ONE SUNDAY EVENING in late August Ale and I pulled out the two white smocks we had bought at the San Francisco market and two leather school bags. Five notebooks each, a jar of black ink and a calligraphy pen. Tomorrow was the first day of school.
The public school, only three blocks from our house, was one of the best in the city, but the naked eye wouldn’t have told you that. It was a falling-down building with rubble strewn around it. No glass in the windows, cracks in the walls. There were three shifts for students. Morning was for boys, afternoon was mixed, and night was for adults who’d never made it past their primary studies. Our shift would begin at 1:00 PM and go until 6:00.
We set off the next day. Hair braided so tight it hurt, socks pulled up to the knee, nails, ears and teeth clean. Mami and Bob waved goodbye from the corner. My mother wiped tears from her eyes; seeing us back in school in South America made her sentimental. As we entered the school’s central courtyard, Ale and I were met with lines and lines of students, raven hair shining in the midday sun, girls in starched white smocks and boys in navy-blue sweaters and grey pants. A tattered flag was raised during the national anthem, and the school principal, a middle-aged man in a suit, faced the assembly from a wooden riser, singing at the top of his lungs. A metre-long stick held in his right hand moved to the beat. Dozens of women teachers, also in white smocks, stood in neat lines next to him. Each carried a book in her left hand and a stick in her right. Young men in leather jackets walked through the lines of students, wooden stick held in the right hand, tip of the stick caressed by the left. A few times the anthem was punctuated by the whack of a stick against a child’s thigh, but everyone sang all the same, chests puffed and proud.
Next the principal pulled Ale and me up onto the wooden riser, where we looked down on the hundreds of brown faces.
“These two new students are from Canada. You will treat them with respect. If you don’t, I’ll hit you.”
He punctuated the air with his stick for effect.
“Where’s Canada?” The principal pointed to a male student with his stick.
“With your permission I will answer the question, sir,” responded the boy.
“You have my permission to continue.”
“Thank you, sir. Canada is the second-largest country in the world, sir, after the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It is situated just north of the United States, and it is part of our great continent of America. The population is Anglo-Saxon, and their religion is Protestant. There is one province, Quebec, where the population is French and their religion is Catholic. It is a First World capitalist country with a liberal democracy, and it has access to both the Pacific and the Atlantic, as well as the Arctic Ocean. Shall I go on, sir?”
The principal shook his head. He sent Ale to join one line of girls and me to another. One of the leather jackets placed me at the very back of my line, because I was the tallest in my grade seven class.
As a series of whistles sounded, I was swarmed by my new classmates. They took turns hugging and kissing me, bombarding me with questions. A stick cut through the air with a snap and landed, hard, on one of the boys’ butts. He flinched, and the rest of us ran. The whole group took the marble stairs two at a time, telling jokes and passing each other love notes and bits of toffee. Inside the classroom, each person stood next to an ancient wooden desk, following a seating plan based on gender: boy, girl, boy, girl, boy, girl. My desk, beside a paneless window, looked out onto one side of the bowl that was La Paz. Every bit of the desk’s wooden surface was engraved with hearts, dates, initials, political slogans and fragments from the poetry of the beloved Peruvian César Vallejo: “I shall die in Paris, in a rainstorm. On a day I already remember.”
A crest hung above the blackboard: “1879–1979, the one hundredth anniversary of the Great War of the Pacific: OH, PACIFIC, HOW I CRAVE YOUR RETURN TO BOLIVIA, OH, PACIFIC, YOU WHO THE CHILEANS STOLE FROM US WITH THEIR CRIMINAL HANDS. THE PACIFIC IS BOLIVIAN.” The war, fought for five years over who would control the mineral-rich Atacama Desert, had been started by the British as part of their divide-and-conquer tactics in South America. Bolivia had lost, and hence become landlocked. One more good reason to avoid saying I was Chilean. A leather jacket entered the room to take roll call. Much to my surprise, I was not the only Aguirre. The other was a boy with light brown hair who looked at me with a luminous smile and winked. Suddenly the students chanted loudly: “Good morning, teacher! How are you!” A bespectacled man carrying a briefcase walked to the head of the class, the indispensable stick under his left arm. We watched him snap his briefcase open and pull out a stick of chalk and a rag. “I’m fine, ladies and gentlemen. Señorita Flores, the board, please.”
