Something Fierce

by Carmen Aguirre

  By now, halfway through our visit, I was an old pro at washing in a basin carried out behind the outhouse. You had to pray that nobody was watching, because there was only the foliage to shield you. Anyway, the neighbours were too busy tending to their coca-leaf plants—watering them, trimming them, laying the leaves out to dry in the sun—to care about some city girls learning their way around personal hygiene without showers. For grooming, we made do with a minuscule hand mirror nailed to a tree. Ironing, a must in Bolivia, was done on the wood-slab table using a hundred-year-old iron filled with hot coals.

  A torrential storm that night had us huddled three to a cot in our highland ponchos, the house full to bursting now with the arrival of Lorena’s parents and younger siblings. We pulled all the cots to the centre of the room, which was lit by a couple of kerosene lamps. Two five-litre bottles of chicha were being passed around. I didn’t drink any, faithful to the vow I’d made back in Canada. The rain pelting the tin roof sounded like ancient drumming in this magical place.

  Dunia regaled us with the story of a mermaid she’d once seen. It took me a moment to realize she was referring to a woman who’d been able to swim; the roaring white rivers there were used only for laundry, which we did every few days, laying out our jeans to dry on the rocks. Lorena’s father recreated the night he’d danced with the devil. I knew he was talking about the carnival devil dance. And Lorena’s mother recounted the Second Coming of Christ.

  It had happened in a remote village to the east, where she’d gone to visit relatives. She was still a teenager, innocent as could be.

  A couple of her male cousins had taken her to hear Him speak in a secret jungle location. She’d noticed His followers first, men who’d walked with Him for many miles, with their long hair and beards, rifles slung over their shoulders. And then she’d seen Him, mane of black hair framing his pale face, tall, strong, eyes on fire as he spoke in a soft but powerful voice. Goosebumps had risen on her skin and her heart had sped up, for His presence was like a light.

  “What did he say?” Liliana asked, eyes wide like saucers, jaw slack.

  “He spoke of freedom and independence. He spoke of the brotherhood of this continent.”

  “Aaahh...” Liliana nodded, a little puzzled.

  “They killed him later, because they said he was a terrorist, but I know he wasn’t. No terrorist could have had that aura.”

  With that, she got up from the cot and poured some chicha right onto the earth, where it mixed with the pounding rain.

  “For the pachamama, our Mother Earth. Amen.”

  Nobody said aloud that the man in the jungle had been Ché Guevara, who was killed in Bolivia in 1967. Lorena’s mother had probably seen him when he’d first arrived in 1966.

  Unexpectedly, we got to stay on in Coroico for an extra week. The storms had washed out the Highway of Death and torn down the telephone lines, cutting off Los Yungas from the outside world. I secretly wished it would stay that way forever. It was incredible to feel happy-go-lucky for a change, far away from the compartmentalized life of the underground. Mami and Bob would be beside themselves with worry, I knew, but now maybe they’d understand what it felt like for Ale and me to have our parents disappear for days or weeks on end, with no clue about when they were coming back, scared they might be dead or were being tortured somewhere.

  My last night in Coroico was spent in the arms of Raymundo, a handsome private-school boy vacationing in Los Yungas with three buddies. It was Saint John the Baptist Day, and Coroico was overrun by La Paz teenagers. Free of parents and schoolwork, the teenagers rambled around town all day and met up at the plaza at night. Bonfires burned everywhere in the village, and the chicha flowed freely. Music played constantly, and the party went on all night. My friends and I had spent our last day at the river washing our clothes, drying them in the sun, breathing in the clean air that came with the passing of the storms. After the moon rose, we made our way to the plaza, for tonight was goodbye. Strolling arm in arm, we saw them after a couple of circuits: four La Paz boys in tight jeans. There was no time to waste.

  As dawn broke, we girls set off for home, surrounded by revellers and small children. Lorena’s parents and siblings were still sitting around the bonfire at their door. When they saw us, lips swollen, collars turned up to cover the hickeys, they elbowed each other and giggled.

