“Corner of Ballivián and Colón, please,” Arminda said.
“And you?” the driver asked, looking at me through his rearview mirror.
“I’ll get off around there,” I said in a fake voice.
La Paz is a peaceful city. In spite of all the misery and alcoholism, assaults and robberies aren’t as commonplace as in other South American capitals. It’s unusual to hear news of a bank getting held up at gunpoint. That being said, Arminda and Severo were extremely unwise to go for a taxi ride loaded down with gold and dollars in the upper barrios of the city. They were tempting the Devil, and at that moment the Devil was me, scared stiff but lying in wait.
The driver looked like a bronze bulldog. Tormented by the traffic jam, he took out his frustrations on his change box, smashing it sadistically. At the Plaza Murillo, he said: “You can get off here. I’m headed to Miraflores to drop off the taxi.”
“No problem,” Arminda said. They got out and headed for Ballivián Street. The driver frowned at me in his mirror.
“I’m getting out too,” I declared.
They were walking hurriedly, as they should have been. I had a tough time keeping up with them. When they paused at a traffic light, I went up to a kiosk and bought myself a pack of gum. In spite of the thick jacket covering her body, Arminda’s derrière swayed provocatively. They hung a right at the corner of Colón Street. I sped up to keep pace. To my surprise, halfway down the block they vanished into the doorway of an ancient-looking, two-storied house. Hundred-year-old adobe blocks jutted out of the crumbling stucco façade. I waited at the corner, weathering the wind and cold. It was an uncomfortable time of night to be an undercover sleuth. I consoled myself thinking that those four shots of moonshine had prepared me for this very moment.
I lay in wait for barely five minutes. Empty-handed and with the smile of a job well done, Severo suddenly emerged from the doorway of that big house. Without hesitating, he headed off down the hill and then made a pit stop at a cheap eatery. He pushed open the door, but not before shooting a snooty glance at the menu nailed to a wall. Arminda had obviously stayed behind. I walked away from the corner and crossed the street, heading for the big house. Just inside the spacious doorway, I found myself in a sort of corridor that ended in a small colonial-style patio. At the center of the patio stood a dry, cracking fountain covered by a yellow tarp.
Halfway down the corridor, a shoemaker had set up shop behind a wooden stand. The shoemaker, a tiny and slovenly man with a throwback Rudolph Valentino–style hairdo, was busy resoling a shoe. A lightbulb stained black by buzzing flies lit up the stand. The shoemaker was so focused on the task at hand that he didn’t even notice when I passed by two feet away. The striking of his hammer made enough noise to smother the sound of a charging rhinoceros. Ringing the patio was an old-fashioned railing that supported a wall of glass. On the first floor, a series of old signs pointed the way to entrances to stores that had already closed for the evening. A stone staircase led to the top floor, which was divided into two apartments. In the patio a bunch of kids, both boys and girls, were chasing some poor bowlegged dog. One of the apartments was shrouded in silence. Arminda surely lived in one of the two. If Arminda was the mother of that host of screaming dwarfs, then things weren’t looking good. Robbing the home of a family of six in La Paz was an impossible task. On the other hand, if she lived in the other apartment, who knew what surprises awaited me?
I lit a cigarette and mentally retraced my steps. There wasn’t a whole lot to think about. My plan was completely ludicrous, the frustrated dream of a harmless guy who read Raymond Chandler, Chester Himes, Dashiel Hammett, and Manuel Vásquez Montalbán as if they were prophets. I didn’t have the balls for the job. And yet, a wicked force inside me that I had long ignored pushed me to continue with the adventure, which seemed more like a quixotic farce than a serious and thoroughly planned professional robbery. I resolved to return to the street, and as I passed by the shoemaker and his shoes, I spotted a beautiful blue Mercedes easing to a stop at the opposite end of the corridor. The passenger door opened and a man dressed in a fine gray coat stepped onto the sidewalk. His raised collar covered half his head and I couldn’t make out his face. I moved closer to the shoemaker’s hut and played dumb. I listened to the guy’s footsteps, to the shoemaker’s gruff greeting, and to a raspy voice responding with an elegant high-society grunt. The guy from the Benz didn’t even notice me standing there, concealed beneath the sinister light. He arrived at the patio and climbed the left staircase. He tapped on one of the doors three times, as if it were a secret code. A woman’s hand emerged and then, like a caress, with a slow and sensual movement, dragged the guy into the apartment. It could have been a scene out of a movie by the British filmmaker Carol Reed. Despite not hearing very well, the shoemaker evidently had the radar of a bat; without looking up, he asked, “What can I do for you?”
