A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism

by Peter Mountford

  Gabriel, phone cradled at his ear, said, "Mom, it's just a date. I'm going to be here for a while, and I thought it'd be nice to make a friend. That's all." Sometimes, he liked to ambush her with some shocking burst of candor—she was so excitable!—and he did so now. "But if we end up screwing tonight, all the better!"

  "¡Hijo malcreado!" she screeched, as if horrified. "I have not raised a womanizer!"

  "A capitalist and a womanizer!" he said and listened to her holler with laughter on the other end. He stood up and straightened his back. She was relaxing, so he moved to deliver the bad news, "But, Mom, I wanted to tell you that it looks like I'll be here through the New Year."

  "No. Gabriel!"

  "Believe me, it's not what I want."

  She groaned. "Gabriel, don't. Please."

  "I have no choice. Really. It's this new job. Is there any chance you'll come down for your piece on Evo?" He'd said this last bit to ameliorate the situation, but as soon as the idea was aired, he realized that it'd be wonderful. Problematic, too—the lies would have to become more elaborate, unfortunately—but he missed his mother badly and would love to see her.

  "You're staying there for Christmas?"

  "That's what I'm saying." He said it as flatly as possible, like he was selecting dressing for his salad. If he gave her any room with this, she'd pin him to the wall with it.

  "Will I ever see you again?"

  "Drama, Mom," he said, reverting to a shorthand he'd adopted in high school. It was always a question of tone with her. Although she was someone whose life was steeped in the intricacies of language, so much of their communication was between the lines. She lilted soothingly in Spanish, whereas his experience speaking English with her suggested that the language was most useful for perfunctory mother-son business, or lecturing. "Look," he said, holding firm, "you'll see me when you come down to interview Evo."

  "I'm not going to go there, Gabriel. I have classes."

  "They're scheduling classes on Christmas Day? That's not right."

  "You're hopeless, child. Now, go be nice to that woman." This was in her closing-time voice, and it was too bad. He did miss her. This was, in part, he knew, the sadness of being abroad too long. Even if he spoke the language like a native, the isolation was inescapable. He was simply too gringo-ized to fit in.

  About his father, the man who'd provided the whitening influence in his DNA, Gabriel knew virtually nothing, not even the man's name. His mother refused to tell him. The whole subject was something she assiduously avoided. A lifetime of habit had made Gabriel disinclined to discuss him too.

  When he did occasionally ask her about him, she replied in a blizzard of ardent and vacuous declarations. "It doesn't matter who he was! We were students! He was a foolish child and so was I and there is nothing else to say about it!" It was a narrative she steered principally by bellowing every single line shrilly, in Spanish. But her resolute imprecision, her insistence on obfuscating every engagement with the subject, conveyed that whatever she might have to say, she wasn't going to say it to Gabriel. For some reason—whether the man had been an abject shithead or something else—she needed him to remain an enigma to Gabriel.

  She wanted, ultimately, to be viewed as an idealist. A Chilean exile who'd defected to Moscow, and then defected, once again, to the United States. Her biography wasn't a story of a woman driven to extremes by crude human concerns—in this story, her personal decisions were a series of philosophical gestures. In the United States, she'd finished her doctorate at UCLA and had her child, himself a complex product of the Cold War, born in the United States of Soviet and Chilean stock. She'd propped this wailing infant on her hip when delivering papers at conferences. Her wild and murky backstory made her a favorite at those dreary events.

  She published widely: regular op-eds in the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post, longer essays in Boston Review, Mother Jones, and the Nation. Few of her publications were in Anthropology Today, or Current Anthropology, or the other academic journals of her field, but no one in the department seemed especially bothered by that. By the time she was thirty-six, she had tenure at Pomona College and was leading rallies to boycott South African diamonds outside jewelers in Claremont. Her son, meanwhile, was then in the third grade at the largely white Franklin D. Roosevelt Lower School, where he had the language and a name reminiscent of the Mexican immigrants of Claremont's poorer surrounding areas. But he spoke with the precocious eloquence of a professor's child and wore a pigmentation that was, ultimately, neither here nor there.

  Growing up, he never considered the possibility that his identity might be a fixed thing, that it might not be something that could or should be adjusted for each situation. He had been born with multiple identities, after all: Californian, Chilean, Soviet, bourgeois, only child of a single mother, Latino, Caucasian. In these, he saw options. He was partially pasty Russian and partially café-con-crema Chilean. Despite what his mother seemed to believe, it wasn't as if one race had swallowed the other. He may have ticked the box for Latino/Hispanic on all of his college applications, but it wasn't that simple. He ticked Latino/Hispanic on most job applications too, except for that one summer-job form in high school when he chose Caucasian and was quite sure that was what won him a position as a waiter in a snooty French bistro in Claremont.

  If his racial and ethnic complexity had been mostly a burden when he was growing up in Southern California, where he was saddled with the perennial curse of creoles across the world (that is, instead of being a member of multiple groups, he wasn't a member of any), it meant something very different once he got to college. At Brown, he found himself gifted with the versatility he'd always wanted. He was not one person bisected or composed of fractions of other people-he was a person amplified, a many-voiced man.