  Our bus left from the plaza an hour later. Our new beaux ran after us as the bus pulled away from the curb. I revealed Raymundo’s gift to me for the journey: a Snickers bar, imported from the North, a rare, coveted gem in Bolivia. The four of us shared it, making it last all the way back to La Paz.

  13

  A COUPLE OF WEEKS after winter break, Mami made an announcement over lunch.

  “Bob, Lalito and I are going away for a week,” she said. “We’re not at liberty to say where we’re going, but Adriana’s going to come stay with you girls. It’ll be fun!”

  A fellow teacher at the American English Centre, Adriana was my mother’s friend. She was also, I’d gathered by now, a “helper.” She hailed from Santa Cruz, and I’d heard Mami tell Bob one night there were whispers at work about Adriana having been held and tortured as a political prisoner during the Banzer dictatorship. I assumed that’s why my mother had felt safe in approaching her. I loved Adriana, because she never talked down to us. I’d noticed she treated everyone with the same respect. The first night of her stay, we lingered at the table after Ale went to bed, chatting over tea.

  “I did my master’s in Boston, and I almost died of homesickness while I was there,” Adriana confided. “I cannot imagine being expelled from my country and never being able to return. I cannot imagine being raised in exile.”

  We both had a little cry after that. Adriana had cut through the facade so swiftly that I was split open, guts hanging out, knowing that if I didn’t gather up my insides and stuff them back in I’d cry so long and hard there’d be nothing left of me.

  There were other helpers too, like Deirdre, who also worked at the American English Centre. I knew Deirdre was a helper because she’d drop by to “visit” sometimes when Mami and Bob were out. She’d pretend to be marking papers, but she’d twitch whenever there was a sound at the door. She’d agreed to be at home with us three kids at certain times, I figured, in case the shit hit the fan. I’d caught the tail end of a conversation once, when I’d walked into the kitchen while Deirdre and my mother were standing at the stove. Conversations at the stove happened a lot between foreigners in La Paz, what with having to boil water for half an hour every time you wanted a cup of tea. “You know I’m Chilean,” my mother was saying. “You know I’m in exile. I’m sure you wonder what we’re doing.”

  Deirdre’s eyes had held fast to my mother’s until the penny dropped, causing a little sound to come out of her mouth.

  “If anything happens to us, will you look out for my kids?” my mother whispered. Her voice cracked.

  “It would be an honour,” Deirdre responded.

  Deirdre was from Northern Ireland, she’d told Ale and me. She had brilliant blue eyes and round cheeks. She always wore jeans and woven Aymara tops. The last time she’d just happened to be in the neighbourhood (that was her standard line), she and I had drunk coca-leaf tea together, to ward off the altitude sickness that still hit her sometimes, and talked for hours about love and life. Mami had shown up a few hours later, covered in sweat, carrying a guitar case that obviously weighed a ton.

  Then there was Mario, Bob’s ex-boss at the computer company, who’d resigned to start a company of his own. Bob had not only taken over Mario’s position after he left; he’d recruited him in the first place. Mario had a Harvard education, and he liked to tell stories of his boyhood visits to his grandfather in rural Bolivia. The old man had owned half a province, and thousands of peons would line up at the end of each month to receive their pay in food stamps from their master, who sat on a throne made of carved wood. Mario had vowed at that age to support the revolution, he said. I
understood from the hushed conversations he had with Bob that he was involved in revolutionary activity in Bolivia and beyond, and that his connections in high places had allowed him to help us out when it came to certain paperwork. Mario had spent a lot of time around Sunnyland whenever the car was getting loaded for deliveries.

  We didn’t live at Sunnyland anymore, though. We’d moved right after I’d got back from Coroico to a high-rise on Arce Avenue, overlooking Plaza Santa Isabel, a few blocks down from Plaza Avaroa, but a million miles away from that life. Our secret political meetings were over, and we no longer saw Soledad and Rulo, with no explanation for that. The move had been sudden, and until we got there Ale and I had no idea where we were going. Afraid we were leaving Bolivia, I’d sobbed uncontrollably into my pillow. I loved the country now as if it were mine.

