Another six months passed before I received a second letter, this time two pages long: He was studying Business Administration in college and waiting tables at a seafood restaurant. His tips were outstanding and his female coworkers had no inhibitions. Six months later came a third letter, one page in which he wrote that he’d had a successful first semester at school, that he’d been promoted to headwaiter and all he ever did was serve shrimp soup to fat-cat ruffians. The fourth missive didn’t contain a single word, just a round-trip ticket. One week later, the fifth letter: five lines in which he announced he’d found me a job at the House of Pancakes in Miami and told me to work on getting fake papers to dupe the gringos for a visa. In the postscript, he wrote that he didn’t have a stable address for the time being but that he’d stop by the House of Pancakes every week to look for me. Next, the address of the House of Pancakes where I was supposedly going to work, and that was it. My boy was off his rocker, but what else could I do? It was my frustrating destiny . . .
“Another drink?” the waiter asked. Just walking from table to table, the guy must’ve lost two pounds each night.
I got up to pee for the second time. The john was packed with boozehounds trying to figure out how to avoid pissing all over each other. I realized I’d reached my limit and that another drop of beer would send me into uncharted territory. It was time for me to leave.
“Thanks. You’re all set,” the waiter said empathetically as I left.
The afternoon had changed color: a sea of gray clouds obscured the sun and threatened to smother the city like a blanket.
My drunken high led me straight home, where I fell asleep for a few hours. After sobering up with a cold shower, I went down to the lobby at around 7. I felt dejected and I was still a bit out of it, but the cold shower had brought me back to the reality of my insoluble problems. I ran into Blanca in the lobby. Wearing everyday clothing of T-shirt, jeans, and no makeup, she exuded a kind of youthful sparkle. Without her harlot’s guise her bawdy sensuality was a thing of the past. She could have passed for an everyday girl from eastern Bolivia. She looked five years younger and like she didn’t have a care in the world.
“How’d it go?” she asked.
“Bad.”
“Your breath reeks. You’ve been drinking, haven’t you?”
“Just beer. I was hoping the alcohol would cheer me up, but all it gave me was a wicked hangover. I could use some aspirin.”
“I was going to get some Chinese food for dinner,” she said. “Wanna come?”
There are some looks that only women can give you, and this was one of those, an unmistakable signal that we could be more than just bedmates. We walked down Evaristo Valle, past street vendors preparing for the nighttime rush, before arriving at Plaza San Francisco. When I traveled to La Paz with my father as a youngster, it was worth the trip just to lay eyes on that plaza, a magnificent, austere jewel that brought to life the grandeur of the colonial era and filled me with pride. Surrounded by a fenced-in garden, it had a distinctive nineteenth-century flavor. Romantic and autumnal, it was a place that evoked bygone times. But then some crackpot developers destroyed the garden, creating a gigantic, open cement terrace that became a hot-spot for boisterous missionaries, rock bands, street vendors, beggars, drunks, shamans, and hobos at all hours of the day and night. At one end of the plaza, an eccentric sculptor had erected a hodgepodge of curious stone statues that looked like the remains of a colossal set long ago deemed unsuitable for television. Heartlessly, and with a healthy dose of stupidity, the city had concocted an enigma for the amusement of foreign tourists. The church, meanwhile, had lost much of its shine and magic.
We plodded down the narrow streets around the old post office before stumbling across a cheap Peruvian-Chinese eatery. The owners recognized Blanca immediately and escorted us with Asian courtesy to a table for two. Blanca asked for the menu and I contented myself with a cup of jasmine tea. After getting up to buy a pack of cigarettes at the counter, I returned to find Blanca chatting with a guy standing beside her.
“I don’t know who he is,” Blanca said. “He’s wasted and he won’t stop yakking at me.”
The man stared at me with watery eyes. “I’m a pilot,” he declared.
“Excuse me,” I said, “can’t you see she’s with me?”
“Who’re you?” he inquired.
“Her man.”
The pilot started shaking as if standing on the bow of a fishing boat on the high seas. He stared at me scornfully and repeated, “I’m a pilot.”
