by Teresa Bruce
“Teresita, I can’t believe it is really you!” she begins. I can hear that she is fighting back tears. Her voice is thin, weathered by the years. But then again, this has to be a shock. I have called her without warning. She has had no time to collect herself or decide what to make of this intrusion.
“Are you still reading so many books? All these years and I never know what happens to you. How is your mother?”
If she feels ambushed she covers it with questions. Gary is hugging me from behind, trying to overhear Sonja’s voice. Richard waves a hand in front of my face to get my attention, then points to the cell phone and makes stabbing gestures with his index finger.
“You can put it on speaker.” He is like a puppy bringing a ball he hopes I’ll toss. “But only if you want.”
I hold the phone out in the space between the three of us and hit the speaker button. I tell Sonja that my parents are healthy, still married, and living in Nicaragua. Richard pulls a pen from his pocket and scribbles down directions as we make arrangements to meet the next morning at nine.
“Adios, Teresita,” Sonja says.
I am suddenly scared to break the connection and lose her. “Don’t say good-bye. Just hasta luego, until tomorrow.”
“Okay, hasta luego, mija,” she says, laughing. “Hasta luego.”
For the first time in months we have not just one appointment but two. Richard’s mother has invited us to a traditional Bolivian meal to meet the rest of her family and to share the story of Sonja and the search for the old camper. Gary and I spend the rest of the day in the tingle of anticipation. I am grateful for the distraction of a family meal. I dig a dress out of the camper’s dusty closet, hoping it will somehow convey a measure of appreciation and respect.
“You’re going to wear that?” Gary asks. “It looks like prune skin.”
“Have a little faith,” I answer, hanging the wrinkled dress outside. “This humidity will breathe some life back into it.”
Richard loans us two bicycles, and we pedal through bumpy mango orchards and spongy pastures. Richard’s mother, Carmen, is bending over an outdoor brick oven pulling paddles of golden rolls from its depths. She is wearing a long feathery skirt that hovers in the draft of the escaping heat, and her silver hair is smoothed off her forehead with a blue scarf. If there is anything to the last-frontier appeal of Bolivia, Carmen embodies it.
The yucca in her canapés is pulled from the ground by her own hands. The cheese in her empanadas comes from the neighbor’s goat milk. The rice-flour rolls she draws from the oven are made from the recipes of her Spanish grandmother. Bolivia seems pioneering and idealistic as we sit down to this feast; for a few hours I will set aside the nagging doubt that it still harbors the camper that was my childhood.
“In Spain they call this dish paella,” Richard says. “But without the sea, Bolivians changed it to majadito.”
Carmen ladles dried beef and fried eggs on top of mounds of slow-cooked saffron rice. If even the celebrated national dish of Spain can be molded into the shape and form of Bolivia, surely I can adapt. Sonja will say whatever she needs to say, and I will go from there. The camper either exists or it doesn’t; it is out of my control.
For dessert the entire family accompanies us on a walk through Carmen’s “secret” garden: a plot of fruit trees tucked behind the campground, enclosed by a living fence of vines. We sample oranges, limes, and mandarins straight off the branch—so juicy and tart that we finish each succulent offering with a nibble of its peel to cleanse the palate. Richard and Carmen take particular delight in introducing us to the most bizarre of Bolivian fruits: achachairú, translucent, pulpy seeds that look like eyeballs covered in spiky leather, and ambaiba, clusters of drooping, fuzzy, fingerlike pods. Carmen laughs as Gary and I get sticky; tangerine juice dribbles down our chins as though we were children, and the oily essence of guayaba leaves stains on our fingers. When she finally closes her garden gate behind us, we are coated in the complex flavors of Bolivia.
Chapter Fifty
SONJA
It was my mother’s journal that jogged the dentist’s memory in El Salvador; photographs of the camper placed us in context for the editor’s wife in Nicaragua. But on Sonja’s face the recognition is instant and total. Gary and I, standing on her doorstep, transport her.
