"Because I am Catholic?"
He nodded.
"It was difficult. I had—"
They were interrupted by a knock at the door. They had ordered a bottle of cheap Bolivian chardonnay and two slices of vanilla cake for lunch. Gabriel went to the door, and Lenka sat up and clapped approvingly when Gabriel returned and handed her her cake. Then she set it down carefully on the mattress, staring at it lustfully. She pulled off the cellophane wrap, and stabbed her fork in. She lay back and chewed, while he poured the wine.
"You were telling me about the divorce from Luis," he said.
She nodded and proceeded to tell him about the last day of her marriage to Luis, about how he slashed the tires of her car in an attempt to keep her from leaving.
"Understandable. I'd cut your tires too," Gabriel said. He sat next to her with his cake and took a sip of the wine, which was awful. He could feel the furnace heat emanating from her body.
"The cut tires didn't stop me." Instead, she said, she got into the car with infant Ernesto on her lap and, clutching her rosary in one hand, shifting with the other, and steering with her knees, drove away as fast as possible, murmuring her Hail Marys as they wobbled noisily at twenty-five miles an hour all the way down from El Alto to the city, a nine-mile trip.
Gabriel had another sip of the awful wine, which somehow deteriorated with further drinking. He gave up on his cake and handed her the rest. Sitting there beside her, he was aware that he had not felt so fully at ease in the presence of a naked woman in years.
By the time she'd arrived at a service station near the market, she continued, all that was left on the wheels were the most meager scraps of rubber. "I could've recited the entire rosary, it took so long," she said, "and Ernesto was screaming the whole way, shrieking like he knew what was happening. He made the sound I wanted to make."
Once she was done with her story, Gabriel pondered his next question. Should he ask? It seemed so. "Was your husband abusive?"
She didn't answer at first. Gabriel turned to face her again. Up close he could see the splattered area of pale, reverse freckles on her chin. He remembered the lines he'd seen on her forehead earlier, lines formed by years of making expressions like the one she was making then.
Eventually, she said, "People often abuse each other when they are married. It happens. There are degrees, I guess. Regret is important to growth, and growth is very important in a marriage. You should learn from mistakes. He did not seem to learn from his mistakes. Or, he did eventually, but it was too late. I know that he is very kind to his new wife. With her he is a saint. And I like to think that maybe it was me, that maybe I taught him how to be that way."
Listening to this, he understood that, unlike Fiona's sadness, which had molted many times and calcified like a spiny shell, Lenka's was simpler, lighter: it was an aura, a weary air. It radiated like her warmth, and maybe that was why Lenka's was, in the end, a softer pain.
When Gabriel's mother brought him to Chile in 2001 for his grandfather's funeral, she made a point of stopping in Bolivia, she said, because she wanted him to see the real South America. Her homeland was too Europeanized for her taste. The trip would be his rite of passage. Other children had bar mitzvahs or first communions, he needed to see "the real South America." She took him on a tour of the shantytowns of El Alto, which were as squalid as promised, but he was not affected in the way she'd hoped. He noticed, yes, that people lived in conditions that hadn't been seen in North America in a century. He saw that they inhabited hovels with no electricity or running water. Families had simply commandeered a small section of land, hastily erected a home, and dug two holes: one for drinking water and one for an outhouse. Unfortunately, both holes plumbed the same water table, which had long been contaminated by a dangerous cocktail of fecal-borne parasites and bacteria. Still, what struck Gabriel most was the place's wildness—its anarchic quality. Chaos indicated a lack of structure, which itself implied freedom. Apart from certain mandatory field trips into the lowest rungs of squalor, he avoided his mother's company in La Paz and traipsed around the city alone. He chatted to locals in Spanish, to foreigners in English.
