1
purple
Bolivia
2017
WHEN PASTOR MARTIR MENTIONED THAT the Quechua Bible conference was a ways out in the Bolivian countryside, he certainly hadn’t been kidding.
By her calculations, eight hours had gone by since they left the vibrant garden city of Cochabamba, climbing higher and higher into the clouds. Wara Cadogan slit her eyes open and squinted around the darkened interior of the Jeep. The windowpanes had frosted now that the sun hid behind the jagged peaks of the Andes. An elbow jabbed her side and Wara heard her friend Nazaret Martir yawn, a squeaky, muffled sound that caused her father, Pastor Martir, to glance at both girls in the rearview mirror.
“We’ll be there any second,” he told them, much too chipper after being cooped up in the Jeep all day. “I know it’s freezing now, but soon we’ll get you warmed up. It’s a long hike.”
Wara stuffed her numb hands into the sleeves of her alpaca sweater and bit her lip. Why had she let herself be talked into this? She loved the Martirs, and their large family had basically adopted Wara during the six years she’d been a missionary here in Bolivia. As a linguistics major, Wara usually jumped at any chance to travel out into the countryside and practice speaking Quechua. So when Pastor Martir said he needed her to translate from Spanish to Quechua at this conference in Potosi, Wara had enthusiastically answered, “Why not?”
Bad idea. A very bad idea.
A Bible conference, Wara? What were you thinking?
Pastor Martir steered the Jeep into a cavernous rut, and Wara felt her jaw snap at the impact. The turquoise knit cap she wore slid over one eye. She pushed the hat back into position as a low moan came from the back seat.
If she weren’t so stressed, Wara would have grinned. Her best guy friend Noah was waking up from his perch back with the luggage. “Where are we?” she heard him mutter under his breath. “This place looks like the Twilight Zone.” One long arm brushed Wara’s ear as he reached up to clear frost from her window. Not a single light outside, and the murky sky tossed off thick shadows. The skeletal remains of a tree rose up out of the gravel path, beckoning the Jeep forward.
Noah was right: it looked downright freaky out there. Pushing back her nervousness about the whole Bible conference thing, Wara turned towards the back seat. Despite the rough ride, Noah was looking content, emerald green eyes glinting in the moonlight. His sandy, shoulder-length hair was littered with straw and the poor guy really had to hunch over to fit his frame in the tight space on top of the luggage. At first glance, Noah Hearst might give off the aura of surfer dude, but he wasn’t really full of muscle. And he wasn’t fat. Noah was just a big guy.
Plus, there weren’t really a lot of surfers in Ohio, where Noah was from.
“Did you have a nice nap back there with the potatoes?” she asked.
Noah tried to stretch, then grimaced and gave up. “Yeah. I guess.” He glanced around the car, took in Pastor Martir and two skinny Quechua-speaking Bible school students in the front, Wara and Nazaret in the middle seat. “I guess I’ll be the one carrying this stuff up to the conference for our lunch. Seriously, that’s about all I’ll be good for. Nazaret’s dad must be thrilled he got you to translate, though. Word on the street is you speak Quechua like a native.”
True. Despite the cold, Wara felt her armpits prick.
She used to be good at this. The first year Wara lived in Bolivia, she worked teaching Bible lessons to ladies in Quechua and helped at a ton of children’s Bible clubs around the city.
But then everything happened. She left the country for four months to try to get things together, and when she came back she was teaching literacy classes to Quechua women. And volunteering at the home for children with AIDS that the Martir family ran.
She didn’t teach about the Bible anymore, because that would just make her a hypocrite. And Noah, good friend that he was, never asked.
“I can never get over how lucky you are,” Noah was going on. “Sounding so Bolivian, and looking it too. Can you imagine anyone ever mixing me up with a Bolivian?”
“Uh, no.” Wara raised an eyebrow and him and stifled a smile. “I would be seriously worried about anybody who thought you were Bolivian.” In addition to being tall and blond with skin that crisped red in the strong Cochabamba sun, Noah had studied Spanish in Spain. Whenever the guy spoke Spanish, it came out with a lisp that, to Bolivians, sounded really silly.
Noah had good reason to be jealous of Wara. Besides teaching her Quechua from the time she was a baby, Wara’s Quechua grandmother from Peru had passed along some of her color. Wara’s skin was a light tan that bronzed in the sun. Behind trendy maroon glasses, her eyes were honey brown. And her brown hair, now sporting an uneven cut with burgundy highlights, let her fit right in with her Bolivian friends.
“I think I’m getting a cold,” Nazaret announced smally from Wara’s side. Wara turned back to her and took in her friend’s pale, heart-shaped face framed in dyed blond ringlets. She was sheathed in a puffy pink coat, mounds of pink scarves, and a snow white knit hat with pale pink sparkles. The Jeep hit another hard rut just as Nazaret sneezed, a cute, shrill little sound that was all but muffled in tiny pink alpaca mittens.
