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The Man Who Could Move Clouds

A Memoir

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$30.00 US
6.36"W x 9.51"H x 1.2"D   (16.2 x 24.2 x 3.0 cm) | 24 oz (675 g) | 12 per carton
On sale Jul 12, 2022 | 320 Pages | 9780385546669
Sales rights: US, Canada, Open Mkt
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST From the bestselling author of Fruit of the Drunken Tree, comes a dazzling, kaleidoscopic memoir reclaiming her family's otherworldly legacy.

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: TIME, NPR, VULTURE, PEOPLE, BOSTON GLOBE, VANITY FAIR, ESQUIRE, & MORE


“Rojas Contreras reacquaints herself with her family’s past, weaving their stories with personal narrative, unraveling legacies of violence, machismo and colonialism… In the process, she has written a spellbinding and genre-defying ancestral history.”—New York Times Book Review 


For Ingrid Rojas Contreras, magic runs in the family. Raised amid the political violence of 1980s and '90s Colombia, in a house bustling with her mother’s fortune-telling clients, she was a hard child to surprise. Her maternal grandfather, Nono, was a renowned curandero, a community healer gifted with what the family called “the secrets”: the power to talk to the dead, tell the future, treat the sick, and move the clouds. And as the first woman to inherit “the secrets,” Rojas Contreras’ mother was just as powerful. Mami delighted in her ability to appear in two places at once, and she could cast out even the most persistent spirits with nothing more than a glass of water.

This legacy had always felt like it belonged to her mother and grandfather, until, while living in the U.S. in her twenties, Rojas Contreras suffered a head injury that left her with amnesia. As she regained partial memory, her family was excited to tell her that this had happened before: Decades ago Mami had taken a fall that left her with amnesia, too. And when she recovered, she had gained access to “the secrets.”

In 2012, spurred by a shared dream among Mami and her sisters, and her own powerful urge to relearn her family history in the aftermath of her memory loss, Rojas Contreras joins her mother on a journey to Colombia to disinter Nono’s remains. With Mami as her unpredictable, stubborn, and often amusing guide, Rojas Contreras traces her lineage back to her Indigenous and Spanish roots, uncovering the violent and rigid colonial narrative that would eventually break her mestizo family into two camps: those who believe “the secrets” are a gift, and those who are convinced they are a curse.

Interweaving family stories more enchanting than those in any novel, resurrected Colombian history, and her own deeply personal reckonings with the bounds of reality, Rojas Contreras writes her way through the incomprehensible and into her inheritance. The result is a luminous testament to the power of storytelling as a healing art and an invitation to embrace the extraordinary.
1

The Secrets

They say the accident that left me with temporary amnesia is my inheritance. No house or piece of land or chest of letters, just a few weeks of oblivion.

Mami had temporary amnesia as well, except: where she was eight years old, I was twenty-three. Where she fell down an empty well, I crashed my bicycle into an opening car door. Where she nearly bled to death in Ocaña, Colombia, in darkness, thirty feet below the earth, I got to my feet seemingly unharmed and wandered around Chicago on a sunny winter afternoon. Where she didn’t know who she was for eight months, I couldn’t remember who I was for eight weeks.

They say the amnesias were a door to gifts we were supposed to have, which Mami’s father, Nono, neglected to pass.

Nono was a curandero. His gifts were instructions for talking to the dead, telling the future, healing the ill, and moving the clouds. We were a brown people, mestizo. European men had arrived on the continent and violated Indigenous women, and that was our origin: neither Native or Spanish, but a wound. We called the gifts secrets. In the mountains of Santander, the fathers had passed the secrets to the sons, who passed the secrets to the sons, who passed the secrets to the sons. But none of his sons, Nono said, had the testículos required to be a real curandero. Only Mami, strong-willed, unafraid, more of a man than most men in his eyes, whom he liked to call mi animal de monte, could have housed the gifts. But Mami was a woman, and such things were forbidden. If a woman came to possess the secrets, it was said that misfortune would soon follow.

Yet, as eight-year-old Mami recovered from her injuries after falling down the well, and as her memories returned, it so happened that, from wherever her mind had gone, she brought back the ability to see ghosts and hear disembodied voices.

The family says Mami was destined for the secrets, and since Nono couldn’t teach them to her, the secrets had come directly to her.

Four decades later, when I suffered my accident and lost my memory, the family was thrilled. Tías poured drinks, told one another with an air of festivity: There it goes again! The snake biting its own tail!

And then they waited to see how, exactly, the secrets would manifest in me.

This is a story that happens in Spanish, where Mami and the tías call each other vos, the archaic “thou,” but they use tú with me, the informal, tender “you.” Theirs is the way of speaking in Ocaña, where our family is from, and where language can sound like a colonial fossil. In Spanish, our stories are slow then fast, and we cackle, constantly.

