I froze. I thought I had misheard. I summoned the waiter.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I didn’t catch what they said the senator died of.”
“A heart attack.”
How could they be so wrong? Why such a lie? What was behind this false scenario? I hadn’t dreamt it; I clubbed him to death. Maybe the police wanted to throw off the murderer; they invented that crude version of the facts to disorient him before they pounced. But Bolivian police were incapable of playing Machiavellian games for free. There surely existed some powerful reason for twisting the facts and presenting Don Gustavo’s death as a natural occurrence. It seemed to work in my favor, since without a crime there was no criminal. Still, I didn’t trust our lawmen. The word “imagination” may not be in their vocabulary, but when they smell money they move like ants. A lot of dough was at stake with what had gone down on Colón Street—dollars and many kilos of gold. The police would look for me, not to put a murderer behind bars, but to liquidate me as a potentially troublesome witness. If they said the senator died of a heart attack, then the lustful Arminda must be in on it. They hadn’t even mentioned her. I was in mortal danger. If I didn’t hurry up and leave the country, I would suffer the same fate as the senator, except they wouldn’t bury me with honors and a marching band. I’d end up in the morgue, so that medical students could play with my balls.
In the hotel room, I found Blanca still asleep, murmuring incomprehensibly in the middle of her adolescent dreams. I woke her and she rose like a sleepwalker and left the room without even saying hello. She returned ten minutes later with a steaming cup of coffee.
“When I go to bed with someone, I like to wake up with someone,” she grumbled.
“I had to go to the agency to give them the money.”
“Ah. Are you happy?”
“I’ve never been to a First World country before.”
“And us, what world do we live in?” she asked.
“The Third World.”
“Damn. And who says so?”
“The people in the First World.”
“And what do you have to do to belong to the First World?”
“Earn at least ten thousand dollars a year per capita, one car for every three inhabitants, social security, vacations in the South Pacific—all that good stuff.”
“I don’t want any of that.”
“Yeah, I know, Blanca. You belong to the great savannas, to the jungle. You’re a member of an endangered species. By the way, I’d like to have dinner with you tonight. We’ll go to a nice restaurant. What do you say?”
“I’m working. I can’t go two nights without making any money.”
“How much do you make a night?”
“Depends. Up to three hundred pesos on Fridays.”
“I’ll give them to you. You don’t need to go to Villa Fátima.”
“Don’t waste your money. When I like a man, I don’t charge.”
“I’ll pick you up at 10.”
“Maybe. I hope my headache goes away.”
Her lips felt like a piece of bark baking in the afternoon sun of Beni.
Chapter 11
In the Senate, the mood was subdued. The occasion was the wake of one of the most corrupt and shameless senators in the country’s history, and no one gave a hoot; the end justifies the means.
It was tough making my way up the steps to the interior of the building. The people in the crowd jostled for position: television cameramen, congressmen, senators, aides, bystanders, MIR diehards, and soldier-women who would have frightened an ETA henchman. Out of morbid curiosity, I wanted to hear the chit-chat circulating inside the halls of Congress. I had forgotten all about the danger that lurked around me—about the police, their gumshoes, and their homicide detectives.
I managed by pushing and shoving to reach the hall where the coffin stood covered with floral offerings. There were crosses of flowers and wreaths everywhere. A pair of rifle-toting soldiers stood watch at the head of the deceased. Later, I heard on the radio that Don Gustavo had been Defense Minister under General García Meza. I saw his entire family there: wife, daughters, brothers, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, and distant relatives, all hoping to reap some benefit from their presence.
“Hi, what are you doing here?” It was Isabel. She looked like a million dollars in black.
“I came to give you my condolences,” I said, feigning sadness.
“How nice of you. Would you like to pray for his soul?” Isabel smiled for both of us. “I’d rather leave,” she added, then took me by the arm. “I’ve already been seen; I’ve done my bit for protocol. I would be lying if I told you I was grieving over his death. The truth is I don’t care.”
We crossed the Plaza Murillo and walked silently down Ingavi.
“My uncle had an amazing life. He had all of the best government jobs. The only thing left was for him to be president. He would have pulled it off in a few years; he was always very lucky.”
“Too bad the same can’t be said of his heart.”
“The heart story is bogus,” she confessed. She looked at me out of the corner of her eye, waiting for a reaction.
“What!?”
“This is between you and me, Mario . . . Promise that you won’t tell anyone.”
“You can trust me.”
“The truth is, they killed him in his lover’s apartment. She was a gold dealer named Arminda. He was paying for the pad; it was right here on Colón Street.”
“Who would have done such a thing?”
“Anyone. A lot of people hated him. Other people knew that she bought a lot of gold, every day.”
“I don’t understand this heart attack business,” I said.
