This old house is not old at all; it only feels this way. The online pictures that grabbed my attention showed conjured-up images of bohemian residents who smoked pipes late at night, held poetry readings, and sang a lot by the Janus fireplace. I bought the illusion of the house rather than the house itself; I realize that now.
Returning to Colombia after thirty years abroad wasn’t an easy decision. It was one my husband made for me, for us. After forty years in the British military, he wanted a place to settle. It was either England, his homeland, three thousand miles away from mine, or mine. He chose Colombia, and here we are.
The roof leaks. Let me rephrase that. There is no roof. We have a thin layer of plastic above the ceiling that I failed to see in the spectacularly staged online pictures advertising the house. The doors, whose quality I couldn’t ascertain online, are rectangular pieces of MDF that look like a high school project on a tight budget. The black-out curtains in the bedrooms are ripped and stained. The septic tank is fissured and framed by patches of bright green grass, the telltale of our organic waste being put to unsuspected use. The water heater works on spontaneous whims, which never coincide with our showers. We don’t have a garbage collection system, although we are billed monthly for it. We need to take out our own garbage to the dumpster in Abreo, the nearest village. The unpaved road to our property is one hundred yards of potholes torn up by age and government indifference.
I am a foreigner in my own country. I get lost wherever I go. I don’t understand the sign language at intersections, the complex road system that seems to have multiplied exponentially in the last thirty years. I can’t decipher the meaning of the acronyms for everything: for paying taxes, for health insurance, for banking, for living. It’s a world of acronyms and silent signs that confuse me. There are motorbikes everywhere on the road; they are my ghostly enemies when I drive. They approach me from my right from my left; they seem to jump in front of me as if descending magically from the heavens. At traffic lights, there is a sensory overload orchestrated by the Venezuelan jugglers, women selling candy with one hand, soothing a baby with the other, thug-looking teenagers threatening to clean my windshield with or without my permission. Everything is for sale before the traffic light changes to green, the fastest commercial transaction I have ever seen. The other day, as I inched closer to the traffic light, someone put a bottle of water, a box of fireworks, and a mango on the hood of my truck. I was so overwhelmed by the noise and the activity that I pulled into a gas station and wept a little bit—ashamed of my low tolerance for chaos—ashamed of feeling foreign in my own land—ashamed of not holding my shit together.
I had the septic tank emptied. Leon, the village handyman, and his crew got to work. They covered their noses with bandanas; Leon’s uncle strapped a transistor radio to his belt and blasted some old romantic ballads, music popular in the 70s and 80s we call música de planchar, the kind of music housemaids listen to while ironing. The three of them, armed with long sticks, lifted the tank’s lid and stirred our organic waste a little as if trying to ascertain the consistency of the matter before their eyes. I watched them from the deck and wondered how much they must hate doing this kind of task, how the need to put food on their tables forces them to accept jobs such as this one. Eliecer, the uncle, clears his throat before belting out: Quiero aprender de memoria con mi boca tu cuerpo, muchacha de abril. Hear me out. This is one of those life-changing moments. This man is stirring my shit with a stick, and instead of being revolted, he is inspired, his heart filled with poetic longing: I want my mouth to learn your body by heart, Spring Girl.
When we bought the house, I dreamed of wine evenings with neighbors, weekend barbecues, and impromptu afternoon visits with a raging sunset as a backdrop. This will never happen, this much I know after eight months of living here. The little creek at the east boundary of our property, which is not an idyllic creek as advertised but a nuisance of black waters that flood our land when it rains, separates us from our potential neighbor—a man of dubious reputation with links to drug trafficking known for his absolute belief that he is above the law. Our neighbors across the pathway own a Pitbull, a German shepherd, and a mean-looking Bull Terrier. They burn fireworks any day of the week at any time of the day—preferably after midnight. Last Christmas, they sent a drone over our estate and fired many shots I’m convinced were not from a BB gun. The neighbors to the left are not owners but tenants. They breed American Bulldogs and can have about fifty caged American Bulldogs at any one point, depending on supply demand and heat season. I have never met the tenants or seen the dogs; I know they are my neighbors because we use the same gardener, Leon, who tells me stories.
