“This way,” the mujik indicated.
We entered a sea of tin shacks, one beside the other, forming narrow alleyways. The mud and the puddles slowed our lurching pace. We found ourselves in a passageway filled with aromatic smoke and fortune tellers. Some of the Aymara shamans, who were standing beside their tiny rooms under the light of candles, invited us to come in. Two pesos to read our fortunes in coca leaves.
“I know someone who can read your future. It’s no joke, he’s the real thing,” the skinny guy said.
Near the end of the line of tin shacks, a young shaman wearing a poncho, a lluchu hat, and sandals was smoking a cigarette.
“This is the one,” the big guy said.
The shaman led me inside his abode. “Coca leaves or cards?” he asked.
I sat on a bench facing him. Between us stood a small table, on top of which he had arranged coca leaves in three separate piles. The guy was a damn sharp peasant, even though he couldn’t have been more than twenty-two years old.
“Coca is better than cards. Sometimes cards deceive,” he said.
The piles on top of the table represented health, money, and love, respectively.
“I want to know my future; I don’t care about anything else,” I said.
“Just your future,” he gurgled. “We need to mix the coca leaves.” He stirred them together into a single pile, threw a handful of leaves into the air, and started to recite a tongue twister in Aymara. Then he threw second and third handfuls. He stirred the coca leaves together again before sending yet another good handful flying into the air. The leaves fell all over the table and he said: “Future, here it is.”
“What do you see?” I asked. “A trip, a long trip?”
“There is no trip,” he answered, rubbing the green leaves. “I don’t see trips, just a calm life without surprises. Your wife will take care of you. Sometimes you’ll do well with money, other times badly. Everything must be purified with sacred smoke—house, body, and soul.”
I handed him two pesos and returned to the hooligans.
“What’s the word?” the skinny guy asked.
“I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about,” I said. “I don’t have a family.”
They laughed and one of them put his arm around my back. “Now we’re going to the lookout,” he said. “If you wanna bang a half-breed Argentine girl, it’ll cost you fifty dollars. You got it?”
I didn’t answer. We found ourselves in a wide-open space, at the entrance to the twisting alleys; the forking paths, as Borges would say.
“Where is this place?” I asked.
“Over there,” the skinny guy said, pointing at the night sky. “Two steps from here.”
In the near distance I could make out the back of the statue of Christ that blesses the city of La Paz. I felt somebody twisting my arm and tried to break loose, but as drunk as I was, it was in vain. The first fist hit me right in the jaw. Somebody kicked my stomach with the force of a mule, knocking the wind out of me. Next, I received a series of blows to the face. The guy who was grabbing onto my arm started to squeeze it with both hands. I suffered a kick to the ribs that knocked me to the ground. It was impossible to react.
The only thing I could do was endure the blows.
“Take him to the cliff!” one of them shouted.
They carried me to the edge of an enormous garbage dump. A shadow emerged from the jumble of papers and rags and began to run. A scavenging dog started to bark. They took my money, my papers, my jacket, my shirt, my tie, and my shoes. When they were about to take my pants, I managed to unleash a piercing scream that startled them. One final kick in the back and a shove sent me rolling downhill. I tumbled through what seemed like thousands of papers before I was stopped by a boulder separating the dump from the abyss.
Before losing consciousness, I glimpsed the lights of the city of La Paz, which looked like a gigantic Christmas tree laid to rest over the valley.
Chapter 13
Aluminous awakening. The sky was a Caribbean blue and the wind delicately refreshing, like the breeze of a flamenco fan. Unfortunately, the odors I was inhaling didn’t jibe with the picturesque landscape. It was the smell of excrement; I found myself in turesque a narrow embankment that served as a toilet for hundreds of Indians from the City of the Future. Since I’d been hit between the eyes, I had trouble opening my eyelids. I tried to stand up, but it was impossible. I’d been beaten to a pulp and my entire body hurt, as if I’d been stampeded by a hundred terrified cows. I was resting, curiously, on an enormous rock shaped like a millstone that was planted vertically in the ground. About ten feet away, an unemployed defecator was squatting Hindu-style and reading a newspaper. A few minutes later, upon noticing that I was giving signs of life, he said: “You got so stinking drunk you don’t know where you are?”
