The Man Who Could Move Clouds will hit shelves in July.
For her next book, she’s turning her sights on her own life.
First, the official synopsis:
For Ingrid Rojas Contreras, magic runs in the family.
Ingrid Rojas Contreras.Credit: Courtesy Ingrid Rojas Contreras
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.
‘The Man Who Could Move Clouds,’ by Ingrid Rojas Contreras.Knopf Doubleday
Nono was a curandero.
We were a brown people, mestizo.
We called the giftssecrets.
But none ofhissons, Nono said, had the testiculos required to be a real curandero.
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.
Four decades later, when I suffered my accident and lost my memory, the family was thrilled.
Tias 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.
In Spanish, our stories are slow then fast, and we cackle, constantly.
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 tias 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.
Mami’s dreams were sequential, and in her dreams she was a ghost.
We have a word in Spanish for the walking of the deaddesandar.To un-walk.
To walk until the walking is worn thin, to walk until the walking undoes even itself.
So, to us, the living go on ghost walks too.
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.
They worshipped her corpse, unrotting and fragrant, and therefore miraculous.
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.
