Something Fierce (13 page)
When the Swede disappeared for two weeks, I worried about him. One day after school, I was thrilled to see him walking down the lane with his backpack. I ran to catch up with him, and his eyes lit up when he saw me. He ate like a starving man when we served up the special dinner we'd cooked in his honour. That night, listening from the door of my bedroom, I heard him tell the others that he'd been intercepted in Chile and taken in for questioning. When his bus was surrounded by the military on a desert road, the Swede had used a razor blade to slice open his seat cushion and had slid the documents he'd been carrying inside it. Two plainclothes cops had ordered him off the bus, then loaded him into the back of a military Jeep, and he'd spent the next few days in jail in a small town, sweating bullets. He'd played the “me no speak Spanish” card, even when the secret police agents told him they knew all about the Return Plan, including that many gringos were involved. But they'd found nothing on him, so they'd let him go with a warning. I wondered if the documents were still stashed in the bus seat and if so, what would happen when they were found. With Ale snoring softly in the bed beside mine, I lay awake for a long time.
I
T WAS A regular July morning in La Paz. The radio was playing, coffee was on, and the adults were huddled around the dining room table speaking about Very Important Things. Except that Bob wasn't in his requisite corduroy suit, ready to go to work at the computer company. Mami, hugely pregnant now, wasn't in one of the two dresses she wore to teach at the American English Centre. Also, both the shortwave and the regular radio were on. The Swede kept turning and turning the dial on the regular one, but all he could get was static. That was the military intercepting, Mami said. The shortwave was still working, and from the miners' radio we learned that General Luis GarcÃa Meza, commander-in-chief of the armed forces, had just staged a coup against Lidia Gueiler. There was a curfew, a state of siege and a state of emergency. Tanks and Jeeps had taken over 6 de Agosto Avenue, just a block down from our house. We kept the curtains closed.
I'd seen Lidia Gueiler just two days before. There had been a parade on El Prado to commemorate Bolivia's martyrs in the war for independence from Spain, and she was marching with a red, yellow and green sash draped across her chest, the colours of the Bolivian flag. Flanked by men in suits and officials in military garbâhad Luis GarcÃa Meza, who the miners' radio said was her cousin, been one of them?âshe'd held a bouquet of flowers in one hand and waved with the other. In her heavy makeup, she looked like an old beauty queen.
Maybe Lidia Gueiler was dead by now. According to the announcer on the miners' radio, the situation was very bad. “Comrades! Luis GarcÃa Meza's right-hand man is Klaus Barbie himself, that Nazi war criminal who walks our streets with impunity. Top advisers and torturers have been brought in from Argentina's Videla dictatorship. GarcÃa Meza has declared that Pinochet is his idol. The military and the right wing are afraid of the ongoing congressional investigations of human rights abuses and large-scale corruption. This coup is funded by the cocaine drug lords and is, of course, part of a much larger plan by the United States to neo-liberalize Latin America. We miners, we peasants, we workers of Bolivia denounce this attempt to stop the democratic process. The Central Workers' Union is holding an emergency meeting and will likely call for a general strike. Stay at your posts, comrades, for further instructions.”
We hid out in our house for the rest of the day, listening to our windows rattling from the low-flying airplanes and the nearby machine-gun fire. All I could think about was the cholitas and their babies who lived on the streets, the mules, the peasants just arrived in the city with nowhere to rest but the plaza. What would they do? There was an overnight curfew, and no one was allowed in the street, but what if the street was your home? Ale played with her Barbie dolls, but I stuck by the adults at the table, their worried faces sending chills up my spine. Operation Condor would go into even higher gear now that GarcÃa Meza was in place, and that would mean stricter security measures for us. I wondered if we were hiding any documents or goods right now. There were certain nooks and crannies in the house that were off limits to Ale and me, and we both knew not to ask why.
