Beyond the Snows of the Andes

by Beatrice Brusic

  ~~~

  The results come back a few days later and they are all negative. Mother reacts with anger, saying that if this test came back negative, it is proof that I don’t have the illness and that I shouldn’t be exposed to a treatment that might damage my kidneys in the long run, but she is overruled by my aunt. I know difficult times lie ahead, but I am more worried about her fragility than I am about the treatment. Mom looks sick, weak, with circles under her eyes and a growing belly. Will she be able to withstand what lies ahead? I have visions of doctors and nurses torturing me day and night, but the vision of mother falling apart is the one I fear most of all.

  ~~~

  I begin my treatment with daily shots of penicillin in my buttocks for three months, and develop a relationship with the nurses who have taken a liking to me and make sure they boil the needles religiously, so I won’t develop any abscesses which are often the consequence of using and reusing the same needles in our city’s hospitals. The shots are painful and the liquid going in feels hot and piercing in my body, but I endure them without complaint. The nurses follow doctor’s orders religiously, and reassure me that I don’t have the illness at all. They agree with mother that the doctor is inept for giving such a severe treatment to an obviously healthy patient, but praise me on my bravery. I acknowledge their complements but I don’t feel so brave. What would they do if they were in my place? I have no choice but to comply, and that is not bravery. I don’t know what to believe anymore.

  I can’t understand how I have gotten used to the diagnosis, and the word no longer produces horror and revulsion in me. I try to focus instead on getting well, so the medicine can do its magic and release me from this nightmare.

  It is during this difficult time that mother’s nerves take their toll, and she makes an unfortunate comment to my aunt that she repeats to me verbatim. I had just come back from my daily treatments, and happy to see her in the house taking some sun in the terrace, I kissed her on both cheeks spontaneously as it was my custom, and sprinted back to my bedroom to change my sneakers into an old pair of comfortable house slippers, before joining them in the terrace.

  I was feeling particularly good and cheerful after having joked with the nurses, and I returned home with that attitude, when I noticed that mother had gotten red and fidgety, but thought nothing of it till I walked her to the bus stop and she seemed distraught and teary eyed. She told me she was having trouble sleeping and eating because this pregnancy wasn’t as normal as the others had been. I gave her a big hug and kiss to console her, and she burst into tears in my arms.

  “She might tell you things about me,” she said, weeping. “Don’t believe her, please don’t believe her.”

  I returned home puzzled and confused, and my aunt asked me if I had kissed her again.

  “Of course I did,” I said, surprised. “Why?”

  My aunt told me mother had wiped off my kiss with her handkerchief because she was worried about contagion, and didn’t want to expose the upcoming baby. I couldn’t believe she had reacted like that, my own mother. No wonder she had looked so upset, she had begged my aunt not to tell me but she must have known that she would, and didn’t know how to repair the damage. I stopped going to see her and when she came to the house a few days later, I turned my face away when she tried to kiss me, telling her that it wasn’t a good idea, I might be giving her this illness, and we couldn’t do that to the baby. Mom turned to my aunt in disbelief.

  “How could you poison this child’s soul in that manner, Sonia? It was my shattered nerves that made me do it and you know it.”

  My aunt looked guilty and ashamed, and quickly left the terrace. “I don’t know why I did it,” said mother, pulling her hair nervously. “You have to believe me. I couldn’t bear it if you thought…”

  “That you were afraid to get sick? That you were worried about your pregnancy? That you really believe I have this illness?”

  “It was a reflex, a nervous action, I did it without thinking.”

  “But it spoke the truth, didn’t it?” I said, bitterly. “If you, my own mother, reacts like that, what’s left for everyone else?”

  “I didn’t mean it,” she said, desperately. “I didn’t mean it.”

  “How do you know you didn’t give it to me anyway? You didn’t even take a blood test. I could have gotten it from you.”

  “I don’t have it,” she hissed, fiercely. “I don’t have it.”

  “Be glad you don’t have it,” I said beginning to cry.

  A pregnant silence followed my words broken only by the sound of her sobbing. “Let’s not do this to each other,” she begged. “Didn’t I tell you from the beginning that it was a mistake? That I never really thought you were sick?”

  “Actions speak louder than words,” I said, meanly. “Maybe you never really believed what you told me. Besides, what if it was true? Would that mean you couldn’t love me anymore because I was damaged goods?”

  She came towards me and tried to hug me, but I turned my face away spitefully. She gave a little sigh and fell to her knees crying and hugging my legs. “Oh, forgive me, please forgive me,” she begged.

  “Get up,” I yelled, horrified. “Please get up.”

  “Not until you say you forgive me.”

  I pulled her to her feet, and we hugged each other crying. She covered my face with kisses and dried my tears with her lips.

  “Don’t ever doubt my love for you, no matter what poison she fills your head with.”

  “I promise,” I whispered, comforted by her words.

