Fruit of the Drunken Tree

by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

  Both versions of the story I told were lies, probably because the truth was more difficult to tell. What was the truth? Something horrible had happened. A man had been killed.

  Maybe it wasn’t so difficult after all.

  * * *

  “You know there were safe routes during the time of La Violencia,” Papá said. Mamá placed her black swooping hat over her face and we descended the great mountain Bogotá is on. When the road flattened, the air was so hot we nearly couldn’t breathe. We begged Papá to turn on the air conditioner but Papá yelled that driving with air-conditioning cost more money. We rolled down our windows and the wind pummeled against my ears. Papá was nervous.

  He was driving, glancing at the little newspaper map, mumbling directions to himself. His lower lip unglued from his mustache and flashed his lower, coffee-stained teeth; then he glanced at the road. The wind shook the map in his fingers.

  Mamá awoke as if from a dream. She lifted the rim of her wide hat and studied Papá. Then reclining, resting her small feet with red nail polish on the dashboard, she said, “Either you pull over, Antonio, or you keep your eyes on the road.”

  Papá pushed the map into Mamá’s hands, “We can’t pull over, Alma, use your head!” But Mamá didn’t help. She opened the glove compartment. She fingered the door pockets, then the sleeves behind the front seats. Papá was yelling. Mamá was searching under her seat when she sat up triumphantly, a roll of clear tape in her hand. She taped the map above the steering wheel on the windshield. Papá shook his head and exhaled. He sat back and turned on his music while Mamá got out her red nail polish, and seeing everything was all right again, I lay down on the seat and fell asleep, the wind pounding hotly on my face.

  During our two days of travel, the corners of the little map yellowed and hummed with wind. At the roadside stops I sat in the driver’s seat to study it. It was printed in black and white. The areas populated by guerrillas were colored in black and were lorded over by men of different sizes holding rifles against their chests. The men had sunglasses on and wore berets on their heads. There were two small men just outside of Bogotá in the heart of the country and a medium-sized one next to Cúcuta. The bigger men clasped their weapons in the Amazon jungle and along the coastline of the Pacific Ocean.

  I traced my finger along the safe route from Bogotá to Cúcuta in the upper eastern shoulder, and read aloud the towns on the way: Chía, Tunja, Paipa, Málaga, Pamplona. The route was the eastern highway. All around it, small roads ebbed in dashes. The dashes stood for danger. Just underneath the map a legend read, “Never take an unfamiliar road. Guerrillas could ambush your car. Please take care of your loved ones.”

  Cassandra was biting her nails. She said she could outsmart the guerrillas if they ever tried to kidnap her. She was, after all, first in her class. She shook her head importantly and settled again in her seat, black hair feathered out over her chocolate shoulders. “My history teacher says most guerrilleros haven’t gone past the fourth grade, and I’m in fifth.” Her white sneakers squeaked against the vinyl seat and her thigh muscles twitched.

  My eyes widened as I turned to look out the window. I was in third.

  Papá must have seen my horror because he said that if I wanted to be helpful, I could keep a lookout for roadblocks, which were often guerrilla fronts. I nodded, thinking that if I spotted them before they did us, we could escape them. I scanned the rushing, snaking roads ahead and craned my neck at the curves to see past what was hidden by the palm trees and giant rocks.

  “Even if something happened,” Papá said, “your papá can take the guerrillas. Or didn’t I tell you girls about the day I killed a boa constrictor with my bare hands? Eh, chicas? You were too little to remember.”

  We nodded, but Papá told the story anyway.

  Mamá, Cassandra, and I were five steps behind him when he saw a snake sliding into a bush. He held the tail, pulled the snake out, and swung the boa against a tree.

  According to Mamá, it was true that Papá had spotted the snake, but it was the hiking guide who killed it. He happened to shoot it with a rifle. All Papá had done was slice the boa’s head off with a machete after it was dead. Just in case, he had said.

  What neither of them said is how Papá hung the snake body on a tree branch and made Cassandra and me squeeze it. It was the only part of the story I truly remembered: the ribbed, hard skin of the boa, patterned in tan circles and dark brown diamonds, warm like a bag filled with soggy dough when you pinched it, but eerie when you took your hand away and the skin bounced back in place.