“Get out of the way. We’re about to take off,” I said.
“What’s her name?” he asked.
“Connie,” I said. “Connie Cockface.”
Blanca broke out in laughter.
Standing two hand-lengths from my nose, the man inhaled. “Some other time,” he grumbled. “When I’m ready.”
The pilot walked away, leaving behind a trail of booze stench. Blanca looked around indifferently.
“Every time I come I meet new Chinese people. I swear they’re using our country to get to the United States.”
“If only they’d show me how it’s done!”
“They work together and always find a way.”
A muscular bowlegged Chinese waitress dressed in a sweater and a skirt left an enormous plate in the middle of the table: a concoction of fish, chicken, and pork rind lathered in sweet and sour sauce, accompanied by a generous serving of Peruvian-style fried rice.
“I don’t think you’re getting enough calories,” I joked.
“The way I live, I’ll get burned out in a month if I don’t eat well,” Blanca said. “What are we gonna do about you? The gringos have ruined your appetite.”
“Find me eight hundred bucks.” I told her about my visit to the Andean agency.
She didn’t seem surprised. “That stuff goes on everywhere, even in that consulate.”
“It’s all legal,” I retorted. “They just speed up the paperwork.”
She looked at me like I was a newborn baby. “So you wanna come to Villa Fátima?”
“I don’t have any plans.”
She raised her long curled eyelashes and studied me mockingly. “You can watch me work. I’m the best one,” she bragged. “At least come and have a beer. You won’t stop drinking this late in the game.”
Outside, a police siren wailed in the distance. No doubt the cop was using it as a horn to get around traffic.
“Where’s your wife?” Blanca asked out of the blue.
“She took a train to Argentina. I won’t bore you with the whole story. I don’t even dream about her anymore. These days my dreams are dark like the night.”
“The men are gorgeous in Argentina, but they take off as soon as they get a few pesos out of you,” she remarked.
“You don’t have a special friend?”
“I haven’t found anyone who’s worth it. I’m not the kind of girl who gets desperate quick. If I don’t find someone I like, I just take care of myself. Anyway, up in Villa Fátima they’re all dirty half-breeds. There isn’t a single white man.”
My left hand climbed up her hard robust thighs.
“You’ll make those Chinese guys blush,” she said.
“They’ve been pale for thousands of years.”
“They go up to Villa Fátima sometimes. The Koreans too; they pay well, but they’re the biggest freaks. Haggling turns them on.”
Blanca ate like a burly truck driver. She didn’t leave a single piece of rice on her plate. The beer took care of my hangover and I stopped thinking about the American visa. Blanca devoured a strange dessert of chocolate and tropical fruit that looked like it could constipate a duck, and washed down her meal with three cups of jasmine tea.
“It’ll take awhile to walk off all that food. You’re gonna catch a cold, it’s chilly out.”
“You should see me at work in just a bikini and panty hose.”
She paid the owner, an obsequious Chinese guy with a cynical smile �
� la Fu Manchu. He offered us a cigarette on our way out. Nightfall appeared behind tiny amber clouds that gently covered the city. We strolled in silence down Avenida del Ejército until we arrived at Las Velas, a bustling outdoor food court. The wind suddenly started to gust and shortly thereafter the rain came. Balls of hail began to fall and then a veritable scourge from heaven was unleashed upon Miraflores. As everyone ran for cover, we hailed a minibus headed for Villa de La Merced.
Blanca giggled like a schoolgirl at the deafening sound of hail smashing against the roof of the minibus. Streams formed along the edges of the sidewalks and the water rushed violently south. The driver barely managed to force the door closed. It was as if the passengers had all morphed into an amphibious mass. Blanca’s buttocks were funneling heat into my lap. She smiled at me knowingly. The driver cussed in Aymara and Spanish as the minibus, a 1970s-era clunker, inched along painfully. Nobody dared get out. The water engulfed the tires and threatened to seep into the motor. It took us a whole hour to reach the red light district, where Blanca and I got off along with five other prostitutes headed for work.
