"Araucaria" by Nicole Saldarriaga
This is a selection from our Winter 2022 Issue, guest edited by Raad Rahman. Click here to purchase the print edition and click here to purchase the digital version.
I. Claudia
We are late for mass—as ever—while Sara takes a cold shower to wash the sweat and mist from her body and Alberto complains—as ever—that he can’t abide by the female need for washing and drying, or curling and clothing with care; all the things that dissipate his maldito tiempo on earth as he sits in the wicker chair in the front room waiting for the secret, perfumed insinuations to finish. Claudia, at least bring me a tinto while I wait, and Tia! I can’t find your hair dryer! I am rooted in the hallway without direction.
We will arrive late to my mother’s death-day mass. The rosary is in my pocket, the woman on the corner calls out her mango biche; Fernanda waits, frowning in her damp habit on the steps of the church, mumbling— as ever—this family is good for nothing, and Sara is yelling that her hair will never dry if she lets it alone in the humidity.
Sara, we are late to the mass already, we will miss the entrance hymn, we are supposed to sit in the front pew, the mass is in my honor. Claudia, I asked for a tinto years ago, does no one listen in this house? My clothing is damp, everything is damp, I am swimming in it!
My mother’s rocking chair sways emptily in the front room, saying creak, creak, as it has since the day she died, though I am still not certain that she died, I am still not certain that she didn’t simply turn into something else—the silver tipped leaves of the yarumo or the hanging mosses of the araucaria—something that hangs or creeps or blows in the winds that come off the water, something that drips with the moisture from the air. My mother’s ashes are in el osario in the church, where we are supposed to honor her passing, where we are supposed to pray for her soul, my mother’s necklace is on the altar of the ancestors in the corner by the window, my mother is in her rocking chair, feeling Fernanda’s curled body through the flesh of my belly, saying another girl for the family, I can feel it, have you been drinking the tea I gave you to bring on your milk? And the woman on the corner screams mango biche, mango biche.
II. Andrea
The outside of the Styrofoam cup is wet in my palms but the coffee is hot and frothy with milk. Fernanda glares at me from the steps of the church, frequently checking the two-dollar watch strapped to the inside of her wrist and using the corner of her scapular to mop the mist from her face.
If they are going to take their sweet time, then I am getting myself a coffee. The cup is in my hands and the strap of my bag is wrapped around my calf, my fingertips are pink from stacking the beets this morning; there is a splinter I hadn’t noticed in the flesh of my ring finger—when did they become so calloused?—and the meat of my thighs presses through the whirling pattern of the iron café chair.
Abuelita is saying Que linda la niña, her skin is so white, look how delicate her nose is—delicada, delicada, that’s what she would call me while she sat in her rocking chair and ran puffy fingers through my curls, until I believed her, until I grew tall and learned to accentuate the curve of my hips, the pattern of freckles on the back of my shoulder—and where is that niña delicada now?
Mami, you stink of fish, my own daughter tells me, you smell of dampness. My daughter, obsessed with the damp—my daughter born pink and squalling into Abuelita’s hands, my daughter who dreams of leaving Guatapé and never considers that I carried the dream before I carried her, that her life in my body planted me among the vegetable crates and the fish stalls that leave their smells, stains, and roughness on my skin that once was alabaster and smooth. To be a mother is the noblest thing, Abuelita told me as she served me tea and wiped my bruised face with a damp cloth—a man gives only one thing and then is worthless after—and she shared her only bed with me as my belly grew, shielding me from the man who was my father, who threatened to chop me up with his axe and feed the pieces to the pigs.
Sara, you have no father. You were an immaculate conception, you sprung from my breast fully formed, you fell into my arms from the araucaria trees, you leapt to life from a neighbor’s zocalo.
Only Abuelita knew the truth, about the man who promised me a modeling career and entered my body without caring what he planted there, who told me I would never model once my body had shifted and grown to accommodate another, who left me with a daughter and the memory of fingers pressing into the meat of my thighs.
III. Fernanda
We are nearing the afternoon rain and the mass will begin in minutes, already the priest has asked after my mother, my family, and I could only point to Andrea having a coffee across the street with her thighs spilling over the edges of the chair and her hair in a greasy ponytail. Ungrateful, wearing navy blue instead of black on the anniversary of Abuelita’s death: Abuelita who took Andrea in when she showed up with a bastard child in her belly, Abuelita who always loved her more.
