What Others Are Saying About “Where Are My Children?”
“This is the saga of one mother's extraordinary love and bravery, and the lonely, perilous odyssey she undertook. This book will truly change you.”
--Rebekah Hamilton, PhD, University of Texas-Pan American
“Where Are My Children? is the dramatic, deeply personal account of one mother’s triumph against impossible odds to protect the people she loved more than anyone else in the world--her children.”
-- Kensington Publishing Company, New York City
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Where Are My Children?
by Cassie Kimbrough
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Copyright 2011 Cassie Kimbrough
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
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The school was having some kind of fiesta. Crêpe paper streamers were strung across the basketball court and children and adults milled around refreshment stands. Quickly I scanned the crowd for Jane and Michael, but couldn't find them.
Then a familiar movement on the far side of the court caught my eye: a little boy and girl hugged each other, and then the girl impatiently wiggled free. My fingers dug into the back of the old sofa I was sitting on.
"My babies!" I said to no one. "My beautiful children!"
How I ached to run down and touch their hands through the steel fence. As it was, all I could do was look down at them and watch helplessly.
I had to wait for just the right moment. There was no room for mistakes. I would only have one chance to get them back.
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Chapter One
Friday, November 13, 1987
It was six o'clock in the evening of Friday the thirteenth. I wasn't superstitious, but still it was a relief that the day was almost over, and nothing bad had happened.
My soon-to-be ex-husband, Federico, would be here any minute to pick up Jane and Michael. They were in their room choosing the toys they wanted to take on their weekend visit. Michael, four years old and all boy, was deciding which He-Man figure to take. Jane, six, looked up at me and asked, "Mommy, where's my Barbie doll?" She would be tall like me. What a contrast to her brother, who would have his father's dark hair and sturdier build.
There was a rap at the door, then a chorus of "Daddy! Daddy!" Federico swept Michael into the air and hugged Jane. I knew this display was partly for my benefit--he hadn't been this affectionate with the children before our separation—but I was glad they still had a loving relationship. In spite of the bitterness of our pending divorce and custody battle, it was my fervent hope that Federico's and my problems would remain just that—his and mine—and not spill over onto the children. But that hope seemed more and more unlikely as time went on.
Federico had demanded a jury trial to decide who should get custody of Jane and Michael. It was set for December, only a month away. I was pretty sure I would be granted custody, in spite of Federico's attempts to paint me as a bad mother. The trial would be ugly, but it would be over soon. Then we could all pick up the pieces and live normal lives again.
"Don't forget you promised to take them to the matinee on Sunday to see 'The Ugly Duckling,'" I reminded Federico.
"Sure. I can buy the tickets from you now," he said. I could hear the forced amiability through his thick Spanish accent. Federico was Bolivian, but with his green eyes and aquiline nose, he looked more like a citizen of France or Spain than Latin America. He paid for the tickets and pocketed them. The smile on his face was more like a smirk, but I considered it an encouraging sign anyway. Maybe things were settling down and he was regaining a margin of sanity. Was it my imagination, or had he been more cooperative for the past few weeks? Could I hope he would give up his insistence on a jury trial?
As I looked at him I found it hard to believe that this was the same man I had married nine years before. Nine years. Amazing, that two so very different people had stayed together that long. We had met at the University of Texas at Austin, and after a tempestuous courtship that had lasted two and a half years, we were married. Two weeks later we'd gone to Bolivia to live. Federico promised that we'd live there only two years. But the two years had stretched into six and a half. Finally, in 1985, we had come back to Texas. That was two years ago. Now here we were, two continents and two children later, strangers again.
I hugged Jane and Michael goodbye and shut the door behind them. Turning, I saw the toys they'd forgotten in the hubbub over their father's arrival. I shouted out the door at them and they came running back, Jane's dark blonde hair flying.
Quick hugs and they were gone again, this time clutching the toys as they ran down the sidewalk. Having a favorite plaything nearby would be a comfort when they woke up in an unfamiliar place, I thought. After all, they had spent the night with Federico only a few times since he'd moved out.
At first, he would pick them up on Saturday morning and have them back in time for supper. Lately, for some reason, he'd started keeping them all weekend. But I considered this a positive sign too.
Anyway, this weekend it would be convenient for me that the kids were gone. I was going to be busy with three performances of the ballet "The Ugly Duckling." In it, I danced the role of the mother swan to a half dozen adolescent cygnets. The first performance was that night.
I set about getting ready to go to the local theater, pulling on tights and leotard and twisting my hair into a chignon. Jane and Michael had come with me to most of the rehearsals. They were excited now about seeing the full-fledged ballet, complete with costumes and scenery. I was probably every bit as nervous as the young girls who would be dancing on stage for the first time that night, but my excitement was tinged with sadness. After the Sunday matinee, this would be my last performance, the final laying to rest of a childhood dream.
At one time or another nearly every girl yearns to be a ballerina, but I passed up an opportunity to give that dream a chance. When I was fourteen I had been offered a scholarship at a ballet school in New York City. Daddy had been alarmed at the idea of his daughter going off to the big bad city all by herself. He'd been even more alarmed at the possibility of my becoming a professional dancer. It was a narrow life, he'd said, grueling, competitive, and harsh. So I didn't go.
