Beyond the Snows of the Andes

by Beatrice Brusic

  “I have been there so I understand it,” Oscar. “Grief is a terrible thing and the mind goes on denial. It gets through you momentarily but the after effects are horrendous.”

  “My case was different. I did my suffering with her and when she was gone I felt free. I don’t know which is worse.”

  My eyes widen. “You felt nothing when she went?”

  “I was literally there for her in life, passion and death. I felt a great loss, sure, but also relief, she was no longer suffering, she was at peace, so I let her go. I spoke to her and told her to go, not to worry about me anymore. I was afraid at night though, I was sleeping alone downstairs and felt her presence in a very powerful way.”

  “Aunt Sonia didn’t bring you upstairs with her?”

  “No, I went to our old room, but that’s okay, I stopped feeling afraid after a while.”

  I shook my head and said nothing, it had begun to drizzle and I felt the water soothing me, cleansing me.

  “I’m trying to come to terms with the past, Oscar,” I said after a long pause.

  “And what a past it was,” he said vehemently. “But don’t worry, you will, you came back, that’s a big step.”

  ~~~

  We took a ride to see Angel and Daisy the next day. Daisy had been a baby when I left and now she was six years old, would she even remember me? As we drove up I felt the old anxiety resurfacing. The house was still located in that hilly, windy street we had last visited with mother, and I felt my heart racing as we climbed up the steps. It seemed a hundred years ago when I first made this journey with her, yet I could still see her pregnant and out of breath beside me. Time had stood still here; it was the same remote neighborhood, with streets so narrow we had to walk single file in order not to run into traffic. Steep red mountains seemingly close enough to touch lurked in the background like phantoms of years past.

  Oscar knocked on the door and after a slight delay, a thin old lady with an arched back, gray hair and thick glasses opened the door. For a moment I didn’t recognized her, and then I saw it was Edna, Gustavo’s mother, who had aged considerably. She spoke to Oscar but looked at me questioningly.

  “This is my sister who just came back from America and wants to see the children, you remember her, don’t you, Miss Edna?” he asked with his arm around my shoulder affectionately.

  “Vicky? Oh, oh, how you have changed, I wouldn’t have recognized you if I saw you on the street, why you were a skinny little thing when you left and look at you now, you have really filled out. Come on in, come on in.”

  She ushers us into the kitchen and offers us “mate de coca,” which we quickly accept. The high altitude is still playing tricks on me and I must drink lots of mate de coca to adjust because most of the time I still feel palpitations and get out of breath easily. My brother teases me that my lungs must have shrunk because in Bolivia everyone develops larger lungs to cope with the altitude. Edna is still wearing her hair up in a tight bun and her big ears stick out. She moves slower now and walks as though something were hurting her.

  “Old age is hell,” she tells us sitting down with pain. “You know I can no longer sit still for long periods of time? I get so stiff I can hardly get up. I was never like that in my life.”

  “You’re not that old, Seňora Edna, that shouldn’t be happening to you. Perhaps you should see a doctor,” says Oscar with concern.

  “I’m old enough. Oh, how innocent youth is, the body is like a car, it gets old and after sixty years of age, it’s nothing but maintenance, I’m afraid.”

  I want to see the children so I start looking around and she gets the message.

  “I’ll call the children in a minute,” she says after a brief conversation. “Please don’t upset them; they have been through a lot already.”

  “My sister doesn’t want to upset them, Seňora Edna, she only wants to see them.”

  “I understand, she was far away, but what is your excuse, Oscar? How come you never came to see them?”

  “I always meant to, but things got in the way.”

  “When it comes to your siblings, you should never let things get in the way. They used to ask about you all the time and I didn’t know what to tell them. The poor little orphans have suffered a lot, losing their mother at such a young age, thank God I was there for them; otherwise I don’t know what they would have done.”

  Oscar looks irritated and before there is an explosion, I change the subject.

  “Regardless of the stiffness, you’re looking great Miss Edna; the years have been kind to you.”

  “Oh,” she says touching her glasses. “I have arthritis and my eyesight got very bad but with the Lord’s help I’m still here. Time passes by very quickly and life is over before you know it, that’s why families should be close, but wait here, I’ll get the children, I’ll get the children.”

  “She couldn’t just get the children? She had to give us a sermon first?” snaps Oscar, lighting a cigarette. “She is such an annoying old lady.”

  “Shush, she’ll hear you.”

  We hear footsteps and nine year old Angel is the first one to come into the room. He breaks into a grin and runs to Oscar first. They hug and he points to me. I extend my arms and he looks at me shyly. He looks like his father but the shape of his face and eyes are unmistakably my mother’s. I give him a big hug and notice he is nice and chunky.

  “They are feeding you well here, aren’t they?” I say, teasingly.

  “He eats all day long,” says Edna. “He just lost some weight. He was beginning to look like a butter ball.”

  She goes back to get Daisy who never came into the room. Holding her grandmother’s hand, she comes in reluctantly but her face is down and she won’t look at us.

  “Daisy, sweetheart, how are you?” cries out Oscar but she remains immobile, unable to let go of Edna’s hand.

  “You can’t blame her,” says Edna, coaxing her. “She hardly knows you.”

  At last she gives Oscar a hug and I go over to her and lifting her chin, tell her that I’m her sister and that I love her. She is a small, thin girl but the physical resemblance to mother is uncanny, the same enormous blue eyes, heart shaped face and abundant dark hair. I hug her and find myself tearing up. She lets me stroke her hair and agrees to sit on my lap. We spend a wonderful afternoon during which we take them for a walk and buy them ice cream.

  Angel is outgoing and affectionate as ever but she is controlled, reticent, her demeanor reminds me of me when I was a child, and I promise her things between us will be very different from now on. I ask about her aunts and Angel tells me they are all doing fine. Gloria has gotten married and she already has two children. Lydia is still single, dating lots of men and Olga is home helping Edna.

  I remember Olga vividly because mother called her “the spiritual one” because she was always praying. She was the spitting image of her mother in body and soul, and the only one Edna could fully rely on. I suspect Olga had a big hand on raising them as well and the feeling is confirmed by Angel. I ask him about their father and whether he still drinks, and little Daisy quickly says no, but Angel says he drinks on the weekends, and they sometimes lock him out of the house.

  “So nothing has changed,” I say, bitterly. “Once a drunk, always a drunk, isn’t that so?”

  “He doesn’t drink every weekend,” says Angel. “But he still drinks and we’re already used to it so we just ignore him.”

  “He doesn’t hit you, does he?”

  “No, because he is afraid of Lydia; she hit him with a lamp once breaking his head after we snitched on him, and he has never done it again.”

  The afternoon ends and we go back home somewhat comforted by the fact that despite everything they seem to be doing well, and that at last we made contact. I extract a promise from Oscar to see them more often, and I reiterate that I’ll be in their lives more frequently from now on.