Mami and I are spooked by the way our lives echo each other’s, so we don’t often discuss our amnesias. But, increasingly, this is an itch I must scratch. I scrape and scald at its touch, only to want to probe into it again.

The tías ask me to tell them what it was like to live without a memory. I focus on trying to communicate how surreal it was, how cinematic. The tías roll their eyes at me, but they do so while looking at one another, like I am a bad television show they are watching and can safely comment on. Such a gringa this one, no? What they really want to know is what I dreamt.

For Mami and for me, during our bouts of amnesia, our waking lives were punctuated by a constant state of confusion—but our dreams were grounding. Mami’s dreams were sequential, and in her dreams she was a ghost. In mine, I had no body, and as I say this to the tías out loud, I realize: I, too, believed I was a ghost.

We have a word in Spanish for the walking of the dead—desandar. To un-walk. To walk until the walking is worn thin, to walk until the walking undoes even itself. That ghosts have a particular way of walking is an idea we inherited from the settlers who invaded the continent, but what is intrinsically ours is the sense of porosity, an understanding that we live between the real and unreal, and that often they are one and the same. So, to us, the living go on ghost walks too.

The Indigenous peoples of the state of Santander, where both my parents are from, dreamt of the beasts they were to hunt the following day. At daybreak, they left and looked for their dream sight.

Dreams are important for us too.

Forty-three years apart, during each of our amnesias, Mami and I dreamt of banishment.

Mami was a village ghost. The villagers of the place where she was stuck spoke a language she did not recognize but could nonetheless understand. They worshipped her corpse, unrotting and fragrant, and therefore miraculous.

I haunted a horizon of ocean where sometimes the waves withdrew, abandoning the land, and bared the seafloor. Sometimes the land glitched and the ocean was suddenly replaced, as if it had never gone. The waves shuddered then, coughing up lava and smoke, birthing islands.

When Nono was treating an illness, he asked his dreams to guide him to the herbs he needed, and when he roused from sleep, he hiked until the landscape matched his vision, and there he gathered the medicine. When Mami was a ghost in the dream village where she was stuck, she practiced communicating with the living, and once she recovered her memory and became grounded in her waking life, she knew how to speak to the dead. I observed land being born in my dreams, and, awake, I studied with attention as the self I was becoming created itself.

I wonder if—since my life echoes Mami’s, which in turn echoes Nono’s—all of us are on the same ghost walk, retracing and undoing one another’s lives.

The tías interrupt my thoughts. They’ve asked a question, but I haven’t been listening. They ask again whether my post-amnesia dreams are prognostic in nature. In the long seconds before I answer, they look upon me with fear and hope. They know the secrets to be a blessing, but also a burden. They’ve witnessed that often an intoxication with power attends the secrets, and that this intoxication can upend lives, bring about alcoholism, depression, self-harm. But in spite of what it may mean, their eyes well with what seems like anticipation, and I read in their gaze a desire for it to be true, for me to be the last recipient of the secrets. I entertain, for the briefest of moments, what it would be like to say yes, to be someone like Mami, to whom all come for help and advice. In the end, I shake my head: I cannot see ghosts like Mami could, I do not hear the dead, and the future is hidden from me as much as it ever was.

The tías nod slowly. They look down. Bueno. They pat my hand. I’ve disappointed them. I had the opportunity to receive the secrets, and somehow I’ve squandered it. This is the information they’ve been waiting for, and now that they are in possession of it, they shift their eyes back to Mami, yearning for a different story now, one with death and ghosts and vengeance—but in between looking at me and looking at Mami, they say: Better anyway to be normal. Live your life. You’ll see how quickly you forget, quicker than a witch’s fart.

When I was growing up in Bogotá, Mami kept a fortune-telling business in the attic of our house. At all hours of the day, Mami sat facing her clients, men and women of all stations and class, and told them about their lives. But clients who came looking for her healing, guidance, and advice surprised her with contempt when she introduced herself as a curandera. Supervisors demoted Papi from jobs when they found out what Mami was, excluded them from social gatherings, and men who called themselves friends sexually harassed Mami when they found themselves alone with her. Clients in our own house, after Mami had given them treatment, let their mouths bloat with epithets and refused to pay what they owed. Needing money, Mami allowed their hostility to teach her to call herself a fortune-teller, an occupation that even white, blue-eyed Colombians could take up. This has always been the privilege of being mestizo, to claim proximity to whiteness, even if the cost is a hate directed at half of the self. Mami told herself she was proud of who she was, that she only called herself a fortune-teller for her own safety. In time, though, Mami would drop this last label, too, opting in the end to simply describe herself as someone with an ability to see.

Mami says she lost the gift of seeing ghosts when my sister was born, and the gift of hearing voices when I was born, but in the wake of her decreased power, she retained the ability to foretell the future, as well as the eerie yet modest talent of appearing in two places at once.

