At the Cleveland airport I parked in the garage. Dave and I walked across the bridge to the terminal. “Once again, thanks,” he said as he headed to check in, and I turned to go down to the baggage-claim area where I would meet Susan. “The CIA doesn’t like to involve folks like you in its activities, but without your help we really can’t get Gonzalo to safety.”
If I can carry it off, I thought.
Susan arrived on time—actually about twenty minutes early. We met at carousel 6. “How was Chicago?” I asked as we waited for her bag.
“Great,” she said. “And I had time to wander around the Institute of Art. One of the best art museums in the country, maybe the world, in my view. Marvelous collection of impressionists. And, to top it off, I connected with Nancy Ryan. We had dinner at the Cape Cod Room in the Drake.”
“Terrific. Red snapper soup with sherry, I hope.”
“Oh, yes, and a good crab entrée. So how have you been?”
Then I told her about Bolivia and Gonzalo.
6
Jennifer arrived in the lab shortly before ten on Tuesday morning. I asked her to come into my office and sit down.
“Sorry to be late,” she said, “but that mongrel pooch of mine needed to go to the vet.”
“No problem,” I replied, “but there are things happening—out of control, maybe, really, in fact—that you need to know about. And I need your help.”
“Sure. What can I do?”
I told her about Gonzalo and my urgent trip to Bolivia. And that I didn’t know just what would be going on or just when I would be back. “I leave tomorrow morning. You’ll have to keep things going in the lab while I’m away.”
“That should be easy. We know what we are doing—at least at this point. But what about the grant renewal? It’s due soon, isn’t it? Right away, no?”
“Yeah, and you will have to pick up the IRB (Institutional Review Board) human rights and animal welfare stuff. It should be ready now. Then get the grant proposal FedExed out. This afternoon.”
“Okay. I can do that if you print it out. You’ve been working on it a lot. Is it really ready to go?”
“Well, as ready as it’s going to get.” And I told her about the CIA funding and the Fogarty Center.
“Five years. Wow!”
“Yes, wow. You know, that’s a bonanza. It really puts the squeeze on me to go and do this wild thing. Besides, I like Gonzalo, and I want to help him if I can.”
“Will Gonzalo come back here?” she asked. “To the lab?”
“Well, I don’t know. I guess not. I think not. He’ll need to find a life for himself, and more time in this lab really won’t help him.”
“Okay, Boss. But if Gonzalo comes back to the lab, I’ll have to leave.”
“What?”
“Yeah. There’s a lot goes on among the ‘low life’ that you and your kind don’t realize.”
“Low life?”
“You know, lab techs, post-docs, students. Worker bees. Sometimes we call ourselves the ‘low life.’”
“Hey, I work in the lab too. I get my hands wet. Sometimes I even wash glassware!” I said.
“Yes, you do. But not too many—not most—of the principal investigators do.”
“Okay. So I’m a good guy. Now, what’s wrong with Gonzalo?”
“It’s really not Gonzalo,” she said. “It’s Gonzalo and me. Well, yes, it is Gonzalo. When he was here back in ’77 and ’78 I had just started here. That was twenty years ago, and I was fresh out of college and pretty naïve about things. Although I thought I knew everything about everything, of course.”
“I remember. I hired you just out of John Carroll University with a biochemistry major. And I remember you and Gonzalo working together. In fact,” I mused, “I particularly recall one day you were cracking jokes as you set up to skin test guinea pigs.”
“Yeah, that involved pulling numbered corks out of a box to establish random sequences for putting twelve skin tests on the flanks of each guinea pig. Somehow that seemed funny at the time.”
“More than that,” I commented, “you and he worked well together in the lab. He caught on quickly to some very tricky techniques. And to the precautions needed when working with virulent organisms.”
“You know,” she said, “he wouldn’t let me work with the TB cultures. He said he was already infected with a positive skin test, so there was no risk for him.”