But my love for dance had persisted through the years, and I'd kept it up now and then between college and babies. Now the strenuous routine of class and rehearsal was just not possible anymore. I was thirty-four years old, not fourteen. Even so, age was not as much of a factor as the fact that my time was filled with having a job and family. And soon I would be a single mother with even less free time. So I danced that Friday night with awareness that it would be one of the last times.
Late that night, just before falling asleep, I remembered again that it was Friday the thirteenth. It had passed without incident.
The next day was unseasonably warm for November—even for the semi-tropical climate of McAllen, Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley—and I kept thinking that the sweaters I'd packed for Jane and Michael would be too hot. I made a mental note to call Federico and go by his apartment with lighter clothes for them. Instead I was needed at the theater to sew last-minute feathers onto swan costumes. There were so many details to take care of for the ballet that night that I completely forgot about calling the kids.
At the matinee performance on Sunday afternoon, a little thrill of pleasure went through me as I thought of Jane and Michael in the audience. "The Ugly Duckling" turned out to be delightful—touching and funny at the same time. They'd love it. Once on stage, though, I could see nothing but blackness beyond the footlights.
As soon as I got home, my friend Susan called. She had gone to the matinee with her two young children. "It was adorable. My kids loved it. But," she added, "we didn't see Jane and Michael. They weren't there."
"Are you sure?"
"I'm positive. We went up and down the aisles looking for them during each intermission."
I was irritated. It would be just like Federico to buy tickets and then not take the kids, just to annoy me. I resisted the impulse to call him and demand an explanation. Besides, I had a hands-off policy for the weekends that Jane and Michael spent with him. It was their time together, and I made it a point not to interfere. So I didn't call.
By six o'clock that evening I was restless for them to be home. It was always like this on their weekends away. On the first day, I enjoyed the luxury of having time to myself. But by the second day, the apartment seemed empty without them.
Six-thirty came. No knock on the door. Well, he was always a little late. I waited awhile, and then phoned his apartment. No answer. At seven-thirty there was still no answer. They were probably visiting one of his friends, I told myself. Nevertheless, a nagging worry began to grow in my mind.
The summer before, Federico had taken the children all the way to Miami to see his mother and sister who had flown up from Bolivia, and he'd brought them back safe and sound. At the time my lawyer had said I wasn't under any legal obligation to let Federico take Jane and Michael with him. But I didn't want to cut them off from their Bolivian relatives. And Federico was planning to take them to Disney World. Besides, maybe if I showed him some trust and goodwill, he'd see that he could have them anytime he wanted and give up his demand for custody. But I hadn't let him go without some guarantees. Before leaving, he'd signed notarized statements promising to return the children by 6 P.M. the following Sunday. The statement spelled out flight numbers and hotel names and included his written promise to have the children call me every night they were away.
The day they'd left, Jane had stood by Federico's car crying, her thin shoulders hunched.
"I don't want to go," she had sobbed. Her green eyes pleaded with me. "Mommy, don't make me go. I want to stay with you."
I tried to reassure her. She would have lots of fun. I would talk to her every night and she'd be back home in just a few days. I had felt responsible for her fearfulness. One night, weeks before that, I had started to cry in front of her. She'd never seen that before. When she asked what was wrong, I'd blurted out that I was afraid her daddy would take her and Michael away from me and never bring them back. I'd regretted that outburst many times, because it had planted the same fear in her. Several times when Federico had come to pick the children up for the weekend, she had begged me to tell him she didn't want to go, and I'd say that she had to tell him herself. But she couldn't bring herself to disappoint him. I sometimes worried that she was too obedient, too eager to please.
All that week they were in Miami, I felt uneasy. Had I been foolish? After all, it was the perfect opportunity for Federico to take off for Bolivia with the children and never come back. Each night I'd be relieved by the sound of their chirping voices over the phone. When he came back with them a week later I nearly wept with relief—relief that they were home and, even more important, relief that I'd never have to worry about Federico kidnapping them again. If he hadn't done it this time, I thought, he never would.
But now I wasn't so sure. He was two hours late. By eight o'clock I had called every friend of his I could think of. No one had seen him. By nine o'clock I knew something was very wrong. I called my lawyer at home. He was surprised to hear from me on a Sunday night.
"Is anything wrong?"
"He hasn't brought the kids back yet. I'm worried."
Mr. Rosenthal's voice was calm. "Have you called every place where they might be?" Yes, I had.
"Don't panic. Just hang tight. Wait until ten o'clock, and if he hasn't brought them back by then, call me."
I hung up the phone. As I waited, my stomach slowly squeezed itself into an icy ball. The minutes crawled by. Finally it was ten o'clock. Hand shaking, I dialed Mr. Rosenthal's number again.
"They're still not back." My voice was shaky, too.
"Okay. I'm coming over."
I waited outside in the parking lot. It wasn't cold but my teeth began to chatter uncontrollably. In a few minutes he pulled up. I slid into the front seat and immediately felt reassured just being in his presence.
Mr. Rosenthal was a bundle of contradictions. He came across as a good old boy, yet he was Jewish. Born and raised in a tiny town south of San Antonio, he'd become one of the most respected civil attorneys in the state. He was brash and outspoken, yet there was another side to him that was soft and kind.
