“I used to be president, and a man who reaches that government seat of honour would never set out to deceive his people. You take on an enormous responsibility up there, and you absolutely cannot, ever, lie to the people.” He felt sonorous, filled with something that resembled happiness, picturing the road to power wrapped around his temples like a crown of Caesarean laurels. At last the dusty colononel could answer without a shred of doubt the journalists’ questions about his seven years in power—no need to mentally prepare to explain and lessen the weight of the dead and the exiles. He no longer needed to give half-hearted explanations about the nepotistic fate of the accrued debt or hide the conditions that had made him president of a country fractured into various coexisting societies, languages and historical times. Later that day, the former colononel ordered one of his assistants to kindly suggest to newspapers that the word “president” be capitalized. Pretty please. He then called the then-president-in-office, a certain Jaime Paz, a manling more cunning than Caco, nephew of another president, a despot of an old man and lover of manoeuvres and bayonets in his spare time. Now, forced by political convenience and the ever-shrinking weight of the dead, Jaime Paz had become a friend—in fact, the old tyrant considered him almost a son. An opponent of the colononel’s dictatorship after the coup d’état of August 1971, and having endured the hardship of exile and persecution, by mid-1985 he had finally revealed a trait that would distinguish him and his people: a stubborn, instinctive, animal ambition lacking any talent whatsoever. The first thing Jaime Paz did as soon as he became vice-president was to devote himself to sabotaging and plotting against his own regime, a coalition united under the name of Unión Democrática y Popular, led by Hernán Siles Suazo, until—not a speck of remorse, forget that—he finally set out to co-govern in kleptocratic union with his ex-exiler.
Old colononel Banzer thought that in 1993 or in 1997, or even after his death, no one would question the illustrious place he would occupy in national history textbooks once he was democratically elected president of either a republic or hell. On the intercom next to his massive mahogany desk, he asked not to be disturbed and called on his assistants—who were lounging around in the next room—to take his messages, he wasn’t there if anyone called. He took out his dentures, gave his tired gums a slow tongue massage and closed his eyes, picturing the next 6th of August—a date that in happier days would have caused prolonged erections and military parades—feeling almost the same excitement he felt the day he graduated from Colegio Mingidor Gualberto Villarroel. Submerged in old black-and-white memories, he suddenly opened his eyes after feeling a swift, light touch, a presence in the air, as if on one side of the room he had again glimpsed the fourteen shadows that used to file by one by one in his worst sleepless hours. No, he wouldn’t let those corpses found by accident in a mass grave at the La Paz cemetery disturb him. He wouldn’t allow them, not now. Fucking dead. That’s what you get for being commies. Shoulda known better. It’s your fault, you damn wakabolas, that I haven’t slept a wink in more than twenty years. And if he did he kept his eyes open. That’s how he cheated the spectres of the disappeared. When they saw his eyes, they thought he was awake and didn’t bother him. He called on one of his assistants with the voice of a troop commander and ordered, “Bring me some ají de fideos a la marinera!” His carnal dagger demanded engagement in a new penetration campaign against the carnal red forces that were always there where you least expected them.
How to stop the rivers of time and memory from flooding and washing out to the sea of dying what little love we may have left? By searching, by inventing María, the one who returns to the South with a charango and a letter. Not Death.
I have decided to look for you here and I don’t even know how. I’ve seen you in so many faces and I don’t even know if it’s because of these lines that I’ll succeed in recognizing you. You said it would be difficult, if not impossible, to have you here. I am scared of finding you and realizing that perhaps it was futile to travel down this long road half-devoured by years of wanting. I also know that when I finally reach you I will have to put a face on you, name you, fill you with shapes, desires and silences. And I don’t even know how I will manage to do that. Today I’ve decided to look for you here and I can’t think of more beautiful words to start my day.
