Something Fierce (14 page)
One afternoon, as I reached the top of the hill, I spied some boys at the end of the lane examining a banana-seat bike. I stopped in my tracks, because that was an unusual sight. Vendors rode around downtown La Paz on huge tricycle-type bikes from the 1940s, carrying mountains of merchandise in their massive bike baskets, but that didn't count. This bike was meant for a kid to have fun on. Jose Luis yelled at me to come look at it. His invitation was obviously a truce, I thought, and they might even apologize for shunning me. I realized how pathetically lonely I'd been without them.
The bike was a gift brought from Miami by Jose Luis's father. The boys begged me to teach them to ride it. I dropped my school bag and jumped on, whizzing down the lane. I felt free as I bumped along the cobblestones.
“Go down the hill to 6 de Agosto Avenue!” Jose Luis yelled.
The boys were running after me, egging me on. A tickle filled my belly, because the hill was steep and I was flying high. As I sailed along, I was back on the forest trails in Vancouver, riding with my cousins, leaping on our bikes over fallen trees and protruding roots, covered in mud and rain, leaving all my problems behind.
Busy 6 de Agosto was coming up fast. But when I stepped on the brakes, nothing happened. That couldn't be, because the bike was brand new, with its shiny yellow seat and brilliant chrome. Then I was standing on the brakes, but still nothing. So I jumped. It was either that or smash right into a bus full of people.
The bike crashed against a wall, and I rolled along the gutter to land spread-eagled on the sidewalk, with skinned palms and knees but no real injuries. I looked up at the sky and, like a true La Paz girl, crossed myself, kissing my right thumb loudly. I got up, brushed myself off and walked the bike back up the hill, to where the boys were standing. The colour had drained from their faces. I handed the bike to Jose Luis, gave him my dirtiest look and kept walking.
A few nights later, Ale and I went for a walk with Trinidad and my mother. We strolled along the narrow downtown streets, where the sidewalks were so skinny there was room for only one person at a time, the four of us wearing alpaca ponchos to stay warm in the high-land night.
A group of rich boys drove by in a Mercedes-Benz, hurling obscenities at the women as they passed. When they saw my mother with her big belly, they yelled: “Hey, look at that one! She got good and fucked!”
My mother gave them the finger. “Váyanse a las conchas de sus madres, huevones culeados!” she yelled back. (Go back to your mothers' cunts, motherfuckers!) It was the most Chilean insult anybody could use.
The boys shouted: “Oooh! Four Chilean whores! Go back to where you came from, putas!” Then they floored it and drove their car right up onto the sidewalk.
A lady opened her door and yanked us into her house an instant before the car would have hit us. She gave us tea to calm our nerves. On the way home afterwards, Mami said she shouldn't have yelled like that; we were doing too many stupid things to draw attention to ourselves these days. “You mean like Carmen being a slut?” Ale said.
Back at home, I opened a tiny silk change purse I'd bought in Vancouver's Chinatown so long ago. Inside I kept my Virgin of Copacabana, given to me by my classmates in Miraflores on the last day of school. La Grandma had handed it to me, with the rest of the class standing at her side. “May the Virgin keep you safe,” she'd said, “whichever road you're on.” Then we'd all held hands, because nobody knew where life was going to take them. It couldn't hurt, I thought, to thank the Virgin for taking care of us.
ICE CASTLES
, a new figure-skating movie, was playing at the 16 de Julio Theatre on El Prado. Lorena and I had gone twice already, and Bob wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I knew he was probably going to lecture me about cultural imperialism and how Hollywood exported ridiculous versions of middle-class North America, but I didn't careâRobby Benson was cute, and I wanted to swoon over him again. When the movie stopped abruptly, right at the moment the blind ice-skater was bending to pick up the roses people had thrown at her feet, the audience moaned and whistled. It was common for the projectors to break down. But this time the lights came up, and an older woman in a business suit walked down the aisle and climbed the stairs to the stage.
“I am Dr. Vergara Emerson, pediatrician at the German Clinic and professor at San Andrés university,” she began. “I am here to denounce the heinous crimes being committed by the dictator Luis GarcÃa Meza.
Hundreds of people have been killed. Hundreds of others have been imprisoned and are being tortured. Many have been forced into exile, and there are dozens of disappeared. We miners, peasants, doctors, students and teachers have resisted from the first day of the coup and will continue to do so. I ask each of you to stand right now and observe a minute of silence for Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz, leader of the Socialist Party, award-winning writer and university professor, and all the others who have fallen. GarcÃa Meza has bragged publicly about torturing Comrade Quiroga Santa Cruz himself and disposing of his body so that it would never be found. We denounce this terrible crime. We demand the expulsion of Klaus Barbie and his Nazi cronies from our country, and the expulsion of the CIA.”
I was shaking hard, but not just from fear. From excitement. I could tell Bob was excited too. The theatre was jam-packed, and everyone was waiting for someone else to make the first move.
Dr. Vergara Emerson looked out at us all, a strand of pearls trembling on her chest. Finally some young people got to their feet. The rest of the audience followed. No one walked out. Bob and I stood in silence with the others. After the minute was over, Dr. Vergara Emerson said, “Thank you, my compatriots.” She climbed down from the stage and walked back up the aisle to where a small group of well-dressed people were waiting for her. They'd probably go on to another theatre and do it all again. People had started to clap and chant, and Bob and I got out of there fast.
On the bus home, I asked Bob if Dr. Vergara Emerson would be killed. Colonel Luis Arce Gómez, the minister of the interior, had announced on the radio that all Bolivians opposed to the new order should walk around with their wills under their arms.
