After that, my mother retreated again. She stopped cooking, stopped stewing herbal remedies on our stovetop, and stopped talking unless it was strictly necessary. She lost interest in the few friends she had made in La Paz. When Mathilde or one of the others knocked on our door, my mother feigned sleep or a headache. My father and I put meals together as best we could, mostly from potatoes and chicken. I made my mother a chicken soup from the bones, adding quinoa and carrots to fill it out, and was relieved when she managed half a bowl.
It was hard to know how my father was doing. His exterior changed so little, unless he was playing. By now he knew most of the European musicians, and he played with them almost every evening when he was done with his students. They performed small concerts, in our homes and clubs and, as Willi had predicted, talked about one day forming an orchestra. As in Vienna, their loose group was entirely male. But here, there were not enough classically trained musicians, not enough instruments for a formal orchestra. Maybe someday, my father said.
He hadn’t heard anything from his parents, his sister Klothilde, or his brother Franz since we left. He avoided talking about them. When my mother brought them up, to ask him if perhaps he had heard any news, he became angry. “Don’t you think I would have told you if I had heard anything?”
None of our family members had succeeded in getting visas of any kind. By the end of 1939 many Bolivians had already been saying that the only way the country could keep refugees was if they left La Paz for the countryside.
I missed my lively aunt Thekla and her stories. I missed sneaking into my grandmother’s Sunday salons to sit on my brother’s lap and try to distract him from the proceedings. I even missed my grandmother’s stern lectures on decorum and politics. I also missed my aunt Klothilde, though not with the ardor with which I missed the rest of them. Klothilde was an enigma to me. She was bookish and science-minded, like her father, and had been studying to become an internist. Children never interested her. Even music couldn’t hold her attention. I wondered what she was doing now that she could no longer study. Now that she could no longer do anything.
I missed Stefi as much as I missed my family. Kind, plump, freckled Stefi had been with me as long as my parents had. She had braided my hair in the morning and told me stories about the clever chickens in her village in the country, chickens that untied her boots every time she went to feed them. (I was starting to suspect that a person’s value to me had always depended largely on her ability to tell me stories.) I didn’t know what happened to Stefi after we were moved to Leopoldstadt. We couldn’t write to her for the same reason I couldn’t write to Anneliese and because we didn’t know where she had gone when we were moved. My only comfort was that at least Stefi, like Anneliese, was not Jewish.
* * *
• • •
I NEEDED SOMETHING ELSE to think about; I envied my father the escape he found in his viola. Despite school, Rachel, and Nayra, something felt absent.
“Mutti, I want to learn how to sing.” We sat at our table, neither of us reading the books in front of us. Just because she refused to sing didn’t mean I couldn’t. My piano lessons had ended with our flight from Vienna, but music still lived somewhere in me. It rose up when I heard my father and his friends play; it had always been part of the air I breathed.
I knew we could not afford an instrument. But the melodies spinning through my blood demanded some kind of expression. When my father wasn’t around, I wanted to fill the silence my mother created. Singing seemed logical. It was inexpensive and required no instrument. I already sang as I walked to the market. I sang to myself in the bath. I sang with my father’s music when he let me. Miguel and I sometimes listened to music on his mother’s radio; he taught me all the lyrics to “Échale Salsita” and “Solamente una Vez.” I knew I didn’t have an exceptional voice, but maybe I just needed training.
“So sing.” My mother continued to stare down at Effi Briest, which she’d been reading for at least a month.
“But can you teach me? To sing like you?”
“Orly.” She looked up at me. “You know I don’t sing anymore.”
“But couldn’t you teach me?”
She sighed. “I don’t think so.”
“But why?”
She couldn’t—or wouldn’t—explain. “Music is over for me, Orly.”
I fell silent, but my feet kicked at the bars of my chair. “It’s not over for me!” Frustration turned to anger. I wanted to hurt her. “Would you sing if Willi were here?”
