Papá shakes his head. “Life in my parents’ community is very different from our modern life in the city, that’s true. But it’s a good life, all the same.”
“There’s no secondary school up there. Just yesterday, and every single day of my life before that, you said I have to finish secondary school! You want me to stop now, when I have only six weeks left?”
Papá’s sigh is like the last wheeze out of the organ pipes in the cathedral. “That was before your mother left. Francisco, you and your sister cannot live here.” His eyes are wide and a little wild as they scan the courtyard. “My children in prison? Absolutely not.” He drags a hand down his face. “Nothing else matters now.”
I am not going up there. You can’t take a kid raised in the city with grocery stores and banks and hospitals and paved streets, and then, just when he’s almost ready to make something of himself, yank him back to the dark ages.
I’ll figure something out. Papá left the Altiplano to make a life here. No way am I giving that up.
My full name is Francisco Guari Quispe Vargas. Straight down the middle: half Spanish, half Aymara.
I look like my father, though. Dark skin, long nose, eyes so brown they could be black. If you picked me up and dropped me in the fourteenth century, traded my school uniform for a tunic and a pair of llama hide sandals, I would fit right in with my ancestors.
Pilar, on the other hand, looks like my mother. Pale, small-nosed, slender. One of the elite. She’s the one Papá should spend his dreams on. Not me.
Mamá with her mestiza complexion and her middle class diction could have done so much better than a taxi driver. How did she ever let herself fall in love with a campesino like him—fresh from the Altiplano, still dropping Aymara phrases in with his Spanish? Did he write her love poems? Did he serenade below her window? Did he scatter the ground at her feet with petals?
All this time, was Mamá ashamed of the home she kept? Was she humbled by lovestruck poverty? Was she waiting, all this time, for a reason to leave?
October 11
Papá is already sitting and leaning against the wall when I wake up. I don’t even get a minute to pretend that the prison doesn’t exist, and that I’m still at home in my bed. My shoulders and hips ache where they pressed against the bare floor all night—and I guess the air would have given it away anyway. The stink of this place infects my dreams.
Papá watches me rub the sleep from my eyes. Last night’s argument still hides in the creases and shadows of his face.
“Papá, come on, you can’t be mad at me first thing in the morning.”
He whispers his answer, so Pilar might sleep a little longer. “Francisco, it’s not safe here. Think of your sister. She cannot live in a men’s prison. Just yesterday, on my way to the toilets, I passed a cell with men crowded around the door. You know what was going on inside? Two boys were fighting each other. For entertainment. Like cocks in a pen, they were being paid to fight.”
I sit up with a groan and scoot over next to Papá. I’m going to have bruises from the ground if we keep this up. “Look, I’ll find work and rent a room in the city somewhere. Pilar can come live with me.”
“And what job are you going to get that will pay rent for you both?”
“Reynaldo and I will just set up our shop sooner than we planned.”
“Francisco, where are you going to get the money to start a business like that?”
“I don’t know—I’ll work in a bank like Mamá until Reynaldo and I can buy the cleats and stuff to get us going.”
“Your mother had a university degree in accounting, Francisco. It took both of our paychecks to rent the home you grew up in. Even if you get a room in a cheap house, how are you going to pay next year’s matriculation fee for Pilar? How are you going to afford her school supplies? Why do you think so many young married couples still live with their parents? It is very expensive to make it on your own out there, Francisco. And where would Pilar be while you are at work? Walking herself to school? Waiting for you in a house you share with strangers? Or is she working too?”
Okay, so I haven’t really thought it through. “Fine. When Abuela and Abuelo answer your letter, she can go with them, and I’ll stay here and figure something out for you and me.”
“No. I won’t have my family broken up any more than it has to be.”
“I’m not living up there, Papá.”
“Well, you can’t stay here. I won’t allow it.”
“Great. So I guess I’ll go live on the street. With the pickpockets and glue sniffers. That’s what you want?” I’m not whispering anymore.
“What I want is for my children to be safe. I want what’s left of our family to be together. Why is that so hard for you to understand?”
Too late, we notice that Pilar isn’t sleeping at all. She’s watching us, her wide brown eyes darting between our faces, her doll clutched below her chin. I feel a slither of something moving through the empty space where things like lungs and a stomach and a heart used to sit under my skin.
Nobody’s even asking her what she wants.
Entire families live in the prison. The mother usually goes out during the day to the cancha, where she sells handcrafts or the furniture made by the prisoners. The father usually works in the wood shop, or in one of the prison jobs: delivering messages from the outside or running one of the little stores in the courtyard. Some serve as delegates on the council that runs the place from the inside and reports to the guards on the outside. They take care of everything from discipline when a prisoner has earned it to collecting rent for the cells to keeping track of the kids who live here.
• • •
Papá asks me to watch Pilar while he goes to the back of the prison to talk to the guy who runs the wood shop. It’s almost time for school, so I make sure Pilar’s okay, then duck into the bathroom for a minute to change into my uniform.
