Something Fierce

by Carmen Aguirre

  One of the other Altiplano Kings was with him, beating on a drum that hung around his neck. They were with a dozen other people, chanting as they moved through the plaza.

  “Fermín! I had no idea you were a Hare Krishna!” I said, trying to make it sound as if I’d just discovered he had an appealing hidden talent.

  “Oh, yes. I believe there are many ways to counteract the age of Kali, and I’ve been meaning to talk to you about—”

  “Oh, shit, where’s Ale? Sorry, I have to go. I’ll talk to you later.”

  “Wait! Let me introduce you to Swami—”

  And with that I took off. Ale was waiting for me, laughing her guts out as she leaned against a post. As the opening credits for The Cannonball Run lit up the screen, I realized I was going to have to break up with Fermín. Dating a Ché wannabe who played banned music was foolhardy from a security perspective, I told myself. But I knew the real reason was that I would never be able to erase the profoundly unsexy image of Fermín practising his religion.

  14

  “HELP!!!”

  I choked out my plea a split second before I was dragged under the water again, my body forced into impossible contortions. Eyes open, I twirled like a whirling dervish in the deafening hum of the Atlantic. Yemaya, goddess of this ocean, had put me on spin cycle.

  Sugar Loaf Mountain, the hill that was a trademark of this city, came into view. I reached for it, but a wave the size of a house slammed into my skull, and the undercurrent grabbed me by the feet. As my mouth opened to let out a scream, my lungs flooded with water. And then I let go. I’d have thought a life-or-death decision would take deliberation, but this was a split-second choice, made with conviction: I was dying, so I might as well go along for the ride. No longer mine to punish or please, my body was a sand-filled sack rolling around at the bottom of the world. My corpse would be washed up on shore, bloated and dull-eyed. As for my soul, it was already rocketing down a fibreglass tunnel toward a very bright light.

  Two minutes earlier, when I was still alive, it had been August in Rio de Janeiro. Copacabana Beach was peopled with only a few locals and the odd tourist on this off-season morning. The sun had burned quickly through the clouds as pineapple vendors wound their way around the towels. Ale and I had contemplated the towering waves for a while before deciding to dive under them to reach the calm waters on the other side. The red flag flapping furiously in the wind had been our invitation to rebel, not an order to obey. We’d grown up swimming in Chile and at Long Beach on Vancouver Island, so we were experienced. A few Brazilian waves? Please.

  As I shot along the tunnel like a cannonball, I was surrounded by voices: Mami, Papi, Bob, Ale, my grandparents, my cousins, my friends and Lalito’s little-boy words. I travelled right through the faces that materialized in front of me, as if they were made of smoke.

  We’d been in Brazil for a week, but as usual this was not a mere vacation. Mami and Bob had disappeared for hours at a time while Ale and I entertained Lalito in our hotel room and ignored the constant knocking of a middle-aged room service waiter who’d grabbed my crotch the one and only time I’d answered the door. That morning Ale and I had woken up early and come down to the beach on our own. The last time I’d seen her, she was being pulled farther and farther away from me, her face seized by fright, her arms grasping at the air.

  I had almost reached the bright light when white noise exploded in my eardrums.

  Someone was rubbing sandpaper on my left cheek. A hand had grabbed my right ankle. The white noise—static—was replaced by animated voices. When my eyes cracked open, I saw wet sand covered with tiny pebbles and shells. Somebody flipped me onto my back, and a dozen faces peered down at me, yelling in Portuguese. Two muscular men stood among them, panting and dripping with water: my saviours. I realized suddenly that I was naked. Gasping and coughing, I covered my privates with one hand as I yanked at my bathing suit, which had rolled down around my ankles. It took me a good five minutes to pull it back on. To think it took more time to cover your exposed vagina than it did to reach the gates of Heaven, assuming that’s what lay waiting at the end of the tunnel.

  I ignored the chiding voices and looked around for Ale. Down the beach I could see another group of people huddled over a shaking body. Somehow Ale managed to get up and stumble toward me. We looked at each other without uttering a word and collapsed onto our towels. Within seconds, we’d passed out.

