A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism

by Peter Mountford

  "You'll double my salary?" he said.

  "Yes, if you get it before anyone else does. A full year's wage delivered in January."

  "Okay then, um—" He tried to collect himself, think of the best way to handle the situation. It sounded bad. He didn't like the way the potential upside had doubled so quickly. It just didn't bode well for the potential downside.

  When he didn't say anything else, she cleared her throat and said, "So, I want an update soon." And then she hung up on him again.

  5. Election

  Sunday and Monday, December 18 and 19, 2005

  THE ELECTION TOOK PLACE exactly one week before Christmas, on a gusty Sunday. Clouds bunched up, appropriately dramatic, and scrolled across the sky too quickly. Rain occasionally splattered the window, and the sun emerged once in a while to ignite the drops clinging to the glass. By the time the voting booths opened, Evo's victory was beyond a given. The press gathered at Hotel Presidente to report on the great anticlimax. Potbellied cameramen in cargo pants and baseball caps consulted quietly with unshaven sound engineers, while comely reporters in heavy coats of matte makeup glowed nearby, scanning notes beneath painfully bright lights and tilting their satellite-dish-sized umbrellas into the wind. Meanwhile, small clusters of men with machine guns and full riot gear patrolled downtown, looking for signs of unrest. Some police loitered briefly on the corner by the Casa Cultura, beneath Gabriel's window, eating pink ice cream cones and chatting among themselves. An atmosphere both surreal and abrasively real, almost mundane, pervaded. Still, the city's mood, if such a thing could truly be identified, was hopeful, even joyful.

  In Bolivia, voting was compulsory but—in what must have been a practical joke played on the electorate by the elected—driving was illegal on Election Day. So the entire country was out on foot, walking around and searching for their polling places. Absent the automotive section of the orchestra below his window, a very different tune emerged from the city, Gabriel found. Voices, separated from their snarlier accompaniment, came through much clearer. Listening to it upstairs, he noticed it sounded like a stadium just as the team took to the field.

  He kept his television on a local channel all day, the volume off. The results came in resoundingly in Evo's favor. At one point, Gabriel turned the volume up and flipped through some channels. Although it had been obvious that Evo was going to win for more than a week, the reporters seemed unable to hide their lingering disbelief. All of them at some point reminded their viewers that Bolivia, which had been an independent republic since 1825 and was over 65 percent indigenous, had never elected an indigenous president.

  At dusk, Gabriel watched from his window as the foreign cameramen wandered the streets, collecting stock footage that could be used in future broadcasts about "the situation in Bolivia," whatever that might be, while the rest of their crews got down to drinking Pisco Sours de Señorita Fiona, as they were now officially called, at the Lookout.

  For his part, Gabriel stayed in his room, looking on from his window. He had wearied of the press corps in the past two weeks and was spending less time at the Lookout, much more time with Lenka. He could see the lights of the Lookout from his room, could see how much smoke was up there, and from that smoke he estimated that the bar was as crowded as he'd ever seen it. Fiona had probably returned from Lima; she'd be up there leading the charge. He considered going over, but quickly decided against it. He hoped Lenka would come around later, once the hullabaloo died down. They could eat room service, screw, and talk about the day.

  In the two and a half weeks since they'd first slept together they had seen each other every night. They'd found a routine. He didn't reveal to her the details of Priya's challenge, but he did mention more than once that he was trying to find out more specific information about Evo's plans for the gas industry. She didn't offer anything, but that made sense to him. He believed that if his situation became dire enough, she would give him something—enough to enable him to keep his job.

  Priya, fortunately, had mostly kept her distance since he'd unveiled his investigation into Santa Cruz Gas. According to Paul's calculations, the region's gas industry was pricing in a 60 percent chance that Evo would expropriate foreign gas outright, but Santa Cruz's price was buoyant, reflecting something closer to a 50 percent chance of expropriation. Paul had run the numbers in different ways and hadn't been able to figure out a cause for the discrepancy. It was precisely for situations like this that they had hired Gabriel. The math didn't make sense, so the solution had to be in a human element that they couldn't see from Weehawken.

