laura jaramillo bernal

For the last five elections, Family Circle magazine has asked spouses of the candidates to share their favorite cookie recipes. Readers then do their patriotic duty: Bake, taste, vote. Only once has the cookie test not accurately predicted which leading lady has gone on to call the White House home.

This was tragic news to me, it was likely to throw off my entire life plan! I couldn't fall in the Hilary trap and offend half the country by ridiculing the whole thing, so, not being one to be discouraged so easily by competitive tests of democratic domesticity, I got to work. I have now baked banana bread successfully twice, and I made toll house cookies that actually looked like cookies. I can’t say they’re anywhere close to my cousin Angelica’s creations, but they were at least enjoyably edible. Baking, you see, is deceptively simple. You get a list of carefully measured ingredients and step by step instructions that tell you what to do. Easy. Except not, because baking violates what seems like a simple mathematical rule, that if you put a bunch of delicious stuff together, it should add up something extra delicious. Instead, it’s full of obscure rules that I don’t understand, and when my cakes turn out flat and dense like bricks, I never know if it was the fact that it was raining, or that I beat the eggs too much, or that I mistook one white powder for another with almost the same name. Baking just leaves no room for my creativity [read: total disregard for rules]. I guess I’m just not that cookie cutter kind of cook (why do all of my puns always fail? Robb, help me!). But today was raining for about the hundredth consecutive day in Beijing, and the only thing in my fridge was eggs and a big fat carrot, so I decided to make carrot cake. I trusted the Google algorithm to pick the most delicious option, and made the first one that popped up. Knowing full well that this was a recipe for disaster, I substituted ingredients, halved measurements, and did a half-baked job of following the instructions (I am a rebel: I added the cinnamon last, replaced part of the white sugar with brown, ignored the call for pecans, and even forgot to pre-heat the oven while I baked!) No one was more surprised than I when a delicious, moist, not-too-sweet thing that actually looked like a cake emerged from my toaster oven. It was the best carrot cake I’ve ever had. Just when you thought my blog couldn’t get any more boring, I bring to you America’s desperate housewife favorite pastime: a pictures of crap I made that you can’t actually taste, and a recipe you’ll never try.  In future editions, expect pictures of the salad I had for lunch, my kitten (I’ll get one for the occasion), and in the distant future an awkward and overly Photoshopped engagement photo shoot with lots of blurry backgrounds. Oh, and look for me on Pinterest, I’ll put anything I knit on there too. PS. When the presidential race begins, someone please remind me to delete this blog post before pundits get their hands on it and use it against our campaign, or my adventurously manipulated cookie recipe.  /> Ingredients

·         2 eggs

·         ¾  cup vegetable oil

·         ½  cup white sugar

·         ½ cup brown sugar

·         1 teaspoons vanilla extract

·         1 cup all-purpose flour

·         1 teaspoons baking soda

·         1 teaspoons baking powder

·         ¼  teaspoon salt

·         1 teaspoons ground cinnamon

·         1 ½  cups grated carrots (I used the big grating side, because I’m lazy)

·         1 cup chopped pecans

She lives in a beautiful modern complex in central Beijing, and when we walked into the apartment it was clear that several generations of the Wang family had been waiting for me for over an hour. It was also clear that Pegasus was the only person in the room whose English was better than my Chinese, so my newly acquired baby Chinese skills would be put to the test all night. Thankfully that week I had learned about five different ways to apologize depending on the situation, but since I couldn’t remember which one applied to this particular case I recited them all in quick succession: “Zhen duibuqi, zhen baoqian, zhen buhaoyisi, qing yuanliang…!” This endeared me enough in their eyes that they didn’t seem pissed at all that the food had gotten cold.

 I was introduced to a couple more sisters, that I eventually figured were actually daughters of “aunties” and thus indeed not siblings but cousins, and the sibling mystery was solved. Pegasus announced that I’d gone to Harvard, and I could feel the magical word -“hafo” in Chinese- echo through the room like a spell. In China, this is a really big deal.

