An Indian among Los Indígenas

by Ursula Pike

  Seeing him for the first time in the daylight, I looked at his face without the haze of alcohol or the shadows of a poorly lit patio. He was gorgeous: dark eyes that I couldn’t turn away from, raven-black hair, and smooth brown skin a few shades darker than my own. Brown as a berry, as my grandmother used to call me in the summer. We shook hands, and he stepped in close to kiss the air next to my cheeks in a proper Bolivian greeting. His hands were warm and rough.

  “How are you today, señorita?” he asked with a formality that amplified the excitement of the moment.

  “Fine, and yourself?” I said, trying not to smile too broadly. My heart was pounding. I didn’t know what to do with my hands now that he wasn’t touching them.

  “I came to talk to the director about my brother,” he motioned to the closed door behind him.

  “Did you have a good Candelaria?” I asked. He laughed. I was proud that I had managed to do more than mumble and sweat.

  “Best celebration in years.” I bit my lower lip and exhaled. He said, “I came by your house the other day, but no one was home.” I did a quick check to make sure no one was standing near us.

  “I’m going to Cochabamba tonight. I will be home until 9 p.m.” I was trying to drop the hint that I wanted him to come over. He did not react to my invitation, and I wondered whether I was using the wrong word or the wrong verb tense. Unaccustomed to playing hard to get in any language, I decided to be more direct with my invitation.

  “Ven a mi casa,” I said. Come to my house. What was I doing? He smirked and told me he would stop by later. We said goodbye, and he shook my hand gently and kissed my cheek for a few extra seconds, then stepped toward the street. I watched him leave through the gate. My thought was more Oh boy than Oh no, what have I done? The rest of the day, I hummed with anticipation while also trying to keep from getting my hopes up. I wanted so badly to confide in Ximenita, because I knew she would relish every detail of the interaction. But I would have to keep my mouth shut.

  My bags were packed and ready before dinner. As the sky was turning from light to dark blue, the way it gets in the first hours of the evening, I heard a knock. I peeked between the door slats and saw Fernando looking left at something in the street, combing his hair down with his fingers. My stomach tightened with anticipation, and I did a mini-jig of happiness before undoing the metal latch and pulling the wood door open wide enough to let him in. It creaked as I shut it. I slid the latch back into the locked position as quietly as I could. The building was empty and silent except for us. The neighbors who also rented rooms in this building were not home, but they might arrive at any moment. I exhaled to calm myself. I was nervous, sure, but it was less about being with a married man than simply about being with someone. I had already started to forget that he was married. Maybe forget is not the right word. Maybe ignore is better. I had no animosity toward his wife; I had nothing except a desire to not know about her.

  Inside the room, I reached up and pulled closed the drapes. They weren’t real drapes, only more of the brightly colored cloth that I used for everything from tablecloths to laundry bags. The dim light from outside my window made his face darker and his hair like night.

  “Hola,” I said, crossing my arms awkwardly over my breasts in the least sexy pose I could have taken. He looked directly into my eyes and gently cupped the side of my face with his hand. I leaned into it, pressing my cheek into his open palm. It was rough, warm, and slightly damp. No one had touched my face for what seemed years. My tits, my ass, the spot in the middle of my back underneath where my bra hooks—sure, those places had been touched a few times. But there had not been this caress of my face. His other hand untucked my shirt, and he reached under the fabric to grasp my bare flesh.

  “I have been thinking about you,” he whispered. We were close now, and I smelled that same sweet cologne I remembered from our first night together. It was cheap cologne, and although it was too strong for my taste, it was his smell. I undid the top button of his shirt, then the next, until his smooth chest was open and exposed.

  “I…thought about you too.” I fumbled around in my mind for a better follow-up, but standing there, nervous and aroused, I could think of nothing. Then I remembered: this was an affair. The rules were different. I did not have to sound smart or hip, or prove anything. We were both here to have sex, as much sex as possible. Coyness was not necessary. What a relief! He kissed me with open hard lips, filling my mouth with his tongue. Then I pulled him into the open mosquito net encasing my bed, onto my unmade mattress. I did not have a bed frame or box springs, only a mattress inside a mosquito net and a thin sheet. That was all I needed.

