Magical Realism for Non-Believers

by Fajardo, Anika

  “Hey, Sylvia,” Santino shouted, and his cousin joined him.

  The seesaw was made of thick logs and had wooden slabs attached at each end for seats. The centerpiece was painted bright red, one seat was yellow, and the other green. Each child chose a seat and climbed on, teetering and tottering as they should, with very little of Dave’s help. At last they were settled and went up and down. Sylvia, the heavier of the two, quickly figured out how to kick off as she neared the ground, a motion that sent her soaring into the air. Up and down. Down and up.

  These two children, born only nine days apart after decades of deceit and secrets. A boy and a girl, I marveled, who would grow up friends, cousins, who had broken the cycle of secrets. I felt a pang of regret at what could have been and imagined, for a moment, a six-year-old Silas and a six-year-old Anika playing together, going up and down on a seesaw. They are both dark haired and brown skinned, one is chubby, the other thin. The little boy runs as fast as he can, the little girl tries to keep up. They argue, perhaps over the best swing on the playground, and then perhaps they share instead, take turns. Perhaps they are siblings but are meeting each other for the first time in this country where they have never lived. Perhaps each child’s mother has brought them here to have a reunion not only with one another but with a dark, mustachioed man whom everyone calls their father. He has followed them to the playground but stands off a bit, a cigarette in one hand. The two mothers watch from a distance, as well, a bit wary, probably shy. But the two children, these two little dark-haired children, don’t let that bother them right now. There are swings and seesaws to explore, a bug recently found in a pile of sand, a flower blooming on an unfamiliar tree. These two children shout and laugh, a brother and sister.

  “I’m done,” Santino announced as he began to climb off his end of the seesaw.

  “Wait,” Dave and I cried in unison, cringing lest one of them get hit in the face. It was, of course, all about balance.

  35

  The Popayán Municipal Airport is tiny, just a couple of runways and a single departure lounge. From the terminal I couldn’t see the air traffic control center, the place where the men my mother had taught English to all those years before had worked. But I didn’t try to imagine what did or might have or could have happened—it was more important that I was here. Dave, Sylvia, and I were leaving one day earlier than Silas and his family, so all eight of us had once again packed into the Hyundai—one child on a lap in front, four across the back seat with one more child on a lap—like a caricature of a Colombian family. We laughed and joked in half Spanish, half English all the way to the airport as Ceci made hard turns and abrupt stops.

  “Where is your Colombian passport?” the woman behind the counter asked when I presented our tickets and passports. I was used to this question now, and besides, I had my father here to vouch for me. I expertly explained my situation again, and she handed back my tickets after checking our luggage.

  The waiting area was big and white with white tiles and white paint on the walls, as whitewashed as the city itself. Popayán. La ciudad blanca. A city washed clean, repainted, always fresh and new. If an earthquake couldn’t destroy it, one small family tree’s roots couldn’t disturb it. The children ran in circles around the rows of mostly empty white chairs.

  “Ay, Anika,” said Ceci in a plaintive tone, taking my hand.

  It said everything we were thinking. Did these ten days really go by so quickly? Would Sylvia remember this trip? Would I be back?

  Even if Spanish had been my native language, I don’t think I could have expressed what I was feeling. Instead I said, “Ay, Ceci,” in what I hoped was an equally plaintive voice.

  A garbled announcement came over the loudspeaker, and my father stood up. “You should probably go through,” he said.

  And I burst into tears, tears that had, perhaps, been waiting all these years, tears that had welled in my eyes since I was a baby, a toddler, a teenager, a new parent.

  He reached for me and hugged me, and I cried harder. Everything from the first phone call to the inscrutable emails to the paintings that hung on walls spilled out through my tears. My father squeezed me, strangled me with his embrace, and the sharp strap of my bag cut into my back. I lifted my head from his shoulder and saw a wet spot on his blue shirt where my tears had dampened the fabric, perhaps the same spot where I had spit up as a baby, the same spot where I had laid my downy infant head. I stepped back and looked around for my daughter. She came running and grabbed my hand in her small one as I wiped my cheeks with my sleeve.

  “We’ll be back,” I said more forcefully than I felt. “We will. We’ll be back.” I had to say it out loud so that I might begin to believe it.

  “Even if you don’t come back,” my father said, “it’s okay because this has been the most beautiful thing in my life, to have my family all here together. I can die happy.”

  “We’ll be back,” I said again and bumped my shoulder against his, trying to smile widely.

  The intercom mumbled again, and we gathered our things, and Sylvia’s hand was held, and then, somehow, we were through the gate and beyond the door, and my family—my Colombian family—disappeared from view.

  Dave and I settled into our seats with Sylvia between us once again. I held his hand across our daughter’s lap as the plane took off, gripping his fingers even in the slight, completely normal turbulence of high-altitude airflow. I knew that the fact of our hurtling through air was miraculous and that my own place in this world was, like all of ours, a result of happenstance and chance and maybe even love. Perhaps, I thought, looking down at the blurred city lights through the scratched Plexiglas window, if an airplane could defy gravity, then I could defy fear and nostalgia and blame. Perhaps I could abandon what might have been for what was and what would be. As night fell and the cabin grew quiet and dim, Sylvia curled up in her seat, and I listened to the rhythmic sucking of her thumb as she drifted into sleep. I pressed my forehead against the glass and looked down to see zigzags of lightning—magic and energy—jumping from cloud to cloud, links across all the emptiness of the dark sky.

