A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism

by Peter Mountford

  She smiled. "Please don't tell me you have herpes."

  "No, that's not it."

  "You're Spider-Man!"

  "No." He laughed. "But almost—I kind of am leading a double life." He watched, inwardly pleased, as her smile faded. "I'm not really a freelance journalist." He let it sink in. She looked appropriately shocked and impressed, so he went on. "I'm an analyst for the Calloway Group."

  Her expression drooped. She was disappointed that it wasn't something more interesting—a spy, maybe. His swelling pride began to deflate. "Priya's looking at Bolivia?" she asked.

  "Oh—" He stalled. She knew who Priya was. Of course, he should have known better. Fiona was not impressed by boys like him, whether they worked for hedge funds or not. Still, now that he'd started on the path, he had to see it through. "I'm just trying to figure out what's going to happen in Bolivia. We're interested in Evo. So, if you—"

  "That's why you're here?" She cut him off. For the first time that day, she sounded annoyed with him. "Gabriel, is it possible that they're testing you? Is this your first assignment with them?" When he didn't answer, she said, "Do you know Oscar Velazquez?"

  "He's the other analyst for Latin America." She knew Oscar too. Attempting to put a floor under his sinking ego, he said, "Same job, different jurisdictions."

  She wasn't having it. "Oscar covers the rich parts and you do the poor?"

  Again, he didn't answer.

  "How do you know Oscar?" he said.

  She shrugged. "Similar circumstances."

  His comeuppance complete, Gabriel leaned back, crossed his legs. Neither of them said anything for a while.

  He watched a pigeon pecking at an empty box of matches near one of the old men on a bench. The man had an astonishing face, its contours chiseled by the sun. It was a face like the countryside itself, bare, brown, ragged with canyons and cliffs—it looked formidable, secretive. The old man wore no socks, and his old black wingtips were buffed to a glassy sheen. He wore an elegant double-breasted suit, a pressed shirt, and a burgundy tie. He was alone, a newspaper on the bench beside him. He stared at the dry fountain.

  At the center of the fountain, Neptune, in blackened bronze, stood on a raised goblet of sorts, completely naked, trident slung over his shoulder. God of naval armadas and the patron deity of colonists, he'd been put there by the Spanish conquistadors two centuries earlier, when the plaza was home to a well from which locals drew water. Now that the country had forfeited its entire coastline in a series of lost wars against its neighbors, the irony of having such a conspicuous Neptune might have seemed bad for national morale, but this was, after all, the same landlocked country that refused to disband its navy. Indeed, La Paz held a celebration once a year in Plaza Avaroa, named for the general who lost the war with Chile for the Pacific. The loss, which had occurred in the late 1800s, continued to transfix the Bolivian people in much the same way that the lost Confederacy remained—culturally, if not otherwise—a fixation of the U.S. South. The eventual reclamation of Bolivia's coastline was a powerful fantasy, and the futility of the issue was well beyond the believers' comprehension. They couldn't accept that the Bolivian coast would not be reclaimed, ever. Mexico might as well ask for the return of California.

  When Gabriel had interviewed the director of one of Bolivia's larger banks two days earlier, the man had said, "The magical thing about Bolivia is that our history does not move in a line like other histories, it does not march; our history stands in one place and observes itself in a mirror, amazed."

  Gabriel appreciated this fact about Bolivia, that it was a country that openly preferred to see things as they should be, rather than as they were. A long-standing pattern of humiliation brings that out in a nation, just as it does in individuals; an active imagination is most useful to those for whom reality is a great disappointment. In Bolivia, a national bovarysme had taken hold. Fantasy was just as important as reality, the citizens seemed to insist. Gabriel was no stranger to the allure of a well-manicured daydream. He knew that those dreams, if cared for properly, could grow like bonsai: trimmed back constantly until they'd matured in miniature, shrunken lives. Perfection was much easier to achieve at that smaller scale. And if daydreams were just the mind's mechanism for giving space to a perfect vision of life, then maybe daydreams could be read backward to find a person's most fundamental desires. In his own case, Gabriel had for some years entertained fantasies of being a Pulitzer Prize—winning journalist—someone not unlike Fiona. Read backward, it was about the fact that he wanted to be not only rich and famous (banal, if pervasive, features of most daydreams) but also respected for his efforts. And, still generically, he wanted to make the world a better place in his own little way.

