The Travel Writer

by Jeff Soloway

  “Can I buy a hat there?” he asked, when we were safely across.

  “You can get one on the way. The Witches’ Market is where you buy what you need to make an offering to the Indian God, the Pachamama. Stone frogs, for example, or llama fetuses.” I paused. At this point, the newbie’s eyes should shine in delight as he contemplates his encounter with an authentically outlandish culture, but Kenny’s remained dull and waxy. “Do you know what fetus means?” I asked.

  “Can these witches tell the future? Can they find people?” He stuffed his red, cold-swollen hands into the pockets of his jeans and hunched his shoulders.

  “They aren’t 900-line witches. They’re religious, and they’re real. We’re talking about a living pre-Columbian culture in the heart of one of the biggest cities in Latin America. This is a four-star, cross-continents-to-get-to-it sight, even if nobody in the U.S. has heard of it. You’re luckier than you know.”

  We crossed again to the stony plaza in front of the cathedral, across the square from the Hotel París. Shoeshine boys, their heads covered in black wool caps just a shade darker than their skin, darted toward us and retreated as I waved them away. Kenny didn’t notice; he was watching his feet move, as if he didn’t trust them to keep going forward. A woman selling lottery tickets interrupted her sales pitch to stare up at his pasty, high-altitude face.

  “My mom’s Catholic,” Kenny said, once we were already safely past the cathedral. “Maybe we should’ve gone in.”

  “You wouldn’t understand what they’re saying.”

  “I could pray.”

  “Pray on the street. Pray as we walk.” I had no affection for the cathedral. It was a dark, oppressive, pseudo-Gothic hulk, not even two hundred years old. I gave it one star in my guidebook. It’s official Caravan Guide policy always to give a capital city’s cathedral at least one star, even if it looks like a Pizza Hut.

  “Maybe I could do it better if I was holding something, like a fetus or a stone frog. Are they expensive?”

  “You can get a good small one for five bolivianos. Less than a dollar. For a frog, I mean. I’ve never bought a fetus.”

  We turned and began our descent down a quiet side street to the avenue known as the Prado, at the bottom of the city. La Paz is shaped like an open book; the Prado is the fold. From there, we’d climb up the page a handful of blocks to Calle Linares.

  “I bet a witch has all sorts of information,” said Kenny, as he gazed out across the street and then up over the urban valley, to the scrubby brown hills that shelter La Paz from the altiplano winds. “I bet we learn something today.”

  * * *

  There is no city like La Paz. Like every capital in this hemisphere, it has its shopping malls, but they’re kitschy ghost towns, patronized only by nervous tourists and the most obnoxious of local snobs; everything anybody could want is sold outside, in the streets. The city itself is divided, like a bazaar, into specialties. Max Paredes Street hosts the black market: disembodied toilet bowls sit gleaming on the sidewalk, next to PCs, stereos, electric drills, cellphones, pine furniture. Traffic there is a honking, frozen nightmare because of all the cars blocking traffic so their drivers can load a coffee table or color television into the trunk. Other streets are famous for fruit, meat, coca leaves, outfits for Indian women (who are known locally as cholas or, a bit more condescendingly, as cholitas), books, and textiles.

  Less expensive goods are everywhere. The indigenous people in cities like Quito come to the city center to beg, but in La Paz, only the lame, the old, or those with babies beg—the rest sell fruit, chewing gum, homemade juice, or if they’re a little more prosperous, batteries, socks, dice. Each morning the vendors descend by bus or passenger truck or on foot from the heights of La Paz, or from the even higher reaches of El Alto (only the rich live at La Paz’s lower altitudes, where the air is thicker and the weather warmer and more pleasant—La Paz is a continent to its citizens). To transport their goods they wrap them in thin pastel-colored blankets that they tie around their chests, so the loads squat on their backs. At night they climb back again to their homes, in neighborhoods I’ve never visited. I love the poor of La Paz. They lack the despair of the poor in other cities, like New York, and inspire no fear in me, which is all we ask of the poor anywhere.

