So it’s a small class now. There are my ex-friends, whose life is fútbol and who only stick it out here because their parents make them. There’s a pack of guys who are super smart and always sit at the front of the class. Then there are the girls who are all bunched into one group because there are hardly any of them left. Except this one girl who always sits alone at the back, in every single class, and never says a word. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her crack a smile.
And still there are tests and stupid scuffles between class in the sterile hallways lined with classrooms. And homework.
Are they serious? I am really supposed to do homework? In prison.
In algebra, Profesor Muñoz has his back to us, the chalk spitting dust into the air as the problem shifts and grows diagonally across the blackboard. He is talking while he writes, but I don’t hear any of it—my mind just keeps rolling over the same unsolvable equation: Papá. Pilar. Me.
A row of barred windows lines the classroom wall, too high for me to see much out of. Bars at school, bars at the prison. Walls around me all the time. Little slivers of the sky.
This can’t really be my life now.
School gets out at noon, and I go to the bank where Mamá worked, even though I know she’s long gone. I stand at the picture window looking in; her station is empty. I knew it would be—so it shouldn’t hurt to see it. But it does. It’s like a knife sliding under my skin and slicing the cords and cables holding me together.
The glass door swings open. “Francisco, is that you?”
I shouldn’t have come.
“I heard what happened to your father.”
I push away from the glass and turn back toward the street. I can’t quite look at her, this woman who’s not my mother, dressed in the same tight blazer and clunky heels Mamá wore to work every day.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” she calls after me, “but your mother hasn’t shown up for work. I covered for her today. When can I tell the manager she’ll be back?”
I turn my head, but I don’t look back. “You haven’t heard from her at all?”
“No. Why?”
I kick the dirt at my feet. “Mamá is gone.”
She doesn’t have an answer for that, so I just go.
“I’ll talk to the manager and have her last paycheck sent to your father at San Sebastián as soon as I can, okay?”
I throw something like thanks over my shoulder and step into the street, dodging cars. Yeah, we’ll take the money. It’s not like we’re above begging now.
I collect Pilar from the primary school. She is still hiding inside of herself. I take her hand, gently.
We have five and a half hours until the prison gate closes and until Papá will be expecting us. I’ve lived in Cochabamba my whole life. I used to stay out all afternoon, roaming the streets with Reynaldo and hopping pickup games. Those were my streets; I knew them and they knew me. Nothing could touch me.
But it’s different now, with Pilar to take care of and no home to go to if she gets tired or hungry or scared. Now I’m like a stranger in my own city—I don’t know where to look, where to go, how to find my way.
We go to the big Catholic church on the corner and lie down on the pews. I’m asleep maybe even before my eyes close. But then the whole place starts shaking—no, I’m shaking. My eyes open in a squint. A priest is right in my face.
“Get up.” He shakes me again. “You can’t sleep here.”
He moves to wake Pilar, and I stumble off the pew and jump in between him and my sister.
“Don’t touch her.” I grab Pilar’s hand.
“Come on,” I whisper.
I help her to stand, and we walk out into the bright afternoon, both of us blinking back the sunlight. Did I even shut my eyes for five minutes?
Pilar jams her fist into her eye socket and starts to cry.
“It’s okay.” What a stupid thing to say. Of course it’s not okay. I pull an old napkin out of my pocket and hand it to her. “Should we go to the park?”
The napkin takes the place of her fist, but she doesn’t answer my question.
“Come on, Pilar, I’m trying. Tell me what I can do.”
She’s still not talking. Not a word since we found her in that cojudo’s cell. I think maybe she’s hungry, so I dig in my backpack for a few bolivianos and take her to a trancapecho food cart. She might stop crying if she eats something.
I pay the guy and she takes a bite, and sure enough, the tears stop. But there’s this stretchy thing going on at the sides of my eyes, like my skin doesn’t know how to fit over my bones anymore.
I can’t hold myself together and somehow her, too.
I make sure we’re at the prison gate fifteen minutes before it closes for the night. The only thing worse than sleeping in that prison would be getting stuck out on the streets.
Papá is waiting for us just inside the gate. Pilar runs to him, and he takes her in his arms. He looks at me, his eyebrow raised in a question.
I nod in return. “We’re okay.” And then, because the mood could use a little lightening, “School was boring—what did you expect?”
Papá pulls us into a corner. We sit together while he unwraps three boiled potatoes and hands one to each of us.
“I had a big lunch,” I say, in part because I’m not sure he’s eaten yet today and in part because a cold potato for dinner sounds disgusting.
Papá gives me a look. “Eat.”
So I do. It’s food. I should be grateful.
My father grew up eating potatoes with every meal, every single day of his life. But even he’s having trouble getting his dinner down tonight.
The council of prisoners that runs this place from the inside appoints one guy to oversee all the kids in San Sebastián. He finds us after dinner and hands Papá a dingy business card that lists the address and phone number of a day care center outside the prison.
