Fruit of the Drunken Tree

by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

  When Mamá told Cassandra, Cassandra was hysterical, covering her ears, yelling for Mamá not to tell her anything else, ever. She was done hearing about Colombia. She needed to concentrate on excelling at school. She needed to attend events for all the different clubs she belonged to. She needed to apply herself, and be smarter than everyone else in order to take cracks at a system that was not made for her so that the system yielded what she wanted: scholarships, travel, opportunities, a life of her own.

  Mamá took me on a bus to the ocean. She held my hand as she bent by the shore collecting stones. “Have you ever wondered why the ocean is salty?”

  I pushed the hot sand on top of my foot.

  “See how royal,” Mamá pointed. We stood staring at the lull of the waves, then we sat. The white of the ocean was hallucinatory. As we sat there, sea salt coated the flesh of my lips, my hair, my lashes.

  “The secret is to carry what you were given with grace.” She pointed to the horizon. “Like that. What do you see?”

  I stared where she pointed, but I didn’t move or answer. I saw that the ocean was inhuman.

  I started stealing salt packets again like I’d done in Venezuela. I snapped them up from the condiment station at McDonald’s when the workers weren’t looking. I wet my finger, coated my finger, and sucked. The salt was something I could feel.

  Another year, another twelve more cassette tapes to the radio.

  * * *

  Just before I turned fifteen and Cassandra turned seventeen, Cassandra said she didn’t want to make any more recordings because it hurt her too much to have one-sided conversations with a ghost. Papá was gone, we needed to admit it. Mamá slapped Cassandra. I glared at her, her downcast eyes visible through the strands of hair that had flicked across her face. Who did she think she was? I wanted to slap her too. Cassandra was calm and said she was done living in the past, she couldn’t keep living two lives at once, and I yelled, “This is the present, Cassandra! Papá is alive—” and Cassandra said, “Are you sure he’s alive?” She waited a moment and added, “You don’t know, do you?” And Mamá was stabbing at her chest saying, “I can feel it, I can feel it.”

  Cassandra had won a scholarship to attend college across the city, and that summer she got a job as a secretary at a dentist’s office to make extra money. In our recordings to Papá, Mamá told him Cassandra was going to business school, he would be so proud of her, and I told him I was washing hair at the beauty salon where Mamá did nails. I told him Mamá was everyone’s favorite because they loved to hear her stories. Remember her stories? I asked Papá. Remember all those nights we stayed up hearing her tell her stories?

  Every night without fail, Mamá brushed Papá’s old coat, muttering, He is not gone, he will return, any day now, and I thought about how I’d had no answer when Cassandra asked if I was sure Papá was alive. The truth was I wasn’t sure. But I couldn’t assume him dead. How could I do such a thing?

  Two weeks went by and then Cassandra ripped the coat from Mamá’s hands and threw it on the ground. “What about when we were all together and you betrayed Papá with that man?”

  I was speechless and silent, and stricken tears fell down Mamá’s face. Her hands lay frozen as if she were still holding the coat and I ran to the bathroom with pen and paper. Fifteen is how old Petrona was when she betrayed us. And I needed to know whether Petrona had been raped, and whether she had been raped because of me. I turned on the shower and thought: Probably this letter won’t reach her. Her family’s shack collapsed. I saw it. I am writing a letter to a place that does not exist. Unless it has been rebuilt. What if I am writing to a dead woman? And even if, by some miracle, she does receive my letter, won’t Petrona tear it up upon seeing my name?

  I felt guilty about writing to her, because it was in violation of the rules of my tribe—Better to leave the past in the past, let sleeping dogs lie—but as I wrote to Petrona, locked in the bathroom, mirror fogging with steam, I was only aware of the drum of my age in my chest, how it connected me to Petrona, across distances, across time.

  33.

  A Home for Every Departed Thing

  It’s strange how you can forget a voice. After a few years, the tone and quality of it just goes. You can’t recall what it ever was. In idle moments, I stared up as if I was looking up the library of my brain, looking for the right aisle, the right call number that would lead me to the record of Papá’s voice. Was Papá’s a low baritone? Was his cadence slow? I didn’t understand how I could forget this central detail.

