Magical Realism for Non-Believers

by Fajardo, Anika

  Ceci’s silver Suzuki was more than twenty years old now and had been confined to the garage for storage, so for our visit she had borrowed a little SUV for our trip to Silvia. I wondered if perhaps she held on to that car the way my father had clung to the yellow baby carrier, these mementos from the past that feel like proof of who we are. For my father, the carrier proved that he was a father; for Ceci, the Suzuki proved she was an adventurer. The things we keep around us are powerful talismans.

  Above the fireplace in our Minneapolis house, in a place of prominence, I display a painting by my father. He had sent it to me when I was in college, just a few months after my visit. It had arrived rolled in a tube plastered with airmail and customs stickers, and I had to bring it to a framing shop to get it stretched.

  “I need to have this stretched,” I had said, laying it on the counter and waiting for someone to remark on the beauty and poignancy of the painting, waiting to be asked who the artist was. I had longed to say aloud: my father. The painting depicted a night scene with dark-blue skies and rolling green-black hills. White swirls made the moon, and pinpricks of paint were the stars. Already Colombia felt like something that hadn’t happened, but here it was, captured in the way my father could capture reality and remembrance in line and tint. It had arrived with a note written in my father’s block script: Recording the Stars, he called it.

  I had immediately known the significance of this scene. We had gone to see a movie in Cali: Il Postino, an Italian film with Spanish subtitles. The film told the story of the poet Pablo Neruda’s 1952 exile from Chile and his time in Italy. In the film, Neruda helps a young man win over a beautiful woman through poetry, like Cyrano and Christian before them. Watching the story unfold, I had thought about my parents, about what had brought them together, what brought anyone together in that almost violent emotion of love. In the movie theater in Cali, my father and I had watched the woman finally fall into the arms of the young man, won over by poetry, by beauty. At the end of the film, when Neruda leaves the country, the young man wants his idol to remember him and Italy. He records the sounds of his country—the fishing boats, the busy café. “I am recording the stars at night,” the Italian man said in the movie, holding a microphone up to the night sky.

  Recording the Stars. Holding the note in my hand, I had remembered the stars, the sound of the night air in Cali. And I had remembered my father’s deep, almost childlike laugh. And I thought about love stories and about how they aren’t always what you expect them to be. The film was, like my father’s, a love story about art. He had been an artist from the earliest age, had always looked at the world through a lens of color and line. And to his art he had been true—more true than he had been to my mother, to me.

  “What kind of frame were you thinking?” the salesperson had asked. And I knew that I would not be explaining to this stranger that I had a Colombian father, that I was born there, that I was a fascinating and special person.

  The road to Silvia was no better than I remembered it with its steep drop-offs and potholed asphalt, but I was grateful we weren’t bouncing around in the Suzuki. Even so, the eight of us—two parents, two siblings, two spouses, and two grandchildren—were piled into the Hyundai Tucson, squeezed hip to hip. The luggage and food were in the back, and my father’s spoiled dog sat on his lap.

  I was in the front seat with Sylvia on my lap, thumb in her mouth. As Ceci maneuvered through a treacherous detour over nothing more than a dirt trail, she told me in Spanish that the rerouting was the result of the bombing of a bridge by guerrillas. This was a common occurrence, she told me, the guerrillas having sharpened their tools of war by concentrating on transit corridors and economic disruption more than kidnappings.

  “What did she say?” asked Dave from his cramped spot in the back seat.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  What he and Sylvia didn’t know would keep them safe, I thought. But I couldn’t hide from them the checkpoints at each town we passed through, the men who guarded the main streets with machine guns and crisp uniforms. I watched Sylvia watch them, wide eyed, and wondered if not explaining things made them even scarier. But she didn’t ask, and I didn’t tell her. Perhaps that was how my father had felt when he kept his own explanations secret. Perhaps he had thought he was protecting me, keeping me safe.

  At last Ceci stopped the car in front of a white adobe building, and we all tumbled out like clowns. My father now kept a house in the center of Silvia. Built in the mid-eighteenth century as part of a compound belonging to wealthy Spanish settlers, the house was part of a building that took up an entire block of the town with its whitewashed walls and red tile roof. The original house had been subdivided into smaller homes and businesses.

