“Do I still look pale?” I asked.
“The alcohol will bring your color back. What are you worried about?” She handed me a beer, we drank a toast, and she sighed. “I’m independent. If I feel like it, I’m gone . . . or I could stay for a man. But you’re not my man. You’re just a crazy guy who doesn’t need anyone.”
Everyone cheered when the bellboy arrived carrying two cooked chickens, baked potatoes, fried plantains, pickled vegetables, and hot sauce. Don Antonio said, “Gastronomic debauchery is the only kind of orgy I can handle at my age. What did you think of the film at the Cinema Bolívar?”
“I liked Istanbul. I’ll bet that shacking up with a Turkish chick would be the best thing for someone on his deathbed.”
“Sexual euthanasia,” Don Antonio said approvingly. “It’s not for a poor guy like me.”
Blanca, who was two steps away, moved closer. “Enough about Turkish girls already! What do they have that we don’t?”
“Ha ha,” Don Antonio laughed. “At this altitude, jealousy is bad for your blood pressure.”
Blanca took me by the hand and said, “You’re trembling.”
“I’m just so excited for Antelo. He’s going to put a stop to poverty. ‘Black Panther’ Yashin couldn’t do it better.”
“You’re acting really weird,” Blanca said. “It’s as if you aren’t here.” I grabbed her by the waist. She stood there for a moment and then rested her forehead on my shoulder.
Don Antonio suggested, “Take her with you to North America. You won’t be lonely with a woman like that. Gringas are descendents of Scandinavians and Anglo-Saxons; it would be like learning to write all over again.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Blanca said. “I love my country.”
“Patriotic fatalism,” I said.
Antelo swayed back and forth euphorically, like a fly inside a bottle. The hostesses from the Tropicana were busy eating; copper-skinned Quechuas, they radiated a sensual mixture of Indian and Spanish. With the life they led, they would get old fast. They were in their twenties but looked about as burned out as harlots celebrating their fiftieth anniversaries in brothels. I tried not to get drunk, so that if the police came I would have enough time to gather my thoughts. The first thing the coppers ask for is your alibi, and I didn’t have one. I needed to be able to justify the interlude between when I left the Cinema Bolívar, up until a half-hour ago. No way could I mention my visit to the Luribay, since the mistress of the late senator worked right in front. I thought about asking Blanca to tell the cops, in case they came after me, that she had been with me. The problem was that I had dusted off someone famous, and poor Blanca would flip her lid; deep down she was just a peasant girl, and if they pressured her, she’d panic. I decided that, if asked, I would simply stop the clock and explain that I went back to the hotel after the movie with a splitting headache that had me seeing stars, and I went to bed.
To ease my distress, I headed back to my room, took a few aspirin, and dozed off. I woke up and went down to the lobby, where I ran into Blanca and the others again. She hadn’t seen me enter the hotel, but somebody might have. The manager always sticks his nose in everybody’s business . . . Or the helper . . . the helper had handed me the keys to my room, but the guy’s a drunk, a little absentminded, and, most importantly, bribable. A hundred bucks would shut him up. Yujra was another story. If the murder made it to the papers, which was likely since a senator was involved, it would get the ex-champ’s attention. He would be able to link me to the gold queen; he had seen me in that dive two or three times. Against that pack of vagrants, a middle-class guy stood out. American detective protocol would have me take out the boxer to cover my tracks, but I wasn’t up for another cold-blooded murder.
Besides, killing Yujra wouldn’t be so easy. You had to watch it with that guy. If I messed up the first try, I’d be a goner. The wisest thing would be to wait and see if the police thought it had to do with a settling of scores with some Trotskyite group. I needed to hide the booty immediately in a secure place, and wait . . .
“Have a beer and stop worrying about the visa,” Don Antonio said. “Money will buy you anything except your death. That’s the honest truth.”
Blanca asked sarcastically, “So you managed to get enough money? When are you leaving?”
“Very soon.”
“Who loaned it to you?”
“My godfather, for old time’s sake.”
“A likely story,” Blanca remarked.
One of the hostesses from the Tropicana came up to us. Her name was Fresia and she had a Polish last name. The blend of Quechua and Polish was something like a Molotov cocktail.
