A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism

by Peter Mountford

  "Thank you."

  Gabriel could tell Alejo was looking at the mountain of bandages on the side of his face. Alejo expressed no surprise at all, though. Resentment radiated brightly from his face.

  "Thank you," Gabriel said again. He took the wine, swung the door shut in Alejo's face. How incredible that the biggest threat to his relationship with Lenka—and therefore his work in Bolivia itself—would be a bellboy in an ill-fitting tuxedo jacket and lopsided bow tie.

  "Are you there?" Priya said.

  "Yeah, I'm here."

  "So, what happened?" she said.

  "Oh." He sat down on the side of the bed. "You're not going to believe this."

  On March 17, 2000, the day after a team of forensic archaeologists working in conjunction with Amnesty International discovered Gabriel's grandfather's body in the Atacama Desert, his mother called to inform him that he would be accompanying her to Chile for the funeral in two weeks. "I'm in school, Mom. I can't just leave when I want."

  "I know. I'm in a school too, in case you forgot. I bought your ticket. It's in the mail already." She didn't mention that she had also booked an extra three days in Bolivia.

  She enclosed in the envelope with his ticket an article she'd clipped from La Nación about the discovery of the mass grave ninety miles from Santiago. According to the article, there had been eleven bodies. The desert had parched them out before bacteria or insects could get to work, so they were well preserved, neatly mummified. There were three women, eight men. They had been picked up and killed on a Sunday, and they were mostly in nice suits and frocks. Their hands and feet were bound. They had been gagged as well, which meant that they would have been speechless in the back of the DINA van as it drove out through the cooling summer evening toward the desert. Eventually, the van would have pulled off the road and the prisoners would have had to wait in the back, listening to their captors dig. They would have sat there quietly in the dark, aware that they were all going to share the experience of death together.

  The exhausted guards eventually led them out. The guards probably would have been sweaty, even in the cool night. Their hands would have been blistered from the shovel handles. Overhead, the stars and the moon would have been bright enough to illuminate the desert. The prisoners were made to kneel in front of the hole. At the last minute, their gags were removed and thrown into the pit, presumably so that they could all say their last words. And then they were shot, one by one, in the back of the head. When it was done, the weary soldiers put down their rifles, picked up their shovels again, and returned to work.

  The forensics team could not tell in what order they had been shot.

  In the weeks after the discovery but before they went down for the funeral, Gabriel's mother called him regularly and wept on the phone. He did his best to console her. He said that her father had died honorably, one of the fallen heroes of the resistance. She didn't disagree. "But what was he thinking in his last moments?" she asked. It was almost as if it hadn't occurred to her until then—twenty-seven years after he'd vanished—that he might have died in this way. It was the story she'd told Gabriel his whole life, but now she seemed surprised by it.

  "Why haven't you had a funeral yet?" he asked.

  "We didn't know for certain that he was dead," she said. Then, "He might have been in some secret CIA prison."

  When she said that, he recognized what was going on. It had always been a sort of unacknowledged subtext of the story. If her father had not been killed, the likelihood was that he was in Buenos Aires with a mistress, rather than in Guantánamo Bay with a hood over his head. She wept so violently now not just because she had to accept that her father was, in fact, dead, but also because she had to accept that she had, partially, at least, always both hoped and feared that he had just abandoned them and was alive and well elsewhere. Later, when he thought about this more, Gabriel would come to see that this uncertainty was one of the primary cruelties inflicted by the disappearances. The uncertainty warped people's minds, made them wish for terrible things. It turned a funhouse mirror on the survivors' innermost feelings about the disappeared person and in so doing made monsters of them until they turned against one another.

  In Santiago, Gabriel and his mother stayed at his uncle Horace's house. Gabriel spent his time with two male cousins who were around his age. Having never had siblings, he often wondered what they might have looked like, and here was an answer. They got along fine, but the differences ran deep. They wore starched white shirts opened almost to their navels and they reeked of cologne. Gabriel wore a too-small vintage YMCA shirt, ancient jeans, and a pair of scuffed wingtips he'd harvested from a bin at the Value Village in Pomona that still stank of mothballs.

