Fruit of the Drunken Tree

by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

  I was behind a building by a cardboard box. I was wheezing, drowning. My knees buckled. Still standing. I bowed over, holding on to the box. My lungs were drinking honey. I grasped for my breath. Then there was Petrona kneeling by my side crying, telling me in her gravelly voice, “Chula, Chula, forgive me.” I couldn’t speak. Get away from me, I was trying to say. I tried to push her, get up and run, but everything was growing dim—Petrona with her ruined mascara, black on her cheeks, her face ashen like a ghost. “Chula, forgive me.” A shopkeeper sweeping the street, another lifting a steel shutter. She was holding my wrist. “You have to calm down, Chula, please calm down.” Down the street someone was unlocking a chain. My knees against the dirty pavement. “Chula, breathe.” My hands on the pavement too, the cracks of the street, a blade of grass, drowning, breathing. Galán bleeding on the podium. My shoe coming off, Mamá’s cigarette, the tip wearing a halo like a dark saint. Hot, cold, drowning, breathing. I hoped Cassandra had gotten away and Mamá was somewhere looking for me. My face against the pavement, everything fading, Petrona’s voice, “Chula, you have to calm down, we can’t stay here, please, Chula, calm down,” her thin, white fingers trembling over my eyes, Mamá’s voice like an outgoing train, saying, “Here, Petrona, let me show you your room.”

  24.

  Void After Void

  A ceiling fan chopped the air at the top of the room, chopped the light too, falling on Petrona’s face. Petrona produced a mirror from her pocket. She fluffed her short hair. Her fingers on the back side of the mirror trembled. She closed the compact and ran her hands over her face. We were on a couch in a strange room that smelled like beer and oil. Petrona was staring at the door. I stirred and Petrona knelt before me tucking strands of hair behind my ears. She whispered, “You’re awake.” Then, “Everything’s going to be okay now.”

  “Where are we?”

  “We’re in a liquor store. The owner saw you faint. We’re waiting for a cab now.” My backpack was on the floor. I thought I had left it by the aqueduct. I stared at it, how strange and out of place it seemed in this dark room where the light was chopped by the movement of the fan. Petrona looked as meek as ever. Her tidy amber eyes poised over me, but now I knew that Petrona had not been hiding from any danger, but was the danger itself.

  “I want to leave.” I tried to stand up.

  Petrona held me down on the couch. “Quiet, Chula, we can’t go out there until the cab arrives—he’ll see us.”

  I knew she meant the driver. “How can I trust you ever again?” I asked.

  Her eyes were soft, then hard, then soft again. She shook her head, crying. Then a white-haired man came running in, telling us the cab was outside, telling us to hurry and get in before we were spotted and got him in trouble. I clung to the couch, not wanting to get in another car with Petrona. The white-haired man lifted me in his arms, saying, “Get out now, I don’t want any trouble.” I kicked and smelled the tobacco scent of his hair, saw the beer posters with bikini-clad women hanging over his door frame. He forced me in the cab and closed the door. I reached for the door on the other side but Petrona opened that door and got in beside me and blurted out the address of my house to the driver, and then she held onto the taxi door, covering her mouth, crying. I looked at the taxi driver, who was bewildered and surprised in the rearview mirror, and I understood he at least wasn’t part of any plot and I managed to say, “please,” and “hurry,” and the driver turned his eyes to the road and we sped down the near empty streets, tall buildings, a park, the aqueduct, and after a few minutes we were driving by the gates of the neighborhood and Petrona was inhaling and exhaling into her hands.

  The cab halted at the neighborhood gate by our house. Mamá was there and Cassandra next to her. In the time I was gone fear had aged their faces. I was returning to my body now, everything would be okay because we were pulling up to our house, and I lifted my arm to the handle, I was finding my voice, “Cassandra! Mamá!” as they ran to the cab. But Mamá’s face was chiseled in anger. She threw the door open and yanked Petrona out of the cab, and raked me across the seat onto the ground. “What were you doing with her? What were you going to do?” Mamá wrenched my hair back and forth. “You little fool!”