I sat down on the bench in front of him and responded: “I’d like you to give me half a sole.”
“That’ll be fourteen pesos.”
“Per shoe?”
“Of course,” he said without batting an eyelid. For the first time I noticed his eyes, cloudy like those of an aging cat. I handed him one of my shoes and he turned it over and over again, studying it. He was badly nearsighted, and his eyeglasses were the size of two magnifying glasses.
“When did you get these shoes?” he asked.
“I first used them during the ’78 World Cup in Argentina.”
“Bolivia didn’t even qualify.”
“I said I bought them, not that I played with them. They’re classy shoes, Plus Ultra.”
“That’s a good shoe. They don’t make them that way anymore. How many times have you had your soles changed?”
“I don’t remember.”
The shoemaker smelled like paint thinner. You didn’t have to look at him twice to realize he was high off his ass.
“It would be best if I put in some neolite rubber soles. Otherwise, they’ll crack at the heels.”
“This house is one of the oldest in the city,” I said, changing the subject.
“They say it used to belong to Don Ismael Montes. They can’t knock it down because it’s in the historic district, luckily for me and the other artisans here. Rents have gotten so high in the city!”
“The guy who just walked in is the owner, right?”
“Him? Nah. The owner is an old bat who lives in Arica. The guy with the Mercedes is a tenant. Of course, he doesn’t live here. He just uses it as a den for bringing back chicks. I’ve seen all kinds go through there. Lately he’s been with this chubby lady who always spends an hour with him.”
“What time do you work till?” I asked.
“Today it took me awhile to finish these Texan boots for a friend who lives in New Mexico. But usually I go home at 8:30, sometimes earlier.”
“Some bachelor pad,” I affirmed.
“He does her twice in an hour,” he said, then twisted his jaw in a mocking sneer.
“These rich guys won’t do it more than once,” I suggested. “They’re too selfish to put in the extra effort.”
He broke out in laughter and then started to pound my other shoe. While he worked away, I took a quick stroll around the patio to see if I might discover anything interesting. Silence imposed itself once the screaming little ones went in for dinner. Meanwhile, the guy with the Mercedes and Arminda were moaning and getting it on upstairs.
Ten minutes later the shoemaker handed me my boots. It cost me almost thirty pesos! All my fucking around was getting expensive.
I left the house and walked down Colón. The shoemaker was right: Without the neolite soles I’d have busted my tailbone on La Paz’s steep streets. I passed right by Don Otto’s, where I saw Severo devouring a succulent pork chop with a jumbo-sized serving of french fries. While he ate his dinner, he didn’t miss a second of a soap opera special on TV. A bottle of beer accompanied his feast. To get more comfortable, Severo had taken off his jack
et and rested it on the back of his chair. At first, I thought that the thing sticking up out of the lining of his sport jacket was his leather wallet, but a second look convinced me that it was the butt of a revolver. So the sidekick was armed. No two ways about it, he was all the protection she had. No one in his right mind would pay three cents to look like that ugly stuck-up prick, but the guy was no doubt a legitimate thug disguised to look like an accounting assistant or an errand boy. That asshole could probably shoot a gun just as naturally as he swept up dust in the office.
I kept walking and then dropped anchor at the corner of Colón and Comercio. I was as confused as a Saharan on the high seas. For starters, because I’d never been so close to so much money before; second, because I was playing along with a game that was threatening to become reality; and third, because I was scared to death just thinking about it.
