“The visa was fake,” I said. “They beat the hell out of me. I’ve got nothing left.”
“You have me. That’s not much, of course.” Blanca sat on the edge of the bed and kissed my lips as if they were part of some crystal palace. I choked up and shed a tear . . . That hadn’t happened in a long time.
“You can take him with you, señorita,” the nurse said. “Sign some papers for me on your way out.” Turning to face me, she added, “The next time you come up to El Alto, stay away from the dump.” She left the room, but not before shooting an indifferent glance at the motorcyclist. “That guy’s dead,” I said.
“I know,” Blanca responded.
I felt a kind of raw, unspoken love . . . the love of a poor sinner.
“You got yourself into quite a mess,” Blanca said.
“All for nothing. I don’t even have clothes.”
“When we leave, we’ll stop by a used clothing store. They have stuff from Switzerland that’s good and cheap.”
“I don’t have plans to go back to the Hotel California,” I said forcefully. “That would be too much.”
“We’ll travel to my hometown,” she said. “I’m sick of Villa Fátima.
I want to go home. You’re coming with me.”
“I don’t need a visa?”
“Just goodwill.” She laughed and stroked my hair. “The truth is that I was glad you didn’t leave.”
“Where were you on Friday?” I asked.
“Wandering around. I don’t like goodbyes. I wasn’t feeling well. I wanted to talk to you, but I knew it was hopeless. You were obsessed with that visa. Did you get over it?”
“By force,” I said. “What day is today?”
“Tuesday.”
“I was here for two days. How much did they charge you?”
“A hundred pesos.”
“I’ll pay you back once we get to . . . to . . .”
“You don’t want to go down to La Paz?”
“If we’re going to travel somewhere, I’d rather wait for you here at the hotel. I paid for a week.”
Blanca stood quietly for a few moments, then said, “I can go to La Paz to get my things and my money from my savings account. It won’t be a lot. I’m going to write a check and cash it at a bank in Riberalta. I’ll look into whether it’s possible to get a flight back home today on a cargo plane. In the meantime, buy yourself some clothes. I’ll come back this afternoon, whether it’s to travel today or sleep and then go tomorrow.”
Her idea made sense to me. I put on my pants and a shirt that she had bought me. I still didn’t have shoes. We left the hospital, which was in La Ceja of El Alto. Blanca gave me fifty pesos for the clothes and then left on a bus for La Paz. Before parting ways, we kissed tenderly.
A couple of blocks ahead, in the middle of Tiwanacu Street, I stopped at a used clothing store. The place smelled like Swiss cheese, mothballs, and dirt. I bought myself a horrible, coffee-colored checkered jacket and a beige shirt, which had belonged to some Swiss farm boy, and a pair of shoes that had been around the world but were still usable. On my way out, I looked at myself in the mirror. Charlie Chaplin couldn’t have made me laugh that much. The strain hurt my broken ribs.
I walked sluggishly down Avenida Antofagasta and arrived at the Primavera. The half-breed was startled to see me. To calm her down, I told her that I would leave that afternoon or the next day at the latest. “You stay out of trouble, sir,” she warned.
The dogs recognized me and accompanied me back to my old room. I lay down and mentally recapped everything I had been through in the past week. I had gone from being a poor visa reject to a wealthy killer, only to turn into a dud from El Alto. I had survived the most humiliating beating of my life and a simple peasant girl from Beni had rescued me and saved me from a schizophrenic future. That’s destiny for you: It makes us win, it makes us lose, it gives us hope, it screws us over, it makes us happy, and it makes us see life for what it is.
Someone knocked on the door and I got up. It was the half-breed lady offering me a glass.
“This chicha just arrived from Tarata. It’s ice cold,” she said, then left.
I drank the chicha, a cold and tasty balm. Then I took off my jacket and shoes and slept.
Around 2, Blanca returned with her luggage and two tickets to Riberalta on a cargo plane, an old DC3.
“When does it leave?” I asked.
“Tomorrow at 6:30 in the morning. It’s a good time to fly. We’ll have a stop-over in Trinidad. What do you think?”
“We’ll get married in Riberalta. Isn’t that what you want?”
“Aren’t you still married to that woman who left you?”
“According to the law, I’m as free as a bird . . .”
She took off her clothes at the foot of the bed and got under the sheets. During the act of lovemaking, she called me several names, including “visa wannabe.” She was happy, and I was glad about that . . .
As for myself, I didn’t know what to feel. But the girl had grown on me. She was returning to me the soul of my adolescence. I no longer had dreams, only Blanca.
I peered out the window: The City of the Future, and in the distance Mount Illimani, the majestic protector of the valley and the bedroom city of El Alto. In some way, I was now part of their misery, their hopes, and their humble people.
