The Travel Writer

by Jeff Soloway

  “Yeah,” I said. He sighed, rolled over, and went back to sleep.

  Chapter 14

  Checking out after a freebie is always a moment of glory for me, one more triumph over the dreary rules of social stratification. Antonio maintained his chieftain’s bearing atop his hidden pedestal, but his lower lip twitched nervously as he presented me a bill for fifty-two bolivianos, about five dollars (the cost of my meal at the Café París). That I was fuzzy-brained with weariness in no way lessened my customary sense of achievement, which at that point, after my encounter with Pilar, hardly needed inflating. Even Antonio, who’d betrayed me to Condepa, was now just a spiteful child, jealous of my newly won popularity.

  “I received the information that you spoke of,” I said, as I signed the name John Hancock on the bill. Nobody notices the difference.

  “I spoke in a very amiable manner with some men,” I continued. “Are they friends of yours?”

  “I hope that you enjoyed your stay at our hotel,” Antonio said coldly. “And also that you enjoy your visit to the excellent Hotel Matamoros.”

  I had stalked and overcome my love prey; I was approaching the secret to the mysterious disappearance; I’d be damned if I let this pip squeak think he could flick his pebbles at me and go unpunished. He leaned back and forth uncomfortably on his invisible platform, a sapling swaying in the breeze.

  “You called your friends from Condepa,” I said. “Your boss knows what you did.”

  “Pardon me for the inconvenience.”

  He was still looking at Kenny, not me, and I couldn’t decide whether he was mocking me, or barely able to control an impulse to strangle me, or just stunned at the prospect of losing his job. He kept swaying, until I feared he would topple over, and then he remembered himself and gripped his desk with both hands.

  “Why are you here at this hotel?” I demanded.

  “I have a wife, three children, and my parents to care for,” he said.

  I scowled, realizing I could never successfully explain, in Spanish, that my question was meant to imply that I knew he was a mole for Condepa. As a travel writer I mainly asked about rack rates, weekend specials, and room service availability, all inquiries for which my Spanish was easily adequate and which my interviewees were eager to answer.

  As I left I remembered the tip I had withheld from him when he brought my tea that first evening at the hotel and I saw myself in his eyes: a pompous, ill-mannered American, with an ungainly accent and a tight grip on his money.

  * * *

  The minibus, or trufi, that would take us to the long-run buses stopped near the overpass at Calle Loayza. From there you could watch cholas washing their families’ clothes in the Choqueyapu River, looking like pioneer women in an old Western stopping at a stream on the way to Oregon, except for the freakish green of the water and the howling traffic on the freeways above the canyon.

  Kenny perched on his duffel bag, affecting the nonchalance of a veteran hitcher resigned to a long wait. How many Sunday afternoons had he spent watching road movies on television? As we waited, I peered into the taxis going by, imagining that each hid a Condepa agent. We would soon leave the simmering danger of La Paz behind and be at the Matamoros. Pilar had left early; perhaps she was already there, daydreaming about the night before and perhaps the night to come as she idly shuffled papers in her office, deep within the hotel. The hotel that was infested with Hilary’s abductors. I imagined maids with ninja gear in their lockers, the concierge shifting his eyes suspiciously in my direction and murmuring code into a hidden microphone, the bellhop with a knife tucked away in the lining of his polyester jacket. At a resort named one of the world’s top 100 by Travel + Leisure? In the morning light, my paranoia seemed ridiculous.

  A minivan covered with signs advertising its stops hurtled toward the overpass. A young boy leaned out the window to shout the bus’s route for the benefit of illiterate riders waiting for the right bus. The kid had first-class lungs, but he wouldn’t have much of a future; as soon as he, or any trufi barker, grew too large to fit comfortably halfway out the window, he’d be unemployable.

  Kenny and I climbed on, squeezed our way back to the second to last row, and crammed our bags on our laps. The woman behind me tried to rearrange the load of oranges resting on my seatback, but all she managed to do was push them deeper into my back and neck, a dozen grinding fists. At least it wasn’t a box of chickens. I handed three bolivianos, one and half for each of us, to the woman in front of me, who delivered the fare to the driver.

