Authors: Jeff Soloway
I didn’t get it.
Our cab joined the swarm of vehicles swerving, backfiring, lunging, jostling for position on a wide road without lanes. Kenny gazed out the side window, unconsciously mouthing the words to some song playing on his mental stereo. There was a lot for his gaze to take in: the Tom Joad–model trucks beside us, their backs loaded with workers packed as close as pencils; the Indian women in full sail of petticoats striding along the roadside where sidewalks should have been or squatting over mounds of produce for sale; the half-constructed or half-decayed two-story structures of cinder block or adobe or both. Giddy anticipation rose like bile in my gut. A week in La Paz and at one of the world’s finest resorts, and all of it paid for; a disappearance to investigate; a reunion with Pilar. Was Hilary really alive? What would Pilar tell me tomorrow? Where would she spend the night afterward? Black spiderwebs began to flutter before my eyes, and I commanded myself to empty my mind and concentrate only on dragging the oxygen out of the stingy high-altitude air.
The driver tried a shortcut through a skinny side street rutted with potholes and moguls. Our headlights lit up a long bank of whitewashed walls emboldened with political graffiti, either generic slogans (“No a Neoliberalismo!”), or party abbreviations (MNR, ADN, MSM), or the full names written out (Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario, Acción Democrática Nacionalista, Movimiento sin Miedo, Condepa). One of them was unfamiliar.
“Condepa? What is this?” I said to the cabbie in Spanish, hoping to start a conversation and thus find something less dizzying than Pilar and less immediate than my breathing to focus on.
“A new political party. Conciencia de Patria.”
The Conscience of the Homeland. Quite a mouthful to get on a ballot. I badgered my brain for the words I wanted. It usually takes me a day or two to get back into the swing of Spanish.
“Who votes for such a party?” I asked.
“Me, for example. I am Condepa,” the cabbie answered, and when we lurched to rejoin the teeming traffic in the main street, he stabbed his finger toward the other cabs. “And he is Condepa. And he is Condepa also. The mayor of El Alto City is also Condepa. The majority of
the drivers are Condepa,” he added, as if that alone assured electoral victory.
“Bolivian politics gives me a headache,” I said. “All I know is the president and the Mallku.”
The Mallku was a man named Felipe Quispe, who claimed to be a descendant in spirit, if not in blood, of the ancient Aymara kings, whose homeland was the high plateau north of La Paz, around Lake Titicaca. Quispe led a party called the United Union Confederation of Working Peasants of Bolivia, composed mainly of rural Quechua and Aymara speakers, the proud but surpassingly poor country hicks of Bolivia. Every July, after the harvest, when farmers had little else to do but organize, Quispe would organize strikes and blockades in protest of governmental neglect. In recent years, he had extended his influence even to the lowland coca growers, also mainly indigenous, who were threatened by the U.S.-backed coca eradication campaign.
“Which Mallku?” he said.
I hadn’t known there was more than one.
“Quispe,” I said.
“Don’t talk to me about Quispe,” the cabdriver said. “He’s a peasant, with a peasant’s strategy. Strikes, blockades, demonstrations. Last month my brother was caught behind a blockade in the North Yungas for a week because of Quispe and his childish demands. And where does it get him?”
I grunted sympathetically. I had once ridden to a new national park in the jungly Chapare province on a tourist van accompanied by a handful of soldiers in a jeep. We rounded a corner and were faced with a swarm of farmers in the road, brandishing a few dusty rifles (souvenirs of service in past revolutions), rusty machetes, shovels, and even some sharpened sticks. They were followers of Quispe’s lowland counterpart, Evo Morales, whose influence had been rising. The two men in front held a chain across the road. They were protesting the latest defoliation runs in Chapare, where all coca leaf cultivation is illegal. The soldiers leaned from the windows and ordered them to scram; the farmers responded with a handful of stones, haphazardly aimed (Bolivians grow up playing soccer, not baseball); my fellow tourists cringed in the van. The soldiers ducked and swore, and the guide turned to assure us there was nothing to worry about. He was right. A minor explosion beside us, like a backfire, an eardrum-tearing scream from the passenger beside me—and suddenly the farmers were fleeing back toward the trees, leaping over tufts of grass as they ran and still clutching their valuable weapons to their chests. The soldiers had fired above their heads. As the van rumbled over the fallen chain, the guide insisted it was all just a political ballet, but the pale French woman beside me trembled all the way to the lodge, and that night insisted on being returned to Cochabamba.