“I’m free—will you marry me?” I asked.
She laughed the way people do in eastern Bolivia, with that happiness that doesn’t disappear even in the hardest of times.
“I think I’d like that, Don Mario.”
I imagined a child taking in the sun, bathing in a river, with the sincere and tender eyes of Blanca.
THE END
Afterword
Mario Alvarez may escape from La Paz a changed man, but has he exorcised his demons? Is this the end of his peripatetic existence? His restless imagination has spurred him to make hasty decisions before. Un hombre cualquiera, an everyman with a strong survival instinct, he now appears reconciled to his fate. But is he?
During the course of the novel, Alvarez proves to be a modern Raskolnikov. His moral dilemma pushes him to the edge. His plight is utterly Kafkaesque. Like Joseph K. in The Castle, he’s lost in a labyrinth without exit, condemned to a miserable life. He might be a patient guy eager to uproot himself, but how many blows can he endure? Will the environment drive him mad? And is he fully aware of the extremes of his personality?
Alvarez’s odyssey speaks powerfully to the global debate surrounding citizenship and immigration in our post-9/11 world of ever-hardening visa and border enforcement policies. Like millions of others, he’ll stop at nothing to make it to El Norte. Ultimately he decides to take the game beyond mere forgery to pull off the fraud.
In Latin American letters, American Visa is a by-product of the ’90s, a period of intense reaction to magical realism and its forgotten generals, clairvoyant prostitutes, and epidemics of insomnia. Those fashionable elements were showcased in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, published in 1967, and were inspired in part by William Faulkner’s wrenching depiction, in his fictional Yoknapatawpha, of the deep American South after the Civil War. Juan de Recacoechea, along with an entire generation, became allergic to these stories, finding them too remote, too ethereal. Instead, he prefers the dirty urban landscape of La Paz, where the only thing magical is one’s talent to make ends meet.
In his style—sharp, acerbic, pungent, expressionistic—he follows another gringo: the Hemingway of “The Killers.” Like the author of Death in the Afternoon, Recacoechea went from journalism to fiction. I would describe his style as “picaresque noir.” His closest regional model is probably realismo sucio, the hard-boiled technique of the Mexican writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II, who is responsible for the one-eyed detective Héctor Belascoarán Shayne. Yet American crime fiction is Recacoechea’s prime stimulation. His prose makes frequent references to Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Chester Himes, and to the movies
based on their oeuvre.
I came to American Visa circuitously in 2004, when Adrian Althoff, a student of mine at Amherst College, conducted an independent study on Bolivia. We stumbled upon the novel and were immediately enthralled. Althoff translated the first twenty pages as his final project. A year later, a film adaptation, close in spirit to Recacoechea’s fast-paced plot, reached the screens, directed by Juan Carlos Valdivia, with Demián Bichir playing Mario Alvarez. It was a coproduction between Bolivia and Mexico that received an Ariel, the Mexican equivalent of an Oscar, for best adapted screenplay, as well as a nomination to Kate del Castillo for best female actress in the role of Blanca.
Althoff was involved in the movie and subsequently completed his translation, at once faithful and free-flowing, lucidly recreating Recacoechea’s voice in English. The book’s publication in the United States is welcome news, not least because Bolivian fiction in translation is a rarity. The nation’s three official languages are Spanish, Quechua, and Aymara. Less than a dozen Bolivian novels composed in Spanish have been rendered into Shakespeare’s tongue, including Renato Prado Oropeza’s The Breach and some of Edmundo Paz Soldán’s cyber-narratives.
Yet unlike in these other works, in Recacoechea’s book la men-talidad del subdesarrollo, the so-called “Third World frame of mind,” is put to a test. It provides an extraordinary window on the tensions at the heart of Bolivian society, while entertaining at the same time. The novel’s quiet yet forceful critique of the United States gives it a sense of urgency. The scene at the consulate early in the novel, in which the bureaucracy treats the native population with condescension and disrespect, helps to illuminate the ambivalence many Hispanics throughout the hemisphere nurture toward Americans. Can’t live with you! Can’t live without you! But I surely can live in you, says Alvarez, if only I can get across. Why not? Bolivia offers little to him. Or does it? His romance with Blanca triggers unexpected emotions, complicating his endeavors even further.
In all his ambiguities, Alvarez is one of us, uno de los nuestros, an immigrant—even at home—relying on the magic of his imagination to overcome adversity.
Ilan Stavans
Amherst, Massachusetts
February 2007
Words alone cannot express the thanks I owe to my mother,
Maria Angela Leal, for her invaluable editorial contributions and her tireless love and support.
—A.A. (translator)
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