“I don’t have a Colombian passport,” I said again.
The man behind the glass shook his head, then he held up his index finger, the universal signal to wait. “Momento.”
When he left his little booth, it seemed the final omen against this whole trip. I shouldn’t be here, this delay seemed to announce. Red tape and bureaucracy seemed to mean that I might never leave this spot. Would they make me board a plane again (more turbulence?) and send me back to my country even though this was my country?
I thought of the day my mother had decided to take me away. What if her plans had been foiled? What if she hadn’t been able to take me away? I imagined a scene like a movie reel, the running, escaping, a mother carrying a wailing child in her arms, desperate to be free.
“Mommy,” Sylvia called to me. And it wasn’t just me now. She looked exhausted, her face pale and her brow wrinkled. The Spanish that surrounded her seemed to strip her of energy, and it made me wonder what it had been like for me coming to Minnesota as a baby, that crush of foreign sounds against my ear.
“Mommy’s busy,” Dave said. I could see fear and worry cloud his face. He was used to being the one to smooth the way for me and now for our daughter. And I could see the helplessness in his eyes. He took Sylvia’s hand while I turned back to the empty booth.
It had been so easy before. Nearly fifteen years earlier, the man across the aisle had escorted me through the lines of first immigration and then customs. He had translated for both me and the agents, not only for language but also for nuance. He seemed to understand that I needed watching over. And now I was on my own, as adult as I could possibly be, feeling the pinch of responsibility in my stomach, my head. I wanted to cry, not only because of the frustration and fear but also because I wasn’t sure I was ready for all this. Especially not if it was going to be this hard. I had thought receiving that email from my father had been a shock, but this reality of uniformed men and an upset, jet-lagged child seemed worse than any family secret.
At last the man returned to his booth and settled himself on his stool before picking up my passport again. “Bueno,” he said as he explained something about dates and changes in laws. I barely listened much less understood, just felt grateful relief as he stamped first my American passport, then Dave’s, then Sylvia’s.
And before I was quite ready, we were through, walking down a white corridor toward Colombian soil once again, soil that suddenly felt safe and comforting.
29
My father’s house in Campo Bello looked almost identical to how I remembered it. The interior courtyard off the dining room still bloomed with impatiens and hibiscus, and the yellow canaries still feasted on mango pits. The same paintings still hung on the walls, and the same wooden ducks still swam across the glass coffee table in the living room.
During my first visit, my father had pointed out one of the ducks on the coffee table. It was smaller than my mallard with less detail to the finish. Black either by design or age, its feathers were indistinct, and its white beak had yellowed with the passing of years. The wooden toys he had manufactured in a fábrica in Silvia were eventually discontinued because of the lead paints used, but before all that the ducks were sold to art collectors around the world. For some reason, German collectors were particularly fond of these accurate replicas of the real things. I have a photograph from that era (probably sent to me in one of his enigmatic letters during my childhood) in which my father stands in a large room, presumably the factory’s floor, rows of ducks lined up on the wide shelves behind him. “See this?” he had asked, pointing to small scratching along the edge of the body, little discolorations, barely discernible. “Those are your teeth marks.”
Looking at the little scratches in the wood, I could almost feel the urge to masticate with my tiny nubs as if this physical confirmation of my existence in Colombia made my infancy come flooding back in a wave of nostalgia and imagined memories. Like the memory of the fountain, this was further evidence that I had lived and breathed and teethed here in this country of which I had no memory. If I had stayed, if I had grown up here, how many more objects, I wondered, would bear the evidence of my childhood?
“There is so much I want to tell,” my father had said then. But he said nothing, nothing more. Instead of elaborating, instead of telling me, he had gone into the kitchen. I imagine now the weight of his knowledge—at least, I like to believe his secret weighed on him—and his agony over hiding it from me. I wonder if he debated whether to tell me while he opened the refrigerator and took out a bottle of Club Colombia. Perhaps he stood in the white and black kitchen, leaned on the red tile countertops, and considered telling me: “You don’t know this, but you have a brother.” Perhaps he rehearsed those words aloud while the sounds of the maid’s television in her room garbled and snippets of conversation from outside slipped over the courtyard walls and into the house. But perhaps he heard all these sounds, and they mixed with the words in his head, and instead of saying anything he pried off the cap of his beer and returned to his daughter, who waited in the living room in front of the wooden ducks.
“Colombia is so fucking complicated,” he had said, sitting on the couch next to me and swigging from the bottle. “It’s a dangerous place. Everyone’s fighting each other.” He took another swallow before continuing. “There’s the paramilitary, the drug cartels, the government, the guerrillas. You know how bad it is?”
I didn’t say anything. I knew it couldn’t be good, because Colombia at that time had been classified as the most dangerous country by the U.S. State Department. In 1995 alone there had been twenty-five thousand murders, many at the hands of the warring FARC. Kidnappings, a tool used to broker power and make money, were on the rise, and paramilitaries, in an attempt to stem their influence, massacred entire villages thought to be sympathetic. But during that trip I had been sheltered more or less from the national conflict. On the other hand, I had felt perpetually afraid—although that might not have had anything to do with the place.
