“Remember we won’t be eating until we get to el paisito,” his mother reminded him.
El paisito. I had been reading up on it in the Lonely Planet travel book Dad had bought me for the trip. In the full-page map in front, el paisito had a sprawling amoeba shape, as if it were breaking out of the ruler-straight borders drawn by some king in Europe. And really, the “little country ” didn’t look all that little. But then, it wasn’t just el paisito that Mrs. Bolívar called “little.” Lots of things were little: a little trip, a little meal. Señora Robles had once explained that people added this ending to words in Spanish to show affection.
“¡Tus manos!” Mrs. Bolívar exclaimed. She had caught sight of my hands. For months, I had tried to hide them from Pablo. Now he, too, was staring down at them. “¡Pobrecitas!” Poor little things.
“It’s just an allergy,” I managed, my face as red as my hands.
The truth is they looked pretty bad. With all the commotion of the last few weeks, my rash had gotten worse. Mom had taken me to a new dermatologist in town where I had to fill out a medical form. Was there any history of skin diseases or allergies in my family? I passed the clipboard over to Mom, who read it, sighed, and put her arm around me. She understood.
“I get the same malady in this country,” Mrs. Bolívar explained in Spanish, showing me her chapped hands. She dug around in her purse and pulled out a tin. I half expected it to be Burt’s Bees hand salve that Em had converted me to using. But no, this was a greenish ointment, the last of some potion she had brought with her from home. “This yerbabuena will take away the itch. Shall we put some on?” The lid was off and her fingers delving inside before I could say yes or no.
“Mamá,” Pablo reminded his mother.
“It’s okay,” I assured him.
As Mrs. Bolívar worked on my hands, I couldn’t help thinking of Dad and his calamine lotion. Dad . . . Mom . . . Kate . . . Nate. . . . I felt homesick all over again. One last call home in case the plane crashes, I promised myself.
A little later when I tried, our line kept being busy. I couldn’t call Em, as she was away at a special leadership camp sponsored by the governor for members of student governments. I’d actually been invited, too, but I had already planned this trip. I had promised Em that I’d send tons of postcards and bring her back some live contraband: a gorgeous Latin hunk in my suitcase, provided I could get him through security!
The only other person I could think of to call was Happy. (555-HI HAPPY, easy to remember, Nate’s trick.) Surprisingly, early as it was, Grandma answered. “Milly, darling! I’ve been thinking about you. Isn’t it today you leave?”
“I’m at the airport. I made it through security.”
“Good for you!” she congratulated me, like I had cause to worry.
“Grandma, thanks so much for paying for me to do this.” When Dad had tried using the price of the ticket as a reason for me not to go with the Bolívars, I had called Grandma with that favor she’d said I could ask her.
“Don’t you mention it. You feeling a little nervous, honey?”
“Nah,” I bluffed, then remembering how Grandma said nobody in our family ever told her the truth, I added, “Just that Kate wouldn’t even say goodbye. And Nate had a tantrum at the door.”
“Don’t you worry about them. They’ll be just fine. I’ve invited Kate to come down and go shopping with me in the city. Roger’s picking up Nate when Scout camp ends on Friday, and we’ll all go to a Yankees game.”
Suddenly, being with Happy on Long Island sounded like a lot more fun than being some place where people were still recovering from a dictatorship.
But this had all been my choice. Grandma had even offered to buy tickets for everyone in the family to go with me. But I hadn’t been sure I wanted them along. Mom had suggested that I play it by ear, see how I felt, and once I was there, if I decided, just call and the family would join me. Grandma’s offer was still open. “And I’ve cleared the decks. I’m free all August, and Dad was going to take two weeks off anyway.”
Standing there at that pay phone, I was so tempted to tell Happy to go ahead and buy their tickets now. But I knew if they came down, the whole thing would turn into a family trip. Mom would hover. Dad would be a safety freak. Nate would whine that he didn’t understand people’s fast Spanish. And Kate would be competing over our native country. No, I really didn’t want them along. I wanted this to be my journey, my country, my story—before they became ours.