Underneath the heavy cotton fabric of my habit, my body has become a stranger to me. I no longer remember the curve of my thighs, the swell of my breasts. My womb is an old pocket that has never held a precious treasure, though at one time Carlos tried over and over to hold me in the right way, touch me in the right places, and each month Abuelita would take my first urine of the morning in a cup with a silver needle inside, waiting for the red rust to announce the coming of a child. Sometimes a woman’s body needs time and technique, she whispers through my tears, have you tried placing egg white at your entrance before he finishes? I am on the steps of the church ready to honor her ashes, I am fingering the damp wooden beads at my side, I am drinking her special teas and letting her knead my belly, I am washing egg white out of my sheets, I am watching Abuelita cradle Sara while Andrea reads magazines in bed, I am listening to Carlos as he calls me barren, as he proves his manhood by pointing out la otra and the small boy in her arms, I am hearing the priest say it is lucky it was only a civil marriage, I am kneeling on the marble floor of the church as the sisters place a linen veil over my head, Receive this sign, for you are betrothed to the eternal King, my womb contracts with emptiness.
The café where Andrea sits transforms back into the fruit stall of my childhood—the creamy orange flesh of the stolen mamoncillo is slippery in my mouth and my teeth are resounding with the effort of cracking the fruit’s rigid skin, or maybe with the power of the fruit vendor’s curse, may you know only bitterness and desolation for the rest of your days. I laughed at her with the mamoncillo in my mouth. Now she must be nothing but bone or else has transformed into a rain spirit, and in my mind I spit out the fruit to apologize and beg for mercy—but she laughs, as I did in real life. I have traded the fruit of my womb for the sour refreshment of the mamoncillo on a hot day and the thrill of misbehaving. On the steps of the church Abuelita stands beside me but does not look at me, as disappointed in death as in life.
IV. Inés
Our clothing never really dries in this town. We set the trousers and blouses, the slips and brassieres, out on the line pointlessly, try to catch the hour of most sun and run the clothes back inside before the afternoon rains. Claudia’s house has a laundry room with an indoor clothesline and skylights to let in the sun, so she doesn’t have to play the game of leaving the clothes out just one more minute, maybe just one more before the rains, she doesn’t have to become an unofficial weather woman like the rest of us. Either way, her clothes are as damp as ours and she plucks the mushrooms secretly from the baseboards like we all do, in between bringing Alberto a tinto or catering to the whims of my bastard granddaughter who whines about the humidity all day long—as if she hadn’t been born out of and into the damp like the rest of us.
Are you sure you should be having another, Doña Inés? Isn’t today’s mass in honor of your mother? Not long now before the entrance hymn.
My mother.
My mother who nursed me, whose hands wiped fevers from my brow and whose fingers entered my secret places to check the progress of my labors, my mother whose name has been forgotten in one-hundred-two years of life, who became only Abuelita on the lips of the grocer, the bank teller, the women calling for help in the middle of the night while their husbands sweated with fear in another room.
My husband died before she did, the son-of-a-bitch who said I make men only and laughed in her face when she warned him he had chosen to join a family of women, only women. Andrea was in my belly then, and we called her Julio, but at night in the darkness of the bedclothes I caressed her and named her Andrea, so that at least he would be pleased with a daughter whose name means manly, strong. When Abuelita pulled Andrea from me, she presented the baby’s wrinkled body to my husband, who spoke words into existence that night and swore on the body of la Virgen that from then on, we would only make men.
Another, I need another to stop remembering the nine pregnancies my mother helped me nurture, all the perfect little boys born after Andrea without breath in their lungs, with hearts cold and immobile as fish in the stalls, all the tiny boxes of bones that are not allowed in el osario next to the ashes of my mother who wrapped each boy in cloth and cursed my husband for playing with fate.
Doña Inés, the mass, aren’t you going to the mass?
