Magical Realism for Non-Believers

by Fajardo, Anika

  But she said I wasn’t allowed to eat.

  “A glass of wine?” I tried.

  The nurse ignored me. She came and went, preparing equipment and instruments just out of my sight. Dave held my hand and then stood by the window to watch the gray day. Then the pain, which had been dulled, slowly and inexplicably returned inch by inch, first a nagging ache, then a sharp throbbing that radiated from my lower back and down my legs. In sixth-grade science class I collected insects, killed them in jars of alcohol, and pinned them to a sheet of white and crumbly Styrofoam. Monarchs, dragonflies, moths. This was what happened to creatures that obeyed their homing instincts. I had suspended the dead insects on colorful ball-head pins, and now, as the twisting spasms tried to contort my body, I felt as if I had been captured, tied down by tubes and monitors, like a round beetle.

  “Keep breathing,” the nurse said.

  “Do you want music?” Dave asked. He had made a CD of soothing songs in preparation for this moment. Adrian Legg, Leo Kottke, and Yo-Yo Ma. He popped the CD into the boom box he had hauled in from the car. Quiet acoustic guitars and gentle moans of cello and strumming mandolins circled and spun. The pain seemed worse, amplified by having been absent for a time. I closed my eyes, listened to the music, breathed. I let the whole thing wash over me, and then I opened my eyes, suddenly annoyed at Dave’s ministrations and the mandates from the nurse.

  “Turn that thing off,” I told Dave.

  I turned to the nurse next. “Do you know,” I said as rudely as I could, “that wallpaper border is the ugliest thing I have ever seen.”

  The border was blues and pinks, colors left over from the early nineties, insipid and faded. It felt like an insult to what I was trying to do here.

  But the nurse only laughed. “When you fill out the evaluation about your care here, be sure to mention the wallpaper,” she said.

  I almost laughed then, too, but another twist of my contracting uterus caught my breath and seemed to rob it from me. The pain was intense and alive. It controlled me. I thought about dying. Did, I wondered, the universe contort and convulse like this when it was created?

  “Push,” the doctor said after hours—who knew how many—of this writhing and wishing.

  “Bear down,” said the nurse.

  I thought of my grandmother making bread, folding and kneading the dough with well-floured hands. My whole body felt like that dough, the pain clawing at me. I wasn’t thinking about steaks anymore. I lifted my knees to my chest and thought about the movie scenes of actresses pretending to give birth. I imitated their faces, but I wasn’t sure what I was actually supposed to do. I felt like a character in a story.

  “How’s your pain level?” the nurse asked, looking not at me but at the pump beside me. “On a scale of one to ten?”

  “A twenty,” I said.

  She fiddled with the dials and buttons, the magical increments that were supposed to give me relief. Even with this pain, I was grateful to be in a clean hospital room, in my own reality, and not on a hammock in a jungle like Úrsula Buendía in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

  “How about now?”

  I felt the same; the same snaking, sneaking pain lashed at me. “A nineteen,” I said because I didn’t want to be uncooperative.

  “Okay, we can see the head,” the doctor said. “Black hair.”

  I had also come out with black hair. Black hair and dark eyes in an impossibly round face. Round like the sun. I was the sun, I thought.

  Then the doctor said, “Looks like the baby is posterior.”

  “What does that mean?” Dave asked, letting go of my hand for a moment.

  “Face up. We need to do a cesarean.”

  “No!” I was adamant. “I can feel everything,” I cried.

  The doctor looked at me. It was nearly midnight on a Saturday, and I wondered where she would have rather been at that moment. Where would I have rather been. She sighed, and I knew that I wasn’t unique. The new mother who didn’t want surgery after fourteen hours of labor. She’d seen all this before.

  “Do you want this baby to come out?” the doctor asked at last.

  My favorite image from my father’s artwork is a dove perched on a barbed wire, these two opposing symbols captured together in one graceful arc. He had designed the image in pencil and black ink and then transferred it to the digital world, where he worked it, kneaded it, shaped it, and colored it. The work was part of a series for an exhibit he had done called Kosombia, named for both the bloody Kosovo War in the late 1990s and the decades of violence of his own country. The paintings captured the horror of both places with falling helicopters and smashed red roof tiles. But the dove on the barbed wire was my favorite image, combining so perfectly two dichotomous paradigms. Violence and life. Peace and danger.

