Fruit of the Drunken Tree

by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

  Mamá touched one droopy, silky flower as she whispered to the girl Petrona, who watched the flower as it swung lightly on its stem. I guessed Mamá was giving her the same warnings I had received about the tree: not to pick up its flowers, not to sit underneath, not to stand by it too long, and most important, not to let the neighbors know we ourselves were afraid of it.

  The Drunken Tree made our neighbors nervous.

  Who’s to say why Mamá decided to grow that tree in her garden? It may have been that long mean streak in her, or it may have been because she was always saying you couldn’t trust anyone.

  In the front garden Mamá lifted a fallen white flower from the ground, pinching it at its stem, and threw it over the gate. The girl Petrona followed the flight of the flower and her eyes lingered on it as it landed on the neighborhood sidewalk with its two o’clock shadow. Then the girl Petrona stared at her hands holding the suitcase.

  Just after she planted the Drunken Tree, Mamá laughed like a witch and bit the side of her index finger, “The surprise they will get, all our curious neighbors who stop to spy in our windows!”

  Mamá said nothing would happen to our neighbors, except if they dwelled for too long the perfume of the Drunken Tree would descend on them and make them a little dizzy, then their head would feel like a balloon, and after a long while they would want very badly to lie down right there on the sidewalk to take a little nap. Nothing too serious.

  Once there was a seven-year-old girl who ate a flower.

  “Supposedly,” Mamá said then. “But do you know what I told them? I said maybe they should watch their young girl more closely, eh? Keep her from poking her dirty nose in my front yard.”

  For years the neighbors had pleaded with the Neighborhood Administration to make Mamá take her tree down. It was, after all, the tree whose flowers and fruit were used in burundanga and the date-rape drug. Apparently, the tree had the unique ability of taking people’s free will. Cassandra said burundanga was where the idea of zombies came from. Burundanga was a native drink made out of Drunken Tree seeds. The drink had once been given to the servants and wives of Great Chiefs in Chibcha tribes, in order to bury them alive with the Great Dead Chief. The burundanga made the servants and wives dumb and obedient, and they willingly sat in a corner of the underground grave waiting, while the tribe sealed the exit and left them with food and water that would have been a sin to touch (reserved as it was for use by the Great Chief in the afterworld). Many people used it in Bogotá—criminals, prostitutes, rapists. Most victims who reported being drugged with burundanga woke up with no memory of assisting in the looting of their apartments and bank accounts, opening their wallets and handing over everything, but that’s exactly what they’d done.

  Mamá, however, showed up at the Neighborhood Administration with a stack of research papers, a horticulturist, and a lawyer and because the fruit of the Drunken Tree was something the experts had little interest in, and because the small amount of research there was didn’t agree on defining the seeds as poisonous or even a drug, the Administration decided to leave it alone.

  There were many attempts to damage our Drunken Tree. Every few months we woke up to see out of our front windows that the branches hanging on the side of the gate over the sidewalk had once again been sawed off and left on the grass around the tree’s trunk like dead limbs. Our Drunken Tree flourished nonetheless, persistently, with its provocative white flowers hanging about it like bells and the wind forever teasing out its intoxicating fragrance into the air.

  Mamá was convinced la Soltera was behind the attempts. We called her that because she was forty years old and single and still lived with her old mother. La Soltera lived to our right and I often saw her wandering around in circles in her garden, wearing too much purple eye shadow and enveloped in a day-old-coffee-and-fresh-cigarette smell. I often put my ear to the wall we shared with la Soltera to hear what she did all day, but mostly what I heard was bickering and the television left on. Mamá said la Soltera was the only kind of woman with enough time on her hands to go attacking someone’s tree. So in retaliation, when Mamá swept our front red-tile patio, she swept the dirt through the sides of the tall ceramic planters and the pines, toward the patio of la Soltera.

  Back in the garden, Cassandra said, “Quick, Chula, before they see you!”

  Cassandra shuffled her feet and slid her hands clockwise around the column to remain hidden as Mamá and the girl Petrona came up the stone steps to the front door. I did the same, but kept my head out the side to watch. Mamá had her arm around the girl Petrona and the girl Petrona was staring down.

