Something Fierce (4 page)

I wasn't worried during the times they were gone, except about one direction they'd left me with—only me, not my sister. “If twenty-four hours pass and we don't come back, call this number and say you're with the Tall One and Raquel. Then hang up. Within an hour someone will knock on the door. Answer it, and then you and Ale go with that person.”

The paper they'd handed me looked blank, but that's where the lighter Bob had given me came in. If circumstances required, I was to go into the bathroom, close the door, and hold the flame underneath the paper, making sure not to burn it. After a moment, a number would appear in brown letters. My instructions were to memorize the number, burn the paper and flush the ashes down the toilet before making the call. All of this should be done only at the twenty-four-hour mark. Not before. In the meantime, I was to keep the paper in a secret place. Above all, I must not mention this to anyone.

I folded the piece of paper in two, wrapped it in a small piece of cloth, and sewed it into the inside of my travel bag. I felt lonely after I'd done that. Up to that point, Ale and I had both been in on everything. Now I had secrets from her, too. But the twenty-four-hour thing never happened, and the only person who kept knocking on the door was the chambermaid, begging for money for her children who had chronic diarrhea. I never answered, because what if she was an informer for the secret police? Ale and I would get really quiet until she gave up.

On the eighth day, Mami announced that we were leaving. She brushed out her hair, releasing it from its tidy bun, and both she and Bob pulled on jeans and sneakers. Ale and I stuffed the bare essentials in our new orange backpacks. Everything else would be packed into our Samsonites and sent away. We walked from the hotel to a massive bus station swirling with people, where we got onto a bus with the name HUANCAYO written on the front. Bob and I sat together, with Mami and Ale behind. I pressed my nose to the window to watch Lima disappearing. Vendors ran up to our bus at every traffic light. The people on the bus were poor, and we seemed to be the only non-Peruvians. My mother chatted with an older woman with callused hands.

“Oh, yes, I'm from Tacna,” she told the woman. “And my husband and daughters are Canadian. They've always wanted to see Peru, so here we are.”

As we reached the outskirts of the city, I thought again about my father. Papi was probably out in the garden right now. He'd be imagining us frolicking in the waves in Costa Rica, green parrots flying around our heads. I swallowed hard, and Bob rubbed my back.

“I love you, Carmencita. I love you.”

I nodded and looked out the window. My eyes met the steady gaze of a girl my age, a baby on her back, a barefoot toddler holding her hand. She stood on the island of the great boulevard, holding up a bag of oranges as we passed.

3

I
'D NEVER BEEN on a bus like the one to Huancayo, packed to the rafters with families, chickens, piglets and giant sacks of fruit. Babies cooed and screamed throughout the ride, and the driver played a soccer game full blast on the radio. What should have been a six-hour journey ended up taking twelve, because of the bus breaking down every so often. A few of the wooden bridges along the way were missing sections, too, which meant we all had to disembark and walk across the planks put down to cover the holes. Then the driver, with the help of the male passengers, had to figure out how to get the vehicle across, going inch by inch to avoid the places that would snap and send the bus hurtling into the abyss. When we weren't hopping on and off, I was holding my breath as our bus hugged the side of one cliff after another, a green valley always waiting at the bottom to catch us if we fell.

We stayed for a few days in a rundown colonial hotel in Huancayo inhabited by European and North American hippies. There was only one bathroom and one shower for everyone, so the lineups in the morning were long. Each room had a pail for emergencies, though. Mami and Bob disappeared every day until dinnertime. This time, our only instructions were to stay in the hotel room. Nothing was said about making a phone call at the twenty-four-hour mark. I couldn't decide if that meant things were less dangerous here or more so.

On the all-night bus to Ayacucho, I watched the stars of the southern hemisphere from my window. We were in the Andes now, the mountains my parents and their friends referred to constantly, and it felt right to be there. At one point we passed a burning village in the distance. The flames licked the sky. Everyone around me was asleep, and I wondered if the bus driver would stop and get us to help, but he didn't. Our vessel continued on through this landscape of beauty and horror.

