I sat at a table next to a window with a view out onto the alleyway. I was just finishing my second moonshine when, by chance, a house facing the bar from the other side of the street caught my attention. A gold dealer had an office on the second floor. The building’s façade was worn and chipped, but the floor with the gold business looked spacious, clean, and prosperous. I noted the presence of a neatly dressed woman who managed the transactions from her desk, on which an array of gadgets sat at her disposal: calculators, the indispensable scale, two telephones, and a computer. The lady was dealing with a man who seemed to be a gold runner. He handed her a little bag, which she emptied onto one of the arms of the scale and then carefully weighed the gold. She jotted down the price in a notepad and showed it to the man. He accepted and the lady led him to a small safe that was built into a wall. She twisted a knob from left to right and then from right to left several times, opened the safe, took out some pesos or dollars, and, after counting them, paid the man, who stashed the dough away in his jacket pocket.
The seller left. The woman picked up the phone, said something, and then hung up. After fixing her hair, she lit a cigarette and pressed a buzzer. Immediately, a half-breed appeared with a bundle tied to her back. They exchanged pleasantries and then the half-breed untied her colorful bag and handed over a small box fastened shut with braided rope. The lady removed the box lid and I thought I saw a couple of bars of gold. She repeated the operation with the safe and the money, except this time my eagle-eye, still sharp after all these years, spotted a fat pile of greenbacks changing hands. My mouth started to water. It was in that crazy moment, I don’t know whether from heaven or from hell, that the idea came to me to plan a robbery. Unfortunately, I wasn’t a professional, or even an amateur with a poor track record. The most I had ever stolen was the leather jacket from the Slav I used to work for. I had been crossing the Chilean border at Tambo Quemado, when I opened up one of my suitcases containing contraband goods and spotted the jacket. I wore it with the intention of returning it, but since the guy never said anything, I just held on to it.
The retired boxer, who by that time, nearly 8 o’clock, had already given three troublemakers the boot, asked me if I wanted a fourth moonshine.
“I’m going to sell a few grams of gold and then I’ll be back,” I whispered under my breath.
The old boxer had been hit in the head so many times that he was deaf as a fence. “What’s that?”
A coarse light-skinned woman—the kind you would call white trash in North America—shouted, “He says he’s going to sell some gold and then he’ll be back!”
Twenty drunkards did immediate one-eighties. They stared at me as if Paul Getty himself had descended from the heavens.
“Try Señora Arminda’s place, they pay dollars,” Yujra said.
I tiptoed out of the bar. With Yujra staring them down, none of the vagabonds dared to move.
I crossed the street and pushed open a heavy door. To my left, a cement staircase led up to a mezzanine. I climbed the steps and knocked on the door. A young man opened it and greeted me with a surprised expression on his face. His dark brown eyes penetrated me like lasers.
“Yes, señor?”
“I’d like to sell some gold,” I said.
“We’re about to close,” he replied.
“It’ll just take five minutes. I’m leaving on a trip tonight.”
“You should have gotten here earlier. This way.”
I entered a small lobby where a man and a woman were waiting. The woman guarded an enormous purse against her chest and the guy, judging by the way he was stooped over, looked like he stood about 6'5". The woman was dark-skinned with Islamic features. She was wearing a sports jersey that read Dodgers on the front and tennis shoes, the kind that the American basketball players made fashionable. The man was staring at a photo album. He had a briefcase trapped between the boots that Santa Claus had loaned him. Everything about him was astronomical. Instead of getting pulled from his mother’s womb, he must have exploded out. I had never seen a guy like that before. He was wearing a raggedy sweater and jeans that only reached down to his shins, leaving exposed his thick wool socks.
The buzzer sounded. The young man told the lady with the purse that she could proceed into the office. Meanwhile, the giant dug up a little bag of peanuts and dried beans from one of his pockets. It’s not easy to peel dried beans, but he squashed them just by rubbing them between his thumb and index finger.
“You from Guanay?” he asked me.
“Oruro.”
“Gold runner?”
“I only have ten grams, a little something I inherited.”
