A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism

by Peter Mountford

  "Well, lover boy, if you insist on knowing, my boss is a bachelorette as well, and I like to let her know when there's a peacock in the chicken coop."

  "Oh. So why aren't you telling her about the young freelance writer?"

  She winced a little, as if noticing an unidentified foul odor emanating from the refrigerator. She wasn't going to answer, or he didn't want to wait for her answer, so he said, "And how else was Grayson?"

  "Fun, but useless. He's a pro. And you? How did he treat you?"

  "Same." He made himself smile. "No, it was bland, really—my fault, though; I had nothing I wanted to ask him. But he had this map on his wall that caught my attention."

  "Oh, is that what you're writing about, his map?"

  "I am," he said and laughed at himself. It was true: he had managed to squeeze a description of the map into his report, despite the fact that there was probably nothing on earth that the hedge fund could care less about.

  "By the way," he said, "Grayson mentioned that you have it on good authority that there isn't going to be a revolution."

  "He said that?"

  He was tempted to ask her why she was telling Grayson her secrets, not sharing them with him, but he didn't want to seem insecure. And having been rebuffed twice already that day, he knew she was his last hope of finding out something valuable. He needed to placate her. He swallowed his pride and went for a flip tone. "He did say that. Why would he say that?"

  "I don't know. Because he's a mind reader?" She threw her sinewy legs over his thighs. Her body language was adolescent. The exuberance came off as prepubescent, and her flirtation was often PG-13, but she was doubtlessly aiming for a pornographic conclusion. That seemed to be the nature of the transaction. It was his duty to negotiate this maze of innuendo without embarrassing himself or her, but it was his job—put bluntly—to extract information from her at any cost. So he said, "Now, Ms. Musgrave, I would be sorely disappointed if I found out you were withholding something."

  She shrugged, batted her eyelashes. "Can I really tell you?"

  Holding on to his composure, he said, "I won't breathe a word."

  Her smile lost its innocence in two steps; it departed her eyes first, and then the rest of her face. She was back within her professional station, even with her StairMastered legs slung across his lap. She blinked once, twice, considering it. He recalibrated his own attitude to meet her at this new place. "I guess it doesn't matter," she said, to his immense relief. "The article will be in tomorrow's paper." She pulled her legs off his lap, sat straight up, lit a cigarette. She had a long drag, exhaled a long cone of smoke across the room. "We did a poll."

  "The Journal ? In Bolivia?"

  She nodded. "Evo Morales has a fifteen-point lead."

  "Evo?" He was stunned.

  She winked. "Didn't see that coming, did you?"

  He stood. "Jesus. I thought he'd be, if anything, fifteen points behind."

  "Likewise."

  "Are you sure?"

  She had a drag, nodding. "And tomorrow," she said, smoke jetting from her mouth, "once we publish the results, and his angry constituents realize that their man is going to win, they'll stop rioting. So that's why there won't be any revolution. Not now, anyway."

  Aware that the election was in mid-December, the inauguration in January, Gabriel—aiming for nonchalance—said, "You going to stick around to see it through?"

  "Would you miss me if I went?" she said, and laughed hard, and her laughter disintegrated into a tar-shifting cough. He waited, watching her curl inward, flexing. It was a brutal event and he had a merciless vantage point. Watching it made him feel more compassion for her, if less desire. She was withered within, he knew, damaged right beneath the skin and straight through to her core. Once she'd recovered, she looked at him as if nothing had happened and said, "Let's get a drink."

  Severo poured, and Gabriel excused himself, went to the empty side of the restaurant. His report was only half finished and wouldn't be done in time. Fiona's piece would render his findings obsolete anyway. A bitter consolation. Regardless, he needed to tell Priya the results of the poll. When word got out that Evo Morales was going to win the election, stock prices for mining and gas companies with significant operations in Bolivia would take a hit on the fear that Evo would nationalize the industries. If Priya found out about it first, she could start short-selling the vulnerable companies before anyone else and make a profit.

  He pushed Call. A long hissing pause, then it rang. She picked up immediately. "Gabriel?"

  "Yes."

  "And bearing exciting news, I presume."