For the past five months he had been not only my lawyer, but also my friend. He was like a kindly uncle. He was also my boss. I worked as a paralegal in the law firm that he ran along with three other partners. Mr. Rosenthal didn't normally handle divorces, but at the request of Kathy, his secretary and my friend, he said he would oversee my divorce case. I knew that my simple divorce had turned into a messy custody battle and a colossal pain in the neck. But he had never made me feel like an imposition. His eyes twinkling beneath bushy eyebrows, cigar clenched in his teeth, he had a way of making an irreverent comment that cut straight to the heart of a matter. He had enabled me to see things in perspective. He even made me laugh about things that weren't laughable. But tonight his impish grin was absent, his mouth under the iron gray mustache unsmiling.
First we drove across town to Federico's apartment complex and circled the parking lot. His car wasn't there. I didn't know which apartment was his, so we couldn't investigate on our own. Next we drove to the police station. He explained the situation to the officer at the front desk, who promised to send a patrolman to check out Federico's apartment. They'd call us as soon as they knew something. We drove to the law offices to wait for news. It was after midnight.
In Mr. Rosenthal's modern chrome and leather office, I sat across from him as I had many times before. He leaned back in his chair, his feet on the desk, and took out a cigar. It was a familiar scene, except that instead of a tailor-made suit and Gucci shoes he was wearing a Mexican guayabera shirt, shorts, and sneakers. And instead of the constant interruption of his telephone, the office was eerily quiet.
He produced a deck of cards and we started to play gin rummy, but without much enthusiasm. The clock on his wall was ticking loudly.
"I wonder when that policeman is going to call," I finally said.
"We should be hearing something pretty soon," he said, shifting the cigar in his mouth and laying down some cards
"He promised me he'd never do this," I thought aloud. I remembered the scene clearly. One week after Federico had moved out of our apartment and filed for divorce, he had sat across from me at the kitchen table, begging me to let him have one of the children.
"Please, just give one to me and you can keep the other. We could live with my mother in La Paz." Like the story of King Solomon and the baby. I couldn't bear the thought of it.
No, I had said.
For the first time a terrible fear took shape. What if he decided to take one of them anyway, or even both? I would be helpless to stop him. He had a legal right to see them. What if some afternoon when he took them for an outing he didn't come back?
"Please don't ever take them away from me," I had begged, and started to cry. Federico knew that I didn't cry easily, and it took him by surprise. For a moment the hard look on his face softened.
"I wouldn't do that to the kids. I know what it was like for you, growing up without a mother. I wouldn't do that to them."
Now, back in the law office, I said, "After he brought them back from Miami last summer, I thought I could trust him."
Mr. Rosenthal's eyes were cynical as he looked up from his cards. He could have said, "I told you so" but didn't. How many times had I heard him mutter that he didn't trust the "slimy bastard"?
Instead, he said patiently, "You don't know for a fact that he's taken them. Maybe he went to visit somebody out of town, in Harlingen or Brownsville or somewhere, and couldn't get back."
He went on with a few other possible explanations, but I was only half listening. Did he really believe any of it? I studied him. Undisciplined salt and pepper curls framed his broad face. His nose had been broken and reconstructed so many times—the first time after a childhood accident—that he now had the look of a boxer who'd been in the ring too long.
His thick eyebrows were drawn together and he wore a look of concerned reassurance. But I could tell that he was hiding something from me now. Could it be that he was as worried as I was? But, so desperately did I want to believe him that I seized on his reassuring words. We turned back to the card game. I struggled to concentrate, but the cards in my hands became a jumble of numbers and colors. The clock ticked on.
Finally, around 2 A.M., the phone jangled. Mr. Rosenthal answered it. His face began to tighten as he listened, and the ball of ice in my stomach turned to lead. "Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Nothing, huh? Well, you have my number. If y'all find out anything, let me know." He hung up and looked at me with baleful eyes.
"That was the police officer they sent out to check on Freddy's apartment. He said the door was open, and everything had been cleaned out—clothes, dishes, everything."
"Everything?" I echoed.
He nodded.
I had been steeling myself for this news for hours. But his words skimmed across my mind like rocks skipping water. I covered my face with my hands, not to cry, but to shut out the room and force the meaning of his words into my brain. Why didn't I scream, why didn't I beat the walls with my fists? Instead I felt hollow, stunned, frozen in time and space, as if a balloon inside me had popped and everything had collapsed in on itself. Mr. Rosenthal came around his desk and patted me awkwardly on the back.
He was saying something. "The police have a description of his car and the license plate number. They'll be looking for him."
My babies are gone.
"First thing in the morning we'll get a court order to stop him from leaving the country."
"It's too late," I said. My babies are gone.
"You don't know that," he said, but without much conviction. "Let me call Susan and have her stay with you tonight. You shouldn’t be by yourself."
"No, I'll be all right." How calm I sounded. How could that be?
Mr. Rosenthal argued with me briefly but gave up without his usual spunk. For once he had no ready answer, no advice, no funny stories to tell. He drove me home through the silent deserted streets.
Once in the apartment I went straight to Jane and Michael's room. Everything tonight had seemed so unreal. Maybe it had all been a weird dream, and I would find them sleeping soundly in their beds. I hesitated a moment and then switched on the light. A self-portrait of Jane in her Super Girl costume grinned crookedly down at me from the wall. A brace of toy dinosaurs stood frozen in combat on the floor. I turned to look at their beds. They were rumpled and unmade…and empty. I buried my face in Michael's pillow, where his scent still lingered. It was no dream. There would be no last-minute reprieve from this nightmare.