  At night Diomedes Díaz played on repeat in the car cassette player. Diomedes Díaz over accordion, piano, congas, and a back chorus, singing “My First White Hair,” “The Soul of an Accordion,” “Womanizing,” “The Cow and the Bull,” “You Are the Queen,” and “The Fault Was Yours.” Papá was the only person in the car who liked Diomedes Díaz. He said he needed the support of a man even if through a cassette player, in order to deal with the woman-viper Mamá had turned out to be.

  In the back of the car, I looked for roadblocks on and off, but on our way from the gray, sleek city, through the mountains heavy with fog; to the roadside cliffs with rivers and wet grass bobbing in misty beds; to the plains with dry wind and yellow weeds; to Abuela’s home in Cúcuta in El Salado, the Salted Place, we never encountered a single one.

  11.

  El Salado

  Abuela’s house stood at the end of the dirt road as if a portal between two worlds: the forest hills rose behind her house, and in front the dirt road zigzagged down, lined with adobe houses and dingy auto shops. The people of El Salado sat in plastic chairs all along the road and stared after our car: rust free, shiny from rain and sun, city license plates. When we pulled up to Abuela’s, men who had been playing a game of chess at the corner froze. As we got out of our car, the men rose to their feet. Papá waved and the men flexed their muscles in return. I was dripping in sweat and faint from the heat. I kicked my shoes on Abuela’s door. Mamá bent down to fix her kitten-heels and said, “The invasión is more and more respectable, no? One day this will all be condominiums!” Cassandra lifted her brows like she wanted to say something snarky but then she kept quiet. She was probably too hot and tired. Papá was staring the men down.

  The invasión hadn’t actually changed since last year when we visited, but maybe it seemed that way to Mamá because she remembered El Salado when it was just people in huts. El Salado wasn’t named that because of luck; rather there was a salt mine nearby. You wouldn’t know it was there, but Papá said some streets were sinking because of the underground tunnels.

  Mamá’s family was the first to settle in El Salado. They had been forced to abandon their farmland just to the north because of the paramilitary. Abuela hated the paramilitary. They burned down good land for no reason. And she had seen them bury bodies underneath the cement of roads so they would never be found. Mamá said Abuela packed their mules crying and together the family walked south until they found unoccupied land. Abuela and Abuelo did what they knew how to do—they cleared a spot, planted seeds, built a shack out of cane. They started to keep chickens and hunt for food. There was no mail, electricity, or water, but Mamá said it all felt like an adventure, like they were the only people on earth. Then more people came. Some of the new people were criminals, but mostly they were displaced families.

  To me, El Salado had a beauty all its own. The chipped paint, the adobe houses, the land filled with people’s gardening. I wasn’t allowed out but I wasn’t interested anyway. The building next to Abuela’s was a brothel and there were leering men along the dirt road, and, besides, Mamá said there was a chance I could be mistaken for a prostitute. Once, a man tried luring Cassandra behind a bush, telling her there was a baby bird on the ground. But Cassandra is no fool so she yelled for Papá and the man took off running.

  There was a sign painted on the front
of the brothel. It read Food and Dine in fading cursive, but there was no doorway—only a garage door that rolled up. Cassandra and I had once seen women in rushes of blond hair and stilettos galloping out of the garage door into army-green jeeps. “Those are prostitutes,” Cassandra whispered. It was New Year’s Eve and Papá and the tíos were setting off fireworks and everyone on the street was dancing. The women climbed into the jeep and settled in the arms of shadowy men and Abuela, who was standing behind us, said, “Women down on their luck, that’s all they are.”

  At Abuela’s door, I heard the metal click and clack of the locks, and then the door peeled back and there was Abuela trembling and grinning. “Mis niñas,” she said, bringing us deeply into her arms. Abuela was short and stout, seemingly fragile, but her body was sinewy and strong. She patted our heads, then walked to Mamá and Papá, reaching her hands to them, her whole body vibrating. Cassandra tapped my shoulder and signaled with her head toward Abuela’s open door. Together we made little noise and took single back steps. Papá had an arm around Mamá. He was counting on his fingers, saying, “…the insecurity, the taxes, and the changes of the neighborhood.” When Cassandra and I took the last back step into Abuela’s house, we ran in circles and howled and hooted.

