Magical Realism for Non-Believers

by Fajardo, Anika

  “You watch,” he said. “Tonight you’ll see them at the jail.” He winked, and I left him as he paused to light a cigarette.

  “What do you think, Sylvia?” Ceci asked in Spanish. She crouched down to my daughter’s level, but Sylvia said nothing. “When it stops raining, we can ride horses.” Sylvia just looked at her blankly, overwhelmed by the smells and sounds and chaos of the mercado.

  When we arrived back at the house, Ceci tried again.

  “Caballos,” she said to Sylvia. She made horse sounds and galloped across the stone floors. But Sylvia declined to play this game of charades.

  “Do you want to ride horses?” I finally interpreted.

  “I do!” shouted Santino from the other room. Like his father, he always seemed ready for anything.

  “Maybe,” Sylvia said at last. Like me, she was careful, wary, and promised nothing, preferring instead to wait and see.

  The horses were stabled in a low, whitewashed building along a dirt road. Bougainvillea almost obscured the sign that read Se Aquilan Caballos. My father paid for the horses, which would take us on a loop along the road, up the mountain, and back again. I put one foot in the stirrup and climbed awkwardly on the horse as the saddle creaked under my weight.

  The last time I had been on a horse was at a finca outside Popayán. The ranch belonged to friends of Ceci, and we had been invited for a New Year’s Day celebration. Palacé was like a film version of a Latin American plantation, with a big white house and a wraparound front porch, where crowds of people (relatives? friends?) had gathered. Inside the women congregated in the kitchen around piles of plantains, bloody chicken parts, and unshucked corn that were being prepared for the huge vats of sancocho they would make. Outside, my father had introduced me to my cousin Renzito, the first Fajardo grandson. Renzito (named after my father) was studying to be an electrical engineer, just like Dave.

  “Ay, Anika,” he said to me as we stood in the yard outside the house. Renzito was four years older than I was, old enough to remember me from when I was a baby, from before I left Colombia. He remembered the baby bottle I dragged around everywhere and the scowl I wore whenever dissatisfied. “We’re so glad you’re here. My tío Renzo is so happy.”

  I looked over at my father, who was talking with some of the other men and sat smoking cigarettes on the porch steps. It hadn’t occurred to me that he was somebody’s uncle. The family relationships, even then, had seemed so mysterious.

  “Have you ever ridden a horse, Anika?” my cousin asked in Spanish.

  “No, never.”

  “What?”

  My father heard us and called to me from the porch. “Try. You like.”

  And before I knew what was happening, a huge and dappled gray horse was in front of me. My mother used to sing me a lullaby about all the pretty little horses, but this one was immense and smelled of musk and straw. I backed up a bit.

  “Get on,” my cousin urged.

  “¡Espera! Wear this!” Ceci called. She had just emerged from the house and nabbed a panama hat off one of the men who sat smoking. “Cowgirl!” she said in English, laughing as she placed the hat on my head.

  “Help her up,” I heard someone say as a fly buzzed over the horse’s gray coat. And then I felt a stranger’s hand on my rear, and in a few awkward moments I was up on the animal, overlooking the relatives and the finca. From atop the horse, I remembered that I had seen pictures of a Colombian finca before in my mother’s black and white photographs of her time there in 1969. She and Melinda had come to a finca with a couple of boys they had met during their first few months in Colombia, when they still put curlers in their hair and wore skirts. She had told me this with some embarrassment, saying that it was unheard of for girls to go unchaperoned with boys they had just met. Their visit with Fernando and Enrique—or was it Boris?—is immortalized in the snapshots of wide innocent smiles.

  “There was a housekeeper,” my mother had told me, “and she certainly didn’t approve of us being there.” They drank Coca-Cola chasers after the burning taste of aguardiente, and I suspect they inhaled the grassy smoke of marijuana, although she didn’t admit to that.

