The Dismal Science

by Peter Mountford

  Lenka entered eventually, twenty minutes late, a stack of newspapers under her arm. She was planning on taking stock of the news, it seemed. Vincenzo had already finished his breakfast and the empty plates had been carted away. She smiled immediately, warmly, and marched toward him, and he felt his heart lift idiotically to meet her. He stood up and extended his hand, but she slapped it away and kissed him on the cheek, dropped her newspapers down on the table.

  “You hungry?” he said, hoping that she didn’t see that he was blushing.

  She nodded and beckoned the waiter. “Sorry I’m late.” She fixed Vincenzo with a deliberate gaze and said, “I had a very late night.”

  “Your boyfriend again?” he said—feeling almost goaded into it, but wishing he’d kept his mouth shut.

  She exhaled steadily, staring down at the menu with an expression he couldn’t read. After a moment, she said, “Thank you for last night. That was very kind of you.”

  “It’s the least I could do. Any news about Evo?” He gestured at the newspapers.

  She rolled her eyes. “Yes. There is a lot of news.”

  Then the waiter came and she rattled off her order to him so quickly that Vincenzo didn’t understand anything of what she had said. Once she was done speaking, she looked at him. “You want something?”

  “No thanks,” he said and patted his belly. “I’m on a diet.”

  She smiled at him and shook her head, as if he were crazy for thinking he needed a diet, and then she waved the waiter away and began to detail the plan for the next few days. Once she had picked Walter up from the airport and he had checked in, she would come back and get Vincenzo and take the two of them over to Evo’s office, where they would briefly meet the president-elect. Then she and Evo would leave for a couple of days. He and Walter would entertain themselves and then, on Friday, there would be a party at the National Museum, at which Vincenzo would give a half-hour speech. Hundreds of people would be there. A car would pick them up and take them to the event. Evo and possibly one of his ministers would make a speech first, and then Vincenzo would talk, and he should brace himself for significant media attention. Not stopping for a beat, she asked if he wanted to make his speech in Italian or English, because if he wanted Italian she could try to arrange for a translator, but it would be more difficult than English.

  “I can do English.”

  “Good. English is easier, we should do English. Right now, there is many international press in La Paz, because of the elections.”

  Vincenzo frowned, thinking of what Colin would say. Briefly, he thought about Hamilton, too, his bitter e-mail—how he would feel about having his name brought back into the news. He said, “I am not going to be granting any more interviews, if that’s okay.”

  She shook her head, gazed at him in frustration. “No, that’s not okay. Why do you want to do that?”

  “It’s too much attention on me. I am not used to it. And I don’t want this thing to become the defining event of my life. This is—” There was an opportunity to make this a moment of personal connection, but he couldn’t manage to bring himself to direct the innuendo.

  A small smile broke on her lips. “I think it’s a little too late for that, Vincenzo,” she said, and put down the first newspaper and picked up the second, but simply laid it on her lap. “The event is going to be covered by the press, one way or another. If you refuse to talk to them, they will only think that you are being strange.”

  “I’ll think about it,” he said.

  She sighed heavily and looked away, at nothing.

  There was no more business between them, really, so they sat there saying nothing and staring at each other for a moment. There was a captivating combination of confidence and doubt in her face, as if she were still a little disoriented by the violent and sudden ascendency of her chosen candidate, but she was acclimating to the new altitude, almost. “How do you like your hotel?” she asked, clearly just wanting to fill the silence.

  He glanced over at the doppelgänger, who was talking to a chef whose white jacket was incredibly filthy. “It’s nice.”

  “I’m sorry about last night,” she said again.

  “It’s fine. I’m sorry for being a little presuming. Was I—” He stopped and tried to think of how to frame it, and then he said, “I was very clumsy.”

  She tilted her head at him and said, “How do you like life after the World Bank?”

  Seeing that the waiter was approaching with her food, he shrugged. The waiter, moving exceptionally fast, set her plate down with one hand and then poured more coffee into their cups.

