The Dismal Science (22 page)

“You must be a very good father,” the woman said, a mixture of relief and gratitude emanating from her face.

Very nearly allowing an ironic grin, he looked her in the eye, hoping to see recognition that maybe he hadn't been a good father at all but at least he'd tried, but there was nothing there, nothing but a plain beacon of appreciation. Snorting under his breath, he glanced at her husband, who had removed one earphone and turned to watch drowsily, vaguely curious. Vincenzo shook his head and handed the now sleeping baby back to the woman. He grinned, awash in sorrow, and rubbed the baby's soft furry head before returning to his place behind the curtain.

11

BOLIVIA

As the plane taxied down the runway of La Paz's confusingly named John F. Kennedy International Airport on the late afternoon of December 26, the stewardess, who smelled so intensely of soap that it was as if she'd spent the night in a vat of molten soap bars, turned on the intercom and recited her “Welcome to Bolivia” speech about how cell phones were fine to use and so on. She cautioned against standing up too quickly, saying, “If you feel like you are going to faint, you probably are going to faint, and you should sit back down.” Out the window to his right, Vincenzo saw a terrain as barren as the moon. The spine of peaks cut jaggedly along the horizon—the bare mandible of a shark the size of a continent. In the foreground stood nothing but an endless shrubby expanse—a plateau as desolate and mean as Siberia.

From reading Bolivian country reports over the years, Vincenzo knew that El Alto, the sprawl surrounding the airport,
had been a withered shantytown as recently as twenty years ago, but now its population exceeded that of La Paz itself.

Walter, who had covered Latin America for a while at the
Post
and had been to La Paz often in the eighties and nineties, had told him that El Alto was home to what was reported to be the largest informal market in the world. “You want a propeller for that Fokker two-seater plane you bought in the sixties? Try El Alto. They have every object imaginable. Well, everything that can be bought for less than five hundred dollars. No one has more than five hundred dollars.”

And it was, of course, owing in large part to the ascendance of the lower classes—owing to their organizing in places like El Alto—that someone like Evo Morales, claiming to want to represent their interests, had won the presidency.

After debarking, Vincenzo moved as slowly as possible, not wanting to collapse on anyone. As he shuffled down the stairs to the tarmac like an invalid, he winced at the wind biting his cheeks, and the overall effect, the way his age felt immediately amplified, was unnerving. An hour earlier, he had been at least a moderately capable person. Inside the airport, nurses with wheelchairs and tanks of oxygen waited by the luggage conveyor belt. Bolivia was a place like that, where people collapsed on arrival and had to be tended to by nurses. This seemed ripe with some metaphorical significance, something political, but Vincenzo's brain was not functional enough to seek the witty core.
FIFA
had decreed that the Bolivian soccer team could not host games in La Paz because it was unfair to their opponents. Chess, likewise, would be all but impossible up there, he supposed. All the other travelers, Vincenzo noticed, appeared
dizzy and irritable already, too. It felt like midafternoon after he'd had three glasses of wine at lunch.

Just standing there waiting for his luggage at the too-small luggage belt, he had to inhale deeply once in a while, as if he'd been forgetting to breathe. His brain was ringing with pain, as if a nest of barbed wire were unraveling in his cerebral cortex.

After customs he found a pretty woman in an Adidas jacket, which was zipped straight up to her chin, holding a sign that read:
VINCENZO D'ORSI
. He'd expected a mustachioed man in a dirty blazer, but she looked like a thirtyish jock. On closer inspection, he saw that her eyes were closed and her mouth open. Could it be? Yes, she was sleeping on her feet.

“Buenas tardes,”
he said.
“Soy Vincenzo.”

Her eyes sprung open and she blinked, dazed.
“Sí, sí—por supuesto. Es un placer conocerte,”
she said. She shook his hand and he could tell, looking at her, that she was still not fully awake.
“Soy Lenka. ¿Bueno, tienes más equipaje?”

He hadn't understood that last part so he just looked at her searchingly.

“This is all of your luggage?” she said in heavily accented English.

“Yes—
sí. Permiso
. I didn't catch your name.
¿Tu nombre?”

“Lenka. It is better if we talk in English.” She spoke well, but clearly had to think to assemble her English sentences.

“¿Por qué mi español
—” He winced.

“Yes, your Spanish is not good,” she explained very plainly. Already, he liked her.

“I'm sorry,” he said. This issue—his disastrous Spanish (to say nothing of his Portuguese)—had been of considerable
embarrassment to him, at times, for years. People expected English speakers to be unable to speak other languages, but for Vincenzo, an executive at an international organization who spoke English, by some measures, better than most native English speakers, a linguaphile—a person who'd been to Latin America more times than he could count, and who spoke Italian, the cousin, if not sibling, of Spanish and Portuguese, as his first language—it was an abomination. Still, it was so, and most Italians he knew who tried to learn Spanish also struggled. It was just similar enough to seem easy, and so there was a tendency to be cavalier about grammar and vocabulary, but, in fact, an Italian's bad Spanish was at least as incomprehensible as a native English speaker's bad Spanish.

“Thank you for picking me up,” he said. “You didn't have to do that.”

She shook her head dismissively. He was surprised that she, herself, had come to pick him up. He was surprised that she was so attractive, too—he'd pictured a dowdy middle-aged woman during their e-mail exchange, but Lenka was not that way at all. She was wearing a track jacket, no less. She looked almost like a footballer. This exacerbated his discomfort about the altitude, too—her virility, her linguistic capacity versus his tongue-tiedness, it was painful. Once, he'd been given a prostate exam by an attractive young female doctor, and it'd been a similar experience.