  Two hours later, I woke on the beach from the deepest, deadest sleep I’d ever had. Ale and I walked in silence back to the hotel, just in time to join Mami, Bob and Lalito for brunch in the dining room.

  “There you are! How was your swim?” my mother asked.

  I shrugged. “Okay, I guess.”

  Ale and I peered at each other over our coconut shakes.

  On our last night in Rio de Janeiro, Bob stayed with Lalito while Mami took Ale and me to the movies. Although my mother convinced the ticket seller that I was twenty-one, nothing—not even an attempted bribe—would get thirteen-year-old Ale into the restricted movie playing inside. After sending her back to the hotel in a cab, Mami and I settled into our seats to watch the film that was banned in Bolivia and the hottest black-market video in Chile right then: Missing. The Costa-Gavras docudrama about the coup in Chile showed the stadium, the involvement of the United States, the repression in the streets, with Hollywood stars playing the lead roles. We were shocked to see our lives depicted on the big screen. The members of the sold-out audience sobbed and gasped aloud at a story that had been so intimately ours until now. On the way home in the cab, Mami and I talked in broken voices, gripping each other’s hands.

  BOLIVIA WAS IN a state of joy when we returned from Brazil. General Vildoso had announced at last that Hernán Siles Zuazo would take over as president in October. The streets were jammed with people celebrating Bolivia’s imminent return to democracy. Political debates raged on every street corner, now that people felt it was safe to speak out loud. There were countless rallies and parades: to honour the incoming president, to grieve the thousands who’d been killed during the years of darkness, to welcome the returning exiles. Add to that Bolivia’s win in a major soccer championship in Europe, and these were the happiest times the country had seen in the last three decades. The day of the win, people ran out of their houses screaming to hug absolute strangers. Drivers pounded on their horns or abandoned their vehicles to jump in the streets. Fireworks, blaring music and outdoor dancing went on through the night. When Tahuichi, the junior soccer team, arrived in La Paz bearing the trophy, it was as if God himself had come down from the heavens.

  I would be turning fifteen in October, and we planned to celebrate it with a simple gathering. My grandma Carmen arrived from Chile carrying an enormous cake. It had taken her two days to bake, she told us excitedly, and she’d been able to get it through Bolivian customs only by slipping a bottle of wine to the officer. Mami had sent her the money for the trip, so that she could fly to La Paz, and I ran to greet her as she walked toward us across the airport tarmac. In the taxi on the way home, she lamented my grandfather’s lousy back, which had kept him from coming along.

  Once we got home, we served Abuelita some coca-leaf tea. That was the traditional way to receive new arrivals in the highlands.

  “So, where’s the quinceañera party?” she asked with a twinkle in her eye.

  “Right here,” I answered.

  “Here? In this tiny living room? No!” She tapped me gently on the forearm, smiling.

  My mother took over. “We’re not joking, Mamá. Carmencita’s having an intimate gathering of her close friends. She’s decided not to go all out.”

  “You mean to say you’ve brought me all the way here and you’re not having a quinceañera party?” my grandmother demanded. She scanned our faces, hoping she’d misunderstood.

  Parents spent years saving up for their daughters’ quinceañeras. They were wedding-like ceremonies involving ball gowns, live bands, hundreds of guests, a five-c
ourse meal, speeches and a throne for the girl being honoured. Fifteen was seen as the threshold of womanhood, and quinceañeras had been celebrated for centuries in Latin America, long before the arrival of the Europeans.

  “Ay, Mamá, it’s so bourgeois—” my mother started to say.

  My grandmother cut in, her eyes flashing. “Don’t give me that. Carmencita is turning fifteen. That happens only once in a girl’s life. I don’t know when you became so bullheaded in your beliefs, Daughter, but being as arrogant as a cat is deadly. Throw your daughter a decent party, for God’s sake.”

  “It’s okay, Abuelita. I think quinceañeras are kind of dumb anyway,” I lied. There was no way I was going to let Mami and Bob down by asking them to be a princess for a day.

  “Mamita, don’t cry,” my mother implored. “Please. You’re tired, and the altitude is exhausting. Why don’t you go lie down?”

