Fruit of the Drunken Tree

by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

  Petrona

  Between dreams, there was white powder floating into my face. Someone saying, This is what we do to traitors. I saw Aurora’s face. She stood in sunlight on a hill of sunflowers. Her cheeks were red from giggling. She lowered herself among the stalks, calling, Petrona, here I am! I am napping now. I went to search for her and there wasn’t a trace. Her body was gone.

  * * *

  There were men between my legs.

  I think I was dreaming.

  * * *

  Gorrión held my hand as we took a walk to the top of the Hills. He stared intensely at my face, Petrona, how can you stand to be so pretty. This had all happened before. It was like watching a film. His friends who I previously thought to be dangerous smiled at us. They called, There go the lovebirds, and, Look how cute they look together.

  Gorrión waved them away like they were teasing children and the men turned from us, laughing, still teasing. I wasn’t afraid when I was with Gorrión.

  Gorrión brushed a rock before I sat on it like I could not get dirty. I laughed at him because it’s like he forgot where we lived. We didn’t say much. We stared at the skyline of Bogotá. There were mountains so large and so blue, the city looked unimportant.

  Gorrión brought a handkerchief from his pocket and when he unfolded it all the way there was a small green stone resting on the fabric. It looked like glass, but he set it on my palm and told me it was an emerald like me. Would I be his girlfriend?

  I looked at Gorrión, and smiled. I said yes. His face melted then regained its shape. I was dreaming. The me in my head wondered, Where is my body? while dream-me didn’t know where to put the gem. Gorrión pulled out a round small plastic pillbox. It was see-through with a bed of cotton. He unscrewed the top and placed the emerald inside, saying this way I can always look at it.

  I shook the little emerald in the box but it stayed put, pressed against the cotton and the lid. Dream-me said, Wait till I show Leticia. Head-me said, If I concentrate I can open my eyes.

  Gorrión said, Don’t you ever show Leticia.

  Dream-me was telling Gorrión that Leticia was like my sister, that when I first arrived to work for the Santiagos, I had felt so alone. She recognized me from the Hills, and offered me a cigarette.

  Then I was walking next to Leticia in the Santiagos’ neighborhood. Leticia asked how my employers were, then told me she hated hers. She told me she made herself pretty and paraded around in front of the man of the house to make that woman cancreca who acted like she was a duchess angry. Then, when she knew she could trust me, she told me she also gave information about their bank accounts and whereabouts to the guerrillas. I could do that too, if I wanted, in addition to passing the manila envelopes into which neither of us peeked. I fingered the little round pillbox in the pocket of my maid’s uniform. I remembered having that conversation with Leticia, but I didn’t have the emerald at that point. I was definitely dreaming. Head-me was weighted down by something. Head-me said, Wake up. Wake up.

  * * *

  There was a dirty white room. I was on a mattress low on the ground, Gorrión screaming Enough! from the doorway. A man mounted on top.

  * * *

  I was gone again, in the Hills at first, and then I didn’t have a body or a name. I was in a garden of sunflowers. I was blades of grass pushing up against dirt.

  29.

  God’s Nail

  Pablo Escobar’s family was trying to leave the country too. The police apprehended them at the airport when they were trying to leave for the United States. The news cameras were there to capture the embarrassing scene—the police pulling Pablo Escobar’s wife and his two children from the passport control line, Pablo Escobar’s wife protesting, arguing, and then the camera focused on Pablo Escobar’s young daughter, a nine-year-old girl wearing a kerchief, who seemed unaware of anything that was happening and was playing on the floor with a fluffy white dog. I knew she was nine years old because the reporter said so, speaking over the footage, adding that the little girl’s hearing had been damaged in a bomb blast when a rival cartel made an attempt against their lives, and that was why she was wearing a kerchief.

  I sympathized with Pablo Escobar’s family. If you forgot for a minute about Pablo Escobar, they were just a mother, a boy, and a girl, going from embassy to embassy—American, Spanish, Swiss, German—begging for refugee status.