  “These are my girls,” Mamá said as they came to our red-tile patio. The girl Petrona did a curtsy, her long sandaled feet together and her knees out to both sides, stretching the lap of her dress like a tent. It was odd to see a girl six years older do a curtsy. Cassandra and I remained hidden behind the columns and stared back at her and said nothing. She looked at us, her eyes a spotlighted brown, nearly yellow. Then she cleared her throat, yellow dress to her ankles, tattered suitcase in hand.

  “They’re shy,” Mamá said. “They’ll get used to you.”

  They walked inside together, Mamá’s voice fading slowly, like an outgoing train saying, “Here, let me show you your room.”

  Cassandra and I always felt strange when we had a new girl in our house, so we stayed in Mamá’s bedroom and watched Mexican soap operas until they were over and then Singin’ in the Rain on the English channel with subtitles.

  The movie was interrupted twice an hour by a news flash. We were used to it, but Cassandra and I groaned all the same. I let my face stretch and droop against my hand, and the reporter talked about that mysterious ocean of acronyms that seemed to always be close at hand—FARC, ELN, DAS, AUC, ONU, INL. She spoke of things the acronyms had done to one another, but sometimes, the reporter spoke of one name. A simple name. First name, last name. Pablo Escobar. In that confused ocean of acronyms, the simple name was like a fish breaking the water, something I could hold on to and remember.

  Then our movie would begin again. The singing would return, the yellow raincoats, the white rosy faces. North America seemed like such a clean, pleasant place. The rain was sleek on the black-tar street and the police were well-mannered and filled with principles. It was striking to see. Mamá always got out of tickets by batting her lashes, begging, and slipping policemen bills of veinte-mil. The Colombian police were easily corrupted. So were the officials at the notaries and the court, whom Mamá always paid so she could be ushered to the head of the line and her applications put at the top of the stack. Cassandra held her nose in front of the television and spoke like Lina Lamont, the beautiful blond actress cursed with the horrible, nasal voice. She said, “And I cayn’t stand ’im,” and we giggled. She said it over and over until we quivered with laughter and we lay on our backs overcome.

  3.

  Mosquita Muerta

  At our house Petrona received her first instructions in washing, ironing and mending, scrubbing the floors, cooking, making the beds, watering the plants, dusting, fluffing the pillows. Petrona didn’t look thirteen, though that’s what Mamá said. Her face was ashy and her eyes bitter-old. Her hair was cut short like a boy’s and she wore a white apron with border lace like a fine tablecloth. She always had flushed cheeks and red knuckles.

  Petrona left every day at six in the evening, but there was a room in the back of our house, past the indoor patio, that was all her own. There, when Cassandra and I got back from school, we would find Petrona, sitting on the bed and listening to the radio. We could see her plainly through the clear window of her bedroom. She sat motionless, hands clasped against her chest, the muffled sounds of men singing over soft guitars escaping from under the crack of her door.

  Cassandra and I pressed our noses against her window. We watched Petrona as she rocked, but most of the time she remained very still sitting
there, like a lifeless rag doll slumped against the wall. I wondered what Petrona thought about as she closed her eyes. I imagined that something hard was swelling from the inside of her, and if we left it alone, Petrona would turn to stone. At times I was sure it was beginning to happen because the light began glowing gray on her cheeks and her chest wasn’t moving with her breath. To me, Petrona looked like one of those smooth plaster statues on display in private courtyards and public squares all over Bogotá—Mamá said they were saints, but Papá said they were random people who had done something good and remarkable.

  In our house Petrona wore a cloud of silence wherever she went. Her footsteps had no sound. She deliberately lifted and placed her feet one after the other on the carpet, inaudible like a cat. Then, the only noise announcing Petrona was the sloshing of soapy water, which she carried in a bright green bucket to the second floor, holding the handle with both hands, advancing one elephant step at a time.

