A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism (8 page)

"No. Of course not. I'm saying—well, I don't know." She inhaled sharply. As someone who'd made it her life's business to be one thing and that one thing thunderously, she had never succeeded in sorting out the complex nature of her own son's relationship with this issue. She said nothing else. Despite being obdurate on many scores, she had no trouble spotting true futility and was not ashamed to give in when it was due. So she said, "Fair enough."

And that was that.

Gabriel was in one of the puffy armchairs in Gloria's lobby, watching the two receptionists argue about something he couldn't hear, when Lenka arrived. The dark lobby had the whispering quality of a library, and when the guard opened the door for her, the white light outside seared itself into his eyes so he could not see her well at first. She came into focus: her ponytail yanked so tight that to his still-blotted vision it looked as if she'd shaved her head. He stood. Her face looked scrubbed. She seemed somber, with her thick black eyebrows, her no-bullshit gait. She had on a pair of skinny jeans and a black Adidas nylon jacket, zipped to her chin. Just when he was about to cower, her eyes met his and she lit up, smiling widely. The transition was so abrupt that he blurted, "Wow," and she laughed, leaned in, and kissed him on the cheek. She led the way back out, explaining that she had to pick Ernesto up from school. "I hope you don't mind, but I have to drop him off at home."

He said he didn't mind. In fact, he liked the idea of running an errand with her. He said he liked Ernesto, but she didn't react, so he added that Ernesto seemed smart.

"He gets that from me," she said, but he didn't know her well enough yet to tell if she was joking or not.

"Who takes care of him while you're at work?" he said, intending to find out if she had a boyfriend or a husband.

"My ex-husband's wife."

"You live with your ex-husband's wife?"

"Yes. And I live with my ex-husband. And I live with my brother, my mother, my grandmother, and my son. It's like a comedy. A comedy with no jokes." He laughed and she went on. "Really, we are a big happy family, but it's not simple. My brother and my ex-husband have a company—they are electricians, and they have lived in that house for a long time. My father moved in because he cannot afford to live alone anymore. Ernesto and I used to live in Miraflores, but it became difficult when I started working for Evo, so now we are all together. This is the story."

"That sounds—" He wanted to make a joke, but nothing came to mind.

"It's insanity," she said. "But we are pretty poor here, you know?" She said it in a matter-of-fact way. Like a lot of other Bolivians he'd met, she had a bluntness about the country's poverty that defied him to express an opinion. Were they proud of their poverty? They certainly weren't ashamed of it. It was just there, like that statue of Neptune in Plaza Murillo. He said nothing. It wasn't clear how accommodating she was socially. People in her line of work were typically, at a minimum, hyperactively concerned with pleasing others. She did not seem to be afflicted by that problem. She was just tired. She'd wanted to go on a date with him, but now she was exhausted, and the date itself had turned into an errand. That was his guess. She pulled the keys from her pocket. "This is my car," she said.

The paint on her busted two-door Datsun had lost its gloss and was a dull beige now. She'd put one of those bright red steering wheel locks on—which seemed strange, because no one would want to steal a car like that. The price of the car couldn't be much more than the cost of a tank of gas. They got in, and she tossed the lock onto the floor by his feet and started the engine. He reached for his seat belt, but there was none. The seat belts had already been sold.

She had pendants dangling from the rearview mirror, including one of St. Christopher. There was a sticker of the Virgin Mary on the glove box with a message beneath it:
Nuestra Señora Del Sagrado Corazón, rogad por nosotros.

She accelerated down the street and turned into a thicket of gridlock. In front of them a howitzer-sized pipe protruded from the grimy rear end of a Tang-colored bus, and when traffic inched forward, a heavy black cloud of exhaust barfed out onto them. Lenka's window was open. Exhaust filled the car. She didn't seem to notice. Down there, at street level, the cacophony was simply astounding.

Watching her drive, he felt even more attracted to her. It made no sense, but he'd noticed that he got turned on by women doing monotonous things: sitting in traffic, sewing buttons on a shirt, cleaning eyeglasses; it was all wildly, weirdly sexy. There was something alluring about the habitual execution of a dull and necessary task—like a preview of married life, but viewed through an enthralling lens of newness.

