When my father and I had traveled by bus to Cali, our shoulders touched at each treacherous turn, and the closeness felt as foreign as the passing curves and the motorbikes that swerved around the bus. I was startled in my seat when the driver leaned on the horn, but the bleat was only meant to prod two brown cows that stood blocking the road. Despite the honking, the cows looked at the vehicle with bored, watery eyes before moving slowly out of the roadway.
Just as slowly I was lulled into complacency by the rocking of the bus and the smoky breeze that swept through the open windows. My father formed a sort of protective barrier between me and the other passengers. But when the bus shuddered to a stop on the side of the mountain, the gravel and asphalt highway crumbling into nothing at the edge of a cliff, and fingers of shrubs and vine invading the road, I felt a wave of panic and acrophobia. The unscheduled stop we had made on the way to Puracé was still fresh in my memory, and I looked for soldiers holding machine guns. There was no town in sight, no reason for a stop. My father had told me about the many traffic accidents—often fatal ones—that occurred on the narrow highway. I thought of road blocks and kidnappings, warfare and machine guns. As these thoughts raced through my head, I wanted to grip my father’s hand. But I didn’t move.
There was a clamber in the front of the bus, and a man boarded. He was loaded with, not rifles, but apples and pastries. As the bus started up again with a whine of gears, he swung his bags of manzanas and pandebono and shouted at the passengers: “Acá tenemos lo más rico. Toman algo.” His accent was thick and guttural, and he clutched the seatbacks as he made his way toward the rear of the bus, looking for buyers of his wares. He had a scruffy beard and smelled of something ripe and primal. After a few passengers exchanged pesos for fruit and bread, the bus stopped again and left the man standing in the road behind us.
When the bus stopped a second time, a man with a scuffed guitar strapped to his back got on and headed down the aisle.
“The driver,” my father explained to me as the busker started to play an out-of-key tune, “gets a kickback from these guys. That’s why he stops.”
When the guitar player got off, I wondered what happened to these peddlers when they disembarked miles from their starting points. They probably just kept going, I thought, because they had no other choice.
“Señoras y señores,” the next man shouted, startling me with the tenor of his scratchy voice. He wore a brown wool poncho, probably similar to the one my mother would have worn, and carried a large bag filled with other little bags. “Using the spells of my ancestors,” he announced in Spanish, “I can cure you. Here we have the potion to solve your problems in bed.” He paused and winked at an overweight man with a mustache a few rows ahead of us. “A wart? Who has a wart? I will remove it before your eyes. These ancient recipes will heal you.”
I watched him selling little sachets of herbs and grasses to the desperate, exchanging desires for coins, and was surprised by the brisk business he did, at the number of passengers willing to part with their money for a dream. Although, it occurred to me, that’s what I had been doing. Exchanging some part of me for the dream of becoming a Colombian daughter.
A woman in a dress and cardigan stood in the aisle discussing a purchase with the peddler. My father leaned toward me and said in English, “Look at that. She believes in this bullshit.”
He laughed and I joined in, laughing at these believers.
But as I watched the alleged healer walk up and down the aisles handing out magical bundles, I remembered that once, when I was seven or eight, I had seen fairies in my grandparents’ apple tree. The branches, thick with pale pink blossoms, were heavy with a perfume as sweet as my grandmother’s baking pies. Inside the blooms as light and fluffy as cotton candy, I saw fairies—little sparkles of light and motion. The wings, I thought then, were iridescent and transparent like cellophane mirages. I had chased them, swung on the branches like a Maypole, lifted my face to feel a warmth that didn’t come from the sun or a fever. If I had been a churchgoer or a believer, I might have explained this with Bible verses and Holy Trinities, but I was a heathen child, already half in one world and half in another. I didn’t feel the need to believe it in order for it to be true. I closed my eyes as if I knew, even then, that this was magic and I needed to will myself to remember every detail of this moment.
