The Dismal Science (24 page)

Alone at his breakfast table, Vincenzo swallowed three paracetamol and then stared drowsily at a woman who looked ineffably, uncannily, like Cristina. But “like” would not be sufficient. She was nearly identical and
nearly
didn't do the issue service, either. Doing his best not to seem like he was staring, he watched her as she stood near the bar. From her beige pantsuit and gold name tag, the burgundy kerchief erupting from her neck, the polite posture of her shoulders, he surmised that she was some kind of manager at the hotel. He was tempted to ask the waiter about her, but decided against it. There'd been other doppelgängers before, none quite so convincing, but he'd seen many. Once, in a three-star hotel in Florence, several months after her death, he'd seen one nearly this convincing, also during breakfast. This wasn't the sort of thing you talked to waiters about, of course. No more than you harassed the front desk about the
CIA
agent who was leaving you jaunty notes, or confessed your lust/love to the PR person who'd invited you to her country. These were all just specters, he assured himself, shady phenomena haunting the periphery of his life, each too improbable to hold much weight, really. Too improbable until they were sitting directly opposite him, that was.

The waiter refilled his glass of water and asked what he wanted.

Vincenzo sighed, picked up the menu, and scanned. He got the idea. It was hotel breakfast, a genre notable mainly for its non-variety, so he just ordered coffee, fried eggs, potatoes, and fruit. There was a buffet option that he'd smelled but not viewed; as a rule he never went for the buffet, not unless the hotel was
genuinely
five-star. Non-five-star buffets were mostly hideous: hollandaise the texture of a melted Barbie doll, a faint essence of butane gas in the desiccated potatoes, scrambled eggs the color and consistency of foam packing material. The way the industrial metal trays hovered, slightly, in their baths of warm water. This hotel was nice enough to have a polished stone lobby, but
not
nice enough to have a vast floral arrangement in that lobby. It was bathrobes and slippers nice, but not pricey fixtures in the bathrooms nice—the breakfast buffet was not advisable.

When the waiter returned with his coffee, Vincenzo gazed at him, a mostly gray-haired gentleman with a face that appeared to have been buffed to a high polish; the hair, too, was unusually shiny, so it looked as if he'd dunked his head in shellac.
“¿Qué es su nombre?”
Vincenzo said and gestured at the woman.

“¿La señora? Se llama Luz Elena Guerriera,”
the man said. He was a stern person, grim as the concierge from last night, the inner tips of his whitish eyebrows slammed gravely into the center of his forehead.

“¿Es Italiana?”

“No, no—Boliviana.”
The severe eyebrows didn't budge. “
Gerente de servicios alimentos y bebidas por el hotel.”

Vincenzo nodded, having not entirely understood that last part (she was something of something and drinks for the hotel,
he approximated), but he did capture that she was Bolivian, not Italian, and that her name was Luz Elena. Could he go over and talk to her? No, of course not. What would he say?
This might sound morbid, but you remind me of my dead wife, and I was wondering if you wanted to go on a date?

No. Preferably not.

There were, of course, some differences between her and Cristina. She had the same sunken cheeks beneath dramatically, nearly haughtily, high cheekbones, the steeply arched eyebrows, like she was perpetually suspicious of the quality of what stood before her. The hair was almost identical, thick and wavy and umber, worn at the most unremarkable length possible: some vague area just past the shoulders. This woman had slightly more frizz and her bangs held themselves somehow differently—it was not a thing that could be described, but he was certain of the difference. Her body, likewise,
was
Cristina, if Cristina shaded a few centimeters one way or another—Cristina had been very lucky and had never really grown fat or haggard like many women did. Luz Elena, the doppelgänger, was slightly shorter, he guessed, maybe an inch or so, and a fraction more slender. Of all the doubles, she was by far the closest. The others, often glimpsed out of the corner of his eye, were mirages that vanished with proximity. Sometimes, he had to cross a street and chase the woman down to get a close enough look to dispel the impression. This was different, though. This woman was not Cristina, obviously, but she was so close, even after another look, that he didn't know what to do, but felt
something
had to be done. She looked at him, no doubt aware that he'd been staring at her, on and off, since he'd sat down, so he looked away.

Lenka entered eventually, twenty minutes late, a stack of newspapers under her arm. She was planning on taking stock of the news, it seemed. Vincenzo had already finished his breakfast and the empty plates had been carted away. She smiled immediately, warmly, and marched toward him, and he felt his heart lift idiotically to meet her. He stood up and extended his hand, but she slapped it away and kissed him on the cheek, dropped her newspapers down on the table.

“You hungry?” he said, hoping that she didn't see that he was blushing.

She nodded and beckoned the waiter. “Sorry I'm late.” She fixed Vincenzo with a deliberate gaze and said, “I had a very late night.”

“Your boyfriend again?” he said—feeling almost goaded into it, but wishing he'd kept his mouth shut.

She exhaled steadily, staring down at the menu with an expression he couldn't read. After a moment, she said, “Thank you for last night. That was very kind of you.”

“It's the least I could do. Any news about Evo?” He gestured at the newspapers.

She rolled her eyes. “Yes. There is a lot of news.”

