Magical Realism for Non-Believers Read online

  “Tiene mucho culo,” Ceci had announced to the saleslady who approached us. A big ass.

  My mother had been shocked, she told me, by the frankness of the sexual tension in the air, the whistles and catcalls, when she first arrived in Colombia. “Ven acá, mamita,” the dark strangers called salaciously to her from car windows and on street corners. My mother had tugged at her shorts that suddenly felt too short. During that first semester in Colombia, she had stayed in a rooming house in Cali, where the proprietress looked after her and the other college girls like daughters. The only other tenants were two black-clad phantoms, old ladies who covered their heads in tight black scarves that accentuated the deep creases of their faces. My mother told me that the spinsters would tell them, What beautiful skin you girls have. And my mother had been startled by the compliment, had run a hand along her cheek. In Minnesota she hadn’t attracted that kind of notice; here she found that her accent and her pale skin made her desirable and charming.

  That I had mucho culo was, of course, no surprise to me, having carried around this ass my whole life. In ballet class when I was seven, the old white man who taught little girls pliés and chassés kept telling me to tuck in my tush. But I never could. It always sat out there by itself, and, having grown up surrounded by flat-bottomed Swedes and Germans, I could only assume that this was a bad thing.

  The saleslady, as if especially chosen to make me feel even more insecure, was petite but curvy in all the right places. She wore thick lipstick and chortled conspiratorially as she grabbed piles of jeans. Through the gap in the fitting room’s curtain, I could see Ceci absently inspecting the styles as she waited. I hated jeans, I thought as I pulled on the first pair, yanking on the belt loops to get the jeans past my hips. That day, still groggy with jet lag and culture shock, I studied my reflection in the mirror and saw only imperfections: the ill-fitting pants, the shadow of a pimple about to emerge, the teeth that were too far apart, the bushy eyebrows.

  At last a pair of jeans glided up with only a little tugging, and I emerged from the dressing room to get Ceci’s approval. She made a catcall whistle. The denim flaunted my ass and thighs in a way that reminded me of the sundress I wore for my role as bridesmaid for my mother’s second wedding. The dress was white cotton with a plunging décolletage that worried my mother. “In Shakespeare’s day,” my grandmother had assured her, “girls always showed off their breasts.”

  All the same, I had been barely fourteen, and my mother bought me a pink tank top to wear beneath the dress and provide a little modesty. Even with the extra layer, I remember feeling exposed. I had been acutely aware of the scooped neckline as I followed my mother down the makeshift aisle in the backyard, as I watched her giggling during the exchange of rings (which I knew, even then, to be a bad omen). After the ceremony, there was a pool party in the yard, and everyone changed into swimming suits. My mother’s new husband got drunker and drunker, sank deeper and deeper into his inner tube in the pool until he was a mirage, an illusion of a happy groom. My uncles had hauled him out of the pool and put him to bed, and I never really liked the white dress after that. I wished it wasn’t so white, so revealing.

  “A ver,” said Ceci, standing back to examine me.

  The jeans did not transform me, but in the shop’s large mirror I looked less pale, and my cheeks, perhaps from the effort of trying on jeans, had flushed pink in an attractive way. From this distance I couldn’t make out the pimple, and while I listened to Ceci and the saleslady, my mouth was closed, the gap in my teeth invisible. The inseam was too long, but the saleslady folded them under at the ankles, using the same technique that the cosmopolitan Spaniards had employed. I remembered my last day in Spain, when the taxi driver had mistaken me for a native.

  “¿A dónde se va? Where are you headed?” he had asked.

  “I’m taking the train to Madrid,” I answered in Spanish.

  “Are you going home for the summer?”

  I looked at him in the rearview mirror. “What?” I asked in my hard-earned Castilian.

  “Does your family live in Madrid?”

  I loosened the scarf around my neck, the one I had bought at Zara in Valladolid a few months earlier after admiring the scarves on the Spanish women. The taxi driver thought I was a Spaniard, I had recognized. After six months of studying not only the language but also the way the women walked and talked, the way they asked “¿Tienes fuego?” when they needed a light for their cigarettes, I finally fit in.

