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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.
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.
We called it el Borrachero, the Drunken Tree. Papá called it by its scientific name, Brugmansia arborea alba, but nobody ever knew what he was talking about. It was a tall tree with twisted limbs, big white flowers, and dark brown fruits. All of the tree, even the leaves, was filled with poison. The tree drooped half over our garden, half over the neighborhood sidewalk, releasing a honeyed scent like a seductive, expensive perfume.
Mamá was giving her the same warnings I had received about the tree: not to pick up its flowers, not to sit underneath, not to stand by it too long, and most important, not to let the neighbors know we ourselves were afraid of it.
Who’s to say why Mamá decided to grow that tree in her garden? It may have been that long mean streak in her, or it may have been because she was always saying you couldn’t trust anyone.
Mamá waved the air. “Hmph. Ella? Ella no es nada más que una mosquita muerta.”
Sometimes my mind went to places I wanted to forget. Like the look of our farmhouse in Boyacá after it was torched by paramilitary. All the walls of the farmhouse fell.
Wasn’t life unfair, a patilimpia like la Señora Alma with an Indian grandmother, skin the color of dirt, ending up in that large house with proper bedrooms. And us sharing blood with the Spanish, here in this dump.
War always seemed distant from Bogotá, like niebla descending on the hills and forests of the countryside and jungles. The way it approached us was like fog as well, without us realizing, until it sat embroiling everything around us.
Papá had strange rules about hair and how long it should be. Mamá said it was all part of a sordid belief system called machismo. Mamá said Papá was a machista. On the other hand, Mamá, Cassandra, and I were feministas.
I didn’t know why I was the only one really seeing Petrona, but it seemed like a gift.
’Tis the final conflict, let each stand in his place. The international working class shall be the human race.”
I felt seen in a way I didn’t know was possible and it quenched something in me,
The news played a tape Pablo Escobar had sent to the radio, except it wasn’t him speaking but one of his men: “The fight is now with blood. Every time one of us is extradited, ten judges die.”
Papá said they had a motto: We prefer a tomb in Colombia to a jail in the United States.
One of Mamá’s favorite pastimes was to scandalize Cassandra and me. Papá said it was because Mamá had been a young mother, and young mothers never grew up.
I put everything into my screaming. The more I put into my screaming, the more things became unhinged—I gave sound to the things that had no language: the tense groove above Mamá’s lips, the snail shell in my palm, Petrona’s swollen mutant skin swallowing her eye and the points of her lashes, Abuela’s porcupine back.
I wiped tears from my face. I would be who Mamá had raised me to be.
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.
Isa and Lala didn’t mention Papá and I understood this was what you did for the people you loved. You sat with them in their pain.
We hugged. Good luck, Have a nice life, we said, See you. Not yet understanding the finality of goodbyes.
Time was, I agreed, a space full of agreeable and disagreeable surprises.
“What are you doing?” Mamá asked from the bedroom door. “Closing the window,” I said. “We have nothing to save from the storm,” she said. “There’s no reason to close the window. Let the storm come in if it wants.”
Multiply me when necessary, make me disappear when warranted. Transform me into light when there is shadow, into a star when in the desert.
In my heart I was broken, and there was no healing beyond this brokenness.
There was a home for every departed thing.
We watched many arrivals: one crowd from Mexico, another from Brazil—there were people who were native to those countries and arrived looking downcast and nostalgic after their visit home, but there were also American women arriving from vacation, their skin red, on their hands and heads other peoples’ cultures.