“Actually,” I interjected, “working in the hood with a UV light meant no risk for you—or anyone. Besides which, we rarely used virulent TB strains. Almost always we used the harmless H37Ra strain. I guess I can think of only a couple of times when we used possibly hazardous bugs, and I always did that work myself.
“You know,” I continued, “you know as well as I do that most of what we do here is lab stuff—chemistry stuff—not TB bacteria and not guinea pigs.”
“True.”
“And Gonzalo seemed to me to catch on to that stuff quickly and become proficient. Of course, that was your doing mostly. It was you who taught him. It was my impression that you two worked well together. And that you became friends. Why your concerns now?”
“Right. Well, Gonzalo and I hit it off pretty well. In fact, pretty soon we started dating.”
“I knew you got along,” I said, “but I didn’t know you were dating.”
“Well, we were. And in about May, six weeks or so before Gonzalo would be returning to Bolivia, I found myself pregnant. Gonzalo was not really helpful or supportive. He suddenly was not the nice guy that we all thought he was. And that I thought I loved. He thought about himself, but not about me.”
“Oh, wow,” was all I could say.
“He and I discussed this, repeatedly, evening after evening. In the end, he proposed that he marry me and take me back to Bolivia with him. I couldn’t bring myself to do that. I was not sure he really loved me. In fact, I think his love disappeared with my periods. Nor did I think I could be a Bolivian wife. I suggested that he marry me and stay here. But he wouldn’t do that. Then he said I should get an abortion. In fact, I had thought of that, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. There was an unborn child growing in me. Could I kill it? No. So I began thinking of how I might disappear for nine months and then put the baby up for adoption. But I didn’t like that either. It was to be my child. I didn’t know how or what I was going to tell my parents.”
“Oh, Jennifer,” I said. “I had no idea that any of this was happening. If you’d have come to me I would have tried to help, although I’m not sure what I could have done.”
“In the end, the problem took care of itself. I had a spontaneous miscarriage. But the whole experience was bad for me. It’s probably why I’m still single. I have seen other guys, from time to time, but I just have not been able to get close to any man. And that’s Gonzalo’s fault, I believe. He behaved badly towards me. He is not—well, was not, anyway—a nice guy.”
“Okay,” I said. “Be that as it may, I leave tomorrow morning to help Gonzalo get out of Bolivia and back to the U.S. Where he will wind up, I don’t know. It might be in Cleveland, I suppose, but it won’t be in this lab. I promise you that. He’ll need to establish a life for himself, presumably as a doctor, and more time here would not help with that. But if he drops in to visit, I’ll welcome him.”
“And if he drops in, I’ll hide,” said Jennifer. “He’s just not an all-around nice guy.”
“You know, Jennifer,” I mused, “you paint an entirely different picture of Gonzalo than the one I have had in my mind. I guess most people are more complex than we sometimes realize. But in any case, I’m committed to help him. He was a good colleague—maybe the best post-doc fellow ever in the lab. And a wonderful friend to the family during the year we spent in Bolivia.”
“And now he’s a hero, a spy for America,” Jennifer added.
“And wanted in Bolivia as a traitor.”
III. La Paz, Bolivia, 1981
7
“Wow, look at t
hat plane,” enthused ten-year-old Eric, our youngest, as we waited to board the Braniff Airlines flight to La Paz. Braniff Airways had commissioned Alexander Calder to paint one of its four-engine, Douglas DC-8 jets, and we were about to begin our long-planned Bolivian saga on this colorful craft. “Flying Colors,” Braniff had named it. We took our seats, Susan and fourteen-year-old daughter Alice on one side, Eric and I across the aisle. Window seats for the youngsters, although we hoped they would sleep during most of the long overnight flight.
