Something Fierce

by Carmen Aguirre

  We hid out in our house for the rest of the day, listening to our windows rattling from the low-flying airplanes and the nearby machine-gun fire. All I could think about was the cholitas and their babies who lived on the streets, the mules, the peasants just arrived in the city with nowhere to rest but the plaza. What would they do? There was an overnight curfew, and no one was allowed in the street, but what if the street was your home? Ale played with her Barbie dolls, but I stuck by the adults at the table, their worried faces sending chills up my spine. Operation Condor would go into even higher gear now that García Meza was in place, and that would mean stricter security measures for us. I wondered if we were hiding any documents or goods right now. There were certain nooks and crannies in the house that were off limits to Ale and me, and we both knew not to ask why.

  At some point during the afternoon, the announcer on the miners’ radio station began yelling. “The military has raided the Central Workers’ Union in La Paz and has shot and taken Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz, our renowned socialist leader, with them! Two union leaders have been killed on the spot! Chaos has ensued. The military is here, comrades, there are jets flying above.” And then there was a huge explosion, right on the air. After that, only static. The miner reporting from the Siglo XX region had just given his life to keep us informed. Mami’s glasses steamed up, and the Swede’s eyes filled with tears. Bob pulled me in close to his chest, his jaw clamped tight.

  Our lane was patrolled all day and into the night by Jeeps, and once by a passing tank. Sometimes there was shooting right outside our gate, setting the stray dogs howling. Whenever we heard gun-fire, we’d all drop to the floor under the dining room table, a difficult thing for Mami to do with her huge belly. Once we were huddled, she’d be overtaken by a laugh attack and pee her pants. “It’s the nerves, it’s the nerves,” she would say, wiping her eyes. We were used to it—certain things struck her that way. Sometimes the rest of us started laughing, too.

  The adults decided we should all sleep in the bedroom at the back of the house. That would make it almost impossible for a bullet to hit us through the window. My mother climbed into my bed, and Ale into hers. Bob, the Swede, Trinidad and I stretched out on the floor. It was kind of fun having everybody take up residence in our room like that.

  When curfew lifted at six each morning, I went out to buy black-market bread, sold from one of the alley doors by the cutest little grandma. The whole neighbourhood was buying bread there. People walked with their eyes glued to the ground, looking up only when a plane crossed the sky to see whether to run back home or dive down flat. Conversations took place in whispers. The stores were closed indefinitely, so everybody’s new diet was this hard bread washed down with coca-leaf tea, which miners, peasants and the poor of La Paz drank constantly to ward off hunger. There was no school, so the neighbourhood kids huddled on the stone steps, unseen from the lane, swapping coup stories until curfew descended again at nine in the evening. According to one boy, Jose Luis, the military had been practising their aim on the stray dogs in the lane. I’d been wondering where they’d vanished to; now I knew.

  El Camba and Rolo reported that the national soccer stadium, up the street from where we had lived in Miraflores, had been turned into a concentration camp. Thousands of people were being held there. Jose Luis said that was communist propaganda, but El Camba nailed him with his blue eyes. No, he said, he had been there himself. The coup had caught him on the way back from the salt mounds of Uyuni, and he was picked up for riding his motorcycle into a city under siege. We all went quiet. Only two people from our lane had gone to work on the day of the coup, and they had continued to go every day afterward: Lorena’s father and Jose Luis’s father. Theirs were also the only two families that still had a steady supply of food. According to Lorena, her father was a political adviser to the new president. She refused to use the word dictator. Jose Luis’s father ran some kind of business. In Bolivia at that time, that meant he was probably into cocaine money.

