The Drive

by Teresa Bruce

  The entire country had only three hundred fifty miles of paved roads back in 1974, and it took Sonja and my family three days to travel from La Paz to Cochabamba, not counting my father’s overnight hitchhike into a town called Oruro to replace a blown radiator. Gary and I make the desolate and bleakly beautiful journey in one smooth day. We are accustomed to the altitude; it doesn’t cause bloody noses or shortness of breath anymore, just slowed movements and fuzzy thinking. We are so high that the clouds that used to float above me appear now to swirl below my feet. The horizon is a stack of layers I am swimming through.

  The flat, high plains give way to the surly peaks and gorges of the Azanaques Mountains. The earth is the color of rust and black slate. There are veins of coal glistening along sunny ridges, and in the shadows clods of dark dirt look like purple bruises. The innards of the mountains have been sliced open and exposed to build this new road to Cochabamba. We drive through a cross section of geology and time. But for the modern road, we might have slipped into the Middle Ages. The ponchoed people of the Azanaques live without electricity, in mud huts with thatched roofs. Shared, low walls break the bitter wind, and the water slopping over livestock troughs freezes in dirty icicles.

  Tucked into the hollow of one valley is a white stucco church. It is resplendent with Spanish grace but off balance. We stop for Gary to take a photograph, and I can’t tell if it is leaning to the right or slowly sinking out of sight. It is surrounded only by deserted adobe huts—as though an entire community has abandoned faith. I wonder if this is what finding the camper will be like: a physical record of my family’s pilgrimage withered and eroded by time.

  I suddenly have second thoughts about looking up an American-Bolivian couple when we reach the town of Cochabamba. We have a physical address, but Don and Margit are two levels of connection removed from anyone we actually know, and it seems a presumptuous imposition. Is a friend of a friend of a friend ever really welcome? But in almost two weeks in Bolivia we have spoken only to Eosebio and each other. Since Margit is married to an American expat she probably speaks English, like Sonja did. I dial her number from a telephone booth, and when she answers I am seven again, swooped into the arms of another strong, decisive woman.

  “Stay right there,” Margit tells me. “It’s too hard to explain how to get to our house, so Don will come find your camper. I’m sure you’ll be easy to spot.”

  Don and Margit live in a rural bedroom community of Cochabamba called Tiquipaya. Their home is nestled between a woman with two cows, named Marta and Rosita Amoracita, and another family with six pigs and twelve children. Don and Margit have a huge television tower in their backyard, around which scratch and peck half a dozen ducks, hens, and roosters. Their garden smells of citronella, cilantro, and lemon basil. They grow alfalfa for the birds and enough vegetables to feed a village. A minuscule Jack Russell terrier growls from the safety of an insulated windowpane, and a nervous German shepherd darts between our legs and chases chickens. Above the graceful arabesque of their Spanish stone gate loom the snow-covered peaks of the Tunari National Park—none of which can compete with the force of nature that is Margit.

  She is a tiny woman with flaming red hair and a personality that would dwarf anyone’s but that of her equally charismatic husband. It is difficult to be glamorous in Bolivia, but Margit has the beauty and flair of Ethel Merman. Don is a silver-haired teacher from Los Angeles who now has Bolivian grandchildren and godchildren and speaks of the United States as a foreign country. When I ask him what he and Margit will do if the riots resume, he says he won’t consider leaving.

  “I’ve seen LA burn twice, once in the Watts riots and once after Rodney King,” he answers. “It’s not so different here.”

  I worry that our new Ford truck and silver camper, beacons of American consumer power, will somehow undermine the delicate and deliberate integration Don and Margit have achieved, but they won’t hear of us staying anywhere but here, with them.

  “Tomorrow is New Year’s Eve,” Margit exclaims as if it is a holiday declared in our honor. “And you and Gary must meet my aunt; everyone calls her Tia Eva.”

  JUNE 28TH, 1974

  We stayed with Sonja’s aunt and visited. Ate hamburgers.

  On both journeys, Cochabamba is an oasis. Gary and I plan on staying only one night, but Margit tells us rescuers are still looking for survivors swept away by swollen rapids when the bridge Eosebio warned us about collapsed.

