A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism

by Peter Mountford

  Eventually, when the two hurried away to do her bidding, she looked at Gabriel, and her look said it all. She wasn't angry. She wasn't confused about him. She didn't feel conflicted because she secretly loved him. He saw hatred, and nothing else. There was no uncertainty there. It was all very straightforward. Still, she did stay long enough for them to speak once more.

  "You leave tomorrow for the tour?" he said. She said nothing, ignoring his attempt at small talk. She was concerned only with the business that remained between them. So he said, "I gather you talked to my mother."

  She just looked at him, and he could see some sadness in her eyes. Was it regret? Probably not. She was simply sad that she had had to break his mother's heart, but she knew she was just the messenger. The message itself was Gabriel's responsibility.

  "And you've been spilling my secret to people?"

  "Yes, to whoever would listen."

  "For what it's worth, I didn't do that to you. I didn't tell anyone about us. I just spoke to Mr. Catacora and I didn't tell him that you'd been the one to leak his job title to me."

  "Am I supposed to be grateful?" she said.

  "No. I just wanted you to know. I didn't tell anyone about you."

  She nodded, staring at him. "I understand."

  "You look beautiful too."

  As if she had not heard him, she said, "I wanted you removed from the guest list, but I am not that surprised that you found a way inside."

  "I made a tunnel from Hotel Gloria."

  She didn't even start to smile. "Did you lose your job?"

  "No." He wasn't sure if he should tell her what had happened, that her scheme had backfired. He decided he might as well, as long as they were being honest. "Actually," he said, "it was quite the reverse. Before, I was just simulating. Now, I am a real employee. Thanks to you."

  "Thanks to me?" She shook her head, incredulous. He noticed the reverse freckles on her chin. He'd stopped noticing those after a while. But now, he knew, it was time to pay attention again. "Gabriel, I don't know what you've done. Whatever it is, you owe your place to no one but yourself. Thank yourself. Don't thank me. You made this for yourself."

  "I'm not as bad as you think I am."

  "No. You are worse than you think you are."

  The fact was that she'd parlayed her decision to tell people about Gabriel into a point-scoring moment for herself. Catacora had been impressed by her intuition, her ability to ferret out Gabriel's true intentions. In fact, she'd lied to them all, while using Gabriel as a professional stepladder. He could have pointed this out, and maybe it would have bought him a redemptive moment, but it also would have killed the conversation faster, and he wanted to prolong it, so he lingered. "It's not so simple," he said.

  "I'm sure it's not simple," she said. She checked her BlackBerry. It was a new phone. It was not unlike his phone, a slightly older model, but close. It was an appropriate phone for the press secretary of a president. She tucked her hair behind her ear as she stared down at the screen, and in that simple gesture, he was reminded of their drive through traffic during their first interview. He remembered how distracted she'd been, the way she'd steered her Datsun with her knee.

  There was nothing to be done about it. It was a loss, a straightforward loss. There were no more plays left. Still, there was time left—time to stretch the encounter out a few moments longer. "The speech was interesting."

  She put her phone down, looked at him, and said, "Your people—they would never really invest here, would they?"

  "Not in the way you mean, no." She glared at him, so he went on. "They would, and they have invested here, actually, but not in a way that"—he searched for the right words—"not in a way that contributes."

  She stared at him for a while. He could see the halogen lights dangling nearby reflected in her black eyes. Her expression was harder than he'd ever seen it before. It killed him to see her like that. It was visceral, an aching in his chest; it rang out in his collarbone, specifically. He scratched at the stitches on his cheek. No one had stared at his wounds all night. No one even seemed to notice.

  In the end—and this was the end, he had to admit—both he and Lenka had survived. They had each been tested by circumstances grand and unforeseen, and they had each survived. There had been damage inflicted along the way, but they'd made it through, more or less intact. She seemed, in fact, to be thriving. Maybe he was thriving too.

  She blinked, and he admired one last time the too-long eyelashes. He glanced at her shoulders and knew that she had the most perfect shoulders he'd ever seen. He knew already that whenever he saw a woman's shoulders from that point on, he'd compare them to Lenka's. And although there were a million different ways he wanted to apologize, to explain, he knew there was no point. It was done.

  Her phone rang and she checked the number. She looked at him. "While Evo Morales is president, you will not be allowed back into this country. If you try to come here, you'll be arrested on charges of espionage. Do you understand?"

  "Espionage?" he said, stunned. He'd been devious—obviously—but he wasn't a spy, and she knew it. He felt sick hearing her say that. He shook his head. He hadn't been disappointed by her until now. "Are you serious?" he said.

  She just glared at him, quite comfortable with her new power, it seemed.

  Bewildered, he looked across the room and shook his head again.

  She put the phone to her ear and walked away.

  Back at the hotel, Gabriel put his name into Google News and saw that the story hadn't broken yet.

  He went upstairs and packed. He smoked a cigarette and watched CNN International. The television's aqueous light flickered on the walls. He called the front desk and asked for a bottle of red wine.

  Alejo arrived with the wine and two glasses ten minutes later.

  Gabriel opened the door and let him inside. He stood by in silence and watched Alejo uncork the bottle. Once the bottle was open, he said, "I'll need only one glass."