  Kenny and I crossed the mad rush of the Prado and trudged up busy Sagarnaga Street behind it. The thin air made our legs heavier, and we stopped gratefully at every street corner to let the traffic go by, even if the light was with us. At the same time, cholas and leather-faced men in fedoras cruised by us on the sidewalk. If we tourists, like gawking midwesterners in Times Square, annoyed them, they didn’t show it. I huddled into the walls to let them pass, and Kenny copied me. His sense of wonder had finally come alive. Several times, when his eyes were fixed on some woman carrying an impossible bundle of fruit, clothing, or children on her back, I had to save him from stepping in someone’s sidewalk sale. Then he’d walk backward to stare at the goods he’d almost trampled until I had to rescue him again.

  “Those fetuses,” said Kenny, “do they keep after you buy them?”

  “They should,” I said. “They’re dried. But what would you do with a fetus? That’s not your superstition. You’re Catholic.”

  “My mom’s Catholic,” said Kenny. “She only took me to church once, when I was a kid. I hated it. Kept staring at the big naked guy with nails stuck through his tendons. Gross. Baby lamb, I can deal with.”

  “It’s a baby llama, not a lamb.”

  “Long as it’s dead, and no nails stuck in it.” He bobbed his head, agreeing with himself. “Hilary’s Catholic. She told me so. She said she always thought she’d get married and make her kids go to CCD on Sunday just like she had to. For revenge, she said. She was just joking.” We were trudging up a street crammed with shops that sold alpaca sweaters, scarves, and gloves to tourists. “I prayed for her once,” he said. “I figured, why not? But I don’t think I was doing it right. What do you do, just think at God, like you think at yourself when you’re on the subway? Or do you need some kind of password to get started? I don’t know.”

  Kenny was now wheezing from the climb. He stopped and swabbed his face with the sleeve of his sweater. My sweater. “Hilary wanted to travel more. She told me that. But she said she didn’t have the moolah.”

  A dog with a bundle of sticks roped to its back trotted between us. Kenny leaned against the wall to gather up the remainder of his breath.

  “You don’t need moolah if you’re a travel writer,” I said.

  We turned at Calle Linares, a street like any other, cobblestones and battered desultory storefronts, except the stalls on the sidewalk overflowed with goods of a quotidian holiness: fizzy drinks; platters of colored confetti, like a shredded rainbow; unidentifiable herbs crisping in the sun; and more, and stranger. To represent the material objects of prayer, there were miniature cars, trucks, and model houses, and for the less imaginative or more direct, undersize counterfeit dollars. The fetuses came in all varieties, from the ice-cream-cone-size llama fetuses that filled cardboard fruit boxes under the table, to the carving-knife-long sheep fetuses propped up at the back of the table, to the alpaca fetuses suspended from hooks above, their necks long and slender. They must have been just days from birth when the abortion was sprung on them.

  “The Witches’ Market,” I said.

  The girl who tended the first stall was perhaps thirteen years old, but she knitted with all the resignation of the most shriveled chola on the street. Kenny began rooting through a box of her smallest and least ostentatious fetuses. They all had big heads, like a rooster’s, affixed to their twig-frail, huddled-up bodies. “I want one that’s a little juicy,” he said.

  I picked up a stone idol.

  “That’s an owl,” the girl said in Spanish. “For knowledge.”

  “Since I’m an idiot, I need this one,” I said.

  “Are you English?”

  That’s the response most of my Spanish-lang
uage jokes get.

  “I’m American. I’m a travel writer. If you’re lucky, I’ll write about your stall in my guidebook. You’ll be known all over the world.”

  I could feel my Spanish growing nimbler with practice. The girl laid her knitting on the table, smothering a jumbled slum of miniature houses.

  “You can take a picture of me and my stall for three bolivianos,” she said.

  “No, thank you. But maybe I’ll buy the owl.”

  “My friend Margarita, her father lives in America. I think his name is Guillermo.”

  She looked at me questioningly. I hated to disappoint her; it’s rare that an indigenous girl will strike up a conversation. Perhaps the younger generation of Bolivians was beginning to realize that, in the tourist business, the spoils go to the outgoing.