At the table, a gorgeous array of food was already waiting for me. At this point I can say with all honesty that all of the food was delicious, but I’m glad that I’m both an extremely adventurous eater and that I’ve spent a while in China already, because it might have been an uncomfortable night otherwise. I was smothered in attention, my glass refilled before I’d gotten past half, the whole family watching me eat and barely touching their plates. The menu included eleven different dishes, most notably chicken stomachs, a whole fish with its dead eyes staring blankly in my direction, full shrimp head and all, and sea cucumbers. My hostess kept using her own chopsticks to fill my bowl with generous portions of the sea cucumbers, an expensive and, um, slimy delicacy that I suppose I’m glad to have tried but wouldn’t order elsewhere.

This is a sea cucumber (although a much larger version than the one I ate). Doesn’t it look just yummy? 

Unwittingly becoming the judge of a cooking competition whose existence I wasn’t aware of, I was asked which dish I found most delicious. I made the mistake of actually answering, I picked the whole fish, and a loud round of cheering and booing ensued as one of the identical looking and rotund great aunts gloated in her victory. At first I felt bad for the other two that I had inadvertently dissed, and then I felt bad for myself, as no one else touched the chosen dish all night and generous portions of it would appear on my plate as soon as I managed to finish the previous one.

One of the most fabulous things about Chinese people is that their minimal expectations for foreigners mean that you get credit for absolutely everything. “Will she be able to eat with chopsticks?” asks Pegasus’s mom with concern. “Of course,” I reply directly to her, in Chinese. Their glee is double, that I can not only eat with their instrument of choice, but also talk about it in their language. You’d think after five months here the expectations would be higher than knowing the name of the sticks I use to eat every single day, but every time I open my mouth to say “thank you” they marvel at the level of my Chinese.

Through the dinner, the parents of the 12-year-old engaged in the nation’s favorite sport: a lively round of shame-your-kid-by-comparing-him-to-the-Harvard-grad. First they smack him on the head, telling him to practice his English with me. “Ask her how long she’s been studying Chinese!” says the dad. “Sister,” he’ll start tentatively (I am now one of them too), then he’ll pause to look for the words, which he clearly doesn’t remember. I answer before he can translate. “Four months?! You’ve been studying English for four years and her Chinese is already better!” will yell the dad. “Ask her how many hours she studies every day, see if you can go to Harvard too!”

Check out highexpectationsasianfather.tumblr.com

When the kid finally gathers the words to ask me a question, he says “how many hours do you play with your iPad?” I don’t have one, and I tell him so. He is flabbergasted. In his twelve year old universe, a young, allegedly successful person without an iPad is inconceivable. This, of course, is more fuel for his parents who suggest that maybe if he didn’t have one he would have more time to study.

The kid’s dad is the person in the family who is making the biggest efforts at having a conversation. He will speak to me in whale Chinese, stretching every word in comical slowness, as if my handicap were a mental and not a linguistic one. (If you don’t understand what whale Chinese is, please do yourself a favor and go watch Finding Nemo’s Dory speaking whale RIGHT NOW).

Dory says “Niiiiiiiiiiiiiii haaaaaaaaaaaooooooooo” (Mandarin humpback dialect)

But aside from speaking ridiculously slowly, he will make no effort to simplify his language, and every five seconds I have to ask Pegasus to translate a word for me, which will inevitably be something I had no way of knowing like “consequence” or “boundary.” He tries to get political but I win the family favor by assuring him enthusiastically that I am in no way afraid that China will attack the United States.

The usual foreigner questions come my way. “Did you know how to eat with chopsticks before coming to China?” (Yes.) “What do you think of Beijing?” (It’s beautiful) “Is it true that westerners eat bread every meal?” (No.) “Do you usually get ripped off for being foreign?” (Sometimes.) At one point, the kid’s dad looks at me quizzically and asks me my favorite question of the night, this time in shaky English: “You don’t look American. Are you a half-blood Arabic?”

Jose Carlos Jaramillo Jaramillo era mi tío abuelo, y hace dos noches, después de setenta y cinco años de una vida digna de su propia novela de García Márquez, nos dejó aquí tirados en el mundo de los mortales. Ésta es su historia como yo me la sé, no tengo ni idea cuales partes sí pasaron. Su vida mezcla el hecho y la leyenda, pero importa poco porque, como todas las historias en mi familia,  al final del día todo lo que queda es la verdad, aunque nunca haya sucedido.

