American Visa (20 page)

“It's a miracle nobody stole it,” Isabel said. “Today's your lucky day.”

Charles rested his arm on my back. “Isabel's always hanging out with boring guys,” he said. “I like you. Where did you two meet?”

“In a bookstore. I'm not her friend, I've only seen her once before.”

Isabel unlocked the car and sat down in the driver's seat. “Thanks,” she said. “You don't want to come to Charles's birthday party? That is, unless you have something more important to do.”

Charles pressed his palms together, as if in prayer. He took everything like a joke. The look on Isabel's face shot a chill down my spine like a centipede doused with morphine. I forgot that I had a robbery to attend to; there's nothing sex or love or the two together can't do. With my heart dancing a merengue, I hopped into the Toyota.

Charles fell asleep just as we pulled out. Isabel drove through congested downtown without saying a word, irritated by our slow pace. Only after we reached Avenida Seis de Agosto did she take a deep breath. She recounted for me the disturbing life story of Charles, her only brother, the apple of their mother's eye and their family's white knight. He had been a model child until the age of twenty-five. He graduated with honors from the Catholic University of Chile with a degree in Economics, and then returned to Bolivia with the energy and euphoria of a young lion. As soon as he arrived, he was lucky enough to land a job with an American company that paid him two thousand dollars a month. An elegant economist and graduate of a Chilean university who speaks English fluently, comes from a good family, and wants to rise to the top isn't something you find every day in Bolivia.

He worked like a Japanese executive for six months. Right at the one hundred and eighty day mark, he met a woman from a humble background who had money—a social climber, typical of the class that came out of the national revolution. She grabbed onto him tooth and nail, sucking the life out of him through sex and orgasms. One happy day they got married without telling Charles's mother, his sister, or his father, who had been living in New York ever since escaping the condescension, haughtiness, and manipulation of his wife. It was a huge scandal, and the Esogástegui line suffered a severe devaluation in the ranking of La Paz's top pedigrees. They were forced to swallow it, and then they got on with their lives. What the family didn't know is that the girl was a huge coke head. She ended up getting Charles, for all his sophistication, hooked on the stuff. At first they sniffed and soon they started shooting up. She caught a strain of Hepatitis B, which landed her in a hospital in São Paulo, where, despite her money and the doctors' best efforts, she died. Disconsolate, Charles was left a widower and an addict. He got over her death but never the addiction. And there he was, unemployed, down on his luck, and living off the family fortune, with one foot dangling over the abyss.

“We don't know what to do with him,” Isabel confessed. “I think he's a lost cause.”

They lived in a Provencal-style mansion in Achumani. I calculated their property at a third of an acre. The house, which measured at least seven thousand square feet, was ringed by a garden of exquisitely trimmed grass and clusters of rose bushes. An illuminated pine tree stood at one end of the garden. When Charles pushed open the gate, a pair of mastiffs galloped to meet us, barking ferociously. They quieted a little upon seeing their master, but my presence provoked distrust. They wouldn't stop baring their fangs at me.

“Calm down,” Charles ordered in English. The dogs obeyed and awaited the next request. “They're bilingual,” he explained.

“They'll go far,” I replied.

Isabel showed us to the main parlor. There, an impressive number of guests, ranging from twenty to fifty years of age, danced with aban- don to the beat of a DJ who was harmoniously operating a collection of multimedia devices. A colossal television screen showed a tantalizing black woman, none other than La Toya Jackson, gyrating on a dance floor to new age rock music, while a strapping black man with oiled skin mimicked a sexual act with a mulatta wearing a thong no bigger than a child's handkerchief.

Isabel approached a lady with the face of an Incan empress and kissed her on the forehead. I guessed that it was her mother. Isabel whispered in her ear, and the mother flashed an apprehensive glance at Charles. The young man's arrival was received with repeated rounds of applause. He greeted his peers confidently, and the older guests reservedly. His mother gave him a long hug. They made a champagne toast, and then Isabel motioned for me to come closer.

“My mother, María Augusta. Mother, this is Mario Alvarez.”

Doña María Augusta was a miraculous Spanish-Indian amalgam. Her face was an Oriental bronze hue, and her lips, nose, and slanted eyes could have been drawn by one of those painters of the tombs of the royal mummies in ancient Egypt. She was a masterpiece of miscegenation.

“Mario helped us with Charles,” Isabel said.

“What was wrong with Charles?” María Augusta asked with genuine surprise.

“He was a little drunk,” Isabel continued. “With those punks he has for friends!”

“Charles has this ridiculous habit of getting mixed up with the wrong crowd,” María Augusta averred. “I don't know who he inherited that from.”

“Not from my father.”

With a penetrating gaze, Doña María Augusta tried to size up my family tree. She asked me where I was from.

“Uyuni, in the Department of Potosí.”

“Decent people used to live there before '52.”

I tried to explain that my father had been a simple working man, but Isabel made a face that stopped me cold.

“Señor Alvarez is a literature professor,” Isabel affirmed.

“How wonderful!” María Augusta remarked. “I'm a big admirer of Miguel Ángel Asturias. I can't stand García Márquez or Cortázar. Vargas Llosa got off track, but he's turned it around.”

“It's because he spends most of his time in London,” I said.

“The environment has a lot to do with it. You must have your favorites too . . . I imagine.”

“I like José María Arguedas, from Peru, and Osvaldo Soriano. I also like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.”

“I've never heard of them. Are they new?”

“I think Soriano is still alive.”

