Exile Music

by Jennifer Steil

  That was the beginning. Once I received that letter I wrote her nearly every week. She wrote me as often, always promising to come soon. But money was elusive. The country was still reeling. Passage to South America cost more than her writing could earn, and her small village offered few opportunities to supplement her writing income. A friend with a gallery had offered her some work writing exhibit copy. Still, the salary was paltry. Had I had enough money of my own, I might have been tempted to travel to France, as much to see where Willi died, to imagine his life, as to see Anneliese. I should have liked to know where to imagine him.

  But in my family, we had never worked for the sole purpose of making money. We worked to create what it could not buy.

  Sixty

  I thought of Nayra and her weaving as Miguel and I strolled the aisles of Alasitas after a summer rain. Nayra and her tiny loom, her dreams of threading constellations into cloth. It had been hard to see her during the past year, preoccupied as I was with school and Miguel. Yet in a way she was responsible for both of these things. On holidays and weekends when Miguel was busy in the observatory or on the football field, I sat with her at the market. She had a loom of her own, one of the backstrap looms like her miniature (gracias, Ekeko), and during slow times she would work. I just watched her, admiring the dexterity of her fingers. She was still frustrated with the shapes and patterns that emerged, though to me they seemed miraculous. They even looked a little bit like stars, with their dozen points. Someday I will weave one of our stories, she had promised me. Someday.

  We walked past an array of tiny loaves of bread and pea-size pastries. My heart skipped. It had been a couple of years since my mother had made her promise. There were moments I almost told Miguel about it, told him all that she had done. I had no one else to tell; I wanted help carrying her secret. That secret also made me doubt Miguel’s expressions of affection. Could genuine love be possible without knowledge, without accepting the dark I harbored? But I could not do it, could not place that guilt on his blameless shoulders. Nor had I ever told him the entire truth about Anneliese, about Rachel. Some truths are not worth the cost of telling.

  I dropped Miguel’s hand to examine the tiny boxes of oats, pasta, the little bags of flour. I never got tired of Alasitas, of admiring the craftsmanship of these tiny things. I bought a newspaper the size of my palm for my father, wondering what my mother might desire in the coming year. No, I knew what she desired. I knew I would never bring her anything approaching it. Besides, she had always rejected the premise of Alasitas as superstition and fruitless yearning. I would not buy her a gift.

  Strange that some part of me still believed in the magic of Alasitas, despite the failure of Ekeko to give me back my brother.

  “Mi kantuta.” Miguel reappeared and took my arm.

  “Would you like a set of tools? A new typewriter? A suitcase full of money?” The tiny notes were so real looking.

  “I’d like to discover a new planet and have it named after me. You?”

  I picked up a tiny motorbike. “I already have a charango. I almost have a university degree. I’m not sure what else I need. I don’t suppose I could purchase a poetic voice?”

  “Is there really nothing else?” There was a strange note of urgency in his voice. “Orlita—”

  “Sí?” I imagined how a motorbike would fare on the Bolivian roads.

  He thrust his hand into his front pocket as if to retrieve something, but hesitated.

  “Nothing. Forget it.”

  I set down the motorbike. We walked on. The rain began again.

  “It’s just, what do you want out of your life? What do you want it to be?” He said it so earnestly that I couldn’t respond with a joke.

  “Haven’t we already discussed this for forever?”

  “Not quite for forever. And people change their minds. I don’t assume you will stay the same.”

  “Gracias.”

  “De nada.”

  “I don’t want to work in someone else’s store forever. I love the shop but—I would like to sing poems with my charango. Maybe finish the stories I wrote with Nayra. Maybe turn them into songs.” I stopped and turned to face him, raindrops running through my hair and down the collar of my dress. “It doesn’t matter where. At home or sitting outside in the mountains or onstage . . .” That was a new thought. But I enjoyed my occasional performances with Vico and my father. “I realize I will have to find something else to do to make money.” I had another idea, something that had never occurred to me. “I could open my own bookstore.”

  “And what else?”

  “That’s not enough? I suppose I would eventually like a place to live on my own.”

  “On your own?” Miguel sounded surprised. In Bolivia everyone lived with their parents until they were married.

  “I just want to see what it’s like.”

  “Why?”

  I shrugged. “Curiosity? Maybe to see if I can do it. Come on, I’m getting soaked.” We picked our way across the muddy ground to one of the food booths. Sitting at one of the round tables with small cups of coffee, we spread out our purchases before us. Miguel had bought a little black telescope, a model of the planets, and a tiny six-pack of beer. I had bought only a tiny music stand.

  “You need to ask Ekeko for beer?” I smiled at Miguel. “I’ll buy you the beer. Save your wishing for something bigger. And are you hoping that all the planets are actually going to land on your doorstep?”

  Miguel laughed, tipping back in his chair. “Wouldn’t that be something to see though? Jupiter balanced on the top of the Andes?”

  “All nine of them, all around us.”

  “Pretty. But we’d probably get tired of them blocking the view.”

  I nodded. “It’s not like these mountains need decorating.” I took a sip of my Nescafé. (I was not as discriminating as my mother about coffee. I had left Austria too young.) “What do you want your life to be?”

