Magical Realism for Non-Believers

by Fajardo, Anika

  In Cali, my father had also brought me to the zoo as if I were, even at twenty-one, a child who must be entertained. He and I had walked along sidewalks that wound their way through wooded exhibits and clapboard fences surrounding the lions and leopards, which paced the bare floors with bored indifference. Since I was an adult and not an excited five year old, I had found the families of the Colombians around me as captivating as the animals. I watched these prides and flocks and herds, the small children whose sticky hands were gripped by anxious parents, the teenagers who demanded money for sweets. At one exhibit a white-tailed deer stood under a eucalyptus. Her appearance had been such a funny surprise. In Minnesota, the species is found in every forest and park and suburban neighborhood. In the northern boreal forests, they nibble on dogwood and sumac, leave trodden paths along streams and lakes, where they splay their legs to drink fresh water. On twilit summer evenings, their white tails disappear into the purple light of dusk as they bound and leap through ferns and underbrush. But the doe in the Cali Zoo had stood motionless in her patch of dirt and chewed a twig as I watched. She didn’t even bother to shake away the flies that landed on her ears and nose. Her brown fur was matted and damp; she looked trapped and sad.

  I thought of the doe as I knelt beside my toddler. Sylvia peered through a mesh fence, trying to spot the macaw in the tropical bird exhibit. “Duck,” she said, her label for all creatures with wings.

  Through the cracks of the tropical soundtrack, I head the distinctive songs of native Minnesota sparrows and swallows rise and fall. The sparrows, I assumed, must have entered the zoo through an open window or doors left unintentionally ajar. Were they, then, as trapped as that doe in Cali had been? I listened to them as Sylvia paced around imitating the funny walk of the waterfowl. No, I supposed as I gathered her back into the stroller for the trek to the parking lot, these tiny birds were the brave ones, the strong ones, the ones who had charted their own course, the ones who came and went as they chose.

  My father’s voice, usually playful and cheery through the distorted phone line, was low and serious. Sylvia ran into the kitchen, where I held the phone in the crook of my neck. She was five now and full of energy, exhausting in a way so different from that of babyhood. We had somehow escaped the whirlwind of toddlerhood and shot straight into childhood. I shushed her as I strained to hear my father’s words. “Anika, you need to call Silas,” he said. “Beth is very sick. Silas is very upset. You need to call your brother.”

  For anyone with siblings, this directive is not unfamiliar, this command from a parent to do something for the sibling. But I wasn’t sure I was someone with a sibling, not really. I had known about Silas for ten years now, but even after all this time I still used the words “my brother” like a wrist splint you might wear to prove you have an injury. I proclaimed the relationship in words and stories, but I didn’t really feel it. In much the same way as I spoke of “my father,” these labels felt false, unearned. When Dave and I first got married, I used every opportunity to say the words “my husband.” My husband and I are going out of town. My husband bought a new car. My husband went to the grocery store. And every time I said it, I felt the thrill of the reality of the relationship, our connection, now legalized and verified. But that had not happened with Silas. No matter how many times I referred to him as my brother, it still felt false. Maybe I just didn’t believe in it enough.

  When I called Silas as directed, he told me, “My mom is really sick.”

  There was a flatness in his voice, a sound in the silences between his words that made my eyes sting. Selfishly, I thought of my own mother, who was, as she always claimed, “healthy as a horse.” I murmured my sympathy, unsure what I should or could say.

  There had been complications from Beth’s lupus. Silas was with her at the hospital and had been there every day, Milenka home with their son.

  “But we think she’ll come home soon,” he said, forcing optimism like air into a balloon.

  I called him again a week or so later.

  “They might have to amputate her foot,” he said, his voice cracking as if the words choked him. I tried to imagine the Beth I had met—the woman who was solid and strong and no-nonsense, the woman who might have seduced my father but had also befriended my mother, lying in a hospital bed like the one Dave’s mother had been in. I pictured the nurses and whiteboards, the scribbles that defined the ailments, the palliatives, the hope.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Silas said. “What would she want?”

