Beyond the Snows of the Andes

by Beatrice Brusic

  “I’m very disappointed in you, Jorge, so I might as well tell you and not keep it to myself,” frowns mother. “You had an obligation to go to the funeral and you didn’t even bother. I shouldn’t have had to go there alone; you should have been there to support me. I had to wait till midnight, all alone in the station before I caught the next bus going to Oruro, in a place that was practically deserted. I was so distraught I don’t know how I got there without getting raped or killed by some maniac in the process. I know that hoping Sonia did the right thing and went there was too much to ask, but you, what excuse did you have?”

  “She was gone, finito, so it didn’t matter anymore,” he says, flinging his cigarette butt outside with his two front fingers.

  “It’s as simple as that, huh? No need to say goodbye, no need to pay your respects for the last time?”

  “You know I’m an atheist and I don’t believe in anything, so I certainly don’t believe in wakes and funerals, they are for the living, not the dead, the dead are gone.”

  “What’s happened to you, Jorge, has Sonia’s influence changed you so completely? Where is the brother I adored as a child? Where is that tender, sensitive child that grew up with me?”

  “He’s dead, and I don’t want to rehash the past as you seem to be intent on doing.”

  “You don’t feel a sense of loss? She was our mother for Christ’s sake, the woman that gave us life. How can you go on as though nothing had happened?”

  “Death is natural, and I don’t believe in martyrdom the way you do. You make a cult out of suffering, Maria, you like to open and reopen the wounds of the past and bleed over them, but I don’t, I have moved on, I don’t live in the past wallowing in my pain, I have buried it, a long, long time ago.”

  “With your heart along the way, no doubt”

  “Perhaps, but I’m a lot happier that way.”

  “Are you really? I doubt it. You’ve gotten callous, but that’s quite different.”

  “It’s better than being an open sore like you.”

  “This has been going on for a long time, hasn’t it? Now I understand why you reacted the way you did when our brother, Mario, died as well.”

  He springs to his feet in a fury. “I’m not going to let you dredge that up again. I leave you to your misery, María, have a great time.”

  Mother lowers her head and stares at the wall. Oscar wants to go to her but I stop him. She is silent for a long time, and when she speaks her voice had a bitter tinge to it.

  “This is the hour of truth. I never saw him as clearly as I saw him today. I always made excuses for his behavior because I loved him so much, but this transformation has been going for a long time, and I just didn’t want to see it. I kept remembering the needy child who clung to me like a mother when we were children, but that child died a long time ago. I went hungry when he was a child so he could eat, and I took the blows meant for him from my stepfather, but I got nothing else to give him now, so he prefers your aunt’s company, that’s perfectly understandable, isn’t it?”

  We hear a knock on the door and it’s Ramiro wanting to pay his condolences. Without saying a word he embraces her, and she embraces him back and cries on his shoulder. He pats her hair tenderly and lets her cry in silence. I stand aside dumbfounded, for I never saw that side of him before. They sit down and she tells him how difficult it was and how disappointed she is with Uncle Jorge’s reaction.

  “He feels it,” he says softly. “He just doesn’t want to face it.”

  “I know. He is always running away from realities. Never change, Ramiro, never get like him. I know you two are very close but don’t imitate him, stay the way you are.”

  “According to my mother that’s pretty bad,” he says with a grin.

  “You’re a good, sensitive person; it is her misfortune if she doesn’t see it.”

  “She never will,” he says, turning serious. “But I’m already resigned to that.”

  “That’s very sad, look how short life is. My mother was only fifty five years old, and now she is gone and all the good and bad years I spent with her are beginning to seem like a faraway dream.”

  “Well, at least you can say there were some good years. I’ll never be able to say that about my mother.”

  “You’re not being fair; she used to pamper you as a child.”

  “I would have to go back to the time I was a baby in diapers, and my memory doesn’t reach quite that far.”

  “Oh, Ramiro,” she says, smiling for the first time. “I’m sure she loves you but she doesn’t know how to show it.”

  “Good try, Aunt María, but I just don’t buy it. Can I do anything for you before I go?”

  “No, your visit has already helped me tremendously, thank you, darling.”

  They embrace again and he kisses her on the cheek and leaves. She turns to us and says we have to get on with the business of living, and is there anything to eat in the house because she hasn’t eaten for days, and is famished. We make her oatmeal and she has two bowls, before she’s full. She lays downs in bed exhausted and tells us not to make noise because she feels like sleeping forever. It’s Saturday and Oscar and I go to the park. He meets with his friends and they go play with the swings and seesaw, because Oscar is very popular in the neighborhood and everyone likes him.

  I sit down on the bench to read my book, but I can’t concentrate because I’m worried about mother. She hasn’t worked for a whole week and I wonder what we are going to do for money. I know she gets crazy if she doesn’t have money, and I’m afraid she’ll get even crazier now that grandma is dead and buried. I wish I could get a job to help her, but there is no work for anyone in my country, much less someone they view as a child. They don’t know that I’ve never viewed myself that way. I always think I was born old and that I’m a thousand years old, but they don’t look at the inside only the outside, and on the outside they see a child.

