We were sitting on the steps outside the San Francisco church, watching the pigeons and eating puffed corn that Miguel called pasankallas. I didn’t quite understand the appeal of this popular snack food, which tasted rubbery and stale. I was happy to let the pigeons have it.
“My father is dead.” Miguel opened a sticky palm to drop the remaining puffs back into the bag. This immediately derailed my anger. It rarely occurred to me—though it should have—that Bolivians had their own tragedies.
In fact, Miguel had been telling me this in a dozen subtle ways for a very long time. I wondered why I hadn’t questioned him about his father before. Perhaps it was the same reason he avoided asking me more about Willi. We were both afraid of touching a place of pain.
I was ashamed I had bragged so much about my own father. “What happened?”
“He had a farm in Los Yungas. He wanted to grow more things than he could grow by the lake. I was born there. Everyone but Ema was born there. My father is why I am so dark.” It was true Miguel was darker than other Bolivians in our neighborhood, though not as dark as Nayra. His mother was paler than all her children and hazel-eyed, of Spanish descent. “He grew chirimoyas and guava, sometimes palta.” Palta, that glorious green orb that had transformed my opinion of vegetables. “It was a good farm. Sometimes my father took the fruit to La Paz himself, on the new road. One day when he was driving back . . . Entonces, we call it Camino de la Muerte for this reason.”
“I thought it was called that because so many people died making the road?” I had heard about the Camino de la Muerte. Paraguayan prisoners had carved the skinny shelf of a road into the sides of steep mountains about five years ago, during the Chaco War. Lots of prisoners died in the process, but exactly how many depended on whom you asked.
“They were the first to die, true. But the road has continued to earn its name.”
I nodded, hoping he would go on.
“It was the only way to travel from Los Yungas to La Paz. Or to go the other way.”
To get to the road, you had to first climb from the city another three thousand feet to La Cumbre before plunging down toward Coroico. The dirt road skirted the edge of the lush green mountains, arriving at last in the forests of Los Yungas. Looking away from the road for even a millisecond meant near-certain death for the driver and everyone else in the car, which would tumble through the thickening air to be buried in tangled vines. Hundreds of people had already died on this road, but the devastation represented by this statistic was not clear to me until I knew Miguel’s father was among them.
“Did someone crash into him?” Parts of the road were only ten feet wide, Miguel had told me. If two vehicles approached one of these stretches at the same time, one of them would have to back down. And if staying on it going forward was difficult, staying on it going backward along the edge of a cliff required a feat of vehicular acrobatics.
He shrugged. “We don’t know. Maybe he fell asleep? It was late. He had been working at the farm all day. It took them months to find his truck.”
I shuddered at the image of Miguel’s father’s truck tumbling down through the air. If he had been asleep, I hoped he had not woken up before he hit the ground.
“When?”
He shrugged. “Three years ago? We moved in with my grandfather in La Paz after that.” Miguel looked anxious to change the subject. “And last year we moved here. My point is that this doesn’t keep me from being fun.”
I nodded, to show him I understood. But he clarified anyway. “It’s not me who’s dead.”
* * *
• • •
THINGS HAD BEGUN to change between Miguel and me after Rachel came and I started classes. I now had a world without him. Rachel came over after school to do homework with me, leaving little time for thunka. Most of my classmates weren’t comfortable with Spanish and I was reluctant to share Miguel with them. Few of my schoolmates had Bolivian friends, and no one even considered trying to make friends with the Indians. “They’re too different,” they said. Or, “I hear they don’t wash their hands.” When they saw me talking with Nayra in the market, they stared. Maybe they had already been forced into more contact with difference than they could handle. They hadn’t asked to come here. They hadn’t asked to be removed from the comfortable vernacular of their home. Refusing to adapt was one way to exert control over their lives.
I bristled at their prejudices, though perhaps I might have shared them had I not had the good fortune to live in Miguel’s house. Had I not known him and his sisters. I wondered if we had come all this way, escaping a whole continent of people who saw no place for us in their vision of a single race, only to close ranks and turn on those who looked different from us. I did not want to remain an outsider, as we all so clearly were, forever. I wanted to belong here.
Most of my classmates assumed this was not a permanent move. Someday, when the Nazis were gone, the more forgiving planned to move back to Austria or Germany. The rest would find somewhere more hospitable, the United States, Canada, or the more developed countries of South America. Countries where it was easier to breathe. Sarah told me her mother couldn’t wait to get back to Austria, “where there was culture.” Here in Bolivia, Sarah said with a disdainful lift of her chin, there were no literary salons, symphony orchestras, operas, or theater. “It’s just fiestas. All they have are fiestas. All these people do is dance in the street, chew coca, or drink.” Although I knew she was parroting her mother’s words—not so different from the words of my own mother—I couldn’t help hating her for them.
Rachel was an exception. Rachel’s only verb tense was present. She could never return to the life she had had in Austria. I never heard her say anything unkind. She didn’t talk much at all.
* * *
• • •
MY CLASSMATES WERE more accepting of Miguel than of Nayra, simply because he was paler—pale enough to be allowed to walk through Plaza Murillo, to go to school, and to accompany me to the movies. The Bolivians, I observed, sorted themselves by color and did not like to mix with people whose skin tone didn’t match theirs. Maybe we did the same thing; I couldn’t remember spending time in Vienna with people who didn’t look like us.
While I didn’t have as much time to spend with Miguel, we still went to the matinees at the Tesla most weekends, to see the westerns that were Miguel’s favorite. Afterward, we would go to the store near our house where you could buy pelis. They didn’t cost much; they were something that we could buy without further impoverishing our families. We held them to the light and competed to see who could be first to identify the film it came from. Union Pacific. Drums Along the Mohawk. Destry Rides Again. I never got the westerns right—all those men on horseback looked the same to me. We traded them and made up games to play. Miguel would stick a peli in his science textbook, and then his siblings and I would slip ours in, trying to get it between the same pages. If we succeeded in inserting our peli in the same place as his, we got to take his peli. If we slipped ours into an empty page, we lost it to him.