That was enough for Gulietta and Doña Clara. They stepped away from the scene of battle.
“Poor girl, so removed from reality,” Durbin said in English, in a voice like that of a Shakespearean actor.
The car emptied in no time at all. The passengers traveling second class surely thought it was a problem between “gentlemen” and headed for the exit. The laughter continued at Durbin’s table as someone yelled, “Way to go, Don Pepe!”
Alderete’s anger was building up like a boiler without a pressure valve. He felt a sharp pain in his stomach and an uncontainable rush of gases. He was on the verge of letting loose the loudest fart in the history of the La Paz–Arica train line; that would be his revenge. He stood up and pointed to his derrière.
Standing in the center of the car with his arms crossed, Tréllez smiled tauntingly. The gases played a mean trick on Alderete. Instead of exiting, they went straight up and pressed against a heart already tormented by rage. They imprisoned it like the tentacles of a giant octopus. He grew short of breath, and at that altitude, finding extra oxygen was highly unlikely. Gripping the seat backs, Alderete left the dining car and moved down the hallway to his cabin. He banged on the door repeatedly. Nobody answered.
“I’m choking,” he said. “Gulietta . . . where are you?”
The steward helped him inside. Alderete collapsed on top of his bunk. Several minutes later, Gulietta came by to see what was happening.
Alderete looked at her with his eyes wide open. He was breathing with difficulty through his mouth and he clutched her shoulder with one hand. “A glass of water,” he begged.
Gulietta took a pitcher from the counter and poured water into a glass.
“I have high blood pressure,” Alderete said. “I don’t handle these blowups well.”
Doña Clara appeared, looking as calm as a nun strolling through a park.
“I’ll tell Ricardo to look for a doctor in second class,” Gulietta said.
Alderete let out a groan. Doña Clara unbuttoned his shirt and put her ear to his chest.
* * *
There was a wide range of odors in second class despite the country air that penetrated the few open windows. Ricardo saw construction workers, contraband dealers, carpenters, and illegal immigrants, but a doctor was nowhere to be found. At the end of the second car, an apprentice nurse headed for Santiago turned up. She was seventeen years old and was only trained to give injections. Alderete would have to fend for himself.
Ricardo asked if anyone knew if they were near any big towns. He didn’t recognize any of the names. Someone suggested a cup of coca tea and even a suppository. Ricardo looked around and saw a disheveled, bearded painter with the eyes of an insomniac. His face was brimming with annoyance. A greasy mane fell over his shoulders.
“Is he Chilean or Bolivian?” the man asked.
“The sick guy? What does it matter?”
The painter smirked.
On his way back through the dining car, Ricardo heard Durbin remark, “The guy’s got nine lives, like a cat.”
“It takes something extra to kill someone like him,” Tréllez said.
The sun was beating down hard. The Altiplano* looked like a desert on fire. The only shadows came from solitary trees rimming the walls of the peasant huts.
Ricardo found Gulietta in the dining car. “There’s no doctor,” he said.
“He’s already better. It’s pure theater. He just wants to impress me.”
Ricardo touched her hand. Since she made no effort to pull away, he began caressing it, at first softly, and then he clasped both his hands around it.
“In Buenos Aires you could have asked me out to the movies,” Gulietta said.
“An animated film? We were too young back then.”
Gulietta stroked his chest. Ricardo was sporting a fashionable, loose-fitting New York–style shirt. It was impossible to stay indifferent to her barely perceptible touch.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Gulietta said.
“With Alderete?”
“He’s my husband.”
“Why did you marry him?”
She was silent. She was caught in a whirlwind of emotion. Her beautiful brown eyes teared up. “Poverty scares me more than death,” she finally said.
“Some of the other travelers don’t exactly respect your husband. Tréllez says this trip is like your lunar eclipse.”
