Mamá stayed rooted in place. “Where is Petrona’s boyfriend?”
Doña Lucía grasped at the mud, “I don’t know where he is, stop wasting time! Let’s go to the police!” and for the first time Doña Lucía looked to us, Cassandra and me in our pajamas, clinging to each other, covered in mud, and she pointed a finger into Mamá’s face. “I don’t know what happened to you, but Petrona had nothing to do with it. Can’t you hear me, Petrona is missing! Why in the hell are you wasting time looking for that man?”
Mamá swept her eyes over the hills, the rust-colored mud, the black smoke rising into the air. “When there’s a tempest, it comes down on all sides equally,” she said. And then she pulled us and we walked away.
So many times before I had interceded for Petrona, defended her, protected her. Now, my feet sank into the mud behind Mamá, her cold hand over mine, pulling me forth down the steep, and I understood that Papá was missing just like Petrona was missing. I walked away knowing I was leaving Petrona behind. This was us, walking away from her. When I had been in danger, Petrona had chosen me over herself. I was not in danger and now we wouldn’t lift a finger to help. I was choosing myself over Petrona. My body was heavy with this knowing as we hurried down the hill. The mud was a wet pillow that sucked at our feet, made us trip, welcomed us as we fell, wanting us to remain fallen, to make a house there in the dark belly of the earth. We slid down the hill in a controlled fall, gliding down great distances, slowing ourselves down by grabbing on to rocks, digging our hands into the mud, or sometimes the mud accumulated beneath our feet in such a way as to give us a foothold. At the terrace of the hill, where most of the invasión dwellings were, where the burning was, I thought, I can still ask Mamá to turn around and help Petrona, but I did not. We ran across the stretch of land without a word and continued to slide down the polished mud. Was Petrona taken like Papá? Would I switch places with Petrona if I could? Mud squished even inside my shoes.
At the bottom of the hill, the boy Petrona had called Julián leaned on our car. His three-legged dog panted at his side. Julián didn’t bother straightening up when we got to him, though his dog tapped his tail quickly on the ground. He saw our clothes and chuckled. “It really is true, you come to the invasión once, and you’re muddied forever.” He smiled archly, enjoying the fear in Mamá’s eyes, how she clutched the car key, her fist nearly white, enjoying how Cassandra and I went around to the passenger side away from him. He glanced at me and then stared at his nails in feigned boredom. “Seño, I heard you’re looking for Petrona.”
“Tell me what you know, I don’t have time.”
Julián yawned and stretched up his arms. “Birds in the Hills have it that you’re willing to pay a good price.” Mamá looked over her shoulder to the hill. It looked desolate, but then a man appeared. He had a black beard. He looked like the man who had taken me, but I wasn’t sure. He was holding the leash to a burro, staring down in our direction.
“Mamá, hurry,” I said.
“I know what happened to her,” Julián told Mamá, sitting on his haunches and petting his dog. “How much is that worth?”
I looked to the hill. There were five men now, standing in a group, staring down. They pointed at us. “Mamá—”
He stood. “Is it worth a minute with your daughter?” He looked at me. Mamá looked to the hill and took out a bill from her pocket and handed it to the boy. Julián held it up to the light, then scrunched it up in his fist. “I was here when they brought her. Poor Petrona, all burundangueada. That boyfriend of hers was with her. He brought her here.”
Mamá said, “Tell me now, where’s the boyfriend? What’s his name?”
Julián touched Mamá’s hair. “Listen, Seño, hand over all the money you got in that nice purse of yours and I’ll tell you.”
Cassandra said, “Mamá, I know his name, what are you doing, we have to go.” The men were climbing down toward us. Mamá looked over her shoulder and saw.
“But do you know his real name?” Julián said. “His street name is Gorrión, but that won’t help you any.”
Mamá fitted the key in the driver’s door, and all the doors unlocked. Cassandra and I got in, but Mamá grabbed Julián by the collar. “Tell me his name, what am I giving you money for.”