  “Urr,” he whispered in my ear, softly pressing his tongue against the top of his mouth to roll out that r. No one had ever said my name that way. It sounded natural, yet different and new. I wanted him to say it again, but I also wanted him to stop talking so he could kiss me. This was the opposite of loneliness. This was the connection I had wanted.

  15

  Aventura — Adventure

  Walking into the Children’s Center for the first time in two weeks after taking some time off and traveling for required medical checkups, I was greeted by hugs from the little kids and handshakes from the older teenagers. I hadn’t thought I would miss them as much as I had. When Tomas and Umberto came through the gate, I hugged Tomas. Umberto let me shake his hand. Then they ran off toward the kitchen where breakfast was being served.

  I went into the kitchen, where Ximenita was ladling hot maizena into cups. It was my least favorite breakfast because it tasted like cornstarch and water, but I had learned to drink it, especially on cold mornings.

  “Did you hear that Nilda is thinking about not wearing a cholita skirt anymore?” Ximenita asked. Nilda had recently moved from the campo and started working at the Center. She couldn’t have been more than seventeen years old. It had been over a year since Ximenita had stopped wearing a pollera, and I wondered what she thought of Nilda’s decision.

  “That’s sad, but I understand why.” I looked at Ximenita, who turned to fill a tray of waiting cups. I didn’t know Nilda well and wondered why Ximenita had told me this information. Maybe she wanted me to understand that she wasn’t the only one who had made that choice. Nilda’s situation was a reminder that even though there were elements of Indigenous Bolivian culture that were thriving, the pressure to conform in order to be successful still existed, and women like Nilda and Ximenita had to deal with it every day.

  In the corner, I noticed a huge white freezer. The newness and brilliancy stood out amid the stained buckets and cans surrounding it.

  “We brought it all the way from Cochabamba,” Simon, the Center director, said, puffing up a little. It was a donation, or paid for by a donation, from the German evangelical organization that supported the Center. Often the kids asked me to translate the neat German handwriting on the back of postcards featuring pictures of giant cathedrals or perfectly coiffed frauleins. I had forgotten most of what I had learned in high school German class except numbers and a list of prepositions. I translated the few words I recognized, and guessed at the others. Together we arrived at a message that sounded like what a First World evangelical donor would want to deliver to its Third World charity recipient.

  No matter the real message—I imagined the postcards said, Don’t give up hope; there’s a rich white person on the other side of the planet praying for you. Were there late-night television commercials in Germany with pictures of Tomas or Joaquin looking sad and dirty, with a voiceover asking for donations to help them? When I saw the Center children laughing, looking happy and full, I wondered whether the donors wanted to see pictures of that. I did not know the word for charity in German.

  Simon rubbed his hand across the smooth white surface. I peeked inside the freezer and saw that it was barely cold and completely empty.

  “We should use this to sell popsicles,” Joaquin suggested. He was one of the older kids at the Center and a year away from gr
aduating. Nora and Jennifer, two teenage girls who had helped with the bakery project, jumped up and down in excitement. Everybody with a refrigerator in town used it to make something to sell.

  “I will pay for the sugar and mix if you’ll let us use this freezer.” Again committing my own resources was not something I should be doing, but I knew he didn’t have extra cash to spend on such a project. His eyes narrowed.

  “Señorita, this freezer is going to be full of the best quality of meat, fruits, milk, and maybe even cheese. I do not think there will be any room for your products,” he said, his hand in the air making a dismissive gesture. A year and a half ago I would have turned and walked away, feeling dejected. A year and a half ago I wouldn’t have even thought this idea was big enough for me to spend time on. But I had learned that starting a project at the Center required several steps. Simon would dismiss the idea at first. But I’d keep asking him, making jokes about the size of meat he planned on buying, or showing him how small a space we needed. Doña Florencia, his wife and the Center’s cook, was my friend. She was the one who could help me get his approval. A week later, he called me into his office and told me we could use a small corner of the freezer for the popsicles.