  Once, the three of them were at a hookah bar drinking Turkish coffee, and the young women at the next table kept casting glances at Gabriel but not his near-identical cousins. Walking back to the car later, his cousin Nico speculated, "Maybe they heard your accent?"

  "I have an accent?" Gabriel said.

  Diego, the other cousin, laughed. He was the more furious of the two, the more political. Even his bitterness had a bitter edge. "It's not that, brother," he said. "He looks like a gringo."

  "Bullshit! He looks exactly like us!" said Nico. Nico was the younger. He was the more handsome and more charming.

  "Would you wear those clothes?" Diego replied.

  Nico bit his lip and laughed. "Sorry, Gabo"—he looked at Gabriel—"but no fucking way! He looks like a bum!"

  "Exactly!" Diego said.

  "Exactly what?"

  "Jesus." Diego shook his head. "You know what it says about a guy that he comes from a place where it's considered rebellious to dress like he's poor? He's so far in the other direction that he's going backward."

  The funeral itself was as surreal as all funerals ought to be. It took place in a large old church in central Santiago, but there were only a few dozen guests, mostly family. Immediately before the service, Gabriel accompanied his mother to a brief viewing of the body in a rear room of the church. It was a small space with a tiny stained-glass window. Gabriel stood, his arm around the shoulder of his crying mother, staring at the desiccated cadaver. He was amazed that they had decided to have an open casket. The body looked simultaneously fake and all too real. The skin was deep umber, glossy; it looked like a dark resin had been painted on the withered body, like some macabre papier-mâché sculpture. A ragged hole the size of a golf ball in his cheek, directly below his left eye, marked the exit wound. Leathery wrinkles rippled around the sharper points in his skull. The skin around his mouth was pulled taut in a horrific gasp. Blue cloth covered everything beneath his jaw. What else could there be to hide? Gabriel wondered.

  After the service, they went to Tío Horace's house. Gabriel was the only foreigner there, the only real outsider. He took a glass of wine and ducked out to the veranda at one point. It overlooked Bellavista's near-Parisian streets. The whole city was fantastically Europhilic, all the neighborhoods were named after countries in Europe. No wonder his mother wanted to take him to Bolivia as well. She followed him outside a little later.

  "What do you think?" she said. It was one of the few times she'd addressed him in English since they'd come down. Just as Spanish functioned as a code between them in North America, so English functioned as one in South America.

  "It's nice."

  "Nice?"

  He shrugged. "What else am I going to say? Look, thanks for bringing me here, Mom, but I'm looking forward to getting back to school. You know, I'm in the middle of a semester."

  "I am too."

  "Right, but he wasn't my father. I don't know these people and I don't know this place."

  "But this is your country too, which is why I'm asking what you think."

  "I don't know," he said.

  Aware that she wasn't going to let him off the hook, he thought about it a little and said, "I don't think this is my country. The people are different from anyone I know. The cousins—I don
't get them at all. They're weird." There were other words he wanted to use, but he didn't want to offend his mother. The truth was that the cousins' obsession with the grandeur of their social station was embarrassingly naked. It was cheesy and it was coarse.

  "Weird?" She shook her head, admonishing him for this lack of verbal specificity that she had been endeavoring to rid him of.

  He thought it over, tried to find a better way of saying it. He had a sip of wine. "They're eager to seem white, for one thing."

  She shook her head lazily, in the way she did when she had hoped he'd be more interesting. She said, "Aren't you too?"

  "What? Eager to seem white?"

  "Yes."

  He laughed. "I am more or less white," he said.

  "You look maybe seventy-five percent white," she said, shrugging. She was prodding him now. "Eighty percent? Do you think that white people, when they meet you, round up?"

  He sighed noisily, as if she were just being silly now.

  "Well, it's probably easy for you to scoff at them," she said, "but you don't know what it's like to live here. People, you know, they come down here. You hear that? What's the operative word?"

