The Travel Writer

by Jeff Soloway

  The trip proved more grueling than usual. On day four, the writers were loaded in motorized canoes and pushed down the river toward a traditional indigenous settlement (though no more traditional, we were told, than the ones we had visited the day before, upriver). I, however, decided that I had earned a break from high-humidity sightseeing. I hid in my hut, until I was sure the rest were gone, and then flung open the door to step out alone into the jungle wilderness.

  But it wasn’t the jungle, really; from the threshold of my hut I could see not the green mosaic of the rain forest canopy but simply a clayey, tree-stump-lined dirt path by the river. And Pilar, one of the Guilford organizers, who was sitting on a stump.

  She held something between her palms and seemed to be blowing, or whispering, into it. When she heard my approaching footstep, her body jerked, and she palmed the object like a cardsharp hiding a fifth ace.

  “You missed the boat,” she said disapprovingly.

  “What’s that in your hand?” I said, to cover my embarrassment.

  She wiped an oily string of hair out of her face (there are no hot showers in the jungle), hesitated, and then showed me a picture of a jolly grinning couple, the man hoisting a pint of Guinness, the woman a half-pint. The man was a few inches shorter, but still he had rested his hand protectively on top of the woman’s head.

  “My parents,” Pilar said. “They died when I was nine. They loved Ireland best of all.”

  I didn’t know Pilar well, but on previous trips I had chatted with the other Guilford Girls, the squad of junior organizers in charge of keeping the journalists fed, happy, and on time to the next restaurant or attraction. All of them were fierce and indefatigable gossips who liked nothing better than to spill secrets over a Miller Lite at the Holiday Inn bar. They told me immediately that Pilar was from Spain and that her parents had passed away when she was a kid under mysterious circumstances, though whether the circumstances were mysterious to Pilar or only to the Guilford crew was unclear. The girls’ guesses included a murder-suicide after a quarrel, an accidental killing followed by a suicide, a double suicide, and a traffic accident. Afterward—and this part Pilar later confirmed—she was shipped off to live with an aunt in Miami.

  The Guilford Girls at first tried to see the proud and lonely orphan in Pilar, but they gave up quickly, as she failed to exhibit the required air of humility and despair. Still worse, the girls couldn’t see much of themselves in her, which made the puzzle of Pilar, from their perspective, ultimately worthless, however interesting on a purely intellectual level. She never accompanied them to after-work happy hours, never complained about a boyfriend, never showed the slightest interest in getting married.

  All I myself had gleaned about Pilar was that she was less perky than the rest but spoke perfect Spanish, which must have been why she was kept on.

  “And now you’re showing your parents the jungle,” I said.

  She nodded. She was making no effort to excite me about the landscape or adventure-tourism possibilities of the area; perhaps it was her day off. I should have left her alone, but she was good-looking and sensible and at the moment exuding that romantic air of pensive sorrow that her co-workers had sought so hungrily and never found, so it was really too much to ask.

  I tried to think of a good question about her parents, but nothing came immediately to mind. As I listened to the violent buzzing of the insects all around us, I felt more and more superfluous to the scene.

  “Are you itchy?” she asked politely and pulled a bottle of insect repellent from the pocket of her cargo pants.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Were you talking to them?”

  She nodded. Her expression didn’t quite convince me that she didn’t mind that I knew. “I like to ask them questions,” she said. “Whenever I have a career decision to make. Sometimes even when a boy asks me out.”

  There was no more room on her tree stump, so I eased myself down in the dirt below her. My pants were already saturated with mud from two days in the jungle; they couldn’t get any dirtier. I had to look up to see Pilar’s shiny face. At this point she and all the rest of the Guilford Girls, for the first time in my experience and possibly in their postpubescent lives, were eschewing foundation.

  “Do they answer you?” I asked.

  “Why should I tell you?” She was definitely off duty. “It’s just some crazy thing I do.”

  My heart was pounding. I opened my mouth and almost told her that her mother was beautiful, but a bug flew in and ignited a fit of coughing and spitting. I was too worried about malaria to be squeamish about etiquette. Pilar didn’t seem to mind. My throat clear, I tried to recapture the moment by turning to stare reflectively at the lacy veil of mist over the river.

  “It’s only crazy if you hear them talking back,” I said.

  “I tell myself I can hear them, but I’m just lying. Why do I bother lying to myself? I’m not an idiot. I’m just pretending I still love them. They used to speak in my dreams, but not anymore. Not for years.”

  The buzz of the insects and the gauzy mist rendered everything indistinct except my own thoughts and Pilar’s voice. The perfect thing to say flashed into my mind, and in this strange tropical world, there seemed no danger in letting it loose.

  “My parents died almost five years ago,” I said. “Their car slid off the highway in the rain, late at night. For a while I talked to them, like you, but then I realized the only voice I was hearing was my own. I had lost their manner of speaking. I tried to remember their catchphrases, but all I had were the ones I still used myself. That’s when I knew they were gone.”

  This was almost true, except that the reason I no longer heard my parents’ voices wasn’t that they were dead but that I’d been avoiding their phone calls.

