Andean Express

by Juan de Recacoechea

  “I’ll ask.”

  “Don’t be so tight.”

  “Fine.” Ruiz looked at him with a rancor that was difficult to hide.

  Alderete was enjoying the moment. “You better not fix the cards.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding, Don Nazario.”

  “I’ll whip you all,” Alderete said, then turned to Ricardo. “You don’t play?”

  “I play badly.”

  “Ricardo’s a good kid. We have to keep him away from cards,” said Ruiz.

  Alderete smirked at Ruiz. “I’ve never seen a coat this color before.”

  “I bought it from a Jewish friend of mine.”

  “I can tell.” Alderete eyed Ruiz as he walked off.

  “I won some land from him near the Soligno factory once. I screwed him over because he was out of line.”

  “And nobody’s screwed you over before?”

  “I’m a born winner.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with losing every now and then.”

  Alderete looked the young man over from head to toe. “You’re a loser. I can see it in your face.”

  “You don’t know me.”

  “You’re an unlucky beginner.”

  “Not in everything. Sometimes things go well for me. I’m lucky with women.”

  “Gulietta’s little ass is mine. Try imagining you’re with her when you jerk off tonight.”

  “Don’t make me disrespect you.”

  “You’ve been circling around her since the train left. Gulietta is my wife. Tomorrow we’re taking one of the Santa ships and that’ll be it.”

  “You’re a sick man. You need a psychiatrist.”

  “Sick or not, she’s my wife.”

  “Nobody denies that.”

  “What do you want then?”

  “Nothing. She’s just a friend.”

  “You won’t see her for many years, maybe never again. An adventure on a train with a married woman—is that what’s missing from your repertoire?”

  “You’ve got quite an imagination, even though you’re only an accountant.”

  “If you keep bothering her, then I’ll have to use my fists.”

  “Why don’t we get off at the next station? That way we can see what you can do with those fists.”

  “Careful, pretty boy.”

  “Better a pretty boy than someone who kisses pretty boys’ asses.”

  Alderete took a step forward. Ricardo stepped back, removed his jacket, and handed it to the steward, who was observing the drama unfold as if he were sitting in an armchair watching a magic show.

  “I won’t hit you because Gulietta would make a scene.”

  “See? I’m a lucky kid.”

  “Laugh all you want, but tonight I’ll have her in my bed.”

  Ricardo asked Alderete to move aside so he could get to the dining car. Alderete, in spite of himself, complied.

  One of the waiters appeared right then, ringing a small bell and knocking on the cabin doors. “Time to sign up for dinner,” he called out.

  Father Moreno stuck his impertinent stevedore’s face out of his cabin door. Alderete frowned and the Franciscan vanished immediately.

  “That little priest, I know him from somewhere. What’s his last name?” Alderete asked the waiter.

  The man flipped through a notebook. “Moreno. Daniel Moreno. He’s a Franciscan.”

  “I’m not very religious, but I’m sure I’ve seen that bastard before.”

  “He’s a Franciscan.”

  “You already told me that. Do you think I’m deaf?” Alderete slowly retraced his steps, trying to remember where he could have seen that face.

  Looking at her reflection in the mirror, Anita asked her cabin mate: “Do you think my outfit is too loud?”

  Gulietta was smoking and she could still feel Ricardo’s caresses on her body.

  “Some people don’t like red,” said Doña Clara.

  “I’ve got a white one that I use when I go to the Tabarís with the girls.”

  “What girls?”

  “The nightclub hostesses . . .”

  Doña Clara had never heard that term before. She went to the window. On the horizon, a ray of sunlight broke the opacity of twilight. She looked out on a row of mountains illuminated by the intense light.

  “You must have an interesting life,” said Doña Clara.

  “Ha!”

  “What did you use to work in?” asked Gulietta.

  “Nothing but nightclubs, ever since I was seventeen years old in Valparaíso. At twenty-five I came to Bolivia. Life is very hard over there in Chile. I retired just two years ago. You know, darling, for certain things, gentlemen prefer youth. Since I retired I’ve been managing several houses and recruiting girls for friends like the Marquis. I only work with serious people.”

