The Man Who Could Move Clouds by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

Annotations for The Man Who Could Move Clouds by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

1: The Secrets

Mami says she lost the gift of seeing ghosts when my sister was born, and the gift of hearing voices when I was born, but in the wake of her decreased power, she retained the ability to foretell the future, as well as the eerie yet modest talent of appearing in two places at once.

1: The Secrets

But as memory returned, though I could recall the shape and weight of this shame, the sting of it was gone. I lost the impulse to hide that I was a brown woman born of a brown woman born of a poor man who said he had the power to move clouds.

1: The Secrets

We don’t have answers. Mami tells us it’s okay: This is the way when you follow instructions from dreams.

2: The Man Who Could Move Clouds

Nona gave birth every other year during La Violencia, the civil war that began in 1948 and lasted ten years, stealing three hundred thousand lives. War was nothing new. Politicians and historians strove to mark the differences, renaming conflict after conflict, but people saw no difference from one war to the next, and even then referred nebulously to the constant state of violence as the Situation. No matter what officials called it—so-called wartime, so-called peacetime—the Situation left behind corpses, disappeared persons, scorched farmland.

2: The Man Who Could Move Clouds

He never once considered the suffering he spun Nona in, or the violence with which he simply took what he wanted when he felt an urge. In seeking joy in his life, he regularly thieved the joy of others, of Nona especially, whom he cast as the one to blame for her own suffering.

2: The Man Who Could Move Clouds

He patted himself on the back for this deed, deeming himself to be different from the other men in the village, but his life, too, was built on the willful and cruel ignorance of the cost of his own high moods.

4: The Well

The people of the town she never heard named surrounded the corpse with flowers and offerings and prayed to it for miracles. It amused Mami to see them tear at their hair and sob into the earth. She sensed that they were crying not because they loved her, but because her unrotting skin defied the passing of days, and her brown locks that smelled of flowers rang fear into their hearts.

4: The Well

In the privacy of his consulting room, as Nono predicted what lay ahead for Mami, he narrated what nobody but Mami has ever heard: what steps he took, what words he recited, how he pointed his mind in order to pull back the veil and reveal her forking paths. Mami remembered then that this was a knowledge she had always hungered for. She wondered if her father was revealing the secrets to her for the reasons he gave, or whether they were a lure to make her choose the world of the living. Mami couldn’t be sure without asking, and she didn’t want to ask.

4: The Well

She didn’t see herself as a child, let alone as a child in need of others. Food and love and shelter were things she could get from anyone, if only she cared to reach.

5: The Aftershocks

Though they manifest differently, all curandero traditions agree on the understanding that illness is tied to the spirit, to the things we live through, and the things we carry

6: The Disinterment

Don Rafael Curandero of Ocaña, by this paper I hold you from your rest until you give me a house. Rafael Contreras look over my children; they are in so much need. Rafael by my will you will dwell among the souls in purgatory until you grant me revenge.

7: Midnight

There are stories in every family whose harm we are supposed to keep under wraps. In mine we call these stories secrets of ultra-tomb. They’re the kind you take to the grave. But Mami is a tumba abierta. Every harm she’s supposed to bury, she speaks. I am an open tomb as well.

8: When You Unearth Haunted Treasure

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.

8: When You Unearth Haunted Treasure

Though he knew what to do, he was drunk, and therefore helpless.

8: When You Unearth Haunted Treasure

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

12: The Curse

Eventually, tío Ariel forgave Mami for setting his things on fire, understanding that he had wronged her. He wanted her to return, to prove he could treat her better, but even though she let go of her resentment, she couldn’t trust him in the same way again. He was a man like all the men she knew: threatened by her, and interested in control.

12: The Curse

All night, we awaited the mysterious conditions under which we could settle and, as we were fond of calling it, listen to the tongue. Mami would tell us a story. Usually, around the witching hour, after the adults had had a few drinks and we tired from running around, Mami would begin. Other people’s stories began, Once upon a time. Mami’s began, Once, in real life…She weaved the same stories we had heard countless times, but with such a collision of charm and tension and high drama that none of us dared move, not even to pee. Our favorite story, the one we asked for again and again, was about Nono and a black vulture. It was a story about being cursed, and breaking a curse. Once, in real life, during one of Nono’s travels, when he was walking the Andes range, he noticed he was low on drinking water.

12: The Curse

Stuckness was something we noted. Our tíos and tías accrued debts and had to stay in bad relationships, bad jobs, dangerous neighborhoods. Our whole country seemed stuck too. At any moment, we might become victims of war.

12: The Curse

Sometimes I was moved to tears watching Mami’s siblings: with all that weighed on them, they played records and danced, shed their anxieties to drums and maracas and gaitas, rooting around for joy. Soon they would reach for my hands, guiding me to raise them with abandon to a sky that would soon glow neon. We lived in the midst of the incomprehensible.