  That whole daydream ended when he started at Calloway. After years of cultivation, it just stopped. The one that replaced it was peculiar in that it didn't involve him winning any Pulitzers or fame. Instead, he merely dreamed of money. He didn't need gazillions. He just wanted to buy his way out of the question of money itself; $3.5 to 4 million would do it. With that, even the most conservative portfolio could be counted on to generate $200,000 a year in pre-tax revenue.

  Neither Gabriel nor Fiona had spoken in a while when a woman in a moth-colored skirt approached, a little boy maybe five or six years old a few steps behind her. "Excuse me," she said to Fiona in heavily accented English, "are you Fiona Musgrave?"

  "Yes," Fiona said in Spanish, "are you Lenka?" Fiona's Spanish was nearly as fluent as Gabriel's, but it was marred, badly, by her accent.

  The woman nodded. Fiona and Gabriel stood. They each kissed the woman hello and introduced themselves, in Spanish. Then Fiona bent down and asked the boy what his name was, but he just shook his head and ducked behind his mother's legs.

  "His name is Ernesto." Lenka had settled into Spanish now as well. Gabriel had noticed that a delicate linguistic dance occurred in first meetings between bilingual people, though he had yet to figure out how they decided on one language or the other. The woman, he gathered, worked for Evo Morales. She was attractive, with a long neck and a cinnamon complexion. On her chin there was a splash of reverse freckles, a spray of paler, vanilla dots fanning up toward her cheek. Her eyes and nose were Asiatic, her cheekbones Amerindian, and she wore her long hair wrenched back in a no-nonsense ponytail. Why had she brought her child? He scanned and saw no ring on her finger.

  Gabriel crouched to talk to Ernesto, who eyed him suspiciously from behind his mother's legs. She wore the kind of dull, flesh-colored pantyhose that Gabriel's mother wore often, and which men sometimes pulled over their heads before robbing a bank. "How are you today?"

  Ernesto's smile widened, veered mischievous, and he shook his head. He stuck several fingers in his mouth.

  "Come here," Gabriel said, beckoning. Ernesto emerged from behind his mother's legs and approached warily.

  Up above, the women were talking business, but Gabriel could sense that both were glancing down at him, and at Ernesto too. So he led Ernesto away, back to the bench, where they both sat down.

  "Tell me about your school," Gabriel said.

  Ernesto was mature enough to grasp the concept of body language, if not its nuances, so he threw up his hands, apropos of nothing whatsoever, and said, "It's nice."

  Gabriel asked Ernesto if he had any girlfriends and Ernesto raised one index finger. "Only one?" Gabriel said, as if disappointed.

  The boy shrugged, brought up three little fingers, and giggled.

  Lenka and Fiona approached, and Lenka smiled at her son, then glanced at Gabriel appreciatively, warmly. "Muy precioso tu maldito," Gabriel said to Lenka, who rolled her eyes and laughed.

  "Yeah, he's a little bit of a menace," she conceded, also in Spanish.

  Ernesto was shadowboxing now, so Gabriel held up his palms and Ernesto punched them.

  "Take it easy," his mother said to him.

  "Yeah"—Gabriel withdrew his hands and shook them off as if they were hurting from the tiny fists—"you'll
break my hands."

  Ernesto growled at him fiercely, adorably, and Gabriel looked back at Lenka. "You work for Evo?"

  "I'm his press liaison." She was staring at him now, her face tilted down slightly. "Are you a member of the press?"

  "If I were, would we be able to meet sometime?" He stood up.

  "Okay, Gabriel," Fiona interrupted in English, "the president-elect is waiting for us. I'll see you when I return in a couple weeks, I hope—assuming you'll still be here."

  Presumably she'd returned to English because that was their native language, but it was still awkward, since Lenka was clearly more comfortable with Spanish. That was the point, no doubt, to highlight Gabriel's foreignness to Lenka, and to douse their flirtation.

  "I'll still be here," he said to her. Then, turning to Ernesto, he said, "Un gran placer conocerte. Y tú también," he added to Lenka, making sure his accent was natural enough to make it apparent that he spoke like a native. He asked Lenka if he could have her card. Maybe they could get lunch someday.

  "I would like that," she said and opened her handbag.

  While she fished around in her bag, he turned to Fiona, who was frowning in a way he didn't know how to interpret. Could it be jealousy? It was hard to imagine.

