~This essay was originally published in Dos Passos Review (2011).
I was born in Colombia. This is true. I was born in a Spanish-style
whitewashed hospital that was later leveled by an earthquake and rebuilt in its
likeness. I was born in a small city in the southwestern Colombian mountains,
and my father congratulated himself with tragos
while my mother swore and labored, screamed and pushed.
I began my life in
Spanish. This is true. Zapato and leche were my first words. I crawled on
wooden floorboards and encountered tropical insects as big as soup bowls. I
teethed on mango seeds, masticating the sweet yellow flesh until my tiny pearls
appeared in pink gums. This is true.
And if my mother had never taken me back the U.S., if my parents had
never parted, never fought over me, never fallen out of love, if I would have
grown up in that rented house in Colombia, I would have heard the peals of the iglesia’s iron bells. When my amigas went to mass with their abuelas, my hippie parents—a mezcla of American progressive values
and Colombian pride—would have kept me at home, my mother reading aloud
chapters from a dog-eared copy of Winnie-the-Pooh.
If we had lived, not in
a Minneapolis suburb but in a town in South America, I would have watched my
mother at her wooden loom, slapping the treadle against the warp with a
comforting thud and singing the folksongs of Joni Mitchell. She would have
played me scratchy records of Peter, Paul and Mary and we would have sung along
in two part harmony. These recordings I remember so well from my childhood
would have been, had we stayed in Colombia, the only time I would have heard
English spoken by anyone other than my parents.
My abuelitos would have adored me just as my maternal grandparents
did. I would have been, for a time, the only granddaughter, a perfect excuse
for spoiling and indulging. Dulcitas
and caramelos and rides on my abuelo’s shoulders would have been mine.
I would have worn my
mother’s hand-sewn clothes embroidered with her original abstract flowers and
designs. When my mother taught English I would have stayed with a primo or the vecino next door. The neighbors would have fed me café con leche and taught me to dance
the cumbia, wanting to mold me into a
true Colombiana.
The house was at one
end of a single-lane bridge where cars and camionetas
waited for their turn to cross, and, with my father’s radicalized ideals and my
mother’s Midwestern upbringing, we would have lived in a sort of comfortable
isolation in our traditional town. I would have been a happy child, pampered
and loved.
My parents would not have been happy. The nights my father spent locked
in his taller would have made my
mother silent in loneliness, wishing for her Minnesota parents, her brothers,
her American girlfriends. She and I would have tip-toed around the drafty casa where she would have scrubbed clothes
by hand over a large rough stone until my father emerged, splattered in paint,
exhausted and self-congratulatory.
My mother would have flown into an occasional rage that made her more
like her adopted country, and my father and I would have sought refuge in
flowers and walks on sun-dappled trails. He would have set up a miniature easel
next to his own and we would have painted pastoral scenes side by side until my
mother’s soprano rendition of Blowin’ in
the Wind would have come floating up into the hills above our house. My
father and I would have marched home through the high altitude jungle to kiss
and make up, the picture of familial bliss for another couple days.
If I would have lived
in Popayán when I was eight, I would have been there when an earthquake hit our
town and I would have been with my cousins buying bread in the panadería. There would have been a
tremble and great rush as if the ocean were suddenly overtaking the coastal
mountains. The moment when my primo
was struck by falling fragments from the ovens would have been repeated over
and over in my childhood nightmares. The brick missed his head—gracias a díos—but his shoulder would
have always been a reminder of the earth moving. My auntie would have rushed us
out into the dust-filled plaza, and
when it was over the equatorial sun would have laughed at the debris nature had
left us.
Even though my family
would have been the only non-Catholics in the pueblo, we would have gone to gawk at the Pope when he came to
bless our devastated town. I would have remembered very little of the papal
visit, only the crowds and the vendors selling handpainted plaques in the shape
of el Papa’s hat. My father wouldn’t
have bought me one, and, since I would have been unaccustomed to being told no,
my hot selfish tears would have made the people around us assume we had lost
loved ones in the terremoto. My
mother would have found this to be another reason she should never have left
the United States.
