Something Fierce (28 page)
A street boy had joined the small army of slaves who now worked at Lorena's house. He approached bearing a silver tray.
“Meringue, Señora Carmen?”
The boy shined the family's shoes, went shopping for bread and helped wax the floors, Lorena told me, all in exchange for food and a stack of hay on the kitchen floor to sleep on. He looked about seven, and I was shocked to learn he was twelve.
“Malnutrition,” Lorena whispered. “If it hadn't been for my father, who saw him crying all by himself at Plaza Murillo, he'd be dead by now. My mother says to leave him be, but I've taken it upon myself to teach him how to read and write.”
When Alejandro returned, we retired to the guest room on the pretense of needing a nap. The afternoon he'd spent with Lorena's brother had left him agitated.
“It was incredible, Skinny. He's driving me around this gated neighbourhood in his brand-new Mercedes, and he starts telling me about all the stuff he's learning at med school, how the cadavers they work on come from the morgue and are mostly poor Indians who have died violent deaths, including by torture, or teenage Indian girls who self-aborted. Next thing you know he's comparing a doctor's training to a torturer's, saying how in the first year of med school you're urged to puke and faint whenever the urge hits you so that you can get it out of your system, and that what gets you through it all is the knowledge that you're doing this for the good of humanity. He said torturers are also urged to puke and faint when they witness their first torture sessions. Once they get to the point where they're doing it themselves, they understand that what they're doing is for the good of humanity, essentially ridding the world of another type of cancer.”
I held him tight while he cried.
“It's so lonely to be around these people, Skinny, to be seen as one of them. How are we going to survive without like-minded people to talk to?”
“We'll just have to talk to each other.”
On our last night in the city, Alejandro and I found the address Bob had given us before we'd left Vancouver. Getting past a pack of wild dogs took a while, with much waving of sticks, but it was worth it. When Adriana opened her door, I felt at home for the first time since our arrival in La Paz.
“Carmencita! And this must be your compañero.”
Adriana was happy to hear that everyone was safe and sound in Canada and immersed in solidarity work.
“So, tell us. What would you like us to do?” She burped her four-month-old baby as her husband boiled water for coca-leaf tea.
“At this point, it's just good to know that you are here, in case we ever need a place to hide in La Paz.”
“Our house is your safe house.”
“And we'll give you some money to open a post office box under an assumed name, in case we need to correspond with you.”
We spent the rest of the evening playing old Beatles records and listening to stories about Bolivia from our hosts, both hard-working teachers and leftists. Too quickly, it was time to leave.
“We'll send you a note once we've reached our destination safely,” I told Adriana.
“Anything for our comrades, Carmencita. Anything.”
I
'D HAD THE runs for the entire ten days in La Paz. Unluckily for me, they were now accompanied by extreme bouts of vomiting. Things would have been manageable if we'd been back at Lorena's house, but instead we were on a twenty-four-hour train ride from La Paz to Villazón, on the Argentinian border. Our packs could never leave our sight, an almost impossible requirement with me running back and forth to the bathroom and a car so full that people were lying underneath our seats and in the racks above our heads. Then there were the robbers. The train was packed with them, and they carried razors between their fingers.
By the time we reached Villazón, my gut was wrung of every last drop. As usual, the trip had taken almost twice as long as scheduled, because of breakdowns and the fact that whenever we passed a cornfield, the train would slow down to five miles an hour. This allowed the train workers, and many of the passengers, to jump off, grab a few ears of corn and jump back on. People ate the raw corn on the spot.
Crossing the border on foot was a piece of cake. Smugglers, pick-pockets, backpackers from around the globe, businessmen, adventurers, families and vendors crowded the crossing, and after passing the guard two twenties we were waved through. Just like that, we were in La Quiaca, Argentina's northernmost city. At the station there, we boarded a second-class bus heading south.
We were startled awake at four in the morning. “Everybody off the bus!” a male voice barked.
Alejandro and I scrambled down the steps with everyone else and waited by the side of the highway. The bus drivers checked the tires, cigarettes hanging out of their mouths, while the Argentinian federal police released two German shepherds onto the bus. All the luggage was pulled off to be opened. Most of the passengers were Bolivian families who had come to look for work in Argentina, and two men in plainclothes shouted in their faces.
“You think we want your filth in a civilized country like Argentina? Well, you'll see what's coming to you if we find anything illegal. You'll see what an interrogation really looks like.”
Alejandro and I stood silent.
“We know there are people on this bus transporting something of great interest to us. You can turn yourselves in right now, or you can wait till we find your goods. And believe me, we'll find them. So, what's it gonna be? If you turn yourselves in, it won't be as bad for you. Here in Argentina, we like people who co-operate.”
When the dogs came off the bus, they went straight for my open packs. One of the men shone a flashlight in my face. I knew my pupils must be dilated, and I knew that dilated pupils signalled fear. Marcela, Lucas and Juan had taught us that. A rat clawed at my spine. But then something happened. It was as if someone had split me open with a machete, pulled out my terrified heart and thrown it on the ground to die, leaving my chest an empty cage. My pupils shrank, and my breathing slowed. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the dogs making a mess of my clothes and toiletries. The items were carefully stashed, though, and impossible to find, I hoped, without tearing everything apart.
Within fifteen minutes we were back in our seats as the bus pulled out onto the highway. No one had been thrown into the police cruisers. All the bags had been closed and returned. Parents held their crying children close, and the sound of frightened whispers filled the bus.
“Welcome to Argentina, dear Bolivians,” Alejandro muttered.
I was wondering how to get my heart back into my body. I was numb, my breath shallow. It was critical to stop the fear, but did that mean having no feelings left at all? If that was the only way to keep doing the work, it was a price I was willing to pay.