  Doña Clara stood there with her eyes wide open, not even blinking. “Of course . . .”

  “I’ve known the Marquis since I managed my first house in Caiconi, over there above Miraflores. I also met his wife. Once in Valparaíso, she invited me to her restaurant, which was popular with the chic crowd. Your husband . . .”

  “Continue,” said Gulietta. “What happened with my husband?”

  Anita blushed, something that didn’t occur very often.

  “Go on, Anita,” said Doña Clara.

  “Nazario stole his wife.”

  “Marquis’s?”

  “You didn’t know?”

  “No,” said Gulietta. “How did it happen?”

  “They were friends and Alderete was going through tough times. The Marquis let him live at his house out of the goodness of his heart. One day he came back early from soccer and found them in bed together. He wanted to kill him.”

  “And why didn’t he?”

  “The thing is, Gulietta, the Marquis is a sentimental guy. Besides, his old lady started crying. The little bitch got the house and they split the restaurant. If your husband’s not a saint, please don’t be upset with me.”

  “He’s a bastard,” replied Gulietta.

  “Don’t swear,” snipped Doña Clara.

  “Poor Marquis,” said Gulietta. “So he hates him.”

  “He doesn’t even want to see his face.”

  Anita changed her outfit. She was a strong woman who exhibited a certain voluptuousness, though her white skin reflected the stress of hundreds of carnal encounters. Even so, her character was that of a high-society woman and it took a great deal of perceptiveness to divine her past. Over time, she had lost most of her Chilean accent, but traces of it remained. She was attentive, respectful, and a trustworthy friend. Her career as a hooker, and subsequently a madam, didn’t stop her from being a sensible matron who adhered to certain rules of the game with respect to Bolivia’s prevailing Victorian morality.

  “I need air,” said Anita. “I’d rather fly a thousand times, even though it scares me to fly. How can you stand him, Gulietta?”

  “I can’t stand him. When he touches me, my hair stands on end.”

  “That’s really something, since his skin is smooth like a Chihuahua.”

  Doña Clara couldn’t keep from laughing. Gulietta coughed and then let out a guffaw that could be heard as far as the dining car.

  “And you, Anita, how did you put up with them?”

  “I stayed focused on the money that came in.”

  “You were so brave!” said Doña Clara.

  “It just takes time. Once I went to bed with a sailor they used to call Baby Seal. He didn’t have legs or arms, just a torso. I picked him up and put him on top of me as if he were a doll and gave him the orgasm of his life.”

  Gulietta and her mother collapsed into each other’s arms laughing.

  “Take it easy, my darling,” Doña Clara said. “You won’t get anywhere by stirring up trouble.”

  “Give him a tranquilizer tonight,” suggested Anita.

  “I already gave him one yesterday.”

  “Then there’s no way around it.”r />
  “No, there isn’t, but he won’t get a virgin.”

  “What? And who . . . ?” asked Doña Clara.

  “I’ve already planned it out.”

  Doña Clara grabbed her by the shoulders. “Don’t even think of it.”

  “It’s up to me,” said Gulietta. “Leave this to me at least.”

  “Ricardo?” asked her mother.

  “It’s my revenge. My very personal revenge.”

  Anita took a small mirror out of her purse and put on lipstick. Mother and daughter looked on in silence.

  “Personal?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “Don’t do anything stupid that you’ll regret later. Alderete will make you pay.”

  “And he’s my father’s murderer. Or did you forget?”

  “I’ll never forget.”

  “So?”

  The train left the Altiplano and began climbing up a steep mountain pass. The locomotive, huffing and puffing, advanced laboriously. The engineer wiped his face, which was streaked with soot. One of the coal men handed him a shot of pisco. Even though Quispe traversed this section a couple of times a week, each time felt just as exhilarating as the first.

  “When do you think we’ll be arriving in Charaña?” asked the coal worker.

  “Midnight, as long as the engine doesn’t break down,” said Quispe.

