American Visa

by Juan de Recacoechea

  At that moment, someone came in to join us. Cell phone in hand, Don Gustavo was preparing to dial a number. When he saw us he changed his mind and left the gadget on top of a desk.

  “Isabel! What a surprise! You don’t get out much these days.”

  He gave me a quick once-over, but couldn’t quite classify me.

  “This is Señor Alvarez,” Isabel said.

  “Such a pleasure,” replied Don Gustavo. “Didn’t I see you in the Senate?”

  “I’m afraid not. I’ve never seen the Senate, except from the outside. I live in Oruro.”

  “Ahh.”

  “He’s a teacher,” Isabel said.

  “A teacher . . . a teacher?” he asked with a sneer.

  Don Gustavo was decked out in a blue suit. He stood about a hand’s-length taller than me and was dark-skinned, just like his sister María Augusta. His hair was straightened in the style of those blacks from Harlem in the 1950s who would put an iron to their heads to look more like white people. A smug-looking mestizo, his face had surely been softened a thousand times with fine creams. He was arrogant, unfriendly, and ostentatious. His rough, swollen hands straightened the reddish tie on his impeccable white shirt.

  He began: “I wanted to talk with you alone for a moment. Your Aunt Alicia is being a complete pain. She’s extremely jealous and she thinks that I have a lover. The truth is that I spend my time in Parliament. I’ve got more important things to worry about . . .”

  “Is that right?” Isabel said with a smirk.

  “Let me explain. For example, take the participation of U.S. soldiers in the fight against drug trafficking: Without the soldiers there’s no foreign aid, and without foreign aid this country’s going nowhere.”

  “Bolivia lives mostly off cocaine,” I said. “It would be absurd to eliminate the coca crops.”

  Don Gustavo stretched out the corners of his lips into a grimace that would have looked funny if it hadn’t been for the rest of his features, which remained funereal.

  “Nobody wants to eliminate the crops, not even the Americans. Cocaine is a good business and the Americans like good businesses. They’ve created a theatrical operation in which we’re like supporting actors; we unleash the mother of all battles against the drug traffickers, but that’s just for the consumption of the media and the general public. Everyone agrees that if there’s no cocaine, there’s no money in the Central Bank, so they’re okay with it. Since you’re a teacher, I’ll bet you’re a lefty just like my niece.”

  “I’m apolitical. I didn’t know that your niece was on the left.”

  “It’s the truth, in spite of her money and good looks,” Don Gustavo said. “You’re one well-dressed teacher. How much did that suit cost you? Two hundred dollars?”

  “I had it custom-made just for my visit to the American consulate.”

  “Big party?”

  “I went for a tourist visa.”

  Don Gustavo laughed, shaking his head from side to side. “Isabel sure knows how to meet strange guys. She’s always hanging around with these trade unionists, but at the moment of truth she picks a boyfriend from a good family with tons of money.”

  Isabel stared at him with snake eyes.

  “They’re more interesting than all of your right-wing friends in Congress,” she responded. “My Uncle Gustavo belongs to the MIR. Before, he was an advisor to each of the military dictatorships, and when he was younger he worked for the MNR; he was even their ambassador to Belgium. Nobody’s been around more than him.”

  “I’m on the side of history,” Don Gustavo said, clearing his throat. “Now I’m a social democrat, an admirer of the Swedes and the Danes. I was a leftist when I was young because I wanted to learn all about scientific socialism and the dialectic. Marx was extremely useful to me in college. Luckily, that’s all in the past. These days you have to look at the world differently. Darwin was right when he said that only the strong survive.”

  “It doesn’t matter how,” Isabel chimed in.

  Don Gustavo strutted around the library as if taming a gang of wild animals.

  “The perestroika was Kerenski’s posthumous revenge; he always wanted a pluralist Duma. You don’t have to eliminate the Bolsheviks— they’re necessary. Without thermonuclear support, the Shining Path, Farabundo Martí and company are all harmless. They can wage guerrilla warfare for a hundred years and the earth won’t stop spinning. Fukuyama called it the end of history. Have you read him?”

  “Yukio Mishima is the only Japanese I’ve read,” I replied.

  “Political scientist?”

