The man who could move c.., p.12
The Man Who Could Move Clouds, page 12
Everywhere in Ocaña, the land seems to hold once-loved, precious things. Everyone I have asked in Colombia knows somebody who has found treasure, as well as somebody who lost their mind after impelling a treasure’s haunt.
* * *
—
When Mami was a young girl, every year, Nono went questing for haunted gold.
His younger brothers, Nil and Manuel, arrived, always by burro, a day before the beginning of Holy Week. Nil told Mami ghost stories, sagas about his encounters with lagoon spirits and a mountain ghost called the Whistler, which materialized only as a sound. If the Whistler was heard as if far away, it was actually near; when it sounded near, it was far. Manuel was more reticent, but he was Mami’s favorite. He arrived with a parrot perched atop his head, and an iguana lazing about his burro’s back.
The brothers drank that night, and the next day, in the darkening evening, they decamped with rifles, divination tools, aguardiente, amulets, and staffs of command, which, in Nono’s lineage, were given to those who became curanderos and which were fashioned after inherited Indigenous traditions. Manuel, Nono, and Nil climbed the mountain, wandered the hills, shared the bottle of alcohol. They were boasting of all they would do if they ever saw signs of treasure when, at a horizon of night, a glare flashed into view. They ran to the spot. Drunk and excited, they dug. One meter down was a pot of gold.
Or who knows what really happened?
The men forgot to follow the instructions for unearthing haunted treasure, and afterward, they each told a different story. Nil said he saw flames licking the underside of a pot at the bottom of the hole. Manuel said he blinked and the gold disappeared, the pot was empty, and then there was no pot at all. Nono said the hole heaved out a dark and terrible whirlwind, and he shrank before it and sprinted away. Though he knew what to do, he was drunk, and therefore helpless. Manuel and Nil hastened after Nono, yelling, hysterical, until they slipped back under the forest cover.
Nobody knows if there was ever really gold in the pot, or what the ghost was, or anything at all. The three of them slept in a cave, and the next morning, when they retraced their steps to search for the hole they had dug, they found nothing.
What is known is that, after that night, Nil began to dig holes.
He opened small pits all over his garden, then around the perimeter of his house. He was rooting after an ever-migrating metallic noise that nobody heard but him. Coins fell and filled his ears in a waterfall of sound. Wherever he heard it, that’s where he dug. It was the same pot of gold they had seen in the mountains, he was sure, calling to be unearthed.
Whereas the sound had first appeared outside, now he heard it inside his house. There it was, in the wall dividing the kitchen and the living room. He hammered a screwdriver into the wall, triangulating for the sound, until he opened a wide cavity. Next, he removed the tiles in his kitchen and dug. No matter where he shoveled, he found a void.
The sound of falling coins haunted Nono too. There was no cure for it. This is what happened when the process of digging up a guaca was botched. Nono descended to the plaza to look for the witches’ mail and get word to his brother Nil. He recited his message to the old woman: Nil, my brother, I hope you are well. The only thing left to do is to try to outlast the ghost and resist its provocations. It’s important you never dig for the gold while infected with the fever: the ghost will only become more powerful. If we can withstand the haunting, without caving in to temptation, it will release its treasure.
The woman, a professional, remained impassive as Nono recited the message and, giving a curt nod, received from him a few coins. Mami remembers her cheeks, how they were leathery and deep brown, creased by age, and, she imagined, continually kissed by sun. Nono continued to ignore the call of the gold, whose din increased as he lay down. He let it become a noise that mingled with the calls of the birds, the racket of crickets at night.
When Nono got word back through the witches’ mail, a few weeks had gone by. Nil’s wife reported that her husband was in a deep delirium; was there nothing Nono could do? Similar reports came each week, until Nil edged back to his usual grasp of reality, though the digging never ceased.