  When school began again ten days later, my classmates seemed ecstatic about the new government. The teachers nodded their heads in agreement. The Niece’s status was even higher now, and the teachers tiptoed around her. Curfew was still in effect, and one evening we were at the stone steps when the little bread-selling lady staggered down the lane, hanging on to passing walls for support. Some of us jumped up to help her, and she told us she’d been caught in the curfew the night before, on her way home from selling seeds downtown. She’d been taken to the national stadium, where she’d witnessed things she never thought she’d live to tell. Beautiful young students being beaten, entire families held under arrest, intellectuals in blindfolds and handcuffs. Street kids and mules had been forced to run around the track all night; soldiers shot at their bare feet whenever they slowed down. Most of them collapsed into unconsciousness after hours of that. As for the old woman, they’d placed her in front of a mountain of soldiers’ dirty socks and kept her up all night washing them. Whenever she dozed off, they’d shoved her hard with a rifle. They finally let her go with a warning to never break curfew again. It had taken hours for her to get to San Jorge from Miraflores, since the bus was a luxury she could not afford.

  I waited for everyone to fall asleep when I got home. Then I snuck out onto our back porch. The porch hung above 6 de Agosto Avenue, but it was not really visible from the street; from below it got lost in the array of balconies running up the side of the hill. I’d stolen the Swede’s special whistle from his backpack. He’d explained it was so loud it could be heard from very far away, especially useful if you were lost in the bush. I crouched low, so that I was entirely concealed, and started to blow it. The whistle pierced the wall of sound made by the Jeeps, tanks, helicopters and planes, and the shooting that rang through the night. It was perfect. Each blow of the whistle stood for something: this one’s for what you did to the old lady, this one’s for what you did to the miner on the radio who gave his life, this one’s for all the maids, mules and shoeshine boys of Bolivia.

  I heard soldiers yelling at each other and the sound of their boots on the cement. I stopped for a minute, slowly got up and peered down at the avenue. Sure enough, they were running this way and that, trying to figure out which of their superiors was blowing the whistle and what he wanted them to do. I blew again, hard. This one’s for all the children who die every day of hunger, diarrhea and other curable diseases. The soldiers raced around like a bunch of idiots. They’d blackened their faces with shoe polish so they could commit their crimes without being recognized. My uncle Boris always said you couldn’t have a dialogue with the enemy when the enemy was pointing a gun at you. You just had to defend yourself and take the power, by any means necessary. The whistle was a good start, as far as revolutionary tactics went for a twelve-year-old. I blew it for a long time.

  I WAS NO LONGER the kissing queen of the neighbourhood, because I had a boyfriend. Camilo was Rolo’s cousin; he and his mother and his three siblings were Bolivians who had moved back to La Paz after a few years in Brazil. Camilo’s fifteen-year-old sister, Katushka, and I also became fast friends. They knew what it was like to leave everything behind and start anew. The whole clan, Rolo’s family and theirs, lived simply—no maid, no fancy clothes, one pair of shoes each. Camilo and his brother slept on the living room floor, and their mother and sisters shared a double bed.

  Camilo and I kissed in the alley more furiously than ever after the coup, heading home just in time for curfew. One afternoon I noticed a bunch of kids rushing into Jose Luis’s house. Lorena told me that Jose Luis’s mother had called an emergency meeting, and that everyone from the lane was attending except her family and mine.

  “They say you’re a filthy whore,” she explained.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Well, everyone.”

  Tears sprang from my eyes, gushing like a waterfall. Lorena handed me her embroidered handkerchief and caressed my arm. It began with the indiscriminate kissing, she explained. Also
, I had kissed both lane boys and alley boys, and that was a no-no. Now my hour-long kissing sessions with Camilo, an alley boy, had the lane ladies up in arms.

  “Carmen, I love you, you’re my friend, but you’ve got to understand that this is Bolivia. If you act like a boy you will pay.”

  No, I thought to myself. This was not Bolivia. This was rich, mestizo, right-wing, sexist, hypocritical, Catholic Bolivia. This was the ruling class, but not for long. Rich Bolivia was where my family was for the moment, though, and I knew we must live by its rules.

  I hurried home to prepare Mami and Bob. I’d barely finished speaking when the doorbell rang. Sure enough, Jose Luis’s mother and a bunch of the other lane ladies, with their bouffant hairdos, heavy pancake makeup and tight girdles, were standing at the gate.