  My father put both of these thoughts side by side, and I wondered whether simultaneously holding opposing thoughts in your head was a sign of genius or insanity. I didn’t know if I was capable of that kind of cognitive dissonance, if I had the same ability, the same genius. But I did know that perhaps I had the insanity, because even as I knew this baby would be born soon if not right now, I wanted to keep this new life inside me.

  “Let’s get her prepped,” the doctor said to the nurses. And it was all out of my control, not my choice to make.

  I was transferred to a gurney, and Dave was led away to change into scrubs and eat peanut butter sandwiches meant to fortify him. He was gone, and I was being wheeled down a corridor, the white tubes of light on the ceiling passing in front of my vision like telephone poles down a highway. And I suddenly remembered watching the lights pass over me on the way to my bladder surgery. I was three years old again, wondering what was going on, wondering where my mother was. Afraid and at the same time not afraid, willing to let someone—anyone—take care of me.

  Once in the operating room, the anesthesiologist, who had just come on duty, discovered that the catheter had slipped out of the epidural space. Without the anesthetic running through the spine, I had been experiencing unmedicated labor as if I had been foolish enough to do the whole thing as naturally as my mother and grandmother had done.

  “I can’t have surgery without something,” I said. I envisioned a knife, a large kitchen knife, cutting through the flesh of my distended belly.

  “We’re going to have to do a spinal block,” she told me. “I have to let you know that this isn’t ideal, doing a block after an epidural.”

  I sat on the edge of the operating table, hugging the obstetrician, my swollen feet dangling over the white tile. If I had grown up in Colombia, if I had married a Colombian man and gone into labor in a Colombian hospital, would I be getting a spinal block now? I wondered. Behind me, the anesthesiologist poked and prodded at my lower back even as contractions gripped me. I thought of my mother in labor in what was then a fairly primitive hospital in Popayán, two hundred miles from a big city, three thousand miles from her mother. The needle was going into my back, but it couldn’t seem to locate the magical subarachnoid space. So I kept talking as if the talking, the storytelling, would fortify me and keep me alive.

  “My husband has a big head,” I told the doctor as I clung to her neck, breathing in her smell of antibacterial foam. “We can never find hats to fit him.”

  The ob-gyn looked down at me. “Never marry someone with a big head.”

  At last the spinal block took hold, and they laid me down on the table, a nurse at my head, her hands outstretched as if to catch me should I fall. I heard the doctors and nurses and knew there was a bed and warming lamp for whatever would be pulled from me. And then I felt myself going numb—no, that’s not what it was; numbness suggests a sensation, and I was experiencing a complete absence of feeling. The anti-feeling started at my stomach and lower back and moved its way up. My fingers, my arms, my chest. It moved into my ears, my chin, my cheeks. It began to take hold of my breathing, my mouth.

  “Help,” I cried out. “I can’t breathe.”

 
It was a bad dream, the kind where you try to scream but no sound comes out, the kind where you try to run but your feet won’t move.

  “Help,” I said in a whisper, all feebleness. And then I wasn’t thinking anymore, not about babies or mothers or galaxies.

  “Keep breathing,” the nurse said. “It’s okay.”

  And then everything went out.

  It was like trying to swim through black oil, that coming out of the netherworld. Like a surreal dream that feels like reality. I was reluctant to open my eyes, as if it would be easier to just fall back and let myself plunge into nothingness.

  I heard a voice from somewhere.

  “It’s a girl,” the voice said. But I didn’t know what those words meant.

  Were those the same words my mother had heard when I was born at five thirty in the morning when the sky above Popayán was still dark? Had she felt like this when she first saw me, a tiny infant, wrapped like an airmail package?

  “It’s a girl,” Dave said.

