After the successful bladder surgery, I spent several days in the hospital. I shared my room with a little girl, who cried when it was time for her to go home. I watched with disbelief as she fought getting her shoes on. Her father cajoled, and the nurses smiled. I remember watching and wishing I were in her place, wishing I was the one going home, wishing to be anywhere but in that dark hospital room.
My mother stayed with me every night, tried to sleep sitting upright in hard hospital chairs listening to the hums and beeps of the unit. One night she took a respite and went back to her bed for a much-needed night of sleep and a shower. It was that night, though, that I remember. I awoke in the semidarkness of the hospital room and screamed. A nurse in scratchy white cotton took me to the nurses’ station and settled me on her lap. It wasn’t a children’s hospital, and I’m sure the nurse’s job description didn’t include comforting hysterical three-year-olds. My mother never left me again during that hospital stay.
After he mopped the café’s floor, my father drove me home in the Suzuki, the dirt roads of the neighborhood jolting my poisoned stomach until I cried. He helped me into the house, and I immediately threw up again. When Ceci got home, they tucked me into their big, queen-sized bed. Their room had an en suite bathroom, and the toilet was a few steps away from the bed. I didn’t always make it. My father cleaned up after me again while I lay prone, as helpless as a baby.
My father called a doctor—a friend, I’m sure (my father was friends with everyone). The doctor came with an actual black bag and brought me some kind of electrolyte drink. I couldn’t keep that down either. For two or three days I vomited.
When I was a baby, my parents used cloth diapers fastened with pastel-colored diaper pins. My mother scrubbed them on a washboard. My father also changed diapers. He cared for me while my mother went to work teaching English. He changed me and burped me. But only for the first two years. That’s all he had: two years of caca-filled diapers and cuddles, of lullabies and baby food, of chubby bellies and shrieking cries. While he escaped most of the more unpleasant parts of parenthood, he also missed out on the best. The image of him mopping my vomit from the floor of a café gives me some satisfaction. After my bout of food poisoning, I felt kinder toward him, felt like he was more mine, more my father.
8
We were on our way to hike at La Laguna de San Rafael in Puracé National Park, and Ceci, who was driving the Suzuki, pulled over on the side of the road somewhere in the hills outside Popayán.
“Mira,” Ceci said, leaning forward to point at something out the windshield. “That’s the Puracé volcano.”
In the distance I could see the fuzzy outline of a mountain. Although I was born in the Andes, I knew almost nothing about mountains. I had grown up with Minnesota’s endless prairies and pine forests that engulf you. In a midwestern landscape, there is less to wonder about, more, I think, that is visible and obvious, right in front of you. Minnesota, with the exception of a few fairies I saw when I was eight, is barren of magic. It is a solid place built on bedrock where the ground doesn’t move and mountains don’t spew volcanic ash.
“Don’t worry,” Ceci added. “The volcano hasn’t erupted since 1977.”
In 1977 I had been three years old, far removed from my beginnings in Colombia. By then I was already in Minnesota with my mother. I had already become an American.
When we reached a high plain above the tree line, my father gestured at the rugged landscape. “This is the páramo. It’s like a cold rain forest.”
I have since learned that he confused his definitions, a páramo being nothing like a rain forest but rather an ecosystem sometimes described as tropical alpine tundra. And yet, he explained it with such authority and clarity, it made me wonder what version of truth he lives.
“In Puracé,” he said, “you can see four ecosystems: forest, subpáramo, páramo, and snow. Can you believe it? Snow, just like in Minnesota.”
My father had been gleeful in this lecture. Snow fascinated him in a way unknown to people who grow up around the stuff. He loved the study of white on white, the exploration of shadow and color. His art was filled with blank spaces as if everything could be explained by omission. Now I wonder if his art has always been an extension of the way his mind works; secrets are part of the whole, a necessary texture that makes everything around them stand out.
“Those are frailejones,” Ceci said, pointing again. I could only assume she meant the little treelike plants that dotted the open field of the páramo.
“Monks,” my father translated for me. “Don’t they look like little men?”
When I looked back at the field, I could see armies bobbing and weaving in the wind, like the attackers that Don Quixote must have battled. It put me on edge, that recognition that we were all perhaps one anthropomorphic succulent away from insanity. And that was when Ceci stopped the car again.
I looked out the window to see what sight she was showing me now. But there was no panorama. Instead I saw a military vehicle in the middle of the road. At least it looked like a military vehicle to me. It was painted a dull color, very dark, maybe black or green. Three men (or maybe just two) stood in front of the truck, feet wide apart, hands on automatic rifles.
Ceci pulled on the emergency brake with a loud creak, and my father reached between the seats to lay a hand on my shoulder. The men stood beside their truck, holding machine guns cradled in their arms like the bouquets of flowers the soprano accepts at the end of an opera. And in a way it almost looked a performance, the men with their guns posing like stereotypes of Colombia’s dangers. I had been immunized against hepatitis A and B, typhoid, and tuberculosis and given a bottle of malaria pills (even though Popayán’s altitude keeps mosquitoes away). But I was happy to take those remedies because I didn’t know how else to prepare for this place, how to be safe. Even though I knew there was no vaccination to protect against violence or bad luck. Or heartache.