Our teacher roamed the aisles with his stick, checking everyone’s ears and nails, before addressing us again. “Welcome to art class, ladies and gentlemen. Homework on your desks.” The students around me opened their drawing tablets. The teacher walked again from desk to desk, holding up a few sketches for everyone to admire: charcoal portraits of a boy sitting on his shoeshine box, a girl leaning against a washbasin, a young vendor holding out a box of Chiclets. These students with their perfect posture and greased-back hair clearly knew and loved their people to the core, and this strict teacher understood how to pass on the skills that allowed them to capture their world and its inhabitants. As he moved among us, he held forth on dark and light, contours, depth and perspective. The students nodded furiously and took notes on his every word.
I sat with my hands crossed in front of me, lost for a moment in memories of macramé hour at my old school. A drumming on my desk brought me back to reality. It was the menacing stick, which led to a hand, which led to an arm, which led to a crisp white shirt and a wide black tie. Then there was an Adam’s apple and a mouth and a pair of goldfish-bowl glasses.
“Homework.”
My mouth refused to open. A girl in front of me turned around to say I was new, but the teacher glared at her, and she fell silent.
“Stand up.”
I did so.
“Hands.”
Students were gesturing to me to offer my palms. I willed my hands to stay in place as the stick cracked through the air, coming down hard. Two tears shot like projectiles from my eyes as I took my seat.
From the front of the class, the teacher lectured on art and revolution, accompanying his words with lively quick sketches on the blackboard. The artist must be ruthless in his pursuit of the truth, he said, and when he found the truth, he must utter it with love and beauty, whatever the danger involved. “An artist who does not risk his art and himself is to be pitied.” My hands were smarting from being hit. But I liked him, because he talked to us like adults. There was nothing in his voice or demeanour to indicate that we were intellectually incapable of grasping these concepts. When the class was over, I stood with the other students and recited: “Thank you, teacher, for the lesson of today!” We bowed as he left the room.
At recess, the whole class ran to the courtyard together, everybody holding hands. People passed coins to a girl they called La Grandma. When she got back from the kiosk, the candy she’d bought was split evenly, and then everyone played together.
At eleven, it turned out, I was the youngest in my class. Most of the other grade seven students were between thirteen and fifteen, and almost all of them worked, the girls as maids and the boys as shoeshine boys. Not all masters were like our landlords, I learned. Some girls spoke highly of the families they worked for, and all were grateful they were given the freedom to go to school. The shoeshine boys lived with their own families and helped provide for them. When times got tough, school sometimes had to be dropped for the year.
Señorita Flores took me under her wing, telling me her secrets as if we’d known each other forever. She was fifteen, a maid, possibly pregnant and thinking of getting married to her twenty-year-old boyfriend. He would save her from a life of servitude, because he was an elevator operator at a downtown office building. Since s
he was wise in the ways of romance, I showed her the note somebody had passed me during art class. “Señorita Aguirre: I have been admiring you from afar for precisely fifteen minutes. And I have come to the conclusion that I am profoundly in love with you. This is my declaration of love. Do you accept? Your fantastic admirer, Eugenio Aguirre. p.s. How convenient that we already have the same last name, don’t you think?” I must wait at least twenty-four hours before I gave my answer, my mentor advised, and even then only at his request. In the meantime, I should restrict myself to brief eye contact and half smiles.
We had four more classes that afternoon: literature, mathematics, French, and embroidery for girls and carpentry for boys. When the day was over, it seemed as if everybody had a sweetheart they’d been dying to make out with, and they were doing that now, no holds barred. Hundreds of night students rushed in through the rubble, pulling combs through their hair. Every teacher worked a morning, afternoon and night shift, my classmates explained, but few had the privilege of teaching all day at the same school. Some of them taught at the university as well. Like the students, they were required to provide their own tools: books, chalk, paper and pens.
