Now my aunt Lola was a high school history teacher with perfectly plucked eyebrows, feathered hair and large sunglasses tinted in a purplish hue. Even though she was a self-proclaimed perpetually single gal, she had loads of boyfriends, and she was an expert on all things feminine. On the bus back from shopping, I’d started telling her about the Chile solidarity work we had done in Vancouver. Since the Aguirre side of the family lived in Maipú, a working-class suburb of Santiago, and the bus was full of poor people, I’d thought it was okay to mention that, but her eyes darted around as if they were going to jump out of her head, and her manicured finger shot up to her lips, as she mouthed “Shhh.” Once we got home, I put on the pastel denim jumpsuit my aunt Vicky had bought me in Concepción and stepped into my new platform heels. Aunt Lola was satisfied. “Impeccable. Now you look like an Aguirre girl.”
This outfit was my plane gear. My mother didn’t approve; I could tell that as soon as we spotted her in the waiting area at the La Paz airport. Neither did Bob. But they didn’t say anything. None of us mentioned the letters, either, as we hugged and kissed. Mami wrapped her arm around my shoulder as we walked outside, and I realized how much I’d missed her.
The airport taxi spit us out into a brand-new life. We sped along El Prado, the main avenue in the central part of the city, but instead of turning left at the university, en route to Miraflores, the taxi kept going until El Prado turned into Arce Avenue, lined with luxury apartment buildings and the president’s residence. At the bottom of a very steep hill we turned right, up past 6 de Agosto Avenue, and then left onto a cobblestone lane. Halfway down we stopped. The four of us climbed out and stood facing a large beige house.
“This is our new home,” Mami announced, as if it were the most normal thing in the world to land in a neighbourhood you’d never seen before, no explanations offered.
Trinidad was waiting for us inside, with the table set for tea. We leapt into each other’s arms as Bob carried our suitcases to the new room Ale and I would share at the back of the house. Once we were all settled in the dining room, Mami said she had something important to tell us: she was pregnant. She beamed as she delivered the news, and Bob’s eyes shone with excitement. I adored babies. I jumped up to feel my mother’s belly, anxious to dispel the tension between us. Ale’s jaw dropped open, but she didn’t say a word. Later, in our new room with the light off, she hissed that it was crazy to have a baby underground.
At the end of our new lane, steps led down to a series of narrow pedestrian-only alleyways. The steps were the invisible border between San Jorge, our new neighbourhood, and the lower-class, nameless neighbourhood below. A concrete wall with broken glass cemented into its top separated San Jorge from the shantytown that hung off another adjacent hill. The first thing you saw when you turned into our lane was snow-covered Mount Illimani, watching over the city like a jagged jewel in the blue sky.
Carnival was in full swing, and that meant La Paz was one big water fight. Water balloons flew from passing cars, buses, trucks and bicycles. Buckets were overturned from balconies. Ale and I were taking a rest at our gate, soaking wet after a dash to the corner kiosk, when a group of girls passed by discussing strategy. We introduced ourselves amid a flutter of hugs and kisses, and soon Ale and I were in the thick of a girls-against-boys water fight that involved all the children in the lane.
When we’d had enough of fighting, the girls convened at Lorena’s house for tea. From the outside, her house didn’t look like much, just a squat brick building surrounded by a security gate, but on the inside it was palatial, decorated with Louis XIV furniture. The parquet floor, draped with rugs, made a nice sound under your shoes. Lorena was the oldest sister of a clan of six, and her mother was young and cheerful. Her father arrived soon afterward in a red Mercedes-Benz. Apparently he worked at the Palacio Quemado—called the Burnt Palace because it had been set on fire during the war of independence—advising Bolivia’s president on legal matters. After that, I went to Lorena’s house every afternoon, and we lay on her bed reading her grandmother’s romance novels from the forties.