  Pilar and I compared perspectives on our losses, and then we relocated to the riverbank, where we sat heedlessly in the mud and slapped mosquitoes and continued the conversation. When the heat began to oppress us (or really, just a bit before), we agreed it was time to withdraw for a siesta, and since the boat with her colleagues and clients and boss wasn’t due back until early evening, we further concluded it would be safe and companionable to retire to my hut, which was nicer than hers and not so cluttered with Guilford Girl skin-protection products.

  We sat on my cot. “You’re not like the other Guilford Girls,” I said, hoping flattery would get me over the last tricky climb to the peak.

  She lay back on my cot and let her gaze lose itself in the thatched roof. I was half afraid she’d say, “You’re not like the other writers,” forgetting the new Times-quality hotshots, but I shouldn’t have worried. “I try so hard not to hate them,” she whispered instead.

  “Spoiled Daddy’s girls,” I said. “Keeping themselves busy until they can land a rich-enough guy.”

  She pulled her gaze back down to earth. “It’s not their fault. They just want enough money so they don’t have to worry. That’s what I want. Someday.”

  “I don’t worry about money,” I said. “I have no family and no girlfriend and no one to depend on me. I live for moments like these, in strange and new places. Moments I won’t forget. New stories to add to the old ones.”

  “But when you get home, who do you tell the stories to?”

  “I don’t need to share them. I just need to remember them.”

  “That sounds lonely.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “You will someday. And then you’ll fall in love and get a job and start worrying about money like all the rest of us. But some of us have so much more to worry about than others.”

  “They don’t pay you a lot, do they?” I said.

  “And I have to send so much to my aunt.”

  I took her hand. I hoped she didn’t mind that my fingers were soggy with sweat.

  She didn’t. She beckoned me down to her, with a smiling laziness so appropriate to the jungle, and unbuttoned my cargo pants as we kissed. That night she snuck into my pitch-black hut again and slipp
ed under the mosquito netting. I liked that better; after we were done, our huddled conversation amid the darkness and the weird noises of the jungle symbolized for me the triumph of human rationality over chaos.

  Pilar somehow managed to maneuver me onto almost every one of the press trips she helped organize for the next eighteen months; I forsook even superior freebies for Guilford, without a second thought. Sex with a beautiful, contemplative foreigner was another type of freebie, to be cherished even more than a weekend in an all-inclusive on the Virgin Islands. I had no qualms about accepting Guilford’s hospitality on false pretenses, but I did mind continuing to lie to Pilar. We didn’t—thank God—analyze the psychological consequences of our orphanhood every time we met, but she did bring up the topic now and then, most often in ruminative emails sent just after one of our encounters. I felt I was capable of experiencing the emotions I described to her and convinced myself that I had endured similar ones the last time I’d hung up on my mother, but I discovered that being a hypocrite and being desperately in love were, for me, incompatible. So I wrote her a letter admitting the lie, apologizing, and openly begging for the forgiveness I knew I didn’t deserve.

  I didn’t get it.

  Chapter 8

  Our cab joined the swarm of vehicles swerving, backfiring, lunging, jostling for position on a wide road without lanes. Kenny gazed out the side window, unconsciously mouthing the words to some song playing on his mental stereo. There was a lot for his gaze to take in: the Tom Joad–model trucks beside us, their backs loaded with workers packed as close as pencils; the Indian women in full sail of petticoats striding along the roadside where sidewalks should have been or squatting over mounds of produce for sale; the half-constructed or half-decayed two-story structures of cinder block or adobe or both. Giddy anticipation rose like bile in my gut. A week in La Paz and at one of the world’s finest resorts, and all of it paid for; a disappearance to investigate; a reunion with Pilar. Was Hilary really alive? What would Pilar tell me tomorrow? Where would she spend the night afterward? Black spiderwebs began to flutter before my eyes, and I commanded myself to empty my mind and concentrate only on dragging the oxygen out of the stingy high-altitude air.

  The driver tried a shortcut through a skinny side street rutted with potholes and moguls. Our headlights lit up a long bank of whitewashed walls emboldened with political graffiti, either generic slogans (“No a Neoliberalismo!”), or party abbreviations (MNR, ADN, MSM), or the full names written out (Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario, Acción Democrática Nacionalista, Movimiento sin Miedo, Condepa). One of them was unfamiliar.

  “Condepa? What is this?” I said to the cabbie in Spanish, hoping to start a conversation and thus find something less dizzying than Pilar and less immediate than my breathing to focus on.

  “A new political party. Conciencia de Patria.”

  The Conscience of the Homeland. Quite a mouthful to get on a ballot. I badgered my brain for the words I wanted. It usually takes me a day or two to get back into the swing of Spanish.

  “Who votes for such a party?” I asked.

  “Me, for example. I am Condepa,” the cabbie answered, and when we lurched to rejoin the teeming traffic in the main street, he stabbed his finger toward the other cabs. “And he is Condepa. And he is Condepa also. The mayor of El Alto City is also Condepa. The majority of the drivers are Condepa,” he added, as if that alone assured electoral victory.

