A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism

by Peter Mountford

  Later, he stumbled along the lines of low-wattage light bulbs that hung on black wires between vendors' booths in Plaza San Francisco. In the plaza, the smell of stewing chicken intermingled with the heavy odor of frying pork and boiling corn and grilling river fish. It was revolting, delicious, and he wanted to hug someone. It was Christmas Eve!

  Weaving around the thicket of pedestrians, angry with them for being so plentiful, so in his way and in one another's way, he found that he wanted to levitate above them all, wreathed in flames, and dish out Old Testament wrath on them: pulverize the bodies and turn the moist pulp into pale ash.

  "This is depressing," he said in English to a man with a coppery face who was also visibly drunk and who was trying to sell blue and pink balls of cotton candy. The cotton candy was threaded, puffy and pastel, on a white lance twice as tall as the man himself. The cotton candy man didn't hear Gabriel and wouldn't have understood anyway. Gabriel nodded firmly at him. "I'm sorry," he said, again in English, and trundled along.

  Well, was it Christmas? Yes. It was Christmas. It had been Christmas Eve before, and now it was after midnight, so it was Christmas.

  Gabriel's face hurt, despite his steady ingestion of Percocet. There was a war of attrition under way between his pain on one side and his painkillers on the other. He retrieved the bottle of pills from his pocket and popped another. Too huge to dry-swallow easily, the pill got lodged halfway down his esophagus. His throat muscles churned, trying to massage it downward. There was no bottled water nearby, none that he trusted, so he tried to work up some saliva. He stood there amid all those warm bodies, smelling their breath and feeling their thick muscles brush against him, focusing on the pill. At last it settled in an esophageal nook just above his stomach. Close enough. It'd get there eventually.

  He shook his head and thought about what would have happened if he'd choked. Would anyone have noticed? Maybe, and maybe not. He might have lain there dead, his maimed face locked in breathless surprise, while Bolivians wandered around, stepping over him.

  In front of him, the centuries-old church of San Francisco was grand, the color of parched bones, terrible against the sky. If divinity did exist above, he might be seeing it now. La Paz was so high it might have punctured the purplish sheet hiding the heavens, and now he was seeing the real thing, a hollow chasm, all limpid negative space. The depth of the space, up there; it began to make sense. There was nothing. Up there, he saw an infinity of nothing.

  A crudely drawn sign indicated that midnight Mass was under way inside the cathedral. Gabriel pulled out his phone, checked the time—it was 12:33; he had missed thirty-three minutes of midnight Mass. The church had been designed by missionaries in the 1600s for the purpose of luring nonbelieving heathens into the fold, which explained why it was decorated with such a curious hodgepodge of Catholic and Inca iconography, including images of the goddess Pachamama carved into the exterior walls. He saw flourishes from Tiahuanaco side by side with details borrowed from the Almudena Cathedral.

  Gabriel bought a cigarette from a young boy, lit it, and had two puffs as he walked up to the giant doors, but it didn't taste that good, so he flicked it away. He entered as the beginnings of a headache started at the back of his brain.

  He stumbled up the narrow stairs that cycloned up beside the door to the small balcony at the rear. It was not so crowded up there. A small wooden cot had been planted, awkwardly, by the top of the banister. A plaque above it explained that it was where a certain infirm monk used to lie in the 1700s in order to hear the day's Mass. Gabriel stood at the banister beside a transvestite, who was kneeling, pinching and twisting her rosary ardently. Below, at the far end of the great yawning nave, a broad-shouldered Franciscan monk with a long white beard and long white hair, light alb, and flowing white chasuble stood with the Eucharist, chanting. He had a thin leather band wrapped around his head. He didn't look like anything Gabriel would have expected from a priest, to say nothing of a monk. He looked like an extra in a movie about the life and times of Christ.

  The man intoned in a remarkably sonorous voice toward the domed ceiling, and his voice reverberated with surprising power, but the echoes crisscrossed until they made mud of his words. The vast church was packed, except for the upstairs. Up there, they had lots of room. Was Gabriel with the repentant squad, those who didn't have the audacity to show up in the nave and refuse communion in view of the congregation? No. That was too easy. Gabriel saw all manner of people up there. If they had anything in common, it was that most were alone.