Our new house was fully furnished. Its two large bedrooms, dining room with french doors, windows all round and back porch off the kitchen made it a mansion compared with our two-room bungalow in Miraflores. The owners were an old Nazi couple. That was a good thing, according to Bob, because it made our cover better than ever. The Nazis came around once in a while to make sure we were taking proper care of the place. On those occasions Trinidad hid on the back porch, puffing on her Gitanes. Once when we were downtown Bob pointed out Club La Paz. That was where the Nazi couple hung out with their friend Klaus Barbie, a German war criminal who’d been living in Bolivia for years.
One afternoon I came home from Lorena’s to discover a new person in our house, sitting in a cloud of smoke at the dining room table with Trinidad and my mother.
“This is the Swede,” Mami said.
The Swede had long baby-blond hair and wore a tunic from India. From then on, the dining room became his bedroom after dinner every night. (Trinidad slept in the living room.) He’d unroll a small mat and work on wooden carvings with his Swiss Army knife or draw in his sketchbook. Ale and I liked chatting with him about all sorts of things. I asked him if he’d ever met ABBA, since he was from Sweden, but he said no. He had such nice hair and luminous skin that we wondered if he’d let us do makeovers on him. He said yes, so Ale would pull out the curling iron and create a do while I applied his makeup.
The four adults talked late into the night. From listening in, I learned the plan. The Swede and Bob were supposed to find a way to enter Chile on foot, via the Atacama Desert. One of the leaders of the resistance was exiled in Mexico, and he needed to be smuggled into Chile as soon as possible, as did his second-in-command. The Swede would do an initial scouting expedition by himself, entering Chile legally on a bus as a backpacker, since he was not on the blacklist.
My mother had enrolled us in a new school for girls only. It was the only one she could find that wasn’t run by nuns, she said, even though it was still Catholic. There was only one shift: 8:00 AM to 1:00 PM. On some afternoons we went back after lunch for physical education and dance classes. Almost everyone at San Miguel Ladies’ School claimed to be either full-blooded Spanish or German. The most popular girl in my class was Pinochet’s niece, who sat on the teacher’s desk, legs crossed, holding court with stories of the summer she’d spent in Viña del Mar in Chile with her uncle.
Now I understood how Mami felt when she got home from the American English Centre every evening. Head down on her arms, she’d cry while she raged that she had to hold it all inside at work, that her colleagues were a bunch of racist, classist, right-wing pigs who assumed she was like them. The five of us sang the secret songs to cheer her up: Inti-Illimani’s “The People United Will Never Be Defeated,” Violeta Parra’s “Grateful to Life,” Pablo Milanés’s “I Will Walk the Streets of Santiago Again.” We danced to abba’s “Voulez-Vous,” the first cassette I’d ever owned, bought for me by my grandmother Lourdes on our last day in Chile. I missed Papi, my aunts and uncles, my cousins and all the other Chileans in Vancouver. I missed my old Vancouver school, where my best girlfriends came from hippie homes. None of them complained about the dirty Indians or the cholas or the backwardness of their fucking country.
Lorena was a student at the Northern Institute, a coed private school structured like a U.S. high school that was all the rage among Bolivia’s rich; but we’d meet up every day after school to roam the neighbourhood, up 20 de Octubre Avenue to Plaza Avaroa, which had a monument to Eduardo Avaroa at its centre. He was the biggest hero of the War of the Pacific, a civilian who had defended a Bolivian bridge from the Chilean army to his last breath.
As the oldest girl in her family, Lorena was in charge of the house and her younger siblings much of the time. Her parents didn’t have maids, which was unheard of for people of their class, and I noticed that Lorena never asked questions about my family
, either. The teeny old Indian lady we often encountered in the kitchen was her abuelita. Lorena uttered racist remarks against the Indians just like everyone else, but I simply admired what I considered to be her best qualities: down-to-earthness and a directness that left you stammering. She was short and round and never swore, preferring expressions like “Jeepers!” Her philosophy of life, quintessentially Bolivian, was “Anything can happen. And it will.”