“Doña Arminda doesn’t buy jewels.”
“They’re gold nuggets.”
“My name’s Cabral. I’m from Tipuani. All I got on my last trip was a two-pound piece I bought off a gold-mining expedition. Sometimes I go to Guanay or to Mapiri. You know the area?”
“I’ve only been as far as Caranavi.”
“Gold country is real beautiful. It’s a true paradise.”
“Two pounds is ten thousand dollars,” I calculated out loud.
“Just about,” the man said.
When he stood up, he looked like an NBA basketball player. His arms were so long he could scratch his knees without bending over an inch. He cracked open peanuts and wolfed them down with the speed of an ape as he walked pensively from one side of the room to the other. His face, with its prehistoric features, looked like something that had escaped from an archaeology museum. He had a Neanderthal’s head, crowned by a mop of hair big enough to shelter a serpent. When he breathed, he inhaled such large whiffs of air that if they sealed off the room, I imagined we wouldn’t last twenty-four hours.
He passed me a fistful of peanuts and remarked casually, “Nothing better for a good hard-on.”
“I always thought it was chili.”
“That’s Indian bullshit,” he said.
Admiring his colossal stature, I asked, “How’d you get so big?”
He smiled like a spoiled young boy. “It’s in the family. My father’s a 6'4" Peruvian from Chimbóte, two inches shorter than me. He came to Bolivia and got married to a big-boned descendant of Spaniards from Alcoche. You gotta be made of good wood to handle life in the tropics. My brother Carlos is 6'5" and left for Argentina years ago. He used to be a professional wrestler until they broke three of his ribs. Then he became a pizza delivery man and now he lives in Tandil. Between you and me, buddy,” he whispered, bending over, “my cock is eight-and-a-half inches long. When I go out whoring, they charge me a hundred pesos. Nobody wants a piece of me.”
“You must like being on top,” I quipped.
“I’ve been in the gold business twenty years. Gold fascinates me, but I never hold onto it. It brings bad luck. Gold dealing is interesting work, but it’s risky. Everyone wants to cheat the other guy, so you gotta know how to buy. It’s dangerous. There are a lot of bad apples out there.”
“A person would have to be crazy to try to rob a guy like you. It would be like ripping a ring off Mike Tyson’s finger.”
“Don’t believe it; it’s happened twice. The first time a mixed black-Indian guy from the Yungas and a Brazilian, both armed with knives, tried to rob me at night in Tipuani. I split the black guy’s head open with a rock and smashed the Brazilian in the balls until he started to sing the national anthem.”
“His or ours?”
He ignored my comment and continued: “The second time, I was coming back from Caranavi in the back of a fruit truck. When we were passing by Unduavi, some prick gave me coffee laced with sleeping pills. I woke up the next morning at the public hospital. They had thought I was done for. The guy who gave me the coffee vanished into thin air with my pound of gold. How about that?”
“It was the only way he could have robbed you.”
Somebody knocked on the door. The helper guy opened it cautiously. In came a small peasant carrying an egg basket. He counted out three dozen
and the helper paid him.
“Arminda’s husband is from down east, and for breakfast every morning he has four eggs and a couple of steaks.”
“Poor liver! If all that food goes down, he must be your size.”
“He’s pure flab, a hundred and ninety pounds of fat.”
“He doesn’t come by to give Arminda a hand?”
“She works alone with Severo.”
“He’s the helper?”
“Yeah, her husband is an antique coin collector. He makes his rounds on Sagárnaga Street at around 11 in the morning. Doña Arminda is the main gold buyer in the city. Haven’t you seen her ads in the paper? There are four different people with four different phone numbers. You call and they all give you the number of this place. She monopolizes the bulk purchases.”
“What does she use it for?”
“Who knows.”