  “Señora, they skipped school and—”

  “NEVER have I given you permission to take my daughters out of the neighborhood.” Mamá shook her. “You criminal!” Mamá was crying and her hand inched back and slapped Petrona across the cheek to the ground. Petrona held her cheek weeping and Mamá dragged Cassandra and me by the hair into the neighborhood. “You little fools!”

  “Papá!” I cried out. I wanted him to be home.

  “Why are you calling for your father, I’m here! And you!” She turned to Cassandra. “Abandoning your sister!”

  “But I ran back, Mamá, I ran back to tell you.”

  I heard the cab driver protesting, and I turned to look as the security guard approached him. Petrona trailed behind us, sobbing. As we walked, Mamá gripped our hair and pulled, her fist flashing past our ears. Wrapped in her wrath Mamá called out to God. Her hands rose to the sky, knitted in our hair, asking why she had been cursed with such stupid children. Cassandra and I clutched each other tightly. Mamá yelled on and on, but I couldn’t listen, or feel when she came again and shook us around. I didn’t see what was in front of me. I was only aware of Cassandra’s wet cheek against mine, our hot breath joining together, and void after void opening in my heart. In the house, Mamá shoved us up the stairs and hurled us into our old bedroom and locked the door. My scalp burned and my cheeks felt hot. We cried and listened at the door, as Mamá yelled at Petrona and Petrona pleaded with Mamá.

  Petrona

  I told her, I saved your girl, protect me. She took the rings off her fingers and put them in my pockets and told me to escape. She pushed cash into my hands and told me to get away. I said, There’s nowhere, they’ve threatened my family, who knows what they’ll do. She took a cross from her mantel and pushed that into my hands too. She said, I’ll pray, and I understood I had risked everything for another woman’s daughter, and nobody would do the same for me.

  I thought I could leave at once. I got on the bus that would take me to the central station. I would buy a ticket and go as far as I could afford. I would clean and sweep houses to make more money. I would put thousands and thousands of kilometers between me and Gorrión. Gorrión who had told me not to fear—the girls would be kept in a nice apartment, a nice abuela would cook their meals, for a week at most, then they would be freed. Then I learned of one girl who was shot point-blank in her forehead. Gorrión argued the little girl was dead because the family did not listen and got the police involved and so the men had had to shoot the girl. You understand, right? he had told me. The men cannot compromise their morals.

  I told Gorrión I wanted out, I would not deliver the girls, I had changed my mind. Gorrión clucked his tongue. Petro. Don’t be foolish. Why say a thing like that now? You know who we all are, see? It’s too late.

  I was going. I was in a vehicle with moving wheels and soon I would be far, far away. I would go to the coast like little Ramón. I would get a job selling trinkets and coconuts on the beach. I would wrap my hair in a bandana like the women of the coast and I would continue north to the Pacific. My new name would be Claramanta, like in the telenovela. I had never seen the ocean. Maybe it was as beautiful as they said. Claramanta would sunbathe by the ocean. She would drink coconut water from the round husks.

  A young boy sat next to me and I made room in the seat. He was young like my Aurora. Little Aurora, what would happen to her? Maybe in time, once I started to make money, I would send her anonymous envelopes filled with cash. It was all I could do for her now. The trouble would be in how to disguise the money so that it wouldn’t be stolen along the way. The little boy next to me was unwrapping a small candy in his lap. Maybe I could put the cash inside a chocolate bar. They s
aid the people that worked in the post offices held every envelope to the light and if they saw it had cash, they stole it, but they wouldn’t suspect a chocolate bar. The ears of the boy were dirty, covered in dust. At least he didn’t smell. Maybe I could hide the cash inside toys instead. Maybe Aurora would figure it out, maybe she knew I would want to write her letters. She would think to look inside. The little boy lifted his hand up to his palm, bringing the sweet to his mouth, and just then someone sat in the seat in front. The man in front had a mole at the back of the neck in the same place Gorrión did. How many people, going around, with identical moles. The little boy opened his palm, and I turned to look at him. He blew on his palm like he was blowing me a kiss and white dust flew on my face. I tried to get up, and the man in the seat in front who not only had Gorrión’s mole but also, I could see clearly now, his face, was telling me, Stay, Petrona, stay, and so I stayed, thinking, that’s Gorrión’s voice too, and the other voice, the voice in my head, telling me to get up and run quieted now. It died down. I waited for whatever else this man would tell me to do, and then I was swimming in a black dark.

