We wanted her to teach us Aymara so we could speak with her in her own tongue. Besides, it was pretty. Everything sounded like the names of flowers. She initially resisted the idea, being both busy and reserved, but our persistence wore her down. While her mother was chatting with customers, she beckoned us behind their vegetable towers and squatted with her hands spread out before her. “Maya, paya, kimsa, pusi,” she showed us, counting out the numbers on her fingers.
In return, she asked that we help her with her Spanish. “It would help my mother,” she said.
“But you know Spanish.” She almost always understood her customers’ requests.
“Not so much for talking.” What Nayra lacked was not the words themselves, but the confidence to speak them aloud.
We started with vegetables. The potatoes had so many different names I got confused. There were dozens and dozens of kinds! More kinds of potatoes than I had ever seen in my life. And each one was a different color and size and shape, with a different name. Some of them looked like fat fingers, some like radishes, some had strange roots trailing off them. I didn’t know the Spanish names for all of them. I just called them papas.
“More,” insisted Nayra.
I shook my head.
“In your language then, what are they?”
“Erdäpfel.”
Nayra was silent, waiting for more words. “That’s it,” I said.
“For all of them?” she asked in astonishment. “Every kind?”
Our own language suddenly felt limited, insufficient for describing the subtleties of the world around us.
Nayra came from a village up near the lake. Lakes to me meant summer resorts and bathing, waterfront cafés and sandy beaches. But when I had asked Nayra if she swam, she had laughed. “It’s not that kind of lake.”
“You can’t swim?”
“You can, if you are loca. Or a fish. But if you stay in more than a few minutes under the surface you will die of cold.”
Some of my schoolmates had been up to the lake. When I asked Sarah and other girls about it, they confirmed Nayra’s assessment. Too cold to swim. Too cold even to picnic beside it, though many families tried. Some even rented boats to travel across to its islands. “It’s as big as an ocean,” my deskmate Sarah told me. “You can’t see the other side. And sometimes you have to take a raft to get across parts of it.”
I wanted to see it for myself, but it didn’t seem likely that Nayra would invite me for a visit. The Indians never invited us to their homes. Besides, it was hours away. You had to take a truck or a bus or a donkey. Nayra stayed much of the time with family in the La Paz neighborhood of Chijini, uphill from us, so she could get to work.
There were so many kinds of Bolivians, each belonging to her own specific geography, jungles or high, cold lakes or semitropical hills. Every mountain, every curve of a river held a pocket of people said to be so entirely different from those on the other side that they didn’t seem to be from the same country. I wondered if the people in all of the parts of Austria I had never seen were as different from each other. I might never find out.
“Can we have Nayra to dinner?” I asked my parents. My mother, who spent so much time with Wayra and who was always hospitable to my friends—even allowing Miguel to join us for meals when we had enough food—hesitated. She looked at my father, whose head was bent over sheet music he’d found in a local shop. “Do you know what she eats?”
I shrugged. “Potatoes, I guess?”
My mother nodded in her newly vague way. “Potatoes I could do. But will she come?”
It was much harder to convince Nayra to come to our apartment than it was to convince my parents to have her. She shook her head every time I asked, for months. When I asked Miguel why she wouldn’t come, he said that Indians never mixed with white people or foreigners, and we were both.
I didn’t give up. Nayra’s presence comforted me in a unique way. She never asked questions. She didn’t force explanations from me. Unlike Miguel, she didn’t even try to find out what Austria was like. Nothing about her reminded me of home. She had never heard of Austria. When I talked to Nayra we rarely said anything that would sound significant to a stranger. But oh, how significant it was to me to sit with someone who asked nothing of me. She didn’t even ask for my friendship. I had to drag her into it.
* * *
• • •
WHEN NAYRA FINALLY agreed to come to our rooms—perhaps simply to stop my incessant invitations—my parents were kind. They gave her our best chair, the only one with a back, and offered her everything first. Nayra sat stiffly on the edge of her seat, keeping her eyes lowered as she whispered responses we could barely hear. When food was served, she bent over her fried potatoes, eating quickly. Only when my mother began asking her—using me to translate—what kinds of things her family grew on their land by the lake did she seem to forget her shyness.
“Only certain things grow there. It’s cold and the soil is not so rich. We have potatoes and beans. Some others grow corn, but we are better at potatoes.” She looked hungrily at her empty plate and my mother refilled it.
“How much land do you have?”
“We don’t own the land.”
My father leaned forward, curious. “Who owns the land?”
“A mestizo. A rich man.”
“But you live on it?”
“We work it. My family does. Other families too. Campesinos can’t own land.” Her tone was matter-of-fact. This was how her world worked.
We sat in silence for a moment. I didn’t know how to address this newly discovered injustice.
My father changed the subject. “What does the lake look like?”
Nayra glanced toward him, then up at our stained ceiling. “It’s a mirror of the sky, almost as big. Around it are the mountains, the highest ones with snow. It’s where everything begins, the top of the earth.” The islands in the lake gave birth to the sun, the moon, and the stars, she told us. The boats and buildings in some of the villages were made from rushes that float on the surface of the water. The water was full of tiny fish called karachi that her family fried for lunch.