14: Water

In my family, stories travel up and down. Lives contract and splay out like accordions. Only the characters, it seems, are different

14: Water

We didn’t know the term “panic attack,” because our people didn’t get sick in this way, or if they did, we had no word for it other than “suffering.” We came from a people who dealt with suffering by making offerings, relying on our community, defying it with joy. This worked, for a time. But our suffering returned.

14: Water

What ritual, what story could I build to hold these confessions? Were these troubles of the first order, the ones that could be solved, or of the second, the ones that required surrender and adaptation? I declined both times, saying I was not advanced enough to help.

15: Memory Lagoon

I thought about all that lay untold in the men I knew. Papi and the tíos were proud of not breaking, of acting tough. Conversely, in the middle of the day, the tías cried over loads of laundry, spoke with a rawness that marked that hour in the afternoon as a forever-crater in my mind. And then, as if it had been nothing, they’d dust their hands, wipe their cheeks, bask in the lightness that came from having expressed a deeply buried truth, and move on. They began the work of cooking dinner. What the men in the family couldn’t see was that, in their suffering alone, they only made us, their wives and daughters, carry the weight of what they would not deal with themselves.

15: Memory Lagoon

Whatever my fall had opened in me was now tightly shut. That night, as if Mami were finally returning from a long-lasting, arduous journey, she told me a story. She told me for the first time of her falling down the well and how it had awoken in her new abilities to perceive. Falling could be the beginning of a mysterious journey. Some accidents were initiations.

16: Doubles

If a person sought a Certificate of Blood Cleansing, their skin color and features as well as their behavior would be weighed to decide whether they could be classified as a race “above.”

16: Doubles

Our noisemakers startled the sky, and we grasped, making stray wishes for abundance and joy, not knowing, as we stood, plunged in a darkness that constantly renewed itself after the neon glare of fireworks, that the opposite would be true.

18: Four Women

I have what Western doctors call an anxiety disorder. Mami calls it spiritual sickness. She says that the problem is stories that have not healed inside me. This is why I am sick. She’s tried to cure me. I have drunk her teas, bathed in her blessed waters, lain before her as she’s beaten me tenderly with herbs. Nothing has worked. The complication is timing, Mami says. I am not ready to let the stories go.

18: Four Women

She said that if my sister and I had shown up at her door in Bogotá, she would have diagnosed our ailments as belonging to the second order, troubles that could not be mended but that we had to adapt to and learn to live with.

18: Four Women

Mami has been trying to teach me my whole life: there is no such thing as a curse. Crisis is routine. Anything can be called a curse, just as anything can be called a gift. Mami doesn’t say, but I know: the space between a curse and a gift is the end of the story. There is surviving, and then there is surviving the surviving. There is a version of the story in which a survivor doesn’t make it; and a version in which a survivor is remade.

21: Records

Others got curious about me, my city accent, and what I might be doing among them. I mentioned my grandfather, and an old man broke into a smile. I can see him in your eyes. He called some others, and suddenly I was surrounded by abuelos and abuelas who peered into my eyes and argued with one another over where exactly my grandfather lived on my face. I felt surrounded by gentleness, and I tried not to cry in front of them, but I did. I wiped my cheeks and explained I lived far away and it had been some years since I’d been back. One abuela rubbed my back, another whispered, Bienvenida. Mami walked over to see why I was surrounded, and soon the abuelos and abuelas turned their attention to her and fawned over her face as they had mine. I slinked away to walk around the statue, toward haunted ground and the ghosts of those who had disappeared.

22: The Book That Self-Combusts

I told Mami I was planning to find genealogical records for Nono’s family through baptismal records and she laughed in my face. First of all, she told me, people in Ocaña didn’t heed the imported Western systems of record keeping as they did in other places, such as Bogotá. A perfect example of the attitude here was the city archivist selling me black-market history during his working hours—while in the government palace, she emphasized. Second of all, she added, who do you think we are? You think we’re the type of people to be in the public record?

22: The Book That Self-Combusts

It’s inevitable, for some of us, that our inheritance will look like nothing. That war, poverty, violence, the politics of the archive will erase the palpable trace of our past. I didn’t know how to explain that I had held a book I thought was solid, but it was always sand in a guise, just me fooled by the illusion. It’s like I watched history erase itself, I said. She stared at me. And what do you think happens second by second? I think I may be full of the dead, I didn’t tell her.

25: Ash

am scared by what I have done. Call it grief. Call it derangement. I am woman-ghost and quicksand, dispossessed of everything but this moment. I hunger for what can speak to my bones.

25: Ash

My sister said: What’s interesting about your memory loss is that even while you had no memory you never stopped being you. The being excited about amnesia, keeping your suffering a secret—that is so you. And Mami assented, rolling her eyes. Who else suffers an accident and falls in love with the void? She said it unironically, so I stared at her for five full seconds before reminding her: You. You did that.