A man was murdered on the other side of the creek. It was November, and Leon was convinced that one single death in a whole year was very good. Good riddance, Leon said. The man was not a very good person; he was another drug dealer defending his turf. His what? I asked. What do you mean, they sell drugs just across the creek? Leon was quick to put my mind at ease. They are not narcos, narcos: just small-time criminals who kill one another over spliffs and adulterated angel dust. From that day on, I obsessed over who crosses the creek, looked compulsively at the surveillance cameras, and committed to memory the clothes of anyone I caught walking by the sad thread of murky water.
The woman who used to own this place told me that my neighbor was an excellent carpenter. Based on her recommendation and the convenience of having a carpenter next door, I hired him over WhatsApp to build bedroom closets. He sent me pictures of his progress. The walls were not even, he reported. It was nearly impossible to flush anything with the walls because of their irregular surfaces and random ceiling drops. I told him to use oak wood; he used MDF boards. I sent him a picture of my dream white library framed with ornamental cavetto molding. He built me shelves of white MDF with no molding or drawers. Among the things he encased in his MDF craze are power outlets and the wi-fi antenna. Now I have to open a closet door for the modem to send its wi-fi waves around the house and a library door to plug in my computer and the printer. Don’t you love it? He asked when I finally came to Colombia to see his work. I looked around at his engineered wood boxes. I do, I said, not wanting to start on the wrong foot with my next-door neighbor.
My husband wants to buy what he calls a retirement truck. I want us to buy something low profile, a beat-up car, if possible. I want to avoid a flashy car with a British husband (read Gringo, which in Colombia means loaded, even if you are a broke backpacker) at the wheel. I don’t want to attract attention, be the victim of car robbery at gunpoint, be ambushed by bad guys on motorbikes who would take our iPhones (Apple products are exorbitantly expensive in Colombia), our pesos, my husband’s Garmin watch and leave us stranded and shaky. My time outside Colombia has been worry-free. Alaska, Kuwait, Florida, and Qatar, none of these places had guerrilla or kidnappings; nobody got knifed over a cell phone or a handbag. I have forgotten how to be on alert. I forgot how to mistrust. I don’t want to relearn fear and fine-tune my internal alarm. Unexpectedly, I miss the subzero Alaskan temperatures and the scorching Middle Eastern summers. My sympathetic system rendered obsolete.
It’s 5:30 am. I get up, wrap myself in a virgin wool ruana, put on my slipper socks, grab a cup of freshly brewed black coffee, and plunge myself into my hammock on the deck. I’m going to meditate, but soon, I find out I can’t meditate while balancing a cup of hot coffee in a hammock. I simply sip my coffee. It tastes like heaven. A group of four rufous-headed chachalacas, the loudest birds I have ever heard, makes raucous calls as they hop across the garden. Thick fog covers the rolling hill, bridging the stilted deck to the creek down below. I stop swinging the hammock. I want to see everything, hear every leaf rustling in the wind, every ray of the sun just peeking above the fog, every drop of dew rolling off the chrysanthemums. It’s one of those life moments when chaos reorganizes itself and replaces every wrong with unexpected blessings. I identify the source of a drilling and drumming sound coming from the top of an acacia tree: two woodpeckers peck at the ancient tree trunk with every ounce of their almighty necks. The sun is coming out above the horizon, which means above the tree line, demarking the next village. The fog begins to thin out. And this dance of more sun, less fog, this cacophony of nature around me, these flowers that seem to have bloomed overnight, the sound of the creek, the warmth traveling from my cup to my hands, and this wool cocoon I’m nested in, awaken something divine within me. I have my family back in my life, I am healthy, my daughter is happy, my husband is where he wants to be, and this damn sun is sending rays through branches and tree lines. It feels like all this light coming from above is something talking to me, a voice from the fog and the acacias and the chachalacas telling me I am in the right place. It’s not always this perfect. But it’s home.
If my sisters have aged, I can’t tell. I look at them with my heart’s eyes, and they look the same as always. It’s hard to see the passing of time in their bodies because they dye their hair, work out, and have inherited flawless skin from Mom. All past grievances are where they belong; we no longer pretend or try hard at anything. They are all in their sixties, and I’m right behind them. If one is forgetful and tells the same story a few times, I tell myself that I’m looking at my future. To be kind and listen to the damn story with love. When we work out together, if one complains about bad knees or loses her balance in yoga, I know I will be her soon. I gather all the love I can muster and allow it to overpower the irritation.
