American Visa

by Juan de Recacoechea

  “It’s up to you, Señor Alvarez. That border is a no-man’s land. Let’s just say, unexpected things happen there.”

  “Eight hundred dollars is a rip-off.”

  “It depends. If for some reason you don’t want to show them your papers, then it’s a good deal. Keep in mind, Señor Alvarez, that the gringos are meticulous. One slipup and it’s over. If they deny you the visa once, forget about emigrating.”

  “But I don’t want to emigrate!”

  “Whatever, it’s all the same. This is your first try, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re not young, but you’re not old either. You’re right at the cut-off age. Maybe if you can get on the consul’s good side . . . What’s your problem anyway?”

  “I’m just worried some jackass will deny me the visa and then I won’t be able to see my son.”

  “Or the hairdresser.”

  “Hairdresser . . . ? Oh right, that hairdresser is a real piece of work.”

  “It’s up to you, Señor Alvarez.”

  “Eight hundred?”

  “They put their jobs and their integrity on the line even though all they’re doing is making sure your papers don’t get lost in the pile or filed away until Christmas. The consul himself looks them over, signs them, and stamps them with his official seal.”

  “No problem then?”

  The fat man smiled as he squashed his cigar like a cockroach. “The visa is totally legal. We just expedite the paperwork to keep those private detectives from sticking their noses where they don’t belong.”

  “And Mexico?”

  “It’s cheaper, but you’d have to start praying those hoods don’t bust your balls.”

  “That would be worse than eight hundred dollars,” I replied.

  “Some people don’t care about their virginity; all they want is to make it to the other side. Think it over, Señor Alvarez. That’s the price and not a cent less. It’s worth it, especially if you find a job in the States and stay there for good. Goodbye, Oruro, hello good life!”

  “I’ll think about it,” I said.

  The fat man smiled like a good-natured asshole. “I’ll be in La Paz until Friday. Then I’m making a trip back home to Vallegrande.”

  I couldn’t think of anything better to do than take refuge in the first dive I saw. Ever since I was a kid, I’d been in the habit of using personal setbacks as excuses to get plastered. After Antonia left me, I think I spent a whole year hitting up watering holes until one day I stepped off a curb, completely wasted, and got run over by a motorcycle. I was later resuscitated in the part of the public hospital where they send patients who are about to die. For a few years I survived on soda pop and coffee, until a brainy lady got me drinking again. She was a high school biology teacher who watered her plants with beer. But I only turned into an occasional lush, the kind who can still control his neurons. My hangovers used to keep me in bed for days—vomiting, with a splitting headache.

  I barged into an enormous underground bar where they served only beer. Just inhaling was enough for the acute smell of malt liquor to make my head spin. The place had forty tables, but at that early hour there weren’t a lot of customers, just a few regulars playing dice games; either they were retired or they were public employees. Several dozen beers adorned their tables. The waiter, a thin man with a sour look on his face, escorted me to a secluded table reserved for deep thinkers with serious problems.

  “How many?” he asked.

  “One at a time.”

  I got up to take a leak as soon as the waiter disappeared. A good piss is the only way beer drinkers can purge their bladders of toxins. A white-haired man about sixty years old was resting both palms against one of the bathroom stalls, futilely trying to shoot his spray into a gutter that was meant to be a urinal. His penis hung out of his fly profanely, ridiculously. He was so wasted that if he’d taken one hand off the wall to try and redirect it, he’d run the risk of hitting the cement floor face first.

  Once the old man realized someone was there, he turned to look at me and stammered, “Hey . . . fucking give me a hand, will ya?”

  I was heated and in no mood for charity. So I stepped up to the end of the gutter farthest from the old man. It was a terrific photo-op; the guy just stood there, completely motionless.

  “Fucking fogey,” I blurted out as I left the room.

  An ice-cold beer awaited me at my table.

  “You’ll have to pay up front,” the waiter said.

  “What? You can’t even trust a decent guy?”

  “Sir,” he protested faintly, “it’s not that we don’t trust you. The thing is, we get cheated every day. They’ll have two dozen and say it was one, or five and claim it’s four. We don’t ask you to pay up front for nothing, sir.”