  "Yes. Evo Morales is going to win the election."

  A pause. She was typing. Eventually, she stopped typing and said, "What makes you think that?"

  He told her the rest. She resumed typing and kept it up as they talked, which made the rhythm of the conversation strange. During the pauses, he just stood there, staring out across the valley, listening to the clacking keys. At the end, she said, "We'll see how this plays. Let's talk tomorrow."

  He put the cell phone back in his pocket and went to the bar, where Severo was howling with laughter at something Fiona had said. Gabriel sat down and felt her hand slide up his thigh.

  The cocaine belonged to a Canadian journalist named Trent who smoked thick cigars, wore an immaculate Panama hat, and seemed to aspire to be a bland Hunter'S. Thompson. He wrangled five male and two female journalists from the Lookout, including Gabriel and Fiona, and they adjourned to Fiona's suite. Gabriel spent the next several hours watching the others snort rocky lines off Fiona's glass coffee table. He talked to whichever wide-eyed enthusiast happened to be sitting in the armchair nearest his spot on the sofa, a list of people that at no point included Fiona herself.

  "Straight from the source," Trent had said of the cocaine. "Completely organic too; we're supporting local farmers." This was a joke, of sorts—the joke being that it was a tree-hugging liberal thing to do, snort cocaine in the plush suite of a five-star hotel in the poorest country in South America. Buried shallowly within the joke, Gabriel saw a squirmy urge to make nice with the journalists' tricky white-liberal guilt and the sense that they were only the latest foreign buccaneers to raid that terrain. And if it seemed like hyperbole to consider journalism a kind of plundering, the purity of that distinction was smudged by the constant presence of Bolivian poverty and the equally constant reminders of the journalists' own relative prosperity.

  Gabriel did one line of cocaine and then abstained. The burst of enthusiasm did not last. Watching everyone, he noticed a conspicuous lack of feeling among them all—himself too. The intoxication should have been an escape mechanism for the world-weary, but it seemed plainly intended to do the opposite: to generate connections and stimulate feeling.

  When someone mentioned that it was four in the morning, Gabriel decided he would not wait around to see if Fiona would kick everyone else out. If she decided to sleep with one of the other men, he would be either angry or not angry, but he would not tell her either way. He drained the last of his stale beer and stood. At the door he bowed, deeply, before shuffling into the hall. Then—booze burning the belly, cocaine numbing the nostrils—he was pitched against the wall of an elevator going down too fast.

  A lobby!

  He waved goodbye to one guard, walked outside, crossed a narrow street, and said hello to another guard, confident that a joke was in there somewhere, even if he couldn't locate it.

  He entered his room still nowhere near sleep. In their week together, Fiona had not been there once. He had spent five nights in her bed. He was, rationally if not otherwise, aware of an enormous sadness about them, together and separate. He sat at the desk and looked out the window to north La Paz, where the city lights sprayed up around the walls of the valley like jaundiced, sagging stars. Behind him, the television played badly dubbed soft-core porn.

  On Hotel Gloria stationery, he wrote:

  The thing about that map on Grayson's wall is that it mak
es Bolivia look like the sickly enlarged heart of a torso, w/ Chile as her swooping spine, Brazil as her big breasts. And also I predict that the results of Fs poll will change things for me.

  To do:

  1. Become indispensible to Priya

  2.

  He put the pen down. In tenth-grade biology at Claremont High, he'd learned that the horseshoe crab hadn't changed in five hundred million years. It didn't need to evolve any further. It wasn't glamorous, but it perfectly occupied its small niche. Gabriel could see, even under the dull light of his late-night gaze, that he needed to become similarly useful to Priya—or at least appear so—if he was going to keep his job. He would do well not to shine too much. Better to establish himself as useful in a way not difficult to sustain.

  She should have been more impressed by his information yesterday afternoon. Maybe she'd be pleased after the news had played out in the markets. It seemed unlikely.