The best way to start will be to let traces of you inhabit me. I will fill myself with your gestures, your capital letters. I will see a street. Stare at a café in the corner. The tables. This key on my keyboard. A handkerchief falling on the ground as the metro goes by. A scream near the bridge at dawn. The hum of an accordion as I wander through the Old Port. A page torn from a book, asleep between the pages of another. Then I will look in the mirror and say that you were here for a moment and I’m finally holding a sign of you, that at last I have you in some way.
I hadn’t thought about that in a long time, finding a page from one book resting in the embrace of another. I think you mentioned it the night we met and you sat next to me at a café on Chemin de la Reine-Marie months ago, or was it years ago?
Sometimes I lose track of you and I hate you and I get tired of looking for you in vain. And I tell myself that the night belongs only to you—the night, where you take all and none of the forms that exist. I close my eyes and think of your lips, my hands recognize your body. You’re lying back, eyes half-closed, giving and denying me the little death that hides behind the mask of joy and pleasure. Then the anguish of knowing everything is finite, that all our haste and desire did nothing but spur the voracity of time. And then I know I have lost you, and I know myself to be too rough, drunk on my fears, awkward like a blind animal, unable to recognize the lightness of your leaving.
I start over. I find a name for you: María. And then I invent an encounter, always the first, always the same one, where my eyes converse with your fingers and your voice touches me and your laughter undresses me. We turn serious, take some distance, know ourselves to be secret accomplices in what you call an exercise in desire and I name the desire of invention. Then our voices touch, caress, recognize each other across the night and the distance. They play and chase and own each other and make promises. My voice sleeps with you and your hair shows me the way into the night that sleeps upon your breasts, into the primeval waters of your pubis, into the eye of life eternal.
Always in you,
Alfredo.
The only way to explain what it means to be Bolivian is through violence. It is as though that first blast of air that welcomes us into the Andean world at birth slowly became punches, sticks, stones and bullets. Nothing else could explain that sense of normalcy, the daily and brutal manifestations of a viceroyal democracy in an endless paper-and-cardboard performance, donning convenient disguises as needed—bayonet, barracks, congress. Bolivia: a colony of civil dictators and important frogs where the exercises of violence invade even the tiniest spaces between flesh and nail.
The worn-out colononel had always thought the art of seduction belonged to the republic of civilians. Especially to that pretentious middle class, men who in his view became lesser men as soon as they set foot in a university and started choosing what colour tie to wear—if they were in finances—or grew a beard that always hid a disgusting Marxist camouflaged under the title of sociologist. Morons. At that precise moment in the year of our Lord Jesus Christ one thousand nine hundred and seventy-one, the Gasser family—or some other similar family of important agro-industry landowners, acting in the name and representation of people of good family name and better bank accounts—had a big fat package delivered to the mouse-in-boots-and-battle-fatigues. A package of patriotic, necessary dollars set aside as funds to rectify the course of the nation, which was dangerously set on the tortuous paths of the international left. This, thanks to the complicity of a bad military man and even worse Bolivian, General Juan José Torres González, who would later be assassinated, several shots to the back of the head from some decent patriot
ic members of the Argentinian Triple A screaming “Death to the Bolivian!” under a Buenos Aires bridge. The young, rampant colononel Hugo Banzer didn’t need to put on a tie or fake civil intellidumbness to sell the powers of his efficacy to his importer patrons, his agro-industrial uncles and his banking and mining friends. He had the necessary credentials to seduce the illustrious Bolivian bourgeoisie—his first failed military uprising, the lethal wisdom he’d acquired from the gringos who taught at the School of the Americas, and his austere military boots. And his name, his name: Hugo Banzer, a booming, iron-cross name with a metallic buzz that echoed German tanks razing the last Polish defences, or tanks coming down from El Alto at 4:00 AM to storm the dream palace of all Bolivians. But nothing had prepared him for his greatest hour of glory, when in 1988 he was honoured by the highest accolade his name, “General Hugo Banzer,” could ever receive: entering the Hall of Fame of his old School of the Americas, buried in the heat and humidity of Georgia, Southern state and old bastion of slavery during the American Civil War. This prestigious distinction granted by the mightiest empire was only earned by the best, the most diligent students from the most important of all the important military schools. Next to such a magnanimous act of public recognition—performed in English—having a dusty avenue in the city of Santa Cruz named after him seemed to be such an unsophisticated tribute—in Spanish—from his naïve, sentimental, amnesiac countrymen.