  “Guillermo,” I said. “Sounds familiar.… Does he work in a restaurant?”

  I studied her reaction.

  “No,” I said. “Now I remember. He works in construction.”

  I was expecting her to beam; I was disappointed. He was probably a physicist or a diplomat.

  “Margarita was studying English,” she said, “but I got better grades.”

  She took a deep breath and said in English, “How are you?” It sounded like three blasts of a car horn.

  “I’m very well,” I said in English, slowly and clearly. I even added a little bow at the end, but again it provoked no reaction. She’d probably tell all her friends that Americans bow after every sentence.

  “Why aren’t you in school now?” I asked in Spanish.

  “There’s a teachers’ strike.”

  “Do you know this woman?” Kenny asked, and he pulled one of the Pearsons’ photos out of his wallet and slipped it over her knitting.

  “That’s the disappeared American woman,” the girl said to me. “She’s very pretty.”

  “I knew her,” I said. “So did he. He was her boyfriend.”

  Her placid eyes widened in respect, as if she’d been told he owned a unicorn.

  “Does she know anything?” Kenny asked. “Sabee? Sabee?”

  “We want to find what happened to her,” I said to her, embarrassed for Kenny and for my country. “Maybe the owl knows.”

  She said something in Aymara to the older woman in the neighboring stall, who answered shortly, without looking up from the potatoes she was peeling. The woman was not endorsing the conversation but permitting it. In the countryside, such a woman would speak only Aymara or Quechua, but here I was sure she knew Spanish as well. Always in a foreign country, you feel you’re being watched; it seems every local can sense discomfort in your hesitating footsteps, in your furtive glances at street signs, and most easily in the unnatural sounds that blunder forth from your mouth when you try to speak their language. Each foreign country is a theater in which you’re permitted to perform for the amusement of the locals.

  “The owl knows, but he doesn’t speak Spanish,” the girl said to me.

  “Ask him in Aymara.”

  “He doesn’t speak Aymara either.”

  “It’s very, very important that we find this information. Incredibly important. A mountain of importance.”

  I spread my arms like wings, to assist my Spanish in conveying the concept of immensity.

  “The man from Condepa said the coca growers from Chapare are responsible for what happened to her, but he always says that,” she said.

  “What’s she saying?” said Kenny.

  “Condepa?” I said. “The political party? Can I talk to this man?”

  The old woman said something to the girl, and the girl quickly hunched over her knitting.

  “Please!” I said.

  Suddenly there was weight on my shoulder, heavy enough to reorient my body, and a young man in a blue nylon sweat suit and a Nike cap invaded my field of vision. A confident smile was spread across his face, stretching and distorting the faint pattern of acne scars on his cheeks. His nose was bony and ridged. I felt for my wallet. It was still there.

  “Good day, American,” he said. “Why are you bothering this nice little girl?”

  I stuttered and fumbled for a suitably indignant phrase as I disentangled my gaze from his. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Arturo. You won’t find the American writer here.”

  “Where will I find her?”

  “How would I know? Probably she’s hiding out with the guy she’s screwing. She will return when she’s ready.”

  Behind him, clattering up the rutted pavement, came a yellow cab. It wobbled as it approached, almost but not quite sideswiping the stalls on either side. I had visions of a crash sending idols and plastic model cars, fetuses and fizzy drinks, confetti and fake money, tumbling through the air. Someone should set an action movie in La Paz. When the car stopped, I retreated, almost stumbling over a box of fetuses; my interlocutor held his ground.

  The driver killed the engine and unpacked himself from the cab. As a rule, Bolivians are small and slight of build, due to their people’s history of malnourishment in the highlands, but this man appeared to have grown up in an environment loaded with rich food and free weights.

  “American,” the driver said. “Son of a bitch neoliberal!”

  Kenny flapped his gaze back and forth between their faces and mine.

  “Come with us, neoliberal,” said Arturo. “And your friend. We have information for you.”

