The Travel Writer (22 page)

When I returned, Kenny was sitting with Arturo and an English-speaking Kallawaya, who was trying to explain, obviously in response to blunt American inquiry, how much a man of his profession could expect to earn yearly. This Kallawaya was younger and more expressive than his colleagues. I wondered how many of the English-speaking Kallawayas were university students who had struggled up from Aymara-speaking families. How hard could it be to learn to throw coca leaves convincingly? Not as hard as to learn to speak English.

“Your friend was telling me that he has seen an acquaintance here,” said Arturo.

“What did you say to him?” I asked Kenny.

The Kallawaya thought I was talking to him. “We talk about being Kallawaya. No?” He had certainly not mastered the mask of impassivity. Kenny must have used the Kallawaya as an intermediary to convey his news to Arturo.

“Your friend has some strange delusions,” Arturo said. “He insists that I investigate one
of the hotel’s security staff.”

“My friend is an idiot. All Bolivians look alike to him. All Latin people, I mean. You know.”

“What’s he saying?” said Kenny.

“I told you to stay quiet,” I said.

“Eat me.” He turned to the Kallawaya. “You’re smart. What do you think?”

“Maybe I not translate well.” The Kallawaya looked guilty and confused; somehow he had wandered into an American minefield. Arturo shook his head.

“Pilar, although she is beautiful and for that deserves our respect, is foolish,” he said. “I had never before heard what your friend just told me, that one of our security guards was a prior acquaintance of both Pilar and of Hilary Pearson. This is a strange coincidence. I wish Pilar had never brought you here. I warned her personally not to collaborate with you in spreading rumors. I hope she took my warning seriously. Or if not mine, then Dionisius’s.”

“Go to the devil!” I said. (I’m not good at swearing in Spanish.) “Pilar hired us to write an article, nothing more. My friend is simply interested in the case of Hilary Pearson. Isn’t everyone? You said you felt something for Hilary as well.”

“Yes, and I also feel something for Pilar. That is why I warned you. Tell Mr. Ken that we will talk later,” Arturo said, and left, gripping his Coke bottle like a dagger. The Kallawaya smiled uncertainly and trotted after him.

I refused to talk to Kenny as we drank.

“You said we shouldn’t trust him,” I said, when my drink was lukewarm in the glass.

“We got to trust somebody,” Kenny said. “I asked that guy, that young Kallawaya guy, and he said it would be okay to ask a question. A Kallawaya’s got to be pretty smart. Right?”

“He didn’t look like a genius to me. Let’s eat.”

Dinner was the finest meal Kenny had ever had, though he didn’t know it and wouldn’t have believed it if you told him. The waiter brought us Lake Titicaca trout, fresh jungle fruit, and a few kitschy exoticisms, such an appetizer of fried piranhas standing on their tails in a plate of mashed altiplano potatoes seasoned not with garlic or butter but with a mango chutney. The chef used to work at Chanterelle in Tribeca, or so the menu claimed. Where he learned to handle piranha was not explained. Kenny dispatched the fishes greedily; anything fried is good.

Afterward, we lumbered up to the room like pregnant women and heaved ourselves on the alpaca-skin sofa. Kenny wanted to hit the lounge again for a beer, but I encouraged him to study his Spanish and go to bed early.

“We have a long day of investigating ahead of us,” I said. I tried to decide what to do
with him tomorrow. On the one hand, I couldn’t stand to have him tagging along with me ruining crucial but ostensibly casual conversations with his dopey demands, befuddled looks, and untimely questions; on the other, I could hardly have him running around unsupervised. Maybe I could get him booked on an organized tour. A stab of fatherly guilt pierced me. You live alone without responsibility, but you have the right feelings after all, I told myself, even if you don’t act on them. I hadn’t understood before the pleasure of guilt, the reassuring reminder that despite our failings we really, deep inside, want to do the right thing.

“I can’t sleep,” said Kenny. “My stomach’s all jangly. You play any games? Backgammon’s my game. Think they got a board here?”

It was only ten o’clock, probably several hours before I could expect my visit from Pilar. I dialed room service and ordered a backgammon board.

I won the first game when Kenny refused to accept my double. “Wouldn’t be prudent,” he said, though we weren’t playing for money.