Mi bisabuelo, don José Jaramillo, se casó con Adela Jaramillo al principio del siglo pasado. Tuvieron trece hijos, y seguramente de puro agotamiento después de tantos partos, la pobre Adela se murió en los años treinta, dejando a su marido un viudo joven e inútil con una tropa de bocas que alimentar. Tal vez por inspiración bíblica, o tal vez porque nadie más se anotaría para la tarea apoteósica de criar a trece huérfanos ajenos, Marina Jaramillo, hermana menor de Adela y bisabuela mía, se casó con don José y tomó las riendas del enorme clan Jaramillo Jaramillo.

En septiembre 17 de 1937, llegó al mundo el primero de sus once hijos, y le pusieron Jose Carlos. A los ocho años a Jose Carlos lo mandaron a un seminario jesuita. Como seguro de vida eterna para el resto de lo que parece haber sido una familia intensamente católica, Jose tendría que sumarse a varias hermanas medias que ya estaban enclaustradas en conventos y volverse un hombre de Dios sin haberlo escogido.

Incluso en esa época ya empezaba a demostrar talentos extraordinarios. Mi abuela, la segunda de la tanda de Doña Marina, me contó una vez que a los nueve años José Carlos ya había inventado un tipo de carbón que, hecho de una pasta de carbón y alguna sustancia altamente combustible, prendía sin ningún esfuerzo eliminando los rituales de soplar y rezar que normalmente precedían un asado. Pasarían décadas antes de que alguien más pusiera un producto así en los corredores de los supermercados gringos.

A mi me gusta imaginarme que la curiosidad inagotable de Jose y su total indiferencia hacia las reglas ajenas  le sacaron canas verdes a los acartonados curas españoles del seminario, pero realmente sé muy poco sobre esa parte de su vida. He visto fotos de su ordenación, antes de  los años de sol y cuchillas de afeitar rechazadas, cuando, como diría mi abuela, era un “lulo” desarmador. Solo puedo imaginarme que con esa personalidad magnética, con esa cara pulida de artista hollywoodense, y con el encanto adicional de ser un hombre prohibido en uniforme, esos votos de castidad dejaron más de un corazón en pedazos en una banca de iglesia.

Escaló rápidamente las filas de la Iglesia, trabajando principalmente con los programas de juventud. Pero en algún momento, esa vida que no había escogido empezó a sentirla  tan vacía que decidió renunciar. Seguía siendo un hombre profundamente espiritual, rechazaba las ciudades y le gustaba decir que estaban llenas de gente yendo a toda para ninguna parte. Empezó a seguir una enseñanza religiosa que llamaba “El Camino,” guiado por un maestro que según parecía en la foto que Jose mantenía junto a su cama,  era algún tipo de gurú de la India.

En una de sus cortas visitas a la casa de mi abuela, sacó un aparato pequeño, como del tamaño de un radio de celador, y me pidió que tocara una pequeña parte metálica con la punta del dedo. El aparato emitió un pito insoportablemente agudo. “Laurita, trate de que se calle”, me dijo. Al principio no le entendí, entonces me preguntó si me gustaba algún niño del colegio, y el pitido se tornó más agudo e intenso. La maquinita esa sabía lo que me ponía la mente a mil. “Sáquese todo de la cabeza, y verá que va a dejar de sonar”. Ese día lo intenté, por horas. Me senté con el detector de mentiras hechizo, tratando de controlar los impulsos eléctricos que me fluían por los dedos lo suficiente para calmar el ruido. Mientras más pensaba en no pensar, más pitaba.

Mis primeros esfuerzos en meditación fueron un fracaso rotundo. Acusé a Jose de haberme dicho mentiras, le dije que no era posible, y él solo sonreía una sonrisa cayada y me decía que lo siguiera intentando. Cuando con el cerebro cansado de tratar de no ser usado finalmente me rendí, puso su dedo en la placa de metal, y el chillido de calló de inmediato.

