Miguel had more pelis than anyone.
* * *
• • •
ONE EVENING Miguel took me to see Rebecca. We had seen it before, and I had been mesmerized by the housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers. The rigidity of her profile and the cruelty of her calculations reminded me of our Austrian neighbors when they became Germans.
Hitchcock had changed the ending. Rebecca dies in an accident rather than at the hands of her husband as she did in the book, which I had read on the ship. It interested me that even without actually killing anyone, Maxim de Winter remained menacing. His need to control and belittle the women in his life, his way of suffocating them, was as effective as bloodshed. As deserving—I thought—of punishment.
“Now I know what I don’t want in a husband,” I joked to Miguel after our first viewing. But he hadn’t found Maxim evil. “It was Rebecca who caused it all,” he insisted. “She was the wicked one.” We argued about it for the entire afternoon, and agreed to see it again to bolster our respective cases.
That evening, the screen was already crackling to life as we slipped into our seats. Every film at the Cine Teatro Tesla began with a newsreel, one more way we kept up with the atrocities going on across the ocean. We were a noisy audience, greeting every mention of the Allies with cheers, every mention of the Nazis with derogatory whistles. It felt good to cheer, it felt optimistic. As if we were actually urging the Allies on to victory.
Tonight, the newsreel announced Germany’s invasion of Denmark. I tried to think of what countries might be left for Willi. I hoped he was still in Switzerland. Why wouldn’t he come? Could anything but Nazis keep him from us? Miguel and I whistled furiously, and I was comforted by the whistles of others around us. But then, from a seat not too far back, came a familiar cry. “Heil Hitler!”
My skin went hot. Fear pinned me to the seat.
Miguel was instantly on his feet, searching the crowd in back of us. “Heil Hitler!” came the voice again. By then I had risen to my feet as well. The teenage boy who had uttered the hateful words leered at me. “Go home, Jews!”
He had said it in German, but Miguel had understood. He started up the aisle toward the Nazi boy and his friends, but a group of Jewish boys beat him there. The one in front swung a fist at the Nazi. I stared. A Jew beating up a Nazi.
It was difficult to keep track after that. The audience was in uproar, watching the boys attack each other, cheering on both sides. Miguel joined in with enthusiasm, an act that won him newfound respect in our community. Despite the terror I felt hearing that Fascist echo of Austria, I was suffused with a giddy euphoria watching Jews defend themselves. I hoped there were not more Nazis waiting in the wings, rolling up in tanks outside the theater. But maybe here, we had a fighting chance.
Forty
On weekends, I woke early and went alone to the market to see Nayra, though she was often too busy to talk. The Aymara were at least as reluctant to befriend foreigners as the foreigners were to befriend them. It took me weeks of persistent effort to get Nayra to look at me, weeks longer to get her to speak more than a few syllables. Aymara people are shy, Miguel reminded me. They won’t want to be friends with you. When I pointed out that he was friends with me, he said, “Just half of me.” And laughed.
It was difficult for me to understand why the majority of Bolivians—people native to the country like the Aymara and Quechua—would not have the same rights that the paler Spanish descendants had. The Indians were not even considered full citizens, Miguel told me. Despite my own experience with insensible divisions, this explicit segregation bewildered me.
So I met Nayra standing before dirty pyramids of yucca, potatoes, and cañahua.
There were different rules for the Indians. If they had Indian names, like Mamani or Quispe, they were simply not admitted to school. If the girls wore the traditional clothes of the cholas, they were not admitted to school. Once I asked Nayra to come to the movies with us and she said she was not allowed. “Your mother?” I asked. But she shook her head. “Bolivia does not allow us.” And I thought, Just as Austria did not allow me. The connections were everywhere.
The Aymara, Quechua, and other native populations were not allowed in the front seats of the tram. Indian children were expected to work, not to study and learn to read. When you were walking on a sidewalk and an Indian was coming the other way, the Indian was expected to step down. I could not do this, could not force an Indian to yield to me. I was always stepping down no matter who was coming toward me and I cringed when I saw my fellow Jews allow this humiliation to occur. Had we forgotten how it felt?
Some Indians worked as maids for the richer Bolivians or the Europeans. Everyone wanted to work for the Europeans, Nayra told me. They paid better and did not whip their servants. “People whip their servants?” The thought of anyone laying a hand on Nayra fueled my outrage. An image of Anneliese’s scars flashed through my mind. But Nayra just looked at me impatiently, as if I were an idiot younger sister. How could I understand so little of the world?
The richer white Bolivians all had servants, usually Indian girls. None of the Austrians did in those first few years. Still, hiring a maid cost almost nothing, sometimes just room and board. That’s why so many immigrant families eventually hired empleadas. Once my father was teaching and my mother was consistently selling Austrian pastries, we had enough to pay the pittance that maids demanded. But my mother wanted no strangers in our home. She had had enough of strangers in her home.
* * *
• • •
ONE AFTERNOON, I took Rachel to the market to meet Nayra. She wouldn’t make fun of an Aymara girl. She never made fun of anyone. In that way, she reminded me of Anneliese. She gave a grave little curtsy when I introduced her to Nayra, who looked bewildered by the gesture. I don’t think she was accustomed to foreigners being interested in her at all other than as a means to her vegetables. I also had the feeling that perhaps she was not as interested in me and Rachel as we were in her.
We wanted her to teach us Aymara so we could speak with her in her own tongue. Besides, it was pretty. Everything sounded like the names of flowers. She initially resisted the idea, being both busy and reserved, but our persistence wore her down. While her mother was chatting with customers, she beckoned us behind their vegetable towers and squatted with her hands spread out before her. “Maya, paya, kimsa, pusi,” she showed us, counting out the numbers on her fingers.
In return, she asked that we help her with her Spanish. “It would help my mother,” she said.
“But you know Spanish.” She almost always understood her customers’ requests.
“Not so much for talking.” What Nayra lacked was not the words themselves, but the confidence to speak them aloud.
We started with vegetables. The potatoes had so many different names I got confused. There were dozens and dozens of kinds! More kinds of potatoes than I had ever seen in my life. And each one was a different color and size and shape, with a different name. Some of them looked like fat fingers, some like radishes, some had strange roots trailing off them. I didn’t know the Spanish names for all of them. I just called them papas.