“This is an organization that takes in the prison kids after school,” he says. “It’s a nonprofit, so you won’t have to pay. The kids get lunch and help with homework and somewhere to spend their afternoons besides here.”
Papá takes the card, his fingers smoothing out the creased corners.
“But just the girl can go.”
“Why not my son? He’s in school too. He needs a safe place to be.”
The man wiggles his finger side to side. “The day care isn’t set up yet to accommodate older kids. Maybe someday they’ll get together a program for teenagers. Maybe not. I don’t know.”
Papá runs his hands through his thick black hair. “That doesn’t help us. My son will turn eighteen in December.”
The man lifts his palms to the sky. “It’s not fair, I know. They appoint a new police officer to act as prison director every six months, to weed out corruption, they say. All that really means is the rules change in here all the time. Just when you get used to something, it changes. If I were you, I’d let the girl go while she still can.”
Papá slips the card into his shirt pocket. “Thank you for your assistance.”
When he’s out of earshot, Pilar, who’s been quiet—scary quiet since this morning, latches onto Papá’s arm. “Please, Papá. I don’t want to go. I want to stay with you.”
“That’s not possible, wawitay. I have to work, and you can’t come to the wood shop with me.”
Pilar drops her head like a bull in a ring. “Then I want to stay with Francisco.”
Papá looks at her, and what moves over his face is like heavy clouds over the sun. “I don’t know. I think maybe this day care will be better—”
I cut in. “I could take her there every day after school, and I could get a job in the afternoons. I could help pay the rent for a cell. Please, Papá.”
“No, Francisco. Until we hear back from your grandparents, what you have to do in the afternoons is study.�
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It’s like nothing has changed, even though everything has changed. My whole life has been flipped upside down, and here we are, arguing about me finishing school. We’re living in actual hell, and nothing has changed.
“But Papá—”
“I won’t do it.” Pilar says. Her eyes dart between Papá and me. “I won’t go.”
Papá frowns. Is he thinking about how his older brother left home for the mines, and his older sister left to be a servant, and how he eventually left, too? How his parents were all alone, in the end?
“Perhaps you are right. We’ve had enough separation in this family.” Papá takes Pilar’s face between his hands. “Very well, then. Your brother will take care of you in the afternoons. He will keep you safe.”
I get this look from Papá. He doesn’t want to say it, not in front of Pilar, why it is that suddenly her safety is everything. But he doesn’t have to. I get it.
October 12
On the way to school in the morning, Pilar stops in the middle of the street. I tug at her hand and check over my shoulder to make sure a car isn’t going to flatten us.
“What are you doing?”
She doesn’t answer me, but her fingers trace the edge of a ribbon, blackened with sludge and patterned by the tread of passing tires. The rest of the kids pass us by.
“Pilar, that’s dirty, don’t touch—” Gross. Of course she has to pick it up. I tug again at her arm, and this time she comes with me, rubbing the discarded ribbon between her fingertips.
“Don’t put that thing in your hair.”
She twists her lips to the side. “I’m going to wash it in the sink at school. Aren’t you curious what color it used to be? Or who it belonged to?” She holds the ribbon up to the sun and squints.
“Whatever it was, it’s trash now.”
Pilar stops again, still in the middle of the street. “This ribbon belonged to somebody once. She braided it into her hair, and it made her feel special. Don’t you think that’s still in there somewhere? Don’t you think it’s worth saving?” Her voice rises until it cracks.
I get her moving again, but all the way to the primary school, she just stares at that ribbon. I’m relieved she’s talking, but I’m so mad at Mamá and that bastard at the prison and the whole world it’s like a fire is eating me from the inside and all it’s going to leave behind is hollowed-out bones for the wind to knock around.
My writing teacher, Profesora Ortiz, begins a poetry unit. We read García Lorca and Neruda, Bedregal and Mistral. She talks about rhythm and sound, rhyme and all that a poem says under the surface.
With ten minutes left in class, she says, “All right, your turn. With the five weeks of school we have left, each of you will write and revise two poems per week. I won’t be administering an end-of-year exam or assigning a lengthy essay. All you have to do is give yourselves over to these ten poems.” She stops talking and sits on the edge of the desk, her arms crossed over her chest, the tip of her reading glasses clamped between her teeth, waiting.
I used to write poems all the time when I was a kid. As soon as I could read, Papá started leaving poems in my room for me, like a game of hide-and-seek. And as soon as I learned how to write, I started answering his poems with some of my own. As I got older, I figured out how to play a rhyme for a laugh, how to break up a line for a surprise. I knew exactly how to make my father smile.
It was our thing.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped. I don’t remember why. Now it’s been years since I’ve even tried. But Papá has never given up on me, no matter how long I’ve been silent in return. Until prison, that is. He hasn’t written me a single poem since we got here.
