The Dismal Science

by Peter Mountford

  Vincenzo obliged with a smile. The frequency of these digs from Walter seemed to come and go like the tides, a byproduct of the gravitational pull of Walter’s waxing and waning sense of self-worth.

  Later, they played two florid games of chess, and Walter, too addled to go home afterward, decided to sleep on the sofa in the basement and watch more television.

  The next morning, Christmas morning, they ate bowls of cereal and drank espresso.

  “You okay?” Walter said, and it was clear he was serious.

  Vincenzo nodded. “Did you sleep okay last night?”

  “Fine, thank you.” In spite of the vein on his face, a murmur of lightning in a distant cloud, Walter was not someone who ever seemed lonely. Even though he almost never dated, he didn’t appear troubled by his solitude. It was a charade, Vincenzo knew. After the dishes were washed, Vincenzo handed Walter the keys to the house and got in a cab bound for National Airport. Walter would spend the day with his brother’s family in Baltimore before catching up with him in La Paz a couple of days later.

  The word “insignificance” had been lodged in his skin like a splinter since Jonathan had spoken of it in New York. It repeated several times a day, the pain of a minor wound that demanded to be recognized. And what a word it was! An oxymoron, or at least a snake eating its tail: a signifier for a thing without significance. And even if that was too literal a reading, significance would have to be a substitute for other more viscerally potent notions, like power, that failed to entice once you understood them. But, still, the splinter stayed.

  Were he to take measure of such things, Vincenzo might notice that he had managed the largest aid organization’s policies in a very needy continent, which surely indicated a kind of significance. And by that measure he’d annihilated his own significance, but fortunately life wasn’t really about such things.

  Machiavelli, in his wisdom, was not a fame seeker at all, and had been perfectly content to remain in the shadows. Zeroing in on the functional value of a thing, he would have seen no value in “significance,” per se. The question of influence was more timeless, it seemed to Vincenzo. The question being: Who pulls the strings and why? By that measure, the idea of them going to Bolivia was really about forwarding Walter’s career, maybe, giving legs to his already leggy story about Vincenzo’s scandal. And Colin’s recommendation that Vincenzo join him at Lehman was just about advancing Colin’s position: calling in reinforcements. Leonora wanted him to renovate the house in Italy, so that, he supposed, he would be far away, and occupied, and maybe even, though it was an uncharitable thought, setting up a wonderful vacation home. She wanted him to like Sam so that this aspect of her life would be easy, too. And what about Vincenzo himself? What was he gaming for? To fill the void he’d helped create in his life. Find some new significance. But he considered his own moves so far: the rash adoption of mutually assured destruction tactics with Hamilton, his pulling the trigger on that situation, the way he courted totally incompatible professional suitors afterward. What kind of ploy was this? He was playing on instinct, and though it seemed a ludicrous series of moves, he knew it was sound.

  Vincenzo’s itinerary had him at a Marriott by the airport in Miami on Christmas night. After settling into his room, he returned Leonora’s phone call. A dog barked in the background, but she sounded pleased, altogether. Of course, he had no idea whether she was having fun or not or whether she actually liked those people or not—it appeared that she’d never confide in him that way, or not anymore, if she ever did. It was all niceties, now. He might as well be talking to one of his siblings in Milan.

  Later, he took his copy of Purgatorio and went to the hotel bar, hopeful that there’d be a group of stranded travelers making a party out of thin air, but he saw that there was only one other man there, another middle-aged guy with not much hair, so he took a stool far away from him and ordered a hamburger from the bartender.

  The only of the three books set on terra firma, Purgatorio was also the only space that inhabitants were passing through. They were, as in life, just visiting, free from the confines of infinity, blissful or otherwise.

  The following morning, he showed up at Miami International Airport three hours early and made it to the gate for his flight to Bolivia with plenty of time to spare.

  He sat down and checked his e-mail. The avalanche of correspondence that had followed his scandal was over. After erasing the junk, he closed his computer.