It was around then that Nono woke up sure he did not hunger for the gold. He heard the waterfall of coins, but they no longer dredged up feelings of avarice; he could let the moment pass, knowing he was free of the ghostly infection. Then, later, while he was collecting curative herbs for patients from his garden, he heard the metal tinkling beckon again. The sound grew louder as he wandered through the forest of bushes with ruby-red coffee berries at the back of his house. Beneath vines hanging from a palm tree, he shoveled. A fountain of clear water sprang from the earth.
Crystalline, Mami called it. Holy.
Nono built an adobe fountain there and called it healing water. He dipped his hands in the water when he wanted to cure someone. He sent word to his brother through the witches’ mail, telling him to come. Nono figured he could probably heal Nil with the water the treasure had released.
While Nono waited for his brother, the people of Cristo Rey came to see the water and receive its blessings. The local Catholic priest, who, unlike the Catholic church, didn’t see anything wrong with how Nono healed or prayed, came to their house and held Sunday mass by the fountain, to pay his respects to the miracle.
For some reason, Nono’s other younger brother, Manuel, never heard the sound of coins. Nono and Nil didn’t know why he had been spared.
When Nil finally turned up and tethered his burro by Nono’s door, it was Holy Week again. He was thin, and his eyes drifted nervously from ground to sky. He was distracted, chewing at his lip, asking Nono if he did not want to go treasure hunting again. Nono flinched to see his brother so frail, and led him directly to the water. There Nono prayed and washed his brother so he would be released from the haunt.
Some say Nil got better right away, others that it took many days until he became the man he was before.
But a year later, Mami woke in the middle of the night, needing to use the outhouse, and walked with a candle through the dark halls. When she stepped outside, she discerned a tall figure standing in the middle of the backyard with a shovel—a terrifying ghost.
Mami dropped the candle. She had been sighting ghosts for four years now, ever since her accident, and still they always managed to startle her. She was in the habit of needing to relieve herself in the middle of the night, and it was especially then, when she was alone and sleepy, that they appeared. One night, she’d had to walk through the living room as it became animated with ghost murmurings of the twenty mysteries of the Rosary. Another night, pale shins pierced through the ceiling into the kitchen, and the relaxed toes of the ghost who must have been stuck between floors twitched sleepily. It didn’t help that there were also real manifestations that could be easily mistaken for apparitions: once, a shocking casket, which unbeknownst to Mami someone in the village had left for safekeeping overnight with Nono, took up space in the middle of the room. Mami was never sure what she might encounter, whether in this plane or another, and she was always on edge.
Outside, Mami bent to pick up the snuffed-out candle. Ghost or not, she really had to go. In the dark, she walked toward the lighted figure, deciding that she could at least find out who the ghost was, or what it wanted. But as she drew near, she saw it was only Nil. His lantern was on the ground, throwing light up on his chin and nostrils, making his face askew. Mami was relieved. She was about to mutter a greeting when Nil wiped his brow, unaware she was there. He was staring at the ground. His shirt was wet and clung to his chest.
And opening at his feet was a deep hole full of nothing.
* * *
—
Nono had warned Mami to be careful about unearthing what had been long undisturbed.
Who was to say what happened to something after decades of being in communion with the dirt?
If a guaca released a haunt, a person could become infirm, sweat, turn in the night, hallucinate, and sleepwalk in search of relief for excruciating hungers. To unearth haunted treasure, a person needed to have the stamina to sit with pain as if in a garden.
It was only then that a haunt unsnarled its grip, and surrendered its treasure.
• 9 •
black smoke
Nono arrived on a weekday in April of 1985 at Mami’s door. He sat erect in her dining room in a wool poncho and his aguadeño hat, reporting no turbulence on his flight. He had heard whispering in his ear, Rafael, you are going to die, and thus he understood that he’d be dead by the time the rainfall season let up.
Nono was always announcing his own death. When Mami was young, every time he caught a bad fever he called his children. Children, line up by the bed, because I am going to give you my last blessing. Mami’s siblings sniffled throughout the many years of that repeated scene. They bowed their heads as Nono put a hand over their crowns and whispered, May God always be with you. Mami had been devastated at the prospect of Nono’s dying, but then she grew bored, and, later, irritated. Papá, she told him, either die or don’t—but leave me out of it, every year it’s the same with you. I’m going back to sleep.
