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  The old man extended his smooth, limp hand to me.

  “My last name’s Alcorta, my first name Antonio. My good friends call me Parrot for my magnificent Cervantine nose.”

  “What time do you have?”

  “It’s 9:10, a terrible time for me. I have to look for my damned Tedral. It’s a pill for asthma. During the day I forget to buy it and at night I have to go out and look for a pharmacy nearby.”

  “If you’d like, I’ll go buy it for you.”

  “I appreciate your kindness. The people from Oruro are known for their generosity. However, after a long trip I don’t advise you to walk up and down La Paz’s steep streets. You could catch emphysema and fall into the hands of the doctors at the public hospital, which is like landing in the arms of Mengele, the famous Nazi doctor at Auschwitz.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if Mengele’s an advisor to the Interior Ministry.”

  “I hear he’s been seen around here holding hands with Klaus Barbie, the butcher of Lyon,” he added.

  I liked Don Antonio. He was a person without visible frustrations. His appearance revealed that his age was catching up with him and he was going through hell, but I could also tell that he was weathering the hard times with a certain grace. Heavy breathing aside, he seemed in good shape. His pinkish skin exhibited the vitality of a man twenty years younger. I excused myself and, as was to be expected, got lost for a good while amidst the tangle of passageways. Only some lunatic architect could have designed them.

  In the lobby, the manager was sprawled across a velvety armchair, playing a game of chess with a bald man whose face was the spitting image of Groucho Marx. One of those Venezuelan soap operas was on TV showing pretty women and people screaming their heads off at each other. The spellbound audience didn’t miss a thing.

  “Could I have an extra blanket?” I asked humbly.

  The manager looked up. He tilted his jaw to the side like a camel. “Coming from Oruro, I’d have thought this would be like spring.”

  “In Oruro I don’t sleep alone.”

  “I’m sorry, but we don’t have any extra blankets.”

  “I’ll give you two pesos if you can give me one blanket.”

  The redhead stood up parsimoniously, smiled, and put his hand on my shoulder. “We’ll see if I have any left.”

  He twisted a door handle and disappeared behind the Chinese folding screen separating the two offices. He returned awhile later carrying a black blanket with yellow trim that smelled awful.

  “It’s all I could find back there,” he explained. He put it in my hands and added, “It’ll be two pesos per day.”

  “That’s absurd,” I protested. “For four pesos I can buy myself a new one.”

  “It’s up to you, Señor Alvarez.” He smiled like a villain out of a 1950s movie.

  “I’ll return it tomorrow,” I said.

  I went back to my room and faced the mirror. Pale and haggard, looking like a shipwrecked man who had just been rescued, I would surely be denied the visa. I urgently needed a shave and a good haircut. I nervously rubbed my chin and felt yet again that old unease and lack of self-confidence. In an attempt to cheer myself up, I downed some cheap pisco*from an exotic-looking little bottle that I kept in my jacket for emergencies. I undressed, put on a pair of wool pajamas like those worn by gold miners in the Klondike, and turned off the light. The problem was that I couldn’t turn off the noise. In that neighborhood, night and quiet didn’t seem to go together; for hundreds of thousands of Aymaras it was the start of a work day. Around midnight, the noise outside became almost unbearable. It sounded as if a horde of bees was rustling inside my eardrums. I heard Don Antonio’s monotonous little cough. At 1 in the morning, finally, silence. After a few moments of complete darkness, the ocean appeared. It was a sign that everything was in order. I slept.

  * A sweet liquor made from grapes, produced primarily in Peru and Chile.

  Chapter 2

  I was violently awoken by the sound of ringing bells. I cursed that medieval custom of calling the faithful to mass; priests can’t care less about anyone else’s sleep. From the bright maroon glare, I saw that it was sunrise. The bells of the parish church seemed to be tolling right in the back of my neck. It felt like the legendary Charles Atlas was pounding a gong deep in my brain.