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Chapter Two
Monday, November 16, 1987
The next morning, as promised, Mr. Rosenthal picked me up at eight to go to the courthouse. It was in the county seat, a small town about fifteen miles north of McAllen. On the way we passed fragrant groves of oranges. The December harvest was only a month away, and the trees were heavy with fruit. Palm trees lined the road, their leafy tops swaying in the breeze. It seemed incredible that the world around me was as beautiful as before. I felt removed from it, as if I were looking at it through an invisible curtain.
At the courthouse Mr. Rosenthal and I went to the District Attorney's office, where we were ushered into the office of a young assistant D.A., Omar Trevino. His desk was cluttered with files, and he looked harassed and overworked. He stood up and extended his hand.
"How can I help you?"
Mr. Rosenthal introduced me and told Mr. Trevino briefly what had happened the night before.
"We want to stop Mr. Bascope from leaving the country with those children. I'm not familiar with criminal law so I have no idea what we have to do to accomplish that."
Mr. Trevino sat back down and motioned for us to take a seat. "Hmm, I've never run into a case like this before. But I know that you'll need court orders—probably a writ of habeas corpus and a warrant for his arrest from the sheriff's office." He shook his head. "But I don't know if there's any way to stop him if he's already left the jurisdiction of this court."
My heart sank. That meant that if he was already out of Hidalgo County—which he surely was—he was out of reach.
Mr. Trevino began to leaf through a law book. I sat perched on the edge of a wooden chair, suppressing the urge to scream, "Hurry up! Every second counts!" Maybe there was still time to stop them. Maybe at this moment they were at an airport, waiting for the plane that would take them away forever.
Trevino put down the book. "If he's already left Texas, you're gonna have to get the Feds involved in it. I know a guy in the FBI office in McAllen. I can call him and see what you have to do to get a federal warrant issued." As he was making the call, a secretary stepped into the doorway.
"There's a phone call for Mr. Rosenthal." He went to a desk outside Mr. Trevino's office to take the call and returned a few minutes later.
"That was my secretary. She called the Carter Apparel Company—that's where Bascope was working—and they said he'd called in this morning to ask for a 'personal day' off. It looks like he might still be in the country. "
My pulse quickened. But why would he call in to work if he was planning to disappear? It didn't make sense.
"Where was he calling from? What did he say?" I asked.
"I don't know. Kathy just talked to the receptionist there. The plant manager was in a meeting, but he's supposed to call me as soon as he gets out."
Meanwhile, Trevino had talked to his friend at the FBI. "To stop this guy from leaving the country you need a federal indictment, not just a state one."
"What do we have to do to get that?" Mr. Rosenthal asked.
"Well, first you'll need the judge who has jurisdiction over the divorce case to sign several different court orders. Then you take those to the sheriff's department and they'll issue a warrant for his arrest. Only after that warrant is issued can you get the federal indictment." He went on explaining the process. I felt more and more frustrated as I listened. What he was talking about would take days.
The secretary announced another phone call for Mr. Rosenthal. This time I followed him into the next room. After listening a moment, he began to frown. "I see, so there wasn't any phone call. Uh-huh. Yes. Well, I appreciate your calling. And please call my office if you hear anything."
He hung up and looked at me. "That was the plant manager at Carter's. Freddy never called there this morning. That was just a story they were giving out—at his request. In fact, he got fired a month ago. The plant manager hasn't seen him since he came in to pick up his check several weeks ago."
Fired a month ago? My throat went dry. "Then why…?"
"They were covering for him in case the social worker called to check on his job status. Federico didn't want him to know he'd been fired." He added dryly, "I guess he thought it might hurt his chances for getting custody."
The court had appointed a social worker to evaluate the two homes, Federico's and mine, and to recommend to the judge which was better for the children. He had recommended mine.
"When this guy got Kathy's message this morning and found out that Freddy had taken off with the kids, he thought he'd better call me and tell me the truth."
I was blinded by tears of frustration and anger—frustration at having my hopes raised and then dashed, anger at Federico's deception, and at his boss for helping him with it. If only I'd known he was out of a job, I'd never have let the kids out of my sight, even if it meant camping on his doorstep every other weekend. And how cool he'd been. Even after he'd been fired, he'd come to pick them up dressed in slacks and a tie, as if he were on his way home from work.
In spite of my anger, I felt a stab of pity for him. He must have felt desperate after he'd lost this job, his second since we'd come back to the United States two years ago. I remembered how hard those first seven months in Austin had been, his grueling search for a job and the toll it had taken on him. He couldn't have done it again. And anger surged up again. He would have been too proud to slink home to Bolivia empty-handed. So he'd taken the children.
None of that mattered now. He was surely well on his way to Bolivia, if he hadn't already arrived. Mr. Rosenthal must have read this thought in my eyes. He said, "Cass, he might not be out of reach yet. We'll go back to my office and get Kathy to type up those court orders right away. Then we'll come back this afternoon and get Judge Villarreal to sign them. There's still hope."
While we were at the courthouse, Kathy had been busy herself. Kathy, who was from my native West Texas, was a mother of two little boys, happily married to her high school sweetheart, and a woman of unyielding convictions. Not only had she called Federico's former boss, she had also phoned his former landlady, who'd told her that yes, Mr. Bascope had moved out of his apartment the previous Saturday. In fact, he'd given two months' notice of his intentions to leave. No, he hadn't left a forwarding address. The landlady also mentioned having seen an Asian man who was helping Mr. Bascope move.
