Magical Realism for Non-Believers

by Fajardo, Anika

  When we approached the baroque building, I stood behind my guides as they crept up to the huge doors. If my father had been with us, he would have ignored the religious meaning of the church but pointed out the lines, the movement, the architecture. The hinges, darkened with age, were out of a movie set, worn by use and rusted in places where relentless winter rains had pounded. My companions were dwarfed by the massive slabs of wood and heavy iron handles.

  “It’s locked; we can’t go in,” I heard.

  “Look through there.” The driver of the small blue car pointed to the space between the doors.

  One of the boys leaned in, his black hair brushing the wood. “I can see something!” he cried.

  There was a scuffle as everyone tried to look through the crack, but I stood back a bit, waiting for the childishness to end, not wanting to take up the space that should be allotted to a believer.

  And then: “¡La veo!” someone shouted. “I see her!”

  I was the last one to move toward the doors. Someone pushed me forward, as if sensing my reluctance. As I peeked through the space between the doors of the church, I saw light. Light as if from a candle, many candles, as if seen through a camera’s soft-focus filter. I pressed my forehead against the rough wood to get a better look. I could feel the splinters scratch my face, and the damp cold of the mountain air played at the back of my neck. I focused on the shadow of a black boot. The rough skirt of a wool habit. A hunched form shuffling past the candlelight.

  The swirl of Spanish surrounded me, and the pungent scent of the old town tickled my nostrils. Colombia was all around me, below me, in me, through me. Hundreds of years of indios and Católicos pushed against me. The songs of the slaves that had built the church and laid each brick echoed in my ears. I could feel the Colombian blood pulsing through my veins.

  My eyes stung with the strain of keeping them open. I was afraid to blink in case I missed something. And then, just when I was beginning to be sure—absolutely positive—that I had seen something, laughter erupted from the voices behind me, and I closed my eyes for an instant. Before following the group that was heading back to the car, I peered through the crack in the door again. I couldn’t see anything. My heart pounded out the Colombian blood, and I was once again American. It was dark in the chapel, no light, no figure, no glow. Just a quiet, nighttime, shuttered iglesia waiting for morning mass.

  We climbed back into the little car. As we drove away, María Fernanda whispered, “Did you see her?”

  Like my parents, I believe in what I can see. A hawk in the clouds, a shadow reflected on a frozen lake. A dark line of paint or a soft brush of pencil. A heavy wooden door; cold iron hinges; a laughing, teasing group of young people; a ghost woman.

  “Sí,” I said, leaning back into the blue vinyl seat.

  26

  I stumbled out of bed and scooped up my screaming baby. Night after night. At first, I made an effort of inhaling the scent of her soft fontanel and trying to cherish the moment.

  But I didn’t have the heart for it. Survival seemed questionable, miracles impossible.

  When Dave went back to work and I was alone with the baby all day, the days grew just as long as the nights. At times, the three of us—me, Sylvia, and the cat—would nap on our bed in the afternoons. I watched my fitfully sleeping baby and gently wheezing tabby and thought about how many years I had loved this feline and how I didn’t know this human-child at all. This new parenting was like having a stranger instantly become part of your family.

  Of course, strangers becoming family was nothing new. Silas sent me pictures of a round-headed infant with big eyes and round cheeks. My nephew. More family. I felt as if I were drowning in family, unsure of what to grab on to.

  During these times, my mother came to help as much as she could. She was more worried about me than her new grandchild, and now I wonder if she was so attentive not only because she was my mother but because she knew what it felt like to struggle with an infant. If she did, she didn’t let on. She simply said, “You lie down. We’ll take care of her.”

  Once, just once, I felt as desperate as she might have. After she closed my bedroom door and took the baby downstairs, I stared at the slit of light from the hall slicing the blackness. I listened to her and Dave in the kitchen, the murmur of their voices interrupted occasionally with the foreign whimpering of an infant. My breasts swelled with milk at the sound, and I rolled over and wept. I turned away from the light and lay on my side, facing the dark window, the window above my neighbor’s asphalt driveway two stories below. I thought of how easily the sash slid up, how the screen popped out.