I stare at the empty lines on the page in front of me while all around, the sound of pencils scratching against paper grows as loud as hot rain on the roof.
Just write something stupid. Something about fútbol, or school, or food.
But nothing comes. That kid who knew how to think in poems is long gone.
• • •
The bell rings, and I can’t get out of class fast enough. I sling my backpack over my shoulder and weave through the crowd, heading for the patio before every inch fills with students sitting on the tables and leaning against the brick wall that wraps around the small space.
Reynaldo bumps from group to group. His eyes find me and his head flicks up, but he doesn’t come over, not yet. Instead, he turns his back to the door so his body hides what he’s doing from the teachers chatting in the doorway. The transaction is quick—small packets exchanged in a subtle switch of clasped palms and hands slipping into deep pockets.
And then he walks away like nothing happened and comes to stand in the corner with me. I should be grateful. Reynaldo is the only one of my friends who acts like I still exist. So I should let it go.
But I don’t. “What was that? What are you into?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Rey, come on.”
“I found a way to get us a little money to start our shop, okay? Forget the cancha, we’ll get a storefront with a room upstairs where we can live. It’ll be great.”
“Don’t get yourself in trouble for me.”
“Look, we both know you won’t be pitching in any money for our shop now. If it’s all on me, how else am I supposed to get us going?”
“Rey—”
But he just starts talking about some girl he met at the movies last weekend. I lean against the bricks and nod my head every now and then, but I’m not listening. I’m barely here. What I thought my life was—what I thought it could be—none of it is real anymore.
My bones grind to dust, scattering on upward gusts of air.
When I pick up Pilar after school, her teacher is waiting to speak with me. And she doesn’t look happy.
“Good afternoon, Profesora.”
“It is a rule of this school that pupils must be clean.”
Pilar won’t look at me. Her hands are clasped behind her back, her fingernails digging into her palms.
“Yes, Profesora. I understand.”
“I have been made aware of your family’s situation. I am also aware that there are showers in the prison.”
“Forgive me, Profesora, but there is no privacy for my sister in the showers. We live in a men’s prison.”
The teacher’s lips pinch together. “If Pilar is not clean, she cannot come to school.”
My sister doesn’t deserve this. She’s been through enough. “Please, Profesora, it isn’t safe.”
“I am sure you will find a way.”
Pilar’s eyes are bright, and her face is red with shame. I drape my arm over her shoulders. “We’ll see you tomorrow, Profesora.”
Pilar’s head ticks up a notch, and we walk away together.
We go straight to the plaza a few blocks over, the one with the fountain at the center. We set down our backpacks, kick off our shoes, and get in fully clothed. We don’t have any soap, but we scrub our hair and our clothes and our skin until we’ve gotten rid of half the grime. When we finally get out, we’re sopping wet and we smell like old pipes, but it will have to do.
Pilar holds up a dripping fistful of bolivianos and foreign coins the tourists tossed into the fountain. “We won’t be eating cold potatoes for dinner tonight!”
The sunlight dances on the water slicking off her skin, and her teeth are bared in more of a grimace than a grin. The coins will buy us dinner; it’s not enough to pay for a cell or a mattress, or even a couple of pillows. But it’s something.
We lie on our backs on the stone rim of the fountain, head to head, Pilar’s hair splayed out like the dropped leaves of a puya plant and curling at the ends. I don’t know what to say to make it better. I never do. So I reach my arm back and ruffle her hair and hope she knows I’ve got her, no matter what.
Papá is waiting for
us when we pass through the gate and emerge, blinking, into the bright sun of the prison courtyard. He squeezes my shoulder, and his other arm curls around Pilar.
“How was school today, wawitay?” He gets a shrug in return. “And what did you and your brother get up to after school, eh?” Another shrug.
Papá meets my eyes over Pilar’s head. I wish my sister would go back to chattering about anything and everything all day long, because maybe that would mean something inside her isn’t horribly broken.
• • •
When it’s time for roll call, the prisoners line up in the courtyard, packed together in messy lines while the guard in the flat green hat runs down the list on his clipboard. Most days it’s quick, but sometimes they have to stand there in the sun while the guards go through the list three times to get the count right.
I’m watching closely this time, sorting the prisoners into sets and learning their names. Most are like Papá, just caught in the wrong place at the wrong time and too poor to buy a day in court.
But there are others—real criminals. I try not to think about what they must have done to get put in here. Try not to think about the money Papá will have to spend just to buy protection for us from men like that.
Roll call happens every day, so it should be no big deal, but every time the guards come inside and line up to face the men they’re charged with keeping there, the tension in the whole place hikes up. The guards don’t like being inside the prison any more than we like having them in here.
They don’t trust us, and we don’t trust them.
• • •
Before dark, Papá, Pilar, and I claim our little corner against the prison wall. We lie on our backs with our coats draped over us like blankets and our backpacks under our heads.
An Uninterrupted View of the Sky Page 5