  A girl in her high school uniform clambered on at the next stop and, finding no seat unoccupied, unfolded the jump seat over the aisle. Kenny stared, as if she’d yanked a rabbit out of a hat.

  “How far?” he asked me.

  “We’re full,” I said. “We won’t be stopping again until somebody gets off.”

  “Good,” he said. “We got to keep moving.”

  And we were moving, the aged bus gathering its strength of purpose and galloping up and out of the heart of the city. Our backs were to the Plaza Murillo and the Gran Hotel París; El Alto too was far above and behind us; the boy had stopped shouting and we weren’t slowing down.

  * * *

  We stopped under a rusted awning next to the service station that serves as the plaza mayor for La Paz’s Villa Fátima neighborhood, where all the Yungas-bound buses depart from. The high school girl had to fold up her seat and stand hunched over to let us pass. She smiled encouragingly as we squeezed by with our bags but yelped when Kenny caught her with the backswing of the duffel as he frog-jumped out the door.

  Vendors with baskets belted to their waists or suspended from their necks streamed through the streets in all directions, hawking flatbread, candy, and fruit. Shoppers pushed by them and each other en route to one of the countless produce and meat stalls that lined the streets. Cars honked at pedestrians and each other or just in frustration at the teeming mess. I scanned the surrounding storefronts in search of my favorite bus company. The road from La Paz to Coroico, though much improved in recent years, is still not to be attempted on a discount service. Bus touts saw our pale skin and hustled in to help us out.

  “Coroico?” I said.

  “Coroico!” The nearest tout sang out the word lustfully, correcting my pronunciation, and whipped out his seating chart.

  “Coroico!” sang out another man, behind us. It was Arturo, sticking his head out the window of a familiar yellow cab, the same one that had taken me to El Alto yesterday.

  “Come on, kid,” he said in Spanish.

  Pilar stuck her head out of the window behind him.

  “Let’s go, Jacob,” she said. “I’m already late.”

  My first thought was that she had been kidnapped and forced at gunpoint to lead me also to my death, but that whistled by and left me certain that she was a willing accomplice, betraying me.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “To the Matamoros,” she said, and heaved open the door. I wanted to pull her out and drag her into the service station or a passing trufi (not a taxi), where Arturo couldn’t follow and I could interrogate her. But what if Arturo pulled out a gun and shot her? Or what if Pilar slapped me in the face?

  “We’re taking the bus,” said Kenny. “Right? Me and the Snake’ll catch the bus, thanks.”

  Flee, and she’s lost; whatever she had become, traitor or captive, I’d never know.

  “Please, Jacob,” said Pilar.

  “It’s under control, Kenny,” I said, and got in beside her. This is different, I told myself. How could I leave Pilar alone in Arturo’s clutches? Kenny inserted himself at my other side, carefully arranging his limbs to fit into the available corners.

  I glanced at her face; in the brutal midmorning light, the shadows under her eyes showed through her flesh-colored makeup like little bruises, all but healed. The night before still showed on her body, and only I knew. How could I distrust a woman with whom I shared a secret? I knew, of course, that many se
crets are betrayed or seized and wielded against the divulger, but Pilar’s pale eyes revealed no treachery. I supposed. But how the hell did I know? It’s a lie to say the eyes are windows to the soul. Aside from their color, all eyes are the same, except for what they hold inside: contact lenses, cataracts, tears.

  “Next stop, the Hotel Matamoros!” said Arturo and started up the hill as quickly as the choppy sea of humanity around us permitted.

  “Did you enjoy the show at the Pig & Whistle last night?” I said in Spanish. I hoped he’d think I’d been clumsy, not beaten. I remembered the cruel chill of the pavement on my butt and clubbed off the memory with vigorous recollections of Pilar’s fingers on my body. I tried to shoot her a meaningful glance, but she was examining her nails. The harsh late morning light glinted off the down above her lip; lucky for her she was fair-haired. Despite the shadows, she looked placid and comfortable. Perhaps she often had men over until dawn. Focus, focus, I told myself, remembering my Little League coach’s mantra. How could I focus if I hadn’t slept?

