The Travel Writer

by Jeff Soloway

We came next to the village of Chuspipata, a massive truck stop and checkpoint. Minivans and open trucks packed with workers pulled over so that drivers and passengers could pay tolls, sign papers, relieve themselves (in the bathroom—the fine for peeing on the roadside was well advertised and unaffordable to any worker), and buy water, Coke, soup, or snacks from the roadside stalls. Kids formed chattering packs. European tourists patrolled the strip on foot, looking for the neatest stall, the least questionable food. Arturo abandoned us to attend to the authorities, while Kenny went for a leak. Pilar pretended to doze. I wasn’t fooled.

  “He and his Condepa friends threatened me over Hilary yesterday morning,” I said to her. “Do you know how dangerous he is?”

  Her eyes snapped open. “Sometimes I forget how dangerous you are,” said Pilar. “Did you tell him any lies? I know you. You told him Hilary was your sister, or your lover, but he caught you out quick—quicker than I did.”

  “You never caught me. I came clean on my own. I apologized.” I hated having to defend myself. Love should be a joyful charge to victory, not a wary advance under fire. But why should I think she’d forgiven me just because we screwed last night? “Does he know Hilary’s alive?”

  “Shut up about that. For once. No one else knows. Don’t get me in any more trouble.”

  “You? I could have been killed.”

  “They don’t kill people. I told you: Condepa is a political party that grew out of a syndicate of drivers. You can’t find a driver that doesn’t belong. Condepa’s done a lot for them. And not only for them. Like I said—half the hotel votes Condepa.”

  “They must be more than a group of taxi drivers. What about their Mallku? I’ve heard all about him. Cocaine? Is it cocaine?”

  “Don’t be such an American.” She opened the door. “Let’s find Arturo.”

  We passed an open truck, and I examined the bored, expressionless faces of the workers standing in the back. Like commuters in the subway: packed close, none of them speaking. Except that these workers would all be wet soon from the waterfalls that drenched several parts of the road.

  Nearby, a crowd of men sat or crouched on rocks by the roadside, opposite the line of stalls and bathrooms, and squinted up at Arturo, who was gesticulating and pantomiming before them. I sidled closer to hear. Pilar held back, amused. She had seen the act before.

  “Here’s my friend the gringo!” Arturo said. The audience turned to stare, grinning, as if I were part of the show. “A good guy, but, ay! Does he get anxious when he sees Dionisius.”

  Before my eyes, he became a contemptible, sniveling coward, cringing in the face of an imaginary assailant and pleading for his life. He spoke clearly and slowly, so that I too could savor every word. Then he straightened to deliver the epilogue in his own voice.

  “He’s an American, and you know they don’t like danger. They fly above and drop explosives and defoliants, or dollars if their digestion’s been good.”

  A horn sounded, and the men slapped their hands together, wiped the dust from their butts, and trotted off to their vehicles.

  “Your friends?” I asked.

  “Drivers. A good bunch of Indians. They love me.”

  We walked back to the car. Kenny was inside already, peering anxiously out the window. How would he fend for himself if we abandoned him? He’d wait for a tourist van, and try to find someone who knew English, but they’d all say they were too full to take him. Perhaps he could hitch a ride on a minibus or pay a dollar for a spot on an open truck filled with workers heading back up to the city. He’d spend the next two hours vomiting out the back while his glaring fellow passengers gave him as much room as possible.

  “Listen,” said Arturo to me. “This Hilary, she was a wild one, but she didn’t deserve what happened to her. She had a lover at the hotel, you know. A groundskeeper, I think, or maybe it was the man who cleans the pool.”

  “What gossip!” said Pilar. “You’re worse than an old woman, Arturo.”

  “The captain of the bellhops himself informed me,” he insisted. “You can’t keep a secret from me. But listen: no one deserves to suffer. Not Hilary, not anyone. Isn’t that right?”

  “No one deserves to suffer,” Pilar agreed.

  “Then we are all in agreement about this girl.” Arturo grinned and clasped his hands to emphasize our consensus.

  “What else did you hear about her?” I asked.