  25.

  Rainfall

  “Cassandra?”

  “What?” Cassandra’s eyes were red and bewildered. She rested her head against the bedroom door.

  “But she brought me back.”

  Cassandra’s nostrils flared and her eyes grew red and moist and some seconds passed before she answered. “I know.”

  I rested my face on the carpet, listening. The house was quiet now. Petrona had gone. I rubbed my head on the carpet. “She changed her mind.”

  We crawled into my bed. Nobody had cleaned it. The grit of dust prickled my skin. The house was eerily quiet. The wind rippled the plastic-covered window and the light waned. There was no electricity and in the darkening room, I felt the skin on the back of my legs burning. I did not move. Cassandra said, “But when she offered to buy us coffee at the bakery? Her boyfriend said he was going to get the driver—Chula, remember? She knew what that meant. She was keeping us there until—” Cassandra didn’t finish. Then she said, “She could have told us to run then. She could have made something up. But she didn’t, Chula. She didn’t.”

  “You left me behind,” I interjected.

  I wasn’t sure why I needed to make Cassandra feel bad at that moment. I didn’t really blame her.

  “I ran to get help,” Cassandra explained.

  “You left me,” I repeated, and allowed Cassandra to sit with her knees drawn to her chest, quietly wallowing in guilt. When it was night, we heard faint crying. It was Mamá. I couldn’t sleep and neither could Cassandra. Cassandra said Papá was probably on his way home and once he got home everything would be all right again.

  Some hours later, our door unlocked and we thought it was Papá, but it was just Mamá, carrying a tray with burning candles, two glasses of orange juice, and bowls with cereal. She set the tray on the floor. She drew her fingers from the tray and said, “I kicked her out, I don’t know what’s going to happen to her now. We can’t worry about her, we have to worry about us now.”

  “But Mamá,” I said. “She brought me back, doesn’t that count?”

  There was hate in Mamá’s eyes. “You almost disappeared, and you’re asking me whether Petrona bringing you back counts?”

  The bowls of cereal Mamá had brought sat on the aluminum tray, spoon handles sticking out, the milk snow white, the bits and pieces of sugared wheat softening, unraveling, as time passed.

  We heard a soft tapping against the plastic of my window. Then there was drumming. Then we understood. “It’s raining.”

  We hadn’t seen rain in so long, all three of us got up and went downstairs. We opened the door, and walked out into the street with our flashlights. The rain streaked long lines of silver. There were other people on the street too—a man in his pajamas walked under an umbrella, chuckling in amazement; small children ran pulling up their rain boots, parents looked on smiling.

  The wind picked up and then it began to pour. I stayed on the porch, but Mamá went to stand in the garden. I saw her in silhouette, lifting her face to the sky. I listened to the rain tapping on roof and street. I thought of Petrona. I pushed the thought of Petrona away. I could smell the Drunken Tree, instantly revived by rain, releasing its sweet scent like overripe vanilla and molasses, and then there was a flash of thunder and in the light I saw Mamá: her hair was wet and her robe, soaked, stuck to her skin.

  26.

  The Hour of the Fog

  All the next day we waited for Papá. There was hail falling from the sky. It bounced on the pavement and the roof of our house. I could barely hear anything anyone said. Mamá yelled he was on his way, stop asking. Alone in Mamá’s room, I dialed Petrona at the pharmacy. “Farmacia Aguilar,” came the familiar voice. I hung up. What if I found out she was dead? I observed the front garden where globes of hail bounced and lay glistening in the grass like round jewels. I turned on the television. I allowed the senseless noise to wash over me. There was the weatherman taking up the screen, his voice a consistent stutter under the roar of hail.

  “What’s this?” That was Mamá touching the red inflamed skin at the back of my legs, startling me with pain. Mamá gripped my chin with her hand, forcing a bend into my neck. “Did you bump your head too? What happened to you?”