The woman we bought the house from tells me there is a shortage of donkeys in Colombia because the Chinese are buying them cheaply and exporting them to their country. At first, I don’t believe her. But she tells me that the vet in her village just forty-five minutes away calls everyone he knows when he gets his hands on a donkey. He vaccinates the animal and gives it up for adoption so that the Chinese don’t empty our national stock of donkeys. Don’t I know that the Chinese believe the donkey’s skin possesses panacea-like properties? I shake my head. No. According to traditional Chinese medicine, eijao, or donkey-hide gelatin, nourishes the blood, enhances the immune system, increases libido, cures anemia, delays aging, and decreases the effects of chemotherapy, among other health benefits. If it is so good, why don’t we use it here? I ask. She seems horrified. Because we love donkeys in Colombia, she says. Do we? She nods without hesitation. Yes, so much so that she adopted one but warned me against it. Donkeys are more demanding than dogs, worse than husbands, and needier than children. She waves her hands as if erasing her praise to the beast. You live in paradise here without a worry in the world. She tells me. You don’t need a donkey. Just enjoy the house. It’s perfect.
My brother, who left home to start his own family when I was five and thus was never a part of my life, is in it now that I’m back in Colombia. He just turned seventy and looks like my grandfather with bushy grey mad professor eyebrows, dark skin after forty years of civil engineering work in the sun, and cataracts. He is a meticulous storyteller, and because he has a prodigious memory and recalls the minor details of every place he has ever visited, his stories are incredibly long and highly detailed, a true challenge for an impatient listener like me. He is also beginning to forget words; all the information is there, untouched by time, tightly stored on his exceptional hard disk, but aphasia makes sharing the memories difficult. He now speaks like a Buddhist monk, passing words through many filters before they leave his mouth. I can’t tell if he has always spoken this slowly or if introspection has always been a part of his communication makeup. Whenever he starts telling a story, I begin to sweat. I find myself taking lungfuls of air, praying for him to skip the details and get to the meat of the story. But he doesn’t. He takes his time. He staggers, and when he can’t remember the word, he looks at his wife, who always seems to know the verb, place, time, noun, and name he is trying to remember. If she is not around, an oddity since they are constantly glued at the hip, he stops mid-sentence, and we never know if the story has ended abruptly or if he needs time. We have already danced to this music when Mom developed Alzheimer’s. None of us want to do this dance again. But he’s been absent from our lives for half a century, and we worship him. We are his most loyal groupies, and we don’t wink when he speaks. We listen to him with something close to adoration. Recently, I devised a coping game. When language eludes my brother, I fill in the blanks with my own details. If he tells us a story about Peru, where he lived for a few years, the moment he stops to look in his mental lost and found for the right word, I imagine other countries, other people, other verbs. When he gets back on track with his account, I have traveled a few thousand miles and elaborated incredible journeys so that my brother’s account becomes a gateway. A story-telling technique to open the door of my imagination to not only the stories he struggles to tell but the fillers he allows me to invent in the process. Colección Creativa, we used to call it in my years of theater.
My sisters tell me the new president, a leftist ex-guerrillero, will expropriate unused land. This means that I could lose more than half of the land I live on now and co-habit with neighbors of the government’s choosing. It won’t matter that I have plans for the unused land but no money to plant the three hundred trees I have in mind or that one day I’ll clean the creek and turn it into a trout farm. Sometimes, from the deck, I look at the hill beyond the septic tanks and imagine strangers living on the property we bought with our life savings, the grass I so lovingly tend, the stone steps to the creek I’m building, all of it no longer ours. Unfathomable.
I am at Frisby—a local version of KFC, waiting for takeaway when I spot a family sleeping under a tree across the street. Remember that Venezuela used to be the South American Miami? The cashier asks no one in particular, but the few patrons around know she is referring to the family. I remember. My father crossed the border several times looking for a job, a good salary, adventure, and women. He mainly got just women. Venezuelans had oil and all the material goods this oro negro could buy. Colombians used to sneak across the border, live and work in Venezuela undocumented, make better money than they would ever make in Colombia, then sneak back out. That was more than twenty years ago. Now, bad administration and obsolete communist dreams that no longer pan out, not even in theory, have crushed the economy. Venezuelans sneak into Colombia, live and work undocumented, and make more money than they ever dreamed of making in their land. They came in waves when times were hard for everyone. Colombians’ compassion was such that more and more Venezuelans came, not just the hungry and the helpless but also the petty criminals and organized gangs. Rumor has it this village was paradise until the Venezuelans arrived. They left impoverished Venezuela and walked across the border into Colombia, where even during the pandemic, they were clothed, fed, housed, and supported by institutions and individuals. You need to keep an eye on them, the cashier mumbles, and a few customers nod. The number of home break-ins has indeed gone up since they arrived, but it could be an unfortunate coincidence. Maybe not. I double the order of chicken, but when I turn around to give half to the family, they’re gone.
