Fruit of the Drunken Tree

“It was, after all, the tree whose flowers and fruit were used in burundanga and the date-rape drug. Apparently, the tree had the unique ability of taking people’s free will. […] Many people used it in Bogotá—criminals, prostitutes, rapists. Most victims who reported being drugged with burundanga woke up with no memory of assisting in the looting of their apartments and bank accounts, opening their wallets and handing over everything, but that’s exactly what they’d done.” 

This first description of the novel’s eponymous “Drunken Tree” reveals its complex symbolism. It embodies numerous significant concepts and motifs: superstition, the occult, intoxication, disinhibition, powerlessness, rape, and robbery. That Mamá has planted this mythological, poisonous, criminally exploitable tree in her front yard is evidence of her subversive nature. The fact that Chula and Cassandra live peacefully in such proximity to this dangerous plant and grow up under the shade of the Drunken Tree echoes the stark juxtaposition of their comfortable, privileged lives with the violence and peril that lie just outside their gated community. 

“I let my face droop against my hand, and the reporter talked about that mysterious ocean of acronyms that seemed to always be close at hand—FARC, ELN, DAS, AUC, ONU, INL. She spoke of things the acronyms had done to one another, but sometimes, the reporter spoke of one name. A simple name. First name, last name. Pablo Escobar. In that confused ocean of acronyms, the simple name was like a fish breaking the water, something I could hold on to and remember.”

News broadcasts permeate the novel, and fragments of TV and radio reports appear throughout many chapters. This quotation encapsulates the blurriness of Chula’s understanding of the various groups involved in the Colombian conflict. Though Chula seems unable to understand clearly who Pablo Escobar is, the mythological nature of his personality captures her imagination, and he becomes a pervasive figure in her mental and emotional life throughout the novel. 

“I didn’t tell Cassandra that in a certain light Petrona looked to me like a statue, that when she was still and quiet the folds of her apron seemed to me to harden into the stone draperies of church saints. I knew Cassandra would find the idea ridiculous and she would laugh at me forever. Privately, I came up with saint names for Petrona. Petrona, Our Lady of the Invasiones. Petrona, Patron Saint of Our Secret Girlhood.” 

Religious and saintly imagery are associated with Petrona’s character, reappearing notably in her Confirmation, Communion, and wedding scenes later in the novel. Her silence and the silent nobility of her suffering cause Chula to perceive her through this deifying lens. This passage recounts the first time Chula makes the connection between Petrona and the Christian saints. The quotation’s emphasis on Petrona’s statue-like quality alludes to Petrona’s dissociation from her body. In the face of trauma, she views her body as a disconnected object.

“Mami said I had to train Little Aurora so she could do the house chores. We were the only women in the family. The boys were older, but Mami wanted the boys to focus on their schooling. Mami said if just one of them became a doctor or a priest, it would be our ticket out of the invasión. All the mothers in the Hills said something of the sort, but I hadn’t seen it work out for anyone.” 

This passage illuminates the overwhelming burden of responsibility that impoverished women are expected to bear for their families. At this point in the novel, Petrona is 13 years old, and her sister Aurora only eight. Their brothers, like all males in the novel, are painted in broad strokes and the expectations of them are similarly two-dimensional. This passage highlights the tendency of the author to offer female voices and perspectives throughout the novel, while highlighting the inequality of gender expectations, particularly at the lowest social tier. 

“With the sweat of my brow I will provide for you, I told little Ramón, which was also what Papi told me when I came aching and crying from my stomach twisting with hunger, asking how come he hadn’t accepted the aid of one of the groups, all similar to each other in his view with their weapons and excuses for violence.” 

This passage highlights Petrona’s determination to adhere to the moral tenets she learned from her father. Though she struggles against the impossible expectations of her family, she resists the pressure to betray her conscience. Papi’s contention that the various groups are equally morally reprehensible, regardless of ideology, further underscores the convoluted nature of the Colombian conflict, which saddles individuals like Petrona with the impossible choice between violence and destitution.

“Of all the years of watching the news and all its images of death, this was the worst by far. The girl’s shoe, like my size shoe, glimmered in my mind. I blinked and saw it, glowing eerily, on the backs of my lids.” 

The nearby car bombing, in which a seven-year-old girl is killed, marks a turning point in Chula’s perspective. Chula’s identification with the victim, who is her same age and wears the same size shoe on her disembodied leg, makes the ongoing violence immediate. The monstrosity of the image of the girl’s shoe imprints itself in Chula’s memory and conscience, and her previous sense of safety is gone forever. 

