compromise when the days became endless and las noches filled with arguments, fighting, misunderstandings—all those problems that arise from a joining and a clash of two cultures. And like my mother before me, I would have had to decide which life I wanted.

  But this, all this, it isn’t what happened: this isn’t the life my mother chose, this isn’t the life I lived.

  I was born in Colombia. This is true.

  3

  My mother never told me not to contact my father, but she had also never encouraged me. When his letters arrived at my grandparents’ house (she never gave him our current address), she would hand them over without a word. It wasn’t until I was fifteen and living with my stepfamily that I wrote “Dear Dad” for the first time, and any armchair psychologist will see the impetus for an only child to contact her father at that point, however distant and estranged he might be. I don’t remember now how I figured out how many stamps to affix to the envelope, and I don’t know whether I visited a post office or simply lifted the red flag at home, but I do remember enclosing a school picture (me with hair-sprayed bangs and cheekbones just beginning to emerge from behind slowly receding baby fat) and licking the sticky seam of the envelope. I didn’t know until much later how my first letter to my father impacted his—and ultimately my—life. The notebook paper, the slanted words written in ballpoint pen, the photograph with its unevenly cut borders: these things became immediate keepsakes for him, artifacts of change.

  After sending the letter, I unlatched the black metal mailbox at the end of the driveway every day after school before anyone else got home, hoping to intercept any return communication from him. Now I wonder if the furtive letter writing was a symptom of a genetic propensity for silence. When a letter did arrive, I kept it secret, clinging to the ownership of a real father, even if it was one I didn’t know. Like many moments in life, this one marked an invisible line that would divide then from now, what happened from what didn’t.

  This line appeared again when, at age twenty-one, I heard his voice for the first time.

  “Hello, my dear Anika,” he had said. It was during a birthday party in my ugly student apartment in Madison, my friends and Dave, whom I would marry years later, drinking beer and making noise in the background.

  “Happy birthday,” said the voice like someone chewing on willow sticks.

  It wasn’t, I recognized later, the first time I had heard his voice, but it was the first time I could remember.

  “My wife and I want to send you a ticket to come to Colombia.”

  When I used to ask my mother about their divorce, she told me it was because she wanted to live in Minn
esota and he loved Colombia too much to leave it. This oversimplification had satisfied my curiosity as a child, but suddenly, standing amid clinking beer bottles and collapsing birthday cake, I needed to know what kind of power this country had that would make a man choose a place over a person. I needed to know if returning to my birthplace would give me a grounding in life, if getting to know my father would make me feel like other people—if somehow that country could help me fit in with my life, my relationships, my future, the world.

  “Yes,” I had told him recklessly. “Yes, I want to come to Colombia.”

  Each action has an equal and opposite reaction, so here I was three months after that phone call, sightseeing in Colombia. That first week my father brought me to the old part of Popayán, known as la ciudad blanca, the “white city,” because its colonial Spanish architecture and character have been preserved since its conquistador founding in 1537. The center of town is all whitewashed buildings with red tile roofs. Many of the buildings were destroyed by the earthquake in 1983, but afterward each ruined structure was rebuilt in exact imitation of the centuries-old style. The city has a park, Pueblito Patojo, that pays tribute to its architecture, a miniature town with replicas of the important buildings with roofs about one-third normal height, making me feel oversized and clumsy.

  I crossed Parque Caldas, the large main plaza, as I returned from mailing postcards at the post office. The plaza was ringed by trees and flowering bushes. Vendors pushed carts with bags of sweets and bottles of soda. Shoe shiners set up shop in the shade. I passed by the elderly couples and mothers with perambulators that rested on the benches surrounding the statue of Francisco José de Caldas, one of the fathers of Colombia’s independence. My own father sat on one of the benches, a cigarette in one hand, knees splayed, relaxed. He always wore a vest—a photographer’s vest with plenty of room for rolls of film and extra lenses, although usually all he kept in the pockets were a couple of cigarettes and a few pesos.

  When I was near enough to hear him, he said, “I thought I saw a ghost.”

  I sat down beside him on the bench.

  “You looked just like Nance,” he said, referring to my mother, Nancy, by her family nickname. “The way you walk. I remember her walking across the plaza just like that.”

  I smiled like I always do.

  “I thought you were a ghost.”

  My mother and I look alike, can always be identified as mother and daughter. We have the same wide smiles, the same gummy teeth. We have had similar body shapes our entire lives but with our own highlights. My stomach was always flatter than hers; her knees were always nicer than mine. (She always told me I had my tía Josefina’s knees; this was not a compliment.)

  When I was young and there were just the two of us, I used to lounge on her bed and help her pick out clothes. I remember going through my mother’s jewelry and deciding what went with that sweater, with that blouse, with those shoes. I remember exactly what my mother looked like when I was ten and she was thirty-five. I remember her fleshy belly and her slightly dimpled thighs. I remember her smooth white back and her loose underwear.

  But in 1970, when she was nineteen years old, she was thin with wispy light brown hair, almost blonde. She favored an oversized Boy Scout shirt, army green. She met Melinda, who would become a sort of aunt to me, just before leaving for Colombia, the two of them the only students from their college who chose Colombia for their semester abroad.

  Colombia. Populated by Spanish descendants, African slaves, European refugees, and indigenous people. Ravaged by alternating periods of war and democracy. By the end of 1969, when Nancy and Melinda booked their tickets, La Violencia of the 1940s to 1960s had calmed, but the guerrilla group, the FARC, was increasing in power and ruthlessness. This political reality did not affect these two girls’ plans. They went to Colombia.