  And if I could do that in Spain, I thought, standing in front of the mirror, I surely could do it in Colombia, in the country where I had actually been born.

  “Perfecto,” the saleslady announced, stepping back to admire her work.

  I remember Ceci inspecting me. “Mejor,” she said. Better.

  My father lived on the outskirts of Popayán, a city in the Andes in southern Colombia. The house was in a middle-class subdivision along the Pan-American Highway called Campo Bello, which I translated as “beautiful country.” Beyond the borders of Campo Bello was open pastureland where white and gray cows grazed, the long flaps of skin under their chins waggling and their udders bulging. Single-family homes lined the unpaved streets at uneven intervals since not all the lots had been sold yet.

  My father’s was an elegant house with electricity, hot water, cable television. Part house, part fortress, it was surrounded by tall brick walls topped with broken bottles. In a land of drug cartels and right-wing radicals, these walls must have given the home a certain kind of rudimentary protection. Anyone attempting to scale the twenty-foot barrier would be met at the top with jagged glass that would cut the palms and leave a trickle of telltale blood. Just in case the walls didn’t do the trick, each night of my stay I watched Ceci line up empty beer bottles at the threshold of the front door to be knocked over by possible intruders. I never asked, but I wanted to know who kept vigil at night, who listened for the crash of glass bottles on tile floors, and what they would do about it. I wanted to know how they protected themselves.

  In the 1970s and 1980s, attempts at peace and reconciliation were made by the Colombian government and other factions, but in the 1990s, kidnappings increased, and Marxist guerillas roamed the countryside. By the time of my arrival in December 1995, Colombia was one of the most dangerous countries on Earth. The U.S. State Department warned against visits, and I was injected with all manner of vaccinations before departing. But my father, like all his neighbors, must have grown used to the extra precautions; they must have had a supernatural ability to keep an eye on peripheries; they must have learned not to jump at the sound of a backfiring car and not to wonder if it was a bomb. Even though sometimes it must have been.

  A half century of violence and unrest had turned a beautiful country into bloody headlines and marginalized political policy. I don’t know if my mother ever worried about the civil war that raged even during her time in Colombia or if she was too young, too naive, too invincible. She never told me. Instead, she told me about the warm friends and gracious neighbors and also about the unruly and crude boys in the English classes she taught. She talked about her mother-in-law’s delicious tamales, but she also told me how los suegros had their own key to the apartment in Popayán and would arrive unannounced. With in-laws of my own now, I cringe at the thought. My mother told me about the beauty of Colombia but was also quick to point out its idiosyncrasies, inconveniences, and irritants. The unspoken one being my father.

  My parents—before they were my parents—lived in a string of apartments and rented houses with varying levels of modern conveniences: the basement of my grandparents’ house in Minnesota, the apartment in Cali, the walk-up duplex in Minneapolis, and the haunted house in Popayán. They lived with hand-me-down furniture and cockroaches, they hung weavings and sketches on their walls, they walked down the block to use a pay phone. The 1970s were a time when many people perfected the art of going with the flow, and perhaps my mother watched it all with the detached observance of an outside
r. And she was young and in love. Love lets you overlook many shortcomings.

  “Would you like to unpack?” my father asked, opening the closet and taking out an old-fashioned luggage stand. He heaved my suitcase onto it, and I sat down on the bed in the guest bedroom of his house, where a vase of gerbera daisies in vibrant colors greeted me. In my real life, in my college life in Madison, Wisconsin, I worked at a flower shop, where I sold gerberas and lilies and bunches of alstroemeria. Beside the vase of daisies hung one of my father’s paintings, a dedication to me penciled in the corner near his signature. A twin bed stood next to French doors, which opened to an enclosed courtyard, and one wall of the room was painted dandelion yellow, which gave the gerberas a golden hue.

  “I love gerbera daisies,” I said.

  My father looked up from the floor of the closet, where he was rearranging boxes and shoes. “What?”

