I would cry a lot, and my mother was bad. She would say, “Cursed be the hour you were born, because it was because of you that I separated from your father.” She would still beat me a lot and insult me. I would leave my house and come sleep here on the street, and she would find me. When she was high or drunk, she would beat me, pull me by my hair, and wound me. My grandmother would always tell me, “Do not approach your mother.” I would try to avoid being around my house, but my mother would always find me and beat me.
Since that time I would not go home because my mother would come home drunk and beat me until I wet my pants. My stepfather gave me a radio, an iron, and a blender for Christmas one year. But then he came back with my mother and they were both drunk. So he told me, “Lazy imilla [girl], why don’t you work?” and took my gifts. I answered, “But you gave me those for Christmas.” He replied, “You should work, lazy imilla; buy your own things.” Then, full of anger, I threw the radio toward him and almost hit him. And my mother threw some moroko [big milling stones] at me. I dodged them, but one of them hit my grandmother in the hand. She said, “Don’t do this to your daughter.” And my mother answered, “Why does this witch imilla do this to me? Why doesn’t she work?”
That is why I started going to the streets, where I met boys and girls and started inhaling thinner with them. My mother would come and say, “Share with me.” I would deny her, and she would beat me. Sometimes she would even drop her baby daughter.
Of course if my mom hadn’t beaten me, I wouldn’t have left my house. She beats me, insults me, and even has beaten me here in the street. She pulled me by my hair and soaked me in blood. She was drunk. Some ladies helped me escape. When my mom is not drunk she apologizes, but when she is drunk and even sometimes when she is not drunk, she shouts at me.
I sleep on the street now.
Vicki punctuates the story of her thirteen years with a concise sigh. We let the sigh settle in our ears as we watch three teenage girls walk out of the park to sell their bodies.
“Would you consider living in an orphanage again?” I ask.
Vicki speaks into the tape recorder as if it were a microphone at a UN assembly. “Many street children fear the orphanages because they don’t trust the people who work in those places. They might hurt us or steal from us or shame us for what we are.”
“Are you afraid?” I ask her.
“I am afraid,” she says, untying her scarf quickly, as if it had been suffocating her. “I am afraid my mother will find me. My mother came to me each time I was in an orphanage. I’ve been in two orphanage houses, and I am scared to go to another one.”
Should I bring up Yassela orphanage? Would Yassela be good for Vicki? Mercedes ran away from Yassela. Daniela was locked out. Many people are to blame, but that doesn’t change the end results: two girls back on the street, one dead baby.
“Besides, Dr. Chi.” Vicki interrupts my thoughts. “I am addicted to thinner, to taking drugs. They will never let me into an orphanage. Those places are for children whose parents drop them off there or who recently lost their parents. They don’t want children who’ve lived on the street for a long time like me.”
“Do you think you can stop using drugs, Vicki?”
“Dr. Chi, don’t you understand?” she implores, begging me to see things through her eyes. “You have been out here long enough to know. We take drugs because of the deception we feel. I take drugs to forget the problems I have with my family, with my home. I won’t lie. I have to take drugs because they let me forget the sorrows. I know the drugs damage me, but I want to forget the sorrows. Without drugs, I will cut open my wrists and die.”
“So are you happy on the streets?” I ask her.
“I’m happy when I have food and don’t have needs. When I am supported. I don’t feel happy when I feel alone, when I feel that I don’t have support, and when I don’t have anybody. That’s how I am feeling now: lonely and without support. I feel lonely always.” Vicki looks at me with matter-of-fact eyes. She wants me to understand that this is simply the way she feels. She seeks no pity, nor is her spirit broken.
“You say you’re lonely, but you seem to have a lot of friends,” I say.
“I have friends, but sometimes they are evil.”
“You know,” I say to her, “if you leave the streets, you can still keep your friends and make new friends, and maybe find friends who won’t be evil to you. And you won’t have to deal with violent men.”
Again, Vicki has a point to make: “On the streets, there is no lack of men who say to us, ‘Let’s go.’ We don’t want to go, and sometimes they take us by force and try to abuse us in large groups. Sometimes, if we don’t want to give them money, they say, ‘Vamos!’ So we say, ‘Joven, we’ll give you the money in a while.’ Then they make an appointment, and we give them the money there.
“I would like to leave the streets,” she continues. “I don’t have a birth certificate because my parents have never taken care of it. If I had a birth certificate I could work, even washing dishes, but I don’t have a certificate or an ID. Sometimes I look for a job as a servant, but they always ask, ‘Do you have a birth certificate?’ I say, ‘No, but I will work. Don’t distrust me.’ But they always want a certificate or any guarantee. I don’t have guarantees.”
Vicki takes a deep breath. She wants to round out the picture of her life. She knows nothing of books, of research papers, of publicity campaigns, but she knows that someone, maybe just a handful of people, might someday read her words, listen to her voice. So she concludes, “The most important things in my life are my sisters. My sisters still live with my mother, so I don’t see them much.”
“Vicki,” I say to her, “you are like a sister to me. You are my younger sister. I want to help you to get off the streets. How can I help you, and how can I help all the street children?”