  Adriana stayed with us for the whole week, as planned. Every morning we awoke bracing ourselves for the military marches we might hear on the radio or the tanks we might see rolling down Arce Avenue from our twelfth-floor window. Torrelio was so unpopular that Bolivia was on the brink of another coup or civil war. Repression was fierce, and the country faced an economic crisis because of corruption in the military.

  One night as we lay in bed, Ale informed me that Torrelio was preparing to hand over power to General Guido Vildoso, his second-in-command, who had recently returned from training at the School of the Americas. “Vildoso will be in charge of returning the country to democracy,” she whispered in the dark. “Before things get too out of hand. The Yanks have given an ultimatum, and no one wants a revolution on their hands. Not with what’s happening in Argentina, what with the idiotic military there losing the Malvinas War to the British and letting the population get out of control. Soldiers are standing up against their superiors and calling the masses to the streets. Not to mention the terrorists gaining strength in Chile. Any chance of an uprising in Bolivia will be quelled when people get the chance to vote and feel as if they are involved in the future of their land.” She swore me to secrecy before putting on her headphones and tuning in to “Tainted Love” on the Walkman we shared.

  Ale spoke like this only since she’d started to date Luis García Meza Jr. Every morning she and I emerged from our high-rise to find Luis waiting to take her to school in the back seat of a bulletproof black car. I walked with Fátima, who lived in a high-rise just off Plaza Santa Isabel, and my new boyfriend Fermín, who waited religiously on the corner and always offered to carry my books. When Luis and Ale drove past us on the street, Luis always lowered his tinted window and shouted: “Hey, sister-in-law! Get in! I’ll give you a ride! I’ll even give your Commie boyfriend a ride!”

  At which I’d shake my head, and the three of us would keep walking. At first recess Luis would tell me again how lucky Fermín was to be dating me, since that had saved him from getting on Luis’s special list.

  Fermín was one of the Altiplano Kings, the one in charge of running the record player and dropping the pamphlets. He and his friends loved to go on about Simón Bolívar and José Martí and Tupac Amaru and Tupac Katari, but all they did was intellectualize. They never referred to the blood and guts of the situation. I nodded and smiled, nodded and smiled. Fermín had been my boyfriend for the past month, and I was tired of being told how great the revolution was. I knew if he really was a revolutionary, he wouldn’t walk around in his black beret with the red star quoting Ché Guevara for all to hear. He’d be underground, like Bob and Mami. Soledad and Rulo had explained that people like the Altiplano Kings were necessary for the revolution; unwittingly, they were spokespeople for the likes of us. But it still bothered me that the people who were risking their lives had given up the right to speak while mestizo, middle-class, artsy-fartsy people claimed the title of revolutionary for themselves.

  Of course it wasn’t so simple. The Altiplano Kings were taking a risk by speaking out and playing their music. And Fermín came from a lower-middle-class home. It showed in his only pair of school slacks, washed and ironed so many times they shone. He wore a silver airplane pin on his sweater and dreamed of being a pilot someday. He’d declared himself to me at the Montículo, the lovers’ lane of La Paz. I’d said yes because he was nice and he loved me. But the truth was I was still in love with Ernesto.

  Ale had started dating Luis for the fame it brought, but I knew it wouldn’t last. She was still in love with Claudio, Ernesto’s brother. They’d broken up and then made up a dozen times already. In the meantime, her dating situation was top secret, never to be shared with Mami, Bob, the helpers or the revolutionary cast of people we lodged. Like Kiko, the British twentysomething anarchist punk rocker who had stayed at the high-rise a few times, with his shaved head and steeltoed workboots. “I come from the north of England, from a line of coal miners,” he explained to Ale and me. “Times are tough now there, very, very tough. England is next in line for neo-liberalism. But we’re putting up a fight, and we’ve always admired the miners in Bolivia. The miners here have balls of steel, and they fight for their rights to the bitter end.” Kiko carried his precious collection of punk tapes in a little black case, each tape carefully labelled. He’d learned how committed he was to being an internationalist revolutionary when Chilean resistance leaders in London ordered him to shave off his neon purple two-foot-high mohawk and take the studs out of his ears. In La Paz, he mixed in like a regular European tourist in his brown alpaca sweater, The South American Handbook peeking out of his dusty backpack. The last time he’d stayed with us he’d popped a tape out of his Walkman and given it to me. It was his favourite, Sandinista! by the Clash. I’d tucked it into my special hiding place for treasures, because I knew this could only mean goodbye. We wouldn’t see him again.

