Andean Express

by Juan de Recacoechea

Ricardo approached Father Moreno, who was now talking with Carla Marlene. Underneath the table, the contortionist was tickling one of his calves. As the train neared the border, the union leader seemed to be losing his fear of being recognized and his movements became looser and more playful.

  “I want to ask you another favor,” said Ricardo.

  “Let me guess.”

  “What time are you thinking of going to bed?”

  “When the card game is over.”

  “Sure?”

  “Would you doubt the word of a poor follower of Saint Francis, Carla Marlene?” asked Moreno, looking at her.

  The contortionist held out her hand to Ricardo.

  “This young man caught us,” said Moreno.

  “Oh really?”

  “He saw everything.”

  Carla Marlene let out a mischievous laugh. “Everything?”

  “Well,” said Ricardo, “I saw some and imagined the rest.”

  “We’re a couple,” explained Carla Marlene.

  Father Moreno nodded, without too much fervor.

  “We’re getting married in Chile,” she said.

  “You’re lucky,” said Ricardo.

  Carla Marlene suddenly stiffened. “I’m afraid of the dark. There’s nobody out there. If we get stopped, no one will help us.”

  “So, can I count on you, Father?” Ricardo said, ignoring her.

  Then, with a look of phony naïvete, Carla Marlene asked Ricardo whom he planned to take to the cabin.

  “I guess I don’t have a choice,” Moreno said.

  Ricardo left the dining car as Alderete was making his way in with a bottle of whiskey under his arm. Alderete tried to challenge him with a stare; Ricardo passed so close that he could smell the accountant’s cheap cologne, but he simply ignored the man and headed to his own cabin. Alderete watched Ricardo’s steps like a hunter; upon seeing him enter his cabin, Alderete continued straight ahead to the poker players’ table.

  Moments later, Ricardo emerged from his cabin and knocked on the Alderetes’ door. He waited for a moment and then continued over to Doña Clara’s.

  “Hi,” he greeted Gulietta. “Aren’t you going to watch the card game?”

  “I’ll wait for you,” she said in a hushed voice.

  “Who is it?” asked Doña Clara.

  “Ricardo; he’s come to say goodbye.”

  Gulietta kissed him cautiously. “I’ll see you in a bit.”

  “Good night, Doña Clara,” said Ricardo.

  Back in the corridor, the steward was sipping maté tea from a gourd, Argentine-style. Ricardo removed a fifty-peso bill from his wallet and placed it in the upper pocket of the steward’s jacket.

  “What’s this for?”

  “You’ll let me know when her husband comes back.”

  “That’s very risky, young man. Don’t get yourself into trouble. He’s a brute. He might kill you.”

  “It’s worth it,” said Ricardo.

  “To be frank with you, I won’t have time.” He tried to return the money, but Ricardo stopped him.

  “It doesn’t matter. If you can, great . . . if not . . .”

  Ricardo didn’t have to wait long. No sooner had he entered the cabin than Gulietta arrived and flipped on the small light above the sink. A tenuous glow illuminated the contours of the room. They could barely see each other, and this enhanced the ambience of tense sexual excitement. Ricardo removed her sweater and placed it on the upper bunk. He went about unbuttoning her blouse with the stealth of a safe-cracker.

  “Can you take off my pants?” he asked.

  “Is that what I’m supposed to do?”

  “French women do it. I’ve seen it before in movies.”

  Gulietta obeyed. The only sound was that of the wind striking the window with unusual force.

  She was still wearing panties and a bra. Her body exuded a fresh, pungent scent. Gulietta nimbly climbed the ladder and Ricardo followed, trembling. He stared at her pinkish-white bottom in the dim light as she ascended, the sight of which rendered him incapable of breathing calmly.

  “It feels wonderful to be up so high. It makes this very special,” said Gulietta.

  They covered themselves with the gray blanket provided by the railway. Their lips touched, cautiously at first and then excitedly. She emitted faltering moans and he started to pant like a bicycle racer. He took one of her hands and showed her the way. It was the first time she had caressed the embodiment of a man’s energy and desire. She understood that he was offering her the symbol of his virility, the very part which used to inspire laughter and dirty talk at bedtime with her classmates at boarding school in Buenos Aires. Curled up against him, her naked body looked completely vulnerable.