  “The flowers.” I gestured toward the vase. “They’re my favorite.”

  He stood up and smiled. “Me, too.”

  I was an adult. I could order a drink at a bar, I lived in an apartment, I did my own grocery shopping and cooking. But now, in Colombia, I was a child again.

  On my first morning in my father’s house, I came out from my bedroom to see a baby carrier leaning against the wall in the hallway. It was the color of the buttercups that I remembered from my great-grandmother’s lake cottage in Minnesota. Made of nylon and aluminum tubing, it looked sturdy but ancient. My father, dressed in track pants and a T-shirt, came from the dining room with a cup of coffee cradled in his hands. He handed it to me and said, “This was yours.”

  For a split second I thought he was referring to the coffee in my hand. Then I understood he meant the carrier. I had seen photographs of both him and my mother carrying me on their backs in the same kind of contraption. But those photos were in black and white, and I had never known it was yellow. And it was as if my past—the world—was getting colored in like a child’s drawing, one object at a time.

  “I kept it,” he said, kneeling down next to it. And I was afraid, for a moment, that he would want me to climb inside, to re-create a past that he remembered and I didn’t. “But now we are giving it to our friends Marcela and Denis who are having a baby.”

  I leaned against the wall and took a sip of the bitter coffee. For twenty years my father had kept the baby carrier, carting it around from house to house, packing it up with each move, never using it for its intended purpose. Now that I was here in person, perhaps the need for him to keep this memento no longer existed. But it also gave me the feeling that my appearance in his house was somehow a bookend to a story, not the beginning I thought it was.

  My father picked up the carrier, hoisted it on one shoulder. And as he held it out like an offering, I noticed his hands. There were traces of green paint under the fingernails. The skin on the backs was dark, age-spotted. These were the hands that changed my diapers, fed me bottles of warm milk, spooned me creamy rice cereal. The hands that never taught me to ride a bike or tie my shoe. The hands that never repaired scraped knees with Band-Aids and kisses. The hands that never loaned me the car keys or pinned a corsage on a strapless dress.

  Instead of reaching for the baby carrier or touching his hand, I wrapped mine around the coffee mug again and fled back into my bedroom, shutting the door. He didn’t follow me.

  During the afternoon of my first day in his house, I sat on the sheltered patio in the backyard, shaded by a lattice of woodwork and vines. My father sipped at his bottle of Club Colombia. I looked at the red-brick expanse that stretched from one bougainvillea to the other, drinking from my own thick bottle of Coke. The smell of citrus circled around me, and I saw two fruit-laden trees—an orange and a lemon.

  The abundance of food growing in Colombia was as startling as servants. On the drive from Cali to Popayán, I had seen lush coffee plantations, fields of corn, mango trees in the parks. Here were lemon trees in the backyard, yet I knew people in this country were battling over land and drug money, and children in the streets were begging. But in my father’s house in December, when we wanted an orange or a lemon, the only danger, the only difficulty we encountered was the sting of bees or the bite of flies. When all was calm, we just reached through the leaves, and the scent of lemon exploded into the yard as the fruit came off in our hands.

  My father smiled benignly as he sipped his beer, as if he saw nothing notable about my first moments in his house, as if we sat on his patio every day surrounded by the bees and the oranges. He no longer noticed the glass shards that protected him from the outside world, and I wondered if there were similar barricades still between us. We looked at one another, not even sure which language to speak in.

  “Bueno . . . ,” I began.

  “So, my dear,” said my father.

  “Yes?” I answered.

  “¿Sí, mi amor?” said my father.

  We were trains on opposing tracks, not sure which rail to take.

  I can’t imagine how my parents were ever able to communicate. My mother spoke nearly flawless Spanish from her years in Colombia, and my father had learned English while a high school student in the United States, so language wasn’t a difficulty. But my father is both overly emotional and fiercely closed off, and my mother reacts to everyone’s mood, switching back and forth between bliss and despair. I know they fought, fought about family and nighttime activities and disparate countries. But did they hold hands afterward, did they kiss and make up like couples throughout time? Or did they go their separate ways, close into themselves, seek refuge in silence?

