My Mother's Dreams

by Sarah Ward (United States of America)

Making a local connection Bolivia

Bolivia is the guardian of my mother’s dreams. At sixteen, she arrived alone at the train station in Potosí, thousands of miles from her home in the United States. At twenty, I stepped off a bus on the opposite side of the city. I had missed her arrival by forty years, but she reminisced that nothing had changed when I sent her photos of the dusty, winding streets outside the station. We will see Potosí, she told me when I was growing up. But when her doctors told her that her cancer made it so that she was too sick to travel, we stopped planning. Potosí became a dusty relic of horn pipes, pottery jars, and silver jewelry high up on the living room shelves. I always imagined my mother as a woman of two worlds: in one, she was my mother. In the other, she was a ‘shadow woman’, haunted by feelings of a life not quite finished and dreams of a country she would never see again. When I turned twenty, I decided that I had to see it for her. After I received my Bolivian visa, I promised her that I would find her house in Potosí. This became my burden. I carried it with me along with a packet of old postcards, a few of my mother’s letters, and a fading polaroid of an old brown adobe house. Arriving in Potosí, Bolivia, I realized that the city is a world unto itself, far outside of the realm of google maps. To find an address, you have to ask around and pray that someone understands your broken Spanish well enough to point you in the right direction. As I walked through the central plaza under the shadows of crumbling cathedrals and government buildings, I obsessed over the cobblestones. Like the faded pastel walls and the faint glow of mountain mines on the hills around Potosí, they had known my mother when she walked these streets as a teenager. Forty years later, I was begging them to reveal her secrets. I wandered through the bustling streets surrounding the market, past stalls of shouting street vendors and children with sweet smelling pastries. The cobblestones gave way to dust. Behind me, the city grew quiet and the world retreated until I was alone, counting house numbers in late afternoon sun. A woman in the market had pointed me down a road towards the city walls. I asked her about the address of my mother’s house and she had eyed me questioningly from her stall before brushing her hands on her apron laughing. I was looking for house number forty-six near la plaza central . I wanted to ask my mother: is that what home is? A two-digit number on a brown adobe house? The gritty taste of dirt, your dirt, on your tongue? I counted down in my head as I skimmed past doorways. Home is a building, a memory, a person. Home is a place that guards your ghosts. Forty-six. I blinked and it was in front of me. “How do you feel?,” my traveling companion asked me repeatedly. I silently stood in front of an old, brown adobe house. The world was held its breath. Taking an old polaroid out of my pocket, I held it up in front of me and snapped a picture on my phone. Hoping for service, I sent the photo to my mother. In that moment, my mother’s ghosts became my ghosts, and my heart ached for everything that her illness had taken away. The people walking by stopped to watch me, a gringa, as I stood silently on the sidewalk, trying to remember every last piece of the house in front of me. My thoughts were interrupted by the buzz of my cellphone. It was a message from my mother. Thank you for letting me see it all one last time, she wrote. Finally, after years of dreaming, crying, and aching for all that we had lost, I was in the land of her dreams. There, in the summer glow of the late-afternoon Andean summer, I began to weep.