DECEMBER 2014 - APRIL 2015INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS74

memoir excerpt

Buried in Our Stories is the Family Treeby InGRId RoJas ContReRas

"I knew a man, a common farmer, the father of five sons, And in them the fathers of sons, and in them the fathers of sons."

walt whitman I Sing the Body Electric.

T here is a book in my closet as old as myself. On the cover a white, apple-cheeked cherubim is in the process of tripping over a banner of white silk. The angel is laughing, diving headfirst into a world that is all pink heaven cloud and plush. The cover is quilted, and at the edges where the cloth has worn I can see through to the cardboard. Mami bought the book before I was born and filled its insides with the errata of my birthx-ray images inside the womb, inked footprints, a frayed hospital bracelet marked Clnica Berraquel, Bogot, Colombia. It is a familiar book, meant to answer for a time none of us remember. But already on the third page, upon coming to the family tree, I have an abundance of questions.

The illustrator has taken pains in making the family tree limbs strong

and varied. The leaves confidently splay out. a blonde, blue-eyed baby nestles into a pillow just where the trunk grows its first limbs. There is a white cloth draped over its private parts. Mami has filled out my name under this babyeven though my skin is color canela, my eyes dark brown, my hair black. i can almost see Mamis hovering pen, her nails flushing white because she grips her pens too hard, and even though i am sure she didnt have it then, my minds eye rests upon her favorite ringthe golden snake coils around her finger and flashes its green emerald eyes and sniffs the air with a glinting tongue.

On the first limb sprouting from the tree on the right she has filled in her name: Genny Contreras. In the limbs above shes filled in the names of her parentsAbuelo Materno: Rafael

Contreras. Abuela Materna: Herlinda Marquez.

The tree printed in the baby book (strong and sure, with birds and pink clouds and ribbons fluttering mid-air), was not made for a family like mine, and so Mami leaves the rest of the tree blank.

When Mami first told me that our family was impossible to trace i did not believe her. She warned me that the family was not recorded by official documents and reminded me that this is why we are a family of stories. Stories are the heirloom, passed down. Stories are the records. Buried in our stories is the family tree. Then she retells the lineage i have come to know so well:

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In the mountains in Santander, Colombia, the father passed down the secrets to the sons, who passed the secrets to the sons, who passed the secrets to the sons. Back then, each family was said to have a quality: my family was said to have the power to move clouds.

Unlike Mami, i was raised in an American high school in Bogot, where various teachers drummed in me the belief in records and documents, of evidence and paper trails. i drag Mami with me on this quest and as we fly from Mexico (where she lives) to Bogot, Colombia (where i was born), as we get on a second plane that takes us over the majestic Andes mountains and lands us in the northeastern city of Bucaramanga, as we drive through guerrilla territory through impossibly beautiful landscapes thick with fog and flowering trees, even as we arrive to the village of Ocaa (where my family is from)i list and relist all the documents that could tell us about our lineage: census documents, land ownership documents, newspaper obituaries, military records, immigration records, birth records.

In Ocaa, a quick chat with great Aunt Raquel reveals that there are no birth records to look up, due to all the women in the family giving birth in their homes, and a quick search online tells me there wont be census documents either, because efforts were interrupted due to civil war. Mami gloats ever so quietly and hides behind her black mane of hair, pressing her lips together so as not to

laugh. i kick myself for assuming the documents would be there, and after a while, Mami finally gains control over her emotions and says, This is not an organized country, not like the United States.

And so we spend weeks holed up in the baptismal registry annexed to the white chapel of Santa Rita. In a direct reversal to the stucco-ed, high-ceilinged chapel, the little office is hot, filled with people, and a woman (not a priest) sees after the requests of the community. She sits behind the tall counter, amidst her big fluff of hair, slowly answering phones and helping the villagers who always want one of three things: appointments to get babies baptized, copies of baptismal records to get married, paperwork to report deaths or legal divorce.