A worker I had doing jobs around the house whispered some juicy gossip. My source claimed that my neighbor, the carpenter, was in a gang before he became my neighbor and a carpenter. He has what locals call procedencia dudosa, a dubious past. The locals also tell me that he had a nervous breakdown before we bought the estate and, that he used to ride his motorbike up and down the village with nothing on but a yellow poncho, and that he had to be institutionalized. This is why the previous owner stopped using his carpentry services. She was afraid of his handling drills, hammers, and sharp objects in the house. A minor detail she omitted when she recommended me his services.
Before we bought the house, there was a break-in a hundred meters up the road. A group of Venezuelans who had done some repair work on the house’s roof and knew its weakest points broke in one night. They stole whiskey, a pressure washer, and other knick-knacks worth three thousand dollars. As it turned out, the men were not Venezuelan but locals. They came on foot and, on their way out, dropped most of what they had stolen. The police knew the perpetrators and located the stolen goods but wouldn’t recover them. Too dangerous, they said. They were on the other side of the creek.
This house, which by all estimates will be the last house we own, is ten minutes away from the airport. There are rumors that another runway will be built this year, forcing the villagers—including us—to relocate. I go online and research the plans, look at maps, and end up reading a doctoral dissertation about the village’s history. It says that the Spanish conquistadors who settled on this part of the valley did not mix with the local population, did not leave when the other conquistadors left, and when they ran out of kin to reproduce with, they chose the lightest locals to preserve their white skin. This attempt at ethnic purity interests me more than the runway. I run a mental list of the villagers I have come across. Leon and his crew have olive skin and green eyes; my neighbors are white, the butcher has blue eyes, and the old man up the road who used to own this whole mountain is white, as are his wife, children, and grandchildren. It would be a discovery of no consequence if it weren’t because it makes me the darkest homeowner in many miles around.
I found a local nail technician. She comes on her motorbike and does me fantastic pedicures and manicures on the deck, a luxury for which she charges me the whooping amount of six dollars. Luz is a single mother with great humor and a winsome disposition. I look at her when she massages my feet and exfoliates the calluses off my heels and big toes while she nicks my cuticles and applies coats of cheap nail polish. She cracks jokes, tells me juicy gossip about people in the village, shares details about the recent break-in just two doors down from her house, relays her conversations with her teenage son, and gets all dreamy when speaking of the man she is dating. She does all of this hunched over my nails, giving them her undivided attention like they are something worth her love, and then she cracks another joke.
The sun is beginning to sink into the horizon. On its way down, splashes of pink and orange strokes grace the skies. Everything is so still. I devote my attention to the acacia tree; not a single leaf moves. A chill runs down my spine. It is the calm before the tragedy Hollywood has taught me to fear. The prologue to a tsunami, the stillness of an empty playground before a 7.7 on the Richter scale hits. I’m standing on a flat patch framed by purple and pink vervain plants. Behind me, perched up high, is the deck attached to the house; in front of me and below is the creek, alongside which run an electric fence, ten lines of barbed wire, and two bamboo gardens. A frantic whirr among the vervains betrays an iridescent green hummingbird. I try not to move. I don’t want to scare it off. Another whirring noise. A dark hummingbird. These two jump from vervain to vervain, taking micro sips of some elusive elixir. Little frenzied miracles dancing in front of me. I stand here, amazed at my luck, reconsidering God’s nonexistence, grateful to bear witness to these spectacular beings going about their business of looking like someone’s hallucination while sucking invisible juice. And just like that, something swoops over my head, and before I have the time to react, about ten swallows perform a little choreography of dives, glides, and vertical ascents. I don’t know how they do it; this ballet of plunges and hovers barely fluttering their wings like eternal gliders, staring without winking, singing with no vocal cords, unwittingly giving me back the faith and innocence I lost a long time ago. I’m lightheaded from holding my breath and awe. I let out a sigh, and with it comes a stream of tears I won’t explain.
