When I finally knew enough to grasp the essence of Miguel’s questions, and he asked me why we came to Bolivia, I didn’t know where to start. Sitting in the dust in front of our house, I sent a rock skittering across the road.
“Nowhere else would take us.”
“But why did you have to leave where you are from?” He squatted in front of me, offering me another stone. We were playing thunka.
“We’re Jewish.” I tossed the rock on Tuesday.
Miguel frowned. “What is Jewish?”
“It’s our religion.” One hop, two.
“¿Entonces . . . ?” And so?
“So . . . most people don’t like Jews over there.” I handed him the rock. He turned it over in his hands.
“Why?”
I shrugged. I had no answer. “Isn’t there anyone here people don’t like?”
Miguel looked thoughtful. “I guess some people don’t like Indians very much,” he finally said.
“Indians?” Keeping one foot off the ground, I remembered the things people had said on the ship about Indians. That they were dirty and strange, maybe violent.
“You know, like the Aymara, the people from the highlands. From the lake. Or the Quechua. My father was Aymara, but he moved to Coroico to grow fruit and coca.” Intrigued by the idea of highlands, I overlooked his use of the past tense when describing his father. There were people living higher than La Paz? Not possible.
“Why don’t people like the Indians?”
He threw the rock and imitated my shrug. “Because we Indians were here first?”
* * *
• • •
AT THE END of our second week in his house, Miguel took my mother and me to the market. Mathilde offered to take us, but I wanted to go with someone who would be able to explain things.
“Miguel will know what things should cost,” I reasoned.
“How will he tell us?” My mother wasn’t yet sure of Miguel. “I understand Mathilde.”
“I understand him, Mutti. At least some of the time. He’s nice.” When the skin of her forehead did not relax, I continued. “Mutti. Would you want a French person to guide you around Austria?”
* * *
• • •
AS MIGUEL AND I walked together, chattering and waving our hands, my mother followed silently behind. I wished she could be like she always had been with Anneliese: inviting, interested. Why couldn’t she at least try? I wanted her to be nice to my friend. I wanted her to try some Spanish words. For years she had been singing in Italian, French, and German. Spanish should have been easy.
We passed little stores with battered signs reading TIENDA ANA MARÍA or TIENDA MARISABEL. Like every store was named after someone’s aunt. At the side of the street I saw a pile of something that looked remarkably like human excrement. “Is that—?”
Miguel shrugged.
I glanced back at my mother, hoping she would not see, that her views of Bolivia would not be made still darker. Yet I couldn’t suppress my own revulsion. It was hard to believe I would ever adjust to the fecal stink of the open sewers that ran along some of the streets. Paving stones glistened with urine and gobs of greenish spit. Every time we took a walk we returned covered with dust. I shared my mother’s horror at the lidless bin next to the toilet for discarded toilet paper. All that stained, festering paper sitting around in the open air. In Austria, bodily functions had been a private matter. But here, we were continually confronted with our animal reality.
A quarter of an hour after we set out, the Mercado Camacho opened before us. Row after row of woven blankets spread on the ground displayed vegetables, fruit, coca leaves, and maize as well as many things I didn’t recognize. Selling these things were the people Miguel called Indians, who were mostly Aymara like his father. They included the cholitas, those many-skirted women with the long braids and bowler hats. Busily they stacked their earth-crusted potatoes and cucumbers for our inspection, babies strapped to their backs with brightly colored cloth Miguel called aguayo. The babies stared at me over their mothers’ shoulders with round, brown eyes.
They had come from the semitropical Yungas Valley or from the plains around Lake Titicaca to sell their produce in La Paz. Their men wore thick woolen ponchos and hats with flaps that came down over their ears. In their hands they carried pouches of green coca leaves. Their calloused feet were nearly bare in sandals that appeared to be fashioned from automobile tires.
I stopped in front of a display of mangoes and other fruits, amazed to discover so many unfamiliar shapes. There were lumpy green fruits that Miguel called chirimoyas, little round guavas with pink flesh inside, like the ones I had seen in the port of La Guaira, Venezuela, where our ship had stopped on our way here, and gourd-shaped papayas. “Mutti, look!” I reached for a pearlike yellow fruit.
“Membrillo,” Miguel told us. I shook my head. Not a word I recognized. “And here, maracuyás. Good, but sour.” He pursed his lips so I would understand the word.
The vegetables were less exciting; carrots, peppers, tomatoes, and garlic were all familiar. I stopped again, however, when I saw the rough green skins of what I now know are avocados, looking to Miguel for explanation.
“Palta,” he said. He spoke to the woman selling them and she cut one open for me to see. The inside was creamy and green. With her knife, the woman sliced a bit of the flesh for me to taste.
The buttery smoothness on my tongue was a revelation. After that initial encounter, I bought them every time we could afford them. My favorite lunch was an avocado with a spoon to scoop out its insides. I felt I could never again live anywhere that did not grow avocados.
“If we ever have a garden, I want to grow an avocado tree!”
Miguel laughed. “You think these grow in La Paz?” Almost all the palta, all of the fruit, came to La Paz from the hot, wet lowlands, he explained. Mostly from around Coroico, a village in Los Yungas. They came to La Paz on trucks, or on the backs of men. I wondered if I would ever see these distant jungles, mythical sources of water and oxygen.
My mother shopped cautiously, purchasing only fruit with peels that she scrubbed with vigor and rinsed with boiled water in the hope that any contamination would not seep inside. Allowing Miguel to negotiate her purchases, she carefully selected plátanos, which looked like bananas but were starchy and bland; tamarindos, which came in brown pods; tuna (cactus fruit with prickly skin); and mangoes, fruits that were either a luxury or unheard of in Vienna.
As we wandered through the market, we passed men sitting at street corners, playing music on sets of wooden pipes. The women, it seemed, did most of the selling.