Then the waiter came and she rattled off her order to him so quickly that Vincenzo didn't understand anything of what she had said. Once she was done speaking, she looked at him. “You want something?”

“No thanks,” he said and patted his belly. “I'm on a diet.”

She smiled at him and shook her head, as if he were crazy for thinking he needed a diet, and then she waved the waiter away and began to detail the plan for the next few days.
Once she had picked Walter up from the airport and he had checked in, she would come back and get Vincenzo and take the two of them over to Evo's office, where they would briefly meet the president-elect. Then she and Evo would leave for a couple of days. He and Walter would entertain themselves and then, on Friday, there would be a party at the National Museum, at which Vincenzo would give a half-hour speech. Hundreds of people would be there. A car would pick them up and take them to the event. Evo and possibly one of his ministers would make a speech first, and then Vincenzo would talk, and he should brace himself for significant media attention. Not stopping for a beat, she asked if he wanted to make his speech in Italian or English, because if he wanted Italian she could try to arrange for a translator, but it would be more difficult than English.

“I can do English.”

“Good. English is easier, we should do English. Right now, there is many international press in La Paz, because of the elections.”

Vincenzo frowned, thinking of what Colin would say. Briefly, he thought about Hamilton, too, his bitter e-mail—how he would feel about having his name brought back into the news. He said, “I am not going to be granting any more interviews, if that's okay.”

She shook her head, gazed at him in frustration. “No, that's not okay. Why do you want to do that?”

“It's too much attention on me. I am not used to it. And I don't want this thing to become the defining event of my life. This is—” There was an opportunity to make this a moment of
personal connection, but he couldn't manage to bring himself to direct the innuendo.

A small smile broke on her lips. “I think it's a little too late for that, Vincenzo,” she said, and put down the first newspaper and picked up the second, but simply laid it on her lap. “The event is going to be covered by the press, one way or another. If you refuse to talk to them, they will only think that you are being strange.”

“I'll think about it,” he said.

She sighed heavily and looked away, at nothing.

There was no more business between them, really, so they sat there saying nothing and staring at each other for a moment. There was a captivating combination of confidence and doubt in her face, as if she were still a little disoriented by the violent and sudden ascendency of her chosen candidate, but she was acclimating to the new altitude, almost. “How do you like your hotel?” she asked, clearly just wanting to fill the silence.

He glanced over at the doppelgänger, who was talking to a chef whose white jacket was incredibly filthy. “It's nice.”

“I'm sorry about last night,” she said again.

“It's fine. I'm sorry for being a little presuming. Was I—” He stopped and tried to think of how to frame it, and then he said, “I was very clumsy.”

She tilted her head at him and said, “How do you like life after the World Bank?”

Seeing that the waiter was approaching with her food, he shrugged. The waiter, moving exceptionally fast, set her plate down with one hand and then poured more coffee into their cups.

She transferred her newspapers to the floor beneath her chair. Vincenzo wondered if the arrival of her food had distracted her enough that her question had died and they could move along, but she looked back at him and, picking up her knife and fork, said, “Well—your new life?”

“It's—” He smiled and gestured at the room. He shrugged.

“This is it?” she interpreted, nodding vigorously as if she understood. She took a bite of her breakfast. “When you made your decision last month, did you know what would happen?”

“I still don't know what will happen,” he said.

Noticeably pleased, she had a sip of coffee.

He went on: “Life has big exciting parts—intersections—where you have to make a choice and you do, you have to, but you never know how it'll work out. You take a turn off one road because continuing in the same direction seems intolerable. Maybe the new road will be worse, maybe it'll be better—you don't know.”

“Yes, that is my experience,” she said. “I did not know that Evo would win this election, in fact it did not look likely. Still, I am happy with this. What about you, are you happy?” She put her knife and fork down.

He shrugged. “I turned onto this road because it seemed necessary to make the turn. You have a son and a boyfriend and an ex-husband who you live with, and you are the press liaison to one of the most famous politicians in Latin America. This is just what you wanted?” The doppelgänger marched through the dining room and, as she passed, made the briefest eye contact with him, offering a quarter smile.

“The situation with that boyfriend—it was a mistake. He was a liar. I should have known that. My husband was a mistake,
too, but at least he gave me Ernesto, who is my favorite person. And I like him, my ex-husband. I hate him and I like him.”

“I felt that way about my wife.”

“You are also divorced?”

He hesitated, impaled on the moment, then nodded. He had developed this unfortunate habit of lying to avoid the explaining about Cristina.

When he didn't say anything else, she said, “I picked Evo because of who he is.”

He continued nodding for a while, still lost in the previous step in their interaction. Then, finally, he said, “But you still don't know what will happen. What if he's a terrible president?”

“He won't be,” she said.

He wanted to say,
Don't fool yourself: you have no idea what kind of president he'll be
, but of course he wasn't going to say that. He'd been married long enough to see the futility of arguments on the basis of principle. There were routes: he could point to the fact that virtually all of Evo's predecessors had turned out to be corrupt or inept and that the vast majority of them had been ousted by their angry citizens; or he could remind her that the country had averaged more than one revolution per year since its 1825 independence. But what would be the point? He'd just be making another prediction, insulting her in another way.