Heeding Virginia Wolf’s call to have my place, not to write but to teach my fitness classes, I am having a dome built by the creek. It’s a 20-foot by 20-foot studio shaped like an igloo. Alveiro, the engineer who had built glamping domes in the past, said it would take about a month, two weeks to build in his workshop, and two weeks to assemble among old eucalyptus and avocado trees. I paid the deposit in September, he purchased a few thousand dollars worth of pine wood, and the engineer and his team got to work. Two months later, it was clear that the wood he had bought was wet, and he had no room to put it to dry. He didn’t have a workshop and was building my dome in his mother’s living room. Alveiro, who is not an engineer, is missing one eye, has no team to support him, has never built a pine dome in his life, and has had a nervous breakdown. His mother wanted her living room back, and the project was too much for him. Unfortunately for both of us, he had already used the deposit to buy the pine and couldn’t reimburse me for the money. He asked for more time. Could he start putting the dome together in January? I had no option but to agree. As discussed before, assembling the dome would take two weeks. We had a dry spell, and the blue skies would be perfect for Alveiro to work outdoors.
It’s been eight weeks, and he is still at it. He’s lost ten pounds, he tells me, has gastritis and other stress-related symptoms. The dome is killing him. Miraculously, he finished, we shook hands, I paid the balance, moved my fitness equipment in, had high-speed internet installed, brought a 60-inch TV in, and started my classes in the space I always dreamed of having. I was in heaven. Until it rained. The dry spell is over now, and when it rains, it pours inside the dome. I do squats and mop the leaks to the right. Bicep curls and a continuous drip dampens my shoulder. I move to the center and get water on my head’s crown. I pray for dry sockets, a water-leak-free modem, and impermeable electric circuits. Virginia Wolf spoke to me. A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to earn a living doing what she loves. I have modest savings and a leaky dome. I just need to stay dry while I do burpees and curtsies—the things I love.
Soon after we moved in, we bought a grill. We wanted to have my family over for our first barbeque in Colombia. We scouted gas stations and supermarkets for a propane gas pipe to no avail. How could they sell grills when there is nowhere to buy gas? I called the only person I knew back then, Luz, the nail technician. Did she know where I could get propane gas? Yes, she said, send me a picture of the grill. I obliged, expecting a message indicating where to get gas for this grill. I didn’t hear back from her and, after an hour, had resigned myself to scouting a different village the following day when she rang the doorbell. There she was on her tiny motorbike, the propane pipe in tow tied with a rope to the back of her bike, a plastic bag dangling from her wrist with hoses and connectors, and that big grin of hers like it was amusing that it was near nine pm and she had gone shopping for us, just because that’s how her heart rolls. She refused the generous tip we offered in return.
I’m having a shitty day. I lost the internet a week ago and am still waiting for the repairman scheduled to visit me six days ago. Today’s power cut was supposed to last three hours; it’s been seven hours without electricity, which means not being able to open the electric gate, turn on surveillance cameras, or arm the alarm system. I feel vulnerable and exhausted. I walk into the garden, looking for the answer to my prayers. A flower catches my eye. It looks like an ordinary bromeliad. I bend over, remove the dry leaves from its center, and there it is, life pulsating within with all its might. She has stiff, prickly, purple leaves folding outwardly in a circle. At the center of the circle is a green core of hard little buds, like tiny tentacles, like crazy spermatozoids, like erect seaweed. What kind of predator is this girl here protecting its beauty from? Each green tentacle ends in another bulbous bud resembling a cone hat, a bunch of extraterrestrials trapped in a rave party. Three lavender-color flowers stand at attention, breaking the greenness of the core. They are of formidable symmetry. Imagine a triangular flower made of three triangular petals. Now imagine that at the base of each petal, there is another triangle of deep purple moving upward and stopping in the middle of the petal, only to be encircled by a lighter shade of purple—a triangle within a triangle. A wild babushka let to grow free in my garden. I’m a sucker for marvelous little things like this. My eyes well up. How many times have I walked by this bromeliad in the last months? And just today, when I’m in desperate need of magic, I find it in all its triangular glory. I want to share this with my family. I point my phone’s camera to the flower, and right before I click, I zoom in on the purple, triangular babushka and realize that at the center of this palette of dark purple and light purple is another flower. It is white, has six triangular petals, and sits there, sat there, has been sitting there for months, years, ignored, overlooked, underestimated. I know the camera won’t do justice to what’s before my eyes, but I try. I click once, twice, and thrice, looking for the perfect light, click, click, the most appealing angle, snap, snap, and look for the shot that captures as much of its incredible beauty. Inside the house, I choose the best photos and send them to my family. What’s this? one of my sisters asks. I don’t answer. I want the other siblings to see what’s obvious to me. What are we looking at? Another sibling asks. Eventually, I give in and tell them they are looking at a bromeliad I found in the garden. Really? Another sister asks. It looks like a spaceship.