  “I don’t have money for those gringo bars,” said Arturo.

  “This guy’s trouble,” said Kenny. He speared me with his elbow as he tried to rearrange his limbs. Out of necessity I pressed against Pilar. The thought of her thighs invigorated me.

  “He’s a member of Condepa,” I whispered to her in English. Arturo had finally rumbled onto a wider road and gave the accelerator all he had. The gale from the open windows ripped a tear from my eyes. We were out of the city now, attacking a winding highway blasted out of the mountains around La Paz.

  Pilar gasped sarcastically and then, in case I didn’t get the point, flipped her wrist to her forehead and pretended to faint. “They all are,” she said. “It’s the biggest party in El Alto and it’s growing over all the country. I bet half the hotel staff votes Condepa.”

  “How do you know him?” I asked. Kenny was pumping the obviously inoperative window-raising handle round and round, at electricity-generating speed.

  She twirled her hand above her head, as if she couldn’t recall the specific cocktail party at which they’d been introduced. “Arturo often drives one of our minivans out to the hotel,” she said. “He’s one of our most reliable employees.”

  They worked together. So it was a conspiracy. She had seduced me, like Mata Hari. Ridiculous. I had no secrets worth anything to anyone.

  “Ask him where he was last night. Kenny, quit it.”

  Kenny humphed, shut his eyes, and wedged his head between the seat and the window frame.

  “I know where he was last night,” she said.

  “Where?” He must have told her some story that morning.

  “Did you meet a girl last night, Arturo?” she asked in Spanish.

  “No,” he said. “Went home to Papi.”

  Papi. As if she knew his papi. And what kind of a question was Did you meet a girl? Was this some delicate form of sparring, or a way of ingratiating herself to him to postpone the coming doom? Were they friends? Just allies? I wished Pilar and I could have continued talking, however antagonistically, while we looked out at the mountains and the ravine beside the road and ignored the existence of everyone else in the world.

  “Surely he’s very proud of you,” I said. “Your papi. As you say.”

  “Why?”

  “Your job. For the hotel. Understand?”

  How could he? I wasn’t making any sense. I wished I could open up my mind and let the images inside pour out and wash Arturo away. Instead I sucked in a steadying lungful of air, mentally designed my question, and asked:

  “What does your father think of your job?”

  “As a driver? You know what I did before this? I cleaned offices. That’s after I graduated from the university. I had a degree in biology and a job in a lab, but it lost its funding.”

  He turned down the radio—the music had blended so well with the wind, I hadn’t realized it was on—and tossed his head back toward me at the beginning of every sentence, like a chatty New York cabbie.

  “It’s all politics in Bolivia,” he continued. “So I cleaned offices at night. Vacuumed the carpets, scrubbed the counters in the kitchen, wiped off the desks. Cleaned the toilets.”

  “You cleaned offices?”

  I imagined him fifty pounds heavier, wearing a discolored flowered skirt and matron’s wig, and sighing as he spiritlessly replaced wastepaper basket bags. The perfect disguise. After all the staff had left, he’d steal corporate secrets from the filing cabinets and hard drives.

  “My father got me the job once they threw me out of the lab. He has a lot of influence.” Arturo laughed. “But we had a car, so I started driving, and then a friend helped me pick up this position with the hotel. My father knows this is better. At night we play dice, and when he wins, my father says, You’re a good son, but you have no luck. And when he loses he says, You waste all your luck beating your father at dice, and there’s none left for your future. He wants me to make enough money to marry, so that he’ll have somebody to cook for him.”

  Arturo spoke clearly and loudly; driving for the hotel had accustomed him to dealing with foreigners. He knew to tell the personal stories, to give the local color that inspires big tips. I had an image of his aged, limping father, alone in the house, impotently shaking a frying pan as the grease around the pork chop flamed within it. Later he would settle his pudgy body in a favorite chair and grin as he shook the dice. Why would Arturo want to win me over? Perhaps his gregariousness was utterly unaffected; perhaps he spun witty stories of his school days to relax Dionisius’s victims before their kneecappings.