  Mamá yelled, “Cassandra! Chula! Have you turned into beasts? Don’t touch Abuela’s things!”

  “And don’t let the dogs in the garden!” Abuela called. “They’ll kill my chickens!” We heard Papá’s voice resume, his tenor swift and steady, accompanied by Abuela’s croaky, slow voice.

  Abuela ran a store out of the front room of her house. She hung a curtain over the hallway that led to the rest of the house, so that her living quarters could not be seen from the store. Abuela’s store changed with every New Year. At the beginning of the year products were sold at a discount and new ones were bought, organized, and priced. I wanted to investigate, but Cassandra wanted to look for the baby rabbits. We went through the curtain into the main room, ran past the kitchen, and outside into the garden.

  Abuela’s garden was like a jungle. There was a clearing and a footpath, and we had to fend off the overgrowth of trees and bushes and step over tree roots. Mosquitoes swarmed our heads, and when my skin flared with the feeling of them biting I ran back inside. Abuela’s dogs barked and leapt around me. I worried Cassandra was being eaten alive by the mosquitoes, but then I realized there was no one around and I could snoop freely.

  All over Abuela’s house it smelled like air that had been trapped for years, even though there were open doors and windows everywhere. In the main room the walls were bare except for two painted, old pictures. One was of Abuelo and the other of Abuela. We were not allowed to talk about Abuelo because he had left Abuela for another woman, but nobody could stop me from studying his portrait. His hair was black and he wore a high white collar. He was handsome, but what I couldn’t believe was that Abuela had once been so beautiful. She wore rouge on her cheeks and her hair came up at the ends and a purple top with pretty pearl buttons closed along her throat. It was shocking to think of Abuela’s face now in comparison: wrinkled and pockmarked by time, her eyes tough and flat. You could really appreciate the portraits from Abuela’s rocking chair. That’s where Abuela sat in the afternoon. Mamá said Abuela sat there only to curse Abuelo and the woman he left her for, blaming them for taking her youth. Mamá said Abuela liked to gaze at the paintings when she was in pain from her swollen feet—the more she could behold Abuelo in disgust. Cassandra said Abuelo had another family, but it never really mattered to me, because it’s not like I could miss what I never had.

  Mamá had recently told me that Petrona’s father didn’t live with them in the invasión. Maybe Petrona’s father left her family too. I was about to lower myself into the rocking chair when Papá, Mamá, Cassandra, and Abuela came into the room.

  Abuela wagged her finger. “Don’t you sit there.” Mamá pulled me to her and wouldn’t let go of my wrist. Cassandra stuck out her tongue. We went down a hall of closed doors. Abuela had built the hall herself, making the bricks out of adobe, one room for each of her five children. Mamá’s sandals slapped on the concrete floor and the sound of Papá wheeling our two suitcases grumbled on behind us and echoed. Abuela had ended up owning the land not because she bought it but because if you lived anywhere for longer than twenty years, it automatically became yours, or at least the government didn’t ask questions.

  Mamá pointed to a room on my left. “A man died in that room.” Abuela walked ahead, her hands touching the walls for balance. One of Mamá’s favorite pastimes was to scandalize Cassandra and me. Papá said it was because Mamá had been a young mother, and young mothers never grew up. “Be a mother, Alma!” Papá often said when Mamá started on us with her ghost stories, but this time, he remained quiet. When I looked behind, he seemed absorbed in his own thinking. “A stranger,” Mamá continued. “He came a month ago in the middle of the night asking for shelter. He was a traveler. He was dead by morning.”

  The room Mamá was pointing at had its door open. It was stuffed with old furniture and a hospital bed. Cassandra pressed against me and I pressed against Mamá, flushed with fear. Abuela stopped at the end of the hall and held the door open to Mamá’s old room. There was still some furniture from when she was a girl.

  “Here, Alma?”

