Magical Realism for Non-Believers

by Fajardo, Anika

  “Were you born in Colombia, too?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “When my mom got pregnant, she went back to Arkansas. That’s where I was born. She decided that your mom and Renzo had a better chance of making it.”

  A better chance?

  My mother had grown up living alongside not only three brothers but also the comings and goings of exchange students. My grandparents, although they didn’t begin to travel until they were older, hosted students from Thailand, Japan, Norway, and Egypt, teaching their children the value of international relations. My mother had studied both French and Spanish in high school and couldn’t wait to explore a new country. But when she arrived, she could barely understand the language, finding that textbook Spanish bore little resemblance to reality. And when she tired of the endless meals of beans and rice at the boardinghouse, she would buy mini-wieners from the grocery store and eat them cold, right out of the can, desperate for familiar flavors and textures. My mother, despite longing for the excitement and novelty that was Colombia, could hardly have been expected to square what she had imagined with the reality of life in a foreign country and an artist husband. Despite Beth’s optimism, my parents didn’t make it.

  “Did you see him when you were a kid?” I asked.

  “A couple times,” he said.

  He had met his father. Our father. A couple times. I had to shift the ideas I had in my head of what a child of my father was. To me, my father wasn’t really a father, and his not seeing me grow up was proof of that. My understanding that he had never been a father to anyone had served, in my mind, to almost absolve him. His lack of contact, his obtuse letters, his distance had somehow been forgivable because he was so distant. But now to hear that he had met his son, which meant that he had in some way been a father to him, confused me with a sort of jealousy that wasn’t envious.

  “We lived in Connecticut for a while, and he was there once.”

  “I never met him until I went to Colombia in college,” I said, trying to keep the bitterness from my voice. Trying to keep it from my heart, too, I suppose.

  “We looked for you, you know,” Silas said. He picked up his pint of beer. “My mom and I tried to find you.”

  I tried to picture what that search would have looked like ten, fifteen years earlier. Before the internet, before email, before I knew anything about Colombia. How would the two of them have gone about searching for a half sister? Did they hire a private detective? Did they comb municipal records in public libraries? Did they simply call around to friends and acquaintances?

  Before I could ask, Silas said, “My mom knew your mom’s last name, so we looked for you.”

  I nodded. Of course they could never have found us that way. My mother kept my last name until she got married a second time, both of us struggling through Minnesota in the 1980s with that Spanish surname, with the j that sounds like an h. When my mother got divorced the second time, she returned to her maiden name, having found that changing names with each marriage did something to one’s identity. I certainly hadn’t been interested in taking my husband’s last name. It had nothing to do with feminism or women’s liberation. It had everything to do with identity and ownership. I would forever have a name that linked me with not only the legacy of my ancestors but also my own being. Kindergarten school pictures, summer camp nametags, graduation certificates, piano recital programs on yellow paper.

  17

  A few weeks later when we met again, I told Silas about the photograph of the boy under the glass on the desk in my father’s studio. The white borders, the gray background, the wide-set eyes of the boy, his oval face.

  “He told me that the person in the picture was the son of an old girlfriend,” I said to this man who looked so much like my father. His eyes were so brown they were almost black. He had a crooked tooth in front, one next to the incisor that overlapped the next one as if trying to get a better view, fighting for attention. We were drinking beers at our apartment, and I watched him take a sip of beer, the smell of Corona mixing with my memories of Club Colombia beer, making me feel confused and somehow lightheaded. I took a sip of my own beer. “Which I guess was true,” I said.

  Silas nodded again. He nodded, not in agreement, but in that California way of recognition, confirmation, perhaps an affirmation he wished he could have. “When I was a kid, he kept saying he would buy me a ticket to visit him. But he never did. Fuck. I was eight years old thinking I was really going to get to know my dad and go to Colombia and then nothing. I got so fucking sick of waiting for him.”

  I didn’t care if it had been the 1970s. I didn’t care if the players in this farce had been hippies. A brother and a sister and so many secrets. We were children, the responsibility—the duty, the privilege, the obligation—of this person who had lied to us.

  “That’s why I stopped contacting him. I was done with him. That shit. In high school . . .” Silas trailed off. “I did some crazy shit. And I just couldn’t take it anymore.”

  In high school, I thought, was when I had reached out. My teenage rebellion had taken the form of writing letters to connect with this father, not to cut him out. Like a revolving door, our father had lost one child only to gain another.

