It occurred to me that Spanish could give me the freedom to write whatever I wanted. Neither of my parents could read Spanish well. They didn’t help me with my homework. And while they understood enough Spanish now to do the shopping and greet acquaintances, they didn’t bother learning to write it. To whom would they write in Spanish? All of their letters went to Austria.
I began to scratch out my thoughts in a journal. It was a relief, to put everything there, on the pages. Thinking I should start from the beginning, I began with Anneliese. I began with our imagined world and its sensible laws, its generous inhabitants. For weeks I wrote our stories, every scrap of them I could remember—in Spanish. Anneliese’s face came back to me, its sternness when I once accidentally referred to our land of bunnies as imaginary. “There is no point in even talking about it with you if you don’t really believe,” she said.
So I did.
* * *
• • •
I WANDERED THE STREETS of the Alasitas markets in January 1941 every chance I could, after school and on the weekends, alone or with Rachel, Miguel, or Nayra, admiring the tiny things. For Rachel I bought little colored books. Rachel was easy.
My own desire was most difficult. One day I stopped again at a table covered with stacks of miniature documents. The stout woman behind the table sat impassively as I thumbed through the piles of marriage certificates, birth certificates, and diplomas. “Do you have a certificate for being alive?” I asked her. “For surviving the war?”
She shook her head. As I turned to go, she said, “We have visas! Visas for Argentina, Brazil, visas for the U.S. . . .”
I turned back. “Visas for Bolivia?”
She looked confused. “You have no visa for Bolivia?”
“No—I mean, yes, I do. But for my brother.”
She shook her head. “No one here needs a visa for Bolivia.”
“He’s not here.” I realized I sounded absurd. I didn’t know how to explain.
She just shook her head.
“No, gracias.” What good were visas to anywhere else? Willi would never find us if we moved again. All I wanted was for him to be here.
* * *
• • •
MIGUEL CAME WITH ME one day after school. “Why don’t you buy a health certificate for Willi? If he’s healthy then he is alive, no?”
I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of this. I had seen the health certificates without registering their import. Using a few of the coins I earned from occasional child minding after school, I bought Willi a tiny health certificate. Squatting on the ground near the table, I took a pencil from my schoolbag and filled out the certificate with his name. The lines for the yatiri’s blessing, the ch’alla, were long, but we waited. We watched as he waved smoke over the certificate, sprinkled it with bright orange flower petals.
With the health certificate tucked into my schoolbooks, I wound my way back through the tables until I found a woman selling tiny looms. Most of the objects were inexpensive, less than a boliviano. I bought one for Nayra, along with several balls of colored wool. Miguel trailed behind me, stopping to examine university certificates and wheelbarrows that came with tiny bags of cement. “Most people want building materials.”
“Do you?” This did not seem a very romantic desire, but I supposed it was quite practical. If you had building materials you could make a home.
“We have a house. I would like some land, I think.”
I wanted to get him something that might express what he was to me. I didn’t want to give him the obvious things everyone bought for each other, the little brown suitcases of money, the parcels of miniature tools. At a woodworker’s stall I fingered tiny carvings of llamas, people, the sun, and the moon. The sun was painted yellow and orange, with lightning-jagged rays of wood sticking out in all directions, reminding me of Miguel’s tousled hair first thing in the morning when I found him outside. When he was distracted, I paid with a coin and slipped it into my pocket.
* * *
• • •
I BROUGHT THE HEALTH CERTIFICATE home to show my parents. “It might work better if we have an Ekeko.” When I explained about the god and the offerings, my father agreed to go back to the market with me. “Maybe they have little Stradivariuses.” The workmanship of the tiny objects entranced my father, who turned them over in his hands in wonder. He liked the pocket-size newspapers, with their satirical stories, the best.
“Nayra says they ask for good health and vegetables, and they almost always have good health and vegetables.” I wanted to believe in something. Anything at all. After we had wandered among the tables for an hour, my father went back to a stall near the entrance and bought an Ekeko who fit into my hand. His grinning mouth was open, awaiting the offering of tobacco, and he wore a belt of tiny bolivianos.
“Danke, Vati!”
“Don’t get your hopes up,” he said. “It’s just a doll.” I was indignant. I was too old for dolls.
“The Bolivians say he’s a god.”
“It seems odd that we should have to pay for a god.” But he smiled at me.
On the way back I collected whole coca leaves from the streets where the careless had dropped them—they weren’t difficult to find. All of the builders and laborers we passed in the streets carried small bags of the leaves, which they chewed as they worked. I stood Ekeko on my windowsill, slipped Willi’s health certificate underneath him, and spread seven coca leaves at his feet. Seven seemed like a magical number.
When I brought the little loom and yarn to Nayra, she flushed and tucked it hurriedly away under her table without thanking me. But I think she was pleased.
I couldn’t find the right time to give the little sun to Miguel. I worried it was the wrong thing. He had plenty of sun, after all. Why should I want to give him more? I hadn’t thought of that at the market, I had thought only that it resembled Miguel, or what he was to me. Maybe I should wait to give it to him on another holiday, when it could mean something different.
* * *
• • •
A WEEK LATER I visited Rachel where she lived with Eloise, though she usually preferred to come to our place. She and Eloise shared a room in a house with several other families. It wasn’t that she was ashamed of where she lived; our circumstances were not so different. I think she simply liked to be around a family—and my mother’s baking.
In a corner of the room, alongside Rachel’s mattress, I spotted a cluster of tiny furniture behind her stacks of books. Some of it I recognized from the Alasitas market. “Oh, there’s the little lamp you bought! Can I look at these?”