  “I don’t know what’s happened to you, Daughter,” my grandmother mumbled through her tears. “There are things in this life that are important. I was the first daughter of my generation, and my mother called me Carmen. You were the first daughter of your generation, and I called you Carmen. Carmencita is the first daughter of her generation. Our line of women must be celebrated. And when Alejandrita turns fifteen, we’ll hold a quinceañera party for her, too.”

  “We’ll have a good time anyway, Abuelita. We will,” I reassured her.

  The last time I’d seen my grandmother, she’d been trying to protect me from the Cousin’s advances. Now here I was, a bad girl in a blue suede tube skirt and rust-coloured cowboy boots. Despite the tea, she spent most of her time asleep over the next few days, bedridden with altitude sickness. I wondered if her illness was really caused by grief, the bitter pain of having her grandchildren grow up in exile and reject the rituals she had so painstakingly devoted herself to. Not only had she spent days baking and decorating my cake, she’d built a special box that would transport it across the Andes intact, bribing her way in, all to be met with a girl she no longer knew.

  The night of the party, Félix, Lorena, Liliana, Fátima, a dozen close male friends and I gathered to eat the dulce de leche cake Abuelita had brought “all the way from Tacna, Peru,” as my mother made a point of saying. My grandmother didn’t join us; she was still in bed. Mami had agreed to leave me alone with my friends, so she’d gone out with Lalito. I’d wanted my little brother to stay for the party. My friends adored him, and he loved being passed from arm to arm. But he’d become so traumatized by the constant disappearances of his parents that Mami had to take him everywhere she went. He clung to her like a little monkey, sitting on her lap even when she peed. When Bob was away, as he was now, Lalito walked from room to room calling “Papá? Papá?” and looking under the bed and in the closets.

  Early in her visit, my grandmother had wondered out loud why Lalito was so scared he stuck close to his mother all day. Hands on her hips, she’d confronted Mami brow to brow. My mother shrugged, muttering something about my grandmother not understanding the choices the modern woman was forced to make.

  “I know all about the modern woman,” my grandmother had snapped. “Don’t you forget it was I who forced you to finish your university degree after you had your girls. Don’t you forget I moved to Santiago to look after your babies so you could continue your studies, get a degree and get a job so you would never have to depend on a man for money. Don’t you speak to me about the modern woman. But do answer me this: at what point did the modern woman lose respect for motherhood and, above all, for the children of this world? Explain that to me.”

  My mother had gone into the bathroom, Lalito hanging off her skirt, and closed the door behind her.

  I excused myself from the party and stepped out onto our tiny balcony. I contemplated my Plan B life, the one in which Ale and I had remained with our grandparents in Chile while my mother responded to the Return Plan. In that life, I’d be wearing a ball gown sewn by my grandmother on this day. I’d be dancing with my grandfather while a Chilean boy my age looked on. I breathed in the La Paz night and choked back tears.

  Félix came to find me. “You’re never going to believe who’s here.”

  “Who?”

  “Ernesto.”

  I’d swallowed my pride and invited Ernesto to the party a few weeks earlier, when our eyes locked as usual at the bowling alley. He hadn’t committed to coming, but here he was now, his buddy Ramón by his side. Ramón strummed his ever-present guitar while Ernesto sang: “And the regretful dog is back...”

  It was a silly number teenage boys sang to their girlfriends when they wanted to apologize for something. He performed it with mock conviction, clutching his heart and throwing himself on the floor à la James Brown. I laughed till I cried.

  My grandmother left the next day, carrying the empty cake box. Her lonely, resigned figure made its way across the tarmac, and a steward helped her up the stairs. Just before she disappeared into the plane, she turned around and waved.

  I FASTENED the silver chain around Ernesto’s neck, with its dangling charm in the shape of the letter C. It was December 31, 1982, and we were in the emergency stairwell of the Plaza Hotel where my family and I were staying on our last night in Bolivia. It was three in the morning. I kissed the love of my Bolivian life for the first time in almost a year. In two hours I’d be leaving La Paz behind.

