Family and Home
Paula Delgado-Kling
Halfway through June, in 2018, my daughter’s school year was over in New York, and we were home in Bogotá. I wanted my daughter to grow up with a sense that she was also Colombian, and I made it a priority for us to come home. My heart broke to take in that since our last visit my mother had allowed her hair to go white, and she kept a cane within her reach.
Together, my daughter and I, read Greek mythology in the garden that once belonged to my grandfather. But every few minutes, we were jolted by an uproar of Blackhawk helicopters above. At all hours, the turbulence injected itself into golf games, tennis matches, garden parties, and it served as an alarm—listen up! Pay attention to the suffering of our fellow countrymen.
I had promised my daughter I would take her to our family’s house in tierra caliente to swim in the pool, but something—what I read of the violent history that occurred in the towns south of Bogotá, a lifetime of overhearing of the bloodshed in ancestors’ haciendas, and God knows perhaps my need to make sense of it all contributed to my anguish about our little get-away. “Come back quick if it doesn’t feel right,” my husband texted me. But all year our girl looked forward to lounging on floats, and diving and swimming.
My mother’s bodyguard, Carlos, accompanied us. Since before I was born, sometime after my grandfather founded Colombia’s first airline and soon after his construction business completed several developments, our family was forced to hire armed bodyguards. In the 1980s, the violence morphed from the countryside to the cities, and one day in 1984, when I was eight years old, we had to leave the country. Abroad, I found greater freedom to build my life on my terms, removed from the shadow of my family.
Carlos drove us across Bogotá to Soacha, and across the bridge over the Bogotá River. Then onto the highway at the city’s uttermost south where streets were lined with tires, rusty cars and parts of cars, and where mechanics and Evangelical churches advertised quick tune-ups—“I live nearby,” said Carlos—and onto greater squalor, streets no longer paved except the highway that ran through, and no sidewalks, but only houses with broken windows, and front yards with abandoned bikes and pieces of plastic toys. Carlos then steered the car around mountains, down the next mountain, and the lush countryside emerged. We began to feel the warmer air. At the toll, children sold bags of peanuts, water bottles, brooms, tamales, piggy banks, and lottery tickets.
Carlos had been a government soldier. His photos of time in the military revealed a skinny twenty-something with a wide smirk holding a Galif rifle, an image that said he was too young to fully understand his role in the army, or his contribution to war and/or peace. One of his jobs had been to protect roads from the FARC’s blockades. The FARC started out as a self-defense group of peasants in the 1940s but through nearly four decades, it morphed into a drug gang. The FARC signed a peace accord in 2016.
Along the way to tierra caliente—clumps of young government soldiers stood guard every half a mile or so, as Bogotanos sped past smoky traffic, roads sometimes with two lanes in one direction, and then suddenly one lane. Buses bursting with passengers traversed into the opposing lane, causing Carlos to curse. News on the car radio reported on the FARC’s arsenal of arms, much of which was to remain hidden in the jungle, and was likely to end up in the hands of the next wave of drug traffickers. We gained distance from Bogotá and lost the radio signal.
“D.E.M.I.S.E. That was the Greek goddess, right?” my daughter asked.
“You mean Demeter,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “Persephone’s mom!” She was captivated by the tale of Persephone’s abduction by Hades, and so Demeter—a mother’s—wrath that caused all plants to wither and die.
My husband texted: “Where are you?”
I texted back: “Halfway there. Close to California.” California was my grandparents’ pool house.
“I’m car sick,” my daughter said.
I was familiar with that feeling. At her age, I had sat in the back of the Lincoln next to my maternal grandmother, Helena, for the drive from Bogotá to California. My grandmother had poured cologne onto a handkerchief and held it up near my nose. She offered mints. Still, I remained nauseated. I laid my head on her lap as she caressed me, her fingers laden with cocktail rings. It had been nearly since those days that any of us had set foot in California. The estate was located in the middle of a basin of palm, bamboo and fern trees, and through the foliage, FARC guerrillas hid and moved arms and supplies. Yet, my mother—nostalgic for her own teenage years when it had been safe to mount a horse and make social calls to neighbors—still held on to the house, and to hope that we would one day return. The house was now semi-abandoned.