But when I get back to the courtyard, I don’t see Pilar anywhere. I turn in a slow circle, and the blood starts banging in my ears. All I hear is panic.
She was just here.
I break into a run. She’s not in the courtyard. She’s not in the bathroom. She’s not in any of the rooms off any of the hallways.
She was just here.
I pound up the stairs and onto the second floor. I bang through every open door, and everyone inside is yelling at me. I’d be yelling too, if I could get any sound past my throat. I’m running and running, and there’s this crowd watching me now, and I can’t move fast enough.
Where is she?
The balcony is jammed with people, and I’m trying to push past them, but I can’t—there are too many of them. I take a breath—I don’t know, to scream? And in that half second of quiet, I hear this whimper, and it’s not that I know that sound, not from her, but it registers somewhere in my spine. It scrapes over my skin.
I throw myself against the cell door where I think the sound came from. Hinges groan, wood creaks. Again. Again. I’m out of breath and my shoulder is pain and Papá is beside me now, and his face—
I throw myself at the door and this time the lock rips away from the door frame and I fall through and I can’t stop myself from crashing to the ground. Pilar is in the corner, shaking, and there’s a guy in the opposite corner, shielding his face from the splintering door.
Papá rushes in behind me and he has her.
He has her.
He’s lifting Pilar into his arms and he’s smoothing the shivers from her shoulders and he’s wiping the tears from her cheeks and he’s carrying her out of here.
“Did he hurt you?” Papá asks. “Did that man lay a hand on you?”
Pilar’s face is tucked against Papá’s neck and her eyes are squeezed shut and she shakes her head, no.
I pick myself up off the floor, and that guy is backed into the corner and saying something about a misundersta
nding, but the blood is back in my ears and his words aren’t even words. I swear, if I had anything more than my fists, he would be dead.
I don’t get more than two steps toward him before I’m flanked by a half dozen prisoners. They push into the cell and move me out onto the balcony. I push back, I try to argue, but a mother on the balcony with two kids behind her skirts lays a hand against my chest, so calm, it stops me still.
“Let them handle him. A man like that is a danger to all of our families. Let them make their own justice in there.”
I’m shaking. Every inch of me. The woman drops her hand, and I back away. The sound of fists on flesh follows me down the stairs as I hurry to catch up with Papá. They must have stuffed a sock in that guy’s mouth, because I don’t hear anything from him but these choked, drowning sounds.
I guess sometimes it’s a good thing the guards stay outside the prison walls.
When Pilar was three years old, she idolized me. She’d follow me everywhere on her stubby legs, yammering nonstop. We couldn’t understand half of what she said. She couldn’t even say my full name yet, just Isco.
I’d take the trash out to the burn pile, and she’d trail after me. “Isco, Isco.” I’d walk to the corner to buy some eggs, and she’d wait for me at the gate, her face pressed between the bars. As soon as I came into view, she’d start waving her arms and yelling my name. “Isco! Isco!” I’d take a bucket of soapy water outside to wash the windows of Papá’s taxi, and she’d chase the bubbles that escaped into the air, laughing when they popped between her fingers.
One day I left the gate open when I went to play fútbol with Reynaldo. Pilar had been following me around the house all day, and I just wanted a minute to myself. When I came home, tired and sweaty, a couple hours later, Papá was holding Pilar, cradling her head and murmuring into her hair.
She’d followed me until she couldn’t walk any farther and then curled up in the shade with a stray dog. My parents found her after an hour of searching, frantic, all over the neighborhood. When Mamá picked her up, Pilar had cried my name and pointed the way I’d gone.
Mamá didn’t talk to me once that night. I tried to tell her it wasn’t my fault. She didn’t believe me, and I don’t even know if I did either. After that day, I never left the gate open again, but still, I never thought twice about taking off without Pilar any chance I got.
Papá is holding Pilar now, just like he did that day, cradling her head and murmuring into her hair. There shouldn’t be anything left inside of me to hurt, no organs to rupture, no tissue to tear. But it’s like everything is busting open all over again.
Before the gate opens for the day, a body is dumped, barely breathing, in front of the guard station. The prisoners all watch as the guards come in and carry it away on a stretcher.
“He won’t be coming back here, unless it’s to the dungeon,” says the prisoner standing behind Papá. “The guards will take him to the hospital, and unless he dies, they’ll cover it up. The council will make sure of that.”
Papá hands Pilar to me, and I tuck her against my side so she’s looking away from the rows of prisoners. “Is she all right?” I whisper.
Papá closes his eyes and lets out a long, slow breath before he joins the rest of the men. “She will be.”
When it’s time for school, Papá puts Pilar’s hand in mine and lays his over both of ours. I feel a shift in that moment: my limbs fusing to my sister’s like they don’t even belong to me anymore.
“Francisco, inside or outside of these walls, your sister is your responsibility. Other than the mornings at school, never let her out of your sight.”
Pilar has stopped shaking, but her eyes are dull, and her steps slow. Before now, I would have felt like an idiot holding my sister’s hand all the way to school. But this place is all dark corners like wells a person could fall into and never come out of again. Yeah, I’ll take care of her.
