The Man Who Could Move Clouds, page 14
At the cemetery, as the funeral procession made the climb to the crest of the hill of El Cacique, Papi remained at the bottom with Ximena in his arms, walking the grounds. Funerals scared him. Nono scared him. Mami scared him. His two daughters scared him. At the edge of the cemetery, with Ximena wrapping her little body around his chest, he could pretend his was a normal father’s life. Ximena did not understand yet what funerals were. As far as she knew, Nono was not dead, but sleeping. Not sleeping, but gone away. Papi whistled part of a song, hummed another, and taught Ximena the names of the flowers. He leaned her over them so she could smell their sweetness, and then he looked to the hill, where the procession was still inching along. He guessed by then people were taking turns before the casket, saying goodbye. He knew Mami would be guarding the coffin, trying to keep requests for miracles from going with Nono to the grave. Papi didn’t believe in miracles, or in Nono’s ability to concede them—what harm could a piece of paper perform against a body without a pulse? Still, he had fretted over Mami’s grief about not knowing how to grant her father’s dying wish. Why don’t you and Perla stand at both ends of the casket and keep vigil? he suggested. Mami had seemed calmer then, having a plan, and Papi imagined she was at that very moment at the mountain crest, by her father, doing as he’d suggested.
In a moment, Papi would hear guns fired into the sky.
* * *
—
Nono wanted his farewell to be like that of a general, even if he had never fought a war.
Mami had no trouble fulfilling this charge. With only a day before the funeral, she approached a couple of army men who were on a break, smoking in the park by her father’s house. She gave them a sample palm reading, and then traded a full reading for their presence at her father’s funeral—but they had to come in full ceremonial garb, fire guns, and play trumpets. She told them, If I see you perform the salute even halfway, so will I, when the time comes, give you half a palm reading. The men stood at attention the whole time the priest was giving his service.
Ve, I never knew Rafael had fought in a war, Mami overheard the family from Ocaña say.
Yes, I seem to remember, must have been La Violencia.
Nono was not fond of priests. The priest was there more for the sake of the funeralgoers than for him. Mami didn’t care much for priests either—to her, they were mere men pretending to be holy—and so, as the priest read from the Bible, always the same story about death and salvation, Mami lifted her gaze to the sky.
Above, clouds gathered, glowing at the edges, and quickly bruising.
Perla, Mami whispered, not taking her eyes off the sky. Do those clouds look natural to you?
Tía Perla said, between gritted teeth, Don’t you dare say one more word to me.
Mami stared in silence as the clouds bulked.
Perla, Mami insisted, look.
Tía Perla glanced up, then away. I think I’m going to have a heart attack.
Tía Perla, who had never grown comfortable with the supernatural despite her upbringing, began to hyperventilate, attracting her siblings’ attention, and in the murmurings that ensued, Mami took the opportunity to disseminate her question about the sky and the clouds. One by one, Nono’s children looked up. Someone else noticed, and the observation was repeated in hushed tones along the tottering row of Nono’s sons and daughters, whose reactions ranged from delight to terror, that the mob of darkening clouds was a phenomenon only happening above Nono’s funeral plot; and down the hill, where another funeral was taking place, there were no clouds at all.
Farther down, where Papi stood, just as he was running out of the names for flowers he knew and was beginning to invent, there was sunlight.
Tía Perla held her temples: What if he gets up and walks? And just then the casket gaped open for a final farewell.
Everyone gasped.
Her siblings inhaled at tía Perla’s words, but tía Perla and Mami were looking at Nono. They had guarded his head and chest well, and there were no little papers requesting miracles there, but his sides were stuffed with them. People had managed to sneak them in. It didn’t occur to the family to stop the proceedings and dig the little papers out, and in their grief, they simply watched it all unfold. Sensing their anguish, the priest recommended, My sons and daughters, take a fistful of dirt and throw it on the casket as it goes down; this will help your mourning.