“Mostly I am living in Chijini now,” she concluded. “It’s closer to the market. I go back to the lake only for holidays, for fiestas.”
I listened, rapt. Lake Titicaca sounded mythical, a place where only gods could live.
My parents had also fallen silent.
“Where do you go to school?” my mother asked. Reluctantly, I translated. Didn’t my mother know anything?
“I don’t.” Nayra swallowed and set down her mug. She had kept on her little hat, and I noticed a small tin animal was pinned to the brim. “I work.”
“I see.” My mother nodded. “And your father? He works?”
“He’s in the Colquiri mine.” Many of the men we knew worked for the mining companies. Bolivia had immense mineral wealth, largely in tin, tungsten, and silver. But the mines were dangerous. In the labyrinths within Cerro Rico de Potosí, the legendary mountain once home to the world’s largest veins of silver, miners were always dying in accidents or from lung diseases.
“Her father knows how to make boats too. Nayra says he made one with the head of a puma on it, with fangs.”
“How clever!” My mother’s smile looked strained.
Nayra continued to eat her potatoes. I was ashamed that I didn’t even know what kind they were. I wanted to ask Nayra but was worried I would sound stupid. She was always astonished when I didn’t know basic things like the names of the many magnificent peaks around us. How could I not be able to name the components of this world?
My father sipped at a cup of coca tea and hummed a bit of Mahler’s “Erinnerung.”
Nayra didn’t ask what my parents did for work or what I did at school. Maybe she didn’t consider those things important.
She had bee
n surprised that I didn’t have brothers or sisters living with us, so I explained that my brother was missing. This didn’t seem remarkable to her, that someone should be missing. I wondered how often people went missing up by the lake, what forces might take them away. The cold water, perhaps.
When she got up from the table, Nayra saw the doll sitting in the corner of the room. “Yours?”
“It was a gift.” I picked up the doll and handed it to Nayra. She turned it over in her hands. Its dirndl was growing stiff and dusty.
“From your country?” She turned the doll backward to make her eyes close. “Ojos de lago.” Lake eyes.
“Nayra, this is for you.” My mother held out a small cake. Nayra set the doll back on the floor. “It’s a recipe from Austria. For your family.” Nayra looked at the cake in her hands. “It’s not usually so flat,” my mother added ruefully. “Es la altura.”
“It’s good,” I reassured her. “It’s Gugelhupf. With almond and fruits.”
Nayra smiled. While I had wanted Nayra to know my parents, had wanted to share our food and show her our room, I realized now that I preferred it when we were alone. I liked it better when Nayra was allowed to be quiet, or tell the stories she wanted to tell, when she didn’t have to answer questions or entertain anyone.
* * *
• • •
THE NEXT TIME I saw Nayra, she handed me a tiny alpaca sweater, a rainbow of colors knitted together. “To help your doll dress for Bolivia,” she said. “She will be cold.”
Forty-one
Under the water of our lake, all the way under, there is a city,” Nayra began in the mix of Spanish, Aymara, and gestures we used to communicate. Her voice was so quiet that it always sounded as if she were telling me a secret. We were sitting on the dusty street in early April, leaning against the wall of a building near the market, sipping tin cups of api morado, a warm drink made from purple corn and cinnamon.
“Like Atlantis!” I had discovered the story of Atlantis in one of Willi’s books, though I embroidered it considerably. “In Atlantis, everyone played music. Writing poetry was as common as writing shopping lists and artists painted every wall before money was introduced. At first people scoffed at the gold coins brought by a visitor. But a few, entranced by their glittering novelty, traded their prized artworks for them. The greed for coins grew until it was all anyone thought about. They stopped writing poetry and only wrote shopping lists. Apollo, or whatever god of music reigned then, sent a wall of water to submerge the city forever.”
Nayra’s face glowed in recognition.
“Yes, similar. Only our whole city was made of gold. But it too was sunk when people became greedy. If you travel underwater in the lake you can hear the music of the quena still playing.” I had heard the quena, the Andean pipe that made a shrill, lonesome sound. The kind of sound a drowned musician would make.
“Who is playing it?” I imagined Andean mermaids and wondered if they braided their hair and wore little black bowler hats.
She smiled. “No one knows. The spirits trapped there?”
As Nayra continued the story of the city under the lake, I noticed something odd. When she referred to something that had happened in the past, she gestured in front of her. When she spoke of the future, she gestured toward her back.
“Say, ‘When I was a little girl, I swam in the lake.’” I interrupted her, and she looked up at me, confused.
“Say the sentence, I mean. In Aymara.”
Still looking puzzled she said, “When I was a little girl, I swam in the lake.” Her right hand stretched toward the horizon. “But I didn’t! I don’t know how to swim.”
“I know. But when you talk about being a little girl you move your hands in front of you. Like your childhood is in front of you.”
“But it is.”
“No, your childhood is in the past. And the past is behind us.”