I walked back up Colón. I tried getting into Our Lady of Carmen Church, which faced the old house, but the entrance was closed. There were just a couple of inebriated beggars outside. The cold was growing more intense by the minute. Off in the distance, I could hear the roar of the crowd jammed into Hernando Siles Stadium. Crossing Ballivián Street, I came upon an open pharmacy. The pharmacist, a balding man with an optimistic look about him, was fixated on the soccer game on the radio. An aging, nearly toothless prostitute was wandering about with little hope of reeling in a customer. She approached me and asked what time it was. I told her.
“You don’t want to talk for a while?” I asked.
She observed me as if she were having a close encounter of the third kind. “What about?”
“I’m not from around here and I feel lost,” I explained. “I haven’t said hi to anyone for a week.”
She smiled, hiding her teeth. Thirty years prior she must have been a very beautiful woman. “Where are you from?” she asked.
“Uyuni.”
“Where’s that?”
“Down south. It’s colder there than it is here.”
“Brrr. I’m from the Chaco. It gets hot over there. You’ve never been to the Chaco?”
“What is there to do in the Chaco?”
“Go fishing in the Pilcomayo River.”
“You’re going back there when you retire?”
“Retire from what?”
“You don’t work?”
“Don’t play dumb with me. What are you doing just standing here?”
“Nothing.”
“You don’t want to go for a walk?”
“With this cold, it would be useless for me to even try.”
“I’ll warm you up.” She lifted up her skirt a little, revealing a soccer player’s thigh.
“Looks tasty, but I can’t.”
“Twenty plus the room.”
“You must have been really beautiful once . . . you still are,” I said.
She opened up her purse, unzipped a pocket, and showed me a photograph. “This is from when I was fifteen.”
I was right. She had been a precious little thing with a clean face, full of promise. I felt bad for having started up the conversation with her. The photo depressed me.
“It must be a long and sad story.”
“Mine? Not so much. I don’t regret anything. I had good times and bad. Things get tougher when you get older. The most important thing is to enjoy being young while you can. When you’re old you only need a few pesos to eat . . . I’m gonna get going. If I don’t find anyone, tomorrow will be a rough day.”
She walked off with a certain Andean majesty. Years of wear and tear had taken a toll on her black coat, which looked like it weighed two hundred pounds.
Around 10 o’clock the Mercedes appeared like a beautiful cat under the moonlight, shining and stealthy. It stopped. The driver honked three times and then turned off the motor. I barely had time to take a leak on the side of a thick wall. When I returned, the opulent owner of that marvelous machine emerged from the house carrying Severo’s duffel bag over his shoulder. He got into the car so fast I couldn’t make out his face. The Mercedes roared, and then smoothly glided away.
The empty street seemed to exacerbate the night chill. The thunderous roar of fifty thousand shouting people broke out in Miraflores. The druggist lifted up his arms. Goal for El Tigre. Severo left the eatery and walked nonchalantly up Colón. He disappeared inside the big house and I was again left alone. My abdomen started to ache, and all of a sudden I had to go to the bathroom. That kind of luxury could wait. My nerves were playing a bad joke on me, so I entered the store and bought an Alka-Seltzer. The pharmacist handed me a glass of water.
“Two to one,” he said happily. “Five minutes left.”
Then Severo and Arminda emerged. She clutched her briefcase tightly under her right arm. They planted themselves on the edge of the sidewalk and hailed the first taxi passing down Colón. The comings and goings had ended, and now the questions began. I asked, and Mario Alvarez responded. Entangled in a web of deductions and suspicions and frozen stiff by the La Paz night, my mind short-circuited. The question was: To follow or not to follow?
“I need something to drink,” I said out loud.
I headed up to the north side of town, where night falls amidst poverty, promiscuity, and despair.