  I paid and got to thinking. Things were looking murky. The consulate would find out about my fake papers for sure. That guy at the agency just wanted to hustle me out of eight hundred dollars. What a bunch of crap. I’d saved exactly what I needed for a week in La Paz and to pay the airport departure tax, and I’d set aside a hundred dollars for my first few days in the United States. Before leaving for eternity, my father had given me a few gold nuggets, about ten grams worth. He told me they would “multiply like the loaves in the Bible and bring you luck.” Instead of spending them, I’d held on to them, hoping they’d multiply. But they still weighed the same as they had eight years before.

  I downed my beer in the time it takes a rooster to let out a morning crow. Why don’t you kill yourself? I thought. If I could just chug twenty beers and then go to sleep, they’d find my cold body the next day. It was the only death a screw-up like me deserved. The law of life states that he who cannot rise should make way for others. The world’s small and useless people are better off underground where they can’t be heard, awaiting the last judgment. That’s the day we’ll all be equal. Who was I kidding? Where had I gone wrong? When had I gone so far downhill? I was asking myself these questions for the thousandth time.

  Born into a comfortable middle-class family, my father had been an inspector for the Bolivian Railway and my mother the only daughter of a wealthy tin mine owner. My maternal grandfather was selfish, reactionary, and had been alone in the world ever since his wife died young, years before. He’d wanted for his little girl to climb the social ladder and never approved of her marrying a modest railroad inspector. My father secretly hated his bosses, Brits every last one of them. And he hated his father-in-law so openly that, just to spite him, he joined the MNR*, back then a progressive party with a statist platform that made landowners and mine owners’ hairs stand on end. I was born in Uyuni, then an important railroad town, along with my brother Osvaldo, who’s six years my senior. I came into the world in ’52 just as the revolution changed my family’s fortunes for the worse. The ruling MNR nationalized the mines, ruining my grandfather.

  At the time, my grandfather had been living comfortably in an affluent neighborhood in Santiago, Chile with a sweet, down-to-earth Chilean girl. He hadn’t suspected that the Indians would one day reflect on their bad lot in life and decide to take over the land and, by extension, the mines. He’d wasted all the money he earned from his mine’s profits on extravagant parties and trips to Paris. He didn’t despair when the money stopped rolling in, though, landing a gig as the headwaiter at a restaurant in Santiago, on Huérfanos Street.

  My father, on the other hand, benefited from the new social order. He resigned his post as a railroad inspector and got into the flour importing business. We moved to Oruro, and then a few months later my mother’s kidneys gave out and she died before we even realized what was going on with her. It was a terrible blow for us. Flora, my mother, had been a quiet, well-mannered, selfless woman, wholly devoted to family life. She was no beauty, but had delicate, distinguished features. My father, Jacinto, the only man she’d ever had, was strong and light-skinned, with a logger’s moustache and a serious face lit up by two youthful, sensual brown eyes.<
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  Still young and good-looking when my mother died, my father didn’t waste any time in starting after a girl who was fifteen years younger, a seamstress with the most eye-catching backside in all of southwestern Bolivia. The two lovebirds moved into an apartment together, leaving me and my brother Osvaldo alone in the old house. Osvaldo, who had always fought with my father over everything, couldn’t think of anything better to do than join the Bolivian Socialist Falange.* He started going through hell—beatings, detentions, a month behind bars—until he was finally exiled to Chile. He made his way to Antofagasta, where a Peruvian woman fell madly in love with him and gave him the money to start up a bakery. Osvaldo was the spitting image of my father, though dark-skinned. This Peruvian lady was so fascinated by the way he would get drunk and beat her that she bore him five kids. I last saw him eight years ago in Arica, Chile. He told me he’d sold the bakery and was working in construction. We went out to dinner a couple of times, and I found him changed. He was far more closed than before and he didn’t care about politics anymore, only money. He asked halfheartedly about our dad and then swore he’d never return to Bolivia.