Growing up in Claremont, that little white dot amid the broad, poor, and largely Chicano Inland Empire, Gabriel rarely spoke Spanish outside of his house. Socially, he was in a complicated position: he looked mostly white but had a Mexican-sounding name. If any of his white classmates or teachers implied that he was Chicano, he was always quick to correct them. Yet among his friends and classmates who knew him reasonably well—these were generally white, lower-middle-class kids—he was the comparatively rich child of one of the more prominent faculty members in their small college town. His house was nicer. His friends' parents watched a lot of television, while his non-TV-watching mother was erudite; the walls of their house were insulated by bookshelves jammed with volumes in various languages.
In Bolivia, he found something else. Bilingual and of indeterminate ethnicity, he darted in and out of clubs, cafés, and hostels on Illampu and Sagárnaga, switching between foreign backpackers and the locals. He was amphibious. He danced salsa and talked trash about gringos one minute, helped cute Australian girls explain themselves to a waiter the next. In the course of three days he fell into bed with three women: a pretty local with a lazy eye, an Italian backpacker six years his senior who didn't shave her armpits, and a frighteningly beautiful Israeli, the daughter of an El Al pilot. It was an unprecedented run for him.
While on the flight back to Miami with his mother, it dawned on him that part of what he'd loved about Bolivia was that he was finally completely outside of the range of the pressures of his murky class position—the compulsion to "succeed." More to the point, everyone seemed outside of its range.
Gabriel's mother didn't know what to make of it all. What a treat that he was smitten by Bolivia, on one hand, and that he was as ardent as she had hoped he would be. But he seemed to love it for all the wrong reasons. "This is not a holiday from reality," she said.
He enthusiastically agreed. (They might as well have been speaking two different languages.) He insisted that what he loved was the feeling of being outside the pressure-inducing illusion that he took for granted in the United States.
She tried to steer the conversation back to the miserable living conditions in Bolivia, but it was no use. He said, "In Providence, I'm surrounded by these overachievers who, for all their politically correct talk, are still just as white and privileged as the assholes who run Bolivia or the U.S. Just as privileged as you and I. You know, we're all living with this preposterous falseness..." and so on. His mother stared at him, alternately hopeful and frustrated by his line.
Bolivia did not have a study-abroad program that Brown would endorse, but Ecuador did. He had filled out his application for the program within a week of returning.
Though he didn't have the words for it yet, he would later realize that what had struck him was not Bolivia itself but what it implied about the United States. That despite being one of the safest and most prosperous countries in human history, the United States was actually a very bizarre place. Elsewhere in the world, the unattainability of great fame and fortune was more readily accepted, and so life was less driven by grandiose fantasies. Elsewhere, people wouldn't tell their children that they could achieve anything, because, of course, they couldn't.
When he returned to Providence from the trip with his mother, Gabriel found his peers' obsession with making it finally felt as trite as he had always believed it was.
A semester in Ecuador did nothing to dampen the force of his revelation. He returned, if anything, more bombastic than ever. To his college friend Harlan, he'd said, "It's like Morpheus came along and took me out of the Matrix. Now I'm back inside, but I know it's fake. We're all doing laps in the cooling waters of a giant mirage..." Harlan bristled at the suggestion that he was a drone in the illusion, insisting that he knew it was a mirage as well. In fact, to Harlan, it may have seemed Gabriel was finally figurin
g out what he, Harlan, had known all along. Gabriel, undaunted, tried to tell him that knowing it and feeling it were different, but that was when Harlan checked out, on the grounds that Gabriel was acting like a patronizing fuckface.
In time, he refined his understanding of the issue. The mechanism for capitalism's perpetual rejuvenation was, he came to believe, built into human nature. Economists called it utility. Utility had a floating definition, which was approximated by something like "satisfaction," or "joy." At the root of all economic theory stood the assumption that human beings' primary motivation in life was to maximize their utility. A simple and apparently irrefutable concept: people want to be pleased, and they do not want to be displeased.