  My father unlocked a thick wooden door, so small Dave had to duck to enter. I stood watching the crowd across the street.

  “Look,” my father said, pointing. “Those are all the wives bailing their husbands out of jail.”

  I laughed and elbowed Dave. “He says those people are paying bail.” My father liked to joke, liked to capitalize on his country’s infamous reputation, liked to make Colombia sound more primitive and treacherous than it was. Then I noticed that painted on the building across the street was the word Cárcel. It was a jail. I laughed again as I stepped across the 250-year-old threshold.

  The portion of the building that was my father’s house had thick adobe walls and uneven stone floors. The white-painted ceilings were crisscrossed with thick beams as wide as a man’s waist. My father lit a crackling fire in the hearth in one corner of the main room, and it struggled to warm the cavernous space. The back rooms of the house held his drafting table and paints, a spare bed, and stretched blank canvases awaiting inspiration. The courtyard included a dry cistern decorated with ceramic mosaic designs, and bunches of marigolds bloomed in the cold mountain air. Even though the adults thought it was chilly, Sylvia relished the feeling of walking the bricks in stocking feet and refused to wear a sweater as she skipped around and in the cistern. The house had a primitive kitchen with a hot plate and fireplace, and while Sylvia and Santino ran in and out of the rooms shouting and chasing one another, Ceci patched together a meal for us.

  The two children ran and explored, and my father, who wasn’t feeling well, retreated to his bedroom. The rest of us sat at the worn wooden table in the kitchen and kept warm by huddling shoulder to shoulder and toasting with one shot of aguardiente after another.

  “Here’s to being in Colombia finally!” I said. We clinked glasses.

  “Here’s to family,” Silas said.

  “Here’s to aguardiente!”

  “Here’s to secret brothers!”

  “And sisters!”

  My brother and I sat on the bench against the wall that my father had painted bright blue and on which hung a framed 1970s poster from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, where he had briefly been a student. As if being in Silvia wasn’t surreal enough, this reminder of Minnesota stabbed the air with poignancy. Silas put his arm around me and squeezed, pulling me toward him. He smelled like anise and cigarettes and damp wool from the jacket he wore. Dave snapped a picture of us from across the table, one that turned out as blurry as we felt.

  “Se acabó el aguardiente,” Ceci said as she went to pour herself a drink from the empty bottle. “We can go get more.”

  After dinner my father agreed to stay with the kids while the rest of us went in search of more liquor. As we stumbled down the street, free from our children and our father, Silas threw his arm over my shoulder and said, “Let the grandpa babysit. He needs a taste of what it’s like to actually have a kid.”

  After we bought a fresh bottle of the licorice-flavored liquor from the corner store (which came with a stack of plastic medicine cups in which to pour shots), we wandered to the plaza, where we sat on a bench drinking tragos. The plaza was illuminated with Christmas lights in purple, yellow, and bright pink, and a few people still loitered in the chilly night.


  “Look.” Dave pointed across the plaza. A motorcyclist and a small white car were stopped, and each driver was being questioned by soldiers dressed in dark uniforms and neat little hats. At least three men surrounded each vehicle, and all of them carried their machine guns with the barrels pointed at the ground. I looked around the plaza at a group of Guambiano Indians who sat in a close-knit circle, the empty bottle alone on the brick path. Leaning back, I looked up at the night sky, imagined all the things I could not see from this cheery spot. The treacherous mountain slopes, the hidden activities, more soldiers that were looking for something. People loitered outside a small pub, where a group of musicians played what Ceci told us was Christmas music. The horns were flat, and the drummer beat slightly out of rhythm, but the music filled the night air and crept into the mountains above us.

  Silas put his arm over my shoulder again and, slurring his words, said again, “Let the grandpa babysit. He has no idea.”

  Earlier that day we had stopped at the panadería that faced this plaza, a little shop that sold the pandebono, little doughnut-shaped salty, cheesy breads. Ceci had ushered us in, calling out to the proprietors, “¿Qué hubo?”