I got my first groceries delivered from La Vaquita, The Little Cow, a supermarket chain located ten minutes away. The delivery man seemed offended when I refused to let him bring in the groceries from the back of his motorbike all the way to the kitchen. He wanted to unpack the groceries on my kitchen counter. He didn’t want me to lift the bags. Tsk, tsk, too heavy for you, he said, and in he marched to the kitchen, nearly pushing me out of the way. When he was, we were, done, I looked in my wallet for a tip. What’s a good tip for a man who, rain or shine, travels these unpaved rural roads on an old motorbike that’s seen better years to deliver the freshest produce in the area, bottles of wine, and toiletries? Ten dollars? Five dollars? A percentage of the bill? But no, this is Colombia, and my family warned me I could create an imbalance in the local grocery delivery business by tipping too much. I think of giving him the standard 2000 pesos, a pittance, but I get muddled up in the exchange and end up giving him the equivalent of two dollars. He looks at his ten thousand pesos and smiles big. Is this for me? He incredulously asks, thanks me profusely, and gets back on his motorbike like he struck gold. From that day on, as he suggests, I make a list of my groceries in the evening, and he delivers them the following morning. If the avocados are not to my liking, he goes around the village looking for better produce. If the chicken is too small, too big, too greasy, too whatever, he goes hunting for the ideal chicken legs—all for two dollars, the largest tip he receives around here. I’m happy to create an imbalance in the local economy.
Imagine this bird. It measures about twenty inches and weighs less than two hundred grams. She has red eyes and gray paws. Pause there. Please re-read. This bird possesses a pair of splendid red eyes. It sports a black crown surrounded by an iridescent turquoise blue ring with hues of violet peripherally. Stop again. Go back one line. This bird I’m describing has an iridescent turquoise blue circle on the crown of her head. Like a halo, it sits quietly on her head instead of hovering. It has a black mask with well-marked turquoise blue edges in all its parts, a grass-green back, olive green underpants, and two black spots on her breast. Stay with me. This bird, which has taken residence outside our kitchen, sits on a tree branch for long periods as if modeling for us, has a long tail racket-shaped at the tips, and is almost entirely blue. Did you get that? This bird that seems taken out of a children’s tale has two median tail feathers that are longer than the rest of the tail feathers; each of both feathers has about an inch or more of a bare shaft ending in a racket-like point. I don’t know if we see the same bird every day or if different motmots visit us, but there is only this one in my head. This solitary beauty, perched silently, swings its majestic tail like a pendulum when disturbed, which is to say when we startle her with the click of our intrusive cameras or move too close, yielding to the childish whim of caressing its scintillating tail. But she is coy. She lets me approach her, tail swaying slightly alarmed, we have long, meaningful stare-downs during which I can’t stop feeling giddy with joy, and she is most likely laughing at my giddiness. I take one step in her direction, then two, my hands outstretched in front of me, anticipating the silk promise of her blue, and when I think she’ll let me touch her, she flies away. Not too far. But higher, out of my reach, free of the threat of my groping hands, where she belongs. She has the last laugh. She always does. And I’m perfectly okay with it.
