We might have met at the Miami airport, Silas flying from San Francisco, me from Minneapolis. We might have sat together in the exit row of flight 965, and when the man across the seat asked us if we were visiting family, we would have said yes without hesitation. We would have ordered beers from the flight attendant instead of cloying Coca-Colas, and the two of us would have gotten punchy during the flight, hiding our nerves and insecurities with jokes and alcohol. We would have exited the plane together, handing over passports with—albeit different last names—the same almond eyes. We would have disembarked and stepped through the automatic doors into the Macondo-like night, and Renzo would have seen both his children together, side by side for the first time. And he would have wept with his own what-could-have-beens.
Instead, we were just getting to know each other.
“You have a brother, so you don’t understand how weird this is,” I accused him.
“I’ve never had a sister,” he countered.
I could only nod and agree: it was weird no matter how you looked at it.
Once when Silas and I met for lunch near his office, he told me about working as something of a corporate spy, going to competitors, finding out secrets.
I pumped him for information. “You just walk in there?” I asked.
He took a bite of Thai chicken and nodded. Silicon Valley tech companies were desperate to beat each other to the market, to look into crystal balls to see the IPOs and buyouts. While I was working on a master’s degree, my half brother had barely graduated from high school. But he had worked his way up from floor sweeper to something even more integral to his company.
“You just pretend? Like you work there?”
“You’d be amazed at how little people pay attention,” he said. “If you act like you belong, no one notices.”
In the late 1960s or early 1970s, my father had been suspected of being a spy. I don’t know for sure whether he was or wasn’t. My mother insists he was too disorganized to be a spy, but I do know he worked for the U.S. State Department. And someone considered him interesting enough to investigate crudely. My father arrived home to my parents’ apartment one evening to find the rooms ransacked, the drawers turned upside down, the closets rifled through. It was one of a string of apartments and houses my parents rented during their marriage, from a duplex in Minneapolis to a flat above a noisy discotheque in Popayán to a place in the capital city that came with a maid (paid for by his parents). I wish I could step into the shoes of the intruders and look through the objects that had made up my parents’ lives. I picture tubes of paint and ink-stained tables, half-loomed weavings, and brown rings left behind from cups of coffee. I imagine there was perhaps an unmade bed with sheets tangled from early-morning lovemaking and cotton T-shirts hanging in the bathroom, turned stiff after drying. I picture pans with glued-on rice soaking in the makeshift kitchen, leaving a chore that might have filled my mother with rage.
Growing up, I remember outbursts. At times they were unfounded, but my mother’s anger bubbled and spilled, occasionally heated by some source or another. Once she broke a pitcher of orange juice on the kitchen floor before work, and her anger had shattered, scattered as far as the shards of glass. Another time, I refused to come inside at bedtime, and I remember her fury as she dragged me indoors in the waning light of summer sunset. Postpartum, my mother had been depressed, my father said. But she was responsible for a helpless baby, stuck in the house in Popayán. Her body and its fluctuating hormones perhaps turned her anxieties to anger, especially when my father returned home late at night.
But I don’t know. Maybe the anger started earlier. When my mother’s water broke, she was brought to the Popayán municipal hospital to be cared for by a friend of my father’s, a doctor who had never delivered a baby before. And while my mother labored and swore, pushed and shouted, my father and his friend drank tragos of whiskey.
Or even before that, when she and my father would yell at one another so that the widow on the other side of the wall could hear their arguments. I can imagine that my mother’s anger would start deep in her chest and work its way out to her fingertips, forcing her hands into fists, contorting her face. I know that feeling because that’s how my anger felt. As a child I was taught to tear paper bags as an alternative to throwing my toys. But nothing releases anger better than destroying something you love.
Whatever reason the ransackers had for searching my parents’ apartment in Colombia, the invasion was never repeated. My parents moved to Bogotá shortly after the break-in. It didn’t occur to me until much later to wonder what was found and what they were looking for.
I told Silas about the spy suspicions, but he only shrugged. “Could be.”
I wondered if perhaps he was done wondering about our dad.
I certainly wasn’t.
20
When I had visited my father years earlier, his need to show me everything in Colombia had been an urgent, palpable thing that followed us everywhere. I know he needed to show me Colombia so that I would love it as much as he did. But I think he also wanted to form memories with me, to create something between us that hadn’t existed. We needed to go to the village of Silvia because he had never read me bedtime stories. He needed to give me a tour of his studio because I had never been to his art shows. He needed to take me to a movie because we had never watched cartoons together on Saturday mornings.
My brother and I, too, needed to do activities together, to form memories. It felt, at times, a little manufactured and artificial, but perhaps all of life is simply manufactured moments strung together.
When my mother came to visit the summer I met my brother, I offered to introduce her to Silas. “I’d love to meet him,” she said. “And I’d love to see Beth, too.”
That I wasn’t ready for, but when she came to California, I arranged a dinner with my mother and my new half brother. Dave and I grilled kabobs and made couscous, one of the few meals we knew how to make. I marinated the beef and skewered the vegetables while we waited for Silas to arrive.
