Escape Through the Andes

by Thomas M. Daniel

  Alice and Eric began climbing and jumping on rock walls. “Take it easy, kids,” I admonished. “No broken bones, please.” We walked along the trail, sometimes as wide as a road, sometimes cut narrowly between towering rock walls. It was a fun outing, we all agreed.

  “Where shall I take you next Sunday?” Gonzalo asked. Sunday outings with Gonzalo had become frequent. He seemed to enjoy these opportunities to show us his country.

  “How about an Inca road?” Alice said.

  “Yes. Great idea.”

  And so the following Sunday found us driving up the Palca road. We were awed by the views of Mount Mururata, inured to the unremitting and spectacular Andean mountain scenery as we had become. We reached the road to the Mina San Francisco (St. Francis Mine) and turned to climb it. This rugged and unpaved road survived because it gave access to a wolfram (tungsten ore) mine and hence was heavily traveled by trucks. But on this Sunday we met no traffic; we met only llamas tended by campesinos. Across the narrow valley, paralleling us, was the obvious line of an earlier highway, no longer in use, undoubtedly the route of the Inca road we hoped to encounter.

  At the head of the valley, we found ourselves at the base of a large cirque, looking at the garden wall between the peaks of Mt. Taquesi to the north and Mt. Mururata to the south. We forded the river and left Gonzalo’s van near a mine service building. A few yards ahead the track from the other side of the valley curved to approach us, and then doubled back to begin its climb up the mountain ridge. Vegetation was limited to clumps of a stiff, coarse grass.

  Taking our lunch with us, we began our ascent on foot, following the broad Inca road. It maintained a breadth of anywhere from about six to about twenty feet. The grade was uniform, the course straight between switchbacks. Shortly we came upon remnants of paving: large fitted stones arranged radially on switchbacks, oblique drainage troughs paved in stone, and well-built stone retaining walls. Time and lack of maintenance had covered most of the surface with dirt and allowed many of the metaling stones to work their way down the mountainside.

  About two thirds of the way up, the road entered a narrow cut with massive granite walls on either side. Here the Inca road was preserved in what we judged to be close to its original condition. The grade was steep, and the road had been laid in sloping steps, each rising about six to eight inches, each step six to eight feet deep. We stopped, rested, and spread out the lunch Susan had packed.

  After lunch we continued our climb to the summit. A crude wooden cross was set in a rough cairn. A llama train with two herders rounded a corner and passed us by. The Inca-built road was still in use. We would long remember this unique outing with its glimpses into Andean history.

  15

  In August we celebrated our wedding anniversary. We went out to dinner at a restaurant at the top of the tallest building in La Paz. The restaurant was named Las Estrellas. From Spanish, Las Estrellas translates to “The Stars.” What else would one name the only roof-top restaurant in La Paz?

  October brought Alice’s fifteenth birthday, an event of great importance in Latin American cultures, the advent of womanhood, an occasion for a celebration. Gonzalo offered a trip to Lake Titicaca, to which Alice responded with enthusiasm. At the lake, Gonzalo parked his well-traveled van beside the house of a Señor Quispe, whom he knew and had treated for asthma. Señor Quispe had a launch, and Gonzalo negotiated with him for a trip to the island of Suriqui. As we crossed to the island, we passed two reed boats, balsas de totora, from which men were casting nets. On the island we found men busily constructing reed boats. One of them, who seemed to be in charge, disappeared into his house and reappeared with a collection of papers. Letters, airplane brochures, maps. He was one of the Bolivian artisans whom Thor Heyerdahl had taken to Morocco to build the Ra II, the reed boat that successfully crossed the Atlantic.

  On another memorable trip across the Altiplano to the region of Lake Titicaca, Gonzalo took us to Tiahuanacu, a large pre-Inca site with a centrally located, massive, monolithic figure, presumably of a deity. People of the early indigenous cultures worshipped Pacha Mama, the earth mother, and Inti, the son god, Gonzalo told us. The monolith presumably represented Inti. At Tiahuanacu we also saw a stone gate or arch with a carved lintel, and a sunken area surrounded by walls adorned with carved faces. Yet to be much studied by archeologists, Tiahuanacu was both fascinating and puzzling.