Throughout my youth, once or twice a month, Mami’s old lovers, close friends, sisters and brothers called to report her visitations. While Mami was at home in Bogotá, her apparition sprang up all over Colombia: knocking on doors in Medellín, shuffling down hallways in Cartagena, tossing strands of black hair in Cúcuta, vanishing into thin air from one moment to the next. Mami celebrated each account. Instead of apparitions, she called her doubles clones. Mami often asked after her clones—what they had been wearing, what hairstyle they had chosen, where their eyes had seemed to alight.

As soon as Mami hung up, her eyes clouded in a dark and mesmerizing defiance. I’ll tell you what, though, she’d say, if someone ever made a real clone of me—I think I would kill her.

Whenever I’ve met Mami’s old friends and lovers, they look at me like they’ve seen a ghost, and I, specifically, am that ghost.

I can’t get over it, it’s like a time machine.

In my presence, Mami’s old lovers slip into a past unknown to me. After polite small talk, they seem to forget who I am. They pull out my chair, hold my hand, gaze into my eyes like they are in love with me. Mami’s old friends, for their part, gossip about acquaintances I’ve never met and expect quick-witted commentary I do not have.

They all look from Mami to me, unbelieving, over a meal or a drink. It’s not that the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, it’s that you had a copying machine, a childhood friend says to us. Mami shows the whites of her eyes, shakes her head, and recoils, all in one gesture, then says, Don’t even tell me. I laugh and sip my drink.

At random moments when Mami is visiting me in California and I am going about my day, playing music, dancing, applying lipstick, drinking wine or tea, Mami will throw books at me, pillows, magazines, whatever is near. Get away from me, you clone!

It’s true that Mami and I have the same thick brows, almond skin, dark, chaotic hair—but I think the gaze of our eyes is different. Where Mami’s is hard and imposing, my gaze is gentle, open, and inquisitive. There is also the matter of the moles. Mami and I have the same moles on our bodies. One rests, small and dark, at the upper inner thigh, and the other is hard to see. It sits enshrouded beneath hairs right at the arch of our vulvas. What do these mean, these markings? Mami once called them constellations, maps that proved we belonged to the same place in the sky.

There’s another mole we share. It is circular, the diameter of a pencil eraser, dark brown. Except, on our shoulders, it is switched: hers sits on her left shoulder, the same circular fleck as mine on the right. Mami and I, we could stand back to back and demonstrate the symmetry of the dot, how it falls at the same length down and in from the shoulder, how the size corresponds one to the other, how faithfully the color is mirrored.

But because it’s on the wrong shoulder on me, I cannot help feeling like a bad copy, like there was a glitch in the machine the moment I was made.

Guerrilla and drug violence drove my family and me from Colombia in 1998, when I was fourteen. This bred a waste of assimilation in my sister and me. Sometimes I imagine: had there been nothing to drive us from our land, had I, in 2007, lost my memory under Mami’s roof in Bogotá instead of in Chicago, to which I immigrated alone, I might have received the secrets in the way the tías implied I should. Maybe I would have started to hear and see the dead like Mami, and, in time, appear in two places at once. Mami might have passed me on the landing one day in our house in Bogotá, and after ascending the flight of stairs would be surprised to encounter me again, upright in the middle of her consulting room in the attic, materialized, a column of air.

But we fled. We had to remake our lives. We didn’t know at the time that the safety we sought had a cost. We didn’t know that this cost would be a gulf—that we would stand before this gulf over and over again and mourn all we’d lost.

Right after my accident, when I picked myself up from the street, new and without a memory, I was overwhelmed by the haunting feeling of having just laid a physical burden down.

Forgetting everything, entirely, was freedom. Amnesia was abundance. The hours lengthened into a certain timelessness, during which a ray of sunlight, never experienced before, was crowned in gold. I forgot myself. On my knees, I followed the ray of light as it cut across my apartment. I stared at the spot where the light met the dark, and in a second I’d rename it: border, grace. Everything was new. My daily labor was the act of naming. I raged with a happiness I have not since and will never again feel.

As my memory returned, piece by piece, I grieved. If amnesia was weightlessness, then the opposite was true: every path taken, every word said, every knowledge discovered, every emotion lived—all of it—came back to me with a manifest weight. The narrowing of a life is gravity. Memory is burden. I mourned every ounce of memory returned.

