The Travel Writer (5 page)

I put the teakettle on and then sat down again to write an email to Pilar. It was the first I’d sent her in a year.

Really I had no ideas, but I was sure I could think some up on the plane and I wanted to demonstrate initiative and independence. Pilar must have been at her PC—what else did she have to do at night in the Bolivian tropics?—because two minutes later she responded, though from a personal account:

What did that last line mean? And now I couldn’t write again to ask for an explanation. I cursed myself for using her work address. Could hotel spies really be reading her email? Would hotel spies even know English? At least she approved of my interview with Hilary’s parents. Maybe this was just the type of investigation she had in mind. I would be more circumspect in the future but no less bold.

A knock on the door interrupted my thoughts. I stood up from the desk. Another knock, louder this time. I peered through the peephole and saw Gonzales’s face, distorted by the lens, a brown jack-o’-lantern.

“What do you want?”

“Only to talk.”

“I’m comfortable talking like this,” I said. “I’m in my pajamas.”

“I promise not to laugh at your pajamas. If, however, you refuse to let me in, then I’ll leave and return with a friend. One of us will wait for you outside your apartment, and tomorrow or some other day—but someday soon—we will take you on a trip and smash something important. Maybe the police will provide a twenty-four-hour guard to protect you for the rest of your life. Maybe not.”

I opened the door and retreated back across the room to the window to let him in—I had to move that far, or there would be no room to pass between my bed and my desk. As I brushed against the tank, Yertle thrashed wildly beside me, his nose bursting through the water’s skin. Whenever I approached, he hoped it was dinnertime.

“This apartment,” Gonzales said, as he shut the door and tiptoed onto the shag rug of old clothing, newspapers, and hotel brochures, “is disgusting.” At least he politely omitted to
observe that I was wearing ordinary clothes and not pajamas.

“Disgusting is filth and vermin and maggots,” I said. “This is just untidiness. Sanitary untidiness. I defy you to find a crumb or a food wrapper. I defy you”—I let my voice soar a moment, to test my courage—“to find a roach or an insect of any kind. Eventually I get to the laundry and the recycle bin. I wasn’t expecting a visitor tonight.” My voice wasn’t shaking; at least I had that.

“Where do I sit? Is this the only room in your apartment? It is as tiny as it is untidy.”

“That’s why I don’t like to be in it. I like to travel. Sit on the chair or on the bed. That’s all I can offer.”

He glanced down at the unmade futon bed, with its whitecaps of sheet bursting through the rumpled red blanket. He chose the desk chair instead.

“What’s that smell?” he said.

“My turtle. I need to clean his tank. Like I said, I wasn’t expecting visitors.”

“This computer”—he bucked his head at the monitor just behind him on my desk—“this is where you write all your articles? Have you yet begun your story of the Matamoros? Perhaps with the sad tale of Pilar’s failure at the press conference?”

“I’ve made a start.”

The kettle whistled.

“You want tea?” I asked. “I’m making.”

He declined. My kitchenette filled the nook conveniently adjacent to the turtle tank. Gonzales watched me, but as I bent to fumble in the drawer for a spoon, I managed to slip a corkscrew into my front pocket.

“You should clean your apartment and wash your animal, so guests can visit you here. So you can make a life in your home.”

“I should get a better job too, with regular hours and a 401(k). I don’t want one. I won’t live like the rest of the world, one uneventful day following the other. Like an editor. Or a marketing manager.”

“Believe me, my days are all quite distinct,” he said. He extracted something from his pocket and laid it on his thigh. It was a small claw hammer with a foldable handle. He leaned forward, over the hammer, and examined me. “You’re young, but in the light I can see gray hairs. You’re thin, despite all your American steaks. You think you will never be fat! But you will.”

I held my hand over the mouth of the cup to insulate it. I wanted it to stay hot as long as possible, in case I needed it. I’d blind him with the tea, then move in with the corkscrew. Not very promising.

“And you want Pilar to be in love with you,” he continued. “She told me who you are, but only now do I understand.” He fondled the hammer with one hand.