We watched one of the men walk toward us. He walked with the self-assurance of someone holding a weapon that can kill you; his movements were sure and solid without any hesitation. I’m not sure how afraid I was then because even as I remember this moment, the reality of my fear chokes me. I needed to be afraid, and the thought that I didn’t know enough to be afraid makes me even more frightened for the version of me at twenty-one who watched the barrels of rifles approach.
The man stood at the driver’s side. He had clear brown skin and inscrutable eyes. Ceci rested her forearm on the open window. She said nothing.
“Get out,” said the man. “Get out, leave the car.”
Suddenly everything seemed to happen in fast-forward. Before I knew how it happened, I was climbing out of the Suzuki followed closely by my father, who said under his breath, “Whatever you do, don’t open your mouth.”
I would have obeyed anyone who told me what to do at that moment, but there was something about being commanded by my father that felt both reassuring and strange. If I had grown up with him, would he have told me to eat my spinach, clean my room, brush my teeth? Perhaps if there had been shared custody, a coming and going of weekends and summer vacations, I would have tried to get away with not listening to him. He might have been the parent I could have manipulated, smiled sweetly at, and kissed on the cheek. I might have become skilled at persuasion and argument, letting my role as daughter give me an edge over doing what I was told. But even if that had happened, I would still have kept my mouth shut that day. There was an urgency in his voice that let me know that this was a matter beyond either of us, beyond decisions and thinking. This was a time to follow, not lead.
The three of us stood down the road a couple dozen feet from the Suzuki as the men searched it. We were just three more bobbing heads, as immobile as the frailejones. Ceci and my father were calm but said nothing as we waited. When I had told my mother before my flight that I was afraid, I had not thought beyond the danger of plane crashes. Even my overactive imagination didn’t have the vocabulary to conju
re barrels of guns and the crunch of boots on gravel. I had been using fear as a placeholder for the anxiety I felt about meeting my father and the fear of finding out about my parents and my family and, ultimately, myself. But here was a different kind of danger, a danger real and palpable. A bird called to its mate as we stood together in the road, and somewhere in the valley below us a truck ground its gears.
At last the soldiers, rifles at their sides, motioned us back to the Suzuki. As the men stepped aside, Ceci put the car into gear again and swerved around their truck. As we left them in the dust of our tires, my father said, “If you would have spoken, they would have known you weren’t Colombian.”
I didn’t ask what he meant by that. I was already learning that if you don’t want to know the answers, you shouldn’t ask the questions.
9
My father and I walked arm in arm through the streets of Cali as if we had been walking like this our whole lives. We had just eaten flatbread and tahini at my father’s favorite restaurant, and we stopped near the fountain in the middle of a plaza, where baobabs and coconut trees leaned over us. We sat on a bench as if we were not strangers. And in the darkness of this Colombian night, the sound of water drumming in my ears, I could believe it. He pulled a single cigarette from his breast pocket but did not light it. There was a momentary, contemplative stillness as we sat side by side.
“I fell in a fountain once,” I told him. The two of us had come to Cali for a couple days of sightseeing in the tropical city, and we needed a story. This one would fill in the space between us. Stories have that kind of power. “I was walking along the edge of this fountain when I was little,” I told him, “and then I fell in.”
I turned to face this man, waiting for him to laugh. Everyone laughs at this story. But my father’s face was stone.
“I was there.”
His words hung in the starry air like threads of time.
I remember, I told him, a fountain. In a big space, maybe indoors. I remember walking along the edge, the rippling water sparkling under my feet. I must have held my arms out like a tightrope walker, balancing between one world and another.
And then, I told him, I fell. I tipped over, one of those falls where one moment you are upright and the next you’re in the water, soaked through like a prehistoric amphibian, your black hair matted to your head and your clothes floating. I was scared. I didn’t tell him how scared I was in those moments before someone lifted me out of the water.
A red-checkered tablecloth. A waiter wrapped me in a red-checkered tablecloth. I sat on my mother’s lap, cuddled close to her as I was warmed, relieved of my fear and surprise and embarrassment.
“I was there,” he said again. “It was at the Black Forest Inn.” It was eerie to hear him speak with such authority about a time from my childhood. He had always been an imaginary father, the one I knew existed but had no memory of. And now, here he was, telling me something about my own life, something he knew and I didn’t. “A German restaurant. We liked to go there, your mom and me and Dick and Sally. There was a courtyard with a small fountain. Do you remember that restaurant? Is it still there? Shit.” He spoke in English, his accent still peppered with American colloquialisms from the 1970s. “It was a great place to drink German beer.”
Even though his body was still next to me on a bench in Cali, Colombia, I could see that in his mind he was once again drinking beer with my mother and her parents in a restaurant in Minneapolis. The echo of falling water in the blackness sounded vast and forgiving. He rolled the cigarette between his thumb and forefinger and then cupped his hand around the match. The phosphoric smell rose as the flame lit, and I was suddenly chilled by the night air.