Not knowing what else to do, the tías and tíos complied. They threw dirt on the casket as it dropped.
That’s right, my flock, take handfuls of dirt and say farewell.
With pain, Mami had closed her fist around black earth when it began to rain. It’s just raining on this plot, Mami whispered to her siblings around her. It’s only raining on this plot.
The tías and tíos saw that it was true. At the other funeral downhill, all of the six or eight persons attending had remained dry. Mami turned to the sky and allowed the rain to drench her face. Her brothers and sisters keened, and then she heard the knock of Nono’s casket as it was released on top of what must have been the coffin of Raúl’s wife. The priest, seeing but not understanding the wild eruption of emotion, insisted, Take fistfuls of dirt, all of you, and throw them on the casket of your good father, for this is the way to say goodbye.
The tías and tíos continued clumping and throwing dirt at their father in his casket, and then the final gunshots were fired into the sky. Mami released a last fistful of soil.
Slowly, the grave filled with earth and water.
* * *
—
Back in Cúcuta, Nona walked directly to her notebook of important facts. It was the one where she had recorded the date of her wedding, the place and time of the birth of each of her children, their baptisms, marriages, and the names of their children. She turned to the very last page, scratched the date, and wrote in all capitals, “rafael contreras alfonso has died he was buried in bucaramanga.”
• 12 •
the curse
Many decades later, it would be said that Nono’s death was what set loose the eerie trouble that had been stalking the family ever since, though nobody would use these words. If there was ever any term I heard it called it was eso: that which we inherited, that which could not be understood, that which struck some but not others, that which caused stories to repeat themselves across generations.
Many things could be called a curse.
Tía Perla’s teeth, of a sudden, falling out.
A tío being kidnapped four different times by guerrillas, each time held for longer and longer periods.
The cells of Mami’s eyes attacking themselves from an autoimmune disease that is supposed to strike only people with AIDS.
What are the odds? the family kept asking, reproach tinging their words. All of this happening in one family?
* * *
—
Tío Ariel knew some of the secrets, but not all. When Mami was a senior in high school, tío Ariel had two sons and no job, and Mami begged Nono to teach him anything that could help him put food on the table. Nono balked at the idea. Tío Ariel was no good for the knowledge. A man whose knees tremble before a ghost cannot be a healer. But Mami could be very convincing, and in the end Nono taught tío Ariel to move clouds, the most showy but arguably least useful of the secrets. Then, when Nono was soon to die and Mami needed a last set of drafts for her paralysis, he made another exception.
Nono trekked to the meadow where he had picked the red flowers before, the name of which Mami can’t recall, collected some more, and left them with tío Ariel. When Sojaila comes…, Nono began. Tío Ariel interrupted: Does Sojaila have plans to come? Nono didn’t say. He didn’t want tío Ariel to know he was crossing.
Mami couldn’t stay in Bucaramanga for treatment after the funeral, so, instead, tío Ariel and the flowers traveled back to Bogotá with her. The flowers, leaves, and seed pods were individually bagged, and the bags were knotted, but their cloying sweetness slipped past plastic and knot and made both Ximena and tío Ariel, who were riding together in the back, carsick. Papi had to stop often.
In Bogotá, tío Ariel prepared the leaves and flowers after Nono’s instructions. How could something that had smelled so sweet turn so bitter once steeped? Mami plugged her nose and forced herself to swallow. She suppressed the urge to throw up. She followed the treatment. When, after a few weeks, the force of her grip returned, Mami should have been relieved at the independence restored to her, but every day she suffered a kind of selective forgetting and picked up the telephone from its cradle and dialed her father. She was full of news about her paralysis, full of missings of him, and she wanted to know what he had dreamt. Each day, the ringing dial tone traced the outlines of her grief.
