Daniela looks back at the words. Drugs and alcohol may kill me slowly. . . . “Nothing,” she says. “Nothing.” I’m not in any hurry, say her eyes.
19
A Way of Life
4 a.m., November 24, 1997;
Obrajes District, Church Construction Site
She is dead now. Maria, and my sister. What did they do in their short lives to deserve such cruelty? If anyone should die, it should be me. I have treated people poorly at times. I have greed and extreme anger, lust and temptation, selfishness and material desires. And yet these two girls die. How could God let this happen?
I just spoke to Daniela. Now I am back at the half-built church where I sleep. I am washing the excrement off of my shoes, a nightly chore. And now I hose off my body. I set my alarm for 6:30, and I lie in bed. I close my eyes, and I see things. I don’t want to bury Maria. Someone else will have to go get her body at the hospital. Go to sleep, Chi! It’s not Christmas.
I don’t want to see a dead baby. I don’t want to have to pick up a dead baby. I will do anything to avoid being in that room. But I am Maria’s only hope. Maria must have a proper burial. If she is left in the morgue, they will throw her away or incinerate her with the medical waste.
The last chapter in Maria’s short life has closed. The possibly long epilogue of the story is how Daniela will live the rest of her life and how she will raise Natalia. She must move forward and become a better mother. But she can’t start the epilogue until she buries and mourns Maria properly. I could not start my new life without burying my sister, without mourning the loss of her life, and without healing. Maria deserves a respectful burial. A respectful burial would be a statement to Daniela that street children are children. This statement I’ll make to anyone who’ll listen.
For six months before I came to La Paz, I studied hermeneutics in Boston. Hermeneutics: the theological analysis and investigation of biblical text. Sitting in the safe confines of Boston, where I was never hungry, cold, or in danger, I made a commitment to a more godly life. I was prepared to make the sacrifices and take the hardships related to humbly living such a life. Now I lie here in the dark, in a cold unfinished church, just a step or two off the La Paz streets. I’ve been asked to bury a baby girl. And this simple request has me scared of sleeping, nay, of dreaming.
The boys of Bururu, dressed in aprons, stir dough in large silver pots. “Why are you here at seven in the morning?” Jorge asks.
“I . . .” I hesitate, “I have to do a few things with Alejandro.”
Every two or three blocks, Alejandro and I walk past a coffin store. The market for coffins is large because Bolivians die at an exceedingly high rate. The infant mortality rate is 90 per 1,000 births (nearly one out of ten); in the United States, the rate is 7.1 per 1,000 births (less than one percent). In shantytowns such as El Alto, the rate tops 200 per 1,000 (one out of five), and among the street community, babies die at a rate of 300 to 500 per 1,000, based on anecdotal evidence. In Bolivia, death is a way of life.
Alejandro and I walk in silence down the city sidewalks. I dig into my pocket and make sure I have my weekly income: five hundred bolivianos, or about one hundred dollars. I never have enough money to care for my children, so I kick myself when I spend two dollars on a café au lait. How many meals for street kids could I buy with that?
Alejandro and I step into a coffin store. Thirteen coffins stand against the walls in this nine-hundred-square-foot room. There are deep brown mahogany coffins, silver-gray metallic coffins, white wooden coffins, and coffins-in-progress. “This old woman who sells baby coffins is a Christian,” Alejandro says. “She’ll most likely give us a good price.” I nod my approval. Saving a few dollars on a coffin means more food and medicine. “Hello?” Alejandro calls out.
A short, elderly woman dressed in a gold business suit waddles out from the back room. Her face is marked with lines of wisdom, and her deep black, dyed hair is neatly tied in a knot. She wears black shoes one size too small for her, and the dorsal parts of her feet stick out.
“Buenos días,” she says.
“Buenos días,” says Alejandro. “We need to purchase a coffin for a five-month-old baby. She is about this big.” Alejandro holds his hands about twenty inches apart. “We don’t have too much money.”
