Fruit of the Drunken Tree

by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

  The only guard we all liked was Elisario, the afternoon guard on our street. Elisario carried lollipops in his pockets and he told us stories about shoot-outs in the neighborhood.

  On Monday after school, we asked Elisario about the Purgatory Spot, and he said we should forget the whole thing because if we ever found it, the Blessed Souls of Purgatory would haunt us. Then to distract us, Elisario gave us sour candy and told us jokes. He looked both ways before lifting the brown jacket of his uniform. He held the side of the jacket bunched up by his ribs so we could see. There, by his hairy belly button, a scar rose in a knotted, pale ridge. He was hit by a bullet a year ago defending a neighborhood house from burglars. He could make the scar jiggle by pumping his stomach. Elisario said burglaries happened all the time. He had a gaunt face and a mole above his lip.

  We were about to give up our search for the Purgatory Spot when we came upon a large house. I thought all houses in our neighborhood were the same, but this one was as big as four regular houses combined. We stood before the house in silent appraisal of it until Cassandra said, “That is a mansion,” and then we looked at the house with this new language for what it was.

  The mansion stood four floors high, and had a single tower jutting out the side. It was the only mansion I had seen besides on a television screen. It sat alone at the meeting of three streets, encircled by a wide garden with long grass. There were old pines in the garden, beds of roses, and everything was hush and still.

  Isa was surprised we hadn’t seen the mansion before. She said nobody was sure how many people lived inside, but Isa and Lala’s mother had once seen a woman. She was a woman who no one had heard speak, Isa and Lala’s mother thought, because she was a Nazi with an accent.

  “What’s a Nazi?” I said.

  “The same people who burnt witches at the stake, don’t you know?” Lala said.

  “That’s not all,” Isa said and told us their father had said that he had it on good authority that the woman who lived in the mansion was not a Nazi but a former stripper who, having outwitted a drug lord and made away with his money, was now in hiding posing as a German woman concealing her Nazi roots.

  “Either way the woman is an Oligarch,” Isa said.

  Cassandra said being an Oligarch meant having blue blood.

  “What color is our blood?” I asked, but nobody answered.

  We were standing across the street looking at the mansion when we saw Petrona walking down the block talking to a girl I instantly recognized as the girl she had been smoking with during the blackout. Now in the daylight I saw all kinds of new details about the girl that I had not been able to make out in the dark: there was the hair so startlingly yellow growing out from the dark brown roots of her scalp. And then there were her eyebrows, which looked like they had been shaved off and then penciled in in the wrong place. Both she and Petrona wore the white dress that was like a cross between a sleeping robe and a lab coat, which nobody called a maid’s uniform, but that’s what it was. They wore the same peach-colored lipstick and were giggling, looking down at a stack of money Petrona’s friend was fanning out.

  We waited until they were near and then Cassandra spoke up, “What are you two doing?” Petrona paled. She wiped the lipstick off her mouth with the back of her hand.

  “Are these your girls?” Petrona’s friend smiled. Petrona nodded and her friend walked up to us, smirking. “It’s Monopoly money, look, someone tried to pay with it at the grocery store, can you imagine?”

  “That looks like real money,” Lala said.

  “It’s Monopoly money,” Petrona’s friend repeated, squaring the bills, rolling them and tucking them into her bra.

  Isa tilted her head. “You weren’t at the grocery store: you have no grocery bags.”

  “Because it was too funny—we had to leave the store laughing, both of us, isn’t that true, Petrona? Petrona, do you really have to watch four girls?”

  “No, just the two,” Petrona said. Four syllables. Petrona glanced at Cassandra and me, flinched her lips into a smile, then looked down.

  Petrona’s friend examined the face of her watch. “Well, I’ve got to run, Petrona. Walk with me so I can give you that thing you wanted to borrow.”