“I can’t wait to swim,” my daughter said.
Ice water. That was the temperature of the pool in California. I had told my daughter about California’s caretakers, Don Leo and Doña Margarita—how the couple lived on the side of the road, in a one-room house with a tin roof and a dirt floor, which Doña Margarita swept to immaculateness. Their home lacked electricity, and the couple’s routine was set by dawn and dusk. Their children, thirteen of them, worried the rising tides of the river would swallow their parents’ home, as it had done with the farmhouse upriver. The couple refused to move to town.
“Let’s get sugarcane,” I said. Don Leo had often brought back sugarcane from the fields. With his machete, which he hung from his waist side, he chopped the sugarcane into pieces as slim as straws.
“You gnaw at it, and suck out its juice,” I said to my girl.
Through the rear-view mirror, Carlos’s eyes studied our mother-daughter relationship. I realized I was softening my voice and giving in to her games willingly, though I did not think it could be discerned. I was looking at whatever she wanted me to look at—a family traveling on a motorcycle and the child bundled for protection between the parents, horses grazing, a pig tied to a fence—and handing her cookies from my purse. She was tall, long-limbed and athletic, with olive skin like her father, and dark-brown hair that I combed into two long braids. Her dark eyes were penetrating, and she was intuitive. She would absorb my anxiety.
Don Leo and Doña Margarita had a bond with my grandmother, Helena, which I sensed came from their consideration that as a widow, she was lonely and vulnerable. Often, they sat with Helena while she drank her afternoon Earl Grey. They talked about the neighbors and local politics. In his old age, my grandfather had volunteered to counsel the town’s city hall, and when his name was mentioned, Helena got teary. She remained in mourning for him, until her death. Once, I found her teary face buried in Doña Margarita’s shoulder.
At each curve of the road, near the government soldiers, I saw duplicates of Doña Margarita: women with one long braid of greying hair, a black skirt, a black knitted shawl, and string-soled shoes. These women hauled home on their backs, in burlap sacks, the family’s groceries. The husbands, men with sandals, black ponchos, black hats, converged at small tiendas at the side of the road to play “tejo,” a game in which you throw rocks at gunpowder buried in mud and upon hearing the explosion, you cheer and drain shots of aguardiente and homemade sugarcane wine. The game of “tejo" reminded me of landmines exploding.
“These locals, always working hand-in-hand with the FARC,” Carlos said. “In what seems like an accident, a boulder across the road, jammed traffic, any old trick, so that I stop the car.” His eyes again on the rear-view mirror were monitoring if my daughter was about to vomit, and did he need to stop the car?
Carlos was right. At some time—noticeably at the first town outside Bogotá—I began to have stomach-turning doubts about bringing my only child to tierra caliente. We were—now—nearing the Valley of Sumapaz, and the locals who reminded me of Don Leo and Doña Margarita might have been FARC sympathizers or FARC guerrillas taking time off from war to play “tejo.” Entire communities came and went from FARC camps, and made their way back to the FARC-controlled mountains through the vegetation.
There had not always been this distrust between Colombians.
My great-great-grandmother was loved by her workers. That was what I always heard about Maye. During the 1940s, she ran a coffee plantation on the other side of the mountains from where we were driving, in Viotá in Sumapaz Valley. A disabled widow who walked with the help of a cane, she drove by herself from Bogotá, for four to five hours (a distance that now took less than two hours) until where the gravel path ended and the lush and steep mountains began. She parked her car, a Ford, at the side of the road, where her workers were waiting for her. She mounted atop a make-shift sedan chair—a rocking chair nailed to four long bamboo poles and covered by a white sheet to form a parasol—and they carried her for another two hours along precipices and near landslides to her hacienda. The hacienda’s name—Entrerios—derived from its location between two rivers. For eight months or longer, she monitored the plantation’s operations. Her only company were the workers.
