American Visa (19 page)

“A good lead club and a glass cutter,” I said.

He opened a bag at his feet and, to my surprise, flashed an extraordinary variety of clubs, switchblades, glass cutters, and knives. I selected a small but formidable club wrapped in leather. Just to prove he wasn't selling me garbage, the guy grabbed the club with one hand, held out the palm of the other, and gave it a whack that would have knocked my head off.

“You've got to hit on the neck,” he instructed me. “If you smack him on the head, you'll kill him.”

“How much?”

“Twenty pesos. Five for the glass cutter.” He picked a piece of glass off the ground and nicked it with the cutter. His gaze rested on mine, and then he split the glass in two with a single chop. “You'll need a suction pad with the cutter. Otherwise, the glass can fall onto the other side.”

I handed him three ten-peso bills.

“For five pesos I'll throw in a Peruvian porn magazine.”

“Not interested,” I said.

I stuffed the weapons in my pockets and walked toward the train station. At Plaza Kennedy, I entered a pool hall teeming with lowlifes, a sea of faces that would have made an SS boss nervous. I ordered a Huari beer. Behind the bar, a mirror leaned against the wall. There I was with a spaced-out expression; I recognized myself by my eyes, which seemed to be looking for an answer. I smiled but the image in the mirror stayed still. This meant the game was getting serious. It was no time for turning back or second thoughts.

I desperately needed some rest. After finishing my beer, I decided to head back to the hotel for a nap.

Chapter 9

B
y the time I awoke from my slumber,
it was around 4 o'clock in the afternoon. On my way out, I found Blanca in the lobby flipping through a fashion magazine. I asked if she wanted to join me for tea and she answered with a beautiful smile.

We walked slowly downtown and entered a café that offered a wide range of creole dishes and cuisine typical of Bolivia's eastern provinces. I settled for a bowl of rice pudding, while Blanca opted for rice, fried plantains, eggs, and beef. The place was small and clean, run by an attractive and efficient lady from Trinidad.

“She makes a lot of money selling this stuff,” Blanca said.

“You could start a place just like this in your hometown,” I responded.

“I would need around five thousand dollars.”

“I could get used to the heat.”

“There isn't a lot to do, but the people are nice. You could run the cash register. I'm terrible with numbers.”

“To grow old and die in a hammock, watching the wind blow over the
pampas
of Beni . . . it would be nirvana, Blanca. What else could I ask for?”

“Better than working like a dog in an American city.”

“If it weren't for my son, I wouldn't doubt it for a minute. But first I have to see him.”

“Doesn't he plan to come back?”

“What for? To be someone in this country you've got to get into politics, the drug game, or dirty business deals with the government. I'm a poor guy with no future. I can't do anything for him. I'll let him stay there. Even if he works as a laborer, he'll never run short of money in America.”

“I want to make a decent living and take it easy,” she said. “My life has been too hectic.”

“You'd never guess it. You look like an aspiring schoolteacher who's about to get her education degree.”

“The joke's on you.”

Living with Blanca for the rest of my life wasn't such a bad idea; she would be a lover, a mother, and a nurse, all in one. It was easy to put up with her. She didn't say much and when she did, she didn't talk nonsense. She had within her the serenity of the great rivers that traverse her homeland, the repose of the savannas lulled by the Amazonian sun. It was relaxing to spend time with her. She wasn't very cultured, but it didn't matter. She was intelligent and simple, courageous and patient. If I had met her ten years earlier, I wouldn't be at the crossroads I was at now. Of course, I still had the option of convincing her with a single word and changing my future; I could trash my visa plans and stop writing my screenplay for robbing Doña Arminda. But the idea was already planted in my head like a shrub in the tundra, deeply and tenaciously rooted. It was a cursed obsession that was growing and beginning to suffocate me.

We stood on the sidewalk opposite the Foreign Ministry. From one of the windows on the third floor, an official dressed up like a stage actor watched us with disdain. In the Plaza Murillo, Blanca took me by the hand as if we were a couple.

She retired to her room as soon as we returned to the Hotel California. She said she was going to shower and then try on a new pair of spandex shorts. She invited me to see her in full battle gear, but I was too busy preparing for what I was up against that night. Since this was to be my premiere as a violent criminal, I lay down on my bed and tried to recall some movie or television series or detective novel that would give me a clue as to what I should wear. The English, who tend to dress formally, usually put on a casual get-up of a raincoat and overalls to rob a bank. Dressing down might be a good way to dupe the police. As for the Americans, they generally wear jackets in which a revolver can be easily tucked away. I was in a bind because my weapon was a measly lead club. I ended up settling on the outfit I'd bought in Oruro to impress the U.S. consul, the elegant Prince of Wales suit, which would turn me into an enigma. Doña Arminda, the crowd at Yujra's bar, and the shoemaker on Colón Street had all seen me dressed like an impoverished gold runner, so it was wisest to go for a refined look.

When I went to shave, guess what the magical mirror had in store for me? A light-skinned face, large thick eyebrows, a thin straight nose, a mouth without much personality, a prominent chin that made women swoon, a wide forehead riddled with wrinkles that converged in a kind of delta, black wavy hair with a few specks of gray, and skin that cried out for some moisturizer. My face was run-of-the-mill, the kind you forget almost immediately. And yet, there was something striking about it, something I had cultivated like an exotic orchid: a moustache that you don't find every day in these Andean latitudes, a French-style moustache that curled up, à la Hercule Poirot. It was my touch of distinction, the thing that drove the ladies crazy when I went down on them. It wasn't a Mexican, Argentine, Brazilian, or half-breed moustache; it was a French moustache, and for what it was worth, it lent my appearance an enigmatic quality.

