La Paz, March 1969
On the street outside the station, the wagon-driver saw me but didn’t slow down. “Hey, cholo!” he shouted as I jumped out of the way. “What are you, blind?”
There wasn’t anyone behind him, so I started across again, and a criollo coming the other way brushed my side. “Look where you’re going, cholo,” he said.
I made it to the opposite curb and took a deep breath of Bolivian air. I was home.
There was a chicha shop up the street, and all at once I realized I was hungry. I’d been on the train almost two days from Buenos Aires, and we hadn’t stopped in Asunción or Santa Cruz long enough for a meal; people had come through selling food and drink, but nothing very substantial. Under the circumstances, the smell of
anticuchos was overpowering.
“There are plenty of cholo places up the hill,” the owner said as I walked inside. It wasn’t an invitation to leave in so many words, but his tone of voice was clear. Inti Torres might have been president three times, and the politicians might wear native dress at festivals and talk endlessly of the nation’s
indio heritage, but here on the Prado, they didn’t seem to have got the message. If anything, they’d become worse during my seven years’ absence, like fanatic defenders of a besieged city.
I didn’t answer him directly, but put two of the new sols on the counter and said “two sticks.” He took the money and handed me two skewers of
anticuchos. He didn’t say anything more; maybe he’d decided that making the sale was the fastest way to get rid of me. If so, he was right; I took the sticks with me and ate them as I made a left turn off the Prado.
I’d made my point, I guess – or maybe not, since I’d paid two or three times as much for them as I’d have had to pay on the heights.
The streets became narrower as I got farther from the office buildings and fancy shops on the Prado, and they wound up steeply toward the canyon wall through brightly-painted colonial houses and then the newer apartments built by the socialists in the thirties. The old rule of La Paz hadn’t changed – the higher you lived, the poorer you were – and the markets and houses got steadily shabbier. There were many cholos here, and cholita market-women in bowler hats and layered skirts, and there didn’t seem to be much difference between them and the criollos and mestizos who lived in the same buildings; shared poverty had erased the lines that they drew down in the valley. There were richer criollos too, hunting for bargains, and I saw a couple of embarrassed women leaving the witches’ market with love potions or fertility charms.
And at last, the
ascensor to the heights.
The cable cars were nearly empty at this time of day, and I paid my half-sol and found a place by the window. It lifted me up above the houses, and for the first time in seven years, I saw the panorama of La Paz: streets built high up the canyon walls, the towers of San Jorge and the Prado, the cathedral, the wealthy districts of the Zona Sur. It was a sight I’d grown up with every day of my life, living near the rim of the heights, but it seemed suddenly new.
How new, I began to realize when I stepped off the
ascensor at the top end. There had been a city on the heights for a long time, since the railhead to Lake Titicaca was first built in the nineteenth century, and it had grown faster since being connected to the municipal water supply in the forties, but it had exploded during my absence. There was construction everywhere, streets being paved, apartment buildings going up in lots where adobe houses had stood. The map I’d carried in my head all this time was changing before my eyes.
There was more than that. On the Prado, I’d stood out because I was a cholo; up here, everyone was, but I stood out again because of the suit I’d bought in Buenos Aires. People measured me with their eyes, and when I stopped in a Peruvian-style chicha shop – the Peruvian and Ecuadorian dissidents had been coming almost as long as the water had, with the
movimiento indigena so strong here – the owner charged me half again what I remembered paying. The chicha was sweet, made with purple corn, and I drank deeply before I noticed everyone staring at me and realized I’d forgotten to spill some for Pachamama. I corrected the error and drank the rest, as embarrassed as the criolla women I’d seen at the
mercado de las brujas.
My family’s house, at least, was the same. My sister Nayra – my sister who’d been twelve when I left, and who was a woman now – was hanging clothes to dry in front. She saw me, and there was a second of hesitation in her eyes before she screamed my name and ran into my arms.
“Mama! Mama! Carlos is home from Africa!”
A moment later, my mother came out from making dinner and joined the embrace. We stood there a long time in silence, and then she stepped back and asked me, “did you go to church in Ilorin?” Yes, that was her first question, although to be fair, it was something I’d never written about in my letters.
“I did when I could,” I said, and I told her about the churches the Catholic Igbo immigrants had built, and the Enugu Use services with their sculpted clay altars and drums and song. “Not in Adamawa, when I was working on the highland crops. There were no churches there.”