“In a shitting hole,” I mumbled.
He lifted up his trousers after wiping his rear with the sports page and approached me. “Mother of God!” he exclaimed. “The hoods from La Ceja got you good.”
“Help me,” I begged. “I can’t move.”
“Good thing that rock stopped you on the way down. If not, you would have ended up a hundred and fifty feet below on the roof of some house. They would’ve found you belly up like a dead frog.”
“It was four guys at the cabaret. I had a thousand dollars on me.”
“And my grandmother plays center forward,” he said.
“I have to go to the police.”
“Without shoes?”
I glanced at my feet. They had spared my brand new socks.
“You probably know them,” I murmured.
“Probably. How many were there?”
“Four.”
“Did you catch their mugs?”
“What?”
“Their faces. Do you remember them?”
“One of them had a face like a wire fence. Have you ever seen him?”
“Rings a bell. What’ll you give me if I sniff him out?”
“I’ll pay you. If you find the thousand, you get half.”
“Relax, man,” he said. “It looks like you got some dough in your trunk.” He accompanied the statement with a glance at my back pocket. It was the truth. I had a couple of tens left.
“I’m better off going to the police,” I said. “Those bastards!”
The man advanced parsimoniously. You could tell he was a hopeless old bum from a mile away. He had a purple face dotted by dark stains and yellowish eyes. He was toothless and his lips were swollen.
He was wearing a reddish sweater, green pants, and shoes that were probably stolen, as they were too big for him.
“If you go to the coppers looking like that, some asshole might give you a hard time. You should look at yourself in a mirror.”
“Help me stand up,” I said.
“I can’t do it alone. Hold on while I get some reinforcements.”
I waited a few minutes. He came back accompanied by another semi-moribund vagrant. They struggled to lift me up and then dragged me over to the foot of the statue of Christ that casts a blessing over La Paz.
“Give this poor guy five pesos or something,” he said. “He’s been deaf ever since he found his lady in bed with his best friend.”
“I want a hot coffee,” I declared.
“It’s a miracle they didn’t chop you into pieces. Those thugs have no mercy.”
I watched his eyes, which were like two black holes with death written all over them. “What’s your name?” I asked weakly.
“People call me Suitcase. I used to rob luggage at the train station, until I retired because of my drinking.” He doubled over in laughter and started to cough. When he finished, he proposed: “For twenty bucks, I’ll take you to the guy with the scars.”
We traversed those strange, narrow passageways between the tin shacks. I remembered that the thugs had taken me along the same route; I also recalled the shaman who had read my future in the coca leaves. As we crossed that wo
rld all its own, that Aymara Ukbar, I realized it would be difficult to picture his face in my mind. Even if I recognized him, he wouldn’t spill the beans on the ruffians, because if he did, they would send him back to his village with the mark of Zorro on his forehead. Going to the police, as I had thought of doing before, wouldn’t be such a good idea—if I broke down and lost my cool, I could see myself telling them about Don Gustavo. That would put me in jail forever. Better to suffer in silence, as the old bolero goes.
“I couldn’t have survived a beating like that,” Suitcase said. “You’re strong.”
He led me to a foul-smelling bar in the midst of that indigenous morass. He sat me down in a corner and went to speak with the owner, an Indian guy who appeared worn down by the altitude and the cold.
We ordered a couple of piscos and two coffees.
“If you don’t want me to help you out, at least give me ten dollars,” Suitcase said.
“I’m still strong enough to kick your ass,” I said. “Get lost or I’ll track you down later and cut your balls off.”