Julián smiled at Mamá. “Well, I’ll tell you now that we are so cozy.”
The men were at a short distance. We could see their faces; one of them had blond hair, two others had beards, but none of them was the one that had taken me. “Mamá, hurry.” Cassandra wiped at her face. “What are you doing, Mamá, let’s go!”
Mamá pushed against Julián. “His name.”
“Seño, he put her in a car with five others. Who knows, they probably killed her.”
Mamá sighed in anger and released Julián and got in. “Cipriano,” Julián called, “but I don’t know his last name,” and then Mamá was reversing the car and our tires spun in mud, then caught, and we lurched forward speeding away. I turned and looked through the back windshield as Julián slinked away, his three-legged dog following close behind, and then the five men ran into the middle of the road, watching us get away, then the orange hills shrank in the distance, and we were among the city buildings again.
* * *
At home none of us could eat. We sat in front of our plates of beans and rice, stirring the food with our forks, all of us still covered in mud. Things were so complicated I could hardly think. Petrona drugged. They probably killed her, Julián had said. I wondered if she recognized what was happening to her, since she had eaten from the fruit of the Drunken Tree before. Cassandra said, “Maybe we should go to the police.”
Mamá stared at her pale hands clasping the dining table. “We can’t go to the police. They have contacts there. No. We are selling everything and we are going away.”
“What? Go where? What if Papá comes home? We have to wait!”
“Maybe we can drive to San Juan de Rioseco. That’s where he was last seen.”
“To the wolf’s mouth, Cassandra? They will kill him if we do that.”
“But is the company going to pay, Mamá? They have to pay, how else are they going to let Papá go!”
“We are going away and we are selling everything,” Mamá said. “Your father will know what is happening and he will meet us. You can each pack a suitcase.”
“Mamá, you can’t be serious.”
“Mamá, he won’t find us!” I cried.
“Pack everything you want tonight.” Mamá stood and walked calmly to the telephone. “Because tomorrow, everything that is not packed we are selling. We will buy tickets to wherever and we will get out of here. Your father will find us.”
“Mamá, we can’t leave!”
Cassandra cried out, “Mamá, I’m not going!”
Mamá lifted the telephone and called everyone she knew and told them we were having a sale; we were leaving the country and we were getting rid of everything we owned.
Mamá pulled out two small suitcases and put one, unzipped, on each of our beds. I packed some clothes, but then I went about the house snatching treasures: a small hand radio, pastel plastic bracelets, a small crystal elephant, a wooden spoon, Mamá’s black eye shadow, Papá’s red wool sock. When my suitcase was full, I went downstairs and hid the small television from the living room in Petrona’s shower. I didn’t want Mamá to sell it. I didn’t know what I would do without it.
In the attic, Cassandra picked at the clothes in her closet. She packed her clothes and a chessboard, and then packed the contents of her drawer crying. I felt very tired of everything and I crawled underneath my bed and slept.
I dreamed of Papá again. Cassandra and I waltzed together in an empty ballroom. Papá watched us from outside the window. He banged on the glass, but we didn’t turn our heads. Papá stood in the garden of our house, frowning in sadness under the shade of the D
runken Tree, but then I noticed that he wasn’t in our garden at all, but in the middle of some field over which the stars shone brightly and black firs stood tall.
28.
Ghost House
The neighbors arrived at dawn. They perused our house with their noses in the air as if it were a smelly market. They brought big shopping bags and deep wicker baskets. Close to the wall, with a discerning look they turned our table lamps off and on, blew the dust from Papá’s records, rolled up our Sikuani rug, rattled the paintings hanging on the wall, questioned the authenticity of Mamá’s porcelain teacups. In the kitchen women bickered over Mamá’s stainless steel.