The old woman squints at us. Why would two young men purchase a baby coffin at seven in the morning? She walks around her store. She picks up a fifty-inch hardwood coffin and carries it toward us.
“This is too big, madam,” I say, “and it is probably too expensive.”
She walks into the back room. We wait five silent minutes. The lady reenters with a small wooden hexagonal box, white and riddled with globs of dried paint. Two silver cloth flowers decorate the top of the casket. I turn the casket over and rap my knuckles against it. The wood is thin but solid.
“How much?” I ask.
“Two hundred bolivianos,” says the old woman.
I give Alejandro a look.
“Madam,” he says, “the coffin is for a street baby. We work on the streets at night trying to recover children and give them a place in our two orphanages just up the street. This baby girl died two days ago, and we need to bring her out of the morgue.”
She looks at us with slackened, watery eyes. Her shoulders slump, and she stares at her feet sticking out of her shoes. She waddles into the back room again and brings out a cream-colored dress. Pinned to the chest are two little angel wings. Paper flowers decorate the skirt, and the hem is crimped.
“Your baby needs a funeral dress. I sell the coffin and the dress for 150 bolivianos.”
“Thank you for your kindness.” We walk outside and hail a taxi. The driver steps out and notices the casket. “I won’t take dead bodies.”
“We don’t have one yet.”
It’s 9:30. Alejandro and I sit in the first-floor waiting room. Daniela’s an hour late. I dread she might not show up. Was all her anguish just an act? How could she be so irresponsible as to not even bury her own child? Ten minutes pass, and I check my watch every thirty seconds. My heart has sunk so low, my intestines are beating. Like some character in a Kafka story, am I waiting for something impossible?
Daniela rushes through the door, out of breath and wearing the same outfit she had on last night. Beads of sweat pimple her tanned forehead. “I am so sorry that I am late. Please don’t be mad at me. I woke up and started to walk to the hospital immediately.”
“It’s okay. You tried your best. Okay, Alejandro is going to get the paperwork, and you and I can have the doctor sign the permit to release Maria from the morgue.”
Daniela takes a small step backward, and we lose eye contact.
“What’s wrong, Daniela?”
She does not respond.
“Would you like me to talk to the doctor by myself?”
“Yes, if possible.”
On the second level, next to a file cabinet, I study Maria’s charts. Her electrolyte (sodium) levels skyrocketed over the last days of her life. Was she not drinking? Eating? Receiving any hydration?
I walk up to a nurse. “Hello, may I see Dr. Rico Velázquez?”
The nurse looks at me with mild suspicion. “I am sorry, but who are you?”
“My name is Chi, and I work with some of the children on this ward. I would like to see Dr. Velázquez.”
“Okay, I will overhead page him.”
A young doctor with wire-rimmed glasses and gelled-back hair enters the room. The nurse scurries over to him and points to me.
“Hello, may I help you?” he asks.
“Yes, I would like to know how Maria Moreno died.”
“And who are you?”
“Does it matter who I am?”
“Yes.”
“I am a medical student from the United States who took care of Maria.”
“Maria died from dehydration and pneumonia.”
“How does a baby die of dehydration in the hospital?”
“The baby wasn�
��t fed for two days.”
“What do you mean she wasn’t fed?”
“I am sure in America it is different, but at this hospital, we cannot afford to feed the patients. It is the responsibility of the mother or the caretaker to feed the child and purchase medication. The mother never came to buy intravenous fluids or feed her baby.”
“And so you let her die.”
“Listen, we tried to enroll Daniela in an alcohol rehabilitation program. She never showed up to the meeting, nor did she attend to her baby. For a couple of days, another Aymaran mother breast-fed this baby out of pity. But when the mother took her baby out of the hospital, Maria remained, and Daniela never came to feed her. She let her own baby die, not us.”
“I did not know that Daniela had an alcohol problem. Regardless, you are a doctor, and this is a hospital. You let a baby die in a hospital.”
“Maria was a street baby. She would have grown up to be a little criminal anyway.”
“So this is your way of justice. Exterminate the homeless. What if someone let you die?”
