An Uninterrupted View of the Sky
Page 1
Also by Melanie Crowder
Audacity
PHILOMEL BOOKS
an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
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Copyright © 2017 by Melanie Crowder.
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Ebook ISBN 9780698175600
Edited by Liza Kaplan.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental
Image © 2017 by Arcangel/Bjanka Kadic
boy and sky © Shutterstock
Cover design and hand lettering © 2017 Maria Fazio.
Version_1
In Memory of
MICHELLE BEGLEY AND
DRA. WENDY LAGRAVA ZAMORANO
CONTENTS
Also by Melanie Crowder
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Cochabamba, Bolivia: 1999 October 6
October 7
October 8
October 9
October 10
October 11
October 12
October 13
October 14
October 15
October 16
October 17
October 18
October 19
October 20
October 21
October 22
October 23
October 24
October 25
October 26
October 27
October 28
October 29
October 30
October 31
November 1
November 2
November 3
November 4
November 5
November 6
November 7
November 8
November 9
November 10
November 11
November 12
November 13
November 14
November 15
November 16
November 17
November 18
Late November
Author’s Note
Glossary
Selected Sources
Acknowledgments
Excerpt from Audacity Clouds
Ordinary
Accolades for Audacity
COCHABAMBA, BOLIVIA
1999
October 6
It’s just a bare rectangle of dirt, maybe half the size of a real field. No lines, no goals, and not even one blade of grass. But it’s where Reynaldo and the guys and I go the second the noon bell rings and we’re free. We peel off our school uniforms, trade our dress shoes for cleats, and start knocking the ball around as we divvy up, shirts and skins. I’m almost always the shortest one out there, but I’m quick and my feet are liquid on the ball.
Five minutes in, and whatever has been going wrong that day slips through your fingers like the string that tethers a balloon to the ground. It’s just gone.
Ten minutes in, and sweat sticks my jersey down the bumpy ridge of my spine. Our forearms slide against one another, elbowing and jamming our bodies into position. Our feet kick up the dust, and the ball bounces through a cloud of knees and bare shins and curses and jeers.
It starts out friendly enough, just some guys from school, and a few from the neighborhood who dropped out years ago. But street games like this take on a pulse of their own, and sometimes guys we don’t know get drawn in. They take sides, and the game shifts. The jeers quiet and the laughter stops. It’s one thing to play against your friends, when it’s all just for fun, and in worship of the almighty fútbol.
But when new players step on, all of a sudden everybody has something to prove. And when the new guys look like this—sporting the new season’s jerseys and cleats we’ve only ever seen in catalogs, and skin so white they don’t even look mestizo—I know it’s going to be bad for me.
I’ve come to expect it by now—cleats-up tackles, hip checks to knock me off the ball, and a few too many shoves from behind. It’s not just me that gets it. They go after Mauricio, too, who’s darker than the rest, and shorter, who looks just like his indigenous Quechua parents.
Honest—I don’t go looking for fights. It’s just, they always seem to be looking for me.
I’m two steps from the goal when an elbow cracks against my eyebrow. Blood slicks down my cheek and drips onto the dirt in front of me.
That’s it. The game is over and I’m in their faces and my fists are up and—
“Hey!” Reynaldo yells as he hauls me back from the tangle of cussing, blustering guys that’s one punch away from an all-out brawl. “Hey! Francisco! Forget those bastards.” I hardly hear him, even though he’s shouting in my face. He holds me back and ducks his head so I have to look him in the eyes. It works.
I leave the field and that fight behind me.
Reynaldo and I sling our backpacks over our shoulders and start walking home. The sun is high overhead. The blood dries on my cheek and cracks into flakes that fall away from my skin.
We don’t talk about what happened back there. What’s there to say? All people see when they look at me is my dark skin and my Aymara face, no matter how I dress or talk or how bad I can kick their ass on the fútbol field.
What good does it do to talk about it?
• • •
Reynaldo and I weave through the dusty streets of our neighborhood. It’s better than some, I guess. But not so good that when Mamá goes out with her work friends, she brings them here. No, they go to a restaurant, or to someone else’s house in a better part of Cochabamba, with manicured gardens and trash collection and sidewalks.
The stores over there are shinier, the cars sleeker, and don’t think I don’t notice—everybody’s skin is lighter, too. Mamá and my little sister, Pilar, with their pale skin and delicate features, might have a chance at brushing shoulders with the elite, but not me.
