Something Fierce (27 page)

A burst of machine-gun fire cracked through the afternoon. Alejandro turned in his sleep. A six-year war continued with ferocity outside these four walls. But the war within me had only just begun.

21

A
NY EXPERIENCE IS good, any experience is good, any experience is good. I repeated the mantra to myself like a Hail Mary. Juan had given it to me on our last day in Lima.

“Life is so much bigger than we are, comrade. Always remember that we're here for a greater cause. The struggle begun by Simón Bolívar a century ago is ongoing, and we are here only to add our grain of sand for the liberation of our continent. Within this context, any experience is good. This knowledge got me through my years of exile, confronting a solitude I hadn't experienced even in jail. Remember, little comrade: any experience is good.”

“Stay calm, everybody! I've got everything under control!”

The man shouting those words was a U.S. mercenary wearing mirrored aviators. His forearms were covered in scars, and the stench of booze oozed from his pores. Waving a semi-automatic above his head, he staggered up and down the aisle of our train car. “Don't worry, folks! It's fully loaded and ready to go.”

It was noon in the highlands, and our train had been stuck for three hours in the middle of nowhere. Alejandro and I were seated in the tourist car, surrounded by European backpackers. A week earlier, this very train had been ambushed by members of the Shining Path. They'd pulled out all fourteen European and North American travellers and shot them in the head. The message was clear: whites get out of Peru. Now here we were, our train at a standstill and tensions running high. The mercenary had taken it upon himself to defend us. I took a deep breath and stood up.

“Please sit down. You're scaring people.”

“You speak English?”

“Yes. Now please sit down. You're making people very nervous.”

“Why didn't you tell me earlier you spoke English? I've been dying to have a decent conversation for months!”

“Well, let's talk, but please sit down and put the gun away.” I gently steered him to his seat.

“Okay, lady, sure.”

“And you should stop drinking. You were drunk when you got on the train this morning, and all you've done is drink since then.”

“You've got quite the woman here, soldier. Hang on to this one,” he said to Alejandro.

For the previous half hour, Alejandro and I had been in quiet discussions with the two big Sicilians sitting across from us. They wanted to overpower the mercenary from behind, take his gun away and cold-cock him. I'd argued that if his gun went off in the process, people might be injured or killed. Nobody in the tourist car knew whether to be more terrified of the Shining Path or of this rabid, pickled mercenary. The Peruvian waiters and porters had disappeared, locking the doors behind them. We were left to our own devices.

“Where are you from, missy?”

“Canada. How about you?”

“South Carolina.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Looking for the Shining Path. I'm gonna take 'em down.”

“How old are you?”

“Sixty-five and still going strong.”

“What happened to your arms? The scars, I mean.”

“Maggots. I'm just back from a month in the Amazon.”

“Your government sent you there?”

“Naw, I'm retired. My wife put a restraining order on me, so I took my savings and came down here to flush out the Shining Path.”

“All by yourself, under nobody's orders.”

“That's right.”

“Tell me more about yourself.”

The other passengers started to relax. As long as I could keep him talking, everything might be okay. It was a rare opportunity to talk head-on to the enemy, I said to myself. Any experience is good.

“Well, let's see. I was a GI in the Second World War. And I haven't stopped serving my country since then. Done Korea, Vietnam, El Salvador and everything in between. Got paid $150,000 in cash to wipe out an African village once.”

“I see. So you must love Ronald Reagan.”

“Reagan? I hate Reagan! Boy has no aim. Tries to bomb Tripoli and all he murders is Gadhafi's nine-month-old baby. Ma'am, if you're going to bomb Africa, bomb the whole damn thing!”

“So, uh, where are you headed now?”

“La Paz. I was there in the early eighties. The War on Drugs.”

“Oh, of course. Did you get the drug traffickers?”

“You don't think we were actually after the drug traffickers, do you, woman? You're smarter than that. We were after the dissidents. But I love La Paz. That place is the heart of South America. All those people want out of life is love.”

Tears started to pour down his face. I patted him on the back. Through the window, I could see a group of Indian boys frolicking in a huge puddle next to the train. The sun shone down on them, making the boys' bodies glisten like gold.

“Just relax,” I told my companion, continuing the back patting. Eventually, he passed out.

“Quick! Get his gun!” one of the Sicilians said to the other.

The tourist car passengers let out a collective sigh of relief once the mercenary was relieved of his weaponry. Alejandro and I glanced at each other, steeling ourselves for what lay ahead. If the train got fixed, if the Shining Path didn't ambush, if we weren't caught beforehand, we'd reach the Bolivian border the following morning. I hugged my purse to my chest and eyed the bags sitting in the rack above our heads.

BY NOON THE NEXT DAY, we were at the border, crammed into the Toyota minivan we'd hired in the town of Puno. Our fellow passengers were a Bolivian couple with two small children, a towering German backpacker, a young California hippie couple and a Bolivian woman about my age. The driver had announced early on that he'd need twenty dollars from each of us to stave off harassment at the border, and everybody but the Bolivians had complied.

The border was exactly as I'd remembered it: a lone shack in the middle of the highlands with two plainclothes guards wielding submachine guns. It was dead quiet this time around, though, not like when my family and I had crossed at the height of the Virgin of Copacabana's celebrations.

The driver handed over our passports, the twenties on top. Bored stiff and looking for some action, the guards weren't going to let us through so easily. Peering through the window, their eyes rested on the young Bolivian woman and me. One of the guards ordered the driver to slide open the passenger door.

“These two señoritas can come with me, along with their baggage.”