But economists also believed that there was a direct relationship between wealth and utility: the more money a person had, the more utility he had access to. The ratio wasn't one to one. A hundred dollars meant a lot more to a poor Bolivian farmer than to, say, Oprah Winfrey. Still, every single dollar a person had would, in theory, increase his utility. To Gabriel, the correlation was somewhat less straightforward. People like him, for example, might be instilled with an initial desire for money, which, in turn, spawned a secondary desire to be finished with that first desire. People might desire to be done with the desire.
In the United States, where the system flourished unfettered, the average workweek got a little longer every year, and the average person's debt grew a little bigger, his vacation shrank, and, in general, the quantity of his time and energy devoted to the acquisition and spending of money grew steadily, persistently. Which was not to say, Gabriel believed, that capitalism was bad and something else was good, but the frame of the system necessitated an illusion of meaning and order that broke down at the margins, in the most destitute parts of the world.
The stratum that Gabriel had been eyeing in the United States, the one he'd worried about his placement within, was, it turned out, a small section of a small section of an immeasurably large canyon. He was fretting over his position, measured in centimeters, at the upper rim of the Grand Canyon. And now that, by traveling to Bolivia, he'd seen this—the narrowness of his perspective, of everyone's perspective—the taut ambition that had been pulling across his throat since he was born slackened, and he could breathe right, at last, and it felt incredible. For a little while. It didn't last. It couldn't last. He had to deal with the life in front of him, not some theoretical life. So he was pushed, daily, a few inches further from his beatific moment, a little further back into a miasma of worry about "making it." Soon, he was trying to keep pace with everyone else, struggling to suppress a spike of envy when a smarmy acquaintance lined up a megabucks job at Amazon over winter break during their senior year.
Caps flew at graduation, and then Gabriel was in New York writing about international finance for IBI. In the morning, he shivered on a subway platform, a large coffee scalding his fingers. During work hours, he occupied a taupe cubicle. In this way, a day occurred. And another. Life proceeded. He noticed that he'd become a sidelines man, a commentator. He met the players, wrote about them. He had lunch with them sometimes too, and he never went for the bill, even though it would have been on his expense account. He liked to watch them pay.
After two years at IBI he'd developed a tic of Googling himself almost daily. He sought some low-grade immortality. A sign of his own footprint in the desert everyone was wandering.
Another two years like this in New York and any trace of his revelation from that trip to Bolivia was gone. Whatever he'd escaped in that first trip to Bolivia had caught up to him again and was sitting on him now. And it was heavy. And he was suffocating.
So he sent off his résumé to Calloway Group and prayed—silently, obsessively—that they'd call. He checked his e-mail every five minutes. He checked his cell-phone reception regularly, just in case. At last, on a Thursday morning, he had a message in his in box. It was from someone named Oscar Velazquez and the subject heading read simply Calloway Group interview. Sitting there in his cubicle, Gabriel emitted a short joyous screech.
"Everything okay?" someone nearby asked.
"Yeah, yeah," he said and bit his knuckle. He clicked on the message with his free hand.
Lenka left in the middle of the night and then Gabriel finally managed to drift to sleep. His body felt well tenderized when he awoke at seven. Though he had not slept more than a couple of hours, his mind zinged with such energy that when he stepped into the shower that morning he might as well have just freebased a two-carat marquise of methamphetamine. Her body was not skinny. It was powerful, athletic; she had an authoritative bearing.
After washing, he dressed and thought about her, about that body, the square shoulders, the wonderful ass, too grand to find its way comfortably into white-girl clothes—it was an ass that in itself made a good argument for settling down once and for all. When she walked, it swung like the pendulum of a clock in need of winding.
Breakfast was spartan: fresh fruit and a glass of purified water. He passed on the coca tea and the coffee—no need. He pissed. He shaved. He wore an incandescent yellow tie, a bright blue shirt. They had not used a condom and he had not asked her if she was on birth control, and, thinking about the various dangers he had exposed himself to, he felt dizzy with terror and pleasure, in exactly equal measures.
He went down to the business center. The computer took a long time to power up, but he wasn't impatient.