"I know who the Asian must be," I told Mr. Rosenthal when he returned to the car where I sat waiting. Wan was a Korean who ran a small electronics shop in downtown McAllen, one of dozens of such shops that did most of their business with Mexicans from across the border, only eight miles away. We had bought a television set from him when we'd first moved to McAllen, and Federico, in typical fashion—in Bolivia you had to bargain and haggle before buying anything, so it was an advantage to befriend the seller—had ingratiated himself with Wan. When Federico and I had separated, Wan had helped him move out of our apartment. He owned a large van that came in handy on such occasions. I was fairly sure that Wan was the same Asian the landlady had seen.
Mr. Rosenthal and I drove to his shop, one of many similar establishments lining the street. As soon as Wan saw me, his face took on a guarded expression. He gave me a curt nod. Mr. Rosenthal handed him one of his business cards.
"I'm Doug Rosenthal, Mrs. Bascope's attorney. We'd like to talk with you if you have a few minutes." Wan led us past stacks of television sets and stereos to his cluttered office at the back of the shop. There he sat behind his desk and motioned for us to take a seat. Mr. Rosenthal remained standing, one foot propped on an empty TV box. He glanced at Wan's business card.
"Mr. Ho," he began, "I represent Mrs. Bascope in the divorce between her and Mr. Bascope. It seems that Mr. Bascope has disappeared and taken her children with him. We were just wondering if you might know something about where he's gone."
Wan's face remained expressionless as he listened, nervously tapping a pencil on his desk. He claimed to know nothing. But when Mr. Rosenthal told him that Federico's landlady had seen him helping Federico move out of his apartment on Saturday, Wan admitted, "Yes, I helped him." He added quickly, "But I don't know where he was planning to go."
"You mean he didn't even mention where he was moving to?"
"He didn't tell me anything. He just say he was moving."
"Well, was he planning to drive there?"
"No."
"How do you know that?"
"He sold me his car."
"Didn't you wonder what kind of place he was going where he wouldn't need a car?"
"No. He sold it to me for very good price. I didn't ask questions." Wan was getting increasingly nervous.
"What else did you buy from him?"
"I bought nothing else from him. We make a trade, though. He came into my shop early last week because he wanted to trade his VCR."
"What did he want to trade it for?" I asked quickly.
"He had a VHS-type VCR and he wanted to trade it for a Betamax."
I turned to Mr. Rosenthal.
"In Bolivia they use only Betamax. I know that's where he's gone."
Mr. Rosenthal asked Wan if he knew that I had legal custody of the children and that Federico had broken the law by taking them. He hinted that Wan might be considered an accomplice, but Wan kept repeating that he didn't know anything. It was clear he wasn't going to reveal anything else. He was visibly relieved when he walked us to the front of the store and saw us out.
Inside the car, Mr. Rosenthal muttered, "That lying little weasel. He probably drove them to the airport himself."
"It doesn't matter," I said. "They're long gone."
That afternoon we returned to the courthouse. Judge Villarreal grimly signed every document put in front of him: writs of habeas corpus, demands to return the children to the custody of the court, orders finding Federico in contempt, orders for his arrest. Federico's lawyer showed up only long enough to present his motion to withdraw from the case. He had little to say about what Federico had done, except, of course, that he didn't know anything about it.
Armed with the signed court orders, we went to the sheriff's office. We talked to a burly female investigator named Lisa Murillo and wrote affidavits setting out the events of Sunday night and our reasons for believing that Federico had kidnapped the children. This was the first step in getting a warrant issued and a stop order sent to all international airports and other ports of exit.
Sometime that afternoon, I telephoned my father in Austin. As soon as I heard his voice, the dam burst. "Daddy," I sobbed, "Federico took Jane and Michael."
There was stunned silence for a moment. Then he asked, "Where are they?"
"I think they're in Bolivia."
He said quietly, "I'm so sorry, darling." At that point there wasn't much comfort he could offer.
I dug old photograph albums out of boxes the next morning and spread them around me on the floor. The sheriff's office needed pictures of Federico and the children for identification. I picked up one of the albums and began to turn the pages. It was hard to believe that these photographs were all that was left of our marriage. I stared at a picture of Federico as he was when I'd first met him. He was leaning forward earnestly, dark hair curling around his ears, and in the lamplight his eyes were clear and intense.
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Chapter Three
Austin, Texas, 1975
It was the summer of 1975 at the University of Texas. Federico was working on his master's degree in economics, and I was getting mine in English. I was the girl from the flat West Texas plains who'd always yearned to travel, to roam the English moors of the Bronte novels, to float down the Amazon River, to safari across the African savannah—the more exotic the better. The more different from my background other places and people were, the more fascinating I found them. So it wasn't surprising that Federico intrigued me, with his Latin good looks, his accent, and what I imagined to be a suave international air.
We met quite by accident. In the summer session of that year we both decided to take a course just for fun: beginning French. It was the first day of class. The students' chatter died away as a large woman strode into the room, dumped some books on the desk, and sang out in a lilting accent, "Bonjour, mes etudiantes. Comment allez-vous?" Mademoiselle St. Clair, who in spite of her name was a homespun Texan like most of the rest of us, had a pixie-ish sense of fun that set the tone for the rest of the semester.
That first day, when she commanded us to introduce ourselves in French, my attention zeroed in on the foreign student in the front row, the older one with the serious expression and aquiline nose. He seemed mature, wise, self-contained, even a little aloof. His name was Federico, but he was soon rechristened Frederique. I was Catherine, pronounced the French way: Cat-er-een.