  She and my father knew the owners of the bakery, and a woman with short gray hair came out from behind the counter. “Don Renzo,” she said, giving them both kisses on the cheeks. “Señora.”

  “These are Renzo’s grandchildren,” Ceci had explained, putting her hands on the heads of Sylvia and Santino, both of whom ducked away and grabbed the doughy treats out of the bag I held. “And this is Renzo’s daughter.”

  The woman took my hand. “I remember your mother,” she told me in Spanish. She held her hand out to indicate a large belly. “She was pregnant with you.” She laughed. “So pregnant.”

  Silas was standing outside the shop, and I looked at him through the doorway. I wondered if this woman also remembered Beth. Had Beth bought her daily breads and sweets from this panadería when she stayed in Silvia with my father? And if she had, did this woman know the sordid story of my father’s love affairs? I understood that in Colombia relationships and family could be complicated, that allowances were made for men with wandering eyes, and that any event that resulted in the birth of a child could be forgiven. Could my brother and I now forgive our father?

  Silas downed another plastic medicine cup of aguardiente. “He needs to get a taste of what it’s like to actually have kids. Every day. All the time.”

  I clinked cups with him, but what I wanted was to laugh with him, not talk about our father. “Look at her,” I said, pointing at our father’s wife, who, for some reason, was now wearing a headlamp that illuminated the night sky as she leaned back to finish her shot. Milenka had moved to the low wall that surrounded the plantings in the plaza and was walking along it like a child on a balance beam. Every time Ceci turned to look at her, Milenka was bathed in the spotlight from Ceci’s head. Silas sighed for an instant, and then he laughed, too, at this scene. All of us began to laugh, the kind of laughter that you feel deep in your belly, in your heart, in your soul. We laughed until we wept tears of something that tasted of letting go. Dave set down his empty cup next to the half-full bottle of aguardiente and captured the scene in off-kilter photographs.

  Silas scooped up the bottle and poured fresh shots for all of us. “¡Aguardiente!” he said, a sort of battle cry.

  Later, as we walked crookedly home through the quiet streets of Silvia, Silas and I hung behind the others. He swirled the last swallow of clear liquid in his cup. “My mom was supposed to be on this trip. That was the plan. She wanted to come back, and we were all going to come here together. Now I’m going to scatter her ashes instead.”

  I knocked shoulders with him. He swiped away something in his eye and downed the fiery drink.

  “Have some more.” We stopped walking as he unscrewed the cap and poured me another cupful. “I kind of hope they don’t behave.”

  At first, I wasn’t sure what he was talking about, and then I realized he was referring to our children left to the care of their grandfather, who had never really been a father. Each of them only children as I had been, they were challenging in their own ways. Santino was addicted to his iPad and the games and movies loaded on it. He had little interest in books or art projects and so had to be cajoled to do other things. Meanwhile, Sylvia studied with interest the hand of her abuelo moving across paper but could be selfish and standoffish and shy. She was sensitive. Sensitive to all things: dogs, noisy cars, right and wrong.

  When she was three years old, she had kicked me in the shin by accident with her little wild foot, and I told her (in the way parents have been saying for eons), “You need to say ‘sorry’ for kicking me.”

  But instead of apologizing, she had started to cry and through her tears had wailed, “But I didn’t mean to!”

  “But you hurt me,” I said. “And when we hurt someone we say sorry, even if we didn’t mean to.”

  I thought about that now, about how we are expected to apologize even when we never meant to injure the people we love. I thought of my father withholding the truth from me for so many years. I thought of his complaining the other day that I hadn’t forgiven him. But how, I thought, could I forgive someone who hadn’t said sorry?

  In Spanish, to apologize is to say lo siento, which literally translated means “I feel it.” My mother had gone through her life feeling everything, apologizing even when she wasn’t to blame. As a nurse, she would apologize to her patients, the doctors, the other nurses. She apologized to my stepfather even when he treated her like a possession or a servant. She apologized to her parents even though they had often overlooked her as a child. My mother apologized to strangers standing in line at movie theaters, to repairmen making house calls, to veterinarians treating her cats. And she apologized to me, telling me how sorry she was that she had in some way not given me her idea of a perfect upbringing.

