His hands had been warm on my thigh as he inspected my skinned knee. We touched under the pretense of emergency; I took his hand and placed my arm around his neck for support. He was solid and real, and his careful attention made me feel protected, even with a bleeding kneecap. We sat in the dirt and drank from the same water bottle, the spout touching both our lips.
I want to say it was raining that night when we were parked outside the apartment my mother had rented after her second divorce. The wind battered the car until we were blown together. It was the summer after high school, and she had taught me that men could be dangerous and unpredictable, that they could hurt you and control you and stifle you. But I was old enough—or maybe young enough—to know that mothers could be wrong. A torrent of fireflies (or maybe just raindrops) poured down on the windshield, until the droplets of reflected light were washed away with a swish of wiper blades. Lightning streaks made patterns across the sky and made maps of our life to come, brought us to that moment.
Later that summer, as the sun tried to dry out the earth, Dave and I brought a picnic to a meadow well above the floodplains, where the purple loosestrife scratched our legs and ankles as we waded through it. We stretched out on a wool blanket, the prairie grasses flowing around our island, and held on to each other. And seven years later when we got married in a grassy clearing at a park next to the Mississippi, there were no floods or lightning strikes.
The rings we exchanged that day were both beautiful and practical, the ruby on mine set deep to prevent any loss or catching, and his a simple band. A ring is a symbol of marriage because its infinite loop is meant to be a metaphor of your unending love. The morning after the wedding, lying in bed at the hotel, I twisted mine around my finger, thinking of the rings at the bottom of my mother’s jewelry box. She and my father had worn rings that were spoon handles bent into interesting but finite curves, each ending in a flourish of silverwork. For her second marriage, my mother and stepfather had chosen puzzle rings, gold bands that intertwined artfully and yet could easily become undone until all that was left was a jumble of metal under the necklaces and earrings she no longer wore. With one final twist of my own wedding ring, I climbed out of bed and put on a luxurious hotel robe. I was standing at the window looking down at the Minnesota summer morning when I heard a clatter from the bathroom where Dave was taking a shower.
“I accidentally washed my ring off,” he said, coming out of the bathroom with a white towel around his waist. Dave’s ring, it turned out, had not fallen down the drain. We had luck or fate on our side; no hotel concierge or plumber was necessary. He had plucked the ring from the soapy water at the bottom of the tub and placed it back on his finger. An opposing phase of the moon, a different tilt of the planet, and everything could have been different. Each moment there is the possibility of the split between alternatives, realities that can be shifted.
The phone call, I suppose, was inevitable. But when I heard a voice identifying himself as Renzo, I slid to the floor of the galley kitchen, where I could see grains of uncooked rice caught between the vinyl flooring and trim.
“I’m sorry,” I told this other Renzo, this Renzo who was my half brother. “I told my dad I wasn’t ready to talk to you.”
The words my dad sat there, silent but not unnoticed.
“Oh.”
“Didn’t he tell you that?”
“No, he didn’t.”
There was a pause during which I played with the coiled phone cord, let it bounce and sway like a suspension bridge.
“Would you like to meet?”
“I need to think about it,” I said, and I felt like I was breaking someone’s heart.
Perhaps as much of a coward as my father, I tested the water of fraternity by dipping a toe into email correspondence as if I were afraid the voice and meeting would make the whole thing real, as if I could keep reality at bay by typing out my questions.
Where do you live? I asked this brother of mine through impersonal bits and bytes.
By coincidence or fate, he lived so near my apartment in California that we could have seen each other at the grocery store, a reggae concert, a red light. I tried to think whether I had ever seen a young man and thought he could be related to me. I began to study every stranger on the street, wondering if that person was family. The world felt simultaneously bigger and smaller. All relations seemed strangely ephemeral, objects appeared impermanent, my own emotions wavered along all segments of the spectrum, everything beginning to feel as surreal as if Colombia’s magic had followed me.
How old are you?
