American Visa (17 page)

I kept walking and then dropped anchor at the corner of Colón and Comercio. I was as confused as a Saharan on the high seas. For starters, because I'd never been so close to so much money before; second, because I was playing along with a game that was threatening to become reality; and third, because I was scared to death just thinking about it.

I walked back up Colón. I tried getting into Our Lady of Carmen Church, which faced the old house, but the entrance was closed. There were just a couple of inebriated beggars outside. The cold was growing more intense by the minute. Off in the distance, I could hear the roar of the crowd jammed into Hernando Siles Stadium. Crossing Ballivián Street, I came upon an open pharmacy. The pharmacist, a balding man with an optimistic look about him, was fixated on the soccer game on the radio. An aging, nearly toothless prostitute was wandering about with little hope of reeling in a customer. She approached me and asked what time it was. I told her.

“You don't want to talk for a while?” I asked.

She observed me as if she were having a close encounter of the third kind. “What about?”

“I'm not from around here and I feel lost,” I explained. “I haven't said hi to anyone for a week.”

She smiled, hiding her teeth. Thirty years prior she must have been a very beautiful woman. “Where are you from?” she asked.

“Uyuni.”

“Where's that?”

“Down south. It's colder there than it is here.”

“
Brrr
. I'm from the Chaco. It gets hot over there. You've never been to the Chaco?”

“What is there to do in the Chaco?”

“Go fishing in the Pilcomayo River.”

“You're going back there when you retire?”

“Retire from what?”

“You don't work?”

“Don't play dumb with me. What are you doing just standing here?”

“Nothing.”

“You don't want to go for a walk?”

“With this cold, it would be useless for me to even try.”

“I'll warm you up.” She lifted up her skirt a little, revealing a soccer player's thigh.

“Looks tasty, but I can't.”

“Twenty plus the room.”

“You must have been really beautiful once . . . you still are,” I said.

She opened up her purse, unzipped a pocket, and showed me a photograph. “This is from when I was fifteen.”

I was right. She had been a precious little thing with a clean face, full of promise. I felt bad for having started up the conversation with her. The photo depressed me.

“It must be a long and sad story.”

“Mine? Not so much. I don't regret anything. I had good times and bad. Things get tougher when you get older. The most important thing is to enjoy being young while you can. When you're old you only need a few pesos to eat . . . I'm gonna get going. If I don't find anyone, tomorrow will be a rough day.”

She walked off with a certain Andean majesty. Years of wear and tear had taken a toll on her black coat, which looked like it weighed two hundred pounds.

Around 10 o'clock the Mercedes appeared like a beautiful cat under the moonlight, shining and stealthy. It stopped. The driver honked three times and then turned off the motor. I barely had time to take a leak on the side of a thick wall. When I returned, the opulent owner of that marvelous machine emerged from the house carrying Severo's duffel bag over his shoulder. He got into the car so fast I couldn't make out his face. The Mercedes roared, and then smoothly glided away.

The empty street seemed to exacerbate the night chill. The thunderous roar of fifty thousand shouting people broke out in Miraflores. The druggist lifted up his arms. Goal for El Tigre. Severo left the eatery and walked nonchalantly up Colón. He disappeared inside the big house and I was again left alone. My abdomen started to ache, and all of a sudden I had to go to the bathroom. That kind of luxury could wait. My nerves were playing a bad joke on me, so I entered the store and bought an Alka-Seltzer. The pharmacist handed me a glass of water.

“Two to one,” he said happily. “Five minutes left.”

Then Severo and Arminda emerged. She clutched her briefcase tightly under her right arm. They planted themselves on the edge of the sidewalk and hailed the first taxi passing down Colón. The comings and goings had ended, and now the questions began. I asked, and Mario Alvarez responded. Entangled in a web of deductions and suspicions and frozen stiff by the La Paz night, my mind short-circuited. The question was:
To follow or not to follow?

“I need something to drink,” I said out loud.

I headed up to the north side of town, where night falls amidst poverty, promiscuity, and despair.

Part Two

Chapter 8

A
ll the noise and people in that Bolivian Calcutta
were making it impossible to think straight. At the head of Figueroa Street, steps away from Plaza Alonso de Mendoza, I chanced upon El Yungueño, a small dive filled with lushes who were always celebrating something, be it their misery or their happiness. A tall, dark-skinned woman with a supple figure was standing and drinking beside the bar in the company of two lowlifes dressed in jackets and jeans. As I entered, the woman winked at me suggestively. The guys, cheap pimps for sure, stood watch over their charges and pretended not to see me. The owner of the bar was a hefty, slovenly lady who could easily have passed for the driver of a twenty-ton truck. She poured me a beer without even asking.

I started to mull things over. Time was short. To carry out my project, I first needed to acquire a lead club, a silent and efficient instrument. A gun was out of the question, since it was going to cost me at least two hundred dollars. Once I had the lead club, the second thing was to draw up a more or less rational plan. It didn't make sense to do the robbery during office hours because of all the gold sellers hanging around. The ideal thing was to catch Arminda when she wasn't with Severo; that way, the armed son of a bitch couldn't blow my brains out. I had a single window for finishing Arminda off with a crushing blow to the neck: between the moment her gorilla-in-training saw her to the apartment and when the rich guy with the Mercedes showed up.

I had it all figured out: Arminda bought the gold with the money the rich guy brought her. When they got together at her apartment, the gold was swapped for dollars, which in turn served to buy more gold. You didn't need the mind of Stephen Hawking to put two and two together. I wasn't interested in the gold, only in the dollars.

