As A Little Girl Growing Up In Colombia Instant

By María Isabel Rueda

For a little girl in Colombia, the world is not a map. It is a series of altitudes.

At age four, the world is the cool, terracotta floor of my grandmother’s kitchen in Manizales. From down here, the legs of the table are a redwood forest. My mother’s ankles are marble pillars. The women of the family float above me, their voices a tumbling river of subjunctives and diminutives: “Ven acá, mijita.” “Siéntate, gordita.” “Cuidado, mi amor.”

They don’t see what I see. From the floor, I see the ants—the hormigas culonas—marching in a military procession toward a fallen mango. I see the dust motes dancing in the slice of Andean sun. And I see the grown-ups’ feet: the scuffed leather of my father’s boots, the cracked heels of my aunt after she comes back from the finca, the chipped coral nail polish on my older cousin, who is fifteen and already knows how to dance salsa like a knife.

Colombia, in those days, was not the Colombia of the news. It was the Colombia of the arepa still warm in my palm. The Colombia of the aguardiente hangover that made my tío laugh until he choked. The Colombia of the hummingbird that built a nest in the bougainvillea outside my window, no bigger than my fist.

I was five when I learned about the mountains. Not from a textbook, but from the view on the road to my abuela’s pueblo. My father stopped the dusty Renault on a precipice. He lifted me onto his shoulders—suddenly I was seven feet tall.

“Look,” he said.

The Cordillera Central unfolded like a green accordion. Valleys fell away into mist. A river below was a silver thread stitching the earth together. I realized, with a child’s cold terror, that the world did not end at the corner bakery. It kept going. It went over peaks and down into ravines where the sun never touched the mud. It went all the way to the jungle, and beyond that, to the sea I had only seen in a photograph of Cartagena.

“There’s nothing bigger than that,” I whispered.

My father laughed. “That’s just the first hill, mija.”

At seven, I discovered the second altitude: the social one.

My family was not rich. We were decent. That word in Colombia is a loaded gun. It means you have a tablecloth, even if the soup is thin. It means your shoes are polished, even if they are two years old. It means you know which fork to use, and which last name to drop like a secret handshake. as a little girl growing up in colombia

But at school, the nuns divided us by our estrato—the invisible ladder of class that every Colombian child learns to climb before she learns to read. The girls from the north of the city had lunchboxes from Miami. Their hair was blown straight. They spoke English with a gringo accent they practiced on Saturdays. The girls from the south—like me—brought mecato wrapped in newspaper. Our hair curled in the humidity no matter how hard we brushed it.

One afternoon, a girl named Juliana asked me where my family’s finca was.

I didn’t have a finca. I had a patio with a lemon tree and a dog with three legs.

“We don’t have one,” I said.

Juliana looked at me the way you look at a cockroach that has learned to wear a uniform. She turned to her friend and whispered, “Qué pena.”

What a shame.

That was the year I learned that Colombia is a country of balconies. Some people are born on them, waving at the parade. The rest of us are born in the street, craning our necks.

I was ten when the violence arrived.

Not the abstract violence of the news—the FARC, the paramilitaries, the car bombs in Bogotá that felt like a faraway thunderstorm. No, the violence that arrived was a silence.

One Tuesday, Juan Pablo didn’t come to school. He sat behind me. He drew horses in the margins of his notebook. The next day, his desk was empty. The nun told us to pray for his family. She did not say why.

At home, my mother pulled the curtains closed at six o’clock. She stopped letting me walk to the corner store for bread. My father started listening to the radio with one hand over his mouth. By María Isabel Rueda For a little girl

“Don’t talk to strangers,” my mother said. But in Colombia, the strangers were not strangers. They were the neighbors who stopped saying good morning. They were the taxi driver who asked too many questions. They were the cousin who showed up at 2 a.m. with a black bag and a new tattoo.

I learned to read the air. A motorcycle with two men on it? Look away. A car with tinted windows? Cross the street. A knock on the door after dinner? Hide in the closet behind my father’s wool coats. Press my hand over my own mouth so even my breath disappears.

I was a little girl. The world was shrinking again. Not to the kitchen floor, but to the space between my ribs where my heart hammered like a trapped bird.

At thirteen, I discovered the third altitude: desire.

I was standing in front of a mirror in my cousin’s apartment in Medellín. She was doing my makeup—eyeliner sharp as a razor, lipstick the color of a wounded fruit.

“You’re becoming a woman,” she said.

I looked at my reflection. I saw the curve of my hip, the dark of my eyes, the way my hair fell over one shoulder like a secret. I saw, for the first time, that I was not just a witness to the world. I was something the world would want to consume.

That night, at a quinceañera, a boy named Sebastián pulled me into a corner. He smelled like cologne and sweat and cheap beer. He put his hand on my waist. He was seventeen. He had a motorcycle and a smile that was all teeth.

“You’re not like the other girls,” he said. (Later, I would learn that all men begin with this lie.)

I let him kiss me. His mouth was wet and warm and full of the future. For three minutes, I forgot about the mountains, the nuns, the silent desks, the curtains drawn at dusk. I forgot that I was a little girl from a decent family in a country that was bleeding out.

I was just a body. And for a moment, that was enough. At seven, I discovered the second altitude: the social one

I am twenty-three now. I live in a city where the winter is polite and the streets are numbered in a grid. I have learned to say “I’m from Colombia” without flinching, without immediately adding, “But not like that.”

But at night, I still dream in altitudes.

I dream of my grandmother’s kitchen floor. I dream of the ants marching toward the mango. I dream of my father’s shoulders, broad as a continent. I dream of the hummingbird in the bougainvillea, its wings beating so fast they disappear.

Colombia was not a country. It was a room. A very small room, and a very large one, all at once. It was the sound of my mother’s heels on the tile. It was the silence of a missing classmate. It was the taste of arepa and the smell of rain on hot asphalt and the terror of a knock at the door.

I am a little girl no longer. But when I close my eyes, I am still there, looking up.

Waiting for someone to lift me high enough to see over the next hill.

María Isabel Rueda is a writer from Manizales, Colombia, now based in New York. She is working on a memoir about the geometry of survival.

Play reflects Colombia’s diverse geography and urban-rural divide:

Our house in a small pueblo outside Bogotá had no central heating. It didn’t need it. The cold came straight from the páramo, biting my ears as I walked to school in a navy blue skirt and wool tights. But the cold was a friend. It meant my mother would make chocolate santafereño—thick, with cheese melted at the bottom of the mug and a chunk of almojábana floating like a treasure.

Every morning as a little girl growing up in Colombia, I learned that comfort is not a temperature. It is a ritual.

The backyard held a guayabo (guava) tree that sagged under the weight of fruit. My cousins and I would climb it to spy on the neighbor’s rooster, whispering about which one of us would move to “the city” first. We believed Medellín was a fairy tale kingdom and Cartagena was underwater. We weren’t far off.