  In ’64, General Barrientos took power and the revolution’s glory days came to an end. With the MNR no longer calling the shots, my father lost all his government connections. Practically overnight, he became an unemployed, impoverished, spiteful old man. As soon as his woman realized he didn’t have any money, she left him for a lieutenant with a promising future. I was still attending Bolívar High School, the cream of the crop in Oruro. I was a hard-working student with a lively imagination. With the new military “order,” we’d fallen from rising middle class to borderline destitute. My father had forgotten how to earn an honest living with the sweat of his own back and, just like my grandfather, had failed to save enough money to pay for his own funeral. Without pomp or circumstance, he found work at a tire importing company.

  He didn’t make much and he started drinking heavily. Since he didn’t have the money anymore to attract rich women, the best he could do was make love to half-breed harlots from the north side of town. He spent his weekends sunbathing and playing chess. Meanwhile, as soon as my eighty-year-old maternal grandfather found out that his political enemies had been defeated, he decided to return to Bolivia to revive his old mine. But luck would have it that, right as he stepped onto the train at Río Mulatos, his blood pressure shot through the roof and he ended up dying at a run-down hospital in town. They buried him at the local cemetery.

  As bad as things were, I managed to graduate from high school with a diploma that made my father cry. “I suppose you’ll go on to become a doctor or an engineer,” he declared. When I confessed to him that teaching was my calling, he sunk into a depression that only worsened when, a couple of days later, I introduced him to Antonia, my new girlfriend. Antonia studied education and dreamed of teaching Spanish. I wanted to teach English, a language that had fascinated me ever since I saw my first Leslie Howard movie.

  We both got our education degrees, and as soon as we’d finished our obligatory one-year teaching assignments in the countryside, we were married in a simple but joyous ceremony at a friend’s house that started off discreetly but ended with several of our guests behind bars. Antonia’s father, who worked at a bank, helped us secure a two-thousand-dollar loan with which we bought ourselves a four-room, one-bath bungalow with a fifty-square-foot rose garden in Oruro’s Chiripujio neighborhood. I bought a bicycle and dedicated my heart and soul to teaching. I was hopeful about the future. I lived modestly, but I wasn’t hard up. I was healthy as a buck, my wife was a dedicated worker, and we had plenty of friends. Combining our two salaries, we were sometimes able to put aside savings. We dreamed of emigrating to Córdoba, Argentina and kept a collection of brochures, newspaper clippings, and letters from people we knew describing the city’s beauty and pleasant climate.

  Within a year our son was born and we baptized him Luis Alberto Carlos. He came out pearl-colored, with his mother’s black hair, bawling like there was no tomorrow. Antonia was attractive, thin, soft-spoken, and discreet. You barely noticed her during the day, but she used her imagination, repressed by years of studying at a Catholic girl’s school, to fill our nighttime lovemaking sessions with surprises. In spite of living in a poor, unstable, troubled country, I couldn’t complain. I had a satisfying existence—low on means, but high on hope.

  My only real worry was my father’s decline into a state of profound neurosis. He started getting irritable and any old thing ticked him off. One day he took me aside and confided to me that he’d lost his virility. I told him it was just a temporary problem that a good sexual-enhancement drug could fix, which consoled him.

  My little boy was growing up, happy and healthy. After working for four years as a teacher, I bought myself a motorcycle and became the envy of the neighborhood. How did it all go to hell? I remember that my wife always used to come down with colds, and then one day she had to go to the hospital with a fever and a nasty cough. The doctor who took care of her told me she had a spot on her lung, but that it wasn’t serious and she’d get over it with a little rest. After leaving the hospital, she quit working and tried staying home for a while. But as soon as she started getting active again, the symptoms reappeared: fatigue, night sweats, and a cough as stubbornly persistent as a leaky old roof. I blew all my savings on medicine, and before I knew it I was in debt and drinking more than usual. Bolivia was in bad shape back then; it’s always been in bad shape. I sent my wife away to Tupiza Valley to stay with an aunt who owned a grocery store, and to breathe warmer air. With the passing months she got noticeably better; she started to gain weight and she got her good looks back. Her sense of humor returned and so did the color to her face.