  By seven o'clock, Plaza San Francisco was packed, and the windows of the Lookout were fogged up. Gabriel glanced at the television and saw Evo speaking in front of a lectern in a square in El Alto. He was garlanded in coca leaves and flowers, wearing a black collarless jacket. Lenka was there too, in the background under bright sodium lights. It was windy in El Alto, and she squinted at the back of her boss's head, then glanced around at the crowd as her hair flapped in the gusts. She had recently applied her makeup and looked magnificent. She tried pulling strands of hair out of her eyes and tucking them behind her ears, but it was no good. Evo's microphone picked up the blaring wind in the pauses between his words. It sounded like a bonfire.

  Gabriel waited until the speech was over before he called her cell phone and left a message. She called him back half an hour later.

  The president-elect and his entourage had already made it back to MAS's downtown office. They were celebrating their victory. She had sneaked off to call him. He asked her how she felt and she mumbled about it feeling like a dream. Evo was, she said, considering a world tour for the two weeks leading up to his inauguration, and she had to look into where he would go and what he would do once there. It would take her all night and she couldn't get away.

  Gabriel told her he was happy for her. He asked if he could see her the next day.

  "Yes, I have the morning off," she said. "We skipped Mass today. So we are all going at nine tomorrow. I'll call you after I'm done."

  "Good." In the background, he could hear people's voices. He could hear laughter and he could hear music. "You should go," he said.

  "I have to. I'm sorry. I'll call you tomorrow."

  In most branches of the foreign service, the rule was that no assignment abroad should last more than three years. The reason: after three years in a country, people ran the risk of going native. They developed a kind of Stockholm syndrome, whereby they began to care more about the welfare of their host country than of those who'd sent them there. The paradox of Gabriel's job was that to do it well he needed to remain distant enough to keep his allegiances clear, but he also had to keep his ear to the ground. Though not confused about his mission, Gabriel found that being with Lenka put him (problematically) closer to the ground, so to speak.

  She usually came around to the hotel after dinner. She never stayed all night, but sometimes she was there until that moment in the predawn when the sun rose from an unseen horizon and was still hidden behind the mountains, illuminating the milky clouds from beneath.

  Regarding the state of his career, Gabriel guessed he had two weeks left in Bolivia before Priya pulled the plug. He had whetted her appetite too much to give her nothing. At a minimum, he needed to be the first person to get the name of the next finance minister. His plan was to keep following Santa Cruz Gas, and if he seemed to be getting no closer, he would redirect his focus and beg Lenka for the finance minister's name. She would doubtless give him that much, if it came to it, even though to do so could endanger her career. (If Evo found out that she had helped the agent of a hedge fund, he'd almost certainly fire her.)

  In the meantime, Gabriel had continued compiling his dossier on Santa Cruz. It traded on the São Paulo exchange and had, from what he could tell, almost no liquid assets. All of its liabilities were held by subsidiaries of the Odessa Corporation, a mining company based in Singapore. The stock was volatile, lightly traded, owned by no major financial insti
tutions, and it had regular spikes of short interest, suggesting that a few vultures were circling.

  It had been founded by a creepy Canadian billionaire named Lloyd Pingree, now the CEO of Odessa. Pingree, one of the shadier figures in what was perhaps the world's shadiest legal industry—mining—had brought together a plethora of wealthy Brazilian investors in Santa Cruz Gas. These board members tended to have connections to Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula, who was, in turn, friendly with the leftist wing within Bolivia. Pingree's hope had doubtlessly been that these powerful board members would step in to defend their investments if the deal was queered by shifting political circumstances in Bolivia. That was probably the reason for the unnatural buoyancy of the stock's price.

  He'd looked into it and found that while Odessa and Pingree had done well in Santa Cruz's IPO in 2002, they hadn't done that well. Odessa still held a majority ownership, with 55 percent of the stock, about $120 million. For Pingree, $120 million would be just one of many chips on his global roulette table. Still, if things went well, Santa Cruz could conceivably generate the kinds of gains that would push him another ten or twenty steps up the Forbes annual "500 Richest People in the World" list, on which he had so far languished in the mid-400s.

