“Hi, Justo.”
“Hi.”
“I thought I might run into someone here from the old guard.”
Lost in a chasm of disquietude, his little eyes were ringed by heavy bags. He never could grow a beard. He was smooth-faced like most Indians, but he did have that long Amazonian tribal chief’s hair running halfway down his back. His coca-chewer’s breath elicited memories that I had long ago forgotten.
“I could get you some pisco,” I said.
“Just water, friend. This is no party.”
“I thought you were in Oruro.”
“The mine is my destiny. I’m going to die there.”
“A tough guy like you could stand this crucifying thing for a week, even if they nailed you to the fence.”
“You’re looking good,” he said.
“I’m rotting on the inside.”
“We’re all rotting in this country. Only the dead are saved.”
The onlookers milled around compassionately. One miner suggested it was about time he got taken to a hospital for rehydration, and a woman with a middle-class look to her bent over and gave him a piece of bread to chew on.
“If you want, I could bring the German TV crew over here,” I said. “You’d be on display for all of Europe.”
“I don’t speak German,” Justo said. A broad-backed woman wrapped in an alpaca poncho forced her way through the crowd. “She’s my wife.”
“Why don’t you all keep moving? There are others worse off than my husband,” the woman said. She was a housewife from Huanuni, nothing more and nothing less. Accustomed to suffering, resignation, and death. She looked me over sardonically.
“This is Alvarez, my buddy from the army,” Justo murmured.
The lady sighed and then covered Justo’s neck with a garment that looked like a scarf. “He told me about you,” she said. “Would you crucify yourself?”
“Not for a miner’s salary.”
She smiled. “He catches colds that are like pneumonia. He’s got bronchitis, so if he has another night like the last, it’ll be over for him.”
“Here’s something for old time’s sake.” I handed the woman ten pesos, and she put them in one of Justo’s swollen hands.
“It’d be good if one of us died on the cross,” he said. “The political impact would be huge.”
“There’s no cross here. You’re tied to a fence,” I said.
“All you need is a little imagination,” Justo replied.
A paramedic pushed me aside. He bent over to take Justo’s blood pressure. “It’s time for this one to go to the hospital,” he announced after listening to his chest.
Justo’s wife started to pray quietly. My friend stopped paying attention to me. I walked away toward El Prado, leaving all the hubbub behind.
The spectacle of the crucified miners left me sad and stimulated my appetite. I wandered the streets around El Prado until I found a dive in the basement of an old house that was about to be bulldozed. The windows on the first floor and on the upper floors had been boarded over. A couple of day laborers were busy nailing a poster in the doorway that announced the construction of a shopping center. The bar was the only sign of life in that decrepit adobe structure. I had hardly put a foot down in the place when a European-looking guy invited me to sit at his table. It was the owner, a Balkan, last name Landberg. He recommended the house specialty—suckling pig with a side of potatoes and salad, all for five pesos. A beer was the solution to help me digest the meat. After jotting down my order on a scrap of paper and handing it to a waitress, Landberg offered me his life story as an appetizer. He said that he was born in Riga, Estonia and had lived in Bolivia since the ’50s. He confessed to me that he had helped the Germans during the Second World War because he was ethnically German and hated the Russians and the Poles. At first, while the Germans still had the upper hand, they had promised him a whole lot of land in the Ukraine after the war was over. In a shockingly sadistic manner, he told me about how he had dynamited a train full of Russians just as it was crossing over a bridge.
“A lot of people died,” he explained seriously. “That’s why the Germans awarded me a medal.” He added that he made it to the outskirts of Moscow just as the rains started and got trapped in the mud, cold, and snow. He paused as the waitress set down a pitcher of beer. Later, they chased him all the way back to Germany, where he began to sense they would lose the war. He fled to Italy and then traveled to Argentina in the hold of a ship. The waitress put a piece of roast pig exuding a pleasant aroma right in front of my nose. Landberg waited for me to take a bite and then claimed it was impossible to eat pork that good, that cheap anywhere else.