Jose estaba lleno de habilidades extrañas, y como yo lo perseguía como uno de sus chandosos recogidos, la meditación y el auto control no fueron las últimas destrezas que trató de pasarme. Él practicaba una ciencia (¿o arte?¿o brujería?) que llamaba iridología, y aseguraba que estudiando las manchas, los huecos y las lesiones del iris de una persona se podía aprender importante información sobre su estado general de salud y cualquier parte específica del cuerpo. Me hizo fotocopias de un libro, y trató de enseñarme a reconocer los patrones en los ojos de las personas. Hoy en día, como una universitaria recién graduada e indoctrinada en el método científico, tiendo a descartar sin pensarlo, el arte de Jose Carlos, pero todavía recuerdo como llevaba a alguien hacia la luz natural de una ventana, le miraba los ojos, y le decía sin falla cual hueso se había roto en el pasado y que con qué órgano interno tenía una pelea médica montada. La leyenda familiar es que él fue el primero en predecir el nacimiento de mi mamá, después de mirarle por un segundo el café de los ojos a mi abuelita Inés.

También podía leer la personalidad de alguien por la letra con que escribía, y en las palmas de las manos leía no el futuro sino los secretos del carácter de una persona, basados en los creces pliegues de la piel, el largo de los dedos, y la fuerza que tuviera en los músculos de las manos. Pero lo vagamente esotérico no era su único talento, y a pesar de no tener ninguna formación técnica, Jose Carlos era un ingeniero intuitivo con un par de manos prodigiosas, que podían construir todo lo que a su cerebro se le ocurriera.

Hace unos quince años, cuando ya pasaba los sesenta, Jose, o “el cura” como le decía todo el mundo, decidió que necesitaba poder volar sobre la llanura y conectar su pedacito del mundo con el resto de la civilización. Compró un avión ultraliviano en uno de sus viajes a la ciudad y aprendió a pilotearlo. Uno de mis recuerdos más vívidos del Cura es en el patio de ropa de mi casa, donde, después de un accidente en que una de las hélices del avión se partió en dos, reconstruyó la parte con sus propias manos. Durante días enteros trabajó bajo las tejas plásticas con madera, fibra de vidrio y las herramientas de mi papá, hasta que armó una hélice en la que confiaba lo suficiente para ponerla a volar en su propio avión.

Cerca de su finca, en los Llanos, había fundado una escuela de un solo salón para los hijos de los campesinos locales, donde les enseñaba todas las materias a unos dieciocho niños de todas las edades. Con más educación y una perspectiva más amplia del mundo que la mayoría de los locales, era un importante pilar de la comunidad. Pero también era un hombre con un par de cuadras de tierra, una moto vieja y un avión, y se volvió blanco de la guerrilla de la zona. Empezó a recibir visitas en la que trataban de extorsionarlo e intimidarlo por sus tendencias “oligarcas,” hasta que se vio obligado a vender su tierra por un precio casi cómico y buscar la protección de la ciudad.

Por un tiempo vivió con mi abuela, que lo quería mucho pero le hizo afeitar la barba y se volvía loca con su vegetarianismo y excentricidades varias. Jose se sentía enjaulado en el apartamento, y finalmente sus hermanos lo acomodaron en un lote cerca de Pereira, donde en dos contenedores se construyó un híbrido de casa y laboratorio de científico loco, lleno de alambres, tarros de pintura y herramientas de todo tipo. Allá fue donde lo encontré cuando regresé a Colombia en 2008, después de años sin ir al país, y finalmente lo conocí en su propio ambiente.

Trabajaba en todo tipo de proyectos (recuerdo en particular una alarma de robo para motos que estaba inventando un día que fui de visita). Lo perseguía a todas partes un zoológico que llenaría de envidia a Blanca Nieves. Un grupo de gansos blancos andaba detrás él, y un séquito de perros chandosos que había ido rescatando de la calle, incluyendo a Cora, su favorita, una hembra pastor alemán casi ciega que compartía su disposición calmada y sus movimientos lentos y calculados. Alimentaba un arco iris de pájaros tropicales, que confiaban en él lo suficiente para comer de sus manos.