  I was trying to remember Papá’s voice as I waited for Mamá to be done reading the list of the recently released. But this day was different, because she pointed at the list unable to talk. Her hair was a frizz about her face as she motioned for me to read. The letters jumbled together and I read then reread the list, then Mamá read it again, and not being able to prove to ourselves that that was indeed Papá’s name printed on the paper, we called Cassandra at work and she rushed to us on her bicycle and when she arrived, some ten minutes later, she read the whole thing out loud, “In exchange for guerrilla prisoners, the biggest guerrilla group has released…” then she skipped to the bottom. “S-A-N-T-I-A-G-O, A-N-T-O-N-I-O.”

  “Is that him?”

  “Maybe it’s not him.”

  “Is that how you spell his name?”

  “It could be a different person.”

  We called a taxi even though we couldn’t afford it, and we cried as we rode to the consulate, “What if it’s him?” “It’s not him, don’t say that!” We could only speak in exclamations, and that’s how we paid the driver, how we burst into the office of the consulate, how we cut in line, how we came up to Ana, yelling that we needed help figuring out if it was really Papá who had been released, what if it was a different person with the same name, how many people in Colombia named Antonio, how many with the last name Santiago, how many Antonio Santiagos held by the guerrillas? Ana said she had Papá’s ID number, she would compare it to the list of the released. She punched numbers into her screen and Cassandra said, “It’s not him, it can’t be.”

  Then I was on the floor crying, and Ana was saying that it was Papá, and Mamá was angry with Ana, saying, “Don’t dare tell me things you’re not sure about, this is not a game,” and Ana pulled Mamá behind her computer, showing her, “Look, it’s the same ID—” Cassandra was looking too, and then she was talking quickly, asking what we needed to do to get a loan, to buy a ticket for Papá, to get his papers in order, did he need a hotel? Meanwhile Mamá repeated, “I can’t read these numbers on the screen, Ana. Print them out for me. They’re not the same.” Everything was tinged with our grief mixed with our joy.

  “You know he might be different,” a woman said, but we ignored her. My hands trembled and Cassandra was still asking about tickets and loans, and Ana was in tears too, telling us where to go and what to do, saying she would rush an application for his papers, and then Mamá and Cassandra and I ran—first to the bank, then to buy a ticket, then to our house phone to call Ana. Ana kept us on the line on one phone as she called the American embassy in Bogotá from another phone. We waited, the three of us, barely breathing, clutching different parts of one receiver. Ana came on and said the embassy in Bogotá would get Papá to the airport for the ticket we bought. She told us to wait; she had a surprise. “I’m going to hold this phone to the other phone, okay?” I imagined Ana sitting at her desk, holding the two telephones, ear to mouthpiece, mouthpiece to ear.

  “Madre, hijas” we heard Papá say.

  I blurted out a sob at the sound. Papá’s voice fit into a groove in my ear, deserted for so many years, now full of his timbre. How easy it was to recognize this once lost detail. There was a home for every departed thing.

  “Antonio, it’s really you,” Mamá said.

  “Papá—” I couldn’t say more.

  “Papá, you’re coming home
!” Cassandra said.

  “After all these years.”

  I could barely stand my own skin. Papá’s flight would arrive the following day. I didn’t understand how we were supposed to survive these hours of waiting. Mamá poured us shots of whiskey and then we tried to eat and then we tried to sleep. We sat staring at our television screen, without seeing what was on. Every once in a while one of us blurted, “What if we don’t recognize him?” I don’t know how time passed, how night came, how the sun rose.

  On our way to the airport, I panicked every minute, wondering what if the guerrillas changed their mind, what if they recaptured Papá, what if the airplane fell, what if he never made it?

  We watched many arrivals: one crowd from Mexico, another from Brazil—there were people who were native to those countries and arrived looking downcast and nostalgic after their visit home, but there were also American women arriving from vacation, their skin red, on their hands and heads other peoples’ cultures.

