Fruit of the Drunken Tree and a Reciprocal Gaze
I wrote about Ingrid Rojas Contreras’s Fruit of the Drunken Tree in a previous post, but I realize I have more to say. The novel is set in Colombia in the time of Pablo Escobar and follows the friendship between seven-year-old Chula and her family’s thirteen-year-old maid, Petrona.
Here is the moment I examined last time, which appears before we know much about the characters or situation. Chula is the narrator. She and her sister, Cassandra, are watching the arrival of Petrona, who has just been hired to work in their house.
The garden yawned between us like an abyss. Cassandra and I gazed at the girl Petrona from behind the two left-most columns of our house. The white columns rose from the porch and supported the overhang of the second floor. The second floor stuck out like an overbite. It was a typical Bogotà house, made to look like the old colonials, white with wide windows and black iron bars and a clay roof with red-blue half-moon tiles. It was part of a row of identical houses linked one to the other by the sidewalls. I didn’t know then why the girl Petrona looked at our house that way, but Cassandra and I gaped back at her with the same kind of awe. The girl Petrona lived in an invasión. There were invasiones in almost every tall hill in the city, government land taken over by the displaced and the poor. Mamà herself had grown up in an invasión—but not in Bogotà.
I talked last time about how this passage reveals important details about the characters and sets up their relationship. But it also generates a magical sort of mystery—one that is very much worth further study.
Here’s the specific sentence I want to drill into:
I didn’t know then why the girl Petrona looked at our house that way, but Cassandra and I gaped back at her with the same kind of awe.
“I didn’t then know” opens up a question, or a space for wondering.
I always think there are three kinds of questions that might arise in a piece of fiction: 1. The annoying logistical kind that might distract a reader from the story—as writers we usually try to keep these from occurring, either by clarifying the situation quickly or by trying not to inspire a reader to worry about it in the first place. 2. The kind that compels a reader to keep going—"Oh my! What will happen next?” Or, “I wonder why the character did that?” 3. And then one more—the kind of question that invites the reader to linger in the mystery of something that cannot be easily known or articulated.
“I didn’t then know” creates both the second and the third type of question.
On a surface level, “then” informs us that the narrator will learn more at a later time. It becomes a promise that we’ll eventually learn what Petrona thinks of these girls. We’ll read on to find out.
But can we learn it all? Is the whole of their relationship actually knowable? I don’t think it can be.
And so “I didn’t then know” also opens the space for a more meaningful mystery, one that will encompass the unexplainable complexity of the relationship. It’s making the space for the reader to wonder about the gap between Petrona and these girls, created by their vastly different experiences. Such a complex thing can never be fully pinned down. We’ll never get the full story of that gap, but we can experience it in a different way.
And so what is this mystery? It is both a gap and connection.
I think intimacy is a special kind of connection—perhaps it is always a mystery. It’s not only seeing or being seen, but seeing that you are seen, knowing that you are known. It requires reciprocity. A connected gaze creates the space for intimacy in a very pure form. “I see that you see me.” “I know that you know me.”
When the girls look at Petrona, who is looking at something else, but the something else is representative of the girls, it creates a reciprocal connection, but a skewed one. In this case, the connection is purposefully uneasy. And so a twisted sort of intimacy happens. “I know that you don’t know me. Or, perhaps, “I know that you know me wrong.”
But there’s more than that. The lines drawn by the gazes not only represent the characters’ uneasy connection, they draw a shape, and this shape can hold the mystery.
The girls look at Petrona at the same time that Petrona looks at their house. And that is the house that the reader has just looked at through its careful description. The house has been made to represent the girls (explained in a previous post), so Petrona is looking at the girls by looking at the house. But she’s looking at them indirectly, by studying their physical signifier. The reader looks at Petrona, as the girls do, and then, with the girls, we pass through her physical person to look at her home, which is not present in the scene but explained.
We’re penetrating to deeper truths about both the connection and the impossibility of connection, about both the proximity and the distance between these characters, as these lines of perspective draw a magical shape around the characters and even reach into the world to include the reader.
The shape drawn by the lines becomes a container for mystery, so we can hold it, even if we can’t quite explain it. What can’t be articulated can still be felt.