Ingrid Rojas Contreras > Quotes

“I wanted to yell at the television like Mama and Papa, but I had to learn how to properly do it. I gathered that being a mouse was better than being a mosquita muerta, and being a snake was better than being a man, because flies pretending to be dead could be crushed, mice were shy, and men were persecuted; but everybody always avoided snakes.”
― Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Fruit of the Drunken Tree

“Multiply me when necessary. Transform me into light where there is shadow.”
― Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Fruit of the Drunken Tree

“Ours was a kingdom of women, with Mamá at the head, perpetually trying to find a fourth like us, or a fourth like her, a younger version of Mamá, poor and eager to climb out of poverty, on whom Mamá could right the wrongs she herself had endured.”
― Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Fruit of the Drunken Tree

“Multiply me when necessary,
make me disappear
when peremptory.
Transform me into light when there is shadow,
into a star
when in the desert.”
― Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Fruit of the Drunken Tree

“At Tio Pietro's funeral, Papa had said that when people became old, they couldn't bring themselves to cry anymore, because they had cried continually, on and off, over a lifetime long with happiness and sorrow. He had said their bank of tears had gone dry.”
― Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Fruit of the Drunken Tree

“Mamá's headlights lit up the yellow fluorescent lines of the road. They were curvy and it seemed like they were being traced out of nothingness by the invisible hand of God - like God was bored, drawing hills and lines with a highlighter.”
― Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Fruit of the Drunken Tree

“War always seemed distant from Bogota, like niebla descending on the hills and forests of the countryside and jungles. The way it approached us was like a fog as well, without us realizing, until it sat embroiling everything around us.”
― Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Fruit of the Drunken Tree

“I sat down. I cried, knowing that what I had wanted was a return to normal, but there would never be a return to normal. Papa was gone. In his place was this man whose cheekbones cut hard into his skin, whose burnt-dark color and malnutrition were still present even though he no longer lived in a jungle. This man who allowed me to hold his hand and sob onto his shoulder, even though it made him anxious to be so close, so near to anyone. I needed to learn how to live with this new man, to negotiate a relationship with his body that was not the body I knew.”
― Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Fruit of the Drunken Tree

“As her photo burned, I thought: even oblivion is a kindness.”
― Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Fruit of the Drunken Tree

“We were refugees when we arrived to the U.S. You must be happy now that you'e safe, people said. They told us to strive for assimilation. The quicker we transformed into one of the many the better. But how could we choose? The U.S. was the land that saved us; Colombia was the land that saw us emerge.

There were mathematical principles to becoming an American: you had to know one hundred historical facts (What was one reason for the Civil War? Who was the President during World War II?), and you had to spend five uninterrupted years on North American soil. We memorized the facts, we stayed in place - but when I elevated my feet at night and my head found its pillow I wondered: of what country was I during those hours when my feet were in the air?”
― Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Fruit of the Drunken Tree

“What song could Pablo Escobar possibly sing in the shower?”
― Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Fruit of the Drunken Tree

“I didn't tell Papa that Petrona was raped.

I didn't tell Cassandra I had written to Petrona and that she had written back.

I didn't correct Mama when she assumed the photograph Petrona had sent was a new photograph. I didn't tell her it was actually printed the year we fled Colombia.

I didn't tell Mama that the man in the photograph was Gorrion.

I was the only one with all the pieces. I was the only one that knew that Petrona had made a home with a man who had betrayed her, that she had chosen to keep the baby, that this new life she had fed from her breasts was something I had to make up to her and the only thing I could do was keep silent about what I knew. After all, who am I to judge? As her photo blurred, I thought: even oblivion is a kindness.”
― Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Fruit of the Drunken Tree

“Both versions of the story I told were lies, probably because the truth was more difficult to tell. What was the truth? Something terrible had happened. A man had been killed. Maybe it wasn't so difficult after all.”
― Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Fruit of the Drunken Tree

“I thought again about Pablo Escobar cutting off people's tongues. It made sense to stop speaking, to say only what was necessary and nothing beyond. It was a way to survive.”
― Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Fruit of the Drunken Tree

“I blurted out a sob at the sound. Papa's voice fit into a groove in my ear, deserted for so many years, now full of his timbre. How easy it was to recognize this once lost detail. There was a home for every departed thing.”
― Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Fruit of the Drunken Tree

“A person was an accretion, constantly growing in strangeness, becoming an accumulation. Healing was found in stretching toward abundance. It was not about leaving the past behind, dividing the self into good and bad, but about opening a path through ruins.”
― Ingrid Rojas Contreras, The Man Who Could Move Clouds

“Beneath the clouds, far below was our deserted house, with the ghost imprints of furniture on the carpet and the television left on. Beneath the clouds, far below in the garden of our house, was the Drunken Tree shivering in the wind.”
― Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Fruit of the Drunken Tree