Her face tightened. “You do not understand.” Her voice was unfamiliar, hard. “Singing comes from a place that no longer exists.” She shut her book, walked to the bedroom, and closed the door.
* * *
• • •
I DIDN’T KNOW any other singers in Bolivia. Surely many existed, but not in my limited social circle. I wondered if I might have better luck with an instrument, if I could borrow one. I wanted something different, something that would be mine. Not piano, not viola. I consulted Miguel. We had been to see the Mexican film Viviré Otra Vez—I Will Live Again—up at Cine Teatro Tesla, and were walking through Plaza Murillo. (It was more fashionable to go to the 6:00 P.M. showing on Sundays, which our parents called the Vermouth—perhaps because it began at the usual hour for cocktails—but Miguel and I preferred to go during quieter times.)
“You could play the Andean pipes,” he suggested, “or the charango.”
“The charango?” I had vague memories of seeing the instrument in the hands of a street musician. The Andean pipes I heard everywhere, but their sound was too thin, as lonesome as the wind.
“It’s got strings. Like a little guitar. You must have seen one. Come! I’ll show you.” He increased his pace and took me even farther upward, where the streets were older and narrower. “Mira.” He had stopped in front of the window of a shop. In the window were dozens of instruments, including several long-handled, figure-eight-shaped charangos.
Miguel pushed open the door. The man sitting in back by the cash register looked up from the charango he was holding. “Bienvenidos.” He rose to his feet, setting the instrument gently on the counter.
“We’re just looking. My friend might want to play the charango.”
“Might?” The man laughed. “Has she heard charango?”
Miguel turned to me.
I gazed at the wall of instruments. So many kinds! Miguel was right, they looked like tiny guitars, with fat, outsize handles and ten strings. I reached out a finger to stroke the wood.
“No los toques, por favor,” said the man immediately. Turning to Miguel, he said. “Por favor dile a la blanquita que no los toque.” Please tell the little white girl not to touch it.
“La blanquita puede entender,” Miguel told him, smiling. The little white girl can understand.
“Ah! The man’s face opened into a warm smile. “Hablas español! Do you want me to play one for you?”
I nodded, suddenly shy to speak Spanish to a stranger. “Which one would you like to hear?” He touched several of the charangos.
“El escamoso. Con las rayas.” The scaly one, with the stripes. It reminded me of the church I saw in Genoa, made of black and white marble. Everything reminded me of something else, something far away. Poems came to me so often now I had to carry a small notebook everywhere to pin them down before they fluttered away over the mountains.
“Ah! El armadillo!” Gently, he lifted the one I had indicated down from the wall. “Toca,” he invited. I stroked the back of the instrument, which felt hard, like a tortoise. You could still see the silhouette of the living armadillo, the skin of its head and even its tiny ears stretched over the belly of the instrument.
Pressing his fingers into the strings, the man played a few chords before beginning to pick out a tune. “Conoces ‘El Condor Pasa’?” I shook my head. “This is ‘El Condor Pasa’.”
I listened. It was a melancholy piece. A piece to be played alone on the top of a mountain. Restless, Miguel paced the shop, hands behind his back.
“Now hear the difference,” the man said, abruptly stopping and hanging the armadillo-shelled instrument back on the wall. “This one is wood.”
He played the same song, but it took on a warmer tone, not quite as desolate. “It’s the wood,” he explained. “It has more resonance than the armadillo.”
Another connection clicked in my brain. “Wood vibrates with music,” I heard my father saying as he tapped the golden women of the Musikverein.
I knew now what I wanted.
Toward the end of the year, as Bolivia’s rainy season Christmas celebrations began, Miguel came to meet me at the cinema one morning holding a lumpy object wrapped in one of his mother’s scarves. He refused to let me see it before the film, making me wait until we were strolling along the paseo del Prado afterward, mingling with the crowds in their Sunday finery.
When we had at last found enough space around us to avoid passing elbows, I unwound the scarf to find a gleaming charango. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, carved from a small piece of cedar and fitted with twenty nylon strings.