Twenty-six.
When’s your birthday?
March.
I have never been a mathematical whiz, but even I could calculate that we were mere months apart, that he was conceived at a time when I was still a zygote hidden beneath my mother’s peasant blouse. She would have barely been showing the bump that would be me at that time, when two women, carrying Renzo’s seed, crossed paths in Cali and in the town of Silvia, too.
When my father brought me to Silvia the first time, he didn’t do anything to hint at the significance of that place. We had gone to see the weekly Wednesday market during which all the Guambianos brought their wares to sell and buy. Piles of mangos, stacks of sweet panela, tables laden with plátanos and yuca. These things were interspersed with handwoven blankets and the ponchos the Indians wore, the scarves and hats, the mochilas in bright stripes.
After visiting the market, rich in exotic smells and a cacophony of sounds, Renzo had driven me into the reservation to the house of an old friend, a Guambiano named Felipe. “He’s a sort of healer,” my father had told me. When we arrived at his little two-room house in the mountains, Felipe motioned for me to sit on the bed, the only real piece of furniture in the dirt-floored room. A television set with wonky antennae was across from the bed, a thick wool blanket pulled taut over the mattress. When I sat down, he offered me coffee, but my father discreetly shook his head.
“You don’t want to drink the water here,” my father whispered to me in English. My mother had told me about a time she had visited a poor family and the woman had offered pineapple juice. My mother had accepted this generous offering from a woman who had almost nothing. She knew the juice mixed with water would make her sick, but she drank it anyway.
Felipe wore the traditional dress of the Guambianos (a man’s blue wool skirt, lace-up boots, and a black bowler hat), and when he smiled at me, his missing teeth and scores of wrinkles popped out like trophies of his life.
“He remembers your mom,” my father had translated for me when Felipe said something that, between his accented Spanish and gaps in his teeth, I couldn’t understand.
Now I wonder if he also remembered Beth, if he had seen my father with this other woman.
Felipe pointed to my face, then my belly.
“He remembers when Nance was pregnant with you.”
Although we had declined coffee, Felipe returned from the other room of the house with his own cup of coffee and trailed by a tiny child. Ceci later told me that Felipe was gay and had adopted the children that surrounded him like grandchildren. The little sprite was the size of a two year old, although she must have been older because she was holding a coffee cup in her hands. She wore a hand-embroidered dress and a little pink and blue crocheted hat. The coffee in the cup was milky, probably sweetened with panela, a sugar cane sweetener that was sold in brown bricks at the market in Silvia. Watching her, I wondered about the warnings I had heard as a child, that coffee stunts the growth of small children. When I was her age, I had not been drinking coffee; I had been wetting the bed and crying for my mother. I thought of Gabriel García Márquez’s character Aureliano Buendía, who before facing a firing squad requests coffee as his dying wish. Coffee, the drink of martyrs and leaders, strong men and fearless women. And, apparently, diminutive children.
Felipe said something more and laughed a gap-toothed and joyous laugh.
“He says you loo
k just like her,” my father translated.
One Hundred Years of Solitude was published just before my mother first arrived in Colombia, when magical realism was part of the landscape, not a literary genre. When healers and lost daughters, secret affairs and illegitimate children were the rule, not the exception. Before literature stole away rainstorms of fireflies and sleeping sicknesses, these things existed in Colombia and were not flights of fancy.
And now I wasn’t sure if this brother four months my junior was any more real than the Guambiano himself. Gabriel García Márquez says that an experience only needs to feel real in order for it to be so. But the memory of a little girl’s sweetened coffee and these email exchanges that could be wiped away at the press of a button felt as unreal as any fairy tale or fiction. I didn’t know how to believe in these things that felt conjured from imagination.
16
When my half brother called again, I agreed to meet him. How could I refuse him? And the itch of curiosity had become an infection that spread into my nerves and brain cells and blood—the very blood that I shared with this stranger. I needed to meet him.
