Fruit of the Drunken Tree

by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

We were refugees when we arrived to the U.S. You must be happy now that you’re safe, people said. They told us to strive for assimilation. The quicker we transformed into one of the many the better. But how could we choose? The U.S. was the land that saved us; Colombia was the land that saw us emerge.

There were mathematical principles to becoming an American: you had to know one hundred historical facts (What was one reason for the Civil War? Who was the president during World War II?), and you had to spend five uninterrupted years on North American soil. We memorized the facts, we stayed in place—but when I elevated my feet at night and my head found its pillow I wondered: of what country was I during those hours when my feet were in the air?

Ours was a kingdom of women, with Mamá at the head, perpetually trying to find a fourth like us, or a fourth like her, a younger version of Mamá, poor and eager to climb out of poverty, on whom Mamá could right the wrongs she herself had endured.

There were many attempts to damage our Drunken Tree. Every few months we woke up to see out of our front windows that the branches hanging on the side of the gate over the sidewalk had once again been sawed off and left on the grass around the tree’s trunk like dead limbs. Our Drunken Tree flourished nonetheless, persistently, with its provocative white flowers hanging about it like bells and the wind forever teasing out its intoxicating fragrance into the air.

Because Mamá grew up in an invasión she prided herself in being openly combative, so people who pretended to be weak disgusted her. That was why she called any nonviolent person a little dead fly, someone whose life-strategy was playing dead while pretending to be highly insignificant. Other mosquitas muertas included our schoolteachers, our neighbors, the newscasters on the television, and the president. Mamá yelled at the television, “Virgilio Barco thinks he’s fooling this country with his little mosquita muerta act, but I know he’s nothing but a snake! Who does he think he’s fooling? ‘He has no ties to Pablo Escobar’? I wasn’t born yesterday.” When Papá was home, he too yelled at the television, except he said: “Are we mice or men, no me joda?” I wanted to yell at the television like Mamá and Papá, but I had to learn how to properly do it. I gathered that being a mouse was better than being a mosquita muerta, and being a snake was better than being a man, because flies pretending to be dead could be crushed, mice were shy, and men were persecuted; but everybody always avoided snakes.