Something Fierce

by Carmen Aguirre

  My nighttime life was separate from my daytime one, though each informed the other. I’d accepted Eugenio Aguirre’s declaration of love at school, which meant we walked together in the courtyards at recess. He sent me love notes, but he never touched me. That was a relief. Señorita Flores, whose first name was Valentina, had become my best friend, and the rest of my classmates were so close they felt like cousins.

  One day after school a girl invited me to her house for dinner. We climbed for what seemed like hours up the steep cobblestone streets. The higher we went, the darker the streets got, until we reached a point where it was pitch black. The dirt road was full of holes, and there were no stone steps anymore to lead the way. Life surrounded us in the dark: packs of barking dogs, children playing, men laughing. Everywhere there was the sound of mortars crushing chili peppers—the sound of La Paz at mealtimes. Finally we reached a muddy courtyard surrounded by dozens of little structures made of bricks, cardboard, wood and cement. Faint light issued from most of the houses, and women and children had gathered at a tap at the centre of the courtyard, pails in hand. My mother had drilled into our heads that there was no reason to fear the poor; on the contrary, the rich were the ones not to be trusted. In Canada, people had sometimes crossed the street when they saw us coming, just because we were poor and brown. But I was still afraid now.

  My friend led me inside one of the little structures, where kerosene lanterns lit a tiny living room. The dirt floor, packed solid, was covered with a little rug. The couch and armchair, their arms carved with intricate designs, would go for a fortune in Canada, I thought. The dining room set crammed into the small space shone as if the wood got polished every day. The obligatory shrine to the Virgin stood in one corner, and a portrait of Ché Guevara gazed down at us from the wall.

  My classmate’s mother offered me coca-leaf tea and a cheese pastry. She was young and beautiful, and an educated person, I could tell. She worked as a secretary, she said. As we were talking, I heard someone cough behind a curtain, and my friend’s mother pulled it open to reveal the bedroom: three single beds right next to each other, only inches from the back of the couch. My friend’s grandparents were in one of the beds, sitting straight as rods and smiling wide at me. The grandfather had a head full of white poofy hair and was in starched baby-blue pajamas. The grandmother wore a pink flowery housecoat, and her hair, black with hints of grey, had been pulled back into a braid, then rolled into a bun. A small gold cage encircling a white pearl hung from each of her ears.

  My friend’s mother served us peanut soup for dinner at the antique table. Her father and brother were home from work by now, and the grandparents joined the dinner conversation from their place on the bed. It was late when I left, and my friend’s brother offered to walk me home. He was fourteen, I learned. He worked at the bus station handling luggage and went to school on the morning shift. His dream was to become an airplane pilot. On the way down we bumped into my French teacher, who was climbing the hill with his bag of books and chalk. The next day, from our desks in the classroom, my friend pointed out the part of the hill where she lived. It wasn’t even halfway up the mountain. That made sense, actually, because the higher you lived, the poorer you were. Only the Indian working class lived at the top. And those were the people who had somewhere to live. The starving class lived on the streets, by the thousands.

  WE’D BEEN IN BOLIVIA for almost four months by now, and I had turned twelve in the interim. On the morning of November 1, after my mother and Bob had left for work, I set off for the boulevard as usual to buy fresh bread. It was the beginning of the rainy season. Black clouds were forming, signalling the kind of storm that could send houses rolling down the hills. Oddly, the regular hum of the city was absent when I reached the street. Suddenly, there was a deafening roar, and military jets flashed across the sky in formation. We’d been living in Valdivia at the time of the coup in Chile, but I’d seen the footage of warplanes over Santiago many times since. The jets crossed the sky again, the roar of their engines echoing against the sides of the bowl of La Paz.

  I stood frozen, my spine tingling. Before I could decide what to do, a man in plain clothes and sunglasses threw a stone at me from a few feet away. I ducked, and he pointed a semi-automatic pistol at my face.

