El Palomero
By Lorena Hernández
Leonard
Farangiz Yusupova, Neighbor’s Gift, oil, acrylic paint and oil pastels on canvas, 42 x 58 inches, 2021.
El Palomero
Lorena Hernández Leonard | MAY 2022 | ISSUE 16
At a time when my new infant sucked from my breast and my oldest daughter demanded much of my attention, I eagerly volunteered to manage the remodeling of our home’s bathroom. Ten years prior, as we were about to get married, my husband and I purchased a Dutch Colonial stuck in a time capsule. Over the years we built our proverbial nest, updated every room in the house. Every room, except the main bathroom.
Before construction began, I curated and sourced each piece, including a sleek dual flush toilet, hand-painted Spanish Azulejo tiles for the floors, and a stunning medicine cabinet. Although the project took far longer than anticipated, with an over-committed contractor and delayed orders, the stress I experienced during this process quickly dissolved when the bathroom remodel had been completed.
Alone, I stood inside my new bathroom and watched in delight at how beautiful it had turned out. I stared at the dazzling medicine cabinet—mirrors inside and out with glass shelving for every beauty product I use and don’t use. Then, I noticed my reflection in the mirrors and suddenly I was overcome with emotion. A faint metallic taste filled my mouth. My throat tightened and my heart began to accelerate, and in what I can only describe as an out of body experience, where time was no longer linear but suspended, I felt myself transported to the place where I grew up: the tiny apartment in a suburb of Medellín, Colombia, where I lived with my parents and my two younger sisters for the first twelve years of my life.
Much like city pigeons roosted upon a concrete nest, I lived perched atop a three-story brick and concrete walk up. El palomero (our pigeon coop of an apartment, as I like to call it because of its diminutive size) showed increasing signs of deterioration over those twelve years. Papito Martín and Mamita Candida, my father’s parents, built the apartment for my parents as a wedding gift. As a founding family of our town, they built a total of six homes: our pigeon coop, four mid-sized apartments they rented to subsidize their income, and their home—an airy house with a colonial style interior, divided in the middle by an open air patio where my grandmother kept delicate Lady’s Slipper orchids my little sister couldn’t resist plucking, giant hibiscus where silk moths liked to lay their golden-yellow eggs, and dramatic staghorns that hung in the air as if by an act of magic. And in the large patio out back, my grandfather kept a young papaya plant that could barely hold the weight of its large oblong fruit, a tall tree that bore enticing, pink flesh guayabas which could only be reached with a long wooden pole, and a coop full of white-feathered chickens for his favorite dish of sancocho de gallina.
El palomero was meant to be a blank canvas for my parents to start their lives together; an unfinished apartment with only the bare essentials. I imagine my grandparents had intended for my father to make improvements to the place through the years, such as finishing the bathroom, leveling and tiling the floors, and adding a third bedroom, but this never happened. After three children and various pets, including a green parrot, a young rooster, and various dogs and cats, el palomero remained virtually an unfinished construction project up until we immigrated to the US. The floors remained without tiles; instead, they were an uneven concrete foundation with creases and swirls. I learned to stand and crawl and walk on this bumpy surface, and as I got older I even learned to balance on them while cruising with my roller skates.
The exposed walls revealed poorly layered bricks and cement, some which were chipped. I recall how as a young child I used to lick with joy the wet walls after every rainstorm. There is something about the scent that arises from a cold torrential downpour crushing against hot cement—musty, earthy, sweet—which was irresistible to me then and still stirs happy emotions in me now. Sometime before my sister Katerina was born, the dark and crude walls had been paved and whitewashed with limestone, giving the apartment a lighter feel. She was born three years after me. Four years after that, when Mami was pregnant for the third time, she and my father freshened up the walls with the same whitewash technique to make the place welcoming for Alexandra’s arrival.
Having had two daughters of my own, I can now recognize this was my mother’s nesting instinct—an overwhelming desire to prepare for the arrival of her newborn babies. But the leaks throughout the apartment got bigger in those seven years, leaving a brownish stain on the ceiling above the bedroom I shared with both of my sisters, in the kitchen, and in the tight space we used as a living room, where we kept a thirteen-inch black and white TV. Whitewashing the walls was merely a band-aid for a progressively decaying apartment.
I can’t say that any of us saw our pigeon coop as a home. Whenever he could, Papi traded life at home with his wife and three daughters for the freedom of bachelorhood, spending most of his days out with friends and his many rumored lovers. As for my mother, she became my grandparents’ caretaker; never mind that she wasn’t blood-related to them. Her days were tied up at their place—cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, and acting as Papito Martín’s personal nurse, administering his daily shot of insulin and tossing the cookies he used to hide in his night stand. All the while, me and my sister spent most of our time playing out on the streets when we weren’t in school.