“It’s very simple. My uncle was a senator and also the president of Banco del Norte. It’s not one of the major banks, but they manage the accounts of the drug traffickers and the money launderers. With the consent of the general manager, they withdrew money from large savings accounts, bought gold, and sent it to the United States. They sold it there for good money. It wasn’t stealing, but they did use the money without the permission of the account owners. They bought twenty to thirty kilos each week, and made five hundred dollars a kilo profit. A young friend of Arminda’s would get his way paid to New York plus a thousand bucks each trip. They didn’t smuggle the gold; it was all legal, they even declared it. In New York, the buyers would wait at the airport with a couple of armed bodyguards and then transport it to a bank.”
“The price of gold is set by the world market,” I pointed out. “How did they turn a profit?”
“Most of the gold around here, from Guanay and Tipuani, is twenty-four karat, and over there it’s eighteen karat. Also, they don’t always pay the international price. If the seller looks hard-up, they pay him less.”
She smiled, unaware that her smiles were making me vibrate like the chords of a gypsy violin.
“That’s a great idea—fifteen thousand dollars a week,” I said.
“Without risks,” Isabel noted. “It was a clean job, except the owners of the dollars had no idea what was going on.”
“So that explains this funeral scene.”
“Of course. First, politically, it would have been an unforgivable transgression for a candidate for the senate presidency and a member of the ruling party to be implicated in those kinds of dealings. Second, the drug lords and money-launderers wouldn’t be too pleased if the authorities investigated the Banco del Norte. At the highest level, they decided that my uncle Gustavo died of natural causes.”
“His wife and kids are there . . .”
“They were in on it. I don’t know how much they got. She didn’t care much for him.”
“Maybe the mistress killed him in a fight.”
“From what I heard, she says she found him dead. The police know he was beaten to death. It was probably a couple of hoodlums.”
“How much did they take?” I asked in a perturbed voice.
“Around thirty thousand
dollars cash and twenty thousand in gold. They didn’t leave a thing. That’s the true story that will never be known.”
I took a nervous, ridiculous step forward, as if somebody had just pinched my bottom with a pair of pliers.
“What’s the matter?” Isabel asked.
I was kicking myself for not having taken all the money. I was an imbecile. Two thousand or thirty thousand, it’s all the same; guilt doesn’t increase proportionately with the amount stolen. How could I have been so naïve to think of myself as only a partial thief?
“Nothing,” I said. “The amount took me by surprise.”
We walked up Yanacocha until Indaburo. The temperature was springlike, the sky a deep blue. The contours of the surrounding mountains looked as if they had been sketched by a giant caprice of nature: hostile, bitter, and sterile.
“I’m not glad that he died,” she said pensively. “But it seems right to me. He did a lot of bad things, especially to my father. He humiliated him for his gentle character, tormented him because of his high culture and his class, and hated him for his aristocratic refinement. He envied my father’s pedigree and the way he could send anyone to hell, including my mother and the money that came with her. I’ll call my father tonight and tell him Gustavo died. He’ll drink champagne and pray that my uncle’s soul goes straight to hell.”
I laughed. She looked at me tenderly. A single word of hers could have led me to tell her everything and confess my full love for her; my never-ending, futureless love. In the end, love goes bad and brings us all down with it. With Isabel, love must have been something short- lived, fleeting, and violent, like a tidal wave.
When we got to the used bookstores near Jaén, she bought a novel by Skármeta, the Chilean writer, which had been lost among volumes on medicine and back issues of El Gráfico. I asked myself if Isabel could make me forget about Antonia. In a single day, I answered.
“I’ve been looking everywhere for this book,” she said. “It’s about Neruda and Black Island. Do you like Neruda?”
“I prefer César Vallejo. He was a sad man. He used to say, ‘I was born on a day when God was sick.’”
Isabel stopped and said in a shaky voice, “I’ll bet you think my boyfriend is exactly the wrong kind of guy for me.”
“I like him. He’s a good a guy; a rich, stable guy who can give you lots of kids and lots of vacations.”
“Please . . . before I get married, I need to get my ideas straight. I’m a little lost. Gustavo’s death is like a change in the weather; it doesn’t have anything to do with the way I feel. The truth is, I don’t see myself taking care of a house and looking after little runts. I’m afraid of boredom and routine. Still, there’s no escaping my destiny to become a housewife on the edge of a nervous breakdown. I think I’ll go to Rome to take an art class or something. If I really need to, I’ll come back. In Bolivia things are always getting worse, but that’s nothing new. I don’t mind living in a poor country as long as it’s free; I mean politically free. I don’t like living in the United States. I’ve lived in Boston and Los Angeles. I get tired of the Americans, except for the Jews. They’re the ones who do the thinking for everybody else.”
I felt like I was approaching the edge of a dark, bottomless well; still, I asked her, “If I were ten years younger and had some money, would you follow me to the end of the world?”
She smiled without saying yes or no.
“This is the last time I’ll be seeing you,” I said. I felt my face turning red, my legs trembling.
“I’ll give you my address, if you want. You can write and tell me how things are going for you.”
