by Teresa Bruce
The paved road dead-ends at the foot of Lake Titicaca, in front of a row of flat wooden barges. Old tires are lashed to the sides of the boats with frayed rope, like floating bumper-rafts.
“Is it some sort of fish market?” I ask Gary.
He looks in the side-view mirror and sees cars and buses bunching up behind us. Horns are honking. Children are pumping empty fists, jumping on the sideboards.
“No. I’m guessing this is the Lake Titicaca ferry system.”
We are facing a narrow pinch in the lake; across the water is the highway that cuts through the mountains to the capital, La Paz. The crew of the first boat in line has already lowered a sheet of plywood to serve as a boarding ramp. Gary puts the truck in first gear and gingerly inches aboard.
The camper lurches to the left as soon as the ramp is pulled in behind us; another boat is nudging into position and we are in his way. Under the weight of the Avion, the bow leans into the lake at a drunken angle and waves slap against the partially submerged sides.
Water splashes up through gaps in the decking. Whole planks are missing, and the sputtering, two-stroke outboard motor almost drowns the voice inside my head. I should jump inside the camper, collect the cash and passports, and stuff them in my bra in case we have to swim to shore. Not even my father tried to cross Lake Titicaca on one of these dilapidated ferries. Live animals are stacked in baskets, topped with spread-eagled men holding them in place like human cargo nets. There are no life jackets in sight; lit cigarettes dangle from the lips of men who can’t seem to smell the diesel fumes around them.
“Look on the bright side,” Gary says. “We might not have to sneak that gun of yours through any more border crossings if it sinks to the bottom of Lake Titicaca.”
The barge men run to the bow. The engine has stopped, and they are poling us in to shore, dodging collisions with waiting ferries. To disembark, Gary has to drive the Avion over a small pyramid of planks. I jump off the front of the barge onto the pebbled shore, clutching Gary’s camera. If I watch this through a tiny viewfinder, it won’t seem so insane.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
THE HEIGHTS
There is smooth blacktop underneath us again, the best Christmas present we could ask for, and we head for La Paz at fifty miles an hour. Any slower and I would think of the gun again and whether we might finally need it to survive in this imploding country. If the contraption even still fires. It’s been under molding paperbacks for months, untouched or cleaned all through the rainy season of every country in Latin America.
Guns fit right into the Bolivia of my father’s slide show. I picture him not bothering to hide the pistol once he smuggled it past the border, letting it rest right between his legs and my mother’s on the front bench seat. The camper was our covered wagon in a country he saw as the Wild West. There are even campfires and cowboys in this sepia-tinted recollection.
But the Bolivia I see through the windshield of the F-350 is apocalyptic. On the altiplano approaching the capital, we are driving through a war zone. Burned-out cars are left like carcasses on the side of the road, upside down and stripped of anything salvageable. Chunks of pedestrian overpasses as big as our truck block the side roads where they collapsed in the riots. I can’t order the clammy fear coating my thoughts and sliding through my guts, telling me to retreat; this is a landscape where natural bleakness is topped by man-made destruction. Even the air whistling through the truck’s vents is agitated and crackling with tension.
When the sun sets, the mountains will black out any hope of seeing where we’re going or who is out there. And no matter how conflicted I am about the gun, what is clear is that we are driving through an explosive country. My principles might not stand up to standoffs in the dark. I don’t want to admit it to Gary, but I am grateful that a seventy-two-year-old woman showed me how to shoot the weapon lying in wait under the floorboards of the Avion.
“You have to be ready to actually kill someone if you pull the trigger,” I remember Nancy saying, back in Arizona. “Then you’ll have to drive the hell out of there without looking back.”
She’s wrong about one thing. Another gunshot in the altiplano wouldn’t even attract attention. Yet somehow people manage to go on living in the midst of all this violence. One-story huts made entirely of reed mats clump together around dirt alleys, the weight of their shared walls suspended by a hovering net of antennae and twisted wires. Each power pole is braided with coat hangers, sloping out to individual rooftops like strings of Christmas tree lights. This endless squatter’s camp has spread across the entrance to La Paz like a thirsting vine.
