Magical Realism for Non-Believers

by Fajardo, Anika

  “Let’s do it,” I said.

  By the time we had settled into the hotel and changed back into damp bathing suits, it was dark. At the Termales de Coconuco, the natural aguas hirviendas that bubbled up from the earth boiled our skin raw and made sweat drip down our faces. Streetlights lined the park and cast a bluish glow over the scene of revelers. We passed by tubs filled with couples soaking in the boiling water and skirted by the slides crawling with children still awake after their bedtimes. We tracked down three plastic cups and a bottle of rum and headed for the last pool, one that was empty of both tourists and water. Even though it was late evening, the pool was just filling with water pouring in through jets near what would become the deep end. We descended a ladder to the pool’s floor and splashed and kicked, holding our cups aloft to prevent spills.

  “Who wants another?” Ceci asked. She climbed the ladder and refilled the plastic cups with rum and Coke, which waited for us at the pool’s edge. Then back down she climbed, rear end first in her floral one-piece.

  We sang songs, we danced, we teased, me in my half-American, half-Colombian, Spain-influenced Spanish. We were nighttime nymphs, wingless fairies, drunken sprites. And while we played like children in the bottom of that pool, I wondered how I ended up here. How did I end up in the middle of a war-torn South American country with two strangers, dancing in my swimming suit at ten o’clock on a January night? How do we end up anywhere?

  “Don’t tell Renzo we gave you rum!” Ceci cried, and María Fernanda collapsed in giggles. In Colombia, rum is pronounced ron, and that made me laugh all over again, pushing aside thoughts of this man Renzo, my father.

  As the pool filled, I lay back in the water. I felt weightless, floating and looking up at the shadowing slopes and black skies above. The mountains of that region of the Andes rise to ten thousand feet and higher, and perhaps my breathing became shallow. The thin air, combined with the ron, made all of us feel even more drunk.

  The next morning, Ceci took a meandering route back down the mountain, and at midday we stopped on the side of the road near a little stream. The mountainside was steep and grass covered, like most of the landscape at this altitude. The almost vertical slopes were shocking in their formations, so different from any kinds of mountains I had seen before. Huge leaves provided shade, and jagged gray rocks jutted here and there as if meant for climbing and exploring. Thin clouds obscured the sun, and the air smelled like dust and rotting leaves. Ceci and María Fernanda pulled out the Cokes and the bottle of rum again. I took my camera and walked along the road a way, taking pictures of the hillside and of a brown cow that grazed at a precarious incline.

  “Look at us!” María Fernanda shouted.

  I looked up, and there they were. Ceci had rolled back the plastic and canvas cover of the Suzuki, and they were standing on the back seat of the car grinning at me. Their heads and shoulders and their hands holding the rum and Cokes protruded from the open roof.

  “Say whiskey!” I said and snapped a picture, capturing that scene for myself to remember later.

  Near the Suzuki, we found a bridge by the stream, and I taught María Fernanda and Ceci to play a game called “Poohsticks.” I had learned about this game from Winnie-the-Pooh, read to me by my grandfather on snowy nights in Minnesota. Poohsticks is a very simple game: you lean over a bridge and drop a stick into the water, just a little one. You watch the moving water take hold of your twig and carry it away until it slips under the wooden boards of the bridge. Quick! someone yells, and you all rush to the other side of the bridge, lean over—way over—and watch for your stick to reappear. Sometimes it takes so long, you’re sure you’ll never see your little twig again, you’re sure it’s caught on something, it’s swirling in an infinity of whirling water. And then it suddenly bobs up again. You feel proud, even though you had nothing to do with its progress.

  María Fernanda and Ceci had never heard of Poohsticks, and whether it was the afternoon tragos of rum or the absurdity of the competition, these two Colombian women embraced it. There might have been guerrillas in those hills watching our game; perhaps trucks carrying arms and drugs hurtled past the Suzuki. But if they did, we didn’t notice. The three of us ran back and forth across a little bridge in the middle of the Colombian Andes breathless with laughter.