  A family: two parents with their newborn in the bank of seats directly opposite him. The derelict father tapped away on his laptop while his wife fed the son, who fussed and cried constantly. The feeding was interminable—it lasted an hour, at least. The baby cried through much of it, but the mother kept pushing her breast on him and eventually he’d give in.

  Vincenzo took a brief nap and when he awoke the infant was shrieking and spitting up copiously all over himself while the novice mother tried, in vain, to soothe him, and the father (now wearing headphones) continued with his computer.

  Not able to watch any more, Vincenzo got up and went to a different seat.

  Some hours later, after the plane had taken off, Vincenzo, up in business class, and trying to get to sleep, heard the baby crying again, loudly—they must have been just on the other side of the curtain from him. After ten minutes, unable to stop himself, Vincenzo got up from his seat and, parting the curtain, discovered the mother right there, in the same awkward position she’d been holding in the airport, hunched over the baby, pressing her breast into his face underneath her floral drape. Nearby passengers did their best to hide their distress.

  Vincenzo kneeled beside the woman and, speaking Spanish as well as he could, said, “Can I hold the baby?” This was all he could think of—that maybe somehow the baby would calm down if someone else took over. Then maybe he’d fall asleep. This had sometimes happened with Leonora when she was an infant, she would calm down only for him; other times it didn’t work that way, but one never knew.

  The woman—too frazzled to be off-put by this breach of in-flight protocol, to say nothing of handling-a-stranger’s-baby protocol—pulled the baby out from under the drape and he shrieked, crimson-faced, into the cabin.

  Vincenzo took him from her gingerly and stood up. He hadn’t held a baby in years, couldn’t remember the last time. To the mother, he said, “Maybe it wants to suck on something, and if you keep offering your—” he wasn’t sure what the word for breast was in Spanish, so he said it in Italian—“seno, but it’s not hungry?” He shook his head. “I don’t know.” Bouncing him in his arms, he blew on the baby’s face, because his face was so flushed, and then the baby fell silent, blinking at the breeze. Seeing his little face so pinched with distress, Vincenzo thought of—he couldn’t help himself—Dante’s treatment of the gluttonous in Purgatorio: how Dante denied them food but made them smell it. If overfed infants died early in their cots, before they could speak, let alone confess their sins or take communion, would they be heaped up in a corner of that terrace on the mountain in purgatory, while the metallic odor of breast milk floated across their nostrils and they howled, writhing among each other, in an obscene pile? Was that how God, in his wisdom, organized the afterlife?

  The woman had tears in her eyes now, her chin was crinkled as she watched her silent baby blinking calmly at Vincenzo.

  Vincenzo shook his head; he had not really expected it to work. The baby kept calm as he blew onto his face and then, abruptly, he burped once, loudly, spat up a fountain of undigested breast milk down the front of Vincenzo’s sweater. Vincenzo quickly smiled at the mother to assure her that it was okay, and continued rocking the baby, singing Fate la Nanna, Coscine di Pollo softly as the baby fell asleep.

  Nearby passengers watched as discreetly as possible. It’s not every day that a dapper aging gentleman from first class comes back to coach to console a crying baby.

  “You must be a very good father,” the woman said, a mixture of relief and gratitude emanating from her face
.

  Very nearly allowing an ironic grin, he looked her in the eye, hoping to see recognition that maybe he hadn’t been a good father at all but at least he’d tried, but there was nothing there, nothing but a plain beacon of appreciation. Snorting under his breath, he glanced at her husband, who had removed one earphone and turned to watch drowsily, vaguely curious. Vincenzo shook his head and handed the now sleeping baby back to the woman. He grinned, awash in sorrow, and rubbed the baby’s soft furry head before returning to his place behind the curtain.

  11

  BOLIVIA

  As the plane taxied down the runway of La Paz’s confusingly named John F. Kennedy International Airport on the late afternoon of December 26, the stewardess, who smelled so intensely of soap that it was as if she’d spent the night in a vat of molten soap bars, turned on the intercom and recited her “Welcome to Bolivia” speech about how cell phones were fine to use and so on. She cautioned against standing up too quickly, saying, “If you feel like you are going to faint, you probably are going to faint, and you should sit back down.” Out the window to his right, Vincenzo saw a terrain as barren as the moon. The spine of peaks cut jaggedly along the horizon—the bare mandible of a shark the size of a continent. In the foreground stood nothing but an endless shrubby expanse—a plateau as desolate and mean as Siberia.