“How you can help us?” she echoes. “Some people used to come and hold activities sometimes. That’s what I would like. They would help us with various activities, and with food, because sometimes we don’t eat. I would like them to help us with medical care, because we don’t have the money for that.”
She looks down at her hands, turning her scarf around in a circle like water in a mill. “Also”—she looks at me, still thinking about how to word this—“you can help by explaining us to the people, trying to communicate with them. There are always people like us, who need help.”
“Why do people think that street children are evil?”
“Because we are always dirty,” she says. “We don’t have a place to sleep. We inhale, and they see us when we are high. Moreover, some people from the streets attack them, and they think we’re all the same. I think that there are good people and bad people who don’t understand us. I would like them to understand us and not think, because we are street children, we are evil. There are some bad, but also good, street children. They must know how to understand us.” Vicki hangs her head, looks up from the shadow of her own face. The lights of her pupils scratch their way through the darkness. “Not all of us children are bad, are we?”
25
Dance with Me
11 p.m., January 25, 1998;
Alonzo de Mendoza
Vicki really is like a sister to me. She asks me about my life; she looks after me. It’s strange. Most street children are concerned only about themselves and talk about their own problems, which is natural when you are at the bottom of the food chain.
Over the months, I tell Vicki about my life. That I grew up in a Taiwanese household, about what my parents do for a living. I tell her about growing up and trying to get the best grades and then going to medical school. I tell her about Mingfang. But just as if she were my real sister, I don’t tell Vicki everything. I keep a little to myself. I don’t tell her what happened after my sister died. I don’t tell Vicki that she is the same age as Mingfang was when she died.
As I walk the streets at night helping the children, I try to make each one understand that
he or she is special, but no matter what craziness is going on, I keep one eye on this little sister of mine, Vicki.
Vicki and a dozen other street children have just finished playing choro-moro, a bizarre Bolivian children’s game. One team of children line up, each with his head in between the legs of the person in front of him. They are all facing the same direction, and the child in front holds on to a pole. The other team takes turns leaping from behind the child in the rear and landing on top of one of the bent-over children in this snake of humanity. The more children on the leaping team who can land and remain on the snake team, the greater the accomplishment. Meanwhile, however, the snake team is shaking their backs, trying to make the leaping team fall off. When one of the leapers falls, the two teams switch roles. It is a testament to Vicki’s spirit that she plays this boys’ game.
Vicki and I sit on a concrete bench in Alonzo de Mendoza. “You know, Chi,” Vicki tells me, “you’re stupid.”
“Excuse me?” I ask.
“You heard me. Tonto,” she repeats emphatically. “You understand the Spanish, don’t you?”
“Why am I tonto?” I ask.
“You could be having fun all these months, but you are out on the streets with us.”
“You’re here too, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, but I don’t have any other options,” she argues. It breaks my heart to hear her say this. Her hopelessness coupled with her self-loathing means she may never escape the streets.
“You have other choices,” I tell her. “You just don’t see them right now. Besides, it’s not so bad to hang out with you.”
“I would think it would be boring,” she says, concerned about the entertainment value of my walking the streets.
“Why do you think in the ‘prime of my life’ I would spend so much time with the street children?” I ask her.
“I don’t really know.” Vicki turns toward the wind to let it tousle her hair.
“Think about it,” I say.
“Chi, I can’t think clearly with the thinner.”
“Then stop sniffing for a few minutes and think.” I’ve been trying for weeks to get her to stop sniffing.
Vicki stuffs her ball of yarn into her sleeve and takes a deep breath. “Is it for the sex?”
“Pardon me?” I try to repress my own useless indignity. “Do you think I am a john?”
Vicki looks at me and tilts her head. For too many sad and twisted reasons, it may be more comforting for Vicki to think of me as a john than as an adult male who simply cares for her well-being.
“Why are you here then,” she asks, “when you could be partying with your friends? With a girlfriend?”
“You tell me,” I say.
“You want to help us?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say. “That is part of it.”
“Ummm.” She takes out her yarn and breathes in the thinner deeply. “It is that Christian thing.”
“What is ‘that Christian thing’?”
“That Christian thing”—she exhales, her words forming a white cloud in the cold air—“is you need to do good works in order to have God look favorably upon you.”
“Sort of,” I say. “But my works do not buy me a ticket into heaven, you know.”
“They don’t?” she asks.
“No.”
“So you are here because you want to be here. Because . . .”
“Because what?”
“Because you love God?”
Is she repeating a cliché? Something she heard another street child recite on a bus for tips? “Yes,” I say. “That is the underlying reason for most of what I do in life. I’d rather be here than anywhere else in the world. Because I like to see children enjoy being children again. Because I see the face of God in every child.”
“You’re not only stupid,” she pronounces in her drugged drawl, “you’re crazy.”
“Maybe,” I peep out. “But I am happy. Happier than ever. This is one of the few places in the world that I feel truly alive, where I feel closest to heaven.”
