Something Fierce

by Carmen Aguirre

  Mules didn’t live long. They looked ninety, but the oldest they lived to be was about thirty-five. Usually they died from being mules, but sometimes they died at the hands of the military or the secret police, who liked to use mules for torture practice and then throw their bodies into unmarked common graves. I’d learned about the lives of mules when we were in Ayacucho, because a mule had been telling his story to a school kid with a typewriter in the main square. Bob and I were sitting on the next bench. The mule spoke in Quechua, but the kid translated out loud into Spanish as he typed. At the end of the story, the mule said in Spanish, “My name is Señor Condori Mamani, and this is my story.” He’d wanted his story to be written down, and the kid had promised to take it to the library for him. The kid tucked the mule’s story into the pocket of his starched white smock and then turned to the next person in line.

  That night, from the bus window, I watched as the big-city guy kicked and spat on the old mule who stood in perfect stillness, his dignity intact. I was sorry that Peru wouldn’t be our last stop. I wanted us to join the resistance here so we could help the angry teenagers in the streets and the little boy outside the hotel and the chambermaid whose children were dying of diarrhea and the Indian family who had carried the tables and chairs for the Austrians and this old mule take the streets and squares and mountains and make Peru their own. I’d be ready to participate in whatever way they wanted me to.

  A TIGHT CIRCLE of men pushed in on us, hands shifting in their pockets. Night had fallen at the Copacabana bus station. We’d made it safely across the border, and Mami and Ale and I were holding down the fort while Bob searched for accommodations. Surrounding us now was a group of Bolivia’s best pickpockets. My mother stabbed the air in front of her face with a rusty butcher knife she’d pulled out of her bag.

  “One step closer and you’re dead, sons of bitches,” she snarled.

  Ale and I clung to her like the koala bears from Australia we’d seen pictures of. We must have looked ridiculous, because we were both taller than she was.

  “Don’t worry, my precious little girls. I’ve got everything under control. Watch and learn, kids, how to deal with motherfuckers.”

  Mami took a step forward, dragging us with her. The tip of her knife touched the chin of one of the pickpockets. The circle broke, and the men scattered. I wondered if they had gone to get reinforcements to really do us in.

  As we waited for Bob, I replayed the border scene for the millionth time.

  We’d changed buses in Puno, a small city on Lake Titicaca. “Documents. We’re at the border with Bolivia,” the driver had announced soon afterward. When I caught Mami and Bob glancing at each other, a shard of terror pierced my gut. Now I got it: They were carrying something. They were carrying something dangerous in their packs. Bob’s Adam’s apple moved up and down, and my mother’s nostrils flared. I remembered Uncle Jaime, my father’s best friend in Chile. They said before he was shot by the firing squad, his tongue and testicles were burned black. As we moved toward the front of the bus, I saw men in dark glasses with guns and German shepherds waiting at the door. An invisible axe struck me in the chest. But when the men with guns had asked my mother what she had in her pack, she’d looked them in the eye, shrugged her shoulders and said, “Clothes. Dirty underwear.” Some U.S. dollars had changed hands, and then we’d been ordered back on the bus. The four of us hadn’t been taken to the shack where the people refused entry were sent. They were all Indian, all poor, all Peruvian. There were two young guys with fear clamped in their jaws, a woman with a baby on her back, a girl who’d kept her chin up. The German shepherds had bounded around them barking, stirring up dust that landed in their shining black hair. I was afraid for them, and I swallowed and swallowed what felt like broken glass cutting its way down my esophagus. Bob rubbed my back.

  That afternoon, a boat with our bus on board had crossed Lake Titicaca, the highest lake of its size in the world, delivering us into Bolivia. The boat was more like a raft, really, and the driver put bricks all around the tires to keep the bus from rolling off. Everybody cheered when we were firmly back on land.