The shoeshine boys from my class, including Eugenio Aguirre, chased after a bus, their homemade skateboards under their arms. Some of the maids were discussing the tasks waiting for them at home: one had to wax all the floors that evening, one had to help prepare a five-course meal, another had to wash a week’s worth of laundry. Since they had the day’s homework, too, they decided they’d go from home to home and do the housework as a group. The other girls in my class offered to walk me home. On the way we bumped into Ale, who was balancing six hot dogs given to her by her classmates and chatting animatedly with a large group of boys and girls. When I came alongside her, we talked about the hitting. Together, we decided never to mention it to my mother and Bob. They might take us out of that school, and we would rather die than leave now. We really would.
That night, I pulled out my Chinatown stationery. The letter-writing ban was off now, and this was the first time I’d written my father a letter. “My dearest Papi: I cannot tell you how much I miss you. Revolutionary Central America was not meant to be, so here I am writing you from the highest capital city in the world, La Paz. Today was the first day of school, where I went to grade seven. My classmates are working children who don’t seem like children at all...”
5
THERE WERE TWO people sitting in our new chairs one day when Ale and I got home from school, a man and a woman about Mami and Bob’s age. The man was blond and blue-eyed. The woman wore John Lennon spectacles.
“This is Lucas. And this is Trinidad. They’re going to stay with us for a while,” said my mother. “They’ll be like your uncle and auntie. Just don’t tell them anything about yourselves. And if anyone asks, say they’re distant cousins of mine visiting from Mexico.”
The newcomers didn’t bat an eyelash. An open bottle of wine stood on the table, and all of the adults were smoking like crazy. I could tell Mami and Bob were happy to have company. We cooked a Chilean cazuela together for dinner, a stew made with potatoes, squash, rice and meat. Darkness fell, we pulled the curtains shut, and it was just like the old days in Vancouver. The adults drank more wine, the ashtrays overflowed, and our shortwave radio, usually tuned in to news stations from all over Bolivia and the rest of the world, was playing Andean music instead. Hours passed as we swapped stories and jokes. My mother and Trinidad kept grabbing each other’s shoulders for support as they laughed. My mother had always had lots of girlfriends, and I could see how much she’d been missing them. Bob and Lucas spoke in hushed tones about the mounting crisis in Bolivia. Walter Guevara, the interim president, was faced with a critical economic situation, thanks to the Banzer dictatorship, which had robbed the country of millions. The military were nervous about the planned elections, because they did not want to respond to questions about the bloodshed during the Banzer years. Poverty was out of control, and people were clamouring for change. Bolivia was growing tenser by the day.
Trinidad had mashed up her food during supper, and every so often she got out of her chair and lay down on her back. She’d lie there laughing at one of my mother’s jokes, and everyone continued as if it was the most normal thing in the world to have Trinidad on the floor like that. Lucas had wavy fingernails from torture, and there were two bullet-hole scars on his right forearm. At least that’s what they looked like to me. Trinidad and Lucas reminded me of my uncles and aunties back in Vancouver. The ones who’d been fresh off the boat, direct from the concentration camps, with their scars and broken bodies. We all did janitor work together, in a group. The broken ones would have to take breaks from using the big vacuum cleaners and mops to lie on their backs on the floor. There was always someone who was crying uncontrollably, and someone else would explain it like this to us kids: “The Great Sadness has overtaken Aunt Lidia today. That’s all.”
For the first time since we’d arrived in Bolivia, my heart ached for my people in Vancouver. I got up from the table and went outside to the courtyard. When I came back in, the adults were singing banned songs in whispers: the music of Violeta Parra and the exiled Chilean groups Quilapayún and Inti-Illimani. Those two groups had been touring Europe when the coup had happened. If they’d been in Chile, they probably would have suffered the same fate as the great singer Victor Jara, who had been tortured and murdered in Chile Stadium days after the coup. In Vancouver, the Chilean solidarity committee held monthly peñas at the Ukrainian Hall, benefits with singing, dancing, empanadas and wine. Hundreds of people—Chileans, gringos from the labour movement and the Communist Party, hippies, U.S. draft dodgers and exiles from everywhere from Palestine to Uganda—jammed into the place. Speeches would be made and documentaries shown and cumbia danced. The kids ran around, falling asleep under the tables while the adults cleaned deep into the night. The money raised was sent directly to Chile, because an active resistance demanded an active solidarity, as my mother always said over the microphone, her left fist in the air. Snow sometimes covered the ground as we drove through Chinatown and back home, where there was always a place on our couch for a new refugee.