Como su gran último proyecto, empezó a estudiar colibríes, su psicología y sus hábitos alimenticios, hasta que creó un alimentador que diseñó con cuidado en resina roja y amarilla. El alimentador atraía una nube de colibríes que Jose me aseguró incluía quince especies diferentes. Los pajaritos, en tonos intensos de rojo, verde y azul, flotaban a su alrededor como un enjambre de abejas de colores. El espectáculo era casi irreal, y empezó a atraer una fila constante de observadores de aves aficionados, académicos, y ocasionalmente un canal de televisión regional. Jose se sentaba con un cigarrillo y casi no se movía, riéndose con gusto cuando lo colibríes se atacaban violentamente por el derecho a pegar el pico de una de las flores plásticas que los llevaban al agua azucarada. Les conocía a todos la personalidad, al pícaro macho de la cresta azul, o el rojito descarado que no dejaba acercar a los otros.

Jose observaba el mundo a su alrededor más que nadie que yo haya conocido, y vivió una vida aislada de las presiones y ambiciones que empujan a los demás. Nunca se casó y nunca tuvo un trabajo tradicional desde el día que dejó la iglesia. Era un hombre hecho a pulso, un inventor, un filántropo y un artista. Solamente lo vi una vez en mi vida de mal humor, hace unos seis meses, cuando fue operado del corazón y lo internaron en un hospital público. Le mentí al guarda, que no me quería dejar pasar, y me metí a las malas a la unidad de cuidados intensivos donde lo vi llorar lágrimas de rabia e indignación, por la manera en que la sociedad trata a los enfermos y los que están muriendo.

Cuando logró salir de allá, volvió a vivir solo, con sus perros y sus pajaritos, hasta el último día. Murió rápidamente y nunca tuvo que volver a la unidad de cuidados intensivos donde lo vi llorar. Por eso, doy gracias a Dios.

Jose nunca se quedaba atrás, y hace un par de años se compró un computador portátil y un módem de USB para poder navegar en la red desde su finquita. Desde allá hacía investigación sobre colibríes, jugaba con fotografía digital, y diseñaba volantes para darle a los curiosos que venían a ver los pájaros. También abrió una cuenta de Facebook, donde describió “superviviencia en el planeta tierra” como su ocupación, y en educación puso “la de la vida, que es la mejor”.

The cabbie is an aggressive driver, as usual, and there is no seatbelt, also as usual. Soon, it’s not a problem because we’re stuck in traffic so we can’t move anyway. To deal with the stress of the unmoving cars, he pulls out a cigarette, and the sweet aroma of the second-hand tobacco nicely compliments the pollution outside. I stop the breathing exercises I was practicing to get my annoyance under control.

I don’t know my teacher’s address because I always take the subway, so I have the taxi drop me off at the subway station. 40 kuai! That’s almost four lunches! That’s 2000% what I had intended to spend on transportation there! I remind myself that 40 RMB are about six dollars, and a Boston cabbie would not let me wash his car for that much. See? China is not so bad after all! I just went across the whole city for six bucks! And I even understood some of the words in the radio on the way there! (They said London, and Olympics, and the words “very happy”) I need to stop whining so much, this is good!

At the station, I stop by the McDonalds to get some caffeine. No ice coffee here, but no problem, I am so effin’ Zen I can deal with anything. I walk outside and it’s raining, but I have my umbrella in my bag, first win of the day. I struggle to open and it’s stuck, so I push a little harder. It opens with a snap, spilling my coffee all over my dress. Yes. I can’t make this stuff up.

My hair, which I straightened the night before for the first time in a year, has poofed into a giant ball of  black cotton candy around my head, but it’s okay because when I make it to Wang Laoshi’s house, China finally gives me a short break. She’s a manipulative lover, you see. She abuses you and denigrates you and tries to crush your soul, but when you’re fed up and about to walk out on her, she turns on the charm. Abuse and seduce, abuse and seduce.

Teacher Wang and I paint beautiful hummingbirds. He’s usually demanding like a good stereotype of an Asian father, but today he tells me this is my best work yet. He gives me the special rice paper to paint on for the first time, today’s work is a keeper. His wife invites me to go with them on a trip to the mountains next weekend. My Chinese is good, our conversations are flowing, we understand each other. She gives me a ride back to a station much closer to my house. Seduction. I’m in love with China again, how could I have thought all of those awful things just a few minutes earlier? This place is paradise.  