  He groaned. "Down," he recited, rolling his eyes. He'd heard this one before. He'd grown up with a world map on the wall of the kitchen that was "upside down," with the South Pole above the North Pole, because, of course, the universe did not actually have a top or bottom, so neither would the planet. The map was also a Peters projection, which, unlike the more common Mercator projection, did not distort the world horizontally and enlarge the Northern Hemisphere. In the Peters, which was slightly more accurate than the Mercator and which was stretched more vertically, South America was enormous, steamrolled long and narrow, while Greenland, that frosty behemoth in the Mercator, was petite.

  "What if you had grown up here?" she said. She was working him into the kill zone. He had to evade or fight back, but he'd never done well fighting back with her.

  So he went for something between honesty and humor and said, "If I'd grown up here, I guess I'd be like the cousins: Drakkar Noir cologne, shiny black shoes, designer jeans, and"—he winked at her cheesily and popped his hip—"a lot of salsa."

  She laughed, threw her arm around his shoulder, grabbed the scruff of his neck, and shook him firmly. He knew he had said something very good that time. Still smiling, she said, "Is that really what you think of them?"

  He shook his head. "C'mon, Mom, have you met them?"

  She laughed again, shaking her head.

  When Gabriel arrived at the Lookout, he recognized no one. Fiona was not there yet, so he made his way to the bar. Severo poured him a Pisco Sour de Señorita Fiona as soon as he sat down, and Gabriel thanked him, aware that Severo was staring. The nurse had unceremoniously, if effectively, affixed a huge piece of gauze to the ear with a couple of yards of white medical tape. It looked bizarre, like an enormous homemade earmuff. Underneath it, his face was swollen and bruised, several puncture wounds had been sewn up with black sutures. His ear had been more or less ripped in half horizontally. They had sewn it back together with black sutures, which now looked like tiny crushed spiders in the moist red lesion.

  "What happened to you?" Severo waved a hand around his own face.

  "An accident," he said.

  Which was true, in a sense, but so much seemed accidental or arbitrary. Of the many overly simple assumptions built into economics, the most egregious, as Gabriel saw it, was the idea that individuals were rational and aware of the costs and benefits of their decisions. It simplified the mathematics but could not allow for reality's madness. All the integers were shimmering, skewed in ways no one could comprehend.

  Fiona entered and crossed the room briskly, stopping to greet a table of journalists on her way. When she sat down beside him, she said, "Yuck."

  He didn't say anything.

  "That's dynamite?" she said.

  "Sort of." He didn't feel like talking about it with her. He didn't feel like dealing with her reaction. "So, how did your meeting with Evo go?"

  "What did you say?"

  "What did I say?"

  "Yeah, what did you say?" she repeated. Severo put a cocktail in front of her.

  "I said, what happened with Evo?"

  She slapped her hand on the bar and laughed a bit too hard. "Wow!"

  He looked away from her. This wasn't starting well. He'd known it might get messy, but he hadn't expected her to get punchy so quickly.

  "Well, that's my Gabriel!" She patted him on the back, very friendly, very sarcastic. "He may be wounded, but his focus is laser sharp!"

  He wasn't sure how best to proceed. It would be fruitless to backtrack, since he planned to break it off with her anyway. The best way forward, the only way, was to plow ahead with cold honesty. "Fiona, I have to ask—"

  "Right, right, right, right, okay, I know, my little darling. It's fine, please don't get sensitive. Really, of all things: sensitivity? It doesn't suit you, Gabriel." She lit a cigarette. "The truth is that I didn't get anything for you. It slipped my mind. Sorry! Maybe next time. No, actually, I won't. I don't know why I'd ask something on your behalf."

  "Fair enough," he said.

  "No—really, why would I?" She put the cigarette down. It smelled good. Gabriel had never liked the smell of cigarettes before, but he liked it that night. Normally, it was as though he could smell the poison in the smoke, but that night it smelled soothing, satisfying.

  "I don't know," he said. "You might ask something on my behalf because maybe, one day, you'll want something from me."

  "I would have laughed at this a month ago," she said. "Now, I don't know." She tapped her cigarette firmly, had a drag, looked around. "With you—I wouldn't be surprised if I did end up asking you for a favor one day."