“I hov I can still help you wif de kids,” she sniffled, bleary hazel eyes turned on Noah, who patted her on the white knit cap with a few encouraging words. They all jerked to attention as the Jeep braked to a halt in a sudden spray of gravel.
When the group piled out of the car, they discovered the air outside the car was even colder than inside. Even though it would look ridiculous, Wara almost wished she was wearing snow pants, just like when she was little growing up in Montana. The frayed jeans and hippie tunic she had on under the alpaca sweater were not doing anything to keep her warm. Frozen fingers brushed lazily over her cheeks from the hulking mountains all around them. Off in the distance, something howled. Nazaret covered her nose with one mitten to muffle another sharp sneeze and it echoed off the mountains in the night.
“’Scuse me.” Noah cheerfully pushed past Wara, carting a gigantic burlap sack of potatoes.
“Coming through,” Nazaret’s father followed him, hauling a second bag of something edible. Wara huddled next to Nazaret for a minute, watching as the guys hefted the food and sleeping bags onto a haggle of scrawny burros. A few Quechua guys in black jackets and slacks had materialized from an adobe hut and were helping to arrange everything on the donkeys by the light of a shimmering bonfire. Pastor Martir, who came every year to preach at this rural Bible conference in Potosi, said that it was best to climb the mountain at night, when it was cooler.
Right now, Wara really hoped he knew what he was talking about. They still had a seven-hour hike ahead of them, up the forested granite. She stifled a heavy yawn and fixed her gaze on the diamond stars.
In the morning, she woke up to scruffy feathers and a beak. A chicken scratched through the pebbles right outside the crumbling adobe wall of the community school house where she and the others had crashed for a few hours after the hike. The local Christians had gone to all the trouble of fixing up wooden pallets with woolen blankets here at the school, so their guests could have a private place to stay. Wara knew they had gone to a lot of trouble and hated to admit that it honestly hadn’t been worth going to sleep. A well-organized army of fleas had taken up residence in the wool blankets long before she had, and she, Noah, and Nazaret had scratched and grumbled for a few hours before Pastor Martir coated their beds with Raid.
Maybe that was why now, with daylight streaming through the holes in the schoolhouse wall, it was so darn hard to move. Could you overdose on Raid?
Wara kicked off the sleeping bag, grabbed her glasses from the dirt floor, and pulled herself to sitting. Pastor Martir was already gone, probably outside at some morning prayer vigil with the Quechua Christians. Nazaret curled on her plank bed, still snoring. Noah’s long legs stuck out the end of his unzipped sleeping bag, leaving his filthy socked feet sprawled in the dirt near giant maroon Nike tennis shoes.
When she moved to stand up, the powdery remains of dried up fleas shifted on the navy fleece of the sleeping bag.
Eeww.
Wara had to grin at the sight of those dried bugs. She really loved these kind of trips.
She dusted her bare feet off on the edge of her jeans and stuffed her sockless feet into Doc Marten boots, hoping to find someplace outside to use the bathroom before everyone else got up. A waist-high cluster of boulders overlooking the valley below turned out to be the best option for privacy. She brushed her teeth with water from a dented bottle of Pura Vida and spit off into the deserted valley. Trailing wisps of clouds slithered around boulders below. The only structures visible were the schoolhouse where she had slept and two sturdy adobe houses a little way down the rounded path.
A Quechua lady with a huge smile was waiting in the school with a breakfast of sweet purple corn drink and boiled eggs. She wore a knee-length circle skirt called a pollera, this one a soft sage green. Despite the morning chill, her mahogany legs were bare and she wore scuffed black plastic ballet flats. She did have on a warm cardigan over the lacy white blouse Quechua ladies always wore.
The lady bringing breakfast introduced herself as Doña Petronia and patted Wara on the forearm in greeting, telling her how happy she was that God had brought Wara to this conference. Wara smiled back wanly, even though it was a lot of fun to be speaking Quechua up in the mountains again. She still didn’t feel good about the idea of her being part of this Bible conference, acting like she was all sweet and good here with Pastor Martir, Noah and the Bible school students.
She felt like a fake.
Still queasy, she mumbled something appropriate and tried to get down the purple api and an egg.
They assigned her to help Noah, who was in charge of the kids while their parents attended Bible classes. Wara had already seen him in action many times during the five years they’d been friends, teaching Bible stories to kids at the Martirs’ AIDS center or hanging out with a little homeless kid in downtown Cochabamba. Within minutes, Noah had the group of kids sitting on a grassy knoll and captivated by Bible songs with actions. Then he made Wara come stand next to him to translate a story into Quechua, one about Jesus calming the stormy sea.
She grew up in church and could rattle off this story by heart, in English, Spanish, or Quechua. But there was no way she could keep a group of kids glued to her every word the way Noah did. She ignored the sick feeling in her stomach and stood next to Noah, feeling little and insignificant at five foot five next to his six foot three. All she had to do was tell Noah’s story to the kids in Quechua. Her own failings couldn’t ruin the moment for the kids. Noah deserved to be listened to.
