Beyond the Snows of the Andes

by Beatrice Brusic

  The baby has dropped and she is due any day now. She is convinced that it will be a girl and is happy at the idea of having another girl like me. I feel like a coward for taking the easy way out but I have no choice. I bide them a silent farewell and tell them that I love them. Oscar hugs me and says he can’t wait for me to move back.

  “She has to finish her secretarial courses first,” says mother, cheerfully. “And then she’ll be back for good.”

  My uncle has given me extra money for my school supplies and I use it to buy sleeping pills from different drugstores. I hide them under my mattress and when I have ten of them, I decide to take them. Slyly, I have asked the druggist what would happen if a person swallowed ten pills at once, and he tells me the person would die. Satisfied that I have enough to do the job, I walk away with a smile. I am glad my inquisitive cousin Carlos is in Brazil for vacation because I’ll have the bedroom all to myself, and will be able to get away in private.

  ~~~

  I pick a Saturday night because my aunt and uncle will sleep late tomorrow, and that will give me more time before I’m discovered. I write them a long letter thanking them for everything they have done for me, and another to mother imploring her forgiveness. I remind her she has other children to care for, and ask her to pray for me, and to be strong. I put the letters under my pillow where I know they will be found easily when it’s all over. I can’t believe how calm I am. I place the white pills on the small table next to me and watch them glowing under my night light. I have asked Josefa what kind of pills could be purchased without prescription, and she has recommended these white, flat pills I now hold in the palm of my hand. I told her mother was having trouble sleeping and Josefa assured me these pills were potent because she used them all the time.

  I really wanted to buy twenty pills to make sure they did the job, but running out of money, had to settle for ten.

  After a moment’s hesitation I swallow one pill but it tastes bitter with water, so I tiptoe to the kitchen to take them with a big glass of milk. I begin swallowing them one by one methodically till all of them are gone, and I serenely wait to die. What I have just done feels peaceful and good, and the silence in the room is broken up only by the wall clock eerily marking my last minutes. I close my eyes and try to drift away, but a fierce struggle starts taking place within me almost immediately. I toss and turn trying to quell my terror to no avail.

  Now that I have done the unthinkable, I’m petrified. This isn’t the way I’d imagined it at all, this is a macabre, horrific experience. Where is the sweet, gentle escape into oblivion I had dreamed of? I feel a numbness overwhelming me and I want to scream but no sound will come, the muscles in my throat have closed and my legs feel like cement.

  My body is dying but my mind is still racing desperately. I try to move but I feel paralyzed, my whole body is inert and won’t obey the anguished commands of my brain. I begin to pray feverishly, imploring God to give me another chance. I want to live now more than anything in the world. I want to see my family, the dawn of another day.

  The terror, the war within me seems to go on for hours and I’m screaming without words, when the same force that had propelled me to end my life is now forcing me to empty everything I have ingested, and I become violently ill, throwing up all over myself, the bed, the floor and everything in between before I can get to the bathroom. The loud, furious retching wakes up everyone, and before I know it the lights are turned on, and my aunt and uncle stand at the door glaring at me with a bewildered expression.

  “What on earth happened here?” yells my aunt, covering her nose and mouth with disgust.

  The stench is affecting her more than any of us because she has an acute sense of smell - she has always said she could compete with dogs when it comes to that, and has often prided herself on picking up all kinds of smells the minute she walks into a house.

  I want to answer her but I’m doubled over with pain.

  “We should take her to a hospital,” says my uncle with concern. “She’s really sick. I think she has food poisoning.”

  “Nonsense,” says my aunt opening the windows. “She got rid of everything she ingested. There’s nothing else they can do for her even if it is food poisoning.”

  “She looks deathly pale.”

  “What a mess,” says my aunt, aghast. “The maid will quit on me if I ask her to clean up this mess tomorrow morning.”

  “I’ll clean up,” I say meekly. “Give me a few minutes.”

  “You’re not in a position to do anything tonight,” says my uncle bringing me a damp towel to clean my face. “Put those soiled clothes in the hamper and your aunt will give you a nightgown.”

  “Like hell I will,” snaps my aunt. “She has to clean up this mess and she has to do it now. I can’t sleep with this stench.”

  “Have a heart, Sonia, she’s really sick.”

  “You feel sorry for her?” she yells heading for the kitchen and pulling a mop and disinfectant from a hidden door where Josefa keeps her brooms, shovels and mops. “Be my guest, clean up the room for her because I will not go back to sleep with vomit all around me.”

  He shakes his head and puts the liquid in a bucket. Aunt Sonia glares at me and goes back to her bedroom, slamming the door after her.

  “Please Uncle Berto, you go back to sleep. I’ll clean up.”

  “Nonsense, the two of us can get it cleaned up in no time. You go change the sheets and put them in the hamper.”

  He is so kind I feel like confessing the reckless, desperate thing I have done, but all I can do is lower my head in humiliation as I watch him work the mop. It takes us half an hour to clean up the mess and he gives me a pair of his pajamas, and asks me to take a shower before opening the convertible bed in the living room.