  I asked the same question again, “What if we don’t recognize him?” but added, “What if he doesn’t recognize us?” Cassandra was brave and said, “He’ll be the same, you’ll see.”

  I felt again like a child, waiting for Papá to return from a trip, dreading the moment of seeing him get out of the taxi, open the gate, and look up. He would be thin, I told myself. Old. I sat down, staring at nothing, minutes passing, trying to prepare myself. I stared at the tiles of the airport, not knowing what else to do. Was time passing or was I in the hell of an interminable minute? Cassandra told me it was time but my legs were asleep. I struggled to get up as a small crowd trickled out of the arrival gate. I hobbled behind Mamá and Cassandra, arrivals brushing past me. There was a tall blonde with two small boys, a stout man. I tried to shake my legs, but I couldn’t put my weight on them. A crowd of teenagers brushed past me, to my right and my left, and then Mamá and Cassandra squealed and jumped into the arms of a stranger, and suddenly I was holding the thin, frail frame of this man in borrowed clothes.

  Everything was sharp. “Papá?”

  The man was laughing out of a prodigious black beard. Was that what Papá’s laugh was like? I withdrew, frightened. Unlike when I had heard his voice on the phone, his laughter now, in person, didn’t fit anywhere in my memory of what Papá was supposed to sound like. Transform me into light when there is shadow, multiply me when necessary. The black bushy eyebrows were the same, but the skin around his eyes wore deep wrinkles and his cheeks sank in against the arc of his teeth, and his hairline had retreated revealing skin that looked soft and mottled. I struggled to put together the old features of the Papá I knew to this new, ravaged face on which even the eyes were different. I remembered how as a girl Cassandra had assured me that Pablo Escobar could change his eyes. I held on to this man’s forearm, wondering what if they had switched him, what if the real Papá had died. Cassandra with wet cheeks reached her hand into his pocket.

  She pulled her hand out with his—it was his hand with the index finger and the middle finger gone. I stared at the stumps, the skin where the fingers had been severed smooth and glistening as if wet. It was his right hand. This awful answer to an old question.

  I wondered, How easy would it be for the guerrillas to just cut another man’s fingers?

  The ravaged man allowed Cassandra to envelop his hand in hers and Mamá buried her face into his chest, “You’re home now, everything will be okay.” I searched Mamá’s face, then Cassandra’s, and I didn’t see any doubt, but relief. I was in a daze when we got in a taxi, thinking how was it possible that I was the only one that had doubts? I looked up and the man was staring into my face. It was a look Papá had never given me; in his eyes a flash of such suppressed desperation, or suppressed need, it took my breath away. Cassandra was biting her upper lip. Mamá was gripping her hands over her own knee. Nobody knew what to say.

  If it were the old days, we would have talked about the driver in Spanish knowing he wouldn’t understand us. Papá would have told us something about history. Maybe Mamá would have said, What does this remind you of? Remember our old road trips to see Abuela? Maybe Cassandra would have said, Who cares about the past? What’s for dinner? What do we want to eat?

  Sitting in the back of the cab, the four of us sandwiched together, I felt the weight of time. The years and strain of our lives of waiting. If the man was not Papá, there would be more waiting—I would have to gather DNA evidence, and save money for a test. People got paternity tests, I knew, as a regular thing, so maybe I could do the same. If the man was not Papá, we would submit the evidence to the consulate, and then we would have to wait for the government to recognize that the guerrillas had lied, and then there would be an investigation over what had obviously been an unjust execution. Maybe the real Papá had been shot and his body left in the jungle. I needed to know Papá’s final resting place. L.A. ran across my window. I showed the man the tall palm trees like the ones in Cartagena, the hot balmy weather, the pretty mansions, the clean streets. I wanted to make him comfortable; maybe he would slip up. The man rubbed his stubbed fingers with his thumb as he listened. It was a gesture Papá never had made. I stared at the man pressed against me in the cab, thinking what if we never recovered Papá’s body.