“You fell in.”
I began to calculate. It must have been a time when he and my mother were still married and we were still an approximation of a family. There is a small window of time when all this could have happened, shortly before talk of divorce, perhaps even days, minutes before. I try to picture myself as part of a little family with a mother and a father and a baby girl. We would have been dressed like hippies, I would have been wearing something hand-sewn and sturdy shoes to help me walk steadily, something that gave me the confidence to balance on that ledge. I couldn’t have been more than a year or two.
I have no memories of my father. People used to ask me, “What is it like not having a dad?” I never knew how to answer them. What is it like living on the moon? What is it like having three hands? These are unimaginable things, preposterous even. “Don’t you miss having a father?” they would ask. I longed to say, Don’t you miss being an astronaut? And they would answer, I don’t know, I’ve never been an astronaut. And I would say, Exactly.
With no memories of my father, how could I be sure he was ever there? Now, here was the proof. That memory, that connection. In the form of a fountain. The possibility that my memories coincided with his.
But I know that memories can be tricky and fluid, can fade in and out and transmute themselves. We can take over other people’s memories, shape them with repeated recitations, mold them until they suit our needs. Our own memories are just as easily manipulated and kneaded and refined from internal or external forces until they are either further or closer to the truth. It is possible—probable even—that I have been told the story of falling into the fountain so many times that I only think I remember it, that it isn’t a memory but a story.
I said this to my father, and he nodded. We listened to the water rushing over the marble in front of us.
“But I remember the red-checkered tablecloth,” I said. I remembered it so clearly I could feel the overwashed cotton and smell the chlorine soaking into the cloth.
“It was a red-checkered tablecloth,” he confirmed.
“No one would have told me a detail like that. People don’t say, ‘And then you were wrapped in a red-checkered tablecloth.’”
He exhaled smoke into the night air, contemplating this.
“Do they?”
“They probably don’t.”
I looked over at him. He said little; he didn’t process through words. I was afraid my sequence of spiral thinking might have pushed his English comprehension to the brink. But I couldn’t stop talking. My words tumbled out, one after another, falling.
“It isn’t the kind of detail you tell people, at least not over and over. And I would have had to hear that story over and over again so that I would internalize it enough to make it feel like a memory. It must be a memory. I was there and I remember.”
I saw the orange end of his cigarette light the darkness. Perhaps he was still in Minnesota with his first wife, drawing on a pint of Spaten.
“I remember,” I repeated, more to myself than to him. “I remember that red-checkered tablecloth.”
He finished his cigarette, and I watched it roll across the sidewalk. I could tell that he didn’t understand what this meant to me. I had no childhood memories of him, but I remembered a moment, and he was in that moment, and I felt like I really was his daughter, like I really was born of a mother and a father, and that my father came from Colombia, and by some twist of fate he found himself with a daughter in a German restaurant in Minnesota, and the daughter fell in a fountain, and there was his wife swaddling their baby in a red-checkered tablecloth.
“So do I,” he said, squeezing my hand.
We stood up and walked past the fountain. Arm in arm again, we crossed the deserted plaza until the sound of our footsteps moving forward drowned out the falling water behind us.
10
My father talked and told me nothing, he showed me photographs and explained none of them, he embraced me but somehow kept his distance. He wanted to keep me at arm’s length and yet close. When Ceci wanted to take me and her niece María Fernanda to the hot springs at the Termales de Coconuco, he was reluctant to let me go.
“We’ll be back tonight,” Ceci had cajoled, soothing him like a woman accustomed to the job.
“Be careful,” he said a
s if he had a right to say that.
I was relieved to get away from my moody father for the day; three days of travel to Cali with him had been exhausting, as was being his daughter. And the hot springs were as breathtaking as Ceci had promised they would be. The small, natural pool known as the Aguas Tibias—lukewarm water—was crystalline. Fed by a mountain hot spring, the water was blue, and the little pool was rimmed with the ferns and grasses of the mountainside. It was beautiful—and it was much colder than we had been led to believe.
“¡Qué frío!” María Fernanda said, laughing with blue lips.
“I’m freezing!” I cried, my teeth chattering.
“You don’t want to go to the Aguas Hirviendas, do you?” Ceci asked from where she stood, warm, fully clothed, and out of the water.
Hirvienda means “boiling.” It sounded better to me, and I nodded.
“But that’s where all the crowds are,” she reminded us.
Despite the prospect of crowds, María Fernanda and I were eager for somewhere warmer. It was late afternoon by now, and we were chilled and tired.
“I have an idea,” Ceci said as she drove the Suzuki farther into the mountains to the Aguas Hirviendas and the light began to fade from the sky, “Let’s stay overnight here. The Coconuco Hotel is wonderful. We’ll get a room, and then we can go to the Termales.”
I knew my father wouldn’t like this idea. He had been anxious at the prospect of letting me out of his sight for this trip up the mountain, as if he still saw me as a child who needed protection and watching. Something that, I thought with sudden irritation, he should have thought of a long time ago, long before I was a twenty-one-year-old adult.
Magical Realism for Non-Believers Page 5