  From reading Bolivian country reports over the years, Vincenzo knew that El Alto, the sprawl surrounding the airport, had been a withered shantytown as recently as twenty years ago, but now its population exceeded that of La Paz itself.

  Walter, who had covered Latin America for a while at the Post and had been to La Paz often in the eighties and nineties, had told him that El Alto was home to what was reported to be the largest informal market in the world. “You want a propeller for that Fokker two-seater plane you bought in the sixties? Try El Alto. They have every object imaginable. Well, everything that can be bought for less than five hundred dollars. No one has more than five hundred dollars.”

  And it was, of course, owing in large part to the ascendance of the lower classes—owing to their organizing in places like El Alto—that someone like Evo Morales, claiming to want to represent their interests, had won the presidency.

  After debarking, Vincenzo moved as slowly as possible, not wanting to collapse on anyone. As he shuffled down the stairs to the tarmac like an invalid, he winced at the wind biting his cheeks, and the overall effect, the way his age felt immediately amplified, was unnerving. An hour earlier, he had been at least a moderately capable person. Inside the airport, nurses with wheelchairs and tanks of oxygen waited by the luggage conveyor belt. Bolivia was a place like that, where people collapsed on arrival and had to be tended to by nurses. This seemed ripe with some metaphorical significance, something political, but Vincenzo’s brain was not functional enough to seek the witty core. FIFA had decreed that the Bolivian soccer team could not host games in La Paz because it was unfair to their opponents. Chess, likewise, would be all but impossible up there, he supposed. All the other travelers, Vincenzo noticed, appeared dizzy and irritable already, too. It felt like midafternoon after he’d had three glasses of wine at lunch.

  Just standing there waiting for his luggage at the too-small luggage belt, he had to inhale deeply once in a while, as if he’d been forgetting to breathe. His brain was ringing with pain, as if a nest of barbed wire were unraveling in his cerebral cortex.

  After customs he found a pretty woman in an Adidas jacket, which was zipped straight up to her chin, holding a sign that read: VINCENZO D’ORSI. He’d expected a mustachioed man in a dirty blazer, but she looked like a thirtyish jock. On closer inspection, he saw that her eyes were closed and her mouth open. Could it be? Yes, she was sleeping on her feet.

  “Buenas tardes,” he said. “Soy Vincenzo.”

  Her eyes sprung open and she blinked, dazed. “Sí, sí—por supuesto. Es un placer conocerte,” she said. She shook his hand and he could tell, looking at her, that she was still not fully awake. “Soy Lenka. ¿Bueno, tienes más equipaje?”

  He hadn’t understood that last part so he just looked at her searchingly.

  “This is all of your luggage?” she said in heavily accented English.

  “Yes—sí. Permiso. I didn’t catch your name. ¿Tu nombre?”

  “Lenka. It is better if we talk in English.” She spoke well, but clearly had to think to assemble her English sentences.

  “¿Por qué mi español—” He winced.

  “Yes, your Spanish is not good,” she explained very plainly. Already, he liked her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. This issue—his disastrous Spanish (to say nothing of his Portuguese)—had been of considerable embarrassment to him, at times, for years. People expected English speakers to be unable to speak other languages, but for Vincenzo, an executive at an international organization who spoke English, by some measures, better than most native English speakers, a linguaphile—a person who’d been to Latin America more times than he could count, and who spoke Italian, the cousin, if not sibling, of Spanish and Portuguese, as his first language—it was an abomination. Still, it was so, and most Italians he knew who tried to learn Spanish also struggled. It was just similar enough to seem easy, and so there was a tendency to be cavalier about grammar and vocabulary, but, in fact, an Italian’s bad Spanish was at least as incomprehensible as a native English speaker’s bad Spanish.

