San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Scars of war
First things first: “Fruit of the Drunken Tree” is one of the most dazzling and devastating novels I’ve read in a long time. It seems I’m in good company with this assessment, since Ingrid Rojas Contreras’ fiction debut has been appearing on dozens of recommended reading lists for the summer of 2018. Set in Bogota, Colombia, during the “drug wars” of the 1990s, the story line features an exquisitely intimate double portrait of two young women — girls, really — whose lives are disrupted as well as disfigured by the intertwined effects of terrorism, poverty, violence and exile.
Chula Santiago, younger daughter of an upper-middleclass Colombian family (and representing at least in part the true-to-life history of Rojas Contreras), introduces the narrative from her current status as a refugee in the United States. The present circumstances of Petrona Sánchez, who worked for a while as the family’s maid in Bogota, are at first glimpsed only by way of an inscrutable photograph and an evasively prosaic handwritten letter. The rest of the book both constructs and unravels the world they shared amid extreme political turmoil, complicated love and equally complicated loss.
You may think you already know about the destructive reign of drug lord Pablo Escobar, about Latin American slums and the vulnerable families who are forced to choose between the brutal options of gang complicity or victimization. Indeed, this novel steers toward the epicenter of shocking reality: scenes of assassination, car bombings and kidnappings; embattled narcos and guerrillas. Yet Rojas Contreras, in this vividly imagined and deeply researched book, renders in breathtaking specificity the humanity of each singular participant — whether perpetrator or bystander, betrayer or betrayed.
As 7-year-old Chula and 13-year-old Petrona take turns, chapter by chapter, recounting the days, months and years in which their lives collided, readers bear witness to the yawning chasms of class and consciousness that divide them. Nevertheless, despite Chula’s privileged access to education, nutrition, financial stability and apparent security, we see that there is no adequate protection against the ubiquitous impacts of chaos and trauma. And when Petrona allows herself to be lured by a romanticized version of radicalism, we see that hope can sometimes be as murderous as desperation.
What cannot be summarized here is the prose on every page of this novel, with images that blister and burn, phrases that adorn and astonish. Notice, for example, the way Spanish words slip elegantly into sentences like this one, in Chula’s point of view: “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 fog as well, without us realizing, until it sat embroiling everything around us.” Petrona’s voice contains a subtle blend of naivete and self-knowledge: “Dusk at the playground was when the encapotados met to walk to the mountain where they had meetings. All of us in the Hills knew because we heard their singing, always the song about the international working class echoing down the mountain . ... [A]nd I was once again lost and alone, just me, only me, left to figure out how to keep the rest of the little ones safe and in school, and little Aurora from the path I was following even now.”
Given the ever-evolving recognition of PTSD and its many permutations, it’s no coincidence that this novelist explores the indelible residue of early traumatic experience, reminding us that anyone caught in the crossfire of war — whether civil or global — is likely to end up scarred inside and out. Flashbacks and dissociative memories are interspersed throughout the narratives of both girls, appropriately reflecting the way atrocities cause complicated damage to psyches as well as bodies. Although Chula manages, along with her family, to find eventual sanctuary in the United States, there is a vast price to be paid; she is accompanied by psychological wounds that may or may not heal with time. Petrona, whose fate is far more uncertain, is left wrapped in a silence that both echoes and illuminates the near-muteness with which she entered Chula’s childhood home. By the end of this unforgettable book, we understand that what these two young women have endured, both separately and together, will continue to haunt them, together and separately.
Readers of “Fruit of the Drunken Tree” will surely be transformed by the imprints of the journeys Rojas Contreras’ characters undertake; their escape routes include flights of imagination as well as involuntary amnesia. In the best of fiction as in the worst of life, we are given the opportunity to empathize with the suffering of others and to find inspiration in the grace of their resilience.
Elizabeth Rosner is the author of, most recently, “Survivor Café: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory.” Email: books@sfchronicle.com