One woman threw her money at Mamá as she went out the door with a stack of Papá’s books—I saw the book spines: Arabian Nights, Twenty Love Poems and One Song of Despair, Motorcycle Diaries, Plato—and then I saw Mamá bend down to pick up the roll of pesos from the floor like she herself had dropped it. The looking-down-their-noses at us was partly because we had fallen from grace but also because it fitted with their idea of who we had always been. They knew Mamá had grown up in an invasión and that we had Indian blood, and they had always suspected we didn’t belong in that nice neighborhood with them.
Cassandra and I sat on the living room couch, watching the neighbors hoarding our belongings, depositing them into piles to be guarded by their children. “Don’t let anyone take anything from this pile,” they said. The children—kids who had once ignored us on the playground—ignored us now in our own house. They stared over our heads at the crowd of adults, snapping objects from under each other’s noses and hiding things under their arms. A man hooked our umbrella on his arm and pointed at a painting depicting a storm. “This one would look good in our hall,” he said.
“That ugly thing?” his wife asked. Mamá’s Indian tapestries were rolled under her arm.
“Let’s ask about the price, anyway,” the woman said.
Isa and Lala came by. They looked just how I felt, damp. They told us that their parents were getting a divorce and that they, too, were moving: they were going to live with their abuela.
“But how did this happen?” I said.
Isa frowned. Lala shrugged. Isa and Lala didn’t mention Papá and I understood this was what you did for the people you loved. You sat with them in their pain. Isa and Lala said nothing as women descended the stairs with boxes filled with Cassandra’s and my toys. We hugged. Good luck, Have a nice life, we said, See you. Not yet understanding the finality of goodbyes.
La Soltera came to see what she could buy. She paused at our front door and gasped in delight when she saw us sitting on the living room couch. “Pobrecitas,” she said. “So young and already dragged under the mud.” Then she clicked her tongue and widened her eyes as if she was struck with a thought. She looked down and caressed the couch. “Lovely,” she said. “Run along, girls. Go sit on the stairs where you can’t damage anything.” Cassandra pulled me away and made me sit on the stairs and I had to bite my tongue. Cassandra even called Mamá so Mamá could negotiate the price for the couch la Soltera so obviously wanted. I looked on, counting to one hundred, the details of our lives disappearing. At some point I saw la Soltera exiting. When she saw me she bowed exceedingly, then turned on her heels. She seemed to float out the front door, touching the white, pointy tops of her ears. Later a few men came to carry all the furniture away.
“I can’t believe all our things will be in other people’s houses,” I whispered to Cassandra. The house felt cold in its emptiness. “It’s like we’re dead.” It was like Petrona’s house, I didn’t say out loud, everything gone and ruined, except we at least were getting something back for it.
At five in the afternoon, Mamá sold our car. I didn’t understand how we were supposed to escape if we had no car. As the day darkened, our few remaining belongings made their way out through the front door. Slowly the house emptied.
On the bottom floor, one of three things that still belonged to us was an amulet. It was the four aloe leaves strung together, hanging above the door. It twirled, even though there was no wind. The aloe plant was supposed to absorb the bad energy that came to our doorstep, but it must have been useless all along.
The second thing we still owned was the small television I hid in Petrona’s shower. I dragged it back to the living room and turned it on. I don’t know if Mamá didn’t notice the television or if she didn’t care, but she didn’t yell at me for hiding it. On the television, the reporters were still talking about Pablo Escobar, but now they were saying that Pablo Escobar had so much money, he probably had altered his appearance. Posters took up the screen for minutes at a time. There were grids of Pablo Escobar faces—with mustache, without it, with head shaved, with nose altered, with the beard of a pilgrim, with the chin thinned out, with the cheeks deflated, with the cheekbones pulled up. I sat by the television learning the black and white lines of the Pablo Escobar faces on the posters: the parentheses by his mouth, the fat nose, the sideways commas of his eyes, opposing each other, as if they were bulls getting ready to charge. Only the sepulchral black, beady eyes repeated themselves down past rows and sideways past columns. Pablo Escobar eyes.
I asked Cassandra, “Can Pablo Escobar change his eyes?”
