An Uninterrupted View of the Sky

by Melanie Crowder

  The guard taps a finger against his rifle. “You’re wasting your time. This is a homicide investigation.”

  “If my son passes his exams today, he will graduate with a secondary school diploma. No one from my family has ever held a secondary school diploma. No one from my family has ever been given that kind of opportunity.”

  The guard doesn’t care—that much is clear. My breath comes in rasps. I have to get to Soledad. I have to get to school.

  Papá lowers himself onto one knee, and then the other. “I may never leave this place. But please, let my children have the chance for a different life than this one.” He lifts his hands in supplication. “Please.”

  The guard shuffles his weight from foot to foot. He looks over his shoulder at the gate behind him. “I can’t.”

  Papá reaches into his shirt pocket and pulls out a roll of bills. It’s everything we have.

  “Papá, no!”

  The guard doesn’t say anything, but he takes the money, reaches behind him, and opens the gate a sliver, just wide enough for Pilar and me to slip through.

  I have to go. Now. It’s what Papá wants, only I can’t seem to move. Pilar closes the space between them and wraps her arms around Papá’s neck.

  He and I have never been able to say what we need to, face-to-face. Maybe I could now, if my throat would open. But it doesn’t, and I still can’t. So I kneel beside them, and the three of us hold on as tight as we possibly can.

  Two breaths, and Papá pushes us gently away, to the other side of the world. “Go now—quickly. And don’t come back.”

  Pilar and I pass hand in hand through the gate. I look back and Papá is still on his knees, framed in the doorway, waving good-bye.

  I didn’t cry when Papá was put in prison, or when Mamá left us, or even when we had to move in to San Sebastián. But if Papá has lost us and he’s lost hope then I think maybe everything is lost.

  My eyes itch. The back of my throat burns. I pull Pilar with me in the space between the brick wall and the row of parked cars, and the water spills from my eyes and my nose like marrow seeping out of a cracked bone.

  I force myself to concentrate on my end-of-year exams. I turn in all my poems to Profesora Ortiz (even the embarrassing ones), and hand in the essay to Profesor Perez.

  I should say good-bye, or at least thanks, to my teachers, but every second I have to wait until Soledad is beside me, before I can be sure she’s all right, makes panic rise up like it’s going to choke me from the inside.

  When the day is finally over, I dodge kids ripping papers out of their notebooks and throwing them into the air, and guys kicking their backpacks down the hallway like they’re shooting on goal. I squeeze through a crowd dancing and singing, flinging their arms all over the place, past a group of girls laughing and hugging each other, and I’m out—through the double doors of the school for the last time.

  As soon as I’m free, I run the whole way, to grab some food at a street-side market, to drop my application in the mail, to buy tickets at the bus station, and finally, to pick up my sister at the primary school.

  Pilar is ready when I get to her. Her jaw is tight, and her eyes are wide. This is never what she wanted, to leave Papá. It’s never what either of us wanted. I take her hand, and together we run for it.

  When we pass under the arch to Reynaldo’s broken city, I don’t see Soledad anywhere.

  “Soledad!” Pilar shouts while I dash through the place, tossing blankets in the air and ripping tarps off the shacks. “Soledad!”

  The kids are wide-eyed, flinching away from me like I’m some kind of monster.

  I wince at the fear on their faces. I’m not a monster—maybe I was, before. Maybe that’s where I was headed. But I’m not. Not anymore. I unclench my fists.

  If she’s gone, though, if something has happened to her—

  “Hey—Francisco.”

  I whirl around. It’s Reynaldo. His hands are up, and his face is pleading.

  “Hey, man, it’s okay,” he says.

  “Where is she?”

  He lowers his hands and beckons. “She’s resting. She’s waiting for you.”

  I’m shaking, and it’s Pilar who follows Reynaldo, pulling me after her. We go through another arch and up a winding staircase into a room with carpet on the floor and lamps in the corners and a sofa against the wall, where Soledad is sleeping, a blanket pulled up under her chin.

