Between the Mango Leaves by Trey C. Erwin

In December, I accompany my wife back to Barranquilla. We arrive at my mother-in-law’s house in the little neighborhood of Modelo, nestled between stately Prado, where the city’s old money resides, and Monte Cristo, known for crime and turning out major league baseball star, Edgar Renteria. I step out of the taxi into the shade of the mango tree. A coastal breeze should be rustling its thick canopy by this time of year, but today the leaves are unseasonably still. Beyond the tree, I see the family house, which resembles many in the Caribbean with its sturdy concrete walls and wooden trim around the edges of the windows. My mother-in-law appears in the doorway. Not a single hair has grayed, but she masks a slight limp in her right leg as she crosses the terrace toward us.

“¡Ya llegaron!” she cries happily. She kicked her smoking habit decades ago, but her voice has never lost its rasp. We hug and kiss, and I wedge the suitcases through the wrought-iron gate.

Each morning, I squat into my favorite mecedora, a wooden rocking chair fitted with a wicker seat, sip my coffee, and read. Our dog, who nervously made the trip with us, hops into my lap, and I artfully avoid spilling the hot contents of my mug on the two of us. Sometimes we sit out on the terrace under the mango tree. Across the street is a park where children roller skate, barefoot teenagers kick a soccer ball, taxi drivers read the paper between fares, and mobile vendors sell coffee, bread, juice, chewing gum, and ice cream.

The dog barks impolitely at the elderly who pass by. I offer a weak reprimand or two, but mostly I want to keep reading. It’s Tom Feiling’s memoir and reportage of Colombia, Short Walks From Bogota. I wonder how he made friends with so many journalists who returned his calls and took up his invitations for dinner. I taught at a local university for six years, and I can’t even get my former students, who once wrote me such glowing course evaluations, to accept my offer of coffee.

My wife’s niece is Colombian by birth but has been raised in Toronto for most of her life. Though her parents speak Spanish at home, she has grown up speaking English at school, listening to Taylor Swift, and watching We Bare Bears. Returning to her birth country is not exactly a homecoming in the way it is for the others. The free-for-all driving concerns her. She can’t eat fish with bones. Her salsa footwork is not as intuitive as that of other Colombian children her age. When she’s excited, the words come out in English, much to the agony of my mother-in-law. She scolds and pleads with her, “No, Pau, en español. Estamos en Colombia.” My niece-in-law repeats herself in a Spanish marked with unrolled R’s and overpronounced consonants.

Before the Christmas Eve celebration gets underway, my wife and I take her to a tienda to buy snacks. She pulls a bag off the shelf. A familiar snack but a foreign name: Trululu. She scowls at my wife. “Everyone knows they’re called Gummy Bears.”

We put on our newly purchased outfits, as is customary, though I skimped and only bought a shirt. I’m what Colombians might call tacaño. For dinner, my mother-in-law serves pasteles—chunks of pork, chicken, and a smattering of potatoes encased in rice and wrapped tightly in bijao leaves. We wash it down with non-alcoholic corozo wine that my wife thinks has been saved too long. My contribution is a chocolate cake that I overpaid for.

Neighborhood fireworks pop off at intervals despite an extended spot on the morning news calling for caution and reminding viewers that hundreds of burn injuries had to be treated during last year’s festivities. Somewhere between explosions, I recognize Diomedez Diaz’s “Mensaje de Navidad” coming from a neighbor’s sound system. The accordion waltzes merrily, but the Colombian icon’s lyrics are melancholic, advising those thinking of traveling for the holidays to stay home. I think about the Christmas I’d be having in the States. I miss my mother’s fudge, the Advent calendar, and even the snow a little. The accordion carries on, and neighborhood children cheer at a fresh burst of pyrotechnics.

***

A text from Caleb, a former colleague whose wife is also from Barranquilla, wakes me from my afternoon nap. His mother-in-law has an arroz en bajo—a burgeoning romance—with the owner of a tienda on Carrera 43, so he’s fairly confident we can score free beer. We meet up a few hours later. To our dismay, we find that the owner is away. Running the shop in his stead is a middle-aged woman wearing a red-and-white-striped jersey of the city’s soccer team. She looks up from her phone. Caleb greets her warmly and asks polite questions to which she responds unenthusiastically.

The tienda is too small to sit inside, but there is a stack of plastic chairs that patrons are free to use on the ample sidewalk next to the busy street. We begin emptying little green bottles of Costeñita, a refreshing light beer made locally. When drinking, Colombian men have a habit of arranging the finished bottles in the middle of the table. We always joked that it was meant to demonstrate manliness, which is probably not far from the truth. Keen to obey cultural norms, we save our bottles and group them, but with no table, we set the pile by our feet on the pavement.

