Something Fierce (20 page)

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.

As our own taxi climbed toward the airport, I bid farewell to La Paz, the crater city that touched the sky. La Paz, “Peace,” was now a piece of me, a place so vibrant I knew I'd never experience anything like it again.

The previous afternoon, Lorena, Liliana, Fátima and I had dressed up in our pleated skirts and lace-collared blouses. We'd taken the bus to Plaza Murillo, where we planned to stroll together one last time through our old haunts. I surprised them when I whistled at the first hot guy who walked by.

“Hey Papacito, has anyone ever told you you're good enough to eat?” I yelled.

As the guy's jaw dropped to the ground, my girlfriends ran and hid behind a kiosk, legs crossed to stop them from peeing in their pantyhose as they giggled.

“Carmen! What are you doing? We belong to respectable society!” Fátima scolded.

“I'm doing what any feminist worth her weight would do: turning the tables so these sexist fucking pigs can know what it feels like to be objectified in the middle of the street, when you're just trying to get on with your day.”

“Promise you won't do it again!” Liliana pleaded, slapping me on the arm.

“Okay.”

Two beautiful guys were walking toward us. As they opened their mouths to say something, I beat them to it: “Hey, sweet cheeks, I'd like to dip you in chocolate and lick it all off!”

“Run!” Lorena ordered, and we ran like crazy to El Prado, my friends electrified by my shockingly bad behaviour.

Four more guys were about to pass us, already puckering their lips for the loud kissing sounds they planned to make.

“Mmmm. Hey, you hot things! There's four of us and four of you. How about us girls teach you all there is to know about the art of sucking?”

We'd raced down El Prado, doubled over with laughter, and jumped on a bus as it pulled away, leaving behind the four boys who'd started chasing us.

The Indian porters at the airport tripped over themselves to help us, their gaze lowered to the ground. It was a crisp morning, the quiet a perfect soundtrack for the vastness of the Andean highlands.

Bob pulled out our passports at the Lloyd Aéreo Boliviano counter. His was Canadian. Mami's, Ale's, Lalito's and mine were Bolivian. For the last few months, our red-tape guy had made a full-time job of standing in line at government buildings to get our papers in order. Anyone who had the money hired somebody like this. The red-tape guy would hand the clerk a wad of cash; the clerk would pocket it and then hand over the documents, on which the red-tape guy forged your signature. Documents were handed back and forth in this way until they were complete.

“Mr. Bob Everton. Your presence is required at the front of the plane.”

The announcement came just as we were about to taxi down the runway. I reminded myself that death wasn't so bad. It was just a tunnel, after all, with the drone of voices and the light. If I hadn't been meant to die a drowning death on Copacabana Beach, then maybe I was meant to be tortured to death in the city that kissed the sky. As long as they let Lalito and Ale go, Mami, Bob and I could pay for our sins.

After an animated conversation with the flight attendant, Bob rejoined us, carrying a little box. He handed it to me. “This is from Félix. He stopped the plane so you could have it.”

Inside the box was a porcelain poodle, parts of its face chipped away. At the bottom lay a letter.

“My dearest friend and sister Carmen: I'm so sorry I couldn't make it to the hotel last night to say goodbye. I found a way to get here, but I was too late for the airport, too. I adore you and will never forget you. Always keep a place in your heart for my country of Bolivia, the shining jewel of South America. This poodle is from my house. I hope my aunt won't miss it too much. Keep it always as a memento of me. Your friend and brother forever, Félix.”

And with that, we were on our way.

15

T
ANGO PLAYED IN the taxi as we sat in a Buenos Aires traffic jam. Our driver hadn't shut up from the moment we'd got in his car at the airport. So far, his monologue had covered the Malvinas War, the last decade of dictatorships in Argentina, the economic crisis and, most importantly, how Boca Juniors would fare in the upcoming preliminary rounds for the Libertadores Cup. He'd yell “Go wash the dishes, little missy!” at the occasional female driver, methodically wiping a checkered handkerchief across his brow. It was hot and humid as hell, and I tried to digest this other planet we'd landed on. Who knew that the capitals of two neighbouring countries could be so different? First there were the women. Uniformly bottle-blonde, with towering frames, they paraded along the narrow sidewalks in stilettos and tube dresses. They were the whitest Latinas I'd ever seen. Then there were the men. Curly-haired and tall, light eyes contrasting with their olive skin, they glided along in perfectly pressed slacks that hung just so. It was a shock after the Bolivians, who were all five foot two with size four feet.

All of a sudden a torrential downpour of paper began. Not confetti:

actual sheets of paper. By the thousands. Our driver pounded on his horn, stuck half his body out the window and shouted up to the gods: “Happy New Year, motherfuckers! Goodbye to 1982, the worst year ever! And by the way, you fucking Brits, the Malvinas are Argentinian!”

The honking of taxis and buses rebounded off the hundreds of buildings in the downtown core. As the storm of paper continued, I leaned out to see where it was coming from: office workers were throwing the pages out the windows. It was midday on December 31, work was over, and the new year had to be greeted with a clean slate. Big-band tango continued to blast from the car radio. The bandoneón, a kind of accordion, punctuated the voice of the tango diva Libertad Lamarque singing “Today you will enter my past,” as we inched our way through the centre of the second-biggest city in South America.