  “They say she smoked marijuana with the security guards, swam nude in the pool at midnight, and kissed a bartender and a guest in full sight of all,” said Arturo. “That’s in addition to the lover. A rich, wild white girl on vacation. But don’t Bolivian girls drink too much and kiss boys? And the boys are ten times as foolish. We’re all idiots from time to time.”

  Pilar reached for the door handle and hesitated. Inside the car, Kenny slunk back against the seat, reddened, and gazed guiltily into his lap. Pilar looked back at me, her eyes full of a deflating disappointment. I almost moved to catch her, though she wasn’t falling.

  “I’ll drive you, señorita,” came the voice from behind.

  It was Dionisius, accompanied by two men only slightly less massive that himself. Pilar must have seen his reflection in the window of the car.

  “There’s room in my vehicle,” he said.

  “You drive for the Matamoros too?” I asked. My courage, in Spanish, seemed almost natural.

  “Of course. And at this moment I have to speak with Miss Rojas.”

  Dionisius looked like a judge and his bench and his gavel all in one.

  “She’s my guide,” I said. “She is necessary to me. I need her services. For my article.”

  “Pardon the disturbance,” he said. “The hotel requires that she accompany me.”

  Arturo pushed his butt backward onto the hood of a car and kept on watching the show.

  “Very well, Dionisius,” said Pilar. She pronounced the name slowly, so that every soft Spanish-style s seemed to fill the space between heartbeats.

  I grabbed and twisted the fabric of her sleeve, like a child getting his mother’s attention. “Don’t go with him,” I said in English. “You don’t want to. I can see it.”

  She bent her head toward me as she detached my hand. “They’ll want to impress you with the medicine man immediately,” she said, quietly and quickly. “See him first.” I nodded, as if I understood. She placed her hand on my chest, and for an instant I thought she was going to kiss me (goodbye?), but she was just pushing me aside as she passed, or perhaps using me to steady herself. Dionisius’s two companions stepped in front of me as she went, like bodyguards protecting a star from an adoring fan. I watched her walk away alongside Dionisius. Dust rose behind their feet like morning mist. A group of children swarmed behind them, a few cars passed, and they were lost. One of the two bodyguards nodded at Arturo, and then they left us.

  “Why did he take her?” I asked.

  “He has to talk to her,” said Arturo. “You’re too suspicious. My father’s that way. My mother died right after I was born, and ever since he watches me. Any cold and again with the medicine, the herbs, the coca tea. He always watches me closely, like I’m trying to get sick.” But he kept looking through the dispersing crowd, as if to find Pilar and reassure himself.

  “Where are they going?” I said.

  “To the hotel.” He pointed to an SUV already shooting up the road ahead, followed by a bushy, brown tail of dust. “They’ll get there much faster than us.”

  What would happen to Pilar along the way? She had indeed been in danger all this time, more than I’d been, and I had hardly believed her.

  We got in the car. All the other waiting vehicles were lumbering out into the road, clogging the passage in front of us. We slogged forward behind a microbus, rolling over the stones in the road so slowly you could feel the car tilt each time the front tire rose and fell. I would have murdered someone for a motorcycle, or even a mountain bike. A military man waved at Arturo as we passed and went on interrogat
ing the driver of a rusty flatbed truck.

  “Where’s Pilar?” demanded Kenny from the backseat.

  The insult of brake lights in front of us. We stopped completely. Infuriatingly. The SUV was now out of sight.

  “She’s getting a ride with someone else,” I said.

  “She went off with that big idiot. I saw the whole thing.”

  “No fooling you, Kenny! Just relax, all right? The guy’s a driver for the hotel. Like Arturo.”

  The microbus ahead of us released its brakes and started forward, relieving some tiny fraction of the pressure on my brain.

  “Like who?” asked Kenny.

  “This guy right here.”

  “Oh. I didn’t know.”

  Arturo feinted to the right, then shot to the left to pass the microbus. Success, but it didn’t matter; there were a half dozen more in front of us, and the road was narrowing, like a swollen throat.