From that day I began to subtly pursue Frederique. After class he'd always pick up a copy of the campus newspaper at a kiosk just outside the building. I would "happen" to be there at the same time. We'd exchange a few pleasantries and then go our separate ways. He was unfailingly polite, even gallant in an old-world way—or maybe I'd read too many English novels. He had a vague and distracted air about him and didn't seem that interested in me. But that didn’t discourage me. One day he walked me to my dorm, wheeling his ten-speed bike alongside. A few days later, he asked me to dinner. We began seeing each other.
I learned that he had grown up in Bolivia in a rather privileged family. His European ancestry automatically placed him among the upper classes. His mother's family hailed from the Andalusian region of Spain, and his father's ancestors had been Basques from France. His father had died when Federico was a toddler, he told me, and his stepfather, now a doctor with the United Nations, had immigrated to Bolivia after fleeing Nazi Germany.
I was impressed with Federico's stories of growing up in houses full of servants, with chauffeurs to drive the family's Mercedes-Benz. He had traveled all over South America and Europe, he told me. He described his childhood in Tarija, a lovely town in the south of Bolivia, close to the border of Argentina, where grape vineyards covered the hillsides, women wore flowers tucked behind their ears, and natives spoke in the lilting dialect used in the days of Cervantes. It was all very charming.
While he was a university student in Bolivia, Federico met an American girl, a Peace Corps volunteer. They fell in love. When her stint with the Peace Corps was over, Federico returned with her to Texas and they were married. He studied English while she got her master's degree in social work from the University of Texas at Austin. Now, three years later, he told me they were divorced. He was staying in Austin long enough to finish his master's degree in economics and was putting himself through school by waiting tables in a Mexican restaurant.
It wasn't until we'd been seeing each other for several months that I learned that Federico wasn't divorced after all. At first I was furious. But by then I was in love, and it didn't take long for me to accept his explanation. He had told me that he was getting a divorce, not that he already had one; I had simply misunderstood. It seemed plausible enough—communication was never easy between us. And a few months after our near breakup, he was indeed divorced. So began a rather rocky relationship that continued for the next three years.
Early in the summer of 1978, Federico's stepfather died. His newly widowed mother needed him. He decided to return to Bolivia as soon as the fall semester ended.
For the first time in our relationship we discussed marriage. It was under the pressure of imminent separation that we made wedding plans. With some misgivings on my part (but doesn't everyone have the jitters?) we were married in November of 1978. Two weeks later we arrived in La Paz, Bolivia.
My dream of traveling to foreign lands had come true—but Bolivia didn't exactly match my dreams. I was suddenly catapulted into a world different from any I had ever known or imagined. Sure, Federico had told me about the snow-capped mountains and the colorful indigenous people, but he hadn't told me that everywhere, all the time, inside or out, it was cold in La Paz, and there was no such thing as indoor heating. He hadn't told me that we'd be stuck in a cramped, cheerless apartment with his mother Nila for nine months. He hadn't told me that almost everything I ate and drank during the first year would give me the Inca equivalent of Montezuma's revenge, until my stomach incubated its own colony of hardy native amoebas. And he hadn't told me that instead of welcoming me into the family, my new in-laws would all but ignore me.
At that point I couldn't speak much Spanish and with the exception of Federico's sister Ana Maria, they couldn't speak English. Every Sunday the family would gather for a huge midday meal in Nila's apartment. In front of us all, Nila would scold Federico for marrying a useless American woman who didn't know how to cook or do anything else a wife was supposed to do. What good was my college degree? What did a woman need that for? Why hadn't he married a nice girl from Tarija, his hometown? To his credit, Federico defended me as I sat picking at my food.
It was worse during the day, when Federico left for his job as an assistant at an import firm. Nila was nothing if not energetic. She furiously dusted, swept, and cooked all morning long. When I pitched in to help, she'd scold me for doing it all wrong, but if I didn't offer to help, she'd scold me for my laziness. Nila and I had a few screaming matches; she would shout at me in Spanish, which I barely understood, and I would shout back at her in English, which she understood not at all. Sometimes we'd shout at the same time—after all, it didn't matter if either of us actually heard what the other was saying.
In La Paz I saw no trace of the lifestyle Federico had described to me. There were no servants or fine cars with chauffeurs. When her husband died, Nila's standard of living fell drastically. She had to move out of their spacious apartment suite and rent it as office space. With the rental proceeds and her UN widow's pension she was buying another large condominium, but in the interim she lived in the no-frills apartment we shared with her.
After nine miserable months, Nila traveled to West Berlin to visit one of her sons. On the eve of her departure, she held a going-away tea in her apartment. Even though I lived there, she pointedly neglected to invite me. I stayed in my room, listening to the clinking cups and laughter of Nila and her friends.
While Nila was in Berlin, Federico and I moved into our own apartment. For me, life improved dramatically. I got a job in the evenings teaching English at a small business college. Later, I taught English to over-privileged ninth, tenth, and twelfth graders, both American and foreign, at the American Cooperative School in La Paz. Meanwhile, Federico had become the assistant manager of a textile factory. We still spent a lot of time with my in-laws, but by then I could speak decent Spanish, and the gatherings were more enjoyable. Nila and I got along better after her return from Germany.