  “Bolivian politics gives me a headache,” I said. “All I know is the president and the Mallku.”

  The Mallku was a man named Felipe Quispe, who claimed to be a descendant in spirit, if not in blood, of the ancient Aymara kings, whose homeland was the high plateau north of La Paz, around Lake Titicaca. Quispe led a party called the United Union Confederation of Working Peasants of Bolivia, composed mainly of rural Quechua and Aymara speakers, the proud but surpassingly poor country hicks of Bolivia. Every July, after the harvest, when farmers had little else to do but organize, Quispe would organize strikes and blockades in protest of governmental neglect. In recent years, he had extended his influence even to the lowland coca growers, also mainly indigenous, who were threatened by the U.S.-backed coca eradication campaign.

  “Which Mallku?” he said.

  I hadn’t known there was more than one.

  “Quispe,” I said.

  “Don’t talk to me about Quispe,” the cabdriver said. “He’s a peasant, with a peasant’s strategy. Strikes, blockades, demonstrations. Last month my brother was caught behind a blockade in the North Yungas for a week because of Quispe and his childish demands. And where does it get him?”

  I grunted sympathetically. I had once ridden to a new national park in the jungly Chapare province on a tourist van accompanied by a handful of soldiers in a jeep. We rounded a corner and were faced with a swarm of farmers in the road, brandishing a few dusty rifles (souvenirs of service in past revolutions), rusty machetes, shovels, and even some sharpened sticks. They were followers of Quispe’s lowland counterpart, Evo Morales, whose influence had been rising. The two men in front held a chain across the road. They were protesting the latest defoliation runs in Chapare, where all coca leaf cultivation is illegal. The soldiers leaned from the windows and ordered them to scram; the farmers responded with a handful of stones, haphazardly aimed (Bolivians grow up playing soccer, not baseball); my fellow tourists cringed in the van. The soldiers ducked and swore, and the guide turned to assure us there was nothing to worry about. He was right. A minor explosion beside us, like a backfire, an eardrum-tearing scream from the passenger beside me—and suddenly the farmers were fleeing back toward the trees, leaping over tufts of grass as they ran and still clutching their valuable weapons to their chests. The soldiers had fired above their heads. As the van rumbled over the fallen chain, the guide insisted it was all just a political ballet, but the pale French woman beside me trembled all the way to the lodge, and that night insisted on being returned to Cochabamba.

  “The peasants will always be poor,” the man continued. “We of Condepa have a better Mallku.”

  “A better Mallku?” I said.

  “Much better.”

  “Better with his promises, or better with … his things? You know? That he achieves.”

  It’s better to seize upon the first, inadequate word than to fumble foolishly for the right one. I have extensive experience in the many and varied sensations of feeling foolish when speaking Spanish.

  “Both. He doesn’t promise a new Andean nation; he promises jobs, and from time to time he makes good. Go to any driver and ask him.”

  “Are you asking him about Hilary?” said Kenny, tired of understanding nothing.

  “He’s a cabdriver,” I answered him, annoyed that he had broken my rhythm. “He doesn’t know anything about Hilary.”

  “Sure, big man—you’re the one knows everything. What if he gave her a ride to the airport? Or what if his uncle Fajita did? Huh? Ask him.”

  The driver slowed for a line of rusty tollbooths, paid, and began the winding descent into the city. Ahead of us and far below in the valley, visible through the chain-link fence that inconvenienced suicides and garbage throwers, was the sparkling bowl of La Paz. I was pleased that, at this time of evening, Kenny couldn’t see the sacred peak of Illimani standing guard over the city like an eagle; it served him right to have that pleasure withheld.

  * * *

  The wheezing taxi, exhausted from its downhill flight, wobbled around the Plaza Murillo and deposited us and our luggage at the corner outside the Gran Hotel París, whose Parisian grandiosity consisted of a red carpet that started just outside the front door and a uniformed doorman who helped out with suitcases. He wasn’t so keen on duffel bags, though; he eyed Kenny’s doubtfully and waited for us to reveal our intentions.

  “Go to the next street, Calle Junín,” I said to Kenny, as we arranged our bags on the sidewalk amid the maddening traffic of evening rush hour, “and climb the hill for a block and a half. The Hostal del
Arco. You’ve got the address. They’re good people, and they speak some English.”

  Kenny heaved his bag once or twice on his shoulder. I had to shuffle off the sidewalk to avoid an Indian woman, her back bowed under an open sack of oranges. Two businessmen in suits followed close behind, letting her run interference.

  “Then what do I do?” he asked. “I should go to a bar, right? Start chatting up the locals.”

  “Good idea.” It was getting chilly and I wanted to be inside.

  “Do you know any bars?”

  “They’re all over the place. Go to the Prado, the main street. You can’t get lost. The Prado’s there, down the hill, and your hostel is back up the way you came. It’s a safe street. Just leave your wallet and passport behind when you go out and don’t take too much money.”

  “What about that one over there, next to the church. Is that a bar?”

  “That’s a café. Give it a shot.”

  A man pushing a wheelbarrow full of paint cans and a woman with a baby on her back forced Kenny off the sidewalk too.