  I imagined myself telling Mamá about the bearded man, about being dragged by one leg on the pavement, about rattling like fancy luggage in the trunk of that car that would have taken me into increasingly darkening compartments—or so I imagined. What happened when they took you? Was there a jail cell? Were there handcuffs? Or was it more like a hospital waiting room with the glare of fluorescent lights and a magazine and a clock and a receptionist?

  I knew that if I told Mamá about the trunk of the car she would never forgive Petrona, and it was important to me that Petrona be forgiven. “I skinned my legs when you dragged me out of the cab.”

  Mamá released the tension of her brows and raised her hand to her mouth, shocked at what she was capable of.

  Mamá cleaned my scraped skin in the shower. My legs burned in long ruts wherever she touched. Mamá blew on my skin to make it bearable. Cassandra held my hand. I knew they felt guilty. For the first time since the bombing I felt relief. The ways we failed Petrona was a bitter pie and I had divided it in three and maybe now it would be easier to bear.

  When we came out of the bathroom, everything on the television was about Pablo Escobar. There was a banner of text running at the bottom of the screen—Breaking news: The biggest manhunt in history. We turned up the volume to hear over the hail. A reporter was saying Pablo Escobar had escaped, and that he had not been in a high-security prison as the government wanted the country to believe, but he had been living in a high-security mansion.

  “He’s free? He can come to Bogotá?”

  “Chula, hold on a minute, I’m trying to listen,” Mamá said.

  Every channel on the television was showing specials: reporters stood inside the high-security prison, showing off the waterbeds, Jacuzzis, fine carpets, marble tiles, the sauna, the bar with a discotheque, the telescopes, radio equipment, and so many weapons—grenades, machine guns, pistols, machetes. He had been running the cartels from prison.

  Finally we found a channel that was talking about the details of the escape. There was an animated map of the prison. The prison was nested in the hilly mountainside. Little army men swept to surround the building. The reporter said that since the prison guards were all Pablo Escobar’s men, the escape was easy. They helped capture a few hostages and used them to hold the Colombian army at bay. The reporter said Pablo Escobar and his men were thought to have escaped at the hour of the fog. That’s because they slipped unseen past the battalions surrounding the prison, and since up in the hills a heap of women’s clothes was later discovered, it was thought that Pablo Escobar and his
men went out into the mountains, in disguise, a row of ladies walking into the clouds.

  I lay on my stomach since I couldn’t sit on my scrapes. As the news went to commercial break, I imagined Pablo Escobar making his way, with each step transforming things: that was narco-grass he was stepping on, narco-fog that rolled by his hair, narco-silence that fell upon the mountains.

  Mamá locked herself in Petrona’s room with a phone, saying she had some things to take care of, and Cassandra and I went out into the garden. We hid under umbrellas to shield us against the pelting hail and set plastic cups on the ground. We waited an hour and then retrieved our cups and ate the hail with a spoon. There were white-etched spiders inside each globe. They tasted like dirt and mercury.

  Cassandra and I ate cereal and watched television for hours. When it was dusk and the storm passed, Cassandra and I went to find Mamá. She was sitting in the living room, the telephone at her feet. She said Papá was late because of traffic. Then she said maybe there had been a landslide, which happened sometimes on the winding cliff roads leading back into the city, small pebbles and rocks loosening with rain but collapsing only later, when it was sunny, filling the roads with the mountainside. I thought of car accidents, hospitals, women in distress, hitchhikers.

  Then Cassandra asked, “What did he say exactly when you talked to him, Mamá?”

  Mamá shrugged. “He said he was leaving right away, he was going to get his bag and drive home.”

  The television droned on in the background: Pablo Escobar this, Pablo Escobar that. I huddled with Mamá on the couch. Night fell. It began to rain again. The drum of rain banged on our roof and windows and the howling wind crept through the bottom of the front door. I was falling asleep when Mamá rose to her feet and went about the house moving things from one table to another. Her bathrobe ballooned about her as she bent and picked things up from the floor. She dropped the dictionary into a cabinet drawer and said, “His car probably broke down on the highway.”