“Everyone’s getting a little wild at this party,” she said. “Except for you, Don Mario; you’re already fixed up.”
“Antelo’s going to bring the house down,” Don Antonio said.
“He doesn’t have a single peso left,” Fresia replied, looking at him askance.
I took her aside and whispered: “I want to make you a business proposal.” She crossed her arms. “I want you to make love to Don Antonio. I’ll pay for everything.”
“The old man?”
“If he can’t get it up, I’ll still pay you. What do you say?”
“For fifty dollars I’ll bring him back from the dead,” she declared.
Don Antonio was savoring a piece of apple pie, courtesy of Gardenia. “Time for my Tedral,” he announced. “There’s an open pharmacy on Bolívar Street. It’s going to be a long walk.”
“There’s still time for that,” I said. “Right now, Fresia is here. She’s from a UNESCO World Heritage site, the city of Potosí.”
“Potosí,” Don Antonio repeated. “I was there when Edward VIII visited Bolivia. Back then, he was the Prince of Wales. He stayed at the Governor’s Mansion. Unfortunately, the mansion didn’t have a single bathroom and his bowel movements ended up creating a diplomatic uproar. We had to escort him to a nearby hotel; once he finished, we walked him back. Let’s hope he didn’t mention it in his memoirs! This was in the 1920s, when I was starting out at the foreign ministry. I was a protocol assistant.”
“This guy wouldn’t stop talking if you taped his mouth shut,” Fresia said.
I took Don Antonio aside. His eyes brimmed with curiosity. “What do you think of Fresia?” I asked.
“A Quechua concoction,” he offered.
“She’s ready to make love to you. It won’t cost you a cent.”
Don Antonio’s face grew serious. He adjusted his glasses and smiled faintly. “Another one of your jokes, dear Alvarez?”
“I already talked it over with her. You have my word.”
“I need the Tedral. Without the Tedral, I’m dead in the water,” he said.
“I’ll send for some. Are you ready?”
“It’s been so many years . . . How much does she want?”
“It doesn’t matter. Do you think you still can?”
“Of course. My prostate’s good to go and my ass is as virgin as the deep Amazon. Wouldn’t you rather give me some money to pay the hotel?”
“No, no . . . I want you to do her. None of this hotel nonsense.”
“You’re a cruel man, Alvarez, but if I have no choice . . .”
Gardenia was puffing on a pipe and blowing smoke circles, like Lauren Bacall in one of her movies from the ’50s. “It’s tough to pull together eight hundred dollars in this town. We’ll miss you. We got used to having you around,” Gardenia said.
“Barcelona’s a great place,” I hummed.
“Before I leave for Barcelona, I need to have an operation to get my little pecker removed.”
“My advice to you, Gardenia,” I offered, “is hold onto your dick. You just never know. I met an Argentine transsexual once who got the operation because he had a thing for young boys. A few years later, he started liking girls so he had to become a lesbian. It was tragic because there was no turning back. He couldn’t get a penis implant.”
Gardenia
laughed. “Some story! That won’t happen to me—don’t jinx it.”
“If you do go to Barcelona, watch it with needle-sharing and people without symptoms. I hear that the Mediterranean is an HIV paradise.”
“A virus with class,” Gardenia concluded.
Antelo approached us. His smile would have looked great on a jack-o’-lantern. “My party rose to the challenges of our times,” he said.
“The MIR? They’re the fair-weather party,” Don Antonio jeered.
“With hands that good at catching soccer balls, now you’re gonna make off like a bandit,” Gardenia said.
“Don’t come to me later asking for favors,” Antelo scolded.
“Easy,” I said. “We trust your honesty.”
Antelo gave us all hugs and a whiff of his pisco breath. When he saw Fresia walk off to serve herself a piece of cake, he said, “Every last one of these hostesses works for the Interior Ministry.”
“You think so?” I asked anxiously.
“They’re such bimbos,” Don Antonio said pointedly, “that they confuse plot with Pol Pot.”
“Pol Pot?” Antelo repeated. “You lost me.”
“The Khmer Rouge,” Don Antonio said.
“Where’s that?”