By the end of eight weeks, when I finally relearned all the details of who I was, I lost myself in the wonder of it. I recalled the stories of Nono and Mami, as well as one small moment: Mami holding my hand over a bowl of water, teaching me how to bless it. In my memory of this moment, I am not listening, choosing instead to be captivated by how our hands—if I ignored the tiny detail of my fingers, a hair’s breadth longer than hers—looked exactly like twins.
  • FINALIST | 2023
    Pulitzer Prize
  • LONGLIST | 2023
    Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction
  • FINALIST | 2022
    National Book Award
  • FINALIST | 2022
    The National Book Critics Circle Award - Autobiography
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE NOMINEE • CALIFORNIA BOOK AWARDS SILVER MEDAL WINNER INTERNATIONAL LATINO BOOK AWARD SILVER MEDAL WINNER CALIBA Golden Poppy/Martin Cruz Smith Award Finalist

A Best Book of the Year: TIME, NPR, Vulture, People, Vanity Fair, The Boston Globe, Esquire and more


“Rojas Contreras reacquaints herself with her family’s past, weaving their stories with personal narrative, unraveling legacies of violence, machismo and colonialism…In the process, she has written a spellbinding and genre-defying ancestral history.”New York Times Book Review

"Striking...Beautifully written and layered, an empowering act of recovery and self-discovery."San Francisco Chronicle

"A blazing memoir...A lyrically rich excavation of memory, mythology and history."Los Angeles Times

"A memoir full of magic...Using philosophical and startlingly delicate prose, Rojas Contreras spins colonial history, personal narrative and the magical around the axis of her family story. The reader feels their soft rotation, like planets around a sun."Washington Post

"Rojas Contreras brings us along as she is guided through the mesmerizing journey of her family history, which is defined both by the guerrilla warfare that eventually drove them out of Colombia when she was 14 and the lineage of supernatural gifts that she traces back to her grandfather, a curandero, or shaman. Rojas Contreras’s talent as a fiction writer comes through in her lyrical prose and her ability to craft clear scenery and narratives. She juggles colonial criticism, explorations of marginalized cultures, and intricate analyses of family dynamics and makes it look easy."—Vulture

"After an accident causes amnesia, Ingrid Rojas Contreras travels with her mother to Colombia seeking family memories. What they find in this poetic memoir is a complicated inheritance of history and magic."—People

"What a story Ingrid Rojas Contreras’s The Man Who Could Move Clouds is, intertwining family relationships and legacies, political conflicts and oppressions, and the expansive realm of healing, identity, and magic into a magnificent, mesmerizing memoir."—Ploughshares

"The Man Who Could Move Clouds is a memoir like no other, mapping memory, myth, and the mysteries and magic of ancestry with stark tenderness and beauty. A dreamlike and literal excavation of the powers of inheritance, Ingrid Rojas Contreras has given us a glorious gift with these pages."Patricia Engel, author of Infinite Country

"Rojas Contreras's lyrical sentences combined with the authority of her narration held me in a kind of rapture, the sort of reading experience I most crave. What a wise and beautiful memoir, full of wonder and reverence for what the past plants in us, and how surprising and inevitable what blooms."—Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood

"The Man Who Could Move Clouds is a testament to the richness of culture and family—as well as a call to maintain these essential elements, despite displacement and Westernization, throughout the generations. With unflinching honesty, Contreras translates the stories of her family and its curanderos—and therefore, herself—without watering them down. I am so grateful that this book exists in the world."—Esmé Weijun Wang, author of The Collected Schizophrenias

"The title, The Man Who Could Move Clouds, is not some magical-realism fancy. Ingrid Rojas Contreras is talking the real stuff, taking you into the curandero’s world. Tell yourself as you read, this is non-fiction. You will believe. And then your questions will begin."—Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The House of Broken Angels

"The Man Who Could Move Clouds is the work of a genius, a wildly moving, profound, groundbreaking, often hilarious book that I’ll reread until I die. Ingrid Rojas Contreras's history of her family and their power, ferocity, and formidable love knocked me sideways with joy and awe. Without knowing it, I’ve wanted this book my whole life."—R.O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries

"A lyrical meditation on her family’s history and the legacy of colonialism in Colombia...Mesmerizing...In grappling with the violence embedded in her family’s DNA, Rojas Contreras affectingly reveals how darkness can only be vanquished when it’s brought to the light. Fusing the personal and political, this rings out as a bold case against forgetting in a forward-facing age."—Publishers Weekly

"A spellbinding memoir that brings her extended family's ancestral magic into the present day...Rojas Contreras adroitly deepens her fascinating family stories by placing them within resonant historical, cultural, and linguistic contexts...Rojas Contreras' uncompromising look at the past and her vivid, crystalline prose illuminate these many dimensions of her memoir, making it a compulsively readable book about one family's mystical experiences, one that has rightly earned recognition as one of the most anticipated titles of the summer."—Booklist (starred review)

"Enthralling...In her deftly woven memoir, she makes [Colombian] history more immediate and personal, with prose that in itself is enchantingly poetic."—BookPage

"In this dazzling memoir, Ingrid Rojas Contreras delves into her family’s stories and history that far surpass the enchantment found in many novels."—SheReads

"In this spellbinding memoir, Contreras weaves family lore and personal narrative into a powerful collective portrait."—Alta Journal

"A moving depiction of family and the power of healing."—Kirkus
© Jamil Hellu
INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her first novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree was the silver medal winner in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, and a New York Times editor's choice. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Believer, and Zyzzyva, among others. She lives in California. View titles by Ingrid Rojas Contreras
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About

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST From the bestselling author of Fruit of the Drunken Tree, comes a dazzling, kaleidoscopic memoir reclaiming her family's otherworldly legacy.