  Chapter 16

  The road between La Paz and the town of Coroico provides La Paz with a steady supply of fresh fruit, coca leaves, and postharvest laborers; and provides Coroico with vacationers, day-trippers, and empty trucks for loading. Most of the road is one winding dirt lane (mud in the rainy season), carved or blasted out of the sheer mountain slopes. As it descends, the tropics encroach: weeds, branches, and flowers grope for the roadside; waterfalls drench traffic from above. Coca fields and orange groves in respectable squares control lonely outposts of land in the distance, and high above, towering over the highest hills and even poking through a few of the clouds, stand the peaks of the Andes, like a spiked fence around a tropical garden.

  To one side of the road is the lush mountain face; to the other, a sheer drop of often hundreds of feet into the topical river valley below. The road’s one lane is barely wide enough for a single descending minibus of weekenders from La Paz, or a single eight-wheel cargo truck dragging a full load of citrus fruit (or human fruit pickers) driving up from the valley. And yet the traffic is two-way.

  We took a corner, and a fruit truck was roaring in our windshield like a dragon. Arturo hit the brakes and swung left, toward the precipice; the truck, barely slowing down, slipped between us and the rock face and motored on. Kenny looked outraged.

  “The rule is traffic going down makes for the edge, and the traffic coming up for the cliff,” I explained, grateful for any respite from brooding over Pilar’s fate. “Lucky we were on a curve, where the road’s wider. If there’s no room to pass, we have to back up.”

  “Why us?”

  “Trucks coming up are loaded with fruit and can’t stop as quick.”

  To unaccustomed passengers, the system seemed needlessly terrifying, but I had braved the route half a dozen times and knew the drivers could be trusted. They were no more reckless than New York City cabbies. Nonetheless, mistakes were made. Once an open truck loaded with Bolivian peasants plummeted into the valley, killing more than one hundred and making the Guinness Book of World Records for Deadliest Traffic Accident. No one, not even the Guinness editors, ever figured out exactly how many had died. The vegetation had swallowed most of the corpses, and several of the migrant victims found had had no families to claim them. Often even the vehicles disappeared into the guts of the jungle below, never to be discovered.

  Arturo was a careful driver. He honked when rounding blind curves and refrained from accelerating through dust clouds. I noticed he had no protective Virgin Mary or other saint fixed to the dashboard or swinging from the rearview mirror.

  “Do you pray before you do this route?” I asked him. “I’ve seen drivers feed pieces of meat to the dogs for good luck.” It was hard to hear myself ask an ordinary question of this conspirator, but I needed the distraction.

  “I ask my mother for a blessing.”

  “Was she a good driver?”

  “She died after she was hit by a trufi. She would know now how to avoid traffic accidents, no?”

  I agreed and had to feign clearing my throat to abort an “I’m sorry.” I envisioned a semitransparent woman of indistinct age seated serenely on the hood of his car, slowing oncoming fruit trucks with gentle blasts of her heavenly breath. Behind his unflappable exterior, perhaps Arturo’s mind was bubbling constantly with such fancies. A microbus came around the bend in the distance and chugged toward us. Arturo zoomed forward to a bulge in the road and pulled over to wait, sighing, like his father would perhaps, when he returned home from work and had to make dinner for his son. I tried to shake the static out of my head. I was so tired and muddled that I was daydreaming my adversary’s dreams.

  “Why didn’t you tell Pilar what you were doing last night?” I asked. “Threatening me. As you did with your friends from Condepa.”

  “Pilar knows where I was. We had a very important conversation last night outside your English bar. I arrived early to meet her before she met you. Maybe six-thirty. You came later. I wanted to prevent Pilar from making a great mistake.”

  “What great mistake?”

  “Having a drink with a disgusting neoliberal. All you want is gossip about the writer who disappeared. Pilar thinks you can help the hotel. She trusts you too much.”

  “Then … I don’t understand. You prevented her from meeting me? How did you know she would be there?”

  “You wrote it on your business card.”

  He cackled, delighted with himself. I remembered that Pilar had written the time and the name of the bar on her business card—the one I had shown to the Condepa chief in El Alto to dissuade him from having Dionisius beat me into powder. He must have ordered Arturo to head her off. But why?

  It didn’t matter. She had wanted to meet me. She had been there, waiting. Early. The subsequent events of that night had pushed away my initial disappointment, but it was still sweet to see it defeated again. For a moment I was so elated I forgot about Dionisius. When I came back to myself, I swore I would find her no matter where he took her.