Although more than thirty years have passed, the memories of our bathroom have frozen in my brain like a coat of frost that sticks to the ground after a February Nor’easter. As it was customary, my mother had me shower every dawn. Sourced from a spring high up in the Andes, the water was icy cold. During my first two years of grammar school, Mami would prepare warm baths for me. She’d heat a large pot of water on the little electric double burner she used to cook our meals, and bring the boiling water into the bathroom where she’d slowly pour it in a bucket halfway full of frosty water, mixing it with her hand until it reached the right temperature. I imagine she felt bad about how cold the water could get and this was her way of pampering her first born. Eventually Mami stopped this practise and I had to endure the torture of early morning showers—freezing cold water that came down fast and hard straight from a hose bibb—before the sun had even risen. But I learned that if I stood still under the running water, what felt like a thousand paper cuts on my skin no longer had the same sting. And as I got older, the frigid water took on a baptismal effect, washing away the fog from the previous night’s infernal dreams, cleansing my body from my own urine after I’d wet my bed night after night.
We kept an old white pail with a missing handle right next to the toilet because it didn’t have a water tank. I would fill up the pail with water from the hose bibb, finding some strength in my scrawny body to pick up the heavy pail, and empty the water into the toilet to flush down my impurities after each bathroom run. And because there was no sink in the bathroom, I used the slop sink in the kitchen to cleanse the invisible filth from my hands. I often felt dirty from grime I could not see; I only sensed its penetrating power all over me. A thick ghostly film on my skin that frigid mountain water and harsh soap could never permanently wash away.
But the bathroom is only one powerful reminder of how different my life is today. There was also the electrical wiring, which was unconventional even for an apartment in a depressed neighborhood. All of the live wires clung to the ceilings in the form of an exposed web and crept down the walls like vines of poison ivy. I do not know who was responsible for installing this trap of energized matter (a catastrophe just waiting to happen), but it was my mother who played electrician every time she needed to plug in electrical equipment, change a light bulb, or move an outlet to a different location. Mami would stand on a shaky wooden chair—a green chair with a chunk of its back missing because her pet parrot had been pecking away at it for years—and while extending her arms above her head, she would test the wires, ensuring the current wouldn’t discharge its nasty viper-like sting. She would troubleshoot and rewire until she felt her work had been executed properly. In my father's constant absence—where he would disappear for hours or even entire days, and his sheer cowardice for doing anything resembling difficult or dangerous labor—my mother also took on the role of a general contractor, plumber, and carpenter; incessantly fixing an apartment that was eroding with the passing years.
We often walked down to the second floor apartment to see my grandparents’ tenants for a variety of reasons—to pay for our share of the electrical and water bills, to use their telephone to make and receive calls as we did not have a phone line wired into our apartment, and to store perishables in their refrigerator because we didn’t have one. It wasn’t until I was about eight years old when my parents got a new fridge in light yellow.
I didn't like going to the second floor apartment, especially when my mother would send me alone on an errand. Occasionally, what would have been a quick stop on the second floor, would turn leisurely when the woman who lived there would pour an inviting cup of café tinto for my mother and one for me—always black, sometimes with sugar. This woman was good-natured and accommodating to our needs. She looked much older than my mother; her spotted hands and fingers were usually grasping a porcelain cup decorated with delicate roses, the discernible aroma of café coming from it, and her wrinkly mouth was stuck in a perpetual O-shape as she puffed Marlboro after Marlboro. I remember these peculiar vices of hers even while she carried a baby inside her belly. She lived with her equally cordial husband (a tall and slender man, a hard worker, and the only person who could match his wife cigarette for cigarette, café tinto for café tinto), their little girl, who was a couple of years younger than Katerina, and their son—the teenager who assaulted my waking thoughts and terrorized me in my dreams.
The second floor neighbors hosted Parcheesi games most weekend evenings for their extensive family members and neighbors from our block (some of whose kids were my friends). My mother always had an open invitation but rarely attended, possibly because she was tied up with us kids, the responsibilities of my grandparents’ care, and with my father’s irrational demands—to iron all his clothes, including his underwear, to scrub the pots and pans to a brilliant shine, or to cook the arepas to a golden doneness, not burnt.
I remember a particular evening before Alexandra was born, Mami and I walked down the stairs to join everyone in the second floor apartment, leaving Katerina asleep in her bed. The adults seemed to play for hours, gulping down shot after shot of aguardiente, while me and my friends hung around the apartment playing over the ruckus of the music and the drunk adults. Although the teenager that lived there wasn’t home that evening, I recoiled at the musty, pungent, ear-waxy smell in his bedroom. The stench was revolting and seemed to linger on my skin and clothes, as it did that afternoon when my mother sent me down to borrow a cup of sugar and the teenager took me into the kitchen and laid on top of me; his skin bare.
At some point during the evening, and despite the music that was playing at full volume, everyone heard a loud thump followed by the shrills of a child. Mami and I bolted up the stairs. Katerina was three years of age at the time, with a reputation for mischief and stubbornness. We expected to see some sort of damage, like a broken plate or a knocked down chair, but nothing could have prepared us for what we found. When we opened the narrow double door to enter el palomero, which was held shut by a latch and a small brass padlock, we were met by live electrical wires on the floor—a pit of vipers hissing at our feet. Standing atop a tall table we had in the kitchen, Katerina was rabid and hysterical. Her face was bright red. Her screams intensified as we got closer. My little sister had, somehow, managed to climb onto a table that was about three times her height, had jumped any number of times to reach the electrical wires above her head, and, with enough momentum and strength, had dragged them down as her little frame gave in to the gravitational forces pulling her below. All the wires, from the kitchen to the space we used as a living room, were on the floor. Miraculously, nothing happened to my sister. Or at least that’s how Mami tells the story and what she truly believed then.