The hailstorm stopped, but the rain kept falling. Villa Fátima looked like Oruro in its worst days, desolate and cloaked in shadow. Blanca walked up to a food stand and greeted a woman who must have been a twenty-year veteran of the pickup business. Her face looked sad and carnivalesque, like a painted mask. After eyeing me from head to toe, she told me she had never been to Oruro, but that she once worked in an exotic dance club in Caracas. For dinner, she ate a bowl of soup mixed with rainwater in which pieces of potato and a few strings of meat floated like tiny islands.
Blanca bought a pack of gum before we headed down an excruciatingly steep byway that dead-ended at a cliff by the edge of a garbage dump. In the doorway to the brothel, a drunken bouncer eyed me suspiciously. The house had an enormous patio, a lounge with a dance floor, and private rooms on all sides. Clearly, it had been built for only one reason. I could tell it was somewhat respectable because there weren’t any half-breed tramps. About twenty guys leaned back against the walls, hands in their pockets, checking out the harlots.
“Those whack-offs come here every day,” Blanca explained. “They stand there for hours without moving and don’t spend a cent.”
Blanca’s arrival in the ring stirred up a small commotion among the regulars at the dive, which was called El Faro.
“I’ll go change,” Blanca said. “Wait for me in the lounge.”
The lounge was strategically illuminated by colorful lightbulbs. This worked in the girls’ favor, since you could only partially make out their bodies in that light. If you were to see them in the light of day, they were the kind of girls you would run away from. On one side of the room stood a mounted stage on which a band had set up the equipment. I made out an organ, a set of drums, three electric guitars, and a microphone. Several members of the band, dressed in cheesy blue tuxedos, busied themselves with hooking up the sound system. The lead singer, who was about the size of a jockey, smiled smugly as he tested out the microphone. In the middle of the room a half-dozen whores warmed their bottoms by the fire of a gas stove. Another dozen or so were crammed in back beside a small window, waiting for their drinks. The madam, an old wrinkly hag, kept watch over her pupils from a tiny bar situated in one of the corners, her lips forming a bitter and disdainful grin. She jotted down clients’ orders in a notebook while energetically bossing around a pair of waiters sporting green jackets. She looked out for her business with a librarian’s seriousness and the penetrating gaze of a Basque shepherd. She didn’t miss a thing.
When a girl managed to latch onto a client, she would trade in a ticket for ten pesos, presumably the cost of a room. Sipping a glass of beer at the madam’s side was the bouncer, who kept all the drunkards in line. He weighed about two hundred pounds and was an astonishing Afro-Aymara hybrid. He nearly had a fit when he saw me walk in with Blanca. As soon as he realized I wasn’t a regular, his instinct told him that I wanted a piece of the pie. I took a look around at the ladies—they were of nearly all races and types. Their uniform was either a simple bikini or a miniskirt short enough to allow you to appreciate their miniscule panties. The girls giggled and shouted as they bounced from one end of the room to another, clicking their heels on the tile floor.
Blanca appeared a few minutes later in full battle gear: a see-through silk shell, a pair of shorts a few sizes too small, and her makeup done to suit the tastes and sensibilities of the clients. She was by far the sexiest and most striking of them all. She wasn’t the prettiest one, but none of the others could match her tropical flair or her primitive voluptuousness.
Blanca came up to me and ordered a beer. “What do you think?” she asked.
“The brothels haven’t changed in twenty years,” I said. “Back in Oruro, I started sinning in a place that was cold and dark like this one.”
“It’s not the best, but these days it’s better to work here than in one of the houses downtown,” Blanca asserted.
“What matters is the quantity. Sex at wholesale prices,” I suggested. The band struck up a lambada.
“This business is all about the time it takes you to get the customers to finish. Most of them are young and already horny when they get here, so a couple of wanks and they’re done. They like it when I do a little theater for them. It makes them feel macho.”
“Did the madam use to be one of the girls?”
“She’s sick with cancer. At least that’s what they say. Maybe she made it up just so we’ll feel sorry for her.”