  From my perch on the gray horse on the grounds of the finca, I found myself in awe of my mother’s daring; I felt unbalanced and dizzy. I was afraid of falling, of the horse, and maybe even of simply the new experience. I was, at that time, already older than my mother had been when she married my father. But I felt so uncertain.

  But with Sylvia settled in front of me, gripping the saddle’s horn with all her might, I felt more secure. As the horse began to move, its body heat radiating through my jeans and the motion of its breathing visible on its flanks, Sylvia squealed with something between shock and delight. That she was on this beast at all was something of a miracle for this sensitive child, but I suspected that the fact that her cousin rode with his mother, too, had helped spur her on.

  “This is Princess,” she said, confidently naming the horse and assigning it a gender.

  The animal began its rote path toward the mountain trail, and Sylvia and I rocked with the motion.

  “Whoa!” she shrieked. And then she laughed.

  Princess plodded ahead, her bones shifting with each step.

  “Oooh.” Sylvia clung to the saddle, both exhilarated and terrified.

  Silas and his horse galloped closer to us. “What do you think, Sylvia?” he asked his niece. Sylvia was his niece, I was Santino’s aunt, and the two children were cousins. All these incredible relationships, all of us on horseback at eight-thousand-foot elevation.

  Sylvia grinned. “Can we go faster?”

  The horses were gentle and docile along a trail they had clearly taken dozens of times, each one following the other.

  “I don’t think we can make this horse do anything,” I said. That New Year’s Day at the finca, my cousin had taken hold of the bridle with a sure grip, and from the safety of the solid ground, asked, “Where do you want to ride?” Maybe I could have learned something up there, maybe I could have felt whatever it was that had made my mother smile in those days, maybe I could have faced my fears on that bright New Year’s Day. Maybe if I had said yes, I would have discovered something that would have led to living a different life than I led. But instead, I had scowled like I had when I was a baby and said no. “I want to get down.”

  “Santino!” Sylvia yelled at her cousin, who was a few yards ahead of us on his mother’s horse. “What’s your horse’s name?”

  Santino turned to look at her and shook his head. “I don’t know its name.”

  “Mine’s name is Princess,” Sylvia said confidently, letting go of the horn for a moment to stroke its white flank.

  33

  A few years after Dave’s mother died, we brought her ashes to a river in Minnesota that flows into Lake Superior. It was a warm summer day, but near the lake the temperature dropped, cooled by the great expanse of fresh water. My father-in-law poured a handful of dried rose petals into my palm from a ziplock bag, and I dropped the petals one by one into the water that ran golden with tannins. Then I stood back as the three men of my husband’s family crouched on a rock and let the ashes cloud above the water and then dissipate into the crisp midwestern air.

  Now I watched Silas do the same, his father and his son crouching beside him on a rock on a river high in the Colombian Andes. This río begins somewhere in the mountains as a tiny trickle that gains momentum as it tumbles downhill. Its waters run deep and wild, brown from the churning sediment. It goes by various names as it passes first through Silvia, then the town of Piendamó, and then Popayán before it makes its way to the Magdelena River. The same waters would eventually work their way north to the Caribbean, where its mountain water would mix with the sapphire blue of the sea.

  When Ceci pulled the packed Hyundai to a stop along the riverbank, Silas grabbed the box containing his mother’s ashes, and the rest of us followed him down a footpath. Beth had met our father in Silvia, and the two of them
had spent time working along this river. It had been her desire to be brought back here, to this spot, this river, this memory.

  As we walked down the path, we caught a glimpse of a contraption on a pulley, something like a Rube Goldberg invention, spanning the river. A wooden box about the size of a banana crate was suspended above the water by cables. A child in a brightly colored dress and bare feet was riding in it as another barefooted child pulled the ropes to bring her across the fifteen-foot chasm. She jumped out, and the two of them ran ahead and disappeared around a bend in the river. Our own American children watched this display of independence with some awe, while Dave and Ceci each observed the scene through the viewfinders of their cameras and snapped pictures of the vertical mountain slopes. As Silas and our father made their way down the slope to the water’s edge, I pointed out to Sylvia the brown cow that grazed at a precarious angle on the grass.

