Beyond the Snows of the Andes

by Beatrice Brusic

  “I’m sorry, my sister,” he says putting his hand on my cheek, placating me. “Thank God I was on the floor when it happened so we only have to wash my pajamas and not the sheets.”

  “I would have killed you if you wet the sheets or the mattress again,” I say hoping mother sleeps through the night so we can get a decent night’s sleep ourselves.

  ~~~

  We go to sleep exhausted and the voice of the maid knocking on our door wakes us early the next morning. “Seňora Anaya, Seňora Anaya,” she is yelling to my mother. “Seňora Sonia wants to see you.” Mother and Oscar jump out of bed startled, and mother asks her anxiously what the problem is. “I don’t know nothing missus,” she replies twisting one of her long braids. “She just say get Seňora Anaya, get Seňora Anaya”

  “Tell her to give me a few minutes to get dressed,” says mother rushing about.

  She puts on a skirt and sweater and combs her hair in a hurry. “Oh God,” she says, dolefully. “I have a horrible feeling about this.”

  I try to reassure her but she waves me away with a frantic look on her face. My brother and I get busy with the soiled clothes and quickly hang them up to dry in the sun.

  “We’ll tell her we spilled water on the pajamas or something, “I coach him. “Now let’s wipe the room so she doesn’t smell anything.”

  Mother is gone for a long time and we begin to worry. “Do you think something really happened to grandma?”

  “I don’t know; I’m hungry.”

  “That’s a switch for you, you’re never hungry, Oscar.”

  He touches his stomach. “I’m hungry now. Do we have to wait for her to have breakfast?”

  “Of course we do, and don’t forget the cod liver oil.”

  He makes puking motions and sticks his finger in his throat. I look at him with distaste. “Don’t let her see you doing that, especially today.”

  She comes down an hour later and looks stunned. Her head is down and she sits at the edge of the bed without talking.

  “Mom,” pleads Oscar. “Is everything alright?”

  “Hush,” I whisper to him, guessing the reason. “Give her a few minutes.”

  He comes to her side and leans his head on her shoulder lovingly. Her face is white and tense and her body is quivering when she tells us that her mother is dead.

  “Oh mommy,” says Oscar, hugging her. “That’s why you had that dream.”

  I know I should put my arms around her in silent support like my brother but I can’t move. I don’t know how she’s going to react so I wait for her to continue. Her eyes are dry but her expression is lost and that is worse than the tantrums and hysteria she threw the night before.

  “Your aunt was in her bedroom when I came up,” she finally tells us, almost in a whisper. “You know how your aunt takes to her bed whenever something unpleasant occurs? Well, true to form she was in her bed, propped up by two pillows with cream on her face and curlers on her hair when she callously told me that your grandma had died the night before and that arrangements needed to be made.”

  Mom covers her mouth with her hand to stifle a scream. “Arrangements needed to be made! Just like that, like saying the dog died and we have to bury it. I sunk to my knees praying and she told me to stop the dramatics and to deal with the fact that it was over. It was almost as if a stranger had died, there was no feeling in her at all.”

  “I’m sorry, ma, tell me what to do, how to help you,” I say, quickly coming to her side.

  She dries her tears with her hand and says she has to leave for Oruro right away, and that I have to be in charge of my brother till she comes back. I nod and she gets busy packing. She says that at least my aunt gave her money for the trip and funeral, saying that she knows nobody has any money over there, and that grandma should at least have a decent burial because she had a miserable life here on earth, and she made a lot of mistakes.

  “Can you imagine?” she wails. “Remembering her mistakes at this hour? But that’s my sister, and she has always appointed herself judge, jury and executioner in life.”

  “Isn’t she going to the funeral?” asks Oscar innocently.

  She shakes her head with a bitter smile. “You must be hallucinating. She didn’t go to the funeral of the aunts who raised and adored her; she is not going to go to the funeral of the mother who left her after the divorce. Never mind that my mother had no choice in the matter because the judge split up the family; according to your aunt, she committed a transgression that was simply unforgivable.”

  She grabs her coat, purse and a small bag containing her underwear and an extra sweater, and leaves the room telling us we’ll have our meals upstairs with my aunt till she comes back from Oruro.

  “I don’t know if the bus is even going today but I’m going to sit there all day and night at the station, if I have to,” she says frantically. “Say a prayer for your grandma’s soul.”

  She’s gone and we look at each other in shock. I have only faint memories of my grandmother and Oscar has none, but he’s upset because of mother. I remember a short, pretty lady with short, wavy, reddish hair who looked like my aunt, but who was always afraid of her, sneaking into our room without being seen because my aunt had made it clear she didn’t want her in her house. I remember her cooking us delicious meals and the sadness in her eyes that resembled my mother’s.

  Everything would start out well, but sooner or later there would be tirades from mother during which she would relive her painful childhood and the fact that grandma had allowed her abusive stepfather to mistreat her since when was a child. The recriminations would bring grandma to tears, and mother would end up apologizing to her later.

  “I can’t be a monster to her either,” she would tell me after grandma had gone back. “After all she was a victim too.”

  Mother would try but she couldn’t help herself, the pull of the past was stronger than her and it would always come up. Yet grandma’s life hadn’t been easy either. She had been born out of wedlock with the stamp of shame carved across her forehead because her father had been a priest. Raised by a fanatically religious single mother, grandma had been forced to pray day and night for her mother and the father she had never known, and only when he died leaving her his house and possessions which included a piano, had she found out that the saintly looking priest who gave mass every Sunday, was her real father.

  Shattered by grief, her own mother had died a few months later, leaving her all alone. Unable to bear the loneliness, Grandma Claudia had married my grandfather, Ernesto Anaya, when she was only fifteen years old. He was ten years older than her and already had a reputation for being irresponsible and a big gambler in town, but my grandma had ignored the rumors. He was a kind, gentle man and they had four children and a few good years together, but he was a poor provider who had dissipated her inheritance leaving her destitute.

  In despair, she had taken up with her second husband, Felix Camacho, a local policeman, confusing his brutality for strength. He had agreed to take only two of her four children, and she had picked out my mother and Uncle Jorge, who were the youngest. Aunt Sonia and Uncle Mario had gone to live with their father, to be raised by their aunts who had never married or had children. Grandma’s second marriage had produced four more children, Rosa, Ana, Raúl and Teresa.