“Pablo Escobar?” she said. “Pablo Escobar can do anything.”
The third thing we still owned was the telephone. Mamá kept it in her room and it rang and rang. She picked it up mid-ring and then she was quiet and breathless as she listened into the receiver. The telephone cord coiled around her toes as she rotated her foot in circles.
* * *
I thought about how Papá kept small portraits of Cassandra and me in his wallet, so he could look at us with just the flick of his wrist. If anybody found his body, they would find our portraits and then they would know that this dead man had once belonged to two young someones. Papá kept our portraits behind the clear plastic meant for ID cards. Mamá had taken our portraits in the park when I was seven and Cassandra nine. In her portrait, Cassandra appeared without her glasses. It was striking how similar we looked. We could pass as twins if it weren’t for some minute differences: my eyebrows were messier, Cassandra was lighter-skinned, her forehead was grander, my lips were smaller.
Papá had once said that he showed the pictures to his workers so often, he wouldn’t be surprised if his coworkers could recognize us if they saw us walking down the street. Papá was always showing our pictures to everyone he met: the elevator man, the guards, the guy at the grocery store. Anyone could have noticed how much he treasured us; the way he faintly ran the tip of his fingers on the face of the portraits, the way his eyes fell back into memory, the way he enunciated, “Mis niñas.”
The hard, possessive hum of Mis, the misty aspirated vaporousness of ñasss; how the s trailed behind like the tail of a long snake.
“I present to you mis niñas.”
My loved ones, my pirates, my queens.
I was sure now that Petrona had taken the portraits that were missing from our album. She had taken them to give to the guerrilla group. I wondered where our portraits had ended up? In the grubby hands of the driver perhaps, or maybe they were with Petrona’s body too.
I sat in the garden and watched the wind turn at the gate. At any moment, Papá could turn the corner past the pine trees and finally come home. At last, at long last. I sang a song Mamá taught us:
Mambrú se fue a la Guerra
Qué dolor, qué dolor, qué pena
Mambrú se fue a la Guerra y no se cuando vendrá
Do-re-mi, Do-re-fa
No se cuando vendrá
Papá would turn the corner into our yard, walk down the stone steps, and look up. Forever changed.
* * *
Even though Pablo Escobar was on the run, he gave an interview on the radio. They played snippets in the news. He had called from an undisclosed location. The television scr
een went black and then I heard the voice of an interviewer: “For you, what is life?”
Pablo Escobar’s voice rang out: “It is a space full of agreeable and disagreeable surprises.”
The calm, bored quality of his voice surprised me. I blinked thinking how I had imagined dark things happened when someone like Pablo Escobar spoke—thunder, disembodied snickering, the sound, far off, of clashing cymbals. Instead, he spoke with the rote boredom of someone passing the time, as if he was reclined, too, in a hammock, and, I imagined, squeezing a stress ball.
“Have you ever felt afraid of dying?”
“I never think about death.”
I raised my brows, impressed. I thought about death all the time.
“When you escaped, did you think about death?” the interviewer continued.
“When I escaped I thought about life—my children, my family, and all the people who depend on me.”
“By temperament are you violent and proud?”
“Those who know me know that I have a good sense of humor and I always have a smile on my face, even in difficult moments. And I’ll say something else: I always sing in the shower.”
I was astounded. What song could Pablo Escobar possibly sing in the shower? The news show moved on from the phone call then, and went on to talk about a beauty queen.
The sound of the announcers and reporters filled my days. The hours shortened and lengthened, sagging and tightening like strings. I stared at the black gate past the garden. The gate swayed with wind, mourning metallically. I gagged from imagining Papá’s return. I didn’t want to picture what I suspected was not possible. Better to imagine the worst. At least then you could be prepared. The phone rang and rang and the four aloe leaves twirled. Time was, I agreed, a space full of agreeable and disagreeable surprises.
Fruit of the Drunken Tree Page 25