  “Get off the street, señorita! Run! Fast! Before I shoot!” He was erratic in his movements, obviously very nervous.

  My eyes darted from side to side. All the stores were closed, and the curtains in every house were drawn tight. There wasn’t a soul in sight except soldiers and plainclothes men in dark glasses. I smelled burning rubber, heard the distant sound of sirens, and it hit me all at once: this was a coup. I started running back down the alley, then hesitated. The man in plain clothes was at the mouth of the alley now, his gun pointed at the ground. If I kept going, he’d see where I lived, where Trinidad and Lucas were staying. My mind jumped to Mami and Bob.

  An explosion threw me to the ground. This was it, I thought wildly. I would die in the heart of South America, killed by a man shooting children in the streets. My heart pounded in my ears. I didn’t want to die, though, not yet. I hadn’t had the chance to devote my life to a greater cause, for a better world, as my mother and Bob and my aunts and uncles in Vancouver were doing.

  A clap of thunder cracked the sky in two. Buckets of water drenched me, giving me the strength to bounce to my feet and run. I decided I’d let my legs take me home, then figure out where the bullet had hit me once I got inside the courtyard. Knees skinned and bleeding, I made it to the gate, looked back one last time—and there the man was, gun still pointed down. He hadn’t shot me. The ferocious clap of thunder had struck me down.

  Hail was bouncing off the tiles like marbles. Señora Siles was looking up at the sky from her window, her face tight with fear. She drew the curtains when she saw me, and I heard her scream: “Pedro! Get under the bed and stay there!” When I made it into the house, Trinidad grabbed me. She took me onto her lap while Lucas tried to get a station on the shortwave. All he could find was military marches. Ale drank a glass of milk, seemingly unaware that anything was wrong. I decided to keep the story of the secret policeman with the gun to myself.

  By noon, Lucas and Trinidad were pacing the floor, worrying about what had happened to my mother and Bob. I couldn’t let myself think about that. The military marches continued to play on the radio, and jets flew back and forth across the sky. In the early afternoon, Mami finally arrived by herself. She hugged us for a long time. Had Bob come home yet? Had we seen him? At that moment, Bob walked through the door.

  Mami had been trapped downtown, she told us. “It was the usual throng of workers on the buses this morning. But when we got to the centre of the city, everything changed. Jets started flying, and the military took the streets. It was incredible how quickly it happened. Young men from the poor neighbourhoods came down from the hills and started resisting, fighting with stones and Molotov cocktails.” She drew in a shaky breath. “I was so worried about Bob, and you girls, and Lucas and Trinidad, of course. Those young people who are fighting are so brave it breaks my heart.” I stood close behind her, caressing her shoulder as she spoke.

  Bob had walked toward home for hours, he said. He’d been scared that, as a foreigner, he’d be arrested immediately, as he had been in Chile. “All the buses were packed, speeding by, with people hanging off even from the roofs. I scrambled onto the back fender of one heading to Miraflores.” Ale had started crying, and Bob tucked her inside his jacket.

  At the end of the day we located a miners’ station on the shortwave, a rebel radio program broadcast underground from somewhere in Siglo XX. That was the biggest tin mine in Bolivia, south of La Paz, and the most combative. The miner explained what had happened. Alberto Natusch Busch, a member of the cabinet during Hugo Banzer’s dictatorship, had taken power through a bloody coup, ousting Walter Guevara and halting any chance for the 1980 elections. Committed to returning the country to a Banzer-like dictatorship,
Busch was determined to keep the neo-liberal economic order of Bolivia intact. There was well-organized resistance in the streets of La Paz, the miner announced, and the Central Workers’ Union, banned for a decade, was calling for a general strike. School was suspended, and everything else was closed.