  “Tell me here.”

  The driver opened his back door and then stepped around behind us, blocking our escape. I wondered if Bolivian heavies have guns like they do in the U.S., in movies at least.

  “He wants to give us a ride?” asked Kenny.

  “He says he wants to talk about Hilary.”

  “Me too. Yo venir!” Kenny said, and hopped in the cab. I hopped in after him, cursing his stupidity but unwilling to leave him to face his fate alone. Not that I had my choice, with the big driver behind me and pushing me forward.

  Chapter 10

  I stared out the windows as we rattled our way through the unkempt streets of the heart of the city, trying to affect an air of sullen displeasure, as if my time were often wasted by worthless Bolivians and I knew enough to bear the delay in silence. Since the driver-stooge and his friend were in the front, no one could enjoy my performance but Kenny. He seemed to be trying to catch my eye, but having no intelligence to communicate, I ignored him.

  You still have options, I told myself. If I wanted to, I could flip up the lock, kick open the door at a red light, and lose myself in the buzzing swarm of street vendors and shoppers. I wouldn’t get very far, but all I needed was to reach the nearest cop or civil guard. Of course, that would leave Kenny at the mercy of our captors, unless I could manage to organize a daring simultaneous double taxi break. But that would necessitate looking at him and getting a message through his thick skull.

  At a red light we stopped in the full glare of a cop. The sun glittered off the threadbare shoulders of his olive uniform. The windows were down; now I could scream or make a break for it. Stay, I told myself. You need this information; what else do you have for Pilar? Besides, a true reporter wouldn’t flee this opportunity, no matter the risks. No use. I knew my paralysis was caused by fear, not courage. My body slipped back into the torn vinyl seat as we sped up on the highway and began to climb.

  Did they really know something about Hilary? Or were they taking me somewhere to kill me, or just to rob me and beat me up? I had never been beaten up before. I wasn’t even sure what it entailed. The phrase itself implies that you’re all right afterward: maybe a bloody nose, a black eye, a few bruises around the ribs. But I imagined the components of the action, each blow, each new infusion of pain replacing and surpassing the one before. Could they make me cry? I felt suddenly nauseated.

  “Where are we going?” Kenny asked. For an instant I thought he was demanding information from the men in front, and I felt the world shoot up in flames of fear, but then I realized he was asking me.

&n
bsp; “This is the road to El Alto,” I whispered.

  Though his eyes blinked anxiously, he nodded, as if he had suspected as much. His attempt at bravado shamed me.

  “What’s this information you have?” I said aloud.

  “Shut up with your neoliberal impatience!” the driver said, or at least I think that’s what he said. He spoke quickly, and his Spanish accent was not that of a trained hospitality professional.

  “The matter will be explained later,” said Arturo, turning to smile reassuringly at us. Perhaps he was the good cop. Nonetheless, my nausea cautiously retreated.

  “What’re they saying?” asked Kenny.

  Arturo turned up the radio and started bopping his head to something by Silvio Rodríguez.

  “They say we’re neoliberals,” I said.

  “Not me. I’m a Republican. Yo Republicano!”

  They paid no attention.

  “A Republican is a neoliberal,” I said. “Don’t you know anything?”

  The driver turned the music down.

  “John McCain’s no liberal,” said Kenny. “I don’t care what anyone says.”

  “What’s he saying?” asked Arturo. With each switchback on the road, we lost speed.

  “He’s talking about North American politics,” I said. “We’re not neoliberals.”

  “My friend doesn’t like neoliberals.”

  “I understand that perfectly and am in complete agreement. But—”

  “Nor North Americans.”

  The car dragged itself up the steep incline at barely a trotting pace. Newer-model sedans driven by local yuppies whizzed past. The ancient egg-shaped minibuses also chugged by us, only slightly less swiftly. A man on a bicycle appeared to be gaining. Yet another chance to escape, but now there was a chain-link fence on the city side of the road, leaving me nowhere to run. It was too late.

  “Do you like North Americans?” I asked.

  He didn’t venture an opinion.

  * * *