  “So the road is still closed?” Gary asks. We are sipping wine in front of a warm fire, and I am secretly hoping for a delay.

  “You mean both roads: the new and the old highway,” Don corrects.

  It turns out there are two parallel routes that straddle a mountain range to the east of Cochabamba and normally reconnect near Santa Cruz. Floods and mudslides have made both passages impassable. Under the circumstances it would be both rude and foolish to refuse Don and Margit’s invitation. So we give them a tour of the Avion and settle in for our first night in Tiquipaya.

  “You will love Tia Eva,” Don says as we climb into his pickup the following evening, New Year’s Eve. “She’s probably the most famous German in Bolivia, if you don’t count Klaus Barbie.”

  Margit swats at Don’s arm. “Tia Eva was sent to Bolivia to marry a family friend when she was eighteen,” Margit explains. “After she left Germany both of her parents were sent to Auschwitz. Bolivians saved her life, so she has dedicated her life to helping Bolivians.”

  It is a startling story, one that puts a temporary highway closure in proper perspective. We take the back roads to Tia Eva’s house, those less likely to be blocked by police checkpoints or protestors, and arrive at a one-story sawmill that once produced the wooden beams lining the shafts of silver mines in Potosí.

  The floors are poured of smooth concrete, and the ceilings are so low that Gary and Don have to duck through door casings. The heavy mud walls are filled with photographs: Tia Eva in a nurse’s uniform, handing out food supplies, accepting awards, and shaking hands with dignitaries. She has outlived her Bolivian husband but is still surrounded by extended family, much of which is converging in her long and narrow dining room tonight or phoning her from countries continents away.

  Tia Eva is sitting in a corner near the head of the table, and we join the line to greet her with hugs, kisses, and New Year’s wishes. I can barely see her over the sea of heads because she is even tinier than Margit. Her face is as round and layered as a pink camellia, and even bundled in bulky sweaters and scarves she is delicate and elegant. Her mahogany hair is curly and bobbed, and her eyebrows regally arched and refined. Her eyes water when she laughs, so it looks like she is crying when Don and Margit explain how Gary and I landed on their doorstep.

  “To survive in Bolivia you must learn to laugh at what life throws your way,” she says and waves us to a seat.

  Long before midnight—Tia Eva makes no apologies for not waiting up—the crowd draws to a hush and Margit stands with a glass of champagne in hand. In a clear and ringing voice, she reads from a list of blessings to be thankful for and effortlessly slips in a mention that her new friends Teresa and Gary arrived in time for the celebration. She is often interrupted with good-natured heckling and murmured agreements, but not a single guest makes a move to drink from the glasses they hold in their hands.

  Until Tia Eva rises from her chair at the head of the table. Only when the matriarch declares the definitive “Próspero Año” do glasses begin to clink.

  “I grew up in that house,” Margit tells us on the long drive home. “My mother left when I was little, and Tia Eva raised me since I was four years old. Let me tell you, that woman was so-o-o strict! The boys were terrified to ask me to a dance.”

  It may be the champagne, but it all makes sense to me now: Bolivia saved Tia Eva, Tia Eva saved Margit, and now Margit is saving us.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  WITCHES AND SPELLS

  The dawning of the new year brings no such clarity to the
issue of when, or whether, the roads between Cochabamba and Santa Cruz will ever be back in service. Gary and Don scour maps of Bolivia to see if there are any routes that detour around the collapsed bridge, or any frontage roads that we could use to bypass mudslides. But between the two parallel routes are undeveloped national parks crisscrossed only by rivers. To the north of the northern highway, all the splinter roads dead-end in the Amazon. And to the south of the southern highway, the paved roads all lead to the capital, Sucre, and the mining city of Potosí. It is as if tectonic plates have shifted and Santa Cruz is now another continent.

  By our third day parked in Don and Margit’s driveway, our predicament is major Tiquipaya news, and friends and neighbors drop by with information and speculation.

  “Six months,” says the neighbor with the cow named Rosita Amoracita. “It will take six months to rebuild the bridge and reopen the highway.”