“I see. How could she love me with you around?”

“Ha! She is quite pretty, though not my type. Spanish and proud. She told me before she left that she invited you to the Matamoros. She implied that, because of your affection, you would be more willing to follow her commands. I hope she’s right. If you break your word, she will regret this scheme.”

“I won’t put her at risk. If you want me to stay here, I’ll stay.”

“I want you to go, Mr. Smalls. To save our hotel. I want you to go and do what Pilar says. But I don’t trust you as much as she does.”

“So what do you want from me?”

“I just want you to think of me from time to time. Especially when you’re tempted to write lies or pass on groundless rumors about my hotel. I will read your work with interest. When I do, I might be with Pilar. I might be in New York. You will never know.”

He stood up, and so did I. He sidled by me, his eyes just at the level of my chin, and stood over Yertle, who still churned the water, but not quite as hard. Yertle was very stupid, but still smart enough to recognize someone different. Either a new food-shaking god or a threat. I set my cup down on my desk.

“What’s its name?” he asked.

“Yertle.”

“Why Yertle?”

“Yertle is the most famous turtle in American literature. A tyrant. He built a tower of turtles, climbed on top, and declared himself ruler of all he surveyed.”

“In Bolivia, we do not joke about tyrants.”

He tapped the hammer on the tank. I had no idea what else he had in his pockets. Yertle, disturbed by the tapping, glided below to cower at the base of his basking brick.

Gonzales lunged forward, elbowing me to the bed, and swung the hammer at my old glass-faced computer monitor, which shattered. I was sure the adjacent neighbors heard; I was also sure they wouldn’t care. He removed the hammer and returned it to his pocket. I didn’t point out that his action was purely symbolic. The PC was perfectly serviceable without the monitor, and I also owned a laptop, stowed safely under the futon. But I couldn’t help imagining the glass as my bones, smashing just as easily. Now seated on the bed, I dropped my hand on my night table, beside a ceramic lamp that was much heavier than it looked. If he tried something else, I might get a chance to heave it and brain him, if I could muster the courage. I had little faith in my prowess with a dollar-store corkscrew.

But Mr. Gonzales had made his point. He smacked his cheek with one hand, as if to demonstrate his imperviousness to pain, and left.

The next morning the Gran Hotel París confirmed via email my reservation for a complimentary two-night stay at the hotel, beginning Wednesday night and ending on Friday morning. I envisioned two nights of hard-boiled urban investigation, done on my own, and secretly, before the descent into the gilded embrace of the Hotel Matamoros. Gonzales was based in the U.S. I had to hope he would stay there.

My flight on American turned out to be a codeshare with the absurdly named Bolivian national airlines, Lloyd Aéreo Boliviano, which is unpronounceable both in English and in Spanish. At my transfer in Miami, I had to schlep my shoulder bag (I never check luggage when flying Latin American airlines, with pronounceable names or not) across the vast expanse of the terminal to my gate. “Any possibility of an upgrade?” I asked the gate agent. In New York, I had borrowed a stapler at the ticket counter to attach my business card to my boarding passes. The look of polite bewilderment on the LAB gate agent’s face told me that the request was not only futile but probably, in her experience, unprecedented.

As I boarded, I gazed at the wide leather seats of first class and the few slouching Bolivian businessmen filling them. Behind them, but still well ahead of the Iron Curtain of coach, was a quartet of pale-faced Americans, underdressed, leaning into each other and whispering like schoolchildren at the back of the class. I should have been there in first too, haughtily ignoring them. Instead my shoulder bag rattled between the aisle-choking headrests of coach as I slogged to the middle of the plane. My seat was next to a withered old Indian woman in a wool shawl and long skirt. I crammed the bag into the overhead compartment and settled in for the haul. “Coach on LAB,” I muttered to myself. Perhaps it could become my catchphrase for misery piled on misery.

The Indian woman asked me in Spanish for the time, but when I showed her my wrist she shook her head and pointed to her eyes. They were coal-black and beautiful but apparently not so useful anymore.

