And I didn’t tell Gorrión.
I needed a father for this son, who I knew was not his.
I took his guilt.
His guilt that got him out of bed, to go to work, to bring back money from an honest job, to get us food. I demanded a house of brick from him. I demanded proper schooling for my growing boy, Francisco. I thought about Chula, daily, especially now that Francisco was almost the same age as she had been when I first arrived to work at her house. Some nights I thought of the body out of clothes I used to make in the bed the Santiagos had provided for me. How it lay still in the darkness. It waited out the night. It was deaf and dumb and without memory.
When Gorrión got home, after weeks of driving, I imagined myself that pile of laundry. Gorrión liked to feed Francisco his dinner, and tell Francisco things that were more for my sake than his: I fell in love with your Mami because she was beautiful. You were on your way to us when we got married in the Hills. She wore a white dress, and a crown with a veil that was so long it lifted in the wind. I was a pile of laundry smiling at Gorrión, doing dishes, making the beds.
When I was alone or just with Francisco, I felt peace. Other times I saw features on Francisco that were not mine and belonged to that terrible night. I loved Francisco above all. I wanted to tell Francisco, Once there was a little girl I took care of. I wanted to say, I once outsmarted the encapotados. One day you and I will go away. Far from all this. But I could not tell him, not yet, because he was young and had a loose mouth and I didn’t want him to repeat anything to Gorrión.
Once I thought that when you have nothing your life stretches toward nothing. In our farm in Boyacá, when the paras started to come, Mami instructed us to not see, to not hear. If we did it right, we would come out of it alive.
We made ourselves deaf and dumb, but still we lost. The story repeated itself, and we lost some more. We had no other choice.
I wanted to tell Chula everything, but I was afraid of my letter being intercepted or read. I didn’t have a word to give to Chula to let her know how I felt, like she had done for me. I did have a photograph, and in this photograph was everything I lived. Sometimes the less you know the more you live.
Author’s Note
Fruit of the Drunken Tree is a novel inspired by personal experience. Kidnapping was a reality for many Colombians until 2005 when the practice really began to decline. If they had not been kidnapped themselves, every Colombian knew someone who had experienced it: a friend, a family member, someone at work.
There was once a girl like Petrona who worked as a live-in maid in my childhood house in Bogotá. Like Petrona she was forced into aiding in a kidnapping attempt against my sister and me, and like Petrona in the face of this impossible choice, she did not comply. I have thought of her throughout the years, along with all the women I have met who are stuck in hopeless situations in Colombia.
My father, too, was once kidnapped. He described the day he was captured as the longest day and night of his life. He spent the time in darkness, bound in a crude shelter. The next day he was taken to see the head of the guerrilla group, and then, he was lucky—the head of the guerrilla group was a childhood friend. The guerrilla boss slapped my father on the back, happy to see him, and in the way of long-lost friends, asked him what he’d been up, how he’d been, how his family was doing—all the while my father was still bound. He was let go. An uncle was not so lucky. He spent six months captive.
I write this at a time when the biggest guerrilla group in Colombia, FARC, has demobilized and the former members are attempting to go back to civilian life. For years the violence in Colombia has been a landscape of victims, corruption, and desperate choices, where the perpetrators are often perpetrated against. In writing this novel, I was inspired by the political born into the lives of children. I remember my little cousins who were afraid of any man or woman in uniform—even the police—because they had no ability to discern between all the armed groups in the country. Pablo Escobar was larger than life to all of us.
While the story told in this novel is fictional, the historical details and political events are factual: the assassination of Galán, the drought, the hunt for Pablo Escobar, his prayer, and his last interview. This historical timeline between 1989 and 1994 was used sequentially, but time was compressed as the emotional timeline of the book required. A girl was tragically killed by a car bomb near my neghbohood in Bogotá when her father went inside a building to buy tickets to the circus. I don’t know for sure if the television showed the girl’s leg still wearing her shoe, but that’s what I remember. That year I would go to the circus. My sister and I were picked from among the kids in the crowd to ride atop the elephant. My sister held on to me and I gazed down at the great wrinkles of the elephant’s head, people cheering in the pews, but all I could think was that the girl was gone, no longer with us.
Mil Gracias
When you are an immigrant your successes are a direct result of the sacrifice and toil of your family, so I would like to begin by thanking them—Mami, Papi, and my sister, Francis. I would like to thank my agent, Kent D. Wolf, for his luminous reading and suggestions, and for his unwavering support. A thousand thank-yous to my editor, Margo Shickmanter, whose unstinting passion and vision were a guiding light.
Thank you to Sam Chang, who sat with me under the shadows of trees and gave me advice on writing and the writing life. To Leslie Marmon Silko, who was a veritable life force and from whose pure heart I learn even now. To Tom Popp, Andrew Allegretti, Patty McNair, Megan Stielstra, and John and Betty Shiflett.
Gracias to all who read this novel: my dear friend Mike Zapata with whom I exchanged letters and writing for years, the incomparable Tiana Kahakauwila whose wit and range and kindness showed me a new way, and to the talented Jacob Newberry who gave his honest advice. Countless others read parts of this book and their thoughts helped me polish this story and gave me wings to continue. Thank you.
I am grateful for all the places that opened their doors to me and gave me a desk with a view to write: Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Camargo Foundation, and Hedgebrook, as well as the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures, and the San Francisco Arts Commission, whose support allowed me to make time for writing.
In the writing of this book, I consulted many Colombian news sources. Thank you to all the journalists who are no longer with us, who risked their lives to tell the suppressed stories of Colombia, and to the journalists who survived and kept reporting even though they knew the risk.
My good friend Ken Lo, who is very hard to impress, talked with me about this book many bar nights over cocktails. To him, a special thank-you.
Without my partner, Jeremiah Barber, this novel would have not been possible. You are my moonlight coyote.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, Guernica, and Huffington Post, among others. She has received fellowships and awards from The Missouri Review, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, VONA, Hedgebrook, Camargo Foundation, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures. She is the book columnist for KQED Arts, the Bay Area’s NPR affiliate.
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Fruit of the Drunken Tree Page 31