“It won’t give you trichinosis,” he reassured me. “It’s pork from Stege, nothing like what the half-breed girls here raise in the garbage dumps.” After a moment, he continued: “I never got used to life in Argentina because the men there yell like Italians. So I decided to try my luck and got on a train to the Andean plateau. I had nothing to lose. I got married twenty days after arriving in La Paz. I got married three times and my third wife taught me how to cook. I landed a job in the Interior Ministry; this was back when the MNR was calling the shots. They needed guys with my kind of experience.”
His story about the bridge reminded me of the one that Gary Cooper blew up in that movie about the Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls.
“Fucking Reds,” he muttered.
“Is she your third wife?” I asked, nodding in the direction of the young woman working the cash register.
“No, that’s Lola. She’s just a friend who helps out around here.”
“So they’re going to knock this place down?”
“Not until they pay me ten thousand dollars to leave. If they hand over the ten grand, I’m gone the next day. If not, they can bulldoze this place over my fucking dead body.”
“Don’t you pay rent here?”
“Not a cent.”
The pig went down like a piece of lead, and my conversation with Landberg didn’t help any. Luckily for me, the Balkan gave me an after-dinner drink. It turned out that the guy had salami syndrome: First he tried to sell me an old car, then a television set, next a plot of land in Alto Beni, and finally a Hungarian salami.
I felt a little dazed and had a stomachache when I left the place. I headed over to the restaurant at Club de La Paz and gulped down three cups of coffee. The coffee reminded me of the American visa, and the America visa made me think about how pathetic my situation was at that moment. My other problem: I was nearly flat broke. I had fifteen pesos, fifty dollars, and ten grams of gold that, for all the good wishes of my dead old man, weren’t multiplying for a damn. The Brazilians say, “If there’s no solution, there’s no problem.” Aren’t they smart! In Bolivia it’s like we’re all made of stone and whatever sticks to the stone, in time, turns into stone. I had a problem that was getting bigger and bigger with the passing hours, kind of like a giant snowball. Although I knew I didn’t have any answers and that I was probably out of luck, a tiny light stubbornly burned on inside of me. Eight hundred dollars was the same as eight thousand or even eight million dollars to me. I thought about my godfather, and then about Blanca. My godfather was miserly and distrustful. Maybe Blanca could give me eight hundred dollars, bit by bit, under the condition that I protect and accompany her. As for my offspring, he wasn’t giving any signs of life. That kid never did have his head on straight. Like father, like son.
I didn’t feel like going back to the hotel or embarking on another drunken binge. My hangover was exacerbating my desperation. The best I could do was take a walk downtown to people-watch, window-shop, hike up streets, and then walk back down them again. I ended up sitting on a bench in the Plaza Murillo, staring at some pigeons munching on corn, and at congressmen and senators posing for the TV cameras. With their elegant attire, they looked happy and arrogant. A few were in full suits and the rest were wearing sporty dress shirts, unbuttoned at the top as was fashionable amon
g the moderate leftwingers. I was lucky enough to catch a glimpse of a foreign ambas- sador climbing out of a limousine and entering the palace to meet with the president. He was wearing a morning coat. The palace guards paid their respects as the regiment’s band started up with a tune that sounded something like a polka. A half-hour later, a group of peasants marched on the palace to defend their right to grow the millenarian and beneficent coca leaf, and not the damned coffee the gringos and their slaves in Bolivia’s parliament imposed on them. They paraded in front of the palace shouting yays and nays, but nobody paid them any mind, not even the palace guards, who stood there straight as toy soldiers. An old pensioner, whose exact age was difficult to judge, started yakking at me about his sleepless nights in a public nursing home.
That was when I decided to head out. I left the scene with no set destination in mind.
Chapter 6
Istarted down Colón, my hand braced against the wall so as to avoid falling flat on my backside. I walked all the way down to City Hall, took a seat on a dilapidated wooden bench, and asked a heavyset shoeshine boy to clean my boots. His face was swollen from too much boozing. He was talking up the new forward playing for Bolívar to another shoeshiner, who, being a fan of their rival, El Tigre, wasn’t having any of it.