  I went out to the patio in my pajamas and didn’t see a single guest. Either they were deaf or had gotten used to the bell ringer’s outrageous sadism. I donned my street clothes under the sheets and covered my ears with wads of toilet paper, but it was impossible to go back to sleep. Tired and in a bad mood, I lit a cigarette, and then the saying of a drinking buddy from Oruro popped into my head: The Yankees read your face. If you look nervous, you’re finished.

  The bell ringer’s torture suddenly ceased. I put out the cigarette and tried to fall asleep again, but I only got halfway there. After dozing a little I rose with the lethargy of a military sentry. I waited a bit and then headed for the shower. The bathroom was freezing and a stream of frosty water flowed from the showerhead.

  As a little kid, whenever I had to pass a seemingly impossible test, I used to think about the Cossacks on the Russian steppes and would then forge ahead fearlessly. Back then anything was possible; all I had to do was close my eyes. Nowadays, wearing coal miners’ goggles wouldn’t be enough. Reality no longer disappeared, even with anesthesia. I stepped into the shower. I didn’t have the hard skin of the cruel Cossacks, so I let out a shriek, and hurriedly rubbed soap over my body. Afterwards, I got dressed in my best clothes. I was wearing the new Prince of Wales suit that I’d had custom-made to impress the feared American consul.

  I longed for a razor specialist for my shave. I wanted the complexion of a Dutch baby and a haircut just like a model in the magazine Hola: a half-naked Spaniard with his hair slicked back, matador-style. I opened up a tiny bottle of cologne and treated myself to deft dabs on the lobes of each ear. I repeated this operation various times in front of the mirror. I saw the smile of a castrated evangelist on his way to heaven, of an innocent armadillo who wouldn’t leave Oruro, Bolivia’s famed folklore capital, for anything. In one of my jacket pockets, I was carrying an ID card proving I was a founder of the Diablada Auténtica dance group. “A couple of weeks will be enough,” I repeated out loud, firmly but humbly. “I’ll miss my country. My son made it over there, but I’m a different kettle of fish, Señor Consul.”

  I held out the statement from my bank in Oruro. According to the figures, I had a sum of five thousand pesos, a tidy fortune. The Americans wouldn’t know that for two months I’d begged some friends to make deposits into my meager bank account, then sent them each checks in return. According to the experts, the bank account was of considerable importance. A notary famous for his skills as a forger had also written me up a convincing contract of sale on a house in downtown Oruro. That blessed document had me down as the owner of a three-story mansion valued at seventy thousand dollars, properly registered in City Hall records. With this pair of parchments, a no from the gringos was unlikely. I left with a renewed confidence.

  Silence reigned in the hotel. In the lobby, the redhead was reading a newspaper and drinking a cup of tea. Two backpackers who looked like Vikings pored over a map of Bolivia, while an elderly lady with a tortured face, her torso covered by a horrible yellow robe, studied them suspiciously.

  The manager stopped reading the newspaper, looked up at me, and asked, “How did you sleep?”

  “You should know. I’m two steps from the bell tower.”

  “It’s a matter of getting used to it.”

  “You ought to speak with that guy. The bells shouldn’t be rung as if we’d won the World Cup,” I complained.

  “Give him a few pesos and you won’t hear a peep tomorrow.”

  “It would be better if you could give me another room,” I said.

  “The hotel is full. Sorry . . .”

  The Rosario neighborhood, the liveliest section of the city, exhibited at
this early hour, 8:30, a discreet, almost nostalgic face. The pealing of the bells faded to a faint, imploring ringing. Since the street vendors had not yet descended from the bedroom city of El Alto, traffic flowed smoothly on the famous Illampu. A few faithful Catholics, the kind who don’t miss a single mass for anything in the world, entered the church in whose doorway a diminutive priest stood rubbing his hands together to keep warm, while contemplating the blue sky through which a few tiny white clouds passed unhurriedly.

  I looked for an open café and found a spacious, simple, and clean place called El Lobo at the corner of Santa Cruz and Illampu. I sat down and called for the waiter, a half-asleep guy who handed me a menu written in Spanish, English, and another language I didn’t know.