There was only one e-mail. It was from Priya, who wanted to know what the fuck he was up to, and did he have any new information to give her yet?
Yes, he wrote to her, he did. He said he'd send her a report that afternoon.
One thing he did know was that he and Lenka would make a strange couple. But so did most worthwhile couples. He was who he was, and she was who she was—an oblique but apt statement. She was, more specifically, press attaché to the future president of Bolivia, a single mother, and a woman who lived with the father of her child, that man's new wife, and her own parents. Life was complicated. Without even stepping inside that messy house of hers, he knew that she ruled the roost. She was tougher than Gabriel by a margin, but so were all of the women he had ever cared about. It wasn't that he was flimsy; it was just a somewhat predictable Oedipal event: he fell for women who, like his mother, were sturdier than he was. In fact, it was their very ability to run roughshod over him that he found alluring.
She was energetic in bed. The sex seemed to replenish her, somehow, as if the act were her photosynthesis, daylight to a sprawling kudzu. She bit and she scratched, she screeched and pinched, she kicked his backside with her heel as if he were a steed in need of encouragement. For Fiona, it had been a more straightforward thing, a brisk workout. Lenka put everything into it, body and soul, and expected nothing less in return.
A midmorning drizzle misted the window. Tiny droplets banded together into bigger drops, which succumbed to gravity and occasionally avalanched into rivulets as they approached the sill. Working on his laptop, he scoured the Internet for some agenda he could push on Priya to distract her. If he continued to produce nothing, she would fire him within a week, he thought—maybe less.
A quick tally of his track record since he came down was discouraging. So far, Fiona was the only person who had given him anything useful, so he saw little hope that he'd beat the press to the punch on the identity of the finance minister. He needed something else.
Popping around financial blogs, he found an angle that seemed promising. It was a medium-sized Brazilian natural gas company called Santa Cruz Gas. The company had sprung up in the late 1990s. In the aftermath of the privatization, a little more than half of the Bolivian gas operations had been bought up by Repsol and Petrobras, immense companies based in Spain and Brazil, respectively, but Santa Cruz Gas had a 9 percent stake in the market too. It had been founded by a mining magnate based in Singapore. Created with the hope of drawing fast dollars from international speculators, it went public six months after being incorporated. The ga
s was pulled across the Bolivian border to be refined and consumed by Brazilians. If Evo seized all the foreign gas operations in Bolivia, as he'd promised to do, the company would be eviscerated.
The stock, which traded on the São Paulo market, had been brought to the NYSE on a scantly traded ADR (ticker: SCZG) that waggled around $9 a share now, down $4 since Fiona had published her article about how Evo was going to win the election. The fate of the company had everything to do with Evo's decision regarding the expropriation of foreign gas.
On the phone with Priya later that day, he said, "I'm looking at Santa Cruz Gas. They have one hundred percent of their fields in Bolivia and one hundred percent of their refinement in Brazil. Expropriation would completely destroy them."
"Are you sure that Evo will expropriate the gas?"
"I don't know yet. That's what I'm trying to figure out."
"Right. I'm going to look at this."
She hung up on him.
Twenty minutes later she called back and said, "Okay, Gabriel, if you find out for certain what Evo's going to do with the gas before anyone else does, I'll double your salary this year."
He inhaled slowly, deeply. He sat down on the side of his bed.
"Really?" he said. He had just been trying to placate her and now she was hurling around ludicrous incentives. And, like any good economist, Gabriel knew there would be no free lunch, particularly with someone as astute as Priya.
"People are speculating on Bolivian gas?" he said.
"In a way." She didn't elaborate. He had to assume that she had looked into it and found that Santa Cruz was, in fact, an ideal candidate for speculation. It was that, or it was something else, probably something that he did not, or could not, fathom, some complex mathematical model generated by Paul that hinged on the outcome of Bolivian gas. There were mysteries in the fund's mathematics that Gabriel, despite his training in economics and his experience as a financial reporter, could not begin to grasp.
A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism Page 9