After the excitement of sighting land had died down, Pablo noticed my silence.
“Are you preoccupied, Milly?” Pablo wanted to know.
I nodded. “Not because of what I’ll find there,” I went on to explain. Well, maybe some of it was that. “But what I left behind. Some members of my family, I guess they’re having a hard time with my going on this trip.” I hadn’t wanted Pablo or his parents to feel bad, so I hadn’t mentioned anything, until now. “It’s like they’re afraid the truth is going to break up our family.”
“The truth, la verdad.” Pablo repeated the word slowly, as if he were trying to understand its meaning in English, and then failing that, in Spanish. “In el paisito, we have now the Truth Commission to bring to justice the guilty ones who helped the dictatorship. Some say let us forget the past and build the future. Others say we cannot build the future if we do not know the past.” It was strange that now that we were on this trip where I was supposedly going to practice my Spanish full time, Pablo was always speaking in English. “Para no olvidarlo,” he had explained. So as not to forget it.
“I think the truth is the most important of all,” I said, jumping right in.
Pablo looked thoughtful. “I believe in the truth, too, Milly. But I had an uncle. I loved my uncle. He was a very good uncle. But he was also a general. Maybe he was not so good a person when he was a general. I would never want to punish the good uncle. But what to do about the cruel general?”
I felt totally confused. Maybe the truth was more than I wanted to know, too? What if my birth father turned out to be some horrible general like the military guys I had seen on TV in their dark glasses? Maybe I’d inherited his genes and that’s why I was hurting my family out of my own selfishness? “So, what about your uncle?”
Pablo glanced out the window at the cloud bank we were entering. The cabin darkened. “My uncle is dead,” he murmured. “He punished the bad general himself. He shot himself a few weeks after the dictator left.”
“Oh, Pablo, I’m sorry. I didn’t know.” I had never heard the Bolívars mention this relative. Maybe they were ashamed of him? The one they often talked about was Mr. Bolívar’s brother, Daniel, the journalist who had worked for a newspaper that published articles against the dictatorship. One night, about a month after the Bolívars had left the country, Daniel disappeared. Days later, his body was found in a ditch with those of other journalists from the same paper. Daniel’s widow, Dulce, and daughter, Esperanza, were now living in the Bolívars’ house with Camilo and Enriquillo, Pablo’s brothers. Suddenly, it struck me that this was probably a bad time to be visiting a family grieving so many deaths.
“It is a happy time as well as a sad time in our history,” Pablo reassured me, as if reading my thoughts. “Our nation is a cradle and a grave.”
Our nation, he called it. It didn’t feel like mine. My country was the U.S. I felt a wave of homesickness. Dad and Mom had tried to spare me. I pictured them sitting in our kitchen in Vermont, holding hands, wondering if I would be okay. Looking down at my own hands, I realized that they had not itched since Mrs. Bolívar had put her potion on them. But they were still red.
The minute we entered the terminal, we were swallowed in a crowd. This was the first time that I’d ever been around so many people from my birth country. I could not stop staring.
The guidebook was right: this sure was a country of mixtures—brown people with straight brown hair, white people with jet-black hair and high cheekbones, black people with Asian eyes
. A white woman carrying a brown baby stood by a black man who was holding the hand of a pale boy with kinky hair. Talk about melded families! I wondered about my own family. What did they all look like? I kept glancing around, hoping to find someone who looked like me.
My head was spinning. A couple of times, I got separated from the Bolívars in the crowd pressing toward the open booths in the Immigration area. People here didn’t seem to be able to make lines.
One thing that spooked me was all the soldiers hanging around in camouflage with machine guns. Maybe because there’d been a dictatorship here, I kept thinking that a revolution was going to break out. But Pablo explained that the soldiers were here to monitor passengers who might be on the Truth Commission list and trying to sneak into the country.
“I don’t get it. Wouldn’t they be trying to sneak out?”
“That, too. But many times they come back to start trouble.”