  On July 21, as Ale had forewarned, General Vildoso was handed power by Torrelio. It was a quiet changing of the guard, with no jets, no shooting, no curfews. Now it remained to be seen what Vildoso would actually do with the task at hand. It seemed obvious that the presidency would go to Hernán Siles Zuazo, who’d been elected twice already, the last time in 1980, without having the chance to govern. There was a tangible feeling of hope in the air.

  One morning a few days later, Bob handed Ale and me an envelope, with the instructions that we were to take it to Plaza Murillo and pass it on to a woman who would ask us for directions to a charango stand on Linares Street. I was supposed to wear my rainbow suspenders, and Ale would be in her baby-blue Adidas sweat top. She was a preppy sort of girl, which was one reason she was so in love with Claudio. He dressed in matching alligator shirts and socks with a pastel frat sweater thrown over his shoulders. I preferred Ernesto’s scuffed black motorcycle boots, faded baggy jeans and just-got-laid hair. I saw him sometimes at the bowling alley on Arce Avenue. Our eyes locked, but he never approached. The woman in Plaza Murillo would have dark glasses and a red scarf around her neck, Bob told us. Our evacuation plan, once the envelope was handed over, was to go for a leisurely stroll down El Prado, stop to watch the matinee showing of The Cannonball Run at the Monje Campero movie theatre, then go to a friend’s house for tea before heading home. This was called losing the tail, in case you were being followed.

  Ale and I arrived at Plaza Murillo on the M bus. Just as on every other Saturday at midday, the plaza was crazy with activity. Standing on the corner by the cathedral, we tried to look like a couple of normal teenagers hanging around talking. I remembered my acting teacher’s constant exhortations for us to stop playing the emotion and start playing the action. Just as I’d come up with an action—I’d play the verb convince, as if I was trying to persuade Ale to do something—an older, elegant lady wearing large sunglasses and a red silk scarf stopped right in front of us. “Señoritas, would you mind telling me where Linares Street is? I’ve been told it’s around here somewhere, but I can’t seem to find it. Apparently the best charangos in the world are sold there.”

  Ale and I looked at each other, deer caught in the headlights. The woman waited, a little smile playing on her lips
. “Over there,” Ale pointed.

  “Thank you,” the woman said.

  I gave her the envelope in an underhanded way, and before I knew it, Ale had disappeared into the crowd, walking toward the statue of Pedro Domingo Murillo, a martyr of Bolivian independence from Spain, at the centre of the plaza. The presidential palace stood directly in front of us. I dashed after her, eager to spend the coins Bob had given us. We were surrounded by ice cream vendors, laughing children and cholitas selling shelled and baked broad beans, but I purposefully avoided the shoeshine boys, for fear of seeing one of my old classmates.

  “Carmen!”

  I jumped out of my skin. What if it was my first Bolivian boyfriend, Eugenio Aguirre, shining shoes while he whistled, hair combed perfectly to the side? I couldn’t have my two Bolivian lives collide, not now, not ever. Not here, when the woman with the envelope was just a block away. General Vildoso was probably sitting in the presidential palace at this very moment. I wouldn’t have the nerve to look into the eyes of a boy who worked from dawn to dusk, biting into life with a hunger never quenched, and have him see what I’d turned into: a bourgeois, Northern Institute brat.

  “Carmen!”

  It was Fermín, only today he was wearing an orange tunic and a carnation necklace. Clapping his hands, he danced with his comrades.

  “Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare.”