  The day after the election, Gabriel ate breakfast by himself in Gloria's cafeteria, then went upstairs and took notes for a meeting he had the following day with Foster Nathanial Garnett, a junior diplomat from the U.S. embassy. Foster Garnett had been on assignment in Bolivia for two and a half years and would soon be leaving. From what Gabriel could tell, Garnett was in no danger of going native: in a State Department photo, he wore his hair parted and kept the corners of his lips turned down in a smarmy salesman's grin. He looked like an affable frat boy who was excited, if a little surprised, to find himself in such a serious job. Gabriel understood completely. Gabriel had picked Foster to interview not because of any potential for camaraderie but because he knew that departing diplomats had a tendency to talk a little more freely. They were thinking about their next assignments, usually, and feeling a little philosophical about the present ones.

  He was still formulating questions when Lenka called. Evo's staff had all taken the day off, and she was going Christmas shopping and wanted to know if he would join her.

  "You can just come up to my room and get me," he said.

  "No sex, Gabriel," she said, reading his mind.

  He laughed.

  "You come downstairs."

  A new oversize plastic nativity scene greeted Gabriel in Hotel Gloria's lobby, its blinking colorful lights strung about chaotically. Some sort of mini-conflagration—no doubt courtesy of one of those precarious lights—had left a droopy blackened hole in Joseph's shoulder. A long strand of scraggly gold tinsel wreathed the front desk, and Gabriel grinned, seeing it, because it reminded him of the chintzy old decorations his mother used to haul out every year at Christmas. There was no angel on top of their tree in Claremont, but it did have a star, which his mother claimed to have heisted from the cathedral in Santiago where Pinochet used to worship. "It was the last thing I did before I left the country," she said, often enough that Gabriel was prepared to believe her.

  Lenka arrived in the lobby and Gabriel kissed her hello on each cheek, then again on the mouth. She slapped him on the ass, hooked her arm under his, and they were off.

  They crossed Mariscal Santa Cruz and ascended Sagárnaga to the Witches' Market, where tourists were supposed to buy postcards, alpaca scarves, fridge magnets, and what was without doubt Bolivia's oddest tchotchke: dried llama fetuses. According to a still-popular tradition in Bolivian witchcraft, if a person buried a llama fetus under the foundation of his house, he'd have good fortune while he lived there.

  Once above the Witches' Market at the outskirts of the much larger Black Market, where locals did their shopping, Gabriel and Lenka paused to catch their breath.

  "Ready when you are," he managed to gasp.

  She tried to laugh but wasn't quite able, so she just shook her head breathlessly. Once she'd recovered, a few minutes later, she led the way down a side street. They walked slowly, surveying goods. Potatoes, native to the region, were ubiquitous. Tiny perfectly spherical ones, like dirty marbles, filled a basket next to a pile of knobby fingerlings streaked with fuchsia. The chuño, freeze-dried by exposure on the altiplano and then periodically trampled by barefoot Aymara women, looked like a cross between a morel and dried goat shit. Pretty pyramids of tun-tas —expensive alabaster potatoes that spent weeks immersed in the icy runoff from melting glaciers before being gently dried in the alpine breeze—caught the eye from a block away.

  In the next street, flies buzzed around a row of pungent butcher stalls, where cabezas, lamb's heads, a local delicacy, were invariably given the premium spot, from which they could gaze down from hollow sockets at passersby. On that block, mangy street dogs sloped to and fro, glancing sideways at stacks of gutted river fish, which ranged in dimensions from minnowy to a cricket-bat-sized carp with teary, bloodshot eyes. All around, the streets were littered with a carnival-colored assortment of tiny plastic bags that had somehow loosed themselves and were running amok on the asphalt, or just drifting sleepily in the breeze.

  She stopped at a dried-goods vendor. Twenty or so heavy burlap sacks ringed the periphery of the narrow store. Lenka filled a flimsy yellow plastic bag with dried fava beans, and a larger one with coca leaves.

  While the woman weighed and tallied her bolsitas, Lenka turned and asked Gabriel if he had plans for Christmas Day.

  He said he did not.

  "You should come to our house."

  "Well, I wouldn't want to impose."

  "Don't be stupid. I ask you to come because I want it. If you don't want to, just say so."

  Gabriel nodded. "Well, if you put it that way."