  Night continued to fall as the train climbed toward the summit. The sun looked like a reddish moon on the horizon as the engine’s churning echoed over the mountain.

  “You say I play with that bastard?” Petko asked.

  Ruiz combed back a clump of black hair sticking out over his forehead like an Apache warrior.

  “He says he’s going to whip us all,” said Ruiz.

  “I not used to play with strangers and tricksters, but if he wants to play with Petko, I have no problem.”

  “Let’s not make him think we’re afraid of him,” said Durbin.

  The Irishman had been an employee of the Bolivian Railway for ten years and, after a period as a chief inspector, had retired with an excellent pension that paid him in British pounds. He was a big man, of the size and build one would expect to find in Canada guarding forests and hunting wolves. It was strange for an Irishman of pure stock to wind up in an English company, but his first father-in-law had been a Londoner and it was he who helped Durbin get the job. Durbin’s English wife died of tuberculosis, so to help get his mind off his loss, he asked the company he was working with in Liverpool for an exotic assignment. They sent him to the Bolivian Railway, which was like posting him to Katmandu. He anchored his tormented soul in Uyuni, a major railway center with connections to Argentina and Chile. At first he suffered from the high altitude and the cold, but later he met Lourdes, a teacher overcome by solitude and seemingly destined for permanent spinsterhood. Lourdes wasn’t pretty, but it was her luck that she fit the bill for Durbin. She was thin and pale, with dark eyes like those of a girl from India. He was the second man she had ever been with. The first was a medical student who emigrated to Brazil, and who, according to news reports, had been cut to pieces at a farm in Matto Grosso. She adopted the Irishman as if he was her own child. He gave her economic stability and she brought him that feminine touch which was missing from his disorderly existence; he drank like a Cossack, frequented sordid brothels, and fought every day with the Bolivian Railway employees, whom he considered lazy and irresponsible. His life slowly became organized. He stopped seeing whores, and even though Lourdes was no Marilyn Monroe, she put a lid on his sexual incontinence. An Irishman built like him needed an ardent woman, but she forced him to move at her pace: a traditional, academic-style sexual schedule: once at night and once in the morning. She wasn’t sensual, but she didn’t like her students to teach her class. In bed, she was both an educator and a wench. He slowly got used to freezing cold Uyuni. He continued drinking beer but moderated his Celtic violent streak. She took him to the movies every day and he became a dedicated film buff. He loved romantic movies and crime flicks in which black men and other people of color who resembled his fellow moviegoers had the daylights beaten out of them. They were childless and she assured him it was because of the altitude and the climate, even though Durbin never ceased to be amazed at how the miners, despite the squalor in which they lived, managed to have five kids per capita.

  He knew the ex-accountant, Alderete. Lourdes’s sister, a girl named Inés, had been the man’s lover for a good while in Potosí, where she lived with her parents. Back then, Alderete was Carletti’s accountant in the Encantada mine. The girl had gotten pregnant, which didn’t please her family or Alderete, who saw in his future descendant an obstacle to his career as an ambitious bureaucrat. Inés, who was young, naïve, and gullible, gave in to Nazario’s repeated urgings and had an abortion at the hands of a half-breed midwife in Oruro. Sadly, Inés did not survive. Lourdes had secretly sworn to kill Alderete without her husband’s knowledge, yet after a while she dropped the idea and forgot her promise to herself. But when she saw him on the train, she remembered her sister and blood rushed to her face. Just being near him was enough to make her shudder.

  “He made fun of my orange coat,” said Ruiz with the face of a hurt child.

  “Is your fault, what you approach this bastard for? Khuya*. Do not think that bastards change with time. They stay that way until death,” said Petko.

  “He doesn’t like Jews,” said Ruiz, jabbing at Petko.

  “I do not give shit what he says,” said Petko. “Tonight I sharpen my fingers to take all money he has.”

  “Will you talk to Moses?” asked the Marquis.

  “Moses lawmaker, Jehovah God. Do not be so ignorant, Marquis. You spent too much time at Tabarís. Too many women mess up your head.”