JUNE 18TH, 1974
Made it to La Paz. Steering went out. Fixed once. Went out again.
“How far from La Paz are we?” Gary asks.
My father’s map is useless. We are threading our way through a slum universe that didn’t exist thirty years ago. La Paz was a sudden sight when I was seven, dropping in front of us on the barren plain like a meteorite into a crater. Now, three-quarters of a million desperate people have staked a claim high above the capital. El Alto, this new city is called: The Heights.
I see a taxicab backed into an alley and tell Gary to pull over. I will knock on the door of the driver’s home and offer to pay him whatever he wants to drive me to a safe spot to camp for the night. Gary will follow the taxi. It is a plan I would have dismissed as ridiculously risky six months ago, but it seems safer than two Americans trying to run the gauntlet of seething tension and poverty.
I climb into the cab of a man whose Christmas dinner I have interrupted, a stranger who has probably never answered the door and found an American woman asking for his services. The cynic in me says he could drive me in circles, running up the meter for a bigger fare. Or deliver the two of us to some political faction who could commandeer the truck and dump us where no one would ever look. Waves of spasms pass through my bowels, nerves wringing my intestines.
Stop it, I tell myself. This man has three children. I saw them. His wife’s homemade soup will be waiting for him when he returns.
I lock the door, buckle my seat belt, and tell him to drive. The only way to fill the awkward silence is to launch into the story of our search for my father’s camper. His jaw relaxes into a smile somewhere between confusion and amazement.
“¿De veras? ¿Hace treinta años?” His name is Eosebio, and thirty years seems like a lifetime to him.
He is Gary’s age, and he tells me he has never left the confines of the city collapsing around him. He asks me to list every country we have driven through and what languages are spoken in each. He is driving over pavement, where it still exists, that is broken like the split-open seam of an earthquake. Intersections are flooded.
“Es normal,” he tells me, shaking his head. “Desafortunadamente.” Corrupt politicians are to blame, in Eosebio’s assessment, stealing all the tax revenue that should go to infrastructure.
We dodge sinkholes, craters, and raging currents of raw sewage. He stops every few hundred yards to check that Gary is still behind us. What I see in the rearview mirror drains the blood from my head, and I have to fight the sensation that I am about to pass out. Men are clambering onto the sideboards of the truck, banging on Gary’s rolled-up windows.
They look less like gangsters or soldiers than hunters in a pack. The truck’s side-view mirrors are convenient foot pegs, and one of them thrusts himself onto the hood. He’s scrunched, gripping the windshield wipers like a swimmer on the starting blocks, inches from Gary’s face. I am fumbling for the lock on the cab door, like somehow I could jump out and scare them off, when Eosebio’s arm pushes me back against my seat.
In a split second, I know why. With his free hand he waves for Gary to follow and then guns the taxi up an on-ramp to a highway overpass. The hungry growl of the truck’s diesel engine behind us is so loud I can feel it through the floorboards. One by one the men let go, peel off, and drop back to the ground. Eosebio gives Gary a thumbs-up in the rearview mirror, but
when I unclench my fists it releases a wave of nausea.
“Hace solo un mes,” he begins another story.
It’s been only a month since a tour bus was held hostage for a week and four passengers wound up shot to death. Closer to Lake Titicaca, he assures me, not here in the capital city, but we should be very careful anyway. It isn’t safe when so many people are suffering. My stomach knows the truth I’m hearing; I don’t need convincing. We drop two thousand feet in elevation during a forty-minute descent, into a mountain basin filled with tinted-window SUVs and billboards advertising protein-rich hair conditioners and low-interest mortgages. It is suddenly overwhelming. Eosebio pulls the taxi to the side of the road so I can throw up in a ditch without getting out.