Part Two
Chapter 8
All the noise and people in that Bolivian Calcutta were making it impossible to think straight. At the head of Figueroa Street, steps away from Plaza Alonso de Mendoza, I chanced upon El Yungueño, a small dive filled with lushes who were always celebrating something, be it their misery or their happiness. A tall, dark-skinned woman with a supple figure was standing and drinking beside the bar in the company of two lowlifes dressed in jackets and jeans. As I entered, the woman winked at me suggestively. The guys, cheap pimps for sure, stood watch over their charges and pretended not to see me. The owner of the bar was a hefty, slovenly lady who could easily have passed for the driver of a twenty-ton truck. She poured me a beer without even asking.
I started to mull things over. Time was short. To carry out my project, I first needed to acquire a lead club, a silent and efficient instrument. A gun was out of the question, since it was going to cost me at least two hundred dollars. Once I had the lead club, the second thing was to draw up a more or less rational plan. It didn’t make sense to do the robbery during office hours because of all the gold sellers hanging around. The ideal thing was to catch Arminda when she wasn’t with Severo; that way, the armed son of a bitch couldn’t blow my brains out. I had a single window for finishing Arminda off with a crushing blow to the neck: between the moment her gorilla-in-training saw her to the apartment and when the rich guy with the Mercedes showed up.
I had it all figured out: Arminda bought the gold with the money the rich guy brought her. When they got together at her apartment, the gold was swapped for dollars, which in turn served to buy more gold. You didn’t need the mind of Stephen Hawking to put two and two together. I wasn’t interested in the gold, only in the dollars.
A second prostitute, a tiny and chubby girl with the expression of a graceless circus clown, joined the others at the bar. One of the pimps started to stroke her back with about as much tenderness as a bear. I needed an accomplice to help me tie up loose ends, but I had to act fast. As I lost myself in thought, a scandal broke out in the street. The police had detained a drunken pickpocket for trying to make off with a woman’s purse. They locked him up in a car and then left with their sirens blasting, as if they had just caught some big shot from the Medellin cartel.
The air seemed to thicken. In the mood for some native victuals, I made my way toward the Uruguay Market. There, I settled onto a stool underneath a plastic tarp and ate an entire chicken. The chicken was so spicy that I was forced to drink a beer. A half-breed lady wrapped in an alpaca blanket and emerald flowing skirts served me a ladleful of potatoes sautéed in onion, which extinguished the fire raging inside my stomach. Riffraff and laborers were consuming two-peso dishes of tripe and lamb stew. When
the half-breed lady served me a strong yet delicious coffee, I felt like new. If I was going to digest that late dinner, the wisest thing was to start walking. I chose Avenida Buenos Aires, the most diverse and exotic artery in La Paz and the one most crammed with people. I wandered past the sellers of raw meat and the fruit stands, past the tents containing coca leaves from the Yungas, past the music vendors, the glass dealers, the candy stores, and the grocery stores with dizzying quantities of rice, corn, and spices. I passed in front of the sellers of handmade leather goods, the bakeries specializing in wedding cakes, and the shoe stores.
At 11 o’clock, as I approached the Puente Abaroa, I observed drunkards trying to hide between enormous bags of bananas and pineapples as they awkwardly mounted half-breed whores. I was tired, but I wanted to get even more tired, stop thinking about the visa and the robbery, and fall asleep; “to sleep and sleep no more.” Up ahead were three-peso barbershops, toilet paper sellers, leather workers, heavy trucks, porters unloading manioc and red peppers, sweetshops, and ice cream stores. I also saw vendors selling canned liquor, weaving shops, chicken joints, and cheap watering holes crawling with vagrant coke heads.
“Don Mario, Don Mario!” I heard all of a sudden.
An unusual looking young woman was motioning to me from a doorway. I touched my index finger to my chest.
“Yes, you! Don’t you recognize me?”
A flesh-and-blood apparition, she looked far-out even in comparison with the rest of the street. The lady wouldn’t stop smiling as she came closer, batting her eyelashes just like Pierrot before a circus act.
American Visa Page 12