  “He was a gay novelist who committed hara-kiri.”

  “Clearly another nutcase. I guess there’s something for everybody.” He paused and then continued: “Every now and then you’ve got to pay attention to the left-wingers. I do it too in Congress. They’re good friends of mine. We get together for coffee, tell jokes, talk politics. They feel lost, but they make a thousand dollars every month, and that’s good money these days. Let’s hope they get enough votes in the next elections to return to the House. What would we do without them?”

  Isabel was livid. Listening to a person that shameless was enough to get anyone riled up. The guy deserved to be blindfolded and hung in a well, but that would have been useless. Bolivia was plagued by Gustavos; they grew like a fungus and survived like cockroaches.

  “Where did your brother go?” Don Gustavo asked.

  “He’s in the parlor.”

  “He’s another one who wants to escape from reality, but through drugs. The kid is spineless, just like your father.”

  “Please don’t mention him,” Isabel snapped.

  “It’s a good thing he’s gone. To him, we were all a bunch of stinking half-breeds. He thought he was better than everyone else.”

  “I said not to mention him, you jerk!” Isabel shouted.

  Don Gustavo didn’t turn red with anger simply because he was dark-skinned, and dark-skinned people don’t change color even in the middle of a rainbow.

  Isabel left the library. I picked up my Jack London books and was about to make an exit, when he asked me, “What’s a teacher going to the United States for?”

  “Pancakes,” I said. “Have you heard of the House of Pancakes?”

  “No kidding,” he replied with a smile. He turned his back to me and made his phone call.

  I went downstairs, where nobody paid any attention to me. I looked around for Isabel, but she had vanished. After one last glass of red wine, I walked out into the bitter night wind. A pair of policemen relaxing in a security hut watched me as I walked off in search of a bus to take me home.

  A sleepless night thinking about Doña Arminda’s dollars and Isabel’s charms seemed to await me, and I wasn’t mistaken. My acute desperation kept me awake most of the night. I figured I had blown my chance to ambush Arminda. I had stupidly wasted hours of my life with those rich stiffs, sipping blue-blooded liquor and unsuccessfully screwing a female castrator until she nearly made a biblical martyr out of me when we were hit by that volley of stones. I was a push-over; I was a lover of the impossible, a dreamer who never could choose his dream, an incomplete man. Deep down, maybe it was fear that had erased my will to steal and take risks. Nonetheless, I realized that the crime was the only thing left for me to do, the only way I could redeem myself in my own eyes, the one thing that would give meaning to my life. I acknowledged that if I didn’t pull it off the following night, I might as well forget about it.

  What would I do then? Screw Blanca in fleabag hotels in that neighborhood-from-hell, coexisting with a virus that might rear its ugly head any day? In a few years, we would retire to a tropical village to sell ice cream, kill mosquitoes, sleep long siestas in that all-consuming heat, gaze out at the rivers, and wait for the rains to come. It would be better to die for the American visa. I was in an idiotic predicament worthy of a Third-Worlder, but I wasn’t the only one. There were millions of losers just like me. It was laughable but also real, so real t
hat when I turned off the lights, my room was illuminated as if by a hundred bulbs. The solution was to drink some pisco, but there wasn’t a single drop in my bottle. Fortunately, around 4 in the morning, Blanca returned, a little dizzy but happy. It’s uncommon to see a sad prostitute; each night they bury their existential angst inside their vaginas. Maybe when God forgave Mary Magdalene he forgave them all, relieving them of their sadness and filling them with cheer.

  “How did it go?” I asked.

  “You’re awake?”

  “I just got back. I was at a party on the south side of town.”

  “Where?”

  “Calacoto, Achumani . . .”

  “I had a good night,” she said. “I think that when the economy’s bad, people stop buying clothes first, then they stop eating, and the last thing they give up is sex.”

  Since Norha the castrator had left me hanging, I made love to Blanca and thought about Isabel. She climaxed with the expression of a girl who has just discovered what an orgasm is. Immediately afterwards, she fell asleep and, naturally, started to snore. I did my best not to wake her; after all, she earned her daily bread through suffering. At 6 in the morning, I was lucky enough to see the parish priest climb up to the belfry and, with sadistic intent, ring the bells loud enough to wake up the entire neighborhood. He observed me from his perch. I gave him the finger, shut the window, and, as soon as the ringing ceased, fell sound asleep.