“The peasants will always be poor,” the man continued. “We of Condepa have a better
Mallku.”
“A better Mallku?” I said.
“Much better.”
“Better with his promises, or better with … his things? You know? That he achieves.”
It’s better to seize upon the first, inadequate word than to fumble foolishly for the right one. I have extensive experience in the many and varied sensations of feeling foolish when speaking Spanish.
“Both. He doesn’t promise a new Andean nation; he promises jobs, and from time to time he makes good. Go to any driver and ask him.”
“Are you asking him about Hilary?” said Kenny, tired of understanding nothing.
“He’s a cabdriver,” I answered him, annoyed that he had broken my rhythm. “He doesn’t know anything about Hilary.”
“Sure, big man—you’re the one knows everything. What if he gave her a ride to the airport? Or what if his uncle Fajita did? Huh? Ask him.”
The driver slowed for a line of rusty tollbooths, paid, and began the winding descent into the city. Ahead of us and far below in the valley, visible through the chain-link fence that inconvenienced suicides and garbage throwers, was the sparkling bowl of La Paz. I was pleased that, at this time of evening, Kenny couldn’t see the sacred peak of Illimani standing guard over the city like an eagle; it served him right to have that pleasure withheld.
* * *
The wheezing taxi, exhausted from its downhill flight, wobbled around the Plaza Murillo and deposited us and our luggage at the corner outside the Gran Hotel París, whose Parisian grandiosity consisted of a red carpet that started just outside the front door and a uniformed doorman who helped out with suitcases. He wasn’t so keen on duffel bags, though; he eyed Kenny’s doubtfully and waited for us to reveal our intentions.
“Go to the next street, Calle Junín,” I said to Kenny, as we arranged our bags on the sidewalk amid the maddening traffic of evening rush hour, “and climb the hill for a block and a half. The Hostal del Arco. You’ve got the address. They’re good people, and they speak some English.”
Kenny heaved his bag once or twice on his shoulder. I had to shuffle off the sidewalk to avoid an Indian woman, her back bowed under an open sack of oranges. Two businessmen in suits followed close behind, letting her run interference.
“Then what do I do?” he asked. “I should go to a bar, right? Start chatting up the locals.”
“Good idea.” It was getting chilly and I wanted to be inside.
“Do you know any bars?”
“They’re all over the place. Go to the Prado, the main street. You can’t get lost. The Prado’s there, down the hill, and your hostel is back up the way you came. It’s a safe street. Just leave your wallet and passport behind when you go out and don’t take too much money.”
“What about that one over there, next to the church. Is that a bar?”
“That’s a café. Give it a shot.”
A man pushing a wheelbarrow full of paint cans and a woman with a baby on her back forced Kenny off the sidewalk too.
“There’s got to be information here,” he said. “Look at them. They all look like they know something.”
“This is their city,” I said. “They know lots of things. Like where they’re going.”
“I wish I knew this place like you. I wish I could speak the language. Christ. My head hurts.”
“It’s the altitude. Ask for mate de coca at the hostal. That’s the local tea. It’ll help.”
I waited to confirm that he did indeed turn onto Calle Junín, and then I advanced on the door of the Gran Hotel París. The doorman maintained his impenetrable expression, but as he held open the door, I caught his eyes flashing to my shoes, the mark of a man’s quality. He was surely unimpressed.
* * *
I slipped the clerk my passport, and he hammered my name, two-fingered, into his computer keyboard, pausing for one heartbeat between each letter, perhaps to facilitate the computer’s comprehension of the outlandish “Jacob Smalls.”
He swiveled the terminal proudly to display this marvel of the hotel’s technology.
“Ah, yes. Mr. Esmalls,” he said in Spanish, tapping my name on the screen. “As you can observe, your room is reserved until Friday.”
“Thank you, Antonio,” I said, noting his name tag. “The room is complimentary, right?”