  “I’m so sorry about all this,” I say downcast. “Thank God tomorrow is Sunday and you don’t have to get up early.”

  “Josefa could have done it tomorrow for a big tip, but you know how your aunt is, she doesn’t listen to anybody.”

  “But tomorrow is her day off,” I say, puzzled.

  “Your aunt is having one of her famous bridge parties here and Josefa is working overtime, that’s probably why she is so mad this happened.”

  After a quick shower, I curl up on the couch with a sense of bliss and profound gratitude. I have survived. I have made it despite myself and will spend the rest of my life making it up to God. My stomach feels like I have ingested fire but I’m elated. I have been given a second chance and will never throw it away again. The enormity of what I have tried to do hit me hours later and I cried and cried for hours, letting my tears gently wash away the pain, regret and fright that still envelops me.

  I crawled to my room to retrieve the goodbye notes I had tucked under my pillow and tore them to pieces. Why had I felt so hopeless? I had no right to feel that way, not when it came to my life which was the most precious thing I possessed. I was very young and had decades ahead of me to find some kind of happiness, maybe not the type I had envisioned but a different kind of fulfillment.

  Ever since I was a child, I had equated America with freedom and opportunity; it was such a vast, generous country that I had wanted more than anything to be a part of it. Now I was resigned, feeling a strange lassitude as if the dream had been nothing but a long sickness and I had recovered. The wanting had made me unhappy, I was free from wanting; the close call with death had freed me. It was a new feeling to be a peace with my surroundings for the first time in my life. I would no longer hate the mountains or my life with mother. I would appreciate each and every day no matter what it brought me.

  I couldn’t sleep all night, my ribs ached as though I had broken them and my stomach felt inflamed, but my mind was at peace. It was dawn, and it had been raining for hours and I wanted to hold that sound, keeping the rain in my fingertips and watching it glistening against the morning light, delighting in the poetry of it for rain had never seemed more precious to me.

  Living at h
ome, I had complained about the rain endlessly, and mother had mocked me saying I should go to the Sahara desert. The Sahara desert! The name alone, had conjured up so many exciting images of me riding on top of a camel through the immense white sands under the hot, blazing sun. Now I would never see it, I would never do any of the things I had dreamed of, but it didn’t matter, nothing mattered more than the fact that I was alive.

  I had always thought I was so special, so different and superior from other people, and now I knew how wrong I was. I was a coward, when I felt life slipping away from me I had reacted with panic, begging for mercy, unable to finish what I had started.

  I finally fell asleep at dawn for a few hours, and woke up in a panic. I dreamed that I had died and had watched my own funeral. There were many people there and they were crying, and all the time I was screaming “but this is a mistake, I’m alive. You can’t be talking about me.”

  C hapter Eighth

  At last, morning came and I got up with the rest of the family. I felt dizzy and weak and my aunt made me “mate de coca.” My uncle and I had done a good job cleaning up but my aunt insisted she could still smell vomit and had Josefa re-clean the rooms. I felt uncomfortable and ashamed of myself for having caused so much trouble, and told my aunt I was going to visit my mother.

  “That’s a good idea,” She responded. “Come back late or better yet, stay there overnight for I don’t know what time we’ll finish playing this evening.”

  My uncle takes me aside and asks me to join him in the terrace alone. Once there, he closes the door and speaks to me solemnly.

  “In life, we must always have a plan A and a plan B, Vicky. Now the plan A seems to have failed but we still have plan B.”

  “I know,” I say quickly. “I’m going back to mother. I don’t want to go back to Uyuni with my father.”

  “Hear me out,” he says impatiently. “Your aunt always has to do things halfway. My friend, Ernesto Locacios, who is the principal at your school, says you’re doing very well; in fact, you are excelling in every way. It would be a sin to interrupt your studies. In a couple of years, you won’t need us anymore. You will be able to stand in your own two feet, but you still need us now. People need a push, Vicky, just a little push to make it on their own. I want you to stay here and continue doing the excellent work you’re doing at school.”

  I blush and lower my head. Why is he talking to me like this? Does he know what I tried to do? I want to say so many things to him, so many emotions I want to express but nothing will come out because I always feel stupid and tongue tied in his presence.

  He puts a hand on my shoulder. “Disappointment is a way of life and the older you get the more you’ll realize that we can’t always get what we want no matter how badly we want it. I know this is a big blow to you but it will pass, and you’ll be happy anyway, you’ll see.”

  “Oh, I’m not upset about that anymore, Uncle Berto.”

  “But you were, your nerves made you get sick like that.”

  I say nothing and he holds my chin. “Now go see your poor mother and don’t upset her, she has enough on her plate.”

  I love and admire him more than anyone else on earth but I will never be able to tell him. I’m more determined than ever to make him proud of me, to repay him for all his kindnesses by being the best student I can be. It’s good he thinks my nerves made me ill, he will never know the truth. He wouldn’t be able to understand it, nobody would. I leave the house in a good mood, life is smiling at me again and I feel reborn.

