American Visa Read online

  “I don’t have anything to do here,” I said. “If I were a woman I’d go out and dance, but I was born the wrong sex.”

  Her gaze, still shrouded in the previous night’s squalor, seemed to caress me. “Maybe it’s because of your age. How old are you?”

  “Pushing forty.”

  “Just like my father, but he spends his life passed out in a hammock and barely moves. His liver is as flat as a pancake. What with all that aguardiente he drinks, he’s not much use anymore. I bust my ass and then some to send my family a few pesos each month.”

  “Everyone does what they can with what God gave them.”

  “I come here for breakfast every day,” she said. “At least here you know what you’re eating.”

  “Just now there were a bunch of Jews in here.”

  “I thought they were German or English.” With her elbows propped up on the edge of the table, Blanca rested her chin on her clasped hands. Her fatigue made her look even sexier.

  “And you, where do you work?”

  “At a cantina in Villa Fátima.”

  “Are you any good?”

  “Ha! The men around here like women from the tropics. For them it’s like taking a hot shower.” Changing the subject, she teased, “They sent you to the second patio.”

  “There’re no secrets in that damned hotel of ours,” I said.

  She reached out and caressed the back of my hand with her thumb, fat like a paunchy worm. “Everyone knows everybody else’s business. The manager sleeps with the girls who don’t pay on time. He tells them everything, like a nosy old maid. Be careful with that one; he’s white, but he has a black soul. Redheads are wicked like snakes. Luckily, I’ve never been short of money. That’s why he despises me.”

  She knocked lightly on the wooden table and called for the waiter. The guy strutted toward us like a runway model.

  “Another coffee?” he asked.

  “With a drop of milk,” Blanca requested.

  “How can you sleep after drinking so much coffee?”

  She shrugged and pressed a cigarette between her lips. “I’m used to it. I hardly feel the pillow. I sleep like a rock. Not even the bell from that lunatic at the church manages to wake me. I get up at 2:00 and eat lunch here, then go back for an afternoon nap till 6:00. If I didn’t stick to that schedule, I’d get burnt out in a week. Where I work, we all have to drink a lot. Most of the clients go there to get wasted.”

  She smiled despondently. The waiter left a second cup of coffee with a drop of milk.

  “You look anxious. Is that visa important?”

  “Time’s running out for me. If I don’t travel now, I never will.”

  Blanca picked up her glass and fixed her gaze on an invisible point behind me. She looked as aloof as a daydreaming adolescent.

  “You’ve never wanted to travel?”

  “What would I do in another country? I’d rather try to get by here.”

  “You’re as fatalistic as the Arabs.”

  “You know what I really want? To save a few pesos and set up a grocery store in Riberalta, where I was born. If I can, I’ll get married, and if not, I’ll go it alone. Either way, I’ll be okay. I would like to have a boy, though. I already have a little girl who lives with my parents.”

  She put out her cigarette and then stroked her muscular hustler’s arms delicately as they took in the sun. “And if they deny you the visa?”

  “Don’t talk like that. You’ll jinx it.”

  She left ten pesos on the table and said, “I’ll be in the hotel. If they give you the visa, we’ll go out for some beers.”

  Chapter 3

  Outside, the wind was whipping up tiny clouds of dust on the edges of the sidewalks. It tugged powerfully on the tents set up by the street vendors. In a seemingly endless line, half-breed women were preparing to spend the day selling every sort of trinket imaginable and struggling to keep their butts warm on the frosty asphalt. I bought a wooden charm from a scraggly old lady. She told me it was from Chiquitanía, and that it would bring me good luck. It was a miniature bull made of palm wood, but it had only three legs and one horn.

  “A demon ate one of the legs and a horn when the bull conquered it,” she said proudly.

  I started down Santa Cruz Street. It was one of those mornings that make you forget that life is hard and then you just die. When I arrived at Plaza San Francisco, a fortune-teller approached me and waved a hand of playing cards right in front of my nose.

  “Take one. These Tarot cards don’t lie. One peso to try your luck,” he said.

