Magical Realism for Non-Believers Read online

  Magical Realism for Non-Believers

  Magical Realism for Non-Believers

  A Memoir of Finding Family

  Anika Fajardo

  University of Minnesota Press

  Minneapolis ■ London

  Copyright 2019 by Anika Fajardo

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published by the University of Minnesota Press

  111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290

  Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520

  http://www.upress.umn.edu

  The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Fajardo, Anika, author.

  Magical realism for non-believers : a memoir of finding family / Anika Fajardo.

  Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2019]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018049197 (ebook) | ISBN 978-1-4529-6062-3 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Fajardo, Anika. | Fajardo, Anika—Family. | Colombian Americans—Minnesota—Minneapolis—Biography. | Minneapolis (Minn.)—Biography. | Colombia—Biography.

  Classification: LCC F614.M553 (ebook) | DDC 977.6/579053—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018037433

  To Dave

  Contents

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  Epilogue

  Acknowlegments

  Prologue

  When I arrived in Colombia, my father hugged me and kissed me as if we had done this before, as if we were family, as if we had not been apart for a lifetime. I remember the damp night air as I stepped through the whir of automatic doors from the antiseptic white of the terminal into the suffocating heat. Santiago de Cali, the capital city of the Valle de Cauca province, is only three hundred miles from the equator, and the tropical heat caught in my throat with its sweet pungency of exotic fruits and diesel exhaust. I remember hearing my name, a shout above the chorus of gritos. I looked up and saw a face that was eerily familiar.

  Even though two decades had lapsed since the pictures I had of him were taken, I could still identify this man. My father. Renzo. His black hair and mustache, now threaded with strands of gray, were recognizable from the yellowed snapshots. His high cheekbones (the ones I had inherited) looked like they must have at some point left a certain type of woman swooning. He wore thick, dark-rimmed glasses, and I suspected that the fine lines behind the lenses had come from years of winking at pretty girls. “Renzo was so handsome,” my mother used to gush—literally gush—and I tried to see in him what she had seen. But I could only compare his seemingly instantaneous aging (that transition from a young husband in old photographs to this graying man in real life) to that of my mother, whom I had watched throughout my life, day by day, and whose soft lines and fading hair were imperceptible to me.

  “Hello,” he said with a strong emphasis on the h as if it would get away if he didn’t catch it in his mouth. He was, I should have seen then, a master of understatement, a magician with unassuming gestures and kept secrets. This greeting in English seemed somehow hollow, falling short of expectation. Where were the Spanish flourishes to mark the occasion of a father meeting his adult daughter? But maybe he didn’t know what to say. What do you say to someone who is kin and yet not, who shares your DNA but about whom you know nothing? Hello was perhaps the only option.

  He put his brown hand on the shoulder of a young and solid-looking woman next to him. “This is my wife, María Cecilia—Ceci,” he said, and I kissed them both in greeting from across the barricade before making my way around the mass of Colombians, who greeted one another with the enthusiasm and abandon that I recognized as the missing ingredient in our first exchange.

  But when at last I had made it past the throngs of passengers and luggage, when no physical barrier was between us, he hugged me, squeezed me until my neck was cramped into an unnatural angle. He smelled of cigarette smoke and soap, and the wiry hairs of his mustache tickled my cheek. It felt strange to hug a man so small, no taller than my mother. When he embraced me—as if physical closeness could spawn intimacy—I held on, hoping and wondering if he was right.

  Ceci, cute and compact in a short sundress and thong sandals, hugged me, too. Her shoulder-length hair was pulled into an unruly ponytail and outlined her smooth, brown face. In an accent so thick I almost didn’t understand her, she greeted me enthusiastically in English.

  As I followed this man and his wife to their car, a foreign-sounding bird cried from the trees at the edge of the parking lot. I couldn’t help thinking of Macondo, the fictional village in One Hundred Years of Solitude, the town that had been formed by hacking away the vegetation of the jungle to make way for the Buendía family. I had read Gabriel García Márquez’s novel when I was in high school, and even while I was reading it, I had felt the weight of expectation that I should love the book because it was Colombian. Like the assumptions that I should prefer spicy foods and tan easily, it felt as if I should love everything Colombian because of my birthplace. And while I couldn’t tolerate hot chilis and my shoulders did occasionally burn on bright summer days, I had wanted to love the novel simply because I had wanted Colombia to prove to me how beautiful, magical, wonderful she was, to show me why my father had chosen her over me.

  “You sit in front,” my father said, climbing into the back of a tiny Suzuki jeep, which smelled of bananas and warm summer days. It was nine in the evening, and as Ceci honked and lurched around slow-moving cars and crowded roundabouts, I wondered if Colombia would always be for me a jostling and jerking of motion and movement, a stretching and folding of moments and minutes.