"What do you want to know about Evo?" she said.

"As much as possible," he said. "Like, what's he going to do once he takes power?"

"He hasn't been elected yet," she said.

"Right, but has he picked his cabinet members? The finance minister?"

She glanced in the rearview at the traffic. "We're going to be here all day," she said and pushed into first gear, yanked the steering wheel to the right so that the passenger side of the car lurched up on the sidewalk, and then accelerated around the car in front of them.

In this way, half on the road and half on the sidewalk, she sped past the traffic and then turned, wheels screaming, at the intersection. The underside of her car scraped against the curb as they swerved back into traffic.

When she turned to him, Gabriel let go of the dashboard. "Sorry, I'm impatient," she said. "So, you wanted to know who the finance minister will be if Evo wins the election?"

"Yes," he said.

"Well, I can't tell you," she said. "Evo wants these decisions to be completely secret. If he wins, he'll announce all of the cabinet appointments at once the week before he takes office."

"We don't have to talk about Evo," he said.

"I don't know how to talk about anything else anymore. You understand?"

"I do."

They pulled up outside a school in a dreary neighborhood halfway up the hill to El Alto, and Ernesto jogged up to the car and leaped into the back seat. He leaned forward and kissed his mother on the cheek.

Gabriel held an open palm up to the back seat and Ernesto didn't do anything for a while, and then he punched it quickly twice. "Well done," Gabriel said.

"How was school?" she said.

Ernesto said it was fine. Lenka asked if he'd spoken to his teacher about Friday, and Ernesto nodded.

They drove in silence through La Paz's congested streets. These were neighborhoods that Gabriel hadn't seen. Some of the streets were so steep they were nearly walls. Messy nests of black wires perched around the tops of crooked telephone polls—all of it jerry-rigged. Homeowners had taken it upon themselves to patch potholes near their houses, but they used different fillers, so the road looked like an asphalt quilt. Still, these were not slums exactly. Gabriel looked at the buildings rolling past: all blocky two-story structures with large rectangular windows. Concrete posts rose like stalagmites from the roofs; rebar poles stretched forth like exposed bones. The rebar represented hope, he knew—it meant another level could be added to the structure, if money ever permitted.

The second time he had visited South America—for a semester of intensive study in Quito in his senior year at Brown—he hadn't wanted to leave. The day before he was to depart, he nearly tore up his ticket. It would sound trite, and it was trite, maybe, but he simply felt more
alive
down there, away from the strictures of the First World. It had been easy to overlook those strictures growing up in Claremont.

Lenka parked outside a huge and bleak house, shaped by architectural shorthand and painted a Soviet shade of pastel blue. Lenka and Ernesto got out and went inside while Gabriel waited in the car. Ahead, he could see a hazy slice of south La Paz, where the upper classes lived. Down there, the rocky hillsides gave way to soft dry soil and clay-rich badlands, which eroded into steep arroyos and vales of hoodoos. The earth beneath those suburbs was in a constant metamorphosis that required sophisticated foundations for the hilltop mansions, foundations that could easily cost twice as much as the buildings themselves. In San Pedro, Lenka's neighborhood, everything was cracked slabs of concrete. There was nothing living in sight. The cinder blocks hadn't even been painted on the more squalid houses.

Looking at it all, Gabriel found himself overwhelmed with a desire for a luxurious and spacious store or restaurant, somewhere in Manhattan at Christmastime, maybe: a sparkling oasis of ravenous retail. And even though he knew the feeling that the place would give him would be a lie—satisfaction imitating joy—the mirage was still tempting.

Lenka returned with her cell phone at her ear. She flung herself back behind the wheel so quickly he caught a whiff of her soapy shampoo. "
Bueno señor, pero, ya
"—she checked the mirror, put the car into gear
—"pero ya estoy con un periodista. Sí, ya.
"

She listened, checked the mirror, released the parking brake.

"
Pues, sí—hablamos entonces.
" She hung up the phone, shoved it under her thigh, started off down the street.

"The future president?" Gabriel said.