  On a Saturday evening, Gonzalo took us to a peña. Tucked behind a shop off Calle Sagarnaga, it occupied a low-ceilinged room fitted with small chairs that seemed to us to have been stolen from a kindergarten. We were served local red wine, probably their first wine for our youngsters. Not a propitious gustatory introduction for them, I thought. Local musicians entertained us on guitarras, canas, zampoñas, and charrangos (guitars, flutes, pan pipes, and ukulele-like instruments with armadillo shell bodies).

  Christmas presented a challenge, for evergreen trees did not exist in Bolivia. Susan managed to pick up some spruce-like branches from a house near ours where bushes were being pruned. We fastened them to a wooden frame, decorated them with candy, and prided ourselves on our tannenbaum. With Maria’s help, Susan put together a Christmas dinner that we shared with Gonzalo. After dinner we challenged ourselves as we tried to remember the stanzas of The Night Before Christmas.

  Once again in Gonzalo’s van, we took a weekend in the Yungas. Susan, Alice, and Eric were eager to see the area in which Gonzalo and I worked. “But let’s go to the South Yungas,” Gonzalo suggested. “There’s a nice place to stay in Chulumani.”

  Gonzalo picked us up early on a Saturday morning. Crowded into his van, we traveled up through Miraflores to the Yungas road. Switchback after switchback, we climbed toward the pass at the cumbre.

  “There are a lot of llamas here,” Eric noted.

  “Yes, and alpacas,” replied Gonzalo. “The alpacas have longer, richer fleece. You can see that as you look at them. Their wool is preferred for knitting by Bolivian women.”

  “We don’t have them in America—North America, I mean,” commented Alice.

  “And in South America, we don’t have bison or deer or bears or any other large mammals,” noted Gonzalo. “Not even raccoons. I guess these various species of mammals evolved after the two continents mostly separated.”

  Gonzalo stopped the van at the summit, and he took pictures of us standing in front of the 4,650-meter sign. “Is this the highest road in the world?” Eric wondered.

  “Aren’t there higher roads in Tibet?” queried Alice.

  “Well, maybe,” Gonzalo replied. “I don’t know. And the road to Zongo goes higher than this to a cosmic ray study station built by some French scientists.”

  “But this is the highest I have ever been,” asserted Eric.

  “Except in an airplane.” Alice managed to get in a last word.

  “Okay, kids. Back in the van,” I interjected.

  We drove down, crossing the large cirque that had been the site of the earlier fuel-related mishap when Gonzalo and I had to coast downhill to buy gasoline from a young boy. Then into rainy Unduavi to pay our toll. Leaving Unduavi, we turned south as the road divided. The road made deep switchbacks as it coursed into and back out of side valleys cut by tributary streams. Lush vegetation and flowers festooned the descending road. Above the road the hillside was cut into terraces. “Coca,” commented Gonzalo waving toward a terraced hillside. “The main cash crop of the region. Those coca plants last for seventy, seventy-five years if they are well tended. The farmers pick the leaves three times a year.”

  “How do they get cocaine from them?” Alice asked.

  “Well, I think you can see the first step right over there,” Gonzalo replied. We passed what had probably once been a large hacienda house, now in disrepair. A man was sweeping up coca leaves that had evidently been spread on a flagstone terrace to dry. “So,” Gonzalo continued, “after the leaves are dry they are crushed and soaked in kerosene to extract the cocaine. Then the kerosene is allowed to evap
orate, and the raw cocaine is shipped off. Mostly to Colombia, I think. There it is refined before being sent on to Cleveland Heights!”

  We stopped by a waterfall to enjoy the picnic lunch Susan had packed. Blue morph butterflies swarmed around us. A recent hatch, I supposed. I took a picture of Alice standing beneath the branches of a tree-height poinsettia.

  Chulumani was built around a central plaza with a church at one side and what I assumed were municipal and other offices as well as shops along the other sides. Palm trees shaded the plaza, and townspeople sat on benches, relaxed on a Saturday afternoon. A few vendadores (sales persons) offered their wares at places on the streets bordering the plaza. Susan found an aguayo she liked. A youngster of maybe eight years translated Susan’s Spanish into Quechua as she bargained and purchased the weaving. “Children learn Spanish in school,” Gonzalo commented. “Many adults in rural areas have not learned it.”