  It didn’t seem prudent to size up my luck after buying a charm, so I continued straight ahead. I felt sure I’d be able to find my way from Plaza San Francisco to my godfather Ambrosio’s barbershop, which I hadn’t seen in years. My haircut was boxlike. If the American consul were to see my long hair, the conversation would be over before it had even started. A visitor’s external appearance matters a lot to those yuppie gringos. I’d seen it a hundred times on television. The ones who belong to “the establishment” are immaculately dressed and the rest look third-rate.

  I strolled through El Prado. It had been ten years since I was last in La Paz. The city had grown enormously, vertically more than anything. The newly erected skyscrapers downtown didn’t compare to those of Dallas or Houston, but they impressed migrants from rural provinces who let themselves get duped by mirages. As in nearly all Latin American capitals, in La Paz “progress” is enshrined in framed cement blocks that give a false sense of prosperity. It’s when you start snooping around the place that you smell the misery and underdevelopment.

  I vaguely remembered that my godfather’s business was in San Pedro. I asked the first traffic cop I spotted on Riobamba Street for directions. With his nearly unintelligible mumbo jumbo, the officer led me to understand that I should go up to Plaza Sucre and ask someone there, which I did. Once in the plaza, I approached a shoeshine boy. With the use of universal hand signals, he showed me the way to go. It didn’t take me much longer to find it. The Oruro Feeling hair salon was built into the first floor of an old tenement. It faced the street and received the morning sun head-on. I pushed open the Wild West–style swinging door and found myself inside a tidy, traditional waiting room.

  Three poor-man’s barbers, each wearing a white work coat, received me with Chaplinesque bows. One of them beckoned to me and said, “Over here, señor.”

  I recognized my godfather; he was the oldest and thinnest one. He came close and I thought he was going to embrace me. Instead, he hurriedly removed my jacket and, without losing for a moment his tip-seeking smile, asked, “Hair and beard?”

  I nodded. He led me by the arm to a majestic chair reminiscent of the Al Capone era. His cold hands brushed my head with a certain delicacy. He didn’t recognize me.

  “It’s been at least three months since you last went to the barber,” he commented.

  “Sometimes I cut it myself,” I said.

  “No wonder. I bet they sold you one of those plastic gadgets with a shaving blade.”

  “Can you tell?”

  “You look like one of those Amazon Indians the missionaries try to convert by force.”

  My godfather settled me in as if he were about to execute me in an electric chair. He studied my head from every angle and concluded: “We’ll make you look like new.” Before I could open my mouth, he lifted me out of the armchair and dragged me over to a seat beside an enormous tub. They had an electric device that released hot water when the faucet was turned on. I suffered two rounds of shampoo with boiling water. Once back in the armchair, my godfather grabbed an enormous comb and parted my hair in two. As he was about to cover me with a white sheet, I asked him, “Aren’t you Don Ambrosio Aguilera?”

  That beard-shaver seemed to think I was some loan shark in disguise. He didn’t dare answer yes or no. He smiled with the innocence of Saint Francis of Assisi.

  “I’m your godson, Mario Alvarez,” I explained. His expression
didn’t change; the old man pretended not to hear. “The son of your friend Jacinto Alvarez, from Uyuni.”

  He spun the seat around and I noticed that his breath smelled of beer. He looked at me through a gigantic imaginary microscope. “It can’t be; you look much older.”

  “I just turned forty. My father would have been sixty-five. He was born in February and you were born in June.”

  He pressed his palms together and gave me a moist, foaming kiss on my forehead. “I met you when you let out your first cry. Where have you been?”

  “Oruro.”

  “You don’t look so bad.”

  “Over there, it’s so cold your body gets preserved like a mummy. The last time you saw me was back at the Oruro carnival in ’82. You had a heart attack while dancing the kullawada. You couldn’t believe it was happening. You looked around at your friends and laughed incredulously.”

  “You’ve got quite a memory. Even I had forgotten that heart attack. You look a little bit like your father. Your nose is exactly the same. How many years ago did he die?”

  “Six—he died in ’87.”