It’s just the way it is.
Light-skinned mestizos work in the banks and the architect offices and the government buildings. Dark-skinned Aymaras and Quechuas work in the cancha and the fields and the mines. And then there’s me, stuck somewhere in between.
I’m not a peasant like my grandparents. I’m not a dreamer like Papá. So what if I am hiding my dark skin and my campesino roots under modern clothes and ready fists? What’s so wrong with that?
I know the streets of this neighborhood. I know where I belong. So I’ll set up shop with Reynaldo, and I’ll play fútbol every day, and n
obody will ever expect anything more from me.
• • •
The whole walk home, Reynaldo tries to distract me, talking about a wholesaler from La Paz who will sell us last season’s jerseys cheap, so we can start small with a stall at the big market in town, the cancha. He says if we take whatever work we can find after we graduate in six weeks, we might get our stall up and running by the spring.
Six more weeks, and then my life is finally my own.
Pilar is already home when I get there. She’s sitting on the couch with the entire contents of her backpack spilled out around her. The house smells like the dough that’s rising under a towel in the kitchen. The light is soft; Mamá has this thing with lamps. There are, like, seven in every room.
It takes a minute for Pilar to notice me. “What happened to your face?”
“Nothing.”
“It looks gross.”
“Thanks.” I swipe a roll off the counter. “I’m going to take a shower. Did Mamá call?”
“She says she’ll be home at six, and that you have to do your homework.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
At the end of the hall, I turn into my room and brush aside the sheet tacked across the middle to make it seem like Pilar and I each have our own private space.
We don’t.
To prove it, before I can throw a towel over my shoulder and leave again, Pilar is there, standing at the border between her half of the room and mine.
“Guess what?” she says. “Maria went to La Paz with her family last weekend.”
I don’t answer. Sometimes if I ignore her, she gives up and leaves me alone.
“Have you ever been to La Paz?”
“Once.” It’s more like a grunt than an actual word.
“What was it like? Is it big? The people there are Aymara, mostly, like Abuelo and Abuela, right? Not like the Quechua Cochabambinos.” She barely breaks for a breath. “Do they really build their houses on the sides of the mountains?”
It wasn’t a big deal, sharing a room when she was three and I was twelve. But now she’s eight and I’m seventeen. A bedsheet is not privacy. Not even close.
• • •
Lucky for me, tonight Mamá and Papá are too busy arguing to notice the cut over my eye. They’ve been doing this a lot lately—fighting about money. Pilar and I take our plates into our room and eat there.
I mean, I get it. Mamá hates being reminded every day that we’re barely scraping by.
Papá hates that everything he’s worked his whole life to achieve still isn’t enough for her.
October 7
The thing about Mamá is she never stays mad long. She gets mad quick, but she melts quick too. Papá says it’s all that Spanish heat burning up her veins. I’ve got the same temper, but nobody looks at me and sees a drop of European blood. Hence the cut on my eyebrow that swelled to the size of an egg overnight.
This morning, since they’ve clearly made up, my parents are free to gang up on me. As usual, Papá is all earnest and rational, and Mamá—I never know if she’s going to swat me with a dish towel for my smart mouth or smash my cheeks between her palms and cover my face with kisses. Just now, I’d rather the swat. My face is killing me.
Papá is on me because I didn’t finish my history homework last night. And then there’s the black eye. Pilar sits across from us at the table, her legs swinging back and forth beneath her chair. She’s eating her pan con queso in small, measured bites while her eyes dart between Papá and me and Mamá, who’s leaning against the kitchen counter, her mug of coffee raised to her lips so the steam bathes her cheeks.
“You need to take your schoolwork seriously,” Papá says. “Learning is a privilege.”
“Oh, yeah? You sit through one week of Profesor Muñoz’s algebra class and then tell me you still think so.”
Snap. Ow. “Listen to your father.”
“Francisco, the only thing holding you back is your own lack of initiative.”
“Really, Papá? That’s the only thing?”
He sighs and tries another angle. “Francisco, history is not just academic. An understanding of where we’ve come from as a country will help you understand where we are going, and how you can be a part of that.”
“I don’t need to pay attention in history class to open a shop with Reynaldo.”
“Working a stall in the cancha to sell cleats and jerseys is not ambition.”
“Come on, Papá.”
“You are more than this.”
“So I can’t do what I want with my life—I have to live the life you wish you’d had?”
