“I get into trouble every time you take Rosa to Yassela,” she tells me.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“I mean I get beat up.”
My heart drops. The lungs make a futile attempt to take a deep breath. “Who beats you?”
“My marido,” she tells me.
“What does he do?”
“He hits me with his fists, especially when he is drunk. Sometimes he hits me with bricks.”
The first time I took Rosa to Yassela, her father and I exchanged some meaningless greetings before I shuttled her away. It was the only time her father and I ever spoke, and it was apparently a prelude to a beating. Tonight Catia tells me of the time her marido tried to drown her in a river. And not long ago he tried to throw her off a mountain while Rosa pleaded for him to stop.
“Why didn’t you tell me earlier?” I ask Catia.
“I don’t know,” she says.
“Does he beat Rosa, too?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says. “He traumatizes her psychologically. When he is drunk, his mind is dulled. He doesn’t want Rosa to play or laugh. She is required to sit quietly. When the child talks to other men, his jealousy comes out. He tells her, ‘He should be your father!’ And then he beats her.”
By playing with other men, Rosa is reaching out for a father who can provide love, warmth, and food. A real father. Biology alone does not legitimize one’s place in a family. Anyone can procreate. Even dogs.
“You see,” explains Catia, “Rosa is a baby, and she does not understand. I scold her when she talks to men to keep her from getting beat and getting beat myself. He often accuses me of having affairs with these men.”
“Why don’t you leave your marido?” I ask Catia.
“It is not that easy,” she says.
“Why not?”
“Because I love him,” she says.
How can you love a person who beats you and your child? Yeah, yeah. I know about the cycle of violence in domestic abuse, but Catia is still a living, thinking human being; she can rise above “cycles.” Can’t she?
“He beats you,” I say. “And he protects you. I know the system. Maybe you should ask him to protect you from himself.” My words circle around the air like useless flies. “He doesn’t take your money, does he?” I ask her.
She says nothing. My words embarrass her.
“He takes your money too?”
“Some of it. He drinks most of it away,” she says drily, and then laughs at how silly her life is. “Chi, don’t get angry.”
“Angry!” I mutter. “I am past angry.”
Rosa burrows her way under a mountain of blankets. Catia and I both look at her and wish and pray for the best for her. What’s best for Rosa means a terrible beating for Catia.
“So, Catia,” I dare to ask, “what do you want to do?”
She takes a shaky breath. “I want Rosa to stay on the streets with me. Rosa must stay.”
What can I do? I can’t confront Rosa’s father. It will only make things worse for mother and child. And I can’t approach child protection services because there are none. I can’t do anything except go back to my room and pray. I look over to Catia’s husband. He sneaks a glance at me and continues conversing with another man. “How can you love this man?” I ask Catia.
“Love.” She exhales, closes her eyes. “Love is a curse.”
Time is running short. In several days I will fly back to the United States to interview for medical residency programs. I need another minor miracle in order to help Rosa experience life off the street.
I find Catia in Plaza San Francisco behind her stand of fruit drinks. She stirs up the juice in five freshly poured glasses, and the fruit pulp floats up like fish eager to be fed. The plaza is quiet; the lunchtime customers have gone back to work, but Catia keeps stirring the fruit. “You know, he left,” she says.
“Who left?” I ask. I spot Rosa with her wings out, flying toward the street. Monica, the ubiquitous grandmother, catches her. Rosa slams on the brakes and zips about in tight circles. She becomes dizzy and falls to the ground, landing on her rear end. “Ba! Ha! Ha! Ha!”
“My marido,” finishes Catia.
“What?” I ask, shocked, happy, and already thinking of what to do next.
“He left yesterday,” she says.
“Just like that,” I say. “He left.”
“Yes,” she responds.
“Why?”
“For another woman,” says Catia. Her jowls sag deeper than usual. The scar on her face seems to spring tributaries. She pronounces carefully, “He left me for a younger, prettier woman.” Again, she stirs her fruit. “He took my blankets and my shoe-shine box and my money too.”