V. Imelda
In my niece’s house there is an altar with a statue of the Sacred Heart and tributes to our ancestors—a boar bristle coat brush, an eyeless porcelain doll, a chipped rosary that belonged to my great, great-grandmother. She made the altar—the one whose name they’ve all forgotten—to honor those who came before us, and when she died they hung her favorite necklace from the hand of Christ and placed her pincushion in the center of the altar, for remembrance of her hands. Fifty-nine years I’ve been gone, I who braided their Abuelita’s hair and tied ribbons on the end that she would constantly lose, I who shared a bed with her and listened to her nighttime secrets, her aspirations, the gurglings of her sleeping stomach, I who smelled her sour breath in the mornings.
Younger sister, younger sister, is there no space on the altar of the ancestors for the childless? I died without knowing the touch of a man and already my younger sister had helped countless women give their children to the light, already she had plunged her hands up to the elbows in blood and mucous, already she had smelled the feral womanhood of so many— already she had delivered her own daughters.
Imelda, you simply don’t try hard enough, you are so cold with the men. Imelda, if only you would let me wax your upper lip and between your brows. Imelda, why not try a higher heel, a more flattering cut, a smile?
To my sister I was a neglected piece of furniture, covered in dust and swelling in the humid air.
Here, where it is dark, I am living all things at once—my sister is walking in unannounced to find me sitting in the lap of Marcela, Marcela’s hand between my thighs, the top of my dress unbuttoned to show the flush of my pale skin. Marcela and I are meeting for the first time in a bar in the afternoon, my sister is screaming it is a pointless relationship, a fruitless one, Marcela is pulling me behind the trunk of a giant araucaria tree at night, I am crossing the street in the rain and watching the headlights come on too quickly, I am broken, I am here, I am sitting beside Fernanda though she barely remembers me, doesn’t feel me, no one feels me, I am watching Marcela, her soft wrinkled body as it is placed in the crematory, I am waiting for her to join me, I am with her still in the single bed. I am braiding my sister’s hair.
VI. Sara
The moisture in the air clings to our skin as we rush to the center of town. Already my hair is growing into a wild animal, swelling large and curly against the clip that keeps the damp strands out of my face. I will never be dry, not until the shoebox of tips I hide in Tia Claudia’s spare closet is full enough to buy a bus ticket and a few weeks in a motel, not until I am away from this town where the humidity lies over everything, where the pamphlets I pass out on tours are limp as if they’ve been left out in the rain: Come see La Piedra Del Peñol, the eleventh largest rock in the world! Tour the most colorful town in Colombia! Learn the history of our most famous zocalos!
I hold the history of our town and sell it daily to the European backpackers who smell sour under their clothes and the American tourists who like to take pictures of everything, and all the while I am thinking only of drier places, places where the heat of the sun crisps things up and permanently cures the moldy dampness of my scalp. Here, moss grows in the crevices of armpits and other private places, and the musk of our bodies is mixed with an earthy fragrance like the smell of decomposing leaves. On the older men who sit in the plastic chairs at the panaderia, the eyebrow hair is overgrown with lichen, the skin of the fingers is wrinkled as if underwater, and the white cotton button-downs are always thin with moisture. Mushrooms grow in close-toed shoes and the air is a shade of emerald green that infects those who live here, bloats them until they can never move.
Those who stay for too long become a kind of creeping plant, they are rooted to the earth the way Abuelita was, Abuelita who I only ever saw in her rocking chair—When will you settle down, Sarita? Your most fruitful years are passing. No one knew her name anymore but everyone knew Abuelita and she knew everything about everyone—vines grew out of her body and creeped over the whole town, pulsing with moisture and information, holding everything close. When she died I know they cut the vines from her, but the vines didn’t die—they are why the rocking chair still moves, they are why the afternoon rains still fall on the town, they are the provenance of the emerald air that bloats the townspeople with a placid acceptance of immobility.
Not far from here the ruins of a town lie beneath the waters of a reservoir and I know that the water came from the air, from the daily rains, from the dampness. Soon our town will also look like a lake that hides shipwrecks, and they will all live under the water as if nothing has changed at all, and the chair will keep rocking, and Tia Claudia will keep bringing tinto to Tio Alberto, and my mother will keep smelling of fish, and I will be gone forever to a place where the vines can’t touch me, where my body will become arid and infertile, and I will belong to myself only.
