Our Own Making

almost all of her life; lived under the weight and luck of it. That day I know they would have taken
every child home if they could: the only ones who braved the riots to find us before the violence
subsided later that night.
It happened in my ninth year.
—
Preparing to leave the country, when we finally did, was like preparing for a funeral before the
person was dead. The bedrooms emptied out and dusted; the lawyers my mother met in secret;
the little crease between her eyebrows that seemed to become permanent; the endless whispering.
My mother’s brother, like a father to us, left the family hacienda for good. That land, where
we learned to love the earth so deeply and so well, had been in our family for centuries. For my
brothers and I, as for our mother and her brothers before us, it was akin to the beginning of life.
Within a few months it was sold, although the acres of oil palms knew no difference.
Even beyond the tangible, this time was marked by the sense that something, or someone, was to
be lost for good. It was hard to tell if we were leaving the country or if it was leaving us: there was
such a deep sense of abandonment, but I couldn’t tell if the core of it was in me or the dormant
volcano that held our whole lives in its lap. Cotopaxi: shining peak. Although, more often than
not, those days it appeared dull and somber behind rain clouds.
Years before, at the very edges of my memory, a smaller volcano on the outskirts of the capital
had blown, leaving a thin layer of ashes over everything for miles. The year we left, the volcano
was quiet but the people grew uneasy. The city rumbled not with the threat of ashes, but with restlessness
and hunger. Both times it was grey and full of smog. Tucked into a merciless landscape,
ravaged by poverty and corruption, we felt our home coming undone as a slowly rotting plum:
the surface still intact, the center growing softer and darker with each passing day.
I dreamt, seven times, that as we sat in our garden surrounded by fruit, the iron gates were
thrown open by a stampede of wild animals. I always forced myself awake before I could die,
trampled by an ox or mauled by a mountain lion.
—
My mother was a math teacher, but she had been born an artist. This became most apparent to
me in the weeks before leaving. In those days she made trips to artisan stands and antique shops,
collecting art like she could gather up the soul of the country in bits of gold leaf and cast iron.
The home of her entire life she would carry with her in tiny mirrors and statuettes: gilded frames,
ceramics, the body of the Virgen rendered six inches tall. For us, she said, these would be reminders—an
origin story wrapped neatly in day-old newspapers, packed tightly in boxes.