The four of us fell into a dead sleep at the Hotel Rochester. We didn't wake up until the sun had set, and by then Buenos Aires was humming with the biggest celebration of the year. We found a table at the nearby Potato Palace. It seemed to be a typical restaurant around these parts, with a whole cow splayed over an open fire in its front window. In a room the size of a basketball court, people chewed on steaks so huge they hung off the plates. One wall was a mirror. Mirrors were everywhere in Buenos Aires, and everyone stopped to primp with no shame whatsoever. The yelling, laughing and joking of the families who surrounded us, ranging in age from newborns to great-grandparents, contrasted so sharply with the dead silence at our table that we had the waiters worried. Standing by in their bow ties, they'd dive every time the breadbasket needed refilling. We stared down at our plates, each lost in our own world of uncertainty and fear. I had no idea where the next stop was or how much trouble we were in. But Mami and Bob were worn out, that was obvious, and this time there was no pretending we were on some exciting adventure together.

We got back to our hotel at precisely midnight. The bellboys in the lobby sprayed champagne in our faces. Up in our room, Ale and I flipped on the TV, to be greeted by the sight of García Meza Sr. giving a news conference at the airport in Buenos Aires. Flanked by bodyguards and what appeared to be Argentinian secret police, he was thanking the local authorities for providing him with asylum. The camera moved from his face to a view underneath the table, revealing a revolver strapped to his right shin.

“Sweet father-in-law,” I whispered.

Ale punched me in the ribs.

TWO WEEKS LATER, my new friend Griselda and I were sauntering down Mitre Street, the main thoroughfare in Bariloche. A ski resort in the Andes, frequented by jet-setters from around the globe, Bariloche was a day's trip from the Chilean border. We'd arrived here after spending a week in Buenos Aires, two days in Bahía Blanca at the home of an Argentinian doctor and his wife, and one night at a fancy hotel in the desert city of Neuquén. Bob had promised Ale and me we were headed to a beautiful place with snow-capped mountains, pine trees and endless forests, trying to chip away at our impenetrable teenage rage. We refused to be swayed. All I knew was this: I would never forgive them for plucking me away from Bolivia.

Griselda, fifteen like me, was our landlords' niece, visiting from Chile. Our landlords were a working-class family of German descent who had built four little row houses on their plot of land. Bob had rented the main house, on the edge of the plot, for us. The landlords lived with their two small daughters in one of the row houses. The father's mother, Griselda's grandmother, lived right next door. The other two houses were rented to a trucker and his wife, and a low-ranking military man.

We'd arrived in Bariloche on a grey January day, the town so dead the pit of my stomach had frozen over. As our taxi passed through an area of ramshackle dwellings on dirt roads, pulling up at a wooden gate held closed by a rope, I realized we'd left behind not only a country but a social class. There was nothing quaint or bohemian about our new home. The massive wood stove in the kitchen warned us that the winters were long and harsh. Stray cats screeched on the roof, and a layer of dust covered everything. Lalito ran around the place, excited that we were putting down roots somewhere.

Griselda was beautiful in a character-actress kind of way. The harsh Patagonian wind whipped her gold locks away from her face as we walked, her big blue eyes squinting in the midday sun. She'd gotten here two days after we had, and without her I would have died. We took a daily stroll down Mitre, window-shopped and then walked all the way back home for yerba maté, a special digestive tea drunk by the litre in Argentina, and butter biscuits made by her grandmother. Griselda came from a family of fishermen. Her class was evident from her one pair of jeans (flared, when drainpipe had been in for years now) and her only shirt (paisley polyester, when the fashion was satin with shoulder pads). It never occurred to her to look longingly inside the dozens of cafés, bistros and lounges offering steaming cups of hot chocolate and copper pots of cheese fondue. She'd never eaten out. She was waiting for the perfect movie to come to the town's movie theatre; she had enough money for one matinee.

I'd taken on the role of housekeeper in our new home. No one else seemed to notice that after years of having Nati clean up after us, we'd turned into a bunch of lazy pigs. Managing the house took a few hours of my day, what with all the sweeping, mopping, waxing, dusting, polishing and disinfecting. Bob suggested that Ale and I join the Andean Club, a hiking group, but something odd had happened to me since our arrival: I was afraid to meet people. The thought of putting myself out there was so frightening I'd end up hyperventilating on my bed, covered in cold sweat. I was ashamed to be mestiza in a country full of whites. But mostly I was tired of lying, of keeping up the facade, of living in fear that at any moment it could all come crashing down. So instead I kept the house sparkling and smelling of Pine-Sol. Bob started calling me the White Knight.

Griselda seemed safe. She accepted everything I told her—that I'd been born in Bolivia but raised mostly in Canada, and that we were here on business. Why would it cross her mind that was a pack of lies? She came from Valdivia, the city where my family had been living when the coup happened, situated just across the mountains, and she talked in the delicious working-class Chilean accent I hadn't heard in so long, referring often to places I used to know: the Calle Calle River, the seafood market, the Spanish fort at Niebla Point. While I played the fool, she'd explain about the delicacies the sea offered: seaweed and kelp, urchin and abalone, salmon and sea bass. I reacted with the requisite retching when she described crudos (raw beef patties seasoned with onion, cilantro and lemon, a specialty introduced by the Germans in the south of Chile), never letting on they had been one of my favourite treats as a child. Griselda was Chilean to the core. Though she didn't know it, it was precisely her Chileanness that drew me to her. There was nothing to explain; all the social signals were understood.

Griselda believed, along with her family, that Pinochet was the best thing that had ever happened to Chile. They were typical working-class supporters of the dictatorship, people who backed him out of ignorance, not because it was in their interests. She was also a staunch supporter of another notorious dictator.

“Hitler was a very intelligent man. The thing about him is that he's misunderstood. People who hate Hitler haven't actually read his writings. Do you want to read him?”