Something Fierce (6 page)

“This is La Paz. The highest capital city in the world,” my mother said.

I looked up to see if that meant the sky was closer.

“This is where we'll live.”

A group of girls about my age were passing us on the sidewalk. They carried leather school bags and had their hair in immaculate braids. They laughed as they walked hip to hip, arms around each other's shoulders and waists. I looked at Ale. She looked at me. It had always been the two of us, and here we were, still together. I moved closer to her, and she leaned into my side. Bob flagged down an empty taxi as the bells of the cathedral announced evening mass. I was surrounded by people who must know all about life, I thought. There was no way you could live in a crater, closer to the sky than anyone else, in the heart of South America, in the continent's poorest country, and not know about life.

4

T
HE KETTLE BOILED its way to exhaustion as Jimmy Cliff sang “You Can Get It if You Really Want” for the tenth time in a row. It was one of Bob's favourite songs, and he played it day and night. Even though we put iodine in the water, we still had to boil it for thirty minutes before we could drink it. There was diarrhea and vomiting to be wary of, but also typhoid and cholera.

The four of us were seated around the table, which was set with bread and jam, waiting for our tea so we could celebrate the chairs. We'd carried them home from the San Francisco open market, almost killing ourselves on cobblestones. The hills in La Paz were so steep you couldn't help breaking into a run as you headed down. People had screamed when they saw us coming and jumped out of the way. A couple of mules had followed us, elbowing each other and laughing, perplexed as to why we hadn't just piled the chairs onto their backs.

Our new home in Miraflores, a lower-middle-class neighbourhood with the national stadium at its centre, was at the end of an alley off one of the great boulevards that criss-crossed this part of town. We'd found the house through Tammy's connections. Tammy was from Wyoming, but she'd lived here since the sixties, which was when Bob first met her. They'd both been hitchhiking through these parts and ended up volunteering at a hospital in the highlands. Tammy's hairy legs indicated to me that she was On the Left. But when I announced how excited I was to live in the country where Ché Guevara had died a mere twelve years earlier, a fact I remembered from one of my uncle Boris's stories, Bob pulled me aside and said sharply: “Don't do that. Tammy's not a revolutionary. She's a pacifist. She has no idea what we're really doing here.” The loneliness I'd been feeling off and on since we'd begun our underground life dropped like a stone into my gut and stayed there.

Our house consisted of two rooms separated by a little staircase. We slept on the floor of the upstairs room in our sleeping bags. Both rooms were spacious, though, and there was a bathroom off the upstairs room and a kitchen off the downstairs one. We shared our courtyard with the landlords: Señora Siles, a matriarch in pearl earrings and a housecoat; her daughter Liliana, a woman in her thirties with a Dorothy Hamill haircut and wobbly high heels; her younger son, Juan, a playboy who rode a motorcycle and had papered the walls of his room with pictures of butt-naked women; and Liliana's eight-year-old son, Pedro. They were part of a clan that stretched back to the time of the Conquest, a prominent family of politicians ranging from the far right to the left, and they liked to tell us as often as possible that they were of full-blooded Spanish descent.

Bob and my mother filled us in on the details. Señora Siles's father, Hernando Siles, had been president of Bolivia from 1926 until 1930. Her brother, Hernán Siles Zuazo, had taken part in the 1952 revolution that led to the nationalization of Bolivia's most important mines and to major agrarian reform. Siles Zuazo became vice-president after the revolution had triumphed, and then president. During the Second World War South America had flourished, Mami explained, because the United States was otherwise occupied. But by the mid-fifties, the U.S. had turned its full attention back to the South, and during Siles Zuazo's term as president, Bolivia was pressured to adopt economic programs that were to the benefit of the United States and the local bourgeoisie. In 1971, General Hugo Banzer, who had trained at the U.S. Army's infamous School of the Americas, was installed by Richard Nixon after a military coup overthrew the left-leaning president, Juan José Torres. Banzer had Torres killed, and during his rule, thousands of Bolivians were imprisoned and tortured. Many disappeared, and hundreds were murdered. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank poured millions in credit into Bolivia as the country's natural resources were handed over to multinational corporations. Half a year before we arrived, Banzer had called elections to calm the volatile political climate. Through massive fraud, a general of his own choosing was elected, even though Siles Zuazo, the leader of a coalition of left-wing parties, had actually won. Now a conservative politician named Walter Guevara was serving as interim president. Bolivia was a powder keg, my mother said, and nobody knew what was going to happen next.