  ~~~

  I see mother and I’m flabbergasted to learn that she already gave birth a few days ago. The beautiful baby girl is sleeping peacefully beside her and I feel moved and tearful. The irony that the birth happened almost on the same night I had tried to destroy myself, doesn’t escape me. I feel a lump in my throat and impulsively hug mother. Oscar puts his arms around me and we hold each other in silence, the sound of my muffled sobs mixing with the soft rain beating steadily against the window.

  “She is beautiful, ma, what are you going to call her?”

  “Claudia Daisy, because she looks like a little flower, don’t you think? She reminds me of you when you were born, you were the most beautiful baby I ever saw.”

  “I see, Claudia like grandma. I’m sure everyone will just call her Daisy. Did Gustavo see her yet?”

  She sighs deeply. “I begged his sisters not to tell him and hopefully they haven’t. I don’t ever want to see that bum again, but the children are beautiful, and they are not to blame for anything.”

  “Do you hate him, ma?”

  “Not really, darling, I don’t have it in me to hate anybody anymore. I just want to make enough money to support my children and live in peace.”

  “How are you doing lately?”

  “A little better, my clothes sold and they paid me in full for a change, not in installments.”

  “I’m glad, ma, now that I’m staying in La Paz, I’ll keep helping you every chance I get.”

  “You always do, darling, you always do. Have you resigned yourself to not going?

  “Oh, yes. I’ll finish secretarial school, get a job and come back to live here with you when I finish in two years.”

  “Something tells me you’re still going to America.”

  “No, ma, that’s all over.”

  “And you have made peace with it?”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened?” she asks, puzzled. “You wanted it so badly that I can’t believe you’re not devastated.”

  “I guess I came down to earth.”

  “It wasn’t meant to be, darling,” she says putting her arms around me. “And you don’t have to put up a front with me.”

