by Laura Resau
Once the evil man is knocked out, MacGyver smiles and my heart turns to honey. He proclaims to the slaves, “You’re free now!”
The slaves stare at him, motionless, in front of their bamboo huts. It’s not that they don’t understand Spanish. Anywhere in the world MacGyver goes, everyone speaks Spanish with a little accent, although their words don’t exactly match the movements of their lips, I’ve noticed. These slaves understand his words, but still they stand and stare.
“Go! Do what you want now!” MacGyver says, motioning with his hands. “You’re free!”
They keep staring until one man says, “There are more bad men above him. Now they will be angry and get us. We will always be enslaved.”
Then creepy music plays and a commercial for cornflakes comes on. A blue-eyed family is crunching cereal together and smiling. The mother’s voice sounds as smooth and soft as her creamy curtains and her skin glows as white as the milk she pours into the cereal. She finishes the last spoonful, grabs her briefcase, and laughing, kisses her children and husband on the nose one by one, then clicks out the door on her high heels.
I can see the life I want: to go to school and be a professional and have money and my own family and a house and a briefcase. Just like the lady in the commercial. But how do I get there? What would happen if one day I were free? Would I stand there and stare?
After a commercial for gum and another for laundry soap, MacGyver comes back on and makes a plan with all the villagers to defeat the higher-up bad guys. They use an inflatable raft and a Jeep and a rope and more coconuts and some special chemicals. One by one, all the bad guys get bashed on the head by coconuts and knocked out. The villagers cheer. They realize that saving themselves is as easy as using basic scientific principles to build lots of booby traps.
Now they are free. For real this time. With their new confidence, they start making plans, and my chest swells with pride for them.
Later that night, after I turn off the TV, I notice music—loud cumbia rhythms—coming from outside. It’s pounding, shaking the walls. The colegio students must be having a dance tonight. I consider sneaking out and watching from the shadows. But the Doctorita often warns me that the whole neighborhood is watching me when she and Niño Carlitos leave. “I have eyes and ears everywhere,” she likes to remind me. It’s true, gossip travels swiftly in Kunu Yaku. If even one person saw me and told the Doctorita, I’d be dead.
MacGyver would find a way to watch the dance. My eyes scan the room, eagle eyes, narrowed and focused.
I find a board left over from one of Niño Carlitos’s projects and carry it out the window and onto the roof. The night is cool, with a sweet, light breeze. I lay the board across the gap between houses, to the roof of our neighbors’ apartment, where I’ll have a perfect view of the dance. I wait, peering at the two stories of darkness below, gathering up the nerve to crawl across.
Once, in Yana Urku, when I was about five years old, my sister Matilde was playing with her friend in the green canyon as I tagged along. They jumped across an irrigation ditch with their long, nine-year-old legs. I stopped in front of the water, afraid to cross. “Matilde!” I whined. “Help me across.” But she and her friend were absorbed in a game and didn’t pay attention. “Matilde, Matilde!” I shrieked, eyeing the deep, murky water. “Help me across.”
She rolled her eyes. “Cross it yourself if you want to so badly.” And she went back to her game. No one was going to help me. I’d have to do it myself. I wiped my tears and got a running start and leapt across the water to the other side, landing safely in the squishy mud. I grinned, stunned, and glanced toward Matilde. That’s when I saw the flash of relief in her face. She’d been watching me out of the corner of her eye the whole time, ready to save me if I fell.
Now Matilde is a faint, faraway memory, so faint I can barely recall the features of her face. But remembering her watching me gives me courage. With my heart pounding, my body shaking, the rough board scraping my bare knees, I begin to cross. Halfway there, I look down, into the blackness stretching below, and I am paralyzed. I take a deep breath and feel the music vibrate my bones and focus on the roof just an arm’s length in front of me. I move toward my destination, centimeter by centimeter.
