Beyond the Snows of the Andes

by Beatrice Brusic

  ~~~

  Lifeless months followed, and still denying the extent of my grief, I went through the motions of getting another job and adhering to a routine. Only Ana and Rose, who had witnessed the extent of my devastation, knew the truth. I wanted to go back to my crazy life but I couldn’t, the veil of self deception had lifted and I cringed at my own self destructive behavior. The men had provided temporary solace but mother’s memory was a deep wound, an open sore that festered and scalded. I wondered if the hurt would ever abate, if the day would ever come when I would be able to think of her without pain.

  Dating crazily had alleviated my despair temporarily, but a low grade depression took a hold of me, draining me. Nothing stopped the sadness that like a constant companion inhabited my soul, dulling my days and disturbing my nights. I had tried so hard not to feel, not to think, but the price was a deadness of spirit that was alien to my nature. I came to realize that Rose was right and I needed professional help, but how could I afford it when the money I made barely covered my expenses?

  I needed someone to love me, to help me but there was no one. I slept with men who meant nothing to me and I meant nothing to them. I felt cheap and ashamed. What was I thinking? What kind of deadly game was I playing? There was only one man who had really loved me, but I had hurt him. It was a big mistake because he would have been the answer to all my troubles. I would have been able to stay here legally, and I would have seen my mother.

  I shared those sentiments with Ana and she told me that it wasn’t too late, that I should call him, but every time I picked up the phone my courage failed me till one night in a moment of madness, I dialed his number and he answered. I hanged up quickly and decided to call him later. He still had the same number and I felt a mixture of discomfort and relief.

  I let a week go by and at last, egged on again by Ana, I pick up the phone again. He answers, and after a moment’s hesitation, I talk to him trying to sound friendly and casual. He is shocked and surprised, and an embarrassing silence follows. Ana is sitting next to me crossing her fingers, he gets very quiet, and feeling strangely humiliated and rejected, I tell him I understand. He asks for my number and I give it to him telling him not to feel obligated to call back. A year and a half has passed and I know his life didn’t stand still either.

  Two weeks go by and he calls me. We make a date for dinner and as I run around nervously fussing with my make up, I realize I’m feeling happier than I have felt in a long time. His voice brings back memories of warmth and security, memories when life hadn’t dealt me the biggest blow yet, and I still had hope in my heart. I’m a different person now; a lot has happened to me and I wonder if it shows. He comes into the apartment, I introduce him to Ana and we go out to dinner. Sitting across from him, my eyes recognize a dear person but there is a reserve in him now that prevents me from getting close.

  “I thought of you from time to time, but I never imagined you would call me one day. You are full of surprises.”

  “I wanted to call you many times but I was afraid you would hang up on me.”

  “What happened to the others? You were once very popular,” he says sarcastically.

  “None of that was real, I know that now.”

  “You certainly took a long time to find out.”

  “I did care for you, Nick, I just wasn’t ready then.”

  “And you are ready now?”

  “Yes, but you might have someone else in your life now.”

  “I do, and I thought it was serious till you called.”

  I swallow my second glass of wine trying to quell the wild hope that invades me.

  “I’m afraid of what you might do to me; you’re a very complicated person.”

  My eyes fill with tears. “My mother died and I’m having a hard time dealing with it. I need someone to care about me and I keep remembering only one person.”

  He looks away. It took me a long time to get over you, and this…this girl I’m with; she loves me so much and she is so different…”

  “I see. I’m sorry I came back into your life so late.”

  “It’s not just her, I don’t trust you anymore.”

  “You’re right, I’ve done a lot of crazy things and I could only hurt you again.”

  “I’m truly sorry about your mother. I lost mine when I was ten years old so I know how hard it is.”

  “What happened?”

  “It was a sudden death. My father was working, my brother and I were out playing and she had a massive heart attack. She was only forty years old; the world ended for me, nothing was ever the same again.”

  “The way it has for me.”

  “You are going to be fine; you’re a very strong girl.”

  “I’m glad we had this date. It was great seeing you again.”

  “Me too,” he says dropping me at the door. “Sorry I couldn’t be of much help to you.”

  I go back with a peaceful feeling. I’m not sorry I called him. I always felt we had unfinished business that wouldn’t let me move on. I’m aware that a kind of reconciliation with the past has taken place and now I can think of him without guilt or regret. Still, I saw flicker of feeling for me in his eyes. Did I imagine it? Was it my ego that misread it? What made him come? Was it curiosity or a secret need to confront his feelings for me? I knew I would never call him again.

  Coming face to face with him was a sobering experience that didn’t match any of my fantasies. My emotional life was in tatters, and I had made the first move towards stability but it had backfired. He looked good, so good in fact I wondered why I hadn’t loved him. I had been so blind, so thirsty for life then, and in the madness that followed the death of my mother; I had vainly sought oblivion and consolation on strangers.

  C hapter Tenth

  I receive a letter from my aunt letting me know that she took Oscar in, but my other siblings had gone to their father permanently, something mother never wanted. She admits that mother had begged her to take all her children, and as much as she had wanted to give her peace of mind at the end, she simply couldn’t do it.

  “You know I could never tell a lie,” she writes in that gigantic scrawl of hers. “Áunque sea una mentira piadosa” [“Even if it’s a lie out of pity”] so I think she realized they would have to go back to their father.” She writes that right after the funeral she gave Oscar a bath, and he was so thin and small, he looked eight instead of thirteen.

  “I could count all his ribs and all the bones in his body,” she writes. “He suffered greatly, alone with her in that cold, windy house, but all his sufferings are over now.” The house mother left was rented to an Indian family and it would get sold some day and split among all of us. “It will be a pittance,” she writes, “but it’s better than nothing.”

  I put her letter in my drawer thinking of her words, “His sufferings are over now.” If only that were true, but I know her and I know him, and his sufferings are far from over. My aunt has always looked at the surface of things, never deeper, and I have always envied that quality. If only things were that simple, today you suffer, tomorrow you are fine, but nothing works that way. I can’t even relate to what Oscar is going through right now, I have enough with what I’m going through.

  My life is out of control and I can’t seem to get a handle on it. A deep uncertainty and unhappiness mars my days making it difficult to function. I have lost my focus and objective and every day I find myself merely going through the motions. Pain is a constant companion that dwells in me like a chronic illness.

  My life was never carefree but I long for the past when Aunt Clarissa was in my life and we lived together in her tiny apartment. I had so many dreams then, so many plans for the future. Where did that girl go? And the shadows of my childhood, with all its joys, sorrows and disappointments seem illusory, like some cruel fantasy someone invented along the way.

  Nothing seems factual, nothing seems real, it’s like I imagined it all. And through the fog that envelopes me, I see mother’s face, I
hear her doleful voice calling my name. I dream of her at night and wake up disturbed. Some dreams are more terrifying than others. I dream that she is wearing a crown of thorns and she is showing me the thorns in her hands and pointing to my aunt. The dream is so graphic I can touch the bloody thorns. I wake up in a sweat trying to discern its meaning. And then the terrible truth comes to me. The thorns represent the cancer and suffering she endured, the pointing of her hand the indifference and callousness my aunt showed her up to the last minute. I sense there is more, much more I don’t know, and I’m afraid to find out.

  Then I receive a letter from Gloria Sanchez, Gustavo’s sister, who was mother’s favorite, and would come to the house often with gifts and toys for Angel. I open it with trepidation and begin reading it. She writes that she doesn’t know if I remember her or not but she was with mother the whole time of her ordeal and saw how abandoned she was. She says my aunt hated to visit mother and when she did her visits were extremely brief and forced. She says that when mother died, she laid in the morgue for days unattended before my uncle came to claim her body. She says her purpose in letting me know these things is not to hurt me but to let me know what kind of a sister she was. She closes by saying that she got very sick with laryngitis just before the end, and one of the big regrets of her life is that she couldn’t be with mother around that time. I hold onto the letter in shock.

  Would the nightmare ever end? I hate her for telling me, I feel I’m falling into a precipice in slow motion and long to hit bottom. I hate my aunt and want to tell her so, but she has my brother. What’s going to happen to him if I fight with her? As usual, I do nothing. I absorb the shock and try to put it behind me. I don’t write Gloria back. I have nothing to say to her.