The lobby door opened and Rommel Videla peeked in with his withered face. His smile was faded and his eyes lit up like candles. “Cheers!” he offered. “If Antelo, my buddy from the Chaco, heads to Santa Cruz, I’m going with him.”
“I’m not from the Chaco,” Antelo grumbled. “I was just the goalie for Chaco Petrolero.”
“They’ve been playing like shit lately,” the salesman said.
“They don’t have any young talent,” Antelo explained.
“In Santa Cruz, my peddler friend, you can sell your sadness,” Don Antonio said.
“In Santa Cruz nobody would buy it. They’re happy people,” Gardenia responded.
Blanca took a step forward and raised her wine glass. “I propose a toast to Antelo’s health. He suffered like a single mother for that job with Customs.”
Antelo lifted his glass in kind. He shed a tear that got bigger and bigger as it rolled down his cheek. “You’re all like family to me!” he stuttered.
Rommel, the tireless salesman, asked Patricia, one of the hostesses, to dance. She was dark-skinned and had the heft of a member of a traveling wrestling troupe. They put on quite a show; she danced salsa and he tango, as the radio blared a Dominican merengue.
Blanca pushed me into a corner. She was drunk. “You’ve been up to something. You look different. Where were you?”
“At the movies with Don Antonio and the barbershop with my godfather.”
“The money . . . did you steal it?”
“You’re crazy. He loves me like a son. I’m going to repay him every last dollar. I’m clean. Later I’ll send you a letter asking you if you’d like to join me.”
“That and the face of God are two things I’ll never see,” she said.
The party continued. We finished off the chicken, the potatoes, the wine, and the desserts. Gardenia and Patricia left at midnight to buy more booze. Fresia brought some cocaine, really good stuff, and we sniffed a few lines. Don Antonio observed us with curiosity. Videla started to cry as he remembered his father, who had plunged to his death off a bend in the road to the Yungas. Antelo was diving on a bed, clutching at imaginary soccer balls. Don Antonio fell asleep.
We carried the old man back to his room. When Gardenia and Patricia returned from their liquor run, I told Fresia that Don Antonio was waiting for her in bed. She asked me for the fifty dollars. I gave her forty, promising her ten more the next day. The pisco they had bought could have moved the bowels of a camel; we took turns going to the bathroom. After several fruitless attempts, Patricia finally managed to slip her hand inside the salesman’s pants. He started to laugh like a hyena, baring his teeth. I remembered the money and left the party without anyone else realizing it.
Once in my room, I wracked my brain for a good hiding place. I couldn’t think of anything better than to remove a loose piece of floor tile, stuff the dollars inside a nylon bag, dig a small hole in the dirt underneath the tile, and leave the bag there. I put the tile back in its place and tamped it down hard. After making sure it showed no sign of coming loose, I returned to the party.
Patricia and the salesman were arguing over the price of a bed-down. The salesman wanted to pay for the act of lovemaking in bottles of wine.
“How many?” Patricia asked.
“Two Concha y Toro.”
“Keep the wine, jackoff!” Patricia snapped.
Blanca was tired and asked me to walk her to her room. She started to throw up as soon as we got outside. After I put her to bed, she made three separate trips to the bathroom. Then she fell asleep. I undressed and started to envisage the next morning’s headlines: Senator Beaten to Death in Secret Love Nest, or, Strange Circumstances Surround Politician’s Murder, or, Police Hunt Gold Assassin. It was impossible for me to sleep in peace. The alcohol kept me in an intermediate state between vigilance and somnolence. I would sleep a few minutes and then wake with a start, alert to the slightest sound. The crime was replaying itself in slow motion.
Absolutely nothing happened. It was an ordinary night, interrupted by the incessant barking of stray dogs and Antelo’s inane proclamations. He started to sing drunkenly and cause a ruckus in the hotel lobby, coming to blows with the night doorman.
Blanca slept like a log. I envied her indolence and her little girl’s slumber. With the first light of dawn, I got up and quietly headed for the shower. I washed up and shaved in the arctic air and put on a jacket and jeans.
Without waking Blanca, I used a penknife to lift up the floor tile and grab my passport and a handful of greenbacks to pay for my visa and an outfit worthy of an affluent vacationer.
