Fruit of the Drunken Tree

by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

  During the week, the commotion around the water made it difficult to find a time in which Petrona was alone. I was stirred awake at five in the morning by the sound of water rushing out of all the faucets in the house and unloading into hard plastic and tin. The sound of water rang like one grand waterfall. In bed, I looked in the direction of the sound, rubbing my eyes and yawning. I listened to Mamá and Petrona walk back and forth between the bathrooms and up and down the stairs where they collected water from the kitchen and the laundry room. The sound of rushing water made its way into my dreams. I dreamed of wetlands where long-torsoed mermaids clung to swamp trees and called and called for me. Their arms were blue and long like snakes. They sang my name, “Chu-u-u-u-la-a-a.” Their voices echoed over the thick mud against trees and sky.

  In the shower there appeared a big orange tub filled with water that was collected every morning before the apagón. A cream-colored coffee cup bobbed in the tub like a lazy boat. I sat on the shower tiles fishing out water from the big orange tub in the morning, dumping the cold water over my head, gasping and shivering, like I had done at Abuela’s. Some days I only pretended to shower and dumped the water down the drain. I felt a kind of thrilling remorse. Mamá stopped taking showers altogether so we could have more water, though she liked saying that wasn’t the reason at all.

  “It’s because I like to bathe like the cats.” She dipped her hands timidly in the water and rubbed them on her face quickly and then under her arms. She smiled. Her face was glossy with water and small drops clung above her lip.

  We kept big pails of water by the toilet to drop over our waste and make the toilet flush. There wasn’t enough water to do it every time someone went to the bathroom, so the waste of the whole family accumulated in the toilet bowls until the end of the day. We tried to save the worst of our waste for later, but sometimes it was unavoidable, and then we pinched our nose and walked away shamefully from the bathroom, saying, “Only go in there if you have to.”

  I did small things for Petrona so she knew we were still friends. “Look, Petrona, I found the best rock at school and brought it to you.” I presented her with cut flowers, pretty bows, apples, until I thought Mamá was getting suspicious. Then I brought presents for Mamá, and stuffed notes with coded alphabets beneath Petrona’s pillow. My notes went unanswered, and it dawned on me that Petrona had a hard time reading as it was. I made her a drawing of our home phone with hearts around it, and this one she understood. I found the same note beneath my pillow with a drawing of her own on the back side—two hearts with the coil of a phone connecting them.

  I was so busy trying to communicate with Petrona, and Mamá and Cassandra were so preoccupied with the apagones, we all kept forgetting Papá came home every other weekend. He surprised us when we ran into him in the halls. “Oh!” we said. “It’s you!” we said. “When did you get in?”

  Papá said now that he was a manager, his job came with some perks. He brought home an extra television we set up in the living room and then he opened a cardboard box like he was a magician uncovering a jailed tiger. Inside was a computer with a black screen that stayed black because of the apagón. Papá and Cassandra spent the next hours setting up the computer by flashlight in Cassandra’s room in the attic.

  We left all of our televisions on so we knew the exact moment when the electricity came back. The voice of the newscasters and commercial jingles marked the apagones as they came and went. The moment the televisions in the house came on, Papá and Cassandra cheered and ran up to the attic to plug in the computer. While Mamá and Petrona collected water, Papá and Cassandra sat in front of the screen, taking turns controlling a chicken crossing a road. They shouted back and forth, “Look, look at this technology!”

  Cassandra spent a lot of time in her new room, which she decorated with Christmas lights and where the computer had a prominent place. Papá got her games on discs and that’s what Cassandra did during the hours of electricity—she led a little pixelated man through a labyrinthine castle, bats and torches hanging from the walls.

  While Cassandra played, I looked in on Petrona. I went to her room and sat next to her on her bed, watching her turn the pages of a magazine. We didn’t say much. We smelled the perfume samples that came trapped between folds you could peel open. We looked at the fashion spreads, thin white models riding elephants, small African boys leading the way. I didn’t bring up our secret. I figured it didn’t matter, Petrona was staying at our house now, what difference did it make. Mamá seemed to always be within earshot so I couldn’t ask Petrona about the danger she’d been in. We played tic-tac-toe on the white pages of a notebook and I admired her porcelain skin.