  And just for a moment, I didn’t wonder how I ended up there. I didn’t wonder about all the things that didn’t happen or all the things that did. I just dropped in my little twig and laughed at the ridiculousness of the game, the idiocy, the wonderful pointlessness of it all.

  When we arrived home red-cheeked with an empty bottle, my father exclaimed, “You let her drink rum!”

  “Renzo, querido,” Ceci soothed, “she’s a Colombiana.”

  “You have to be careful,” Renzo said, his words slurring from the bottle of something he had opened while we were gone. The alcohol made him even more emotional than usual, made him overcompensate for years of missed parenting. He was lonely, I saw, but I held my mouth in a straight line. And I saw something else in his face, a darkness in his eyes; the fact that I was twenty-one and fully adult, fully American, did not seem possible to him, I supposed. I had been absent, and now I had appeared again—a lifetime for me, a moment for him.

  “Anika, my dear,” he said, reaching for me, putting his arm around my shoulder in a protective embrace. All he had left, I supposed, was to shield me from the harmless, from tragos of rum on a mountain road. That there were other things from which a parent might protect a child either did not occur to him or were too numerous to comprehend.

  11

  A week or so into my visit, my father helped me place an international phone call to my boyfriend. He asked what Dave’s family thought of my visit to Colombia, and I told him they conflated Mexico with every other South American country.

  “Tell them we eat bananas,” my father said, laughing at his own joke. “Tell them we gave you a nice tree to sleep in.” When I hung up the phone, my father said, “Never marry a Latino.” He was speaking from experience; he knew Latinos like him did not make good husbands.

  Before getting swept off her feet, my mother once told her father: “I’m so glad you raised me the way you did. I would never let a man sweep me off my feet.” Despite this burgeoning feminism, she was the product of American popular culture in the mid-twentieth century, a reader of Daphne du Maurier and Margaret Mitchell. So it wasn’t really her fault that when she arrived in Colombia, she became a new person. She was without her parents, her brothers, her routine of the mundane. Her facility with Spanish perhaps gave her a confidence she had lacked before, and when she saw this man, this dark and exotic man, I wonder if she pictured a romance novel, a film, a happily-ever-after. Perhaps they were each other’s fairy tales come to life.

  My mother arrived home from her extended stay in Colombia, and on the way from the airport she told my grandfather that she was getting married. My grandfather tells me it remains the worst moment of his life. His only daughter. Age nineteen and she was leaving him. He was certain he would never see her again.

  But before she left, the couple had a Christmastime wedding at the family’s large Congregational church in Minneapolis. The smaller chapel, not the sanctuary, had been reserved, and my mother wore an orange blouse and flowered skirt. My father wore necklaces of beads, and they exchanged rings that were really spoon handles curved into circles. A friend of theirs played Bob Dylan (Lay, lady, lay, lay across my big brass bed . . .), and I’m sure my great-grandmother was appalled. No one said anything, though, and the guests ate wedding cake. My uncle and his band played rock and roll in the basement of my grandparents’ house. Was this an auspicious start, that church wedding and Bob Dylan?

  The honeymoon was a family affair: my mother’s parents and Ginny and the newlyweds at the family’s northern Minnesota cabin. Snow and cold. My father painted in white and shadows. There is a photograph from that week at the snowy cabin. My mother and father are cocooned together on a little
sofa, her arms wrapped around him. My mother looks up at the camera, a pout on her lips. At first glance, it seems that my father is studying her hands with adoration. Look closer, though, and he is actually studying his own hands, those artist’s hands. At the end of the honeymoon, Renzo fell ill, and my grandparents paid his hospital bills, and my mother nursed him. He had a long history of stomach-related health issues, and he has always been good at playing the patient.

  They didn’t have an apartment in Minnesota at first. They didn’t have much. They lived with my grandparents, who were always taking in strays. My grandparents hosted foreign exchange students, refugees from Tibet, and their own errant and wandering children.