  We drove past the plaza and out of town a short distance to find the lodging Gonzalo had promised us. The Motel San Antonio proved to be a welcome respite from La Paz. Susan and I marveled at the clean rooms and modern fixtures. A shower with truly hot water! Alice and Eric enjoyed its clean swimming pool. They spent hours in it, soaking themselves in a way that reflected the absence of any such opportunities since leaving Cleveland Heights. They swam. They dunked one another. They played a sort of two-person volley ball.

  Alice found a group of girls her age and was soon seated on the edge of the pool, legs dangling in the water, busily chatting in Spanish. Eric, we noted, was seated at a small table on the far side of the pool. He and a Bolivian boy were playing chess with a portable chess set presumably provided by the other boy. Eric’s Spanish fluency was limited, but the rules of chess were sufficiently international to surmount that handicap.

  Sitting at poolside, Susan and I enjoyed cold beer while we watched our frolicking youngsters. We were all amused by the large horned beetles found in the vicinity of the pool; Gonzalo explained that they were called “rompe focos” for their habit of flying into lights and breaking the bulbs. In the San Antonio’s dining room, we enjoyed dinner, including a bottle of Chilean wine. I could not help but compare that dinner with the uninspiring food served at the Hotel Prefectoral in Coroico.

  Soon—too soon, we all felt—it was time to prepare for our return to Cleveland. We brought out from closets the cartons in which our goods had been shipped to La Paz. They were in reasonable shape, and so we set about packing newly acquired possessions into them. The household items they had contained were gratefully accepted by Maria. They would be treasured.

  I had arranged for shipment of the cartons, and soon a truck arrived and took them away. Alice and Eric had both made friends at the American Cooperative School, and they promised to write. Similarly, we had met and enjoyed friendship with our neighbors in Obrajes. Taking leave of Gonzalo was heart-wrenching for all of us.

  The day came. Gonzalo’s van once again transported us, taking us up to the El Alto airport. Shortly we were airborne and headed home.

  IV. The Escape, 2007

  16

  I opened my hotel room door in response to the gentle knock. Rosa Maria, the Hotel Europa bar waitress who had served me a pisco sour and peanuts, turned her head, looking up and down the corridor. “Nobody there,” she said. “Good. I wasn’t followed.” She stepped into the room. “I don’t think I’m known here, but I’m always careful.”

  She was wearing a fine brown and natural white alpaca poncho over her waitress uniform, and her high-heeled shoes had been replaced with loafers. I guessed she was probably in her mid-thirties. Pretty. Her dark hair was cut to about shoulder length. Blue eyes. Slender. A nice figure hidden under that poncho. This young woman was not a native Bolivian, I was sure. And I sheepishly thought to myself that a middle-aged, married man should not be looking at the figure of a young woman. But my father-in-law once remarked that his wife should be worried when he stopped looking at pretty young women!

  “Hi,” she said, with a charming, seductive smile. “I’m Rosemary Murphy. I’m your CIA contact person here in La Paz. Welcome to Bolivia, and many thanks for your help in getting Gonzalo Mamani safely out of the country.”

  “Well, hi, I guess,” I said. “Rosa Maria, Rosemary, Rosemary Murphy, of course. I mean, well, you’re not what I expected. Come in and sit down, won’t you?” I took my jacket off the arm chair where I had left it, and motioned for her to sit.

  “I will sit. Working as a waitress in high heels has its downsides.”

  “Can I get you something from the minibar? It seems to be reasonably well stocked.”

  “Thanks. Is there some wine? Chilean, maybe, not Bolivian—if a place as classy as the Europa even stocks Bolivian wine.”

  “Seems to be some Chilean. How about Chardonnay? Or there’s also some red, I believe.” I pulled out several small bottles.

  “The Chardonnay would be great.”

  I took a beer for myself, and found some glasses on a tray above the minibar. I sat on the edge of the bed. “Now, for heaven’s sake, clue me in. What is going to happen? And who are you—I mean—”

  She smiled and said, “How does a young woman turn out to be a CIA agent? Is that what you mean?”