WE ARRIVED IN Villa MarÃa, Alejandro's hometown, in the early morning on a cold, cloudy winter day. His parents, MarÃa and Paco, were waiting for us at the bus station with open arms. Tears ran down MarÃa's face as she patted her son's head. As the three of them hugged, rocking together like a boat on the sea, Paco's legs vibrated with emotion. I stood to the side, my hands clasped in front of me, listening as the bus station came alive with the shouts of newspaper vendors and the hiss of espresso machines. On our way to the car, Paco offered me the crook of his arm, but MarÃa remained aloof.
Villa MarÃa's cobblestone streets were clean, and already the sidewalks were full of ladies in housecoats and curlers sweeping and washing the pavement in front of their doors. MarÃa and Paco's house was long and narrow, with a freshly waxed floor and a gleaming table where we sat to have croissants and coffee. As the day wore on, MarÃa started to warm up to me. I walked with her to evening mass, and that seemed to help. Her beloved son was back in Villa MarÃa only long enough to marry a woman she didn't know, and though she'd accepted long ago that he was an atheist, it still hurt her that her only boy would not have a church wedding.
My grandmother Carmen had a phone in her house by now, so I'd called her from La Paz and invited her to come. My grandfather had died a year earlier. Because of the blacklist, Mami and Uncle Boris had mourned him from afar.
When there was a knock on the door the next morning, I leapt up from the table and ran to open it. There she was, holding the same large cake box she'd brought to Bolivia for my fifteenth birthday. She wore a widow's frock and the grey winter coat she'd had for years. Her 1940s suitcase was at her side.
“Abuelita!”
“Why didn't anyone inform me that Villa MarÃa is two days' travel from Limache? I thought it was just over the border. And then there I am at the Mendoza bus station, telling a taxi driver to take me to Villa MarÃa, and he doesn't understand me. Finally he realizes I'm talking about Villa MarÃa, Córdoba, and that it's two provinces over. I had to sit on a bus for another day to get here!”
“I love you, Abuelita,” I giggled into her hair.
“Now, let me go so I can get a good look at you.”
We stood on the sidewalk together as she shook her head, hands on her hips.
“You're a woman now. A woman.”
Alejandro and I were getting married for political and immigration purposes, and that was that. I'd been announcing to the world since the age of eight that I would never marry, and as far as I was concerned, I was just doing some necessary paperwork, taking care of legal matters in a town I didn't know, surrounded by strangers. My wedding dress was a fuchsia satin tube skirt with matching top. MarÃa and Paco's next-door neighbour had curled my hair, and my new sister-in-law had made me a bride's bouquet of dried flowers. Alejandro's relatives and family friends crowded around us in the civil registry as we exchanged our vows. My only blood present was my grandmother, and she cried as she signed her name next to mine. She was my witness, the person I loved the most in the world.
“Why were you crying, Abuelita?” I asked at the reception as we sat watching people dance.
“Because I hate that son of a bitch so much.”
I'd never heard her swear, and I almost fell off my chair.
“Alejandro?”
“No, no. I'm referring to Pinochet. Because of him I'm here, in a foreign country, watching my exiled granddaughter getting married far from her rightful home. You left when you were six years old, Carmencita. Now you're eighteen, and I've lost it all. I've lost it all.”
As my heart expanded painfully in my chest, I rose and staggered to the bathroom. Inside a stall, I bent double, flooded with homesicknessâfor my parents, my siblings, all that was familiar. My feelings had returned with a vengeance, and it took all I had to get them under control. Back at the table, I choked down the cake that had taken my abuelita three days to make and two to transport. I held her hand tightly in mine.
The following day we saw my grandmother off at the bus station. Her beloved dog Muchacho awaited her in Limache, as did her new vocation. Since my grandfather's death she'd started making figurines, brooches and earrings, described in detail in the weekly letters she'd sent to me in Canada. After spending fifty years kneading dough for bread, pies and pastries, she'd begun to people her solitary house with witches, babies, cats, trolls, and invented creatures that sprang from her agile hands. The dough told her what to do, she explained, and she used toothpicks for the finer work. Food colouring gave her creations a soft pastel glow or the brightness of the rainbow. Once a month, her sister Perlita, one of the three virgins, came to visit from Santiago and took my grandmother's crafts back to the boutique in the Plaza de Armas gallery, where they sold like hotcakes. I was wearing her wedding gift that day, a brooch and matching earrings so delicate people had gasped when they learned they'd been made by her hand.
After waving goodbye from the platform, Alejandro and I picked up our bags and walked to another part of the station. Twenty-four hours later we would start our brand-new life. We had two hundred dollars to our name.
A
N EIGHTY-MILE-AN-HOUR WIND greeted us in Neuquén. Dirt, garbage and the odd tumbleweed flew through the freezing air. We locked away our bags at the bus terminal, first visiting the bathroom so we could transfer the goods we were carrying to the inside pockets of our coats and our money belts. It was noon, meaning we had two hours before businesses shut down for siesta. The city was booming, we knew. People from every corner of Argentina were arriving in droves, since this was the oil capital of the region, with work to spare. We headed for the closest rental agency, leaning our bodies into the gale.
The rental agent frowned when we told him what we could afford. “There's not much I can do for you for 150 australes,” he said.“ The cheapest place I've got right now is 170. I suppose you have no guarantor?”
“No, we just got here, and we don't know a soul.”
“What do you do?”
“She's an English teacher, and I'm an electrical engineer,” Alejandro lied. I'd completed a night course in English as a second language in Vancouver, but a teacher I was not. Alejandro was merely an electrician.