Vincenzo looked up at him. Walter hadn’t played the gambit against him in ages, regardless of time constraints. Despite his penchant for vocalizing his inner emotions during conversation, while playing chess Walter was studiously inexpressive.
Glancing up from the board, Walter said, “I don’t really envy you, either—the empty hours. It’s nice that you’ve started going to the gym. You were thinking of staying around, flirting with the press liaison?”
Vincenzo took the pawn—why not? The worst that could happen was that he’d lose and he had no problem with losing. “Her boyfriend is probably half my age.”
With cold certainty, Walter swept knight to F3 and smacked the timer in a single gesture, then looked back at Vincenzo. “I know it doesn’t need to be said, but you’re not allowed to make a pass at the doppelgänger. Maybe you don’t want to. Either way, it’s verboten.”
“I wouldn’t, of course.” Vincenzo blushed, more annoyed than embarrassed. He moved knight to F6, tapped the timer. Walter brought out his queenside knight, tapped the timer. The tapping of the timer was just a habit at this point; at the pace of play they kept now there was really no way that either would run out of time. “Who’s paying for your room?” Walter said and had another sip of tea.
“Evo’s political party, I suppose. That woman Lenka set it up.” Vincenzo brought out his queenside knight, too.
Walter grunted, looked down at the board again, sighed. He brought out a pawn to E3 then shook his head and clucked his tongue in the way he always did once the game began to develop actual complexity—a cue that he needed to turn on the rest of his mind. It was his only tell with chess.
Vincenzo mulled his options. Walter had the momentum already, and Vincenzo would have to fight hard if he wanted to regain the initiative. In all likelihood, he’d lost the initiative until the mid-game. Now, he’d have to win with violence, not guile. He’d hack his way to victory. Either that, or he’d already made his fatal mistake. It had been his second move, probably. The best maneuvers in chess, the ones that ended up in the newspaper, were the ones that showed such deep thought, such a thorough understanding of the strategy of both sides, that the outcome seemed almost inevitable. There was no trickery involved. One player did not step into a “trap” as such. What was magical about those moves was that there was never a way out. One had to reverse the course all the way back, so far back that the pursuit of an explanation for the outcome would be lost there, too.
Which was the fatal flaw buried deep within the architecture of economics: that notion that humans behaved rationally. People may intend to pursue self-interest, may set out to be rational, but they don’t even understand their own circumstances, don’t know what they want, so, in the end, they chase the winds of whim and are ruled only by blind impulses, finally.
The following afternoon, the day before the big event, Vincenzo had his second abortive session at the gym in two days—the altitude made such crusades hilariously unpleasant, and he inevitably found himself wheezing in the armchair near the treadmill within minutes. Breathing was unsatisfying work at that altitude, and panting was even worse. Afterward, he showered and put on the hotel robe and sat at the table in his room trying to write a response to Leonora’s e-mail on his laptop. The phone rang. It was Lenka, who had just returned from her trip south with Evo. She was hoping to come by the hotel and check in to see if everything was okay.
He threw his robe onto the floor and spritzed his chest with the Hermès cologne his daughter had given him last Christmas. He grabbed a button-down blue shirt and a black sweater, the brown corduroy slacks. He put on his old black loafers, no socks, and checked himself in the mirror: his face was still red from the morning’s exertion, and his eyes looked exhausted, almost jaundiced—there were huge pouches underneath. What was left of his hair was more white than black now. Looking like the late-life Neruda who appeared on dust-jacket photos, he pulled his shoulders back and sucked in his stomach a little, then he turned away and walked to the door.
Lenka walked into the lobby wearing a black dress with heels and makeup.
“Well!” he said, and approached—somewhere in a dark and optimistic corner of his being, he wondered if she had dressed this way for him, but it was unlikely. He kissed her on both cheeks. “What’s the occasion? Do you have to work on the weekends?”
“Oh—my clothes?” She shook her head. “I came here from church.”
“Of course,” he said. Then he said it again, but more enthusiastically: “Of course!”