I won the second game the same way. In the third game, Kenny took the double and lost.

“You’re lucky,” he said spitelessly.

I nodded. “Did your father teach you backgammon, Kenny, like he taught you blackjack?” I too had played with my father when I was a kid.

“I had a friend, high school, taught me. Used to invite me over. Good guy.”

“You have to hold on to friends like that.”

“Yeah. He was a few years older. He dropped out, but he got his GED and signed up for the Marines. Cool, huh? Or maybe it was the Army. My mom said he wouldn’t last, but I bet he did. I told Hilary about him one night. Not
the
night. Another one. She said she thought about joining once. She wanted to see the world, she said. I called her Sarge and she laughed. She’s like five two. She was with her boyfriend that night, but I didn’t care. Know why?”

“You were laying the groundwork.”

“Yeah,” he said, disappointed that his punch line was spoiled.

“You keep laying the groundwork, Kenny, but do you ever get any reward? Maybe you need to go for the gold sometime.” The subject was best approached via cliché.

“Is that what you do? Is that what you did, the other night? With Pilar?”

“I guess I did.”

“I got time,” he said quietly, with the patience of those for whom nothing really ever changes.

“That’s the spirit, Kenny,” I said. The spirit that defeated despair by ceaselessly ignoring it. I hoped that spirit never abandoned him.

We turned out the lights, but I stayed awake, gazing out the window at the stars I could never see in New York. Maybe, after what I’d learned, the Hotel Matamoros could be coaxed or blackmailed into taking on another PR agent, and I could stay here with Pilar and the stars. How could I work for a hotel operated by drug lords? Perhaps instead I could become editor in chief of the English-language
Bolivian American
, or start a new magazine in nearby Coroico, dedicated to uplifting the Bolivian worker by evangelizing to rich Americans on behalf of Bolivia’s tourist industry. I’d dash off smart puff pieces on helicopter tours over the jungle, horseback treks beside the Rio Vagante, and life-changing epiphanies achieved via Kallawaya; and maybe once an issue, I’d sic the full powers of my lyricism and analysis on some subject not unworthy of
The New Yorker
’s Far-Flung Correspondent. (A portrait of the descendants of African slaves who still farmed coca in the Yungas? A lament for the dying art of Aymara weaving?) Eventually some Stateside editor would notice my work and take me on. I’d become their Man in Bolivia. Better still, their Man in the Jungle. And even if no one ever noticed me and my writing, it wouldn’t be a bad life. The food would be terrific, assuming the local hotels would feed me. And despite my lack of reputation, I would always be (even if no one back home remembered) the mystery man who abandoned his country for the Andean tropics. I could write a memoir or a screenplay. Learn the names of tropical birds. Finally see a jaguar. Have sex with adventuring guests, if things didn’t work out with Pilar.

As if anything mattered but Pilar. Not
The New Yorker
, not a lifetime of the finest freebies in the world. Suddenly, I saw Pilar and my freebie hunting and my dreams of fame all as different weapons in the same struggle against misery and monotony. And even death itself, the ultimate and eternal monotony. When I was polishing off a free steak, or mentally composing a hypothetical Pulitzer acceptance speech, or just talking without anxiety to Pilar—in other words, when I was content, however briefly—the dread was banished, or perhaps just wrapped up and packed safely away. Death itself is universal and undefeatable, but the dread of death is merely human and therefore subject to human mastery. I fought it with travel and freebies, but these remedies were losing their efficacy. I needed Pilar to talk to forever, not just to imagine talking to. I needed a remedy that would never make me feel foolish; therefore I needed her to love me too. I could only hope she needed something from me. She had, after all, called on me in her time of need.

I heard the click of a lock and a brief whine in the adjacent room. The front door had
opened. Footsteps vibrated through my bed or maybe just my imagination. Wait, I commanded myself. It could be a maid entering for a midnight wastebasket clearing. It could be Dionisius. I squirmed within my twelve-hundred-thread-count sheets as I prolonged the anticipation—I knew it wasn’t Dionisius or the maid. Kenny snuffled and turned. He had insisted on sleeping on the foldout love seat beside me in the bedroom. A tap on the bedroom door, like a kick from my heart, and then the door opened. It was her. I scrambled out of the covers, grabbing a handful of coca leaves from the nightstand as I went.