  Below, he saw one of the witches from the nearby Witches' Market. Those brujas wore a black-on-black version of the traditional indigenous attire; from the petticoat to the hat to the stockings—it was all black. Gabriel stared down at her while beside him the transvestite prayed, intensely, kneeling on the stone floor and not on the padded ledge. The transvestite pinched the beads of her rosary, her hands quivering, as she hissed prayers toward her boyish breast.

  It was approaching time for Holy Communion, and a few of the people in the balcony sneaked downstairs. The priest said something, stopped speaking briefly, and the congregation replied in a muffled indecipherable chant. Then the priest asked them to give the sign of peace and, to Gabriel's surprise, the transvestite stood up and extended her undainty hand to him.

  Gabriel reached out, took the hand, looked at the face: the full lips, plump and redolent with grief, painted industrial red, the dark, beady eyes lost beneath gargantuan fake eyelashes. The cheeks were sweat-moist. Gabriel smiled as sincerely as possible at her face, so festooned with tragedy. The sorrow had bureaus in which further misery lingered, expressing itself in ways he had not ever seen before. The shape of the nose somehow implied tragedy too, a drooping hook. The hand was clammy, its grip predictably feeble.

  She said, "Peace be with you," and he knew that she meant it.

  He knew she had wished him well more sincerely than almost anyone else he had met since he'd arrived here. Other than Lenka, no one in Bolivia seemed to want him to really be okay, not that vividly. And for that alone, he wanted to kiss her face and apologize for thinking unkind thoughts about her.

  But he was stumped, and replied only, "Peace be with you," and then he turned and wished the same to another man, also to a woman. He felt their hands. He looked into their eyes, and—for a fleeting moment—he knew that he had made a very bad decision when he chose to accept his job at Calloway. He had made a bad decision when he had agreed to come down to Bolivia. There were decisions that scattered away behind him, and most of them were wrong. Since he had arrived, he had made bad decisions daily. He had made scores of them. The epiphany flew quick and bright into view, where it lingered, briefly, awfully, for him to appreciate. It began its retreat before he turned and hurried down the winding stairs to the ground floor. By the time he ran out, the realization had evanesced completely.

  Outside, he sat and caught his breath, leaning against the jamb of the doorway. Before him the mob was a blur, the voices were fuzz, the smells foul. A smear of senses. Fondly, he thought of the crowded streets in New York before recent Christmases, the harried bluster of Midtown near IBI's offices, where he sometimes loitered with a coffee while on a break, observing the ravening shoppers. He remembered the scent of chestnut smoke and how it had already seemed freighted with nostalgia the first time he smelled it, and he remembered the stampede of clopping heels and the hypnotic blur of giant shopping bags swinging in the chilly air.

  A finger tapped him on the shoulder, and he looked up, expecting to see the sad transvestite—hoping to see her, really; there were things they could talk about—but it was not her. It was a man.

  Standing, he shook the wee simian hand—recognizing, with a little ruefulness, that it belonged to Alberto Catacora, the finance minister in waiting. He was with a woman, presumably Señora Catacora. Gabriel hastily attempted to recover a more sober version of himself. No luck. Aware that, with a kind of belly-flop slow motion, he was already wavering, cockeyed,
he said, "Eshtoy borracho." He swayed as he stood, as if in demonstration. He hoped to kill the issue by putting it right out there. Such was the nuance of his game that night.

  "I see," Catacora said, in English. "What happened to you?"

  "Oh—Jesus. Dynamite! Can you believe it?" He could hear himself slurring. "Very horrible. This is—it was this miner, this guy, he blew his hand up. Boom!"

  "I'm sorry."

  There was a long pause while Gabriel nodded steadily.

  "Were you inside?" Catacora asked and pointed at the door behind him.

  Gabriel continued nodding, a little more quickly. "With a—there was a transvestite! Jesus! Have you ever seen a transvestite in there? I mean—" He shook his head.

  Catacora took a deep breath, shook his head quickly, embarrassed, eyebrows crushing toward the center of his face.