“What about you, why are you wearing this type of clothes?”
“This?” He looked down at himself and thought of the times his daughter had made fun of him for being incapable of wearing casual clothes. “This is how I dress. You think I am an old man who puts on formal appearances?”
“I would not say that,” she said, and grinned.
“Right. Well, maybe I just want to be ready in case I decide to go back to church? I haven’t been in years. The confessional—” He was meandering, saying too much. But he would say more, he needed to explain, so he went on, “I don’t go anymore. But I did when I was a child. I was confirmed.”
“If I did not have my son, I wouldn’t always make it, either. But I feel like I have to make an example for him. Right?”
It was generous of her to bail him out like that. “Where should we go?” he said, eager to change the subject.
At her suggestion, they walked down the hill toward the park. Vincenzo’s room looked out over it, and it was not much to look at: a little sliver of greenery slicing through the gully of the city. Plants had difficulty at that altitude, too. There was a string of skinny eucalyptus trees and some dry shrubs, scrub oak and the like, some burly juniper, but not much else. From his room upstairs, he could see, on the far side, the United States embassy. They called it “The Bunker” in La Paz, because it looked like a cement block spangled with surveillance cameras.
As they wandered down the hill, he began to dread the walk back up. The farther they went, the more he wondered how he was supposed to do it. Going down was strenuous enough, and he had to slow down.
“I’m sorry, it’s—” He shook his head and pointed at the sky.
“Yes, we live in a strange place. We are pressed against the atmosphere. I know foreigners who have been here five and six years and who never adjust to this. Every day they have headaches. It must be horrible. And it is too bad, I think, because it means that we will never have that much tourism.”
He looked around at the city, down at the park ahead. The city was not attractive, really, but this was a park that he could see himself walking in, if he moved to La Paz. He could see himself reading the newspaper there on a lazy afternoon. There was a way to like this life, even for an outsider. It just took a little work. They continued their descent.
At last, they arrived and sat on a concrete bench. She handed him a bottle of water and he had a long drink from it.
“You are ready for tomorrow?” she said. “You have your speech?”
“Yes, yes, I have ideas,” he said, which was not true. Insofar as he had thought about it, he had thought that it’d be best to say something simple and bland during the speech. He could talk about Bolivia’s rich natural resources and the need for good governance and how much he appreciated the invitation—a recitation so sanitized it could be an operating table. “I like it here. I mean, I like being away from everything that has mattered to me for so long. I put so much time into these things. A family. A job. Putting together that life I had. Then it ended, and I—I don’t know.” He shook his head. “I should shut up?”
“No. Tell me.” She had a sip of the water and handed the bottle back to him. He studied the inverse freckles on her chin, her bright eyes with those long eyelashes. He looked at the top of the bottle where her lips had been and he thought about her lips, what it would be like to kiss her, and he could barely contain the rush of desire that this brought up in him.
Taking
a deep breath and trying to steady himself, he shook his head, still staring at the top of the water bottle, and said, “I have nothing to do. I don’t want to go back to DC, I am not welcome in New York, and I couldn’t imagine going to my house in Italy. I would hate to be in Italy right now. So I think maybe I will stay here for a few months, you know? Why not?”
He looked at her and she smiled. She looked away. “You should stay. You would be a good addition to our city. A great economist. Famous economist! Who knows, maybe Evo will put you into his cabinet!”
Vincenzo laughed at this. “That would be strange, no?”
“He isn’t afraid of being strange, you know. I think you are not afraid of this, either.”
Vincenzo chuckled, shrugged. “Have you—?” he began, but hesitated. “When was the last time that you restarted your entire life? Have you ever done that?”
She held up an index finger, said, “I have done it once.”
“Have you ever thought about doing it again? Just starting over?”
“I have, yes, but I don’t want to. There are so many problems with my life, you can’t imagine. But I don’t want to do something else, or to live somewhere else. My ex-boyfriend is a foreigner, and I am not going to go with him to New York City, which I believe is a nice place to go on holiday, but I have no friends there, I have nothing there. So I will not go there just to be near him.”