Finally, it was our turn at the Immigration booth. The young official was eager to try out his little English. “Where did you receive those beautiful eyes? You look like a girl from Los Luceros.” Pablo and I exchanged a glance. “That is where the most beautiful women come from,” the guy added, winking at me.
“You have to be careful,” Pablo coached me when we had gone through the line. “Men from this country will always flirt with a pretty girl.”
So Pablo thought I was pretty! I had never noticed him being flirtatious with me. Back at Ralston, he hadn’t seemed interested in anything as frivolous as flirting. Every once in a while, there’d be that look, or he’d cut loose but then pull back, as if jolted by some memory.
We had to wait forever for our luggage—actually, I waited by the carousel while the Bolívars stood by the exit, peeking out whenever the doors swung open. Suddenly, they began waving wildly. They had spotted their family in the lobby.
An officer approached them. I thought he was going to tell them to move away from the doors. But it looked like he had recognized the Bolívars. They threw their arms around each other, embracing. Then the officer went out the exit doors and came back with his arms around two guys. Mrs. Bolívar rushed toward them. “Camilo! Riqui! ¡Mis hijos! ¡Mis hijos!” she called out. Her sons! Her sons! People turned around to watch. Soon, all the Bolívars were hugging and crying.
The suitcases started arriving. The Bolívars’ bags were easy to tell apart, huge and overpacked and tied with red ribbons—the color of the Liberation Party. This was so they wouldn’t get confused with somebody else’s, Mrs. Bolívar had explained. As I reached to lift them off the belt, a bunch of guys rushed forward to help. Wow! If Em could see me now!
Mrs. Bolívar must have spotted all these guys around me. She hurried over, the rest of her family behind her. The introductions began. It was just like the families I’d seen inside the Immigration area. The officer, who turned out to be a cousin, was dark-skinned with slanted eyes. He had been in the Movement with the Bolívar brothers and was now a supervisor in Customs. Then there was the middle brother, Camilo, tall and thin with pale brown skin like Pablo’s but instead of Pablo’s straight hair, Camilo had a kinky Afro. Riqui, short for Enriquillo, the oldest brother, was very dark and short like Mr. Bolívar, with straight black hair and dimples like Pablo’s, though his showed more in his chubby cheeks every time he smiled—and boy, did he ever do that a lot!
It surprised me: how tubby and jokey he was. I guess for months I’d had this torture-prison image of him as all skin and bones with ugly scars that made you wince just thinking about how he had gotten them. But Riqui kept making jokes, teasing Mrs. Bolívar on how buenamoza she looked in her American pantsuit. So good-looking! Papá better watch out or those gringos would steal her away!
“Milly, ¡qué placer!” he said, throwing his arms around me like a long-lost brother. “What a pleasure! Thank you for being a family to my familia.” I felt embarrassed, thinking about how I had rejected Pablo at first.
Once our bags were piled on several carts, the cousin led us to the exit marked NOTHING TO DECLARE. No inspection was necessary for the family of two Liberation heroes!
“What about me?” I asked Pablo. I didn’t want to get in trouble because I hadn’t done what I was supposed to do as an American.
“You are our family,” Pablo said, putting his arm around me. I told myself he was just imitating his older brother, but I could feel myself blushing. Since we’d landed, Pablo seemed so much more relaxed and happy.
“But if you want to declare something, Milly?” Pablo teased, pointing toward the long lines under a big sign that read, ALGO QUE DECLARAR: SOMETHING TO DECLARE.
“What does a beautiful girl like her have to declare? We are the ones who have to declare to her.” Riqui put his hand over his heart and sighed like some corny, old-time actor. I could see that I was in for some teasing in the next two weeks.
“My brother lost the little knowledge he had about women in prison,” Camilo noted dryly. His face was so long and serious that at first I couldn’t tell he was joking. “All women have secrets, Riqui,” he lectured his older brother.
Pablo looked at me pointedly as if he knew my secret— that this was mi paisito, my little country, as well.
But that was not the secret packed away in my heart. I was determined not to declare it, even to myself. Enough things going on already on this trip! The secret of Pablo. Friend, brother, or . . . something else?