The dazzling blue sky augured a sunny day. In the hotel lobby, the doorman was reading the newspaper. Once he noticed me, he shot me an irritated look. “That jerk Antelo, he raised hell all night,” he complained. “Good thing he’s leaving.”
“Anything in the news?” I asked, trying to sound relaxed.
“I don’t know. It just came.”
Not a soul in the streets. I had to walk about six hundred feet to find a newspaper stand. I bought the four dailies and then went looking for an open café. In Plaza San Francisco, a solitary homeless man sitting on the edge of a curb contemplated the world with a pained expression. The small coffee shops at Pérez Velasco and on Comercio Street were still closed. It took me almost half an hour to find a place that was open. On Avenida Juan de la Riva, I happened upon a joint that smelled of freshly baked bread. A young boy with a contorted face served me brewed coffee and two warm rolls. With anxiety, fear, and excitement, I leafed through every page of the newspapers like never before in my life. News about the crime was nowhere to be found. I figured that since I had taken out the senator so late at night, there must not have been time to print it. But I wasn’t convinced. I told myself that it was impossible, and true to the old saying that “the criminal always returns to the scene of the crime,” I hurried up Colón Street. My curiosity was stronger than my judgment, and it led me back to the very house where it had all happened. In front, at Our Lady of Carmen Church, the bells were ringing for the first mass. The house was as quiet as any other in the neighborhood. I didn’t see a single policeman at the door, nor any signs of a disturbance. The gate was wide open. The small man in charge of cleaning was sweeping the patio with an old broom. It was the spitting image of petit bourgeois tranquility, of idyllic small-town life. For an instant, I thought that I had dreamt it all, that my imagination, dulled by age, had revived, as if in the confused awakening of a madman; when I felt the dollars in my pocket, I convinced myself that the dream was reality and that the money was indeed the product of a homicide.
At 9 o’clock, after wandering aimlessly down streets near Jaén, the city’s hidden colonial jewel, I resolved to pay a v
isit to the Andean Tourism Agency. I had to wait there half an hour before fat man Ballón showed up, with a look on his face like he was choking on a scorpion. When he realized that I had the money for the visa, his expression changed. He smiled repeatedly and even offered me some coffee. He told me I would have my visa in two days. When I let him know I couldn’t wait that long and that I was willing to pay a thousand dollars to have him grease the wheels at the consulate sooner, he explained that it was impossible. But when he saw the thousand dollars on his desk, he said he would do everything in his power to make sure that they gave me the visa within twenty-four hours. I said goodbye and left him happy, thumbing the greenbacks.
I took advantage of the morning to go shopping for a wardrobe that would go well with the art deco look in Miami. I got everything I needed at a Jewish-owned clothing store. It was important to put your best foot forward at the Miami airport, since they sometimes send you home if they don’t like your face and you look like a suspicious immigrant. I spent more than two hundred dollars on a wealthy tourist get-up and bought a few magazines in English to get a feel for the latest American slang. English is so dynamic that in a decade, if you don’t keep up, you’ll need the help of a dictionary just to read an article in Time.
Around midday, I went to an Argentine steak house; it had been an eternity since the last time I ate a cut of beef that smooth, tender, and classy. The waiter offered me the house wine, a Mendoza red. At 12:30, as I was attacking a salad, the owner, a blond Argentine with an impatient manner, switched on the television that sat on top of a shelf wedged against the wall.
On the screen, a woman with an angelic face declared with a smile: “We regret to inform you of the tragic death by heart attack of the honorable Senator Don Gustavo Castellón in La Paz last night at 9 o’clock.” Next, she read a long list of important government posts that he’d held during his precious and fertile existence, while the television cameras zoomed in on his grieving family surrounding the coffin, which was laid out in a room of what appeared to be an enormous, gaudy mansion. I recognized his wife, his daughter, Doña María Augusta, Isabel, and Charles. Decked out in black, Doña María Augusta was a living image of theatrical pain. Isabel was consoling her and trying, without much success, to adopt a distressed air, while Charles, who looked kind of high, was smiling and visibly content. The sounds of a funeral march served as background to the words of the reporter, who added that the remains of Don Gustavo would be moved to the Senate in the afternoon, where he would receive a final farewell from political and religious leaders and the country as a whole.
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