At some point during the afternoon, the announcer on the miners' radio station began yelling. “The military has raided the Central Workers' Union in La Paz and has shot and taken Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz, our renowned socialist leader, with them! Two union leaders have been killed on the spot! Chaos has ensued. The military is here, comrades, there are jets flying above.” And then there was a huge explosion, right on the air. After that, only static. The miner reporting from the Siglo XX region had just given his life to keep us informed. Mami's glasses steamed up, and the Swede's eyes filled with tears. Bob pulled me in close to his chest, his jaw clamped tight.
Our lane was patrolled all day and into the night by Jeeps, and once by a passing tank. Sometimes there was shooting right outside our gate, setting the stray dogs howling. Whenever we heard gun-fire, we'd all drop to the floor under the dining room table, a difficult thing for Mami to do with her huge belly. Once we were huddled, she'd be overtaken by a laugh attack and pee her pants. “It's the nerves, it's the nerves,” she would say, wiping her eyes. We were used to itâcertain things struck her that way. Sometimes the rest of us started laughing, too.
The adults decided we should all sleep in the bedroom at the back of the house. That would make it almost impossible for a bullet to hit us through the window. My mother climbed into my bed, and Ale into hers. Bob, the Swede, Trinidad and I stretched out on the floor. It was kind of fun having everybody take up residence in our room like that.
When curfew lifted at six each morning, I went out to buy black-market bread, sold from one of the alley doors by the cutest little grandma. The whole neighbourhood was buying bread there. People walked with their eyes glued to the ground, looking up only when a plane crossed the sky to see whether to run back home or dive down flat. Conversations took place in whispers. The stores were closed indefinitely, so everybody's new diet was this hard bread washed down with coca-leaf tea, which miners, peasants and the poor of La Paz drank constantly to ward off hunger. There was no school, so the neighbourhood kids huddled on the stone steps, unseen from the lane, swapping coup stories until curfew descended again at nine in the evening. According to one boy, Jose Luis, the military had been practising their aim on the stray dogs in the lane. I'd been wondering where they'd vanished to; now I knew.
El Camba and Rolo reported that the national soccer stadium, up the street from where we had lived in Miraflores, had been turned into a concentration camp. Thousands of people were being held there. Jose Luis said that was communist propaganda, but El Camba nailed him with his blue eyes. No, he said, he had been there himself. The coup had caught him on the way back from the salt mounds of Uyuni, and he was picked up for riding his motorcycle into a city under siege. We all went quiet. Only two people from our lane had gone to work on the day of the coup, and they had continued to go every day afterward: Lorena's father and Jose Luis's father. Theirs were also the only two families that still had a steady supply of food. According to Lorena, her father was a political adviser to the new president. She refused to use the word dictator. Jose Luis's father ran some kind of business. In Bolivia at that time, that meant he was probably into cocaine money.
When school began again ten days later, my classmates seemed ecstatic about the new government. The teachers nodded their heads in agreement. The Niece's status was even higher now, and the teachers tiptoed around her. Curfew was still in effect, and one evening we were at the stone steps when the little bread-selling lady staggered down the lane, hanging on to passing walls for support. Some of us jumped up to help her, and she told us she'd been caught in the curfew the night before, on her way home from selling seeds downtown. She'd been taken to the national stadium, where she'd witnessed things she never thought she'd live to tell. Beautiful young students being beaten, entire families held under arrest, intellectuals in blindfolds and handcuffs. Street kids and mules had been forced to run around the track all night; soldiers shot at their bare feet whenever they slowed down. Most of them collapsed into unconsciousness after hours of that. As for the old woman, they'd placed her in front of a mountain of soldiers' dirty socks and kept her up all night washing them. Whenever she dozed off, they'd shoved her hard with a rifle. They finally let her go with a warning to never break curfew again. It had taken hours for her to get to San Jorge from Miraflores, since the bus was a luxury she could not afford.