Maye visited the workers’ huts. She sent sick family members upriver to another hacienda to a doctor with whom she kept an open tab. Most of the time, the doctor diagnosed tropical anemia, which made kids’ stomachs explode and turned adults’ skin yellow. He treated stomach worms, measles, lice, hepatitis, and the deadly stings of scorpions.
Once a year, Maye invited Father Cipriano to travel from Bogotá. Inside the chapel with the white bell tower, the priest married the couples who were already living together, or couples who hurried to define their relationships when they heard Father Cipriano was in the hacienda, or couples who had children together (men fathered children with different women, and Father Cipriano’s arrival caused riots among mothers). The priest gave the last rites to the elderly, even to the ones who showed good health. He also celebrated the children’s First Communions, which was a day of grand celebration. Girls wore white dresses with fringed veils that covered their black hair, and boys wore pressed white shirts and dark-colored blazers, all brought by Maye from Bogotá. Though some of them were barefoot, there was pride in their faces, and parents and children posed with Maye for photos. I found these photos in a rickety trunk in the back of a closet.
“Señora, this entire region has been dangerous for generations,” Carlos said.
It was true what he was saying. But for Maye, the workers at Entrerios were her family. If I’d told her that after her death, some of them went on to ally with the FARC’s predecessors, and grew to occupy positions of power within the FARC, she would never have believed me. She did not want to accept what was happening at the hacienda.
The children of Entrerios attended a one-room schoolhouse, which Maye funded. After rainfall, the fog was a blanket over the fields, and in the dewy evenings, the adult workers gathered in the schoolhouse where the teacher schooled them on Lenin’s principles. Lenin said Sundays are for rest and must be a paid day. Maye only paid for days worked, and she paid on Saturdays when the head of the family, either a mother or a father, collected what the whole family, including the children, had earned. Lenin said there were to be eight-hour work days. Maye’s were nine hours long, or longer if there was an emergency like a flood or colic among the animals. Lenin insisted on compensation for accidents at work. Maye, too, took on the responsibility when someone was injured. Lenin said there had to be lodging rooms for workers. Maye provided that.
The teacher was named “Zoila Blanca Luna” (Literally: “I am the White Moon”), and she pushed the workers to buy “Bonds for the Armed Revolution,” say for $5 pesos, which was equal to several days’ pay of an entire family, parents and children. She said the money would be redeemed when the revolution triumphed, and most workers guarded these slips of paper under their mattresses. The bond stated, “The new guerrilla struggles for the triumph of the social revolution. Support it. To win or to die.”
She persuaded them to sell an animal and buy a rifle.
Her lessons ended nearing midnight when the workers walked home by the light of torches. It was in such secret meetings that Communists allied with the FARC’s predecessors in preparation for a nationwide revolution.
The teacher also made sure to speak to the women separately as women had to feel themselves included in the proletariat. The Communist manuals forewarned of bourgeois feminists—like the widow in the sedan chair who taught the women hygiene and basic first aid and gave them nutritional tips for their children.
In the evenings at Entrerios, Maye read books she’d brought with her, among them the works of Maupassant, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, and she played the operas of Puccini and Verdi on the victrola. She recalled nights at the opera and the philharmonic in Paris, where she had lived with her husband during his tenure as Colombia’s ambassador.
One evening, past midnight, eighty men and a few women gathered beneath the balcony outside Maye’s bedroom. Maye heard noise and commotion—they spoke of burning down the house—and she lit a candle. For the electricity in the hacienda to run, the workers had to ignite the water turbine, which ran only during the daytime.
Maye felt no harm would come to her and she stepped outside her balcony, supported by her cane. She blinked, blinded by the glow of fire from torches.
We have come to ask you for this land that is ours, demanded a voice from the crowd. Esta tierra es nuestra. Titles to the land and working toward land ownership were the main source of strikes and tensions between landowners and tenants.
Maye knew the workers well. Like the Communist recruiters, she, too, perceived the answer lay in finding solutions to people’s problems.
