Boon's Bookcase

 PHOENIX RISING

BY

ALBINA DU BOISROUVRAY

I was very honoured to be approached by the Publishers to host an extract for Phoenix Rising by Albina Du Boisrouvray and I am posting an extract below for you.

I am mixed-race, hybrid.
A jumble of geographical, ethnic, social, economic, and cultural contradictions. 15% French and Celtic, 20% Iberian (Spanish and Portuguese), 28% southern European of all sorts, and 21% Native American of southeastern Asian origin. The remaining percentages are divided between sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East: Arab, Jewish, and 1% African — most likely the legacy of an ancestor who was a slave in the sugarcane fields of the Bolivian lowlands.

A paradox. A walking oxymoron.

Luz Mila, my mother, was the youngest child of an extremely wealthy Bolivian family. Slight, short, and fragile, she was a chola (of mixed Quechua and Spanish heritage). She was tan, but she lightened her face by washing it with milk every night. On July 2, 1939, at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, in the midst of seizures from pre-eclampsia, she gave birth to a little piece of ethnic patchwork weighing 4 pounds, 15 ounces(2.25kg) — me. She even dislocated her shoulder during labour.

Saddled with the first name of my maternal grandmother, Albina Patiño, I landed in this affluent Parisian suburb on the eve of World War II. I embodied two traditions: my father was from the Jacquelot du Boisrouvray Polignac family, the old aristocracy of Brittany and Auvergne. And my mother was a Patiño, from a newly enriched family that was part Quechua and had risen from poverty.

I stayed in an incubator for one whole week. My mother couldn’t produce any milk and when I obstinately refused powdered formula, the hospital provided milk from an anonymous wet nurse from Levallois, to whom I am infinitely grateful. At the end of July, a certified British nanny who had raised almost all the grandchildren of the Patiño tribe arrived. Miss Eva Rust, whom we called “Nursie,” was the daughter of a Protestant minister. Tall with greying hair, she resembled a police officer in her dark blue uniform. She was solid and reliable, and, while somewhat prudish and harsh, she had an enchanting imagination.

Taken by my mother to her parents’ house at 32 Avenue Foch, a Bolivian enclave within Paris, and I was immediately stored on the top floor to spare the family my piercing cries. One afternoon, Marie-Louise Parent, my mother’s gentle and distinguished maid, heard my howls from afar and found me alone under the eaves. I was purple with rage, blue with cold, and had no blanket. “I warmed you up and comforted you,” she told me later. Though I lacked maternal tenderness, I was still born with a tin spoon in my mouth.

Tin. Several decades before, this metal had sealed the fate of my grandfather, Simon Patiño, before he became the dictatorial patriarch I knew. He was born in 1860 to an unknown father, just like his two half-brothers. A Quechua cholo from Cochabamba province (altitude: 8,900 feet), Simon was an orphan working in the mines by age sixteen. My great-grandmother Mali had run a café on a dirt road in the main square of Carrassa, a poor village in the Andes. She served chicha, a local beer made of corn. When their mother died, Simon took his half-brother Ernesto, who was only ten, to work in the tin mines at an altitude of 15,000 feet. After working in the mine, Simon was then hired at a store selling prospecting tools. Through luck and ingenuity, this adventurous young man discovered a deposit that would become the most gigantic tin mine in the world. Locate above Oruro, it was almost at surface level, at an altitude of 16,400 feet. In the early days, my grandmother Albina, escorted by llamas, would transport chunks of ore on the back of a mule when she went to borrow money from the bank in Oruro, her small hometown.