  She would want to know first and foremost whether Evo Morales was serious about his campaign promises. Evo had promised to nationalize the natural gas industry, Bolivia's largest source of revenue. The Bolivian gas industry had been bought up by foreign companies when it was privatized in the eighties and nineties. Those companies had seen a tenfold return on their investments, and when the extent of their profits came to light in 2003, protests—mostly led by Evo—swept across the country. One president was ousted. The chief justice of the supreme court, Eduardo Rodríguez Veltzé, took over—yet another in a long line of pale-skinned men with degrees from Ivy League universities to hold that office. Now, Veltzé would be succeeded by Evo Morales.

  Evo proposed to buy the entire natural gas industry back from the foreign companies for a fraction of their real value, then pass the revenue to the poor. He insinuated that he might nationalize or expropriate other foreign-owned businesses. The mathematics for Priya were very straightforward: if a foreign company's Bolivia-based income represented a significant portion of its overall revenue, then Evo's decisions regarding that industry would have a significant impact on the value of the company's stock. Whatever his plans, if she knew them in advance of her competitors, she could make a tidy profit on the companies in question.

  Gabriel was no doubt the only analyst for a hedge fund who was actually in Bolivia studying the situation, so Calloway had a unique advantage, assuming Gabriel could deliver usable information. Priya would be the only fund manager positioned to make an informed play on the Bolivian situation. So Gabriel would not be called back to New York, not soon anyway. Not until after the election. The election would be in December, the inauguration in January, he reminded himself. He needed to keep track of these things.

  He opened the calendar in his cell phone. It was November 26, a Saturday. The election was weeks away. Looking at the dates, he discovered with a little dread that he would probably have to spend Christmas and New Year's in Bolivia. His mother would not be pleased.

  And what about Thanksgiving?

  If it was already the end of November, what had happened to Thanksgiving? How could he misplace such a conspicuous holiday? It had to be very soon. His poor mind struggled in a dim bog. Then it became clear: Thanksgiving had passed. Thanksgiving had been two days ago.

  Now that was a worthy joke. He smiled glumly as the dread descended in a twisting motion, like a giant corkscrew burrowing through his torso.

  He had spent all twenty-six Thanksgivings of his life so far with his mother, who, although Chilean and ferociously liberal, hosted an elaborate dinner for the holiday. Her party was a celebration out of spite. In the fourth grade, his mother had been called to the principal's office because he had said, on the Wednesday before the holiday, "The English settlers were more bloodthirsty than the Huns." His mother said to the principal, "It's true, isn't it?" And then, aghast, "Do you disagree?" That was the end of that conversation.

  On every Thanksgiving—which she'd celebrated this same way ever since she'd moved to the United States, in 1978, when Gabriel was little more than a zygote—she would say, in lieu of grace, "This is a conquistador's celebration, but tonight we dine for the conquered, for our exterminated ancestors."

  Gabriel was an only child. His mother had fled Chile during Pinochet's regime, in the early seventies. She'd been offered amnesty by the Soviet Union and had gone there to study anthropology at Lomonosov University, in Moscow, where she met a man. The man, also a student, was Russian, handsome. He did not welcome her pregnancy, however, and refused to marry her. Distraught and pregnant in Moscow that winter, she decided to defect to the United States. To Southern California, specifically, the sunniest city in the country. By the time Gabriel was born she had resumed work on her dissertation at UCLA.

  Most of his mother's family members were either dead or still in Chile. One cousin lived in Chicago, but he and Gabriel's mother were estranged because he'd given passive support to Pinochet, who had ordered Gabriel's socialist grandfather, his mother's father, murdered in 1973.

  So the Thanksgiving guests were nonfamily, mostly colleagues from Pomona College, where his mother was a professor of anthropology. For two decades Gabriel and a handful of other children sat once a year at the kids' table, trying to ignore their impossibly verbose parents volleying abbreviated lectures across the long table in the adjacent dining room. Actual literacy was preceded, in Gabriel's case, by a working knowledge of the Communist Manifesto.

  That he had not only skipped the party this year but had forgotten even to call would require weeks of amelioration. Aftershocks might be felt for years. He'd be hearing about it, in one form or another, until one of them died. She might have abandoned the Catholicism of her childhood, but the need to absorb and impart whopping doses of guilt would never leave her.