Next, I took off down Mercado Street and then, without thinking, out of pure boredom, stopped in front of a bookstore window. A fastidious bookseller was busy decorating the shelves, arranging in the shape of a fan several copies of a recently published book by an author named Mabel Plata. The book cover bore a seagull flying above choppy waters. I entered the bookstore and started flipping through some magazines. Their collection of publications ranged from National Geographic to issues of Hustler featuring bimbos striking raunchy poses, sometimes alone and other times beside heavily tattooed men. On the last page of one of the magazines, the amateur models had provided their addresses for receiving any sentimental correspondence. Though not aesthetically pleasing, the pictures were provocative.
I lost myself amidst gigantic shelves holding hundreds of books, ranging from children’s stories to thick volumes on medicine, and a gamut of novels and short stories in between. I was never a fan of literature that talks about literature. I always liked noir novels about detectives and hoods that have clear beginnings and endings. Guys like Raymond Chandler and Chester Himes can change my life for a few hours, freeing me to see the world through the eyes of Philip Marlowe or Grave Digger Jones. Just then I stumbled across one of Himes’s books, The Heat’s On.
The first few lines had me hooked. I spaced out completely as the escapades of Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones lifted me away to the alleys of Harlem. Apparently, anybody who knows Harlem can tell you how hard it is to get out of that neighborhood. I didn’t even notice that the bookstore employees had cleared the shelves, moved the furniture from one side of the room to another, and adorned the tables with placemats, where only minutes before there had sat enormous piles of books. They set out plates, glasses, flower pots, and pictures of Mabel Plata, a haggard-looking woman with protruding cheekbones and a sad, deep-set face. A waiter sporting an immaculate white jacket and black gloves was ceremoniously arranging bottles of Chilean champagne, as a plump balding man with a Nietzschean moustache barked out orders impatiently. I figured he was the owner of the bookstore and the organizer of Mabel Plata’s book launch. I was just the party crasher.
I thought it would be prudent to make my exit, but not before taking Himes with me, hidden under my shirt and behind my belt. I hadn’t stolen a book in twenty years, and I didn’t want to lose the habit. I tried slipping away, but the street exit was roped off. The balding man approached me, Cuban cigar in hand, and then grabbed me by the arm with a big shot’s self-assurance.
“This way,” he said. “You’re here just in time. I like punctual people. I’m hoping the rest of La Paz’s bigwigs get here soon. Where do I know you from?”
“A long time ago I owned a used bookstore in Oruro.”
“And . . . it tanked.”
“How did you guess?”
“Books are a bad business in this country. Not a lot of people read and the few who do, they read about politics hoping that it’ll be of use to them. What are you doing these days?”
“I don’t make a good living. I’m planning to emigrate.”
“To Australia?”
“South Africa. The white people are leaving because they’re afraid the blacks will eat them alive now that they have the same rights.”
“Do you like black people?” he asked inquisitively.
“I have a thing for black women. You’ve never seen a black lady lying naked on white sheets?”
“In Brazil, but I don’t remember the color of the sheets,” he said, laughing.
“The sheets must be white. It’s the most erotic thing you’ll ever see.”
“I’m Salomón Urquiola. I own this place,” he declared, holding out his hand, then averred, “thank God there aren’t too many blacks in this country.”
“That’s why our soccer players aren’t any good. They don’t know how to move their hips,” I replied.
Salomón Urquiola handed me a cigar and lit it for me. He seemed puzzled by my identity. He couldn’t place me; he directed quick, polite glances in my direction. He was wearing a dark gray suit. His footwear, a pair of copper loafers that looked like they’d been run over by a steamroller, clashed with his brown socks.