“But what if you could live anywhere you wanted?” He was getting to a point now.
She looked at him and he knew she could see the point he was getting at, too. She shook her head. “I don’t want to be anywhere else. I won’t go anywhere else. Even if I could bring my son, and go anywhere in the world, and live as comfortably as someone like you, I would not want to leave this place. I want to stay here and do this.”
He understood her point, and he was grateful that she had had the decency to see his point, too, and not to judge him for it. It was not going to be a lewd proposition, and she had probably known that. It would have been beneath her, of course, to go with him. And she was proud, in the straightforward sense of the word: she was proud of her country, and the life she had made for herself. No, she didn’t long for an opportunity to settle, quietly, into a bucolic life with any man in the Italian countryside. Still, he held out hope; she had, after all, dated another foreigner, so she surely did not reject foreigners outright.
The sun was starting to set, so they headed back up the hill. They had barely made it out of the park when he became so winded that he had to pause and hold on to a nearby wall. They made it another half block before—feeling as if he would faint—he stopped again and shook his head. He could feel his heart convulsing jerkily in his chest, beating so hard that it was frightening—a muscle at the limit of its capacity. “Jesus. I can’t do it,” he said, and looked up at her. “I’m sorry,” he managed to say. “It’s not safe for me.” And, still afraid of fainting, he sat down there on the pavement.
“Let me go get my car,” she said. “You wait here.”
He nodded, the indignity of his situation complete.
She set off, and he leaned up against the concrete wall of someone’s house and watched her jog up the hill. Before long, he regained his breath, and began to feel quite relaxed. Little beat-up cars zipped past once in a while. Two men in black fatigues and combat boots, one of them wearing an Uzi, rode past on a dirt bike—the one in the back, the one with the Uzi, was holding on to the other for safety. A mangy yellow dog trotted past, panting.
Eventually, Lenka’s car pulled around the corner and began putt-putting down the hill. Vincenzo stood up, and brushed the dust off the bum of his expensive corduroy trousers.
On the drive up the hill, he looked at her profile. She was more majestic when the sun was setting, because it allowed her skin to glow, as it should.
She pulled up under the awning of his hotel and yanked the parking break up.
The bellhop opened the car door, but Vincenzo didn’t get out. Instead, he turned to her and said, “If I stay in La Paz afterward, can I take you out to dinner sometime?”
Smiling gently, she shook her head. “Thank you, but no. I don’t want to.”
“Is it your boyfriend?”
She shook her head again. “No, it’s you.”
“Fine, that makes sense.” He made himself smile at her. Then he got out of the car.
The bellhop had opened the hotel door for him and was standing aside, waiting. Moving slowly, Vincenzo approached the open door, and returned to the crisp lobby. There, he sat in one of the leather armchairs. Ten minutes later, someone approached and asked if he needed anything. He shook his head.
Back in his bathrobe, with the BBC World News on the television, he sat in the armchair by the coffee table. After several thwarted drafts, he had abandoned any hope of responding via e-mail to his daughter’s missive, and had decided to call her instead. The phone rang four times before she answered.
“Hello?”
“Hello. It’s me—Papi.”
“Oh! Hi! I didn’t recognize the number, sorry. How’s Bolivia? What’s going on?”
“The altitude is destroying me, but I like it here. I have the party tomorrow.” The line was fuzzy, and there was a slight echo, so he could hear himself whispering the words again half a second after he said them, and he could hear that his voice was quite effete after all, and his daughter’s imitation was accurate. “How is New York? Are you back in the city, or are you still with Sam’s family?”
“We’ve been back for over a week. The party is tomorrow? A big party in your honor? Wow, I kind of wish I were there. I’d love to see that. The president of Bolivia is throwing a party in your honor. That’s crazy, isn’t it?”
“Yes. I’m sorry about the letter.”
“What?”
“I’m sorry about being so—what was the word you used in that e-mail?”
She sighed, frustrated, maybe. It was hard to read her sighs. “So what happened with that woman who invited you there? Did you guys go on a date?”