Forgetting even to thank him, I sank down at the foot of the monument to Simón Bolívar, my dry and cracked fingertips on the strings. I plucked a few bright notes. “It’s the child of a harp and a guitar, don’t you think?” I looked up at Miguel.
He shrugged. “I do not think. I cannot imagine the guitar making love to the harp.”
My face felt hot. I could not remember hearing anyone speak about making love before, not out loud, not so casually, as if it were a natural phenomenon.
“Now a guitar and a mandolin I could imagine,” Miguel continued, unaware of my discomfort. “Or even a mandolin and a lute.”
“Did you get it from the store we went to?” I wondered where he could have gotten the money to pay for such a beautiful instrument.
“I made it.” He smiled and looked away from me, uncustomarily shy.
“You made it?”
“Well, parts of it. I had help from a real instrument maker. I am still learning.”
“It must have taken forever! Look how smooth it is!” I ran my fingertips over its face, its beautiful brown face.
He shrugged. “It took awhile.” He had been working a couple of days a week after school in the instrument shop, where he had met the craftsman who made many of the charangos. “I traded work hours for the cedar and knowledge. I can tell you just how to adjust the tension of the strings and how to rub Brazil nut oil into the wood.”
“It looks bigger than the one we saw in the shop.”
“It’s a chango.” The chango—invented in Bolivia, Miguel said—was one of the larger charangos.
“Miguel.” I wanted to embrace him, but I wasn’t sure that would be appropriate. I cradled the instrument in my arms instead. “It’s a work of art.”
* * *
• • •
AS THE WAR RAGED ON, I spent hours alone in my room plucking at the strings of my charango. Given that it was an instrument my father could not teach me how to play—the tuning was different from the tuning of a guitar, and it had double strings—I wondered where to find a teacher. I couldn’t afford to pay one. So as I sat in my room, listening to my father play in the living room, I tried to match my notes to his. Slowly, dissonantly, I plucked my way toward a melody. Progress was slow.
Forty-three
What is your greatest desire?”
It was a strange question, coming from Nayra. She so rarely asked me anything. We were standing near her blanket of vegetables, during a lunchtime lull in January 1941, our second summery January. The relentless afternoon sun was making me sleepy. I thought I should probably be getting home to do schoolwork or to practice before the rain started again.
“My greatest desire?” I didn’t need very much time to think. “For my brother Willi to be safe.”
Her dark brows pulled together. “I don’t know if that will work.”
“But that is my greatest desire.”
“Is there something else?”
I thought. We already had a new home. I already had a charango. I assumed I couldn’t ask for a person since Willi wouldn’t work. I could always use new books but I wasn’t sure that would count as a Greatest Desire. “The end of the war?”
“Something real. Something you can touch.”
“So I can’t ask for the Nazis to die?”
Her face was still for a moment. “This might be possible. Come. I want to show you something.” She set off down the street, leaving the vegetables behind with her mother, who squatted behind the blanket, watching. I quickly trotted after her. Passersby stared at us when we walked side by side, but most of the time the sidewalk was too narrow for us to walk together. I wondered what I would do if a Bolivian were to demand Nayra descend to the street to make way for him. Would I protest? Would she? I balled my hands into fists at my side, prepared for a fight. I wanted to be tested. But our journey was not long, despite the fact that we had to detour around the plazas Nayra was not supposed to enter. We remained unmolested, and I was not forced to choose between loyalty to my friend and obedience to local custom.
* * *
• • •
NAYRA HALTED BEFORE a table in a thronged and sprawling market. It was heaped with what I presumed to be dollhouse furniture: tiny rocking chairs, tiny beds, tiny lamps, tiny houses. Each one was smaller than a thumb. “It’s the first day of the festival of Alasitas. It lasts a month but the first day is the luckiest.” Her face was animated, alight. “We make everything miniature. You buy what you want to acquire in the next year. If you want a baby, you buy a fingernail-size doll to take home. If you want to own a home, you buy a little house. Then Ekeko brings you what you want.” It worked best, she added, if you bought the items for yourself and got them blessed by a yatiri. “Your faith will make it possible for it to become reality.”