  Tréllez preened in front of the mirror like a Rio de Janeiro dandy from the ’40s. His face was certainly special; it looked like a Venetian carnival mask crafted by a madman.

  “I assume you’ll be staying at the Hotel Pacífico, Petko?”

  “Where else I stay? Other hotels are for low-class people.”

  “I’m not low class,” the Marquis snapped. “But I’m staying at the Madrid.”

  “Your case different. You have hostesses over; you cannot stay at Hotel Pacífico. They do not let you in,” said Petko.

  “It bothers you that I get to hook up with pretty Chilean girls, while you’re stuck with yourself,” replied the Marquis.

  “I go to rest and meditate,” said Petko.

  “And think about all the money you’re putting away,” added Ruiz.

  “Petko put away money? I spend everything. My apartment at EMUSA building costs a ton, and then the suits, and nights out with friends . . .”

  “Good thing that half-breed chick doesn’t cost you anything,” said Durbin.

  “I not drunk Irishman,” said Petko. “I not raise hell in Uyuni bars beating up half-breeds.”

  Durbin started laughing, and the others followed suit.

  Petko lit a cigar. “Each one costs nearly a dollar,” he said. “Straight from Cuba.”

  “What are you going to do with all this money you’re saving? Or can you use it in Jewish heaven?” asked Ruiz with a mischievous smile.

  “Our heaven different. Abstract. No sexless little angels playing harps.”

  Petko stood about 5'4". He had lived in Gorki during the difficult Stalinist period, when dear father Joseph started to eliminate intellectuals and Jewish bankers, accusing them of imperialist plots. He fled in trucks, concealed under sacks of potatoes, and on foot, through inhospitable land where any citizen could be a spy helping the local authorities with their witch hunts. After a few months, frozen and hungry, he arrived at the Hungarian border. From there he traveled to France, where a Jewish organization that assisted refugees helped him ship out to South America. He arrived in Bolivia with a few Argentine pesos in his pocket, but before long he became economically stable, and within a year had evolved into a kind of banker for the Jewish
community. He was intelligent and wise, not very cultured but possessing an extraordinary business sense. He was a regular at the Club de La Paz café and knew everybody. He was a hardened misogynist, but also outgoing and loquacious. Some people thought he was a nice guy; others considered him impertinent. He was on his way to Arica to pick up imported goods for a textile factory owned by one of his compatriots. Sometimes he would act as intermediary and charge a commission in dollars. Seizing the moment, Petko would stay in Arica for a few days taking in the sun and try to bring his elevated red blood cell count—common among people living in La Paz—down to a reasonable level.

  “Durbin talk about half-breed woman. I have half-breed woman and guarantee you is most exquisite thing. I cannot compare with Tabarís girls or rich girls with fur coats, but guarantee you that this half-breed girl makes me happy. She tastes like the earth. She know everything naturally and do not have to take classes in Marquis apartment.”

  “I met your French girl,” Marquis said to Tréllez. “She was a real babe.”

  “Alderete made her go back to France. He offered to buy her an apartment, but that son of Satan couldn’t please her even with a million dollars.”

  “I used to see her walking an enormous dog at the Plaza Avaroa,” remarked the Marquis.

  “I bought it from Carlos Víctor Aramayo, the tin baron,” said Tréllez. “He sold it to me because it used to eat the plants at his house on Avenida Arce . . . She was a delicious girl,” he continued nostalgically. “I met her in Paris in the Lafayette department store. She was a saleswoman. Back then I was Bolivia’s ambassador.”

  “You couldn’t resist,” said Durbin.

  “An ambassador is an ambassador, despite the fact that our country isn’t exactly a superpower. I miss her, even though it’s been a few years since I last saw her.”

  “Devil sent that Alderete bastard to earth to do evil bidding. Everything I hear about him involves dirty trick.”

  “Did he do anything to you?” asked the Marquis.

  “We do not run in same circles,” said Petko. “He lives in mining towns.”

  “They tell me he could be named a minister in Ballivián’s next cabinet.”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me,” said the Marquis. “He has an impressive résumé.”