A Venezuelan peddling custom wire art passes by. He asks if we’d like one. Caleb obliges, and the young man takes a seat and gets to work molding a long wire with pincers. In 2016, a severe economic crisis in Venezuela sent millions across the border into Colombia. Many have stayed despite difficulty securing steady employment. They work wherever they can, and when there is no work, they busk and hawk in the streets.

The tienda attendant steps out and asks if we have any music requests. Up to this point, we have been listening to an excellent line-up of salsa, but as tienda beer requires, I suggest vallenato, Colombia’s country music. “El Condor Herido” is first up, a favorite of mine. I turn to our Venezuelan friend and inquire as to the affinity for vallenato in Colombia’s sister country. He replies, “Some like it. But by and large, Venezuelans are more salseros.” He pauses before adding, “Pero a mí la única salsa que me gusta es la tártara.”

Caleb’s wife, Daniela, arrives shortly after. She looks unimpressed at our pile of bottles. We get to reminiscing about some of the language seminars I once gave at the university, which Daniela attended years ago. I taught the short story “The Most Dangerous Game” by Richard Connell. During the seminar, she became overly concerned with a minor character who falls overboard from a ship and never reappears. How cruel and entirely unbelievable that the main character would carry on without his friend, she argued. I always found hers to be an authentically Colombian reading of that story. Identity in Colombia is far more collective than in the Anglo-sphere. If you abandon one of your friends in the first scene, you’ve already lost the plot.

***

My wife and I accompany my sister-in-law to a neighborhood in the city north called Las Flores. The zone is known for fishing and an old trolley that became somewhat iconic, although to me, it looked more like an oversized mining cart. Starting from Las Flores, it ran three kilometers to the end of a peninsula where the muddy waters of the Magdalena River bleed into the Caribbean. I rode it twice when I lived here. The city has since replaced the vintage trolley with an open-car train that can hold larger numbers. They’ve also cleaned up the beach on the Caribbean side of the tracks, where we’re ultimately heading today.

When we arrive at the new train station, we are told tickets are sold out, so we will have to make the rest of the journey on the backs of mototaxis. My driver is fast and reckless, and I have a grand time as we overtake clumps of pedestrians and dodge oncoming traffic. We pass a vendor with a sign that says aceite de tiburón—shark oil. It is rumored to be a remedy for erectile dysfunction.

At the end of the peninsula, we find a chaotic throng of beach-goers, police, and mototaxis. A crowd of angry passengers is trying to muscle their way onto a returning train, which is already full. Transit officials with megaphones urge them to stop the commotion and wait patiently. I smell fish being carved up on the riverbank a few meters to the right. To the left is the beach, a small bay on the Caribbean side. The sand has indeed been cleaned up, but the water is still dark, and I spot more than a few plastic wrappers. Large letters placed at the entrance of the beach read “Puerto Mocho.” Mocho, I learn from my wife and sister-in-law, is slang for someone missing one or more limbs. Some say it earned the name because of a dismembered corpse, rumored to be a victim of the mob, that was found here years ago. Others say it’s because a few fishermen carelessly used explosives and maimed themselves. The city council tried to change the name, but ultimately it stuck. Now, hundreds of Barranquilleros stretch out under red tarps staked into the sand and take turns wading into the calm waters.

We have a seat under a tarp and start to rub in sunscreen. I look over at my sister-in-law and notice her scarred arms. Years ago, she was riding in a government convoy as part of a humanitarian operation in the rural southeast, where Colombia’s largest leftist rebel group, the FARC, was active. For decades, the FARC and the Colombian Army fought a guerrilla war that affected the inhabitants of the countryside most of all. Her vehicle drove over a landmine planted by the FARC. At least one of her colleagues was killed in the blast. She walked away, but the fire from the explosion severely burned her arms. Despite injury and trauma, when then-president Juan Manuel Santos called for a referendum on a peace treaty with the FARC in 2016, she voted in favor of the deal.

By all appearances, she lives a happy life now. Were it not for the burn marks, one would never suspect she was a victim of war. It is the same with Puerto Mocho. Seeing it as it is today, full of parents reclining in plastic chairs and children splashing in the shallows, it is hard to imagine mutilated torsos washing up on these shores.

***

I am standing on the terrace, luggage in hand, staring up at the mango tree. The branches sway, and the slender leaves flitter. The seasonal winds have finally arrived. They are several weeks late.

Barranquilla’s beaches don’t have white sand or crystal clear waters. Its cathedrals rarely end up on a postcard. What draws me to this city is the undercurrent, the overlooked bits that take a season to notice, and even longer to appreciate: the brass of a Christmas salsa, the wind on an evening walk home from the tienda, the calloused hands of the fishermen, sunbeams flickering between the mango leaves.

I step into the car. Someone turns up the radio. “Barranquilla hermosa,” I hum along.