“I stared at the lap of my own dress and imagined what ceasing to exist would be like. I held my breath and tried not to have thoughts. I stared at the shape of my thighs, past them into a yawning void of nothingness, where I was unthinking and breathless, nonexistent and nonfeeling. For a few seconds, I was a big roaring nothing. Then I gasped in air and sprang back into fearful, rushed thoughts about not existing. How horrible it was to die!” 

The image of the bombing victim’s shoe brings death to the forefront of Chula’s imagination. This passage focuses on vision and breath, and this sensory specificity in Chula’s imagination demonstrates the depth of her empathy. Chula and Petrona share a capacity for empathy, and this shared trait draws them together over the course of the novel. 

“Petrona growled like an animal, and I fell back. Mamá held on fast to Petrona’s hands and Petrona tossed her head and laughed long and maniacally. In the few seconds before Mamá next spoke, as I gripped the grass, recoiling from Petrona, I saw, for the first time, objectively, that she really was thirteen. She was thin and rosy, and stuck somewhere between woman and girl, alive with secrets.” 

The scene in which Petrona eats the fruit of the Drunken Tree is an early climax and turning point in the novel. Prior to this scene, Chula perceives Petrona as inhuman and saintly; now, Chula sees her with new humanity. Chula notices Petrona’s youthfulness, which causes her to identify more intimately with Petrona.

“Gorrión looked at me. Leticia said something but I could not hear properly, because there were Gorrión’s eyes in front of me, attentively watching, pools of brown sucking me up, from which I could not look away […]. I felt seen in a way I didn’t know was possible and it quenched something in me.” 

Eyes and the power of the gaze and water are two of the novel’s most important motifs. In this crucial scene, Petrona first encounters Gorrión, with whom she instantly falls in love, and Gorrión’s eyes simultaneously vanquish and nourish Petrona. Other scenes in the novel show that Petrona has heightened awareness of the gaze of others, but Gorrión’s eyes manipulate her.

“I was screaming, but everything lagged—there was a thought in my head, Am I going to die? The words crawled over the splatter of gunshots, suddenly in slow motion, over a hundred people screaming, and then when I hit the ground, everything was happening quickly again, and I heard one clear voice as it said: ‘Lo mataron! Lo mataron! Hijueputa, lo mataron!’ [‘They killed him! They killed him! Motherfucker, they killed him!’].” 

This graphic account of the chaos following Galán’s assassination exemplifies the sentence structure and sensory descriptions that depict the novel’s most climactic scenes. Verbal, visual, auditory, and tactile senses blend together as Chula observes a horrific landscape of sights, sounds, and pain. Her nonlinear experience of the passage of time—a narrative feature common to the novel’s other traumatic incidents—further heightens the drama.

“I stared at my tennis shoes climbing the Hills with Gorrión. These are the shoes of the girl that could have kept Ramón alive but did not. I was not a good person and after thinking about Ramón, I thought about Gorrión and the soft way his lids fell over his eyes. Lids like night, the white of his eyes moonlight. I saw Gorrión clearly in my imagination. I could not remember how Ramón’s lids fell over his eyes.”

Petrona’s contemplation of her shoes recalls Chula’s obsession with the car bombing victim’s shoe, but more importantly, it demonstrates Petrona’s growing sense of disembodiment. Looking at her own feet, she sees the feet of another girl—a girl who did not live up to her expectations of herself. As her guilt deepens, her sense of separation from her body intensifies, and she views that body with increasing loathing. Her reverie on Gorrión’s eyelids underscores the power that Gorrión’s eyes have over her. His presence in her mind is so strong that it begins to eclipse her memory of her brother, Ramón. 

“When we prepared food, I thought about the Santiagos. I felt pangs of guilt. They had been kind to me. I felt a growing tenderness for little Chula and Cassandra. But Gorrión said there was a system that took away money from people like us so that people like me did not even have enough to put a family member underground. It hurt me to have Ramón brought up in this way, but then I thought of little Ramón in a box on top of a stranger in a different box and I took the Santiagos’ rice and beans. They had plenty, and I had nothing.” 

