I shook my head. “I don’t think Austria is possible for any of us.” When I looked up at him, there was understanding in his eyes. “Austria is like another planet now.”
He smiled, gently, faintly. “So there, you have been to one then.”
Later that night, after we left the bar and had begun to stumble down the cobblestone street toward our homes, he took my hand. I stopped walking. And in the thinnest air of the oldest street in the highest city, my arms trembling with the cold or something stranger, I kissed him.
I had never dreamed about boys. I had tried not to dream at all, afraid of what my unconstrained self might do with girls in the small hours of the morning. Though it wasn’t girls in general that lured me out of myself, just two of them. Just as Miguel was the only boy. My school friends had fallen in love regularly and almost indiscriminately. I found it alternately amusing and somewhat horrifying to observe the ways in which they tied themselves in knots for lesser beings. I was relieved to have avoided the absurdity of falling in love.
Yet now that something inside me was beginning to uncurl, I felt a sense of peace rather than anxiety. Miguel, to me, was more home than man.
* * *
• • •
THE NEXT MORNING the peaceful feeling had faded. Maybe I was ruining things with Miguel. I didn’t know if kissing meant he was my boyfriend, or if it was the singani. I didn’t know if I wanted a boyfriend. I got up, put on a dress and shoes, and ran all the way to Miguel’s house. He didn’t play thunka near his doorstep anymore. He didn’t kick balls up the street. I knocked and his sister Celia answered the door. “Orlita!” she said, smiling. “It’s been a long time.” Then, calling back into the apartment, “Miguel! Orlita está aqui!” He came to the door still tucking a shirt into his trousers. “Did something happen?” His face creased with worry.
I felt stupid. “No. Yes. I . . . Come outside?”
“Let me get my shoes.”
Together we walked toward Plaza Sucre. I had forgotten a hat and the sun burned the part in my hair. “I don’t know what I want to say. I only want to know that it was all right. That we did the right thing last night. I’ve never—”
Miguel laughed, a gentle, kind, delighted laugh that offered reassurance even before he spoke. “Do you know how long I’ve been waiting for you to kiss me, Orlita?” Stopping, he turned and took my hands. To my enormous relief, I found that I wanted to kiss him again.
“But you have Carla and—”
“Carla’s a friend. I can talk with her about science. She’s not my girlfriend.”
“Really not?” I felt eleven years old, as if I had once again arrived in a new country.
“Really not. I had a girlfriend named Angela, but we broke up a few months ago.”
Still something hummed in me, something anxious and high. “So what happens now?”
“Whatever we want to happen.”
“But. Bueno. Pero . . .”
“What is it?”
“I’ve never had a novio.”
“Never?”
“Never. So I don’t really know how—”
“Kantuta! You don’t know how to be with me? The same way you have always been with me.”
“Don’t laugh at me.”
“I promise I’m not.” But his eyes were mirthful. “If you want rules, here are some rules. First, we should go to the cinema together. Then we should go for a walk down the paseo del Prado. Then perhaps you will invite me home to meet your parents.”
“Miguel! You’re laughing at me!” I whacked him on the shoulder.
“There is the Orly I know. Come on, let’s get an api and llaucha. I just woke up and I’m starving.”
* * *
• • •
NOW IT WAS MIGUEL who came to our house to do homework with me, although he spent just as much time studying with students in his department. What surprised me the most was how ordinary everything felt, how ordinary he felt. That he had slid into a space that had been reserved for him all along.
At the same time, we were so young. I wasn’t ready for too much. For me, this was all a beginning.
Partly to escape the claustrophobia of our homes, partly because sitting in a bar wasn’t much less claustrophobic, Miguel and I began to walk. Long walks, from one end of the city to the other. Walks that would take us from lunch to supper on Sundays. Or from dawn until the start of our first classes. Walks that took us farther and farther past the edges of the city, to where the houses thinned and the land opened. We walked past where the tram ended in Obrajes. We walked all the way up to El Alto. We walked up the dirt roads that led toward La Cumbre, the highest point before the road descended to Coroico.
Sometimes we talked and sometimes we walked in silence. Miguel talked about his sisters, what he wanted for them. Nice husbands, steady work. He told me about his father. It astonished me how little I knew about his family after living in the same house for so many years. But then, we had spent so much time in the present. The two youngest, Ema and Nina, were going to dance in Carnival this year. In our first years, we had gathered to watch the Bolivians dance through the streets, but I did not like the crowds. There were too many delirious bodies falling toward me, too many unrecognizable faces. I didn’t like the oversize, garishly painted eyes of the masks, their unchanging expressions. I didn’t like to get wet when the celebrants splashed each other with water. Parades and crowds reminded me of other parades in other countries. Now during Carnival, I stayed home.
Celia, the oldest and Miguel’s favorite, wanted to move to Coroico to grow coffee. They still had relatives there. She preferred the semitropical jungles to La Paz. But his mother didn’t like the thought of her traveling on the road that had killed their father. She didn’t like the thought of her daughter falling in love and settling down there.