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: TIME, NPR, VULTURE, PEOPLE, BOSTON GLOBE, VANITY FAIR, ESQUIRE, & MORE


“Rojas Contreras reacquaints herself with her family’s past, weaving their stories with personal narrative, unraveling legacies of violence, machismo and colonialism… In the process, she has written a spellbinding and genre-defying ancestral history.”—New York Times Book Review 


For Ingrid Rojas Contreras, magic runs in the family. Raised amid the political violence of 1980s and '90s Colombia, in a house bustling with her mother’s fortune-telling clients, she was a hard child to surprise. Her maternal grandfather, Nono, was a renowned curandero, a community healer gifted with what the family called “the secrets”: the power to talk to the dead, tell the future, treat the sick, and move the clouds. And as the first woman to inherit “the secrets,” Rojas Contreras’ mother was just as powerful. Mami delighted in her ability to appear in two places at once, and she could cast out even the most persistent spirits with nothing more than a glass of water.

This legacy had always felt like it belonged to her mother and grandfather, until, while living in the U.S. in her twenties, Rojas Contreras suffered a head injury that left her with amnesia. As she regained partial memory, her family was excited to tell her that this had happened before: Decades ago Mami had taken a fall that left her with amnesia, too. And when she recovered, she had gained access to “the secrets.”

In 2012, spurred by a shared dream among Mami and her sisters, and her own powerful urge to relearn her family history in the aftermath of her memory loss, Rojas Contreras joins her mother on a journey to Colombia to disinter Nono’s remains. With Mami as her unpredictable, stubborn, and often amusing guide, Rojas Contreras traces her lineage back to her Indigenous and Spanish roots, uncovering the violent and rigid colonial narrative that would eventually break her mestizo family into two camps: those who believe “the secrets” are a gift, and those who are convinced they are a curse.

Interweaving family stories more enchanting than those in any novel, resurrected Colombian history, and her own deeply personal reckonings with the bounds of reality, Rojas Contreras writes her way through the incomprehensible and into her inheritance. The result is a luminous testament to the power of storytelling as a healing art and an invitation to embrace the extraordinary.

Excerpt

1

The Secrets

They say the accident that left me with temporary amnesia is my inheritance. No house or piece of land or chest of letters, just a few weeks of oblivion.

Mami had temporary amnesia as well, except: where she was eight years old, I was twenty-three. Where she fell down an empty well, I crashed my bicycle into an opening car door. Where she nearly bled to death in Ocaña, Colombia, in darkness, thirty feet below the earth, I got to my feet seemingly unharmed and wandered around Chicago on a sunny winter afternoon. Where she didn’t know who she was for eight months, I couldn’t remember who I was for eight weeks.

They say the amnesias were a door to gifts we were supposed to have, which Mami’s father, Nono, neglected to pass.

Nono was a curandero. His gifts were instructions for talking to the dead, telling the future, healing the ill, and moving the clouds. We were a brown people, mestizo. European men had arrived on the continent and violated Indigenous women, and that was our origin: neither Native or Spanish, but a wound. We called the gifts secrets. In the mountains of Santander, the fathers had passed the secrets to the sons, who passed the secrets to the sons, who passed the secrets to the sons. But none of his sons, Nono said, had the testículos required to be a real curandero. Only Mami, strong-willed, unafraid, more of a man than most men in his eyes, whom he liked to call mi animal de monte, could have housed the gifts. But Mami was a woman, and such things were forbidden. If a woman came to possess the secrets, it was said that misfortune would soon follow.

Yet, as eight-year-old Mami recovered from her injuries after falling down the well, and as her memories returned, it so happened that, from wherever her mind had gone, she brought back the ability to see ghosts and hear disembodied voices.

The family says Mami was destined for the secrets, and since Nono couldn’t teach them to her, the secrets had come directly to her.

Four decades later, when I suffered my accident and lost my memory, the family was thrilled. Tías poured drinks, told one another with an air of festivity: There it goes again! The snake biting its own tail!

And then they waited to see how, exactly, the secrets would manifest in me.

This is a story that happens in Spanish, where Mami and the tías call each other vos, the archaic “thou,” but they use tú with me, the informal, tender “you.” Theirs is the way of speaking in Ocaña, where our family is from, and where language can sound like a colonial fossil. In Spanish, our stories are slow then fast, and we cackle, constantly.

Mami and I are spooked by the way our lives echo each other’s, so we don’t often discuss our amnesias. But, increasingly, this is an itch I must scratch. I scrape and scald at its touch, only to want to probe into it again.

The tías ask me to tell them what it was like to live without a memory. I focus on trying to communicate how surreal it was, how cinematic. The tías roll their eyes at me, but they do so while looking at one another, like I am a bad television show they are watching and can safely comment on. Such a gringa this one, no? What they really want to know is what I dreamt.