There were many warnings of death. A knock on the door at night. A dream of getting married with a spouse whose face could not be discovered. A one-second drag in the movement of one’s image in the mirror. A ghost veil lowered over the soon-to-be-deceased.
In the intervening days, as Nono had been traveling and on his way to her, Mami had heard disembodied knocking on her bedroom door. Now, as she beheld Nono across the table, she saw a smoky black film glazing over her father’s eyes. The ghost veil.
Of all Nono’s children who happened to be born with a gift, tía Nahía is the one most able to see the ghost veil. While Mami can only perceive it in the eyes of someone soon to die if she stares with attention, tía Nahía can spot the veil from a distance, concealing a person’s whole face. She sees it even when she’s in the middle of something else: running errands, paying for vegetables, talking on her cell phone. In the 1990s in Cúcuta, when tía Nahía lived with Nona in the family’s last house, their neighborhood came under guerrilla occupation. When Nahía stepped outside, everywhere she looked were people whose heads were cloaked in black smoke. Two out of four men playing dominoes at the curb were marked for death; so was one of the women washing laundry in the middle of the dirt road; and so were the children chasing one another down the street. Tía Nahía stopped going out. She adopted a fluffy white dog and spent her days lingering idly about Nona’s garden, where she was safe from knowing.
At her dining table, Mami’s joints ached as she reached for Nono’s hands. He was cold and sweaty to the touch. His hands carried tremors. She knew that he was going through alcohol withdrawal, and that he was heartbroken.
Seven years ago, after Nono and Nona separated, Nono had fallen in love with another woman, and five years ago, that woman had disappeared. The woman had lived alone in the forest. Nono described her to Mami as solitary, earthy. Mami did not breathe a word, but the witch Nona regularly saw told her of it.
Nona hated the idea that her estranged husband could be happy with someone else. She paid the witch to tamper with Nono’s destiny, so that his and his new love’s paths would never cross again. This is what Nono said, and also what Nona confirmed. When Nono returned to the forest, the door to his lover’s house was open and everything inside was broken.
People in the nearby town said it had been paramilitaries.
This was war.
Men raped and pillaged. Sometimes the paramilitaries kidnapped women and took them to their camps. Sometimes the men made money off the women’s forced prostitution. Sometimes the paramilitaries coerced women to participate in improvised beauty pageants where the top prize was being chosen, and therefore enslaved. Sometimes the men got carried away and had to disappear the corpses.
Nono was bereft. He accused Nona of asking for the death of the woman he loved. She denied it, said she had not asked for the woman’s death.
The never-to-be life with the woman he loved was a knowing that undid him by the hour. He moved to Bucaramanga to be far from Nona and near his third son, Ariel. In Bucaramanga, Nono continued to heal clients and spent all the money he got on rent, women, and drink. He downed whiskey with tío Ariel in taverns. In each other’s living rooms, they would sing ballads about loneliness and heartbreak, distracting themselves with plans to hunt treasure.
Mami was not ready for Nono to leave her. She had two baby girls and hands she could not use, and her gifts of seeing and hearing spirits had gone. She had at least handled Papi’s abuse; the new front door lock that had been installed could be unbolted from the inside; and she had continued to torment him, filling his ears, apropos of nothing, with stories about how guilty men often saw dangers where there were none, took leave of their minds, and precipitated their own demise.
But Mami did not want to burden Nono with her problems. Instead, she asked about what plans he had for fixing the hex.
Farmers were always wanting to hire Nono. When droughts prolonged, pest control didn’t work, the economy soured, or animals got sick beyond the scope of Western medicine and strategy, they turned to him.
Once, in Ocaña, when Mami was twelve, Nono brought her along on a job. No explanation for what she saw—in a field of cacao, birdsong, and Nono stepping in a dance. Caterpillars dropped from the trees to the ground.