  We agreed that Bob would deal with them, playing the stupid-gringo card. I spied from the window as Jose Luis’s mother handed him a letter at the gate, gesturing wildly at the houses surrounding ours. Bob simply nodded at first. But then he got his back up, because the lady wouldn’t let him get a word in edgewise. As he opened our front door to come back in, I could hear Jose Luis’s mother yell: “Every family on the lane has signed this letter, including your downstairs neighbours. And I’ve already contacted your landlords. I’m sure they will not be too happy to learn about the whores and hippies they’re renting to.”

  Bob punched the wall as Mami sank into a chair at the table, her head in her hands. Ale rolled her eyes at me. She agreed with the ladies, and she’d already told me so. Trinidad and the Swede called me into the living room. I’d done nothing wrong, they assured me, but I cried anyway, until my heart was squashed like a piece of fruit lying on the market floor.

  Two mothers stood by me after that: Lorena’s and Camilo’s, kissing and hugging me every chance they got. But the neighbourhood girls started to cross the street when they saw me, and the boys watched from afar, elbowing each other in the ribs and laughing.

  One afternoon, as I reached the top of the hill, I spied some boys at the end of the lane examining a banana-seat bike. I stopped in my tracks, because that was an unusual sight. Vendors rode around downtown La Paz on huge tricycle-type bikes from the 1940s, carrying mountains of merchandise in their massive bike baskets, but that didn’t count. This bike was meant for a kid to have fun on. Jose Luis yelled at me to come look at it. His invitation was obviously a truce, I thought, and they might even apologize for shunning me. I realized how pathetically lonely I’d been without them.

  The bike was a gift brought from Miami by Jose Luis’s father. The boys begged me to teach them to ride it. I dropped my school bag and jumped on, whizzing down the lane. I felt free as I bumped along the cobblestones.

  “Go down the hill to 6 de Agosto Avenue!” Jose Luis yelled.

  The boys were running after me, egging me on. A tickle filled my belly, because the hill was steep and I was flying high. As I sailed along, I was back on the forest trails in Vancouver, riding with my cousins, leaping on our bikes over fallen trees and protruding roots, covered in mud and rain, leaving all my problems behind.

  Busy 6 de Agosto was coming up fast. But when I stepped on the brakes, nothing happened. That couldn’t be, because the bike was brand new, with its shiny yellow seat and brilliant chrome. Then I was standing on the brakes, but still nothing. So I jumped. It was either that or smash right into a bus full of people.

  The bike crashed against a wall, and I rolled along the gutter to land spread-eagled on the sidewalk, with skinned palms and knees but no real injuries. I looked up at the sky and, like a true La Paz girl, crossed myself, kissing my right thumb loudly. I got up, brushed myself off and walked the bike back up the hill, to where the boys were standing. The colour had drained from their faces. I handed the bike to Jose Luis, gave him my dirtiest look and kept walking.

  A few nights later, Ale and I went for a walk with Trinidad and my mother. We strolled along the narrow downtown streets, where the sidewalks were so skinny there was room for only one person at a time, the four of us wearing alpaca ponchos to stay warm in the high-land night.

  A group of rich boys drove by in a Mercedes-Benz, hurling obscenities at the women as they passed. When they saw my mother with her big belly, they yelled: “Hey, look at that one! She got good and fucked!”

  My mother gave them the finger. “Váyanse a las conchas de sus madres, huevones culeados!” she yelled back. (Go back to your mothers’ cunts, motherfuckers!) It was the most Chilean insult anybody could use.

  The boys shouted: “Oooh! Four Chilean whores! Go back to where you came from, putas!” Then they floored it and drove their car right up onto the sidewalk.

  A lady opened her door and yanked us into her house an instant before the car would have hit us. She gave us tea to calm our nerves. On the way home afterwards, Mami said she shouldn’t have yelled like that; we were doing too many stupid things to draw attention to ourselves these days. “You mean like Carmen being a slut?” Ale said.