  From our spot above the river’s edge, we watched Silas leap from the bank to a large boulder, Santino close behind him. The three generations of men crouched near the water. Silas opened a small box, and even though I couldn’t see or hear from where we waited, I knew he was weeping. I remembered watching Dave and his dad letting the ashes go, knowing I couldn’t help, couldn’t change anything, couldn’t make reality hurt any less. I looked away just as gray dust blew across the churning water, feeling far away from my brother, feeling like an interloper in his private moment, a moment he shared with this father we shared.

  I was relieved when Sylvia tugged at my sleeve wanting a snack. Ceci opened the Hyundai’s hatch, and Sylvia sat on the edge eating a granola bar and dangling her little tamales above the dirt road in Guambia above the town of Silvia. Soon Silas would dry his eyes, and we would all pile back into the car to rumble and rattle past makeshift huts, dozens of loose chickens, and a horse or two that lined the river’s path toward home.

  34

  Whether from the cold air in Silvia or the horse ride or a virus caught from her cousin, who had been sick when he arrived, two days before Christmas Sylvia spiked a fever over 103, her little body limp and lethargic. We didn’t know what it was, but I shifted from daughter and sister into parent mode. When your child is sick, you go into tunnel vision, put on blinders. You push aside fears of unnamed noises and imagined dangers. No matter how worn out and overwrought you are, you move forward. I couldn’t be a daughter while my own lay quiet and still under thin blankets.

  That night, in our dark room, I listened to Sylvia’s uneven breathing. I opened my eyes, and the bedroom was the navy blue of night. She wheezed and rolled over. I ached to get up to feel her forehead but didn’t want to wake her. And then I heard it.

  An explosion, a crack in the night air. My senses were alert for both the sound to come again and to hear Sylvia breathe in and then out. Another crack sounded and then the rattling exhale of my child. Was it fireworks? Fireworks are common at Christmas. No light shone under the bedroom door, so I knew everyone else in the house was asleep. Another booming sound echoed. Was it something else? Behind Campo Bello, just beyond a field where cows graze, is a military base where Black Hawk helicopters take off like prehistoric birds. These monstrous modern-day dinosaurs roar to life, the sound startling until you get used to it. Crack. This didn’t sound like a helicopter. I pushed thoughts of grenades and gunfire from my head. Danger was everywhere from the streets of this subdivision to the child at the foot of my bed fighting a fever.

  At last the crack of explosions or fireworks faded, and I climbed out of bed, my footsteps silent on the worn carpeting. I leaned down to brush my hand lightly across her cheek. Her skin was soft but hot to the touch, its usual suppleness gone slack with illness. Sylvia wheezed again in her sleep, making a tiny mewing sound, and my heart felt as though it were made of crystal.

  Parenting, I thought, even in a mountain city in Colombia, is an endless loop of pain and strength, messes and cleaning, hardship and intimacy. Its cycle spirals tighter and tighter when children are sick, when they are upset, when life’s delicate balance is thrown off. It is in the ebb and flow of illness and health, happiness and fear, anger and forgiveness, that a life takes shape.

  After Silas had scattered his mother’s ashes in the Cauca River, a stray dog with mangy fur and wagging tail came wandering through the grass toward us, and Sylvia had clutched at me, her primal fear aroused despite the bright eyes of the creature. I had always assumed that fears, however irrational, existed to keep you safe. But now I wasn’t sure. As I held Sylvia close, I could feel her heart beating with the rhythm of the river. Even as my father bent down to scratch the dog’s crooked ears, my daughter whimpered in fear—an unfounded, useless fear. What, I wondered, was the purpose of being afraid?