  “No, it’s not,” I said, and I opened my eyes, was blinded by lights. Lights like the big bang of the universe, the explosion of atoms and particles that created the world as we eventually came to know it. In the beginning there was light. Weren’t those the words in the Bible?

  “Look,” I heard him say. But I didn’t see anything, just shapes and shadows of the recovery room. I closed my eyes again.

  I awoke again later when the nurse brought my baby to me, laid her in my arms. We were in a new room, and Dave was asleep in the fold-down chair beside my bed. With the glow of the hall light, I could see the baby’s face, small and round. A cherub nose like all babies have, slits of eyes, thin lips. Her hands were little claws, impossibly small like a fairy’s. I looked up to see the clock on the wall tick to four in the morning.

  “This is my new life,” I said. Or maybe I just thought it.

  The next day my throat was scratchy from the intubation. When the doctors and nurses came to take my blood pressure and monitor my urinary output, they didn’t tell me how lucky I was. They didn’t tell me how controversial it was to administer a spinal block following an epidural. They didn’t mention that patients can die from what I later learned was called accidental total spinal analgesia. They didn’t tell me how dangerous this would have been if my mother, in 1974 in the provincial Colombian hospital, had experienced similar troubles while giving birth to me. They watched me carefully, though, gave me opioids, and tended my staples.

  My mother was the first of the visitors to arrive, and she looked so normal in her coat and gloves. Somehow I had expected that everything and everyone would be different now. But my mother was still my mother. She leaned over the bassinet in the hospital room and scooped up the baby. I watched my mother cradle my daughter’s head, hold her at arm’s length, both of them trying to focus on the other.

  “What’s the name you chose?”

  Dave stood, puffed his chest a bit. “Meet Sylvia,” he said.

  “Well,” my mother said. And there was a split second when I wondered if she felt betrayed, if we had done the right thing naming our child for the town in Colombia (albeit spelled wrong). The town where I had been conceived (and where Silas had also been created). But she looked at the baby in her arms and smiled. “Beautiful.”

  Then the baby began to fuss, and Dave took over. He laid the infant in the bassinet to change her diaper.

  “Look at those toes,” my mother said, watching. While Dave practiced his new skill, she took hold of one of Sylvia’s feet, held it in her hand. The feet were wrinkled and pink, they were padded on the tops and bottoms, and my mother looked like she wanted to put one in her mouth. “They are just like yours were. We used to call them little tamales.”

  Later that day my grandparents arrived at the hospital. They brought champagne.

  “Nursing mothers shouldn’t have any champagne,” the brusque nurse taking my blood pressure said. “No amount of alcohol is safe.” Her nasally voice sounded like a recording from a neonatal instructional film.

  “But it’s her birthday!” my mother cried. She poured the sparkling wine into plastic hospital cups.

  The day after giving birth to my own child, and it was my birthday. The beginning of the world.

  “Happy birthday to you,” sang my family, my grandmother’s wobbly harmonization coming in for the finale. Even though I already understood that I had been usurped, I still had one more day of being serenaded.

  The tiny creature lay in my arms as they sang, her fists clenched as if she were still hanging on for dear life. My breasts were engorged and tight with milk, and the baby’s mouth was so tiny. I latched her toothless gums around my nipple, and I felt less like the center of the universe and more like the center of her universe. In Spanish, to give birth is dar luz. To give light. I looked down at her, this girl who would be, I hoped, my light. I wished that I could already grasp the significance of this moment, of this new life. But it was too soon for that. I sipped the champagne, and the cold bubbles shocked and startled.

  25

  Those first days were long, and the nights were even longer. In a fog, in a funk, in a fracaso of sleeplessness, I thought of the nighttime glow of the Spanish-style San Jose Hospital, the hospital in the old part of Popayán in which my mother had given birth. The building had been destroyed in an earthquake in the 1980s and rebuilt as it had always been. Could everything, I wondered, be returned to normal with enough work?

  “I was born there,” I had told María Fernanda and her sister María Alejandra when they pointed out the hospital on my first visit to Colombia.