  Nora and Jennifer, the teenage girls who had been enthusiastic about the idea, led me to the market down the street. It was Wednesday, not a busy day at the market, but the girls knew right where to find the tiny plastic bags, the sugar, and the flavor mix. Ximenita, the cook’s assistant, helped us boil the water to make a few test popsicles.

  “They worked, they worked!” Nora told me when I walked in the next morning. Simon was already halfway through one of first popsicles by the time I made it to the freezer. The following Saturday after breakfast, a few of the girls who had helped me with the bakery and two boys whom I didn’t know well joined me in the Children’s Center kitchen. We made four dozen popsicles and stuffed them into the tiny real estate we had been granted in the freezer. Standing in the kitchen with the kids, I looked up to see Ximenita smile and wink at me. She had been with me since my first day at the Center a year and a half earlier and knew how much I had struggled in those first few months.

  On Sunday, market day, the cook let me in right after breakfast. Two of the younger kids had volunteered to sell the popsicles. They were probably about twelve years old, but had experience selling their mothers’ baked goods. Nora and I handed the kids a tray full of popsicles and some coins to make change. I watched them disappear into the crowd surrounding the stalls of bread and backpacks and anything a person would want to buy. Within two hours, they sold everything we had. I carefully locked the money away in the cash box and said good-bye to Ximenita as I headed home. In the weeks to come, the kids would make twice as many popsicles in each batch and sell all of them.

  What surprised me was what they did with the money. They bought enough oranges for the whole Center and passed them out to the kids one afternoon. They also bought an iron for their clothes. My Bolivian friends always looked put together, and no one left the house with wrinkly clothes. The kids from the Center often wore used clothes made thin by years of hand washing, but most of them were careful to keep their clothes as wrinkle-free as possible. Joaquin, who was tall and thin, waved his arm with a grand flourish and made sure I noticed the crease in his pants. I thought of all the times I had arrived in a rumpled dress pulled from the floor. What did they think of me when they watched me leave my apartment looking as though I had slept in my clothes? It was one of the things that made it clear that no matter how many commonalities existed due to our shared heritage, we were different. This had been the case all along, but only now was I starting to see myself through their eyes.

  A few weeks later, Daniel asked me whether I knew the anthropologist who lived a few towns over. There were so many anthropologists in Bolivia that it was difficult to keep them straight sometimes.

  “The one who loves goats?” Daniel asked as he stuffed shirts and jeans into his stained backpack. Now I remembered. She was having a despedida that weekend. “I can’t go, but you should,” he said. Despedidas were going-away parties that often turned into final blowout celebrations. After my recent trips, I was enjoying lying low in Kantuta. A party in another town sounded like too much effort.

  I walked with Daniel to the corner where he was about to catch the late-night bus to La Paz for his Close of Service conference. Three days of meetings and workshops to prepare for the end of volunteers’ service, to think about what they might do after they returned home. The end of my service was six months away. Or a hundred years. It was too far away to be real.

  “Unless you’re doing something with what’s-his-name.” Daniel looked at me. He did not approve of my relationship with Fernando. At first, he had encouraged me to go for it. But when he found out that Fernando was married, his opinion changed.

  “We don’t make plans. It’s not like that,” I said, shifting in the chair, trying to find a comfortable position. Daniel did not understand what Fernando gave me. I knew I wasn’t going to change his mind that night or probably any night before he left Bolivia.

  “Come on—this is supposed to be an adventure. Do something adventurous!” He cocked his head and smiled. I narrowed my eyes at him. He was presenting a challenge. Now I had to prove I was adventurous too. Jack Kerouac to his Dean Moriarty. My idea of adventure was tamer than his and usually included multiple backup plans.