Gee, this is like an American soap opera. Older man beats his wife and children, takes her money, and then leaves for a younger woman. Yet Rosa’s father’s abandoning the family makes my heart light. “How do you feel?” I ask Catia.
“Good and bad,” she says, thinking, trying to place each component of this misfortune on the proper side of the fuzzy line between blessing and curse. “I feel good because I can use the money to feed Rosa, and I won’t get beat anymore. I feel bad because I care for him. He was a part of me.” Tears add salt to the fruit drink, and she quickly wipes her face.
Good riddance! Don’t let the door pop you in the rear on the way out. I guess there really isn’t a door. “How can I help you, Catia?”
“Help me protect and feed Rosa. And just listen,” she says, “and talk to me.”
“Okay,” I say, “I will.”
“Catia, I’m leaving Bolivia in a few days. Do you want Rosa to live at Yassela? She can try it out, and if either of you don’t like it, you can bring her back home.”
“Yes, I would like Rosa to live at Yassela. So if she wants to live at Yassela, you can take her there.”
“Rosa, would you like to live at Yassela?”
“I don’t like Yassela. One of the girls there hits me. They’re mean to me.”
“How about staying there just one night?”
“No. I want to stay here with my mommy.”
I will leave for Boston tomorrow. Rosa and I sit in a posh restaurant in downtown La Paz. Her legs dangle, swing, and then dangle from the chair. Her mouth is full of rice, chomping with delight. We are surrounded by rich businessmen. How many days would Catia have to work to buy Rosa this meal?
“This is good,” Rosa tells me, chewing on lean Bolivian beef. She rubs circles on her stomach.
“I am glad you like your meal,” I tell her. “I want you to eat well every day so you can grow up strong and smart.” I carefully place my fork on my napkin. “Did your mother tell you that I am leaving?”
“No.”
“I’m going back to Boston soon, and I’m coming back in a month.”
“Will you still come play with me when you’re in Boston?”
“Rosa, Boston is in a faraway country called the United States. That’s where I come from. When I’m in Boston, I can’t visit any of you.”
Rosa’s fork falls to her plate. Tears threaten to break their dams.
“I’ll be back, Rosa. It won’t be very long until I’m back here. You won’t even notice I’m gone.”
Rice and beef grow cold as my napkin wipes away the tears, hers and mine.
32
I Want to Go Home
June 1998;
La Paz, Bolivia
I don’t want to go home. I have been back from Boston for two weeks, and I will return to Boston in another few months. It is a beautiful day in La Paz. The sun cascades fat rays, fresh and yellow, down and further down through the thinnest of air, onto the tops of our heads, as the earth swings La Paz through cool eddies of mountain mist. The streets stretch before me like crisscrossing snakes baking themselves in their own sand tracks. I walk up and down the sidewalks looking for my children. Here they are. And there they are. I ask them how they did overnight, if there were clubs and knives in their lives an
d bodies. I wish, against the momentum of my own life, to live that cliché of clichés: to be there for them. I want to stay here in La Paz to protect and provide for my children. I don’t want to go home.
In Plaza San Francisco I talk to half a dozen shoe-shine children. They wear ski masks all the time, even when they play fútbol. They claim the masks block out pollution and shoe polish fumes; some say they wear masks because they are ashamed to show their faces to their own customers. They greet me with a strong handshake and a warm “Cheeee,” and they set their wooden shoe-shine boxes down on the concrete. They have to work hard for these boxes, saving fifteen American dollars to buy a comfortable spot for their customers to rest their feet while their shoes are being shined.
I say hello to “Mentisan,” a twenty-six-year-old street woman who has lived on the street the last ten years. We affectionately nicknamed her Mentisan because I always give her the trademark lip balm for her constantly engorged lip, an allergic reaction to thinner. I do not know her real name. The children ask me which night I will return. I tell them, “Tomorrow night, and I’ll visit all of you.”
Beyond a heated street fútbol match, I see Catia holding in her arms her daughter, Rosa.