  “Hmm . . . looking at you, I see him too, the same expression of pent-up anger. Are you married?”

  “She went to Argentina to try to find herself.”

  He opened his mouth like a fish out of water, then arched his eyebrows. “And she found herself?”

  “She found an Argentine guy who fixed the problem for her.”

  The two other barbers found it just as funny as my godfather did.

  “She’s still in Argentina, in Mendoza. The guy opened up a restaurant on the highway to Chile.”

  They all laughed in unison. Don Ambrosio let out a guffaw that ended in a fit of violent coughing. He doubled over as if someone had dealt him a crushing blow to the stomach. He stomped on the floor several times, kicking up clouds of dust. One of his helpers, a fat man with a bloated belly, slapped his back several times. The old man flung the door open and launched a gob of spit onto the street without bothering to check if anybody was passing by.

  “What do you do?” he asked, still visibly entertained.

  “Everything and nothing in particular. I’m a teacher, but what I really did back in Oruro was sell contraband from Chile.”

  “We’ve become Chile’s Persian market.” He didn’t stop looking at me, as if he had before him one of those abstract paintings that, you can’t tell for sure, might be turned upside down.

  “Are you going to leave me like this with wet hair? I’ll catch a cold.”

  He started to cut my hair with a razor. His hand wasn’t very steady. Each time he passed close to one of my ears, a chill ran down my spine.

  “Before he died, my father told me that if I ever needed anything, I should come to see you,” I said.

  Don Ambrosio turned slightly pale and held his breath. He was certain that he was going to be hit up for money.

  “I need a haircut just like the one in the photo.” I pointed to my chosen model in the magazine.

  “This guy has wavy hair, but yours is straight like an Indian’s,” Don Ambrosio said.

  “So what?”

  “You don’t have the head for that haircut,” one of the barbers remarked. “That guy’s head is square-shaped and yours is like a rugby ball.”

  “Besides, godson,” Don Ambrosio said, “this guy looks like a fruit. Why would you want to look like him?”

  “I have to go to the American consulate to apply for a visa.”

  “Ahhh!” all three exclaimed at once.

  “I’d go for a crew cut,” the pot-bellied man suggested, “with the part down the middle, but not like a tango dancer’s—disguised, without making it obvious.”

  “I like the haircut in the picture,” I stressed.

  “If you want it, there’s no fighting it,” my godfather said. “I’ll leave you looking just like him. Of course, this guy in the picture is twenty years younger than you and he’s tanned like a swimsuit model, while you, godson, look like you’ve just spent the night on the train from Chile.”

  “The beard too,” I said seriously, “but not the moustache.”

  “Now I see what’s going on with you,” Don Ambrosio said. “Those damned gringos have got you scared.”

  “It’s not easy to get a visa. You have to go there looking sharp,” I declared.

  “Elegant suit, shiny hair,” chimed in one of the other barbers, who looked slightly bigger than a dwarf.

  My godfather continued with the razor, now and then comparing my head with the picture and turning it from side to side.

  “What did you teach?”

  “English.”

  “The teachers here are just as screwed as the miners.”

  “In a serious country, it’s an honor to be a teacher.”

  “Honor doesn’t mean anything here anymore. What matters is money. It doesn’t matter if you earn it selling cocaine or renting out your rear end. The issue is getting a piece of the pie.”

  “This was once a country of decent people.”

  “The new money isn’t clean, that’s for sure. Is that why you’re going?”

  “I’m leaving because I’m washed up and I want to see my son and raise him so that he doesn’t end up looking like me.”

  “Your father, he was a great man,” Don Ambrosio said. “A poor but impeccable man. He didn’t owe a cent to anybody and never refused to do a favor. You don’t find people like that around here anymore.”

  I was starting to look more and more like Humphrey Bogart from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Don Ambrosio was removing locks of my hair furiously, like a sheep shearer.

  “My father used to say you were the best basketball coach that Bolivian Railway ever had,” I said.