  “This is my studio,” my father said in English, pointing toward the window behind me.

  We left our drinks and entered the room just off the patio. A desk faced the window, and a drafting table stood against a brilliantly painted wall. The wall was the color of dried apricots and stretched at least fifteen feet high. The ceiling and other walls of the studio were barren white and covered with framed posters of my father’s designs, paintings on tightly stretched canvases, plaques that honored his work as an artist, a graphic designer, a photographer, and a teacher. On the wall in his studio there were no family photographs but on his desk, under a large piece of glass, he had tucked old pictures. There was one of me as a naked baby, an old school picture of mine, another of an unnamed child, one of a group of strangers smiling and squinting at the camera.

  I had seen pictures similar to these in my mother’s old photo albums. One features my mother as a young woman with a group of other young, long-haired hippies. I knew it was 1974 because I could see the bulge that was me under her peasant top. My father, with his black hair and black mustache, has his arm slung around her shoulders. As a child I studied this photograph not because I wanted to know what my dad was like but to see if I could unlock the mystery of my own mother, the woman I knew so well and who had this mysterious and alluring history. But when I looked at the slightly blurry outline of her face, she just looked like a pretty young woman, no one in particular, no one of any relation to me. That’s how family is. We could be anybody’s daughter, father, mother. I was in this foreign country, thousands of miles from all that was familiar, trusting that this man was my blood relation. Sure, there was that roundness of the eyes, the faint shape of the nose, the coloring that didn’t come from my mother. But this man was no more familiar to me than the pictures under the glass.

  I stood in my father’s studio, looking at his desk and his walls and thinking about my mother and why she couldn’t stay with her husband, why she left Colombia, why she took me away. In that moment I understood, although I couldn’t quite articulate the reasons yet. I knew it had something to do with art and expectations, abandonment and claustrophobia, home and family. And I knew with heartbreaking certainty that part of what I would learn on this trip was the reality of my family’s past, the complicated truth of these two people who brought me into the world, the events that had aligned to create the life I was living.

  2


  I was born in Colombia. This is true. I was born in a Spanish-style whitewashed hospital that was later leveled by an earthquake and rebuilt in its likeness. I was born in a small city in the southwestern Colombian mountains, and my father congratulated himself with tragos while my mother swore and labored, screamed and pushed.

  I began my life in Spanish. This is true. Zapato and leche were my first words. I crawled on wooden floorboards and encountered tropical insects as big as soup bowls. I teethed on mango seeds, masticating the sweet yellow flesh until my tiny pearls appeared in pink gums. This is true.

  And if my mother had never taken me back to the United States, if my parents had never parted, never fought over me, never fell out of love, if I had grown up in that rented house in Colombia, I would have heard the peals of the iron bells of the iglesia. When my amigas went to mass with their abuelas, my hippie parents (a mezcla of American progressive values and Colombian pride) would have kept me at home, my mother reading aloud chapters from a dog-eared copy of Winnie-the-Pooh.

  If we had lived not in a Minneapolis suburb but in a town in South America, I would have watched my mother at her wooden loom, slapping the treadle against the warp with a comforting thud and singing the folksongs of Joni Mitchell. She would have played me scratchy records of Peter, Paul and Mary, and we would have sung along in two-part harmony. These recordings I remember so well from my childhood would have been, had we stayed in Colombia, the only time I would have heard English spoken by anyone other than my parents.

  My abuelitos would have adored me just as my maternal grandparents did. I would have been, for a time, the only granddaughter, a perfect excuse for spoiling and indulging. Dulcitas and caramelos and rides on the shoulders of my abuelo would have been mine.

  I would have worn my mother’s hand-sewn clothes embroidered with her original abstract flowers and designs. When my mother taught English, I would have stayed with a primo or the vecino next door. The neighbors would have fed me café con leche and taught me to dance the cumbia, wanting to mold me into a true Colombiana.