  ~~~

  During the time mom was away, we ate lunch upstairs and I prepared breakfast and a light dinner at home. I was surprised to see that my aunt had guests for lunch every day the entire week mother was gone. The first day we saw Clarissa Ascamón, a good friend of hers from childhood who was always coming to lunch. Clarissa was a warm, thin lady with sparse shoulder length brown hair parted to the side, and enormous brown eyes with protruding lids. She had small, delicate hands like a child, which she used often to express herself, and seemed poised and serene. She talked and moved slowly and was only two years older than my aunt but looked much older due to prematurely wrinkled skin, which was a family trait.

  My aunt
used her name all the time to make her point about wrinkles, and how important it was to maintain a good skin, but if her wrinkles bothered Clarissa, she gave no sign of it. I never saw her evading the sun or worrying about the way she looked. Nothing seemed to rattle her; she took life as it came and made the best of it. She had never married or had children but belonged to a tight family unit which consisted of her mother, two sisters and two brothers. She offered me condolences about grandmother, and said she must be in heaven because her life was not easy.

  “Nobody’s life is,” snapped my aunt, clearly irritated. Clarissa understood my aunt didn’t want to talk about it and changed the subject. I had liked her from the first moment I met her, because she was kind and serene, and made me feel very peaceful. Something about her reminded me of a bird, perhaps it was her fragility and delicacy.

  The next day Aunt Sonia had Uncle Jorge over for lunch, and seemed more nervous and affected because right after Uncle Berto left for work, I heard her tell him she was having trouble sleeping at night.