  “Thank you for picking me up,” he said. “You didn’t have to do that.”

  She shook her head dismissively. He was surprised that she, herself, had come to pick him up. He was surprised that she was so attractive, too—he’d pictured a dowdy middle-aged woman during their e-mail exchange, but Lenka was not that way at all. She was wearing a track jacket, no less. She looked almost like a footballer. This exacerbated his discomfort about the altitude, too—her virility, her linguistic capacity versus his tongue-tiedness, it was painful. Once, he’d been given a prostate exam by an attractive young female doctor, and it’d been a similar experience.

  Lenka was leading the way out to her car. He hurried after, dragging his large suitcase and mesmerized by the way her hips popped when she walked. The sun had fallen behind the mountains and was making a dramatic light show in the western sky, where fleecy wisps of clouds burnt an incandescent metallic hue, as if they had been garlanded with gold leaf. She opened the trunk to the old Datsun, and he loaded the large bag inside, then shut the door.

  Darkness swooped in. Vincenzo’s headache had settled upon a plateau of its own by then, and it would rest there until he gave it a compelling reason to leave. He massaged his temples, but that just activated new regions of pain. The cranial contortions seemed to be tenderizing his brain, though, and he was already hopeful that the pain sensors themselves would be beaten comatose, eventually, and the headache would cease.

  Lenka was more than half asleep as they drove, and he didn’t quite know what to do about it. He didn’t want to be rude, but he also didn’t want to die.

  At a red light in the midst of El Alto, she started wheezing a light snore. The light turned green and Vincenzo had to shake her lightly. She opened her eyes quickly and blinked, cleared her throat, put the car into gear, and pulled through the intersection.

  On the dark and winding highway that emptied from the heights of El Alto into the basin of the city, Lenka seemed, miraculously, to be driving with her eyes closed. She swerved around the lanes so casually and senselessly that all of the other drivers honked and gestured as they passed, but she was too asleep to care. Meanwhile, the night outside was weirdly serene. La Paz’s skyline was, even from above, less than magisterial—a long puddle of orangish globes filling the valley. As they descended, the stench of exhaust became palpable.

  Vincenzo did his best to rouse Lenka with bursts of animated conversation—relating the story of how he helped that young mother with her infant on the flight, and how he had once seen lightning strike a church in Cuenca in southern Ecuador—but she was lost in a twili
ght state.

  At the crest of a more lucid moment, she grunted and said, “I have not slept in a while.”

  “I can tell,” he said. “Do you have children that keep you awake?”

  She shook her head and her eyes fluttered. “I have one son. But he doesn’t keep me awake. He is eight.”

  “Oh really!” He was thrusting at the conversation now, just trying to keep her attention. “So what keeps you up at night?” he asked, aware that it was inappropriate, supposing that perhaps the inaptness would jolt her enough to keep her awake for another minute or two. She didn’t answer, but shook her head and blinked at the road and he doubted if there was a more captivating sight than a beautiful woman battling off sleep, fighting to bring herself back to life so that she could be there in that moment.

  Later, after he thought the question had evaporated, she said, “My boyfriend is a bad person.”

  Images of bad men came into his mind: overconfident womanizers, drug addicts—but then he had to accept that he had no idea what she meant. “My daughter has a terrible boyfriend. I thought she might leave him, but now I don’t know anymore.” This did nothing to rouse her, so he switched directions quickly, saying, “Tell me about your son.”

  She shrugged, appeared to think about it for a minute, and then said, “He is a flirt. He takes after his father.”

  “I see. What is his father like?” It was difficult to piece her story together: a son, a bad boyfriend, the son’s father—she also had a cross hanging from her rearview mirror and was almost certainly Catholic.

  “His father is a fool. But I like his new wife. We all live together.”

  “Really? The two couples and your son?”

  She shook her head and explained, wearily, that her boyfriend didn’t live with them, but she lived with her ex-husband, his wife, and various other family members, including her parents. They lived not far from the hotel where Vincenzo would be staying.