“I don’t need to hear this.” The doctor turns to leave.
I follow him. “If I ever hear that you allowed this to happen again, I will try my best to make sure that you never practice medicine in Bolivia again.” I stop in my tracks, as he walks on. “Besides, you’d be a better mortician than a doctor.” With my face red and sweaty, I hand the nurse a hundred bolivianos for the medications and IVs used on Maria.
I head down the stairs to see Daniela. What will I say to her? She helped kill Maria. Do I confront her with her failure as a mother? She already knows. The street children know the difference between wrong and right. They love their children and their street families. Daniela spent days walking already, numb and self-destructive. The Lolas of the world will ingrain her failure further into the lining of her soul.
I am Daniela’s advocate. No one besides Pedro encourages her. With street children, there are times to be strong, and there are times to be kind and gentle. This is a time to be caring. Daniela knows more than anyone else her wrongdoing; she has lost her daughter as a result. What she needs, like other street children, is the social tools to prevent tragedy from recurring. Hopefully, I can help her find a new way of living.
As Daniela and I stand quietly in the hospital lobby, I act as if I haven’t learned anything about her role in the death of her daughter. Daniela says nothing. She examines a scar on her hand for a long time.
We get more stamps. We pay more fees.
Finally, the social worker in the basement asks for us to pay a morgue fee: one hundred bolivianos. I reach into my pocket. Nothing. All we need is a lousy twenty bucks, and we don’t have it.
I ring the doorbell to an upstairs apartment attached to La Iglesia de Dios. Laura opens the gate and, without asking any questions, says, “I don’t have much, but you can have all that I have.” She examines my face. “It was Maria, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” I say.
“How did she die?” she asks.
“Daniela let her starve in the hospital; the doctors did too; the father wasn’t there; society and the government let Maria live on the street; the orphanage kicked her out; and I left on vacation. It took a village to kill Maria.”
We watch Mount Illimani, allowing silence to supersede words. I want to scream out at the mountain: Why? But the only answer I’d get is the echo, Why?
“I’m sorry, Chi, about little Maria,” she says. “How’s Daniela?”
“Keeping it inside. She doesn’t ever say anything about Maria. When I ask her if she’s okay, she always says she’s fine.”
“Come on in,” she says. “I have another visitor—Señora Nuñez.”
“So what are you doing here?” Señora Nuñez asks me.
“I came to borrow some money from Laura to get a baby out of the morgue.”
“Oh, that is so sad. Whose baby is it?”
“A girl I have known for the past four months.”
“Is she from church?”
“No, she’s from the streets.”
“From the streets.” Her maternal facade melts away like wax, revealing a cosmetics-caked volcano. “Let the baby die!” she demands. “They are just street children. They’re drug addicts and thieves! Let them rot! Don’t waste your money. They are not worth anything.”
Daniela, Alejandro, and I have been waiting for an hour now in the hallway of the morgue. We know which room we need to get into by the smell emanating from the gap beneath the door. A large-set janitor walks up to us and asks us for our papers. He glances at the rainbow of stamps and unlocks the door. The smell of formaldehyde and rotting flesh eats at our nostril linings. Alejandro picks up the casket.
“I can’t go in there,” says Daniela. “Can you take care of Maria for me?”
“Sure.”
Alejandro and I walk in and shut the heavy door behind us. A humid breeze blows across my face. The window is open, but the view is striped by four rusted bars. The walls are tiled by light brown ceramic squares. Atop a lonely steel surgical table sits a small package wrapped in cream-colored cloth.
Alejandro pulls on the casket’s lid, but it doesn’t budge. He doesn’t notice the painted white nail heads along the coffin’s edge. I take the coffin from him and try to pry the nails loose with my Swiss army knife. My hand trembles. Pain blazes, and I watch blood drip from my right index finger. Alejandro takes the knife from me and opens the casket. The tiny space within it is barely enough to bury my arm.
