Fruit of the Drunken Tree

She sits in a plastic chair in front of a brick wall, slouching. She is meek with her hair parted down the middle. There are almost no lips to be seen, but by the way she bares her teeth you can tell she is smiling. At first the smile seems flat but the more I study it, the more it seems careless and irresponsible. There is a bundle in her arms and a hole for the newborn’s face, which comes out red and wrinkled like an old person’s. I know it’s a boy because of the blue ribbon woven into the blanket edge; then I stare at the man behind Petrona. He is afroed and striking, weighing his cursed hand on her shoulder. I know what he’s done, and it turns my stomach but who am I to say whom Petrona should allow into a family portrait such as this?
On the back there’s a date stamp of when the photo was printed—and because when I count back nine months it falls exactly on the month my family and I fled from Colombia and arrived in L.A., I turn back the photograph to look intently at the baby, to register every wrinkle and bulge around the dark hole of his gaping mouth, to decide whether he is crying or laughing, because I know exactly where and how he was conceived and that’s how I lose track of time, thinking it was my fault that the girl Petrona was just fifteen when her belly was filled with bones, and when Mamá comes back from work, she does not yell (even though she sees the photograph, the envelope, the letter from Petrona all addressed to me)—no, Mamá sits down next to me like taking off so much weight, and together we are quiet and sorry on our dirty stoop on Vía Corona in East L.A., staring at that fucking photograph.
We were refugees when we arrived to the U.S. You must be happy now that you’re safe, people said. They told us to strive for assimilation. The quicker we transformed into one of the many the better. But how could we choose? The U.S. was the land that saved us; Colombia was the land that saw us emerge.
There were mathematical principles to becoming an American: you had to know one hundred historical facts (What was one reason for the Civil War? Who was the president during World War II?), and you had to spend five uninterrupted years on North American soil. We memorized the facts, we stayed in place—but when I elevated my feet at night and my head found its pillow I wondered: of what country was I during those hours when my feet were in the air? When we applied for citizenship, I rounded the hard edges of my accent and that was one tangible way in which I had changed. We heard nothing for a year. We grew thin. We understood how little we were worth, how small our claim in the world. We had no money after our application fee, and nowhere to go. Then, we received the summons for our interview, the final background check, the examination, the approval.
At the ceremony, they screened a video filled with eagles and artillery and all of us recited a pledge. We sang our new anthem and once it was done it was said we were American. The newest batch of Americans celebrated, but in the open courtyard, I let my head hang back. I watched the sway of palm trees knowing here was where I was supposed to think about the future, and how bright it might be, but instead all I could think of was Petrona, how I was fifteen like she had been the last time I saw her.
From Mamá’s old agenda I got her address. But it wasn’t a real address, just a set of directions Petrona had dictated to Mamá back when we lived in Bogotá: Petrona Sánchez at the invasión between Street 7 and 48. Kilometer 56, the house past the lilac bush. In our apartment, I locked
myself in the bathroom and turned on the shower, and as the bathroom steamed I wrote the letter. I didn’t know where to begin, so I followed the
form I had learned in middle school:
Heading (3 de Febrero del 2000, Chula Santiago, Los Angeles, Estados
Unidos), respectful greeting (Querida Petrona), body that uses easy and
exact vocabulary (Petrona, cómo estás? Cómo está tu familia?), each new
paragraph with first line indented (Mi familia está bien. / Estoy leyendo Don
Quixote. / Los Angeles es bonita, pero no tan bonita como Bogotá). The closing line was next, but instead I wrote about what it was like to flee from Colombia; how we boarded a plane, Bogotá to Miami to Houston to L.A., how I prayed for no immigration officers to stop us and send us back, how I could not stop thinking about everything we had lost. When we first arrived to L.A. it was impossibly sunny and all I could smell was the salt from the
ocean. The smell of salt burned my nose when I breathed in. I wrote paragraph after paragraph about salt, like I was crazy (We washed our hands with salt to reverse bad luck. / Salt was the one thing Mamá bought when she was afraid to spend our money. / I read in a magazine that packaged salt has crushed animal bone in it, which disgusted me until I realized that so must the ocean’s. Beach sand was part bones too). In the end all the talk about salt came to feel like some type of code. It’s gotten so, I wrote, I can’t even smell salt anymore. It became my closing line, not because I meant it to be but because suddenly I had nothing more to say. I never asked the one thing I wanted to know: Petrona, when we left, where did you go?
When Petrona’s reply arrived, I tried to find hidden messages behind the ordinary information she volunteered: the nice weather, the newly paved road to her house in the invasión, the lettuces, the cabbages in season. In the end it didn’t matter her letter back to me was so ordinary, because all the answers I could ever hunger for were printed on that photograph, which she creased in half and placed in the folds of her letter before licking the envelope and pressing it shut, before handing the letter to the postman, before it traveled just like how I once did, Bogotá to Miami to Houston to
L.A., before it arrived bringing with it all this wreckage to our doorstep.