  After an hour, the jangles on the road evened out and the car gathered speed over honest to God asphalt. Each year the pavement started a little sooner. For years, Bolivia had flung much of the nation’s transportation budget at a paved, two-lane highway, complete with a kilometer-long tunnel under a mountain, to replace the existing thin, fearsome snake of dirt. It was the greatest and costliest public works project in Bolivian history. The day the tunnel opened was declared a national holiday. Arturo hooted in triumph as we plunged into its depths.

  “The Grand Bolivian Tunnel!” cried Arturo. “Without it, there would be no Hotel Matamoros. Did you know that?”

  “No.”

  “Then you are evidently unfamiliar with the story of the establishment of the Hotel Matamoros, correct?” The paved road clearly required less of Arturo’s concentration.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  “Will you translate for your friend? No, don’t wake him. When my English improves, I will be able to enhance the visits of English speakers; as of now, I am only permitted to accompany Spanish speakers to the hotel. I begin.”

  Arturo launched the story. Apparently, Enrique Matamoros, the wealthiest of local plantation owners and an aspiring hotelier, had been present at the ribbon-cutting festival dedicating the tunnel. According to the Matamoros’s PR spiel, at one point in the all-day affair, which came complete with parades of local villagers dancing in full indigenous regalia and performances by the La Paz university orchestra (to lend class to the proceedings), Matamoros gazed up over the mouth of the tunnel at one of the hillside terraces nearby, cut by the Incas but long since abandoned. The hill that got his eye was no more beautiful than any other in the region, but no less, and the widest of the terraces seemed like a pedestal waiting for a masterpiece. At that moment he decided to build a hotel.

  Arturo’s story glossed over the tedious process of cajoling, politicking, threatening, bribing, blackmailing, and other essential acts of red-tape cutting that must have ensued, and proceeded straight to the hotel’s construction. Matamoros cut a dirt road up from
the highway to the terraces, to bring in heavy machinery and laborers, and started building. Men and boys left their coca fields and papaya groves to do the muscle work, but anything more technical than hauling bricks was done by the finest crews from La Paz or even Cochabamba or Santa Cruz. The project was almost unimaginably expensive (for Bolivia), but Matamoros was rich and had the support of his government.

  “What about the rumors?” I asked.

  “What rumors?”

  “About the origin of Matamoros’s money? They say it came from narcotraffickers.”

  “Jealous lies of competitors. Matamoros owns coffee plantations as I own underwear.” Arturo chuckled; he liked that one.

  The rest of the story I knew myself, from travel writer scuttlebutt and what articles I had read in the English-language press. The hotel opened to great local and national fanfare. Bolivian Kallawayas—medicine men—were imported from the highlands to entice the international New Age Nut market. Jeeps, horses, mountain bikes, and expert guides were provided for well-heeled adventure travelers. The infinity pool was the length of a soccer field.

  But no one thought it would work. Despite the exhortations in my guidebook, few tourists, in general, visit Bolivia. A few come to Lake Titicaca and La Paz, fewer still to the old colonial towns of Potosí and Sucre, some hardy souls to the mountains or the Great Salt Lake of Uyuni—it doesn’t add up to much. So Matamoros went straight for the international press. He filled rooms by providing them to foreign journalists for free (no big deal), along with free airfare and transfers to La Paz (unheard of). The French came first, and reviewers from all the well-heeled nations followed. The adulation was universal.

  We passed through the great tunnel and shot into sunlight. All around us was the sparkling greenery of the Bolivian tropics.

  Chapter 17

  The road unfurled one last time, and before us was a colossal statue of a Kallawaya. His toes were like footballs; his hat, like the upturned hull of a yacht. His brown plastic face was lifted to the sacred peaks to the north, and below his oak-tree staff was the dark mouth of a cave, gaping as if flabbergasted to find itself beneath the bare feet of a thirty-foot-tall Kallawaya. Flanking the cave were two armed men in camouflage, slouching against the rock. As we approached I could see little pockmarks in the Kallawaya’s robes, made by falling stones or maybe low-caliber bullets used for target practice. Arturo honked his horn, and the guards lifted their rifles in salute. I caught one of them yawning as we passed.