  “Give it a year,” says the wife of an American university professor. “Remember, we just had a coup and the natives are restless.”

  In Tiquipaya, there are no television news networks or radio stations with traffic helicopters, so no one knows exactly where the roads have washed away or how much ground clearance is needed to ford the flooded rivers. If we wait long enough, our parade of visitors advises, the rains will stop and the roads will reopen.

  DON GOES BACK TO TEACHING CLASSES AFTER THE NEW YEAR’S BREAK, and Margit calls a cab to take us to the long-distance bus terminal in Cochabamba.

  “We should talk to the people who really know the roads: bus drivers,” she explains. Within minutes of arriving at the terminal, she persuades a ticket taker to make us a photocopy of each bus line’s schedule and route. Most have crossed out the entire fortnight of departures to Santa Cruz with thick felt pens. Margit is not deterred. In her one-inch pumps, pleated skirt, and buttoned-up floral cardigan, she flags down bus drivers and climbs aboard double-decker buses asking questions.

  An hour later she has cobbled together an alternate route to Santa Cruz, over dirt roads and through towns not even listed on our map. But the same rains that turned two major highways into mudslides also fell on these more remote locations. None of the drivers can tell Margit how long this primitive route might take to drive, if it can be driven at all.

  “I really don’t think it’s safe,” she tells us reluctantly. “I haven’t even heard of some of these towns and I grew up here. But you can decide later. Right now, let’s go home to have a meal together.”

  Normally, taxi drivers deliver passengers no farther than the town square in Tiquipaya; beyond that point its roads are tire-swallowing mud bogs that regularly ruin suspensions. But Margit knows the driver’s mother and answers his shy questions about how to apply for a home loan at a bank. Without being asked, he drives through troughs of mud and right up to her front gate. Margit presses a generous tip into his hand, and the driver not only boosts her over a mud puddle when he opens the door but carries her packages inside as well.

  “On the news in America you see only the anger and protests in Bolivia,” she tells me as she waves good-bye to the driver. “But all Bolivians want—all anyone wants—is a little gentleness.”

  I think of the begging toddlers of Lake Titicaca, the burned-out buses of El Alto, and the fear I felt asking a stranger to drive me through the streets of La Paz. And standing before me is the lesson I’ve been stranded here to learn. Margit comes from a family that harbors more than lucky travelers; people like her are the bone marrow of Bolivia. We are witness to the kindness and bravery that hold countries together.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  PACHAMAMA

  The discussion over when and how to leave Cochabamba continues over wine and roasted chicken. Margit wants us to stay a little longer, to see if the rains will stop.

  “Mi casa es su casa,” Don says.

  “We are having a wonderful time,” Gary says. “The thing is if we hang out here too long we’re pushing our luck on the political end.”

  Don looks unconvinced, so I jump in. “The truck can ford a stream or two, but we can’t barrel through riots and roadblocks.”

  “Teresita,” Margit says, extending her arms in a gesture of both question and embrace. “Why risk your own safety, and Gary’s safety, just to find an old camper? It’s probably chopped up for firewood. Your father moved on and forgot about it. Why can’t you?”

  I am tempted to run into her outstretched arms, let this gentle woman protect me from disappointment. But she is waiting for an answer.

  “I had a brother I barely remember who should have been beside me in that camper.”

  The Jack Russell terrier is whimpering and pawing at Margit. This woman, who can fend off haggling street vendors, is wiping away a tear.

  “In Bolivia, we have a saying that wisdom comes through the soles of our feet,” she says. “This is because the earth is Pachamama, the one to whom we all return.”

  Now I am the one fighting back tears, and Don leans over to pinch my cheek.

  “So if you want Mother Earth to clear these mudslides and help you find that camper,” he says, “you always need to spill a little of whatever you’re about to drink on the ground. She likes the strong stuff.”

  Margit’s eyes widen and she claps her hands. “Don, you have given me a wonderful idea,” she says. “Tomorrow I will take them to the witches market and we will buy an offering to Pachamama.”