Her face showed only slight disapproval as she led me into the house; here and now, I could do no wrong. “Is it true you’ll be working for the government?”
“Yes, they offered me the job last year. They’re starting a new branch of the agricultural institute, here on the heights. They wanted me to be part of it when I finished at the university.”
She knew all that from my letters, but she was my mother, and she wanted to hear it.
“What will you actually be
doing?” my sister asked.
“I wrote you about my research with Andean potatoes and quinoa…” I said, and waited for her nod. “They didn’t do well for the African highland crops project – the highlands there aren’t high enough. They don’t have anything like the altiplano. But we did come up with some strains that look promising for here. The agriculture ministry wants me to work on them.”
“Give Mama Jatha some new clothes?” came a voice from the other room: an unfamiliar voice, speaking casually. A moment later, a man about my age walked in, and my sister went to stand by him and hold his hand. I remembered that she’d married, and searched my mind for the name… “Anca?”
“Carlos,” he answered, and took a seat on one of the empty crates that did duty for chairs. I tried to remember what Nayra had told me about him. He was a Peruvian, a mestizo, although his face strongly favored his Quechua side. He was a waiter in the restaurant where she cooked, and had been so since he’d fled Peru two years ago. Now he listened to my sister spin visions of a world without hunger, a world in which the altiplano was as fertile as ancient Sumer…
“Your institute,” he said. “It will be you and some people from the university in La Paz?”
“And from the agriculture ministry. It won’t be
my institute.”
He nodded. “Have you thought about how you’ll get the people here to use your new potatoes, if you develop them?”
“Why wouldn’t people use them?” Nayra asked, but I remembered the chicha shop near the
ascensor, and I knew what the answer would be before it came.
“People have been coming here and promising miracles for four hundred years,” Anca said. “Why would they listen when someone in a suit promises them another one?”
“I have other clothes.”
“It’s not just the clothes, Carlos. The potato
is Mama Jatha here. You don’t just change something sacred. Do you understand that anymore?”
Truthfully, I wasn’t sure I did. I was swimming in deep water after only a few minutes at home, and I was reminded again of how seven years’ absence can make a person into a stranger. I’d gone to Africa on an agricultural scholarship that Ahmadu and Asma’u Abacar’s parents had named in their honor, but I’d absorbed more there than biological engineering: I’d been present at yam festivals and Hausa harvest celebrations, and I’d spent nights talking with classmates about Abacarist environmental ethics. “There is no God but Allah and Pachamama is His prophet,” I’d joked once when I’d stayed up far too late – I’d never dare say that here, but had I really come home thinking of the earth the same way as when I’d left?
I recalled my first months in Ilorin, the isolation that came from not knowing the language and the culture, the feeling that I was walking blindly even in the bright day. I’d had to learn how to live all over again. Maybe I’d have to do that again.
I sat down on another crate – a crate, I noticed, that had once held potatoes. “I’m only going to work on crops,” I said. “Not politics.”
Anca shook his head. “You’re trying to make a revolution,” he said. “I spent five years in prison rather than the university, but you learn many things in prison, and I think I know more about revolution than you do. An agricultural revolution’s the same as a political one. You have to bring the people into it, even before it happens.”
This time, Nayra saw where he was going before I did. “Bring farmers into the institute’s work?”
“And let them shape its ritual. Science has rituals, doesn’t it?”
It does here, I imagine, I thought, and nodded.
“This can’t be a criollo revolution…”
“Even if it also has a cholo in a suit?”
“Even then.”
There was silence again. I’d heard the word “revolution” many times to describe what the Ilorin University agricultural school, and its counterparts in Brazil and India and Europe and the United States, had done, but I’d never taken the term literally. The yam festival should have told me, though. Changing something sacred, even for the better,
is a revolution. I tried to remember how the new yams had been introduced in Igbo country, and I couldn’t. I’d never paid attention to politics.
It didn’t matter; there were people I could ask. In the meantime, my mother was cooking chicken and had started a pot of
sopa de maní and another of potatoes and cheese; when they were done, we would open a bottle of
singani and celebrate my return. And…
“Do you know anyone in the farmers’ union?” I asked, and at Anca’s nod, I asked the next question.
“Can we talk to them tomorrow?”