  When I woke up at around 11 o’clock, Blanca was still sleeping like an angel. I went out to the patio, where Don Antonio was bingeing on chocolates.

  “This is the best chocolate in Bolivia, Alvarez, my friend, straight from the pampas of Beni.” Don Antonio held a bag filled with fresh bread rolls, still warm from the oven. He handed me one. “The owner of the hotel is in a diabetic coma. Let’s hope he doesn’t die on us. That would be a tragedy; we’d all be at the mercy of the nurse and the Scotsman. The old bat would boot me out onto the street within a week.” After a pause, Don Antonio continued: “You don’t look so hot. If you keep overdoing it at this altitude, they’ll find you stiff in bed one day.”

  The salesman stepped out of the shower. He was much paler than usual and maintained an air of permanent sadness, of unfathomable bitterness. He had on a long-sleeved undershirt, long underwear, and old-fashioned slippers.

  “Chocolate?” Don Antonio asked.

  The salesman greeted me and, bending over, replied, “It’s bad for my stomach. A bread roll and some coffee would be nice.”

  Don Antonio winked at me and scoffed, “Our tireless salesman sold out his entire stock of wine and cheese, a record for him. Even so, asking him for a loan is like asking for rain in the Atacama Desert.”

  “I don’t borrow and I don’t lend,” the salesman said, retreating to his room.

  “That’s one lonely man,” I said.

  “The guy’s a stingy, cold-hearted misogynist. The goalie tells me he’s a huge masturbator. To be honest, I’ve never seen him with a woman, not even with one of the girls from the Tropicana Cabaret who don’t exactly play hard to get. He pays for his room on time, eats two meals a day, and consumes an incredible amount of bread; our guess is ten to fifteen rolls every day.”

  The salesman returned with a small kerosene stove and began heating some water in a kettle. When it reached a boil, he mixed in a pinch of ground coffee and then added three tiny spoonfuls of sugar. After stirring the coffee, he put the cup to one side and, hands trembling, picked up a bread roll. With smooth and persistent gestures, he removed the crust, sliced the inside into small pieces, arranged them on a plate, rubbed his hands together, and began to drink the coffee. He sipped slowly, accompanying each slurp with a piece of bread. It was a true ceremony; we watched in silence for five minutes. He finished without speaking and then returned to his room.

  “A poor man’s gourmet, but a gourmet nonetheless,” Don Antonio commented, then changed the subject. “Today is a milestone: the last showing at the old Cinema Bolívar. They’re going to turn it into a gambling hall. I used to get in for free. May the late owner rest in peace; the man was a good friend of mine and the ticket agents would let me sneak in when it wasn’t too full.”

  “The Last Picture Show,” I said. “Do you remember the movie?”

  “We ought to see a porno flick; it’ll raise more than just our spirits.” “Okay, what time?”

  “Let’s meet at 3.”

  “Sounds good. I’ll take a nap and see you then,” I said.

  Chapter 10

  The taxi dropped us off at El Prado and we walked slowly toward the movie theater. In spite of his physical and economic tribulations, Don Antonio was in a terrific mood.

  “In my day, when I was still young,” he began, “the United States didn’t have immigration quotas for Latin Americans. If we wanted to go live there, it was no big deal. I never had the same dream as you. I wanted to go to Europe, to Paris most of all. If I had made it to the City of Lights, I never would have left. I’m talking about the Paris of the interwar period, the most brilliant Paris, the Paris of Picasso, Modigliani, Vallejo, and Henry Miller. Unfortunately, my MNR friends at the foreign ministry sent me to inhospitable places like Puno and Calama. I didn’t have a bad time, but I would have preferred better postings. Valparaíso was very good to me; I fell in love with nearly all the hookers who worked at the port. I’d like to be buried there, but at the rate I’m going I’ll end up encased in marble in the Alcorta family mausoleum. If you ever come back to Bolivia, you’ll know where to find me. I’ll be there until kingdom come.”

  “Don’t talk like that. You look good,” I said.

