The Gulliver Fortune

by Peter Corris

  "Never mind," said La Vita, who was tolerant of Eduardo's militarism as of everything else he did. "We will have wars of our own before long."

  But the martial phase passed. La Paz was an exciting city for a young man with money. Eduardo spent his share of time in the taverns and brothels, often waking in a strange bed with a hangover and feelings of guilt he did not understand. His cures for the fits of depression that followed carousing were to walk in the Indian market in San Sebastian, savouring the smells of food and freshly tanned leather and the deafening noise of hucksters' shouts, chanting street singers and the banging of metal on metal to attract buyers. Then he would pack a haversack and walk in the Cordillera Real, hiking along the pre-Colombian highways and then leaving them for tracks in the cold, clear air high above the treeline.

  In villages such as Choquekota and Takesi, Eduardo spent time with the stoical Indians who herded llamas, made rope and cultivated crops as they had for thousands of years. Wrapped in his poncho, he slept on the dirt floors of adobe huts. He smoked the local tobacco and learned a halting, pidgin Quechua. From these retreats he would emerge thoughtful and serious, devoting himself to his books until the next binge.

  This phase lasted for almost two years, during which time Eduardo struggled with medical studies. Late in 1920 he returned from a tramp that took him through the mountain pass above La Cumbre, down a broad trail with snow-covered peaks on either side into the subtropical Yungas area. He stayed in the village of Chairo where the people grew coffee and citrus fruits and spent any surplus centavos they might gather on festas. He talked for most of the time with an old man who had returned to the village after twenty years of working in the mines at Potosi. He was forty years of age and looked sixty. He chewed coca leaves and drank aguardiente, raw cane alcohol, to ease the aches and pains he suffered from numerous injuries sustained in the mines. His pain was all he had taken away from the mountain, which yielded two billion dollars' worth of silver. Eduardo had seen mine foremen and engineers, inspectors and medical officers. He knew how bad the mines were, but he had never before met an actual victim.

  Eduardo abandoned medicine for law at the University of San Andres. He graduated in 1924 and went into practice in La Paz, specializing in the sorts of cases approved by his mentor. He represented miners attempting to form trades unions, Indians petitioning for land grants, evicted tenants. The work intensified his radicalism and drew him into his first real dispute with Ferdinand La Vita.

  "How can you continue to use Fochsted money, Tio? You know that it comes from the sweat of the workers."

  "I do. From their blood too."

  "Then how?"

  "You will agree that I use the money well? That I help people?"

  "Yes. Many, many people. But . . ."

  "If I renounced the money it would go to one of my cousins in Europe. He would use it to buy an automobile that would go five kilometres an hour faster than the last one. Does that make sense?"

  Eduardo agreed that it did not, but he moved out of La Vita's house as soon as he could afford to. He rented a small apartment near his office, worked long hours and was careful not to get into debt or to call on La Vita for financial help in any way. He knew that Ferdinand channelled cases to him but he also knew that he performed well for his clients. The Bolivian economy boomed after the war as a rebuilding Europe bought its minerals. None of the prosperity penetrated to the workers and peasants who, more than ever, needed protection from the laws that were designed for the rich and influential.

  Occasionally, through the 1920s, Eduardo had thoughts of his siblings, whom he imagined to be in Australia. He felt sure that Carl would be a man of note by now, especially in a backward and small country, and that he could locate him. But he never took the first step. He was busy; he was tired; he was seriously ill with a mysterious blood disorder; he recovered; he argued with Ferdinand; he fell in love and was rejected absolutely. His English had become halting through disuse and his passion to see a just society in Bolivia intensified.

  Political and practical matters, quietly conducted, dominated his life until 1932 when the Chaco war erupted. After the discovery of oil in the Chaco region of the south-east, where Bolivia shared a border with Paraguay, skirmishes between the citizens and militias of the two countries were common. In 1932 Bolivia despatched 100,000 troops, largely armed and provisioned by the Patino tin mining interest, to the Chaco to secure control of the area and win a route to the Atlantic for Bolivia.

