My mother was telling my father she had that dream again— the one about the dying horse. It wasn’t a dream so much as a memory that came to her in sleep: She was nine years old, riding in the passenger’s seat of her father’s Chevrolet as he drove her and her sisters to the farm in Fusagasugá. On one of the long, dusty roads of the savanna Mami saw a gray horse walking along the ridge of grass—so thin you could count every rib, his back sunken as if he were carrying a thousand ghosts. The horse wobbled along, unsure of every step, and Mami begged her father to stop the car, said the poor horse was starving and that they needed to feed it, give it some of the fruit they had packed in a basket in the back of the car, give it some of the water they had brought in bottles all the way from the capital. But Mami’s father said, Don’t worry, my darling, the horse is fine, just bored and tired. Told her they had to get to la finca before dark or some guerrilleros might stop them on the road and start some trouble.
Mami cried, told her father the horse would die and it would be their fault, but her father kept driving, promising her that they’d come back this way tomorrow on their way to pick up some new chickens for the farm. He’d drive the trailer and said if the horse was still there, they’d bring him back with them and have one of the ranch hands nurse him to health. My mother didn’t sleep all night, waiting for her father to have his morning tinto and his first cigarette before he was ready to get back on the road to find the horse. When they came to the same spot, the horse was still there, lying dead on the grass, its mouth wide open with flies gathered at its nostrils.
Mami told Papi the dream like it was the first time, and he listened, detail by detail. Finally, he told her that it was because we were in Colombia that she was falling into nightmares. Papi hated coming to Colombia, always said this place never did him any favors, and it was only because Mami’s sister was here that we ever came back.
“This country is a giant cemetery,” Papi said. In a way it was true, most everyone Mami had ever loved here was dead. Every visit to Bogotá was marked by a full day of leaving flowers at the tombstones of relatives I never met, including Mami’s parents.
Mami got mad when he talked like that, said they were both born of Andean earth and we should honor it.
“Es que no entiendes, Maria. This country doesn’t want us back.”
On the cot next to me, my brother pretended to sleep. We were assigned to our cousin Símon’s room. He and my prima Sara preferred to bunk with each other in Sara’s room rather than be with either one of us. Even though we were all close in age, us kids didn’t know what to say to one another most of the time. Símon and Sara were four and six, and Carmen was going through this phase of dressing her kids in lederhosen and embroidered jumpers as if they lived in the Swiss Alps or something.
I poked Cris with my finger. “Do you hear them?” I knew he was awake. He always kept his eyes closed for a long time after he was conscious in the morning just to eavesdrop on the world. I was seven and Cris was ten but he had skipped a year of school and this always made him seem much older to me.
“I’m not deaf,” he answered, eyes still shut.
My aunt’s house was cold. The climate is static in Bogotá: always cool with only a taunting sun breaking through the fog of the Andes. But they didn’t have heaters and Tía Carmen insisted that it wasn’t because she was cheap— nobody in Bogotá had them. So we slept under alpaca blankets so heavy that we couldn’t move all night, packed into the mattress as if we were being smuggled.
Mami and Papi were silent on the other side of the wall. Carmen gave them the guest room, which was furnished with things that used to be in Mami’s childhood home. Every time we visited she would say, “So that’s where that dresser ended up,” or “I remember that lamp.” It annoyed Carmen, who said it made her feel like Mami was accusing her of theft, and they always got into a big fight that resulted in both of them crying and the husbands trying to calm them down.
Carmen would tell Mami that she had changed and that the United States had turned her into another kind of woman. This made Mami cry even more and it always took her ages to fall asleep, with Papi offering her words so soft I couldn’t make them out through that flimsy wall. Cris always fell asleep the minute he hit the mattress but I stayed awake for hours listening to the sounds of the apartment, the car horns on the carretera below, the echoes of a city I didn’t know.
On nights that our parents went out for dinner with old friends or distant cousins, the primos, Cris and I were left with a family who lived in the same building. The older couple had a daughter named Carla, who kept us entertained until our parents came to collect us. Carla was eighteen, beautiful, with golden skin and canela hair. She had tiny green eyes, a flattened nose, and a pale coin-size smile that looked so fragile it might fall off her face. She was slight of build and always wore a denim jacket that her mother said made her look like a campesina. If you put her in a lineup, compared her to other girls the way people like to do, you might not think her so pretty, but I thought Carla was the most spectacular girl I’d ever seen in real life, with the largest laugh you could imagine coming from such a small face.