“You look just like Beverly and David!” she blurts out before even introducing herself, her hand covering a gasp.
Seeing Sonja is a little like returning to elementary school as an adult. She is shorter than me, and I feel like this will overwhelm her. There is no way I can ask about the camper yet; there are fluttering hands to settle, nervous giggles to escape. I can’t reconcile the woman brushing bangs away from my eyes to get a good look at my face with the Sonja who hitched a ride with us from La Paz to Santa Cruz. She wears blue suede boots and her English is hesitant. Despite the heat, she wears a light cardigan to cover up the looseness of her outstretched arms. Her blue eyes are heavy with mascara that smudges into surrounding creases. She seems like a kindly grandmother, not a woman who engineered my family’s salvation.
“Your mother was such a sad person,” Sonja begins. “You have to tell me, Teresita, did she ever have another son?”
In all my adult life I have neglected to ask my mother if she wanted more children. I suddenly feel shallow and inconsiderate, but I never pondered whether the love of two daughters was enough to make up for the loss of a son. When Sonja met my mother, only two years had passed since John had been killed. Every day in Santa Cruz my mother watched her daughters playing with someone else’s son.
“Her heart was heavy with missing John John,” Sonja says. “She wanted so deeply to give your father another son.”
I can’t stop myself from dissecting the words that Sonja chooses. “John John,” she calls my little brother. This Bolivian woman in blue suede boots speaks the private language of my family. My mother’s heart was “heavy,” and she wanted to “give” my father another son. Maybe I am reading too much into the words of a woman who probably hasn’t spoken English for years. But perhaps her words reveal a heavy truth—that my mother blamed herself for my brother’s death.
“We shared many tears together,” Sonja says, softly.
I think of my mother now, isolated on an island off the coast of Nicaragua, and I am sorry she let Sonja slip away. The connection must have been too painful to maintain. This friendship was like an itching scab from a time she wanted to forget. When Sonja puts her arm through mine, I know she understands.
“Here is where your father parked the camper,” she points out as we stroll through a walled-in front yard. It looks too crowded; a gardener is packing topsoil around newly planted fruit trees.
“That camper was so big, but David, he could make it go anywhere he wanted. He could make anyone go where he wanted. He had a very strong, macho personality.”
I laugh and tell her he still does. “Mom settles for occasionally steering him in directions she wants.”
I am camouflaging the truth. Now that my sister and I are grown and gone, my mother has no daughters to use as leverage. My father still drifts from country to country, chasing dreams and attacking windmills, and my mother follows without question. Sonja chose a different course.
“I finally divorced Jim,” she says, flatly. “I would not let him take away my mother’s land.”
I’m not following. My father has always described Jim in glowing, almost envious terms. Jim was Butch to my father’s Sundance; even as a kid I thought of them as a pair of adventurous pioneers. But Sonja tells me that the two of them, her ex-husband and my father, wanted her to sell her family land and use the money to build a steel factory. It is an uncomfortable pause in the slide-show history I remember of my time in Bolivia. Instead of another romantic, sepia-tinted image projecting on the wall inside my head, it is as if my father’s whirling carousel is sticking on a blank slot.
This steel factory was not a plan developed with the input of wives or
discussed in front of children. The men simply expected to get their way and for the women and children to learn to like it. There was money to be made, frontiers to conquer. I struggle to imagine what growing up in Bolivia would have been like, and all that comes into focus is that I would never have met my grandparents in South Africa. The silent pause in the slide show is filled with the soft, regretless voice of a woman who stood up to men in a time and a place where most women did not.
“The children could have claimed US citizenship and moved there, because of their father,” Sonja says. “But our roots are here, in Bolivia.”
I have an urge to bend down and touch the smooth, grey concrete floor of Sonja’s house. I can picture my Monopoly game spread out here—piles of pastel money tucked under the board and dice sliding across the slippery floor. I can hear my sister turning one-armed cartwheels while waiting for her turn.