  Don Ambrosio stopped cutting my hair. He smiled, obviously pleased. “Those were good times. Oruro was once a promising city: theater, good cafés, excellent brothels, and Slavs everywhere. The brothels were lounges with pianos, and the hookers used to wear long dresses. The money flowed back then. British pounds!”

  The haircut I saw taking shape didn’t bear the least resemblance to the one in the Spanish magazine. He gave me the same haircut all the half-breeds usually get, with a tacky part down the middle. It was actually more of a path than a part. The sides of my poor head resembled coca crops planted on a hillside.

  “After the shave, you’ll look like that Argentine singer Carlos Gardel,” Don Ambrosio said.

  The shave felt like Turkish torture, not so much for my godfather’s trembling hand, as for how dull the blade was. With each stroke, I felt my skin peel. All the scraping had left my chin the color of a carrot.

  Even so, the face I saw in the mirror after that hazardous haircut looked ten years younger.

  “How do you like it, godson? The visa’s in the bag. Scent!” he shouted. “The kind we spray on the tourists.”

  The short, fat helper shot me with a squirt of German cologne made between the first and second World Wars. I smelled like a cheap whore from a half-block away.

  “How much do I owe you?”

  “Not a cent. It was a pleasure. I did it in memory of your holy father.”

  “Sensational!” declared the pot-bellied man, “When the boss puts his mind to it, no hand in the neighborhood is better.”

  “You’re missing something,” Don Ambrosio said. “Something . . . something . . . The gringos don’t like handsome Latin men, they think they’re going to screw all the blond women. They want them drowsy-looking. I’ve got the solution.”

  He pushed open the front door again and spat without looking for the second time.

  “The eyeglasses,” he said. “With these, it’s a done deal, godson.”

  He opened the drawer of one of the sideboards and proudly displayed a pair of round lenses with metal rims that exuded somnolence. He turned the armchair around and put them on me. I looked like a mountain-sick James Joyce.

  “These glasses, my dear godson, have quite a history. I
got them from a German man who used to come to me for his haircuts in the ’50s. Back then, I rented a place on Comercio Street. The owner, a real bitch, kicked me out so she could open up a shoe store. This German guy was a wreck when he escaped from his country. Being a Nazi and all, the authorities wanted to jail him. He came over here with a few pieces of jewelry that he’d undoubtedly robbed from some Jews and set up a cake shop. He told me that in Berlin he’d worked in theater and he’d sometimes worn these glasses for fun. They’re not prescription, just plain old glass. They go with your hair; they give you a serious look. What profession did you put down in your passport?”

  “Businessman.”

  “Not bad. If you had put down teacher, they would send you home right away. The gringos know what our poor educators earn.”

  “I’ve got everything I need.”

  “They pay attention to everything, and it’s even worse now, what with the cocaine and all. They imagine that every one of us is carrying at least a hundred grams.” He looked at me, grinning. “Talk to them in English,” he advised. “That flatters them.”

  “I know the bit I’m going to tell them by heart.”

  “Before you leave, stop by if you need anything else; I’m not talking about money, because I’m broke. Cutting hair doesn’t pay what it used to. Those damned peasants have moved here from their villages and set up hundreds of barber shops.”

  He walked me over to a special mirror that looked like something straight out of a royal court. It was an almost magical mirror, one that retouched images. I looked more like a pharmaceutical salesman than I did Carlos Gardel.

  “Good luck,” he said. “You want a beer?”

  “Better not. If I start with one, I won’t stop until two dozen.”

  “What do you plan to do in North America?”

  “Anything.”

  “My little boy, Raúl, is in Chicago. He knows a lot of people. Earns eight dollars an hour selling telephone books.”

  “A fortune!” I exclaimed.

  “You’ve gotta have experience to work there.”

  I looked at my godfather for the last time. He resembled a withered scarecrow: bony, yellow, with a bitter face and the unmistakable veneer of a hardened drinker. I shook his hand, left the shop, and hailed a taxi at Plaza Sucre. The driver was already taking a few passengers to the Finance Ministry and said he would leave me close to the consulate at the corner of Ayacucho and Potosí.