Once I reach the clay tiles, I lean back on my elbows, light-headed and reveling at my small feat. The dance spreads out below in a circle of spotlights; beyond it, the shadows of fields and mountains melt into darkness. A group of boys huddle on one side of the basketball court, near the giant speakers, and the girls on the other. As the night goes on, the boys grow braver, daring to approach the girls and ask them to dance. Soon almost everyone is dancing, spinning. Skirts swirl, hips sway. When the slow, romantic songs come on, the girls nestle their heads on the boys’ shoulders and my heart skips along with theirs.
For a long time I sit, watching them and staring at the sky, full of zillions of stars. In Understanding Our Universe I read that stars are really distant suns. Each star is the center of its own solar system, planets encircling it, and moons encircling each planet. This makes my problems on Earth seem small. Maybe far across the universe, on another planet, the indígenas are the powerful ones, the ones who go to school in burgundy uniforms. Maybe the mestizos are their servants.
Why was I born on this planet? Why was I born to people who don’t love me? Why, out of all the zillions of possibilities, have I ended up a servant? I try to let the secondhand music and the distant blazing suns and the far-off happiness fill me, but it is not enough.
Something else begins to fill me, though, an energy like the flaming heat of the sun—all 5,600 degrees Celsius of it—and I make a pact with myself. One day, when I am free, I will not stand and stare. I will take the leap. And in the meantime, I’ll get a running start.
I become a secret-agent student.
Every day after Niño Carlitos and the Doctorita leave for work, I race through my chores in a whirlwind, then plop down at the dining room table to study exactly what the Doctorita’s and Niño Carlitos’s eighth-grade students are studying. I shuffle through their stacks of ungraded homework and make myself do the same assignments in my little notebook. When a fresh batch of blank exams sits piled on the table, I steal a copy for myself and slip it under the refrigerator. The next day I take the test and then check my answers with the key.
When I pasture the cow near the colegio, I time it so I can talk to the students, like an infiltrating spy, to pump them for information.
“Hi!” I say to Leo, the tall guy who asked me to read months earlier.
“Hi, Virginia,” he says, almost shyly. I’ve noticed lately that when I’m around boys my age, they tend to get nervous, with flickery eyes and dry mouths.
“Want some help studying?” I ask. “I can quiz you.”
“Sure.” He hands me the book, and this time it feels light and comfortable in my hands, as though it belongs there.
And as the words roll off my tongue, I discover what the students are studying. Static electricity. Ions and electrons and nuclei. The chemical elements.
“So,” I ask casually, “what lab experiments have you been doing lately?”
“This one on page two fifty-six.” His face is turning pink, which makes his pimples redder. He seems flustered by my attention. “That one was fun,” he said. “Rubbing a balloon on your hair and making it stick to the wall.” His voice cracks and he swallows hard. “Oh, and this one on page two seventy-five. It was so exciting, everyone was screaming. The Doctorita got mad.”
“What was the experiment?”
“Building a volcano.”
Building a volcano!
The next day, Saturday, the Doctorita and Niño Carlitos plan to go with the boys to Ibarra to shop all day. Now that they’re out of debt, they’ve been wiser with their investments and have even saved extra money to spend on clothes and toys for the children. They want me to come, but I say, “I’m not feeling well. I think I’ll stay here.”
Niño Carlitos eyes
me suspiciously. “No boys in the house, Virginia.”
“Of course not!” I say, indignant. Niño Carlitos’s worries about boys have been getting out of hand lately. Even the Doctorita rolls her eyes at him.
“Maybe we should lock her in,” Niño Carlitos says quietly to the Doctorita, thinking I can’t hear him.
I hold my breath. They haven’t locked me in for at least a year now. That would completely ruin my plan.
“Oh, come on, Carlos,” she says. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
While the Doctorita is gathering a bag of food for the trip, I take the key to the science lab off her key chain.
Once their truck has disappeared, I walk nonchalantly down the road toward the school. If anyone catches me, I’ll say that the Doctorita forgot some important things in the lab and asked me to get them. Still, if she finds out, I’ll be beaten for sure. I glance around. No one in sight. I open the door, slip inside, and click the lock behind me. Quickly, I close the blinds. It’s dark, but little lines of light creep around the windows’ edges.