  Escape can take many forms. For my mother, it hadn’t been a twenty-foot drop but a three-thousand-mile plane ride. I thought of her whisking me away, first to her family’s cabin, then to the care of Mary Jean, my grandmother’s best friend, who lived in an innocuous suburban rambler that had synthetic carpeting and laminate countertops. I remembered Mary Jean’s thick eyelashes, gravelly smoker’s laugh, and unflappable manner and realized she had been the perfect accomplice.

  “But we didn’t know that she had you,” my grandmother had said when I was a teenager and hearing this story for the first time. “No one could know where you were so that if they asked, we could honestly say we didn’t know.”

  I tried to imagine myself, a wailing toddler, in the arms of a stranger. I tried to imagine the lengths my mother went so that she could keep me.

  “It was cloak-and-dagger stuff,” my grandfather had told me. “We watched Renzo and the consul drive around the neighborhood looking for you.” I pictured my grandparents standing just behind the curtain in their dining room, leaning slightly against the seagrass wallpaper. I imagined a black government sedan prowling the street that circled the neighborhood, passing the Eight Pond (named for its shape) and the vacant lot (where we could always find butterflies) and the storm drain that collected deep puddles to splash in each spring. I pictured my father hidden behind tinted-glass windows peering out at the post–World War II split-levels painted dismal hues of brown and gray and tan. I imagined the invisible scars the vehicle must have left on the streets I would later run and walk and bike on. “Spooky,” my grandfather said.

  In the end, it turned out that my mother had planned well. A U.S. court, at a time when mothers were almost always guaranteed guardianship, granted her sole custody and charged my father one hundred dollars, a sum he never paid.

  “I remember the day he said goodbye to you,” my grandmother said. “He took you to feed the ducks at the Eight Pond. I felt sorry for him, so we let him take you down there.”

  As my grandmother told me this, I could picture the grassy shore that sloped down from the road above. The pond was technically on private property, but all the kids of the neighborhood fed the ducks in the summer and skated on the ice in the winter, possession trumping borders. I imagined me, a little girl with blunt-cut bangs and elbows dimpled with baby fat, perched beside my father on the neatly cut grass of the bank. Perhaps I pointed a chubby finger at the ducks swimming in the pond.

  “Pato,” I might have said, one of my few words.

  “Pato,” my father might have repeated.

  Perhaps I watched a duck send ripples across the water, not yet knowing that they were mallards, a species native to North America, that the female’s inconspicuous mottled brown feathers help her to blend into her surroundings. Maybe I pointed to the drake that swam in figure eights around his mate, resplendent in iridescent green, his head appearing blue, then emerald, his neck ringed in white, like the line left after a wedding band is surreptitiously slipped into a pocket.

  To my father, the Eight Pond perhaps looked, for just a moment, less like something quantifiable and more like two ample breasts. Or maybe he remembered, a fact dredged up from his Catholic childhood in Colombia, that eight is the symbol for resurrection and new life.

  “I will send you a duck, my dear,” my father might have said to me. “A pato for you.” H
e sent me one of the wooden ducks he designed and painted to sell to art collectors. A life-size mallard hen, a faithful imitation of the real thing. For many years, the bird’s glass eyes watched over me, and now the wooden duck, a replica in vivid color, sat atop a shelf in my baby’s room, where Dave would pace with her nestled against his shoulder. Sylvia’s little pudgy hand would slip into his shirt pocket, and our baby looked so content in the arms of her father, watching the world from his height. I wondered what it meant to take a child away from a father.

  “We liked Renzo,” my grandmother had said.

  “It just wasn’t meant to be,” my grandfather had finished.

  Maybe it wasn’t meant to be, my having a father and mother. But even if that fate had been my past, it didn’t have to dictate my future.