  "No," Gabriel blurted, in order to clarify what he, belatedly and incorrectly, saw might be Catacora's misperception, "the transvestite wasn't with me. I mean, she was—I don't know—just there. You know?"

  "You should get to sleep."

  Something about Catacora's tone said that he didn't, in fact, understand what Gabriel had meant. So, to make sure Catacora understood, Gabriel said, "I just found her there. It was a surprise to me."

  Catacora nodded and turned toward his wife as if to leave, and Gabriel said, "It was nice talking to you." Then embarrassed that he had flubbed the conversation so badly, he added, "Are you—are you going to be an official—"

  Catacora turned back. "What?"

  "You—are you okay with being a politician?" Gabriel hurled the last word like an epithet. He managed a wink.

  "No." Catacora turned and murmured something to his wife, an apology perhaps.

  "A finance minister?" Gabriel muttered, because he wasn't going to let it go like that. He didn't want to come off both unknowing and drunk. "That's—is that you?"

  Catacora's face went severe. "Where did you hear that?"

  "I just think that—well—no." Gabriel shook his head. "I've had too much to drink." This was, by his dim reasoning, a deft maneuver. He'd raised the issue and ducked its consequences.

  The man didn't move.

  Gabriel said, "Let's talk tomorrow. Right?"

  "It's Christmas, but I will call you." Catacora turned without another word and led his wife into the crowd.

  Gabriel sat down on the church's steps, satisfied that he'd handled that well. His headache was worse and he thought it might be because he hadn't been drinking for the last half hour, so he decided he'd drink a little more. He caught the attention of a young man hawking chicha and waved him over. The man ladled the viscous fermented-corn drink into a plastic cup and handed it to Gabriel. It was warm through the plastic. The man said it was five bolivianos.

  Gabriel reached into his pocket, pulled out a messy wad of bills. He tried to sort through it one-handed, tried to organize the bills and to make sense of the numbers. Eventually he found that the smallest bill he had was fifty bolivianos. He handed the fifty to the man. "You keep the change."

  The man started counting up bills for his change. Gabriel repeated, "Please, keep the change! It's for you!"

  The man paused briefly and stared at him, and then he shook his head, threw the fifty back at Gabriel. "Fuck you," he said and walked away.

  Gabriel nodded. He thought, Fuck it! and glanced down just in time to see a little boy's hand reach out and snatch up the discarded bill. "Good for you," he mumbled. With the cup of warm chicha in his hand, he weaved back through the crowd in the direction of his hotel.

  Every time he bumped into someone he stopped, bowed, and said, very politely, "Permiso, por favor, disculpe, permiso..." No one replied. One woman laughed, thinking it was a joke, but that was the only response. He sipped from his cup until, halfway done and too sickened to continue, he handed it to a nearby legless beggar, who glided noisily around the square on a wooden plank affixed with wobbly metal wheels. The man bowed, thanking him, grinned toothlessly, like a fledgling chick: big dark eyes, beak abridged and fixed in a terrible grin, wings wooly and crooked, pegged to a warped torso. Disturbed by the man's visage, Gabriel moved on and was quickly bumbling through the horde toward his hotel again. Among them, he too was a shuffling phantom, one of the many slurring together in that plaza, a shadowy and slow-shifting thicket that wandered, in unison, nowhere in particular. Together, they made a great sad swath of tottering and blinking humanity.

  He briefly muttered curses at them in English, things like "I think I understand why GIs shoot pedestrians in Iraq." He said these things to people and either they didn't acknowledge them, or they nodded back at him, as if in appreciation. And the further he got through the crowd, the harder he pushed against their stocky, sauntering bodies.

  Soon, he put away the ethnic slurs, out of guilt, and—despite how much he hated them all by then—was back to the more sane and polite refrain of someone traversing a thick crowd. "Perdóname, por favor, discúl-pame, con su permiso, por favor..."

  Eventually, he neared his hotel and his impatience returned. He felt frantic. He banged into the people in the crowd by accident at first, and then deliberately, jamming his elbows into their ribs. He began surreptitiously shoving them aside, into others. In that swarm, no one could identify the source of aggression. And still, he continued with his litany of apologies. It came like a sweet benediction; he muttered, "Con permiso, señor, por favor, lo siento..." Inside, it was all bile and wrath and burning blood—inside, he was wishing the horrors of hell upon them—but outside, he begged their pardon.