  “I’m more nervous than I was this afternoon.”

  “Don’t worry about the priest. He’s watching the poker game and your husband is up against a pack of revenge-thirsty dogs.”

  Alderete trusted his lucky stars. He knew the coalition of rancorous men before him was eager to rip him off mercilessly. Even so, he wasn’t afraid; he was difficult to take down in poker.

  “Good evening,” he said as he approached.

  “Don Nazario,” replied Ruiz with a hint of sarcasm, “are you itching for a fight?”

  “Where should I sit?”

  “In back, Don Nazario,” said Ruiz in an angelic voice.

  Alderete set the bottle of whiskey on top of the table. “We’ll start with this one, and then you guys can order a second. If we make it to a third, we’ll split the cost.”

  Petko looked perturbed as he made room for Nazario to squeeze by. The Marquis, Durbin, and Tréllez were seated at the other side of the table, and Petko and Ruiz were in front. The table was made of imported wood and its smooth top shone.

  “The cards?”

  “You do not trust,” said Petko as Alderete examined the deck with great care.

  “I know who I’m playing with,” responded Alderete.

  “Maybe we should be the ones saying that,” said Durbin.

  “It looks like these haven’t been marked,” said Alderete. “How’s everything at the Jewish bank?”

  “I am not banker,” answered Petko.

  “Actually, I’ve always wondered what you do for a living,” said Alderete.

  “It does not matter,” said Petko. “We came to play cards.”

  Tréllez served the whiskey.

  “It’s not just any drink,” said Alderete. “Top-shelf Scotch.”

  “Top or not top, whiskey is whiskey,” said Petko.

  The person with the highest card would go first. Durbin drew an ace.

  Anita settled in at the table in back, escorted by the Franciscan and Carla Marlene. Alderete noticed Father Moreno.

  “Isn’t your twin brother a union leader?”

  Father Moreno turned pale; Carla Marlene pinched his backside.

  “You’re obsessed,” said the priest.

  “I’m good with faces,” said Alderete.

  Durbin dealt the cards with flair. His green eyes avoided looking at Alderete’s face; it would unleash his memory and this wasn’t a good moment to hash over the past.

  From her vantage point, Anita had a full view of Alderete’s hand. A rectangular mirror also reflected the hands of Ruiz and Petko. Anita had been instructed to memorize Alderete’s cards and, through the use of sign language, send messages to the rest of the players, except for Petko, who wasn’t participating in the plot to take down Alderete.

  The poker theatrics kicked off with a toast, which was followed by the first squabbling. Durbin raised his glass and proposed a drink to the Republic of Ireland.

  Everyone agreed except for Alderete. “The Irish are the ones who always take a beating from the English, right?”

  “There’s a kind of civil war between the Catholics and the Protestants in Northern Ireland,” Durbin clarified.

  “I can never tell the difference between the ones from the north and your kind.”
<
br />   “It’s because you’re ignorant and you don’t know the history.”

  “Don’t insult me, goddamnit!” snapped Alderete.

  “If you want, we can fix this some other way,” suggested Durbin.

  “Señores, please. We just started the game, and here we are, about to come to blows. Let’s play like civilized people,” Ruiz interjected.

  “A toast to my wife, who will make me happy for the rest of my days,” said Alderete as he sipped on his drink.

  The Marquis laughed and Durbin pretended to have a coughing fit.

  “What are you laughing about?” demanded Alderete.

  “These guys laugh everything, khuya,” said Petko.

  The first few hands favored Alderete: simple three-of-a-kinds and two pairs. His expression resembled a smile, but also conveyed a coldness reminiscent of a rabid mastiff. A second round of drinks was served. Petko was working on a straight; lady luck shined on him and he drew just the card he needed.

  Alderete had three aces. Petko balked at Alderete’s thousand-peso wager. Anita winked at him, but Petko was playing by the books.

  “Khuya, I not want these things,” he said.

  “What things?” asked Alderete.

  “Petko’s talking to himself,” said Tréllez.

  “Because nobody’s listening, just like when you talk in Congress.”