For Mami and for me, during our bouts of amnesia, our waking lives were punctuated by a constant state of confusion—but our dreams were grounding. Mami’s dreams were sequential, and in her dreams she was a ghost. In mine, I had no body, and as I say this to the tías out loud, I realize: I, too, believed I was a ghost.

We have a word in Spanish for the walking of the dead—desandar. To un-walk. To walk until the walking is worn thin, to walk until the walking undoes even itself. That ghosts have a particular way of walking is an idea we inherited from the settlers who invaded the continent, but what is intrinsically ours is the sense of porosity, an understanding that we live between the real and unreal, and that often they are one and the same. So, to us, the living go on ghost walks too.

The Indigenous peoples of the state of Santander, where both my parents are from, dreamt of the beasts they were to hunt the following day. At daybreak, they left and looked for their dream sight.

Dreams are important for us too.

Forty-three years apart, during each of our amnesias, Mami and I dreamt of banishment.

Mami was a village ghost. The villagers of the place where she was stuck spoke a language she did not recognize but could nonetheless understand. They worshipped her corpse, unrotting and fragrant, and therefore miraculous.

I haunted a horizon of ocean where sometimes the waves withdrew, abandoning the land, and bared the seafloor. Sometimes the land glitched and the ocean was suddenly replaced, as if it had never gone. The waves shuddered then, coughing up lava and smoke, birthing islands.

When Nono was treating an illness, he asked his dreams to guide him to the herbs he needed, and when he roused from sleep, he hiked until the landscape matched his vision, and there he gathered the medicine. When Mami was a ghost in the dream village where she was stuck, she practiced communicating with the living, and once she recovered her memory and became grounded in her waking life, she knew how to speak to the dead. I observed land being born in my dreams, and, awake, I studied with attention as the self I was becoming created itself.

I wonder if—since my life echoes Mami’s, which in turn echoes Nono’s—all of us are on the same ghost walk, retracing and undoing one another’s lives.

The tías interrupt my thoughts. They’ve asked a question, but I haven’t been listening. They ask again whether my post-amnesia dreams are prognostic in nature. In the long seconds before I answer, they look upon me with fear and hope. They know the secrets to be a blessing, but also a burden. They’ve witnessed that often an intoxication with power attends the secrets, and that this intoxication can upend lives, bring about alcoholism, depression, self-harm. But in spite of what it may mean, their eyes well with what seems like anticipation, and I read in their gaze a desire for it to be true, for me to be the last recipient of the secrets. I entertain, for the briefest of moments, what it would be like to say yes, to be someone like Mami, to whom all come for help and advice. In the end, I shake my head: I cannot see ghosts like Mami could, I do not hear the dead, and the future is hidden from me as much as it ever was.

The tías nod slowly. They look down. Bueno. They pat my hand. I’ve disappointed them. I had the opportunity to receive the secrets, and somehow I’ve squandered it. This is the information they’ve been waiting for, and now that they are in possession of it, they shift their eyes back to Mami, yearning for a different story now, one with death and ghosts and vengeance—but in between looking at me and looking at Mami, they say: Better anyway to be normal. Live your life. You’ll see how quickly you forget, quicker than a witch’s fart.

When I was growing up in Bogotá, Mami kept a fortune-telling business in the attic of our house. At all hours of the day, Mami sat facing her clients, men and women of all stations and class, and told them about their lives. But clients who came looking for her healing, guidance, and advice surprised her with contempt when she introduced herself as a curandera. Supervisors demoted Papi from jobs when they found out what Mami was, excluded them from social gatherings, and men who called themselves friends sexually harassed Mami when they found themselves alone with her. Clients in our own house, after Mami had given them treatment, let their mouths bloat with epithets and refused to pay what they owed. Needing money, Mami allowed their hostility to teach her to call herself a fortune-teller, an occupation that even white, blue-eyed Colombians could take up. This has always been the privilege of being mestizo, to claim proximity to whiteness, even if the cost is a hate directed at half of the self. Mami told herself she was proud of who she was, that she only called herself a fortune-teller for her own safety. In time, though, Mami would drop this last label, too, opting in the end to simply describe herself as someone with an ability to see.

Mami says she lost the gift of seeing ghosts when my sister was born, and the gift of hearing voices when I was born, but in the wake of her decreased power, she retained the ability to foretell the future, as well as the eerie yet modest talent of appearing in two places at once.

Throughout my youth, once or twice a month, Mami’s old lovers, close friends, sisters and brothers called to report her visitations. While Mami was at home in Bogotá, her apparition sprang up all over Colombia: knocking on doors in Medellín, shuffling down hallways in Cartagena, tossing strands of black hair in Cúcuta, vanishing into thin air from one moment to the next. Mami celebrated each account. Instead of apparitions, she called her doubles clones. Mami often asked after her clones—what they had been wearing, what hairstyle they had chosen, where their eyes had seemed to alight.