  The tragedy is that although the spot did disappear from her lung, Antonia no longer felt anything for me. At first she didn’t want to make love because she wanted to recuperate. Later, she needed time to feel like herself again. In the end, she just didn’t love me anymore. She didn’t even want me to touch her. My caresses were pure torture for her. I was too dumb to realize she’d latched onto another guy, a new-wave, right-wing, pro-military, boot-licking politician who’d gone from opportunistic trade unionist to labor advisor for the Armed Forces. While I taught English at a public high school to a bunch of do-nothings, she spent the whole afternoon in bed with that rich bastard. I couldn’t bring myself to kick her out of the house because our son was still so young. I swallowed it . . . I swallowed it, anxiously hoping that Antonia would get bored with that guy. I used to see him from time to time in town, strutting around with the other politicians, regular louts and sleazebags every one of them. I thought about buying a revolver and putting a bullet in his head, but killing him wouldn’t have solved anything. I would have gone to jail, my son would have died of hunger, and Antonia would have found somebody else.

  I went from brothel to brothel screwing tarts until I started getting an ungodly discharge that I was only able to cure with a mail-order medication from Germany. I became a self-denying cuckold who was still hopelessly in love. My teacher’s salary wasn’t enough to cover even our basic necessities anymore, and so I left the rich and precise language of Keats to work in contraband, a line of work that’s looked down upon but that brought in three times more money for me.

  That still wasn’t enough to get Antonia’s attention. She slept alone in a separate room and couldn’t have cared less whether or not I went out whoring. One day she declared she was leaving for Argentina to reflect on her future, on the essence of her womanhood, and a bunch of other nonsense. When she said goodbye, we clasped hands and she kissed my son on the forehead. I haven’t seen her since. Years later, people told me she was living in Mendoza with some guy who sold empanadas on the road to Chile. One Christmas, I got a photo in the mail of her beside a lake. Poor thing . . . she revealed that the trip was helping her find herself. With her callow, empty bumpkin’s mind, I don’t know what the hell she was going to find. Luis A
lberto Carlos had become an easy-going, handsome, dark-skinned kid and he was getting bigger; soon he’d grown taller than my shoulder. I did a brainwashing job on him to make sure he didn’t feel anything for Antonia. He burned all her pictures and proclaimed that she was dead to him.

  After graduating from high school at the age of eighteen, my son got the preposterous idea of moving to Canada and nearly pulled it off. A cousin from my mother’s side owned a fur shop in New Orleans and was married to an American. He came down to Oruro on vacation once and hit it off with my boy. He told me that Bolivia was going nowhere and that if I wanted a better future for Luis Alberto Carlos, he could take him along to Louisiana as his helper to teach him the fur business. If the kid felt like studying, he would have the time and the money for it. The idea hardly made me jump for joy, but it was a good option for my son’s college education.

  My relationship with my son was based on mutual respect: He was my companion, my friend . . . and sometimes my confessor. I didn’t have a lot to give him. Contraband sounds romantic, like a lot of money, but that’s only true for the guy who puts down the dough himself and then sells the merchandise. I was just a middleman, a ten-percent-plus-travel-expenses kind of guy.

  I let my son go even though it meant I’d be as lonely as a priest in the boondocks. It was best for him to take his chances on the American dream. Just like Borges, the Argentine, I’ve always had a weakness for Anglo-Saxons. Not so much the Brits as the Americans, most of all because of their crime fiction. So the fur dealer had his helper, and my son promised to write often and to send me a ticket as soon as he could scrape a few bucks together. Back then it was relatively easy to do the paperwork to go to the United States. I don’t think my son had to go through as much agony as I did later. In spite of his promise, I didn’t hear a peep out of Luis Alberto Carlos for three months. Then one day I received a four-page letter in small handwriting that read like a last will and testament. He explained that he’d left New Orleans because my cousin was exploiting him like a Chinese laborer and paying him a pittance. So, it turned out my cousin was a real son of a bitch. Luis Alberto Carlos set off for Chicago, where he worked in a gas station and later in a hotel. He said the winters were freezing there with biting winds. The manager of the hotel, an old Armenian hag who smelled like olives, wanted to get into his pants, so he was planning to head back east and relocate to Miami, a tropical paradise inhabited by a teeming mass of Hispanics.