She laughed, which made her look even lovelier. She was a captivating girl. Her parents were European, but her genes seemed to have skipped a generation: She was dark-haired, of medium height, slender, and very feminine. Her skin was olive-toned, like that of an upper-class woman from India. Her body was harmonious; there was a delicate sensuality about her. Ricardo was under the impression that, up until then, her life had passed by as if it were a dream, like water flowing down a river without whirlpools or rocks to disturb its tranquility. But Gulietta had not recovered from the shock of her sudden impoverishment and her marriage to her father’s ex-accountant, a man she disdained.
Ricardo wasn’t sure her character was strong enough to put up with Alderete for long. The humiliation of being at the beck and call of the bean counter was probably an unbearable punishment.
“I have to go check on him,” Gulietta said. “I’ll see you later.”
Ricardo liked the girl, but he knew that train romances nearly always ended abruptly and prematurely. This would be no exception; besides, Gulietta was traveling with her husband, who, having survived an acute episode of high blood pressure, was going to be just fine. In any event, part of the afternoon had already passed, then night would come, and the following day, in a matter of hours, they would be on the Chilean coast.
It wasn’t like the Paris-Istanbul or the Trans-Siberian line, where the trip lasts nearly a week and relationships have time to begin, develop, and find reason for hope upon arriving at their destination. The affair between Captain Vronsky and Anna Karenina began on a train and continued until the curtain call in Moscow. If it had happened on the La Paz–Arica line, the game would have been over for Vronsky. Timing is everything. Ricardo was at the age where it made sense to either rush into a sexual adventure—a casual tryst that would just as soon be forgotten—or pursue the classic courtship of a girl of his social standing, which generally involved a degree of mutual attraction and the occasional absentminded caress, and no more.
He understood that it would be nearly impossible to make a move on her, even if the circumstances were favorable; furthermore, the naïve bourgeois flirting game was absurd and would only end up frustrating him. Ricardo decided to let destiny play Cupid. He didn’t hold out much hope, but his gut told him that something unexpected could occur.
*On May 27, 1812, a group of women and children mounted a last-ditch attempt to prevent the seizure of the city of Cochabamba, Bolivia by forces loyal to Spain on a hilltop called “La Coronilla.”
*Spanish initials for the Socialist Republican Union Party, a coalition of right-wing parties that supported a military takeover in 1951 under the rule of General Hugo Ballivián.
*The high Andean plateau extending through portions of Bolivia, Peru, Chile, and Argentina.
Edmundo Rocha woke with a start, sweating. With his left hand, he reached for a flask of pisco on the floor and took a long swig. For years, he had done nothing but drink pisco and sometimes pure alcohol, the kind that’s sold in cans and intended for hardcore vagrants. Despite an overwhelming desire to finish it off, he left the bottle on top of the chair next to his bed. He lit a cigarette and sat up. He was wearing striped underpants that had been cut out from an old pair of pajamas. The stump that was his left leg stuck out grotesquely, shamefully. Rocha stared at it for a good while. He was alone in the cabin; the upper bunk was undisturbed. He knew that nobody would occupy it because he had two tickets in his jacket pocket: He had bought an extra one so that nobody would bother him.
As usual, he had been dreaming and his dream had turned into a night
mare, the same one as always. It used to happen at night, but lately it had begun plaguing him during siestas and post-binge sleepiness. The visions had a spine-chilling clarity to them. They would start with the cursed scene of him descending into the mine shaft on the ore car and then continue as he penetrated deeper into the mine. The naked torsos of his fellow workers were mirrors in which his own anguished face, his mop of hair, and his long, disheveled beard were reflected. He wanted to get out of the car, as it increasingly became one with the darkness and the silence, but it was impossible to move. His legs didn’t respond and when he tried to shout, his throat went dry like a desert sandpit. There was nothing to be done. An evil force was leading him to the thick rock, which he was supposed to blow up with dynamite. His sweaty hands grasped the dynamite stick while Alcón, his mine buddy, chipped away at the rock with a pick. Alcón was making strange noises that sounded like wails. When he determined that the dynamite had been inserted deep enough into the rocky wall, he lit a match and they both started to run. The nightmare would pause there, with him escaping in slow motion. Then the other nightmare would begin, the one Rocha would see while waking up. The subsoil was slippery, the sticky underbelly of a mountain suffering at the hands of men tearing apart its insides. Rocha was desperately stumbling and falling. He would try to pull himself up, but he had lost time. No sooner did he succeed in standing up, than he heard the boom of the explosion and the burning gust propelled him several yards forward. Alcón shouted and pointed to the arch above, which was coming undone in thick and rough sheets of rock that were crashing down on both his legs. He managed to save his right leg, but his left leg got jammed under an enormous rock, turning it into a gelatinous, irrecoverable mass.