I will.
Papá raises a hand in good-bye and watches us walk through the prison gate. I glance back before we turn the corner and he’s out of sight. He looks like the loneliest person in the world.
• • •
The prison is on the opposite side of school from our old neighborhood, so I don’t see anyone I know on the way there. We’re like a pack of street dogs—all the prison kids walking together. Only we’re not together. I don’t even know most of their names. The kids who live in the women’s prison across the plaza fall in with us, and I notice for the first time how few girls live in the men’s prison. Only four, counting Pilar.
It takes us half an hour, the big, noisy pack of us. Half an hour of trying to figure out what to say to Pilar to make her feel safe in her own skin again. Half an hour of trying not to think about what’s waiting for me at school. Half an hour of new streets and kids I don’t know but who I guess are just like me.
When we reach the primary school, Pilar doesn’t want to let go of my hand, so I kneel down in front of her and rest my hands on either side of her face, like Papá would do. I wait until she meets my eyes.
“I’ll be right here when school gets out, okay? My school gets out thirty minutes before yours, so I’ll be here when you’re done. You wait for me right here.”
She nods. Her eyes are round and wide, and if there were anywhere I could take her that would be safer than leaving her here at school, I wouldn’t make her go in there alone, not today.
But there isn’t. There’s nowhere for us to go.
I wait to make sure she gets in okay and then head a few blocks over to the secondary school and through the double doors at the front. Guys lean on the half wall, flirting with the girls who sit there swinging bare legs under their skirts. I keep my eyes down as I pass through the crowd.
Does everybody know about Papá? Are they all talking about me behind my back?
There’s only one way to find out. I walk up to Arturo and Mauricio and the rest of the guys. They don’t say anything. They don’t call me names or push me away. But they won’t look me in the eye either.
“Hey, Reynaldo,” they say when he walks up behind me. But still, not a word to me. It’s like I’m a leper or something, except they’re not afraid their fingers or their noses are going to start falling off. They just don’t want themselves—or their families—connected in any way to someone who was arrested on a drug charge.
“I get it, okay.” I do. “But do you have to be such bastards about it?” They glance around at one another, but they won’t look at me.
I drop my books to the floor and ram my way into their little circle. “Do you?”
“Francisco!” Reynaldo steps between me and them and throws an arm across my chest, pulling me away and slapping me on the back. He picks up my books and steers me away from them, from that fight.
“It’s all right, man. We’re almost out of here. You can ignore those idiots for a couple of months, right?”
I shake the fight out of my arms and take my books back. Walking away isn’t something I do. But I don’t want to hit my friends. Or even, I guess, my ex-friends. “Yeah.”
He doesn’t take his hand off my shoulder until they’re out of sight. “Yeah.”
I got into my first fight when I was eight.
Two boys cornered me before school and called me indio bruto. I didn’t know what it meant, but I saw the twist of their lips, their mocking eyes. So I rammed the bigger one in the stomach and knocked him to the ground, which gave the other one the chance to kick me over and over again from above.
It was Reynaldo who pulled them off, who looked away while I wiped the tears from my cheeks, who dusted the dirt from my uniform so the teacher wouldn’t punish me for bringing dirt from the street into the classroom.
That night, Mamá and Papá sat me down on the sofa. I remember their knees touching mine, their arms encircling me, and the soft light from the lamps sinking into the carpet. I tol
d them what happened, and Mamá was furious.
“I’m calling your teacher right this minute! Those boys don’t know what they are talking about. They will be punished for what they said to you.”
Mamá went into the kitchen and yanked the phone off the receiver. Through the open doorway I could see her fist on her hip, the round swell of her pregnant belly and the long loop of the phone cord swinging, agitated, around her knees.
Papá patted my hand and spoke in a soft voice. “My son, no person can make you feel inferior in this world unless you let them.”
I remember looking up into his face, and not understanding what I saw there.
“Are you ashamed of the color of your skin? Are you not proud that half of your blood comes from your mother’s ancestors and the other half from mine? Is that not a beautiful thing? Do not both cultures have something honorable to impart?”
I don’t know how I answered him that night. But the next day when the same boys taunted me again, I remembered my father’s words. I told the boys that I was proud to be half Aymara. They just laughed and kicked dirt all over me, until it sank into the fibers of my woolen vest and coated my thick, black hair.
The teacher did punish me then, for being dirty a second day in a row. So I found the boys after school. I found my fists, and they never bothered me again.
The thing is, once you start fighting, it’s almost impossible to stop. I’m not gentle like Papá. I’m not pale-skinned like Pilar. I’m not cultured like Mamá. I can play fútbol, and I can fight. It’s not a bad thing to be realistic about what the world holds for you.
Besides my ex-friends, the rest of the day goes on as normal, when absolutely nothing is normal. Everything is upside down.
I have classes with pretty much the same kids I’ve gone to school with my whole life, except every year the group shrinks as a couple drop out. Most make it through primary school, but it’s pretty rare for kids from our neighborhood to graduate from secondary.
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