Vicki lets the matter go. She will think about it later, after it sinks in. She chatters on. And on. She talks so much that sometimes I tune her out. Sometimes I think she talks just to hear herself. It’s like she is saying, “Yes, world. I exist.” Maybe the world should tell her to be quiet sometimes. No, I don’t mean that. The world has shut her up far too many times.
“If someone helps me,” she tells me, looking over at me from across the bench, “I will survive and get off the streets. I will study and work.”
My daydream evaporates. “You what?”
She cringes in embarrassment. “I want to be a beautician.”
I don’t quite understand the Spanish. “A what?”
“A beautician!” she shouts. Vicki dreams of making people look pretty, lifting others higher. Her life and her self-image are so ugly that this dream seems both sad and beautiful.
“A beautician, huh?” I ask. “Maybe you could make me beautiful. That’s impossible, huh?”
Vicki laughs. “I like to paint nails,” she says. “I was in a project once, and they took me to study painting on fabric, serigraphy, pottery. But after the courses ended, I could not keep studying.”
“I think you would be a good beautician.” Indeed, she has done an excellent job on herself tonight, as usual. “Did you hear me? I said you would be a good beautician.”
She neither agrees nor disagrees. She leans over the concrete bench and aims a kiss at my mouth. I turn my face and let her kiss my cheek. Bolivian women give kisses on the cheek each time they part company, but Vicki does not leave. She stays, keeping us in an awkward state. I must say something, and yet how would it help? She’s been rejected by her parents, and then by her world. To be rejected, or to feel like she has been rejected, by me too—does she really need that?
Little sister, I want to say, your depth of feeling and empathy may be greater than my own. And yet you founder in these very depths, drowning in your own self-hatred.
We pretend nothing has happened, and we continue to talk about making people beautiful.
Tonight Vicki has dressed for leisure, not work, as she sports baggy purple sweatpants and a loose sweater. It is time to go to work, but she strolls with me around Alonzo de Mendoza. Sometimes it is like this; she takes a night off and visits with me as I treat my street patients.
Tonight my little sister is quite touchy-feely with the boys. She sits close to them, puts her arms around them. I can’t stand to see this, so I try to concentrate on my work, treating children and mothers. At 1:35 a.m., I pack my things and prepare to go home. Vicki strolls over. “We should go and party sometime, Chi,” she tells me, trying to make eye contact. “You can take me clubbing.”
“I don’t think that would be a good idea.” I try to take control with a serious stare.
“Come on, Chi.” She maneuvers about, shaking off my stare. “What is a little dancing and a few drinks? It won’t hurt anyone.” For street girls, “dancing” means that the man pays for the girl’s drinks and the girl lets the man have sex with her.
“Vicki,” I say, “you know I don’t dance. You see these two left feet. Plus, I have the rhythm of a chicken.”
She giggles. “I can teach the chicken how to dance.” She grabs hold of my arm and scoots her hip against mine.
“No.” I parry her hand away and back off. “Vicki.” I look her square in the eyes. “No.”
Vicki sits down on a bench. She pouts. I sit down too, on the other side. Cold silence. She looks out into the distance and sniffs, then sniffles. He doesn’t want to dance with me. I can hear the words in her head. He doesn’t want to dance with me. She believes me this time. He will not dance with me! She looks at me. Looks me square in the eyes. She narrows her eyes at me—out of hate or out of curiosity. “I wish,” says Vicki, “I wish there were more good men like you out there.”
Me too, I say to myself. Me too.
“You will be back tomorrow,” she
asks, “won’t you?”
“Of course.”
She walks over to the street boys. As she approaches them, her steps stutter. Vicki turns around and looks at me. I see on her face a look of pain—if not pain, then some sad question about her fate. When? Where? How?
Me too, Vicki. Me too.
26
Rain
February 14, 1998;
Calle de las Americas (a Street along Alonzo de Mendoza)
Alonzo de Mendoza needs this shower. The park has, appropriately, stripped naked for the occasion; all the prostitutes and drunks have run for cover—away, somewhere—leaving Alonzo de Mendoza bare of its human accoutrements, to be cleansed by the acidic rain of angry Andean clouds. Alonzo is now simply the stage for the smashing of water spirits into its face like flies into a screen window.
I am the only witness to this monotonous play.
Why am I out here? I told young Tina I would meet her tonight to check up on her gynecological ailment. She’s not here. I am. But if, against the one-in-a-million odds, she had come out here and if she had then found herself alone, I would have lost her trust and a load of street credibility, so to speak. I spin around and around in my Gore-Tex jacket, searching the soulless streets. No one. Time to go back home.
Wait. I laugh on the inside. There’s one other person as crazy as I am, running around in this freezing, sneezing weather. She is a girl, dressed purplishly from head to toe, running toward me, head hooded and arms holding her sides for warmth.
“Vicki!” I holler. “Is that you?”
She waits until she is before me to speak. “Chi!” Strobe-lightning takes flash photos of our faces as we look at each other. Vicki looks out of sorts, as if she left her favorite painting out in this rain.
“Terrible night, isn’t it?” I ask, wondering why she’s out here.
When Invisible Children Sing Page 20