A second prostitute, a tiny and chubby girl with the expression of a graceless circus clown, joined the others at the bar. One of the pimps started to stroke her back with about as much tenderness as a bear. I needed an accomplice to help me tie up loose ends, but I had to act fast. As I lost myself in thought, a scandal broke out in the street. The police had detained a drunken pickpocket for trying to make off with a woman's purse. They locked him up in a car and then left with their sirens blasting, as if they had just caught some big shot from the Medellin cartel.

The air seemed to thicken. In the mood for some native victuals, I made my way toward the Uruguay Market. There, I settled onto a stool underneath a plastic tarp and ate an entire chicken. The chicken was so spicy that I was forced to drink a beer. A half-breed lady wrapped in an alpaca blanket and emerald flowing skirts served me a ladleful of potatoes sautéed in onion, which extinguished the fire raging inside my stomach. Riffraff and laborers were consuming two-peso dishes of tripe and lamb stew. When the half-breed lady served me a strong yet delicious coffee, I felt like new. If I was going to digest that late dinner, the wisest thing was to start walking. I chose Avenida Buenos Aires, the most diverse and exotic artery in La Paz and the one most crammed with people. I wandered past the sellers of raw meat and the fruit stands, past the tents containing coca leaves from the Yungas, past the music vendors, the glass dealers, the candy stores, and the grocery stores with dizzying quantities of rice, corn, and spices. I passed in front of the sellers of handmade leather goods, the bakeries specializing in wedding cakes, and the shoe stores.

At 11 o'clock, as I approached the Puente Abaroa, I observed drunkards trying to hide between enormous bags of bananas and pineapples as they awkwardly mounted half-breed whores. I was tired, but I wanted to get even more tired, stop thinking about the visa and the robbery, and fall asleep; “to sleep and sleep no more.” Up ahead were three-peso barbershops, toilet paper sellers, leather workers, heavy trucks, porters unloading manioc and red peppers, sweetshops, and ice cream stores. I also saw vendors selling canned liquor, weaving shops, chicken joints, and cheap watering holes crawling with vagrant coke heads.

“Don Mario, Don Mario!” I heard all of a sudden.

An unusual looking young woman was motioning to me from a doorway. I touched my index finger to my chest.

“Yes, you! Don't you recognize me?”

A flesh-and-blood apparition, she looked far-out even in comparison with the rest of the street. The lady wouldn't stop smiling as she came closer, batting her eyelashes just like Pierrot before a circus act.

“It's me, Gardenia.”

“Gardenia! What are you doing here?”

“I usually come here with my friends for
api
and empanadas before we go out on the town. Come in, it's on me.”

I tried to bow out, but Gardenia, with an effeminate sweep of his hand, grabbed me by the arm with the strength of a teenager. Without further ado, he showed me around. The most fecund imagination could not have envisioned the scene before my eyes. A dozen or so transvestites decked out in bizarre outfits were occupying four tables and drinking
api
. Gardenia introduced me to the owner, a guy with whitish skin and curly hair.

“This is Don Félix,” Gardenia said.

Don Félix appeared to be an older gay man who spent his days running a business frequented by young deviants, whom he managed to somehow control.

“Delighted,” he enunciated slowly.

Chubby and well-dressed, he seemed obsessed with hygiene; his hair was parted in the middle and his skin was smooth. His gaze was both playful and mocking. I guessed that he was over sixty, but he had the sense of humor of a mischievous girl.

“Don Félix is going to make you some empanadas to die for,” Gardenia said.

Don Félix invited me to sit down with Gardenia at a table. “Let me get you some
api
,” he said, walking away.

“It's weird running into you here,” Gardenia said to me.

“I ate an entire chicken for dinner. It was too much,” I said. “I had no idea there were places like this on Avenida Buenos Aires. Where did all these transvestites come from?”

“Half-breeds dressing up like girls are a dime a dozen,” Gardenia said knowingly.

“From what I can tell, you're the only white person and the only one who looks like a girl. The others look like carnival characters.”

“Don't be so mean. You'd never know it with some of them.”

“Maybe if the victim drinks half a bottle of
pisco
first . . .”

Gardenia let out a girlish giggle. It felt like I was seeing him, or her, for the first time. He was almost my height, about 5'9", and too pretty to pass for a guy. Nature had bestowed upon him a harmony of features that was incongruous with the male sex. He had light brown eyes that were practically covered by his eyelashes, long like the legs of a giant mosquito, and a pointed nose that complemented his finely chiseled face. His full lips over a wide mouth looked like those of an African fashion model. He was wearing a conservative purple sweater with white pants, worthy of a stroll along a seaside promenade. His delicate, graceful hands didn't remain still for a second. They reminded me of the hands of my cousin who used to embroider tablecloths.

“One glass of
api
a day, and say goodbye to your stomach,” I commented. “I think you've convinced yourself that you're an old man.”

“I'm old enough to know not to overdo it with that stuff,” I said. “I bet all the Indians here think you're a real-life angel. Don't tell me you'll get in bed with any of them for a few pesos.”

“I come here to spend time with my girlfriends. But Don Félix's friends are good catches. They're old, married, and still in the closet, so they come up for air every once in a while. I actually work in a house in Sopocachi. Only classy folks go there.”

“And these guys?” I asked, pointing to the other transvestites.

“They hang out at Plaza Kennedy, on Evaristo Valle, or at the Plaza del Estudiante. They're twenty-peso half-breeds.” He laughed and covered his mouth.

“Don Antonio told me you're from the cream of Sucre.”

“We have a solid pedigree. My family lives in Montevideo. We used to live in Sucre until they realized I was hopeless. They couldn't stand the idea that I was gay. They would've been happier if I'd caught leprosy. Years ago we used to be called fags because we were supposedly degenerates, but now people just say we're sick or sexually maladjusted.”