“I’m going to bring my husband,” I warned him. I wouldn’t be going anywhere without Dave. I would need him to prop me up.
Despite the Colombian connection and the broad range of bars and restaurants in the Bay Area, we agreed to meet at a spot on the 101, a Mexican American joint that served taco salads and fried ice cream, a choice as randomly absurd as eating at a crepes restaurant my first night in Colombia.
El Torito’s yellow marquee was easy to spot from the freeway. As Dave took the exit, I let the movement of the cloverleaf jerk me from left to right as if I were nothing more than a puppet or a rag doll. Inside, the dining room was filled with families eating their weeknight dinners, but Dave and I headed toward the bar, where flat boleros alternated with Top 40 and advertisements for strawberry margaritas made me nauseous. We ordered drinks, whatever was on tap.
The beers sweated in their thick glasses. The bartender wiped down the bar. Somewhere a child shrieked, but I couldn’t tell if it was in laughter or tears. A young man in baggy shorts and a T-shirt walked in.
“Is that him?” I whispered to Dave.
Dave looked at this man who had a trim black beard, thick ponytail, almond eyes. He looked back at me. “You think?”
In Spanish, the verb conocer means both to meet and to get to know. When I first went to Colombia, Renzo and his wife had seemed desperate for me to conocer the country, to see everything and do everything as if they could make up a lifetime in a single month. Once I rode along with Ceci in the Suzuki as she ran errands: the market, her sister’s house. We stopped at a street-side stand to buy a Styrofoam cup of arroz con leche. As I took small bites of the rice pudding—a little dull to my overstimulated American palate—Ceci unfolded the bills she had received as change for her purchase. She stopped and held one up to the afternoon sun.
“Es falso,” she had said. She showed it to me, but all Colombian currency looked fake to me. Without knowing what the original looked like, there was no way for me to recognize something false.
At the next stop, Ceci bought a doohickey of some kind at the mechanic, something mysterious for the Suzuki. I waited in the passenger seat, and when she returned she slammed her door shut, turned the ignition, and spun out of the parking lot.
“Vámonos,” she had said, a sneaky smile on her face. “I gave them the counterfeit money.”
And just like that, the difference between real and fake blurred. I could see that if we agreed to believe, perhaps we could make it so.
The man in the beard and shorts approached our table. His resemblance to my father was momentarily paralyzing: the same eyes, the shape of the face. His beard even echoed that of my father’s in the faded black and white photographs, the ones in the box under my bed. It was like seeing a ghost.
We greeted awkwardly, stiff arms and hunched shoulders. How do you greet a ghost? Should we hug or shake hands? Do nothing? We were simultaneously strangers and family, both intimately connected and yet separated by what seemed then to be an impossible distance. Dave and I picked up our pint glasses, and the three of us moved to a booth, where the man ordered a Corona. Even from across the table, the smell of cigarette smoke wafted toward me, and the smell reminded me even more of my father.
“Hello,” we said.
“Renzo,” I said, trying out the name, my father’s name given to a stranger. I watched him as he squeezed lime into the narrow neck of the beer bottle. I wondered if his name felt like an article of clothing he wore awkwardly, if he felt as fake as I did.
“I had a dream about you,” I said. The night before I had had a dream about meeting this unknown brother. I dreamed that, even though his name was Renzo, he was called Bob or Jerry. In the dream, I had been so relieved not to have to call this stranger by my father’s name. “Can I call you Jerry?” I asked after telling him about the dream.
“Actually, my family calls me Silas.”
It was a nickname from his middle name, Silvanus, he explained, chosen by his mother. Maybe she couldn’t bear to call him Renzo either. Silvanus was chosen to honor the town of Silvia, where he was conceived four months after I was. I thought of the town with its steep roads and Guambianos. I hadn’t noticed anything particularly romantic in Silvia, but maybe, I was beginning to think, I hadn’t looked close enough.