  * * *

  During apagones, when Papá was home, he caught up on his reading. He sank in the living room couch and read the newspaper by flashlight. He created a sort of blanket as he read, discarding the thin pages of newsprint all about him; they rustled noisily whenever he shifted.

  Mamá taught Petrona with my old textbooks. They sat at the dining table: Mamá pointing at things in the textbook and Petrona twirling the pencil in her hair. There were floor-to-ceiling mirrors by the table, one behind Mamá at the head, and one behind Petrona to Mamá’s left. I looked for revealing discrepancies. Petrona looked the same, but one of Mamá’s eyes looked bigger in the mirror. Above the table hovered a small, unlit chandelier. Underneath the table an old Sikuani rug unraveled in one corner.

  Every other weekend when Papá wasn’t home, Mamá had parties. Women in pretty dresses and men in suits sat in our living room playing canasta, drinking, and laughing. Petrona had to make finger food and keep the tables stocked with enough snacks and drinks. The house warmed with candlelight. Mamá’s girlfriends lifted me up from under my armpits. “What are you going to do, mi cielo, with this pretty face?” Their breath rolled in the sweet and sour smell of cigarettes and brandy. “Listen to me, preciosa, break many hearts and never marry. Remember that.”

  Sometimes it wasn’t a big party, just Mamá sitting on the couch talking to just one man. The man was whispering some long story to Mamá while Mamá held her cigarette in the air, without smoking, smiling. Everywhere the light of candles flickered.

  17.

  Las Hermanas Calle

  Before Petrona came to be the center of all of our lives, our vacaciones largas began, stretching for a whole glorious month from August to September. Mamá and Petrona handled the drought. Cassandra and I were free to take up with Isa and Lala. Isa and Lala decided that apagones were a unique time to terrorize the neighbors and so they told us about a game called Rin Rin Corre Corre. In it, we rang a neighbor’s doorbell, pressing our finger down hard and long, until we heard someone come to the door; then we ran away. The game became fun only when the people inside the house began to lose it. They thought we didn’t know, but everyone could be counted on to crouch near the door around the fifth ring, listening in the darkness, flashlights at the ready. It was at this point that we sent Lala, because she was the best at walking without making a sound. Isa and Cassandra and I crouched behind a parked car. We heard nothing for a long time, then the sound of the doorbell broke the silence. We heard the quick tapping of Lala’s feet and then the person opening their door. “You vagrants! Have you nothing else to do but rob the sanity of nice families!”

  We snorted and giggled into our hands.

  Isa and Lala’s mother told us that the neighborhood guards had a nickname for the four of us, Las Hermanas Calle. I asked if it was because we were always playing in the street, and Isa and Lala’s mother said yes, but also Las Hermanas Calle was a musical group in which two sisters sang about getting even with men who had wronged them. “You want to hear?” The song began:

  Si no me querés, te corto la cara

  Con una cuchilla de esas de afeitar….

  It was easy to learn. Cutting the betraying man’s face with a razor blade was vaguely funny, but stabbing
, ripping out his belly button, and killing his mother on his wedding day was hysterical. To live up to our nickname, we walked the dark streets singing at the top of our lungs. We could barely walk, and we clung to each other, laughing and singing.

  We went to the Oligarch’s mansion. The roof looked like a mountain, while the roofs of neighboring houses looked like hills. At the top of the Oligarch’s house, there was a floating yellow light going round and round, disappearing at one corner and appearing at the next. We thought it was a Blessed Soul of Purgatory but then I saw the yellow light was only a person holding a candle, pacing around the wraparound balcony. I gasped. “That’s the Oligarch.”