“¿Está usted embarazada?” He thinks I am pregnant. I shake my head, but Eosebio smiles knowingly, and there is no use in explaining how this is the price I pay for the gun I am smuggling through South America. He scribbles his cell phone number on the back of a card and hands it to me, in case I need anything during my stay.
Only more antibiotics and Dramamine, I think to myself. And a hotel with good plumbing.
The clouds lift and I can see jagged peaks of bare mountains ringing the city. The sun lights up the glass facades of modern skyscrapers just before it drops behind the peaks.
“¿Es milagroso, no?” To Eosebio, La Paz is a modern miracle, and at Christmas he delivers a woman he believes is pregnant to a fenced-in hotel compound in an elegant, tree-lined neighborhood known as Zona Sur. Eosebio convinces the owners to let us camp in their parking lot for four dollars a night, and even though he lives in a shantytown forty minutes up the side of a crater, my sweet shepherd will check in on me every day until I am well enough to leave La Paz.
Chapter Forty
LA PAZ
JUNE 20TH, 1974
Still working on truck… Aduana stopped by and asked if we want to sell the truck. We said maybe yes. He came back a half hour later with other men and offered to buy it for $3,500. We’ll attend to the paperwork tomorrow.
After seven months on the road and sixty major breakdowns, there it is: a price on the life that had collapsed around us. By the time we reached La Paz my father could no longer even steer the beast that staggered under the top-heavy load of his homemade camper. With $3,500 he could buy four one-way plane tickets from South America to South Africa, an escape from his escape. My mother had passed beyond disappointment and even relief. She was in my father’s world, mechanical: We’ll attend to the paperwork tomorrow.
Only one thing stood between my family and the money that would free us. The broken steering column had to be cut off with a torch, refabricated in a machine shop, and somehow reattached to the front axle. Even in the poorest country on the continent, this repair would cost more money than we had left. But my father still had a few spare engine parts to trade for labor.
JUNE 21ST, 1974
Traded ring and pinion for work done. Started to pack. Parked in vacant lot
Eosebio has fetched us again, and I crane my neck from the front seat of his cab every time we pass a vacant lot. Each one could be the spot that was the beginning of the end for my childhood camper; it is as if time hasn’t passed but traveled in circles. Like my stomach.
Eosebio is convinced that the sandwiches of La Paz’s famous cholas will stop my vomiting. I’m leery of street food, but Gary is fascinated by these women. Their long black braids are tucked under stiff, narrow-brimmed hats straight out of a Laurel and Hardy skit.
I give in. Succulent roasted pork slices melt into a puffy cheese-bread bun. I would eat whatever Eosebio recommends for the rest of my life. He is showing me a different La Paz than the one I remember.
In that La Paz the air was grey and woolly with exhaust fumes, like a scratchy blanket. It was prettier at night, when I stood outside with my father, watching a mechanic loop a roll of scrap wire around his son’s shoulders and make the sign of a cross. There was no electricity in the vacant lot, no way to reattach the repaired steering column. So the mechanic’s son, not much older than me, climbed barefoot up a utility pole to an overhead power line. He scooted higher and higher, trailing wire behind him like Rapunzel’s hair. His voice, tinny and far away, shouted, “¿Listo, Papa?”
When the mechanic was ready the son wrestled with the lines at the top, tapping directly into 440 volts of electricity. Blue sparks flew from every direction: the boy’s hands, the coat hangers twisting around the pole, the welding torch his father held underneath our truck. Connected in arcs of current, the son stole from the lights of La Paz so his father could see.
JUNE 22ND, 1974
Aduana man came by to assure us that everything was okay, but then our battery wouldn’t start.
It is never to the seller’s advantage when a vehicle refuses to start. It was as if my father’s unwillingness to stop a boy from risking electrocution circuited back on him in judgment: the end did not justify the means. The next morning dawned on a drained battery, and my father was out of spare parts to trade for labor.
Boy were Dave and I sick during the night and all morning. Shits and vomiting—neighbors gave us some medicine.