  Abuela offered Cassandra and me our own rooms, but we didn’t want to sleep alone with the menace of the dead stranger. In Mamá’s old room there was a large bed with a mesh canopy hanging over it from a wire-circle at the top. It was there for the mosquitoes. A ceiling fan set the canopy in rolling motion. There were no windows, and an old blue desk stood at the corner. It occurred to me that if the fan fell while we slept, it would chop and kill everyone. At the funeral, I would wear a black veil and stand at the pedestal of the church. Behind me the four coffins containing the remains of Abuela and my family would stand in shadow while I received the mourners with one hand—my other hand, dismembered by the ceiling fan blade, would lie wrapped in black tulle inside a small coffin marked, Here lies the hand of Chula Santiago, courageous survivor. Petrona would give me a white rose and then we would ride away together in a black limousine.

  In the bedroom, Papá exhaled loudly. He propped up our suitcases and set our backpacks on the floor and said, “Yes, this will do.”

  * * *

  At Abuela’s I felt happy in extremes. I sat in the sunlight until I was burning and then I ran to Abuela’s bathroom and dumped buckets of cold water on myself. The shower in Abuela’s bathroom wasn’t really a shower but a corner where the tiles sloped down around a drain, and a tall blue barrel stood filled with water. In the first shock of water, I gasped and was unable to breathe. It’s hard to say why such a thing brought me happiness. Maybe it was the burning sensation of cold after hot, or the anxious joy with which I gasped for air, or the feeling of being very much alive, or maybe it was the way in which the sensations were a short circuit to the kinds of things I worried about: Petrona eating from the fruit of the Drunken Tree, Pablo Escobar smiling in his Hawaiian shirt, Galán bleeding on the podium. My days filled with sensations: hot, cold, drowning, breathing.

  Cassandra and I were not allowed to go in Abuela’s store, but we lifted the curtain in the living room to look. There, under the single lightbulb dangling from the ceiling, we would see Abuela taking money from a customer, sitting on a stool, organizing her wares, sweeping the floor. I told Cassandra I bet Petrona would have liked to see Abuela’s store, and Cassandra blinked several times at me. “Who cares, Chula, get a life.”

  We felt wild at Abuela’s. Our classmates were back home taking finals while we were already on vaction, wearing our swimsuits thin, daring each other to stand in front of the room where the stranger had died. The seconds grew as the days passed until we stood in front of the room for a full minute. Cassandra said she could hear someone breathing. Sometimes she saw eyes that hovered above the d
irty hospital bed. They were green.

  As always when we visited Abuela, Mamá’s sister Tía Inés came to visit with her husband, Ramiro, and our cousins Tica and Memo. Tía Inés lived a few blocks away but we never went to her house, I wasn’t sure why. Either it was a worse place than Abuela’s, or Tía Inés had never invited us. Cassandra thought it was the latter because she had inferred (from years of overheard hints and insults flung during sisterly fights) that a man had once impregnated Tía Inés and that Papá had refused to recommend this man for a job. What had happened to the man? Where was the baby? Neither of us knew. What we knew for sure is that when Mamá and Tía Inés got together things got tense. “What are those sandals you’re wearing, Inés, why don’t I take you shopping?” “Aren’t you a mother of two, Alma? It’s time you start wearing blouses like a lady. You’re not twenty anymore.”

  Cassandra and I dragged our little cousins away. Tica and Memo were a year younger so we played tag. Memo was always stuck being it because we easily outran him. We had so much time between his chasing us we climbed up trees. Memo stood under the tree where Tica straddled a big branch and told her she needed to come down because there was a tick on her leg. I smirked at Memo to let him know I admired his cunning, but when Tica came down he really lit a candle and held the flame to Tica’s skin and Cassandra and I watched in horror as a little animal crawled out.

  In Abuela’s garden while Tió Ramiro and Papá got manly and sumo-squatted around a dug-out hole where they were going to create the perfect conditions for a small fire, Tía Inés made Cassandra and me press our hands on her pregnant stomach. It was spongy and had something like eels moving inside it. We were polite and forced grins onto our faces, but then we kept our distance from her “miracle of life.”