  The witches market is hidden in a city-within-a-city called La Cancha. This outdoor trading post, notorious for pickpockets and counterfeit goods, sprawls over fifteen city blocks. Margit, luckily for us, is well practiced at spotting forgeries and has a sixth sense about people following too closely or watching too carefully.

  “See that bottle of Lysol?” she points out. “It is just water with yellow food dye. And those radios from Sony? Pick them up, what do you feel? They are as empty inside as the brain of a Santa Cruz beauty queen.”

  We are shopping in La Cancha’s witches market just before the first Friday of the new year. Margit laughs as she guides us through a tarp-covered maze of bundles and boxes, and it’s hard to keep up through the market’s cluttered canals. She flutters and dodges, twirls and dips, advances and retreats with such unpredictability that pickpockets eventually find someone else to trail. She never ignores the pleas of earnest merchants and finds a tactful recourse for every sales pitch. When we reach her favorite vendor, her arms gesture back and forth in the universal language of introduction as if she were conducting an orchestra.

  “You must be wondering if she is really a witch,” Margit whispers in my ear.

  “Do you believe she is?” I ask.

  “She says so, and who am I to doubt her?”

  I have never seen so many powders, roots, and tiny vials of liquid. Peering down each aisle is like examining a chemistry set through a kaleidoscope. Apparently everyone in Cochabamba believes in witches at least some of the time, because they alone can prepare the monthly offering to Mother Earth.

  “It’s called a q’owa,” Margit explains. “You pronounce it like co-aaaaah. I’m going to ask her to make two: one for us and one for you and Gary.”

  The basic ingredients of a q’owa include piles of dried flowers, herbs, and incense glued to a stiff sheet of construction paper and sprinkled with myrrh in a vaguely biblical offering. If the believer wants Pachamama to grant good luck with livestock, the witches mold tiny figures of llamas or sheep out of sugar and food coloring and attach them to the q’owa. Car trouble is addressed by sugar molds of vehicles. Homes are protected by tiny sugar dollhouses.

  “Mis amigos necesitan la protección de Pachamama para su.…” Margit is trying to explain that we are taking a dangerous trip in a camper, but the witch looks confused.

  “Casa rodante,” I interject. I stick my finger in a pile of sugar and draw a house with wheels.

  The witch smiles and lifts an armadillo off a stack of boxes in the back. She hangs it on a hook from a string tied behind i
ts tiny ears and underneath its belly. I am still staring at the swinging armadillo, wondering if it’s alive, when she peels the lid off a Tupperware container and holds up a pink sugar mold of a truck.

  “Looks like a Ford F-350 to me,” Gary says.

  Then, underneath the pile of sugar trucks, the witch pulls out a green, boxlike canopy that looks remarkably like a camper.

  “I can’t believe it,” Margit exclaims, congratulating the smiling witch.

  “Um, do I want to know what the animal innards are for?” The witch is scraping the lining of a twisted pile of intestines over our q’owa.

  “Grease from guts makes enough smoke to fill each room of the house with blessings.”

  Gary raises a bushy eyebrow.

  “Don’t give me that look,” Margit laughs. “We are going to burn the other q’owa inside your camper.”

  The final, and perhaps most important, ingredient of the q’owa is the dried, aborted fetus of a llama or a condor. I am staring at baby llama skeletons tied to a rope in the back of the stall like emaciated toys hanging by their necks on a laundry line. Their tiny leg bones are bent at the joints, and their jutting chins tuck down in fetal position. Margit points to one dried fetus for herself and a second for us—as though it is no different than selecting produce.

  Each llama is delicately wrapped in cotton balls and added to the q’owa, which is rolled in several sheets of newspaper like a fish-and-chips cone. I have no idea how much such sorcery costs; Margit presses a wad of bolivianos into the witch’s palm before we can object. On the bus ride back to Tiquipaya, almost every passenger’s shopping bag is topped with a carefully wrapped q’owa sticking out between plastic handles.

  When we get home Don is back from the day’s classes and already firing up the charcoal grill on his deck. “I get the coals really hot and then scoop some out with this shovel and put the q’owa on top to catch fire,” he explains, as though he has been burning llama fetuses all his life.