  I can’t help picturing that moment. Perhaps Renzo had just gone to the post office where he kept a box, number 672. He used a little key to open the metal box only to find—could it have been?—two envelopes sent from the United States. They were both dirty, and one might have been torn in one corner, victim of the unreliable mail delivery system in Colombia, where letters were occasionally intercepted and sometimes never made it to their final destinations. Renzo would have seen one envelope with the familiar round letters of his son. And the other would have been a new script, small and tentative. But the return address in Minnesota would have made his heart catch in his throat. Maybe he brought both letters to a café, where he ordered a tinto (a strong black coffee served in a little white cup) and took several sips of scalding liquid before tearing open the envelopes. Perhaps he let the letters sit on the table for a few minutes, long enough to have a friend stop by and clap him on the back, maybe a student who called him “Don Renzo.” Maybe an attractive woman around his age (a woman I would later meet on a plane to Popayán) watched his reaction as he read Silas’s letter filled with sorrow and disgust. Maybe Silas wrote that he would never write again, maybe he wrote that he hated him. And then, maybe Renzo opened the other letter, my school picture falling from between the pages to the concrete floor of the café. Renzo would have bent down to pick up the picture and stare at it before opening the letter. Reeling from his son’s dismissal, he might have had tears in his eyes, his vision blurry, and when he first looked at my tenth-grade school picture he might have thought he was looking at my mother, his ex-wife, in a time warp of emotions. And maybe that confluence of correspondences made everything that happened after possible. From the lies to the truths, from the sorrow to the anger.

  “Recently I started thinking about you again,” Silas said. “I mean, screw him, but I have a sister.”

  There was a word to ponder. Sister. There is an entire pseudoscience around birth order, pop psychology that aligns one’s place in the family with characteristics and outlooks and behavior. “Only child” is its own side note, usually, those of such unusual parents, selfish and probably entitled parents who chose to bring only one child into the world, repopulation be damned. I suppose if I had grown up under China’s one-child policy, my status as only child would have felt normal. But in the United States—not even just the United States but most of Western societies, most societies in general—multiple children are expected. Brothers, sisters. These turn into uncles and aunts when nieces and nephews come along. Siblings that share the burden of farming or the family business, the care of the elderly, and the maintenance of the estate. I read about the sisters in Little Women and Pride and Prejudice. Only children were the anomaly. Maybe that’s why I was drawn to Anne Shirley and Rebecca of Sunnybr
ook Farm. Of course, these characters not only had no siblings—they generally had no parents either. It had always seemed to me that lacking siblings was correlated with orphanhood. Perhaps I was half an orphan: mother only, no father.

  Sister. I was a sister. It dawned on me that I had been a sister my whole life without knowing it. All the times I said I was an only child had been a lie. Through my father’s lie, I became a liar. And my life suddenly felt like a lie, too. There was what didn’t happen, what could have happened, and what did.

  I was lied to by my father. I wasn’t an only child. I was a sister. I had always been a sister. The anger that I had seen in Silas surfaced in me, taking hold of my insides with bony fingers that tugged toward resentment.

  In the English translation of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, the Buendía family tree is included in the front of the book. It maps the parents and lovers, the wives and children, the bastards and angels. In strong black lines it connects each person, one to the next in clearly demarcated logic. My father told me that in the original Spanish (if he is to be believed) no genealogical history is included. García Márquez never sketched one out, never planned for such a rudimentary explanation to be part of his book. Families do what trees do: they grow and change and modify themselves to fit.

  The lemon tree in my father’s back courtyard had a branch that rested on a makeshift support as it grew heavy with lemons. A plastic footstool or ladder kept the branch from breaking off and falling to the ground. And the tree was still beautiful, still bore fruit, which Ceci squeezed and made into lemon mousse for New Year’s Eve.

  New Year’s Eve in Colombia is a much bigger celebration than Christmas. There are parties and rituals. One must wear yellow (usually in the form of polyester underwear sold on every corner at the end of December) and carry lentils. If you want to travel during the coming year, you must walk a suitcase around the block. For good fortune, you might create an año nuevo muñeco, an effigy of the old year, a figurine to be set on fire, removed from memory with a strike of a match. The carefully constructed life-size dolls wear old hats and trousers, some wear T-shirts and work boots. Before the practice was banned, at midnight these muñecos were burned, letting last year’s disappointments and tragedies disperse in clouds of ash, making room for this year’s promises.

  When the music swirled during my New Year’s Eve in Colombia, I recognized that this was what my life could have been. I might have been one of the small children dodging between uncles and grandmothers, running with brothers and sisters. At the time, it was all complete fantasy—conjecture based on wishing and wondering. Now I saw that this story had another element. A brother and a sister sneaking dulces and caramelos from the table of food, leading younger cousins in hijinks and setting off firecrackers.

  18

  When Dave pulled up at the address Silas had given us, the first thing he noticed was the wide gold Buick Skylark parked in the driveway.

  “Look at the car,” he said, “from the sixties, maybe seventies.”

  On the other side of the Skylark was another car under a tarp. Dave lifted the canvas. “Another beaut,” he said. “A convertible.”

  When Silas answered the door, Dave nodded toward the driveway. “Nice car,” he said, communicating in that way men do, speaking a language more complex to me than Spanish.

  Silas nodded back. “My ’69 Cutlass.”

  Dave, after recently inheriting money from his great-aunt, had bought a Mazda convertible. First we had looked at used Honda del Sols and then had test-driven several Miatas. These little two-seaters were for sale by owners whose wives were having babies. I could see the pity in Dave’s face when the men caressed the hoods and explained why they were selling.

  “Your life is over when you have kids,” Dave had said after buying a mint-condition 1990 Miata. He’s more than six feet tall and had removed some of the stuffing from the driver’s seat in order to fit inside. He was better at adjusting to life than I was.