  I imagine the people who became my mom and dad as the young lovers you might see in a film’s montage of romance. Corny music appropriate to the era plays (I am as constant as a northern star . . .), swells in the background, and I watch my parents go about their doomed lives (You may say that I’m a dreamer . . .). Here goes my father, on the bus to the College of Art and Design—paid for by his in-laws (I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain . . .). My mother, a scarf on her head and bell-bottoms swaying, takes the bus the other direction, to the University of Minnesota—paid for by her parents (You’ve just got to see me through another day . . .). What music plays when they go and ask my grandparents for money? What is the soundtrack for the arguments they had over when to return to my father’s homeland? How soon into their marriage did things begin to show wear?

  It was all love and passion. Or maybe just passion. Or maybe not enough passion. Renzo was an artist, a bohemian. He had been abandoned by his parents, separated from his siblings. He had been sent away to upstate New York for high school, something that was both transformative and stifling. He was both selfish and selfless. His ego was both huge and trampled. He loved his young American wife, but there were so many pretty women.

  Keeping house in Colombia was complicated and frustrating for a Minnesota girl. There were in-laws and cockroaches and late nights alone in foreign apartments. How could my mother have a life there, where she had no family, where everything was exotic? Perhaps this was when she began to think that the adventure had gone on too long.

  Keeping house in a rented duplex in Minneapolis with no phone and no car was difficult. This wasn’t the life my mother had imagined. She expected something, but even she didn’t know what. And now Renzo was unhappy, homesick. They wandered the art galleries; artists will seek beauty, will tell themselves they are entitled to beauty, they need beauty. The muse, the inspiration. Temptation was everywhere.

  A baby, they thought, would fix everything. A baby. A baby to bind them together. They moved back to Colombia, lived in a small house in a small village called Silvia, and made a baby. In Silvia, they not only had no phone and no car, they also had no heat.

  A few months into the pregnancy, unable or unwilling to talk about her unhappiness, Nancy fled. She went back to the sweltering humidity of Cali, back to where all these adventures had begun. She was back in the valley city, this time with a growing belly, a permanent tie to Colombia. She left Renzo behind in Silvia, removed the ring from her swollen finger. She bumped around the city in tentlike maternity muumuus and lived with friends in an apartment in Cali. She shared a room with Beth, an American who worked in Silvia a few times a week.

  “Never marry a Latino,” my father repeated. He patted my leg before stepping into the courtyard for a cigarette. “Marry Dave.”

  12

  Even though I didn’t see my father in the five years after that visit to Colombia, I did eventually marry Dave. It was a summer wedding at a city park in Minnesota. My mother walked me down the makeshift aisle, our fingers entwined. An invitation to my father had been sent too late for him to either accept or decline, and so he called during the reception while my friends and family drank and ate and laughed. The stars were out as my father congratulated me over the phone, his voice distorted by the distance.

  Besides that wedding call, our sole communication became the emails my father wrote whenever he felt like it, sporadic and whimsical as that was. Like the foreign airmail envelopes that used to arrive when I was a child, these correspondences often felt like they were sent not only across political and geographical boundaries but across time, too.

  He wrote to me in simple, adoring words as if I were still the baby he remembered. He attached scanned black and white photographs of my mother when she was twenty or baby pictures of me in his arms or his own artwork in bold colors with sharply defined lines. Once he emailed a scanned poster he had designed for a children’s relief fund. This is you, he wrote in the email. The stylized photograph shows a little brown-haired girl with blunt-cut bangs and round cheeks. In the corner of the poster, a date is written in pencil in my father’s square print: 1972. Two years before I was born. My new husband, ever the pragmatist, concluded that he had gotten the date wrong, but I ended up feeling a little off-balance and uncertain as to what was true and what was not.