In Bolivia, directness is always the best policy, especially when computers are involved. At the Four Seasons (any Four Seasons), I would have attempted some sort of simple but polite dance of discretion with the desk clerk to confirm my freebie, but in Bolivia, the clerks rarely get huffy—perhaps all American journalists exude the same sense of entitlement, and therefore the
clerks assume it’s perfectly appropriate. Or perhaps they think I’m a graceless lunk. I’m sure I embarrass myself a million times a day in other ways when I visit Bolivia, so I’ve decided not to sweat this one.
The clerk’s nostrils swelled, flared, and then deflated slowly. He was a young man, and though his red-and-green uniform made him resemble a Christmas elf at a shopping mall, he bore himself nobly. He smiled, and held up both his hands, as if to show he was unarmed.
“Of course. We often accommodate journalists such as yourself. Are you writing an article about La Paz?”
“Yes. After, I’m going to visit the Hotel Matamoros in Los Yungas.”
“Ah!” He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “The greatest hotel in Bolivia! My cousin works in its restaurant. He says it is paradise—for the employees as well as the guests.”
His eyes glowed. The Matamoros was said to employ only the superstars of the national hotel industry, and to pay them accordingly. Of course, the salary of the average Bolivian desk clerk could be matched by many American paperboys.
“I hope so,” I said. “I am going to write an article for the hotel. Also, I want to write about the missing American journalist, Hilary Pearson.”
Kenny was right; why not spread the word? Anything might be a lead, or at least lighten my ignorance a little.
“Hilary Pearson?”
“You are familiar with the case?” I asked.
“No, no, very little. You are not … not a policeman or an agent of the government. True?”
“I already told you. I’m a journalist.”
“Yes, yes, of course. And you are writing an article about the case? For a large American magazine?”
“Maybe. Perhaps I could interview you, Antonio, later on?”
“Of course, of course,” he mumbled. “I have a note here from the manager. She would like to speak with you at your convenience. Just dial 9 once you’ve settled in.”
The doorman, who apparently doubled as bellhop, scooped up my bag and led me down a hallway, at the end of which he tugged open a useless pseudo-Parisian metal grate that guarded a perfectly ordinary modern elevator. There was hardly room for both of us inside.
“Mr. Esmalls!”
The desk clerk was hustling down the hall as fast as he could without running; the bellhop blocked the closing door with his foot.
“Do you want your mate de coca now, in your room?” he asked. “Or later in the café?”
He stood before me, his face flushed with some unidentifiable emotion. He was six inches shorter than me; he must have been standing on a platform behind his desk.
“Now. Yes. Thanks.”
“I will bring it up myself.”
He flung shut the gate, which the bellhop hadn’t bothered with, and we ascended.
* * *
The Gran Hotel París tried to achieve the air of a two-star hotel on the Left Bank. The room, like the lobby, the café, and the elevator, did its best. The walls were the faded yellow of old newsprint; the carpeting was a meadow of rose petals. The two twin-size beds were not quite touching. Overhead, beside the ceiling fan, a lightbulb nested in a plastic rose-shaped fixture. The air stank of cigarette smoke. The bellhop flipped a switch on a mahogany-colored space heater, and the red bars in its underbelly glowed; he flipped another switch, and a fake smoldering log burst into view.
“The hot water works all night,” he announced, holding his hands together and assuming his doorman’s stance.
I tipped him five bolivianos, almost a dollar, a fortune in Bolivia. I like feeling rich, and he’d put the money to better use than I would. He left.
But before I could shut the door behind him, Antonio appeared.
“Your mate de coca, sir,” he said, speaking English for the first time, as I took the cup and saucer from him. The handle of the cup was chipped on the underside; the staff either hadn’t noticed or hoped the guests wouldn’t.
“Thank you,” I said, also in English. I think it polite to answer English with English, even when the foreigner has clearly exhausted his knowledge of the language. But I didn’t tip him, for fear of poking at his pride.
Instead of vanishing, the clerk wandered into the room, slowly, almost sleepwalking. I placed the
mate de coca
on the space heater and turned to watch him.
“Have you called the manager yet?” he asked in Spanish and then stopped to turn toward me and compose an English sentence in his mind.
“She desires very much that you speak with her,” he said slowly.
“I’ll call soon,” I said, nodding and smiling.
“Thank you.” He seemed relieved and returned my smile, as if we’d just achieved an important breakthrough.