Mami and tío Ariel consoled each other, but tío Ariel always had disaster on his face. He suffered from depression. He was an embattled man, seeming to overcome his worst, then not. Papi and tío Ariel drank together. At night, they grew somber and erratic, and high-spirited and red-faced in the day. It was under those intemperate moods that Papi proposed they take me to meet the Salto de Tequendama, his favorite place on earth.
The Salto is a gleaming waterfall with a drop of more than four hundred feet. It’s an hour’s drive out of Bogotá. At the top of the road, a mansion hangs at the edge of the abyss, and the spray of the falls rides the air. The mansion, built in the 1920s, was a train stop, a hotel, and later a restaurant. Year after year, it collected its ghosts: jumpers who chose the place.
The spot where the waterfall greets the river below is known as the Lake of the Dead. In the sixteenth century, the Muiscas, the original people of Bogotá, knew they would lose their territory and kingdom to the Spanish. Rather than being conquered, many chose to jump. What is a waterfall? A promised descent, a journey water takes to meet itself. The survivors told the story: instead of joining the water in its fall, the jumpers turned into eagles, and the eagles flew to the sun. Those who stayed behind regretted not leaving with the others.
For centuries, the bodies of jumpers at the Salto de Tequendama vanished into the whirlpool beneath the falls, into the Lake of the Dead. It was believed to be a vortex, a place of no return. The first body to be recovered from the falls was in 1941, that of a taxi driver. His friends, also cab drivers, steered their canoes and ropes and got close enough to smell the putrefying body and to see it, lifeless, tossing and turning beneath the tumult of the falls.
No one has ever sought to recover the bones that lie at the bottom of the waterfall, and people say to this day to be careful, never to stare too long into the Lake of the Dead, because the dead are constantly calling from the water. A hungry mouth, clamoring for a drowning.
Three weeks or so after the funeral, Papi pulled over and parked, and together we hiked up the road’s edge: Papi holding Ximena, Mami holding me, and tío Ariel bringing up the rear. At the manor, Papi went inside to buy coffees and almojábanas while Mami and tío Ariel strolled to the broad stone balcony. They leaned over the banister and gaped at the steep drop of the canyon and the roaring whitewater. Mami grew transfixed. Her gaze took in the foam of the rapids below, the glaze of the rocks, and, by the crest of the waterfall, the blue-robed Virgin of the Suicides, who stood, opening her arms, overlooking the Lake of the Dead. The misted air gradually soaked Mami’s skin; then her arms flinched and, on their own, went slack, a betrayal of her body that Mami’s siblings would later identify as eso. I slipped from her grasp. In the hell of an eternity, during which Mami’s hands did not work, not my limbs but the red blanket I was wrapped in stuck to her fingers. I dropped toward the white thunder, and Mami knew she would jump too.
Behind us, Papi was coming down the steps to the balcony. His hands were full of coffee and pastries, but beyond that, I don’t know what he saw. He won’t tell me anything else, and he walks away from me each time I ask.
Tío Ariel possessed an intermittent ability to perceive the future, and he said later that he had foreseen what was about to take place. That was why he was already kneeling, already sticking his hand through the stone balusters of the balcony, to catch me by the wrist as I fell. As Mami screamed, he calmly pulled me up. He paused once his arm met the thickness of the top rail, reached with his other hand, passed me from one hand to the other, and released me, safely, on the ground.
Mami says I looked like a small sacrifice to her, laid directly on the brick, a wailing red-faced baby girl with a dislocated arm stretching away at a cruel angle. Papi pulled at his hair in the roar of the canyon, and tío Ariel, who had also learned from Nono about setting bones, popped my arm back into place.
After what Mami called a near-disaster and what tío Ariel called the consequences of her knowing the secrets, Mami refused to leave the house. She was angry. The waterfall had tried to gulp her baby down. Tío Ariel advised her to abandon her practice of healing and divination, for her family’s safety, and teach what she knew to him. Only then might she be released from the string of tragedies nipping at her heels. Mami accused tío Ariel of jealousy. Nono loved her more than him, believed her to be more capable. She had earned the secrets, while he was only privy to a few because of Mami. Tío Ariel packed a bag, bought a bus ticket to go back to his family in Bucaramanga, and left within a day.