Suitcase wasn’t a fighting man. He didn’t have it in him anymore. Thanks to alcohol, his condition was terminal. He left cursing and damming the thugs for not having finished me off. I fell asleep for a few minutes, only to be awakened by the pain, which came over me like a rising tide. I could feel all the places, from my ass to my neck, where they had hit me.
My testicles were throbbing with pain; they felt heavy as two steel balls. I urgently needed some painkillers and a couple of days in bed. I didn’t consider looking for a doctor because I couldn’t afford it. Even a local yokel from El Alto would cost at least twenty bucks, not including medication.
I summoned a kid who was panhandling motorists stopped in traffic. I asked him to hail a taxi for me and promised him a one-peso tip. The taxi came; the driver and the kid had to lift me into the car. At first the driver mistook me for a cripple. Then, halfway to the hotel, he bought me thirty painkillers and a couple of family-sized bottles of orange soda. When we reached the Primavera, the owner thought that I had been run over by a truck. She and her husband, a taciturn guy, helped me to my bed. Upon hearing what had happened, the half-breed lady started to complain: “I thought you were a problem when I first laid eyes on you. You should go to the hospital. I don’t want you to die in my hotel.”
“Don’t worry; I don’t plan on dying yet.”
“You shouldn’t be out on the street at night; there are lots of Peruvians around. They’re cruel.”
“The guys who robbed me were one-hundred-percent Bolivians. I would’ve preferred Peruvians.”
The half-breed moved her head from side to side several times, like a horse shaking off flies. The husband said: “Get some rest and we’ll see how you do. You’re not going to die here. If you’re still doing badly, we’ll take you to the hospital.”
They left, closing the door behind them. I swallowed three painkillers with a gulp of soda and tried to sleep. It was useless. The pain was acute, lacerating, and constant. My whole body felt like one large wound, like a poultice of burning lava. A few hours later, I became immobilized by the pain, which scared me. I imagined that my spinal cord was kaput and that I would waste away like a forgotten soldier on the battlefield.
I dozed off for half an hour. A heavy nosebleed woke me up. I wet my neck with water and managed to position my head off the edge of the bed, tilting it backwards, which stopped the nosebleed. Three additional painkillers kept my suffering under control until almost 9 in the evening. Around then, a raucous mêlée broke out at the hotel entrance. I heard the drunken voices of the half-breed landlady and her husband insulting each other. The tumult lasted a solid half-hour. It apparently ended with the woman locking him out in the street. Since the guy was still ranting and raving, the woman tossed a bucketful of urine on him from the balcony, which succeeded in quieting him down.
With the return of silence, that sad and anguished silence of the Andean plateau, the pain that had been momentarily held in check attacked me with intensity. I had never imagined that a beating could leave you so devastated, incapable of any movement. And that wasn’t all; I became feverish. First came the chills and then my esophagus felt like a burning chimney. One hundred and four degrees? One hundred and five? I’ll never know how high my fever was that night. I simply thought that my time was up, that the moment I’d been hoping for and fearing, that I’d seen as inevitable, had finally arrived. I decided to play my last card.
I swallowed the rest of the painkillers, more than twenty of them. I had enough time to pay my respects to the saints and the sinners, to Blanca and to Isabel, the unattainable one. It was a sinister and laughable fate to die alone in a rented room in El Alto, penniless, frustrated, and defeated. It couldn’t be worse. When the half-breed lady found me cold, she would throw me to the hogs for sure. All for an American visa that in the end turned out to be fake.
“If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t believe it, Alvarez,” as Don Antonio would say.
When I opened my eyelids, a Kafkaesque scene slowly became frighteningly real. I could see that I was in a room painted entirely white. Through the window, the sun shone with a blinding intensity. A strong smell of disinfectant pervaded the place. Opposite me, a fully dressed man had been laid to rest on top of a cot. Beside his bloody head, I made out a motorcycle helmet. One of the guy’s arms was dangling off the side of the cot. In the far corner stood a sink and a small table. Under the table, a cat, which appeared to be suffering from terrible allergies, was scratching its back with zeal.