When he walked into the apartment, my mother flushed and floundered and then said, “Nice to meet you.” And they stood in the doorway with their arms at their sides.
Silas was nearly the same age our father had been when my mother first met the Colombian artist with the beard and black eyes. Silas’s ponytail mitigated the déjà vu somewhat, but he had the same slight build, the same brown arms. Of course, my father had worn the uniform of a hippie (beads and bell-bottoms), while Silas was a California kid, raised on the streets of San Francisco’s Mission District and Redwood City’s Mexican neighborhoods. His jeans were baggy, and he wore Vans, his black T-shirt advertising something none of us knew anything about. I could tell that my mother was eyeing him all throughout the dinner around our little kitchen table, perhaps thinking of the old black and white photos of her husband with the mustache and the sunglasses.
Or maybe she was remembering him in real life, her memories not dependent on old photographs.
“Renzo,” she said, meaning my—our—father, “was so handsome.”
We all nodded, another moment for our shared memories.
Then, after her visit, another moment. Silas took us to San Francisco, where he had grown up. He maneuvered through San Francisco’s Friday evening traffic as haphazardly as Ceci driving the Suzuki around motorbikes and cattle in Popayán. We would see a band, stop by a couple bars, check out a club where his brother was doing sound, maybe get something to eat. With Dave in the back leaning between the seats, and Silas at the wheel, I felt a strange sort of symmetry between this moment and all those rides in the Andes.
“This is where I used to walk my little brother home from school every day,” Silas told us after he parked and we emerged into the cold night air of the Mission District.
I pictured a dark-haired boy watching a little blond one, navigating the sidewalks and red lights. My own childhood walks home from school were unaccompanied except for the imaginar
y companions I invented. Sometimes there were orphans and others pioneer girls, all the characters I saw in my mind’s eye inspired by the books I had been exposed to. In each one I was the protagonist, the star, the heroine of the story. Maybe that’s what happens when you’re an only child and have no other children to startle you back to reality—you begin to believe that you are the center, the most important. And I’m not sure that’s selfishness. It isn’t that an only child feels entitled or that she must get her own way. It’s that there is no other way, everything experienced solo.
“Tacos?” Silas asked as we walked by a storefront.
Dave and I followed him into the taquería, where a woman in a white apron and white cap smiled at us.
“A la órden,” she said as we entered. She was round and brown, her black hair pulled back tight under the cap, and I could tell she assumed we were people who spoke Spanish. But despite my brother’s black hair and Colombian blood, he didn’t speak much Spanish, and neither did Dave. So I ordered the taquitos and bocadillos as if I spoke this language every day.
We had just unwrapped our food at a white Formica table when the glass door swung wide and a guy stumbled in. He was like a frat boy from central casting—ball cap backward, shaggy blond-brown hair, stocky build.
“Hey, man,” the guy said, approaching our table.
We were the only customers in the shop. I glanced over to the counter, but the woman had disappeared. Dave and I hesitated while Silas looked up, his hands still wrapped around his taco.
“Can you spare some money for the BART? I need some train fare to get back to the East Bay,” the guy said.
I watched Silas eye him up and down with a look of disgust.
“I just got jumped by some spics.”
Spics. A word I hadn’t heard until a college friend—one of those Latinos who had grown up with a mamá who administered Vick’s VapoRub and recited rosaries—threw it around.
“Get a bunch of spics together,” she had said while we were cased by a security guard at the mall, “and you’ll get followed around.”
My white maternal family marveled at my tan skin, and classmates in my suburban school touched my smooth dark-brown hair. It wasn’t until I was forced to fill in the demographic information on the Pre SAT that I realized there was a designation for everyone. After shading in the little circles that corresponded to the letters and numbers of my name, birth date, and address, a question I’d never answered before stopped me. Race.
It was 1990, and these categories were, for me at age fifteen, new. Black? Not me and not any of the other students in this suburban classroom. Asian? Nope, although several of my friends would fill in that bubble. White (Not Hispanic)? Yes—wait. I looked at it again and then glanced around the room. No one else’s eyes were wandering. No one else seemed confused by the options. I was white, wasn’t I? That was the circle most of my friends would shade. My mother, my maternal grandparents, all my Minnesota relatives for generations. I moved my pencil, and the point hovered above the circle.
But what about Not Hispanic? I scanned down the list and found Hispanic. It said “of Mexican or South American heritage.” Was that me? I was born in Colombia, as I would tell anyone. I had undeniable South American heritage. But could that be me?
Most people are born into families who look like them with the family structure in place. Brothers, sisters, parents. Children adopted into families of different ethnic backgrounds must, at some point, have the realization that they are different from their parents, but I suspect that the realization of being different doesn’t usually come in a rush, is already known if not understood. Of course, the realization of being a sibling also isn’t something that usually has to be told.
Yet for me, that awareness seemed to happen over and over again. I would forget that I was different until suddenly someone would remind me. I was a freshman in college when Dr. Waters, an English professor obsessed with Milton and Chaucer, had offered to let me take the ESL version of the basic skills test.