  ~~~

  It’s April 27, 1969 and I receive a call from my aunt telling me that president René Barrientos Ortuňo, who will be forever associated with Che Guevara, has died today in a helicopter accident he was piloting. She apologizes for calling me so late at night but says the whole country is in a state of consternation about it, and she wanted to share the news with me. The details are sketchy but she says he was on his way to Cochabamba, the city of his birth, when his helicopter exploded, killing him instantly.

  “They are saying that by giving Che such a horrific death, Che took revenge on him,” says my aunt. “They are calling it Che’s revenge here.”

  I hung up thinking of mother, and how she had despised Barrientos for his brutality to the miners, for the killing of Che, for fooling the Indian masses into believing he was one of them, and for being a conniving fraud all his life. Mother had told me he had learned Quechua as a child and that had been his ticket into their hearts. She told me that the fact that his mother was Indian further endeared him to the Indian population, but he proved to be more treacherous than the man he had betrayed, Victor Paz Estenssoro. She told me he grew up poor in a village near Cochabamba, and that he was sent to an orphanage when he was very young because his father died, and his mother couldn’t support him.

  Barrientos had run away when he was 12 and had put himself through high school by working at all kinds of jobs. He had joined the military academy, and later on the army, till the man who would change his life forever entered the scene, Victor Paz Estenssoro. Under him Barrientos would become air force commander and later on his running mate, after endless machinations. But unable to keep his own ambitious under wraps for too long, he would betray Paz Estenssoro a few months later in a coup.

  His life seems to have been a ruthless, steady climb to the top. In his tenuous hold on power, he had survived intrigues, plots, five assassination attempts, revolutions and public condemnation for the massacre of the miners and the killing of Che, only to end up losing it all in a fiery crash.