  Eduardo was a violent critic of the war.

  "It is unjust," he asserted to Ferdinand.

  "Yes."

  "It will cripple our economy."

  La Vita puffed on a cigar and nodded.

  "How can you be so calm? It's a disaster. It will cost thousands of lives."

  "Listen, Eduardo, it could be the best thing that has ever happened for the people of this country. Salamanca is weak and unpopular, right?"

  Eduardo nodded. The president was a laughing stock and the government was unusually corrupt and inefficient.

  "This war will be lost. The Paraguayans are better fighters than the Bolivians and they have more to fight for. The war will be expensive and disruptive. This government will fall and the next will be no better and the one after that will be the same."

  "You seem very sure, Tio."

  "I've studied history. This is the beginning of a change for Bolivia, a big change."

  "Revolucion?"

  La Vita shrugged. "Who knows? Men will be trained to fight, some of them will have ideas of their own. Trained fighters with ideas are hard to control."

  Eduardo looked at the man sitting on the other side of the big polished table. Around them were the trappings of affluence—ancient Peruvian rugs, copper and brass that had taken hundreds of manhours to fashion, European glassware. La Vita smoked Cuban cigars. Eduardo had never known him to perform a mean act, never heard malice from his mouth or seen him act violently. He felt impatient, irritated by the comfort surrounding the man to whom he owed so much. He felt an irresistible urge to hurt him.

  "All this will go in a revolution."

  "I know that. I do not think Bolivia is a country for violent revolution."

  Eduardo lit a cigarette and expelled the smoke derisively. "You should go more to Potosi, Tio. See the people there. See the men of my age who look older than you. You will not see any who have reached your years."

  "I have been to Potosi," La Vita said quietly. "Many times. I've walked around this country just as you have done. I have seen it all."

  "It is ripe for revolution."

  "No. The priests have twisted the people's emotions so that they cannot see the world as it is. You agree?"

  "There are some good priests," Eduardo said grudgingly.

  "The good ones admit that a bandage or a tooth extraction might be of more use than a prayer. That is as far as they will go. The bad ones still defend the conquistadores' dashing out the brains of Indian children to send them to heaven the quicker. They would do it themselves."

  "The workers . . ."

  "The workers are patriots. We are a landlocked country. There are no revolutions in landlocked countries. Look at Switzerland."

  Eduardo felt that this was superficial, but he did not reply. La Vita appeared to be unusually animated, as if he was gathering himself for something. Eduardo felt he should proceed warily. "The Indians cannot endure much more. They must have rights, they must . . ."

  "No! They must have land!" La Vita butted his cigar savagely in a beaten copper dish. He leaned across the table and reached for Eduardo's hand. Eduardo extended it and the two men gripped hands across the table.

  A question, nothing to do with the discussion, leaped for the thousandth time into Eduardo's mind. "Tio," he said, "why did you take me with you?"

  "I'll tell you one day. Not now. Listen, I need your help. The workers must own the mines and the Indians must own the land. You agree?"

  "Yes. But . . ."

  "Th
ere are many who think the same. We are organising. You must join us, Eduardo."

  36

  In November 1952 Eduardo La Vita was appointed Minister for Education in the government of Dr Victor Paz Estensorro. His election to the Chamber of Deputies to represent an industrial area in the capital was a formality. Behind Eduardo lay twenty years of political activity, all dedicated to the aims of overthrowing the corrupt oligarchs, nationalizing the tin mines and restoring land to the dispossessed Indians. He had been in gaol twice as a result of these activities. The National Revolutionary Movement, led by Dr Paz, had won government in 1951 but the army junta then in power had attempted to resist the will of the people. Along with many other MNR members, Eduardo had been officially declared a bandito with a price on his head.

  This was the period of his life which most interested Juan, Eduardo's son.

  "Did you have a carbine, Papa?" Juan crossed his thin arms across his chest. "And ammunition belts, so?"