She laughed. “The past is right in front of us, where we can see it. It’s the future we can’t see.”
“But that’s backward.”
“It can’t be any other way.”
I was frustrated. Were we not walking away from our childhood with every step?
Yet later that night, as I lay in bed mulling this over, I had to concede that it was only the past I could see. I could see the scar on Anneliese’s lip, Stefi sewing a tiny dress for my bunny Lebkuchen, the men in brown trampling my city. I could see the braided rug by the door of our Vienna flat and the imposing silhouette of the Proteus. I could see Miguel running up the aisle of the Cine Teatro Tesla. But I could not see tomorrow. I could not see who would win the war or when Willi would come home or where I would live when I grew up or what my children would look like. It made a kind of sense to refer to the future as belonging to the blind spot at our backs. Hadn’t Orpheus been reaching for his future when he turned back toward Eurydice?
It startled me that the way I had always thought of the world could be wrong. Yet at the same time, it filled me with a breathless sense of freedom and possibility. Closing my eyes, I imagined with all of my might that my brother Willi was standing just behind me.
* * *
• • •
WHEN I TOLD NAYRA our stories of Friedenglückhasenland, she didn’t mock me or raise a skeptical eyebrow. Telling stories about rabbits did not strike her as odd. Like my stories, hers were focused on animals, but Bolivian animals, such as turtles, foxes, vizcachas, snakes, condors, vicuñas, and jaguars. It was a puma, Nayra told me, that she wore pinned to her hat. The puma was a symbol of prosperity, among other things. Nayra could not write, but she allowed me to transcribe her stories, to create a record.
Nayra was nothing like Anneliese, except for her love of stories. Anneliese was a wild talker, expressive and turbulent. Nayra was still and quiet. Yet when it came to stories, a channel of fire seemed to rise inside both girls. I had no trouble writing the connection between them.
* * *
• • •
WITH OUR STORIES, Nayra and I created a common ground.
“Tell me the one about the fox and the monkey,” I begged, another afternoon at the market. Nayra’s mother had let Nayra take a break to sit with me when I stopped by after school. Monkeys were still exotic to me. I knew there were monkeys in Bolivia, but they didn’t live in La Paz. I dreamed of traveling to the jungle, where the monkeys would come down from the trees and ride on my shoulders.
“The fox and the monkey sneaked into a rich farmer’s house one night, to eat from the pot of quinoa porridge left on the fire.” Another connection between worlds was the greediness of foxes. The Aymara fables were much like Aesop’s fables, those stories intended to instill the values of modesty and unselfishness. But while Aesop’s fox was clever, the Andean monkey was cleverer.
Tucking my skirt underneath me, I settled on the dirt beside her to listen.
When she ended the story with the monkey tricking the fox into holding up a piece of the sky, I was reminded of Atlas. I had always wondered how one person could hold up the sky, how he could keep it from falling in folds around him like a tent. If the sky is being held aloft, then what is between the sky and earth? What do we call that space we breathe? Another poem suggested itself.
* * *
• • •
“NOW, TIWANAKU? PLEASE?” While I loved animal stories, I was even more ensorcelled by tales of the ancient city whose ruins still sprawled across a plain near the lake. Tiwanaku was patterned after the sky, Nayra said. Doorways were aligned with the passage of the sun. “The moon used to be brighter than the sun,” Nayra said. “But the sun was jealous and threw ashes in her face.”
Temples were constructed from earth and a blue-green gravel collected from the beds of mountain streams that fed their crops. I wondered if there had been poetry in Tiwanaku. There must have been, because there must have been music, at least reed pipes from the lake. So
meone would have had the impulse to sing along.
* * *
• • •
SOMETIMES NAYRA’S STORIES frightened or repelled me.
“There was a mother with two sons,” one began. “These sons were lazy and did not like work. One day the mother sent the sons off with the seed potatoes to plant in a distant field. But when the sons got there, one stretched out on the ground and put his hat over his face. ‘You go ahead and plant them,’ he said. ‘I’m tired.’ The other son lay down next to him. ‘I’m tired, too,’ he said, wrapping himself in a blanket to sleep. ‘We can plant them later.’
“But when they woke they were hungry and they ate the seed potatoes. Satiated, they kicked around a rock like a football, until the lords of the underworld got angry about all the noise overhead. “Stop your games or you’ll have to play a match against us down here.” Frightened, they went home and told their mother they had planted the potatoes.
“The following spring the mother went to the field to dig up the potatoes she thought her sons had planted. But as she began hoeing the dirt, a neighboring farmer stopped her. ‘Your sons did no planting,’ he said. ‘They slept, they ate your seed potatoes, they played games and went home.’
“At home, the mother said nothing to the sons. There was no food for dinner. There would be no food for the long, hard winter. While her sons were outside kicking rocks again, she cut a piece of her thigh off with a kitchen knife, fried it, and served it to her sons.
“The next morning she was dead. When the sons realized what had happened, they were horrified. But it was too late. They could not undo what was done. The gods came down and turned them into wind, rain, and hail.”
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