It’s all that asshole’s fault. If he hadn’t sent me into the mines, I’d still be standing on two legs.
Rocha placed the crutches under his armpits and started to move from one side of the cabin to the other. Someone knocked on the door. The slightest noise could provoke a certain desperation in him.
“Who is it?”
“I have your lunch.”
Rocha opened the door and let the waiter enter.
“One chairo soup, one large plate of meat, and a cup of applesauce.”
“What time is it?”
“One o’clock, señor. You said you wanted the late lunch.”
“Right . . . right,” Rocha said, then handed the waiter a tip and closed the door.
He ate the soup and devoured the meat and accompanying French fries. As he savored the dessert, he thought again about his tragedy.
My nightmares end tonight. Once I take him out, I’ll go back to sleeping like I used to. I’ll sleep for hours and I’ll dream about quiet lakes and beautiful eyes that love me. About the lush forests of Beni and rivers that look like the sea. All the things I lost because of that bastard—
Moments later, another knock on the door. It was the waiter coming to retrieve the tray.
“Can I get you anything else?”
“No . . . nothing,” Rocha said. “I’m going to rest.”
“Are you all right?”
“I have a fever,” Rocha lied. “But I’m sure that tomorrow, on the coast, I’ll feel better.”
“There’s nothing like being on the coast,” the waiter said, and disappeared.
Rocha lay down. It was cold and his stump hurt. Sharp, stabbing pain shot up and down his leg. He rubbed the affected area with some ointment, then propped his head on a pillow and tried to picture Alderete, just as he was the day he went to visit the guy in the mining company office to ask him for a job. Alderete was his half-brother. They shared the same mother, an indigenous woman who had been the lover of Nazario’s father. Edmundo’s father was a carpenter from Oruro who died of a lung infection. Before succumbing to a terminal illness, his mother had advised Rocha to visit his half-brother, who seemed to have a good thing going in the mineral trade. He was an accountant and handled a lot of money. Rocha, who was going through hard times, had become little more than a drunken hobo who wandered from one place to another selling textiles and other odds and ends. He didn’t think twice, and as soon as he had collected a few pesos, he headed for Potosí. Alderete worked in an office downtown in a well-preserved two-story building. At first he refused to see Rocha, claiming that he was too busy with work; however, several days later, upon noticing Rocha sitting in the lobby, he decided it would be better to attend to him once and for all and be done with it. Rocha showed him a letter from his mother and a few photographs of Nazario at the age of seven. Alderete read the missive and looked at him with a certain curiosity mixed with arrogance.
“So you’re my half-brother. You look really bad.”
“Things are tough over in Caracoles.”
“I can imagine.”
“Our mother is very frail.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“A crippling arthritis. She can’t get out of bed.”
“You don’t help her at all? What do you do for a living?”
“I’m a street vendor.”
“You don’t sell much and then you drink away the rest.”
“How do you know?”
“I can see it in your face. I don’t like meeting with guys who have drinking problems.”
“I’m your brother.”
“That was just an accident of life. We don’t choose our brothers.
What did you come here for?”
“I want to work so I can send a few pesos to our mother.”
“What can you do besides sell junk?”
“I could be your assistant.”
Alderete laughed and eyed him with disdain. Rocha began to hate him at that very moment.
“An assistant like you, maybe in a tavern.”
“You don’t need to make fun of me,” Rocha said, half-swallowing his words. “I can do anything.”