  She transferred her newspapers to the floor beneath her chair. Vincenzo wondered if the arrival of her food had distracted her enough that her question had died and they could move along, but she looked back at him and, picking up her knife and fork, said, “Well—your new life?”

  “It’s—” He smiled and gestured at the room. He shrugged.

  “This is it?” she interpreted, nodding vigorously as if she understood. She took a bite of her breakfast. “When you made your decision last month, did you know what would happen?”

  “I still don’t know what will happen,” he said.

  Noticeably pleased, she had a sip of coffee.

  He went on: “Life has big exciting parts—intersections—where you have to make a choice and you do, you have to, but you never know how it’ll work out. You take a turn off one road because continuing in the same direction seems intolerable. Maybe the new road will be worse, maybe it’ll be better—you don’t know.”

  “Yes, that is my experience,” she said. “I did not know that Evo would win this election, in fact it did not look likely. Still, I am happy with this. What about you, are you happy?” She put her knife and fork down.

  He shrugged. “I turned onto this road because it seemed necessary to make the turn. You have a son and a boyfriend and an ex-husband who you live with, and you are the press liaison to one of the most famous politicians in Latin America. This is just what you wanted?” The doppelgänger marched through the dining room and, as she passed, made the briefest eye contact with him, offering a quarter smile.

  “The situation with that boyfriend—it was a mistake. He was a liar. I should have known that. My husband was a mistake, too, but at least he gave me Ernesto, who is my favorite person. And I like him, my ex-husband. I hate him and I like him.”

  “I felt that way about my wife.”

  “You are also divorced?”

  He hesitated, impaled on the moment, then nodded. He had developed this unfortunate habit of lying to avoid the explaining about Cristina.

  When he didn’t say anything else, she said, “I picked Evo because of who he is.”

  He continued nodding for a while, still lost in the previous step in their interaction. Then, finally, he said, “But you still don’t know what will happen. What if he’s a terrible president?”

  “He won’t be,” she said.

  He wanted to say, Don’t fool yourself: you have no idea what kind of president he’ll be, but of course he wasn’t going to say that. He’d been married long enough to see the futility of arguments on the basis of principle. There were routes: he could point to the fact that virtually all of Evo’s predecessors had turned out to be corrupt or inept and that the vast majority of them had been ousted by their angry citizens; or he could remind her that the country had averaged more than one revolution per year since its 1825 independence. But what would be the point? He’d just be making another prediction, insulting her in another way.

  So he nodded as if he agreed completely and he let that subject die, too. Was this how courtship worked: Did you dodge mines until the commitment was solid enough that you could exchange maps detailing the whereabouts of all the remaining mines?

  During the ensuing silence, he had a sip of coffee and looked around the room, but Luz Elena was nowhere to be found.

  Vincenzo spent the rest of the morning eating paracetamol, drinking coca tea,
and walking around an adjacent neighborhood called Sopocachi, which was where Lenka apparently lived. It seemed to be home to the city’s middle class, such as it was. Stopping at a bakery for a salteña and café con leche, he noticed that the headache had temporarily vanished. Soon, however, it was back, so he went to his room to lie down. He drank more coca tea, per the recommendation of the concierge, and tried to push on toward the third terrace of Purgatorio, but couldn’t manage to focus on the words. He watched BBC World News instead.

  He awoke from his nap to the sound of the telephone ringing. From the digital clock on the nightstand he saw it was three thirty. He answered. It was Lenka, downstairs. It was time to go meet the president. Vincenzo quickly put on a tie and blazer, straightened his hair. Downstairs, Lenka was waiting beside her Datsun with her mobile phone at her ear.

  Steering halfheartedly as she drove up the main avenue bisecting the city, she remained mainly engrossed in her phone call. From what he could understand, she was talking to her boyfriend about the fact that she and Evo were leaving town today, and she couldn’t see him for a while. “Tenemos reuniones ahora, y despues vamos directamente al aeropuerto. Pero te llamo prontito, mi amor,” she said.

  When she hung up, Vincenzo said, “Your boyfriend?”