Esta es su casa, she said. If you and I work hard, it will be you and I who will prosper. Look what you have all achieved. The success of this coffee depends on you and me because I cannot do this alone, and I thank you for your hard work. This is success that will bring employment and investment to this desolate area, and success that will feed and educate your children.
Maye did not recognize some men waving machetes in the air.
I want to see your children growing up, reading and writing, Maye said. I want the coffee that we grow together to bring progress here. Que quieren ustedes? Your interests are my interests. Maye’s voice was strong for a crippled old lady. She explained basic supply and demand; how if, as a team, they produced good quality coffee, buyers would specifically request coffee from Entrerios. This would mean continuous employment for them. She told them she negotiated the best price, and she passed along to them as much of the gains as she could.
Maye was a devout Catholic, strict in her confessions to Father Cipriano, and as if by an act of God, her words disarmed the crowd.
Dios la bendiga, su merced, said a voice in the crowd.
Supported by her cane, Maye limped inside and locked the balcony door behind her. She held herself accountable for the wellbeing of the families of the nearly two hundred workers spread throughout Entrerios. Her protection came from the respect and admiration with which her workers regarded her.
“A salamander in the closet,” my daughter said. Earlier, I had taught her that if you chased a salamander, it dropped its tail and scurried away.
On the night table of the bedroom we had chosen to make ours for the weekend was the book “Greek Myths and Legends.” It lay face down, its spine split open to the story of Echo. At last her bones became rocks. At last nothing was left of her but a hardening voice that haunted caves and cliffs, and answered the calls and cries of others.
A fan hung from the ceiling and its arms spun—and by the light of the moon streaming from the window, our eyes followed the movement of the fan, hypnotizing after a day in the heat. Humidity filled our lungs, sweat lined our eyebrows. We shook the bedsheets to cool ourselves. Outside, we heard the sprinklers tending to the yellowing lawn and the churning of the engine of the machine that cleaned the water in the pool. A wind swept through like a low whistle, and palm and fern trees trembled. A moment later it stormed. Rain dripped from the leaves long after the worse had passed. Refreshed, we fell asleep. I woke half-way through the night and gasped: was that a shadow at the window? Were those the feet of a guerrilla in black rubber boots?
Some years ago, in this same room, my niece, then the same age as my daughter, had told me she planned to hide inside her weekend bag when the guerrilleros arrived. When, she said; not if.
“I have thought about it, haven’t you?” she said.
Then my niece ran to torpedo into the pool. Friends dropped by. We barbecued. We drank beers. To carry on—like Maye had carried on after the night with the angry mob and the torches—seemed to be the way Colombians coped with violence through generations.
“The scorpions. Always check your sandals for scorpions before you put your shoes on,” my niece had said between getting another ice-pop from the freezer and plunging back into the pool—all while the Blackhawks drilled through the horizon over Sumapaz Valley. The glowing sky in shades of pink, green and blue made you forget that it was only because the soldiers and the Blackhawks were nearby at the Sumapaz Military Base that we could lounge here.
Now, my daughter asleep next to me, I had another book—a history of the Communist Party—open on my chest. I could not take my mind off the army’s choppers circling above the house, sometimes one after another, and they exuded the distinct noise of war. Their echo bounced off the white walls and the windows shook. It was thundering again, and it would be difficult to discern between thunderbolts and gunpowder explosions. Don’t go there, I told myself.
For most of the way to Entrerios, rain splattered the windows of the car. My grandfather and my father, Alberto and Francisco, approached the hacienda at mid-day, as the temperature spiked. The ground was absorbing moisture, and the vegetation released its scent. Earlier, hail had fallen and knocked the white flowers off the branches of the coffee plants.
It was halfway through June, in 1952, and the Communist struggle meant the murders in the countryside were constant. The caretaker had reported to Alberto that corpses were abandoned to rot on the fields. Communist gangs were setting up roadblocks and extorting money to allow mules carrying the coffee to proceed. Coffee shipments were often stolen.