  Back at home, I opened a tiny silk change purse I’d bought in Vancouver’s Chinatown so long ago. Inside I kept my Virgin of Copacabana, given to me by my classmates in Miraflores on the last day of school. La Grandma had handed it to me, with the rest of the class standing at her side. “May the Virgin keep you safe,” she’d said, “whichever road you’re on.” Then we’d all held hands, because nobody knew where life was going to take them. It couldn’t hurt, I thought, to thank the Virgin for taking care of us.

  ICE CASTLES, a new figure-skating movie, was playing at the 16 de Julio Theatre on El Prado. Lorena and I had gone twice already, and Bob wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I knew he was probably going to lecture me about cultural imperialism and how Hollywood exported ridiculous versions of middle-class North America, but I didn’t care—Robby Benson was cute, and I wanted to swoon over him again. When the movie stopped abruptly, right at the moment the blind ice-skater was bending to pick up the roses people had thrown at her feet, the audience moaned and whistled. It was common for the projectors to break down. But this time the lights came up, and an older woman in a business suit walked down the aisle and climbed the stairs to the stage.

  “I am Dr. Vergara Emerson, pediatrician at the German Clinic and professor at San Andrés university,” she began. “I am here to denounce the heinous crimes being committed by the dictator Luis García Meza.

  Hundreds of people have been killed. Hundreds of others have been imprisoned and are being tortured. Many have been forced into exile, and there are dozens of disappeared. We miners, peasants, doctors, students and teachers have resisted from the first day of the coup and will continue to do so. I ask each of you to stand right now and observe a minute of silence for Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz, leader of the Socialist Party, award-winning writer and university professor, and all the others who have fallen. García Meza has bragged publicly about torturing Comrade Quiroga Santa Cruz himself and disposing of his body so that it would never be found. We denounce this terrible crime. We demand the expulsion of Klaus Barbie and his Nazi cronies from our country, and the expulsion of the CIA.”

  I was shaking hard, but not just from fear. From excitement. I could tell Bob was excited too. The theatre was jam-packed, and everyone was waiting for someone else to make the first move.

  Dr. Vergara Emerson looked out at us all, a strand of pearls trembling on her chest. Finally some young people got to their feet. The rest of the audience followed. No one walked out. Bob and I stood in silence with the others. After the minute was over, Dr. Vergara Emerson said, “Thank you, my compatriots.” She climbed down from the stage and walked back up the aisle to where a small group of well-dressed people were waiting for her. They’d probably go on to another theatre and do it all again. People had started to clap and chant, and Bob and I got out of there fast.

  On the bus home, I asked Bob if Dr. Vergara Emerson would be killed. Colonel Luis Arce Gómez, the minister of the interior, had announced on the radio that all Bolivians opp
osed to the new order should walk around with their wills under their arms.

  “I don’t know,” Bob said. “But you will remember her, Carmencita, because what that woman did is the definition of courage.”

  PART TWO

  THE

  FALL

  10

  FIREWORKS ERUPTED ALL over La Paz, celebrating the kiss I’d been dying for. It was midnight on Christmas Eve 1981, and Plaza Avaroa was a little piece of paradise, its benches and grassy slopes home to the courtship of every kid in the neighbourhood.

  Not that I was a kid. At fourteen, I was a veteran kisser, smoker and dancer, and I’d been witness to some very bad behaviour during my first year of high school back in lonely Vancouver. My classmates there had made a habit of alcohol poisoning. Bush parties were the name of the game. You’d crash through the forest to arrive at a clearing containing the moonlit bodies of thirteen-year-olds trashed on booze, pot, mushrooms and acid. I vowed never to drink or do drugs, no matter how much I wanted to dull my pain.

  As the kiss continued, I flashed on my father, left behind to celebrate Christmas without us. Midnight had yet to arrive in the far North Pacific, I knew, and I wondered if it was another rainy night in Vancouver. The place had seemed so sedate and sterile after La Paz. Most of my adopted aunts, uncles and cousins had departed from Vancouver, leaving no forwarding address, no doubt responding to the Return Plan. I was still devastated by the image of Papi standing at the end of the airport tunnel, hand on his heart as my aunt Tita held him up.