This passage showcases the intensity of Petrona’s ambivalence toward Gorrión and the Santiagos, and her confusion over her allegiances. Petrona vacillates between her sympathy for Chula and Cassandra and her grief over the death of Ramón. Her motivations are personal, not political; Gorrión’s invocation of structural inequality does not move her, but her memory of Ramón and his pitiful burial does.

“This must have been what the doctor had meant when he said the mind could do astonishing things: Petrona eating from the fruit of the Drunken Tree and believing she had misplaced a bowl of soup in her sheets, and Abuela taking the doctor’s drugs and thinking herself on a cruise. Maybe the astonishing thing was how much nicer the things they imagined were compared to the real suffering of their bodies.” 

Intoxication and hallucination, especially as an escape from trauma or agony, are important recurring features of the novel. In this passage, Chula connects Petrona’s hallucinatory fit upon eating the fruit of the Drunken Tree with Abuela’s opioid-induced hallucination while recovering from the injuries and shock of getting caught in guerrilla crossfire. Chula marvels over the fact that Abuela’s and Petrona’s minds can bring them soothing visions, even as their bodies endure acute suffering. 

“[Petrona] was impossibly peaceful and serene. But then I ran into Petrona in the hall, and saw there were bite marks on her hand. She had obviously bitten herself, and as I looked at her it seemed like it wasn’t the Spirit of Wisdom settling into her but the Spirit of Holy Fear.” 

Observing Petrona’s Confirmation and her preparation for First Communion reignites Chula’s imaginings of Petrona as a saint. This vision, however, clashes with Chula’s perception of Petrona’s gripping anxiety. Chula tries to reconcile the dissonance by recalling the priest’s words at Petrona’s Confirmation. He had prayed for the confirmants “to be possessed by spirits,” including “the Spirit of Holy Fear” (170), so Chula believes she is observing the Spirit of Holy Fear at work in Petrona.

“At the Santiagos’ I bunched up my clothes on my bed, a fake body to account for my real body—which was so good at hiding manila envelopes […] Once it was done, I returned and pushed the fake body onto the floor, the purpose of it met, and there it was, just a dirty pile of laundry on the floor. Then it was just me, climbing into bed with my real body, and I fell asleep the moment I closed my eyes, this body of mine so good at pretending to be innocent.” 

This passage showcases Petrona’s sense of disembodiment. At this point, she feels a dual identity, bifurcated into a “real body,” which is criminal and deceptive, and a “fake body,” which is “innocent.” In the final chapter of the novel, when she is living unhappily as Gorrión’s wife while planning her escape, she will recall the fake body made of laundry. At that point, she feels she is subsisting as a fake body until she can escape and finally be free to inhabit her real body again.

“I put everything into my screaming. The more I put into my screaming, the more things became unhinged—I gave sound to the things that had no language: the tense groove above Mamá’s lips, the snail shell in my palm, Petrona’s swollen mutant skin swallowing her eye and the points of her lashes, Abuela’s porcupine back.” 

The inability to speak is an important theme throughout the novel, from Petrona’s mysterious silence at the beginning of the novel to Chula’s traumatized muteness at the end. In this passage, Chula is seized by kidnappers and locked in the trunk of a car, where she screams for her life. She channels into her screaming everything that has ever frightened or horrified her. This passage drives home one of the novel’s most important themes—that trauma is an experience beyond the scope of language and can lead directly to an inability to speak. 

“I told her, I saved your girl, protect me. She took the rings off her fingers and put them in my pockets and told me to escape. She pushed cash into my hands and told me to get away. I said, There’s nowhere, they’ve threatened my family, who knows what they’ll do. She took a cross from her mantel and pushed that into my hands too. She said, I’ll pray, and I understood I had risked everything for another woman’s daughter, and nobody would do the same for me.” 

This passage depicts the breaking point of Mamá’s empathy for Petrona. At the beginning of the novel, Mamá sees in Petrona a version of her younger self that she can help and nurture; here, in the heat of anger and defensiveness, Mamá expels Petrona from her fold. Mamá falls back on her socioeconomic privilege, using money and jewelry to shoo Petrona away, rather than protecting her as one of her own. Petrona understands that in their deeply unequal society, she cannot expect mercy. 