  I watched children—barely tall enough to peek inside—pester us at every red light, asking to wash the windows or sell us bags of unfamiliar fruit. I had not yet tasted the sweetness of the guyaba and guanábana and maracuyá. From the car I watched a black woman in a colorful turban selling something out of a basket that rested between her ample knees. “¡Chontaduros!” she called. Later I learned that I didn’t like this small, hard fruit cooked with salt—not everything in Colombia met my expectations or satisfied my palate. Young men on bicycles wove in and out among tiny cars and speeding traffic, oblivious to danger. Strung between turquoise and salmon buildings, white shirts and blue towels fluttered like flags. The lights of the houses on the hills surrounding Cali twinkled in the night and looked like stars.

  1

  When my mother first arrived in Colombia, she was nineteen, just a bit younger than I was now. I tried to imagine her seeing this place for the first time. For the tenth time. Did she get used to it? Did the things she saw eventually become just part of the landscape, or did they remain foreign? I tried to fit it all into what I had imagined, the man seated behind me into the shape of a father.

  Ceci drove and gesticulated, and my
father leaned between the seats. “Are you hungry?” he asked. “¿Qué quieres comer?”

  I didn’t know what I wanted to eat. I was barely off the airplane, still transitioning. My last meal had been something with rubbery chicken and atrophied mushrooms on flight 965, the same number of the American Airlines flight bound for Colombia that had, just one week earlier, landed not on the runway of the Alfonso Aragón International Airport but nose first in the mountains surrounding the city. The village of Buga was the deathbed for most of the nearly sixty people aboard the 757. My father told me later that his friend was in the village at the time and watched looters search for cash left in singed wallets and valuables hidden in dented suitcases. As news of the crash made its way around the world that day, I was in the kitchen of my mother’s little bungalow in Minneapolis, the one she bought after her second divorce. I was packing for the month between college semesters that I would spend in Colombia.

  “I’m so afraid,” I had told my mother from across the red linoleum, gritty with spilled sugar from Christmas baking. Fear had rippled through me and around me, infested its way inside the winter layers I wore, and bored into the vertebrae of my spine, the tendons between my toes, the soft palate beneath my tongue. I could feel every molecule of my body urging me: don’t go.

  “I know,” said my mother, who too had been alone when she traveled to Colombia as a young woman. She had probably been afraid, too, but her fear must have been a reflection of her sheltered upbringing and shy tendencies. She had gone for adventure, a semester abroad, a new experience; we both knew I had more to fear.

  When she sank into a creaky kitchen chair, I collapsed into her, weeping. She held me on her lap like a baby. “You don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”

  But I had to, I needed to. And one week later I found myself pressed into my seat by the acceleration of takeoff, my entire body feeling the preposterousness of air travel. When we were at last miraculously airborne, a man across the aisle leaned toward me. He had black hair and wore a button-down shirt over a stomach that was just beginning to paunch. He smiled and asked in better English than my Spanish, “Are you visiting family?”

  Family to me meant my mother’s little bungalow in Minneapolis, it meant a log cabin built by my grandparents on the edge of a lake in Minnesota, it meant uncles and cousins and friends who occasionally entered my trajectory. Could it also mean strangers in Colombia?

  “I’m visiting my father,” I told the man, the simplest answer.

  “Do you visit him every Christmas?”

  I shook my head. “I’ve never met him before,” I said. I don’t know what I expected from this explanation, this story I had told before. The story of my not knowing my own father. Like anyone’s life history, it is both intensely personal and yet in some way, acutely universal.

  The man nodded and told me that his wife’s daughter was also half-Colombian, that she had never met her father either.

  “Well, I was born there,” I felt the need to clarify, as if differentiating myself from what, apparently, was an epidemic of unknown and unmet Colombian fathers. As much as I wanted to fit in, I also wanted my unique story to be heard. “I just don’t remember him,” I added.

  But I wondered how different knowing and remembering were. I met countless people whose names I immediately forgot, I remembered stories that never happened, and I knew nothing about ones that had.

  Maybe, I thought as Ceci and my father exchanged mumbled, incomprehensible words while we were stopped at a red light, I would discover which was which. “My dear,” my father said, laying a hand on my shoulder. “We’ll eat at Crepes y Waffles.”

  I don’t think the crepes and waffles chain was around in the early 1970s when my parents lived together in Colombia. Maybe their marriage would have survived if it had been, if my mother could have ordered fast-food sweets. Colombia was more foreign then than it is now, and I wonder if globalization could have saved my parents’ marriage.

  My mother had told me about the salty, cheese-filled arepas you could buy on the street corners and the deep bowls of sancocho that accompanied every family gathering. She told me about her mother-in-law’s black beans and tamales.

  “Doña Rosa made the best tamales,” she would tell me. “They’re different from Mexican ones.”

  When I was growing up in Minnesota with my Minnesotan mother, Mexican food was the closest I had come to experiencing South American cuisine. She had served tacos with store-bought shells and sour cream, and we ate mild enchilada casseroles. For school reports about my birth country, my mother would help me make the laborious manjar blanco, and I remember the sweet, slightly burnt taste of the caramel-like Colombian dessert.