  She didn’t say anything for a moment, and then she glanced at him with her wickedly smart eyes and said, “He is a liar and a shit. We are not going out anymore.”

  He nodded steadily, very cool, although he adored her now, almost overwhelmingly so. Her self-assurance and muscular social style. That she could be coolly dangerous, too, was indescribably alluring. It seemed that she’d been talking rather sweetly with the boyfriend/ex-boyfriend a few minutes before, which didn’t quite connect with her suggestion that they’d broken up, but Vincenzo thought better of asking her to clarify. Was this how people dated now? Everything was civil, even hatred. The terms of a contentious breakup were hammered out in dulcet tones: “Pumpkin, I don’t think we should see each other anymore because you’re a foul slag and an idiot—I hope that’s okay.”

  She said nothing else on the matter but her silence let him know that she was bothered. Maybe her oddly and inappropriately mirthful tone had other, more complicated sources. Maybe she, too, was just badly heartbroken and trying to get on with things, leaping through the Kübler-Ross gauntlet.

  They veered into a denser downtown area and pulled up outside another hotel—a gaudier place—mirrored windows, fluorescent-lit placard declaring its name: the Presidente Hotel.

  “Let me get him,” Vincenzo said.

  “Hurry,” she said, and picked up her cell phone again, put a hand to her forehead, and called someone.

  Vincenzo encountered Walter in the lobby and the two men hugged.

  “The flight?” Vincenzo asked, surprised by how relieved he was to see Walter.

  Walter shrugged and glanced at his wristwatch. “Don’t we have an appointment with our biggest fan?”

  “Our chariot is outside. It’s that woman Lenka.”

  “Of the e-mails?”

  “Of the e-mails,” Vincenzo said as he led the way toward the doors. “How is this hotel?”

  “It’s resolutely mediocre, but I know it well. I’ve stayed here one or two million times.”

  “The altitude? Is it . . .”

  “Nah, I’m immune to such things!”

  “Ha! Of course you are. My brain is cooked.” Vincenzo opened the door to the backseat for him. “When we play chess you’ll have to give me a handicap.”

  “Ha!” Walter said and got into the car.

  Lenka drove them four blocks and then steered onto the sidewalk outside an anonymous-looking office and pulled up the parking break. That would, apparently, be her parking space.

  They found Evo Morales in a large and bland office at the back of the building, not far above the sidewalk. The windows looked out on the narrow street jammed with cars, the opposing walls riddled with graffiti and Evo’s own campaign posters. It was uncanny to sit there, facing the man whose grinning face was repeated, like some epic Warhol painting, on the wall outside his own window.

  Evo, with his bizarrely enormous head, encased in its thick helmet of hair, was on the phone, his computer screen at an angle, displaying a blank Word document. He laughed into the phone and Vincenzo looked out the window at all the other Evos, the smiling Evos, all promising Adelante—forward progress. The Evo in front of them said, “¡Te amo! ¡Te amo! ¡Pero tengo que irme!” into his phone. He listened while the other person talked and was maybe amused, but also visibly eager to cut the conversation off. Clearly new to politics, he hadn’t figured out how to organize his facial expression, permanently, into a mask of something dull and enticing. Eventually, he slammed the phone down and sighed loudly.

  “¡Familia!” he said and stood up—he’d been on the phone with his family, apparently; but, as Vincenzo understood it, Evo was a bachelor.

  Evo shook both men’s hands and started talking to them quickly in Spanish, until Lenka cut him off and informed him that they had to speak English, because neither man was any good with Spanish.

  Evo sat down again and switched to English, though his English was halting and unsteady, full of unnatural pauses. But it made sense, at least.

  “Thank you for coming to Bolivia,” he said.

  “Thank you for having us,” Walter said.