It is very possible, of course, that Katerina may have felt a painful jolt, causing her state of hysteria; but my mother, seeing no visible injuries, chucked it up to my sister’s anger at finding herself alone. A difficult toddler throwing a tantrum.
And just as mites can plague a pigeon coop, ours was infested with vermin. Mice left droppings on our kitchen counter and nested in the apartment’s only closet. I thought the baby mice were quite cute but Mami threatened to throw the nest, mice and all, away. After days of begging, she agreed to keep the mice until they were old enough to fend for themselves.
What's more, gargantuan cockroaches resembling a primeval life form roamed freely throughout el palomero day and night. It wasn’t enough that these grotesque disease-carriers would bite: they had the audacity to fly, too. At night, while lying in bed, I would hear their wings buzzing close to my head. But regardless of the many light sensors in their eyes, I could also hear their thoraxes crash hard against the walls. And despite my claustrophobic tendencies, sleeping with the covers pulled over my head was the only way to protect against a nocturnal airstrike. This tactic also helped shield my skin from the equally dangerous disease-transmitting mosquitoes that harmoniously joined in the nightly buzz.
I didn’t always have such hatred and disgust for these critters. According to Mami, when the apartment still had exposed brick, before the walls had been whitewashed, I used to crawl around on the uneven floors. One time, a cockroach ran right in front of me as I was cruising. And as babies do, I grabbed the thing and shoved it in my mouth.
“!Ay jueputa!” Mami yelled and quickly grabbed me, pushing her pinky into my mouth. She hooked her finger and scraped my tongue, trying to get the cockroach out but I had already chewed it up. All my mother pulled out were white guts and brown legs.
Being perched up on the third floor had its perks. From our terrace I could survey the ghetto below and the wild jungle at the end of our street where one of my closest friends lived and where the marihuaneros—the drug addicts—and later the sicarios (the narco hitmen), hung out. And across the street, on the distillery's grassy field, I watched some of the best Colombian professional fútbol players do endless practice drills. But mostly, I stared into the distance beyond my street, beyond la Fábrica de Licores de Antioquia, beyond the wealthy town of El Poblado. With the stimulating fragrance of anise coming from the distillery, all I could see, no matter in which direction I looked, were las montañas de los Andes. They were enormous, verdant, and teeming with life; the complete opposite of the decaying city where I stood. A truly majestic sight.
And yet, the mountains enveloped me; an impassable barrier keeping me imprisoned in a city I could never leave. I felt suffocated by the sight. Often gasping for air, I would bring my gaze back to the street below where I once stared as the little girl next door fell from the second floor balcony onto the sidewalk, where I watched as my neighbors ran back inside their homes in a panic after shots had been fired, and where I saw myself grow much faster than my actual age, because while inside el palomero many dangers lurked, outside our door a human rights crisis was developing.
We were concerned about drug cartels, paramilitaries, guerrillas, and even Colombia’s own armed forces who were committing unspeakable violence; spilling blood across the city of Medellín, across the entire country. Children were being recruited to become sicarios, innocents were displaced from their homes, thousands were disappeared and tortured, and the murder rate kept climbing. Still, we moved forward with our lives.
Back in my newly remodeled bathroom, my oldest daughter’s whining centered me in the present, and time continued to tick forward. I saw myself reflected in the medicine cabinet mirrors once again; this time, I noticed I had been crying. I was crying for the child I had been, for the hardships my family endured. I was also crying for the incredible ways in which my life has changed, for what I am now able to offer my own children—a safe and secure home.
Lorena Hernández Leonard is a Colombian native living in the Boston area. She's a storyteller, writer, and filmmaker whose award-winning animated short film, Demi's Panic, was Oscar long-listed in 2021. As a storyteller, Lorena has appeared on World Channel’s television program Stories from the Stage and has performed on Suitcase Stories, a traveling storytelling event created by the International Institute of New England which features immigrant stories. Lorena is a Pauline Scheer Fellow at GrubStreet, where she is currently working on a memoir about her experiences growing up during the Colombian drug war and migrating to the United States.
Farangiz Yusupova is an artist whose work explores ideas of cultural dissonance, home, and memory through painting. Born in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, Farangiz immigrated to New York with her family in 2014. She holds a BFA from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. In the summer of 2018, Farangiz was awarded a scholarship to attend a workshop at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Aspen, Colorado. Her work was exhibited in numerous group shows such as at 56 Bogart St, Brooklyn, NY (in affiliation with M. David & Co), Dodomu Gallery and Mi-Sul Virtual Exhibition, and Yonkers Arts Weekend. Farangiz is currently participating in NYFA’s Immigrant Artist Mentorship Program.