This was one generation after Maye, and Communist indoctrinators had moved onto use more forceful ways to intimidate and to appropriate the land. Workers, who were openly loyal to the family, found written threats in the form of scribbled notes that spoke of taking over the land as the “duty of the masses” and signed off as “Yours in Lenin and oppressed humanity” or “Brothers in Father Lenin.” Under their doors, the Agrarian Communist Movement slipped flyers that stated, “If your family does not register for the Agrarian Communist Movement, we will burn your property and chop off your head and your arms.” Some returned from work in the fields to find their huts and their possessions burnt.
My grandfather was disconcerted to find that on the peripheral land, closing in around the hacienda, dozens of squatters had recently settled on makeshift sheds. Alberto remarked that without asking the squatters directly, it was hard to discern if they were escaping from more violent areas, or if they were Communists pillaging the land, and so they drove on.
For months, Alberto had made random unannounced trips to the hacienda, each time going alone. However, he had promised his thirteen-year-old son (my father) that he would take him to visit his friend, Agapito, the son of the head mule trainer. A year earlier, the two boys, both uninhibited riders, rode mules across mountains that sparkled with the red gems of coffee plants. There was such freedom to be had when atop an equine! When the morning sun brewed the valley, they removed their clothes and jumped in the Calandaima River. Agapito had perceived the patrón’s son as proper and stiff, and the sight of the skinny boy in the water in his briefs made him smile. Here and there, large smooth boulders interrupted the flow of the river, and Francisco bounced from one to the next. In one river crossing, the current dragged smaller rocks, twigs, branches, even entire tree trunks. The river marked the boundaries of the fields, and the water flowed down from mountains entirely covered by coffee plants.
Agapito was at the age in which whiskers grew into a mustache. He laughed often and told stories, and burst into song—but in the last year, there was a change in him, and he stayed quiet and guarded, as if afraid of the blue sky, clear enough to see—and be seen from—the other side of the valley. He was afraid of those who watched and judged his friendship with the patrón’s son. He was afraid of the notes under his door. He was afraid of the Communists who demanded his loyalty. He would be forced to act against Señora Maye’s family.
In her will, Maye requested that Father Cipriano continue his annual missions to Entrerios. Agapito had put off preparing for his Holy Communion, and Agapito’s mother and father reminded their son that Catholic rituals had meant a great deal to la Señora Maye and should be continued and respected.
Alberto pulled up the car in front of the barn. Francisco planned to ride one of the mules that were kept saddled in the barn, and look for Agapito.
Francisco emerged from the car, glad to stretch his knees after the six-hour ride. His father steered away.
Scrawny, long-limbed Francisco struggled to open the thick wooden barn doors.
He found Agapito dangling from a beam, arms stretched up and wrists roped and tied to the beam. His throat was sliced, the slim cut of a sharp knife. He was murdered. Blood seeped through clothes, and dampened the chest and stomach and dripped down the legs, accumulating inside a deep and long canoe-like feeding post filled with grain for the mules.
Francisco yelled for his father. The scream summoned some of the workers, and they fetched Alberto.
Someone lowered Agapito’s body. It was still warm; so the murder happened as the car pulled into Entrerios. So the murderers were among the workers clambering to get a look.
The caretaker could tell the knots on Agapito’s arms and feet were the trademark of the Communist leader, Juan de la Cruz Varela. He was the FARC’s main associate in the area, and no one entered or left Viotá region without his permission.
More workers were piling into the barn. Women screamed. Men snickered in open mockery to my grandfather. A man glanced at the dead body and at the patrón, back and forth, and down at the son.
Francisco was aware that things were happening fast. He clamped Alberto’s hand, and he could hear the sound of his father’s heart racing under his shirt.
Three mules were tied up, below where Agapito’s body hung minutes prior, and the animals, afraid of the growing crowd, stomped their hooves against the ground. They rubbed their noses and their long ears against the side of the bloodied feeding canoe. They pulled back on the rope looped to their halter, desperate to be released. They made whinny noises, and the mules in the coffee fields answered them.
Francisco looked up, over the crowd, at the barn ceiling and his eyes narrowed in on the top of the door. It was halfway closed.