  Pilar runs over to her, whispers in her ear, and smooths the hair away from her bruises. Soledad sits up slowly, watching Reynaldo and me through her one good eye.

  Time slows, my breath slows, and it’s like even the dust and dander sifting through the air all around us slows. Soledad stands and moves to my side. This girl who doesn’t trust anyone trusts me. Pilar kisses Soledad’s hand and clasps it between both of hers.

  Reynaldo watches as the three of us leave together. He lifts a hand to wave from the top of the stairs, and now that the weight has fallen from my chest, now that my hands are filled with Pilar’s on one side, and Soledad’s on the other, I can smile in return.

  A real smile. A full one.

  At the bus station, I hand Soledad and Pilar their tickets. We climb on board and even in the tight spaces and the noise and the still air, my breaths come easily. We’re here. We made it.

  Soledad and Pilar take one seat, and I sit across the aisle from them, close enough to help my sister shift her heavy backpack, and close enough to reach out and brush the back of Soledad’s hand. If I knew how, I would draw that sadness from her cheeks, and her eyes, and her mouth.

  Instead, I keep my hands clasped in my own lap. Soledad sleeps, and I watch the flutter of her eyes under closed lids, the flicker of a pulse at her neck. A slant of sunshine filters across her forehead, her torso, and the backs of her hands.

  There is blood under her fingernails.

  The day fades, and the bus rumbles over the broken highway. The road climbs steadily up into the hills. To reach the Altiplano, you have to go up, over the high mountain passes. The road, sometimes paved, sometimes not, hugs the side of peaks. If you look over the edge, you can see bits of gravel tumbling down to a graveyard of cars with blown-out windows, rusted doors, and broken frames lining the bottom of the ravine.

  When we reach the top, the earth levels out again, rolling and barren, and stretching as far as you can see. We pass a man working a small rectangle of tilled earth. We pass a military checkpoint, and we all get out, our bags held in front of us while men with machine guns walk a drug-sniffing dog down the line. We pass empty stretches of land where only wandering llamas and vicuñas live. The orange and pink light from the fading sun drips over terraced hillsides and jumbled rock piles that mark abandoned mines.

  Pilar whimpers and shifts in her sleep. Soledad tucks herself against my sister’s sleeping form. But before she sleeps again, she finds my eyes, reaches a hand across the narrow aisle and rests it for a moment against my cheek, her fingers curling behind my jaw.

  I can’t help myself, I lean into her hand and press my lips against her palm. Soledad’s eyes flare and fade. Her hand falls, and then her eyelids, too.

  In the city, wrinkles of mountains surrounded us at all times like cracks around the rim of an eggshell sky. But it’s different here on the Altiplano. It’s not really the air, or the quiet, or even the Andes in the distance. It’s the sky. It doesn’t keep to its borders. It’s all-encompassing. It’s everything.

  The earth stretches as far as I can see, to where the beginnings of blue shiver on the horizon, where the air is so thin my lungs shrink in on themselves just to feel full, where the only scar in the ground leads to abandoned mineshafts deep in the earth, and the sky is too much to take in with a single glance.

  • • •

  I take Pilar’s hand as we step off the bus. There is no luggage to hand down from the roof. We have not
hing but our backpacks. But we’re together.

  I tug Papá’s hand-drawn map out of my pocket and turn it as the bus chortles along the road, coughing dust and exhaust over us like incense spilling out of a priest’s thurible, blessing the last leg of our journey.

  When Pilar was born, we came here once to show the new baby to our grandparents. All I remember from that trip is a curving, dusty road ending in a cluster of squat buildings nestled against the hills. I wait for Soledad to come in line with Pilar and me; she catches my hand, and the three of us start down that same dirt road together.