“Hola, Catia.” I give her a Bolivian kiss.
“Hola, Chi. Rosa, say hello.”
“Hola,” Rosa responds shyly.
“How are you doing today?” I ask Catia.
“Good,” says Catia. “It was a quiet night.”
“What do you have planned for today?” I ask.
“You know: the same routine. Sell juice and soft drinks to earn some money.”
Rosa removes a cooked chicken head from her mouth and pipes up, “I want to go to your new house.”
Over the past two weeks, I’ve discussed with Catia the possibility of letting Rosa stay with me at a middle-class house owned by an American woman living in La Paz. Her name is Teresa. She allows La Iglesia de Dios to use a room in her house for whatever they need, as she lives in the rest of the house. I would like Rosa to stay in this room until I return to Boston and after that to stay in the home of a member of La Iglesia de Dios. She will visit Catia often, but she will learn to live in a home. And she will go to school.
“It’s fine with me,” Catia says, squinting against the sun. “Rosa can stay with you and the landlady, like we talked about. It will give me more time to earn money. You can bring her back tomorrow. It will be good for her to be off of the street for a little while. These streets are not good for little children.”
“I want to go to your house,” Rosa pleads.
I look into Rosa’s eyes and begin to melt. “Are you sure that it is all right with you, Catia?”
“Yes. It will be good for her,” she responds, and I take her response at face value. Catia puts Rosa in my arms.
Rosa immediately pounds on my chest with all her strength. “Shoulders! Shoulders! Shoulders! Shoulders!”
I place her on my shoulders, and she begins hitting my head with glee. “Say good-bye to your mom,” I tell her.
“Bye!” she screams.
Rosa rides on my shoulders across Plaza San Francisco, and we jump into a truffi (a taxi-bus). Sitting in the center of the backseat, she stretches her neck upward and peers out the window. The farther south we go, the bigger her eyes grow.
She chews on the chicken head, probably a treat from her grandparents. The head has lost most of its meat, and I tell her, “You can throw away the chicken head now.”
“You’re so wasteful!” she scolds me. “Malo chico!”
Bad boy, she calls me. To Rosa, meat is meat, even if it is peeled off the crown of a sickly, featherless fowl. And we in the United States squawk at being served dark meat instead of white. We ride silently for five minutes, and then she tugs on my shirt. “Where are we going, Chi?”
“To my house in Calacoto.”
“Where’s Calacoto?” asks Rosa.
“It’s a neighborhood about twenty minutes to the south.”
“That’s very far. Far, far away. Far away from Plaza San Francisco.” She nods, agreeing with herself.
The door opens before her. Rosa steps gingerly into the house.
“Hello, Doña Teresa. This is Rosa.”
“Rosa, you are a cute little one,” says Doña Teresa. “My home is your home.”
Rosa looks around as if she has walked into haunted catacombs. As she takes a tour through the house, she carefully touches the chairs, the carpet, the windows, and even the walls. I show her the bed she is to sleep on, in her own room. She walks up to the bed carefully and runs her hands across the comforter. She has seen beds before, but she has never slept in one.
She stops in the living room to consider its enormity. She walks into the kitchen. She cautiously turns her head to the left and then to the right. Her eyes balloon as she notices, standing against the wall, five twenty-gallon boxes of children’s clothes donated by Park Street Church. Rosa looks up at me, opens her arms, and jumps up and down. “Baby clothes! Baby clothes! I am a baby!” she exclaims.
“You can pick out the clothes you like.”
Before I can finish my sentence, Rosa has literally dived into a box of clothes. Only her legs are visible as she wriggles her way down toward the bottom. Her muffled voice is incomprehensible; all I can hear is her happiness, and I smile. She rights herself and sits atop the clothes.
I pick up a sweater from another box, and I hold it up before her. “Do you need a sweater?” I ask.
She nods fervently, takes the sweater, and drops it on the floor.
“Do you need some overalls?” She again nods, takes the overalls, and drops them on top of the sweater.