“How did your parents ever meet?” Given the divisions between the worlds of the Spanish descendants and the Indians, it was an unlikely pairing.
“My father moved from Achacachi, near the lake, to Coroico when he was young, taking his parents and grandparents with him. They had bad crops for many seasons and my father thought the land was cursed, that they should start again. There were already Aymara near Coroico.
“My grandfather—my mother’s father—was a businessman, a trader. He grew up in La Paz and traveled to Coroico to find produce to sell. He wasn’t in the tin business yet. My father sold him fruit. Sometimes he came to La Paz himself to make deliveries. That’s where he met my mother. My mother was still very young when she met my father.”
We were walking along the river toward a rocky canyon below the city, a fantastical labyrinth of twisty stone spires that was one of Miguel’s favorite places. The day was dry and hot, our feet kicking up clouds of dust. I kept my hat pulled low on my forehead.
“How old was she?”
“You know we don’t keep track of years like you do. Maybe fifteen, maybe older.” Younger than we were.
“My grandfather was furious. He didn’t want her to marry an Indian. When she ran away to marry my father my grandfather stopped speaking to her for a while.” He stopped to run his fingertips over the quills of a cactus. They were the only vegetation around.
“And then you came back to La Paz when your father died.”
He nodded, resuming his brisk pace. “And we needed money—even traders don’t make very much here—and so we took you in.”
“And Mathilde and Fredi.”
“Yes. We found the Europeans were good about paying on time.”
“Did my parents always pay on time?”
“I think so, after the first couple of months when your parents didn’t have work yet.”
“But you don’t have boarders now.” Miguel had moved into our old rooms, and Celia, Nina, and Ema shared Mathilde and Fredi’s room. His two older brothers had moved to the
growing city of El Alto and were working in construction.
“I still have some work at the textile factory, it doesn’t pay badly. Watch your step here.”
We reached the entrance to the maze of paths, and I marveled anew at the jagged pillars all around us, like the dripped turrets of a child’s sandcastle.
“What made these things?” I brushed my fingers against the crumbling towers.
“Water. Wind. A lot of time.” He reached back a hand to help me up a rocky section. “And the rock is soft. A mixture of rock and clay.”
“It’s like another country. The surface of another planet. Or the moon.”
“That’s why I like it. I would like to spend time on other planets.” He glanced up at the sky, as if to see if the planets were listening. All we could see above us was uninterrupted blue.
“I guess we’re closer to them than most people.”
“I can almost touch Mars from the window of my laboratory.”
I smiled, placing my feet in the wider prints his made in the dust. “That must be alarming for the Martians.”
“Oh no, we’re friends now. They shoot me down notes through an enormous straw. Terrible handwriting. Curious people; they always want to know more about our food.”
“They don’t have quinoa?” I had developed an affection for the grain, which grew little tails when you cooked it. Sometimes my mother made a pudding of it with cinnamon, sugar, milk, and cut-up apples.
“Nada de quinoa, nada de api, nada de singani. It’s a terrible life. I feel sad for them.”
“Do you shoot them notes back?”
“When I have time. Mostly I shoot them seeds to plant. Amaranth, quinoa, rice.” We paused at a high point in the path to gaze around us at the vast field of rocky needles pointing toward the cosmos.
“How generous of you.”
“I am a generous man.”
“What if they don’t grow on Martian soil?”
“I’ll invite them down to live with us. We have a long history of opening our homes to immigrants.”
Fifty-eight
Miguel and I had been together for more than a year when I found the book. It was June 21, 1948, almost closing time, and I was the last person in the shop. I was tired. It was the first day of the winter solstice and the Aymara New Year, and Miguel and I had met before dawn to greet the first rays of the sun from the cliffs above the city. Dawn was my favorite time, the mountains around us glowing rosy and gold. The light promising that everything was still before us.
When we stood to walk back down to the city, I slipped a hand into the small leather pouch I had brought with me and curled my fingers around a pointy wooden object. “I’ve been waiting for the right time.” When Miguel looked at me, I extended my hand, the tiny painted sun balanced on my palm. He paused in the road to take it from me and turn it in his hands. “Look,” he said, gesturing to the rising orb we had just greeted. “It’s already working.”
The memory of his face that morning kept me warm as I worked. Several crates of books had arrived from Europe and I was shelving them by language. Most of the books in Arbres Morts were in Spanish, but we had a small collection of books in German and English. I always felt anxious opening the German books, afraid of the stories I would find. Wondering what kind of Austrians or Germans had written them, what new horrors the histories and memoirs might hold.
This day, I was hurrying to shelve the last few books so I could lock up the store and meet Miguel for a walk before dinner when I found it at the bottom of the crate. Gold embossed letters on the brown leather cover: Geschichten von Friedenglückhasenland. Stories of Friedenglückhasenland. I closed my eyes and read it again. It was still there. It still said the same thing, just above the image of a little gold rabbit. My hands shaking, I reached for the book, my legs folding underneath me. Sitting there on the floor, I examined the cover more closely. There it was, her name in small letters below the title. Anneliese Meier. She was alive. She had the same name. She had written our stories. With thick and clumsy fingers I fumbled to open the book and turn its pages. My thoughts raced around my skull like frantic mice, skittering into each other. The book fell open on my lap to the dedication: For Orlanthe, cocreator of this land and coauthor of its stories. She lives there with me always.