I open up a fresh pair of gloves. The snap of latex on my skin echoes off the walls. With my bloodied index finger and thumb, I slowly peel the cream-colored cloth off the small package. A grayish blue doll lies supine before me. Maria. Her glassy, glazed eyes look straight into mine. Two big green-black flies buzz out of her nostrils. My heart races. I try to catch my breath and breathe slower at the same time. Calm down! Three thin red scratches mark her left cheek. Her front incisors clamp down on a wad of cotton. I try to open her mouth to take it out, but her jaw is locked. Suddenly I feel as if I am watching myself from the ceiling. I see myself running away, but I can’t. My legs can’t move. Mouse or lizard fecal matter sticks to her skin. I brush it off of her. My nostrils flare and my stomach turns. Her face is turned stiffly toward me. Those black, beautiful olive eyes of Maria . . . Mingfang? I slip my hand under her. Her back is icy rubber; her hands are cold as mountain stones. I rush Maria into the coffin. Alejandro nails the lid down.
20
The Wake
4 p.m., November 24, 1997;
Yassela
Señora Lola barks in Daniela’s face. “This is all your fault. You killed your baby! The only reason I am letting you have the wake at the orphanage is because of Chi. And because Maria is a baby angel. She was too young to be impure.”
Daniela is just standing there without expression as Señora Lola continues her tirade. Daniela shows no anger. No sadness. Señora Lola is talking to a brick wall. Daniela does not want to fight. She just wants to hold the wake for her baby.
Minutes later, Señora Lola finishes, “I never want to see you again! This is the last time, Daniela!” Señora Lola takes a breath and turns to me. “How much did you spend on this girl? I hope not too much!”
Señora Lola and I walk to a corner. “Daniela’s drinking again,” she whispers to me. “She can’t stop it. So irresponsible. I knew that she couldn’t make it. How disappointing. She killed her baby because she is still a child.”
“Señora Lola,” I say in a soothing voice, “I’ll take care of everything from here. Just give me a room for the wake.”
“You can have the room on the roof.”
Up on the roof, the sky above is blue, and the tile floor beneath is magenta with white speckles. From the edge of the roof, I study the huge “Disfruta Coca-Cola” sign to the north and the blue neon beer billboard next to it. Down on the street, little white taxis bob and weave through traffic, past a 1960s Tortoise bus. Colorful bundle
s of babies bounce up and down as their mothers piggyback them zigzag across parallel lines of moving metal. Mothers and fathers here work eighty to one hundred hours each week so their families can build a red mud-brick shack in El Alto.
I step along a small plot of rich brown dirt on the roof. Plants and vegetables sprout from the soil, their leaves still too young to be differentiated from each other by species. In one corner of the roof is the room for the wake. Its old door, warped by rain, can never close. The room is six feet by six feet, with a view of the city through a broken window. Serrated chunks of glass litter the stained green carpet, inviting soles to open up. An uneven wooden table holds up a black-and-white television.
Sara pokes her little brown nose into the wake room. With my torso, I block her view of Maria. “Chi, Chi,” she says, “here are the bedsheets you asked for. Can I come in, Chi?”
“No, Sara. That’s not a good idea.”
“Why not, Chi?”
“Sara, I have to do a few things today that are not good for you to see.”
“What happened, Chi?” asks Sara. “Did Maria die? Poor little baby.”
“Yes, Maria died.”
“Why?”
“These things sometimes happen. I don’t want you in here because I have to wash her and dress her in new clothes.”
“But, Chi . . .”
“You will get nightmares.”
“Okay,” says Sara. I look at Sara in her dirtied pink dress. Sadness swells in my chest. Sara unpokes herself from the room.
I retrieve some towels and a basin of soapy warm water. Daniela sits on the steps near the exit, quietly explaining what is happening to one of the older girls. I find a few rusted tacks on the floor and pin the bedsheet over the window.
I look at Maria once again. The three distinct red scratches on her left cheek are the only color on her pasty face. My chest tightens. With her lungs full of fluid from the infection, did she flail about as she gasped for air? Did she scratch herself in a final attempt to let air into her lungs?
When Invisible Children Sing Page 16