  I’d been confused when Copacabana first came into view. From watching Barry Manilow sing his hit song on TV, I’d thought Copacabana was a place where you fell head over heels in love while doing the kick ball change in platform shoes. But I’d gotten it wrong. Copacabana was the home of a brown Virgin with pink neon lights flashing off and on all around her. She commanded the top of a steep hill, and people crawled up to her on their knees like little ants, murmuring prayers in Spanish, Aymara and Quechua. We’d arrived on August 6, Independence Day. Bolivia had freed itself from Spanish control in 1810, and every year thousands of people came to this sacred place to celebrate. Everywhere we looked there were temples and shrines and candles burning. Our Lady of Copacabana was the country’s patron saint. She kept the roads safe, and seemingly every car, cart, bus, truck, taxi and bicycle in the land was here to be blessed. Everybody prayed for protection from accidents that would kill them or turn them into vegetables or leave them deformed.

  As we walked through town, it became evident that every thief in Bolivia was here as well, using razor blades to rip people’s pockets and purses open. The thieves robbed everybody: gringos, skinned-kneed believers, nuns, students, whole families. They didn’t care. People chased them through the streets and markets, but they were fast, and they helped each other out. Also, if you made too big a scene, they might slide a palm across your face, razor still in place, and leave you with a scar you’d have forever.

  Under the circumstances, my mother decided it would be best to keep her butcher knife visible. She held it up against her chest as we manoeuvred around the processions and offerings that littered the sidewalks. Since she was a kill-two-birds-with-one-stone kind of person, she took the opportunity to remind Ale and me that organized religion had been invented by the rich and powerful to keep the poor down. “See?” she said, gesturing to the prostrate pilgrims. “Who’s on their knees right now? The Indians, the most exploited of all.” She gripped her knife with ferocity. “Once upon a time, Bolivia was the richest country in the world. The city of Potosí was crowned by a shining silver mountain. But the Spaniards arrived and enslaved these people—though they resisted, they put up a damn good fight—and made them mine that mountain until every last ounce of silver was gone, across the Atlantic to Europe, along with all the gold taken from the Incas and every last resource in the South. Genocide was committed in the name of the Church and progress. That’s why we are atheists.”

  We passed a red-haired priest who was sprinkling a procession of taxis with holy water as he recited prayers in gringo Spanish. The priest was Irish, probably, Bob said. Buses had their own separate procession, as did trucks. Shiny Mercedes-Benzes driven by men in Ray-Bans lined up as well. The streets were packed, with everybody wolfing down chuño, charcoal-black potatoes, and meat patties called salteñas. Boys and men winked and puckered their lips, murmuring “Mamita” and “Delicious” and other, ruder comments. I noticed that there were mules in Bolivia, too, waiting in perfect stillness with their ropes. The ones with bleeding knees must have climbed the hill to ask for protection from the Virgin.

  We left Copacabana on a newly blessed bus with its own little shrine to the Virgin at the front. The highlands stretched for thousands of miles around us, interrupted by the sharpest mountains I’d ever seen. Our fellow passengers crossed themselves every two seconds. I kept my face still so my mother wouldn’t know what I was doing in my head: asking the Virgin to keep the roads clear and open for my family’s journey. Whatever the journey was. Wherever our destination might be.

  We drove for hours, until the land broke like a Greek plate and there was a drop in the road. I looked out to see nothing but sky. The universe. Then I looked down, and there below us was a city in a bowl. A bowl like the deepest crater on the moon, with a little house stuck to every last square inch of it. The bus drove over the edge of the bowl
and down. Independence Day and the Virgin were being honoured here as well, because hundreds of people were dancing in hand-woven clothes with matching hats. Ladies with ten skirts in every possible colour twirled in unison, bright threads woven through their braids. We continued our spiral into the belly button of the South. Little kids chased after a homemade ball, wild dogs fought over a bone, armies of men carried big bundles on their backs, and finally our bus reached the bottom, honking its way along cobblestone streets with gold-encrusted cathedrals growing out of them. The air stank of shit and rotting garbage. The sounds of Aymara, Quechua and Spanish filled my ears.

  A couple of guys in moth-eaten sweaters threw our packs down from the roof of the bus. We stood on a sidewalk in Plaza Murillo, which looked to be the main square, amid the bustle of newspaper boys, shoeshiners, pinstriped businessmen, Indian women on errands, secretaries, beggars and office workers in baby-blue smocks. There were Indian women selling tiny dried-up llama fetuses and kiosks displaying beautiful cards made of carved bronze and wood and silver. If we’d been allowed to write to our father, I would have bought one to send him.

  “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

  THE 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, ad
ded 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.