“Don’t be sorry,” my mother said. “None of this is your fault. None of this is any of our faults.”
As I watched the cluster of brick and mud that made up the city grow closer and closer, my mother vomited into her hat.
I could barely hear anything above the rattle and roar of the train. Again the ground was moving under my feet. Again I swayed above it. I wanted the earth to be still. I wanted something firm underneath me. I wanted an anchor.
Once we had rolled slowly to a stop, all three of us stumbled as we rose from our seats and started toward the doors. We had arrived somewhere after all. A few metal steps and then—
My feet touched the top of the world.
* * *
• • •
THIS COULD NOT be the same sky. This could not be the same earth.
My eyes burned. Never had I seen a sun so stark or felt such force. The sun back home had been a weak and benign presence that had to be coaxed out of the clouds. It touched us gently, stroked our hair, warmed our fingers. But the sun of La Paz was all naked aggression; I worried it would blind me. How could the sky be so bright when the air was so cold?
It took a moment for our eyes to take in the landscape—the city and the vast bowl that cradled it. There were jagged cliffs, deep canyons, and mountains in every direction. I could spend all day staring around and not absorb it all. What an odd place to build a city, in mountains so high, in air hardly thick enough to sustain life. It sprawled down the rough sides of a valley, as if a local deity had tripped on its way to more fertile ground and had spilled a bit of metropolis over the edge. I gazed across the crater of the city and up the range of naked peaks on the other side, to the snow-covered slopes of the most beautiful peak of all.
“What’s its name?” I asked, pointing to it.
My mother shook her head, but a small, dark man who had been sitting across from us on the train followed the direction of my finger. “Illimani,” he said. “Se llama Illimani.”
“Ill-ih-mahni.” I rolled the word across my tongue. So much faded in the shadow of that great peak; so much was restored.
The buildings were shabby in such majestic company. Among the mud-brick huts were scattered half-finished square houses of red brick and ugly, round-edged modern apartment buildings. These homely structures were huddled so close together that I could see the tiny roofs of nearly every building all at once. Vienna had to be absorbed piecemeal, one street, one building, one canal at a time. While the population of La Paz was only an eighth of Vienna’s nearly two million, the mountains gave the city a gravitas and scale that even the mansions of the Ringstrasse failed to evoke.
My eyes remained on Illimani. Hers was a savage kind of beauty, not the gentler, eroded beauty of our mountains. The mountains of La Paz had no need for admiration from us, mere ants clinging to the hems of their skirts.
If I had felt small gazing up at our ship in Italy, I felt a thousand times smaller now.
Third Movement
LA PAZ
Twenty-six
It makes sense that our Bolivian story began, like that of so many foreigners in the country, with food poisoning. After we emerged from the train in La Paz we stood on wobbling legs, gulping mouthfuls of thin air. I searched the crowds for my brother, Willi. Maybe he had arrived in Bolivia before us, because he left Austria first. Surely he had already gotten out of Switzerland. But the crowds before us were empty. A crown of pain tightened around my head. I wanted Willi. I wanted to lie down. I wanted water.
Across from the station was a woman like no woman I had ever seen. As round as an onion, she appeared to be wearing many bell-shaped skirts all at once. This woman—I can still picture her because she was the first Bolivian I saw after stepping off the train—wore a turquoise overskirt with tiered ruffles and a purple and turquoise shawl pinned at her collarbone with a gold brooch. Her shiny black hair hung in two long braids, like the hair of a fancy doll. On the middle of her head perched a small bowler hat, so precariously positioned it appeared in danger of flying off at any moment.
I wanted to touch her. “Sie sind hübsch,” I said to this grown-up doll. You are pretty. None of us spoke more than a few words of Spanish. The round woman looked at me, her creased brown face breaking into a smile. She reached out her hands to take my small one between them. Her fingers were hard and smooth. “Que linda,” she told my mother, “que linda su hijita.” My travel-numbed parents just stared at her. Before her was a waist-high wooden cart and a stack of oranges. With a small glass juicer she had been squeezing half oranges into a pitcher before pouring the juice into cups.
Nothing had ever looked as tempting as that juice. Our mouths were parched and it seemed like hours since I had had anything to drink. Months. But when I looked imploringly at my parents my mother shook her head. “Wir haben kein Geld,” she said, turning up her empty palms.
The man who had sat across from us on the train, who was still fiddling with the straps of his suitcase, stepped forward and pressed a crumpled note into the woman’s hand. “Jugo para toda la familia.” My parents, who would normally have refused any kind of charity, didn’t protest. They were as thirsty as I was.
That first taste of Bolivia. That sour sweetness. The sun warming our pale skin as the pulpy juice slid down our throats. The austere beauty of the mountains against the sky, forming a protective ring around us. Dusty children with uncombed hair stared at us. I smiled, the skin of my lips cracking.
“Do you think Willi is here yet?” I touched my mother’s sleeve.
With her hand shielding her pale eyes from the sun, she scanned the city’s silhouette, as if she could find him there. “Probably not.” She and my father had repeatedly reminded me that they didn’t know how long it would have taken him to get a visa and book passage. They didn’t even know how long it had taken my mother’s note containing news of our Bolivian visas to reach him. “We can see if anything has arrived from Violaine.” My mother’s friend had promised to send word from Paris via poste restante once she heard news.
If Willi were with us, he would be holding my hand. He would already have made friends with the orange-juice lady and found a way to communicate with gestures. He would know what to do with our parents, small and stunned against these new mountains.
As we finished our juice and gave the doll-lady back her tin cups, a tall short-haired woman in a navy-blue dress and jacket hurried toward us. “Willkommen! I’m Chani from SOPRO. Austria, Germany, or Poland? Name? Oh yes, the Zingels. We were told to expect you. Is anyone else with you? We’re expecting many more families. You must have all met on the ship. How are you doing with the altitude? Do you mind if we walk to Plaza Murillo—the main square? It’s downhill, don’t worry. I find it’s more pleasant than the buses. But we can find another way if you don’t think you can make it. That’s where our offices are. We’ll take you there and help you sort out your paperwork and fees, then to somewhere you can sleep until you’re on your feet.” She kept talking, hardly leaving room for us to reply, which was fortunate given my sudden, heavy exhaustion and the dryness of my mouth despite the juice. Like a shepherdess, she gathered a group of other refugees and herded us together. We followed her in a ragged line down Avenida de América. It was just as well we had so few possessions to carry. The buildings we passed looked dirty and half built, steel rods sticking out of the brick. I peered curiously into the few shops. Roasting chickens turned slowly on spits in the window of a narrow storefront called Café Restaurant Goliat. The smell made my mouth water.