  I hate being a child, not having any control over my life. I want to be an adult and work and bring money home, but I want a different life from my mother and aunt. I don’t want to suffer all the time about money like mother, and I don’t want to play cards four times a week with lots of people like my aunt. I yearn for something else, something foreign, intangible. I live inside my head all the time, that’s why mother says I’m always daydreaming, and that I’ll never get anywhere because life is very hard and there is no room for reveries.

  She says I’m lucky I have time to indulge myself because she never had that luxury growing up. She had to cook and clean and be the maid to everyone in the household from the time she was five years old. She says her stepfather beat her, quite viciously at times, and if her mother interfered, she was physically abused also. Mom says grandma ran away several times, but he always found her and hit her some more.

  Mom learned to read and write by the sheer force of her will because she was absent so much, the teachers wanted to throw her out of the school and only kept her out of compassion. She was so lonely growing up; she adopted a mouse as a pet and raised it in her shoe. Ugh, the thought of adopting a mouse as a pet makes me cringe. We have them in our room and they drive us insane crawling over the walls and making horrible screeches at night when we are sleeping.

  Mother says my cat is useless because he doesn’t catch them but she doesn’t realize that he is outnumbered by fifty to one, and to lure them she has to rely on mouse traps and cheese which are always very expensive. Sometimes I regret discovering Bello in the backpack of the Indian woman five years ago because he has had a tough life. He is always falling short of expectations. I wonder what would have happened if he stayed with the Indian woman, yet I know they have horrible lives there too, and he would probably live in a shack at the foot of the mountain, cold and hungry all the time because it never gets warm there, even in the summer.

  ~~~

  Oscar comes back from the park and we return home. He is wearing a faded pair of jeans, a sweater mother made for him out of her left ov
er wools, and a white cap with red stripes he found in the streets which he always puts on backwards. He is very happy whenever he finds time to play, and this week has felt to him like a vacation. He hasn’t gone near the knitting machine and has had a great time dining upstairs with my aunt, a precious luxury he doesn’t get very often.

  We haven’t had to swallow cod liver oil either and perhaps that’s the biggest bonus of all, but now things will get back to normal, and I tell him to get ready to do it first thing in the morning. He makes faces and I remind him not to tell mom we haven’t been drinking it because she’ll give us triple the portions, and he makes vomiting motions with his fingers.

  “Monkey,” I tell him repeating mother’s favorite nickname for him. “No wonder mom says nature made a mistake with you and you should have been a monkey in the zoo.”

  “And you should have been a boy,” he retorts. “Because nature made a mistake with you and you’re useless, useless.”

  Mother does say that nature made a mistake making me a girl and my brother a boy, because I’m a tomboy who prefers the company of boys while my brother is sweet and docile like a girl, but her insult doesn’t offend me. I always wanted to be a boy; I feel boys have better lives than girls do and that they are clearly happier, freer. Male adults also have it better than women, Uncle Jorge has a wife and two children at home but you would never know it by his conduct because he is always alone, doing whatever he feels like doing, like flirting with Ana and her friends. But it really bothers me when, angry at me for burning rice or overcooking noodles, mom says I should go to America to have a sex change operation because I was meant to be a boy and I will never be soft and feminine the way a girl should be. I find that extreme and wish she didn’t use it so often just because I don’t like house chores.

  At other times she’ll scream I was born to be rich and was left in the garbage dump. I like that better because that means that perhaps in my other life I was a rich woman, accustomed to the finer things in life and that’s why I can’t adjust to my new surroundings.

  We get home and mom is feeling better. She has a little money left over from the funeral and we go food shopping.

  “Tomorrow we have to get back to our routine,” she tells me solemnly, as I’m holding the big bag. “I can’t even mourn my mother properly. All I want to do is crouch into a corner and die, but if I do that we’ll starve for sure.”

  She dresses in black from head to toe and tells her Indian friend at the potato stand of the market what happened, and pretty soon everyone finds out and the natives give her “Yapas” [“extras”] to ease her sorrow. She gets extra potatoes, yams, carrots, onions and garlic. She is on the verge of tears and they tell her “no llores mamita” [don’t cry, little mother] but she’s so touched by the gesture she can’t speak; she bites her lower lip and touches their outstretched hands. Pretty soon they descend from their stands and form a consoling circle around us. They smell of cheese, meat and sour milk and my brother and I are repelled by the smell and embarrassed by the side show we are making, but mom is comforted by their actions and oblivious to it all.

  Mother knows the natives love her, ever since the time she saved a four month old Indian baby girl from starving to death by giving her milk, egg yolks and meat juice all blended into one drink, and now they think of her as a “good witch.” They don’t understand that the little baby was dying of malnutrition and think that mother has special powers, so they let her buy things on credit whenever we are hard up. They also sell her their merchandise at reduced prices and consult her about medicine.

  Mother laughs with irony and says that she always wanted to be a doctor, so now she is the fake doctor of “El barrio de Miraflores.” [The neighborhood of Miraflores]. Yet the truth is that she does know a lot about medicine because she has read many books about natural healing, and has helped a lot of people.

  The market has three floors and open stands everywhere, but we never get to the top floor where they have the most expensive products such as choice meats and delicacies. We always visit the first and second floors looking for bargains.

  I think of the contrast between her humble attitude and that of my aunt who goes to the market with her maid, and looks down at the vendors. She has her nose in the air and would rather die than be touched by people she considers the “scourge of Bolivia.”

  She has fights with the Indians because she feels they jack up the prices out of spite when they see her coming, and I saw her tear up money in their faces more than once to show them she didn’t care about money, but it was the principle of the thing that bothered her. I know that she and Aunt Eli punish the Indian cab drivers they consider insolent by not giving them a tip, and by getting out on each side of the vehicle and leaving the doors wide open. They also get even with “Chola” [a mixed breed person, usually a derogatory term ] waitresses who are not attentive enough when they go out for tea and pastries, by leaving them one cent as a tip.

  We get home just as my aunt is going out, and she sees me carrying the big bag of groceries. She looks beautiful in a red coat with white heels, a white purse, and a cloud of her favorite perfume, Miss Dior.

  “What are you doing with that horrible big bag?”

  “We went to the market and she is helping me, Sonia.”

  “She shouldn’t be carrying a big bag like that, María; she’s going to ruin her shoulders. Why don’t you carry it? You have some nerve making the child carry heavy things like that.”

  “My back hurts… and it was not supposed to be that heavy, today we got more than we intended.”

  “Well, I don’t want to see her carrying big loads like that anymore while you are in this house, is that understood?”

  “Perfectly,” says mother, downcast.

  She gets into her cab and takes off. Mother turns to me and comments that of course she has to wear red today of all days, to flaunt her flagrant disrespect towards grandma. We come down the stairs and she rages about the fact that she is always interfering in my life and undermining her authority.

  “It is because she never had a daughter,” she says tearfully. “So she now wants to steal mine.”

  It’s true that my aunt has always taken an active interest in my life. I can’t remember a day when she wasn’t there putting lemon and ammonia on my hair to preserve its natural blondness or Nivea cream on my face to prevent wrinkles. During the summer she also makes me sit by the window with baby oil on my skin to achieve a healthy glow. She was always dissatisfied with my posture, however, and tried to improve it by teaching me to balance a book on my head while walking but that never worked so she settled on teaching me to suck my stomach in, and whenever I’m in her presence I try to walk that way but once I’m out of her sight I go back to my familiar posture, which she considers atrocious.

  Mother resents the fact that whenever she calls me, I have to fly to her side regardless of what I’m doing downstairs, and says that she’s teaching me disrespect and that’s why I’m insolent with her. I’m not aware of my insolence, but I’m aware of the fact that I’m always walking a tight rope between the two of them. I love my mother but I need my aunt like the air I breathe, so I have to be very careful what I do and say in her presence. I wish she was closer to my mother. I wish she didn’t criticize her so much all the time. I wish I could defend her. I wish I didn’t have to bite my lips and swallow my tears when she starts, but I know that wishing doesn’t get me anywhere so I learn to stop wishing and to accept things as they are.