  “Once you hit seventy, every day’s a lottery. One bad fall, a year in bed, and then you’re dead.” Don Antonio ran his fingers through his silvered moustache and took a deep breath. “If I ever decide to kill myself, I won’t need poison or even a pistol. I’ll just catch a train to Cochabamba, and within a week my asthma will send me to the other world.”

  Don Antonio bought some sweets at a street stand and started to suck on them delicately. He was wearing a fur-lined jacket meant for frigid temperatures.

  The last showing at the Cinema Bolívar was an Italian production called Nightfall in Istanbul. Don Antonio flashed a friendly smile at the ticket agent as I slipped him a single peso under the rope. The theater was at near capacity with patrons from the middle class on down. The mixture of odors was impressive, but nothing I couldn’t get used to. Don Antonio picked seats in the front row so he could catch every last detail of the erotic scenes. The plot was simple enough: A French couple, an older man and a woman in her thirties, were traveling to Istanbul on vacation to admire the Mosque of Santa Sophia. The man was impotent, and the woman, a nymphomaniac with a fetish for riffraff.

  Just for fun, the husband would send his wife off to do guys in the poor neighborhoods. One afternoon, she screwed a Turk on top of their bed. Bottle of brandy in hand, the French guy sat in a chair at one edge of the mattress and ogled the couple’s gyrations, amidst wild cries and Islamic invocations. Don Antonio confessed to having seen each of the previous three showings.

  During the movie, I got up to go to the bathroom. There were two adjacent stalls in a hallway in the back. While taking a leak, I heard a fight break out between a man and a woman in the stall next to me. When they quieted down, the unmistakable cadence of lovemaking started up. I stepped onto my tiptoes and peered over the partition to find a couple of Indians entangled like a pair of larvae. The man was drunk, and the woman nearing ecstasy. They were humping standing up like a couple of animals, as if their lives depended on it.

  “I’m the Turk,” the guy stammered.

  “Fucking Turk!” she cried.

  I returned to my seat and told Don Antonio what I had seen.

  “See Istanbul and die happy,” he said.

  During the course of the movie, Don Antonio ate a cold empanada, a dozen chocolates, and a tamale.

  The film ended with the French couple’s return
to their ancestral homeland. They took back with them a Turkish sheepdog and a dimwitted, 230-pound wrestler with a shaven head, a nose like an anteater, and fleshy lips.

  The show was over. It was 7:30 in the evening.

  “I have to go,” I said. “Wish me luck.”

  “Good luck,” Don Antonio replied, “with whatever you’re doing.”

  I left the theater and headed for Santa Cruz Street. Dusk advanced imperceptibly, as the sun began to hide its pale sphere behind the Andean plateau. In spite of the approaching night, it wasn’t cold, nor was the wind blowing.

  The north side of town had a festive air to it, as if it were the eve of carnival. I entered the first bar I saw and chugged a half-glass of pisco with a squeeze of lemon juice. I asked for a beer to chase the pisco, and then another pisco to chase the beer. I felt rejuvenated and ready to stop by Yujra’s place.

  Half an hour later I arrived at Ortega Way. The street was abuzz with vendors and people out for a stroll. I felt the weight of the lead club in my pocket. Serene and optimistic, I walked to the Luribay. I found the place nearly empty, except for three or four vagrants who were used to spending their waking hours plastered. As I entered the bar, the bartender ordered them to leave.

  “Get lost, punks!” Yujra roared.

  “Just one more, boss,” one of the vagrants whined. “We’ll split it and then we’re gone. Don’t be this way, brother—”

  “I’m not your brother,” Yujra retorted. “I don’t have no bums for brothers.”

  “We got cash,” another vagrant said. “We’re going to Rafa’s place then.”

  “She’ll give you pure liquor. I don’t sell garbage here.”

  “Don’t tell me you were breast-fed expensive booze,” the vagrant jeered.

  Yujra lifted him up by the lapels and dealt him a well-placed head-butt to the face. It sounded like a truck running over a watermelon. One of the vagrants whipped out a pocketknife and said, “You were the heavyweight champ till that black Peruvian knocked you out. They had to take you away on a stretcher. You got hit so hard, it made you retarded.”