“I remembered Cassandra said that when Pablo Escobar found out someone had betrayed him, he sliced the person’s throat and pulled the tongue out and left it hanging out the slit. I got the pressing desire to touch my tongue then, squeeze it in between my fingers. I wondered what not having a tongue would be like. You would probably forget you didn’t have a tongue, and would try to move the red, lean muscle, but there would be nothing to move. Just the empty dark hall of your mouth. You would be alone with your thoughts.”
― Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Fruit of the Drunken Tree

“Trust is water in a glass; if you spill it, it's gone forever.”
― Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Fruit of the Drunken Tree

“For years the neighbors had pleaded with the Neighborhood Administration to make Mamá take her tree down. It was, after all, the tree whose flowers and fruit were used in burundanga and the date-rape drug. Apparently, the tree had the unique ability of taking people’s free will. Cassandra said burundanga was where the idea of zombies came from. Burundanga was a native drink made out of Drunken Tree seeds. The drink had once been given to the servants and wives of Great Chiefs in Chibcha tribes, in order to bury them alive with the Great Dead Chief. The burundanga made the servants and wives dumb and obedient, and they willingly sat in a corner of the underground grave waiting, while the tribe sealed the exit and left them with food and water that would have been a sin to touch (reserved as it was for use by the Great Chief in the afterworld). Many people used it in Bogotá—criminals, prostitutes, rapists. Most victims who reported being drugged with burundanga woke up with no memory of assisting in the looting of their apartments and bank accounts, opening their wallets and handing over everything, but that’s exactly what they’d done.”
― Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Fruit of the Drunken Tree

“The more I put into my screaming, the more things became unhinged—I gave sound to the things that had no language: the tense groove above Mamá’s lips, the snail shell in my palm, Petrona’s swollen mutant skin swallowing her eye and the points of her lashes, Abuela’s porcupine back. I started to lose track of myself, until there was someone else yelling.”
― Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Fruit of the Drunken Tree

“I sat down. I cried, knowing that what I had wanted was a return to normal, but there would never be a return to normal. Papá was gone. In his place was this man whose cheekbones cut hard into his skin, whose burnt-dark color and malnutrition were still present even though he no longer lived in a jungle. This man who allowed me to hold his hand and sob onto his shoulder, even though it made him anxious to be so close, so near to anyone. I needed to learn how to live with this new man, to negotiate a relationship with his body that was not the body I knew.”
― Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Fruit of the Drunken Tree

“To Mami and Nono, purity never came into healing, because purity didn’t exist. A person would always be visited by pain and grief. A person was an accretion, constantly growing in strangeness, becoming an accumulation. Healing was found in stretching toward abundance. It was not about leaving the past behind, dividing the self into good and bad, but about opening a path through ruins.”
― Ingrid Rojas Contreras, The Man Who Could Move Clouds

“Fruit of the Drunken Tree is a novel inspired by personal experience. Kidnapping was a reality for many Colombians until 2005 when the practice really began to decline. If they had not been kidnapped themselves, every Colombian knew someone who had experienced it: a friend, a family member, someone at work. There was once a girl like Petrona who worked as a live-in maid in my childhood house in Bogotá. Like Petrona she was forced into aiding in a kidnapping attempt against my sister and me, and like Petrona in the face of this impossible choice, she did not comply. I have thought of her throughout the years, along with all the women I have met who are stuck in hopeless situations in Colombia.”
― Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Fruit of the Drunken Tree

“They told us to strive for assimilation. The quicker we transformed into one of the many the better. But how could we choose? The U.S. was the land that saved us; Colombia was the land that saw us emerge.”
― Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Fruit of the Drunken Tree

“We kept our distance like we were at a border, none of us with papers.”
― Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Fruit of the Drunken Tree

“My whole life, Mami has been trying to teach me: there is no such thing as a curse. More and more, I understand what she means. Everyone suffers. To believe in a curse is to believe oneself above suffering. No one is above suffering. You can only believe in a curse if you believe in being spared.”
― Ingrid Rojas Contreras, The Man Who Could Move Clouds

“He wanted to exude authority and power, but these were qualities he did not have. They were, as it happened, the very air that Mami breathed.”
― Ingrid Rojas Contreras, The Man Who Could Move Clouds

“Mamá touched one droopy, silky flower as she whispered to the girl Petrona, who watched the flower as it swung lightly on its stem. I guessed Mamá was giving her the same warnings I had received about the tree: not to pick up its flowers, not to sit underneath, not to stand by it too long, and most important, not to let the neighbors know we ourselves were afraid of it. The Drunken Tree made our neighbors nervous. Who’s to say why Mamá decided to grow that tree in her garden? It may have been that long mean streak in her, or it may have been because she was always saying you couldn’t trust anyone.”
― Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Fruit of the Drunken Tree

“This must have been what the doctor had meant when he said the mind could do astonishing things: Petrona eating from the fruit of the Drunken Tree and believing she had misplaced a bowl of soup in her sheets, and Abuela taking the doctor’s drugs and thinking herself on a cruise. Maybe the astonishing thing was how much nicer the things they imagined were compared”
― Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Fruit of the Drunken Tree