She went to school at Los Andes, was studying psychology, and wanted to help children. Maybe that’s why she would ask me so many questions. Not the usual stream that I got in Colombia about what it was like to live in Grin-golandia. Carla wanted to know what I was afraid of and what my dreams were. I told her I only had one dream that I remembered and that was of my brother killing my only friend, Mina, who lived down the block. In my dream, my brother locked Mina inside a refrigerator until she suffocated. The dream was so real that I avoided Cris for days afterward every time I had it. And my only fear, I told Carla, was of losing my parents the way Mami had lost hers, before they had a chance to see her make anything of her life.
“How are you afraid of them dying? By sickness? By murder?”
Cris and the primos were watching a movie on television while Carla and I sat on the window seat overlooking the street.
“I’m afraid that one day they’ll just disappear.”
Carla nodded as if she understood what I meant. She told me to wait for her a minute, walked off toward her bedroom, and returned with a guitar. She sat beside me again and began strumming. This pulled Cris and the primos away from the movie, and they gathered around Carla, who was already deep into a ranchera.
Cris asked her to play “Purple Rain” but Carla said she didn’t know the song by heart. The primos requested some song, and finally I thought of one other than “Los Pollitos Dicen,” which was the only Spanish song I really knew.
“‘Spanish Eyes,’” I offered and Carla asked me why I wanted that song.
“That’s the song that was playing when Mami and Papi had their first dance,” I said. “When he was still engaged to that other lady.”
Carla’s eyes narrowed on me and she asked me what I knew about that.
“She used to sew handkerchiefs for Papi with her own hair, but Papi never wanted to marry her in the first place.”
My primos and Cris wanted me to shut up so Carla would play the song already but she kept staring at me as if I was some kind of exhibit. Finally, she pulled her eyes off me and went back to her guitar, sang “Spanish Eyes” in her private-school English, and we all chimed in at the si, si part and cried out like mariachis.
She retired the guitar after that song and we all moved to the sofa to watch the rest of the movie, but I fell asleep, and when I woke up, I was buried under the alpaca blanket in Carmen’s house with the whispers of my parents on the other side of the wall.
In New Jersey, my brother and I disappeared from our house for hours without having to check in with our parents. We lived on a shaded suburban block near some woods and a river, and played on the slow street with the neighborhood kids until we each got called home to dinner. We rode our bicycles, played Manhunt, sold lemonade, and performed magic shows for each other. My brother was obsessed with Electric Boogaloo and spent his afternoons popping, locking, and trying to do backspins and flares on a flattened cardboard box in the driveway with his friends, while I roller-skated up and down the sidewalk convinced I was training for the Olympics. But in Bogotá, we couldn’t leave the apartment without an adult escort, and when they took us out it was with their large hands pulling us along the avenida. Carmen took us to the mall one day and along the road there were children, not much older than me, with glazed eyeballs like zombies, asking for money. Every now and then one would poke their nose inside their jacket and lift their head with an even smokier expression than before. I don’t know where he heard it but Cris said those kids were sniffing glue, not like the kind we use in art class at school but one that makes you dream and forget where you are.
“Where are their parents?” I asked my brother.
“They don’t have any, stupid.”
Everywhere, we saw children. On the steps of the cathedral, outside El Andino, perched like gargoyles on the walls of La Zona Rosa. Some of them were selling gum or flowers, and some just floated along the street watching us, saying “Por favor,” in low voices. Mami kept telling Carmen the city had changed so much, but Carmen said, “No, mija, it was always like this.”
The mothers took us kids for fast food because Cris and I were sick of the ajíaco at home. Mami saved our leftovers to give to a pack of stray dogs we saw circling the parking lot. But behind the dogs came a cluster of children, asking Mami if she had any more scraps for them. We sat in the car with Carmen while Mami went back in to buy the kids some food. Cris, the primos, and I were silent while the kids—you couldn’t tell the boys from the girls—stood around the car looking at us, dirt on their faces, mocos like webs around their nostrils, mumbling words I couldn’t understand.