  “I’m so sorry you had to go through all that,” she told me. “I wish I could have protected you better.”

  But I knew that none of her choices were meant to harm and that the things that happened were not solely her fault. Now I think about how she and my father really shared the blame in the breakup of their marriage and complications of custody over me, their only child. Despite the fact that my mother did the unthinkable—to steal away a child from a father—she owned that choice. And because she apologized, there was nothing for me but to forgive her. To forgive her meant to accept my mother with all her flaws, to love her despite them and because of them. I knew that she felt what I was feeling, and this bound us together in a way that I longed for with my father. I desperately wanted to hear him say, “lo siento.” I feel it. I wanted him to admit his part, to acknowledge that he could feel the hurt he caused me. I wasn’t sure if he didn’t say it because he didn’t want to feel it or because he couldn’t.

  “They probably won’t behave,” I said to Silas. “Those two will be wild and crazy, asking for treats and not going to bed.” My brother laughed with me, and the aguardiente burned as it slid down my throat before coming to rest in my gut, heavy and harsh.

  32

  The next day, Wednesday, was market day in Silvia, the traditions of this ancient village marching forward with no concern for our headaches and upset stomachs from the three bottles of aguardiente we had consumed. Our father was as energetic as his two grandchildren, who, unlike us, had slept last night. Despite rain that thundered on the plastic roof of the market building, he led the way through the sidewalks to the building.

  Sylvia held tightly to my hand as we let Dave part the crowds ahead of us. Among the stalls, a stench like wet dog overpowered even the smell of cooking arepas. Shoppers jostled and bumped as they made their way through the tables laden with stacks of brown cakes of the sugar cane sweetener panela, piles of guavas as big as a child’s head, row after row of sacks of potatoes and onions, mountains of yucca and plantains and cassava. Men in the Guambianos’ traditional narrow, cobalt-blue
skirts and bowler hats squinted at customers, while the women, wearing smiles riddled with gaps, clasped handfuls of money as they bartered and argued over prices and quality. My mother, despite being as shy and standoffish as her granddaughter, had told me that she grew to like the interactions with vendors. She liked the way, at the close of the transaction, the buyer and seller would exchange handshakes as if to say, No matter how much I just fought you, I respect you.

  In addition to the food vendors, artists sold weavings and cotton bags called mochilas and adobe ceramics. Sylvia fingered little wooden turtles and clay figurines in the shape of horses and chickens. As she wavered over the choices, I remembered the first time my father had taken me to the mercado in Silvia, when I, too, had been unsure of what I should buy. I remember strolling the market aisles (which had been much less crowded then) with the unfamiliar pesos in my purse, nervous that I would choose the wrong keepsake, an inferior souvenir, an inartistic weaving. I had wanted to impress both him and this country, as if by purchasing the right gifts I could prove that I belonged and that I deserved to be half Colombian. I eventually chose a small weaving that depicted a traditional Guambiano family surrounding a campfire. At the time I had thought I would give it to my mother, but I ended up giving it to Dave, and for many years it hung above his bed, where I could glance up at it as we made love.

  My father now caught up to us as we passed a woman holding a bundle to her breast that smelled of ripe diapers. He grabbed Sylvia’s arm as a man stumbled into us, a bottle of aguardiente clutched in his hand. My father leaned toward me and whispered, “The Guambianos come here and spend all their money on aguardiente before they go back to their village.” He laughed at their misfortune, and I felt my stomach turn at this. Once when I was about six or seven, my grandparents came across a print of an American Indian girl. The girl in the painting was about my age with a leather beaded dress and colorful headband. And she looked just like me. I could have been the model who sat for that portrait, the likeness was so striking. At the time, no one voiced the question that must have been in their minds. What blood ran through my veins? Was I descended from Indians? I had once asked my father, my father with his brown skin and wiry hair, if we had Indian or African blood. No! he had said, and I had let it go. One more thing I would never really know the answer to.