The Siles family's three maids, two young teenagers and an older woman, slept on bundles of hay brought into the landlords' kitchen late at night. They washed themselves in the morning in the cement laundry sink in the courtyard, using pails to shampoo their hair in the five o'clock highland cold, when a veil of frost covered the city. I loved to watch them braid their hair and weave coloured wool into it. The maids talked in Aymara. They liked to laugh long and loudly, but I could also hear them cry late at night. They scrubbed the landlords' clothes in the cement sink in ice-cold water until their hands bled. Often Señora Siles would monitor them: “More bleach on that one, you Indian. Or don't you know the meaning of white?” The clothes were hung to dry, and when they were taken down in the late afternoon, every last piece was ironed. The maids swept, washed and waxed the floors in the landlords' vast house, on all fours. They cooked four meals a day from scratch, kept an eye on Pedro, made the beds, scrubbed the three bathrooms clean, tended to the garden and did the shopping at a nearby market, where they were allowed to go for only half an hour at a time. The walls of the courtyard were topped with broken bottles encased in the cement. The jagged edges pointed straight up to keep thieves out and the maids in. If they were late getting back, Señora Siles would pull their braids and spit in their faces. Her shrieks of “Stupid, lazy Indian!” overtook house, garden and alley. Ale and I watched it all from our kitchen window, where we were peeling potatoes and boiling the corn. On a day when the punishment was particularly harsh, Ale exclaimed, “I will never be poor. If you're poor, that's how people treat you.”

“But that's why we're here,” I said. “To participate in the struggle to change all this.”

“No. I don't care about the struggle. I will never be poor.”

The maids got two hours off on Sundays, between three and five in the afternoon. In preparation, they shined their braids, added coloured pompoms to the ends and put tiny gold hoops in their ears. Each pulled out a velvet skirt and pinned an embroidered shawl over her shoulders. A bowler hat and a pair of flats with starched bows completed the look. They were beaming by the time they boarded the bus to Plaza Murillo, and didn't seem to mind that Ale and I were tagging along, although of course we'd go our own way once we got there. Dozens of buses were headed to the centre of the city, crammed with maids and the men who would woo them as they walked in big circles around each other in the plaza. Shoeshine boys grabbed the buses' back bumpers, their wares on their backs and their feet on homemade skateboards. Vendors in white pleated smocks held cotton candy like little pink clouds above their heads. University students with ancient typewriters strapped to their backs made the pilgrimage along the cobblestones, card table under one arm, block of paper under the other. They hoped to make a few bucks by taking dictation from the maids, who maybe had to send a letter to an important someone. The men who received the letters would pay some other student to have them read.

Organizers from the domestic workers' union were also out in full force, speaking urgently to maids of all ages about a planned general strike. Most maids were new to the city, and many of them didn't get paid. They simply worked as slaves in exchange for room and board. If a maid was impregnated by one of the males of the house, she'd get fired and thrown into the street, and then what? Ale and I heard all this from a woman shouting through a bullhorn. We didn't get too close to the action, though. Bob had warned us that no matter how much solidarity we felt for the maids, we had to come across as neutral Canadians who just felt sorry for them; otherwise our cover might be blown.

ONE SUNDAY EVENING in late August Ale and I pulled out the two white smocks we had bought at the San Francisco market and two leather school bags. Five notebooks each, a jar of black ink and a calligraphy pen. Tomorrow was the first day of school.