Carmen’s husband, my Tío Emilio, organized outings for us while my parents and Carmen did their social rounds. He took us to the top of Monserrate, where Cris and I threw up in the cable car, and to the Gold Museum, and when Cris complained that he wanted to go bowling, Emilio took us to a decrepit alley in las afueras. One day, he decided to take us kids to the salt mines while my parents and Carmen went to visit an uncle who Mami had avoided for the last ten years. We roamed around the caves, whispered into the walls that my uncle said could carry voices for miles, and in the old days that was how people would communicate to each other that they were being invaded. Emilio broke off a piece of wall and licked it, helped each of us do the same so we could taste the salty rock, chew it, and when we were through my uncle grinned, “There, niños, you just ate a piece of our land.” We giggled because it felt like we were breaking some kind of law.
I liked my uncle a lot. He was tall, gangly, with thick, black glasses and a giant mouth that made me think of alligators. His thick graying hair was slicked back and he was always talking about jazz music and books because his father was a famous writer that the whole country worshipped. The big secret was that Emilio had been working on his own book for years already, late at night after everyone was asleep. Since I often stayed awake, I’d hear him clanking away on the typewriter in his office and smelled his cigarettes because he always smoked as he wrote.
Emilio had his own daughter, but when I was around he was extra special with me. He held my hand and pulled me around the salt mine and said, “All this is part of your inheritance.”
“We own this?” I asked, confused.
“All this land belongs to all of us. The good and the bad.”
I didn’t know what he meant but that night I got a better idea of it. Over dinner, the adults were talking about La Violencia and La Situación. It was the mideighties and the name Escobar was just starting to catch the current. Emilio, a lawyer by trade, told Papi that the man who had already taken over Medellín and was now infiltrating the rest of the country had his hand in every pot and a bounty on the heads of the police and important officials. Papi laughed, said that he couldn’t believe it, that he knew Pablito Escobar from childhood. They’d gone to the same school but Papi was a few years older. Still, even then, Papi said, the kid had gangster tendencies.
“His hands are all over this country,” Emilio said. “You watch. There’s not one pure soul left.”
One of Mami’s cousins came to see us at Carmen’s house and kept saying how dark Cris and I were. We looked at each other, and even Cris, who always had a retort, didn’t know what to say. Another friend, an older lady with orange hair, said I was fat and Cris had bad teeth. Another couple, who insisted on speaking in phony British accents, asked my mother why she allowed us to dress like vagrants. For the next day of visitors Mami had us dress as if we were going to a party and Cris and I sat around the living room stiffly, him in his First Communion suit and me in a fluffy dress, sighing that we wanted to go back to New Jersey.
Since we were groomed better, the criticisms turned to Mami. One of her relatives asked her what country club she belonged to and Mami said ninguno. The man raised his furry brows as if he’d just witnessed a scandal. He asked Mami what charities she belonged to and Mami said ninguno, that she was taking college classes and helping out at Papi’s factory. The man just about lost it. Told her he couldn’t imagine why she left Colombia to live como una cualquiera in New Jersey.
He was sweating, and asked Carmen’s maid for a glass of water.
Mami softened her face. I could tell she was trying to show this guy respect, though for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how we were related to him.
“It’s different over there,” Mami said. “We manage just fine. And we are happy.”
“How can you be happy,” the man challenged, “when you’re invisible?”
Luckily Papi was out with Emilio or he would have let the guy have it. Papi already knew that Mami’s Bogotá society gang thought he was a renegade Paisa; he didn’t finish high school and even though he had a profitable business in the States, he was a factory man, not one of those guys from El Club who get siphoned off to the American Ivy Leagues and then return to be senators. Plus Papi’s accent gave him away, fluttery and still carrying the heat of Medellín, not with a potato in the mouth like the Cachaco accent. And even though all those people talked about Papi like he was a bumpkin and not a big-time empresario, they never hesitated to ask him for a loan— showing up at Carmen’s house saying, “Amigo, I’ve got a proposition for you. All I need is a little capital.”
“Where were they,” Papi would ask Mami, “when we had cardboard boxes for furniture?”
That night, Papi came home a little drunk with Emilio. Mami was already in bed when he went into the room and I heard him drop his watch on the night table.
The whispers started. Then Mami’s voice grew louder, clearer. I looked to my brother who was already sleeping, his mouth open and lips dry.
“I was somebody here,” Mami whimpered.
“What are you saying?” Papi was impatient, like he just wanted to sleep.
“Quiero volver.”