  Petrona’s friend walked away and Petrona caught up with her in a quick jog. Then they rounded the corner, holding their hands over their stomachs like they were nuns out for a walk. As we watched them go, Isa said Petrona was definitely not a ghost. Cassandra said she agreed. She was not a ghost, not a poet, but was she a saint, or under a spell?

  Petrona

  Mami said, Wasn’t life unfair, a patilimpia like la Señora Alma with an Indian grandmother, skin the color of dirt, ending up in that large house with proper bedrooms. And us sharing blood with the Spanish, here in this dump. Mami liked to share the story of our famous ancestor. He was the one history books talked about when they said Spaniards came in a boat bringing civilization. We didn’t know his name, but our ties to him were clear by our white skin and our fine black hair.

  When I came home from the Santiagos’ my family knelt around me in a tight circle. They wanted to know about the kind of wealth my employers had. My siblings wanted to know what the family ate. I talked to them about the house. There is a large rectangle of grass in front and they’ve planted stones so that la Señora’s heels don’t sink into the grass.

  The second floor has to be supported by tall beams, the house is so large.

  They have a room on top of their house where no one actually sleeps, but which they fill with the excess of their stuff.

  I didn’t tell my family I had a bedroom of my own and a shower too. It felt cruel because our bathroom was an outhouse, and our front door a curtain. At the Santiagos’ there were all the doors you could imagine, to the bedrooms, closing the bathrooms, but also there were doors with no purpose. There was a swinging door dividing the kitchen from the living room. There were double doors in the kitchen and inside there was a boiler that heated up water. Anyone could take a hot shower whenever they wanted.

  I told my friends in the Hills, My employers are rich. They have breakfast every day with milk.

  In the Hills, everyone’s dinner, lunch, breakfast, snack was pan con gaseosa. The bread was filling with a taste you couldn’t get tired of, because the gaseosa could be Pepsi, Sprite, or the orange one called Fanta. The many options of fizzy drink dressed up even the stalest bread. You could break the bread in half and dip the sponge in the different colors and it could seem like a different meal.

  In the Hills I laughed to myself remembering one thing or another about the Santiagos. I told Mami about how the little Santiago girl asked me to teach her to wash. Mami laughed and laughed. A rich girl, wanting to learn to wash! Mami prompted me to tell the story to every person from the Hills who stopped by our hut to say hello. Every person laughed at the part when Chula insisted on learning, saying someday she would go off to college and there would be nobody there to wash her clothes. Ask her if she wants to learn to plow the field, people in the Hills joked. Nobody in college will do that for her either!

  Chula reminded me of little Aurora, even though Aurora was a year older, and there couldn’t be more differences between two girls. But they both had a habit of staring off into space, daydreamers.

  Steal for us, my little brother begged. Bring us a little taste of what they eat. But I was too proud and I told Ramón, so little and his cheeks so red, that the day I brought back meat it was going to be because I earned it with the hard labor of my own two hands. I tried to impress in him the pride of labor, which I still remember from Papi, who refused the government handouts, the paramilitary handouts, the guerrilla handouts, and on nights when we went hungry because one group or another had taken our harvest, he would tell us that it was better to sleep alongside your own clean conscience than to be a parasite of the state or of the militarized groups who were also
just a different version of a state.

  With the sweat of my brow I will provide for you, I told little Ramón, which was also what Papi told me when I came aching and crying from my stomach twisting with hunger, asking how come he hadn’t accepted the aid of one of the groups, all similar to each other in his view with their weapons and excuses for violence.

  But it wasn’t the same. I couldn’t keep my family together the way he could. One day when I came home early from work, I saw little Ramón sharing a sausage with one of the encapotados. The guerrillas stay up in the mountain but every once in a while they come down. They hide their faces with bandanas, that’s why we call them the hooded ones, but most of the time we recognize their voices and we know who they are. The encapotado had given Ramón a stick with a sausage and I saw little Ramón’s face as the sausage cooked in the bonfire. The sweet smell filled my nose, and I understood his weakness, but later I told him not to do that again. My little boy spit into the ground and he told me my pride didn’t feed his stomach, that it was my fault his three younger brothers were skin and bones, that I could starve if I wanted, but he was in line to be the man of the house, and the power wasn’t mine anymore.