VII. La Niña
Mami there is a scream in my head, mami the scream keeps going and going, mami why don’t my sisters remember me? Mami I remember your hands, they were cold on my face, they were soft, why were you crying? Mami how old am I now? How old are my sisters? There is a woman here who says she was your sister but I can’t see if she looks like you and I can’t feel her hands. Mami where is the blanket that you wrapped me in—surely Claudia found it hidden in your drawer Mami Claudia is using the blanket. Mami Claudia has given the blanket away. Who is wrapped in my blanket now? I remember coming out of you, I remember slipping out into your waiting hands like a fish, I remember cold, I remember the blanket, I remember your hand hard on my back, I remember the color blue. Mami you haven’t remembered me. My sisters don’t know me. My name has been forgotten but not like your name has been forgotten because I never existed and you existed forever without me. I am waiting in the church, I am waiting for the others, I am waiting for you to remember me, to find me, to give me a name. Mami why are you screaming still in my head? Mami why re my bones in a different place than yours? How will you find me then?
VIII. Abuelita
Midwife. This is the word I was taught by the priest who visited so long ago, the man with the accent who asked the schoolchildren what we hoped to become. I knew only the word on the lips of the women—partera, partera, deliverer—but he did not know the word, only the gesture of rubbing an imaginary belly, of pulling an imaginary child from between my legs. Ah. Midwife, with-woman. I became with-woman, a deliverer of women, I became the first hands to touch the felted skin of nearly every child born in our town. Birth is the process by which the bodily gives way to the sacred, by which a being grown in darkness and damp is given to the light.
The women of this town called me abuelita and knocked on my windows in the night when they needed me to come quietly. I have delivered children that were passed off as siblings, I have held girls who released their babies into the arms of another while their parents watched pallid from the doorway, prepared to go to Mass that Sunday as if their daughter wasn’t bleeding from the absence of her own flesh. Always the gifts would appear on my doorstep—a choice cut of meat from the butcher, a tablecloth hand- sewn with expensive thread—and I would give these to the nearest beggar. I needed no gift or bribery to hold the secrets of the women so tight they were compacted almost to nothing—only the memory of my mother, who hid the swell of her belly beneath clothing and stacks of books, who hid the truth from us and from the world and yet I knew, I knew even back then, as a girl, that a woman’s hips speak out when they prepare themselves as a gateway for life. My mother had no one to hold her secrets close and when they found her body in the hills her lips were white, white, all the color had pooled around her legs where she had ripped the child away without practice, and my cold dead sister was in her stiffening arms where the crows were already gathering. The black-and-white photos in the newspapers hid the darkness of my sister’s skin, and yet the town knew. The town knew because our father never cried, never attended the funeral—and he raised us after that to remember that the space between our legs was unclean, impure, a place where only darkness lived. For this reason I learned to open the legs of the townswomen to the light; for this reason I kept a strip of leather in my bag to put between the teeth of the women who needed to stay quiet— for my sister whose eyes belong to the crows now, the same crows that watched me carry the secrets of the townspeople to the grave.
When I felt the first flutterings in my own belly I knew we would become a family of women. I knew that in my body I carried bodies that would carry other bodies, women who would bleed to show their capacity, and when my daughters were ready I bore them without pain—they slid from me and into the light like tetras cardenales through clear water. Claudia, so beautiful as she moved, who brushed the hair away from my face and helped me to my rocking chair. Inés, whose breast I bound nine times to stop her milk from flowing into nothing, from evaporating into pointless air. My third daughter, her small soft body with the name we never say, the three days she spent in my arms before she turned into the dampness in the air and clung to the town, the people, the boats swaying in the reservoirs.
My ashes are lying in el osario, the priest is ready to honor them, the town has gathered to relinquish its deliverer and the histories, the bloodlines I have engraved upon these hands that swaddled newborns still slick and flailing. My daughters, my granddaughters, my great-granddaughter—even now I think they must not know what it meant to feel them push against the walls of my own body, or what it meant to trace the outline of their heads through the skin of my daughters-turned-mothers, or what it meant to deliver them safely into the warmth of a clean room—as they gather to remember me I wrap around them like the mist; but they cannot feel me, only Claudia looks up and notices the breeze that shakes the araucarias.
Nicole Saldarriaga is a Colombian-American writer based in New Jersey. She is an MFA candidate and Felipe P. De Alba Fellow at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Her work has appeared in The Hunger and The Sarah Lawrence Review. She lives in Hoboken with her ferocious cat, where she is at work on a novel and a collection of short stories.