  The light shone eerily on the Oligarch’s face. She appeared pale and all kinds of shadows sent her features askew. I couldn’t tell if she was old or young. We sat on the sidewalk and watched her globe of candlelight moving about the house. We guessed the woman lived alone. Once or twice I saw the Oligarch’s profile when she set her candle on a table and stepped in front of it. There she was now, a heavyset woman wearing some kind of long cape standing by the window. Was she looking out or in? It was very difficult to tell. Cassandra said it was a miracle the woman’s hair did not ever catch on fire and then the lights came back on. The sudden light over the street blinded us. I saw Isa reaching her hand to a car for balance, and when I was able to look up at the house, the woman was gone. We all looked at each other, then Lala said, “Run!” We sprinted without stopping to our block, Isa and Lala breaking off to run into their house and Cassandra and I sprinting until we were safely inside ours.

  * * *

  Mamá took us to the mall. Cassandra and I had not set foot in a mall since the girl with the red shoe had died. Cassandra said, “But Pablo Escobar is setting off bombs in public places! Do you want us to actually die?” Mamá said that living in a prison was worse than dying, and clicked the turn signal of the car on, and added that if we wanted to continue being imprisoned at home she would happily oblige. She waited for us to speak, but neither of us said a word.

  I thought the mall would be empty given what Cassandra had said, but there was a long line of cars going into the parking lot. I admired all the people not afraid to die—except everybody looked bored and unaware of the heroic nature of our defiance. When we got to the entrance, a security guard pointed a gun at our tires, and another held a mirror under our car, looking for bombs. Once inside, Cassandra and I ran straight for the indoor skating rink. We rented skates and lapped the wooden pit, dancing along to the songs they played overhead. Cassandra said it was called disco. Cassandra stopped to fix her skates and two boys pivoted to a stop by her. They leaned against the low wall of the rink and asked where she went to school. The way they asked her made me uncomfortable, so I went to find Mamá.

  I found Mamá sitting at a table, drinking coffee, a man next to her.

  “So nice to see you,” the man said.

  “I feel liberated, this air—” Mamá said.

  When Mamá saw me, she gave me money to get a milkshake. She was alone when I returned. “Where did the man go?”

  “What man? Come here, mi cielo. Sit here next to me, Chula. We can make fun of the kids who can’t skate.” I didn’t know who the man had been, but I wasn’t surprised. Mamá was an incurable flirt. Mamá’s flirting was the subject of countless fights with Papá, which ended with Mamá saying it wasn’t her fault she was an exotic bird. If anybody was to blame it was Papá, because he had known who she was and had married her anyway. Mamá flirted with policemen, waiters, men at parties. But as we left the mall for home, Mamá was serious. She didn’t slow down her car for the bicyclists on the road like she always did, and she didn’t comment on their muscles as we passed the panting men.

  * * *

  The man I had seen at the mall came to our house the next day to celebrate his birthday. Mamá lit candles on a cake she had bought and even Petrona sang “Happy Birthday” with us. At the end of the song, where you were supposed to say, “And many mooore,” Cassandra sang, “And never mooooore,” which was completely shocking. Petrona’s face reddened with embarrassment and everyone laughed, but I was quiet and confused. When the man unwrapped Mamá’s gift, Cassandra was upset and asked why Mamá was giving the strange man the same tie Papá had. Cassandra burst out in tears and ran up the stairs and the man covered his face. I thought he was ashamed, but then I saw he was smiling. Mamá followed Cassandra, calling, “It’s not the same, I’ll show you.” Then the man left.

  Mamá sat in the living room with both ties on her lap, saying, “They’re not the same. They’re different.” But from the dining room table, Petrona and I could see they were exactly the same; both blue, both with a pattern of golden squares.

  “The man has left, Señora,” Petrona said. “Should I cover the cake?”

  “Throw it out, give it to stray dogs, I don’t care.”

  “Why is Cassandra upset?” I asked Petrona.

  “Nobody’s perfect,” she said, fitting the plastic cover on the cake. At the time I thought she meant Cassandra wasn’t perfect, but now I realize she was talking about Mamá.