  "Forgive me," he implored. "Please, I'm so sorry, please..."

  In his hotel room, Gabriel took the heavy, blood-drenched gauze off of his head and dropped it on the bathroom counter. He stood, staring at himself as he listed in front of the mirror. His cheek had swollen and was mottled colorfully, like half of an overripe mango. The punctures sat moistly, stitches pulled taut on the surface of the distended skin. He recalled the beautiful girl from the bar earlier that night, who had peeked under the bandages and then continued to flirt with him. He thought of her kindness, her perfect beauty. She had given him her phone number. He had thrown it away when he left the bar.

  That night, he brushed his teeth with tap water. He was never going to successfully avoid those germs and it was pointless, finally, even to attempt such a thing. If it wasn't an ice cube, it was the beads of water on a leaf of lettuce, a still-damp plate in a restaurant. Sooner or later, the germs found a way in. It was a shame, but the sickness wouldn't last long.

  9. Christmas

  Sunday, December 25, 2005

  TINY SPECKS OF BLOOD dotted the pillow in the morning. In the bathroom mirror he saw that the swelling was down, but the bruises had darkened. The pain was worse, a dull ache all over the side of his face that resonated through his skull. It itched too. It itched furiously. After showering, he reapplied the ointment and put three large Band-Aids over the sutures. The ear was still a problem, though. It was just too gruesome to leave uncovered. He tried to construct a less gigantic gauze earmuff than the one the nurse had made for him yesterday, but his lighter application of medical tape wouldn't hold it. Abandoning that approach, he gently applied a few oversize Band-Aids to the offending area, which looked weird, but he concluded that it was better than any of the alternatives.

  He brushed his teeth, again with the tap water, and pondered his ill-begotten conversation with Catacora. Magnificently stupid. He blushed just thinking about it. He tried to eject the thought from his mind, but it was no use. It had slipped in like a splinter.

  Gabriel mulled over the potential consequences. He bypassed a number of benign or even pleasant possibilities and tucked into the most mortifying possible outcomes.

  One specific nightmarish scenario played out in his mind on a kind of loop, repeating incessantly, as if to confirm that it was, in fact, possible. The pieces fell with a horrid logic: Catacora would find out that Gabriel was working for Callo
way, and then he'd discover that Lenka had been sleeping with Gabriel. He'd be able to deduce that she'd fed Gabriel sensitive information. She'd be fired on the spot. Catacora and Evo might well go to the press with the story—both to advertise the potential investment opportunities being created in Bolivia and to show that they were not going to tolerate scheming foreigners—at which point Gabriel's name would work its way through the newswires in a story about hedge-fund subterfuge in Bolivia. Priya would make a big show of firing Gabriel. His mother would disown him. Lenka would (justifiably) blame him for ruining her life.

  After breakfast, Gabriel called his mother. It was one thing to forget Thanksgiving, it would be quite another to forget Christmas.

  "I'm glad you called," she said immediately. "I booked a ticket. I'll be there in two days."

  "You're kidding."

  "No, I'm not kidding. And feliz Navidad a tí también, Gabo."

  "Merry Christmas, Mom. But, look"—he paused, letting her acclimate to his less-than-cheerful tone before continuing—"this isn't a good time for me. I just want you to know that."

  "I know," she said. "That's why I'm coming..." As she went on, he recalculated the lay of the land and it struck him, straightaway, that it was hard enough to maintain the one lie—that he was a freelance journalist—while in Bolivia, but it would be almost impossible to simultaneously sustain his mother's belief that he worked for BellSouth. There were other considerations too, but he couldn't do all the calculus right then. In his good ear, she was saying that she was worried, and that it was Christmas, and that she was going to write a profile on Evo, who had agreed to an interview.

  Gabriel understood that had he not managed to get himself blown up, she wouldn't be en route—all he'd done was stop and take a look at the miners' protest, and now his life was derailed and rolling down some hill. "You got an interview?" he said. "How did you set it up?"