By fifteen, I would
have come back from a visit to the U. S. to find that my best friend’s hermano had been killed by guerillas. The brother would have been
just seventeen. He would have saved up for a motocicleta and would have taken off on a rosy October morning to
drive into the páramo. He and his amigos would have been young, beautiful
boys with short, black buzz cuts who would have started la universidad next year. I would have been half in love with one
of the hermano’s friends, although I
never would have admitted it. And when all seven boys, mistaken for military,
were shot in the knees before being shot dead in the back, I would have
imagined them, as I do now, face down on a winding mountain road, the shiny
coffee leaves and giant sugar cane shading the bikes that lay abandoned on the
gravel, a vicious guerilla killing
that would have made no sense to either me or the families in the pueblo.
When I went to a big
Midwestern university—assuming I even went to college—my accent would have been
stilted and cautious. Even though my mother would have spoken English to me had
we stayed in Colombia, there would have been holes in my vocabulary,
experiences that set me apart. I wouldn’t have had a quinceñera, but I wouldn’t have gone to prom either. I would have
earned A’s in English class at la colegia,
but I would have strained to understand the subtitled episodes of Saved by the Bell I would have watched,
not on a looming color TV in the basement of the house on Edgerton, but on a
small black and white tele at the
foot of my parents’ bed.
At home in Colombia, I would have always been viewed as the outsider. My
skin would have been lighter than the other muchachos
in our neighborhood. My German legs and ankles, clearly descended from my
mother’s Anglo Saxon roots, would have made me self-conscious in front of my
Colombian amigas —girls with the
slender bodies of Indios.
And whenever I visited
my mother’s family in the U.S., I would have found myself even more of an
outsider. I would have been pasted with labels: Hispanic, foreigner, Latina,
minority. My English would have been grammatically exact, but colloquially
forced, and my Spanish wouldn’t have been like the more familiar Mexicanos’ drawn-out rhythm.
If I somehow would have
still met my future husband, and if I brought this gringo back to Colombia to meet my parents, my father would have
given him a Colombian kiss on the cheek and then called him “dude” to show he
was a modern man. My mother would have been stand-offish, but secretly relieved
that I was marrying an American.
But my newly-wed life
in the U.S. would have found me as confused as my mismatched parents. I would
have pined for the humidity of the valleys and the crisp air of las montañas.
I would have spent my money on long-distance phone calls to friends in Bogotá,
Quito, Cartagena. I would have found myself simultaneously homesick and at
home. I would have discovered that my handsome esposo didn’t always understand my accented English, didn’t like
the sancocho or deathly sweet café con canela I prepared for him. We
would have had to compromise when the days became endless and las noches filled with arguments,
fighting, misunderstandings—all those problems that arise from a joining and a
clash of two cultures. And, like my mother before me, I would have had to
decide which life I wanted.
But this, all this, it
isn’t what happened—this isn’t the life my mother chose. I was born in
Colombia. This is true. In a whitewashed hospital that was destroyed by a terremoto. In a town with abuelitos and amigitas and guerillas.
In a family that loved me. This is true.
*****
THE STORY BEHIND THE ESSAY
In 2010, I was spending a lot of time thinking about truth. I was
working with JC Hallman, Dinah Lenney, and several other writers through the
Loft Literary Center’s Mentor Series program. Through various readings and
writing exercises, we endlessly discussed the intricacies of truth related to
nonfiction and the covenant the writer makes with the reader. I was in the
early stages of writing what would turn into a memoir about my childhood as a
half-Colombian Minnesotan and was meticulously concentrating on accurately
capturing the details—the truth—of my story. But the more I thought about
truth, I realized how much of it I didn’t know and how much of it was relative
and shaded in grey, not black and white. So as an experiment, I thought about
the truth and decided not to be constrained by what did happen but to explore what didn’t. This essay was the result.
*****
ABOUT ANIKA FAJARDO
Anika Fajardo was born in Colombia and raised in Minnesota by her single
mother. Her work has appeared in various publications including Literary Mama, Hippocampus Magazine,
McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and others. Her memoir-in-progress, Magical Realism for Non-Believers, was a
finalist for the Bakeless Literary Prize in Creative Nonfiction and was awarded
a Minnesota State Arts Board Grant. See more at http://www.anikafajardo.com
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