  We should have taken the night bus so we had all day to walk. But I didn’t think that far ahead. So when night comes, we lie side by side on the edge of the road. Before, I might have been scared. Now, after all we’ve been through just to get here, the gato montés and the foxes will damn well leave us alone.

  Pilar invents her own constellations and whispers their stories in Soledad’s ear, tracing the figures in the air. The sky is smothered with stars, with no city lights to mute them. The mountain peaks in the distance are little more than jagged shadows. I shift my backpack beneath my head like a pillow and look up. I swear if the mountains weren’t there, the sky would wrap underneath me too, like a big bubble of stars.

  It’s quiet, not like in the city, where restless cats yowl at the darkness and taxis weave through the streets at all hours. If there is even anything alive out here besides those lonely vicuñas, it isn’t saying a thing. My head falls to the side, away from the stars. Soledad is watching me over Pilar’s head. Her eyes are black pools. The starlight shines in her hair.

  It’s a good thing Pilar is there, asleep, between the two of us.

  Still, I reach across and run my hand up and down her arm, chafing the goose bumps from her skin. I blow on my palm to warm it and lay it against her bare neck. “You’re cold,” I whisper.

  She shakes her head. “Do you know that every night I spent in San Sebastián, I wrote a wish on a scrap of paper and dropped it over the prison wall? Every night. Do you know what my wish was, Francisco?”

  “What?” My voice cracks on the cold air.

  “This. Freedom. I’d rather spend every night of my life shivering in the dirt than in that prison or on the street under some tough’s protection.”

  I can’t hold those eyes.

  “Francisco, look at me.”

  My eyes flick back up to hers.

  “Ven.”

  And I do.

  I lean up and over Pilar, and Soledad pulls me up and over to the other side of her. I take her face in my hands and kiss her. Those black eyes flutter closed as she moves against me.

  Her lips are salt and wind and fire on mine. She presses the length of her along the length of me, and the stars start spinning above. The shadow mountains disappear, and the bubble of stars is spinning, spinning, spinning all around us.

  November 18

  It’s not a short walk, but it’s an easy path to follow. There’s just the one road. By midmorning, I can see the low buildings like a smudge against the hillside, and by the time the sun is above our heads, we’re there.

  The whole community comes out to welcome us: two dozen people, not one of them younger than my father. They offer us coca like Papá said they would, and I mumble my way through Aymara words I half remember.

  My abuela kisses our cheeks and takes our hands. She’s round and short, but her grip is so much stronger than I would have expected. My abuelo’s back is hunched and his gait is broken and shuffling, but his eyes are clear when he asks about his son.

  Soledad answers for us, and translates. I thought I would feel awkward, like I didn’t belong here with them. And it’s true, I don’t—I’ve spent so much of my life pushing this part of me away, out of sight. But despite all that, through the leathery pads of Abuela’s fingers, through the loose weave of Abuelo’s shirt, something is there, beneath the skin and beyond blood.

  My grandparents hold on to Pilar and me and to each other, and tears roll down their creased cheeks. I know those tears. The ones that are half and half. One part joy, to have us here with them, and an equal part sorrow, to know that Papá was left behind.

  Late November

  Anyone looking in from the outside would say my grandparents are terribly poor.

  They store all their food in the silo beside the home. What’s in there lasts no more than a year. What goes into the silo is no less than every bit of food they were able to coax out of their small plot of land the year before. Quinua, ocas, corn, peppers, potatoes. There is a jar with eight coins on the mantel above the cooking fire. I counted. Eight.

  They tell time by the angle of the sun. They gauge the weather by the smell of the air. Abuela has a chicken. Pilar loves that scruffy thing from the second she scatters her first handful of seed. And a goat—they have a goat for milk, too.

  Both of my grandparents are missing teeth. Their skin is folded and wrinkled and soft. They look so much older than I remember.