When it rains, it pours, says the old adage. And pour it did. By the time I finish a quick lunch, the streets are under three inches of water, and I have no choice but to waddle through the puddles on the way home.  This time, it’s not a toddler but a full grown man peeing that I have to dodge on my way. The rain ruins the edges of my hummingbird painting. I walk into my house and my favorite necklace snaps for no reason and makes a little heap when it falls on the floor. The tragedy starts becoming comical. I decide to start documenting this absurd day so I take a picture. “Bring it on, Beijing!” I think, suicidally. “See how absurd you can make the blog post I’ll write about this!” (Ominous hint: NEVER THINK THIS. EVER. CHINA WILL WIN.)

I’m going to the other side of town again, this time to teach a class, and I miraculously find a cab in the rain right away. When I’m on my way there, I glance at my phone and see a text message from earlier in the day letting me know that the rain is so bad that it’s okay if I don’t go to class today. Too late, damn it. I sigh. This cab driver is not smoking, but he’s periodically rolling down the window to perform amazing feats of Olympic spitting. Once we arrive, I get out of the cab, open the umbrella I stole from my roommate when I stopped at home since mine was now useless, and the wind just snaps it back over itself the minute I try to open it. It’s the second broken umbrella of the day, and it’s too funny to get mad. I take my phone out in the rain and snap a photo. I nearly swim across the street, covering myself with the flaccid half of the umbrella that still sort of works. Surprisingly, no one jumps out of a corner and yells “Punk’d!”

After class I have an event in Caochangdi, the new art district. I am out in the boonies, in an abandoned suburb north of the fourth ring road where there are no public transportation options and cabs disappear when it rains. I wait for 30 minutes and a car drops someone off. I get on, say where I’m going and immediately get the Boo Arm Wave. He’s going home, and it’s too far away. “Bu bu bu bu bu!”, he says. “Boo you, asshole” I say in my head (I stop being a lady in my head when I’m that worked up). I recite a new mantra to myself: I’m a grown woman, I’m not going to cry; I’m a grown woman, I’m not going to cry; I’m a grown woman, I’m not growing to cry. My throat hurts, and I can’t tell if I’m crying or not because there’s so much water on my face.

Twenty minutes later, another cab drops someone off on the opposite side of the block. I sprint and catch it before he has time to leave, and he agrees to take me to the art district. I am now over an hour late, but the conference hasn’t started so there’s hope. I show him a map on my phone. This driver doesn’t spit and he doesn’t smoke, but when we are getting closer, he asks to see the map again. I have left my phone unlocked and accidentally deleted the map. I am sure I did something awful in my previous life.

We are in the right area, and when I see foreigners my heart jumps with joy. I guess correctly that they are going to the same event, so I follow them and find the place map-lessly. The conference starts an hour and a half late, I don’t miss a thing. I am so lucky, after all. Except the storm is so loud over the old factory building’s roof that I can’t hear a word of three of the four presentations. After the last one, it’s raining too hard to go home, but someone proposes crashing a party in a building next door. China has been cruel, and it’s time for some serious seduction.

The party is in another old factory building that is now a woman’s house, but feels like an art gallery. I follow the people deeper into the party, and walk into a large room with exposed brick walls and a spectacular sculpture in the middle, at least two stories tall. It’s made of hundreds of Forever brand bikes, delicately balanced, and I ignore the cosmic irony of my own Forever stolen bike, and gape in wonder. The sculpture is amazing, and word at the party is that the work is Ai Weiwei’s.

There are three entire lambs being roasted. There is squid, and salad, and GUACAMOLE. There are incredible ginger cocktails, and fascinating people. China throws an Ai Weiwei and three sheep at me and here I am again wagging my tail, delighted, full of forgiveness and love and amazement. You are too good to me, China, where else could I be? Where could I possibly go? This is love, pure love, undying love, I’m never leaving!

And now it’s time to leave (the party, that is). There is a chartered bus taking people back to town (see? She’s so giving and so kind!) As I’m about to walk out, I realize I have been a victim of theft for the second time in the same day, as someone has shamelessly grabbed my ravaged umbrella out of the bucket by the door. Here comes the abuse again, worse than ever. We get to the highway and the picture is apocalyptic, like an evacuation scene in an end-of-the-world Hollywood movie.  There are parked cars as far as the eye can see. A driver tells us he’s been in the same spot for an hour and a half. The bus is nowhere to be seen, and cab drivers give us the Boo Arm Wave before we even get a chance to ask.