As soon as Mami hung up, her eyes clouded in a dark and mesmerizing defiance. I’ll tell you what, though, she’d say, if someone ever made a real clone of me—I think I would kill her.

Whenever I’ve met Mami’s old friends and lovers, they look at me like they’ve seen a ghost, and I, specifically, am that ghost.

I can’t get over it, it’s like a time machine.

In my presence, Mami’s old lovers slip into a past unknown to me. After polite small talk, they seem to forget who I am. They pull out my chair, hold my hand, gaze into my eyes like they are in love with me. Mami’s old friends, for their part, gossip about acquaintances I’ve never met and expect quick-witted commentary I do not have.

They all look from Mami to me, unbelieving, over a meal or a drink. It’s not that the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, it’s that you had a copying machine, a childhood friend says to us. Mami shows the whites of her eyes, shakes her head, and recoils, all in one gesture, then says, Don’t even tell me. I laugh and sip my drink.

At random moments when Mami is visiting me in California and I am going about my day, playing music, dancing, applying lipstick, drinking wine or tea, Mami will throw books at me, pillows, magazines, whatever is near. Get away from me, you clone!

It’s true that Mami and I have the same thick brows, almond skin, dark, chaotic hair—but I think the gaze of our eyes is different. Where Mami’s is hard and imposing, my gaze is gentle, open, and inquisitive. There is also the matter of the moles. Mami and I have the same moles on our bodies. One rests, small and dark, at the upper inner thigh, and the other is hard to see. It sits enshrouded beneath hairs right at the arch of our vulvas. What do these mean, these markings? Mami once called them constellations, maps that proved we belonged to the same place in the sky.

There’s another mole we share. It is circular, the diameter of a pencil eraser, dark brown. Except, on our shoulders, it is switched: hers sits on her left shoulder, the same circular fleck as mine on the right. Mami and I, we could stand back to back and demonstrate the symmetry of the dot, how it falls at the same length down and in from the shoulder, how the size corresponds one to the other, how faithfully the color is mirrored.

But because it’s on the wrong shoulder on me, I cannot help feeling like a bad copy, like there was a glitch in the machine the moment I was made.

Guerrilla and drug violence drove my family and me from Colombia in 1998, when I was fourteen. This bred a waste of assimilation in my sister and me. Sometimes I imagine: had there been nothing to drive us from our land, had I, in 2007, lost my memory under Mami’s roof in Bogotá instead of in Chicago, to which I immigrated alone, I might have received the secrets in the way the tías implied I should. Maybe I would have started to hear and see the dead like Mami, and, in time, appear in two places at once. Mami might have passed me on the landing one day in our house in Bogotá, and after ascending the flight of stairs would be surprised to encounter me again, upright in the middle of her consulting room in the attic, materialized, a column of air.

But we fled. We had to remake our lives. We didn’t know at the time that the safety we sought had a cost. We didn’t know that this cost would be a gulf—that we would stand before this gulf over and over again and mourn all we’d lost.

Right after my accident, when I picked myself up from the street, new and without a memory, I was overwhelmed by the haunting feeling of having just laid a physical burden down.

Forgetting everything, entirely, was freedom. Amnesia was abundance. The hours lengthened into a certain timelessness, during which a ray of sunlight, never experienced before, was crowned in gold. I forgot myself. On my knees, I followed the ray of light as it cut across my apartment. I stared at the spot where the light met the dark, and in a second I’d rename it: border, grace. Everything was new. My daily labor was the act of naming. I raged with a happiness I have not since and will never again feel.

As my memory returned, piece by piece, I grieved. If amnesia was weightlessness, then the opposite was true: every path taken, every word said, every knowledge discovered, every emotion lived—all of it—came back to me with a manifest weight. The narrowing of a life is gravity. Memory is burden. I mourned every ounce of memory returned.

By the end of eight weeks, when I finally relearned all the details of who I was, I lost myself in the wonder of it. I recalled the stories of Nono and Mami, as well as one small moment: Mami holding my hand over a bowl of water, teaching me how to bless it. In my memory of this moment, I am not listening, choosing instead to be captivated by how our hands—if I ignored the tiny detail of my fingers, a hair’s breadth longer than hers—looked exactly like twins.