  The goodbyes had been going on for a month. The school year had ended a couple of weeks earlier, and then Christmas had come and gone in a flurry of activity. I carried a stone of pain in the bottom of my heart, mixed with fear at what we would encounter next. As usual, Ale and I didn’t know exactly where we were going, though we’d been instructed to tell people we were moving to Bahía Blanca, a navy port on the Atlantic south of Buenos Aires. Mami and Bob had put it like this, a month after we’d returned from Rio de Janeiro.

  “We have to move away from Bolivia. We can go to either Brazil or Argentina. You girls decide.”

  Ale and I had received the news in silence. I’d looked out the window at La Paz shining in the night.

  “When are we leaving?” Ale asked.

  “At the end of the school year.”

  “Are we coming back?”

  “No.”

  That no was like a machete. There was nothing more to say.

  “Well, you two let us know as soon as possible which country you prefer.”

  All I knew about Argentina was the terrible war with England that the country had been waging. It was talked about incessantly in Bolivia, where solidarity rallies were organized and communiqués were read over the radio offering unconditional support to our Argentinian brothers and sisters. During recess, the Altiplano Kings had taken to playing Mercedes Sosa, the Argentinian superstar, and making pronouncements against the imperial British enemy. A friend of my mother’s, an Argentinian with British ancestry and hence an English name, had been turned back at the border, even though she’d been born in Argentina, as had her parents. At our house, she’d repeated the border guard’s words: “As a British subject you are an enemy of Argentina, Señora. You are not allowed in.” She’d boarded the train back to La Paz, sitting in a state of shock for the twenty-four-hour ride, her suitcase of gifts intact at her side.

  Argentinians were unbearable. That’s the other thing I’d heard since I was a child. Absolutely insufferable, because they considered themselves better than other Latin Americans. Actually, they didn’t believe they were Latinos at all. No amount of arguing would change their minds: you could pull out maps, refer to history, ask a self-proclaimed “European” Argentinian if he’d ever even been to Europe, and still there was no budging them. A favourite pastime at Latin American parties was exchanging Argentinian jokes. Like: “When an Argentinian wants to commit suicide, he hangs himself by his ego.”

  The few Argentinians I’d met were loud braggarts who never let you get in a word edgewise. So this was all I knew: the Malvinas War, Argentina’s horrific dictatorship, the unbearable ci
tizens of Argentina. No images of the country’s landscape came to mind. We’d been to Brazil, but Ale and I saw our near-drowning there as a bad omen. Plus, we didn’t speak a word of Portuguese. The prospect of learning a new tongue again on top of everything else was too much to bear. Within two days we’d announced that we might as well move to Argentina.

  That night in the stairwell, I promised Ernesto I’d write to him as soon as we arrived in our new city. If he waited till I was eighteen—only three more years—I’d come back to Bolivia and never leave again. He confided in a low voice that his family was also leaving very soon. “Now that Siles is in power, people want to burn us at the stake. My father’s high up in the military, he’s dedicated his life to the service, he’s studied good and hard at the School of the Americas, and there are certain people who would have him shot by firing squad. We will leave quietly, in the night. I don’t know where we’re going. But I will give you a post office box here in La Paz. Even if it takes months for your letter to reach me, I will write you back.”

  “Do you agree with what your father has done?”

  “No. But he is my father, and I love him.”

  Bob poked his head into the stairwell. “It’s five in the morning, Carmencita. Time to go.”

  Ernesto and I rode together in the elevator down to the lobby. The doors opened, he stepped out, and he walked through the front entrance of the building just as the elevator doors closed. He never looked back.

  The previous morning, Ale and I had gotten up before dawn and tiptoed our way to the living room. Opening the curtains just a touch, we’d had a full view of Arce Avenue. Sure enough, the García Meza convoy appeared. Luis had confided to Ale that his father was fleeing the country to avoid being arrested and charged with corruption and crimes against humanity. They were flying to Buenos Aires, where the Argentinian dictator, Reynaldo Bignone, would welcome them with open arms. The three-car convoy drove quietly up Arce Avenue, the García Meza family in the centre bulletproof vehicle. Headlights turned off, they’d headed toward the airport to make their getaway before the sun came up. A jet awaited them at the top of the city.