There is a dissatisfying kind of relief when you recognize that not only is the thing you feared nonexistent but also that there was never anything to fear to begin with. The first morning I woke up in my father’s house in Popayán, I thought of a conversation I had with my mother when I was eight or nine.
“In Colombia, you really have to be vigilant,” my mother had said. We must have been doing dishes at the time, an activity we did for many hours, not having a dishwasher for most of my childhood. “The cockroaches come out at night. They can find any bit of leftover grease.”
My mother usually washed, and I dried, putting the spoons and forks and knives away in their own neat compartments in the silverware drawer. “They could be all over the kitchen, and then when you turned the light on, they would all disappear. I remember the little scurrying noises they made.”
My mother made a face, and I stopped drying to watch her. I couldn’t imagine. I couldn’t imagine Colombia or her there. “Doña Rosa had a maid who didn’t use hot water to wash dishes,” my mother said about her former mother-in-law. “I always washed dishes with hot water, even if I had to heat it on the stove. That’s the only way to keep cockroaches at bay. Sometimes,” she said as if I wasn’t already scared enough, “we would wake up and find cockroaches in our shoes.”
From the safety of the sheets and blankets of the bed in my father’s house, I had leaned over the edge of the bed to scan the floor, where pools of Andean sunlight fell. The whole room had a yellow glow from the sun and the turmeric-colored walls of the bedroom, which my father had said was mine. My own bedroom in his house. Or, I see now, a child’s bedroom—any child. I peered into my shoe as the canaries cackled from the courtyard.
No cockroaches.
This was what it was like to meet Silas for the first time.
After avoiding his calls and insisting I wasn’t ready to meet him, I found that he was simply a person, a young man my own age, both a stranger and also something else. And so we agreed to meet again, this time just the two of us. I would encounter my brother without the security of my husband.
Walking toward the pizzeria, I twisted my wedding ring on my finger. My footsteps on the sidewalk sounded like the clatter of cowboys’ spurs. He was already there when I pushed open the heavy door, and we were shown to a table with a checkered cloth.
“Renzo said you and your mom didn’t want to meet us,” he told me after we had ordered beer and pizza—cheese and sausage and green peppers to share. He had begun to unspool the story, our story, and each rotation got more knotted.
“But we neve
r knew about you,” I cried. “My mom didn’t either.” I didn’t tell him about “Love the One You’re With”; I wasn’t sure yet if he was a Stephen Stills kind of person. I didn’t know anything about him.
“We searched for you, but we didn’t know you had Renzo’s last name.”
I had been given my father’s last name; my half brother had his first name. Proof, I suppose, of my legitimacy and his legacy. Our mothers, independently of each other, had kept a tie, a daily reminder of the man they had each loved or needed or both.
“My mom was married to a Colombian man she met in college,” he told me. “At Carleton College.”
“The Minnesota connection,” I said. “Carleton.”
“Right. They got married and moved to Colombia and then got divorced.”
The waitress placed a large pizza on a little stand in the middle of the table. “You two need anything else?” she asked in a way that made me think she thought we were a couple. How strange, I thought, to have a brother.
“But she stayed in Colombia after the divorce,” Silas explained, as cheese stretched between a slice and his plate.
“That’s when she met my mom,” I said.
“And our dad.”
The way he said this, “our dad,” was both shocking and strangely comforting. For a child with no siblings, there is no plural possessive when referring to parents. The world is often singular and sometimes lonely. I had a sudden urge to reach across the table and touch his hand, but instead I managed to bump the pizza. Silas caught it just before it toppled off the table.
“Nice one, Sis,” he said, and the world and all its complications seemed, just for a split second, to simplify into the familial relationship of brother and sister.
Even when I had stepbrothers, they never called me anything remotely endearing. Despite spending five years sharing the same bathroom and washing dishes together, we remained, stubbornly, strangers. We spoke when we had to, but we were always divided. It was a choice I had made then, but it didn’t need to be the one I made now.
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