  “Well, yes, I guess. Yeah, exactly.”

  “Okay. My story first. Then we have some business to attend to. My mother is Bolivian, my father American. I take more after him than after my mom. Dad works in and around Washington. He’s a lobbyist representing the interests of several South American companies. Mom does some free-lance translating. I grew up mostly in the States, but spent many school vacations here in La Paz with Mom’s family. They live in Calacoto. Mom always talked to me in Spanish, so I am pretty much bilingual, and I speak like a Bolivian—not like a Mexican or Puerto Rican. I went to college at Smith.”

  “Hey, I went to Yale,” I interrupted. “Dated a girl from Smith for a while.”

  “Yeah. There were a lot of Yalies around most weekends. Well, I decided I wanted to be a nurse, so I transferred to Simmons College in Boston.”

  “Just down Avenue Louis Pasteur from Harvard Medical School, where I went.”

  “Right. Anyway, and making a long story short, I was recruited by the CIA and wound up here, where my day job is as embassy nurse. The State Department considers La Paz a hardship post because of the altitude. Not justified in my mind, but I am not about to rock that boat. So, because of the altitude, all the American personnel here get extra pay, and there’s a medical clinic here. That’s me, and that’s my CIA cover. There are a bunch of CIA people at the embassy, all with some sort of made-up-to-sound-important jobs.

  “Actually, I have had to do some nurse things at the embassy. You’re a TB specialist, aren’t you? I think someone told me that.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, we actually had a case of TB at the embassy last year. Not one of the Bolivian employees—you might have thought it would be—but a state department man assigned here. An American. He presented to me with symptoms so classic that even I, a nurse, not an MD, pretty much knew what he had. Weight loss, cough, and night sweats. That’s pretty classic, right?

  “You know, I pulled our copy of Harrison’s text of medicine off of the shelf in the embassy clinic and looked up TB. Guess who wrote the chapter, I think? Am I right?”

  “Depends on which edition. Was it me?”

  “Yup. So then I got the INLASA lab to check his sputum, and they found TB bacilli in it. We evacuated him back to the States.”

  “Okay. Then why the waitress gig?”

  “All part of the cover, part of the spook act. I told the hotel folks I needed more money than the embassy pays. Actually, the CIA pays me well, but the hotel doesn’t know that. You know, most of the mid- and lower-level folks at the embassy also don’t know that I’m CIA. The embassy clinic is only open in the mornings. And it turns out that the bar job lets me overhear conversations that are sometimes interesting and important. People don’t
think that a waitress really exists, and they talk about all sorts of confidential stuff within my hearing.”

  Rosemary had kicked off her shoes and curled her feet under her as she sat in the hotel room’s only armchair—a comfortable-looking chair for a hotel room. Relaxed, looking even prettier, I thought. She must have a boyfriend somewhere. “Now then,” she said, “fill me in more about you and how you know Gonzalo.”

  “Well,” I said, “I’m a professor of medicine in Cleveland, and I run a research lab there. Gonzalo spent a year with me as a fellow in my lab, and we have worked together here in Bolivia, both on the Altiplano and in the Yungas. I spent a sabbatical year here in 1981 and ’82. Gonzalo and I did some pretty interesting stuff then—if you’re interested in the immunology of tuberculosis, that is.”

  “And Gonzalo trusts you. That’s pretty much good enough for me. In fact, Gonzalo has made it clear he won’t leave without you.”

  “Is it going to be that tricky? Can’t he—can’t we—just get on a plane and fly out on some pretext or other?”

  “No way! Gonzalo is known to the Bolivian security forces. He’s being watched and followed. They’re tracking him every day, everywhere. If he shows up at the airport, he will be arrested and wind up in the carcel (jail). In fact, if we don’t get him out of Bolivia soon, like in a few days, there really is not much hope for him.”

  “Okay, I guess that’s why I’m here. So what do I do?”

  “You have your passport?”

  “Yes, in the safe in the closet there.”

  “Get it for me.”

  I opened the safe and gave her my passport.

  “Did they tell you to bring extra passport photos?’

  “Yeah.” I retrieved them from my suitcase and gave them to her.