  We followed Silas into his house, a cozy rental that smelled vaguely of marijuana and stale beer.

  “This is my mom, Beth.”

  At an oak dining-room table sat a woman with grayish-blonde hair and blue eyes. “I remember your mom,” Beth said in greeting. She was older than I expected, a little disappointing in her ordinariness. “Does she still live in Minnesota?”

  I nodded. She nodded back.

  She wasn’t a seductress or vixen. I had hoped that she would provide some clue to events that led to this half brother. But she seemed nice and was unremarkable in appearance. She was closer in age to my father than my mother, and she had only recently gotten married again. She worked in a food co-op, liked to do tile mosaics. My own mother had dabbled in both painting and textiles. I remembered the comforting thud of the treadle against the warp as she formed lines and circles, curves and shapes out of wool and cotton in shades of browns and oranges. The weavings (the ones that she completed, anyway) eventually hung on the walls of our apartment until she got remarried and they were folded into fourths and stored in cardboard boxes. Beth’s art, in contrast, was solid and bold. Silas pointed out a couple of pieces of her artwork that decorated his living room. Tiny squares of vibrant color came together to form a flower, a dolphin, a face, hung beside a sketch in ink that could have been made only by our father.

  Beth’s husband came in from the backyard and introduced himself. By some strange coincidence, his elderly father lived in Minnesota next door to my great-aunt in their retirement community. Beth only nodded again. Like Ceci, she seemed to find nothing odd in this familial situation, perhaps willing to take family where she could get it.

  “Anika,” I heard Silas call from outside. I went through the kitchen to find him standing in front of the grill with a young man.

  “This is my brother,” Silas said, tongs in one hand.

  Silas’s brother was blond like their mother. Where it wasn’t a ruddy red, his skin was pale, almost literally white. He looked nothing like Silas, although I wasn’t sure if I did either. Before this meeting, I had studied my face in the bathroom mirror while Dave was at work. What Silas had inherited from Renzo was much more obvious: the black curly hair, the dark eyes, the thin chicken legs. I am much more my mother’s daughter, with a wide gummy smile and thick thighs. But my coloring, considered dark by Minnesota standards, clearly comes from my father, as if he, the artist, was the one who got to choose the shade of skin, the color of the eyes.

  I didn’t embrace my Latino heritage until I left for college, when I left behind my white mother and my white friends and my white relatives. I joined the Hispanic Student Association and listened to Spanish-language rock and roll and ate Mexican buñuelos and arroz con pollo. We went to movies and met in the library for study sessions. We held bake sales and salsa dances. It was 1994, and Cesar Chavez had just died, his death still inspiring marginalized Latinos and farmworkers. We lobbied the administration to allow us to change our name—radically—to the Latino Student Association. Hispanic implies a language, a common Spanish origin, and Hispanic is an English word, given—not taken. And not all Latinos are Hispanic. We don’t all grow up speaking Spanish, we’re not all descended from Spaniards. The U.S. Census uses Hispanic and Latino interchangeably as if words hold no meaning. Origin, country of birth, heritage. It’s all lumped together. “Too political,” the college administration said.

  How differently we hear the sounds of words.

  Even after I learned how to dance the merengue, my Mexican American friends would good-naturedly call me “half-breed.”

  Me with my white mother and Latino father. Me with a half brother.

  Looking at him manning the grill, I saw that we both have something of the same half-and-half look to us. Not quite foreign, not quite domestic. We could be Italian, Middle Eastern, French, American Indian.

  Children get half their DNA from their mothers and half from their fathers (although there is a little fuzzy math there in
that you get just a bit more from your mother on account of her X chromosome), and siblings share half their DNA. Half siblings, although they also get half their DNA from the same parent, share only an average of 25 percent of their DNA, similar to a first cousin. And yet I already felt more connected to my new half brother than to my father, with whom I share as much DNA as I do with my mother. Silas and I were nothing alike and at the same time similar beyond measure.

  I shook hands with Silas’s brother. We accepted beers and plates of food, and all of us sat at the patio table together.

  “My half brother has a half brother,” I joked.

  Then Silas’s brother said, “I have another half brother, too.”

  We are all half something, I supposed. Half our mothers and half our fathers. Half our upbringing and half our genes. Half our fantasies, half our realities. And after all the halves come the quarters, the eighths, until we can’t be divided anymore, the pieces of ourselves too small to count. I rearranged the punch line: my half brother has a half brother who has a half brother.

  19

  Silas began calling me, phoning to chat as if we were friends, leaving messages that began “Hey, Sis,” as if we were siblings. And when I returned the voice mail, I would say, “This is your sister,” just to try out the words, to experiment with the way they felt in my mouth and in my heart.

  When we met for lunch or went out for a drink, we didn’t talk about what might have been. But I couldn’t help imagining a life I had never lived. Imagine if there had been no secrets, if my half brother and I had grown up knowing about one another, if there had been weekends spent together, phone calls, Christmas cards. We might have gone to Colombia together that first time in 1995, both of us twenty-one years old, both of us unsure of what lay ahead. Both of us together.