The streets are flooded, and the people I’m following don’t know where the mythical bus is supposed to be, and I really have to pee, and everyone keeps walking and walking in the rain, and I don’t know where we’re going, and I really really have to pee. I realize I hadn’t closed the zipper on my purse, and my kindle is wet, and my journal is wet, and my pride is feeling pretty wet too. I convince one girl to walk back to the party with me, and I still really have to pee, and on the way there we run into some people that know where the bus is, so we get on the bus, and I really have to pee.

The girl that walked back with me becomes my new best friend, and we laugh maniacally on the bus to keep from crying. After a while, the bus driver informs us that the way is blocked, so he’ll drop us off at a subway station. My new best friend tells me a story about a time where she was stuck on the subway for hours because it was flooded, and I’m terrified, but China’s done with being cruel for the day. I spring down the station’s stairs, and find a bathroom. It’s an appallingly dirty squat toilet in the subway station, but it’s open and it’s there, and after that, I no longer have to pee. The Bad China Day has come to an end.

An hour and a subway transfer later, I am home. Soaked, and abused, and exhausted, I am home with one more ridiculous story to tell. And after all, isn’t that what I came to China for? She has delivered again, the sly fox. Just the thing she knows I want.

On September 17, 1937, the first of her own eleven children was born, and she named him Jose Carlos. At the age of eight Jose Carlos was sent away to a Jesuit seminary. As after-life insurance for the rest of what must have been a deeply catholic family, he was to join several of his already cloistered older half-sisters, and become a man of God though no choice of his own.

Even then he had already shown signs of extraordinary talents. My grandmother, the second of the batch, told me once that at the age of nine Jose Carlos had already invented little blocks of self-lighting charcoal bricks that, made of a paste that mixed the coal with some highly flammable substance, did away with the blowing and praying ritual of getting a grille going for a barbecue. It would be decades before someone else put that same product in supermarket aisles, she said.

I like to think that Jose’s inexhaustible intellectual curiosity and total disregard for other people’s rules drove a few stiff Spanish priests insane while in seminary, but I know very little of what that part of his life was like. I’ve seen pictures of his ordainment, he was devastatingly handsome at the time, before the years of sun and shunned razors, and I can only guess that with his magnetic personality, with those looks, and with the added allure of being an unattainable man in uniform, those vows of celibacy must have broken more than one young churchgoer’s heart.

He rose quickly in the ranks of the Church, working with the youth ministries. But at some point, that life he had not chosen felt empty enough that he decided to quit. He was still a deeply spiritual man, he shunned cities and liked to say they were full of people moving really fast going nowhere, and he started following a religious teaching that he called “the path,” led by a master that from the looks of the picture in Jose Carlos’s room, was some sort of Indian guru.

In one of those short visits to my grandmother’s house, he brought out a small little device, about the size of a pocket radio, and told me to touch a small metal part with the tip of my finger. The little machine emitted an annoying shrill beep. “Try to make it quiet,” he said. I didn’t understand. He asked me if there were any boys I liked in school, and the beeping got louder and more high pitched. The thing knew what sent my mind racing.  “Clear your mind, and it’ll stop.” I tried that day, for hours. I sat down, with the little makeshift polygraph, trying to control the electrical impulses flowing through my finger enough to calm the darn beeping down. My attempts at meditation were a resounding failure. I accused Jose of lying, I said it wasn’t possible, and he’d smile a quiet smile, and tell me to keep trying. When I finally gave up, he put his own finger to the metal, and the beeping quieted down right away.

 Jose was full of bizarre abilities, and since I followed him like a puppy, meditation and self control were not the last skill he tried unsuccessfully to pass on to me. He practiced an art (or science? or witchcraft?) called iridology that claimed that by studying the ridges, patches and lesions of a person’s iris one could learn important information about the state of health of any part of the body. He photocopied a book for me and tried to teach me to recognize the patterns in people’s eyes.  As a now college-educated woman indoctrinated in the ways of the scientific method I am of course inclined to dismiss Jose’s art off hand, but I still remember how he would lead someone to the natural light next to a window, take a look at their eyes, and tell them without fail which leg they had broken in the past, or which internal organ they were struggling to get to work as it should. It was uncanny. Family legend has it that he was the first to inform my grandmother that she was expecting her first child, after looking for a second into her brown iris.