Once the ropes were withdrawn, the guests, sporting their best party outfits, started to file in. They all greeted Salomón Urquiola in an orderly fashion as they entered. An older man with a fancy walking stick and wearing an English coat and an imported Borsalino felt hat strolled into the bookstore. His face rang a bell: Last name Mezquita, he was a famous right-wing man of letters who had been chummy with all the military dictators. A rather artless teller of Andean folk tales and legends, he was a writer of tepid prose but an excellent businessman. Successive military governments had used him to write longwinded newspaper articles extolling their virtues. Salomón Urquiola greeted him with a hug and some sweet talk to show what an incredible honor it was to receive such a distinguished guest. The guy thanked him and then cast a Napoleonic gaze out at the rest of the crowd. Once he determined there was no one else worth greeting, he became aloof like a celebrity trying to escape notice. As he made his way toward the back wall, the entire room broke out in applause. The guest of honor had arrived, the skinny lady in all the pictures. An indigenous-looking girl was escorting her by the arm. Mabel Plata was tired, but she mustered enough energy to acknowledge the crowd with a smile. She flashed a set of decrepit yellow-orange teeth as she extended a languid, pale hand to the owner.
“Dearest Mabel,” Urquiola said in greeting.
“All those hills,” Mabel Plata whined. “I don’t know how I’d manage without Andresita.”
Andresita, a peasant girl, was unable to repress the look of irritation on her face. At the end of the day, carrying an exhausted poetess on her back up and down La Paz’s sheer streets was no joke.
Salomón Urquiola extinguished his cigar and raised his left arm. The chatting died down, the murmurs ceased, and he began. “Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished scholars. We are very pleased to be here today for the reading of Mabel’s latest book of poetry. In light of the crisis affecting every level of society in this country, these are difficult times for the publishing business. But this book is destined to be the next big hit. We have all anxiously waited to hear what topic our beloved poetess will choose this time. Years ago it was The Lost Love, and next Tremendous Solitude, to be followed by that harrowing and magnificent story about alcoholism, and then that daring and painful confession about eroticism between two people of the same sex, reminiscent of Anaïs Nin, and now the sea . . . Yes, the sea that was taken from us by the treacherous Brits and the crooked Chilean bourgeoisie. The sea, so near and yet so far, the romantic and deep-blue sea that we all miss. It’s a difficult topic
for even the loftiest of pens, a challenge that Señorita Plata has bravely taken head-on. Out of this challenge a book of poems has sprung that is sure to make your eyes well with tears, while at the same time infusing you with the hope that we will one day soon return to our imprisoned Pacific coast. I must confess that I read it all in a single night, spellbound, as Mabel’s magical pen whipped me away to the empty beaches of the Atacama Desert, which may not have received a drop of rain in three hundred years but are still filled with the tears shed by our immortal soldiers.”
Salomón Urquiola capped his speech like an orator from colonial days, spreading his arms wide and gazing heavenward. He wiped away an invisible tear and immediately lit another cigar. A round of applause crowned his performance. Next, Señorita Mabel Plata released herself from the protective hand of her Indian servant and slowly, as if dragging a heavy chain, walked over to the podium. Standing with arms akimbo, she waited until it was so quiet that a fly’s buzzing could be heard.
“My dear, lovely friends, I am truly grateful for such heartfelt words from the people’s publisher, the most humane bookseller in our country. He said it well—a challenge it certainly was. The mere act of traveling to the beaches that were once ours in the distant past meant, for me, entering a hostile and ghost-riddled universe. My great-great-grandfather, Antonio de las Mercedes Plata, died in combat near Mejillones. To see the ocean, to be able to touch it, to rock in its waves, to gaze at the ships, to glimpse the tiny fishing barges, and to breathe the marine air was a truly sad and unsettling experience. Staring at the unruly ocean that used to belong to us, but that we lost thanks to our backstabbing mining oligarchy, shook the very foundations of my poetic sensibilities. I started writing in a hostel that faced the water and, like someone possessed, didn’t put my pen down until the last sentence. Then a couple of Peruvian hooligans stole the pen from me on the flight back.”
American Visa Page 9