  I retreated to the dark behind my closed door and listened to the hum of the bus as it drove away. Maybe I should go to the party. Other volunteers would be there, friends whom I hadn’t seen for weeks. It might be fun to be anonymous for a few hours again. Everyone in Kantuta knew me. When I first arrived, that made me feel special, like a celebrity. Now, it was exhausting. All the extra effort it took to be conscious of my actions, who might be watching me, and how they would judge me. In the United States, I was invisible most of the time. No one asked for my opinion, and even in small classes my college professors never knew who I was. I only spoke when I thought there was something important to be said. Twenty-seven years spent being invisible and silent, and now I was watched every second outside my house.

  I decided to go to the party. While getting ready that morning, I listened to the radio. Radio Kantuta had recently given Fernando a morning spot. It was the first time I thought about how he made his living. He read the news in Quechua. I understood every few words, enough to make out that it was an announcement of a community meeting. I stood in the middle of the patio, sipping my coffee, glad that no one was there to see me suspended, marveling at my connection to the station that had felt like a barrier to me for the last year.

  By nine, I was standing in the open-air market on the north side of town waiting for a ride. Dark clouds full of rain were moving in my direction. Adventure, I reminded myself. The flat cement floor of the market was empty except for the few women who sold onions and tomatoes every day of the week. A short man in a misshapen felt hat pulled large wood crates down from the back of his truck. My favorite food seller flipped her puffed pastries in hot oil. She was my favorite because she remembered my name and that I liked the sweet pastries the best. Sometimes being noticed had its advantages. I liked to get one of them right as it came out of the oil, when it was almost too hot to touch, and rip it apart piece by piece until there was nothing left but my sticky fingers.

  I was tempted to walk over and buy something warm and greasy. Then I heard the rain. Softly at first as it hit the branches of the trees, then loudly as it pelted the roof of the market and poured off the corners of the building in great streams. My feet were starting to get cold, and the thought of returning to my dry bed sounded better with each additional minute. Maybe Fernando would come by later. But I knew I might miss my ride if I walked away. What would Daniel say if he knew I didn’t go?

  An hour later, a large cargo truck stopped in front of the market. He was going my way and for two dollars would take me. Three young women with long, dark hair pulle
d into ponytails climbed up the ladder after me. Knowing that I wasn’t traveling alone made me relax a little. The vulnerability I felt as a woman in the world was raw and real even in the daylight. It was easy for Daniel to talk about adventure when, as a man, he moved through the world and this country with a level of safety I never had. Those beatnik adventurers Daniel admired were all white men like him. I loved being adventurous, seeing and doing new things, taking risks and having experiences no one I knew had ever experienced. But as a Native woman, I always had to think about safety and survival. I was scared, but didn’t want to give anyone the satisfaction of letting my fear stop me. This required me to be hyperaware of my surroundings and especially of the men I encountered. My vigilance wouldn’t protect me from everything, but it was the only way I knew how to live a life of adventure and not be paralyzed by fear.

  The back of the truck, like most on the road, was a flatbed surrounded by walls of wood slats. A bus would have been better and safer, but sometimes a truck was the only way. I looked into the bed and was surprised to see that it was full of dirt. Dark, clumpy dirt. Six feet deep. I looked back at the other people waiting for rides. With their thin jackets and short skirts, they looked as cold as I felt. This might be my one and only chance to catch a ride today. At least this was safe. Dirty but safe. Once aboard, I exchanged a look with the girls. The tiny slip-on flats on their feet almost disappeared under the dirt. My thick-soled boots would keep me a few inches above it. I held on to the metal railing to steady myself. It was wet from the rain.

  The driver banged on the side of the truck and honked an air horn to announce his departure. We passed the large brick school building across the street from the Children’s Center. From this height, I could see the broken windows and holes in the chain-link fence. The white evangelical church inside the courtyard of the Children’s Center stood empty. The truck approached the edge of town. Loose dogs walking slowly down the street sniffed once in our direction as we rumbled by. The houses were smaller and browner here. Eventually, there were no houses, only fields of flat, dry land.