  "Okay. Is that it?" he said.

  She shook her head, had another drag. She seemed keyed up, pugilistic, and he wanted to be away from her. "What is your problem?" he said.

  "What happened to your subtlety, Gabriel? Everything is so—since you met Lenka, you've been just ignoring me. That's fine, but it's blunt. And now this?"

  He hadn't realized she'd expected to hear from him. "Look," he said, hurrying after this opportunity to transition to the more unpleasant business at hand, "I have to tell you that this—" He shook his head, hoping that she would anticipate his direction and settle down.

  "Wow!" she said, not settling down. She put her cigarette in the ashtray, ran her fingers through her hair. "If this is how you treat friends—" She stopped.

  "I'm sorry if it seems blunt, Fiona, but I had bone fragments blown into my face yesterday, and I don't want to act out some verbal tango with you tonight. I don't want to joust it out. And I'm not going to snort a couple lines, make nice, and then let this slip later. You want the truth. This is the truth. I'm sorry, but I can't do it anymore. I've got a girlfriend here, and things in my life are a little crazy right now, so"—he shook his head—"and they've got me on these pills, so I'm pretty—" He stopped and looked down at his cocktail.

  "Okay. That's fair enough. I'll chalk this up to your injury and your medicine," she said.

  He glanced at her, unsure of what she meant by that. "Look," he said, "I accept that I could have handled this better, but the message remains the same. I'm sorry, but I'm serious."

  "Oh, I know you're serious, Gabriel, please don't feel like you have to reiterate that." She had a drag, glared directly into his eyes. Her face was pinched. He hadn't realized that she cared about him. Not that it was the first time he'd missed such a signal. The way women cared for him, it was easy to miss the message. He had no idea why, but their affection was forever cloaked in a veil of indifference.

  "Are we done here?" she said.

  He nodded.

  "Good," she said. She gestured to Severo for her check.

  "I don't want to hurt your feelings," he said.

  She leaned in and, with her breath warm on his ear, whispered, "I get it, Gabriel:
you don't want to fuck me anymore because you're fucking some woman who's something more useful for you. That's fine. I get that, believe me. We all have that day at some point, and maybe it's kind of shocking to you at first, but I promise, Gabriel, it's completely normal. The thing you've got to realize is that this is just a sea of bullshit—I'm bullshit, you're bullshit, and even she's bullshit—we're all full of bullshit and we're all swimming in bullshit."

  "I get that," he said, staring at his cocktail again.

  She leaned back and looked at him. "Yeah, good. There you go. There's the bullshit. And don't worry, by the way, it wasn't special for me either." Severo brought her the check and she stood up. She patted him on the shoulder hard, like he was a good chum, then she bent down and signed the check. "My treat, " she said.

  He nodded, glanced at her.

  She drained her cocktail. "And, by the way: merry Christmas." She walked away, leaving her cigarette burning in the ashtray.

  Gabriel took a deep breath. He hadn't been told off in years and it was an alarming experience. It took a moment for the warmth to drain from his face.

  He glanced at the cigarette. It smelled good at the Lookout that night, so he lifted it and had a drag. The smoke scorched his lungs and they seized. He stifled a cough, exhaled slowly. The smoke scraped his throat. His bronchi tingled as the nicotine slipped through the unblemished membranes. He downed the rest of his pisco sour, took another short drag, and then stubbed the cigarette out ineptly, so it broke in half and continued to smolder. Then he stood up quickly and waited for the dizziness to overcome him. It didn't take long.

  He wound up in Plaza San Francisco later that night, plumb drunk. There had been other bars. He'd flirted for a while with a startlingly attractive Bolivian woman, who'd been pleased with things all in all, as she should have been. She flirted in a Catholic way, leading him on. She wanted to see his wounds and he let her peek under the bandage. She clearly had no intention of sleeping with him, and he couldn't have faced her by the light of day. The problem was her joy. He'd have relished that joy a couple years ago, but now he wouldn't have known what to do with it.