  Miguel looked down at the table and picked up my hand. “I want to be near my mother and my sisters, always. I want to understand the sky better. Maybe someday, if I keep going to school, I could teach physics. Or astronomy.”

  “And what else?”

  He began fiddling with something in his pocket again. “I realize I shouldn’t have bought it before talking to you, but you don’t have to accept it.” He drew his hand out of his pocket, clutching a miniature and quite crumpled document. Carefully, he spread it out before me, turning it around so I could read it.

  Across the top, in careful calligraphy, were the words “Certificado de Matrimonio.”

  My breath got caught in my lungs. I looked up at him. “Miguel, I—”

  He nodded sadly. “I know. You want to live alone.”

  “Yes, but that isn’t what I was going to say.”

  He waited.

  “Miguel, I’m Jewish.”

  “And?”

  “And I am not going to convert to Catholicism. I am not a religious Jew, but I am still a Jew.” I felt far surer about the things I did not believe than about the things I did.

  He nodded. “Okay.”

  “Okay what?”

  “You can stay a Jew. I’m only really half Catholic after all, remember?” He smiled. “I’m also half witch.”

  “I don’t mind whatever you are, as long as I can be what I am.”

  “Here I was, worrying that you would say you didn’t love me, and your objection is my religion. I feel strangely relieved.”

  “It’s not insignificant. My religion got me sent into exile. My religion lost me most of my family. My religion landed me here.”

  “For that last, I am thankful. I love any religion that brought you to me. But what does that mean for our children?”

  I was not accustomed to this earnestness from Miguel.

  “We’re already having children? We just
started this conversation!”

  He laughed. “Orlita, I’ve been having it in my head for years. Though it wasn’t as interesting without you.”

  “Well, just to keep things interesting, our children would be Jewish, according to Jewish law.”

  “They would?” He thought for a moment. “And you obey these laws even when you are not religious?”

  “I don’t know. It hasn’t ever come up. Not this particular law. I guess I am not sure what it would mean for me to raise Jewish children. I need to think about it.” I imagined a miniature Miguel in a yarmulke and smiled. “I would want them to know their history. I would want them to light candles sometimes.”

  “I always thought your Shabbat was a very rational way to spend a Friday night.”

  I thought for a moment. “Miguel, what are your actual beliefs?”

  He leaned back in his chair again and looked up at the sky beyond the canopy of the food stall. “I believe there is a God. I believe in Mother Nature. I believe in gravity and orbits and mysteries. I believe God is in many places.”

  I drew a deep breath. Marrying Miguel would mean closing the door to Anneliese before she even got here. Closing the door to possibility. I did not want to be rushed. “It’s not that I doubt my feelings for you. But I want to talk about this for longer.”

  “About the children part, or the marrying me part?”

  “Both.”

  Miguel put the certificate back in his pocket.

  “That wasn’t a no,” I clarified. “That was a not yet.”

  “I know,” he said. “But you can’t have it until you’re sure.”

  * * *

  • • •

  I WAITED TWO YEARS for Anneliese. For a brief period, I thought it might be possible to have everything I ever wanted. But I did not think it through. How she might have changed. How my feelings for her might have changed. Whether she could be happy here. Whether I could ever return to Europe. Whether I could give up the hope of a child. Eventually, I realized that Anneliese might never arrive. That she might not actually want to arrive or be able to make the journey. That I might not like who she had become. I could no longer put my life on hold for an insubstantial dream. This fantasy of a life with a woman. With this particular woman. It was also becoming impossible to imagine life without Miguel.

  I lived alone for two years, during my last year of university and the year afterward, writing and working on plans for the bookstore, plans that blazed brightly once conceived. Miguel visited often, to spend the evening studying at my kitchen table while I wrote or played music or tried to figure out how to craft a business plan. I realized quickly that I actually didn’t want to do bookkeeping or accounts. I really just wanted to talk with people about books. At some point I would have to find a partner. And a location. And money. The bookstore was a very long-term plan.

  As was Miguel.

  But he was growing restless. I told myself to be content with the knowledge that Anneliese was alive. That she loved me still. That is more than most people I knew ever had.

  * * *

  • • •

  WE MARRIED IN DECEMBER—a lucky month for weddings, Miguel said—under a chuppah in my parents’ garden. To keep rain away, we placed eggs in each corner of the flower beds. It was 1951. I was only twenty-three, yet I had already lived two whole lives.

  We poured drops of singani into the earth of my parents’ garden, a tribute to Pachamama. To the shock of both Señora Torres and my parents, we included a priest, who offered a marriage prayer, and a rabbi, who blessed our cup of wine. We also included an amauta, who spoke prayers to Pachamama in Aymara. (Any other god we ought to cover? Miguel commented as we reviewed the plans.) My father played with his string quintet; my mother made the cake (with my close supervision). I wore a white cotton dress with a wide green sash. Together, Miguel and I crushed the napkin-wrapped glass under our feet. I had thought for a long time about the wisdom of including this element. The breaking of glass carried weight for my family, carried pain. “But with this act, you can transform that sound for yourself, into something joyful,” said my father, who knew more about sound and its meanings than anyone. While Miguel had been willing to crush the glass alone, I felt strongly that a Jewish foot should participate, even if it was female. As the cries of “Mazel Tov” and “Felicidades” broke out around us and I lifted my foot from the shards of crystal, I looked over at my parents. Tears ran down my mother’s cheeks, but my father nodded at me, and smiled.