  Nobody wanted to take the family in. The embassies said that Pablo Escobar’s children were underage and they needed a notarized letter from the father in order for them to leave the country. A notarized letter meant that Pablo Escobar needed to turn himself in. Because to get a letter notarized you had to show up at a public notary, stand in line, give your signature and thumbprint, swear an oath, and only then would the official press a series of seals on your document and glue down some stamps and sign it. Everything had to be notarized in Colombia. Who came up with the system? When Mamá needed to open a new bank account, she had to get a letter notarized confirming that she was who she said she was.

  When Mamá said we had applied for refugee status and were going to Venezuela to wait for our papers, I was suddenly short of breath. “We need a notarized letter, we’re underage.”

  “Chula, what are you talking about?”

  “But what about Papá? You can’t seriously leave him here!” Cassandra cried.

  “What good are we to him dead?” Her lips turned down. “We’re leaving Friday night.” That was in two days.

  Thinking of Papá, my breath thinned in my stomach. I rushed to the bathroom and vomited. I could barely keep anything in my stomach. I ran out of breath often. I hid in Petrona’s old room and held my head in my hands. If Mamá was taking us to Venezuela we were in immediate danger. But at least it wasn’t that far. We didn’t know anybody in Venezuela, I could not imagine where we would go.

  I ran outside. I wanted to say goodbye to somebody, but Isa and Lala were gone. I kept running down the street, everything blurred, and then I was catching my breath at the Oligarch’s door ringing and knocking desperately, and the Oligarch was asking me what was wrong. She was wearing a long cotton dress, black to her ankles, and her feet were barefoot on the tiles. Her arms came over my shoulders and then I was sitting on the couch, in that plush room I had seen only from the window and being there was all I had imagined, as I blurted out, “My father has been kidnapped.” I cried, not inhaling.

  The Oligarch covered me with a blanket. “Where is your mother? What is your name?” She touched my chin and pulled tissues from a golden box on the table to dab at my wet cheeks.

  “Mamá wants us to leave the country, without Papá.

  “Please,” I added, but I didn’t even know what I was asking. All I wanted was to be in the proximity of someone whose life was going according to plan. All I wanted was to cry in that well-ordered living room, with the heavy yellow curtains matching the tasseled pillows on the couch, to cry and look into the face of that woman who seemed so well-put-together, so balanced and poised. She stared at me patiently.

  “My own mother was kidnapped. I was a little older than you,” she said. “Is this why you’ve come?”

  I shook my head no. The Oligarch went to a table and pulled on a little drawer. She brought a small cedar box and opened it on her lap. Inside there was a brown braid of hair and a rosary. The hair and rosary were all the things she had left from her mother. The Oligarch hugged me close and crossed herself and took up the beads. “Creo en Dios, Padre todopoderoso, Creador del cielo y de la tierra…” She prayed the full Rosary as I nestled against her chest, soothed by the sound of her voice, staring at the braid of her mother’s hair sitting in that box. When it was done, we sat together for a while longer and then she walked me in silence to my house. She kissed the crown of my head and knelt and looked into my eyes. The whites of her eyes were filled with red little veins, but her pupils, dark brown and large, were ste
ady.

  I went back inside the house and when I turned, the Oligarch was gone. I ran to my bedroom and I ripped the plastic off the window. I searched the empty lot for the cows. They stood by each other, near each other maybe because of the cold, chewing grass in the close distance. I bit my lip and mooed at them. There were so many things I wanted to tell them. I was leaving. My father was kidnapped. Petrona was gone. I would miss them. I tried to get across the fact that Antonio needed to be a good cow, and honor my father’s name. I mooed, trying to tell them everything through the lonely sound. The cows looked up in my direction and threw their heads back, then they lay down on the grass. Maybe they were saying goodbye. I fell on my knees and I did not wipe the tears that came.

  * * *

  At night the walls ran high and bare to the ceiling, and the mirrors throughout the house multiplied the emptiness.

  The mirror in Mamá’s bedroom, facing the bare wide windows, reflected the slate clouds. The windows were open.