  I turned off my light and missed mother more than ever. There had never been another person in my life that I could talk to about everything the way I did with her, no other person who exhibited such intelligence, such richness of spirit. Under her tutelage, we had grown up with personalities, we had learned about the intricacies of politics - we had examined lives and we had given our opinions. She had talked to us as adults and we had responded accordingly. With her enormous gallery of characters, she had sparked our imaginations; she had lit a fire, a thirst for knowledge. I would spend the rest of my life looking for that nourishment, yearning for that intellectual communication, realizing how blessed we had been in that regard.

  ~~~

  It’s July 20, 1969 and man walks on the moon for the first time. I’m glued to the television set but Ana is bored, she couldn’t care less about space or about the fact that this is a momentous occasion for America and the world. I love her but sometimes her simplicity gets on my nerves. I want to have with her the same rapport I have with Rose but often find it impossible. I also want to help her lose weight but she hides her true food intake from me and tries to make me believe she gains weight on pure air.

  ~~~

  It’s a hot, stifling day in August, and the alarm radio wakes us up with the news that a horrendous crime has been committed in Los Angeles. Sharon Tate and five others have been brutally murdered. The details of the crime send shivers down my spine and mother’s words that some people are simply born evil ring in my ears. This sensational crime reminds me of Susana Valda and the strange mixture of horror and fascination the country felt when the details of her killing were made public. The cases are similar, young, beautiful women dying horrible deaths at the hands of maniacs.

  I can’t think of anything more tragic than being cut down in the summer of life. I want to live a long time; I want to be able to look back on my life with gratitude when I’m an old lady with gray hair and feeble bones. When I think of the foolish chances I took when I was temporarily crazy, I shudder. Ana shares the gory details of the murders with me and chases me around the apartment when I refuse to listen. She has an overdeveloped sense of the morbid about her and spends weeks watching the news and talking about the murders. I long to meet someone real, devoted to me. In this crazy world, it would feel good to be married, to be protected, to have someone sheltering me from evil.

  Two weeks later Nick calls and tells me he wants to see me again. I had already written him off and felt truly shocked when he called me again. I had gone back to the discos to search for the right man but in a more normal fashion, not in the frantic way I had searched after mom died. I had met all kinds of men but nothing worthwhile and durable had come my way, so when he finally called, I was ready to see him.

  He comes to pick me up and we go out to dinner and dancing, and he confesses he still has feelings for me. He broke up with his girlfriend and wants us to try again. He waited a long time to call me because he wanted to be absolutely clear about his feelings for me. I’m dancing in his arms feeling the comfort and security of the past, when he kisses me passionately. He is mine again. I feel a surge of happiness and hope for the future.

  “My brother is very unhappy about this,” he says. “But it’s my life and when you truly love someone, you don’t forget them that easily.”

  His presence in my life feels like a gift from heaven and I promise him I won’t mess it up again. We make love that night and he kisses me from head to toe making me feel adored. Later, as I lie in his arms, I tell him I feel good, better than I felt in a long time.

  “You know how often I dreamed of this after we broke up?” he says with a sigh. “Only a million times a day. I used to fantasize that you would come back to me crawling, but you never did, and then when I thought I was finally over you, you came back and I realized how wrong I was. Life is funny, isn’t it? I never did stop loving you.”

  “I guess I always loved you too, only I didn’t know it. I never felt this peace, this serenity with anyone else.”

  He says I have to win his brother over because we need his blessing. “Now that you’re back into my life, I don’t intend to lose you again. I want us to get married as soon as possible.”

  Thi
s time I’m ready. I’m only twenty years old but I’m tired of struggling, I need his strong arms to guide me, to protect me. Things are not moving awfully fast this time and I’m not scared of his passion, I welcome it, I want it. He makes me feel safe and I need that feeling desperately. I’m tired of facing the world alone. I want him to keep the demons that drive me at bay. He is a wonderful lover and a wonderful man, but perhaps I had to go through all the craziness I went through to appreciate him.

  As plans for the wedding keep growing, his brother takes me aside for a serious talk.

  “I’ll come clean with you,” he says guiding me to the porch of his house. He is a tall man with a round face, green eyes and a muscular build.

  “When he told me you were back in the picture, I was very unhappy. I told him that if he had any sense he would stay away from you forever but he couldn’t do it, his feelings for you ran too deep. Maybe I was wrong to interfere but I did it out of love. My brother and I have gone through a lot together and I only wanted the best for him. I hope you can forgive me.”

  “There is nothing to forgive. I’m the one that has to apologize.”

  “He’s never been happier so I want to wish both of you all the happiness in the world, and I’ll be the best man, of course.”

  I hug him and he says “welcome to the Valente family.”

  We go back inside and his wife takes out champagne glasses. “Let’s set a date,” she says. “What about Nick’s birthday?”

  “Great,” says, Nick with a grin. “My birthday will be perfect.”

  “When is it?” I ask, giddily.

  “Two months from now, September 25.”

  We clink our glasses and Sergio says they will have the party at their house. They have a big house in Astoria with two living rooms and a huge kitchen. I’m delighted; I already know Ana will be my maid of honor, and want to ask Uncle Berto to give me away. Nick drops me off later that evening and calls me the minute he gets to his apartment.