June of 1993 was only four hours away and carried enough loneliness and nostalgia to chill Alfredo Cutipa to the bone, as though he was standing naked waiting for the train at the Charaña station.
Marcelle Meyer had left him again, the last time, and taken with her all her memories, her voice and her books. And her shoulders—moon apples, skin eyes that had gazed at him with utmost calm and affection in perfect, intimate dawns together on Rue Cartier that would never return.
Alfredo wrote down in his little madeinChina notebook that the Bolivian presidential elections would be happening in a few days. The carnival season was approaching—a farce performed in a viceroyalty that dreamed itself sovereign, independent and with a national anthem. A colony with its own army of self-occupation. In those months, he read the news with growing disquiet, examined the rhetorical masks worn by characters playing in the fatuous exercise, the potential viceroys’ empty promises. Bolivians had so much faith in them, the same people who had profited from the dictatorship feasts. Bolivians listened, attentive and eager, besieged day after day by the fangs of hunger and unemployment, urged by the blindest of hopes to believe in something, someone, anyone.
The masked ball was attended by former colononel Banzer, his condor claws still caked with dried blood—not his own. He was eager to become president and held the wishful thinking that twenty-two years was enough for the bones of people killed under the Banzerate to disintegrate and stop screaming underground. “If you are really quiet, you can still hear their little bones singing, generalito Banzer… They’ll always be right under your bed, singing just for you. Manchay Puito’s femur, for example. The bones of the dead will keep singing and wailing, especially in August, month of winds, month of the dead and memories that never go away.” These lines, mailed with no sender address, reached the hands of generalisisisísimo Banzer on November 1, 1987. The sender was clearly someone in the opposition, some little shit with nothing better to do than pester a good democrat and better patriot. Someone in the family, he thought, an insolent nephew who wanted to cleanse the family name. Not a lot of people know the mailing address of the Great Marshal of Oblivion, the favoured son of Bolivia’s perfumed kleptocracy.
Hugo Banzer, in a small sitting room in the hundred-year-old sombre mansion, was shaking his head, lamenting again his former excess of patriotic fervour. He never should have staged his military coup in August, month for celebrating the nation’s independence and the theatrics and hyperbolic affronts of imaginary heroes and unrelenting warriors as magnificent as any Amadís de Gaula in a chivalric romance. He should have planned his coup during the carnivals, in February. That way, he said to himself, between the protests and the processions, many Bolivians would have focused instead on fiestas, dances, singani and urgent orgasms. That way, the memory of bullets piercing the wind—shootings from military airplanes against the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, against the civilian resistance at the foot of the Laikakota hill that August afternoon in 1971—that memory would have been less jarring, less annoying. His enemies—who rinsed their mouth everyday with words like justice, memory and human rights—would have seen their acts of remembrance and their stupid dead drowning in the indifference of the holiday and its water balloons, challas and drunkenness. What do they know about how hard it is to save a country from Castro-communism? he thought. What do they know about what it means to be Bolivian?
The other masked guest was a businessman more efficient than forty bilingual thieves trained in Chicago. Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada spoke perfect, fluent English and a shameful Spanish in a country where around half of the population spoke Quechua, Aymara or other languages. Intellectually domesticated in the United States, he still had good contacts at the Inter-American Development Bank, the Instant Misery Fund and the World Bank. Incidentally, he was well-loved by people who wrote for the New Yorker, a weekly magazine published at number 20 on West 43rd street in the maze that is New York. They also spoke highly of him at the Economist, a conservative magazine published in Europe—the same Europe that invented the charms of modern warfare, where in 1932 Mauser rifles were manufactured in smaller sizes to fit hypothetically invincible Bolivian soldiers, overpriced rifles for an absurd war fought in the Chaco sands. Same people, same thieves, different masks. The Bolivian bourgeoisie: stingy and stinky and fattened on money, hopelessly barren of ideas, always cornered into a ménage-à-trois and submitting to boots, then to ties, or both at the same time. Bolivian bourgeoisie: a big word you fail to live up to, and your newspapers are so bad!