  At my six-week postpartum appointment, the nurse wrapped a blood pressure cuff around my upper arm. From the car seat propped on the floor of the exam room, Sylvia studied her surroundings with big baby-blue eyes.

  “You know what I think,” the nurse said as she pumped the cuff. “I think babies are wasted on new mothers. We should have them the other way around: start out with eighteen-year-olds and then, when you’re my age, end up with tiny babies. I have all the energy in the world to cuddle a baby.”

  She smiled, the creases at the corners of her eyes and mouth soft and comforting. I tried to return the smile, but I had done very little smiling in the past few weeks. I had wanted this—a baby, this life—but in the middle of the night as I stumbled around the nursery that used to be an office, I wondered why I had done this to myself.

  “How are you doing today?” the doctor asked when she came in and had complimented the alertness of the baby.

  “Tired.”

  “Very tired?”

  I had never experienced exhaustion like what I was living since the birth of this baby. That my parents had thought a baby would save their marriage was proof of their foolish optimism, the same optimism that led to their marriage in the first place. Dave and I had been struggling blurry-eyed for these first weeks, barely talking, hardly touching except to hand off the bundle of spit-up and blankets. Parenthood doesn’t bring you closer; just because you share blood and ancestry doesn’t mean you form an instant bond. It would be so easy to become like two sides in a civil war, each fighting for survival.

  “So tired.”

  The doctor checked the smile-shaped slice across my abdomen, proof that this thing had been wrenched from me. She palpated the area, but all I could feel was the presence of her hands.

  “It’s numb,” I said. There was a scar, but I had no feeling.

  “The incision for a C-section severs some nerves,” the doctor explained. “They’ll grow back eventually, but it can take years for the numbness to go away.”

  Tears that seemed always to be ready started dripping down my cheeks.

  As the doctor pulled a Kleenex from a box, the baby startled at the sound, her eyes gone wide, her face scrunched and ready for wailing.

  “This is so hard,” I said.

  “Do you ever feel like hurting your baby?” Her hand was poised over my chart as if deciding which box to check.

  I shook my head as my infant wiggled her feet instead of crying.

  “Do you ever feel like hurting yourself?”

  I shook my head again. That night in the dark of my bedroom, the quiet had eventually lulled me to sleep, and I hadn’t looked at windows like that again.

  “Do you feel like getting on a plane and not coming back?”

  My father had once designed way-finding signage for an airport in South America. As a graphic designer and artist, he was skilled at making the mundane visually appealing, at looking at flow and movement in new ways. It was comforting to think that somewhere there was a terminal where people followed his suggested path, looked up when they were lost and read his boldly lettered signs. I wished that he had left similar signs for me to follow.

  The day I departed Colombia almost twenty years ago, I remember sitting next to my suitcase as a uniformed security guard strolled through the area with a dog straining at its leash. The dog sniffed each bag, each passenger, each cumbersome shoe. The dog was checking for drugs, but I wondered what else he could smell, what scent each person carried away with him. I wished that I had packed the smell of my father’s cigarettes, the aroma of frying plátanos, the must of old photographs, the scent of lemons. If I had never left, never got on that plane, never married Dave, I thought, perhaps I would be living in Colombia, where my father and Ceci would take care of me, where a maid would bring me slices of mango and my father would treat me like a child.

  I thought of the preposterousness of air travel, the defying of gravity and fear, and both of those things sounded wonderful. To board a plane and never come back sounded like a wonderful, split-second fantasy.

  “Yes,” I told the doctor.

  But this was life, real life. And it was mine.

  “Let’s get you on some Zoloft,” the doctor said.

  And I wondered if antidepressants could have saved my parents’ marriage, if modern medicine could have altered my life’s trajectory. The number of points where a life can diverge is infinite.