Federico's older brother Rene, an electrician, was forty years old and never married. He was shy and intense but very kind. Rene and Federico were Nila's children from her first husband. When Federico was still a toddler, she had married Dr. Kann and had had three more children: Edgar, Manuel and Ana Maria.
Edgar and Manuel attended the University of Berlin and stayed in West Berlin after their graduation. Edgar was a mining engineer. He was unmarried but living with a German girl and their small daughter. Manuel was a clinical psychologist. He was married to a Peruvian woman and they had two sons.
The youngest of Federico's siblings, and the only girl, was Ana Maria. Pretty and spoiled, Ana Maria was the only one of the children who lived with her parents during the years Dr. Kann was stationed in UN posts in Burma and Afghanistan. She had been educated in private schools and had traveled all over Europe. Besides Spanish, she spoke fluent English, German, and Farsi. She was married to a dentist, Horacio, from Buenos Aires, and they lived in La Paz with their two children. On the eve of the birth of their son, Edgar married his German girlfriend and they moved to La Paz. After a few years, Rene finally got married to Lily, a hairdresser.
We spent time together endlessly, and I got to know my in-laws very well. Lily and Rene were always kind and generous. Rene was always running errands for his mother, and Lily spent a lot of time giving free haircuts and perms to the other women in the family. Edgar had been a radical student in Spain in the movement against Franco and had even spent time in jail there as a result of his involvement. He was still a revolutionary at heart and seemed to have genuine concern for the downtrodden. For now, though, his main concern was providing for his unhappy wife and their children. He wore a constant look of worry, and his German wife Monika lived in frustration at the difficulties of living in Bolivia and trying to learn Spanish. She and I probably would have .been better friends if we'd had a language in common.
Ana Maria and Horacio were caught up in the social whirl of the German and Argentine Embassies. They entertained often, and their main interest was to accumulate fine and costly possessions. They could talk of little else. Horacio was a walking encyclopedia of the best brands of any product you could name, but his snobbishness annoyed me less than his habit of making jokes about my height. I towered head and shoulders above everyone in the family except Federico, and Horacio's teasing wore thin. These made up the clan, the hub around which our lives revolved for six and a half years.
I was learning what it meant to be a housewife in Bolivia. I learned the art of haggling with surly vendors in the marketplaces. I learned how to take a twenty-pound chunk of raw meat and cut it into manageable pieces. Cooking was time consuming and labor intensive. Preparing the noon meal was the task of an entire morning. Frozen or packaged foods were nonexistent, and canned food was expensive and of inferior quality. There were peas to shell, and meat to cut and pound into tenderness. Tap water wasn't potable, so each day one had to boil a tub of water and then allow it to cool for drinking. Raw fruits and vegetables had to be soaked in iodine to kill harmful bacteria (farmers fertilized their fields with their own waste).
There was an unwritten rule that lunch had to begin with homemade soup. This was made with stock from boiling either beef bones, or from boiling the inedible parts of a chicken: the head and the feet. I remember the first time I lifted the lid off a boiling pot in my mother-in-law's kitchen only to find the glazed eye of a chicken staring up at me, and chicken claws bobbling around in the stock. The main course was a meat dish, served up with several vegetable dishes and the obligatory rice and boiled potatoes. Dessert was fresh fruit, followed by coffee or coca tea, made from boiled leaves from the coca plant. It was an enormous amount of food.
Breakfast was light, continental style, with bread and coffee, and instead of supper there was late afternoon tea, which consisted of more bread and coffee or tea.
Washing clothes was a project. There were no laundromats, and a owning a washer or dryer was rare. Every house and apartment came equipped with its own laundry room: a tiny cement cubicle with a built-in washtub. Maids would stand at the washtub, rubbing and wringing the clothes by hand. The only "detergent" on the market was a soap powder that was used for everything from washing dishes to scrubbing toilets. Washed clothes were hung to dry on lines strung across the laundry room.
Maids did the ironing, too and did they ever. I couldn't convince them that it wasn't necessary to iron everything. Bras, men's underwear, and washcloths did quite nicely without being ironed. Over the years I threw away many a dainty thing that had been scorched with a hot iron.
Items I had always considered necessities—breakfast cereal, underarm deodorant, paper towels, and later, baby food and disposable diapers were either unavailable or prohibitively expensive. I learned to do without or to make my own. No mayonnaise? No problem. I made it at home in a blender. No baby food? I made that at home too. I learned from the Bolivians, who were wonderfully inventive at finding unusual uses for ordinary items. If what they needed wasn't at hand, they'd adapt something else to do the job.
I learned about dealing with maids, although with limited success. When we first moved to Bolivia, I was amused at the women's complaints about the "servant problem." It was the kind of conversation I thought went the way of the English landed gentry, but there it was. At first it seemed like a wonderful convenience to have a maid to cook and clean. But I never felt comfortable dealing with a “servant.” I didn’t know how to treat a maid. Should you be all business? Should you treat them as a kind of friend? After all, they were in your house most of the time, something else I couldn’t get used to.
But because of the lack of labor-saving devices, maids were almost a necessity. There were hardwood floors to sweep and polish, clothes to wash by hand, rugs to beat. Maids were also incredibly inexpensive—it cost the equivalent of $20 a month for a full-time, live-in housekeeper.
Eventually I made friends with other Americans in the community. Most were with the U.S. Embassy, or the U.S. Agency for International Development, or one of the various church missions. For a while my only social life outside of Federico's family consisted in attending gringa teas held by American wives married to Bolivian husbands. But I didn't go for long. The teas were an excuse for wives to get together and complain about Bolivia and everything in it, and by then I was beginning to find the country fascinating.