  “Me too,” he replied opening a window in her terrace to let the smoke from his cigarette out. “But remember that this too shall pass.”

  “I know, but I wish I had made my peace with her. She came here so many times looking for me but I wouldn’t see her, I wouldn’t talk to her…”

  “Don’t even go there. You had powerful reasons. She wasn’t there when you were little and tried to play that role too late in life - you didn’t need her then - anyone in your situation would have done the same.”

  “Yeah,” she said sadly, her eyes misting. “But the end of a life, that’s really something, isn’t it?”

  “It’s going to happen to everyone.”

  “She haunts me, though. I can’t stop thinking about her. Tell me what to do, how to stop feeling what I’m feeling.”

  “It’s a matter of mind over matter. You’ve got to keep busy during the day and take your sleeping pills at night. Don’t dwell on the miserable memories, that’s not going to do you any good,” he said with a frown.

  “I don’t have a game this afternoon,” she said getting up abruptly. “Let’s catch a movie, anything, I don’t care. You don’t have to go back home, do you?”

  “No, I’m entirely at your disposal, Madam,” he said with his usual flair. “I’ll call my wife.”

  Oscar and I walk down to our room quietly. It has begun to rain again and I feel a chill going through me.

  “Why wouldn’t they take us too? We also wanted to go to the movies.”

  “They need to be alone, Oscar. It’s a bad time for them.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s not so easy to make believe it doesn’t matter.”

  “What?”

  “Forget it, Oscar.”

  It’s gotten cold and dark and I do what I always do when I’m down, I go to my bed and curl up with my cat and a book. I’m reading “Little Women,” and it’s a beautiful story of family, love and sacrifice, and I read it slowly, savoring each word, delighting in every scene. Out of all the sisters I identify keenly with Jo March. She is a tomboy like me, but she is also strong, independent and resourceful, and that’s how I want to be. Beth March is like my brother, sweet, caring and docile. They don’t have much money but they have a loving, stable family life without daily storms and crises, and that’s what I would like to have. Aside from the movies, nothing makes me happier than curling up in bed with a beautiful book, stroking my cat and listening to his purring.

  I worship writers. I think they are the greatest people in the world because they do a lot of good with their stories. I want to go Denmark some day to see the place where Hans Christian Andersen was born. Mother agrees and tells me that when she worked at the library, she read till her eyes got blood shot, and she still talks about some of the stories she devoured, like Nero the infamous Roman Emperor who killed both his wife and mother, while the latter defiantly faced the knife, saying “kill the womb that produced this monster.”

  ~~~

  The next day my aunt has Laura Gianni and her husband over for lunch, but Laura seems distant, troubled. Her husband is also tense and leaves immediately after the meal. I walk my uncle to work after his nap and ask him what’s wrong with Laura.

  He smiles at me kindly and says she is miserable because she is beautiful and thinks she could have done better for herself. He knows I don’t understand so he explains that some women feel entitled to extraordinary lives because they have extraordinary beauty, and that Laura is one of them.

  “Her husband doesn’t make enough money to satisfy her thirst for the good life, Vicky, and the poor slob kills himself trying, but he’ll never be able to measure up because she wants to be your aunt.”

  “I see,” I say, finally understanding.

  “She doesn’t know that your aunt isn’t happy either.”

  “Why isn’t she happy?”

  “Because she wants to live like her friend, Alicia Rao, who resides with a swimming pool and a gardener” in Zona Sur. [An upscale neighborhood at the outskirts of the city].

  I laugh. “Is Alicia happy?”

  “Probably not because there must be somebody out there who has more than she has, understand?

  “Oh, Uncle Berto,” I say, squeezing his hand. “Is anybody ever happy?”

  “Only the ones who live their reality, Vicky, the ones who appreciate the things we can not buy in this world, such as your health and your life.”

  “I’m going to be happy, Uncle Berto.”

  “Then start laying out the ground work right now, Vicky, or you’ll end up like your aunt and Laura.”

  I return to the house to pick up my brother, and Laura is weeping on the terrace. She is saying she wants to divorce her husband and start over. My aunt tells her she has three children to think about and that in all probability she won’t be able to get married again because no man wants to be saddled with three children, and she cries harder. I think about what my uncle said, and wonder if that’s the reason she is so unhappy. Her face is smudged with mascara and tears, but she is still beautiful, even in that condition. I walk in to say goodbye, and she apologizes for creating a scene.

  “I’m sorry about your grandma,” she says, drying her eyes. “Please give my condolences to your mother. Tell her I’ll come down to meet her real soon.”