  I could hear her panting as she carried things up and down the house. She carried trays with food, mops, bags of clothes, boxes with toys, cleaners, disinfectants. When I heard the first murmurs of her panting, I left my half-done homework on the bed and stood at the door of the bedroom that I shared with Cassandra. It opened to the left at the top of the stairs. As I watched Petrona, she looked up at me and smiled weakly. Then she cleared her throat and went down the hall toward Mamá’s bedroom.

  I always imagined the silence in Petrona’s throat like dry fur draping over her vocal cords, and when she cleared her throat, I imagined the fur shaking a little, then settling, smooth like hair on a fruit.

  Petrona’s silence made Mamá nervous.

  Mamá put all her energy into making Petrona speak. Mamá shared countless stories about our family in the northeast, her childhood, her Indian grandmother, seeing ghosts, but Petrona never told stories of her own. Petrona only punctuated Mamá’s stories with “Sí, Señora Alma,” “No, Señora Alma,” and shook her head when she wanted to convey surprise or disbelief.

  Cassandra and I were intrigued by Petrona’s silence. We hung around to see if she talked with Mamá. We decided it was just like a street cat when a cajoling stranger offered a bowl of milk. We made it a point to count the syllables Petrona used each time she spoke. We pressed our fingertips to our thumbs and pronounced her syllables in our head. We counted obsessively and slowly we realized she never spoke more syllables than six. We started to think that maybe Petrona was a poet or maybe someone under a spell. I didn’t tell Cassandra that in a certain light Petrona looked to me like a statue, that when she was still and quiet the folds of her apron seemed to me to harden into the stone draperies of church saints. I knew Cassandra would find the idea ridiculous and she would laugh at me forever. Privately, I came up with saint names for Petrona. Petrona, Our Lady of the Invasiones. Petrona, Patron Saint of Our Secret Girlhood.

  At night, when Petrona was gone, we looked for clues in her room. There were fashion magazines stacked next to her bed and a red lipstick standing erect on the windowsill. Her room smelled like laundry soap. On the white wall of the bathroom she had drawn little hearts by the toilet paper dispenser in black ink. The black hearts floated up in a smoky pattern until they disappeared behind a beehive painting Mamá had hung before Petrona arrived. I thought the black hearts were proof Petrona was a poet, but Cassandra said that the magazines and the lipstick weren’t something a poet would own. None of the items seemed like they would belong to a saint either.

  At home, Mamá watched Petrona closely. Her eyes hovered over Petrona like two bright-as-the-moon planets, deep with death. Cassandra and I sat on the floor with our homework on the coffee table. From time to time we glanced from our books and just over the top of the living room couch we could see Mamá smoking her cigarettes at the dining table and following Petrona with her eyes.

  That meant she was looking for incriminating evidence. It happened the same way when Papá came home for vacation and she thought he was cheating on her. “His thing smelled like fish, it’s not normal,” she said while Cassandra and I stared at her wide-eyed. As Papá made breakfast, read the newspaper, played solitaire, Mamá followed him with her eyes and said, “Sucio,” under her breath, until one day she stopped doing it altogether, and I had to wonder how Papá had managed to convince Mamá to stop.

  In the living room, I tried to keep my eyes on my math book, but as I looked at the numbers I couldn’t understand them, and looking at them I only remembered Mamá’s eyes, felt them, the darkly set eyes deep with death hovering over Petrona. Petrona felt them too, and this made her run into things and topple over Mamá’s pretty vases with the stick end of her feather duster.

  Mamá petted her widow’s peak. She drew a breath from her cigarette and said, “Petrona, how is your mother?” The white smoke of her cigarette climbed in a winding trail to the ceiling, where it widened in circles. Some of the smoke trailed out of Mamá’s mouth. Petrona looked up. She looked shocked, then relieved. “Well, Señora, thanks,” she said, the s’s in her words carrying the most volume and burying everything under their hiss. She slinked to the swinging door and sighed a long sigh before going into the kitchen.

  If the tarot cards had called Petrona an upside-down Fool and Mamá didn’t trust her, I wondered then how come Mamá didn’t fire her. Instead she became the girl whose name bubbled up beneath our hours.