I hear heavy footsteps and look up as Ann Juliet waddles into the living room. The baby girl who used to suck on strands of my hair is seven months pregnant and as blond and beautiful as Richard described her. We stare at each other, archaeological specimens, laughing to cover the absence of an instant bond. Our shared history is proven but not present; it is an awkward intimacy.
“So, Teresa and Gary, do you want me to take you to the camper?” Sonja asks, jolting me back to the reason I am standing in this house again. “The roads are too much for Ann Juliet to come with us in her condition, but I don’t have to work tomorrow.”
The room seems suddenly loud; the drone of the window air-conditioner drowns out the shouts of protestors marching across the living room TV. My ears pop when I swallow, and I am conscious of my feet scuffling over the concrete floor. I can’t seem to put one in front of the other. I need to repeat Sonja’s words aloud, as though I were in a spelling bee, to make sure I understand them in context. Sonja doesn’t have to work tomorrow; that means she is offering to spend her day off with us. To take us to the camper.
Sounds streak past me, and my peripheral vision closes in. Suddenly I am back at the beginning, confronting a giant creature bolted and welded together in the laboratory of my desperate father.
“Sit down, Teresa,” Gary says. “You look like you’re about to faint.”
I sink into the sofa and stare at Sonja, letting the cushions reach around my hips like a seat belt. Buckle up, relax, enjoy the flight, I tell myself. This is what you’ve come so far to learn. The camper my father built still exists, and Sonja, unlike my father, knows exactly where it is.
“So it’s close enough to drive to?” Gary asks, handing me a glass of water from Ann Juliet.
“Of course,” Sonja says, her intonation rising for confirmation. “Isn’t that why you came to Santa Cruz?”
She laughs when I tell of our blunderings through the Bolivian outback and the e-mail that drove us to the brink of Paraguay.
“That may be where your father saw it last,” she explains. “We had some property near Boyuibe a long time ago. But we needed to use the truck on a farm not too far from here, near Puerto Izozog. We took the camper off the back of the truck and left it there; it has been waiting in one spot for the past thirty years. If you have four-wheel drive, I think it would only take a few hours to reach.”
I feel dizzy, like I am seven years old again, blindfolded and flailing at a piñata. Sonja’s hands are steady on my shoulders; my heartbeat slows, and the past stops spinning around my head. We have driven 16,397 miles, across two continents, and the camper is waiting not fifty miles from this living room. After thirty years, I will see it tomorrow.
Ann Juliet phones for a cab to take us back to the balneario, and I watch modern Santa Cruz slide by my window in a stream of diesel exhaust and sagging telephone lines. I am grateful that Gary and I have our own space, beside Carmen’s secret garden, to contemplate and savor the flavors of anticipation.
“Are you ready for this?” Gary asks, hours later. We are sprawled atop the Avion’s bed, ceiling fan swirling inches above our sweaty, spent bodies. “It might not be the fairy tale, castle-on-wheels that you remember.”
“I don’t expect it to be,” I tell him. “The slide show is over.”
Chapter Fifty-One
THE CAMPER
We have been driving ever since we picked up Sonja two hours ago, but we still seem to be on the outskirts of Santa Cruz. It is pouring rain, and in the grungy industrial districts the dirt streets overflow with rainwater. The truck is thick with tension, and not just from the dangerous driving conditions. I am sitting between Gary and Sonja feeling like I should hold her hand or something. So much was blurted out when we first met, but we are still essentially strangers, suddenly thrust together, thigh to thigh.
Sonja is disoriented; road signs are obscured by steam, and there are cars stranded in intersections. She is embarrassed when she mistakes a turn and we have to double back. I am staring at naked children paddling plastic oil drums like boats from house to house.
“Don’t worry, it is just a flash flood,” Sonja says. “This happens all the time in the rainy season. The politicians in La Paz say they will fix the streets, and they forget as soon as the sun comes back out. In Santa Cruz, if you want something fixed it is better to do it yourself.”