  Soledad talks to them. She’s teaching Pilar the Aymara language so she can speak to our grandparents on her own. Pilar soaks it up like a cactus about to flower in the rainy season. Soledad tries with me, too, but the words are like spines on my tongue. She laughs this cackling, uncontrollable laugh when I speak. I don’t mind. I think I would do just about anything to hear her laugh.

  Soledad is Abuela’s shadow. She’s different here. So many days of contentment strung together have altered the slopes and rises of her face.

  Pilar is Soledad’s shadow. She follows behind while they talk about plants and herbs and old stories. She still collects shed snakeskins and dropped feathers, desiccated exoskeletons and snail shells, and gives them as gifts every chance she gets.

  The two of them stepped into their first day on the Altiplano like they were stepping into the rest of their lives.

  But me? I know this isn’t my place. I know I’m going back, and maybe soon. Maybe for a long time. I can’t be fully here. Not yet.

  • • •

  Abuela has a quipu that tracks the crops and the harvest. It looks like a bunch of knotted cords in different colors all strung in a row. But I can ask (well, Soledad can ask) how much it rained in 1967, and the answer is there, in the knots. She can ask the yield of the quinua crop over the last ten years, and Abuela’s fingers drift down the cord to find the answer.

  They don’t have computers or telephones. They don’t have chemicals to test the soil or machines to till the rows. But I’m beginning to wonder if their way, which is the same way it’s been done here since before the rule of the Inka, isn’t so much better.

  Abuelo can’t work the soil like Abuela. His lungs won’t let him. So he sits on a bench in the shade in front of the house shaping and binding together sets of pan flutes to sell. He does this every day, but I’ve never heard him play them. I bet his lungs won’t let him do that anymore either.

  I sit beside him and lean against the wall as he turns a pile of hollow sticks into an instrument. My head drops back. Beyond the thatched roofline, the sky is the kind of blue you only get up here above the haze, above the layers of wispy clouds that hang over the valleys. A blue so clear you’d think you could bend your knees and swan dive into it.

  I was wrong about this place. And these people. And my place here, with them.

  I thought coming to the Altiplano would be taking a giant step backward. I thought anyone who would live up here was backward. I didn’t think I would see any part of myself here.

  Instead, it’s like I’ve taken a giant step to the side. All the crazy energy of the city is still there, spinning out in the valley below us; I’m just taking a break from it for a while. Yeah, the no running water sucks. But my hands don’t clench into fists so easily here. They’re too busy digging with Abuela in the fields or helping Abuelo milk the goat.

  The air is thin. The rhythm of the day is s
imple. My mind is quiet.

  I get it now, when Papá said his poetry came from this place. The Altiplano becomes a part of you, if you let it. It forms like dew on your skin and sinks in through your pores. It alters the chemistry of your blood. It changes you, if you let it.

  Soledad and I are suspended in this in-between place, where neither one of us knows what comes next. I know I’d never be able to leave Pilar here without Soledad watching over her. She knows she never would’ve made it here without me.

  But it’s more than that. Our lives are stretching out before us, unplanned and unpredictable. Will I even get accepted into university? If I do, how long will I be gone? In a year from now, or two, will this place still feel like home to her?

  How often will I be able to visit? And how, now that I know what it feels like to sleep with her in my arms, will I ever be able to leave?

  So we don’t talk about it. We wake together when the sunlight slants through the open window, we sleep together on an animal-skin mattress, and we make sure we’re never far apart in the hours between.

  The afternoon heat is punishing. Sweat pours off my skin. Abuelo is sleeping when I duck into the house; his breath sounds like pebbles knocking together. I blink and wait for my eyes to adjust to the darkness inside. Two white rectangles glow faintly from the rug. Envelopes. Somebody must have made the trek to town for the mail.

  I float over and kneel down, my skin as thin as the membrane of a helium balloon. I pick up the envelopes and bring them close to my eyes. One is from San Sebastián prison. The other is from the University of San Simón. I weigh the two envelopes in my palms.