  Her words hit a wound and I dissolve in tears. “Dreams die hard,” she says gently. “And we don’t get over them overnight; you die a thousand deaths before you accept reality.”

  “What dreams did you have, ma?”

  “When I separated from your father I wanted him to come after us, to put his wife and daughter first, that was my most cherished dream.’

  “And you never got over it, did you?”

  “Not really, but you learn to live with the pain of a broken dream, the way you learn to live without a limb.”

  ~~~

  It’s October 11, 1967 and the local news and newspapers are full of stories about the death of Che Guevara, on October 9, 1967 at the hands of Bolivian troops. The details of his death at the hands of Bolivian troops are atrocious. At first they had wanted to make believe he died in battle, but details emerged that they had wounded him twice before capturing him in Las Higueras, a tiny town in the southwestern part of Santa Cruz, where according to the government he had gone to incite revolution and corrupt the miners with his Marxist doctrines. A few minutes before they shot him, he had looked at them defiantly and dared the gun by saying “go ahead and shoot, you cowards, for you’re only killing a man.”

  A fierce, handsome man - he looked like a saintly prophet in death. The soldiers had cut off his hands to demonstrate that he was indeed the legendary Che Guevara. The news filled me with shock. I knew of him through mother who always told me he was the true idealist, while Castro, the man he had given up everything for, only a ruthless opportunist who had cruelly used him. The fact that he had met his death in an obscure town of Bolivia rather than in his beloved Cuba - the country he had adopted - was a huge irony.

  He had altered his appearance and changed his name to enter Bolivia but nothing had been able to disguise his fervor, and pretty soon everyone knew who he was. From the beginning, newspapers had reported stories geared at the indigenous community he was trying to attract, warning that he had come to take over Bolivia, and to instill his own brand of communism, which was nothing short of terrorism for nearly a year before he was finally apprehended and killed.

  He had been painted as the antichrist, a real Satan incarnate, and the miners, fearful of losing what little they had, had succumbed to the tactics
by betraying him and giving away his identity.

  I knew mother would be very upset so I visited her the next day, and her eyes were red from crying.

  “I went to the black market yesterday to collect my fees and everyone was talking about it,” she said distressed. “I couldn’t believe it. I came back home and sobbed. It was almost as if a member of the family had died. I had admired him for such a long time for giving up a life of privilege in Argentina to fight for the poor, abused, and forgotten members of society. He was a doctor, a healer, so he could have lived a great life in Argentina, but he was a romantic and had a pure heart. People like that can not live in this world. He saw social injustices and he tried to correct them. He gave up country, wife, children and now his own life for his noble cause, how many people are able to say that?”

  “I wonder what they will say and do in Cuba now, ma.”

  “That phony Castro will make a hero out of him now, but he got him out of the way because he was a threat,” said mother with disdain. “He was a heroic man while Castro was always a butcher and a fraud. I’m not surprised he came to Bolivia, though” continued mother looking out of the window with a painful expression. “He could have done a lot of good here; we needed a man of his caliber in this miserable country.”

  I held her in my arms and she cried. “He fought for us, do you understand? He dreamed of a better world for us, and they killed him. I feared this would happen to him ever since I learned he was in this country. Don’t forget what they did to our miners just four months ago, how they massacred them. The monster that’s running our country now has no pity, no soul, and he calls himself “The people’s general,” what a laugh” she scoffed. “The people’s killer would be more like it.”

  As she wept I recalled the recent, horrible incident that had happened at Siglo XX, [“ Twentieth Century”] in the largest tin mine of Bolivia, located in the city of Llallagua, [“Province of Bustillos, Potosí”] where twenty miners had been brutally murdered and seventy wounded, under orders from our current president, René Barrientos Ortuňo. Mother had cried for days, unable to comprehend the treachery of the government who had chosen the crack of dawn, when the miners were just returning from a celebration with their unsuspecting families, to attack them viciously.