He woke up and searched all over his room. He opened his drawers. Looked under the bed. Opened his armoire. Nothing. No trace. It had been raining all night and the branches in the wind sounded as if they were laden with fragile green birds shaking their wings to dry. Until last night, it had been sitting in the middle of his bedroom like an antique piece of furniture you don’t dare get rid of, a family heirloom that’s always in your way. He went to the kitchen and looked for it in his cooking pots. He opened the fridge—the light in the appliance revealed a half-eaten piece of cheese, vegetables waiting for the final judgment, a piece of chicken still looking pale after its most recent experience, and some pears and apples having a board meeting. It wasn’t there either. He couldn’t even find a trace of it. He was sure he’d seen it at the foot of the bed, where it usually was when he went to sleep. Most of the time it just stayed there, coiled like an old toothless viper. Other times it would turn into a feral cat or a third shoe for some invisible foot that turned up on the street in cities he visited, guiding his footsteps along paths and alleys he never wanted to take. But this morning it was gone. He walked up to the window that looked out over Montreal, pondering the remote possibility that it might have jumped from the ninth floor. No. It was too high. Finally he surrendered to the evidence. He was alone, unable to ask anyone any questions. Hatred was gone, at last.
You won’t be able to ask Boxeador anything. He won’t be able to tell you because the virtue of bones is silence. Even if you run through the night tripping on uneven ground and rough grass until you reach that lost point in the Altiplano where two men are looking for each other in the dark with knotted fists, screaming in the voice of blood that never sleeps. You can hear it, the thud of a fist on the other man’s flesh, bones and blood. You witness every fall, your nose feels the dust in the air from two bodies rolling around in the dirt like two fighting fish running aground. You are the frozen witness, the invisible actor in the fight, unable to stop or lessen the weight of violence. Here, at guard post number eleven at
the El Alto military base, here, almost midnight, under a sky heavy with luminous pulsations and black stars, here where Vicios and Boxeador seek each other’s fists and blood, here you are the witness, which is also a way to be an actor. They split up for a moment, as if to fill their lungs again. You hear them panting. Little by little their tired lungs cloud their judgment and memory, make them lose sight of who’s attacking and who’s defending, who’s offending and who’s offended. It doesn’t matter. Their sweaty feet in soldier boots test the ground again, looking for a firm stance but also hoping to win over the earth, to earn its sweetness for when it’s time to fall. In that mess of uniforms attacking and shredding the other, the voice of one contender spits at the other: “Damn you! You…you were there that night, too! It’s your fault, too, damn you!” The rage in his words is a ball of rancid lard stuck in his throat, concentrated deep in his chest, something that screaming won’t help dissolve or disappear. Each word a slingshot crashing against the crystal of the night. Again the fighters fall down twisted around each other like ants, one red, one black, pulling on hair and ears and scratching at each other.
Vicios is taller, more mestizo than indio, more beer drinker than chicha drinker compared to Boxeador, who’s shorter, dark-skinned and broad-shouldered with a stocky neck. His head seems to sprout right from between his shoulders, his arms heavy like two pendulums. His nose shows signs of having been broken more than once. Beneath his Spanish you can hear some intonations, some vowels pronounced a certain way that reveal—like the foundations of colonial churches built with stones from the ancient Puma Punku or Tiahuanaco constructions—that he also speaks Aymara. Boxeador came from Santiago de Machaca to become a real man, as they say in the communities in the Altiplano. Or maybe from Guaqui, who knows—quén sabe, like the Aymara say when they speak Spanish, quén sabe.
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