  “At least I speak proper Spanish,” said Tréllez, “and not some nouveau riche slang.”

  Petko upped the bet five hundred pesos. Alderete hesitated and scrutinized Petko’s face in the hope of finding some trace of a bluff. Petko was staring at his cards without raising his gaze. Alderete matched his bet.

  Petko held out his straight. “Go ahead and top that.”

  Alderete examined the cards one by one. He threw his three aces on the table, served himself another whiskey, called the waiter over, and asked for ice. The waiter headed to the kitchen and they could hear him chopping up ice in a bucket.

  “Deal,” said Durbin. “When this guy doesn’t want to listen, he won’t even hear his own conscience.”

  “I’ll do it,” said Alderete, ignoring Durbin.

  They handed him the cards. Alderete shuffled them several times.

  “Not go overboard,” advised Petko. “We not cheaters.”

  “I know what I’m doing. Cut,” said Alderete.

  The Marquis performed two cuts and handed the cards back to Alderete, who had started whistling a popular tune.

  “I like it when you’re happy, Nazario,” said Ruiz.

  “That’s Don Nazario to you,” said Alderete. “When did I give you permission to call me tú?”

  Ruiz bit his tongue. Alderete dealt the cards with an exasperating slowness.

  “How is it that you all ended up on the same train?” Alderete asked.

  “It’s vacation season,” said the Marquis.

  “Don’t make me laugh, you on vacation?”

  “You were on vacation once in Valparaíso,” said the Marquis. “You stayed at my house almost a whole month. Don’t you remember?”

  Alderete ignored him and scrutinized his hand. He had pairs of tens and eights. The Marquis also drew pairs, but his were queens and jacks. Petko had five different cards, and Durbin held pairs of kings and aces. Tréllez held a straight and Ruiz, three nines. They all asked for more cards, except Tréllez. Alderete received an eight, the Marquis a card that was of no use. Petko salvaged a pair; Ruiz cursed the card that Alderete had dealt him. Durbin, to his relief, got a magnificent and unexpected king. Alderete removed a handful of bills from his inner coat pocket and counted two thousand pesos. Durbin raised his cards so Anita could see them. With a quick peep, she spotted Alderete’s full house, then patted her own back, indicating that Durbin could bet.

  Durbin raised the bar to three thousand pesos. Alderete guessed that the Irishman was bluffing. Tréllez folded.

  “Five hundred on top of Durbin’s three thousand,” Alderete wagered after a long pause.

  “Let’s see ’em,” said Durbin.

  Alderete swore when Durbin revealed his hand.

  *Russian expletive.

  The train came to a halt at the Campero station—another abandoned settlement in the middle of the Andean plain. It was drizzling, and aside from the railway building there was no other light in the area. The train woke the dogs, eliciting a chorus of barks; the local railway employee was sporting a rubber poncho and a sombrero. The engineer, Quispe, got out to stretch his legs and inspected the engine with a lantern. Meanwhile, the card game continued amid misunderstandings, arguments, and caustic remarks. The group had finished a bottle of Scotch and everyone was a little tipsy. Alderete won some hands, lost others, and the plot to clear him out had not yet acquired any momentum.

  This was because he hadn’t yet consumed enough whiskey to lose control of his emotions, at which point he would become dangerous and vulnerable. With the alcohol rising to his head, however, Alderete, the ex-accountant-turned-bourgeois-gentleman-miner, was beginning to uproot hidden feelings from deep inside his tension-ridden soul. He was returning to his humble origins, not with nostalgia or tenderness but with rage. He was becoming sharp-tongued and sarcastic. This is what his tablemates were waiting for, except for Petko, who remained focused on the game and unaware of what was being stirred up around him.

  “Why are we stopping?” asked Alderete.

  “The engine has to rest,” said Ruiz.

  “What the hell do you know about engines?” Alderete countered mockingly.

  “I travel to Chile and Argentina all the time.”

  “Just to rip off idiots on the train. People know about you. One of these days the police will catch you.”

  “I don’t do anything illegal,” said Ruiz.