The public school, only three blocks from our house, was one of the best in the city, but the naked eye wouldn't have told you that. It was a falling-down building with rubble strewn around it. No glass in the windows, cracks in the walls. There were three shifts for students. Morning was for boys, afternoon was mixed, and night was for adults who'd never made it past their primary studies. Our shift would begin at 1:00 PM and go until 6:00.

We set off the next day. Hair braided so tight it hurt, socks pulled up to the knee, nails, ears and teeth clean. Mami and Bob waved goodbye from the corner. My mother wiped tears from her eyes; seeing us back in school in South America made her sentimental. As we entered the school's central courtyard, Ale and I were met with lines and lines of students, raven hair shining in the midday sun, girls in starched white smocks and boys in navy-blue sweaters and grey pants. A tattered flag was raised during the national anthem, and the school principal, a middle-aged man in a suit, faced the assembly from a wooden riser, singing at the top of his lungs. A metre-long stick held in his right hand moved to the beat. Dozens of women teachers, also in white smocks, stood in neat lines next to him. Each carried a book in her left hand and a stick in her right. Young men in leather jackets walked through the lines of students, wooden stick held in the right hand, tip of the stick caressed by the left. A few times the anthem was punctuated by the whack of a stick against a child's thigh, but everyone sang all the same, chests puffed and proud.

Next the principal pulled Ale and me up onto the wooden riser, where we looked down on the hundreds of brown faces.

“These two new students are from Canada. You will treat them with respect. If you don't, I'll hit you.”

He punctuated the air with his stick for effect.

“Where's Canada?” The principal pointed to a male student with his stick.

“With your permission I will answer the question, sir,” responded the boy.

“You have my permission to continue.”

“Thank you, sir. Canada is the second-largest country in the world, sir, after the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It is situated just north of the United States, and it is part of our great continent of America. The population is Anglo-Saxon, and their religion is Protestant. There is one province, Quebec, where the population is French and their religion is Catholic. It is a First World capitalist country with a liberal democracy, and it has access to both the Pacific and the Atlantic, as well as the Arctic Ocean. Shall I go on, sir?”

The principal shook his head. He sent Ale to join one line of girls and me to another. One of the leather jackets placed me at the very back of my line, because I was the tallest in my grade seven class.

As a series of whistles sounded, I was swarmed by my new classmates. They took turns hugging and kissing me, bombarding me with questions. A stick cut through the air with a snap and landed, hard, on one of the boys' butts. He flinched, and the rest of us ran. The whole group took the marble stairs two at a time, telling jokes and passing each other love notes and bits of toffee. Inside the classroom, each person stood next to an ancient wooden desk, following a seating plan based on gender: boy, girl, boy, girl, boy, girl. My desk, beside a paneless window, looked out onto one side of the bowl that was La Paz. Every bit of the desk's wooden surface was engraved with hearts, dates, initials, political slogans and fragments from the poetry of the beloved Peruvian César Vallejo: “I shall die in Paris, in a rainstorm. On a day I already remember.”

A crest hung above the blackboard: “1879–1979, the one hundredth anniversary of the Great War of the Pacific: OH, PACIFIC, HOW I CRAVE YOUR RETURN TO BOLIVIA, OH, PACIFIC, YOU WHO THE CHILEANS STOLE FROM US WITH THEIR CRIMINAL HANDS. THE PACIFIC IS BOLIVIAN.” The war, fought for five years over who would control the mineral-rich Atacama Desert, had been started by the British as part of their divide-and-conquer tactics in South America. Bolivia had lost, and hence become landlocked. One more good reason to avoid saying I was Chilean. A leather jacket entered the room to take roll call. Much to my surprise, I was not the only Aguirre. The other was a boy with light brown hair who looked at me with a luminous smile and winked. Suddenly the students chanted loudly: “Good morning, teacher! How are you!” A bespectacled man carrying a briefcase walked to the head of the class, the indispensable stick under his left arm. We watched him snap his briefcase open and pull out a stick of chalk and a rag. “I'm fine, ladies and gentlemen. Señorita Flores, the board, please.”