  Nancy and Melinda lived in a boardinghouse in Cali and became friends through proximity. They arrived just after Christmas during las Navidades, the weeks-long celebration born of the country’s Catholic roots, and the women learned slang, tried new foods, drank local beer. They shopped for hand-knitted sweaters and emerald jewelry.

  In the boardinghouse, my mother and Melinda met Ginny. She already spoke fluent, angular Spanish and introduced them to the life of American girls in Colombia, to others like Beth and Barbara and Dan. There were the local college boys. There were fiestas and impromptu outings with Peace Corps volunteers and wanderers and hippies. There were the daily walks to the Centro Colombo Americano to teach English, the meals with the other boarders.

  Colombian men in the streets would heckle the three girls until Ginny talked back and gestured rudely. My mother watched Ginny’s daring with admiration, and I picture my mother, tugging at her miniskirt as she passed these bold, dark men. Her pale cheeks redden easily. She has always been too quick to smile, a reflex from her childhood.

  And it wasn’t long before she found a boyfriend. Seth—was he the first one? He was blond and tall. Or was he brown-haired and heavy? All that really mattered was that Seth introduced Nancy to his former roommate, a bearded Colombiano a few years older than the college students. An artist, a man with an easy laugh, a way with women, a charming and disarming personality.

  I picture my mother walking the streets of Cali with Renzo, the Colombian artist. He is just her height, barely five foot six. In all the old photographs she is wearing a ruana, a sheep’s wool poncho, and smiling broadly. The whitewashed buildings of Popayán charmed her, its cobbled streets enchanted her. In June that year, Melinda boarded a plane and returned to a changed United States; the Beatles had fallen apart, blood had been shed at Kent State, and the war in Vietnam was under scrutiny. My mother stayed in Colombia, making her own changes, her own choices. She enrolled in school in Popayán. She moved in with Renzo, set up house. When he fell ill and was hospitalized, she hurried through white corridors and past nuns in habits and waited by his bedside. His mother referred to Nancy as la nuera, the daughter-in-law. Even though she wasn’t, not really, not yet.

  “I thought you were your mother for a moment,” my father said and smoked his cigarette, and we stared into the distance or the past. I could imagine my mother. I could imagine her, my age, walking across the plaza. But I didn’t see any ghosts. I saw strangers, the people of Popayán busy in their days. My father looked across the plaza and saw my mother. Perhaps my father’s eyes misted as he saw ghosts, as he saw me as my mother, me as my infant self.

  But I wanted to tell my father, I am not a ghost. I do not look like my mother. I do not look like my grandmother. I am unique. I am different. See this dark hair? I wanted to say. See these brown eyes? These are yours. I am not a ghost. I am a new person, a flesh and blood person totally and completely made by you and my mother. I am here now. My mother is not here. I am not her. I am not a ghost.

  I said nothing, and the smoke from his cigarette drifted across the cobbles.

  4

  My bedroom in my father’s house is saturated in him. The yellow wall, the daisies, the paintings he has framed for me. A Guambiano Indian. An African woman hauling bundles on her head. Clay roof tiles and whitewashed buildings. With tint and charcoal, he has managed to capture Colombia in this room. And even though I have been here only a few days, I feel captured.

  I pull back the curtains on the French doors in my room, desperate for a breath of fresh air. The courtyard between my bedroom window and the dining room is bright with cloud-filtered light. It is both inside and outside. It is sheltered and also exposed. Crickets hop into my room. Who doesn’t belong here?

  I think of my former stepfamily’s house back in Minnesota and how out of place I had felt there. And then, just as I became resigned to that life, my mother decisively ended that marriage, too. I remember how confident she had seemed, how certain, although now I understand that, of course, she had done this before—this leaving a marriage. My mother told me that in those final months during my last year in high school she had been secretly
collecting her most precious belongings and moving them, piece by piece, to a self-storage locker. Her grandmother’s china, old photo albums, the breadmaker. How, I had wondered, did she choose the things she wanted to save?

  The evening after she told me we were leaving, my stepfather held our last family meeting from the confines of his La-Z-Boy recliner, which opened its menacing jaws. “Nancy and I are getting divorced,” he said, and I could see that his two sons were hearing the news for the first time. But I couldn’t really think about them anymore. I was glad I was the only child, the only one.

  I was so embarrassed to have those two stepbrothers. They were unruly puppies, had never been properly housebroken. When I first became part of this jumbled family, the stepbrothers were at home only every other week. I was left on my own during those quiet times, while my mother and her husband did their newlywed thing. I hibernated in the reclusion of a big stephouse, scanning Seventeen magazines, watching the new phenomenon of music videos on a TV bigger than any I had ever seen before. Then the stepbrothers would begin their week at the house, and chaos would whirl around me. How could it not have? I wonder now. They were two boys whose lives were demarcated by Sundays, by the switch between houses, neither of which was really home. They had outbursts of tears and shouting as if they couldn’t control their own actions—and no one else could control them either. This was before diagnoses of attention deficit disorder and before Ritalin was prescribed for children with no impulse control. This was before social workers connected the dots between fathers with abusive pasts and their troubled sons. But even if I had understood the complexities of their psyches and lives then, it still wouldn’t have prevented my resentment, my aversion. They were not just a couple of hyperactive boys; they represented all that was my new life. When they were around, I counted down the hours until they would leave again.