  Ceci’s nieces (whom I could never keep straight) took me on a tour of Popayán. El Morro, the Humilladero Bridge, Parque Caldas, the recently built Pueblito Patojo. Someone’s ex-boyfriend drove a little blue car, and there were a few other cousins or friends packed into the sticky back seat. As we joked and laughed and the twenty-something kids in the car got louder and rowdier, María Fernanda (or maybe it was María Alejandra) turned to me and said, “You’re speaking like a native now. Your Spanish is perfect, Anika.”

  “Es un milagro,” María Alejandra said.

  “If it’s a miracle, we need to go thank the Virgen,” María Fernanda said.

  I knew my Spanish-speaking ability wasn’t a miracle; I knew it was a result of years of study, a semester of college-level Spanish in Spain, and the intense immersion I was experiencing in Colombia. But if they wanted to believe in a miracle, I had thought, why stop them?

  “Let’s go to Iglesia de Santo Domingo.”

  I started to laugh because I thought she was joking about giving thanks, but the driver had already turned the car, embarking on uncharted territory. I was familiar with Jesus and his cross, Noah and his ark, but my religious education hadn’t gone much further than that. While my childhood friends were at Lutheran Sunday school, I was exploring the woods with my mother, watching early dandelions peek their heads through brown grass, studying chickadees and red squirrels. My mother had taken me to church for the occasional wedding or funeral, but what she believed in was nature. A red-winged blackbird spotted on a highway overpass was reason to pause and reflect on the enormity of the world. An orange sunset over a glassy lake could stall dinner. An owl illuminated by our headlights was cause to wake a sleeping child.

  “Let’s go see la fantasma,” someone in the car said.

  La fantasma? The ghost? I wasn’t sure I had translated that correctly, despite my newfound and “perfect” Spanish.

  The sun’s last rays cast shadows of rolling curves on milky buildings as the driver careened around corners and honked at the scooters that whizzed by. He then came to an abrupt halt halfway on the sidewalk near a small plaza. A dusty gray fountain stood in the middle, and across from this were the doors of a church.

  Even in the twilight I could make out its arches and spires; the Iglesia de Santo Domingo was my idea of a church. I had seen so many churches during my time in Spain (French, Italian, Spanish)
, and they had all been old and dignified like this one. Despite my mother’s religious reluctance, when she married my stepfather he decided that our new blended family needed to attend a church, a Presbyterian church on a bland suburban street with a short-cropped lawn and spirea for landscaping. The building was late-1960s or early-1970s blond wood and turquoise upholstery—everything the antithesis of this postcolonial church.

  “This is where the ghost woman lives,” María Fernanda explained to me as I followed her out of the car. The others were already crossing the plaza, but I hung back a moment, watching her black braid swing against her back. After all, I didn’t believe in ghosts. I knew that spirits did not walk the cobbled streets or aisles of churches. I certainly had never seen a ghost at the Presbyterian church. And if there had been one, I would have seen it when I stole a Bible from one of the pews. A Revised Standard Version, it had been dedicated to the church from some long-forgotten family. I took it home and thumbed through its gold-edged pages and found the Psalms, black and white text that could be touched. Save me, oh God, for the waters have come up to my neck. I marked the page and found comfort in the words, although whether they were written by the hand of God was something for believers to decide. I was an American and a pragmatist and, standing in this square in South America, I hung on—desperately, perhaps—to what was real: a carload of twenty-somethings, the lingering smell of motor oil, the scent of lemons from a tree hidden in a courtyard somewhere.

  “Vámonos,” someone called, and I ran to catch up with María Fernanda.

  As we walked across the plaza, she told me about the ghost woman. She told me that you could hear the ghost singing mass in Latin and that some people go crazy after seeing her. As I listened, my mind wandered to Allende, Borges, García Márquez. I had read enough magical realism to know that Latin America is fond of the imaginary, the line between real and fantasy blurry. Just like the division between political protest and drug smuggling is permeable, the demarcation between good and bad is changeable, malleable, and fluid. Ancient family trees intertwine and heal where they have been hacked down. Friends can become enemies as easily as acquaintances can become family. The line tends to be a moving target, and instead of questioning it’s better to just accept.