I waited for everyone to fall asleep when I got home. Then I snuck out onto our back porch. The porch hung above 6 de Agosto Avenue, but it was not really visible from the street; from below it got lost in the array of balconies running up the side of the hill. I'd stolen the Swede's special whistle from his backpack. He'd explained it was so loud it could be heard from very far away, especially useful if you were lost in the bush. I crouched low, so that I was entirely concealed, and started to blow it. The whistle pierced the wall of sound made by the Jeeps, tanks, helicopters and planes, and the shooting that rang through the night. It was perfect. Each blow of the whistle stood for something: this one's for what you did to the old lady, this one's for what you did to the miner on the radio who gave his life, this one's for all the maids, mules and shoeshine boys of Bolivia.
I heard soldiers yelling at each other and the sound of their boots on the cement. I stopped for a minute, slowly got up and peered down at the avenue. Sure enough, they were running this way and that, trying to figure out which of their superiors was blowing the whistle and what he wanted them to do. I blew again, hard. This one's for all the children who die every day of hunger, diarrhea and other curable diseases. The soldiers raced around like a bunch of idiots. They'd blackened their faces with shoe polish so they could commit their crimes without being recognized. My uncle Boris always said you couldn't have a dialogue with the enemy when the enemy was pointing a gun at you. You just had to defend yourself and take the power, by any means necessary. The whistle was a good start, as far as revolutionary tactics went for a twelve-year-old. I blew it for a long time.
I WAS NO LONGER the kissing queen of the neighbourhood, because I had a boyfriend. Camilo was Rolo's cousin; he and his mother and his three siblings were Bolivians who had moved back to La Paz after a few years in Brazil. Camilo's fifteen-year-old sister, Katushka, and I also became fast friends. They knew what it was like to leave everything behind and start anew. The whole clan, Rolo's family and theirs, lived simplyâno maid, no fancy clothes, one pair of shoes each. Camilo and his brother slept on the living room floor, and their mother and sisters shared a double bed.
Camilo and I kissed in the alley more furiously than ever after the coup, heading home just in time for curfew. One afternoon I noticed a bunch of kids rushing into Jose Luis's house. Lorena told me that Jose Luis's mother had called an emergency meeting, and that everyone from the lane was attending except her family and mine.
“They say you're a filthy whore,” she explained.
“Who?” I asked.
“Well, everyone.”
Tears sprang from my eyes, gushing like a waterfall. Lorena handed me her embroidered handkerchief and caressed my arm. It began with the indiscriminate kissing, she explained. Also, I had kissed both lane boys and alley boys, and that was a no-no. Now my hour-long kissing sessions with Camilo, an alley boy, had the lane ladies up in arms.
“Carmen, I love you, you're my friend, but you've got to understand that this is Bolivia. If you act like a boy you will pay.”
No, I thought to myself. This was not Bolivia. This was rich, mestizo, right-wing, sexist, hypocritical, Catholic Bolivia. This was the ruling class, but not for long. Rich Bolivia was where my family was for the moment, though, and I knew we must live by its rules.
I hurried home to prepare Mami and Bob. I'd barely finished speaking when the doorbell rang. Sure enough, Jose Luis's mother and a bunch of the other lane ladies, with their bouffant hairdos, heavy pancake makeup and tight girdles, were standing at the gate.
We agreed that Bob would deal with them, playing the stupid-gringo card. I spied from the window as Jose Luis's mother handed him a letter at the gate, gesturing wildly at the houses surrounding ours. Bob simply nodded at first. But then he got his back up, because the lady wouldn't let him get a word in edgewise. As he opened our front door to come back in, I could hear Jose Luis's mother yell: “Every family on the lane has signed this letter, including your downstairs neighbours. And I've already contacted your landlords. I'm sure they will not be too happy to learn about the whores and hippies they're renting to.”
Bob punched the wall as Mami sank into a chair at the table, her head in her hands. Ale rolled her eyes at me. She agreed with the ladies, and she'd already told me so. Trinidad and the Swede called me into the living room. I'd done nothing wrong, they assured me, but I cried anyway, until my heart was squashed like a piece of fruit lying on the market floor.
Two mothers stood by me after that: Lorena's and Camilo's, kissing and hugging me every chance they got. But the neighbourhood girls started to cross the street when they saw me, and the boys watched from afar, elbowing each other in the ribs and laughing.