I imagine I’m a world-famous scientist who was brutally kidnapped but managed to use her brilliance to escape to perform this vital experiment. If I can complete the volcano without anyone catching me, I will be free and the world will be saved.
In the dim light, I open Understanding Our Universe to page two seventy-five and squint at the diagram, then search the cabinets for the ingredients. Perfect. They’re all in a single cabinet, neatly arranged and labeled in the Doctorita’s tiny, cramped handwriting.
My pulse racing, I mix the flour and salt and oil and water to make the dough, kneading it with my hands like bread. Then I put a plastic Inca Kola bottle in a pan and shape the dough around it, just like in the picture. Only I make mine more realistic, so it really looks like a mountain, with crags and nooks and rock outcroppings. If I had more time, I would shape little goats from the dough, and children and cows and houses and potato fields. But I stick to the instructions, and fill the bottle with warm water and some drops of food dye and detergent and baking soda to make the lava.
And then, the final step. The book warns to jump back from the volcano after this step. I can almost hear the suspenseful music playing, just like in a MacGyver episode right before something explodes. What if I blow up the whole lab?
I pour in the vinegar and jump back.
Slowly, it starts rising—the vinegar reacting with the baking soda and making carbon dioxide—and now bloodred lava is bubbling over the sides of the volcano, spilling down the slopes. I move closer and sink onto a plastic chair, a little disappointed there’s no explosion, but mostly amazed that you can mix together simple, innocent kitchen ingredients and come up with a frothing volcano.
How will it feel when, one day, I am free? A giant explosion? Or a slow, bubbling transformation? I watch the oozing lava and wish that other students were crowded around me oohing and ahhing and giggling. I put the materials back into the cabinet, wipe off the table, raise the blinds, stuff my soggy volcano in a garbage bag, and go home to scrub the floors.
chapter 13
“WHAT ARE YOU SMILING ABOUT?” the Doctorita asks, suspicious.
We’re taking an evening walk along the fields and orchards with Niño Carlitos and the boys. The school year has just ended, and on my top-secret final exams I scored the second highest in social studies and the highest in science, out of the entire eighth grade.
“Oh, nothing.” I try to make my face solemn, but the sky is too pink, the clouds too silver, the light too golden. And the crickets and frogs are too enthusiastic, chirping and cheering for my success. Jaimito is running ahead, kicking up dust. Andrecito’s pudgy hand clutches mine, and the other hand clutches his father’s. Every few steps, we swing Andrecito in the air and he squeals with delight.
“You don’t have a boyfriend, do you, m’hija?” Niño Carlitos asks quietly.
“No!” I blush. Of course, I still have a lingering crush on MacGyver. Not on Roberto the MacGyver look-alike—he’s engaged to be married to another teacher—but the original MacGyver, the one on TV. Marlenny and Marina know all about my devotion to him, but I’d never admit it to Niño Carlitos or the Doctorita.
“You’re forbidden to have a boyfriend,” the Doctorita warns.
“I don’t have a boyfriend. I’m just … happy.” I turn to Andrecito. “One, two, three, swing!” And we laugh together.
“Humph,” the Doctorita says, screwing up her face into a half frown, half laugh. “We better not find out you have a boyfriend.”
I’m in the truck, breathing in smells of sunshine on plastic and the pungent sweat pouring from my armpits. I’m nervous. We’re on our way to Yana Urku, my old village. For some reason, they’ve decided to bring me along to visit Niño Carlitos’s parents for the weekend. They were probably afraid something crazy would happen if they left me alone in the house with all my mysterious happiness.
All five of us have been squeezed on one seat for three hours, Andrecito asleep on my skinny lap and Jaimito on the Doctorita’s wide lap, and Niño Carlitos driving. Andrecito’s face is damp and smells sweet and sticks to my arm. His cheeks are rosy and his little lips parted and his chest rising and falling. Meanwhile, Jaimito is bouncing and shifting as the Doctorita tries to hold him still. He’s going through a phase where he talks and asks questions nonstop.
“What are those plants?” he asks, staring out the window at fields of tall stalks. I can’t help smiling at the way he still can’t pronounce his s’s.