  On the morning of the coup in Chile, my mother and father had called Ale and me into their bed. Together, we’d listened to President Allende say goodbye over the radio as warplanes flew above La Moneda Palace. “Compañeros, surely this will be the last opportunity for me to address you. My words do not express bitterness but disappointment. May there be a moral punishment for those who have betrayed their oath: the soldiers of Chile... The only thing left for me to say is to the workers: I am not going to resign. Placed in a historic transition, I will pay for your loyalty with my life. And I say to you that the seeds we have planted in the good conscience of thousands and thousands of Chileans will not be shrivelled forever... Social processes can be arrested by neither crime nor force. History is ours, and people make history. Workers of my country: I want to thank you for the loyalty you always had, the confidence that you deposited in a man who was only an interpreter of great yearnings for justice... At this definitive moment, the last moment when I can address you, I wish you to take advantage of the lesson. Foreign capital, imperialism, together with the reactionary right, created the climate in which the armed forces broke their tradition... I address the youth, those who sang and gave us their joy and their spirit of struggle. I address the worker, the farmer, the intellectual, those who will be persecuted, because in our country fascism has already been present for many hours... History will judge them.”

  There had been a whistling, then the sound of bombs exploding. My parents, who had joined the student movement in the sixties, had sobbed quietly as they held us, and when we tried to speak, they pressed a finger to their pursed lips and whispered, “Listen. Compañero Allende has something important to say, and no matter what happens to us, you must always remember this moment.” And so we’d sat and listened. “I will always be next to you. At least my memory will be that of a man of dignity who was loyal to his country. The people must defend themselves. The people must not let themselves be destroyed or riddled with bullets, but they cannot be humiliated either. Workers of my country, I have faith in Chile and its destiny. Other men will overcome this dark and bitter moment when treason seeks to prevail. Go forward knowing that, sooner rather than later, the great avenues will open once again where free men will walk to construct a better society. Viva Chile! Viva el pueblo! Vivan los trabajadores! These are my final words, and I am certain that my sacrifice will not be in vain. I am certain that, at the very least, it will be a moral lesson that will punish felony, cowardice and treason.” That voice and its message had been burned into my core forever. We’d listened on that bed in our yellow wooden house in Valdivia as if we were on a vessel lost at sea.

  Two weeks later, Natusch Busch was ousted by popular resistance in Bolivia. Many people had fought in the streets, and the whole country had responded to the Central Workers’ Union’s call for a general strike, paralyzing Bolivia for fifteen days. Soldiers in U.S. helicopters had shot at protesters in La Paz, and the crackdown on street protests had resulted in over two hundred dead, hundreds of injured and over one hundred disappeared. People had resisted in spite of the repression, and Natusch Busch had agreed to step down as long as the power was not handed back to Walter Guevara. It was agreed that the new provisional president would be Lidia Gueiler, the leader of the House of Deputies. She would be Bolivia’s first woman president, and she was a feminist and social democrat who’d spent a lot of time in exile, most recently during the Banzer years. Elections were still to be held in 1980, but as per Natusch Busch’s condition, the transition would not be entrusted to Walter Guevara.

  School began again, but the celebratory mood in my classroom changed to fear when a soldier in fatigues arrived to teach the first class of the day: art. Señorita Flores whispered that the teacher had disappeared. The soldier made us do jumping jacks and march around our desks while he yelled: “Left, left, left right left!” He looked uncomfortable in his helmet. He wasn’t much older than we were, and, like most low-ranking soldiers in Bolivia, he was a poor Indian. Young men with the means to do so bribed their way out of military service, so the army was made up of poor brown men made to kill their own people. The army provided them with meals and shelter, though, Señorita Flores said, and when you were starving, you took what you could get. Natusch Busch may have been ousted, but it seemed that the military still had all the power.

  At recess in the courtyard my classmates talked excitedly, mostly in hushed voices, and the boys who had fought, including Eugenio Aguirre, were treated like royalty. Kids lined up to hug and kiss them, and stories of heroism spread like wildfire through the school. The teachers were quiet, avoiding the topic of politics at all costs. They’d all taken part in the general strike, and though everyone was proud to have participated, they knew it wasn’t the end. Anything could still happen, and it probably would. Would they lose their jobs, accused of breaking the law that had prohibited unions and strikes for a decade? Would they be placed on a blacklist? Would they too disappear into thin air, replaced by some poor kid from the rural highlands wearing fatigues?