Vamos corriendo al carro, Alberto said to his son, and there was heartbreak in the father’s voice. Holding hands, they pushed through the crowd. Once outside, they bolted to the car, and slipped inside, and locked the doors.
A crowd blocked the car. Alberto honked and accelerated and waved his hands to signal to them to move out of the way. Alberto drove on, his hand on the horn, and he revved the engine and the crowd cleared the way. The force of the car picking up speed pressed their bodies into the seats.
Francisco strained his neck to glance back through the rearview window. A few men he’d never seen before were pointing at the car and cheering.
Alberto sped through dirt roads. He swerved around branches, and slammed down his foot on the gas, sending the car up in the air to swoop over ditches. Francisco held on to the dashboard. He prepared himself for the worst—behind every tree, he expected a gunman. Alberto screamed at the road ahead, and Francisco was aware that his father was terrified—and though gratified to know this because he should be terrified, the boy soiled himself.
Francisco grew up believing he’d failed his stringent father if he cried in front of him. So in the car, the boy pinched his legs to hold back tears.
Two hours later, as the father’s attention turned to the son, Alberto found no words of comfort. Another two hours on the road, and Alberto turned on the headlights. They reached the two-lane road leading to Bogotá, and the presence of more cars and a few trucks on the road gave them a sense of safety. He exhaled. Alberto realized the danger in which he had put his son. He wanted to stop the car and embrace him, but, as was his nature, he clamped, and so he drove on.
Francisco rolled down the window, and the breeze dried his tears.
Alberto told Francisco they could never return to “that place.” He could not articulate the name Entrerios. Alberto was a jeweler. He had little experience in managing a coffee plantation, and he half-wished his wife had not inherited it from Maye. The newspaper reports of violence confirmed the era of Entrerios had culminated when Maye died in 1950. In the same way I knew the era of California had ended with my grandmother, Helena’s, death in 1997.
Within a year of the murder, Entrerios was divided into plots and sold to the first bidder, pronto, before the land lost further value. After the sale, the entire family vacationed in Miami. Why? Were there further threats to the family, and did they need to leave the country for some time? My father dismissed these concerns. His mother wanted to treat them to a holiday.
Two months after the trip to Miami, Francisco was enrolled in boarding school in Switzerland. Colombia’s violence forced my father to finish growing up abroad and separated from his family, the same fate as me.
My daughter, my only child, continued sleeping next to me. I knew that I could vacuum and she would not wake up. She was nine years old and already an accomplished tennis player with a display case of trophies won at tournaments. Her teachers said she was friendly with everyone in the class, and so an asset during group projects. She played the violin and though shy, she relished the spotlight when performing for school functions.
I got up from the bed and looked out the window. The fog thickened and out of the fog, a creature formed shape—now to be seen by the light of the moon. The night guard—not Carlos, Carlos was sleeping in the basement—waved. The moonlight caught a glitter on his rifle, an old-fashioned wooden knick-knack, that hung over his shoulder. Greying hair, he limped on to continue his loops around the property.
My mind seemed now at some distance from my body. Soon enough, my daughter would have her own children, and the years would be tearing along and this—income disparities, class conflict, lawlessness—would it continue? Communism to FARC to drug traffickers, and what was next? One echoed into another. Already FARC dissidents, who were disenchanted with the peace process, had formed new drug gangs.
Of course, I had believed that we would come back intact from tierra caliente, that our lives would not be altered by our little get-away. Yet, I texted my husband: “You are right. We will drive back to Bogotá this morning.” I felt released.
Paula Delgado-Kling holds degrees in comparative literature/ French civilizations, international affairs, and creative writing from Brown, Columbia and the New School, respectively. She has completed a book about her native country, Colombia. It has been excerpted in Narrative Magazine, The Literary Review, Pacifica Literary Review, The Grief Diaries, and translated into Japanese for happano.org. For this book, she received two grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and won the OneWorld Prize in non-fiction from the Pan African Literary Forum. You can follow her blog at www.talkingaboutcolombia.com or connect via Twitter @ColombiaTalk