  ~~~

  “I wish that awful man wasn’t in the picture anymore. Why doesn’t
he just die?” I tell Oscar heading back home.

  “He’s sick, Vicky, he can’t help himself.”

  “But they had to grow up seeing that, it’s not fair, that’s something mother never wanted for them.”

  “They will live through it as we did, and we didn’t turn up so bad, did we?”

  “No, but I wanted better for them.”

  “They have more protection than we did. The aunts really love them, they support them, give them everything. Their drunken father is just a small part of their lives.”

  “Funny, the things we survive, isn’t it?”

  “That’s nothing, before Uncle Berto died, Aunt Sonia got crazy again and decided to get rid of me so she called my father and told him to take charge, all this to a man who had never been in my life, who was nothing but a stranger to me. He came to get me and took me to live with him, and those were the worst six months of my life, he got drunk and beat me, he forced me to…”

  “What…. please tell me?”

  “You know violence to animals, all kinds of animals has always killed me, so he sensed that and forced me to kill a chicken.”

  “Oh, my God, what happened?”

  “He beat me black and blue, I didn’t want to do it, had nightmares about for months after that. But that liberated me because when Aunt Sonia gave me a bath and saw the welts, she took action right away and got me away from him. He had the nerve to fight for custody; he went to court and everything, hard to believe, isn’t it?”

  “When did this happen?”

  “A year after mother died.”