I thought I was delirious so I pinched my cheek. It worked. I was awake, in some sort of clinic. I felt my body up and down. I was almost naked, except for the black underpants covering my family jewels. Luckily, I hadn’t been operated on; there weren’t any signs of scars or incisions. The pain from the beating, the memory of which abruptly returned, had ceased. The only thing I felt was a kind of pleasant drowsiness. I was obviously under the influence of a sedative.
Suddenly, I heard footsteps. Clacking heels approached through what I gathered was a hallway. They stopped in front of the door. A few seconds later, a short nurse entered and came straight toward me. Her face was small, dark, and almost completely covered by enormous sunglasses. She smiled happily and declared, “It’s about time you woke up.”
“Where am I?” I asked.
“In a clinic in El Alto. They brought you here the day before yesterday, in the afternoon. We thought you had poisoned yourself. We pumped your stomach. What made you sleep like that?”
“More than twenty painkillers. I was in a lot of pain.”
“Painkillers? Thank goodness. Up here there are people who take rat poison. Of course, they don’t just fall asleep—they die.”
“And that guy on the stretcher?” I asked.
“He’s dead. He was driving a motorcycle drunk when he crashed into the back of a truck. He forgot to put on his helmet; it was tied to the back of his seat.”
“He’s really young.”
“Old people don’t ride motorcycles.”
“Who brought me here?”
The nurse started to delicately wash the dead man’s face with a sponge after freeing him from his leather jacket. “A young woman and a half-breed who said she was the owner of the place where you had been staying.”
“I feel great. What did they give me?”
“A shot of Demerol. You got the living daylights beaten out of you. I bet there were lots of them.”
“Four; they stole everything.”
“You were lucky. Usually, if they rob you, they kill you. How much did they take?”
“About a thousand dollars.”
She stopped cleaning up the motorcyclist and looked at me incredulously. “And what were you doing with a thousand dollars in that part of El Alto?”
“I missed my plane to the United States. I got drunk because I was upset.”
“You could have waited for the next flight.”
“It’s a long, sad story; tragic and funny at the same time. I’d be better off dead.”
The nurse looked at me with a mother’s tender gaze. “The young lady who brought you here doesn’t think so. She cried her eyes out thinking that you were going to die. She was very happy when she heard you still have a lot of time left on earth.”
“What young lady? I don’t know anyone in El Alto.”
“She seems to know you well. It’s good to have someone like that at your side who loves you. Besides, she’s very pretty. She’ll be back in a few minutes. She went to the pharmacy to buy you some medicine.”
“Will I be able to leave?”
“Of course.”
“I don’t even have money to pay for the medicine.”
“It doesn’t cost much. You’ve got two broken ribs. I think she looked in your pockets, and when she didn’t find anything she said she would cover it.” The nurse took the limp arm of the motorcyclist and placed it on top of his chest, forming a cross with the other. She then crossed herself and said: “Nobody has come for him since yesterday. But a thousand dollars! Are you telling me the truth or are you pulling my leg?”
“You have my word. Those bastards won the lottery.”
She smiled benevolently. “Are you going to report it?”
“Better to just forget about it. In any case, I won’t get the money back.”
“The important thing is that you’re alive. Your life isn’t worth losing over a thousand lousy dollars,” she said.
At that moment Blanca arrived. Upon seeing me awake, her face lit up. I had never seen her so radiant. She greeted the nurse and approached my bed.
“Who told you?” I asked.
“The owner of the Primavera; she had written down that your previous address was the Hotel California. The manager’s helper took the call and told us. Your friends say hi. Don Antonio wanted me to give you this book.”
The nurse was a witness to this affectionate encounter between a sentimental whore and a survivor. Had she been a priest, she would have married us on the spot.
American Visa Page 22