  It was clear Cassandra was upset by the man coming to celebrate his birthday. It was clear from the way she went around our darkened neighborhood, looking for something to destroy, ringing doorbells without preparation, and then announcing to Isa and Lala in front of the Oligarch’s house that she and I were going to walk over and shine a flashlight inside. I said I wouldn’t do it, but then Cassandra said, “You’re a chicken.” Chicken. There was that word I didn’t like. I dusted my thighs. “I’m not afraid.”

  Isa and Lala said they would stay behind and be our lookouts. The silhouette of the Oligarch’s house teetered in my vision as Cassandra and I advanced. I felt and heard grass under my feet. Then the ground changed underfoot but I didn’t know to what until Cassandra whispered, “Be careful, it’s a garden.” I clutched Cassandra’s shirt as she walked with both arms raised, balancing, trying to avoid stepping on the plants. I looked up but could barely make out the sky anymore. We were completely under the dark shadow of the house. Cassandra stopped abruptly when we reached it.

  “Where’s the window?”

  “I think this way,” Cassandra said. “Keep hanging on to me.” We stole around the perimeter of the house, and as I let my hand pass over the wall that looked gray I noted the wall was of a rough material. Cassandra said, “This is something.” She grabbed my hand and placed it on a darkened spot on the wall. I let my hand roam and discovered it was wood. When I slid my hand up there was a series of wooden slats. “It’s a window shutter,” I said. “Yes,” Cassandra said. “Here’s the knob.” I heard the creaking sound of the shutter opening. I came closer and pressed my fingers forward into the blackness framed by the window. My fingers came up against glass.

  “Okay, now shine your light inside.”

  “Me? Why me? You do it, Cassandra, you’re older.”

  “No, you do it. You’re younger.”

  I grabbed my flashlight hanging from my belt loop and unfastened it and lifted it up until I put it against the window. The plastic of the flashlight tapped against the window. “Shh,” Cassandra said.

  “Well, you do it, Cassandra, you’re older.” My heart was pounding.

  “Don’t be such a baby, just turn it on.”

  When I pushed the button on, I closed my eyes. I was afraid that when the light clicked on, the Oligarch, snarling, staring, would be right there at the window, expecting us, waiting to shine a light on our faces to see once and for all who we were.

  Cassandra sighed. “Wow.”

  I opened my eyes. The light of my flashlight fell over the living room. It was like a museum. The room was spacious and sprinkled with old paintings and single armchairs and pretty tables and so many crystal trinkets that bounced back the light from my flashlight like diamonds.

  We heard Lala’s lispy
whistling.

  “What does she want?” I asked. Cassandra snatched at my wrist, “Turn it off, turn it off,” pulling me across the lawn. I struggled, trying to find the button. When I found it and clicked it off, we heard the Oligarch calling, behind us, maybe from her front door, “Who’s there?”

  I saw the beam of her flashlight sweeping across the grass, and that’s when we took off running. It’s a wonder we didn’t fall down. We lost Isa and Lala, but we found a hiding spot two houses away. We walked into some pines and came up against a gate. If we climbed the gate, we could see the slight silhouette of the largest house, and the Oligarch’s flashlight beam, sweeping back and forth across her front garden, illuminating corners and behind bushes.

  Cassandra was panting. “She’ll never find us.”

  “Do you think she saw us?”

  “No.”

  We made our way home with some effort, not feeling safe for a few blocks to turn our flashlights on. When we got back, Isa and Lala were waiting by the curb in front of our house. “What happened?”

  “Did she see you?”

  “Are you okay?”

  We told Isa and Lala about everything we saw. Cassandra said she had seen a fireplace with a bear’s fur in front of it like in the movies, and that there was a red rug under every table. I described all the trinkets that bounced light back to us—a glass cabinet filled with tall stemmed glasses, the globes of a chandelier, the dangling decorations from golden lamps, thin vases with no flowers inside—and how because all those objects glittered under the passing beam of our light it made it seem like the whole room was set with jewels.

  “It probably is set in jewels,” Lala said.

  “Enough about the house, did you see the Oligarch?” Isa wanted to know.