  "Keep in touch," he said to Fiona, switching to English now himself.

  "Te llamo cuando vuelvo," Fiona replied, her cadence stiff with her bad accent.

  They kissed each other on the cheek.

  He took Lenka's card and told her he'd call tomorrow morning.

  "I look forward to it," she said.

  They kissed cheeks a second time. He mussed Ernesto's hair. "¡Nos vemos chico!" he said and turned and walked briskly into a swarm of pigeons, which batted aloft. The old man on the bench looked up and tugged on the brim of his fedora in greeting as Gabriel passed. He decided to grab a coffee from the café there on the plaza and then head up the hill in search of a chicken salteña. At the far side of the square he glanced back, hoping to see Fiona and Lenka again, but they were already gone.

  3. Hedged

  Monday, November 2 8, 2005

  ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, when Priya was new at Calloway, their offices were on the twenty-second floor of the World Financial Center, opposite the World Trade Center; according to Oscar—who was in Argentina at the time but heard about it when he returned—she and Paul were at the office when the first plane hit, and the explosion nearly blew their windows out. Then, while the rest of the building was busy evacuating, she and Paul started setting up hedges against the inevitable crash. Outside, paper drifted down like a ticker-tape parade. Markets in New York were not yet open, but Priya and Paul were able to sell most of their long positions in Brazil and set up some short sales on the FTSE. They preemptively called in various futures. Then, when the second plane hit, she and Paul grabbed their laptops and set off. They headed uptown. Paul's place was closer, in Tribeca, so they went there. By the time the first tower fell, they were back online, reinforcing their defensive positions. All capital from the sale of their substantial LAN Peru stake went directly to futures on Lockheed Martin.

  A month later, quarterly statements went out to Calloway's clients, and dozens called to ask if there had been a mistake, because it looked like the portfolio had grown by 4.28 percent in September. No other New York fund had managed to pull off gains that month.

  The staff at Calloway was forbidden to discuss the matter in detail. "Tell them the numbers are correct, but do not under any circumstances explain how we achieved them," Priya wrote in a memo, according to Oscar.

  During Gabriel's orientation, Oscar said, "I had that memo in my briefcase, and my wife saw it. She was shocked. I tried to explain what Priya was thinking, because I understand it, as I'm sure you do, but it's not the kind of thing I could explain to my wife, you know?"

  Gabriel nodded. He did understand. He understood quite well.

  Though far from the largest hedge fund, Calloway had a reputation for adamantine, Terminator-esque pursuit of gains that was legendary. It'd become a poster child for the perils, and potential profits, of unchecked avarice in the late nineties, when the dangers of highly leveraged, unregulated hedge-fund activity first became apparent. Entire nations could, it turned out, be brought to their knees by the collective whim of a few dozen math whizzes in monochromatic cubicles in lower Manhattan. The hedge funds themselves weren't impervious either, and many, including Calloway, had been run into near or total bankruptcy in 1998 when Russia suddenly defaulted on all its short-term debt.

  A year later, Gabriel's mother published an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times that argued for more federal oversight of hedge funds. She mentioned Calloway in the piece, writing that "though small, [it] represents the worst kind of animal in this menagerie. In the ten years since it was founded it has served its tiny group of wealthy clients at the direct expense of stability in the developing world."

  So when he took the job at Calloway, he wrote his mother an e-mail saying that he would be working for BellSouth. As lies went, BellSouth was pleasantly innocuous. Who, after all, could complain about telephones?

  Her reply was just one word: Congratulations! She had learned to shun any discussion of work or politics with him. Although her position was understandable—political ideology was as personal to her as religion was to most of the rest of the world—Gabriel found her inflexibility, her sheer bullheadedness, maddening. Theirs was a tiny family, a family of two, and they could not afford to put a moratorium on discussions of such a large proportion of their common interests.

  Intending to defuse the explosive device before she could use it against him, Gabriel opened their conversation that Monday by saying, "Mom, guess what! I forgot about Thanksgiving! I mean, I don't know how it happened, but it did! I'm sorry!" He laughed, because it was, he wanted her to see, just a funny blunder, like pouring coffee on your Cheerios.

  "Where the hell are you?"

  "Bolivia." He was sitting in his boxer shorts on his bed at Hotel Gloria.