  “What language is this?” I asked.

  “Hebrew,” he answered.

  “A Jewish café on Illampu Street?”

  “Restaurant,” he clarified.

  I opted for the American breakfast of eggs, ham, toast, and coffee. The price was prohibitive, but my face needed to shine, healthy and alert for the American consul. After taking my order, the waiter left for the kitchen. I glanced around at my surroundings: pencil drawings of Andean peasants, rugged landscapes of bluish mountains, the usual naked children running around huts of mud and straw. Three maps of Israel were tacked to the wall in the back. The red-varnished wood tables were adorned with flowery tablecloths. A three-foot-tall vase stood on top of each table and held a velvet rose bearing Bolivia’s national colors: blood-red, gold, and forest green. For the neighborhood, it wasn’t bad.

  While I waited for breakfast, the place filled up with tourists. A line of boisterous youngsters entered. I guessed that they were Jews; the tonality of their language evoked millenarian lands. They were of all colors and types. From the dark Yemeni to the blond Teutonic, they exhibited all of the Levant expressions. The boys had that somnolent and sensual Mediterranean bearing; the girls were attractive, with enormous anxious eyes, breasts that burst out of their cotton T-shirts, and conspicuous, undulating buttocks. From the way they were dressed, you would’ve thought there was a beach right around the corner. They shouted to one another, laughing as young people without inhibitions tend to do. A man with white curly hair and the look of a Jewish native of La Paz welcomed them in broken English. He started to order the waiters around, so I figured he owned the place. The waiter who had taken my order brought my ample American breakfast and placed it on the table.

  “I’ve never seen so many Jews together before,” I commented to the waiter.

  “They’ve come from Cuzco and they’re going to Chile.”

  “Do they have money?”

  “It’s cheap for them. They don’t spend much and they’re organized.”

  “The Jewish chicks aren’t bad.”

  “They stick to their own kind; they don’t give us locals a chance. If you want more coffee, just let me know. Refills are half-off.”

  Accustomed as I was to tiny, poor, proletarian meals in the last forty years of my existence in Oruro, I had indigestion before even tasting the food in front of me. Third World poverty had weakened my stomach. Any sort of excess brought sharp pain to my intestines, opening up a Pandora’s box of gases accompanied by aquatic noises, as if a tiny diver were scouring the insides of my guts. I attacked the feast prudently, waiting for a sharp remark from my abdomen at any moment, but as I ingested the food, a certain optimism and juvenile excitement came over me. The man who seemed to be the owner passed between the tables, smiling and joking. Upon arriving at mine, he looked at me as if I were a well-dressed aborigine who had never had a breakfast like this, even in my wildest dreams.

  “It was a good idea to open a restaurant in the neighborhood,” I said.

  “The Jewish kids are fascinated with our culture. They’re crazy about colorful blankets, ponchos, quenas . . .”

  “They’re far from home.”

  “Jews are travelers. Sometimes they’re forced to travel without being consulted,” he said derisively, “like in the last World War.”

  “These people here look different than the Jews of the last World War.”

  “They’re healthy and they have a different mentality. Besides, they don’t let themselves get abused anymore.”

  “I wish we were that way! Everybody abuses us.”

  The man smiled. I was on shaky ground.

  I had a tough time finishing off that Bunyanesque breakfast. I felt like a recently freed inmate who’d been invited to a hundred-dollar banquet. I lit a cigarette and observed the scattered Jewish tourists. A bus waited outside to take them to Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the world. Our national consolation is possessing the highest everything, whether it’s the world’s highest stadium, highest velodrome, or highest anything else. It’s compensation for our frustrations.

  A Jew with a face like Jesus who was wearing an orange turtleneck sweater bid farewell to everyone in the restaurant with a celestial glance. Walking hand in hand with him was a freckle-faced female compatriot of mine as tall as his shoulder, who carried in her other hand a book by Borges. The Jewish youngsters didn’t leave a crumb on their plates. The restaurant emptied.