Mami had always wanted to move back. Her saying so was nothing new. I wanted to wake up Cris, tell him what I’d heard, ask him if it was really true that we were nobodies in New Jersey. Ask him why Mami seemed so disappointed by her American life, if it was because my brother and I spoke funny Spanish and were always messing up our tenses, or maybe because in New Jersey, store people were always saying to Mami, “I can’t understand you, ma’am. Speak English,” and my mother would shoot back slow and steady, “I am speaking English.” I wanted to ask him why Mami spoke as if Papi stole her from Colombia, as if she belonged more to this country than to us.
But then my parents went quiet and I decided it was best to try and sleep.
Carla invited my cousins, Cris, and me to her apartment to make arepas. It was the day before Easter and our parents took the opportunity to go visit some other ancient relatives because Papi said they would probably croak before our next trip back. One was the million-year-old third wife of Mami’s great-uncle, whom he married when she was only fifteen. Mami said the woman was pretty much senile now but that didn’t take away from their gesture of driving all the way out to Chicó to bring her cakes and cheeses.
Símon, who at four was the youngest of us, refused to make arepas because in his own house men were not allowed in the kitchen, so Carla planted him in front of the TV again. Sara, who thought herself Símon’s bodyguard, went with him and Cris decided he didn’t want to cook either so he chose the television as well. This left Carla and me in the quiet of her kitchen. The muchachas were watching telenovelas in their rooms and her parents were out.
I told Carla about the discussion I overheard between my parents the night before and she nodded as she listened.
“Women cut off their hands for men,” Carla said as we patted our balls of flour into flat disks and dropped them onto the pan. I was already quite good at making arepas and Carla even said so. I told her I had learned from Papi’s mother, Abuela Luna with the violet eyes, who lived a few miles from us in New Jersey.
“What do you mean they cut off their hands?”
She shook her head as if she wished she could take back her words. I still didn’t understand what she meant and she didn’t explain. We went on in silence, sculpting our arepas, trying to make each one more perfectly round, flat, and smooth than the one before.
Carla had a boyfriend nobody knew about. Nobody except me. She confessed her secret to me the day of the arepas when my brother and cousins had all fallen into a deep sleep in the living room. Carla and I were on the window seat again. She asked me if I had a boyfriend and I said no, I was only seven, and then when I asked her, she blushed, said his name was Andy and he was a professor at her university.
“Is he old?”
“No, he’s just thirty,” she said, which sounded very old to me.
“He rides a motorcycle,” she went on, her eyes widening so that it looked like her emeralds would roll right out from under her lashes. “He was engaged when I met him and he left that girl for me. My parents don’t know yet but we’re going to get married.”
Her little mouth grew bigger and bigger. Her teeth glistened, her cheeks filled with color, and her smile expanded so much I could nearly see down her throat.
“How do you know he loves you?” I asked her.
“It’s a feeling,” she said. “No matter where I am, with him I feel that I’m home.”
I wanted to tell her I felt the same way about our cocker spaniel, Manchas, but I was shy. Carla told me her Andy said he’d been waiting his whole life for her and I wondered how that could be since he didn’t even know she existed until last semester. Even so, I felt privileged that she told me her secret, especially as us kids filed back down to Carmen’s apartment after the parents came to get us. They still wore sleep on their faces but I was refreshed because I felt I’d been let in on the adult world of love, and the way people talk about it, like it’s some kind of secret code.
On Easter morning, Mami and Carmen were each in their rooms crying as the husbands tended to them. They got in a huge fight about something that happened when they were kids. It all came out over breakfast, when Carmen asked Mami why she wears so much makeup and Mami snapped that it might be because her sisters told her she was ugly her whole life.
It continued from there and us kids went into the living room to play with the pollitos Emilio bought off some guy on the street. There was a basket full of chicks sitting on a mound of fake grass, each one dyed a different color: pink, blue, green, or orange. A whole rainbow of pollitos that chirped as they bounced around between us and crapped in our laps. We each took one and named it. Cris named his blue one Rambo and Sara named hers Flor. Símon named his Símon and Cris told him it was stupid to name a pollito after yourself but Símon said the chick was actually named after Bolívar so it was perfectly acceptable. I named my orange pollito New Jersey.