  That day, Ale and I came home to a quiet house. My mother explained that Lucas and Trinidad had gone somewhere else for a while. Tears stung my eyes, but I knew it was probably safer for everybody this way.

  A month later, the school year came to an end. Things had gone back to normal, with the teachers yelling at us every chance they got and the principal ruling the school with an iron fist. We had a new art teacher, who drew pictures on the board for us to copy. On the last day of class, we danced to the Beatles and the Doors in the courtyard. Then the girls ran off to their maid jobs, kissing Ale and me goodbye. Valentina was indeed pregnant, and she wouldn’t be back in March, when the new school year began. Eugenio Aguirre waved from the fender of a bus, shoeshine box strapped to his back. As I walked home alone along the cobblestones, I prepared myself for a journey Mami and Bob had described to us late one night, while most of the city was asleep.

  6

  IT WAS SIX in the morning at the La Paz train station, and already the first-class section of the train heading to the border was crammed with well-dressed ladies, families from all walks of life and the odd businessman in suit and tie, fresh newspaper in hand. Christmas was only a few days away, and many people were travelling.

  Bob and Mami had instructed us on the details of the journey Ale and I would be making without them. One of our instructions was to pretend we didn’t know Trinidad, who’d be accompanying us part of the way. She’d been back sleeping on our floor for the past week, acting as if she’d never left. This time around, she had gotten up early every morning and readied herself to go downtown, where she was “picking up some papers,” she said. Her morning ritual began by taking a curling iron to her frizzy head. Once her hair was in ringlets, Trinidad would powder her face and apply red lipstick, blue eyeshadow and mascara. Skin-tight black jeans and a red paisley shirt completed the look, with a black corduroy blazer to keep her warm in the cold highland mornings. She’d carry out her ritual while smoking one Gitane after another and listening to the miners’ radio on the shortwave. Low, so the neighbours wouldn’t hear.

  The four of us had taken a cab to get here. Trinidad was going to meet us on the train. Inside our brown carry-ons, stuffed with clothes, cheese rolls and grapefruits, was a typewritten letter my mother had given us, which we were to read, memorize, then burn and flush down the toilet shortly after the train left. The fifty-dollar bill at the bottom of my bag was all the cash we had.

  Following Bob’s lead, we were speaking English. When we arrived at our seats to see that a cholita, an urban Indian woman, had taken them over with five sacks of onions and seven children, Bob shouted at her to move, waving our tickets in her face.

&
nbsp; “Señora! As you can see, I have paid good money for these seats so that my daughters can travel in comfort.”

  “Who cares about your tickets, Mr. Gringo? I got here first,” she responded, sitting like a large oak tree rooted to the ground.

  “Listen, Señora, don’t make me call a policeman to have you forcibly removed.”

  “Just try it!” The woman crossed her arms.

  “Police!” Bob yelled at the top of his lungs. The lady grabbed her onions and her children and moved, swearing under her breath.

  We could have shared our seats with the lady, but Bob was acting like the big-city guy he’d argued with on the bus back in Peru. It was a soul-destroying tactic, but as my mother had explained, if we were to keep people safe and transport goods across borders without being caught, we had to hold our beliefs inside. I could see that it cut Bob to the quick.

  Trinidad arrived a few minutes later, carrying a small white Samsonite. She looked tired, maybe because she had spent a good two hours in the bathroom in the middle of the night. Trinidad had some health troubles because of the concentration camps, my mother told us; that’s why nature rarely called. When it did, she had to heed it. Speaking in a perfect Mexican accent now, Trinidad greeted Ale and me and indicated she’d be sitting in the seat facing us. Bob made a huge show of asking her to keep an eye on his two daughters, who were going to Chile to visit their grandparents. That part was true.