There were rallies in the streets of Ayacucho, and Mami and Bob whispered about a civil war. It was the first time I'd heard them use the term. Something was different here in Peru, and it had to do with those words. I knew from earlier conversations that the general in power, Francisco Morales Bermúdez, was dangerous to us because he participated in Operation Condor, which had been set up by Pinochet and the surrounding dictatorships to catch revolutionaries operating anywhere in South America. Operation Condor was an illegal, top secret affair, officially denied by the governments in question, but foreigners in Peru were disappearing all the time. There was a new movement rising in the country, based right here in Ayacucho, and its members believed that peasants, not the working class, should lead the war against the powers that be and take over the cities.

Late at night, when Ale and I were supposed to be sleeping, Bob took photographs of papers that he'd taped to the wall. In Lima, he and Mami had read photos of documents. Now they were the ones producing the photos. Whenever a roll of film was done, Bob would hide it deep in his backpack. On our last morning in Ayacucho, very early, Bob wrapped the rolls of film in plastic, put them in a small cardboard box and taped the box shut. He grabbed his wallet and passport and slipped out of the room. When he came back, he announced that we were going to have fun that day. We bought chirimoya ice cream and ate it sitting in the square. Then we all had diarrhea. That was the thing about Peru. If you didn't have diarrhea, you were either puking or doubled over in pain, because your gut was seizing. My mother said it was good for us to build up our immune systems.

At dawn the following day we boarded a bus for Cusco, which Bob explained had been the capital of the Inca empire. For the next twenty-four hours we wound our way along narrow Andes roads so high up that sometimes we looked down on the clouds. We passed tiny villages and flocks of llamas tended by four-year-old shepherds wearing sandals made from tires. Every so often the bus would stop for a villager who needed to travel only a little ways, and he or she rode for free, chitchatting in Quechua with the driver. Quechua was the native tongue of the Andes, and ever since Huancayo, it was pretty much all we'd heard.

Every so often the driver would stop and yell out: “Time to go to the bathroom!” Everyone would scurry off the bus. Ale and I knew better by now than to look for the toilet; everyone just went over a little hill and squatted. The ladies and children went over one little hill, and the men went over another. In Peru, if you wanted to look up the definition of a word, you'd need two dictionaries: the Poor Peru dictionary and the Rich Peru dictionary. If you looked up the word
bathroom
in the Poor Peru dictionary, the definition would be: “Just over the hill there.” If you looked it up in the Rich Peru dictionary, the definition would read: “Marble room with gold taps and its own servant to keep it sparkling.” I'd been in a Rich Peru bathroom in Lima, when we'd gone to a fancy restaurant on our last night there.

Cusco was bustling with activity. My mother had bought us a kids' book about the history of Peru, and as we walked around town, I could see that the city was constructed on the foundations of Inca buildings destroyed by the invaders. When we got to the main square, I thought about Tupac Amaru, the native leader who had been murdered by the Spaniards here. They'd tied each of his limbs to a horse, and then each horse had galloped away in a different direction. Tupac Amaru had held on so tight, my uncle Boris told us, that the horses had had to use all their might.

We spent the day buying oranges, grapefruits, apples, chocolate—for energy, Bob said—and lots of quinoa, the local grain. We were going on a hike, and I was pretty sure I was starting to get the picture. Chile was lined by the Andes from north to south, and the only way to get there was by crossing those mountains, the highest in the Americas. We couldn't get into Chile by plane or bus or train or car, with Mami and Bob on the blacklist, so I figured we were headed there on foot. That night we redid our packs, making room for a few litres of water in canteens and a new pot to cook the quinoa in. At four the next morning, Bob woke us up, and we ran to the station and jumped on the train to the trailhead just as it was leaving.

The Inca trail was actually about twenty thousand miles long, Bob explained, but we took the stretch that led right to Machu Picchu. Bob was happier than I'd ever seen him as we set off up the towering mountain, whistling with his pack, stopping to admire the unbelievable beauty around us while he took a sip from his canteen. We were covered in dirt and sweat within minutes. In places the trail was only a sliver, and one wrong move would send you rolling down into the river hundreds of feet below. Ale spent most of the day crying, with Mami calling encouragement from behind. We pitched our tent that night under millions and millions of stars. It made my mother very emotional. “These are our mountains, Carmencita, these are our stars,” she kept saying. As we hugged by the fire, I felt proud that I belonged to the Andes too. The Urubamba River shone like silver at the bottom of the world.