  Evo held forth, speaking in broad terms, as politicians like to do before they take office: he talked about correcting imbalances, he was confident and vague. Each idea was lovelier than the previous. It reminded Vincenzo of Jonathan Paris, with his talk about how the World Bank should focus on doing right by the helpless and majestic trees in tropical forests. There was a sense even that history had ordained these events because history knew best and was excited about this proper agenda—the righting of old wrongs, the punishing of the wicked, and so on. Having seen some of these issues from the messy interior, Vincenzo was not as confident that history had a plan, or that the trees and the poor were best served by any of the ideas Evo had to offer. Admittedly, he didn’t have any especially useful suggestions of his own, but he was quite sure that a general simplification of the issues wasn’t going to help.

  The central problem, the one voters tended to struggle with, was the idea that people or things were supposed to be a certain way. No one—not Jonathan Paris or Evo Morales, William Hamilton or Paul Wolfowitz—seemed able to cope with the stark reality, the abject arbitrariness and stupidity of the world, that life was an insult to everyone’s plans.

  Evo, though, for the time being, was nowhere near that messy reality.

  Sitting there in front of this man, Vincenzo found that he didn’t look at all like any politician he’d ever met. Politicians, from his experience, regardless of their nationality or race, were physically potent in a way: a presence that demanded attention. Evo, however, was not like that—he looked exhausted and suspicious.

  Addressing Vincenzo, he said, “For Bolivia, you have done a great service. It is a sacrifice you have made—and with the help of this journalist.” Then he turned his big face to Walter and Walter smiled his vacant smile, the one he presented when his mind was calculating something else. Then Walter jotted something in his pad, a strangely unnerving accessory, that pad.

  While his pen was still moving, Walter cleared his throat, looked up, and said, “I would like to do a more complete interview with you while I’m here.”

  “Yes, of course!” Evo laughed. It was a hearty laugh, a bodily event, but surprisingly forced—he laughed like a person without much of a sense of humor.

  Lenka shook her head as she laughed along with him. She seemed determined to bolster the unconvincing jollity, but Walter and Vincenzo just smiled.

  When he’d stopped laughing, Evo looked at her and she glanced at her watch. “Cuatro minutos,” she muttered and Evo relaxed and looked back at the men, as if they had all the time in the world. Lenka stood up and walked out of the room.
/>   “When are you going to expropriate the gas?” Vincenzo said. Walter grunted, quietly, clearly displeased that Vincenzo had asked that.

  “I’m going to do what is best for the Bolivian people. The gas is our primary export, our great national treasure, but we don’t see . . .” The points unfurled in this way, very pro forma, all delivered with the kind of mechanical certainty that public figures often develop after being compelled to recite the same lines again and again for months.

  When the recitation was over, Vincenzo said, “But what would you do if the international community withdraws support?”

  “Fortunately, you have helped us to draw attention to this threat. Because of the thing that you two men did, those people will be more reluctant to punish Bolivia for being an independent country.”

  “But what if it happens later?” Vincenzo said.

  Lenka ducked in and nodded at Evo, who acknowledged her, but stayed, saying, “I will find support elsewhere.” Vincenzo sensed that he thought Brazil or Venezuela or others could fill any void left by irate wealthy aid-providers. The paradigm had changed, he was saying. Vincenzo was not convinced it had changed that much.

  Evo stood up and apologized for having to leave early.

  Vincenzo said, “What if these other places don’t give you the kind of support you need?”

  Evo smiled innocently, amused, and shook his head. “We will see!” But beneath his smile there was a palpable fury, a river of rage, and while that rage might be understandable, Vincenzo sensed it would steer his governing style, too. Evo appeared to be a principled leader because he was a principled leader, and he was a principled leader because he was so furious that he could not be anything other than honest.

  The persistent question with Machiavelli, when Vincenzo read him in university, seemed to be whether he was a realist, or whether such self-interest is tantamount to a kind of malice. The question resonated throughout Vincenzo’s subsequent studies of economics, which also presented its logic as pure and impartial, absolutely rational. Rousseau, meanwhile, thought The Prince a work of satire. Giving credence to this argument, Machiavelli wrote it in Italian, not Latin, so his intended readership was presumably not elite princes, but commoners. Still, while Machiavelli’s writing persona changed throughout his life, and he was not always so cunning, his view of the human being was always hard.