For a long time I could not move. Then I lay down on my back on the hard wood floor and let the tears run through me. She hadn’t forgotten me. She hadn’t forgotten me. I sat up again then, so abruptly I was dizzy, and searched through the pages for something about her. Something that might tell me where she was. There it was, at the very end. Anneliese Meier makes her home in the South of France. This is her first book.
France! She was in France! Where Willi was. She had probably never received my letter. I wondered when she left Austria, why she was in France. The two people I loved had both ended up there. Had they known of each other’s presence in the country? Could they even have met? No, then she would know I was alive, know where I was. She can’t have met him.
The bell on the door tinkled. “Kantuta?” Miguel stepped into the shop and closed the door behind him.
I had a strange feeling in my stomach, as if I had been caught doing something illicit.
“Miguelito,” I said weakly. “Sit down with me. I have a story for you.”
“Is it happy or sad?”
“It’s both.” I patted the floorboard next to me.
While I had mentioned Anneliese before, I now unfolded our friendship from the beginning, all the way through her mother shoving me into the street, and our final meeting just before I left. “I wrote to her after the war but I never heard anything. I have stacks of letters for her in my room. She never wrote.”
Miguel sat leaning against the bookcase, his shoulder against mine, his legs stretched out in front of him, ankles crossed. He was quiet, listening without interrupting me until my words stuttered to a stop. “There is a reason you are telling me this story now?”
“Look what I just found.” I held out the book, gold letters up. He took it between his hands and stared at it for a moment. Then it registered. “Orlita, your friend’s alive! This is fantastic. Querida, I’m so glad.” He set the book down to kiss me and then picked it up again, turned the pages. “What kind of book is it? This is German?”
I nodded and ran a fingertip over the title. “Stories of our country, the one we created.”
“Does that mean she is still in Austria?”
“The book says she lives in the South of France, not even the name of her village.”
“Will you write to her?”
“How?” I was still too giddy to put my thoughts in order.
He studied the first few pages. “Is this the name of the publisher? Can you write to her there?”
That night I took the book home and read every page before sleeping. I didn’t tell my parents. I didn’t want to share it yet. Nearly all of the stories were familiar, but a few she must have dreamed up after me. She had set them all in a frame, the story of a little red-haired Jewish girl frightened by the Nazis who begs her parents for stories to distract her from the terror and monotony of their lives in hiding. The parents take turns telling the stories, and in the end the little girl and her parents escape abroad. I recognized our bunnies, my Lebkuchen and her Marmalade. I recognized Krokodilland and Katzenland. I recognized the Carrotmobiles. I recognized the generosity and spirit of my Ana.
My Ana. Could I still claim her? Was I still hers? I wondered if we could belong to each other again, and if I could still belong to Miguel. I wondered if a heart could beat for several people at once.
When I had turned the final page, I tucked the book under my pillow and lay awake until all the baby stars over Illimani disappeared.
* * *
• • •
THE NEXT DAY after classes I hurried home to pick up my stack of lett
ers, scraps of paper containing nearly a decade of my life, and sealed them into a large envelope. For a moment, I sat on Willi’s bed, my bed, holding them on my lap. Here were my stories of arrival and disorientation, of thunka with Miguel, of Rachel’s illness and Nayra’s lake. Here were my stories of Alasitas and my father’s orchestra and my mother’s grief. Here was—almost—everything. I had lived with them for so long it tore at me to send them away. These were my whole Bolivian life. I counted out coins for postage; it would be the most expensive letter I had ever sent. In my neatest hand, I printed the address of the publisher, copying it from the title page of the book. It interested me that her publisher was Austrian although she lived in France. Maybe she wrote only in German.
I carried the letters up to the post office myself, and kissed the bundle before handing it to the clerk.
Fifty-nine
A letter from Anneliese arrived just two months later. Forgive me if these pages are still damp, she wrote. I cannot write you without crying. When my publisher forwarded me your letters—all of your lovely, Orly-like letters!—I didn’t sleep for days. I couldn’t stop reading, could not tear myself away from your life. Your life! Your dear life. I don’t think I have ever been as grateful for anything as I was for those letters. For your continued existence. I never let myself imagine that you were dead, but I had imagined that you had forgotten. Forgive me! It was my own weakness and not any suspicion of your character that is to blame. There is so much I will never get it all down. The only way for us to say all we need to is to see each other. I will not believe your hands, your face, your hair survived until I touch them. Can you understand? From everything you wrote, I don’t think you want to return to Vienna. Nor do I. Austria does not deserve you. But I wonder if you might come to France? Though France’s hands are bloody too. No, I think it is better that I come to you. You have done too much traveling already. I will come to you, Orly! I am impatient, but it can’t be soon, as I will need to save. Now that I know what I need the money for I will become the most penny-pinching woman in all of France! For I must see your dear face once more.
Exile Music Page 32