My father’s camper has waited thirty years; I can’t justify rushing. We decide to park the Avion and wait for the waters to recede at a roadside diner at the edge of a petroleum refinery. Dozens of customers are crammed around mud-splattered plastic patio tables. Refinery workers in denim coveralls and neon hardhats hunch over bowls of soup and plates of fried chicken in thirty-minute lunch-break intervals. The owner seats us under the sturdiest portion of thatched roof, farthest from his cinder-block wall of naked pinup calendars and Playboy centerfold posters. We have an unobstructed view of the flooded dirt road and an oil well less than two hundred yards away. The grey sky is torch lit by a roaring orange flame that burns off natural gas.
“This is all new, this oil discovery,” Sonja explains. “Ten years ago it was only farms—like ours—but the government owns all the rights to the oil and gas under our fields.”
The revolving door of Bolivian presidents has sold these rights to multinational corporations, at prices that prompt deadly riots far away in El Alto and La Paz. None of which seems to upset Sonja; she says the violence never makes its way this far east. I am opening my mouth, about to ask about the impending coup and the window of time left before the next flare-up, when Gary interrupts me.
“So what crops do you grow these days?” he asks.
I smile. This is Gary wisely steering us into the easier conversations of hostess and visitors, saving strength for the floodgates he knows will open when I see the camper. A horse and buggy pull into the parking lot right behind the Avion. Holding the reins is a blond, blue-eyed man wearing farm overalls and a straw hat. Behind him, in the trundle seat, sits a silent woman in a prairie dress and three little girls with bonnets covering their blond heads.
“Mennonites, from Paraguay,” Sonja whispers before we ask. “They are persecuted everywhere, but here they are just left alone.”
The man hands the reins to his solemn wife, walks over to stare at our camper, and then climbs back in his buggy without saying a word. The family rides off with the refinery flame burning in the background and the girls’ pink ribbons streaming behind them in the breeze.
“Did my family seem as strange as that to you when we first arrived in La Paz?” I ask Sonja.
“Maybe a little more strange, because your father’s camper looked like it came from the future, not the past,” she laughs.
When the rain stops and we can see through the steam rising from the mud, we set off again for the farm and the futuristic camper of my past. The road makes sucking, slurping noises as we slip and skid along it.
“On the left, those fields used to belong to my grandfather,” Sonja points through the open window. “Up there, around the bend, all of that was my mother’s.”
It dawns on me that Sonja is describing the disappearance of a dynasty. Her great-great-grandfather settled the area and cultivated some ten thousand hectares of land. Over the years, the family holdings have been sold and expropriated by the government until they are down to less than two thousand hectares. No wonder she refused to relinquish control of what remained to my father and her ex-husband.
“Did all this happen because of Che Guevara and his revolution?” Gary asks.
“El Che didn’t have anything to do with it,” she answers with a dismissive laugh. “In Bolivia the land reform started in 1953. We were giving land to the poor long before that troublemaker came around.”
She seems ambivalent, even charitable, about the redistribution of 80 percent of her family’s land.
“Now it is more equal,” she says. “It is only fair.”
Sonja nods to the men on horseback who tip their hats when they recognize the woman riding past. Their faces are as weathered as the raw curtains of hide serving as homemade chaps. Their sweating horses are protected from the scratchy brush by heavy shields of leather.
At last Sonja recognizes one section of the tree-limb fence we have been paralleling, in first gear, for a full hour. She hops out of the cab, into ankle-deep mud, and nonchalantly slogs through overgrown brush to unlatch a wire loop from a post.
“It’s to keep the cows away from the soybeans,” she says as she hops back in. “They love them.”
We pass through three separate barriers of wire fence, each secured with naked tree limbs stabbed into the soil. Each field we drive through seems to drag our camper a little deeper into the mud and a little farther from what we have come so far to find. Even four-wheel drive isn’t enough; we have to wedge pieces of wood and rocks in front of the back tires to rip away from the muddy suction.