  I sat in the space where Mamá’s bed had been, and when the storm came, instead of getting up to close the window, I watched the surface of the mirror trembling from the wind. If I looked at myself in the mirror, my face shook as if I were in an earthquake.

  I looked into the mirror for a long time. For a while, I started to believe I really was in an earthquake. But when I looked away, everything was still. I was still. Great huffs of wind lifted my hair and I listened to the howl of the storm. The air always smelled sweet in the rain from the scent of the Drunken Tree.

  The rain reached me and I got up to close the window. But I could not bring myself to close it and I stared at the bruised and bulbous sky. My shirt was wet. The Drunken Tree was blowing in the wind up-skirted. I reached for the window handle.

  “What are you doing?” Mamá asked from the bedroom door.

  “Closing the window,” I said.

  “We have nothing to save from the storm,” she said. “There’s no reason to close the window. Let the storm come in if it wants.”

  I turned to Mamá. She was leaning on the door frame and her eyes were closed against the handle of a broom. My heart was beating fast. I walked past Mamá, swallowing everything, and then tiptoed around the empty house. There were no runners in the hall, no tables, no paintings, but I pretended they were still there. I walked through the house sidestepping the imagined dotted outlines of our furniture: the paintings, the vases, the lamps, Papá’s books. I visited each bedroom and traveled up and down the stairs.

  The air around the ghost objects felt charged and solid. Space held in place compact over ghost tables, chairs, and bed frames. In the dining room, the carpet dipped in creamy light circles where the table legs used to be. That was how I knew where the ghost table was, the sofa chairs, the glass cabinet.

  I thought of all the objects in relationship to Papá. The chair Papá had sat in. The runners his feet had walked on. The rails he had rested his hands on.

  Then, I found the last of Papá’s belongings in the house hiding in the dark corner by the refrigerator, overlooked, forgotten, dusty.

  It was a scarlet-tinted bottle of whiskey sequestered in the darkness. I reached for it and holding it against my breast, I ran and took it to the indoor patio.

  Papá’s whiskey.

  When I uncorked the top I breathed in the scent greedily. The smell was bitter and churned in my throat. I took a small sip, imagining I was Papá. I remembered Papá’s wooden-scented breath laughing over his whiskey. It was a gagging feeling, but I continued to take sips until I felt the floor rising up to meet my feet. I couldn’t think straight, but there was nothing to think. I left the bottle behind the fridge, and I staggered up to my room crying, crawling to avoid the ghost objects.

  I imagined Cassandra couldn’t help but feel the ghost objects like me. When I came into my bedroom, a chill of wind came through the uncovered window and Cassandra was sleeping in the rectangle that used to be her bed when we shared a room. Her chest heaved, snoring quietly; Papá’s black wool coat, which Mamá had saved, wrapped around her legs, and her hair tousled and knotted around her. She looked so peaceful sleeping: her shiny black hair in waves about her head, and her skin with twitching, muscular secrets underneath. I walked around her ghost bed and I went to lie down in mine.

  I spun lying down. I stared at the night sky through the window frame. The rain had stopped and now the sky was clear. I stared at the stars shining in the black sky. Like brilliant pearls. I sped forward but they vibrated vertically. They popped and popped.

  Only the crescent moon stood in place.

  The crescent which Abuela said was God’s nail. His hand or his foot.

  30.

  Two Fingers

  When it was morning, Cassandra lifted her head from the floor and she looked toward the bedroom door. Her eyes opened in tired slits, the pattern of the carpet printed on her left cheek. She yawned, closed her eyes, and dropped her head heavy on the cross of her arms. I went downstairs and sat in front of the small television. There were cartoons, then an image of a man facedown on a roof took up channel after channel. Blood pooled underneath his body on the roof tiles. Then the reporter was speaking over the images, saying, “The police are preparing to take the body to the medical center for an autopsy.” I couldn’t breathe, thinking what if it was Papá, but policemen came and when they turned the body to place it on a stretcher, I saw it wasn’t Papá. It was Pablo Escobar. On the stretcher, Pablo Escobar’s hair fell long over his ears, and his face was wet with sweat, but his body was so still I immediately knew he was dead. This man I had feared, dead.