While we went to Easter mass, we left the pollitos in the bathroom. I thought they would get cold, so I dragged the alpaca blanket off my bed and tried to leave it there for them, but Carmen stopped me, said the blanket was very expensive and did not belong on the bathroom floor. After mass, the pollitos were gone. Emilio explained that someone took them to live on a finca. Not the one in Fusagasugá that belonged to Mami’s father—she lost it to some relative in a family inheritance land war years earlier, which turned out to be a blessing because guerrilleros had taken to hanging around on that land and when they get rowdy, they sometimes cut off people’s fingers, ears, or tongues. I heard that last part on the television in Carmen’s house.
My cousins and I were crying over the lost pollitos. Even Cris was sad over losing Rambo so soon. We’d fallen in love with those little chicks so fast and now they were on their own in the world, and Símon was sure they’d been fed to the rottweiler who lived in an apartment on the ground floor. My uncle and father tried to calm us down, assure us that the pollitos were going to live long happy lives and be adopted by adult chickens that were lonely and wanted to be parents, but we were inconsolable. On top of it, our mothers were still giving each other the silent treatment. Mami was in one room saying, “I don’t know why we bother coming here anymore,” and Carmen was in another room muttering, “I don’t know why she even bothers coming back.”
Then the phone rang. It was one of the neighbors reporting some building gossip: Carla had been in a motorcycle accident. La pobre niña, the lady said, esta media muerta.
We went to see her at the hospital. Two days had passed and Carla was no longer half-dead but recovering, though her back was broken and she was wrapped in a long, thick plastic brace that made her look like a giant crustacean on the bed. Her arms were broken and her beautiful face was ripped open on one side, sliced by the concrete, though she said it was a milagro that that was all that had happened, since she hadn’t been wearing a helmet, just that denim jacket her mother hated so much.
The novio was doing just fine. Somehow the guy made it out without a scratch and Carla’s parents got to meet him in the hospital, and their first words to him were not hello but “She lost the baby.” I know this much because all us kids were gathered around our parents’ legs when they exchanged information.
Carla’s mother, who was normally expressionless and always wore a tea suit, looked like she’d just been in an earthquake, and her father, a respected advertising man, looked like Carla was already gone. My father kept saying thank God she’s all right, but her parents looked like they were ready to bury Carla and I didn’t understand why.
When they let us in to see her, I held Carla’s hand and told her she looked pretty, that the hospital light above the bed made her glow like an angel. Cris didn’t come through the doorway and Símon was still traumatized from the missing pollitos and stayed on a plastic chair in the corridor with Sara looking over him, as usual. I told Carla I wished she were my sister. I always wanted a sister and all I got was lousy Cristían. Carla tried to laugh but her bones hurt, so she stopped. They hadn’t yet told Carla she wouldn’t walk again or that she would probably never have children of her own. That day, despite the stillness of her shattered body, Carla looked vibrant, her eyes dancing because Andy had just called to say he was on his way over to see her.
We left a few days later. I promised Carla I would write her letters, tell her all about my life in elementary school, let her know as soon as I got a boyfriend, and she promised she’d invite me to her wedding, though the last time I saw her, when we went over to the hospital to say good-bye, Andy was sitting all alone in a chair at the end of the hallway with his face in his hands. He didn’t move from there during the full hour that we were with Carla.
Mami and Carmen finally made up, asked each other’s forgiveness, and spent the whole last night of our stay sitting on the floor of the living room, going through photo albums of their childhood. There were no whispers from the other side of the wall that last night. Papi was snoring and Mami crept in without disturbing him, slipped under the heavy blanket, and went to bed without a sound. I lay in the darkness, the song of Bogotá humming several stories below the window.
The next day at the airport, we said our good-byes. Emilio kept asking my father when we were coming back and Papi wouldn’t give him a straight answer. I could tell that if it were up to Papi, the answer would be never. Mami was crying. Hugging her sister as if it were the last time. Cris and I huddled with our cousins, said “See you later” because we already knew they were coming to stay with us in New Jersey that summer.
Emilio took me by the hand and walked me a bit away from our family crowd for some private words. “This is your country,” he told me. “For better or worse you carry its salt in your blood.”
I told Mami what my uncle said as the plane lifted off and we watched the city shrink into the Andes. She looked tired, her face resting on her palm, her lips pale because she’d forgotten to put on lipstick that morning. She shook her head, said Emilio always went overboard trying to be poetic and I should only listen to half of what he says. She didn’t lift her eyes from the window, even after the mountains melted under the thick clouds and the plane drifted into a sea of milky sky. And I felt foolish because, for a moment, I believed him.