“I don't know,” Bob said. “But you will remember her, Carmencita, because what that woman did is the definition of courage.”
F
IREWORKS ERUPTED ALL over La Paz, celebrating the kiss I'd been dying for. It was midnight on Christmas Eve 1981, and Plaza Avaroa was a little piece of paradise, its benches and grassy slopes home to the courtship of every kid in the neighbourhood.
Not that I was a kid. At fourteen, I was a veteran kisser, smoker and dancer, and I'd been witness to some very bad behaviour during my first year of high school back in lonely Vancouver. My classmates there had made a habit of alcohol poisoning. Bush parties were the name of the game. You'd crash through the forest to arrive at a clearing containing the moonlit bodies of thirteen-year-olds trashed on booze, pot, mushrooms and acid. I vowed never to drink or do drugs, no matter how much I wanted to dull my pain.
As the kiss continued, I flashed on my father, left behind to celebrate Christmas without us. Midnight had yet to arrive in the far North Pacific, I knew, and I wondered if it was another rainy night in Vancouver. The place had seemed so sedate and sterile after La Paz. Most of my adopted aunts, uncles and cousins had departed from Vancouver, leaving no forwarding address, no doubt responding to the Return Plan. I was still devastated by the image of Papi standing at the end of the airport tunnel, hand on his heart as my aunt Tita held him up.
The boy I was kissing was Ernesto, born and bred in Sopocachi, our new neighbourhood. We lived in a narrow two-storey row house with “Sunnyland” engraved on a plaque above the door. It boasted a palm tree in the front yard, a garage in the back and a tile courtyard where our laundry got washed and hung. The music of our own mortar and pestle joined all the others in the lunchtime symphony of chilis being crushed. Ale and I had been back in La Paz for just three weeks, because my parents had a new deal: the two of us would go back and forth between them until we came of age.
My mother explained the arrangement like this: “Your father misses you.” But I knew it was more than that. As Mami had explained that day at LAX, most women who had responded to the Return Plan sent their kids to live with Cuban families who'd volunteered to raise them or with grandparents somewhere else. My mother had insisted on bringing her daughters with her, and not only that, on having another baby while living underground. As far as she was concerned, a woman shouldn't have to choose between motherhood and revolution. She wanted both. But Trinidad, I'd come to understand, was Mami and Bob's superior, and she'd argued that the current situation was too dangerous. If GarcÃa Meza had fallen after a brief time in power, it would have been different. But six weeks after the coup, the dictator's boast that he would govern Bolivia for twenty years looked as if it might come true. Mami and Bob were in deep, and GarcÃa Meza and Pinochet were soul brothers.
“Well, if you are ordering me to get rid of them, the best thing would be to send them back to Canada. But I feel absolutely that my girls belong with me. I am their mother, and I will not give them up just like that.” Mami's voice broke.
Listening from my bedroom door, I knew that Trinidad would have the final word.
Before we left, my mother took us to the black market, where we talked her into buying us the white Bata clogs that were in fashion. When she reached for her wallet, however, she discovered a hole in the bottom of her purse, where it had been sliced open by pickpockets.
“Well, my precious girls, your memento of Bolivia from your mother will be the anecdote of this hole in my purse.” Mami laughed till she cried. She cried and cried as we walked hand in hand all the way home. Ale couldn't stop sobbing. I cried silently, my teeth chattering.
Papi, who had just completed his PhD, was penniless, and the cheapest tickets he could get for our return to La Paz required a two-day stopover in Miami. We stayed with a Cuban family who still grieved the U.S. defeat at the Bay of Pigs; the driver pressed the gas pedal to the floor when forced to pass through black neighbourhoods. The Cubans were related to Julio, our Colombian friend in Vancouver, though they had no idea that Julio had defected to the left. They showed us around Miami, even giving us a tour of their “freedom farm” on the outskirts, a small sugar plantation where a couple dozen black men worked the land and were housed on the premises in huts. The men had been “saved” from Cuba by this family, they told us. They helped smuggle people out on a regular basis. The evening news on their TV was filled with images of Cubans scrambling out of speedboats, dropping to their knees and kissing Florida's shores.
The stopover was good practice for the Bolivian reality of having to nod and smile and keep our political views to ourselves. No more wearing painter's pants covered in buttons reading “El Salvador SÃ, Junta No” and “Boycott Chilean Goods.” In Vancouver I had officially joined the Rebel Youth Brigade, run by my uncle Boris, so I was now a card-carrying member of the resistance youth. (Not that we had actual cards; that would have gone against security measures.) After being sworn in, I was given the task of politicizing my high school. That involved showing documentaries on Latin America at lunch times, bringing in speakers and raising my hand in class to give my revolutionary opinion on whatever was being taught.
My button campaign had begun with me going up to random kids in the hallways and saying: “Hey, do you wanna wear this button? The red will coordinate nicely with the hats on your Devo button.”
Random kid: “Well, what the fuck does it say?”
“Farabundo Martà National Liberation Front.”
Random kid: “What the fuck is that?”
“It's a revolutionary guerrilla organization fighting for justice and bread in El Salvador.”
Random kid: “No fucking way, man! Gorillas are taking over? Get the fuck outta here!”
“Totally. And they need our solidarity.”
Random kid: “Like, how many are there?”
“Oh, thousands. Urban, rural, rich, poor, intellectuals and workersâ”
Random kid: “Get the fuck out!”