“Why did you go to bed?” Pilar whispered to me in the outer room, as I eased the bedroom door shut. “I told you to be awake.”

“It was the only way to get him to go to sleep,” I said. “He likes to stay up.”

“Follow me.” She turned and stumbled over the electrical cord from the iron, which forced her to hop inelegantly out the door.

I clapped on my sandals and trotted down the hall after her in my barely respectable cotton sleeping shorts and T-shirt. The recessed hall lights were now emitting a dull, gone-to-bed yellow. We padded single file, silently, like Indians in an old movie sneaking up on the enemy camp. When Pilar turned a corner, I stuffed the wad of coca leaves against my gum and chewed—I wanted to be as sharp as possible, in every way. She stopped before an unmarked door with a security box on it and slipped a card key into it. “Hotel passkey,” she murmured, flashing the card at me like a badge. Was this her room, and so close to mine? It boded well for the rest of the week. Inside was a closet with a boiler. Somehow Pilar wormed her way behind it. I followed, less gracefully. Behind the boiler was a shrunken passageway, as dark as a coffin and not much wider. Pilar pulled out a penlight and moved forward. I followed. My sandals clopped on the floor. The passage twisted and sloped. I had no idea how Pilar was navigating or what she was seeing in front of me. With my free hand I felt the walls and ceiling, cool concrete just inches from my body.

Pilar stopped short, and my chin clicked against her back. I mumbled an apology. She grunted and pushed, and we stepped outside into a cool forest of stars. We were on a ledge above the gardens, which were gray in the moonlight, like carved stone. I let my vision run up the ramps of the mountains and launch itself into space, up onto the road of the Milky Way. Just one more thing you never see in New York. Pilar sat down on a rock. I turned around. The door was still open behind me, an unhealed wound in the mountain.

Pilar lit a cigarette.

“Are you chewing gum?” she said.

“Coca leaves,” I said. “Helps me think.”

She took a long drag and blew the smoke out toward the moon.

“Nothing’s gone well,” she said.

“It’s not my fault,” I said. “Is it?”

“No. I’m sick of blaming you, anyway. I used to, all the time.”

I nodded sympathetically.

“And my parents. But now I know my life is nobody’s fault but my own.”

Her despondency surprised me; she had seemed so optimistic earlier, in the hut behind the Kallawaya. But she had been in the same depressive mood in her apartment, the other night. Maybe she needed the sun to burn away her weariness and anxiety.

“I can help you,” I said. “But you have to tell me the truth.” I paused, to give her a chance to come out with it on her own.

“You want to see the note from the kidnappers?” she asked.

“Yes, but first I have a question. Why did you get Ray Quinones a job here?”

“Ray Quinones? The security guard?”

“That’s right. He was Hilary’s boyfriend in New York. Didn’t you know that?”

“No.”

“How did you know him?” I asked.

“I met him when I worked for Guilford. When I came up to New York once. I think Hilary put us in touch, but I didn’t know they were that close. He had to go home to Bolivia and he wanted to talk to someone about a job.”

“I didn’t know he was Bolivian. Neither did Kenny.”

“Why would he?”

“Good point. But in New York this guy was a handyman, not a security guard. Why did you get him a job?”

“He needed one when he came back to Bolivia. What other kind of job could he get? He was smart. And big. He had lived in America.”

“He doesn’t speak English.”

“A few words. He tries.”

“Were you in love with him?”

“That’s ridiculous.”

Was she lying? I almost hoped so. Then we’d be even. As long as she wasn’t in love with him now. “We need to help each other,” I said.

“You think I don’t know that? You don’t realize how much I need you. I’m so tired of depending on other people for everything. All I want is my freedom. And here I am buried in this Third World mountain.”

“Come back to New York with me,” I said. “You can start all over, with me to help.
We’ll forget everything here. I only lied to you once. I won’t do it again. I promise. Try to believe me. Everybody lies, but only a few of us come begging for forgiveness afterwards. You can’t hate us all forever.”

“Sometimes I’m afraid I can.”

“Then come to New York. You’ll fit right in.”

I was hoping she’d smile, but she nodded into her dying cigarette. “Here’s the note from the kidnappers.”

She handed me a piece of paper and her penlight. The note was in English: