Sociedad Anónima

A.M. Rosales

No one was there to greet me at the airport when I finally landed. My sister had died four days earlier. After missing her velorio, I ended up missing her burial as well. I had excused myself with a text message. I told my father that I was sorry, and I was. After missing my connecting flight, I was waiting on standby for the next one. I carefully omitted that I’d had too many drinks before the first one and ignored the announcements over the PA system. It was four in the morning when I finally carried my bags through customs. The Aduana Officer looked at my American passport and stared unceremoniously at my face.

Place of birth?

Cochabamba. I said quietly.

He frowned, but with little fanfare his large forehead and dark eyes nodded me through the line. Another officer began to look in my bag. I had already planned an explanation. On the plane I had memorized and practiced how I would answer uncomfortable questions about the medication in my makeup bag, but he handed it back to me without any discernible expression on his face and I simply moved along.

The same diagnosis that had ended my mother’s life so long ago had also taken my sister. This was something I had given a lot of thought to since I was only a few weeks away from my thirtieth birthday. Like my mother’s death, this trip did not feel like the beginning or the end of something, as much as it felt like more of the same.

I followed the crowd that had left the plane into the terminal where arrivals and departures converged into a large, circular atrium with a dome for a roof. All the shops and boutiques were closed. The only sign of life came from an instant coffee kiosk, where weary travelers haggled with an Aymara boy in charge of dispensing hot water from an electric kettle. A giant analog clock on the wall marked the time. With nothing to do but wait, I stared at it haplessly. The clock’s hands mimicked the sundial moving from the top to the left, then down, then right, then back at the top and instead of sobbing and grinding my sorrow into the ground, I kept my eyes open and managed to contain it. While it was not in the best of circumstances, I had returned without humiliating myself or asking for forgiveness or obliviousness from anyone.

My sister had been hospitalized for a month, but no one had foreseen the complications that would end her life. Or rather, doctors had speculated for too long about their medical opinions before it was too late. I pictured a group of men in white coats arguing among themselves, probably ignoring whatever my sister was trying to say to them.

Unlike some of my aunts and uncles who stopped talking to me and about me entirely, she never questioned the way I was. But when she found out, the tone of our relationship remained muted and distant. During our last conversation, she told me that she was fine, that she was sick of all the tests, and I believed her. Our last call had followed its monthly format, a strange formality born out of obligation, or maybe loneliness. She reminded me of our mother in that way. First, she talked about my father. He had promised again that he was considering retirement. Then she talked about my extended family. My aunt Alecia who was making an addition to her house. Her daughter, my cousin Julia, who had begun medical school and no longer had time for friends or family. She listed my cousins, one by one—many of them had children now—and she told me what they were up to even though I hadn’t asked, and in all honesty, didn’t care. What I wanted to know was about her, but like our mother, she had learned the habit of leaving herself out of her own conversations.

Some military fraternity had invited my dad to a party and for the first time, mostly because of her condition, he had declined. At no point during that call had she mentioned any urgent signs or unusual symptoms. I couldn’t know if the end had come as a surprise for her. Death was such an awkward business. After an hour waiting at the airport, I was recognized by the driver my father had sent.

I am Jacinto, he said. Emiteria’s ahijado. I don’t know if you remember, but I used to drive for your dad’s taxi company. Jacinto was short and thin. His head was kind of triangular, with a sharp jaw, a broad nose, and close-set eyes. He was wearing a striped jersey in support of a local team, the Strongest futbol club. He looked at me in the eye, and said, now I have my own business. As if I were supposed to interpret that, and I did. I knew exactly what he meant.

I think I remember you, I said. Nice to see you, Jacinto.

So, you’re the General’s other daughter, he said.

I am, I said. I expected to hear a mocking tone when he said it, but it didn’t register. I wasn’t used to it. Being called the General’s daughter. My father had left the military so long ago, but those kinds of nicknames stick. He spent most of his time pretending to retire. My sister had put it succinctly with her last breaths. They were just conferences. Meetings. Consultations. Supervisions. He no longer called it a job.

Jacinto offered to take my bag. But I declined. His taxi was a Japanese import. I sat in the back while he got in the driver’s seat. It took me a while to realize that the car had originally been a right-hand model. The steering wheel and the shifting stick had been repositioned; a makeshift speedometer hung from the doorframe, but the dashboard and all the instruments were still on the right side of the cabin.

This is my baby, he said. It’s a work in progress.

We drove thru El Alto on mostly empty streets, Jacinto’s eyes ahead on the road. We drove past la feria 16 de Julio. Even though it was still early morning, vendors were already setting up their post and stalls. Soon after, he began speaking with an ease that can only come from being a taxi driver. He offered his condolences. I was surprised by how well he knew my extended family. He talked about local politics. He complained about the state of the roads in the outskirts of the city. Mis tías. Mis tíos. They had all been at the velorio and some had stayed for the burial, but all had found themselves in buses and planes back to the valley soon after, complaining about the perpetual cold. He talked about my aunt Juana, my father’s youngest sister, who had finished remodeling her house in the lowlands.

From the car, just before daybreak, we could see the city. La Paz, the seed of Bolivian government, a crater high up in the mountains, a hollow basin carved into the rock full of lights shimmering like crystals. The air was crisp and clean. We had caught a brief break in the rainy month of February. La Paz operates on its own timeline. The sun had already risen over La Ceja but downtown remained trapped in darkness. Behind us, I lost myself in the intensity of the blue and yellow horizon. In no time we were on the highway and on the way home.

I found my father on his laptop in the living room. Everything looked exactly as it did after my mother died. All the pictures and the decorations remained the same. Even in old age, my father still woke up on military time.

That’s why you don’t get gringos to build your house, he said. They can’t measure to save their lives. That was the way my father was. He had long become accustomed to abandoning and resuming conversations as if no time had passed in between. He hugged me, but if he had experienced any emotional reaction to his daughter’s death, I honestly couldn’t tell. He moved on to explain that the original deed of the house had listed measurements in yards instead of meters. He had been planning a new addition and had uncovered the error at the city’s real estate office. More square meters meant a new appraisal, forms, red-tape, bureaucracy. The kinds of things that brought out the worst in my father.

Can you believe it? he said.

No, I said. It happened so suddenly.

Changing all the paperwork on the deed of the house is going to be a nightmare, he added. I may have to bribe someone.

I nodded in agreement. In my years away, my body had grown accustomed to living at sea level. I was fatigued and vaguely nauseous. No one ever got sick in La Paz until outsiders started coming here. Then, some gringo doctor had to invent a diagnosis for it. A diagnosis for your body adjusting to the shape of the world. Altitude sickness. I felt like a foreigner, like some strange tourist wandering around the vestiges of my childhood.

Gap

Nevarez Encinias

My boyfriend and I lie side by side. He’s awake and so am I. But because it’s the first truly hot night of the year, and because the heat is itself like a third person in the room with us, we don’t move, almost at all. We’ve just returned from a long bike ride and taken turns jumping into a cold shower, but the water did very little to end what still feels like afternoon. So we lie here, his eyes closed and my eyes blinking, and the heat I guess threatening to keep its eyes open all night.

I feel towards him –– my boyfriend –– an odd fondness these days, that soft, platonic feeling one feels for the people with whom you survived your twenties, though I didn’t know him then. It may be the bike ride, and the lactic acid playing games with my muscles, but to be next to him at this moment really is to feel what two cereal boxes must feel, sitting next to each other on the shelf. I take his hand and kink my knee and lay it on my thigh, and using the tips of his fingers, he mimics a few light scratches, stopping each time at his nails. His unstated approach to my body as of late has been do no harm, and if I am to be honest, I am so fascinated by the influence of this funny idea on his choices, on his physicality, on how he subtly alters his body to do the opposite of trespass or infringe upon mine. He brings his huge hand to loving stillness at one point, and I lay there and I meet it with resolve, as if enshrining this strange moment in bed with him right before falling asleep and all others I’ve known like it, in which every little movement and sigh feels interpretable.

And so I hold myself doubly or triply still: underneath the oppressive blanket of the heat, and underneath our sweaty top sheet on top of that, and I feel his fingers on me as I feel everything –– as presence, and as moisture, and as weight. His hand has been given over to a kind of daze as he swirls it loosely on my leg, then it pauses briefly like it’s thinking, or like it feels the need to do something cute or clever, almost evincing some sense of obligation, like that heat should always bring fun. But he takes it all back. Everything softens. And the dazed stillness of his hand on my leg starts to fade: from touch back into contact, back into hand resting unmeaningfully on thigh. I smile like I’ve just watched rewound footage of something breaking, like a fishbowl being restored to its place on the counter, without any harm being done to the fish.

For whatever reason I think of the flowers outside earlier, shrinking pathetically from the harsh late-spring sun, the edges of their petals already hardened and discolored, their bodies flopped open in odd places like they matured too quickly to be picked and hold shape, or like they’ve burst. The irises fully gave up about a week ago, and their spear-like leaves have since lain themselves into a defeated pile at the base of the stems, which somehow remain upright, but hold out to my shins every morning a shriveled wisp where an iris once was. I water them regardless, though probably too late in the day, and maybe this is my problem –– that I can’t just let anything die. Luke stood over them for quite some time in the middle of the night last night when we got home after my shift; he finished his cigarette, rolled himself another, asked questions that lead to questions that lead to questions, and to keep his hair behind his ears, he must have traced forty or fifty sickles into his skull, pulling strands of hair from his forehead with a soft scratch of four fingers, only for it all to fall into his face again seconds later. The dying flowers, that entire time, were like yet another unresolvable problem, and Luke was almost twitching in their presence, his toes inching closer and closer to their bed as if his proximity might accomplish something that discussing them never could. We lingered over the flowers for such a long time that it must have been something I said that reminded him, though he waited for me to finish telling my story –– like me, refusing to let anything die. He reached into his bag then and pulled out some tulips, wrapped almost too tightly in butcher paper, a fashionable five or six thick-stemmed white ones that, in a large-enough vase, will splay outward as if in scorn of arrangement, like umbrellas in a bucket by the door.

My sleeping boyfriend rolls into me then, his back now a graffitied wall against which I lay motionless, trying to make sense of myself, I guess. His body is hot and there’s something altogether bricklike in its physics, in its construction, in its presence, and for a second I do wonder what it would feel like to take my fingers and climb. I scoot my body down a few feet, then squeeze myself into the place where his body and the bed form a tight right angle, disappearing slowly into that cranny until I have somehow slid my arm, a bit of my shoulder, and about a third of my left leg totally underneath him. He sighs like what I am doing is annoying but a pleasure, and from this position I look up his back, and make out the inky shapes long ago needled into his skin like they’re signs up there, unreadable from this vantage point or with the scant knowledge I possess. An old, familiar feeling permeates me at that moment, and it says, let’s get nonsensical. It says as if to remind me, oh how glorious it is that bodies make us nonsensical. It says, I want to be nonsensical. So, I take my right arm and my right leg like I am a spider with six more where those came from, and I latch onto him, and I bring him down upon me. He’s a wall falling in one piece and I am a spider underneath him, squashed. I feel for his edges with all eight of my broken limbs and I hold him against me. Then I wrap myself around him and I squeeze and I rub and I bite until I encourage from him a gorgeously nonsensical sound –– tonight it’s somewhere between a howl and a whinny and a growl and all the sounds that birds make at each other. I could die.

The box. I forgot to tell you about the neighbor’s box. Luke walked right over and wrapped his arms around its soft cardboard body; I felt so silly. He squatted and wrapped himself around it like he was picking up a toddler, and it entered Luke’s embrace like it too had arms. Then Luke carried it around the side of my neighbor’s house, dodging her bushes, and ducking under branches, and side-stepping around trashcans and spilled-open bags of potting soil until he arrived at a wall. He pressed the box above his head until it balanced precariously on the ledge, then he jumped for leverage and pushed, and it disappeared. I think I stopped breathing when it fell over onto the other side –– when it made that silly, satisfying, almost beautiful thumping sound a box makes when it finally finds the floor. Then he wiped his hands on his bare thighs and walked gingerly through the bushes and the branches and the bags of soil, back towards me and my porch step, from which he looked like he was walking on spiders, and from which it all looked like a climb.