Physically, Bolivia was a land of contrasts. La Paz was on the flat high plains between the eastern and western ranges of the Andes Mountains. It was two miles above sea level and chilly year round. But you could hop in your car and in two hours be in the steamy Zongo Valley, where oranges grew wild and parrots squawked in the trees.
The road led from the the icy heights of the Andean peaks into an emerald valley nestled between steep mountainsides. The first time we rounded a bend and I saw the mist rising up from the Zongo, it was like seeing the Hudson River painting "Heart of the Andes" come to life. The humid breezes of the Zongo felt like a caress against my skin, so different from the cold, dry air of La Paz.
Two hours away from La Paz to the East lay another jungle valley with an equally exotic name, the Yungas. There the names of the towns rolled off the tongue like strange music: Chulumani, Unduavi, Socabaya. We once stayed in the Yungas in a hillside hotel nestled among orange and coffee trees and surrounded by coca fields. (Even though its, leaves are used to make cocaine, coca is grown legally in Bolivia. The Aymara, the indigenous people of the Bolivian altiplano, for centuries have chewed its leaves to alleviate fatigue and hunger. The tea brewed from its leaves was often served in both private homes and restaurants. It was also a remedy for “soroche,” or altitude sickness.) In the Yungas, we picked wild oranges—enough to fill the trunk of the car—and took them back to La Paz to distribute among the family.
The road to the Yungas was called, among other things, El Camino de la Muerte, the Road of Death, because it is so dangerous. The Death Road is now featured regularly on TV programs as “the most dangerous road in the world.” It has even become a tourist attraction, with guided mountain bike trips offered by several adventure sports companies in La Paz.
When I traveled on the Yungas road, it had no such international fame. It was just the scariest, most white-knuckled road trip I’d ever taken and traveling it several times only lessened the fear a little. The dirt road became slippery with mud when it rained, which was often. The mountainside rose steeply on one side of the narrow road and on the other side steep cliffs fell hundreds of feet. There were no crash barriers or shoulders. Looking over the edge, you could see the wrecks of buses and other vehicles that had slipped off the road and tumbled hundreds of feet down the mountain.
Bolivia was full of contrasts: rich and poor, beautiful and ugly, kind and mean spirited. I had never seen so many Mercedes-Benz automobiles in one place, yet the vast majority of people had no car at all and got around on crowded buses. Beautiful mansions surrounded by well-manicured gardens could be found on the same street as mud shacks with half-naked children playing in the doorways.
People who didn't know you could be quite rude. Customers were all but ignored by store clerks and marketplace vendors, who didn't seem to care whether you bought from them or not. But people who knew you were effusively warm and affectionate. It was the custom to greet anyone you had even a passing acquaintance with, male or female, with a kiss on both cheeks. It took me a while to get the hang of knowing which cheek to aim for first and to master the art of brushing the air with my lips without actually touching skin.
There were other customs to get used to: the way Bolivians made promises and arranged vague social dates they had no intention of keeping, the eight o'clock dinner invitation that really meant ten-thirty, the fact that there was only one correct way to do everything—the Bolivian way.
There was a yawning gap between the sexes, with rigidly defined roles and expectations. At parties everyone separated immediately into two groups: men and women. I soon learned that the men expected to be left alone by the women, except when the women served them. Each woman would heap a plate with the choicest bits of food and then serve it to her husband. Then the women and children would eat. The women sat on one side of the room and discussed maids, children, and manicures, and the men drank beer on the other side of the room and discussed politics.
Once, before I understood the rules, I got bored with the women's corner and ventured onto the men's side of the room to stand at Federico's elbow. The men's discussion faltered and an embarrassed hush fell over them. It was like the scene from Giant when Elizabeth Taylor joined her husband and the men.
Federico and I had our own share of problems. Almost from the moment we got married, his ardor for me seemed to cool. I was puzzled and hurt, but he denied that anything was different. In many other little ways he became less attentive. It was as if from the moment we were married he thought, "I have her now; I'll turn my attention to other things."
And there were plenty of other things he could turn his attention to. In Austin he had been just one of the faceless crowd. In Bolivia, he was somebody. In Bolivia he was in his element, on his old stomping grounds. In Tarija he'd played on the national basketball team, and many people still remembered him as a sports star.
In his new job he was important, too. As manager of a large textile plant, he was master of the fate of some three hundred workers. Fresh out of an American college and bursting with new ideas, he had set about modernizing the plant and introducing new management techniques. He renewed friendships with old high school buddies and every week played soccer or basketball with them. Later, he became president of Bolivia's National Basketball Association and was caught up in planning the South American Championship games, which he arranged to have in Tarija. He was often in the papers and on the news. I was glad for him and proud of his accomplishments. But few of his activities included me, and I began to feel like nothing more than a cheerleader on the sidelines.
I was homesick. I missed my family and pets. I craved baked potatoes with sour cream, a breakfast of Grape Nuts, and an occasional enchilada. I missed Texas and all things Texan. I even missed country music, and I'd never even liked it before then. I put a travel book about Texas on our coffee table, eager to talk about home, but nobody ever asked. Bolivians seemed strangely insulated, so preoccupied with their own country and its problems that they never asked me what it was like in my country. Besides, they thought they knew all about it from the movies.