“You're an expert,” she said. “You should visit us more often.”

Isabel pulled me by the arm with a soft, irresistible caress. “How about a glass of real French champagne? It's nothing like what we had at the bookstore.”

“You two met in a bookstore?”

“At the signing of Mabel Plata's poetry collection.”

Doña María Augusta furrowed her brow like Jack Palance of yesteryear preparing to send a poor and honest cowboy to the other world. “I haven't heard good things about the sexual preferences of that woman,” she said.

“Mom! Everyone has the right to be himself.”

“I read in
Time
magazine that the problem is the hypothalamus, which regulates our sexual impulses. A little brain surgery and
zap!
You're cured,” said Doña María Augusta, addressing me.

“Seeing is believing,” I said.

“What do you think of my children, Señor Alvarez?”

“They're different.”

“My husband, who lies buried in New York, was very handsome when he was young; he was blond, tall, and sexy.”

“I didn't know that he had died.”

“He's not dead,” Isabel said. “He's alive and kicking. He works for a travel agency. To my mother, working in tourism in New York is like being dead.”

“Of course,” María Augusta stressed. “He used to be the CEO of an insurance company here in Bolivia. He made good money and enjoyed all the privileges of a man in charge. Then he got bored and ran off with fifty thousand dollars to New York, chasing after some girl. As was to be expected, he got robbed blind and ended up on the street. I'm glad; he didn't deserve any better than to have to start all over again from the bottom.”

“I expect to travel to the United States in a few days,” I said.

Doña María Augusta raised an eyebrow like a nineteenth-century aristocrat. “If you go with half-a-million dollars, maybe you'll fit in. Anything less, forget it.”

“I didn't know about this,” Isabel said.

“It came up at the last minute,” I lied.

Isabel took off her raincoat. She was wearing a simple, beige, casually elegant dress. “I'm going to go look for Claudio,” she said.

“Claudio is . . .”

“My official boyfriend; he was handpicked by my family.”

She left and Charles reappeared. He had brought me a glass of Scotch, which I substituted for the champagne.

“I'm going to introduce you to some of my friends,” he said. “They keep asking me who you are. I told them I have no idea. Who are you?”

“A guy who was born in Uyuni, an English teacher, and a lover of detective novels and films. I was raised on crime fiction.”

“Did it do you any good?”

“Maybe. I'll know soon enough.”

The room was so large that a tennis match could have been comfortably staged there. In back, a long rectangular table with white tablecloths was getting covered, little by little, with platters of food and bottles of imported wine. A number of waiters were serving the guests, who, as was typical at these functions, ate like a gang of shipwrecked sailors. To reach those delicacies, we first had to walk past some knuckleheaded acquaintances of Charles. They were high-society boys straight out of some Luis Buñuel dream: a prematurely balding ex–tennis player with sunken cheeks and a silly smile, and a chubby guy with an Argentine accent who was a former Minister of Economy. I recognized the ex-minister; his crooked ways had cost him his government post. Last name Sánchez de Bustillos, he looked like a Sephardic North African with his enormous backside, French beard, empty stare, and Mickey Mouse ears.

Enough is enough,
I thought.

Charles took me aside. “The tennis player says he's friends with Guillermo Vilas, but he actually just sucked him off one night in Monte-Carlo and hasn't seen him since. He also brags about banging all these Monacan chicks, but in reality he hasn't done a single one . . .”

“The guy couldn't score with a tied-up sow,” I said.

“Exactly,” Charles agreed. “This Sánchez de Bustillos is so stingy, he padlocks his freezer and his servants live all week on leftover noodles. He's a loan shark and charges seven percent a month. He's had all his best friends put in jail.”

“Do you remember the name of that horrible woman from
Les
Liaisons Dangereuses
?

“The Marquise de Merteuil.”

“You better watch what you say,” I cautioned.

“I just don't like them. They're the nouveau riche of our society, mediocre guys who have no class. With those assholes at the top of the pyramid, the poor people at the bottom are screwed.”

Isabel returned with her boyfriend. Charles greeted him and then left to go hang out with his friends. Claudio, the boyfriend, was a sharply dressed, two-hundred-pound fire hydrant with a face like an orchestra conductor. He was devouring a whole trout meunière.

“Something to eat?” Isabel asked me.

“I'll have trout with a glass of white wine.”

When Isabel headed toward the table with the food, the boyfriend asked, “So what do you do besides teach school?”

“I used to trade in merchandise from Chile. I was what you'd call a middleman.”

He adjusted his glasses and burst out laughing.

“It's not a joke.”

“How did you meet Isabel?”

“At a poetry reading about our lost sea.”

“We got it back with the treaty that gives us duty-free access to the Pacific. Haven't you heard of the Ilo Treaty?”

“You've got a great girl,” I said. I was getting tired of bullshitting.

“Did she talk about me?”

“Not a word,” I answered.

“She's too perfect . . . intelligent, beautiful . . .”

“Do smart women scare you?”

“They scare the shit out of me. Are you married?”

“I was. My wife wasn't too smart or too dumb. She was average, but I liked her. She left me. I'm a free man.”

“Don't you think there's too much intimacy in marriage?”

“You can do like the English and keep your distance.”

Claudio praised the trout and then went for seconds. I had no choice but to accompany him. He was sweating profusely and I thought that if he didn't watch it, his cholesterol would force him on a strict diet for the rest of his life.

“That brother of hers, Charles, is such a screw-up,” he said. “You came in with him; I'd like to know what you think.”

“He can't help himself.”