  She grabbed his hand and kissed it. It was settled; he'd spend Christmas Day with Lenka and her family, and it might be awkward, but so would spending Christmas alone in his hotel room or, worse, with whichever orphaned foreign journalists were at the Lookout. They walked on and Lenka reassured him that it was no big deal. The major holiday party in Bolivia was on Christmas Eve. He'd be one of sixty or so non—family members, she said.

  Lenka had to buy a suckling pig. That was her main mission that day. The problem was that everyone in La Paz who wanted to have a traditional Bolivian Christmas Eve dinner also had to buy a suckling pig. The pork butcher had carcasses stacked up as high as Gabriel's shoulder. The pigs were all facing the same direction, making a wall of floppy pink ears, smashed snouts, and fleshy eyelids pinched shut. A few of the pigs had plump violet tongues protruding. Their pink skin looked grotesquely human. Blood pooled between the cobblestones and ran down the street for half a block.

  Across the street from the butcher a living crèche filled an open storefront, complete with a real lamb, costumed people, and an actual newborn. The infant nursed at the Virgin Mary's breast while a few dozen pedestrians gawked, whispering among themselves. A sign said that the display had been organized by the Maria Santa orphanage. Gabriel didn't know what to make of it. He tried to read the other onlookers, but he got nothing from them. Lenka was busy vying for the attention of the butcher.

  Once she had paid for her pig, the butcher wrapped it in plastic, cinched the plastic at the top so that the blood would not spill, and handed it to Gabriel.

  Gabriel slung it over his shoulder and they set off for her car, which was parked, unfortunately, all the way back at Hotel Gloria, half a mile down the steep hill.

  By the time they had made it to the bottom of Sagárnaga, he was perspiring, panting, and doing everything in his power to avoid letting his distress show.

  "Do you want me to carry it for a while?" she said.

  He wiped the sweat from his forehead and switched the pig to the other shoulder. "No, I've got it." He wasn't going to make her carry the pig.

  At her car, he put the pig on the back seat and got in the front.

 
They said very little as she drove through the narrow streets. Her entire family would have returned after their Monday-morning Mass. They'd all be there, pretending it was Sunday, dressed to the nines, eating changa de pollo. Officially, he would be there to help carry the pig, but she'd clearly engineered the situation so that she could show him around to her family and collect reviews.

  "What about Luis?" he said as they edged through stop-and-go traffic. Her ex-husband would also be at the house.

  "What do you mean?"

  "Is there going to be some testosterone thing? Muscle flexing and so on?"

  "That's not for you? You are not a muscle person, is that right?"

  "Well, I was an only child, so I never had that early training in fisticuffs. Is Luis macho?"

  "Luis?" This was a hoot. "Of course he's fucking macho: he's Bolivian!"

  "Well, if it looks like he's going to clock me, I'm going to deck him with the pig. I just want to be clear with you about that."

  "Be my guest, please. I'd love it."

  She took out her phone, called the house, and asked her mother if she had cleared enough space in the refrigerator for the pig yet. A pause. "Because we're almost there!" she said. She hung up, plonked the phone down onto the floor.

  It must have been disorienting to everyone in that house when Lenka's career took such a hard turn into the limelight. Six months earlier she had started working for an outlying candidate; now he was not only the president-elect but one of the most talked-about public figures on the continent. And she was still there beside him, managing his newly outsize image.

  They parked directly in front of the house in San Pedro. With the pig slung over his shoulder, he followed her to the door, into the claustrophobia-inducing foyer. Low-ceilinged rooms and hallways, devoid of windows or any decorations, ran off in every direction like a plaster dungeon that had been decorated in the mid-1970s. Sickly light seeped from tired fixtures in the ceiling. Cheap parquet hardwood tiles covered the floor throughout, except for the linoleum kitchen at the far end of the hallway. The house was redolent of simmering chicken stock and potatoes, old rags. Queerly small icons of saints and of the Virgin Mary dangled from nails planted in the hallway walls. Gabriel, taking it all in as swiftly as possible, followed her through to the capacious kitchen. On the far side, through another doorway, the family were in a massive sitting room, chatting animatedly, laughing, and drinking tea, while children were scattered on the floor playing with toy cars, and the men pretended not to stare at a soccer game on a small television in the corner.