Ingrid Rojas Contreras: The Man Who Could Move Clouds

I’ve been wanting to write about The Man Who Could Move Clouds for a long time, but each time I tried I decided it was too hard to know what to say. The author, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, is so good, and so completely herself, that I felt trying to put new words to the story would only be sad. The most I could say was that someone should read it. But it kept coming up, this request to write something about it, from inside of me. So much that many other pieces I’ve wanted to write have gotten held back. 

Now I think the best I can do is write about the experience of reading it. How it was so pleasurable and also so hard. How I’d read it ten pages at a time in the bathtub, covered in bubbles. How I’d read it just for the sensation of reading. It was the first true intimacy I’d felt in a long time. 

Ten pages always felt like enough because there’s just - how do I describe this - a thickness to the pages. The story doesn’t unfold like I'm used to and the voice is so multi-layered it’s hard to place a speaker or even a voice. It’s more like an enchantment and I can’t really describe how it’s being done. The best way I can say it is that the paragraphs don’t build on each other in the standard way; rather, they describe whole shapes of worlds that are only momentarily being dipped into. There are so many worlds being described simultaneously that the constellation of stories becomes the story of this person’s life.

See, I haven't done it. Just read this book, is better than that.

I'll try again:

I was struck at the writer’s capacity to deliver a level of insight of the highest order along with the mystery of a good story that’s still being told, on each and every page of the book. It’s in how she never quite says which is which that her greatest gift lies.

For example, on this random two sides of a page I opened up to today, there’s a paragraph that describes Mami, the writer’s mother, and her vocation, which was clairvoyance. In the following passages the writer describes how her mother had to learn how to tell the truth in ways her clients were willing to hear. How at first she described things literally and her clients never came back. “Yes, your husband is cheating on you. No you should not go on that trip. Yes, he likes you, but I do not see him long-term in your path.” You can see why these revelations might not feel magical. You already know them, though it might be impossible to understand how someone else who doesn’t know you at all might also see the truth in such stark relief.

Then the writer describes how Mami learned to deliver messages through metaphors, which were ultimately more empowering for the one receiving the message. In one example, Mami’s first long term client only learns to forgive her father by praying over a plant while washing it off in the river. This “tangible task” was the act of forgiveness, which the daughter was otherwise not able to do, no matter how many times she’d been instructed to do so. 

"Was it the ritual that worked, or the metaphor?" the writer asks. “Is a ritual a story enacted?” Is the insight the truthful bit here?

In response I might conversationally wonder: Is it that forgiveness cannot ever be had but only enacted, which is a chilling revelation I’m only now accepting as true. 

This is just four paragraphs on one page. The layers of memory of mothering, of daughtering, of the position of nature, of the nature of questions go down so many levels that I’d often need to come up for a breath of air after just one or two. 

It’s much easier to talk about the language which is exquisite in so many places, delivering sentences that summarize the previous paragraphs as well as some greater beauty that even the insight itself is too small to hold. 

For example, a few pages later, after the details of Mami’s rituals the writer says: “I laid all my trust at my mother’s feet, followed her around as she continued to expound upon the theorems of divination. She taught me how to do tarot card readings, what each suit and number meant, and when she could think of nothing else to teach me, she dealt the cards into a star and read her own fortune.”

The next paragraph is an example of what I mean:

“In the tarot, Mami was always the Empress, a woman wearing a crown of stars reclining on a throne with a scepter in her hand. Whenever she drew the card she called in glee. Oh! There I am!”

This is the kind of masterful 10 lines that the writer puts down every other page of this memoir, which is more a memoir of a body which came from a body and which has had to metabolize ghosts which were never hers. 

There were a number of times in reading the first half of the book when I stopped and asked myself wait–is this story true? For example this moment: when we hear that the writer’s grandfather laid her down in her crib and then saw a snake climb into the same crib and fall asleep in the veiled canopy. As soon as he lifted the veil the snake disappeared. The writer’s mother has told her this story many times, saying that her grandfather said that either she had a snake spirit or the snake was an enemy who she had entranced. Either way this was a blessing. 

Then I realized that all of us grow up with stories which were told to us as the truth and then when you write these truths down you see how much they are made of so many things, truth taking up only a sliver.

Sometimes, the writer delivers all three mechanisms: family mythology, metaphorical histories, and exquisite language all in one go. For instance, in the short chapter ten: entitled Mud.

The chapter describes a dream her grandmother had in which she and her husband, the writer’s grandfather, made love. The bed is a symbol from another story where Nona took her matrimonial mattress to a witch to try to stop her husband from sleeping with one of his lovers. The spell didn’t work and so the story goes that Nona dragged it into the jungle and left it there, “for the beasts and elements to tear apart.”

The dream Nona reported took place on the new mattress that her daughter, the writer’s mother, had bought her. Their sex was pleasure-filled and was accompanied by a heart-felt apology for his philandering ways. But even with his groveling, Nona refused to forgive. 

When Nona woke up there was evidence that the dream had in some way also transpired, because there was dirt on the sheets and mud in her underwear. To Nona, this was a message that her husband had died. 

“She would tell everyone, Now I know what it’s like to make love to a ghost.”

I thought, Oh, I know that exact feeling–what it’s like sleeping with someone whose presence in your life has already passed. I know that haunting.

The one reason I return to this book has to do with one line: it’s when the writer’s mother says almost, off the cuff, and maybe to no one, that she thought that she was having a daughter, but really what she had birthed was a mirror. I thought about that line then and I think about it now, more than a year later. How true this is and how it holds both beauty and terror. I think this book has allowed one history of a family to reflect both.