At dusk, boys would play soccer in the lane. Two social classes met during these games: the private-school boys who lived along the lane itself, and the public-school boys from the narrow alleys that began at the bottom of the stone steps. The lane families were business people, or at least that’s what the kids answered when you asked what their fathers did. The alley families were working people with white-collar jobs: secretaries, schoolteachers, bank tellers. The alley kids were not invited to the rich kids’ homes. When tea time came, the two groups went their separate ways. But once the sun had gone down and darkness overtook La Paz, we’d all meet again at the top of the steps, telling stories, making eyes at each other and cracking jokes until our parents called for us to come home. The 100-per-cent Indian kids never mixed with us. The wall succeeded in making them invisible, even though some of them lived in makeshift houses propped up against the concrete, inches away from our world.
One day Rolo, a public-school boy, took me behind the front gate of my house and kissed me. Other boys followed suit. Before long I was the kissing queen of the lane and alleys. With each kiss came the possibility that the Cousin might be replaced in my heart. His memory was like a shard of glass that moved through my bloodstream.
El Camba, at sixteen the oldest boy in the neighbourhood, was Rolo’s cousin. Sporting a perpetual leather motorcycle jacket and baggy jeans, he had jet-black hair, pale skin and brilliant blue eyes. El Camba was from Santa Cruz, a province southeast of the highlands whose men were renowned for being irresistible. Santa Cruz was also known as cocaine cartel central. Brand-new Mercedes-Benzes, shipped directly from Germany, were deposited in an open field there five hundred at a time, sold for cash only. Every last one went within the hour.
El Camba lounged on his motorcycle while kids gathered to listen to his adventures. He’d disappear for days and then come back covered in dust, telling stories of Bolivia’s deserts, mountains, jungles and mines. The lane boys were being groomed by their parents to have a shot at becoming the next president of Bolivia, the next commander-in-chief of the armed forces, the next minister of economics. The money for their U.S. Ivy League education was already set aside. But the alley boys were free to pursue any dream they wanted; they had nothing to lose and no one to impress. The lane boys hated El Camba.
At school, my favourite class was etiquette. It involved lots of role-playing, which I loved. In Vancouver, I’d taken acting classes from the age of eight, having announced my calling five years earlier after seeing the circus in Valdivia. I’d written, directed and acted in dozens of plays, the most famous being Revolutionary Cinderella, which starred Ale as Cinderella and featured my cousin Macarena as the Clock, the Guerrilla and the Mouse. We’d performed it for years at solidarity benefits and for the international speakers who’d stayed at our house. Etiquette class was taught by Señorita Karina, a fancy lady who wore cream-coloured lace dresses, white gloves and a lovely hat decorated with plastic flowers and a fake canary. She talked in a soft, high voice as she perched on the edge of her desk, hands resting daintily in her lap. Beneath her hat, her hair was always pinned into a bun.
In etiquette class we learned that girls must always laugh with their lips creating a perfect O, to avoid getting laugh lines and crows’ feet. For the same reason, you were supposed to avoid moving your face when you talked.
“If a gentleman is taking you on a stroll around the plaza, and he looks up at the sky and says, ‘Amor mío, isn’t the moon wondrous this evening?’ how do you respond?” our teacher would ask us.
One of us would raise her hand. “Señorita Karina, one must always respond by agreeing with said gentleman. For example, one can say, ‘Yes, the moon is magnificent tonight, isn’t it?’”
“You are correct, señorita. But ladies, you must also remember that you are as much a part of the courtship as the gentleman is. So if he speaks of the wondrous moon, you might add something like: ‘Yes, the moon illuminates your face so that I can see your passionate eyes, my dear.’ Now you have given him the tools by which he can proceed to steal that kiss he so fervently desires.”
We all wrote furiously in our notebooks.
There were Indians on our school grounds, construction workers who toiled twelve hours a day building the new gymnasium with no breaks, no bathroom access, no water, for slave wages. They were visible from our classroom window, and the teachers referred to them by pointing their lips toward the outside. “In today’s speech lesson,” Señorita Karina would say, “we will learn to speak in a quiet, articulate voice, unlike those illiterate, uneducated Indians out there who yell, swear and have no use for proper Spanish grammar.” Our science teacher called them dirty Indians, though I knew it was they who’d taught the Europeans about washing. She informed us the answer to the “Indian problem” in Bolivia was mass sterilization. In Catholicism class, the Indians were accused of practising black magic, casting spells and giving people the evil eye. My heart was sick by the end of each day.