Now, in her living room, Nono told her the farm he had been hired to fix had cows with worms, and stalking paramilitaries. Nono had plans to feed blessed tobacco to the cows, and against the paramilitaries he would bury around the periphery of the farm small satchels of disorientation, the contents of which I am not at liberty to disclose.
Mami and Nono sat in silence. Nono fanned his fingers over hers. I can see that you’re sad. Think that I am going on a trip. Just like when you were little and I packed my bags to go live away from you—like that. Think that I am going; but never believe that I do not exist.
In the kitchen, Nono spread the bundles of red flowers he had brought for Mami. He set to the work of boiling and blessing the greenery. The tree pods were oblong and tawny. Nono cracked them to get to the small seeds inside. He ground the seeds into a fine powder, and from this and the leaves he made drafts. He balanced cupfuls of the bitter water on Mami’s lips and tipped them back so she could drink. The tang of it was awful and sharp, like nothing she had ever tasted. Like lightning, Mami told me.
In the weeks that passed, Nono’s drafts made the pain in Mami’s arms decrease. The inflammation of her joints eased. Mami wept in relief. She was nearly able to grip with her hands. Exuberant, Nono and Mami went out and spoiled each other, Nono clasping my sister by the hand and Mami carrying me in a wrap. They weaved in and out of museums and parks, bought each other clothes and perfumes, feasted on ice cream. They put on boisterous shows for shopkeepers and vendors as they fought over who would treat whom, passing back and forth the only credit card they owned, which was Mami’s, and which she would pay off for many years to come.
At home, Nono helped Mami care for me in her bedroom. He placed a number of pillows on her lap, and then me on top. With the help of the pillows, her knees, and her shoulders, she could get me to feed. She didn’t fully trust her hands yet, so, to show me love, she brought her lips to my scalp and licked. She licked, as if she were a lion and I her cub.
Mami and Nono told stories.
Once, when he was in his twenties, a fiery orb buzzed after Nono through the jungle. He hid inside the hollow of a tree and waited out the night. When Mami fell down the well, Nono heard her voice, even though it was not possible—he couldn’t have heard her voice. Once, when Mami was seven, Nono took the family to the river and Mami complained it was boring, there were too many people, she could scarcely breathe. Tired of her whining, Nono unloaded his gun several times into the sky. A shocked silence settled on the riverbanks, and then one hundred people fled. Everything but the river was still. Mami glanced at the overturned pots, blankets, and food, and complained again—now the river was empty, there was no one to look at, let alone speak to.
In Mami’s bedroom, Nono confessed that the reason he had revealed the secrets to her wasn’t that she had returned from amnesia with abilities to rival his own. Rather, it was because of everything else that had happened right before she fell down the well.
Unwisely then, when Mami was seven, Nono had encouraged Nona to raise Mami to be a wife.
Mami needed to learn obedience if she was to have a good life, but when Nona ordered she collect her brothers’ dirty laundry and wash it, she refused. She argued that her older brothers, who were fourteen and twelve and ten, had biceps three times as large as her own—wouldn’t it make more sense for them to wash her clothes?
Her older brothers were cruel. She climbed to the treetops to escape them. She watched from above. Each weekend, they asked one of Mami’s sisters to play hide-and-seek, lleva, and marbles. One sister fell victim to their tricks. The real game happened around a bucket of water into which they dunked her head until she almost drowned. The sport was in watching her feet—how her kicking grew frantic, then weak, then slow. They allowed her to come up for air just before it was too late. They implored for her forgiveness, then called her queen, promised not to do it again. With Nono gone, Mami’s brothers conducted themselves after the men around them—steely men, who flaunted an enthusiasm for brutality, and were guerrilla or paramilitary members, or the victims of these men. Violence touched everyone. Mami didn’t tell Nono how his sons became worse men in his absence, but later, for many years after I turned seven, Mami would tell me this story over and over again. Unlike Nona, who wanted to teach Mami obedience, my mother wanted me to understand defiance.