It was Monday, July 6, and we had spent Sunday afternoon and night at a hotel near the Miami airport. After a morning flight from Cleveland to Miami, Eric and Alice had spent much of the day in the hotel pool. Meanwhile Susan and I rechecked and rechecked our baggage. What had we forgotten? Two years had gone into planning our soon-to-be-experienced sabbatical year in Bolivia. A grant from the Rockefeller Foundation together with funds husbanded from my Markle Scholars award had made this adventure possible.
I had much-dreamed-of research plans worked out in collaboration with Gonzalo Mamani, once a fellow in my laboratory, now my colleague and collaborator. The planned studies would be carried out at the Bolivian Instituto de Torax and the Facultad de Medicina of the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés in La Paz. Gonzalo and I had stayed in touch over the proposed studies. In fact, I had been to Bolivia for about ten days the preceding year, and Gonzalo and I had agreed on the general course of what we would do during my year in La Paz. Getting mail back and forth to work out protocols had frequently been frustrating, but I trusted Gonzalo, and I had been encouraged by his responses to my letters.
I had jumped through the proper hoops for approval of human experimentation protocols in Cleveland. Gonzalo had obtained approval from the Bolivian Ministry of Health. More than that, he had organized a review board of Bolivian citizens to consider the rights of persons who would be studied. Approval of such a group was a necessary precursor to review in Cleveland. With that Bolivian approval in hand, the CWRU Institutional Review Board approval was relatively easy.
Lulled by the drone of jet engines, we managed some sleep. Early in the morning—very early—we stopped first in Guayaquil, Ecuador, followed by Lima, Peru. Then, with day breaking, up into and over the Andes Mountains. The Andes awed us. They rose steeply from the arid Pacific Coast. As we flew high above and over them, there were peaks on either side of us, the Cordillera Real to the east and the Cordillera Occidental to the west, with the high, flat Altiplano between. Beneath us, the blue water of Lake Titicaca soon appeared. We landed in La Paz and taxied to the small but modern terminal building.
We descended the stairs rolled up to the plane. We walked tentatively toward the terminal, uncertain where we should enter. There were neither signs nor persons to guide us, and we found ourselves standing with a group of confused passengers. Finally, a short Bolivian man wearing a uniform came from the terminal and herded us all to an inconspicuous doorway. Inside, we filled out a health form, presented our yellow fever vaccination cards, and cleared immigration and a cursory customs inspection. Gonzalo met us. Collecting ourselves and luggage into Gonzalo’s elderly Volkswagen van, we headed out of the airport.
La Paz sits in a canyon, with the airport on the flat terrain above the city. The city was originally founded in 1548 in a canyon as a sheltered retreat for mule trains carrying silver and gold from the cerro rico (rich mountain) at Potosi to ocean-side ports for Spanish ships. El Alto (the height) is that part of the city above the canyon at an elevation of about 13,600 feet where the airport is located. As we reached the edge of El Alto and were about to descend the winding road to the city, I called to Gonzalo, “Stop!” There beneath us lay La Paz.
“Oh, look,” said Alice, excitement in her voice. Beyond the city loomed the Andes, with Mount Illimani watching over the city. A rocky outcrop protruded through the mountain-capping glacier, creating an arrow pointing down to La Paz. That mountain with its arrow would become a favorite sight in our Bolivian year and become fixed in our memories of it.
Working with guide books in the Cleveland Heights library, Susan and I had identified a pension—boarding house—on Avenida Vente de Octubre. Gonzalo had checked it out and given it an okay. We settled in and asked for boiled water (which we treated with our iodine tablets, despite assurances that it had been boiled). Then we rested, as the stomach upset of acute mountain sickness—soroche—struck all of us. We rested, but could not sleep—another manifestation of soroche. We limited lunch and dinner to chicken soup; none of us were hungry.
With help from our genial host, I managed the pension telephone and called Gonzalo on Wednesday morning. He came by the pension and we greeted him warmly, now mostly recovered and somewhat adapted to the altitude. Gonzalo assured us that the four large cartons of household supplies, clothing, and personal effects that we had shipped to the Torax had arrived safely. He would deliver them to us in his venerable, hopefully immortal VW van as soon as we found a place to live. He offered to take us out to dinner, but we demurred until a later date when we would have more fully survived our soroche.
