“More,” insisted Nayra.
I shook my head.
“In your language then, what are they?”
“Erdäpfel.”
Nayra was silent, waiting for more words. “That’s it,” I said.
“For all of them?” she asked in astonishment. “Every kind?”
Our own language suddenly felt limited, insufficient for describing the subtleties of the world around us.
Nayra came from a village up near the lake. Lakes to me meant summer resorts and bathing, waterfront cafés and sandy beaches. But when I had asked Nayra if she swam, she had laughed. “It’s not that kind of lake.”
“You can’t swim?”
“You can, if you are loca. Or a fish. But if you stay in more than a few minutes under the surface you will die of cold.”
Some of my schoolmates had been up to the lake. When I asked Sarah and other girls about it, they confirmed Nayra’s assessment. Too cold to swim. Too cold even to picnic beside it, though many families tried. Some even rented boats to travel across to its islands. “It’s as big as an ocean,” my deskmate Sarah told me. “You can’t see the other side. And sometimes you have to take a raft to get across parts of it.”
I wanted to see it for myself, but it didn’t seem likely that Nayra would invite me for a visit. The Indians never invited us to their homes. Besides, it was hours away. You had to take a truck or a bus or a donkey. Nayra stayed much of the time with family in the La Paz neighborhood of Chijini, uphill from us, so she could get to work.
There were so many kinds of Bolivians, each belonging to her own specific geography, jungles or high, cold lakes or semitropical hills. Every mountain, every curve of a river held a pocket of people said to be so entirely different from those on the other side that they didn’t seem to be from the same country. I wondered if the people in all of the parts of Austria I had never seen were as different from each other. I might never find out.
“Can we have Nayra to dinner?” I asked my parents. My mother, who spent so much time with Wayra and who was always hospitable to my friends—even allowing Miguel to join us for meals when we had enough food—hesitated. She looked at my father, whose head was bent over sheet music he’d found in a local shop. “Do you know what she eats?”
I shrugged. “Potatoes, I guess?”
My mother nodded in her newly vague way. “Potatoes I could do. But will she come?”
It was much harder to convince Nayra to come to our apartment than it was to convince my parents to have her. She shook her head every time I asked, for months. When I asked Miguel why she wouldn’t come, he said that Indians never mixed with white people or foreigners, and we were both.
I didn’t give up. Nayra’s presence comforted me in a unique way. She never asked questions. She didn’t force explanations from me. Unlike Miguel, she didn’t even try to find out what Austria was like. Nothing about her reminded me of home. She had never heard of Austria. When I talked to Nayra we rarely said anything that would sound significant to a stranger. But oh, how significant it was to me to sit with someone who asked nothing of me. She didn’t even ask for my friendship. I had to drag her into it.
* * *
• • •
WHEN NAYRA FINALLY agreed to come to our rooms—perhaps simply to stop my incessant invitations—my parents were kind. They gave her our best chair, the only one with a back, and offered her everything first. Nayra sat stiffly on the edge of her seat, keeping her eyes lowered as she whispered responses we could barely hear. When food was served, she bent over her fried potatoes, eating quickly. Only when my mother began asking her—using me to translate—what kinds of things her family grew on their land by the lake did she seem to forget her shyness.
“Only certain things grow there. It’s cold and the soil is not so rich. We have potatoes and beans. Some others grow corn, but we are better at potatoes.” She looked hungrily at her empty plate and my mother refilled it.
“How much land do you have?”
“We don’t own the land.”
My father leaned forward, curious. “Who owns the land?”
“A mestizo. A rich man.”
“But you live on it?”
“We work it. My family does. Other families too. Campesinos can’t own land.” Her tone was matter-of-fact. This was how her world worked.
We sat in silence for a moment. I didn’t know how to address this newly discovered injustice.
My father changed the subject. “What does the lake look like?”
Nayra glanced toward him, then up at our stained ceiling. “It’s a mirror of the sky, almost as big. Around it are the mountains, the highest ones with snow. It’s where everything begins, the top of the earth.” The islands in the lake gave birth to the sun, the moon, and the stars, she told us. The boats and buildings in some of the villages were made from rushes that float on the surface of the water. The water was full of tiny fish called karachi that her family fried for lunch.
“Mostly I am living in Chijini now,” she concluded. “It’s closer to the market. I go back to the lake only for holidays, for fiestas.”
I listened, rapt. Lake Titicaca sounded mythical, a place where only gods could live.
My parents had also fallen silent.
“Where do you go to school?” my mother asked. Reluctantly, I translated. Didn’t my mother know anything?
“I don’t.” Nayra swallowed and set down her mug. She had kept on her little hat, and I noticed a small tin animal was pinned to the brim. “I work.”
“I see.” My mother nodded. “And your father? He works?”
“He’s in the Colquiri mine.” Many of the men we knew worked for the mining companies. Bolivia had immense mineral wealth, largely in tin, tungsten, and silver. But the mines were dangerous. In the labyrinths within Cerro Rico de Potosí, the legendary mountain once home to the world’s largest veins of silver, miners were always dying in accidents or from lung diseases.
“Her father knows how to make boats too. Nayra says he made one with the head of a puma on it, with fangs.”
“How clever!” My mother’s smile looked strained.
Nayra continued to eat her potatoes. I was ashamed that I didn’t even know what kind they were. I wanted to ask Nayra but was worried I would sound stupid. She was always astonished when I didn’t know basic things like the names of the many magnificent peaks around us. How could I not be able to name the components of this world?
My father sipped at a cup of coca tea and hummed a bit of Mahler’s “Erinnerung.”