  As we walk I press his arm firmly, to force a gentle soul like him to kill went beyond cruelty. He had endured so much, it’s no wonder he took refuge in Silvia. I would spend the rest of my life taking care of him, letting him know that he could count on me unconditionally.

  ~~~

  We come to the last stop on my journey, a visit to the cemetery. It’s a cold, sunny day and after a quick breakfast, we hop into a cab for the long ride. We get to the eerie place and Oscar finds Uncle Berto’s grave right away so we visit him first. It’s a small box on the wall and it looks abandoned, there are no flowers or anything to mark his grave, except for his name. I stand there in respectful silence saying goodbye to the giant of my childhood. He had spent a long time preparing for the end; did he meet it with the same courage and integrity with which he faced his life? His presence in my life had left an indelible mark in my heart and in the hearts of many others. “Una bella persona” [“A beautiful person”] said everyone who really knew him, and that is how I will always remember him, as “una bella persona.”

  Oscar has a hard time finding mother’s grave because all the buildings look the same, some are better preserved and some are falling apart but the tall, gloomy structures are on uneven rows and it’s easy to get lost.

  “I hate the way we bury our dead here in buildings,” I tell him. “In America the dead are buried in the ground, it’s less morbid.”

  “I know, and that’s why you will never even leave your bones here.”

  “I won’t leave my bones anywhere. I want to be cremated and my ashes spread over the ocean, and not just any ocean, either. I want the Atlantic Ocean. I want big waves to engulf my ashes.”

  “Picky too I see. You wouldn’t settle for Lake Titicaca, would you?” He teases.

  “No, I wouldn’t, Oscar.”

  “We can’t do that for you here either because we don’t have an ocean, so it looks like we have lost you forever, my sister,” he says pinching my cheek.

  “And you? What do you want when you go?”

  “From dust we come to dust we go. I want to go back to earth. I want the worms to eat me. I’m not afraid of the natural process of life. I want a sign on my tombstone that says “he lived and he suffered, mission accomplished.”

  I smile knowingly. “Isn’t that the truth?”

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t happen soon. We both have a lot of living and suffering to do yet.”

  “I say Amen to that.”

  “Look at us,” he says flicking his cigarette butt into the wind with his finger. “Two cheap philosophers at the cemetery. Plato would have nothing on us.”

  “Oh, Oscar, this place is giving me the creeps. How come you can’t find it?”

  “I have not been back here since it happened,” he says looking disoriented. “Just bear with me, we will find it.”

  My heart is heavy and my mind is racing. Why do I feel this way? She is gone and all I’m going to find is a box yet I know I must find it. I will not let him leave this place till he finds it.

  “Let’s take it one row at a time,” I tell him, calming myself. “After all, we have all day.”

  “Look at the size of this place, it will take us hours.”

  “I don’t care. We have to find it.”

  “It was in the back,” he says scratching his head. “All the way in the back near Uncle Mario’s grave, but this place has changed so much.”

  “Let’s start at the back then and we go on from there.”

  We pass some big family mausoleums and I remember my last visit here with mother when we came to visit Uncle Mario. It had rained then and the area was muddy. Today the sun is out but I feel a chill inside of me seeing name after name, tomb after tomb, while Oscar searches the area. I feel anxious, depressed; the undeniable reality of what awaits us all oppresses me.

  “Was mom afraid of dying?”

  “At the beginning yes, but after things got so bad, she embraced death; she looked upon it as “un ensueňo” [“a sweet dream”].

  We make a few turns and he suddenly remembers. “There,” he says rushing to the spot. “The third row on the left, she is in the middle.”

  It is a small, cramped box in the humblest of spots, depicting the way she had lived and died. There is no sign of the crucifix, no image of the Virgin, just a bare box with her name in small letters, “María Anaya.” It’s almost a pauper’s grave and I begin to cry. He hugs me and says, “It doesn’t matter, her soul is not there, that’s why I never come to visit.”

  “Couldn’t they get her something more decent?”

  “The funeral cost a lot of money, they couldn’t afford anything fancy.”

  ~~~

  It was a fitting end, for she couldn’t have in death what she had been denied in life. I touch it and kiss it, begging for her forgiveness. I can’t believe her bones are there, in this cold, lonely box. I stand there a long time saying goodbye to her, telling her that I love her, thanking her for loving me, for giving me life. Her spirit follows me everywhere; I no longer fear it, no longer hide from it. She will always be a part of my life and I will have her by my side like a gentle shadow. She had wanted it all to end with her, for her children to have a better life; that had been the dream of her life, the force that had sustained her for decades, and now they would, I was sure of it. I was free and Oscar had found a soul mate. Little Daisy and Angel were being reared under loving aunts and a faithful grandmother. She had broken the chain of her past and had transcended her tragedy by giving us a good, solid foundation; that was her triumph, her vindication and undeniable victory over adversity.

  We would all encounter storms and get tested in the rough seas of life but nothing would equal the torments she had endured. I whispered a silent prayer and made her a secret promise that some day, come what may, I would tell her story.

  THE END