  “You’re my daughter, my first born, and the person I’ve loved most in the world. Even if it’s true, I’ll love you till the day I die, I swear it.” She said, fiercely.

  ~~~

  I lay awake that night reliving the experience. Why had my aunt told me? What were really her motives? She was such a complicated person that I would go to my grave without understanding her. Had she done it maliciously so that I would hate my own mother the way she hated hers? If so, she had failed miserably for I would never hate my mother, and this experience, raw and devastating as it was, had actually brought us closer. I already knew that the bond I had with her would never be broken, not by violence, poverty, betrayal, illness, tragedy, or death.

  Yet I also had a bond with my aunt, imperfect as she was, and I felt truly sorry for her. She was a troubled, haunted person, who filled her life with superficial friends, missing the joy of her husband and children. I admired her toughness and resilience but not her cruelty. I wanted to have my mother’s heart with my aunt’s brains. I wanted to face the world unafraid but also with compassion and empathy for those less fortunate. I had forgiven mother from the bottom of my heart, but the experience had scarred me. How many people would recoil in horror if they knew I was a VD suspect? I was attending a good secretarial school my uncle was paying for, but how long would it last if they knew?

  The unfortunate experience had also added a new dimension to my life by giving me an odd superiority over my peers. I was facing illness, rejection, something everybody was afraid of, and I would emerge from it stronger than most people. Outwardly I was still the same person, but inwardly I had undergone a drastic, fundamental change. The experience of being sick at such a young age had altered something inside of me permanently. I knew that even if they found that there had never been anything wrong with me at all, I would never look at life in the same way when this crisis was over.

  ~~~

  At last I finished the treatment, and when the results were ready I went to pick them up with my mind in turmoil. It was a raw, cloudy day and Illimani was hiding behind thick clouds, which I read as a bad omen. Like the Incas, I found myself uttering a silent prayer to the missing mountain. The nurse wouldn’t divulge anything so I opened the envelope on the way to the house, and was stunned to see that all the results were positive again. Noticing my despondency when I got home, my aunt knew right away I had seen the results. We took them to the doctor who seeme
d disconcerted.

  “I wasn’t expecting a big change, but there should have been something,” he said scratching his head. “I’ll have to increase the dosage, I didn’t want to do that due to her age but we have no choice.”

  “We trust you completely, doctor, do whatever it takes,” said my aunt without hesitation.

  We got back to the house depressed and angry. “It isn’t fair,” said Aunt Sonia throwing her coat and purse on the couch. “You want to get ahead and life keeps holding you back. What is it going to take to for this infernal positive blood test to go away?”

  I had no answers and felt very tired, as though all the energy had been drained from my body. I retired to my bedroom and heard her dialing Aunt Eli; once she had her on the phone and told her the results, she began sobbing. Hating the fact that I had become the object of pity, I buried my head under my pillow to drown out my own sobs. Outside children were playing and everyone seemed to be celebrating life except me. I was more convinced than ever now that all the treatments in the world wouldn’t change the results. My blood was my doom, my life sentence, something that was going to follow me all my life. How would I ever escape it? There was only one way and I had already decided to take it, but first I would exhaust all the possibilities.

  ~~~

  Mother went crazy at the thought of more penicillin. She told me they were flooding my body with penicillin in vain, and I would pay the price later on in life.

  “What else can I do? Drain all my blood and replace it with someone else’s?”

  She brightened up; telling me that she would test under my name and I would take that test to the doctor making believe it was my own.

  “You really think it would work?” I asked her, reluctantly.

  “What have we got to lose? If the results are positive, we won’t use them, it’s that simple.”

  “I wish we had thought of that before he ordered the second treatment, now the doctor already knows the results, and is expecting me to get daily shots of penicillin for another two months.”

  “Don’t do it,” pleaded, mother. “Wait out the two months and tell him you got it done. They gave you enough penicillin to kill a horse already. There’s nothing wrong with you, I don’t have his medical degrees but I could put my hand to the fire for that. Don’t let them ruin your health like this, Vicky, I’m begging you.”

  “Then how do you explain the constant positive results?”

  “It must be a false positive,” reiterated mother. “People give false positives for other tests all the time, why not this one?”

  ~~~

  Afraid to take a chance I started the second round of treatments, but after a few weeks developed some painful boils on both sides of my buttocks because they nurses had not boiled the needles properly, and my misery knew no limits. The whole area was red and inflamed and the clinic doctor had to lance the boils and give me antibiotics.

  “I told you not to go back,” said mother, exasperated. “Why won’t you listen to me?”

  I let her take care of the boils with alcohol and hot compresses, and discontinued the treatments right away. She had always been interested in medicine and knew the long term repercussions to drugs better than anybody, so we became accomplices and swore Oscar to secrecy. I knew my aunt would never understand the deception so I made believe I was still having the treatments, but I did confide in her about switching the test results with mother if the results were again positive, and she thought that was a very good idea.

  “Too bad we didn’t think of that before. We could have done that from the beginning and save you a lot of trouble. Once in a while your mother gets a bright idea, doesn’t she?”