“Listen: it all started out ideological. You know, they were fighting for Marxism and communism and shit. But now everyone is corrupt and just wants to get rich. It’s all about fucking money.”
Colombia’s civil war has been in progress since 1958, and there was unrest even before that, bombings my mother had witnessed and yet had paid no attention to. Like my parents’ marriage, Colombia’s embrace of communism and socialism had been a good idea in theory. The left-wing guerrillas, groups like FARC and the ELN, had originally been formed by Communists and liberals who had been influenced by Che Guevara (whom my mother, she had told me, had found handsome and dashing back then) and by Cuba’s revolution and by the Cold War. It had been born out of poverty and frustration, inequality and inattention. Revolution so often gets tainted by the idealism of ideologies.
“This damn war just keeps going on,” my father said, his words slurring slightly, his accent more pronounced by the influence of alcohol.
At the time, I had just listened, stunned into silence by these complex political revelations. I claimed myself as a Colombian, but I knew nothing about Colombian history or its struggles, nothing, really, about its culture or past. Now I try to imagine what it would be like to watch something you love be destroyed by itself. I wonder about all the loss my father must have seen from the disarray of his country to the dissolution of his marriage. He had felt betrayed, and perhaps his secret-keeping had been a reaction to that sense of betrayal.
“No one knows when the fuck to stop,” he said, setting down the empty bottle.
The living room was quiet, and the only light came from the dining room. I studied the gnawed duck on the table.
“Colombia is so beautiful,” he said. “I want you to see how beautiful it is, my dear Anika.”
He went to the kitchen again and came back with another bottle. “Lots of things went wrong,” he said. “Next time, there is so much I want to tell you.”
But there hadn’t been a next time,
not until now.
And now I already knew what he had wanted to tell me. At least, I assumed that was what it had been. As he and Ceci watched Sylvia run from room to room exploring the house, I couldn’t tell if he was thinking of my last visit or if he had already moved on, ready to be a grandfather. Sylvia ran to the Christmas tree they had set up in the living room and then bounded down into the courtyard, relishing the feeling of fresh air on her bare legs.
“It’s summer!” she shouted joyously, as incongruous as the crepes had been the night of my arrival so long ago.
On the afternoon of that first day in Popayán, Sylvia and I collapsed in the bedroom, the room that had been mine, its walls still painted golden yellow. Ceci’s maid had served us sancocho, a traditional chicken stew from the region.
“I know you like tajadas,” Ceci had said to Silas, presenting him with a platter of fried sweet plantains. I felt a litany of jealousies wash over me—that she knew that about him, that he knew what tajadas were, that my brother was receiving an attention that I wasn’t. But my jealousy was short-lived because there, too, were the chunks of mango and papaya and piña that I loved.
“Mangos for you, Anika,” Ceci had said, beaming.
I bit into a fresh Colombian mango and felt the rush of recognition wash over me. The first time that I had tasted mango as an adult had been in my mother’s kitchen. I was home from college, and she had bought me a fresh mango from the supermarket, one of those half-red, half-green things one gets in Minnesota. She had sliced it into misshapen chunks, and we had stood in the kitchen of her little house. That day, the taste of the soft, sugary flesh had bombarded me with a distinct feeling of home, albeit a distant, ethereal home, nothing more than a sensation, void of specifics. The mango was honey sweet, and it inexplicably made me want to cry.
My mother had watched me. “You used to teethe on mango seeds in Colombia. I used to cut them up and give you the seed. You just held on to it with your chubby little hands and gnawed on it.”
I ate the juicy slices and stared at her, suddenly feeling that if I had teethed on mango seeds as a baby, who was this person in Minnesota? If I had grown up in the Midwest, who was the child that tasted tropical fruits? That I had teethed on mango seeds made me wonder if I had parallel lives—two roads and one not taken.
“Haven’t I ever told you that before?” my mother had asked then.
There were so many things that she didn’t know she needed to tell me. Tasting the mango for the first time in my mother’s kitchen had overwhelmed me with sweetness and safety, a sort of déjà vu. I didn’t remember the mango seeds from my infancy, but there was, stored somewhere in my hippocampus, a recollection of orange-yellow flesh and strands of pulp.
“¿Quieres mango?” Ceci asked Sylvia, who had so far refused the soup, rice, and fresh-squeezed juice. Sylvia was overwhelmed with the sights and smells, the sound of her own mother speaking in a foreign tongue. She was exhausted and confused with culture shock and something more deeply felt, I think—that sense of the known being suddenly unknown.
After lunch Sylvia and I walked like zombies into the bedroom, while my father poured shots of aguardiente for Silas and Dave. My husband towered over the two Colombian men by at least a foot, and his skin appeared especially pale in the light of the house. But he was filled with something like elation, perhaps from the plethora of flowers or the mountain air or maybe simply the chance to see this land from which his wife originated. Dave had been warned about the strong, anise-flavored sugar-cane liquor, but as I closed the bedroom door, I could hear him clinking glasses with my father and my brother.