  I pressed the back of my hand against Sylvia’s forehead in the cloudy dimness of the bedroom. Maybe fear did not have to be a construct of life. After all, being unafraid couldn’t keep one safe. With or without fear, Beth had died, and Dave’s mother had died, and no amount of anticipations or precautions could have kept them alive. We cannot change these things any more than I can change when my father revealed his secrets. The present—my father throwing a stick for a dog or my daughter wheezing with an upper respiratory illness—was reality, and fear—guerrillas in the hills above us or antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria—might be nothing more than imagination. We can’t change the present—or the past—but we can move forward, do what needs to be done. I kissed my child’s fevered head and slipped back into bed.

  By morning, Sylvia, her body filled with antibiotics, was ready to play video games with her cousin, and I was ready for a large cup of coffee.

  “¿Cómo amaneciste, my dear?” my father asked as I came into the dining room. “How did you sleep?”

  “I heard noises last night,” I said, yawning. “Maybe fireworks?”

  Silas took a sip of café con leche and exchanged looks with our dad.

  “At least they sounded like fireworks,” I said. A plate of eggs and arepas waited for me.

  Silas looked away.

  “You keep telling yourself that, my dear.” My father laughed and drained his coffee cup.

  And I wondered why he would still try to shelter me, protect me. Clearly Silas knew something about those noises, and I did not. I could feel my chest tighten in frustration—no, in anger.

  “They weren’t fireworks?” I said, coming out and asking the question to which I wanted the answer.

  “They weren’t,” my father said, his smile fading a bit.

  They weren’t fireworks. I pushed the eggs around my plate, the yellow mounds suddenly unappetizing. Those explosive sounds in the dark of night were just as frightening as I thought they had been, no trick of the imagination. Sometimes stories are true.

  I opened my mouth as if to say something. But what? Whom could I be mad at? Whose fault was the tension I felt in my stomach?

  “Uncle Dave!” Santino shouted. Both children, Sylvia still pale and ghostlike, came careening around the corner of the hallway, startling the birds that were eating their own breakfast in the courtyard. “Let’s go to the park!”

  Dave looked at me, then at my father and my brother. “Find your shoes,” he told Sylvia and Santino.

  When I first arrived in Colombia more than fifteen years earlier, my father’s house had been surrounded by vacant lots, and the streets had been muddy and unpaved. Now Campo Bello was crowded with two-story plaster buildings with the familiar red tile roofs. A convenience store on the corner sold candies and cigarettes, and a playground—complete with a swing set and seesaw—had been built in a small square.

  “Why aren’t we driving, Uncle Dave?” Santino asked as he followed Dave and me out of the house.

  “Because we’re walking.”

  “How far is it?” Sylvia whined, dragging the toes of her shoes along the asphalt.

  “Around the corner, you two goofs.”

  When we came around the corner, the two cousins took off running. They scramble
d up the climbing structure, which was made of large, even tree trunks painted in bright primary colors. A pavilion had been built at one end of the park, where now, at Christmastime, a nativity scene had been constructed. The pesebre represented not only Mary and Joseph and the manger but also rolling green hills, grazing animals, rock outcroppings, and chickens pecking for food. It was a diorama of Colombia in miniature. The green hills that took your breath away with their vibrancy; the mountains with such steep slopes it looked as if the vegetation itself might come loose; the small enclaves of peasants and Indians farming the land, herding the cows, chasing the poultry. When my mother had lived in Colombia, these nativity scenes had been the sole decorations for Christmas, often occupying an entire corner of a living room, she had told me. At the house, Sylvia and Santino had created their own little pesebre, with glue and plastic animals.

  “Look at me, Uncle Dave!” shouted Santino from the top step of the slide.

  “Mama, look at me!” Sylvia said from her perch on the monkey bars.

  Dave and I stood on the edge of the grass, the Andean hills behind us, and watched them play and climb, swing and run. The two of them could have been brother and sister, each with sandy-brown hair and dark eyes, each with round, pale faces and quick smiles. I took Dave’s hand in mine, and it felt warm and safe as I closed my eyes and let the sun beat down on my half-Colombian skin.

  “What’s this for?” Santino asked, and I opened my eyes.

  “It’s a seesaw,” Dave said and told him how it worked.