  5.

  The Dead Girl’s Shoe

  On Thursdays after school we called Papá at the oil site in Sincelejo. He spoke to us through a crackling radiophone and his voice came out broken up and filled with static.

  “How is my favo…te?” he said.

  “Well, Papá.”

  “An…school?”

  “They give us a lot of homework.”

  “A lot of wh…?” he said, and then there was dead static, like the tuning dial before a radio station.

  “A lot of homework.”

  “A lot of wh…?”

  “Homework,” I repeated. I tried to enunciate my vowels and consonants as plainly as possible. I could never have real conversations with Papá when he was away because the radiophone swallowed up our words. He always asked about school and then he asked to talk to Cassandra.

  “Oh. Wh…re is your sist…?” Static erupting at the heels of his voice.

  “I’ll get her,” I said, but didn’t move. “Papá, when are you coming back?”

  He was quiet for a moment. “Soon.”

  “How soon?”

  “Ver…soon, Chula, I pro…ise.”

  “Okay. I love you, Papá.”

  “Lov…you too,” he said.

  * * *

  On Fridays we watched television. I loved Fridays because they were the only days when I could really observe Petrona. Fridays were a half day at our school, so Cassandra and I were home by noon. Then, we all got together in Mamá’s bedroom. Petrona sat on the floor near the bed, with the excuse of folding up laundry or balling up socks but she never got very far and Mamá didn’t care. Cassandra and I lay on our stomachs on the bed and Mamá sat under the covers with her back against the wall. I often forgot to watch the television program and stared instead at Petrona’s mouth.

  It was pink and thin and closed in a line. A light mustache grew under her nose. I stared at her lips, thinking how great it would be if the lips parted and words suddenly came out. I wondered what Petrona would say. Maybe she would tell stories of her childhood. Maybe she was heartbroken and the heartbreak had stolen her voice. Looking at her, I grew convinced this was the reason behind her silence. Whole television shows came and went as I thought about Petrona, until, when I least expected it, her lips parted and suddenly the vowel sounds of laughter came out. The sound made me jump and Cassandra turned to me with a puzzled, guarded look. Petrona teetered forward with laughter.

  When Mamá changed the channels we were regularly disturbed by the graphic quality of the news reports. I could piece some things together from the news—massacres in the countryside, common graves found in farms, peace talks with the guerrillas, but I didn’t understand who was responsible for what or what any of it meant. The name I had heard so often was on every newscaster’s tongue. When I asked Mamá who Pablo Escobar was, she sat up. “Pablo Escobar? He’s the one responsible for every shit that happens in this country.” Cassandra stretched her lips down and I raised my brows at Petrona and Petrona cleared her throat.

  I decided to commemorate the dead I had heard about in the news by walking around the house, opening and closing cabinet and closet doors. But there were so many massacres and common graves and disappeared and kidnapped persons, that after a while, I lost interest.

  The television lit our faces pale blue. Death was such a common thing.

  Sometimes a detail would make me feel again. Once there was a line of bodies in a field covered with a white sheet but red wetted through only at the sixth body. Another time there was a common grave, and the camera lingered on the feet sticking out: everybody wore shoes but one person had bare feet.

  I knew that there was no gate surrounding the invasiones where Petrona lived, no iron locks on the doors, no iron bars on the windows. When I asked Petrona how she and her family stayed safe, she laughed. Then because I was embarrassed she shrugged her shoulders. She thought for a moment then said, “There’s nothing to lose.” Five syllables.

  I thought about all the things I had to lose. There was Cassandra, Papá, Mamá, all my tías and uncles, Abuela María, all the cousins. We had a house, I had school friends, I had a lot of pretty shoes and many plastic bracelets, there was the small television, my box of colored pencils, the radio with the big plastic knobs in the living room.