Mamis and my requests strike the woman as odd, so she has us stand to a side, where she can keep us out of the way. Mami and i shift our weight from one foot to the other, using the counter as a table. Its easy to locate the book that contains Mamis record, easy to find the book that contains her mothers and fathers, difficult but not impossible to find her two sets of grandparents, then her great grandparents. But then, on both sides of her lineage, we come upon an insurmountable blank. On my grandmothers side i get stuck earlier on. Her father was illegitimate so he took his mothers last name. Day after day i ask for books from 1870, 1860, 1850, 1840, turning the dusty pages, looking for the baptismal record of

Mamis great grandmother, but its no use: the system was devised to keep track of men.

Mamis great-great abuelo on her fathers side proves to be just as elusive. i dont know if he was illegitimate as well, but the fact is i just cant find him. The priest at the church, who grows accustomed to seeing me standing at the counter inhaling the dust of books, tells me that if Mamis great-great abuelo lived in the mountains, its probable he never came down to the village to be baptized. What hes really saying is that people in the mountains were heathens, mestizos who both claimed their indigenous and Christian history, people who might have not been interested in a Catholic baptism.

Whats certain is that both him and his secretary are irritated. i dont know if its my constant presence at the same spot in the counter of the registry, or the pointless nature of my search, and i dont ask. i am determined to find Mamis great abuelo, Raimundo Contreras, because he could hold the secret to unlocking a family mysterywhere did the idea of moving clouds come from anyway? What i do say to the priest is that i must continue looking on the off chance Mamis great-great abuelo did come down to be baptized. The priest raises his white brows at me and looks into Mamis eyes and then into the eyes of cousin Esther, whose help ive also enlisted.

You ladies should wear masks, anyway, he says after a time. You may get sick from the dust.

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We thank him, and just as he disappears into the little side door that leads into the chapel, cousin Esther opens the dark flap of an especially old book. i gasp and come near to look at the calligraphy. The pages have yellowed, but the ink is still jet-black and the notes on the margin are still flush-red. Slanted titles bear the names of the baptized, but the calligraphy is so decorated it is nearly illegible. i am admiring the downward curve of a serif when Esther brings her eyes close to the page, trying to sound out a name. She lifts the thick, leathered book and puts her arm underneath the great weight, tilting it up to see. It happens in secondsi watch as the whole block of paper slides down, and at first i think the pages are not bound to the cover, but when part of it catches, the whole thing breaks into a million grains of ink and paper, and the wave

of grain and ink and dust rolls against itself, and i yell, Close it! Close it! but its too late: the names of the baptized cascade in a great mass and fall into a heap of dust, like it was always sand sitting there in the guise of solid paper, just us fooled by the illusion.

i cover my mouth and say, All those names lost forever.

The records secretary hears me. Unruffled and serene, she glides up to the counter and takes the book from Cousin Esther and replaces it flat into its row, not at all shocked by what has happened. Its an old book, what can you expect?

When there is nothing else to investigate in Ocaa, Mami and i travel

to the nearby city of Ccuta, to see Mamis older sister. Ta Nancy shows me a few government documents she inherited after her father died. They are brief documents detailing debt, measly inheritances, graves on loan. The most important detail i come to know is that all but one of my abuelos brothers and sisters sign their name X.

Theres not a lot you can tell from that single letter, two lines simply etched, crossed at the middle. Except that an X represents a shut door. It represents an opting-out of the educated world, and an opting-in into a different existence: the woods, the sun, the crops growing and falling, the years passing.

But an X is also the marking of a spot, marking a treasure to be plundered by future generations.

Ingrid Rojas Contreras is the 2014 recipient of the Mary Tanenbaum Literary Award in Nonfiction. She is a 2015 fellow at the San Francisco Writer's Grotto and is in residence in Cassis, France, as part of the Bread Loaf Bakeless Camargo Fellowship. Her writing is forthcoming or has been anthologized in Guernica Annual, Wise Latinas (Uni-versity of Nebraska Press) and American Odysseys: Writings by New Americans (Dalkey Archive Press). Currently, she is working on a nonfiction book about her grandfather, a medicine man who it is said could move clouds.

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