The Niece was always surrounded by the German contingent. I was much too dark to be accepted by them, and fear gripped me when I was around these girls. But the Niece was nice to me because I spoke English. She’d ask me about Canada and inquired what my family was doing here. I was afraid she must know about us, but Bob advised me to play it cool. Having the Niece as a classmate was a fantastic opportunity to learn more about what the hell her family was doing in La Paz, he pointed out. It was rare to be so close to the enemy, so I must seize the day. From the shortwave broadcasts and the newspapers the adults devoured, they were convinced something terrible was brewing again in Bolivia. New elections were scheduled to be held soon, but surely it was only a matter of time before a new and bloodier coup took place. All of South America was under right-wing military rule, installed by the CIA, funded by multinational corporations, with the IMF and the World Bank doling out billions of dollars in credit. There was no way Lidia Gueiler could hang on much longer.
When the Swede disappeared for two weeks, I worried about him. One day after school, I was thrilled to see him walking down the lane with his backpack. I ran to catch up with him, and his eyes lit up when he saw me. He ate like a starving man when we served up the special dinner we’d cooked in his honour. That night, listening from the door of my bedroom, I heard him tell the others that he’d been intercepted in Chile and taken in for questioning. When his bus was surrounded by the military on a desert road, the Swede had used a razor blade to slice open his seat cushion and had slid the documents he’d been carrying inside it. Two plainclothes cops had ordered him off the bus, then loaded him into the back of a military Jeep, and he’d spent the next few days in jail in a small town, sweating bullets. He’d played the “me no speak Spanish” card, even when the secret police agents told him they knew all about the Return Plan, including that many gringos were involved. But they’d found nothing on him, so they’d let him go with a warning. I wondered if the documents were still stashed in the bus seat and if so, what would happen when they were found. With Ale snoring softly in the bed beside mine, I lay awake for a long time.
9
IT WAS A regular July morning in La Paz. The radio was playing, coffee was on, and the adults were huddled around the dining room table speaking about Very Important Things. Except that Bob wasn’t in his requisite corduroy suit, ready to go to work at the computer company. Mami, hugely pregnant now, wasn’t in one of the two dresses she wore to teach at the American English Centre. Also, both the shortwave and the regular radio were on. The Swede kept turning and turning the dial on the regular one, but all h
e could get was static. That was the military intercepting, Mami said. The shortwave was still working, and from the miners’ radio we learned that General Luis García Meza, commander-in-chief of the armed forces, had just staged a coup against Lidia Gueiler. There was a curfew, a state of siege and a state of emergency. Tanks and Jeeps had taken over 6 de Agosto Avenue, just a block down from our house. We kept the curtains closed.
I’d seen Lidia Gueiler just two days before. There had been a parade on El Prado to commemorate Bolivia’s martyrs in the war for independence from Spain, and she was marching with a red, yellow and green sash draped across her chest, the colours of the Bolivian flag. Flanked by men in suits and officials in military garb—had Luis García Meza, who the miners’ radio said was her cousin, been one of them?—she’d held a bouquet of flowers in one hand and waved with the other. In her heavy makeup, she looked like an old beauty queen.
Maybe Lidia Gueiler was dead by now. According to the announcer on the miners’ radio, the situation was very bad. “Comrades! Luis García Meza’s right-hand man is Klaus Barbie himself, that Nazi war criminal who walks our streets with impunity. Top advisers and torturers have been brought in from Argentina’s Videla dictatorship. García Meza has declared that Pinochet is his idol. The military and the right wing are afraid of the ongoing congressional investigations of human rights abuses and large-scale corruption. This coup is funded by the cocaine drug lords and is, of course, part of a much larger plan by the United States to neo-liberalize Latin America. We miners, we peasants, we workers of Bolivia denounce this attempt to stop the democratic process. The Central Workers’ Union is holding an emergency meeting and will likely call for a general strike. Stay at your posts, comrades, for further instructions.”
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