  Staring at my math book in the living room, I thought it must have been Petrona’s saintlike qualities that stilled Mamá’s distrust.

  Mamá put out her cigarette. “God knows how she survives the invasiones.”

  “Shh, Mamá.” Cassandra stared at the still swinging door. “She’ll hear you.”

  Mamá waved the air. “Hmph. Ella? Ella no es nada más que una mosquita muerta.”

  * * *

  Because Mamá grew up in an invasión she prided herself in being openly combative, so people who pretended to be weak disgusted her. That was why she called any nonviolent person a little dead fly, someone whose life-strategy was playing dead while pretending to be highly insignificant. Other mosquitas muertas included our schoolteachers, our neighbors, the newscasters on the television, and the president.

  Mamá yelled at the television, “Virgilio Barco thinks he’s fooling this country with his little mosquita muerta act, but I know he’s nothing but a snake! Who does he think he’s fooling? ‘He has no ties to Pablo Escobar’? I wasn’t born yesterday.”

  When Papá was home, he too yelled at the television, except he said: “Are we mice or men, no me joda?”

  I wanted to yell at the television like Mamá and Papá, but I had to learn how to properly do it. I gathered that being a mouse was better than being a mosquita muerta, and being a snake was better than being a man, because flies pretending to be dead could be crushed, mice were shy, and men were persecuted; but everybody always avoided snakes.

  * * *

  Mamá had been yelling increasingly at the television because of a man called Luis Carlos Galán. Galán was running for president and Mamá was a complete fanatic. She said that Colombia’s future had finally arrived, and it had arrived in the most beautiful package possible. Am I right, princesas? We were watching the presidential debates in Mamá’s bedroom.

  Petrona sat on the floor. She didn’t seem to have much of an opinion, which was fine because neither did I. I told Mamá Galán didn’t seem to me to be different from any other man on the television and Mamá pretended to spit into the air, saying, “See this? This is what I think of what you just said.” She clicked her thumb on a key on the remote until Galán’s voice boomed in the bedroom, and then she raised her voice over the television, asking was I blind, was I not able to see how all politicians were salt statues compared to Galán?

  Mamá was making a reference to the Bible—that much I knew. Cassandra and I went to a small Catholic school where a priest visited each year and told us the basic stories
, but our knowledge of the Bible was spotty at best. I knew there had been a woman fleeing her burning town who had looked over her shoulder and God had pulverized her into a pile of salt—but I didn’t know why she was punished, and I didn’t get what that story had to do with politicians. It didn’t matter anyway. Mamá was always coming up with weird metaphors. One time she said, “Trust is water in a glass; if you spill it, it’s gone forever,” as if she had never heard of mops or the cycle of rain and evaporation. I liked what Papá said better—that Colombian presidents were all of them salados, all of them unlucky. I caught Petrona’s eye and smiled, but she didn’t respond. I made circles with my index finger at the side of my head and pointed at Mamá. Petrona pressed her lips together and looked away in a grin.

  Papá was interested in the war like Mamá was interested in Galán. When he was home, he clipped articles about the civil conflict, turned up the volume when the news came on, and ran to the phone to gossip with his friends afterward. “Did you hear the latest?” He talked about the most recent political scandal and then exploded into accounts of the 1980s, which was his favorite decade in Colombian history.

  That’s how come I was interested in politics myself. Someday, I wanted to be just like Papá. Papá was like a walking encyclopedia. He boasted that he could name at least a third of the 128 paramilitary groups in Colombia: the Begrimed, Black Eagle, Antimás, Alfa 83, the Crickets, Magdalena Cleansing, Menudo, Rambo…He also said he knew some of the names of the groups within the death squadrons, the narco-paramilitary (Death to Revolutionaries, Death to Kidnappers), the regular guerrillas (FARC, ELN), but his specialty was the paramilitary. I tried hard to be like Papá, but no matter how much of an effort I made, I couldn’t even grasp the simplest of concepts—what was the difference between the guerrillas and the paramilitary? What was a communist? Who was each group fighting?