“No, no. She is not interested in me, not at all.”
“That’s too bad.”
“No it’s not too bad. It’s fine.”
“Okay,” she said.
An intercontinental hiss filled the silence.
“Aren’t there dating services,” she mused as if they were brainstorming now on how to solve his problem. “I’m sure there’s something online. I can look into it if you want.”
“Don’t do that,” he muttered.
“It doesn’t have to be cheesy,” she said.
He didn’t answer. And, after a long enough pause, they both started talking simultaneously. Then they both shut up and waited for the other to continue. It was then that he decided that he would wait indefinitely—he would wait silently for the rest of the day, if he had to. Either way, he would see this through. He got up, pulled a half bottle of white wine from the minibar, grabbed one of the tumblers, and sat back down.
“When do you come back?” she said.
“Come back?” He twisted the cap off and filled the glass. “I don’t think I’m coming back. I’m going to sell the house in Italy. I’m going to sell the house in Bethesda.”
“Jesus. Where are you going to go?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you sure you want to sell the house in Italy, Dad? You bought that with Mom. You guys worked on it for two years.”
“I am aware. You think I don’t know? I will sell it.” He had a sip of the wine, which tasted metallic, overly bright. “How’s Sam?”
She didn’t answer.
“Hello?” he demanded.
“He’s fine.” There was a long pause. He said nothing, ready to wait out anything she had to offer.
“Why do you hate him?” she eventually asked.
“I don’t hate him! I’ve told you that before, and it’s true. Now you have to accept it! I don’t hate him! I don’t hate him! I don’t hate him! What I hate, and I do ha
te this, is that you are giving yourself to him. He is a fool and it is obvious. But I don’t hate him. In fact, I like him, maybe. In New York I liked him—but I hate that my daughter, the person I love most in this world, is copulating with this fucking fool and she tells me that she is in love with him!” He stood up and, pacing, relinquished what was left of his control. “And I hate the idea that you would allow someone as boring as that—this idealistic child, who protests against things he doesn’t understand, things he cannot understand!—I hate that you give yourself to him! I hate that you want to be with him more than you want to be with me! I am your father! I am your blood! Your only family! But you throw me aside! That is what I fucking hate!”
He drew a deep breath and grasped his forehead, aware that he had gone too far—he paused and waited, resisting the urge to throw the phone into the window.
There was no answer. He could hear himself breathing into the hissing static.
He sat down again. He drained the rest of his glass of wine and refilled it. The inferno inside him started to dim as quickly as it had ignited. “Look I . . .” But he decided against apologizing preemptively, and let the silence stand for a moment. She, too, had good reason to apologize, after all.
At last, he heard a sound—a swiftly inhaled breath, a long shuddered exhale. She inhaled again, more slowly. “Is that all?” she whispered. That voice—that phrase—it cracked straight through a plane of glass that had somehow remained intact inside him. It was the most painful sound he’d heard in years.
“I’m sorry,” he said, although it was too late.
There was a fuzzy click on the line when she hung up.
14
SPEECH
While not religious, Vincenzo believed in a kind of cosmic balance. Leonora, for example, had been savaged with loss, and so when, in college, she was in a terrible car accident, she emerged unscathed. The paramedics were astonished. But it made sense.
The person who was driving, a friend of hers, drove into a guardrail while trying to turn the volume up on his stereo, and then his car helicoptered through several lanes of highway, missing various cars, miraculously, any one of which could have killed Leonora, before they slammed into a streetlight. The pole, as chance would have it, struck the driver’s side. The driver, named Lee, who was drunk and high on marijuana, died immediately. His body absorbed much of the force of impact, so Leonora felt almost none. The car, slowed considerably now, rolled off down a hill into the woods. Leonora walked out of the crushed car soaked in Lee’s blood, but completely unharmed. She sat on the damp leaves and watched the full moon above, listening to the cars whipping past on the freeway nearby. Eventually, she heard the sirens.
The Dismal Science Page 18