“You can’t buy something for someone else?”
“Some people do. It helps if you know the person’s strongest desire. My aunt once bought her friend Nina a divorce.”
“Did it work?”
“Nina has a new husband now.”
So much about this market filled me with wonder. I felt I had stumbled into a kind of fairyland. I picked up a tiny radio. Everything about it looked real. “Who is Ekeko?”
“The Aymara god of plenty.” Looking around the market, I began to see his diminutive figure everywhere. Grinning on top of the tables and surrounded by offerings of coca leaves and cigarettes, the mustachioed Ekeko was supposedly working to provide his hosts with their hearts’ fondest desires. His mouth was always open to accommodate a cigarette and he was laden with packages. Some families had Ekeko statues in their home, Nayra said. After you bought the miniature of your heart’s desire, you could place it near Ekeko with coca leaves.
We wandered through the rows of tables, all of them overflowing with mounds of colorful miniatures. Nayra had not exaggerated. There were miniature cars, typewriters, babies, houses, bags of cement, tool kits, chairs, beer cans, suitcases, tables, trains, fruit, diplomas, and certificates.
I was fascinated by the craftsmanship. The little houses had doorbells and gardens. The postage-stamp-size typewriters had letters on every tiny key.
When we came to one of the tables selling certificates, Nayra asked the woman behind the table something I didn’t understand. The woman nodded and rummaged around in the stacks of certificates. “Mira,” she said to me, offering a tiny piece of paper.
Holding it carefully by its edges, I read, Certificado de Defunción. Death Certificate. The name and date of death were blank. “You fill it in and the person will die.”
I stared at the paper in my hands.
“You could wri
te Nazis on it.” Nayra waited.
Bile rose to the back of my throat. Though I had asked for that kind of power, I found now I did not want it. I could not turn myself into an instrument of death. I dropped the paper back onto the table.
Nayra looked at me. “No?”
“No money.” I wiped my hands on my skirt, as if trying to brush off a fatal contagion. “What do you ask for?”
“We ask for good vegetables, a good harvest. We buy tiny beans and sacks of potatoes. We get good vegetables.”
“Just vegetables? Every year?” The modesty of her request intrigued me. That she wouldn’t wish for money, a way to escape work. A new skirt. Perhaps wanting things was Austrian. She nodded. “Without vegetables, we have nothing.”
I nodded slowly. “But besides the vegetables. What about you? What do you want?” She didn’t hesitate then—there was a difference, clearly, between what she asked for every year and what she wanted. For the first time, she took my hand and pulled me through the market. Her hand was warmer than mine, with soft skin over her knuckles. My hands were always rough and dry, my cuticles peeling away and bleeding. Sometimes a finger would get infected and swell like a sausage for a month, until one of my mother’s remedies finally fought it off.
If Nayra hadn’t been holding on to me, I might have been lost among the families pushing past me down rows of stalls that all looked alike. We walked by women frying bread in oil and roasting corn on a grill. Women pressing oranges into juice. My dry mouth watered.
At the end of the market, Nayra stopped at a woodworker’s stall. In the corner of the table was a tiny wooden loom made of two sticks with strings connecting them, complete with a shuttle the size of a grain of rice. “It’s a backstrap loom,” Nayra told me. “You can move it more easily than the other kind.” She showed me how one stick could be tied to a tree or a pole and the other attached to the weaver’s belt. “Like my grandmother’s loom. She is teaching me.” On the loom was a half-completed tapestry woven from woolen threads of red and black. Alpaca, perhaps, or vicuña. I thought I could make out birds, or tiny human figures. I reached for it, felt the softness of the fibers. “I have no time to weave now,” Nayra said. “What I want is some day to have time. To make my own designs.”
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