She just smiled. "Gabriel, have you been to Blueberries?"

"Were you talking about me to Evo?"

"Does that make you feel special?" She grinned at him.

She kept smiling quietly, eyes back on the road. They drove through the tunnel connecting San Pedro and Sopocachi, and on the other side Lenka slowed and stopped at a red light. Dusk showed La Paz at its finest: the cool air, papaya sun in a cobalt sky, craggy mountains lit vividly. The comparatively well-heeled denizens of Sopocachi walked past, some muttering into cell phones.

Gabriel asked her if she'd had a lot of press to deal with.

"Yes." She pulled the parking brake, took her foot off the clutch, and scratched her ankle. "There were reporters from every newspaper calling us all afternoon. Fiona called, actually. I told her that I was going to meet you later."

"Oh
God,
" he said and rolled his eyes, aware that he was tipping his hand.

Lenka's smile widened and she checked to see that the light was still red. She looked back at him. She had magnificent eyelashes, like palm fronds dipped in pitch and dried in the sun, and when she blinked he could almost feel the breeze. "Why do you say 'Oh
God
' like that?"

He shrugged. "What do you think?"

"Did you sleep with her?"

He grinned guardedly, stuck somewhere between embarrassed and proud. She shook her head. He was surprised by how relieved he was to make the admission. "Does it surprise you?" he said.

"No, it's just funny." Now she was lying. "What was Fiona like in bed?" she asked.

"Do you know what a mechanical bull is?"

She laughed, shook her head. "You are bad, Gabriel."

"That's true," he said.

Someone behind them honked, and she put the car back into gear.

A block later, she parked on the north side of Plaza Avaroa. The plaza slanted slightly to the southeast and was full of knobby, tumor-laden maples that stooped behind worn metal benches. Restaurants and cafés packed the promenades on two sides of the square; the other two were occupied by a mixture of colonial houses and old ministerial buildings. On the distant westerly corner, the American ambassador's former residence, a once stately mansion, was dark and abandoned now. The residence had been too exposed there on the square, too easily accessed by the mobs, and the ambassador had had to move down to the far corner of an obscure neighborhood in south La Paz.

***

When she asked him what he wanted to know, Gabriel leaned back and thought it through. The boisterous restaurant was packed with people, mostly leaning over two-person tables and talking animatedly. It seemed as if all of them were smoking at once. He didn't know why they called it Blueberries; nothing on the menu involved blueberries. He said, "It's all deep background right now, nothing for attribution. So, if you could tell me the next finance minister's name, I'd be eternally grateful."

She squinted at him, an expression somewhere between scolding and flirtatious.

"The name of the head of the central bank?" he continued. "Minister of the interior?"

She rolled her eyes. She had made it clear already that Evo would not be revealing the names of these people until January. It was a big deal to Evo. If she leaked one of the names, she'd be fired.

A gambit opened for him. With Lenka, he had little reason left to maintain his cover. Of course, if she let it out that he was there as an analyst for Calloway, Priya would probably fire him. And Lenka herself had little to no reason to want to talk to a hedge fund. She might do it anyway, and she might keep his secret, but these were far from certain, still, she knew everything he wanted to know. And he liked her a lot already, and the feeling seemed mutual, and if he told her the truth, she wouldn't have as much of a reason to withhold that information. He held his course, though. "Is he going to expropriate the natural gas?"

"He has said repeatedly that he plans to do that."

"Right." Gabriel paused, but she offered nothing else, so he said, "But does he mean it?"

She smiled, partially exasperated already. This was turning into more of an interview than he'd intended it to be.

He continued anyway, unable to stop himself. "And what about the mines?"

"Can I ask you a question?" she said.

"Anything," he said. The eye contact was steady, but her flirtation was dimming.

"What kind of questions are these?" she said.

"They are direct questions. If you want, I can ask what he plans to do once he takes control, but if that's what you prefer, then you should just give me a copy of your latest press release."

She had ordered tea, which now arrived. He watched as she drizzled pale honey over the floating tea bag until it started to sink. She put the honey down, and the bag rebounded, returned to the surface. She tugged on the string and the bag bobbed.