Outside in the lobby, even more relatives were waiting to greet the Bolívars. Aunts and uncles and cousins, as well as Pablo’s tía-madrina and Mrs. Bolívar’s comadre—relatives we don’t really have names for in English. Only Dulce had stayed home, preparing the food, everybody explained.
Seeing them all together, I felt that familiar pang of not belonging. I stood apart, with the bags on the curb, wishing I could crawl inside one of them. But Pablo spotted me and hurried over. “Ven, ven, Milly,” he insisted, pulling me into the circle of his familia.
People kept taking my face in their hands. My eyes were so much like Dulce’s!
“¿De dónde viene tu familia?” they wanted to know. Where did my family come from?
What to say? Thank God, everyone was talking at once so my not answering went unnoticed. It was just like a Kaufman get-together!
A girl about my age approached Pablo. She was pale and looked so sad, dressed all in black. The minute he saw her, Pablo put his arms around her, closing his eyes as if with deep feeling. She clung to him, her head buried in his chest. It was like a Romeo and Juliet scene, I swear. I felt a pang of jealousy. I remembered what Meredith had told Em about Pablo probably having a girlfriend back home. True, he had never mentioned one to me. And knowing what awful stuff was happening to his brothers and family, I had never asked him a whole lot of questions about the life he’d left behind.
Finally, Pablo and this girl came apart. That’s when she turned to me, and I noticed her eyes. They looked just like mine: light yellow with brown flecks! No wonder Pablo had been so mesmerized by mine. They had reminded him of his girlfriend’s eyes.
Pablo introduced the girl. Aunt Dulce’s daughter.
His cousin who had suffered so much! “Hi,” I managed, my voice as small as I felt.
“Bienvenida,” she welcomed me. “My name is Esperanza,” she added in English as if she wasn’t sure I could understand Spanish. “It means hope.”
“Soy Milly,” I introduced myself. For a moment, I wondered how it might feel to say, “I’m Milagros. It means miracles.”
Esperanza looked surprised to hear me speaking in Spanish. “¿Hablas español?”
“Un poquito.” Just the little bit between the two fingers I was holding up.
Pablo was shaking his head. “Milly speaks very good Spanish.” I couldn’t help thinking about our first meeting in February. At least now I was admitting to speaking some Spanish.
The reunion at the airport might have gone on for another hour, but Dulce was waiting at home with our welcome dinner. She was cooking
puerco asado, Esperanza told me, the roast pork people always made for special celebrations in this country. My mostly vegetarian diet was going to have a hard time in the next two weeks. Mom had already warned me. “Don’t ever refuse a dish. People take it as a personal insult. Unless you say you’re allergic to something, you better eat it and ask for seconds.”
Maybe I could be allergic to meat for the next two weeks? Thinking about allergies, I looked down at my hands. They had really calmed down! Mrs. Bolívar was right. My body knew it was back in the little country it had come from.
But the rest of me was still in a daze.
Driving in from the airport, I had this sense of being suspended in the air. Like I hadn’t yet landed on the ground anywhere.
So much was happening at once, so many new people, names, and relationships to take in; so many conversations going on, most of them in a fast-moving Spanish that—I had to agree with Nate—wasn’t always easy to follow. Everything was so different: the light, the heat, the sounds, the earthy smells wafting in through the open windows, like being near the compost bin in the garden in Vermont in the middle of the summer. Again I felt a wave of missing home.
As we drove to their house, the Bolívar brothers were giving me a crash tour of the capital. Esperanza, Pablo, and I were in back—I was at one of the windows so I could see the sights. We, the young people, had been purposely put together by the older Bolívars, who had gone directly home in another car.
We passed the main plaza with the statue of the father of the country, Somebody Estrella. I recognized his face— the man on the coin that was in my box! Over there, Riqui pointed out, was the national cathedral, right beside the fort where the colonists had fought for their freedom from Spain. Could I see the eternal flame to liberty just inside the entryway?
“Eternal since yesterday,” Camilo commented dryly.