As the bus made its way into the lowlands of the Valle de Cauca and the heat intensified and I imagined my mother shedding her ruana, I didn’t tell my father the story of the fairies. I didn’t want to admit how much I wanted to believe in these cures and the magic of little pouches. When the magician was deposited on the side of the road, I wondered if he had a concoction to make me more Colombian, a poultice I could apply to become more my father’s daughter, a charm that would rid me of my wonders and worries.
The pulsating of the sound waves pounded in my ears, and the wall alongside the exam table felt like it was closing in on me. The tile flooring, the drop ceiling, the doctor’s lab coat were all white, reminding me of my father’s fascination with shading and perspective. There’s a joke familiar to all Minnesota schoolkids in which you produce a blank piece of paper and ask, “What’s this?” The answer, during which giggling ensues, is that it is a picture of a polar bear in a snowstorm. White on white, easily confused with nothing.
The doctor shifted the probe across my belly, and the volume increased, faded, then increased again. “Sounds healthy.”
I knew I was supposed to smile, but I was suddenly horrified. I had, I realized, a being inside me. I was possessed, haunted. What was this thing, I wondered, who had taken up residence in my uterus? I knew I should be crying tears of joy, that I ought to be relieved to receive this news of a healthy fetus, to witness the miracle of life in the form of sound waves. But I couldn’t muster anything more than a half smile to placate the doctor. And I wasn’t sure how I felt about adding yet another new person to my life, another object to my orbit.
My brother had a surprise, he said when I called him. We had been back to visit him several times in the three years since we moved to Minnesota, and he had even once agreed to come to Minneapolis and see the fall foliage. While Dave and I planned our pre-baby visit to California, my brother hadn’t called it a secret, but he hadn’t given me an inkling of what it was either. Of course, I also had a surprise—my own secret—in this new life that was growing inside me. Dave and I were telling our family and friends one by one, little by little, but I was caught in that time period when it isn’t apparent to onlookers that you have a tiny zygote percolating inside. My mother had spent this first part of her pregnancy with the other girls in Cali, and then she had gone home to Minnesota. Her parents were happy to take her in. When she opened gifts of tiny socks and little bibs at a baby shower, I could imagine that even then she had not decided whether she would go back to Colombia at all.
When Dave and I arrived at Silas’s house in the Bay Area, his new girlfriend opened the door.
“Renzo is at work,” she said. Milenka was from Peru and spoke accented English, rolling the R in my brother’s first name, his given name. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Aureliano Buendía leaves a wake of illegitimate sons wherever his warring takes him. And the sons are given Aureliano as their first name and, like my brother, their mothers’ last names. Each one comes back to find him when they are tall, broad, strong young men. The senior Aureliano doesn’t really know what to do with these dozens of sons, but his mother makes them all go to Ash Wednesday mass, where they are anointed with a cross of ashes on their foreheads, a permanent mark they wear for the rest of their lives.
We followed Milenka inside the house. She was petite and pretty with long hair and red lipstick.
“Maybe the surprise is that they’re getting married,” Dave whispered to me. I wasn’t sure that was the answer; Silas’s mother had never married either his father or his brother’s father. I couldn’t really imagine him wearing a black tuxedo with his black hair slicked back, h
is goatee trimmed, a nervous flush to his cheeks.
For dinner that night, Silas made spaghetti and garlic bread. I was over the worst of the nausea of the first trimester, but many smells still made my stomach turn. I helped by sitting at the table cutting vegetables for a salad. At least I thought I was helping until I sliced my finger instead of a carrot. In their bathroom, I opened cupboards and cabinets looking for Band-Aids. When I swung the mirror back I saw, on a crowded glass shelf, a bottle of prenatal vitamins. Could it be? I wondered. I quickly closed the door and smiled at myself in the toothpaste-splattered mirror.