When the story was over, she could see in the kids’ eyes that they had imagined every peal of thunder, felt the shuddering of the splintered wooden boat on the open sea. Noah asked the kids to come up and stand at his side, one by one, to tell him what they were afraid of.
“That we won’t have enough to eat if hail destroys the crops,” mumbled one almond-eyed little boy in a jade chullu cap.
“I’m afraid of the terrible goat that lives down the hill.”
Several muffled giggles scattered across the group.
“Of the thunder when it storms.”
One short boy in a tattered soccer jersey trudged to the front when it was his turn and recited gravely, “I’m scared that my other brothers will become one of the missing, like my brother Antonio.”
Wara scrunched up her face. She had never heard anyone refer to someone who died as “the missing” before in Quechua, but maybe it was a regional idiom. She was going to have to ask around later to figure out if that was really how that phrase should be used.
I’m such a nerd.
She blinked away thoughts of Quechua grammar and brought her attention back to Noah, who was beaming at the children, then her, waiting for her to translate.
“You know, when I was little,” he told the kids, “there was this dog that lived a few houses away from mine, and he had really, really big teeth.” Suddenly, strangely, Noah slung an arm over Wara’s shoulders, leaving the two of them facing the children together. “I want you to know kids, if Jesus is with you, you don’t have to be scared of anything. He’s stronger than anything in this world.”
Just as mesmerized by Noah’s words as the kids, Wara felt herself leaning into his side. Then the lesson was over. “Thanks for translating,” Noah told her, then dropped his arm and smiled. Wara felt her heart do a very weird pitter-patter and she stared after him as he jogged off to chase some of the kids in a game of tag.
That attraction you’re feeling? she chided herself warily. That’s just because Noah is your friend. You would never think of Noah as anything more than a friend. Right?
Wara blinked, then squinted at Noah, who was grabbing a giggling little kid around the shoulders and swinging him in the air.
She would be crazy to let herself think of Noah as anything other than a friend. He was much too goofy for anything else. Wara was always studying and was sometimes really grouchy. Noah was always so happy-go-lucky and watched way too many cartoons.
Not exactly Prince Charming.
Plus, he didn’t really know her.
Wara shook herself back to reality and headed back down towards the house, thinking she should probably help the ladies fix lunch. The cloud-covered valley writhed with mist, licking the emerald grass at her feet. It was hauntingly beautiful.
In the rocky dirt outside the main house she found a circle of Quechua women squatting in their wide velvet pollera skirts around a plastic tub of potatoes. The ladies skillfully attacked the miniscule purple and yellow-veined potatoes with paring knives, leaving the spuds without peel in seconds. Wara hunkered down next to the smiling lady from breakfast this morning, Doña Petronia. Wara had tried so hard to learn to peel potatoes like a respectable Quechua woman should, but she usually ended up desecrating the potato, scraping half of it off into the scrap pile. She fiddled around a little with the knife and a bumpy yellow potato, then decided to put her grammar question out there.
“I was wondering about something one of the kids said. If you say that your family member is the missing, does that mean that person died?”
Doña Petronia’s long blade faltered mid-peel and she reached up with one work-roughed hand to flip a braid behind her back. Everyone fell silent. “You must have heard my son Edgar talking,” she finally nodded. “He’s only six but he is so worried about his older brother.”
“Or maybe it was my Juan Marco talking about his older brother,” interjected a more portly woman in a royal purple pollera. A thick layer of fat rolled out of the waist of her skirt, blanketed with the silky white undershirt the ladies wore under their short lace blouses. She jerked her chin towards Doña Petronia. “She and I both have older sons, teenagers. Three months ago, the boys both went away, never to be heard from again.”
“Went away?” Wara frowned.
“We call them ‘the missing’.” Doña Petronia looked Wara directly in the eye. “The boys went into Llallagua to sell some potatoes, but on completely different days. We never heard from them again. We do not know where they could have gone. That is why we call them and the other boys ‘the missing’.”
“What other boys?”
The two women eyed each other soberly. “From all over the mountains, many different communities. All missing.”
Wara didn’t know what to say. How could these women’s sons, and boys from other communities too, just be gone? The pain in the women’s black eyes was evident, and Wara felt horrible. How many of the people here at the Bible conference had a son or brother who had just disappeared?
I am really glad Nazaret is still off teaching somewhere. I hope she hasn’t already heard about this.
The Martirs were a busy household of six kids, but once upon a time there had been seven. Wara knew Nazaret’s older brother had run away when he was a teenager, and she knew the serious, skinny oldest Martir only from his faded photograph in a frame on Nazaret’s dresser.
Talking about missing kids was always enough to start Nazaret weeping.
Wara really hoped her friend wouldn’t hear about this. It would only make her think of her brother, the missing boy who was probably never going to come home.
She could identify a little with that kid in the picture, because sometimes, when she thought too much about things, Wara just wanted to run away from here and start over.
Except the past always follows you.
Noah was running up the hill panting, with a hundred screaming Quechua kids close on his heels. Even if she wanted to be with Noah, she would never deserve him.
There were some things that even time couldn’t erase.