  His mother, sensing this emergent tendency to view his identity as multifarious—a convenient array of masks that he could don as he pleased—chided him on the phone about this once when he was a freshman, saying, "You want to pass for white sometimes, but, Gabo, this is not attractive. Not at all. You should be aware that it says nothing appealing about you, trying to play up one race over another."

  "What do you mean?" he replied severely. He didn't use that tone with her ever. He could be stern, but he'd never been so harsh. She was understandably stunned. He continued, "Are you saying that I need to pick a side?"

  "No. Of course not. I'm saying—well, I don't know." She inhaled sharply. As someone who'd made it her life's business to be one thing and that one thing thunderously, she had never succeeded in sorting out the complex nature of her own son's relationship with this issue. She said nothing else. Despite being obdurate on many scores, she had no trouble spotting true futility and was not ashamed to give in when it was due. So she said, "Fair enough."

  And that was that.

  Gabriel was in one of the puffy armchairs in Gloria's lobby, watching the two receptionists argue about something he couldn't hear, when Lenka arrived. The dark lobby had the whispering quality of a library, and when the guard opened the door for her, the white light outside seared itself into his eyes so he could not see her well at first. She came into focus: her ponytail yanked so tight that to his still-blotted vision it looked as if she'd shaved her head. He stood. Her face looked scrubbed. She seemed somber, with her thick black eyebrows, her no-bullshit gait. She had on a pair of skinny jeans and a black Adidas nylon jacket, zipped to her chin. Just when he was about to cower, her eyes met his and she lit up, smiling widely. The transition was so abrupt that he blurted, "Wow," and she laughed, leaned in, and kissed him on the cheek. She led the way back out, explaining that she had to pick Ernesto up from school. "I hope you don't mind, but I have to drop him off at home."

  He said he didn't mind. In fact, he liked the idea of running an errand with her. He said he liked Ernesto, but she didn't react, so he added that Ernesto seemed smart.

  "He gets that from me," she said, but he didn't know her well enough yet to tell if she wa
s joking or not.

  "Who takes care of him while you're at work?" he said, intending to find out if she had a boyfriend or a husband.

  "My ex-husband's wife."

  "You live with your ex-husband's wife?"

  "Yes. And I live with my ex-husband. And I live with my brother, my mother, my grandmother, and my son. It's like a comedy. A comedy with no jokes." He laughed and she went on. "Really, we are a big happy family, but it's not simple. My brother and my ex-husband have a company—they are electricians, and they have lived in that house for a long time. My father moved in because he cannot afford to live alone anymore. Ernesto and I used to live in Miraflores, but it became difficult when I started working for Evo, so now we are all together. This is the story."

  "That sounds—" He wanted to make a joke, but nothing came to mind.

  "It's insanity," she said. "But we are pretty poor here, you know?" She said it in a matter-of-fact way. Like a lot of other Bolivians he'd met, she had a bluntness about the country's poverty that defied him to express an opinion. Were they proud of their poverty? They certainly weren't ashamed of it. It was just there, like that statue of Neptune in Plaza Murillo. He said nothing. It wasn't clear how accommodating she was socially. People in her line of work were typically, at a minimum, hyperactively concerned with pleasing others. She did not seem to be afflicted by that problem. She was just tired. She'd wanted to go on a date with him, but now she was exhausted, and the date itself had turned into an errand. That was his guess. She pulled the keys from her pocket. "This is my car," she said.

  The paint on her busted two-door Datsun had lost its gloss and was a dull beige now. She'd put one of those bright red steering wheel locks on—which seemed strange, because no one would want to steal a car like that. The price of the car couldn't be much more than the cost of a tank of gas. They got in, and she tossed the lock onto the floor by his feet and started the engine. He reached for his seat belt, but there was none. The seat belts had already been sold.

  She had pendants dangling from the rearview mirror, including one of St. Christopher. There was a sticker of the Virgin Mary on the glove box with a message beneath it: Nuestra Señora Del Sagrado Corazón, rogad por nosotros.

  She accelerated down the street and turned into a thicket of gridlock. In front of them a howitzer-sized pipe protruded from the grimy rear end of a Tang-colored bus, and when traffic inched forward, a heavy black cloud of exhaust barfed out onto them. Lenka's window was open. Exhaust filled the car. She didn't seem to notice. Down there, at street level, the cacophony was simply astounding.

  Watching her drive, he felt even more attracted to her. It made no sense, but he'd noticed that he got turned on by women doing monotonous things: sitting in traffic, sewing buttons on a shirt, cleaning eyeglasses; it was all wildly, weirdly sexy. There was something alluring about the habitual execution of a dull and necessary task—like a preview of married life, but viewed through an enthralling lens of newness.

  "What do you want to know about Evo?" she said.

  "As much as possible," he said. "Like, what's he going to do once he takes power?"

  "He hasn't been elected yet," she said.

  "Right, but has he picked his cabinet members? The finance minister?"

  She glanced in the rearview at the traffic. "We're going to be here all day," she said and pushed into first gear, yanked the steering wheel to the right so that the passenger side of the car lurched up on the sidewalk, and then accelerated around the car in front of them.