  The owner shouted, “Twenty-five breakfasts! Everything’s paid.”

  The owner’s wife, who worked the cash register, stuck her head out through the window facing the kitchen. “Did they leave?” she asked.

  “They’ve cleared out,” one of the waiters assured her.

  The dawn cold gave way to a mild start to the morning. Through the restaurant windows, the sun now showed a languid and earthcolored city. There was hardly any clattering on Santa Cruz Street, but half-breed women, wrapped in blankets and traditional Andean flowing skirts, were setting up their stands and canopies to sell absurd alcoholic concoctions that poison the miserable plebes of La Paz’s upper barrios on a daily basis.

  Moments later, the young dark-haired woman I had seen the previous night in the Hotel California entered the café. I recognized her slanted eyes and indolent demeanor, typical of women from Bolivia’s eastern lowlands. She walked spiritlessly, her fat rump swaying from side to side, and yet her robust legs gracefully supported her stunning, hefty body. Her breasts, pointing directly at me, seemed to ask to be caressed fervently. Without thinking twice I walked over to her table and uttered, with the voice of someone who’d been out all night, “Can I sit down?”

  “Of course.”

  She yawned unabashedly and asked me for a cigarette. After inhaling an impressive quantity of smoke, she shot it out through her nose like a raging dragon.

  “Did you just get up?” she asked.

  “Who could sleep through those bells?”

  She still had on makeup from the night before. Bluish shadows surrounded her eyelids, her cheeks were illuminated with blush, her eyebrows were accentuated, and her eyelashes sticky-looking. Her lips, fleshy like an Asian woman’s, rounded out her veneer of a nocturnal zombie.

  “I just got off work. I still smell like perfume.” She smiled tiredly.

  The whiteness of her immaculate teeth contrasted with her cinnamon skin that smelled of the countryside. She removed her leather jacket and put it over her chair. She clearly wanted to show me her bust, even if it meant ripping her cheap, low-cut blouse. The waiter reappeared and served her coffee as black as tar.

  “You know, today’s a big day for me. I’m going to the American consulate to apply for a tourist visa.”

  “You’re going on vacation?”

  “My son lives in Florida. He sent me a ticket three months ago.”

  “What does your son do up there?”

  “A little bit of everything, I think. He studies Business Administration in his free time.”

  After each sip of coffee, she would look up and instinctively open her mouth halfway. There was an intention behind every one of her gestures. She wasn’t my type. I’d never liked strong women. My ex-wife was skinny, so skinny that sometimes when I made love to her, I woul
d lose her. I used to love to embrace her and leave her breathless, dominating her with my body, feeling her defenseless, incapable of looking straight at me. I remembered her silhouette: always fragile, always quivering from anxiety or from cold, and delineated by the oppressive sun of the Andean plateau. Antonia was thin and trod lightly over that godforsaken land. Her spirit was a reflection of her body: hesitant, intimidated, until one fine day she decided to fly away and leave me grounded, just like that. I heard later that she’d found her soul mate. It’s always the same old story.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Blanca.”

  Blanca, in contrast, was a luxurious product of the Amazonian savannah. She transmitted that sensual magic of brown-skinned women from Bolivia’s lowlands.

  “You want to stay in the U.S.A. for good,” she suggested, “or am I wrong?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Then why are you so nervous?”

  “I didn’t sleep at all. If I don’t get a good night’s sleep, I’m a mess the next day.”

  “You’re all dressed up,” she pointed out, laughing, “but your long hair and beard don’t go with your outfit.”

  “I’m going to fix that right now. My godfather’s a barber.”

  “I don’t understand why people dream of going to America, since you get screwed over there just the same when you don’t have money. A friend of mine just came back from New York; she’d been working on an assembly line in a plastic toy factory. She aged at least ten years. She says in that country everybody’s afraid and goes around alone and nobody hangs out with anybody else. Now she’s back working in a cabaret here on El Prado, so she’s okay again.”

  She observed me sardonically, sipping coffee from a little spoon.