By afternoon of the following day we all felt much like ourselves. I ventured out and purchased a copy of El Diario, which Gonzalo and our pension hosts had told us contained the most real estate ads. Several calls from the wall-mounted telephone in the pension living area and several experiences with Bolivian buses resulted in identifying a furnished rental house that seemed suitable on Calle Cuatro (Fourth Street) in Obrajes, further down the canyon from the center of town and our pension. We all made the bus trip down, not wanting to impose on Gonzalo and knowing that we would soon have to master public transportation in La Paz. We liked the house, and agreed we could live there. We agreed to move in the following Monday. We had made it to Bolivia. We had found a place to live. Our year-long adventure was about to begin.
On Monday, July 13, we hired a taxi and moved from the pension to our new home in Obrajes. Gonzalo arrived in his venerable van with the goods we had sent ahead. Two trips for the four cartons. He also brought bottles of Paceña, a Bolivian beer, and of Inka Cola, a local soft drink—yellow with a licorice flavor. With his help, we mostly unpacked—at least our most urgent needs. Then a trip to a neighboring tienda, one of the nearly ubiquitous small shops that stock a little of almost everything, to pick up a few essentials and breakfast for the following day. We did our best, making our purchases in Spanish. Gonzalo, bemused but exercising restraint, stood by, occasionally nodding approval.
Our new home had its limitations. There was no central heating, and we had arrived in middle of an Andes mountain winter. There were in the house, however, two area heaters that used bottled propane gas. Fortunately replacements for the large and heavy canisters of propane were available in the local tienda.
“Hey,” Alice called, “the bathroom faucets are labeled C and H, but the C isn’t for cold; it’s on the side where hot should be. And the H seems to be the cold one.”
“Well,” I said, “the Spanish word for hot is caliente—hot. And the H is left to go on the frio tap. Didn’t you learn those words in your Spanish class?”
“It doesn’t matter, anyway,” added Eric. “Look. The pipes come together under the sink. It’s all the same water.”
In fact, we would spend the year without the luxury of a hot water heater. Water came to La Paz from a glacier-fed mountain river. There should have been plenty of it, but it was available only four hours a day. Our house, our home for a year, had a large water tank under the roof, so we would have water at all times. We were fortunate, Gonzalo told us. Our shower was equipped with an in-line heating element. A switch on the wall turned it on. The water temperature it achieved was variable and sometimes challenging. A high flow rate meant little time for heating, so lots of shower water was cold shower water. Alice, with her long blond hair, would manage but never like that arrangement.
There was a knock on the door. Susan opened it to greet a Bolivian woman. Obviously indigenous—probably Quechua,
we would later judge. She was deeply tanned and had long, braided, black hair. She was short, probably no more than five feet. She wore a knitted alpaca poncho.
“Me llamo Maria. Quisiera volverme su empleada.”
I translated for Susan: “Her name is Maria. She wants to work for us.”
“Come in. Sit down,” said Susan.
We learned that she lived with her daughter. She proposed to come to our house to work every day, but not on Sundays. She said she would prepare lunch and dinner for us and then leave for her evening meal with her daughter’s family. She would bake bread every day. She would go each week with Susan to the market to buy food. She would help straighten up after meals and wash dishes, but she was a cook, not a housekeeper.
Gonzalo, who had been helping unpack boxes, came forward with important questions that we were too naïve to ask. “Have you worked for foreigners before? For Americans?”
“Si, Señor.”
“Do you have references?”
Maria reached into a purse hung beneath her poncho and pulled out three folded letters from former employers. Two were from Americans, one from an English couple. All were positive, strongly so.
“Do you understand that Americans do not tolerate thievery? Not even of tiny items,” Gonzalo asked.
Escape Through the Andes Page 3