  "Yes. And a beard, but no earring."

  "He smelt," Yolanda La Vita said, "your father smelt like a mofeta. That was what they called him in the gang, el mofeta, the skunk."

  Eduardo laughed. "Not true, Juan. Don't listen to her. They called me el canguro, the kangaroo, because I have been to Australia."

  "The Minister is a liar," Yolanda said. "No one has been to Australia. Describe a kangaroo, el mofeta mio."

  "I've never seen one."

  "There. I told you. All lies."

  At various times Eduardo told his young son about his voyage to Australia and the death of his parents, and how Tio Ferdinand had taken care of him and brought him to Bolivia. Juan listened dutifully, but was always likely to ask a question about his father's brief period of banditry. Eduardo sensed a recklessness in his son, which alarmed him. He attempted to emphasize the hunger and discomfort that went with living off the land and the danger of being betrayed to the militia. Although he was a Bolivian in speech, dress and manners, Eduardo retained a reserve more appropriate to an Englishman. He would not tell Juan that the worst part of being a bandit was the separation from Yolanda.

  He had met her shortly after making his commitment to his uncle and the group of men who were to join other liberals and form the MNR. Yolanda was the daughter of Dr Carlo Borota, who was of Basque extraction, although his family had lived in Bolivia for a hundred years. Borota's views matched those of Ferdinand La Vita closely, which meant that he was frequently in conflict with the more progressive Eduardo. But Eduardo was able to forgive the conservative doctor everything on account of his daughter. Yolanda was eighteen years of age and still at school. Eduardo asked her to marry him on their second meeting and she told him that she had no intention of marrying until she had finished her studies.

  "I'm thirty-two," he said.

  "In four years I will be twenty-two, only ten years younger than you."

  "But I'll be . . ."

  "Pooh," Yolanda said. "What does it matter?"

  She completed her science degree and married Eduardo in 1937. Their son was born five years later after Yolanda had suffered several miscarriages. The birth was difficult and damaging, and Yolanda did not become pregnant again. This was a sadness to them.

  But the 1940s were a time of elation and despair for Bolivian liberals. The first MNR government under Colonel Gualberto Villaroel attempted to make the changes sought by Ferdinand La Vita, Dr Borota and the liberals, but the mining and landed interests proved too strong. The bloody coup that overthrew Villaroel sent many MNR supporters into exile. Yolanda joined her father and Ferdinand La Vita in Paraguay. Eduardo spent a brief period in jail then, and again three years later, when President Urriolagoitia took a hard line with liberals.

  Through this time Eduardo visited his wife and infant son in Paraguay, but the brief taste of victory intensified his desire to see a progressive government in his country. The death of Ferdinand La Vita in 1950 inspired him further.

  "This is temporary," he told Yolanda, after a brief funeral and burial in a churchyard on the outskirts of Asuncion. "We will bring him home soon and do it properly."

  Yolanda nodded. The next time she saw her husband, he was no longer the neatly dressed, well barbered lawyer, but a stinking, hairy rebel worn thin by effort and near-starvation. She expected hourly to hear that he had been shot on a hillside or executed in prison, but the day came, as he had always said it would, when the miners rose in a revolt that sparked the revolution. Dr Paz and the MNR were swept into power.

  Eduardo was offered several government posts and chose the education job because he knew it would have pleased Tio. It pleased his father-in-law and wife too. It smacked of offices and desks and quiet meetings, of careful planning and gradually achieved results. As Eduardo fulfilled these tasks he sometimes thought of Ferdinand's insistence that Bolivia was not a revolutionary country. He certainly did not feel like a revolutionary now. But you were not quite right, Tio, he thought, it took a revolution to bring you home so that you could sleep in the mountains.

  Juan Gulliver La Vita had his first serious fight at the age of ten years. A boy at school called Juan's father a 259"/> comunista. Juan left him with a black eye, a broken nose and three cracked ribs. The rib damage was done when Juan kicked his opponent several times as he lay on the ground. For this he was threatened with expulsion from the school and the Minister had to go personally to the reactionary principal and eat humble pie to avert the catastrophe.