“It’s twelve-thirty,” I told her, in Spanish. “We’re taking off soon.”

She nodded and smiled and set to staring out the window toward the luggage trucks and taxiing planes and scrambling workers. Perhaps she was just a bit farsighted. Her hair, still as
dark as her eyes, despite her age, was done up in braids that reminded me of pictures of my mother when she had been a hippie. I pulled out my copy of
The New Yorker
and searched the table of contents for a piece of investigative journalism that might be worth emulating when I finally wrote Hilary’s story. There was a small explosion beside me; I turned, startled, to see the woman fluttering a narrow form at me. She had yanked down the window shade to attract my attention. “Fill it in?” she said. I had trouble with the accent and the unfamiliar Spanish word
llena
, and had to ask her to repeat herself, but eventually I deduced that she wanted me to fill out her customs declaration. I nodded, and she groped through a vinyl shoulder bag until she found a zipped-up vinyl envelope in which her passport and plane-ticket stubs were neatly enclosed. I held the passport in both hands, to demonstrate respect.

I filled in her name, passport number, citizenship, and trip purpose (“pleasure,” of course—it could hardly have been “business”), and address (somewhere in Bolivia’s barely civilized interior), and gave the form to her to sign.

She refused.

“I don’t read,” she explained. “They don’t mind.”

Not even an
X
? I thought. I returned the form and began flipping through the in-flight magazine, ashamed of assuming she’d want to disguise her illiteracy. Lack of education was no more embarrassing to her than her outlandish skirt and babushka shawl—where she was going, they were the height of normalcy, notwithstanding the double takes of foreigners along the way. Had I ever been so self-confident? She was relying on the kindness of airport customs officials. Customs officials! I wanted to make a movie of her life. Somehow this woman had journeyed hours from the province of Chuquisaca over the mountains to the nearest city (I wasn’t sure exactly where Chuquisaca was, but to get anywhere in Bolivia, you have to journey hours over mountains), hopped on a jet, and abandoned her continent for Miami, where (perhaps) the fourth and wildest of her sons had just had his first child. I recalled the terror I had once felt on the first night of an assignment in Tokyo—the flashing lights, swarming crowds, and indecipherable hieroglyphics of the city had left me all but weeping. Every city, even in Bolivia, every newspaper or Bible, every face of the million-eyed insect of the modern world of information—to her it was all hieroglyphics, all mystery and unapproachable power, and none of it could pierce her equanimity.

I stowed the magazine and turned to pry the woman’s secrets from her, but satisfied that she had met the legal requirements for returning home, she had set her head against the drawn window shade and fallen asleep. A single strand of hair, newly escaped from her braid, was dangling over her mouth and quivering in the breezes of her breaths. The plane thundered down the runway; she kept sleeping.

I imagined the woman as Hilary Pearson, years from now, emerging aged, oak-skinned, heavyset, and shabby from her hideaway in the hills of Bolivia, to return home after so many years of captivity. Perhaps the world had changed, and her captors’ political grievances been made obsolete; perhaps nothing had changed, except that they’d eventually forgotten why they kept this old white woman, good only for boiling the most rudimentary of stews, keeping the adobe hut tidy, and dragging their clothes down to the river.

Maybe that would be Hilary in twenty years, but where was she now? What enemy had seized her? A commando team of organized drug runners, raising funds through ransom? A pair of old-fashioned perverts? A troop of kidnapping guerrillas, screaming Marxist propaganda in her ear? Could she even understand what they said? At least the old woman could communicate with city dwellers and customs agents; she could speak Spanish, not just Quechua or Aymara, like so many indigenous Bolivians of the rural provinces. Hilary also knew Spanish—she had queried some of my accent marks—but the guttural jargon of the criminal class would surely be beyond her, and what she did understand would only frighten her more. Give hope a chance, I told myself—maybe she’d managed to escape; maybe I really could find her, with Pilar’s help. But out of all ways of escape, I knew which was the most likely.