“ESL?” I had asked him, confused. I was standing in front of his lectern as he packed up his papers and books. He was a small craggy man with a face so wrinkled it looked like his eyeballs would be sucked into his skull.
“English as a Second Language,” he enunciated. This was the same man who had read my essays all semester and scratched As across the top of the dot matrix printouts. This is the man who called on me in class as I (with unaccented English) responded to questions of comprehension and theme. “There’s a special test for people like you,” he said. “Hispanics take it.”
But I had never had the word spic spat at me. I was unprepared, then, for my brother’s reaction to the guy in the taquería.
“Some what?” Silas asked, not looking up from his taco.
“Some spics, man,” the guy insisted, coming closer to us. His eyes were slightly red, the backward cap a little crooked. Dave and I were silent. “I just need money for the train.”
“We got nothing for you.” Silas squinted his black eyes and stood up, his chair scraping against the cement floor with a teeth-rattling screech. His shoulders back, chin up, he looked taller and broader than he really was.
The guy swayed a moment and then stumbled back out into the night.
“That prick’s never making it out of the Mission,” Silas said, sitting back down and picking up his taco again.
And then the three of us began to laugh. We laughed with fear, with relief, with the knowledge that we were in this whole crazy world together. But our laughter was tinged with sadness. My half brother and I were twenty-six years old, and we were laughing together for the first time. And I couldn’t help feeling like I had been cheated. By the world. And by my father.
21
I had known my brother for less than six months when a photograph on my computer one warm sunny day in September showed black, billowy smoke engulfing tall buildings. Looking more closely at the pixilated image on my monitor, I recognized that it was the World Trade Center, and I read the headline and wondered what kind of joke this was. And for the first time since returning from Colombia, I had a sense of danger everywhere.
On September 12, the first lists of victims appeared in the newspaper. I cut out the names as though by saving the newsprint I could save them. These people had existed, had had fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters. The next day more names appeared, and it was clear there would be too many to count. I took an old plastic water bottle and stuffed the newspaper inside like a pointless message. Dave and I drove to Santa Cruz, where I flung the bottle into the water from a rocky cliff above the Pacific Ocean. I couldn’t see them, but I had heard that the Coast Guard and military ships were patrolling the coastlines. I thought of Colombia, which, like the United States, borders two oceans, her shores as vulnerable as ours. I held hands with Dave as we watched the bottle bobbing up and down in an eddy of churning water going nowhere.
Even though we had known each other only a few months, Silas and I arranged to meet at a candlelight vigil that was being organized at San Jose State University, where I was in graduate school. On Friday we stood on the campus, holding candles protected by paper cups. The scent of eucalyptus from the trees that dotted the quad reminded me of Colombia and made me feel out of place, magnified a sense of homesickness that the tragedy had brought on. If I had visited Colombia after moving to California, these trees wouldn’t have smelled so foreign. If the planes had not crashed into their intended targets, innocent people would not have died. If I had met my brother before all this, he wouldn’t have been a stranger.
Later we hung out with a few of Silas’s friends at his girlfriend’s house. Someone grilled food, which no one ate, and we sipped Coronas on the patio. A kitten who had been abandoned by her mother occupied our attention. People laughed at her miniature pounces and outsized purrs as they told stories about where they were on Tuesday, what they were doing, how their ordinary lives had become just a little less ordinary by being witness to
such tragedy. These strangers around me mourned the strangers who had died; we just needed to be with one another, it didn’t matter who. Love the one you’re with.
I looked over at Silas. My brother. He was mostly silent, didn’t say much, absently smoked a cigarette as the kitten attacked his shoelaces. The light from a citronella candle flickered and cast shadows on his face. And the more I watched him, his resemblance to my father faded. He looked less like a ghost or a stranger and more like my brother.
Thousands of people had lost loved ones and family, and yet, in the midst of September 11, I had gained someone. And I was just beginning to realize that I might someday forgive my father for keeping this secret, that maybe I would think about all the choices made and choose to make the most of what had happened. Maybe I could leave behind what hadn’t happened and face what had.
That winter, when everyone was still reeling from the events of September 11, still hunkering down in hopes of some kind of self-preservation, Dave’s parents came to visit. They were solidly midwestern, even more so than my mother’s family. They were churchgoers and socially conservative, he a Vietnam War vet, she a preschool teacher. That was when they were nothing more than a charmingly ordinary Presbyterian couple who had been together nearly since high school. That was before I noticed any similarities between their marriage and mine. That was before Dave’s mom fell ill with a cancer that invaded every part of her.
After 9/11, George W. Bush had urged Americans to spend money and live life as a way to combat the bad guys, and so Dave’s parents arrived at our apartment ready to be California tourists despite increased airport security and talk of war, despite his mother’s head scarves and a wig with artificial blonde hair. With remnants of chemotherapy still making their way through her body, she was hungry for sensations: touch and smell, sight and taste. We took her to a winery in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and she became giggly and tipsy after a few sips of pinot gris, and to Monterey, where she was sprayed by salty ocean water and teetered on the craggy rocks of the Pacific Coast.
Magical Realism for Non-Believers Page 10