  The Marquis sent the cards flying gracefully down onto the table. Alderete drew four jacks. Before he could pull them up against his chest, Anita glimpsed his hand—Alderete would bet until the bitter end. Anita Romero had not only worked as a hostess, a whore, and a madam, she was also a bit of a magician. When she saw the Marquis’s troubled gaze, she worked out a way to tip him off to Alderete’s hand. The Marquis made use of his knee and Durbin took the hint. He in turn passed the warning on to Tréllez, who at that moment was deep in the red. They needed four queens, four kings, or four aces to beat Alderete’s four jacks.

  Ruiz got the message as well and four majestic queens sprung forth under the table for precisely the person who needed them. Tréllez already had two queens and tacked on two more as a gift. The smoke from Petko’s cigar was a formidable curtain that helped shroud hand and eye movements.

  In a ploy to confuse the others, Alderete asked for a card and started mixing it with the rest of his hand. He trusted that another player would open the pot; his hope became reality when Petko, who had garnered a three-of-a-kind, opened with a bet of five hundred pesos, setting off the boom of the night—and everyone got into the mix.

  “One thousand over his five hundred,” said Alderete.

  The ex-accountant’s enemies sensed that the trap was set and that the fox was about to step on shaky ground. The five of them each tossed another thousand pesos into the pot.

  Tréllez studied his cards once again, lining them up in his left hand while, with his right, holding up an extremely long cigarette in a mother-of-pearl holder. He furrowed his brow and smiled like a giddy young boy who had just come across a photo of a naked woman.

  Everyone raised the pot an additional three thousand. The Marquis watched the pile of money with a certain eagerness. “Two thousand more on top of the three thousand,” he said.

  “Too much for me. I am out,” announced Petko.

  Durbin, Ruiz, and Alderete placed bets.

  “Why don’t we up it five thousand?” said Alderete.

  A circle of onlookers formed around the table.

  “Alderete’s five thousand and another ten thousand,” said Tréllez.

  Durbin and Alderete answered the challenge
.

  “Better yet, twenty thousand,” declared Alderete as he laid out the money.

  Durbin produced twenty thousand pesos in brand-new bills, a reflection of the inflationary spiral afflicting Bolivia. Tréllez followed suit and added: “Twenty thousand plus thirty more.”

  Alderete glanced over at Durbin.

  “That’s it for me,” announced the Irishman.

  “Frenchie Tréllez’s thirty plus twenty more,” said Alderete.

  “Better a Frenchie than a pillager of mines,” answered Tréllez.

  “Are you betting or not?”

  “Fifty thousand pesos on top of this squirt’s twenty,” said Tréllez.

  “Where did you get the money?”

  “What is it to you?”

  “I’ll match it,” said Alderete. “I’d like to see you call me a squirt again later.”

  Alderete displayed four jacks and Tréllez, with a princelike gesture, revealed four beautiful queens.

  Alderete looked like a sand sculpture being slowly washed away by ocean waves. Overcome by a rush of cold sweat and a sudden spell of rage, he began to break down. “That’s impossible!”

  “What’s impossible?”

  “I thought I saw another queen somewhere else,” said Alderete.

  “You can see what you want to see,” replied Durbin. “Are you calling us cheaters?”

  “I want to count the queens,” he said, his eyes red with anger. They handed him the cards. He searched for the cursed queens, but found only the four. “I saw one more. I won’t be played for a fool.”

  “It could be altitude,” said Petko. “Maybe you see things that do not exist.”

  “Stay out of this. Damn Russian ex-pat; it’s too bad the communists didn’t catch you.”

  “Khuya, bastard. I Russian émigré, but honorable; difference is you want be white, but nature cannot make miracles like that.”

  Alderete went searching again for the card under the table.

  “You look ridiculous,” said the Marquis.

  “Nobody messes with me. It’s not about the money. I just won’t stand for looking like a fool.”

  “You are fool even if not lose at cards,” said Petko.

  Alderete forced the other players to rummage through their pockets, setting off an uproar of laughter. Their trusted ally, Anita, began her retreat. Even though he looked as if he were suffering from a seizure, Alderete happened to notice the mirror at his back. He stood up and went over to the table where Father Moreno and Carla Marlene were still seated.