The Travel Writer (13 page)

The idea terrified me. If it was true, there would never be any peace. Didn’t these girls know to giggle and spout something shallow when I was looking for a private laugh? I took a pull at my new beer, and when I looked up, they were still staring expectantly at me.

“If I can only find her dead body, I’ll be happy,” I said.

They weren’t sure if I had just said something profound or something disgusting, but either way, it killed the conversation. The band started assembling the drum kit and amplifiers. I finished the beer and left, twisting my paper until it tore.

* * *

Warmth in La Paz, like in the desert, flees headlong over the horizon the minute the sun sets. Outside the Pig & Whistle I shivered in my sweater with the cruel breeze of every passing car on the road. No cabs, and the next streetlight was a steep, chilly walk uphill.

I had just started when a man emerged from the shadows. At first I thought he was one of the security guards that shelter in plywood sheds outside fancy apartment buildings, listening surreptitiously to the soccer game on the radio and stepping out now and then like vampires to make the rounds or sneak a smoke, but then I saw that he was grinning. No guard ever grins. I recognized him.

“Good evening, neoliberal,” Arturo said, and clapped my shoulder, playfully but hard enough to make me stumble, my feet clicking together like the blades of a pair of scissors; and suddenly the world tumbled under me and I was looking up at the moon from the gutter. My frosty breath puffed rapidly before me. The pavement was like ice on my butt. Thank God no car was coming.

Arturo pointed at me and laughed. Where were the real security guards when you needed them? The lights of the bar, just a block away, seemed as distant as the stars. A teenager glanced my way up the hill before hustling into the Pig & Whistle. He thought I was just some drunk.

“What do you want?” I said.

Arturo stepped closer, within kicking range. I could see his sporty nylon hiking boots, with their fading (and certainly fake) Nike swoosh. Then he bent over at the waist, as if he was bowing, or preparing to spit.

“What a surprise,” he said.

In the dim light of the streetlamps, his face was a rich olive, and his acne scars were invisible. I scooted backward, a grimacing crab, and scrambled to my feet.

“What do you want?”

A taxi passed, with a dying moan and a freezing wake. I felt an itch at my back; perhaps Arturo had friends, perhaps they were surrounding me, perhaps even now they were reaching for my neck.

“I hate these gringo bars,” he said.

“There are no gringos there,” I said. “Not after I leave. Left.”

Had he followed me? Had he come to kill me? How unfair, after he had let me off and even given me a lift back into town. I could have taken a flight home and enjoyed the rest of my life.

“Why are you here?” I asked. I tried to convince myself that he had wanted to hear the band, couldn’t afford the three-dollar cover, and was left in a bad mood.

“I’m sure you’re very happy that Dionisius is not with me,” he said.

“Happy enough,” I admitted. “I understand he doesn’t like Americans.”

“I have a different attitude. I find them fascinating beasts.”

I kept my eyes locked on his, like a trespasser staring down a growling dog, and stepped backward, up the hill, hoping Arturo wouldn’t notice. Another step or two, and I’d have room to run if I had to. But my confidence grew with my altitude; it’s hard to fear a shorter man.

“Why did you pick me up today?” I asked.

“We wanted to learn more about you,” he said. “We learned more than we expected.”

“My life is an open book.” Did they have that expression in Spanish? “What do you
want?”

He waved his hand dismissively.

“That I go back home?” I said.

“I want only that my employer is happy.”

“Your employer? Condepa? What does it matter to the party if I’m in La Paz? What have I ever done? In my entire life.”

Arturo turned his back on me with a matador’s disdain, and I watched him go like a wounded animal, frightened, suspicious, and also grateful. He hadn’t come to kill me after all. He had just finished slugging down a drink in another, cheaper bar down the road, with his third-string political-gangster friends, and just happened upon me by an evil chance on his way to the bus stop. Or maybe he picked up extra cash on weekends shaking down the busier bars like the Pig & Whistle for protection money. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t dangerous by himself. And tomorrow I’d leave him behind forever.