Silas and I are not marked as children of our father, not in any way that can be seen from the outside. But we are marked inside with something just as indelible. We are siblings and yet lost; we are offspring from the same loins and yet strangers; we are intimates and yet hidden. That he and I might be having children at the same time felt preposterous. It went beyond the stuff of fairy tales and magical realism and delved into the arena of falsehoods and lies.
When I came back from the bathroom, Silas held up a bottle of cabernet. “Wine, Sis?”
I instinctively put a hand over my belly. Now that I was growing this alien inside me, I could understand better my mother’s urges during those first few months, and I wondered whether she had been trying to escape her husband or me, the child-to-be. At the first flutters of movement in my uterus, I didn’t feel a thrill of excitement. Before I grew accustomed to it, the sensation of being occupied was too strong; the feeling of being followed and watched haunted me. When the thing inside me flipped and flopped, I frequently rested my hand on my abdomen as if I could calm this being from the outside. “I’m good, thanks.”
“Well,” Dave said as we sat down to dinner.
“What’s your surprise?” I asked even before anyone had taken a bite.
Silas and Milenka looked at each other. I held my breath for the news that I knew was coming.
“We’re having a baby.”
Dave and I started laughing, shaking our heads, laughing.
“So are we.”
And then we were all laughing, nearly crying.
“Have you told Renzo?”
“I called him on Easter.”
“No. Way.”
“You called the same day?”
And the tears from laugher were mingled with tears of sorrow, tears of what could have been. I pictured my father in his house in Popayán, the city noisy and crowded from the famous Semana Santa parades and processions that draw tourists from around the world during Easter week. He would have declined any invitations to church or Ceci’s parents’ house and opted instead for a quiet noon meal at home beside the canaries that gathered in the courtyard.
When the telephone rang and his live-in maid answered, he would have taken the receiver from her hand. The phone in the dining room was an old rotary style, a greenish-gray model. He would have said, “¿Quién es?” and heard his son’s voice. And when he heard the news, the news that at that point still made Silas sick to his stomach if he thought about it too much, he cried. He wept and congratulated this young man. He would have promised not to tell me. And then my father would have gone back to his meal, perhaps already envisioning a new painting he would begin, one that was inspired by new life. When the phone rang again, he might have been expecting a call from Ceci, but when he answered and it was his daughter, he would have wanted to tell me about this baby that would be born. And so when I told him we were having a baby, he didn’t cry. This time he laughed, he laughed as much as we were laughing now with the ridiculousness of life.
“Due date?”
“October seventh. You?”
“October twenty-eighth.”
“Twins!”
And the world and its marvels and mistakes opened up. We clinked glasses (that contained no alcohol) and laughed and chose to be in this moment of joy. The long and convoluted road that had led to a brother and sister four months apart now pointed toward future cousins who would grow up knowing one another. Between Silas and me, we were able to break the cycle of secrets. With a trick of timing and a twist of chance, there would be two children closer in age than seemed possible.
24
The illegitimate sons of Aureliano Buendía—the large, handsome young men marked with the cross of ash—were all murdered. This happens in the latter half of One Hundred Years of Solitude and is told as matter-of-factly as their births. But birth and death are nothing alike, I thought, as the pain of labor seeped in during the predawn hours on a Saturday in late October. Death is the end of pain, and birth, I realized, is only the beginning. A rope tightened around my abdomen and lower back as if my organs had been taken over by a complex system of pulleys and ratchets. The urgency and intensity of contractions felt like a civil war inside me, like treason, one part of me betraying the desires of the other.
“I don’t want to do this,” I told Dave, whose breath gagged me with the smell of milk and cereal. The bedroom walls we had painted last summer closed in on me with their beigeness, and the sheets of our marital bed were too hot and too wrinkled. Every movement awoke the pain inside me, beside me. “You do it.”
But he couldn’t and I had to.
When we arrived at the hospital in Minneapolis, I was already exhausted from the relentless pounding and pulsing in my lower back. While Dave parked the car, I waited alone in the high-ceilinged foyer. There were no other patients on this gray morning, and I was left to suffer alone with only a passing janitor for company.