“Desk work, not a chance. Why don’t you start from the bottom? It’ll take you awhile to rise, but it’s the only way. I’m talking about the deep mine.”
“Inside the mine?”
“It’s the only way.”
Rocha had no choice but to accept. He became a miner, and that’s no small matter. Being a miner is like being a sailor on the high seas. If you’re the former, you really have to like underground caves, and if you’re the latter, it’s the ocean. Two unmerciful passions. At first it was very tough. Rocha sometimes thought he was in hell. He rented a room in a pension where it was so cold that even the rats couldn’t survive. It was colder inside than outside. He would hang out at miners’ dives and once a week go up the hill to a brothel filled with half-breeds. He drank more and more to rid his mind of the underground agony. Becoming a human mole is part of a pact that man makes with the devil. By the end of three months, he had accepted his lot. He got himself a girlfriend who cooked for him and made love to him in sepulchral silence. When he asked her why she didn’t moan, she said it was because she didn’t want to startle him. Then came the accident, on a Monday, a month before Christmas. They amputated half his leg in the mine hospital. They sawed it off as if he were a soldier in the First World War.
Deciding he was worthless, Alderete gave him a compensation package that was barely enough to bury their mother. Rocha swore that he would get revenge, but the years took him down roads in which there was no time to remember anything, until one day, just about a week earlier, God had granted him a few happy hours in the midst of that bitter existence. It seemed like plenty to him.
He couldn’t help himself and took a swig of pisco. It made him feel brave.
Despite his limitations, he had managed to read a book: Treasure Island by Stevenson. He thought about John Silver, the one-legged pirate, and at times he identified with him. After the rock destroyed part of Rocha’s leg, from the knee down, everything had been a pure tragedy for him, with hardly a break to take a breath. A life mapped by a cruel fate, deprived of the slightest relief. Killing Alderete wouldn’t be murder; it would be a settl
ing of accounts. He began to sing: I’m waiting for you, Nazario; Rocha the cripple is going to do you in. The movements and vibrations of the train felt like the funereal gallop of a black colt, and he, Rocha, was the horseman. With the money that he would collect from this job, he would travel to Iquique, where a black Peruvian woman who had stopped over in La Paz a long time ago was waiting for him. She was a mediocre stage actress, but had been blessed with a pair of shapely thighs molded in Callao. Since the stage didn’t yield much dough, she opted to offer her goods in a brothel in that sandy northern Chilean city. She knew about the accident and the stump. Love doesn’t care if you walk like a lame rooster, she had written him. After all, the damage was only from the knee down; the rest of him was intact and she was happy with the whole package. For the first time in his life, Rocha had something to look forward to. He wouldn’t become a millionaire, but there was a room waiting for him on the outskirts of Iquique. He could spend his last days as a doorman there, keeping an eye on the asses of the neighborhood prostitutes. Ending your life on the coast isn’t bad; even with an uneasy conscience, time eventually fixes everything. If Alderete wasn’t Lucifer’s son, he was at least his nephew, and sending him to the eternal fires of hell was a humanitarian act. It would free the country of a snake that leeched off the happiness of others. Rocha thought he should be decorated for what he was about to do.
Suddenly, he heard commotion in the corridor. He picked out the loathsome voice of Alderete. The arrogant tone was still there, even more overbearing than before. Rocha had been advised not to leave his cabin at all, even to go to the bathroom, which is why he had to make do like when he was in the military. The person who hired him had told him that he would get a signal to go out and that he would have a few minutes in which to finish off Alderete. Time was the enemy; Rocha was a cripple on crutches, not an athlete. His hands, however, had acquired the strength that his legs had lost; they were like a pair of pliers, and when he used to choke people during bar fights, the victims would be unable to breathe for several minutes. Rocha studied the damp rag with which he would cut off Alderete’s oxygen. He would have to act fast when he got the signal: three knocks on his door. He wasn’t a first-class assassin but he was the only one available on the market. Now all he had to do was wait until dark.
Andean Express Page 4