30
The sleep of the jet-lagged can be disturbingly deep, especially in the late afternoon. I awoke in the yellow light of the bedroom to find that Sylvia had gotten up, probably to play with her cousin. I lay in bed with my eyes closed, picturing the courtyard outside the French doors of the bedroom, the dandelion yellow of the walls. I remembered the vase of gerbera daisies that had greeted me in this room, the one they had called “my bedroom.” I sniffed the air, but there were no flowers this time.
From beyond the closed door, I heard the high-pitched laughter of the two six-year-olds playing in the other room. Santino had introduced Sylvia to video games, and I could envision the two staring at his tablet, their heads together. Except for his mop of curly dark-blond hair passed down to him from Beth, Santino looked just like his father. And Sylvia looked just like me except for her fair coloring; her eyes are hazel, just like my mother’s. Before this trip, we had visited my brother for short, sometimes awkwardly forced vacations in California several times, so we already knew that Santino is shorter but faster than his cousin. We had already seen that although Sylvia’s vocabulary often confused Santino, he talked more (and louder) than she did. Even though they hadn’t seen each other in more than a year, they were already conspiring together in my father’s house like it was their own, two only children ignoring the adults as much as possible.
I shut my eyes again and listened to the clink of glasses from the dining room. My body felt the heavy weight of jet lag. My legs were boulders, my arms fallen logs. My head was fuzzy as if I were the one drinking shots. I kicked off the sheet and listened to the sounds of the men talking from across the courtyard, their voices carrying as if they were in the room with me.
“She’s not mad at you,” I heard Silas say.
“She won’t forgive me.”
It was my father’s voice, and my heart beat in time to the canaries’ chattering at the courtyard bird feeder. I opened my eyes, squinting against the yellow light.
“Listen,” my father said, his consonants blurred by alcohol. “Listen, you can be in love with two women at the same time.”
Silas made a sound like agreement.
“I loved your mom,” my father said to Silas. A bottle clinked again. Must have been a refill, another shot, more clear liquid. “You have to believe that.” Louder.
“I do.”
“I loved your mom.” More clinking. “And I loved Nancy, too.”
What did he know of love, I thought. I thought of Dave’s hand on mine after I fell off the bicycle, of my mother taking care of the baby when I was at my most fragile, of Silas needing to talk to me when his mother was sick. I thought of my father’s sporadic emails and rare phone calls, of his paintings that he seemed to think could stand in for something.
“You can love two women at once.”
I sat up.
Love the One You’re With.
A wave of nausea swept over me like an earthquake. It wouldn’t have been the first time I had vomited in his house. I lay down again, and the sensation passed.
My father’s voice again. With hard edges like the corner of a building, a wall. “But she won’t forgive me.”
He was talking about me. Even with my eyes closed, tears leaked out onto the pillow. I thought of those gerbera daisies. The Colombian flowers, he had told me, that were shipped to Paris each day to be sold at flower markets. But my father had never been to Paris, much less Europe. He could talk about these places—places like Paris and Minnesota—but they were not really part of his life, they were his imagined fantasies. Through my closed lids, I could see the light of the room, and the air itself felt suffocating.
“She was just surprised,” I heard Dave say, entering the discussion, defending me. His voice was steady, calm. The only clue that he was drunk this afternoon was the unusual volume.
“But why should she be?” my father said, making a noise like a snort or maybe a cough. “She had to know.” I could picture him pointing a brown finger at Dave as if by gesture he could convince someone. “Shit. I knew she would be mad. This is why I didn’t tell her.”
“Just think how she felt,” Silas said. “You kept a pretty big secret.”
I heard the sound of a bottle on glass. I was crying now, listening to these ideas my father had about me. My body heaved in silent sobs, and I sat up in bed, then stood up.
“After I told her, she stopped talking to me. She wouldn’t fucking talk to me.”
“Give her time.” Silas’s voice was calm and, like Dave’s, louder than usual.
“She hasn’t forgiven me.”
If I had not forgiven him, I wouldn’t have come. I had told him once that he swore too much, and he had laughed at me. “Oh, come on,” he had said in his accent that attacked the vowels, “you don’t care.”
“You sound like you’re left over from the sixties,” I had told him, not realizing at the time that this might be insulting, that perhaps he thought himself a hip and modern man.
“Shit,” he had said.
It wasn’t that I was a prude, it wasn’t that curse words bothered me, it was that it didn’t feel like he was my father if he swore in front of me. And I wanted him to be my father. I did.
I walked to the door and then changed my mind. I climbed back into bed, turned away from the window. How could he be my father if he didn’t understand me? I wondered. How could we ever build these bonds? I felt an ocean of regret that I had come here at all. Suddenly I was frightened—more frightened than I had been on the flight after the plane crash, more frightened than I had been on that mountain road in front of the machine guns. I was frightened because I didn’t know if this could be repaired and if I could be a Colombian daughter. Our return flight was in ten days, and those hours and minutes stretched before me like an eternity.
31
Magical Realism for Non-Believers Page 16