The woman with the purse exited the office. The big guy stood up, waited for the doorbell to ring, and pushed open the door. I heard him greet someone. Severo was reading the Spanish magazine Gente; he was smaller than me and weighed about twenty pounds less. I could have maimed him with a couple of punches . . . unless he was a karate master. Even so, it couldn’t hurt me to have a lead club handy. A blow to the lower neck would knock him out cold. And yet, something was bothering me. If Arminda bought so much gold, she had to have at least a couple of guys watching her back. Severo wasn’t much protection, so if Cyclops was telling the truth, this robbery was child’s play.
“What time are you open till?” I asked Severo casually.
“Until 8, sometimes 8:30. Depends how busy we are.” He looked at me askance; he clearly didn’t like my questions.
“That’s the first time I’ve seen a giant with so much gold. Usually they’re off in the circus working for pennies,” I said.
“That guy’s no freakin’ joke,” he replied.
“Couldn’t hurt to have him here for security.”
Severo punished me with a weary and disdainful glare. “We don’t need anyone,” he said.
What did he mean by that? That he was alone or that undercover bodyguards were lurking around in case they needed a hand? I prudently shut my mouth. Severo was going to get suspicious if I kept interrogating him, so I left him alone. He was quietly reading out loud and his cologne, which smelled like marijuana, was starting to make my head spin. Before five minutes had passed, the behemoth emerged, smiling from floor-to-ceiling. I noticed a fat wad of greenbacks nestled in his jacket pocket. When he gave me a goodbye shake, my hand disappeared inside his paw.
“Come in,” Severo indicated.
I was greeted by a woman in her mid-thirties with blackish hair and white skin. Though not graceful, her features were pleasant. She had a full, sensual face, and her eyes, which were the same color as her hair, shone nobly. Her lips looked like those of a figurehead on a ship’s prow, forming a faint, friendly smile. She was wearing a sky-blue blouse covered by a blue sweater, and a skirt that left exposed a pair of finely sculpted legs. She had the hands of a woman who liked to please and they were shaking nervously. Blushing, I handed her my tiny stock of gold. With precise hand movements, she took the lid off the bottle as she had before and picked up a testing saucer on which she deposited the gold. Next, she dumped acid on top and awaited the result.
“Twenty-four karat gold.” She placed it onto one of the dishes on the scale. “Ten grams at ten dollars makes one hundred dollars, or three-hundred and eighty pesos. Okay?”
“I won’t get very far with that,” I said.
“Depends how far you want to go. Are you a dealer?”
“No. When my dad handed this stash down to me, he told me to make it multiply like the loaves in the New Testament. But with the economy as bad as it is, it’s not so easy to recreate the Lord’s miracles.”
Doña Arminda shot me a good-natured smile and pulled open one of her desk drawers. She counted five twenty-dollar bills, piled them on her desk, dumped out the gold into a case the size of a shoebox, and put it away in another one of her desk drawers. The safe that I had glimpsed from the Luribay was half-open. With my heart in my throat, I saw bars of gold and small silk bags of various sizes, which surely contained nuggets or gold dust. Not even Captain Flint’s treasure chest would have gotten me so worked up.
“Very kind of you,” I said. “I’ll stop by sometime later with a few more grams.”
“From 9 o’clock on. We close for lunch.”
Surrounded by a modern Japanese décor, Arminda gave off an impression of omnipotence and total self-confidence. I don’t know if it was the smell of so much money in the air or the sight of the magnificent calves of that gold queen, but I started to feel a gurgling in my bowels. I left her surrounded by her treasures.
Out in the waiting room, Severo was vacuuming the hardwood floor and whistling a tune by the Kjarkas. He hurriedly showed me to the door. “Good night,” he said.
I didn’t respond, simply because my mind was off somewhere else. The thought of what a racket life is—the way it showers a select few with riches and leaves the rest of us with just dreams—was eating away at me. I crossed the street and rested against the frame of an old door to a fruit store. With a theatrical flair, a trembling and sorrowful half-breed woman offered me a bunch of bananas. I lit a cigarette, returned to my senses, and went back to the Luribay.
It was a rowdy time of night. The stench from all the vagrants’ breath was strong enough to launch a space rocket. I saw a half-breed lady dressed in rags and wearing a tight cap on her head yell at someone behind her, “How dare you lift up my dress!”