  In this way, half on the road and half on the sidewalk, she sped past the traffic and then turned, wheels screaming, at the intersection. The underside of her car scraped against the curb as they swerved back into traffic.

  When she turned to him, Gabriel let go of the dashboard. "Sorry, I'm impatient," she said. "So, you wanted to know who the finance minister will be if Evo wins the election?"

  "Yes," he said.

  "Well, I can't tell you," she said. "Evo wants these decisions to be completely secret. If he wins, he'll announce all of the cabinet appointments at once the week before he takes office."

  "We don't have to talk about Evo," he said.

  "I don't know how to talk about anything else anymore. You understand?"

  "I do."

  They pulled up outside a school in a dreary neighborhood halfway up the hill to El Alto, and Ernesto jogged up to the car and leaped into the back seat. He leaned forward and kissed his mother on the cheek.

  Gabriel held an open palm up to the back seat and Ernesto didn't do anything for a while, and then he punched it quickly twice. "Well done," Gabriel said.

  "How was school?" she said.

  Ernesto said it was fine. Lenka asked if he'd spoken to his teacher about Friday, and Ernesto nodded.

  They drove in silence through La Paz's congested streets. These were neighborhoods that Gabriel hadn't seen. Some of the streets were so steep they were nearly walls. Messy nests of black wires perched around the tops of crooked telephone polls—all of it jerry-rigged. Homeowners had taken it upon themselves to patch potholes near their houses, but they used different fillers, so the road looked like an asphalt quilt. Still, these were not slums exactly. Gabriel looked at the buildings rolling past: all blocky two-story structures with large rectangular windows. Concrete posts rose like stalagmites from the roofs; rebar poles stretched forth like exposed bones. The rebar represented hope, he knew—it meant another level could be added to the structure, if money ever permitted.

  The second time he had visited South America—for a semester of intensive study in Quito in his senior year at Brown—he hadn't wanted to leave. The day before he was to depart, he nearly tore up his ticket. It would sound trite, and it was trite, maybe, but he simply felt more alive down there, away from the strictures of the First World. It had been easy to overlook those strictures growing up in Claremont.

  Lenka parked outside a huge and bleak house, shaped by architectural shorthand and painted a Soviet shade of pastel blue. Lenka and Ernesto got out and went inside while Gabriel waited in the car. Ahead, he could see a hazy slice of south La Paz, where the upper classes lived. Down there, the rocky hillsides gave way to soft dry soil and clay-rich badlands, which eroded into steep arroyos and vales of hoodoos. The earth beneath those suburbs was in a constant metamorphosis that required sophisticated foundations for the hilltop mansions, foundations that could easily cost twice as much as the buildings themselves. In San Pedro, Lenka's neighborhood, everything was cracked slabs of concrete. There was nothing living in sight. The cinder blocks hadn't even been painted on the more squalid houses.

  Looking at it all, Gabriel found himself overwhelmed with a desire for a luxurious and spacious store or restaurant, somewhere in Manhattan at Christmastime, maybe: a sparkling oasis of ravenous retail. And even though he knew the feeling that the place would give him would be a lie—satisfaction imitating joy—the mirage was still tempting.

  Lenka returned with her cell phone at her ear. She flung herself back behind the wheel so quickly he caught a whiff of her soapy shampoo. "Bueno señor, pero, ya"—she checked the mirror, put the car into gear —"pero ya estoy con un periodista. Sí, ya."

  She listened, checked the mirror, released the parking brake.

  "Pues, sí—hablamos entonces." She hung up the phone, shoved it under her thigh, started off down the street.

  "The future president?" Gabriel said.

  She just smiled. "Gabriel, have you been to Blueberries?"

  "Were you talking about me to Evo?"

  "Does that make you feel special?" She grinned at him.

  She kept smiling quietly, eyes back on the road. They drove through the tunnel connecting San Pedro and Sopocachi, and on the other side Lenka slowed and stopped at a red light. Dusk showed La Paz at its finest: the cool air, papaya sun in a cobalt sky, craggy mountains lit vividly. The comparatively well-heeled denizens of Sopocachi walked past, some muttering into cell phones.

  Gabriel asked h
er if she'd had a lot of press to deal with.

  "Yes." She pulled the parking brake, took her foot off the clutch, and scratched her ankle. "There were reporters from every newspaper calling us all afternoon. Fiona called, actually. I told her that I was going to meet you later."

  "Oh God," he said and rolled his eyes, aware that he was tipping his hand.

  Lenka's smile widened and she checked to see that the light was still red. She looked back at him. She had magnificent eyelashes, like palm fronds dipped in pitch and dried in the sun, and when she blinked he could almost feel the breeze. "Why do you say 'Oh God' like that?"

  He shrugged. "What do you think?"

  "Did you sleep with her?"

  He grinned guardedly, stuck somewhere between embarrassed and proud. She shook her head. He was surprised by how relieved he was to make the admission. "Does it surprise you?" he said.

  "No, it's just funny." Now she was lying. "What was Fiona like in bed?" she asked.

  "Do you know what a mechanical bull is?"

  She laughed, shook her head. "You are bad, Gabriel."