This old house that’s not old but feels ancient has been a financial bloodshed. We pour money into it like a black hole that swallows all our savings into a void. After thousands of dollars, the house still hasn’t recovered from the abandonment the previous owners punished it with. The roof can’t hold another repair. If we don’t want the rain trickling down the living room walls and inside the bathrooms, we’ll have to change the roof entirely. I call three roofers; one looks at my Scottish husband and quickly decides we are loaded. He charges an exorbitant amount for the job. The second roofer comes to assess the prospective job but forgets to bring a ladder. No problem, he says, and he proceeds to climb the recently painted walls like a country traceur, scratch that, like a country Spiderman, which impresses me with the same intensity it annoys me as he ruins the fresh paint job with his muddy boots. He steps on the edge of the roof and freezes. He is afraid of heights. Fuck me. The man looks at the roof from where he is, without moving, and tells me he’ll send a quotation later that day. Without measuring it? I ask. He has a pretty good idea, he says and jumps free-fall onto the grassy ground. I don’t hear back from him. I give the job to the third roofer.
Sorting through a box of CDs and cassettes in storage, I find a tape labeled Mother’s Day 1993. I remember that day, my last Mother’s Day in Colombia, just two days before I left the country for good. I hadn’t mustered the courage to announce to my family that I’d be leaving and decided not to ruin Mom’s day with sad news. I’d tell them after. I insert the cassette into the sound console and press play. I hear my twenty-six-year-old self. I don’t remember having a squeaky voice thirty years ago. My siblings also have squeaky voices, and I think that maybe time and temperature fluctuations have stretched the tape, making us all sound like chipmunks. We gathered to celebrate Mom’s Day. We sang the songs she liked, which we have always known by heart. My nephews, still teenagers, told lame jokes, and one of my sisters got into hysterics over a mispronounced word. We were tipsy. Then I hear Mom’s voice. Something within me cracks wide open. I glue my ear to the sound console and weep hard like my mom had just died in my arms, not sixteen years ago. I want to hear her voice, be a daughter again, her niña. I want her to wrap her arms around me and take me back into the ancestral cocoon. I weep with longing, orphanness, and a fresh type of loneliness bordering on abandonment. The leftovers of her loss. Residual grief.
I invite my siblings and their families over for a barbeque. In the evening, we drink wine, dim the lights, and when all moods are mellow, the temperature drop sends everyone looking for blankets and wooly socks; I gather them around the lit fireplace. I play the tape, the existence of which is unknown to everyone. At first, they don’t know what they are listening to, but as soon as the singing begins, we identify one another’s voices. My sister’s contralto tone, my brother’s guitar, and my nineteen-year-old nephew singing the same song he has always sung since he was a little boy about a Barcino bull, and we all surrender to nostalgia. They wipe their tears and laugh at our thirty-year-old shenanigans. Then Mom speaks, and their necks cock. They want to hear her better, closer, and more clearly. What did she say? I rewind the tape. She wanted to die before any of her children or grandchildren did. She couldn’t endure the pain of losing any of us. It’s a full moon. I wrap everyone the best I can with blankets and heavy coats my husband and I bought in Turkmenistan, Mongolia, and the Middle Eastern desert. I boil water and give my siblings hot water bottles to warm their bodies. We move the console outside to the deck, rewind the tape, and start listening to the recording from the beginning, the full moon shining over us. We huddle around the tape, glasses of red wine in hand, Kleenex tissues at the ready. Nobody talks. We look ridiculous, wrapped in every imaginable blanket and poncho, socks and gloves, furry Cossack, and beanie hats. A thick fog starts to lift from below by the creek. My brother rubs his gloved hands together to generate heat. I didn’t know how prone he was to be cold. Despite my efforts to keep them warm, everyone is shivering in silence, as if everybody intuits the importance and the irreplaceability of this frail moment. And the love the tape emanates spills over the deck and envelops us in a tight hug. The love, yes, the love we feel for one another, is so palpable that it feels like I need to bring it its own Sherpa jacket and fuzzy slippers and make room for it in my hammock. The love we give and receive is so homogeneous in kind, so strong, so stern, so unmovable that I let it rain over me like water filling the contours of every space I inhabit in this old house. As hard as life might sometimes be, I know I belong here, and I secretly hope my siblings feel the same way; there isn’t a better place for any of us than right here, right now, under this blinding full moon.
I’m finally home.
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Learn more about Adriana on the Contributors’ page.
Adriana’s latest essay collection, Keeping Quiet: Sixteen Essays on Silence, was published by Red Hen in 2024 and is available here.
(Photo: Dave Curtis/flickr.com/ CC BY 2.0)
- This Old House by Adriana Páramo - January 16, 2025