The martian from Oruro

Annie and her sister Claire were arguing about whether the Americans or the Russians would be the first to go to the moon. "Let them both go to hell, and you go to sleep!" their mother would say before turning off the light.

This family, composed of three French women in Normandy, is part of the first wave of extraterrestrials that arrived on our planet. The rest appeared around the 1980s, in the Bolivian highlands, most of them in the city of Oruro because it apparently was the most convenient for landing their tremendous spacecraft.

Luckily for me, one of them became my classmate. His real name is impossible to pronounce; we would need twice as many vocal cords to say any word in his language, so in class, we simply called him "Diego."

Once I invited him to my house and showed him all my toys, but the only thing he was interested in was a bottle of olive oil my mom had saved. It was a gift from her friend who visited Italy, and we kept it in the living room as a decoration because the bottle was truly beautiful. Diego finished the liter of oil in one gulp, and we had to refill it with cooking oil so my mom wouldn't notice.

He told me that the worst thing about being a Martian was that he could never fully integrate with humans, and he didn't have a home to return to either. I recently found out that he moved to Virginia in the United States. "You wouldn't believe how many Orureños live here," he said, and I burst out laughing.