“And the tough guy?”
“Some half-breed they brought over from Peru. He snorts coke all day and has a dealer who stops by around midnight. But it’s not all for him. They say the madam uses it as a painkiller.”
“She could have cancer. She doesn’t look very well.”
“Who knows? Anyway, you want to see my room?”
“In this cold? No thanks. I’ll be waiting in the hotel when you finish.”
“So you don’t care if I start working?”
“Nah, I’ll just hang out here awhile. I wouldn’t miss out on the band for anything,” I joked.
Twenty-odd pairs of eyes ogled at the pendular swaying of Blanca’s hips as she strutted away. A young guy who looked like a military recruit approached her and, after they murmured to each other for all of ten seconds, he followed her across the patio. Most of the customers were recruits, laborers, and hoods, the kind of people who couldn’t afford more than twenty pesos a session. Blanca surprised me. She didn’t waste any time. She did six different guys in the single hour I sat at the bar. She avoided the drunkards and the teenagers, but the rest were fair game. Blanca’s good-natured charm and straightforward manner with the peasant migrants made them forget how inferior they felt. A white woman, unattainable under any other circumstances. The country’s rotten economy was hitting the expensive hookers; for the common people, something good had finally come out of the recession.
At around 11 o’clock, Blanca swapped her original get-up for a bikini, stockings, and a pair of extremely high-heeled shoes. That was a trick to further accentuate the swaying of her buttocks. Her level of activity at that hour was truly impressive. She went in and out of the lounge, hardly pausing to breathe, and yet the pace didn’t seem to affect her. After each excursion, she would quickly brush her hair and reapply some lipstick. Her idea of inviting me to see her in action seemed to be a subtle way of offering me a future cut of her nocturnal earnings. If I hadn’t been so caught up in my visa problems, I would’ve considered it. The girl meant well and the money flowed into her like a slot machine. We wouldn’t have had to pay any taxes, but then there was the risk of AIDS and other STDs. There’s always a price to pay. You can’t get something for nothing in this world.
When the madam saw that I was about to leave, she decided she wanted to get to know me better. After offering me Chilean cognac on the house, her pale, limp fingers handed me a plastic cup. The bouncer, who st
ill hadn’t had his fix, gently shook my hand. His name was Tolque and he reeked of cheap hustler’s cologne. The madam’s sister, an ashen old lady who repeatedly stuck out her tongue like a lizard, kept track of what each table owed. With the passing hours the place filled up with night owls, the kind who have one drink and then stare intensely at the whores without saying a word, allowing their imaginations to run wild. By midnight I’d knocked back half a dozen beers. It was definitely time for me to go.
Outside I encountered a brutal high-mountain chill. The sky threatened to unload yet another deluge. The few stars that had been visible were now obscured and the wind hissed as it ripped over the mountaintops. Villa Fátima, a jumble of bungalows interspersed among the bordellos, sits smack in the middle of a ravine flanked by arid slopes. I could make out the trickling of a stream off in the distance. Before catching a taxi I decided to take a walk down Lambaque Street, which runs parallel to Avenida Tejada Sorzana. Red lightbulbs pointed the way to second-rate whorehouses worked mainly by half-breed women. As I started down the street, a dive with three tables and a counter caught my attention. In the doorway stood two transvestites caked in makeup as thick as the face paint used by Amazonian Indians. They blew kisses at the peasant riffraff walking by who weren’t welcome at more upscale establishments. Tawdry, thin like sugar cane stalks, and short-legged, the transvestites stamped their feet in a vain attempt at keeping warm. Behind them, an inebriated lady shouted profanities at no one in particular.
When I walked through the entrance to one of those hot spots, a fat light-skinned half-breed grabbed me by the arm and declared she’d make my night for ten pesos. An exotic treat for some English tourist, maybe, but I wasn’t in the mood to lift up five flowing skirts just to grab a piece of some lady’s backside. So I kept walking. Once I made it back to the main road, I caught a taxi to Plaza Alonso de Mendoza.
American Visa Page 7