  War always seemed distant from Bogotá, like niebla descending on the hills and forests of the countryside and jungles. The way it approached us was like fog as well, without us realizing, until it sat embroiling everything around us.

  * * *

  One Friday we recognized a street.

  Cassandra and I sat up and reached for our hearts. Cars were upside down, billowing smoke. The buildings had giant shark bites out of their sides. And the fountain, where Cassandra, Mamá, and I had so often thrown pesos and made wishes, was now leveled to rubble and the water and a thousand people’s wishes drained on the street. The reporter entered the scene, leading with the black foam top of his microphone. “This is the site of our latest tragedy. A car bomb exploded in Bogotá just two hours ago, leaving seven dead and thirty injured. Among the dead is a seven-year-old girl who was waiting in the car next to what officers believe to have been the car carrying the bomb. She is survived by her father, who went into this building,” the reporter said, pointing behind him at a blackened structure missing its front walls. “He was buying tickets for the circus. And here,” he pointed among the rubble on the ground, “is the young girl’s leg.” The camera zoomed its shaky lens at a heap of burnt car parts and then a blackened red shoe and a smoky white sock filled with leg came into focus.

  “This night the murmur of people praying with the girl’s father is a constant as officials try to discover who was behind the attack. The father was the last to see her alive. Officials struggle to unearth the rest of her remains, but this,” the reporter said, lifting his hand holding something small and golden between his fingers, “is the girl’s ring.” The camera zoomed steady like a tunnel to the gold ring. It glimmered in the reporter’s fingertips. Then the camera zoomed out and the reporter put the ring into his breast pocket. “Officials believe the guerrillas are responsible for the car bomb, as the target appears to have been a bank.”

  Cassandra and I turned away from the television and crawled to Mamá. I couldn’t believe we had just seen a recently dead girl’s ring. Mamá was calm and she received us in her arms. I said, “Mamá.” Cassandra said, “They killed a little girl.” “There’s no helping what happened,” Mamá said. “When it’s time, it’s time. There’s no escaping death.” Mamá combed our hair with her fingers. They vanished within our hair. I looked up at Mamá’s nose, the eyebrows curving up and sweeping down.

  Pet
rona spoke from her corner: “The girls are frightened, Señora?” It was more a statement than a question. I counted, automatically, the syllables of her sentence, pressing the tips of my fingers against my thumb. Eight. I stared at Petrona in the corner, her legs tucked under to a side, her black short hair, her skinny arms supporting her weight, her body leaning forward. “Things like that scare my little sister too,” she said. Ten. I tried to catch Cassandra’s eye but she was lost in thought.

  Mamá snaked her arms to the back of our necks. Mamá always said—the life she knew was a last-minute tsunami that could sweep away fathers, money, food, and children. You were never in control, so it was better to let things run their course. Petrona came and knelt near us by the side of the bed.

  “Niñas.” She reached and rubbed Cassandra’s back. “Don’t worry. That little girl probably didn’t even know she was dying.”

  I tried to count but lost it, then Cassandra rose up on one elbow. “Wasn’t their target a bank? Why kill a little girl? She was little, like she was Chula’s age, Mamá.”

  Mamá put her hand over my ear. “When it’s time, it’s time. There’s no escaping death,” and then she repeated the first thing. She repeated the two things like a poem. Petrona twirled the lace of the bedsheets in her fingers. Then she gripped the sheet in a fist.

  “But did you see,” I said, “her leg wasn’t with the rest of her.”

  “She didn’t feel a thing,” Mamá said, and said again the thing about never escaping death.

  I rested my head on Mamá’s chest and stared at the white comforter. I followed its cloudy seams down to the end of the bed, to the television, snug in its cream armoire between Papá’s and Mamá’s separate closets. It blared colorful commercials: lime green, purple, and red.