Fruit of the Drunken Tree

by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

“Remember the death of Galán, the bomb to El Espectador, the kidnapping of Diana Turbay and Pacho Santos? Ugly days when adrenaline spread from the feet to the head and you had to write, even if it was with fear.”

“Me? I’m a student of history.”

Multiply me when necessary, make me disappear when warranted. Transform me into light when there is shadow, into a star when in the desert.

saw the Drunken Tree all over L.A., but here it wasn’t a tree, it was a shrub.

Datura arborea,

Brugmansia arborea alba, the Drunken Tree from our garden in Bogotá. The entry said indigenous people called the tree The Breath of the Devil because when you were exposed to it, it snatched away your soul and you became a shell of a person.

Hello Father! We love you so much, from here to the sky! We are doing well. We miss you! We pray to God for your release.

scalp. I massaged soap into their hair, feeling how tender and soft heads are, startled at how the bones are so nearly palpable. I felt I wasn’t handling hair but small universes.

Mamá, Cassandra, and I orbiting her bruised, sweating face like we were three moons and she the planet.

I understood her silence in a way I never would have been able to when I was a little girl and nothing had yet gone wrong. My quiet grew from the coils of my stomach, and stopped frozen at my throat.

Her hand slipped down her cheek, and when she met my eyes, I smiled. I don’t know why I smiled. In my heart I was broken, and there was no healing beyond this brokenness.

“The secret is to carry what you were given with grace.”

felt guilty about writing to her, because it was in violation of the rules of my tribe—Better to leave the past in the past, let sleeping dogs lie—but as I wrote to Petrona, locked in the bathroom, mirror fogging with steam, I was only aware of the drum of my age in my chest, how it connected me to Petrona, across distances, across time.

Papá’s voice fit into a groove in my ear, deserted for so many years, now full of his timbre.

How easy it was to recognize this once lost detail. There was a home for every departed thing.

there were also American women arriving from vacation, their skin red, on their hands and heads other peoples’ cultures.

The man was laughing out of a prodigious black beard. Was that what Papá’s laugh was like? I withdrew, frightened. Unlike when I had heard his voice on the phone, his laughter now, in person, didn’t fit anywhere in my memory of what Papá was supposed to sound like. Transform me into light when there is shadow, multiply me when necessary. The black bushy eyebrows were the same, but the skin around his eyes wore deep wrinkles and his cheeks sank in against the arc of his teeth, and his hairline had retreated revealing skin that looked soft and mottled. I struggled to put together the old features of the Papá I knew to this new, ravaged face on which even the eyes were different. I remembered how as a girl Cassandra had assured me that Pablo Escobar could change his eyes. I held on to this man’s forearm, wondering what if they had switched him, what if the real Papá had died.

I wondered, How easy would it be for the guerrillas to just cut another man’s fingers?

I looked up and the man was staring into my face. It was a look Papá had never given me; in his eyes a flash of such suppressed desperation, or suppressed need, it took my breath away.

Sitting in the back of the cab, the four of us sandwiched together, I felt the weight of time. The years and strain of our lives of waiting.

Cartagena,

the man thought of Emily Dickinson. He thought, “I must go in; the fog is rising.”

I cried, knowing that what I had wanted was a return to normal, but there would never be a return to normal. Papá was gone. In his place was this man whose cheekbones cut hard into his skin, whose burnt-dark color and malnutrition were still present even though he no longer lived in a jungle.

This man who allowed me to hold his hand and sob onto his shoulder, even though it made him anxious to be so close, so near to anyone.

I needed to learn how to live with this new man, to negotiate a relationship with his body th...

I watched Petrona’s words disappear. There’s a paved road to the invasión now. I am growing cabbages, let—

She would have escaped her belly being filled with bones. Now the same silence that had been her undoing was the only thing I had left that I could still bestow upon her, whom I loved. I daydreamed of her cabbages, and my silence about her was like an eternal burning.

I was the only one with all the pieces. I was the only one that knew that Petrona had made a home with a man who had betrayed her, that she had chosen to keep the baby, that this new life she had fed from her breasts was something I had to make up to her and the only thing I could do was keep silent about what I knew. After all, who am I to judge? As her photo burned, I thought: even oblivion is a kindness.

I thought the fireflies were filthy animals, little flying specks attracted to the smell of men on my crotch.

I looked at his face and wondered if this was a face I could love.

The empty dress held my shape. It was like the shell cicadas shed and leave behind.

there was this woman with her eyes sinking like daggers into me and then there were clouds with changing faces of men hovering over me.

In time the difference between a memory and a dream became clear. I remembered the things I was not supposed to.

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.

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.

I did have a photograph, and in this photograph was everything I lived. Sometimes the less you know the more you live.