Lucas and Trinidad stayed with us for months. Lucas would sometimes leave for a week or so, but he always returned. Soon after their arrival, Bob landed a marketing job at Bolivia’s first computer company. My mother started teaching English at the American English Centre. They both set off early every morning, leaving Ale and me to do our homework. Once that was finished, the two of us went to the market, haggled for food and cooked lunch. We ate together; working hours in Bolivia provided for a long lunch, the most important meal of the day. After that, Ale and I would go to school.
In the mornings, before breakfast, Lucas greased his hair back, dabbed on English Leather cologne and ironed his white shirt. He owned only two shirts, and he rotated them, washing one every night in the bathroom and hanging it to dry. At breakfast, he and Trinidad listened to the shortwave radio and commented on the news. Lucas, who was as cool and collected as an oyster lying on the bottom of the sea, would shake his head and murmur while Trinidad yelled out obscenities at the right-wing general being interviewed or praised the miners who were denouncing their horrific working conditions and demanding a change in government. Some of the miners in the highlands had started their own radio stations, and everybody listened to these to get local news and reports on Bolivia’s political situation. Sometimes Trinidad would pull Ale or me onto her lap and caress our arms and hair. She found all kinds of things funny, and it was easy to make her laugh. She liked to have things clean, so she spent a lot of time scrubbing our floors. She was a voracious reader who could read a book in a night, and often did, since she was an insomniac. She liked black coffee for breakfast and had a tendency to stare off into space for long periods of time, cigarette held near her face, hand shaking just a touch.
At night I’d sit quietly at the top of the stairs and listen to the adults talk.
Trinidad and Lucas were on the blacklist in Chile, I’d figured out. They had both been in the leadership of the resistance when the coup happened. Lucas had been sent to the notorious Colony of Dignity, a concentration camp run by an ex-Nazi who was one of Pinochet’s right-hand men. The camp received political prisoners of German descent with special glee, torturing them for being traitors to the Aryan cause. Nobody got out of the Colony of Dignity, Bob said, shaking his head in admiration, but somehow Lucas had. Trinidad had been sent from Villa Grimaldi, an underground detention centre near Santiago, to Chacabuco, a concentration camp in the Atacama Desert. Both of them had sought asylum in Mexico, since Mexico City had become the new resistance headquarters.
Those who joined the resistance believed in a revolution that would topple the existing capitalist structure in Chile, kick out the multinational corporations and create a socialist, democratically run state. They believed in armed struggle because the status quo was defended tooth and nail by the military, armed with the latest gadgets funded by foreign backers. When those weren’t enough to keep people down, the United States sent in its own military to oversee and even carry out the dirty work. The resistance had recruited members from all sectors of Chilean society: students, peasants, priests, workers, miners, artists, anarchists and native leaders. Internationalists who had come to Chile from all over the world to support Allende joined the resistance as well. Allende had believed that socialism could be achieved peacefully, through the existing structures, but on the day of the coup, he himself, along with other members of his government, had taken up arms. The resistance was virtually destroyed by Pinochet, its members murdered, disappeared or exiled. But now people believed it was ready to build itself up again from within Chile. This year, 1979, had been deemed the Year of the Return, I heard the adults saying. An international call had been made for remaining members, along with new recruits from around the globe, to go to Lima. Now I understood what we had been doing there. The Return Plan was very dangerous, I understood. All three countries bordering Chile—Peru, Bolivia and Argentina—were under right-wing dictatorships, and Operation Condor was in full swing. Captured resistance members were either disappeared by the local secret police or illegally transported across borders and handed over to Pinochet.
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