  I assented guiltily, the fact that I had already stopped the treatments without telling her bothered me, but I was convinced mother was right.

  ~~~

  Two months pass at last, and mother takes her blood test which comes back completely negative.

  “You see?” she says, vehemently. “Had you been sick you would have given us this illness and my results are normal. That famous doctor your aunt admires so much is nothing but a pompous fool.”

  I nod but I still can’t understand why I keep giving a false positive. I know I have been stolen once when I was a little girl and went missing for one hour, did the man do anything to me? Mother said she left me outside the market because she forgot something, and when she returned I was gone. She said she started running down the street crying and screaming and attracted so much noise the police came right away and began looking for me, combing the market and the nearby park while my hysterical mother kept praying on her hands and knees for the man to become impotent. She said the tragedy happened in seconds, that the man must have been watching us and grabbed me as soon as she turned her back.

  I was found in the park unharmed and scared one hour later but semen was found on my legs and dress, yet the man hadn’t been able to perform sexually because I was still intact. Mother’s prayers had been answered, and he had become impotent. Intact, the word itself has such strange connotations now. How could I be intact when I had been kidnapped? I have no memory of the incident because the doctors said I blocked the whole thing out of shock, but the fact that it happened, haunted me, especially now. What if he exposed me to the illness in some way? Mother says they never found him because she created such a scandal, the man panicked and ran away, but I always wondered what he did to me during that hour.

  “That was the worst hour of my life,” says mother whenever I bring up the subject. “If they didn’t find you I was going to kill myself. You were only five years old and couldn’t tell us anything but the Lord is merciful and he didn’t have much time to hurt you. I never forgave myself for leaving you alone those seconds. You were everything I had in the world, and I guarded you with my life, but that day I got careless for a second and you were gone. I would have gone mad with grief if you weren’t found.”

  I walk over to the window and look out. “That whole episode bothers me, though” I tell her as she comes up from behind me and hugs me. “I wish Aunt Sonia had never told me.”

  “I begged your aunt not to tell you, but she said you should know so you never went with strangers again. She didn’t think he took you by force, she thought you went with him willingly because nobody noticed anything.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “He enticed you with candy because we found you with caramels.”

  “I wish I could remember, ma, but I don’t remember anything except your shaking me roughly, and asking what he did to me over and over.”

  “If I found him I would have killed him, that’s why I wanted you to tell me, but it’s a blessing you don’t remember, and I hope you never do.”

  “Is it? Maybe that would unlock the secret of this illness.”

  “Some day you will find out why you test positive, and I assure you it will have nothing to do with that unfortunate experience.”

  ~~~

  We take the results to the embassy and the doctor sees through the deception right away telling us we aren’t fooling anybody because no medicine would wipe out all the vestiges of the illness at once. He said there would be a slight improvement if the medicine had worked, but whoever took this test never had the illness. My aunt begs him.

  “We switched the results with her mother. We are desperate, doctor. Can’t you just accept it and approve the visa?

  “I can’t do that, and I can’t give her anymore medicine either. These are potent drugs and they’re not doing her any good. There is one last resort left. I’ll request a special visa, provided we take a last test called FTA-ABS. If that test comes back negative, the visa will be granted, if it doesn’t, it’s over.’

  “It’s going to be positive,” says my aunt, drying a tear from her eye. “You know it and I know it. Why can’t we just use her mother’s test? We’re playing with her life here, doctor. It’s imperative that she goes, you don’t know what this means to her.

  “
On the human level I can understand that very well, but I can’t commit fraud. I have to go by the book, and the book says no infectious diseases are allowed. She might be in the dormant stage now but this is still considered an infectious disease.”

  “Then we already lost, why even bother with the last test.”

  “I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful, but don’t give up yet. You’ve gone this far, take her for the last test. You have nothing to lose.”

  She shakes his hand coolly, and I follow her quietly. We ride back in silence, I feel lost, defeated. I can’t go back to my father and I can’t stay with my aunt, what recourse do I have left? I want to cry but my eyes are dried. With fear I watch my aunt’s face, and she looks morose and solemn.

  “I can’t believe he wouldn’t help us,” she says, angrily. “He’s a first class jerk and to think I thought the world of him. Why, I even flirted with him to help you here.”

  I say nothing and she continues. “But they have not licked us yet; if this last test fails, we’ll find some other way.”

  But I know there is no other way and I already feel detached, distant from it all. I know I should be feeling sorry for myself, but I’m surprised that I don’t and I just feel a deep, bottomless sadness.

  ~~~

  We go for the special test at the embassy three days later, and they tell us to come back for the results in ten days. It doesn’t matter to me because I have already decided not to wait. I tell mother I’m resigned to not going, and she consoles me saying that God must have other plans for me. She is looking forward to us being a family again, and I let her believe that I will come back to her. I know that what I’m about to do will devastate her emotionally, and only hope that the novelty of the upcoming baby will help her cope.