  There were crowds of people on the street, waiting in a hush, as the stretcher was hooked onto ropes and lowered from the roof. Even as the stretcher came swinging at street level, people remained quiet and only reached their hands to touch the body and then they traced a cross over themselves. The policemen escorted the stretcher through the river of people, allowing the people to touch Pablo Escobar, his hair, his bloodied shirt, his arms. There was the sound of women crying.

  Television specials, expert interviews, press conferences—the sun fell then rose in the background of the same information rearranged then said anew. I stayed near the television. I didn’t tell Mamá or Cassandra that Pablo Escobar was dead. We each hid in separate corners in the house, dealing with our own horror. Watching the television is how I dealt with my grief, seeing the unfolding event of Pablo Escobar’s death—experts gave their opinions, witnesses gave their statements, then the president congratulated the police snipers who had shot Pablo Escobar, decorating them with medals, speaking to a crowd, “Colombia’s worst nightmare has been slayed.” In Medellín people were in mourning. There was live footage at the cemetery, rivers of people chanting Pablo, Pablo, Pablo! They pressed against each other and the pallbearers carrying the silver casket, trying to run their fingers on the wood, trying to capture the feeling of the wood that carried the last of Pablo Escobar. The thousand mourners called together: “Se vive, se siente, Escobar está presente!”

  The camera caught a few seconds of Pablo Escobar’s widow, crying behind a black veil, and then her children. I only saw Pablo Escobar’s daughter for a second, but that’s who I wanted to see the most. She looked down, pale and bewildered, staggering next to her brother. Then the camera showed the scene from above. The casket was being lowered. Many hands held on to the casket. Someone flipped open the lid, and for a moment the news camera caught Pablo Escobar’s face. Red roses framed that pale face, his eyebrows splayed themselves at rest over his swollen eyes, and a thick beard grew out of his chin. He died fat, another man. Then the silver casket clicked shut and was lowered. A tractor dumped a mountain of fresh dirt over it.

  It was dark when Emilio’s taxi arrived. Emilio was haggard and he put our suitcases in the trunk and then he held Mamá. I cried against his shoulder, his wide shoulders like Papá’s shoulders. I cried incessa
ntly. I rocked, sure that Papá would show up at the last hour, the last minute, the last second. Now he would be lost to us forever. It was raining. We were on the highway, streaks growing long on our windows. I saw Pablo Escobar waiting at a streetlight in a dripping wet trench coat. I jolted up and pressed my hand to the window. Pablo Escobar stared at me, frozen, then he spit and turned on his heel, burying himself in the shoulders and umbrellas of pedestrians.

  Then I saw Pablo Escobar holding a wet newspaper at a different corner, I saw him crossing himself in front of a church, saw him struggling with an umbrella that had turned inside out, saw him running with his chin tucked close to his chest and a book under his arm. Rain fell all over the city.

  I remembered Cassandra said that when Pablo Escobar found out someone had betrayed him, he sliced the person’s throat and pulled the tongue out and left it hanging out the slit. I got the pressing desire to touch my tongue then, squeeze it in between my fingers. I wondered what not having a tongue would be like. You would probably forget you didn’t have a tongue, and would try to move the red, lean muscle, but there would be nothing to move. Just the empty dark hall of your mouth. You would be alone with your thoughts.

  At the airport Mamá tried to give money to Emilio, but Emilio wouldn’t take it. He pressed money of his own into Mamá’s hands, telling her it was his savings, telling us to be careful. I puked in the bathroom. When we boarded the airplane it was night, and my chest congested with tears. The air lengthened in long, stretchy strings inside me. I couldn’t breathe. There were terms for what we had become: refugees, destitute. I clicked my seat belt on and from the airplane window I saw the bright blinking lights of the city. I ran my fingers along the scar on my face from the car bomb. The skin imperceptibly tucked in a long line across my cheek. It was cloudy, and the shimmering lights of Bogotá disappeared behind the clouds. I didn’t care where we were going anymore.