The young woman walked into the shack as if she owned the place, but I froze for a second. Any experience is good, I reminded myself. My knees trembled, but maybe no one would notice. Taking the oath, attending daily meetings for those ten days in Lima, seemed like peanuts compared with this. As I stepped into the shack, the musty smell of a packed-dirt floor assaulted my nostrils. My eyes took a few seconds to adjust to the dark, a sharp contrast to the brilliant colours outside.

I was carrying five incriminating items, distributed across my pack, my purse and my person. Alejandro carried another five.

Alejandro and I had made the items at night, following Juan's instructions, in several different Lima hotel rooms. We'd moved every three days for security purposes. Alejandro was an electrician by trade. He'd learned a great deal at the nuclear plant in Bariloche, and he approached our assignment with zeal, even finding ways to make the items more compact. One night I'd sat handing Alejandro components while we watched Shirley MacLaine, who was making a movie in the Andes, speak at a press conference on TV, apologizing to the citizens of Peru for suggesting that Machu Picchu had been built by aliens.

One of the border guards had taken a seat behind a metal desk with an array of rubber stamps covering its surface. “Reason for travelling to Peru?” he asked the Bolivian woman as he studied her passport. Standing at his side, the other officer caressed his machine gun suggestively.

“This,” the woman snapped, exposing a dozen electric shavers in her shoulder bag. Leaving one on the table, she grabbed her passport and walked out like the queen of the highlands. I'd spent countless hours trying to master the art of showing no fear, taught by older, highly experienced resistance workers. But watching this eighteen-year-old smuggler, I finally got it.

“What's this?” the second guard demanded.

He'd opened my pack and was holding up a gift box, perfectly wrapped and tied with a pink silk ribbon. He shook it. Two of the items we'd made rattled inside. I snatched the box from him.

“This is a gift for Señorita Lorena de Jesús Calderón Cabral. Her father is a direct adviser to the president of Bolivia, and you will surely understand that I do not want it ruined.” I grabbed my passport from the seated guard, plunked two ten-dollar bills on the table and walked out, legs shaking so hard I wasn't sure I'd make it to the idling van.

The driver gunned the minivan out of there like one of the Dukes of Hazzard. My body was drenched in sweat, my heart banging against my chest. But I looked over at Alejandro and winked. The young smuggler chewed on a wad of gum as she studied her painted nails. She'd sell the shavers at the black market the following day and go back to Peru to do it all again.

When we got to Copacabana, our driver told us we had half an hour to pray, stretch and buy food before we left for La Paz. I followed the Bolivian woman into a temple. A thousand candles burned inside, and the murmur of prayers filled the air. The smuggler lit a candle, placed it at the Virgin's feet and got down on her knees to thank her for the safe passage.

FOR ALMOST A YEAR, Bolivia had been under the iron fist of Víctor Paz Estenssoro. Although his government was not a military dictatorship, it might as well have been, since the once-revered leader of the 1952 revolution that had nationalized Bolivia's tin mines and redistributed the land was now a full-fledged neo-liberal. Elected under false pretenses, Paz Estenssoro had turned his back on his popular supporters and, through a state of siege, had imprisoned hundreds of labour activists, leading a campaign of terror against anybody who opposed the free market economy. The extreme poverty in one of the world's poorest nations had become even more extreme, as had the extreme wealth of a few. Overrun by thousands of peasants who begged on the streets, La Paz also boasted a slew of new glass skyscrapers and a gated community of mansions that Beverly Hills billionaires would have envied. Social services and government spending had been severely cut; price controls were cancelled, wages frozen and the borders flung open to anyone wishing to engage in the free trade that had flooded Bolivia with imported goods. Malnourishment was widespread, and unemployment stood at 30 per cent.

Alejandro and I spent our first night in La Paz at a hotel just off Plaza Murillo. The following day we walked up the lane to my old friend Lorena's house and knocked on her door. It took Lorena a moment to recognize me, but when she did, we hugged for a long time, our eyes welling up. She insisted we stay with her family for the ten days we'd be in the city. We were installed in a large guest room, our special items waiting patiently in the packs under the bed.

Lorena didn't ask why I'd never written to her, and her parents opened their home to us with no questions asked. She was a soul sister, and it was as if not a day had passed. Alejandro and I had left Vancouver wearing wedding bands. The official story was that we were moving to Argentina to start a family and were taking the scenic route to get there: Machu Picchu first, and now La Paz. Lorena was studying business administration at the private Catholic university, she told me, but she would probably never use her degree, since she was already promised to the son of a major businessman, an associate of her father's. While her older brother took Alejandro for a spin, I asked her about our old friends.

“How's Félix?”

“Oh, his aunt sent him to the States on an exchange, and he seems to be having a good time there.”

“What about Fátima?”

“She and her family had to go into hiding after her father was arrested for masterminding the kidnapping of a super-wealthy Belgian who was here on business. They came out of hiding a year later, and now she visits her dad in jail every week. He's missing all his teeth and nails from the torture, and he can't walk now. It's pretty bad.”

I'd always known secret things happened at Fátima's house, but I'd assumed they were connected to the dictatorship, as with Lorena's family. “Oh, my God. Well, how about Ernesto?”

“Never seen or heard from again, although word on the street is that his father is a military adviser in Guatemala. So I guess that's where they are.”

My heart did a double flip, but I kept a straight face.

“Do you want to see Liliana? She's still around.”

“No, Alejandro's a bit jealous of my past, so it's best if we hang out just with you and your family.”

“Of course. My promised one is very possessive too, and I love it. Well, my darling friend, I feel so selfish and lucky to have you all to myself. And my family's so happy to have you here. I've missed you more than words can say, and I'm grateful that life has brought us together again.”