Lenka was leading the way out to her car. He hurried after, dragging his large suitcase and mesmerized by the way her hips popped when she walked. The sun had fallen behind the mountains and was making a dramatic light show in the western sky, where fleecy wisps of clouds burnt an incandescent
metallic hue, as if they had been garlanded with gold leaf. She opened the trunk to the old Datsun, and he loaded the large bag inside, then shut the door.

Darkness swooped in. Vincenzo's headache had settled upon a plateau of its own by then, and it would rest there until he gave it a compelling reason to leave. He massaged his temples, but that just activated new regions of pain. The cranial contortions seemed to be tenderizing his brain, though, and he was already hopeful that the pain sensors themselves would be beaten comatose, eventually, and the headache would cease.

Lenka was more than half asleep as they drove, and he didn't quite know what to do about it. He didn't want to be rude, but he also didn't want to die.

At a red light in the midst of El Alto, she started wheezing a light snore. The light turned green and Vincenzo had to shake her lightly. She opened her eyes quickly and blinked, cleared her throat, put the car into gear, and pulled through the intersection.

On the dark and winding highway that emptied from the heights of El Alto into the basin of the city, Lenka seemed, miraculously, to be driving with her eyes closed. She swerved around the lanes so casually and senselessly that all of the other drivers honked and gestured as they passed, but she was too asleep to care. Meanwhile, the night outside was weirdly serene. La Paz's skyline was, even from above, less than magisterial—a long puddle of orangish globes filling the valley. As they descended, the stench of exhaust became palpable.

Vincenzo did his best to rouse Lenka with bursts of animated conversation—relating the story of how he helped that
young mother with her infant on the flight, and how he had once seen lightning strike a church in Cuenca in southern Ecuador—but she was lost in a twilight state.

At the crest of a more lucid moment, she grunted and said, “I have not slept in a while.”

“I can tell,” he said. “Do you have children that keep you awake?”

She shook her head and her eyes fluttered. “I have one son. But he doesn't keep me awake. He is eight.”

“Oh really!” He was thrusting at the conversation now, just trying to keep her attention. “So what keeps you up at night?” he asked, aware that it was inappropriate, supposing that perhaps the inaptness would jolt her enough to keep her awake for another minute or two. She didn't answer, but shook her head and blinked at the road and he doubted if there was a more captivating sight than a beautiful woman battling off sleep, fighting to bring herself back to life so that she could be there in that moment.

Later, after he thought the question had evaporated, she said, “My boyfriend is a bad person.”

Images of bad men came into his mind: overconfident womanizers, drug addicts—but then he had to accept that he had no idea what she meant. “My daughter has a terrible boyfriend. I thought she might leave him, but now I don't know anymore.” This did nothing to rouse her, so he switched directions quickly, saying, “Tell me about your son.”

She shrugged, appeared to think about it for a minute, and then said, “He is a flirt. He takes after his father.”

“I see. What is his father like?” It was difficult to piece her story together: a son, a bad boyfriend, the son's father—she
also had a cross hanging from her rearview mirror and was almost certainly Catholic.

“His father is a fool. But I like his new wife. We all live together.”

“Really? The two couples and your son?”

She shook her head and explained, wearily, that her boyfriend didn't live with them, but she lived with her ex-husband, his wife, and various other family members, including her parents. They lived not far from the hotel where Vincenzo would be staying.

“I would love to meet them,” Vincenzo said.

She groaned and shook her head. She rubbed her eye vigorously. There was a problematically long pause as they approached the first traffic light within El Alto. She pulled to a stop, and before she could fall back asleep, Vincenzo said, “Would you like me to drive?”

She nodded like a sleepy child, eyes closed. “Yes,” she said. She opened her door and stumbled out into the street and a car honked at her, almost hit her.

Once he was behind the wheel and had adjusted the mirror, he looked over at her. “Where do I go?”

“Straight. When you come to a place where the road goes into a circle, wake me.” She turned away from him and curled up. He took a deep breath. He looked back at her. She really was pretty. Maybe ten years older than Leonora, maybe less—it was hard to tell. On her back, he noticed a narrow strip of exposed caramel skin above the line of her jeans. A dimple in the small of her back was visible, as was the pink edge of her panties, which, from what he could tell (extrapolating from the
glimpse), were very utilitarian: cotton, Pepto-Bismol colored, built to last. When he'd tried to think of the kind of woman he'd like to spend time with, the person who had come to mind was not this woman—she was outside of his experience—but he was grateful for her differentness. Living amid such machismo, and being ambitious, presumably, and being fierce and independent, she came off as very sober and sexy at the same time. DC didn't have women like this, to say nothing of Italy. Or, he'd never met someone like this.

He glanced down at the console and noticed that there was no speedometer or odometer. There was just the fuel gauge, its needle collapsed at E. There was nothing else.

Then he took a deep breath and looked in the rearview mirror. A line of cars was slowing to a stop at the light ahead, so he put the car into gear and put the blinker on, pulled out into traffic. The muffler was probably damaged, judging by the way the underside of the car blared.

At the roundabout, he nudged her awake, and she directed him through it, then fell back asleep, leaving with him parting instructions to remain straight for half a mile.

That was how he made it, finally, to the Radisson.

When he pulled up, he didn't wake her.

He approached a stern concierge who was reading something on the computer screen and grimacing thoughtfully. He wore a dark suit and a blue-on-gold tie. Looking up at Vincenzo, he blinked, but did not smile or speak. Vincenzo handed over his passport. While the man looked him up, Vincenzo asked if there was an extra room available for the woman who had picked him up, because she was too tired to make it home.

The concierge paused, looked at him sternly, his head tilted to the side.

“She's asleep in the car right now,” Vincenzo said. “I had to drive halfway here from the airport.”

“We can get a taxi for her,” the man said, and resumed typing in Vincenzo's information.