* * *
—
This was not the first time Mami and tío Ariel had fought over the secrets. Back when Nono had taught tío Ariel how to move clouds, tío Ariel opened a consulting room. But he didn’t know how to heal. Mami was finishing high school, and thankful to tío Ariel for saving her from an abusive relationship, the one before Papi. So, just as she had done for her father when she was younger, she ran the operation for tío Ariel’s consulting room and moved into his house.
Unheeded, unrecognized, she prepared the drafts, cared for tío Ariel’s patients, and carried out the actual work of healing. Tío Ariel delighted in her support, but as he sat in his consulting room, negotiating payment and treatment plans, saying his assistant would carry out his instructions, there came a day when he began to believe the charade that he was in charge. After Mami healed his patients, the patients presented her with tokens of their gratitude. Tío Ariel didn’t immediately discover the tokens, but once he did, he stole them. He was the face and brains of the operation. He accused Mami of prostitution—what else would incite his patients to give her extra money and gifts if they had already paid him in full?
Mami allowed him to insult her, take her money, break her gifts only because she was biding her time for the perfect moment to exact her revenge. Tío Ariel’s wife, Mariana, was scandalized at the thought of Mami selling sex under her own roof. She stole Mami’s panties and half-buried them in the soil of their house plants so Mami would see what Mariana had done and come to understand that Mariana did not condone her actions either.
One night, when Mami was sure they were both asleep, Mami gathered as many of tío Ariel’s belongings as she could, piled them high in the indoor courtyard, doused them with gasoline, and tossed a lit match. She walked away from the house in the middle of the night, the air thickening with smoke.
The road to the Salto de Tequendama. Bogotá, 1997
Six years later at the Salto de Tequendama, my sister runs at my father, who takes this photo. Sitting on the ground with cousin Gabriel is tío Ariel. In front, also on the ground, is cousin Fabián. In the back row, from left to right, is tío Ariel’s wife, Mariana, with their sons Ivan and Omar. Mami, still nervous that someone might tumble into the falls, grips and holds on to Omar’s shirt. I am seated next to Mami, on the far right.
What did I tell you, mi animal de monte? Nono said, not surprised to see her arrive at his house as the sky was beginning to lighten. He’s no good for it. He’ll lose his head.
At the time, tío Ariel called for Nono to beat Mami for what she had done: his children had been in the house, after all, and if he had not woken up when he did, the whole house might have burned down. You deserved what she did, Nono said. Eventually, tío Ariel forgave Mami for setting his things on fire, understanding that he had wronged her. He wanted her to return, to prove he could treat her better, but even though she let go of her resentment, she couldn’t trust him in the same way again. He was a man like all the men she knew: threatened by her, and interested in control.
In the absence of Nono’s and Mami’s guidance, tío Ariel bought an old book on Spanish witchcraft at a secondhand bookstore and used it to teach himself to communicate with spirits, invite them into his body, trade his sensory experience of life for their ability to foretell. He drank a whole bottle of vodka in a night, saying the only ghost who could tell him the future liked to enter his body and drink. It was the price he had to pay.
* * *
—
By the time of Nono’s funeral, tío Ariel’s consulting ghosts had begun to take residence inside his body without his permission, demanding more and more alcohol. The family remarked on his declining health, and with the additional news of my almost falling into the waterfall, the baby girl born at the devil’s hour, questions that had long been coming were uttered for the first time: If the practices Nono had devoted himself to were good, why had he died looking like such a terror? If the practices Mami was devoted to were also good, why had she lost the movement in her arms? Why had the Lake of the Dead tried to take a newborn life? Why had tío Ariel, who had closely followed Mami and Nono, ended up becoming, clearly, an alcoholic?