“So many times before I had interceded for Petrona, defended her, protected her. Now, my feet sank into the mud behind Mamá, her cold hand over mine, pulling me forth down the steep, and I understood that Papá was missing just like Petrona was missing. I walked away knowing I was leaving Petrona behind. This was us, walking away from her. When I had been in danger, Petrona had chosen me over herself. I was not in danger and now we wouldn’t lift a finger to help. I was choosing myself over Petrona. My body was heavy with this knowing as we hurried down the hill. The mud was a wet pillow that sucked at our feet, made us trip, welcomed us as we fell, wanting us to remain fallen, to make a house there in the dark belly of the earth.” 

This passage illustrates Chula’s sense of responsibility in her role as Petrona’s protector, and her wrenching guilt in the moment she is forced to abandon her. Chula is stricken with a painful realization of her relationship to Petrona. Their situations are alike in that “Papá was missing just like Petrona was missing,” yet Chula and her family will not make the same sacrifices to help Petrona that she made to help them. The motif of water functions here as a metaphor for her family’s fall from grace, as the wetness of the muddy earth drags Chula down the hillside. 

“I puked in the bathroom. When we boarded the airplane it was night, and my chest congested with tears. The air lengthened in long, stretchy strings inside me. I couldn’t breathe. There were terms for what we had become: refugees, destitute.” 

The trauma of fleeing home, like so many traumas in the novel, is a visceral experience for Chula. She struggles to reconcile her physical symptoms with words commonly used to describe them. Those “terms” seem insufficient for her experience.  

“The body came to rest in a dim hut, where I was still a woman without a name, but sometimes I awoke, sitting on a bed, drinking a foul-smelling soup, I was throwing up, no name for this woman who was ill, whose breasts were tender, whose belly would soon start to grow, whose feet were cut, who wore abrasions on her thighs and arms and back, whose insides burned like a live gash.” 

Throughout the novel, as Petrona becomes increasingly involved in illicit activity, she feels a growing sense of disembodiment as she struggles to recognize herself in the person she has become. That loss of identity reaches a literal breaking point after she is drugged and gang raped as punishment for sabotaging the kidnapping attempt against Chula and Cassandra. In this passage, Petrona describes regaining consciousness after her attack, but she lacks any memory of who she is or what has happened to her. Her experience of being a nameless body in physical pain encapsulates the novel’s theme of trauma as an experience that causes deep suffering.  

“[N]ow that I only said what was strictly necessary, I couldn’t just begin voicing whatever came to mind. I thought of Petrona. I understood her silence in a way I never would have been able to when I was a little girl and nothing had yet gone wrong. My quiet grew from the coils of my stomach, and stopped frozen at my throat. I wondered if there were children who thought I was a witch or under a spell, who counted the syllables of what I said when I was forced to speak.” 

After the trauma of fleeing home and leaving her kidnapped father behind, Chula finds herself unable to speak. She feels the symptoms of her distress acutely in her stomach and throat and these symptoms inhibit her ability to express herself verbally. In her traumatized muteness, Chula finally understands the mystery of Petrona’s silence, over which she has puzzled obsessively since the beginning of the novel. Having herself now experienced trauma, Chula’s empathy for Petrona is deeper than ever before. 

“I was the only one with all the pieces. I was the only one that knew that Petrona had made a home with a man who had betrayed her, that she had chosen to keep the baby, that this new life she had fed from her breasts was something I had to make up to her and the only thing I could do was keep silent about what I knew. After all, who am I to judge? As her photo burned, I thought: even oblivion is a kindness.” 

This passage contains the novel’s final sentences from Chula’s narrative perspective. Chula has pride in her role as Petrona’s protector, and she feels a deep sense of debt to Petrona. Chula realizes, however, that her knowledge does greater harm than good, and she arrives at the conclusion that the greatest service she can do for Petrona is to forget her. This realization underscores the novel’s theme that knowledge is a liability.

“I knew something was trying to speak to me, and I looked to the tall ceiling of the church feeling shame, because there was this woman with her eyes sinking like daggers into me and then there were clouds and changing faces of men hovering over me. I shook my head and let all those visions drop from me and I knelt before the Father. Where did the visions come from? Maybe they were just dreams.” 

Just before Petrona marries Gorrión, she perceives a woman staring at her. The woman’s identity is ambiguous, and it is unclear if Petrona is seeing her in reality or in a flashback. During the wedding ceremony, Petrona is burdened with the memory of that woman’s gaze, as well as the gazes of the men who raped her. This scene not only provides an important example of the motif of gazing eyes, but its ecclesiastical setting also resurrects the portrayal of Petrona as saint-like—standing in a church, overwhelmed by visions from above.