The antiseptic smells and the flickering fluorescent lights reminded me of the time, nearly a decade ago, when my grandfather had been in the hospital with a blood infection. When I had seen him in a hospital gown on the cold white sheets of the bed, he had looked old and fragile. The table next to his bed was stacked with National Geographics and National History magazines, which he carted with him everywhere in a leather satchel. I sat talking with him while my mother and grandmother went to the cafeteria.
“Did you know, honey,” he had said, “that the world was created on your birthday?”
I didn’t say anything as he fumbled with the glossy pages of a magazine, his hand wrinkled and spotted with brown as if chocolate ice cream had melted over his knuckles. A large white bandage covered the catheter hub that carried antibiotics to his bloodstream.
“This bishop, James Ussher, figured out the exact date of this beginning of the world. He spent his life calculating dates for everything. The twenty-third of October, your birthday. Well, a different year, of course. Four thousand four B.C.”
I nodded. My grandfather had been telling me stories all my life, and I had believed them all.
“So you were born on the day the world was created, honey.”
I leaned on the counter of the maternity floor’s registration desk, letting the pulsing seize and suspend me.
“Name?” said the woman behind the sliding glass window.
I glared at her as another contraction gripped me. We were two days away from the beginning of the world, but it felt like the end.
Her hands were poised above the keyboard, and Dave stepped in front of me and gave her my vital information while I gripped the edge of the counter.
We were shown into a small dark room with a bed in the center like a throne.
“You can put this on,” a medical assistant said, handing Dave a white, flowered hospital gown.
Dave helped me out of my sweatpants and onto the bed. I concentrated on my most self-centered survival. Fuck. How had my mother done this with two men drinking whiskey beside her? Jesus fucking Christ. Breathe in. Breathe out. Curse. Holy shit. I wasn’t thinking about family or my mother or my father or the son that had been born to Silas and Milenka a week before. I wasn’t thinking about some bullshit miracle of bringing a new life into the world. I wasn’t even thinking about the world anymore. Fuck. I was thinking only about me.
“If you want an epidural for the pain, we need to do it now,” said the nurse who
checked on me.
We had talked about not using meds. Dave and I had researched the options in our careful studious ways. He looked at me for a cue.
“Now,” I said.
I appreciated the speed with which the nurse left to carry out my demands.
Soon another nurse walked us down a hallway to the labor room, which had a view of the industrial buildings in that part of the city. The streets below were gloomy and vacant, and I felt like the last person in the world, the queen bee, the one who had to perform the duty of populating the colony again.
“You’re going to sit on the edge of the bed,” the anesthesiologist told me, “and lean forward while I insert the catheter into your back.”
“He’s going to have to leave,” I said between contractions, pointing at Dave. “He faints.”
Back when we still lived in Madison and were dating, the two of us irresponsible college sweethearts, Dave and I had gone to see Pulp Fiction in a crowded movie theater. We were in the middle of the back row, where we had an unobstructed view of the screen. In the film, Uma Thurman’s character has a drug overdose, and the prescribed remedy is a shot of adrenaline, administered straight to the heart. John Travolta’s character holds a huge syringe over her, its five-inch needle dripping, and then plunges it in. Next to me, Dave had shuddered and then slumped forward, head to knees.
“Let’s go,” I had whispered. “Do you have to throw up?” I shook his arm, and he bolted upright again.
“I’m fine,” he whispered back. “I just fainted.”
So in the labor room, I didn’t want him there while the needle was being inserted into the epidural space in my spine. I didn’t want any distractions from me; I wanted all the attention, all care focused on me. I was the only one in the room, the only child.
When the anesthetic took effect and I was feeling only the force of the contractions, not their stabbing, I was hungry. I told the nurse, “I want a steak and a baked potato.”
Magical Realism for Non-Believers Page 12
