* * *
• • •
NAYRA HALTED BEFORE a table in a thronged and sprawling market. It was heaped with what I presumed to be dollhouse furniture: tiny rocking chairs, tiny beds, tiny lamps, tiny houses. Each one was smaller than a thumb. “It’s the first day of the festival of Alasitas. It lasts a month but the first day is the luckiest.” Her face was animated, alight. “We make everything miniature. You buy what you want to acquire in the next year. If you want a baby, you buy a fingernail-size doll to take home. If you want to own a home, you buy a little house. Then Ekeko brings you what you want.” It worked best, she added, if you bought the items for yourself and got them blessed by a yatiri. “Your faith will make it possible for it to become reality.”
“You can’t buy something for someone else?”
“Some people do. It helps if you know the person’s strongest desire. My aunt once bought her friend Nina a divorce.”
“Did it work?”
“Nina has a new husband now.”
So much about this market filled me with wonder. I felt I had stumbled into a kind of fairyland. I picked up a tiny radio. Everything about it looked real. “Who is Ekeko?”
“The Aymara god of plenty.” Looking around the market, I began to see his diminutive figure everywhere. Grinning on top of the tables and surrounded by offerings of coca leaves and cigarettes, the mustachioed Ekeko was supposedly working to provide his hosts with their hearts’ fondest desires. His mouth was always open to accommodate a cigarette and he was laden with packages. Some families had Ekeko statues in their home, Nayra said. After you bought the miniature of your heart’s desire, you could place it near Ekeko with coca leaves.
We wandered through the rows of tables, all of them overflowing with mounds of colorful miniatures. Nayra had not exaggerated. There were miniature cars, typewriters, babies, houses, bags of cement, tool kits, chairs, beer cans, suitcases, tables, trains, fruit, diplomas, and certificates.
I was fascinated by the craftsmanship. The little houses had doorbells and gardens. The postage-stamp-size typewriters had letters on every tiny key.
When we came to one of the tables selling certificates, Nayra asked the woman behind the table something I didn’t understand. The woman nodded and rummaged around in the stacks of certificates. “Mira,” she said to me, offering a tiny piece of paper.
Holding it carefully by its edges, I read, Certificado de Defunción. Death Certificate. The name and date of death were blank. “You fill it in and the person will die.”
I stared at the paper in my hands.
“You could write Nazis on it.” Nayra waited.
Bile rose to the back of my throat. Though I had asked for that kind of power, I found now I did not want it. I could not turn myself into an instrument of death. I dropped the paper back onto the table.
Nayra looked at me. “No?”
“No money.” I wiped my hands on my skirt, as if trying to brush off a fatal contagion. “What do you ask for?”
“We ask for good vegetables, a good harvest. We buy tiny beans and sacks of potatoes. We get good vegetables.”
“Just vegetables? Every year?” The modesty of her request intrigued me. That she wouldn’t wish for money, a way to escape work. A new skirt. Perhaps wanting things was Austrian. She nodded. “Without vegetables, we have nothing.”
I nodded slowly. “But besides the vegetables. What about you? What do you want?” She didn’t hesitate then—there was a difference, clearly, between what she asked for every year and what she wanted. For the first time, she took my hand and pulled me through the market. Her hand was warmer than mine, with soft skin over her knuckles. My hands were always rough and dry, my cuticles peeling away and bleeding. Sometimes a finger would get infected and swell like a sausage for a month, until one of my mother’s remedies finally fought it off.
If Nayra hadn’t been holding on to me, I might have been lost among the families pushing past me down rows of stalls that all looked alike. We walked by women frying bread in oil and roasting corn on a grill. Women pressing oranges into juice. My dry mouth watered.
At the end of the market, Nayra stopped at a woodworker’s stall. In the corner of the table was a tiny wooden loom made of two sticks with strings connecting them, complete with a shuttle the size of a grain of rice. “It’s a backstrap loom,” Nayra told me. “You can move it more easily than the other kind.” She showed me how one stick could be tied to a tree or a pole and the other attached to the weaver’s belt. “Like my grandmother’s loom. She is teaching me.” On the loom was a half-completed tapestry woven from woolen threads of red and black. Alpaca, perhaps, or vicuña. I thought I could make out birds, or tiny human figures. I reached for it, felt the softness of the fibers. “I have no time to weave now,” Nayra said. “What I want is some day to have time. To make my own designs.”
We stood there for a while, admiring it. “I want to weave the stars,” Nayra continued. “There are women who can weave designs that show the Great Road in the sky and the Grandfather Star.”
“You can weave the stars?”
“You must first see them from a special place, a pukara, at a special time, then you can learn to weave them. We do this in October, sowing time. The time that the earth and the sky are talking the most.”
“Does the sky look different then?”
“It’s the best time to see the Goat-kids, and the Eyes of the Llama. Haven’t you ever watched the stars move?”
I tried to remember the skies over Vienna. “You mean shooting stars?”
She didn’t answer. “When the mountains breathe out the stars. The stars tell us the best time to do things. When it is time to mate the llamas, or to plant seeds. There must also be a full moon.” She sighed, weary of my questions. “There is too much for me to explain.”
“Bueno.” It was becoming clear to me that I knew astonishingly little about the world. “Maybe someday you can tell me more.”
“Maybe someday. Today I have to go back to work.”
* * *
• • •
I WALKED HOME with tiny llamas trotting around my brain. I couldn’t believe such a magical festival existed. It was exactly the kind of thing that would exist in Friedenglückhasenland. I loved to imagine the Black Llama in the sky and a Grandfather Star. It all seemed dreamed up, as if Nayra had created a world as enchanting and mysterious as Friedenglückhasenland.
New stories were rising in me.
* * *
• • •
AT HOME THAT NIGHT, I tried to write down these new stories, but my German was starting to sound stiff and unnatural. We still spoke German at home, and within our community, but I was beginning to prefer the softer sounds of Spanish. Were it not for my need to maintain a sturdy bridge to my parents, who never quite became themselves in their new tongue, I might have given up the corset of German entirely.