  * * *

  • • •

  AS A WEDDING GIFT, my parents had bought us a week at a hotel in Cochabamba, where I had never been. While it was still high, it was not nearly as high as La Paz, and I marveled at the softness of the air, at how easy it was to stroll the relatively level streets of the city. On our wedding night, we were gentle with each other at first. We took our time learning the geography of each other’s bodies, despite our growing impatience. We had known each other so long, but there were still so many mysteries. The sex itself did not hurt; on the contrary, I wanted to start again as soon as it was over. How had we waited this long? Miguel eventually drifted off, exhausted, but I felt too alive to ever sleep again. When my thrashing legs accidentally kicked him, he woke and put a hand on my hip. “Are you all right? Can I help?”

  “Yes,” I said. “You could sing to me.”

  And Miguel opened his mouth and he sang. He sang a low, summoning song with words I did not know. An Aymara song. A song that drew before my eyes the landscape of the Andes, a song that summoned the sun or put it to bed. I had never heard Miguel sing. His voice was rough and kind. His voice held me. Before he reached the end, I was asleep.

  * * *

  • • •

  WE FOUGHT OUR WAY through those first few years, each of us clearing a place for ourselves in the marriage. Staking our ground. I hated cooking and Miguel did not know how to cook. I liked to be up early and he slept late. I didn’t know how to make the right foods. He didn’t know how to wash his clothing. He had had a mother who kept a tidy house; I left dishes in the basin for an entire day if I was in the middle of a poem or reading a good book. These domestic details required adjustment for both of us, required concessions and compromise. As they do for us all. Complicating matters was the fact that Miguel wanted a child right away, while I wanted to wait, to settle into ourselves and our lives. A child would bring further reshufflings and negotiations. I wanted there to be space between changes.

  Yet it never occurred to us to part. This fighting was simply a process to be gotten through in order to figure out how to live and change together. A way for us to sort out what was important to us, what we could live with. A way to make our boundaries and priorities clear.

  When Isidora was eventually born, her existence drew everything else into place.

  Sixty-one

  I hadn’t only married Miguel, I had married all of it—the mountains, the chaos, the waves of political unrest. We had barely set our feet over the threshold of our new apartment on calle Nicaragua in Miraflores when rumors of revolution reached our ears.

  I sat tearing apart a marraqueta in early April, puzzling over the day’s edition of El Diario.

  “Don’t expect to gain any clarity in those pages,” said Miguel.

  I sighed, and closed the paper. “I want to understand.”

  “I know. You understand a little already. You know that most Aymara, most Bolivians, do not have the right to vote. Most do not own the land they work. Something like six percent of the landowners own ninety-two percent of the land. Ninety-two percent! Did you know that? All the mines. Most of the farms. What have they left for the remaining ninety-four percent of us? Outside of the city, almost no one owns the land. They work all their lives to have nothing. Their land was stolen.”

  I nodded slowly, thinking about Nayra. Thinking about what I knew about losing land, losin
g a country.

  “The MNR wants to change that, to give that land back to the people. To take the mines away from foreign hands.” Miguel supported the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario, the political party whose candidate, Víctor Paz Estenssoro, had won the presidential election in 1951 while in exile in Argentina, but was prevented from taking office by a military junta. “We want to give the vote to everyone.”

  “I don’t know how anyone can argue against that.”

  “But they do. There is going to be violence, Orlita, but we are going to own this country again.”

  * * *

  • • •

  HIS PREDICTIONS CAME true on April 9, 1952, when the revolutionaries surged from across the country. The church bells warned us first. They were always ringing, to announce the demise of a government, the rise of a new one. They rang to say it was time to pay taxes to a different man, to march in a new army, to fall in step with a new ruling party. The Bolivian government was overthrown with alarming regularity. Every time I heard those bells, my skin tingled with fear.

  The previous government had given power to the military rather than cede it to MNR. Now, MNR revolutionaries marched to wrest control from the military. They blocked the roads; they fired rifles and ignited sticks of dynamite. They carried their dead home on their backs. There were explosions and gunshots in the streets. For three days they fought; for three days I kept the doors and windows locked.

  Miguel had wanted to join the fighting. “I need to be part of this, Orlita. It’s my country.”

  “You cannot be part of it if you are dead. How many people do I have left, Miguel? You want to take one more away?” A terrified fury rose in me. “I didn’t marry you to endure one more heartbreak. I didn’t marry you to grieve again. I married you because you gave me hope for happiness. You give me hope, Miguel. Does that mean nothing?” To underscore my final word, I threw the iron pan in which I had cooked his eggs across the kitchen floor, narrowly missing his feet.