“Do you need a jacket?” The jacket falls on top of the overalls. Rosa digs clothes from the box she sits in and throws them on the pile. Within minutes, she stands beside a pile of clothes taller than herself. “Bag!” she demands. “I need a bag.”
I open a plastic grocery bag. As Rosa carries the big pile of clothes, only her two little legs can be seen sticking out from beneath. A voice from within the clothes pile says, “Chi, I need to go poo-poo.”
I help her drop the clothes into the bag, and I lead her into the bathroom. I make sure she understands how to use the toilet. Assured that she won’t fall in, I leave her alone in the bathroom. From the kitchen, I can hear her dangling feet kicking the porcelain bowl.
“All done!” she announces. I walk back into the restroom to find her all dressed again.
“Did you wipe yourself?” I ask her.
“What do you mean?”
“Did you use toilet paper?”
“Why would I use toilet paper, Chi?” she asks.
I tear a handful of toilet paper and hand it to her. “To wipe your butt.”
“To wipe my butt? Mommy and I only use that to blow our noses,” she tells me cheerfully, but I insist that she use the toilet tissue for its original purpose.
“Doña Teresa, would you help me give Rosa a bath?”
“I think that is a great idea,” Teresa says.
I turn the metal knob ever so slowly to make the water warmer a little bit at a time until it is nicely lukewarm. The clear water inches up the side of the cream-colored bathtub. Rosa comes in and watches me curiously. Her big brown eyes peer upward at my hands as the stench of human excrement wafts up from her shoes.
“What are you doing?”
“Getting a bath ready for you.”
Rosa watches me intently as I stir the water with my hands and distribute the heat evenly.
“I can’t take a bath,” she tells me.
She needs a warm bath with real soap. Her skin should be free of human excrement from this day forth. “And why don’t you need a bath?” I ask.
“Because it is cloudy and cold today,” she says. “I will be cold if I take a bath.”
I look at her lovely, round face. Her mother bathes her in the cold dirty river or in a restroom sink. Her survival instincts tell her to bathe only
when it is sunny so that the water is warm and the wind does not make her shiver.
“I have a special machine that makes the water warm. Touch the water, Rosa.”
Rosa carefully sticks her chubby little fingertips into the bath water. They reach in deeper and deeper. She lets out her cackling giggle as she realizes that this special machine actually works. The water heater, I explain to her, makes the water warm, even when the sun is gone.
Rosa jumps into the tub. Old dirt steadily gives way to the attrition of a good scrubber and warm water. She splashes water onto herself and giggles. She is happy for warm water! She is so happy that she jumps out of the tub and runs naked into the living room, screaming; she prances around in circles, cackling and leaving a trail of suds in her wake. Doña Teresa laughs hysterically. Little Rosa’s cackle is infectious, and the giggles bubble out of me as I chase her around, trying to wrap a towel around her. She swings the white lace curtains to one side and peeks out.
“Columpiar! Columpiar!”
She jumps up and down in a frenzy as I throw a towel on her. What does columpiar mean?
“Columpiar!” she exclaims. “Columpiar!”
She presses her face against the window and points her finger at a wooden swing set in the yard below.
“Put on your new clothes and your shoes.”
She runs into the bedroom and pulls on her new used OshKosh B’Gosh shirt and overalls.
“Rosa, you need underwear.”
“No, I don’t.”
I give her a disapproving look. “Yes, you do.”
She bounces like a rubber ball to the big cardboard boxes and digs out a pair of underwear.
Rosa laughs at the sky as she swings up in the air, telling me, “Higher! Higher, Chi!” I grunt and pretend to push her even harder.
We run inside and I blow up all the balloons bought just for her arrival. She starts hitting them, and hitting new high notes with her giggles.
And now it is 4 p.m., and I am hungry. She is too, she just doesn’t know it. I make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the kitchen as Rosa makes a racket in the living room. She opens up every board game in the house and throws them together into one big game.
When Invisible Children Sing Page 24