  The day my inbox revealed the most memorable of all his enigmatic emails, a breeze, smelling faintly of garlic from the fields of Gilroy in the next valley, wafted through the window of our California apartment. In 2001, email was, even in Silicon Valley, still a fairly novel method of communication and was primarily conducted through the likes of Yahoo! and AOL. Google was in its infancy, and Netscape was still a viable option for browsing the nascent World Wide Web. Most people (and everyone in Colombia) still connected to the internet by noisy modems and clumsy phone lines. The infrastructure—everything, actually—was antiquated in Popayán, and the internet connection was slow and intermittent. Sending emails was a deliberate affair requiring planning and consideration, time and preparation. But how much forethought, I now wonder, went into this message? Had he carefully crafted his subject line and fine-tuned the first paragraph? Or had he simply, in a few impulsive moments, dashed off the words that would change my life so completely?

  This was what I wondered when I saw the subject line of his email: Brother.

  My mother has three brothers. My father had a brother, my uncle—whom I had never met. My grandmother had two older brothers she adored, and my grandfather had an older brother he never got along with. My husband is the middle between two brothers, with whom he has nothing in common. But I grew up an only child, the sun around which my mother—and often my maternal grandparents—orbited.

  For most of my life, my family was just the two of us, a complete unit, and I came to see my world as a yin and yang: mother and daughter, the two of us forging a path during a time when the phenomenon of the single mother was new. In the 1980s, only one in ten children was raised by a single parent, and those (mostly) women were often vilified for their single status, seen as freeloaders or welfare moms. Other neighborhood kids in our mostly blue-collar apartment complex had single mothers, but those children also had dads somewhere, men they would visit for a few weeks in the summer or every other weekend.

  But to me, family meant that simple dyad: a mother and a daughter. This was interrupted briefly during the five years my mother was married to her second husband and I found myself with a stepfather and two unruly stepbrothers. But even their existence was fleeting; after her second divorce, I went back to my rightful spot, center of the universe, an only child.

  I looked at the subject line of my father’s email in the filtered California sunlight of our second bedroom, which served as an office. During my visit to Colombia five years before, I had asked Ceci if she wanted to have children. We were in the kitchen preparing food for a New Year’s Eve celebration at her parents’ house in the center of Popayán. Ceci was almost twenty years younger than my father (closer in age to me than to him), and the way she bustled around had seemed so maternal.

  “I had several miscarriages,” she had told me as she stirred dessert, a lemon mousse made with the lemons from the back courtyard squeezed one by one until the juice covered our hands.

  “I’m sorry,” I said
, although at twenty-one I had no idea what that meant, what it felt like to either want or lose a child. “Maybe someday,” I said brightly.

  “Maybe,” she had said.

  The leaves of a Japanese maple rustled outside my window, and the traffic on the expressway behind our apartment droned. My inbox, with its message from my father, waited.

  I clicked to open the email and read the first line: You don’t know this.

  That there was something I didn’t know came as no surprise. It would be easier to count the things I did know about my father than those I didn’t. I knew he was the grandson of Italian immigrants to Colombia, that he was born in the 1940s, the older brother of fraternal twins, who trailed after him. I knew his life hadn’t been as shrouded in tragedy and miracles as the characters in a Gabriel García Márquez story, but there were still mysteries. I knew he had been sent to the United States for high school and college, but I didn’t know what that had done to him. I knew he married and later divorced my mother, but I didn’t know what had happened. I knew there were secrets but didn’t even know enough to ask about them. I had heard stories, seen photographs, studied the archival evidence, but without growing up with this man in my life, could I ever know him? Even after I went to Colombia and met the man who was my father, the things I didn’t know about him—about this half of my family and about the country where I was born—could be lined up and stretched from California to South America and back again.

  I stared at the computer monitor and stretched my palms flat against the cool, fake wood of the ridiculously large desk we had chosen for the office. It had barely fit through the doors of the apartment but had seemed proof that we were here in California to stay. The computer’s CPU hummed. From the living room, I could hear Dave and my grandparents talking, my grandfather’s storytelling drone punctuated by my grandmother’s near-deaf contributions. They were visiting us en route from Minnesota to Hawaii, had traveled by RV, and would then catch a flight at SFO. I had escaped the socializing for a moment to check my email, ostensibly because I was in graduate school but really because I was slightly homesick for Minnesota and craved any connection to my old life.