  Epilogue

  It is summer. Strollers bite at our ankles, fat men and pregnant women bump us, and entwined couples block our progress. Sylvia tags along behind us as we wander a street fair in Minneapolis. The salty smell of corn dogs and French fries and the delicate aroma of handmade soaps and sachets of dried prairie flowers mingle with my memory of the pungent odor of ajo and the sweetness of panela in the market in Silvia high in the Andes. I think of my mother crossing streets with a protective hand over her belly, of the little Guambiano girl with her cup of coffee, of Silas and me drinking aguardiente in the plaza.

  As I drift into the past, I catch a glimpse of a family, distorted and backward, in the window of a Starbucks. The father, tall and thin, walks in front with a long, confident gait. He grips the hand of a black-haired woman in a purple sundress and large sunglasses. The blur of a little girl in pink sandals trails behind them, skipping and twirling, wisps of toffee-colored hair escaping her braid. She grabs hold of the woman’s sash every few feet before letting it go.

  And then I see that this family—this mismatched triad reflected in the glass—is my family. My husband. My daughter. Me. This family of mine shimmers, our images superimposed over the queue of people inside. Dave and I have been together for a lifetime, and this little brown-haired girl is still a blip on the time line of our lives. But this is all it takes, I realize, to make a family: love, blood, time.

  When I was a child, I used to blur my vision by squinting my eyes at something close but letting my focus drift far away. Everything would become hazy and gauzy, mystical and strange. I preferred to look at the world like this, this backward, unfocused view. I liked to observe the everyday from another perspective or to imagine what didn’t happen, what couldn’t, what could have. Blurring my vision could make strange things look safe and the known feel exciting.

  For a split second the
reflection of a little boy seems to appear in the glass and then fades. I don’t know who is inside and who is outside, who is a mirage and who is real. Our reflections—these shapes and shadows that make up my family—in the window of the coffee shop look like strangers until I look again, and like magic, our images shift and sharpen, and the three of us in the glass are as intimate as my own skin. I close my eyes for an instant, and in the darkness behind my lids I realize that these figures could be—in a different light, a different moment, a different place or space—my own once-upon-a-time family, my family that never was, me as daughter instead of mother. Time stands still, and time flips and flows. When I open my eyes again and look at the reflection, I see.

  Acknowledgments

  Magical Realism for Non-Believers would not exist without the support of my family, friends, and community. Thank you to my editor at the University of Minnesota Press, Erik Anderson, for believing that my words could become this book and for the magic worked by my lovely agent, Thao Le.

  Thanks to the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, where I took my first writing class, and to the 2009–10 Mentor Series, through which I met the community of writers that changed my life. Thank you to mentors Shannon Olson, Pablo Medina, and JC Hallman, who helped me figure out what I didn’t know and what I did. Special thanks to mentor Dinah Lenney for giving feedback and including “What Didn’t Happen” in Brief Encounters: A Collection of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction.

  Minnesota’s support of artists through the Artist Initiative Grants makes the winters here almost bearable. Thanks to the Minnesota State Arts Board and to the Jerome Foundation for generous grants. Thanks also to the literary magazines that first published essays that eventually became part of this book, especially Hippocampus Magazine and Apt Literary Magazine for publishing multiple pieces along the way.

  Before the editors and agents, grants and magazines, there were many hours of writing and the support of friends. Thank you, Karlyn Coleman, for keeping me going—and for enabling my coffee habit. I am especially grateful to Fred Amram and Mary Jane LaVigne for their unflinchingly honest critiques that helped make me a better writer. And thanks to early readers and supporters Laura Randgaard and Amber Larson.

  A memoir of finding family owes a lot to those who let me share their stories. Thank you to my mom, who raised me to be my own person (and who is a wonderful grandmother to Sylvia); to my dad, who sees me as an artist; and to my grandparents, who first taught me that books contain worlds, stories, and sometimes even answers. Thanks also to Milenka Idrogo, Santino Saunders, María Cecilia Paredes, Melinda Smith, and my Colombian primos and tías. And I am grateful for the magic and reality that gave me the best brother a sister could hope for.

  Of course, thank you to my two favorite people in the world: my amazing and unique daughter, Sylvia Dieken, the reason I get out of bed every day, and Dave, who has been there for me the whole time.

  ANIKA FAJARDO was born in Colombia and raised in Minnesota. Her writing has been published in the anthologies Brief Encounters: A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction; Love and Profanity: A Collection of True, Tortured, Wild, Hilarious, Concise, and Intense Tales of Teenage Life; and Sky Blue Water: Great Stories for Young Readers (Minnesota, 2016). She has received awards from the Jerome Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and the Loft Literary Center. She lives with her husband and daughter in Minneapolis.