The $3,500 sale fell through, but the neighbor my mother noted in her journal turned out to be the final guardian angel of my family’s tormented trip. A Bolivian woman named Sonja was visiting her mother in La Paz when my parents puked through the night in a vacant lot next door. The mother happened to own property near Santa Cruz, on the other side of the country, and Sonja was married to an American man who needed a farm truck.
If my stomach ever settles, our plan is to leave La Paz and drive to Santa Cruz to see if the truck and camper are still on that farm. But I am still huddled over the toilet when there is a knock on the Avion’s door. I peek through the windows and see Eosebio’s taxi parked outside. He is pacing, one hand gripping the cell phone that is chained to his belt like a trucker’s wallet.
“He must have bad news to give us,” I tell Gary as I dress. “Maybe the political situation is heating up.”
It has been a week since we arrived in La Paz, and I’m ready to leave. It’s the rainy season in Bolivia, and the camper is closing in on me again. I duck inside the bathroom and splash water on my face before opening the door to greet Eosebio.
“Teresita,” he begins. “Miras mejor que ayer.”
I know my hair is still plastered to my forehead and I probably smell, but Eosebio tells me I look much better than I did yesterday. He is agitated, anxious to warn us of a problem. He remembers that I told him the farm where Sonja’s husband offered to buy my father’s camper was somewhere near Santa Cruz, days to the east of La Paz. Eosebio says to drive there now is impossible. According to other drivers in his union, a major bridge has washed away along the main highway to the eastern half of Bolivia.
“Debe ir en aeroplano,” he says. He thinks we should leave our camper here at the hotel and fly to Santa Cruz.
“Not a good option,” Gary says. Even if we never find my father’s camper, we still have to drive south from Santa Cruz to continue on to Argentina and reach the end of the Pan-American Highway. “Ask him if there are any other cross-country routes.”
Eosebio pulls out a map from the front of his cab. It shows only one route to Santa Cruz, and apparently the farthest east we could possibly drive along it is a city called Cochabamba. After that, major flooding has wiped out the bridge and closed the highway in both directions.
“Sonja’s aunt lived in Cochabamba; my mother wrote about it in the journal,” I tell Gary. We also have the name of a contemporary contact in Cochabamba, written on one of the lists I made before we left: a friend of a friend of my production manager back in the world I left behind.
“If we make it that far, maybe we can wait it out until they repair the bridge,” Gary says. “How long could that take?”
Eosebio slowly shakes his head: I must be pregnant, Gary must be crazy. Still, he offers to lead us out of La Paz in the direction of
Cochabamba so that we don’t have to drive through El Alto again. For the last time, I sit beside a man who feels more like a fairy godfather than a taxi driver I met at random just a week ago. Gary follows, and our two-vehicle convoy threads its way through cobblestone streets and past concrete mansions built next to corrugated-metal shanties. Chola ladies in Laurel and Hardy hats shuffle past us in what should be gutters. Kids tug ropes around the necks of cows to move them out of the road. We climb for almost a full hour until we are level with the lip of the crater that cuts La Paz off from the rest of Bolivia.
Eosebio will have to drive another ninety minutes to return home, dodging burned-out buses and collapsed overpasses. But he seems reluctant to leave us. He fidgets with the map he insists on giving to Gary and digs through his glove compartment for a pressure gauge to make sure the truck’s tires are ready for the trip ahead.
It is humbling, how much we have come to depend on strangers. Not on their sympathy but simply on their kindness. A woman who pukes a lot is not the same as a family forced to sell its possessions next to a broken-down truck. Yet I am collecting as many benefactors on my second journey as I did on my first. A handshake is all Gary can offer this man who has shown us the bravery and benevolence of Bolivia. But I can get away with hugging him.
“Buena suerte,” Eosebio shouts when Gary starts the truck.
We’ll need good luck. The last time I set out along this road, we made it only as far as the Jeep’s sixty-first and final breakdown.
Chapter Forty-One
THE NEW YEAR