Awards

  • FINALIST | 2023
    Pulitzer Prize
  • LONGLIST | 2023
    Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction
  • FINALIST | 2022
    National Book Award
  • FINALIST | 2022
    The National Book Critics Circle Award - Autobiography

Praise

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE NOMINEE • CALIFORNIA BOOK AWARDS SILVER MEDAL WINNER INTERNATIONAL LATINO BOOK AWARD SILVER MEDAL WINNER CALIBA Golden Poppy/Martin Cruz Smith Award Finalist

A Best Book of the Year: TIME, NPR, Vulture, People, Vanity Fair, The Boston Globe, Esquire and more


“Rojas Contreras reacquaints herself with her family’s past, weaving their stories with personal narrative, unraveling legacies of violence, machismo and colonialism…In the process, she has written a spellbinding and genre-defying ancestral history.”New York Times Book Review

"Striking...Beautifully written and layered, an empowering act of recovery and self-discovery."San Francisco Chronicle

"A blazing memoir...A lyrically rich excavation of memory, mythology and history."Los Angeles Times

"A memoir full of magic...Using philosophical and startlingly delicate prose, Rojas Contreras spins colonial history, personal narrative and the magical around the axis of her family story. The reader feels their soft rotation, like planets around a sun."Washington Post

"Rojas Contreras brings us along as she is guided through the mesmerizing journey of her family history, which is defined both by the guerrilla warfare that eventually drove them out of Colombia when she was 14 and the lineage of supernatural gifts that she traces back to her grandfather, a curandero, or shaman. Rojas Contreras’s talent as a fiction writer comes through in her lyrical prose and her ability to craft clear scenery and narratives. She juggles colonial criticism, explorations of marginalized cultures, and intricate analyses of family dynamics and makes it look easy."—Vulture

"After an accident causes amnesia, Ingrid Rojas Contreras travels with her mother to Colombia seeking family memories. What they find in this poetic memoir is a complicated inheritance of history and magic."—People

"What a story Ingrid Rojas Contreras’s The Man Who Could Move Clouds is, intertwining family relationships and legacies, political conflicts and oppressions, and the expansive realm of healing, identity, and magic into a magnificent, mesmerizing memoir."—Ploughshares

"The Man Who Could Move Clouds is a memoir like no other, mapping memory, myth, and the mysteries and magic of ancestry with stark tenderness and beauty. A dreamlike and literal excavation of the powers of inheritance, Ingrid Rojas Contreras has given us a glorious gift with these pages."Patricia Engel, author of Infinite Country

"Rojas Contreras's lyrical sentences combined with the authority of her narration held me in a kind of rapture, the sort of reading experience I most crave. What a wise and beautiful memoir, full of wonder and reverence for what the past plants in us, and how surprising and inevitable what blooms."—Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood

"The Man Who Could Move Clouds is a testament to the richness of culture and family—as well as a call to maintain these essential elements, despite displacement and Westernization, throughout the generations. With unflinching honesty, Contreras translates the stories of her family and its curanderos—and therefore, herself—without watering them down. I am so grateful that this book exists in the world."—Esmé Weijun Wang, author of The Collected Schizophrenias

"The title, The Man Who Could Move Clouds, is not some magical-realism fancy. Ingrid Rojas Contreras is talking the real stuff, taking you into the curandero’s world. Tell yourself as you read, this is non-fiction. You will believe. And then your questions will begin."—Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The House of Broken Angels

"The Man Who Could Move Clouds is the work of a genius, a wildly moving, profound, groundbreaking, often hilarious book that I’ll reread until I die. Ingrid Rojas Contreras's history of her family and their power, ferocity, and formidable love knocked me sideways with joy and awe. Without knowing it, I’ve wanted this book my whole life."—R.O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries

"A lyrical meditation on her family’s history and the legacy of colonialism in Colombia...Mesmerizing...In grappling with the violence embedded in her family’s DNA, Rojas Contreras affectingly reveals how darkness can only be vanquished when it’s brought to the light. Fusing the personal and political, this rings out as a bold case against forgetting in a forward-facing age."—Publishers Weekly

"A spellbinding memoir that brings her extended family's ancestral magic into the present day...Rojas Contreras adroitly deepens her fascinating family stories by placing them within resonant historical, cultural, and linguistic contexts...Rojas Contreras' uncompromising look at the past and her vivid, crystalline prose illuminate these many dimensions of her memoir, making it a compulsively readable book about one family's mystical experiences, one that has rightly earned recognition as one of the most anticipated titles of the summer."—Booklist (starred review)

"Enthralling...In her deftly woven memoir, she makes [Colombian] history more immediate and personal, with prose that in itself is enchantingly poetic."—BookPage

"In this dazzling memoir, Ingrid Rojas Contreras delves into her family’s stories and history that far surpass the enchantment found in many novels."—SheReads

"In this spellbinding memoir, Contreras weaves family lore and personal narrative into a powerful collective portrait."—Alta Journal

"A moving depiction of family and the power of healing."—Kirkus

Author

© Jamil Hellu
INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her first novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree was the silver medal winner in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, and a New York Times editor's choice. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Believer, and Zyzzyva, among others. She lives in California. View titles by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

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Congratulations to the Finalists and Winners Who Made The National Book Critics Circle List!

The National Book Critics Circle was founded in 1974 by a group of the most influential critics of the day. It was awarded its first set of honors the following year. Now comprising of more than 600 critics and book editors throughout the country, the NBCC annually bestows its awards in six categories, honoring the

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