We continued on Pichincha. I felt serene and trauma-free. I had confessed my love the old-fashioned way, as if I couldn’t care less, without a trace of romanticism. She was too much woman for me. You could feel the word “friend” in the air. Small consolation; a punch in the face would’ve felt better. Hatred can lead to rape, and friendship to coffee or the movies. That’s what I was to her, a strange guy who had become her pal. She could tell me anything, her secrets, her confessions. Since I didn’t have her social standing, conversation was a cinch for her. I didn’t have the right to demand anything; love and sex weren’t in the cards. I was just some forty-something, borderline-poor guy who served as human experience for her, as a complement to her college education.
On Yanacocha, hundreds of children were just getting out of school. They took over the sidewalks and part of the street, forcing the cars to roll by at five miles an hour. They were making happy, carefree chatter. I had been the same way in my day, shoulder-deep in youthful fury, with that explosion of life in my heart, that joy of being young and still believing in the future. Now, I found myself in the future and it was no great shakes. To be honest, I would have preferred to stay forever in the past.
“I’m going back to the Senate,” she announced. “My mother is waiting for me.”
“When is the burial?”
“Tomorrow morning at 11 o’clock. The procession leaves from the plaza. The president and part of his cabinet will be there.”
“All the crooked politics around the murder are confusing me. Don’t you think the police are playing both sides, publicly accepting the story about the heart attack as a compromise while they go after the murderer?”
“Who knows? Maybe.”
“Arminda could be in on it with the guys who killed him,” I said.
“If they go out looking for the murderer or murderers, it’ll be on their own dime and it’ll be criminal against criminal.”
She stopped at the corner of Comercio Street and looked at me with those eyes I would never forget. I kissed her on the lips, quickly and somewhat timidly. The contact with her skin made my head spin like an undertow. She opened up her purse, looked for a card, and then handed it to me.
“Ciao . . . keep in touch.”
“Ciao . . .”
I couldn’t find Blanca in the hotel. I knocked on her door several times but no answer. I descended to the lobby—her key was in her box. Just to make sure, I went looking for her in the room where the Tropicana hostesses lived. The two of them were drinking homemade tea with rice bread. Patricia told me that Blanca had gone to meet a client from Santa Ana, a cattle man who called her every time he visited La Paz. The guy was crazy about Blanca; he had even proposed to her after divorcing his wife, a woman from Pando whom he detested.
“You’re the favorite,” Patricia said. “Blanca doesn’t like really old guys. This one’s around seventy.”
“What time will I be able to see her?” I asked.
“Who knows. Sometimes he has her for as long as two days.”
Fresia appeared, covered in a skimpy bathrobe.
“You owe me ten dollars,” she said.
“Did Don Antonio get it done?”
“Not really. Afterwards, he told me that with the forty dollars we could go out for some pork rind. The old man’s got some nerve. I didn’t accept. He groped my legs for about ten minutes and then fell asleep.”
I handed her the ten dollars. “If Blanca shows up, please remind her that we have a date.”
“If she finishes with the cattle man, she might go up to Villa Fátima later.”
I didn’t feel like talking to anybody. I was nervous and close to losing my cool. I didn’t know what to think about the way the coppers were acting. If Arminda had taken all the money, she must have told them that the killer ran off with everything. The police would get on that guy’s trail—that is, on my trail—secretly detain him, and then finish him off. They were probably looking for a villain with a long record of stealing gold, jewels, and dollars, a professional assailant or a hood who, upon being caught red-handed, had turned into a murderer. The underworld was familiar territory to them; they bankrolled snitches and informants who had their ears to the ground. If that were the case, then I was safe. All the authorities had on me in their files was a drunken mêlée in Oruro and the time I ran into a motorcycle while drivin
g my Yugoslavian boss’s car; not a single major offense. Yujra was the wild card. If the ex-boxer put two and two together, I would be up a creek.
It wasn’t hard to get the picture: My hide wasn’t worth much. On the other hand, maybe Arminda had cut a deal and split the booty with the police. That would be better because then they wouldn’t go looking for anybody. Regardless, it was best to keep my guard up. I needed twenty-four hours—if I was lucky enough to get the visa to fly north.
I left the hotel and entered a café on Evaristo Valle. I called Ballón to ask about the visa. He answered the phone himself. He calmed me down by telling me that my passport was already at the consulate. The visa was almost a sure thing. I told him to book me a seat on Lloyd Bolivian Airline’s red-eye flight the following night.
“That’ll be tough,” he replied. “If you don’t put down a few pesos, you won’t even get a seat in a week.”
“How much?”
“At least a hundred dollars. They’re always upping the price.”
“It’s impossible to live in a country like this,” I protested.
Ballón laughed. He said he would advance me the hundred dollars and charge me when he returned the passport. I told him that was fine.
I had dinner at a Chinese restaurant on Juan de la Riva. It was six pesos for the special and a beer. I asked them to turn on the TV. At 8 o’clock the Channel 2 news came on. It was more than fifteen minutes before they showed a clip of the wake at the Senate. The anchor interviewed Don Gustavo’s wife, who explained that her husband worked too hard and that the “stress” had killed him.
“He dedicated his life to the community,” she said. “He is watching us from heaven as we mourn him. That is his greatest reward.”
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