The Man Who Could Move Clouds

Ingrid Rojas Contreras's memoir opens with a striking parallel: At twenty-three, she crashed her bicycle into a car door in Chicago and lost her memory for eight weeks. Decades earlier, her mother, Mami (Sojaila), fell down an empty well in Ocaña, Colombia, at age eight and lost her memory for eight months. The family treated these twin amnesias as an inheritance linked to gifts that Mami's father, Nono (Rafael Contreras Alfonso), never formally passed down. Nono was a curandero, a traditional healer in the mountains of Santander, Colombia, whose abilities, called "secrets," included talking to the dead, telling the future, healing the sick, and moving clouds. These secrets had been passed from father to son for generations among the family's mestizo ancestors, people of mixed Indigenous and European descent whose healing traditions survived centuries of colonial persecution. Though the secrets were forbidden to women, after her amnesia Mami returned with abilities the family believed had come to her unbidden.

When Rojas Contreras told Mami she wanted to write about their history, Mami refused, fearing exposure. Then Mami, her sister tía Perla, and another sister, tía Nahía, each independently dreamed that Nono wanted his remains disinterred. Because shared dreams carried special authority in the family, Mami relented and agreed to travel to Colombia. Their collective mission was to dig up Nono's remains; Rojas Contreras's individual mission was to remember.

The memoir weaves backward through Nono's life. He was illiterate but possessed a prodigious memory. He married Nona in 1946 and raised a family during La Violencia, Colombia's civil war (1948-1958). He traveled for months healing across the country while Nona raised their children in poverty. The year Mami was born, 1956, Nono returned convinced by spirits that the baby was evil and chased Nona with a machete. Nona fled to her mother Mamaria's house, where Mamaria hid the newborn under a bed with a whispered prayer that rendered the infant invisible.

At the memoir's center are the two amnesias told in alternation. In 1964, eight-year-old Mami was pushed into the well by a ghostly hand, and Nono carried her home and treated her injuries with herbal medicines. Mami entered a coma, during which she dreamed she was a ghost hovering over her own corpse. When she woke, she did not recognize her family. Nono placed a small shaving mirror beneath her pillow to help her remember. Eventually she chose her physical life, and Nono revealed the secrets by reading her fortune while she watched and learned.

In 2007, Rojas Contreras crashed her bike on her way to pick up a dress Mami had warned her was bewitched. She picked herself up not knowing her name, the city, or the year, and concealed her amnesia from everyone. Over eight weeks, her memory returned in pieces: family stories first, then the circumstances of leaving Colombia, and finally Mami's demand for secrecy about their curandero heritage. The shame of hiding no longer fit, and she resolved to stop living in secret.

Both women experienced aftershocks: Mami began appearing in two places at once, and Rojas Contreras had recurring nightly episodes of amnesia, counting to fifty-six to remember her mother, because 1956 was the year Mami was born. In 2012, they traveled to Colombia to carry out the disinterment. At a cemetery in Bucaramanga, gravediggers pulled Nono's remains from a disintegrated casket: bones, ribbons, blackened prayer papers, and his linen wedding suit, still largely intact, which they passed from arm to arm as if handling a person.

The memoir's second half expands into family history. When Rojas Contreras's older sister, Ximena, was born in 1982, Mami lost the ability to see ghosts. When Rojas Contreras was born in 1984 in Bogotá, Mami lost the movement in her arms overnight. Two months before his death in 1985, Nono visited and prepared herbal drafts that began restoring Mami's hands. He confessed he had revealed the secrets because of Mami's childhood defiance: refusing to serve her brothers, cutting her hair to declare herself a boy, and fighting with a ferocity that earned his respect. At the airport, he told Mami he would keep watch from the other side.

Nono died on his bathroom floor. That night, he appeared to Nona in a dream. When she woke, there was dirt on her sheets; she knew he had died. At the funeral, clouds gathered only above his burial plot and rain fell only on his grave. The family fractured. Some siblings joined charismatic churches and condemned Mami as a witch, burning Nono's possessions. Weeks after the funeral, at the Salto de Tequendama waterfall, Mami's arms gave out and infant Rojas Contreras slipped toward a four-hundred-foot drop. Tío Ariel, Mami's brother, caught the baby by the wrist.

In Bogotá, Mami ran a fortune-telling practice from the family attic and taught Rojas Contreras that divination was the art of storytelling. She discovered a client used her auspicious dates to help Pablo Escobar's drug operation avoid customs officers and cut ties in horror. Guerrillas kidnapped Papi (Fernando Rojas Zapata, Rojas Contreras's father) from his oil site, and threats against the children followed. A teenage girl employed by the family participated in handing the children over to armed men. Ximena escaped, but the girl held Rojas Contreras before ultimately helping her into a cab. The girl was raped as punishment, a violence Rojas Contreras carries as devastating guilt. The family fled Colombia in 1998.

In the United States, both sisters turned their trauma inward. Rojas Contreras describes periods of self-harm and disordered eating. Ximena developed a severe eating disorder. Rojas Contreras served as interpreter between Mami's curanderismo, the family's healing and divination tradition, and Western psychiatry at Ximena's inpatient program. Mami insisted Ximena needed a new story. When Ximena became pregnant, doctors detected no heartbeat, but Mami insisted the baby was alive. A later checkup revealed one twin had survived by absorbing the other, and the pregnancy became the story that anchored Ximena's recovery.

In Ocaña, Rojas Contreras searched for genealogical records at the Chapel of Santa Rita but hit dead ends at illegitimate forebears and names absent from the record. One old registry book disintegrated in her hands. Rojas Contreras argues that what survives is the stories passed down in memory, the inheritance that looks like nothing on paper but carries everything.

In Bucaramanga, Mami's old friends mistook Rojas Contreras for young Mami, dissolving her sense of separate identity. That night, she saw one of Mami's clones walk past the hotel bathroom door and for the first time felt comfort rather than fear.

The family released Nono's ashes into a river along a path he once traveled. Before the ceremony, Rojas Contreras secretly swallowed some ash, an act she describes as grief, hunger, and a desire for what can speak to her bones. Tía Perla lowered the bag into the current. Three white cows emerged from the forest to drink where the ashes flowed. Mami removed the golden snake ring she had worn since before Rojas Contreras's birth and placed it on her daughter's hand.

In the epilogue, tía Nahía arrived demanding to know if Nono had been disinterred, revealing she had slipped a prayer paper into his casket, exactly the kind of request he wanted to escape. Back in San Francisco, Rojas Contreras fell asleep and sat up into another episode of amnesia. She began to count, following the numbers upward like a labyrinth, and at fifty-six, she remembered her mother.