  I couldn’t answer. No one could. I didn’t understand what was going on medically, and neither did anyone else. She had gotten so sick so fast that there was hardly time to think or act. I was worried about the medical care she was receiving.

  My mother had told me that my surgery was one of the reasons she could never regret leaving Colombia. “If you would have had those problems there,” she had told me once, “you might not have survived.”

  “I’m trying to get Renzo to come here,” Silas said. As his mother sank deeper into sedation and oblivion, he became desperate for someone to help him. And he thought his father could be that for him. And when he talked of that plan, I couldn’t decide if Silas would want me there, a sister but not really. Maybe my role was also nothing more than words strung together. The plan (or fantasy) of our father coming to the United States fell through.

  By then, it was too late anyway. Beth died very suddenly with no decision needed on the amputation. She was less than ten years older than my mother, the only parent to two sons, one grandson. Silas’s son was six when Beth died and couldn’t understand why he couldn’t see his grandmother. I cried for Silas. For Beth. For what would never be.

  This life and death cycle, it was bullshit. Births and deaths as if in some kind of juxtaposition, some goddamn yin and yang of life. We want to be with family that are gone; we miss those we’ll never see again; we confuse the ones we only think we know.

  Beth’s death seemed to rupture the tenuous bonds between my brother and me. Silas, a boy who had been disappointed and abandoned before, could see the loss only as the huge, infinite hole it felt like. And that made him, for a time, lost to me as well. His story isn’t mine to tell, but he looked for solace in bars and alcohol, practiced the fine art of shots and tolerance, forgot things for the sole purpose of forgetting, and fought his demons with more demons. When Dave’s mom had died, he had turned to me and searched for ways to appreciate life and see it through her eyes. I couldn’t presume to do the same for my brother because, of course (and this became painfully clear all of a sudden), I barely knew him. His bereavement was deep and dark, and in many ways it scared me because I knew it could happen to me as well.

  And so when, as he slowly climbed out of the abyss into which he had fallen, he suggested all of us (brother, sister, spouses, grandchildren) go to Colombia at Christmas, I said yes. Yes, we want to go to Colombia. Again.

  28

  Once we were in the air over the Caribbean, it felt like a very bad idea. Our flight in Miami had been delayed, and the three of us, crammed into a row of seats on the port side of the aircraft, were exhausted. Sylvia would miss a few days of kindergarten before Christmas vacation, and I had left my mother with instructions to fill her stocking that hung by the fireplace. Our suitcases were filled with gifts (maple syrup for my father, earrings for Ceci, a Lego set for Santino) and warm weather clothes (short-sleeved shirts and sandals to be worn near the equator).

  Silas and his family would already be in Popayán by the time we arrived. I had made most of the arrangements without actually talking to my father. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to speak to him, but I let Silas make all the phone calls and decisions, exchange emails about dates and times. I rationalized my lack of participation by letting myself believe that this was best for Silas, that it would help him heal after his mother’s death. He wanted a father more than he wanted to be resentful.

  But I was still wary of my father. And I was still reeling
from having made this choice. It was enough that I had agreed to this reunion, enough that I had deigned to travel that distance, enough that I was willing to bring my child to Colombia. And when I imagined my daughter there, I couldn’t stop myself from imagining all the dangers. Flight 965. The young men mistaken for military. The roadblock. The boy who pulled a pin out of a grenade.

  Ceci’s sister, María Elena, had told me that story when I stayed in Cali with my father. María Elena looked nothing like Ceci, had none of Ceci’s vigor or wanderlust. She wore narrow skirts and slim-cut pants and kept her straight brown hair out of her face with a barrette. While Ceci was brown, María Elena was light, almost fair. And María Elena was a mother, looked after her children. And a tortoise.