  ~~~

  A few days later, Laura pays us a surprise visit. She has taken advantage of my aunt’s luncheon invitation to sneak downstairs on her way out and finally meet my mother. She offers her condolences and apologizes for not coming sooner. Mother is delighted to meet her and tells her that through me she knows her already, and that I didn’t exaggerate her beauty. She smiles graciously and looks at me with affection. She is wearing a blue sweater that brings out her multicolor eyes and a long skirt with black boots.
She stays talking to us a long time and says she will come back again with her husband, and that she will have us over to her house for lunch soon.

  “Don’t tell my sister you stopped by,” cautions mother. “Or you’ll lose her friendship, for sure.”

  Her face darkens and she says she doesn’t understand why this has to occur between sisters, and yes she realizes that for some obscure reason, my aunt doesn’t want mom to meet any of her friends, but she just had to stop by and pay her respects and doesn’t care if my aunt hears about it. She tells her she comes from a close knit family of two younger brothers, where she is the only female, and this is a whole new experience to her because she would have loved to have a sister and would have included her in every event of her life.

  “I’m very happy you stopped by,” says mother kissing her on the cheek. “And it will be an honor to come to your house and meet your husband.”

  She leaves our room and mother dries a tear from her eye. “I like her,” she tells me. “She’s kind, sensitive and seems to have a heart. I hope your aunt doesn’t spoil her and change her values.”

  I don’t tell her about the fight with her husband or about my uncle’s remarks. I want to believe that Laura is happy and was just having a bad day.

  ~~~

  Three months later, it’s May 15; the anniversary of Uncle Mario’s death, and after a light breakfast we head for the cemetery, a ritual we have followed religiously every year since he was killed by a stray bullet during the revolution. During the long ride up there mother talks to us about our uncle, how tragic he was in life and death, and how my aunt wouldn’t allow the wake to be held in her home claiming that it would be too ghastly for her children and he had to be buried without a wake.