  "He insulted you," Juan told his father.

  "Thank you for defending our honour, but you went too far. The eye or the nose would have been enough. The ribs were a mistake."

  "I got excited, Papa. The way you must have done when you shot it out with the militia."

  "I did not shoot it out. I mostly ran away."

  Juan shrugged his disbelief. "You're being modest, Papa."

  "It's not a bad quality. I'm worried about you, Juan. You are doing well at school, better than me, perhaps not as well as your mother . . ."

  "School is fine, but I can't stand idiots."

  "Get used to them, boy. You're going to meet a few."

  Apart from disquiet about Juan's wild behaviour and the health of Yolanda's father, things ran smoothly for the La Vita family. A minister's salary permitted them to live comfortably and Yolanda's earnings as a teacher allowed extras—a cabin in the mountains about Choquekota, a car for Yolanda and a very belated two-month honeymoon trip to the United States. Juan, now fourteen years of age and attending an experimental school for the children of liberal parents, stayed behind with his elderly grandparents. They saw little of him. He spent most of his time on the streets of La Paz and around the market. Severe neglect of his schoolwork dated from this period.

  Yolanda endured the unexplained absences from home, the stumbling arrivals in the early hours, the scruffy companions and adverse school reports for as long as she could. Eduardo worked an eighty-hour week and she was protective of him, but eventually she was forced to share her distress.

  "He is uncontrollable," she reported to her husband.

  Eduardo was working on papers at home. He looked up. "Who?"

  "Your son, Mr Minister. If he goes on this way he will become a client of your colleague, the Minister for Justice."

  Eduardo sighed. It was 1959 and a difficult time for the government. The bottom had fallen out of the world tin market after the nationalization of the Bolivian mines, almost as if by cause and effect. Land reforms had thrown agricultural production into chaos and Bolivia was importing more of her food with less money to pay for it. In many branches of government the demands of the conservatives were being heard; in his own department the problem was with the radicals. On every side he heard the cries—reduce the influence of the church; increase teachers' salaries; amalgamate the teachers' union with a workers' union; allow student participation in school government. He was finding difficulty in keeping sympathy with progressive thought, and this alarmed him.

  "I have a Cabinet meet
ing tomorrow. I must be prepared for it. After that I can do some delegating and find more time for the boy."

  "Good," Yolanda said. "He still respects you."

  "When he finds I am not recommending equal representation for students on the school board, he may not."

  Yolanda kissed her husband's neck. Eduardo's dark hair was streaked with grey and he looked older than his fifty-nine years. She hoped he would not accept another term in the government but she knew there was pressure on him to do so, even to move up in the ranks and assume more authority. After Dr Paz's first term, Hernan Siles Zuazo had become President. His elevation was seen by many as merely an MNR ploy to allow Dr Paz, constitutionally barred from a second consecutive term, to return to office. Dr Paz, Yolanda felt sure, would have plans for her husband.

  "You have always spoken of a trip to Australia, querido, to find your family. Is there any chance of it soon? It would be good to take Juan away from the locos he hangs around with now."

  "I don't know," Eduardo said. "Perhaps. Or maybe to the mountains for fishing?"

  "He refuses to go to the mountains. He says it's dull."

  Eduardo laughed and reached to embrace Yolanda. She came close to his chair and he put his arms around her. "Dull? He should try my job."

  "You should retire next year, Eduardo. Go out with Zuazo. You have earned a rest."

  His age was a sore spot with Eduardo. He dreaded being sixty; he did not want to underline the fact with retirement. "Too much to do," he muttered. "The Americans want this, Lechin and the mine workers want that. It's a balancing act and I am an old high-wire artist." He realised that he had said 'old' and he made an impatient gesture. He lit his forty-fifth cigarette for the day and coughed. "I have to work."