“Shut up!” the barman shouted back in Spanish and in Aymara. “Shut the hell up!”
The half-breed lady stared at him with a glazed look in her eyes. She lowered her head. Yujra stuck out his disfigured face and asked me, “Another one?”
“One double moonshine with lots of cinnamon.”
I walked up to the window that had become the perfect lookout. From there, I continued studying Doña Arminda’s harmonious routine.
My espionage didn’t last long. She closed the curtains to her office, leaving me hanging. Doña Arminda was presumably starting to tally the day’s inventory.
I felt the same kind of feverish excitement that I had experienced decades earlier when my father took me to see the ocean for the first time. Just like then, the horizon suddenly seemed to clear out and all of those gray clouds that hovered over my life dissipated. A magical and energizing sensation rushed over me. With some smarts and a little bit of luck, maybe I could put an end, once and for all, to that heavy frustration that had plagued me ever since I received the first letter from my son, in which he proposed to meet up with me in the land to the north.
The problem was that, frankly, I didn’t see myself as a competent outlaw. When I used to play cops-and-robbers as a kid, I always wanted to be one of the good guys, and if it was my turn to play a gangster, I was a terrible actor. I had always been a sorry and repentant ruffian. Years later, after Antonia’s one-way trip, a few buddies of mine asked if I wanted to work as a mule and carry two kilos of cocaine to Buenos Aires. I turned it down out of the fear of ending up behind bars, disgraced. I preferred to be an easygoing middleman without any ambitions, a guy who doesn’t have to put himself or his money on the line. For the first time in my life, however, I now felt that I was ready to put all my cards on the table.
In reality, I didn’t have much to lose. If they caught me, they’d lock me up in the slammer to bask in the sun for about five years, to drink their horrendous coffee and bread, to stuff myself with their dog meat, and to rub elbows with the most miserable riffraff in La Paz’s underworld. But if I managed to get my hands on a few thousand dollars, or at least the eight hundred to pay the guy at the travel agency, my life would change completely.
Get a move on, Alvarez: Time for Operation Lazarus.
I anxiously finished my fourth moonshine. I was about to ask the boxer for a fifth, when I
saw the lights go off in Doña Arminda’s office. I rushed to pay and then cleared a path through the throng of boozers crammed into the Luribay. Once outside on Ortega Way, I hid between two vendor stands, beside a half-breed lady selling imported shoes who could have played Emperor Nero without wearing any makeup. It had never occurred to me that Arminda and Severo, weighed down by all that gold, might make the trip home without a hired gun. They had to have a trick up their sleeves. There was bound to be at least a third man, armed to the teeth, to walk them as far as Tumusla Street. I calculated that it was a distance of about two hundred feet. Another route would be for them to walk to Max Paredes, which was only a hundred feet away.
Nightfall arrived dark, overcast, and silent. Ortega Way was deserted, surely because of the soccer match. The biggest show in town, El Tigre, was playing. Despite the numerous bulbs hanging from lampposts, the street lighting was relatively scant, perfect for an abrupt and violent heist. My imagination was a series of noir films in which I was the guest villain.
To my utter surprise, they were walking down the street alone. She was carrying a James Bond–style briefcase, and Severo, a standard duffel bag. It all looked way too naïve; everyone knew they had a fortune on them. I followed from a safe distance, concealed among the street vendors and the passersby. I walked bent over, as though looking for dropped coins.
They arrived at the corner of Ortega Way and Tumusla Street. Elementary, my dear Watson, I said to myself. A vehicle must be waiting for them. While hiding behind the back of a homeless man wrapped in a mass of rags, I took a chance and got to within ten feet of them. Arminda was chatting about the bad weather that was on its way, without showing the least bit of precaution. Severo looked up at the starless sky. Suddenly, he raised his arm and hailed a passing taxi. He opened the front door of the car for his boss, who sat down next to the driver, and then settled in beside her in the window seat. A pair of lovebirds was curled up in the back, leaving room for a third passenger. Without thinking twice, I hopped into the vehicle.
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