  ~~~

  Mon returns from Oruro late at night, startling us. She is very upset. She throws her coat and purse on her bed and sobs.

  “It was terrible,” she says, mournfully. “You wouldn’t believe the things I found out. My half sisters spaced her medicine during her last months and made her suffer. She was in so much pain she prayed for death day and night. Now they are crying and acting like they loved her, those monsters who resented taking care of her. The wake was terrible, her face still showed the agonies she endured, and the funeral was heartbreaking. My legs gave way from under me, and I felt faint a couple of times. I kept imagining her stuck in that old house suffering and I wanted to kill them.”

  “You’re shivering,” says Oscar, now wide awake. “Let me make you some hot cocoa or you’re going to get very sick, ma.”

  “It’s so hard; nobody deserves to suffer so much, why didn’t God take her of a heart attack like my father? Why did he have to give her cancer?”

  We feel afraid and get very quiet. She’s exhausted and after drinking her cocoa she gets into bed in a fetal position and keeps weeping, quietly, softly, like the rain outside. Oscar starts rubbing her back gently starting at the nape of the neck and she begins to feel better and goes to sleep.

  We get back into bed, and I think about my grandmother lying in a coffin dead. I wonder if she sees us, if she can remember the little girl with the blonde curls who used to nag her about making “Buňuelos” [“Fritters”] which were delicious and she served with lots of syrup. I haven’t seen her in a long time but I do remember her bent over the stove, struggling to please me. I feel depressed again and the feeling is int
ensified by the rain and dampness in the room that makes it so hard to get warm.

  I don’t like our mountain weather and brief summers, and wish I could live in a warm climate where’s it’s always sunny and hot and I would never have to see rain again. I want to wear shorts and sandals like I see in the movies. I wish I didn’t live here. I wish I had been born in a big country with wide open spaces instead of surrounded by mountains like a fortress.

  And I wish we had an ocean, oh, how I wish we had an ocean. Sometimes the longing is so great; I can smell the surf coming at me. I can see seagulls lounging, watching me. I hate the mountains because they oppress me, closing in on me and making me want to scream. I want to be a condor and soar over them to another continent. Mother says I have claustrophobia, and that it’s a sin to hate the place of your birth; she may complain about the tough situation we endure here all the time, but she still loves her country and I should learn to do the same. But it’s very hard to love a country where there are long lines for everything, a country where roadblocks, strikes and misery are a way of live.

  ~~~

  The next day Uncle Jorge comes to visit mother and they have a long conversation about grandma.

  “I know it sounds awful,” he says inhaling deeply on his cigarette. “But it must be hell taking care of a cancer patient. The mistake was keeping her at home. They should have taken her to the public hospital.”

  “With all those poor, destitute women like some charity case? Are you crazy?”

  “Well, isn’t that what she was? We are not talking about Patiňo here.”

  Antenor Patiňo, heir to tycoon Simon Patiňo was a world famous Bolivian tin king whose father was a man of humble origins and “mestizo” [“mixed breed, usually Indian and white”] background, who had nonetheless succeeded in becoming one of the world’s richest men. Antenor Patiňo, had inherited millions after his father died, and his name had entered Bolivian lore forever because every time someone wanted a raise or needed to borrow money, we would immediately say, “Who do you think I am, Patiňo?” Even the Indians had learned his name because whenever we haggled too much over their prices which rose daily without any controls, they would tell us mockingly “We are not Patiňo, Seňora; we are just poor, working people.”