I vanished from the hotel like a ghost. The hostesses watching a Brazilian soap opera didn't see me, nor did the manager who was sweating a river and trying to sell six Italian tourists on the merits of the hotel, nor did the bellboy who was busy booting a shoeshiner out onto the street. Perfect! No one had seen me leave. I walked down Illampu and within a few minutes reached Plaza Eguino. Eight o'clock was still an hour away, so I took a seat in the patio of a café called Stephanie. Actually, “patio” is a bit of an exaggeration; they had simply arranged two tables on the sidewalk facing the plaza. At one of them, a pair of lovebirds held hands. With their lips nearly touching, they shared a dish of ice cream doused in chocolate syrup. A girl wrapped in a greasy apron took my order.

“A beer, but I don't want it if it's warm.”

On that windless afternoon under clear skies, Protestant preachers were singing a Christian rock song in the middle of the plaza. I thought about how within a few years, Bolivia and the rest of Latin America would cease to be majority-Catholic to make way for those singing missionaries who fought for their faith in the streets, mixing with the locals in an effort to disseminate simple but seductive beliefs. The money came from somewhere else, but that's the free-market era for you.

“Beer and tamales,” the girl said as she placed them on the table.

“I didn't ask for tamales.”

“They're free because it's the first day our oven is working,” the woman reassured me. “But just for today.”

Plaza Eguino serves as a kind of funnel through which thousands of people pass en route to buses headed for El Alto, the bedroom city that the MIR party naïvely baptized “The City of the Future.” The hustle and bustle starts at 7 o'clock in the evening. Ninety-nine percent of the people are dark-skinned, but every once in a while you'll come across a native or foreign white person. You can easily pick out the tourists by their style of dress, their height, and their skin color. The blond people look like ears of wheat in a pile of charcoal. The tourists seem happy and unworried; compared with Europe or the U.S., it's cheap to shop in Bolivia.

I was growing mesmerized by the bustle of the crowd, by the chanting of the Christians and the blaring horns of the buses, taxis, and minibuses stuck in traffic, when I saw her . . . none other than Isabel Esogástegui. If she was a celestial apparition in the bookstore, here in the Rosario neighborhood she was galactic. She was accompanied by a tall young man who appeared to be in a bad mood. There was a certain unkempt elegance about him. At that hour, there weren't too many hoodlums or vagrants on those desolate streets, but a woman of her pedigree was still taking a risk. She was wearing a raincoat and loafers, with a plaid wool scarf wrapped around her neck. When they passed by Stephanie's, I stood up and called out, “Isabel!”

She turned around and looked over without recognizing me.

“I'm Mario Alvarez . . . from Mabel Plata's book signing.”

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

I got a whiff of her expensive perfume. “I live in a hotel on Illampu Street. And you?”

“I came to pick up my brother. He loves hanging out here.”

“Won't you sit down?”

“Thanks, but as a matter of fact, today is his birthday and I've got to take him to his party. There are a hundred guests waiting for him.”

The birthday boy was a little older than Isabel, and, just like her, had refined, upper-class features. He was a handsome guy, with a lean yet robust build. He looked pale and had dark bags under his eyes, which wandered as if in their own far-off universe. From what Isabel had said and from his spaced-out expression, I gathered that he was high on some drug, probably homegrown Bolivian cocaine.

Without paying her any mind, the young man sat down and called for the waitress. “One dark coffee,” he requested.

“Tamales are free today,” the girl said.

He stared at her and then broke out in laughter. “What did she say?” he asked me.

“Tamales are on the house today; it's the first day they're offering them.”

“A black coffee, nothing in it,” he said. He flashed me an inquisitive glance, and Isabel had no choice but to settle in next to me.

I suddenly wanted her so badly that if the Devil himself had offered me five hundred years in hell in exchange for a relationship with her, I wouldn't have hesitated for a second. She looked gorgeous. She possessed the kind of beauty that seems unreal and invisible to poor guys like me; invisible because we don't even want to look at it.

“Hopefully the coffee will clear your head a little,” Isabel said.

The guy smiled, straightened his tie, and ran his palm through his blondish hair. “My name's Charles,” he said in an affable tone. “My dad is a serious anglophile. You don't get classier than the Brits. He went to school there.” Charles paused. “Since you're from around here, you must know Virrey Toledo Street . . . ?”

“No.”

“It's just past the train station and those shacks that the Bolivian Railway workers built to house the company bureaucrats.” Isabel's face turned red. She tried to shut him up, but he continued: “You have to jump over a wall and the house is right there, a little yellow house. I didn't leave the place for two days. Know why?”

“I can imagine.”

“Isn't it shocking?”

“Well, it's your birthday,” I said.

“I had forgotten all about my birthday. Besides, I couldn't care less. My mother planned this great party for me.”

“Go on, tell him your life story,” Isabel muttered.

The waitress brought him his coffee. As Charles sipped away, his mind cleared up enough for him to remember he had come in a car. The problem was, he didn't remember where he had parked it.

“You're so irresponsible!” Isabel exclaimed.

“Where do you usually leave it?” I asked.

“Sometimes in front of the train station, sometimes at Plaza Kennedy.”

“Drink your coffee and stop being such a pain,” Isabel said. “Let's go look for it.” She stood up and made as if to leave.

“I'm free until 8 o'clock,” I said. “If you'd like, I can help you find it. What kind of car is it?”

“A Toyota Corolla,” Isabel replied. “New and red.”

“I thought I came up in the Nissan,” Charles said in jest.

“Idiot,” Isabel mumbled.

It took us fifteen or twenty minutes to find the car. We spotted it between two large dumptrucks, near Virrey Toledo Street, in a dark alley in which a few boys had created a makeshift soccer field with some rocks.