  “I teach special education for the blind,” María Elena had told me, sitting back on her heels. She told me this as she fed the tortoise bits of frozen meat. “I have one student who makes it all worth it. He was just a toddler when he was playing in a mine field. Only,” she paused, absently holding the next mouthful just out of reach of the tortoise, who strained with his prehistoric jaw, “he didn’t know it was a mine field, of course. But he was just little, a little boy, and he saw a grenade. Only he didn’t know it was a grenade, of course.” I remember so clearly María Elena standing up and wiping her hands on a towel she had slung over her shoulder. She told me that he had picked up the grenade and pulled the pin out. “You know how children are.”

  I remember looking away from María Elena and watching the tortoise, who seemed to study her with his black eyes as if he, too, were listening to the story. Because that’s all it felt like. A story. Something I would later retell when trying to explain what Colombia is. Twenty thousand deaths. What does that mean? Kidnappings. So abstract.

  “He wasn’t killed, but he was blinded by the grenade. And he lost both his hands.” María Elena held up her hands as if they were useless. “The doctors split apart the two bones in his lower arms so now he can use them as pinchers.” She moved the fingers of both hands open and shut to demonstrate. “He’s almost completely independent now.”

  I didn’t find out until much later how independent the boy was. I learned that he had finished high school in Colombia and gone to college in the United States. An Ivy League school, perhaps Harvard. A boy with no hands and no sight, a victim of time and place and circumstance. The story of this boy ached to show me that we don’t have to be victims. But I couldn’t let go of the fear.

  I pictured the shaft of sunlight that shone through the blinds in María Elena’s son’s room. The light had aligned with the flat rock in the middle of the tortoise’s pen as the creature climbed aboard with slow, precise movements, its claws scraping the surface with a clicking sound. With all the lessons I could have learned, this was the part I remembered. The ordinariness of a child in Colombia with a pet tortoise. This was what I had forced myself to think of, to hold on to with an iron-like clasp.

  While I was desperately believing in hope and the ordinary, the whole plane dropped ten feet. Around us, there was a collective intake of breath as every passenger gasped in unison. We craned to look out the windows, although I’m not sure what we thought we would see. Outside the aircraft all that was visible were clouds and the reflection of the wings’ navigation lights. The plane jerked again, and Sylvia, seated between us, was as wide awake as we were. She sat more upright in her seat, her waist straining at the seatbelt.

  “Oh!” shrieked the people in the cabin as the plane bounced again and rattled side to side. I gripped the armrest with one hand, and Dave reached across Sylvia’s lap to hold my other.

  “Santa María, Madre de Dios, ruega por nosotros, pecadores,” a man in the row behind us began chanting. “Dios te salve, María.”

  I looked back and saw him clutching a rosary, eyes closed, swaying back and forth in his seat.

  The plane dropped again, and yet the cabin remained seated, no flight attendants appeared, no voice was heard on the loudspeaker.

  “I didn’t sign up for a roller coaster ride!” Sylvia said, now clinging to both our hands.

  I tried to laugh. “It’s pretty crazy, isn’t it?” I said, but I felt sick.

  A baby started to cry, and behind me a woman said in Spanish, “Babies know when something is wrong.”

  I looked at Dave and Sylvia. They could hear the praying, but they couldn’t understand it, and I was thankful for that.

  “Santa María, Madre de Dios,” the man repeated. The woman seated next to him had begun praying with him, their voices rising in panic every time the plane rocked. “Dios te salve.”

  “Señoras y señores, we’re going to try to move above the turbulence,” the pilot finally announced just as passengers began locating the motion sickness bags tucked into seat pockets. “Things should calm down pretty soon.”

  I thought of my father and my brother waiting for us in Colombia. I thought of my mother at home filling Sylvia’s Christmas stocking with trinkets and candy. The plane rocked violently again, first to one side, then the other. I felt like I was in an earthquake in California, like gravity and fear could not save me now.

  Dave looked at me over Sylvia’s head. “It’s going to be okay,” he said. And I had no choice but to believe him.

  “Where’s your Colombian passport?” the official asked in Spanish when we finally touched down, shaken but in one piece.