* * *

When I got back, Kenny was sitting up in bed, ignoring the open
Idiot’s Guide to Speaking Spanish
on his lap in favor of a rerun of
Friends
on the English-language channel. “How’s the chica?” he asked, then added, graciously, “She’s a hottie.”

I considered describing a sex romp in a secret jaguar-fur-draped room in the basement of the Pig & Whistle, but my heart wasn’t in it. “She didn’t show.”

He nodded. He had heard, or read about, or seen on TV, the cruel games men and women play with each other, so he could sympathize. “That’s cold,” he said. “When Hilary took that trip down here without telling me, I felt the same way.”

“You didn’t feel the same way. You hardly knew her. She felt sorry for you one night. How did you get like this? You’re not just a virgin, you’re completely ignorant about women. How have you stayed that way for so long?” I was too humiliated by Arturo and Pilar to hate myself for meanness. And these were serious questions. A journalist should not hesitate to pick at painful wounds in order to find the truth.

“I’m not like everybody else,” Kenny said. The laugh track soared, and Kenny clicked the television off viciously with the remote. “I don’t know why. I go to work and I come home and then it’s the weekend and nothing to do.” He spat his words at the blank television, not me, as if he’d suddenly realized that the cast of
Friends
had been laughing at him and not each other for all these years. “Where do you go to find people? What do you say to them? I keep thinking
things will be different. They should have been. But high school sucked and then college; I went to Hunter and lived at home. Everybody already had friends. Now at work I go out for drinks but there’s never anything to talk about. I’m not a real editor like the others. There’s only one other assistant, and she’s too good for anything but her own face in the mirror.”

“You made friends with Hilary,” I said. “You can make more.”

“She was special.”

I pulled off my sweater and sat on the other bed. At least Kenny had figured out how to work the heat.

“Do you still live at home?” I asked.

“My mom got transferred to Denver last summer. I went for Christmas, but I don’t ski, so it was just cold. I still live in our apartment on Twenty-ninth Street. My mom says we’ll have to sell next year. You live alone?”

“I like it.” I didn’t want him to think I was as lonely as him.

“I like it too. Nobody fucking around with your stuff. Put on whatever music you want. Don’t have to listen to the TV all night if you don’t want. Invite girls over, no problem.”

“But you never invited Hilary over.”

“I would have.”

I remembered the first time I had Pilar in my Queens apartment. She burst out laughing at its tininess, and I laughed with her, though I was glad she didn’t keep it up. That was the best thing about Pilar then; anything unpleasant about her was over so quickly. The only place to sit was on the futon, which I had left pulled out in its “bed” position, to be more conducive to romance. As soon as she sat down there was no question about the next step. No awkwardness, no uncertain hesitation. It seemed odd that I had ever experienced such unreserved joy. It was like remembering some inexplicable, overpowering emotion from childhood, long abandoned. You remember gaping in awe at your first sight of a major-league baseball diamond or the ocean, but you don’t remember exactly what about it overwhelmed you.

I undressed and burrowed under the blankets, but Kenny wasn’t ready to sleep. He’d had nobody to talk to all evening.

“What’s the plan for tomorrow?” he asked.

“I’m taking a bus to the Hotel Matamoros, about three hours from here,” I said. Pilar worked there—she couldn’t hide. Perhaps she’d apologize and claim that she missed our appointment because a planeload of Venezuelans were held up by the altiplano gusts and missed their minibus connection. Or better, that she had been paralyzed with fear, unable to face the emotional eruption of seeing me again. Or maybe that she knew Arturo was tailing me.

“Where Hilary disappeared? I’m going too. Shut up. That’s where the information is. I’m
there. No discussion.”

“Fine,” I said. The bus left from the other side of La Paz, and I could see the advantage in having company as I crossed the city, in the brightest daylight. Kenny could call for an ambulance if a sniper got me. “If they tell you to fuck off when we get there, you can stay in the village, Yolosa. It’s not too far.”

“Thanks.”

I shut my eyes and saw Arturo’s face at night, and then the sunlit face of his boss, holding his hands to his head in a dramatic interpretation of pain, and then I felt a heavy hand fall on my shoulder and I opened my eyes again.

“It’s a strange country,” I said.