  Alejo poured him a glass.

  "Do you want the rest of the bottle?" Gabriel said.

  "Excuse me?"

  "I'll take the one glass and you can have the rest, if you want."

  Alejo shook his head and set the bottle down.

  "Fine." He regarded Alejo for a second, and then said, "I just want to ask you something."

  "Yes."

  "Did you really think that if you ruined her feelings for me, she'd run into your arms?"

  Alejo frowned and shook his head. "No, I never thought that. I was not trying to impress her, or whatever you think it was. This is the problem with you gringos: you are so used to being concerned about shallow things that you think everyone thinks this way. She is an important person for this country and I have seen you, and I think you are dangerous. This is why I told her what you did. It has nothing to do with her beauty, or my love for her, or any of those huevadas."

  This was utter bullshit, but it was heartfelt bullshit. Gabriel nodded, not caring to explain about the outcome—that Alejo's move had accidentally spared Gabriel and expedited the destruction of some companies that had invested in Bolivia. He picked up the full glass of wine and then turned to Alejo and said, "Are you sure you don't want it? I'm just going to dump the rest down the drain."

  "You are a shitty person. Do you know that?"

  "I do, actually." He lifted his glass in salute.

  Alejo turned and headed toward the elevators, then stopped and turned back for a parting shot. "I'm not like you," he declared with the conviction of a true believer. Gabriel envied the earnestness and purity of that perspective, the tender idea that the world was a place where good people and bad people were locked in an epic struggle—

  What a gorgeous notion!

  The following morning, Gabriel Googled his name again. It wasn't that bad, but it didn't have to be that bad to be fatal. There were a handful of articles that mentioned a Gabriel Francisco de Boya, analyst for the Calloway Group, who was in Bolivia. One was on a liberal bl
og, FDR Opines, and the rest were near-clones of a Reuters brief about investors seeking opportunities in politically unstable countries. The original piece had been published by Horace Calloway, whom Gabriel had met twice at the Lookout and who, other than his rigid blandness, had seemed like a pleasant enough guy.

  In any case, Gabriel's name was out now. If his mother had doubted Lenka, this would erase that doubt. He could try to head it off, call her and tell her this rumor was just the crazy manifestation of some lovers' quarrel, but it was too much. He could be honest, say he'd lied because he didn't want her to write him off. But it was going to be too many lies. It would only make it worse.

  He walked up to Café los Presidentes Ahorcados for a cappuccino and one last salteña. As he walked, it dawned on him that he'd not done any touristy things. When he'd come to Bolivia with his mother five years earlier, they'd gone to several museums and seen the hoodoos in the Valle de Luna. They'd had a tour of San Francisco Church, with its second-story garden and its dozens of portraits of malnourished saints and monks. In colonial Latin America, they'd been told by their guide, Saint Francis was always shown holding a skull, a symbol of poverty. It had seemed odd to Gabriel then—in the first days of his youthful, rapturous infatuation with Bolivia—that the skull, symbol of death, would also symbolize poverty. That confusion had been resolved for him now.

  On the tour, they had also learned that those disembodied babies' heads with wings hovering around the edges of many devotional paintings were cherubs who had enjoyed the pleasures of the flesh too much and had therefore been deprived of their bodies. Their guide at the church had been a beautiful young woman with a frightening cough. Gabriel and his mother had been the only ones on the tour, and his mother had been relentlessly inquisitive. She'd badgered the ailing woman with questions and had extracted everything she deemed interesting from her. Still, the questions persisted. She picked the bones clean. During the final minutes of the tour, the guide knew almost none of the answers to his mother's questions.

  In the past six weeks, however, Gabriel had not once gone to take in a view of the city or to appreciate some cultural attraction. He hadn't even brought a camera. He hadn't sent a single postcard. Other than to occasionally check out a restaurant, he hadn't opened his Lonely Planet guidebook since the flight down. He'd had grand plans, initially. He foresaw that the new job would help him develop a rich and detailed familiarity with the best of Latin America.

  On the flight down, he'd dog-eared pages for Cusco, Potosí, Copacabana, Coroico, and the rest of Yungas, for Cochabamba, and for Santa Cruz. He'd hoped to come away from the assignment a minor expert on Bolivia's many splendors. Instead, he knew the staff at a couple of hotels by name and he knew his way around central La Paz, but he didn't have delightful recommendations to share. He had no madcap tales of Third-World misadventures that might make for charming dinner-party chitchat. He decided he'd ask his taxi driver for information about the country.

  Gabriel packed. After depositing his bags behind the front desk, he went upstairs to the business center one last time to check his e-mail.

  There was only one message. He knew who it was from even before he saw the name. He clicked on his in box and confirmed that it was from his mother.

  The title said it all: Calloway Group.

  He felt an aching lump in his throat right away. He coughed but couldn't clear the knot. He took a shuddering breath, set his mouth firmly to stop the crinkling in his chin, and clicked on the message. It was in English.