  "I thought you were dead, Gabo. I called a thousand times on Friday! Nothing! I waited. Saturday. Yesterday I called hospitals in New York."

  "Oh Jesus," he said as the guilt latched on. "I'm so sorry. I have a different phone here."

  "How long have you been there?"

  "Not long. I'm so sorry, Mom," he said. "I forgot, and then I assumed—"

  "It's fine, Gabriel," she said. "How are you doing otherwise?"

  "I've been busy."

  He said that he was "busy" as often as possible to her because she didn't respect him as much as he wanted. Not that her love for him was in doubt. Her love was, in fact, generally suffocating. Still, it was all swaddled in condescending innuendo. It was as though she saw right through the ruse and knew he was a hack, a third-rate reporter, just another shyster who'd conned a gullible editor into hiring him. Then, incapable of hanging in, he'd quit like a quitter and taken some snoozer of a job at the telephone company. This was the narrative he imagined she might construct to explain his professional life so far. Meanwhile, she was the genuine article. Brassy and brilliant, she was a lecturer who could hold forth on any subject for hours, and every sentence would be a mini-revelation; her oration would be grammatically spotless (though English was her second language), its syntax would be lively, and her word choice would be as apt as what Gabriel could produce only after exhaustive editing. His mother regularly gave papers at anthropological conferences. She had been the keynote speaker at a recent conference in Denver. Newspapers to which Gabriel had not been able to sell his freelance work quoted her regularly. So he told her he was busy. He said it all the time. He said it because it gave him a reason for being a deadbeat son who didn't even bother to call on Thanksgiving, and he said it because busyness was a noble state in his mother's universe. Or, more accurately, she believed that noble people were busy, and from this Gabriel settled on the logical fallacy that busy people were therefore honorable.

  "BellSouth is in Bolivia?" she
said.

  It would have been better to know the answer to that question before he called. "Uh—we have some operations here, yes," he hedged. "I'm looking for ways to expand telephony further into rural areas. Farmers need telephones too."

  "How else would they get in touch with their stockbrokers?"

  "Precisely! Anyway," he said, moving right along, "I've got a date today, with a woman named Lenka, who works for Evo." He needed to score a point and subtlety be damned.

  "Oh?" He had successfully piqued her interest. "What does she do for Evo?" she said in Spanish; she always switched to Spanish when the conversation went personal.

  "She's his press agent," he said, following her into Spanish. "I'm hoping she'll introduce me to Evo."

  "I'm going to write a long essay about him for the Nation," she said.

  There was a pause while each waited for the other to ask a follow-up. Then, when Gabriel realized that his mother was going to steer the conversation to herself and her piece in the Nation, he ran interference. "I met Lenka through a journalist I know who works for the Wall Street Journal." There was some truth in all this. He was, in fact, meeting Lenka later, but it wasn't quite a date. It was supposedly an interview. "She's a single mother," he said.

  "Oh, my love, don't take advantage of her!" A single mother herself, his mother had an unending reserve of sympathy for women in her position.

  "I'm not going to take advantage of her, Mom," he said.

  "Well, of course not," she replied, and he could hear a hint of pity, a sentiment born of her cloying, overly maternal side. What made it worse was that her implication in saying "of course not" in that way was that he couldn't take advantage of Lenka, regardless of his intentions.

  Despite his winsome ways and boyish good looks, Gabriel was no Casanova, not by a long stretch. He had dated sporadically in college, and while women were often initially drawn to him, he had a confounding knack for fumbling at the crucial moment. Sometimes, from the back of his mind, he watched himself going astray but was unable to right his course. His timing, for one thing, was atrocious: tepid one minute, overeager the next. He invariably put forward precisely the wrong kind of sweetness (fraternal, adorable), and then cut it with a dissonant brashness (cruel, pouty), so that the whole package seemed both contrived and careless, and he managed to come off as simultaneously overeager, lecherous, and creepily insecure. Maybe if he could relax a little, he would be more successful with women, but as it happened, he'd only been with nine, all of whom came to know him in nonromantic circumstances. They had, in short, been seduced by accident. With Fiona he'd assumed she was out of his league and had viewed her simply as a valuable contact. Only once she was suddenly naked, in the middle of her hotel room, stubbing out a cigarette with one hand and letting her hair down with the other, did it occur to him that maybe her interest wasn't strictly professional.