“Cane,” Niño Carlitos answers, since the Doctorita has no patience.
“Why did they plant cane?”
“To make sugar and liquor.”
“Why?”
“For money.”
“What’s that smoke?”
“Part of the sugarcane-making process. They distill it.”
“What’s distill?”
The Doctorita rolls her eyes while Niño Carlitos explains distillation. I listen for a while, recognizing some words from Understanding Our Universe—evaporation, pressure, water vapor.
As the mountain Imbabura grows bigger and closer, I try to remember my mother’s and father’s faces. My sisters’ and brother’s. They are frozen in time, and fading, like old photos in an album. Do they remember my face? Do they wonder how I might look now? Would I recognize them if I passed them on the street? What did we used to talk about? Definitely not distillation and evaporation. What, then? Potatoes? Corn? What would we talk about if we saw each other again?
With a damp handkerchief, the Doctorita dabs at the sweat trickling down her face. She shifts Jaimito, who has finally quieted down and fallen asleep in her lap. Now she and Niño Carlitos are talking about their plans to move to Ibarra, a nearby city, much bigger and busier than Kunu Yaku.
“I’m sick of our backwater town,” she snorts. “I can’t wait to live in Ibarra. Civilization.”
Niño Carlitos looks straight ahead. Light pours through the window, illuminating his bald spot. “Well, if our job transfers go through, then we can move there. But for now be patient, Negra.”
A couple of years ago, when they first started talking about moving, I felt fluttery with nervous excitement. A new place filled with new people. Something different, something big. But after years of hearing about the move, I began to accept that it would never actually happen. Complaining about Kunu Yaku was just another of the Doctorita’s little fixations, I realized, like knitting Baby Jesus dresses and fretting about thieves and worrying about her boys catching germs.
“It better be soon,” the Doctorita says, just like she always says. Her chins jiggle extra hard with every bump in the road. She never lost the weight from her last pregnancy, and now she has two fleshy chins.
She wipes her forehead again and turns to me. “Virginia, I know you want to go to school. So I’ll pull some strings and get you a diploma from the elementary school, and with that you’ll be able to go to sewing school in Ibarra.”
“
Really?” I say, trying not to show any emotion, reminding myself that this will probably never come to pass. I press my lips to the top of Andrecito’s head, onto his wispy hairs. The thought of getting a diploma gives me tingles; it’s the next step toward my dream. With a diploma, I’d be able to enter the colegio. The sewing school part, though, makes my stomach queasy. Maybe I can just take the diploma and then refuse to go to sewing school, or run away if I have to.
I blow on Andrecito’s neck, cooling him off, and wonder why the Doctorita is bringing up school now. Then I realize: she’s afraid I’ll run away to my parents. She wants to give me a reason to stay with her family. This annoys me a little, that she thinks she can manipulate me. At the same time, it touches me that she cares enough that she’s scared to lose me. It gives me a backward kind of power.
In the midafternoon, when the sun is high overhead—the earth’s equator close to the ball of burning fire, just like the diagram in Understanding Our Universe—we turn onto the dirt road to Yana Urku.
Nothing has changed. The giant blue sky, the fields of potatoes and corn, the white houses with red tile roofs, the rocky canyons, the mountains towering overhead. Quichua words come back to me in tiny pieces that smell like wood smoke and people sweating in fields and rain-soaked wool. Urku—mountain. Api—soup. Kiya—moon. The words float by, flecks of ash, seeds on the breeze, remnants of another life that hasn’t quite vanished. I try to snatch at the words, hold them in my hand and remember their textures, feel their shapes on my tongue.
Mariana, Niño Carlitos’s mother, emerges from the house to greet us and fuss over her grandchildren. Jumbled memories return—Mariana stealing the sweetest choclos from our cornfield, Mariana scolding indigenous workers, Mariana and Alfonso sitting with my parents and Niño Carlitos and the Doctorita the first time I met them. As Mariana hugs Andrecito, I notice the graying hair wound tightly at the back of her head, and remember what we used to call her: misha copetona. Mestiza with the ridiculous bun.