  Dearest Gabriel,

  As you probably know by now, Lenka told me about your secret. That's why I left so suddenly. I'm sorry I didn't leave a note—I just couldn't think of what to say. I thought of calling you to have you tell me that she was wrong, or that she was lying, but it was clear to me who was lying. My fears have been confirmed now.

  I have to say that I am both dismayed and impressed, but mostly dismayed. More than anything, I am sad that you lied to me. But you know that. You know it all before I can even say it. I wonder if I brought you up this way, or if you learned it from someone else? Don't answer that question, please.

  I wish you had taken this job to spite me, as some act of rebellion, because then at least it would be personal—from the heart. But it's not that way and I know this. If you were trying to defy me, you would have thrown it in my face. But you hid it, carefully—lied about it and then covered that lie with another lie. You lied because you joined with these people for private reasons. With them you are feeding a desire that you are ashamed of.

  Most of all, it makes me sick to realize that I might have unknowingly aided and abetted your work by offering you the chance to ask that question of Evo. If that question earned money for your employers, letting you come to that interview will be one of the greatest mistakes of my life. In any case, you lied to me, manipulated me.

  So I want you to do a favor for me. Please do not respond to this note.

  The fact is, we are both adults now, Gabo, and I'm sorry to say that this is too much for me. It's too much, not just as a mother, but as a person. I am truly sorry I can't see past this. Maybe that is a failing of mine. Probably! But it doesn't matter. Though I don't want to abandon you, it's clear you can take care of yourself. And I believe we need to be apart until you are through this phase. So I am telling you now that until you have quit this path, I will not answer your calls and I will not answer your e-mails.

  I love you more than I love anyone else alive. I look ahead and I dream only of you returning to my life. Until that dream is true, my heart is more broken than you can possibly understand.

  —Your mother

  He read the e-mail twice more. By the end of the second time, his vision had been completely blurred by tears. He blinked them away and they skipped warmly off his cheeks. He wiped his eyes and sniffled. He swallowed the knot in his throat again and again, but it was no good. Then he got up and went to the business center's bathroom to blow his nose and wash his face. He considered calling her to try to convince her that he'd been doing it as an act of rebellion, that it was all about her. But he couldn't bring himself to lie to her any more.

  He just logged out, closed the browser.

  His flight left in three hours. He had an hour to kill, but he thought he might as well spend that hour at the airport, so he retrieved his luggage from behind the front desk.

  The people at the desk seemed to want to talk to him, to see him off, but he was too upset to say much to them.

  "Thank you," he said.

  "Will you be back?" the female manager said. He'd seen her often as he'd come and gone, but he'd never talked to her, just dropped off his key or picked it up. She was petite, officious, of an indeterminate age. Her eyes were cold, circumspect, the color of gunpowder.

  "I don't think I'll be back," he said. He was supposed to lie, of course. If ever there was a time, this was it. The lie was expected. He just couldn't bring himself to do it. "Thank you for everything."

  As the taxi buzzed through La Paz, Gabriel asked the taxi driver a few questions about the country; the driver replied dutifully, but none of it was new to Gabriel.

  Later, when they drove through El Alto, Gabriel inhaled deeply and could tell that the air was even thinner up there. The sky was clear, startlingly bright. He could see the flayed tips of a cirrus cloud above, a thin blotch of white splashed against an otherwise empty sky. There was no music in the car, only the sound of the blasting wind. Outside, El Alto was dusty, its streets patrolled by scrawny swine and mottled, hairless dogs. Chickens tiptoed around warily. Buildings abandoned halfway through construction, leaving only an empty collection of cinder-block walls, had become depositories for heaps of unidentifiable urban detritus, garbage that ceased to retain the qualities of its discrete ingredients. At the edges of each pile, scraps of this material flapped in the wind. He rolled up his window and the air suctioned in. The subsequent stillness in the car felt peculiar to Gabriel after all those minutes of steadily howlin
g wind.

  Approaching the airport, he could make out the squat control tower off in the distance. The airport in El Alto—confusingly named John F. Kennedy International Airport—was immense. Or, it was immense in a way. Like everything in Bolivia, the scale was crazy. The terminal was poky—only a handful of flights came and went a day—but the runway was twice the standard length. With the air so thin, planes needed to achieve double the ground speed required at sea level to lift off. Outgoing flights typically had a number of empty seats because a full flight would simply be too heavy to catch air at a sane speed. Incoming planes needed special tires to land at those velocities.

  The driver caught Gabriel's eyes in the rearview mirror and asked how long he'd been in La Paz. Gabriel told him that he'd been there since November. He'd been doing research, he said. There was a lull, and then he added, "I went to a party hosted by Evo Morales last night."

  "Do you know him?"

  "No. Well—sort of. I met him. I was close with his press liaison. I was here on research."

  "What do you think of him?"

  Gabriel shrugged. "He seems honest. I think he means what he says."

  "We could use some honesty. So you found out what you came to find out?"

  "Yes."

  The driver paused for a moment, seeming to consider something that he wasn't sure he should say. Eventually, as they pulled onto the half-mile-long driveway to the John F. Kennedy International Airport, he met Gabriel's eyes in the rearview again and said, "This is your job? You come here, find out something, and go home?"

  "I suppose so."

  "That sounds nice."