The Man Who Could Move Clouds: A Memoir by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

Author:Ingrid Rojas Contreras [Rojas Contreras, Ingrid]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780385546669
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2022-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

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While I was growing up, Mami, Papi, my sister, and I traveled by car from Bogotá to see Mami’s family in Santander. We saw Mami’s family for only two months out of the year—in September and December, the months that Ximena and I had off from school. I was unsure if I believed in eso, but I could see why some tías and tíos might. More than what seemed usual, even for Colombians, we were a family surrounded by the strange.

Annually, as our car glided up from Bogotá along the Eastern Cordillera, into which the Northern Central Highway is etched, into the foggy air of the highlands, we used the newspaper as our road map, avoiding towns and areas where recent skirmishes and massacres had taken place, but this also made us feel that at any point we could suddenly take a wrong turn toward calamity.

We sweated through the infernal heat of the lowlands, and at night gaped at the cemetery, where small balls of fire could be seen floating above the graves, which Mami called ghosts, and Papi called photon emissions. It would be early morning by the time we pulled up to tío Ariel’s house, where Mami shook us awake and told us to scoot inside.

The house had been a largesse presented to tío Ariel by an old man, a devotee of the Black Arts in the European sense, who had come to tío Ariel with a bad case of arthritis. Tío Ariel healed the man using the same medicine Nono had shown him for Mami, and the old man was so thankful to be rid of his daily pain that he immediately moved out and gave tío Ariel the keys.

It was a big house, three stories high, and with a basement. But under tío Ariel’s care, it fell into disrepair. The roof needed new tiles, the paint peeled, and the basement smelled like urine. Ximena and I were afraid to stay inside too long, so, for the two or three nights we spent at tío Ariel’s, we chased fireflies outside, ate random plants to see what would happen, then went to taverns to see tío Ariel sing.

Tío Ariel had a mariachi group. Mariachi music was a mestizo music, developed from centuries of revelry in Indigenous, African, and European spaces by the mixed people who crossed between them. Colombian rancheras were inspired by mariachi music, and tío Ariel sang those too. Standing at the center of the small stage, under a soft spotlight, he would transform. In the dark, starred by a million bright points that lasered toward us from a rotating disco ball suspended from the ceiling, we listened to the croon of tío Ariel’s pretty tenor calling us beautiful, calling us heartbreakers. Mujeres, mujeres tan divinas, no queda otro camino que adorarlas.

During the day, tío Ariel massaged my arms with holy oils to cleanse me of what he said had tried to kill me at the waterfall. If my mother was touched by eso, I was too.

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