I get a look for that one. “My son, I want you to have a good life. I want you to not always be scraping by. If you go to university—”
I can’t listen to any more of this. I push back from the table, sling my backpack over my shoulder.
“If you could get a degree like your mother—”
I leave, letting the door slam behind me.
When is he going to get it? All this opportunity he thinks he missed—it doesn’t exist. It was never there, not for someone who looks like me.
I don’t think there’s anything I hate more than disappointing Papá. So I finish my history homework in math class, which means I’ll have to figure out whatever Profesor Muñoz was droning on about in algebra after school.
Or not.
Nobody needs this stuff in real life, do they? But then I’d fail the test on Friday and get that look from Papá again.
And I’d be right back where I started.
• • •
After school, we’ve barely started our game when Mamá shows up at the field, out of breath and red-faced. Did she run all the way here? Mamá never runs, anywhere, for any reason. She didn’t even take off those clunky high-heeled shoes, or unbutton the blazer that cinches like a straitjacket over her ribs all day at the bank.
Wait—why isn’t she at work?
“Francisco!” Mamá calls. “You need to come home. Right now.”
I kick the ground, and a cloud of dirt swirls around my shins. “Our game’s not over.”
“We have to go. Now.”
“Ay, Má!”
“Francisco!” She’s gasping for breath. Her hair is sliding out of its clip. My mother’s always-busy hands hang at her sides, between the folds of her skirt like a pair of felled doves.
It’s all wrong.
So I go, and the guys chuck me on the shoulder as I leave the game.
I think about spinning around and cracking the ball through the posts, clenching my fists and shouting GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAL as I back away. But I don’t. I trail behind Mamá. Now that I’m not running anymore, I can smell myself. I need a shower.
“What’s going on, Mamá?”
Her lips stay glued together like slabs of dough pinched and sealed at the edges. I don’t get a word out of her the whole way home.
We swing through the iron gate set into the brick wall that wraps around our house, and step across the stone path to the door. Mamá’s begonias look thirsty. And I guess it’s time to empty the ashes from the trash pit at the back of the yard. Did she call me home to do chores?
I duck my head to pass under the wooden beam and keep it down, as I always do inside our house, the soft light and the low ceiling hanging over me like an unresolved argument. Mamá closes the door behind us.
Pilar is standing in the middle of the kitchen, like she’s been waiting in that spot all afternoon for us to walk in. “Mamá, what’s wrong?” Pilar asks.
Mamá doesn’t turn around to face us.
“Papá ran out of gas on the highway.” Her words are muffled.
I don’t get it. “What do you want me to do about it? I don’t have a car. I guess I could ask Reynaldo’s mother to drive me, but—”
“Francisco!” Ma
má spins to face me then, slamming her hand against the kitchen table. “No interruptions.”
Pilar backs into the space between the counter and the oven. Her backpack slides to the floor, and for once, she has nothing to say. My sister hates it when we yell. She and Papá—they’re the gentle ones. Mamá and I are the hotheads, too alike not to fight.
“Your father picked up a customer this morning who needed to go far out of the city. Papá didn’t think he had enough gas, but the man was impatient, and it was a big fare.” Her shoulders lift and fall again in a shrug, and she brushes a row of crumbs from the counter into her bare palm. “We need the money. So he took it.
“Your father dropped the customer off and turned back to Cochabamba, but the tank went empty a few kilometers from the gas station. He had to walk along the highway the whole way there and back. But he never made it to the taxi. The police stopped him and arrested him, said that he was going to make cocaine with that gasoline.”
Mamá leans over the sink. Her head hangs below her shoulders, and her fingers grip the chipped porcelain. “It’s a lie, and they know it.”
I lick my lips and try to swallow, but my voice still cracks when I speak. “Arrested? The police have Papá?”
With a sigh, Mamá shrugs out of her blazer, and the sharp angles of shoulder pads and lapels slump onto the counter. “Your father is in prison.”
She kicks off her shoes and reaches out to Pilar. My sister’s feet skim silently across the floor, and she buries her face between Mamá’s belly and the fleshy inside of her arm.
“He was in the wrong place at the wrong time, it’s as simple as that. He has rights, like every other citizen of this country, but somehow the drug law that they got your father on is outside of that. I’ve never heard of a single person who got out after being arrested because of the one thousand eight.”
Pilar’s shoulders start to shake.
“So what—the 1008 is a drug law?” I sputter. “Papá doesn’t have anything to do with drugs. Mamá, I don’t understand.”