Fruit of the Drunken Tree

by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

I was sure he was a witch.

Petrona’s uncle mimed at lifting an imaginary hat from his head, and Mamá mimed at bowing down holding the imaginary ends of a skirt.

smiled. I felt better knowing I had passed the shock of my recent brush with death onto someone else. “It was a recent brush with death,” I continued out loud, like Petrona was privy to the conversation inside my head.

Cassandra was quiet for a moment. She sat up. “Chula, that is the least idiotic thing I have ever heard you say.” “Really?”

Cuando te violen, relajate y disfruta.

My hands on the pavement too, the cracks of the street, a blade of grass, drowning, breathing. Galán bleeding on the podium. My shoe coming off, Mamá’s cigarette, the tip wearing a halo like a dark saint. Hot, cold, drowning, breathing. I hoped Cassandra had gotten away and Mamá was somewhere looking for me. My face against the pavement, everything fading, Petrona’s voice, “Chula, you have to calm down, we can’t stay here, please, Chula, calm down,” her thin, white fingers trembling over my eyes, Mamá’s voice like an outgoing train, saying, “Here, Petrona, let me show you your room.”

I could smell the Drunken Tree, instantly revived by rain, releasing its sweet scent like overripe vanilla and molasses, and then there was a flash of thunder and in the light I saw Mamá: her hair was wet and her robe, soaked, stuck to her skin.

For the first time since the bombing I felt relief. The ways we failed Petrona was a bitter pie and I had divided it in three and maybe now it would be easier to bear.

I imagined Pablo Escobar making his way, with each step transforming things: that was narco-grass he was stepping on, narco-fog that rolled by his hair, narco-silence that fell upon the mountains.

“Mi más sentido pésame.”

“When there’s a tempest, it comes down on all sides equally,”

I walked away knowing I was leaving Petrona behind. This was us, walking away from her. When I had been in danger, Petrona had chosen me over herself. I was not in danger and now we wouldn’t lift a finger to help. I was choosing myself over Petrona. My body was heavy with this knowing as we hurried down the hill.

I can still ask Mamá to turn around and help Petrona, but I did not.

Poor Petrona, all burundangueada.

I dreamed of Papá again. Cassandra and I waltzed together in an empty ballroom. Papá watched us from outside the window. He banged on the glass, but we didn’t turn our heads. Papá stood in the garden of our house, frowning in sadness under the shade of the Drunken Tree, but then I noticed that he wasn’t in our garden at all, but in the middle of some field over which the stars shone brightly and black firs stood tall.

We hugged. Good luck, Have a nice life, we said, See you. Not yet understanding the finality of goodbyes.

The house felt cold in its emptiness. “It’s like we’re dead.”

At five in the afternoon, Mamá sold our car. I didn’t understand how we were supposed to escape if we had no car.

The hard, possessive hum of Mis, the misty aspirated vaporousness of ñasss; how the s trailed behind like the tail of a long snake. “I present to you mis niñas.”

Mambrú se fue a la Guerra Qué dolor, qué dolor, qué pena Mambrú se fue a la Guerra y no se cuando vendrá Do-re-mi, Do-re-fa No se cuando vendrá

Papá would turn the corner into our yard, walk down the stone steps, and look up. Forever changed.

“For you, what is life?” Pablo Escobar’s voice rang out: “It is a space full of agreeable and disagreeable surprises.”

The calm, bored quality of his voice surprised me. I blinked thinking how I had imagined dark things happened when someone like Pablo Escobar spoke—thunder, disembodied snickering, the sound, far off, of clashing cymbals. Instead, he spoke with the rote boredom of someone passing the time, as if he was reclined, too, in a hammock, and, I imagined, squeezing a stress ball.

The hours shortened and lengthened, sagging and tightening like strings.

Time was, I agreed, a space full of agreeable and disagreeable surprises.

I was gone again, in the Hills at first, and then I didn’t have a body or a name. I was in a garden of sunflowers. I was blades of grass pushing up against dirt.

“Creo en Dios, Padre todopoderoso, Creador del cielo y de la tierra…”

The air always smelled sweet in the rain from the scent of the Drunken Tree.

The Drunken Tree was blowing in the wind up-skirted.

I walked through the house sidestepping the imagined dotted outlines of our furniture: the paintings, the vases, the lamps, Papá’s books. I visited each bedroom and traveled up and down the stairs. The air around the ghost objects felt charged and solid. Space held in place compact over ghost tables, chairs, and bed frames. In the dining room, the carpet dipped in creamy light circles where the table legs used to be. That was how I knew where the ghost table was, the sofa chairs, the glass cabinet.

Only the crescent moon stood in place. The crescent which Abuela said was God’s nail. His hand or his foot.

Her eyes opened in tired slits, the pattern of the carpet printed on her left cheek.

“Se vive, se siente, Escobar está presente!”

Beneath the clouds, far below in the garden of our house, was the Drunken Tree shivering in the wind.

The airport was one big murmur of American English, that garbled metallic noise.

so we clung to this man who wore an echo of our face, who talked in an echo of our voice.

“Ella dice que hay comida en la nevera para estos días,”

Sus dos dedos. His two fingers. We put the bag of ashes that was Papá in a little box and we buried it.

I could listen. I was a vessel for all pain, all stories. I burrowed into the safety of Vía Corona, that corner of the world where we had started anew, that tribe whose only power was that of forgetfulness.

I thought again about Pablo Escobar cutting off people’s tongues. It made sense to stop speaking, to say only what was necessary and nothing beyond. It was a way to survive.

We knelt before Papá’s coat. We didn’t even know where he was being held. I couldn’t even picture his face. I repeated Our father who art in heaven.

I prayed for Petrona too. Kneeling before the shadow of Papá’s coat, I tried to imagine her safe, but it was no good—I couldn’t picture her face either.

I was a woman without a name, lying still, in an empty lot.

was a woman without a body. Maybe my body was cold.

I didn’t know because it did not shiver. Fireflies flashed about the field. I could see through the swollen slits of my eyes—the night was blurry. Someone, an abuela, checked if the body was breathing.

The body came to a rest in a dim hut, where I was still a woman without a name, but sometimes I awoke, sitting on a bed, drinking a foul-smelling soup, I was throwing up, no name for this woman who was ill, whose breasts were tender, whose belly would soon start to grow, whose feet were cut, who wore abrasions on her thighs and arms and back, whose insides burned like a live gash.

So much of my life was waiting.

How many breaths did Papá take in a minute? How many times did Petrona scratch her arm during the same length of time? I chose people in the library to answer for me. The rhythms of strangers were a prayer for what I did not know.

My waiting anticipated a black future where nothing existed but more waiting.

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