  27

  When, at sixteen months, Sylvia finally pulled herself up on the coffee table and began to take tentative steps, I bought her a miniature pair of soft-soled Mary Janes, brown leather with pink and white polka dots. My mother had been adamant about foot health, and so the shoes were not only adorable, they were also specially designed for growing infant feet. I had grown up wearing sturdy Buster Browns and lace-up athletic shoes, but once there was a pair of hand-me-down black patent leather shoes. She must have given in to my desires after I found the Mary Janes at the bottom of some bag of clothes other families passed along to single mothers.

  “Can I wear them to day care?” I had asked. I was five, almost six, about to start kindergarten in the fall. And she had let me wear the shoes to preschool. But when one of the straps of the used shoes broke off, the preschool teacher stapled it back on—with the sharp prongs pointed inward. I remember the tetanus shot I had to get that evening, as memorable perhaps as Sylvia falling on the sidewalk during her first outing in her new shoes.

  But even after the vaccination and the bloody chin, we parents are indulgent. I remember that one year she bought me a coveted pair of two-toned saddle shoes. My father, too, bought me shoes. A pair of sandals in Cali. And after choosing for me a pair with soft brown leather straps and low wooden heels, we had walked the river path along the Río Cauca where birds of paradise and hibiscus bloomed.

  “How long are we going to walk?” I had asked him as the leather began to rub.

  “Do you need a rest, my dear?” he had asked, and we sat on a bench while I eased the shoes away from my growing blisters.

  “Come, rest,” he said, and we sat watching the birds of paradise sway in the humid breeze.

  “See that?” my father had said, pointing to an impossibly large and knotted tree behind us. He had been pointing out plants and buildings, art and architecture all along this walk as if he could fill me up with his knowledge in one visit. “That’s a ceiba, like in El principito.”

  “The Little Prince?”

  “Yes, the tree. Your mother loved that.”

  “Oh, the baobab,” I said, suddenly recognizing the tree that the Little Prince feared would overtake his tiny planet. The Little Prince carefully weeded his planet of the tiniest saplings because if not checked when they were small, the baobabs would grow and become dangerous, could disrupt the delicate balance of his world.

  “Nance and I used to read El principito together,” he said.

  There was a dog-eared copy next to the fireplace at my grandparents’ cabin, one that she had pulled off the shelves many times when I was young. She and my grandfather both loved the drawing of an elephant that had been eaten by a boa constrictor. The adults think it’s a hat until the Little Prince sees the drawing and
knows right away that it is an elephant inside a snake. I didn’t tell my father that I had given Dave a copy of the book. On the front page I had inscribed my favorite quotation, the one I thought most romantic: “You will be unique to me in all the world.”

  Wiggling my toes inside my new sandals, sitting beside my father beneath a baobab, I realized the gnarled roots were just as confused and twisted as our family tree, and even though I didn’t know then how complicated, I knew the complexity was part of what made the tree beautiful.

  As Sylvia began to walk on her little tamales, the world opened up to us. Now that I had left the hardships of her infancy behind, we began to explore the city in a new way. We ventured down the sidewalk that had just emerged from melting snow. I followed her around art museums as she walked on stocky legs. I brought her to the Minnesota Zoo, where she flapped her arms and waddled like the mandarin ducks and exotic poultry she saw there. My mother brought me to this same zoo when I was a child, and I felt a sort of symmetry to my own trips there. Like ghosts of myself and my mother, Sylvia and I explored the tropical exhibits and looked for the dolphins, which sprang from their tanks, and the gibbons, who swung from branch to branch on long arms. I pointed out these things to my daughter. “Look at the blue bird!” I said. “Can you see the big fish?” Sylvia stopped walking (not yet able to do two things at once) and looked, her big eyes taking in the scene.

  My mother used to stop and stare patiently, waiting patiently for an animal to gain confidence and make an appearance. “Look! There’s the wolf,” she would exclaim upon spotting the creature. She would bend down to my level, pointing out the thick gray fur slinking through the pseudo-Alaskan tundra. Watching for a glimpse of a sleek coat or bushy tail, I learned to observe and wait: if you looked close enough and were quiet enough, you might find something hidden, something precious and fleeting.