  Ceci pulled into a dirt parking lot, where teenagers and families loitered in the warm evening. The long wooden tables on the cement patio were crowded, and a menu was painted on the bright orange wall of the building. The strains of “Angels We Have Heard on High” playing through tinny loudspeakers reminded me of the Christmas Eve I had just spent with my mother and grandparents a few days before. I watched the white lightbulbs swing from wires above us and blot out the stars. This wasn’t anything like the Colombia my mother had described.

  We found seats at a wobbly wooden table, Ceci talking and my father smiling. Twenty years had lapsed since the pictures I have of him were taken, and although he still wore a mustache, he was shorter and looked older than I thought he would.

  “Ay, Renzo, que chévere, la familia acá juntos.” Ceci smiled at both of us. She looked much younger than my father, and I later learned that she had been his student in a photography class. My mother had been my father’s student for a time also, making me wonder about the cycles and circles we are bound to repeat.

  “Hay que estar cansadita después del vuelo y tanto viaje. ¿A dónde vamos mañana por la mañana?” She talked, and her words were like a machine gun’s rat-a-tat-tat. I struggled to understand and clung to anything I recognized: Family. Happy. Welcome.

  She turned to the menu and then to me. “¿Qué quieres?”

  What did I want? The last time I had eaten crepes they were broccoli-stuffed buckwheat ones made by my mother. She had fed me, her only child, on whole grains and garden vegetables; she had cooked with an agenda of health and economy. I looked at the menu and didn’t know what I wanted.

  The crepe Ceci ordered for me was decidedly not buckwheat. It was rich and sweet, filled with vanilla ice cream, a few plump strawberries, and smothered in thick whipped cream. The only relief from the tooth-aching sweetness was the delicate, light pancake. As I washed down each bite with sips of warm Coke, I thought about my mother’s crepes. I thought about Doña Rosa’s tamales and whether I would get to try arepas. I wondered what my mother would say one month from now when I told her my first Colombian meal was crepes.

  “¿Te gusta, no?” Ceci asked, grinning.

  I looked at the two strangers sitting opposite me and nodded. I did like it.

  There is a photograph of my mother from the early 1970s. She is framed by a window, her back to a Colombian cityscape. Vertical stripes of orange and white and brown decorate her hip-huggers, match her brown blouse. A shank of dishwater-blonde hair shades one eye, and her head is at an angle as if she is about to brush her hair out of her face with one casual move. She’s smiling in what was perhaps only a brief and fleeting feeling of contentment, no hint of the heartache to come. Photographs hold their subjects frozen in time, the only indication of passing years the yellowing of the colors and the softening of the paper. In real life, time marches onward, changing and transforming us.

  In an age before constant social media updates, my father had no idea what to expect from me when I arrived. Did he imagine that I would be slender and blonde like my mother had been? Did he picture me in a sundress and thong sandals like Ceci? In the airplane, I had watched the passengers become increasingly jubilant, effervescent, expansive. Spanish had bombarded me from all sides, buffeting and jostling me even more t
han the turbulence. As the collective mood rose, a parade of women tipped and swayed down the aisle toward the bathroom. In what looked like a practiced ritual, they went in wearing jeans and sweaters, shorts, and running shoes and emerged from the tiny closets like butterflies, their shirts and pants replaced with halter-neck sundresses patterned like jungle oases, with low-cut blouses and miniskirts, with spiky heels and open-toed sandals. Tired faces were redrawn with sun-kissed rouge and black eyeliner, smiles refreshed with crimson lipstick. I stumbled off the plane still cocooned in winter’s thick wool and my baggy, misshapen jeans.

  My very appearance—my actual being—was a marker for both my foreignness and artlessness, pointing out all the ways I didn’t belong. If I were to be kind to my twenty-one-year-old self, I would cut myself some slack for arriving in clunky Doc Martens, baggy Levis, and unflattering bobbed hair. After all, in 1995 the world was less connected than it is now with its instantaneous communication capabilities and 24/7 news cycle, and I had no way of knowing that Seattle’s grunge look hadn’t penetrated South America.

  That first morning, even before we left the hot valley city of Cali, even before we drove to his hometown of Popayán ninety miles to the south, my father and Ceci took me to buy new jeans. The low-altitude heat hung thick, and the sun beat down as Ceci zipped through traffic-clogged streets. She pulled up on a sidewalk next to a shop with open, glassless windows. Yanking the Suzuki into first gear, she climbed out and walked in ahead of me. The small space was lined from floor to ceiling with denim meant to lengthen the leg or accent a round behind. Even with open windows, the stench of sweatshop fabric and harsh cleaning products pummeled me. Instead of following us into the shop, my father chose that moment to stand on the sidewalk with a cigarette, leaving me at the mercy of Colombian fashion, an abandonment that felt almost like the one twenty years earlier.