  But how had Thanksgiving slipped his mind? What had he done? And why had no one mentioned it? There had been no sign from the other North American journalists that they knew it was Thanksgiving. No one had even ordered a turkey sandwich for dinner. He and Fiona stayed up late, he remembered. Later, they had screwed slowly in the darkness. Afterward, she smoked and he saw the dull orange spot of her cigarette brighten in the darkness when she inhaled. The smoke was caustic. Her clothes were crumpled by the foot of the bed. Her underwear shone white at the crotch of the splayed slacks. Still unable to sleep, they watched bad action movies dubbed in Spanish. They laughed a lot at the movies. She smoked several cigarettes and Gabriel wondered if maybe he could eventually get used to her smoking after all. Outside, the cacophony had settled back into silence. He and Fiona said very little to each other that night that he could remember. Of course, there was very little worth saying.

  2. Plaza Murillo

  Saturday, November 26, 2005

  IN THE MORNING, Gabriel read his sloppily scrawled note about Bolivia being the "sickly enlarged heart" of South America, which he took as evidence that he had been a very serious-minded drunk the previous night. He tossed the note and had a long shower, but it didn't help his hangover. His blood was plaster in his veins. A mess of half memories scrimmaged in his aching mind. He ate four aspirins. Measurements of things were off at that altitude, he knew. Water boiled at 80 degrees Celsius, the quantity of oxygen in the air was nearly halved, and doses for painkillers needed to be doubled. He went downstairs and checked his e-mail at the hotel's business center. There was a message from Priya telling him to call.

  Fiona had e-mailed her article, along with a note saying that she was going to do a quick interview with Evo Morales at 10:45 before catching the 2:20 to Lima. She wanted to meet Gabriel at 10:30 at the lamppost in Plaza Murillo where Presidente Villarroel had been hanged.

  He printed her article and took it with him to the cafeteria above the lobby. At lunchtime, the cafeteria served a delicious vegetarian buffet, popular with local business folk, but the breakfast was foul, and he had the whole place to himself. He ate a bowl of partially frozen watermelon and drank a pint of tepid coca tea, which tasted a little like green tea but felt like a shot of epinephr
ine jammed straight into his soggy brain.

  Fiona's piece had been—presumably because of Bolivia's geopolitical insignificance—packaged as one of the Journal's elliptically titled page-one curiosities, or, in the paper's own jargon, A-heds. The headline, in this case, read "Bolivian Election: Populist Morales Ahead; Indigenous Win; Gassers Lose." Her lede trumpeted the results of the poll: "Morales holds a 15% advantage over Jorge Fernando 'Tuto' Quiroga Ramírez..." Ramírez, she went on to explain, was "a generic Bolivian technocrat and self-described 'corporate yuppie.'" The gist of her story was that this was only the latest in a string of such moments in Latin American history. It was further evidence of a continentwide—perhaps global—sea change: a grass-roots shift to the left. "The era of investor-friendly Latin American leaders might be coming to an end," she wrote. Gabriel was close to the end of the article when he checked his watch and saw that he was supposed to meet her in twenty minutes. He deposited his tray on the conveyor belt and headed back up to his room.

  He sat down on the bed and dialed Calloway's office in Weehawken. He keyed through to Priya's extension. She answered on the first ring. "You sleeping late down there, Gabriel?"

  "Not exactly. What did you think of the piece in the Journal?"

  "I thought, 'Gosh, I'm glad I sent Gabriel down to Bolivia, because otherwise I wouldn't know this exciting information already.'"

  "I'm meeting the author in fifteen minutes."

  "Fine," she said.

  "How do you think the markets will react?"

  "Barely, with a few exceptions. Paul's on it. So, Gabriel, now I want to know more about Evo Morales. When does he take office?"

  "January."

  "Well, as soon as possible I want to know which foreign-owned companies he's going to expropriate, if any, and I want to know what he's going to do with them."

  "No problem."

  "And what will the World Bank and IMF do if he does expropriate foreign property? Will it affect Bolivian aid? And—and this is the most important—if Bolivian aid is cut off, how long before the Bolivians are angry enough to throw out their new leader?"