  At home, Mamá served what had been Papá’s favorite dinner—arepas fried to a crisp, steak, cabbage salad, and rice. The man had a difficult time eating. I stared at his fork pushing the food on his plate and noted there were mosquito bites on the arms of the man Mamá and Cassandra believed to be Papá. There were random cuts and scratches on his thighs and a red marking along his wrists and also around his ankles where he must have been bound, the dark brown skin bare, hairless, and raw. There was no doubt in my mind this man had been a captive too.

  Mamá remembered the coat she had been brushing for years and she retrieved it from the little closet by the door. She presented it to the man. “Every night you were gone, I brushed it so that it would be ready for you.”

  The man looked at the item of clothing, I thought not recognizing it, and he caressed it as he placed it over his lap. “Thank you, Madre.” That’s what Papá used to call Mamá, but maybe that would be an easy detail to find out. Anyone could have known that.

  * * *

  In our apartment that night, we heard the only things the man would ever say about his kidnapping.

  He said, “I was making my way back to the car in San Juan de Rioseco, I saw the peak of the Sierra Nevada; then seven guerrilleros stepped out of the fog.

  “They said: ‘Freeze or we’ll piss you with bullets.’ They said, ‘We have your girls, cachaco––better come with us.’ ”

  The man said he was blindfolded. The guerrillas shoved him through the jungle until they reached a guerrilla camp. He was put in a hut.

  There was the smell of jacaranda flowers in the air, that bitter honeyed smell, as a guerrillero aimed at the man’s fingers with a machete.

  When his fingers were gone, gone because the guerrillas deemed the man a traitor—once a communist and then a capitalist—the man thought of Emily Dickinson. He thought, “I must go in; the fog is rising.” He was a prisoner for 2,231 days. He moved camps sixty-eight times. He heard us four times on The Voices of the Kidnapped.

  When they told him they would let him go, three boys escorted the man through the mountain to the exchange site. They pushed aside the plants and trees with the point of their guns. The man thought to the very last minute they weren’t going to release him but shoot him.

  * * *

  I wondered if this man pretending to be Papá had been Papá’s cell mate. The Emily Dickinson quote was something I could absolutely picture Papá thinking as he lost his fingers. It rang true, but Papá wouldn’t have told that detail to just anyone, so maybe the pretender had been Papá’s confidant.

  I tried to ask the man more, specifically about what he had heard us say on The Voices of the K
idnapped, because this was something that could prove he was who he said he was, but Mamá told me to be quiet—let your father forget, Chula, leave it alone.

  I wondered who the man’s real family was. Why had he agreed to come to us to fake a life he didn’t know anything about? Was it for the prospect of living in the United States? Possibly it was the American citizenship, which was not easy to get and not cheap either.

  That night as I lay down to sleep I wondered if the guerrillas often sent a pretender to the families of the kidnapped. I had to admit it was clever. Papá had been missing for six years, and kidnapped persons were often gone for decades, so if ever anyone wanted to take over a person’s identity, pretending to be a kidnapped person was the perfect circumstance. By the time a kidnapped person was released, after the horror they’d been through, it was believable that their faces would change. Anyone remotely similar could pass for the real person.

  If the pretender gained the trust of the family, it was a way for the guerrillas to renew their blackmail. The guerrillas had given us a man with similar build, similar skin color, similar shoe size, but had failed in the thickness of hair, the posture, and the expression in the eyes. Where Papá had been able to emanate an effortless command, this new man was skittish, and insecure. The man now living in our house was afraid of large spaces. If he was outside, he was nervous and on edge until he was able to go inside a building. At night, the man didn’t want to sleep in Mamá’s bed, which I thought made sense, since he was a stranger to her. He took a blanket to sleep in a corner of the living room. He lay down between the wall and a table holding Mamá’s vase filled with potpourri. I couldn’t sleep at night and sometimes I wandered out of the small room I shared with Cassandra and looked for the man. The dining table hid him from view. I wondered what each object was meant to substitute. The wall of a shack, the trunk of a tree, the open air of the jungle, the soft bed of dead leaves.