We climbed and climbed for the next three days. Once I got lost, surging too far ahead of the others, but Bob rescued me with the help of two Quechua men. I wrapped my legs around his waist and he carried me, backpack and all, up the trail to where my mother and Ale waited. The night before we reached Machu Picchu, we camped in an abandoned Inca city made of stone, bonfires burning around us. Bob told us that the city had been deserted hundreds of years before, during the time of the Conquest. The courtyards and houses and stairways were now open to the stars, which were the size of light bulbs in the ebony sky. A group of Austrians joined us for a chat while a family of twenty Indians set a table with starched white tablecloths and gleaming silver forks.

I'd been the first to spot the group that afternoon. Rounding a corner of the trail, I'd seen a little army carrying tables, chairs, mattresses and trunks on their backs, winding their way along the side of the mountain. Even the youngest, a girl about four, was carrying a pillow. Her shoes had no laces, which made her ankles twist. Like the others, she chewed vigorously on a ball of coca leaves. The oldest woman, who looked about a hundred, transported an enormous pot on her back, secured with ropes. She grunted as she climbed. One of the Indian men walked with a giggling Austrian woman in his arms, sweat pouring down his back in a perfect stream. The rest of the Austrians were pointing at the scenery, putting their palms to their hearts before clicking away with their cameras.

The Austrians feasted at the table while the Indian family squatted around a bonfire, sucking on corncobs and drinking chicha morada and chicha amarilla, liquor made from purple and yellow corn. We'd pitched our tent close to theirs, and when Mami said it was time to get water from the stream at the bottom of the abandoned city, Bob stayed behind, sharing cigarettes and jokes with the Indian family.

There was a full moon lighting our passage, and my knees were wobbly from excitement as we clambered down the steep stone stairs: one of the boys from the Indian family had been peering at me across the fires. His skin was like copper, and he wore an alpaca sweater with little llamas frolicking on it. He carried himself as if he might break into a cumbia at any moment. His eyes were so black you could see the fire reflected in them, two little bonfires blazing away. Halfway down the steps made by his ancestors, I looked back, and sure enough, there he was, standing at the top, hands in his pockets. When his eyes met mine, I smiled and leaned into one of my hips, just as Olivia Newton-John had done after John Travolta collapsed at the sight of her in Grease.

But I'd leaned too far, because now I was rolling down the stairs. My head made knocking sounds against the stone. I tried to stop myself, but it was no use. I remembered what my father had told me about gravity: sometimes you just had to give in and let it pull you down. Hikers came running toward the steps from all over the abandoned city, yelling in a variety of languages. I landed like a flopping fish, then leapt to my feet, brushed off my knees and resumed my Sandy stance. I looked for the boy, but he was no longer at the top. I never saw him again. He left with the other men in his family the next day before dawn, carrying the furniture in order to get a head start.

THE TRACKS WE were following led to Quillabamba, a jungle town on the edge of the river. The Urubamba River was brown like chocolate here, and banana trees lined its shores. We'd started out on the train, but when it broke down and nobody came to fix it, we climbed out the window and started to walk. Hours passed as we trudged along with our backpacks. Bob kept the wild dogs at bay with sticks. We still made it to town faster than the train, which arrived so late at night that we'd already eaten, bathed and gone to bed. But one of the passengers from the train started running through the streets, yelling that the Sandinistas had just won the revolution in Nicaragua, so we got up again and went out to a local bar. We ordered Inca Kolas and beer and then sat without uttering a word so Mami and Bob could hear what people were saying. The Sandinista National Liberation Front had been fighting for almost twenty years. They'd named themselves after Augusto César Sandino, leader of the resistance against the U.S. occupation in the 1930s, and they'd finally overthrown the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza. Against all odds, another socialist revolution had won in Latin America—the second, after Cuba, in the twentieth century. Mami and Bob could hardly contain their joy. When we did a secret toast, their eyes were filled with tears. “To the Sandinistas,” my mother whispered. “To bread and dignity for everyone.” I beamed with pride to be part of it. Ale yawned over and over again.