  “But what does your father think of you now?” I asked. “Now that you … help frighten people.”

  “Eh? I don’t understand you. In any case, my father was much happier when I was in the university. So was I.”

  Pilar was gazing through the window, her hand shading her eyes Indian-style. The shadow that masked her face shook with the rattling of the car.

  “You never told me what happened to you last night,” I said in English. “I asked, but you never answered.”

  “I was unavoidably detained,” she said, without turning away from the window. “I cannot discuss this now.”

  I turned to watch a cliff approaching alongside us. Some evangelist had spray-painted “Jesus Salva” on the rock.

  “I waited an hour,” I said. “All by myself,” I added, and instantly regretted it.

  Kenny stirred and blinked sleepily.

  “I’m very sorry. I’m very sorry you opened your big fat mouth about our appointment. Jacob, try trusting me. Remember how careful I have to be. Try to understand the world from another point of view.”

  “I never told anybody about our appointment! And I understand lots of points of view.” I could almost feel myself pouting as I spoke.

  “I know,” she said, patting my knee. “You’re very sympathetic, Jacob, when you try.”

  Kenny was awake now, watching us. Interaction between lovers was a strange and fascinating spectacle to him, like the aurora borealis.

  “Do you see that mountain, Jacob? Kenny, look. It’s on my side. Duck down and look.” She palmed his head like a basketball and pulled it almost into my lap. I could see dainty flakes, like dandruff, on her knuckles; she must have forgotten her lotion that morning. “I climbed it once, with a guide and a pack of ten German fanatics, all of them in their forties. You don’t believe me? We hired boys from Chuspipata to carry our oxygen masks. I never needed oxygen before. You get a headache and then you get stupid from the weariness, and you know I don’t like to be stupid, Jacob. I wonder if I’ll ever do anything like that again.”

  I wasn’t sure which peak she was talking about; a grove of them loomed white and jagged across the valley from the highway. Arturo hunted through his side window to find what we were staring at.

  “Keep your eyes on the road, man!” said Pilar in Spanish. Arturo scornfully jiggled the steering wheel, shaking the butt of the car.
<
br />   Pilar laughed.

  “Are you sorry now you destroyed the photo?” I asked.

  She let go of Kenny’s head. He straightened up, slowly, a blade of grass after the gust has died away.

  “No,” she said. “My parents have traveled enough.”

  An apology rose like bile in my throat, but I swallowed it down.

  “How did you meet Hilary?” Kenny asked, tired of being left out of the conversation.

  “At my old job, on a trip to Citrus County, Florida. Manatees,” Pilar added. “We liked each other right away. One night when she was here, we stayed up at the lounge, talking, almost until dawn. Several men tried to buy her drinks, but she wasn’t interested.”

  “Told you,” said Kenny to me.

  “Until dawn? Kenny says she could get pretty sauced,” I said.

  “If you had the life she had, you’d get sauced too,” said Pilar. “Let’s not talk about her now.”

  I wondered what miseries Hilary could have recounted to impress an orphan like Pilar. Had they really become fast friends over a long night of girly drinks at the Matamoros lounge? Perhaps the talk had turned to old boyfriends. Perhaps Pilar had told Hilary my lover’s secrets: what I was good at and not so good at, how happy or unhappy I had made her. I imagined the two of them laughing and sharing healthy disdain for the people who’d failed them. I didn’t mind. Hilary and I now had something in common—we were the only two people, to my knowledge, ever to win over Pilar.

  “Are you joining us at the Matamoros, Kenny?” she asked.

  “If I’m invited.”

  “Of course.” She lowered her voice. “But you’ll have to pretend to be a photographer working with Jacob on a review of the hotel. You can’t tell anyone”—she nodded at Arturo—“why you’re really here. Can you pull it off?”

  He nodded and beamed. She’ll be another Hilary to him if she’s not careful, I thought, and then analyzed my surprising jealousy. How readily it subsumed more useful emotions—distrust, for example.

  Chapter 15