He also could tell a person’s personality from their handwriting, and believed in a kind of palm reading that read not the future but someone’s character based on the folds of their skin, the length of their fingers and the strength of the muscles of their palms. But the vaguely esoteric was not his only talent, and despite no technical education, Jose Carlos was an instinctive engineer and had a capable pair of hands that could build just about anything that his brain could think up.

About fifteen years ago, at the age of sixty, Jose, or “el cura,” (the priest) as everyone knew him, decided that he needed to be able fly over the empty grasslands and connect his little homestead to the rest of the world. He bought an ultralight airplane on one of his trips to the city and learned how to pilot the thing. One of my most vivid memories of el Cura places him in my house’s laundry room, where, after a flying accident in which one of the plane propellers had snapped in two, he rebuilt the part. For days, using wood, and fiber glass, and my father’s power tools, he worked on the piece until he had built from scratch a new propeller he trusted enough to fly on his own plane.

 Near his farm, he had started a one room school for the local peasants’ kids, where he taught for free about eighteen of them in grades k-11. With more education and a broader view of the world than anyone around, he was an important pillar of the small community. But as a man with a little bit of land, an old motorcycle, and a plane, he soon became the target of guerrillas, who started to drop by to intimidate him and extort him for his “oligarchic” tendencies, until he was forced to sell his land for a risibly small sum and leave for the safety of the city.

For a while he lived with my grandmother, who loved him very much but made him shave his beard and rolled her eyes at his vegetarianism and various eccentricities.  Jose felt trapped in the apartment until his brothers set him up in a little plot of land, not far from Pereira, where in two large shipping containers he built himself simple living quarters and a mad scientist’s workshop, full of twisted wires, and tools, and cans full of paint. That’s where I found him when I returned to Colombia in 2008, after years of being away, and I finally saw him in his own environment.

He worked on various projects (I remember, in particular, a theft alarm for a motorcycle that he was building when I visited one day). He had a zoo of adoring animals that would have made Snow White jealous. A group of big white geese followed him around, as well as various stray dogs he had rescued, including his favorite, Cora, an old German Shepard that was nearly blind. He fed a wild array of tropical birds that trusted him enough to sit over his shoulders or eat out of his hands.

As his last big project, he started studying hummingbirds, their psychology and eating habits, until he created a feeder that he lovingly designed in red and yellow plastic resin. The feeder attracted a cloud of hummingbirds that Jose assured me included 15 different species. The tiny little birds, in wild shades of green and red and blue, buzzed around him like jeweled bees. The display of color and life was surreal, and it started attracting a steady stream of bird watching aficionados and scholars, and even occasionally a regional TV show. Jose would sit and hardly move, staring at them, laughing with delight when they’d viciously fight each other for the right to one of the little sprouts that led to the sugary water, and pointing out the personality of that one shy blue male, or the evil little red one with the big white crest.

Jose observed the world around more carefully than anyone I’ve ever met, and he lived isolated from all the pressures and ambitions that drive the rest of us. He never married, and never had a traditional job since the day he stepped away from the Church. He was a self-made man, an inventor, a philanthropist, and an artist. I only ever saw him angry once, about six months ago, after he had a heart attack and was hospitalized in a public hospital. I lied to the security guard, who would not let me go in to see him, and snuck into the intensive care unit where I saw him cry tears of rage and indignation at the way that our society treats the sick and dying. After he made it out of there, he went back to living on his own, with his dogs and his hummingbirds, until the last day. He died quickly and never had to go back to the IC unit where I saw him cry. For that, I am thankful.

A couple of years ago, not ever being one to be left behind, Jose bought himself a computer and a USB modem so he could get access the internet from his little farm. From there, he researched about hummingbirds, played with digital photography, and designed beautiful flyers to give the curious that came to see his little birds. He also opened up a Facebook account, where he listed “survival on planet earth” as his occupation, and under education, he wrote “life’s, which is the best kind.” He may now be done with his planet earth survival job, but the things he taught me will stick around a little longer.