  We had made it through both legs of our flight and had survived the worst air turbulence I had ever experienced, and now I felt in charge and in control. All of my anxieties had, for a time at least, dissipated. The relief at being on the ground gave me courage, a sense, however momentary, of invincibility. We might have fears, but we had taken all possible precautions, from bringing antibiotics in little orange canisters to carrying all our documents together.

  I approached the immigration officer with confidence as Dave stood behind me gripping Sylvia’s hand. She was wearing a pale peach dress covered in ruffles, and her brown hair was recently rebraided into two plaits. Dave’s job was to carry the shoulder bag and wheel our suitcases. I was the translator, the expert. I was the Colombian. But without a Colombian passport.

  I slid the three little blue books under the gap, where a brown hand grabbed them and opened each one to its page with our pictures. Sylvia’s passport was shiny new with her gapped smile peering out of its pages (her teeth had since grown in). Dave’s identification pictures are always more neck than face because the camera has to point upward to capture him. Mine, with something of a mug shot quality about it, was as unflattering as always.

  But now the officer spoke in Spanish through the little round hole in the Plexiglas. “It says you were born in Colombia,” he said, and I wondered if the glass was bulletproof. “Where is your Colombian passport?”

  “No lo tengo.”

  When I was born, I was issued a Colombian certificate that listed place of birth (Popayán) and parents (Renzo and Nancy). At eighteen months, I was issued a certificate of birth abroad, a fancy affair with red ribbons and signed by Warren Christopher, the acting secretary of state (which my grandfather always thought was very impressive). This was my proof of existence: two birth certificates that declared me to be me. When my parents brought me to the United States just before my mother asked for a divorce, I had been a footnote to her U.S. passport. A little square black and white photograph of a screaming infant stapled into the pages was all that marked me as hers.

  “You need a Colombian passport.”

  I didn’t know this at the time, but Colombia had altered its constitution in 1991 to institute dual citizenship. A Colombian is a Colombian. Beginning during the liberal presidency of César Gaviria, anyone born in Colombia retains Colombian citizenship and qualifies for a national ID card and passport.

  I pointed at my U.S. passport and clarified in my rusty Spanish that I was born in Colombia but raised in the United States, that my mother was American, that I was American.

  “You were born in Colom
bia,” he said, shaking his head. “You’re Colombian.” I thought of Silas passing through this same entry point, but with an American birthplace listed on his passport, encountering none of this confusion. I felt something that might have been sibling jealousy, and the sensation was both startling and strangely comforting.

  “No.” I tried to explain, “I have a U.S. passport.” But with each badly pronounced word, my confidence drained away. The adrenaline that had kept me going since the flight seemed to be fading. I knew I was confusing verb tenses, and I couldn’t remember the vocabulary I needed to describe myself. But what was I? This seemingly simple question was as complex as the one the man across the aisle had asked nearly fifteen years ago: Are you visiting family? The world seemed to want me to pick one side of the line or the other, but people—families—don’t fit into neat columns. Family members could be strangers; I was an only child, and I had a brother; I was both Colombian and American. This was true.

  “Then where are your naturalization papers?” the man asked.

  “I’m not naturalized.”

  “Then you need a Colombian passport.”

  We were swirling around in a vortex of facts and data, each one a contradiction to another. I thought of the singer Shakira’s first Spanish-language hit, a song María Fernanda and I had listened to over and over on the stereo in my father’s studio when we were in our early twenties, practicing the lyrics that came loud and fast, a torrent of words. “Here I am, loving you, drowning among the photographs and notebooks, among the things and mementoes that I don’t understand . . .” Singing with my Colombian cousin, I had looked around at the things in my father’s studio—the tubes of paint, the half-filled canvases, the cardboard mailers, the photos on his desk, the souvenirs of his past. All this proof of everything that I didn’t know and didn’t understand. All those things hadn’t made anything any clearer, hadn’t prepared me for the secret of my brother. What use, I wondered, were the documents, the birth certificates, the passports, if they didn’t tell the whole story?