“It’s like Jackson Heights. Ever been? Out on the 7 line, in Queens. Everybody speaks Spanish there, and they sell ice cream on the sidewalk out of these white wagons, and it’s crowded and noisy, especially when the train comes by overhead. Right over the wagons.”

“It’s not at all like Jackson Heights. The people in Queens left their own countries behind, to mix with everybody else. In Jackson Heights you’ve got Colombians, Peruvians, Mexicans, Ecuadorians. You’ve got Indians—real ones, from India. But they all live together and they all have to follow the same American rules. Bolivia is a different world. They’re selling toilet bowls and llama fetuses on the street. This is nothing you could ever imagine before, no matter how many times you’ve been to Jackson Heights, or Flushing, or Brighton Beach. You’ve got to appreciate it for what it is.”

“Why should I? Have they ever appreciated New York? This is just a place to see, not a place to live in. Dogs shitting in the middle of the road. Headaches all day. People in stupid getups in your way all the time. Where do they get off? They’re nothing special. They’re not Hilary. We danced, that night, that last night. Did you know that? She held me like she knew something. Something big. Maybe she was afraid she was going to—you know.”

“Maybe she was. Everybody gets afraid. Everybody’s going to die.”

“Not yet. Not here.”

We went to sleep.

A ringing phone nagged me from my dream. It was Pilar.

“I need to see you. I’m at the Matamoros’s suite in the Aparthotel Real Camino, on Capitán Ravelo.”

I squinted at the clock radio. It was 2:00
A.M
.

“Now?” I tried to put just enough annoyance in my voice to show I thought her request absurd, but not so much that she’d take back the offer.

“Yes. We need to talk before I go back to the hotel.”

“Where were you? I waited for you at the bar.”

“Please just come, Jacob. I have to show you something. Everything is very difficult right now.”

Kenny never stirred as I dressed.

The Matamoros kept up appearances in La Paz by maintaining for its staff a suite on the Real Camino’s ninth floor, the second to highest. The living room held the blond furniture of any internationally minded business hotel anywhere, but the garage-door-size plate-glass window, now mostly masked by vertical blinds, promised a magnificent view of the surrounding mountains, in the daytime anyway. At night La Paz, like any other city, is just a jagged relief map of partially lit towers. Pilar was trimming her nails over a room service menu. She always bit them ragged; I used to complain of splinters when we held hands.

“Lock the door,” she said, without looking up from her fingers. She grunted, satisfied, when she heard the bolt shoot home. She was wearing a University of Florida T-shirt and gray sweatpants, ragged and stained around the cuffs. Good, I thought. She’s in for the night.

“Where were you?” I asked. “Are you all right?” I had decided to put the questions in that order, to demonstrate that my pride had some fight left in it.

“I can’t plan everything perfectly!” she said vehemently, as she smacked the nail clipper to the table. She sprang up and stared out through a dark slot between two of the window blinds.

I took her place on the sofa. On the wall was a portrait of a
chola
selling oranges. I counted the colors on the petticoat and waited for Pilar to finish staring. Perhaps she was calling her thoughts to order, or adding the final mental touches to an argument or story, or hosing down a conflagration of confusion in her mind. There wasn’t much point in trying to predict her emotions. She would let me know soon enough.

She turned. “I tried to be there. It was not possible. I wanted to talk to you but I couldn’t. Someone interrupted me. Why is it that the simplest plans collapse as soon as I make them? There’s no room for anything complicated in the world.”

There was a bright splash of light on the curve of her neck, from the standing lamp beside her. The splash shimmered faintly with her breathing.

“We managed some complicated things,” I said. “Remember O’Hare?” We had been crossing the country in separate directions, and managed to organize not only flights that gave us
two hours of overlapping layover in Chicago but a freebie at an airport hotel. After we finished screwing in our room, which looked out on a runway, we opened the blinds and for the next half hour lay there watching the planes take off and land. It was my idea to assign grades for smoothness, proximity to the center stripe, and speed in braking.

“Your brain holds only one type of memory,” she said, and sat down beside me with a forgiving sigh. Sometimes we need our old friends to retell the old stories, or even just nod toward them, to remind us that life was once decent and predictable.