American Visa (12 page)

“How arre you doink?” the interviewer asked.

“Bad, really bad. Very cold. Nothing to eat.”

“You spent ze whole night outside?”

The miner assented with a slight head nod.

“Can you hang in zere for anozer night?”

“We'll die here if the government doesn't give in.”

“Vat do you vant?”

“To get our jobs back. They threw us out of the mines like dirty laundry after we spent twenty years frying our lungs to make the bourgeoisie richer.” The miner was communicating in proper Spanish and seemed to be in good shape in spite of the cold, the wind, and the rain the previous night.

“Vat is your name?” the German lady asked.

“Benedicto Condori. I'm from Huanuni.”

“Ven vas ze last time you ate?”

“A bowl of soup three days ago.”

“How mutsh ver you making ven zey laid you off?”

“One hundred fifty pesos a month.”

The German lady turned to face the camera and explained incredulously that that sum didn't even add up to two hundred German marks. The conversation came to a close and the camera crew ran off to look for more suffering miners. Another crucified guy was dramatically perched all alone on the edge of the university building's second-floor balcony. He was strung up loosely about two steps away from the abyss. The tin cans covering his body shook dangerously with the blowing wind. The guy didn't have a beard, but he did have a full head of hair that was tangled in the shredded wooly ropes lashing him to a flagpole. I figured the guy could tip over at any moment and, like a metal bird, come crashing down twenty yards below. Maybe that's just what the crowd was hoping for—a tragedy to put an end to their boredom.

A few minutes later, the terrace had become devoid of police and rock throwers and metamorphosed into a kind of outdoor fair. The miners elicited sentiments of pity and respect from most of the people, and in a few cases astonishment and mocking smiles. Classical music that would have been the delight of Bela Lugosi or Boris Karloff was blaring from the speakers on the fifth floor, serving as a kind of backdrop to that Pasolinian stage.

I walked along the railing to see if I knew any of the miners. After all, I was from mining country and I used to visit the great state mines four or five times a year. I soon noticed a guy named Justo Rojas, a deep miner who had been in the army with me. We were stationed together in an inhospitable barrack on the dry, frozen Andean plateau near the Chilean border at 16,000 feet elevation. Justo was graying and his bronze face had wrinkled, but otherwise he looked exactly the same. He recognized me as I got closer.

Chapped by the cold, his skin had acquired a violent tone. He was covered by part of a gasoline barrel that he had probably cut out himself and a few newspapers. A bowl-shaped sombrero crowned his head. Twenty years earlier he had been a sad, lonely guy. Maybe we had become friends because I honored his silence. I was the one who dragged him out to his first brothel, and I was the one who got him into his first fight in boot camp with a sadistic and racist sergeant who gave him an awful beating. A good Indian is a quiet Indian, and Justo started to talk too much. He'd been a Communist since he was a kid because of his father, a miner from Potosí who read Pablo Neruda and could handle dynamite cartridges like they were frisbees. He first went to the mines to work at age twenty and returned every single day for the next twenty years. He studied the classical Marxists, and as far as I knew he never softened up like Gorbachev. Stern and proud, he was never an intellectual type or a yakking leader. He was always close to the grassroots, his feet firmly planted. I hadn't seen him in ten years. His black eyes brightened when he saw me.

“Hi, Justo.”

“Hi.”

“I thought I might run into someone here from the old guard.”

Lost in a chasm of disquietude, his little eyes were ringed by heavy bags. He never could grow a beard. He was smooth-faced like most Indians, but he did have that long Amazonian tribal chief's hair running halfway down his back. His coca-chewer's breath elicited memories that I had long ago forgotten.

“I could get you some
pisco
,” I said.

“Just water, friend. This is no party.”

“I thought you were in Oruro.”

“The mine is my destiny. I'm going to die there.”

“A tough guy like you could stand this crucifying thing for a week, even if they nailed you to the fence.”

“You're looking good,” he said.

“I'm rotting on the inside.”

“We're all rotting in this country. Only the dead are saved.”

The onlookers milled around compassionately. One miner suggested it was about time he got taken to a hospital for rehydration, and a woman with a middle-class look to her bent over and gave him a piece of bread to chew on.

“If you want, I could bring the German TV crew over here,” I said. “You'd be on display for all of Europe.”

“I don't speak German,” Justo said. A broad-backed woman wrapped in an alpaca poncho forced her way through the crowd. “She's my wife.”

“Why don't you all keep moving? There are others worse off than my husband,” the woman said. She was a housewife from Huanuni, nothing more and nothing less. Accustomed to suffering, resignation, and death. She looked me over sardonically.

“This is Alvarez, my buddy from the army,” Justo murmured.

The lady sighed and then covered Justo's neck with a garment that looked like a scarf. “He told me about you,” she said. “Would you crucify yourself?”

“Not for a miner's salary.”

She smiled. “He catches colds that are like pneumonia. He's got bronchitis, so if he has another night like the last, it'll be over for him.”

“Here's something for old time's sake.” I handed the woman ten pesos, and she put them in one of Justo's swollen hands.

“It'd be good if one of us died on the cross,” he said. “The political impact would be huge.”

“There's no cross here. You're tied to a fence,” I said.

“All you need is a little imagination,” Justo replied.

A paramedic pushed me aside. He bent over to take Justo's blood pressure. “It's time for this one to go to the hospital,” he announced after listening to his chest.

Justo's wife started to pray quietly. My friend stopped paying attention to me. I walked away toward El Prado, leaving all the hubbub behind.

The spectacle of the crucified miners left me sad and stimulated my appetite. I wandered the streets around El Prado until I found a dive in the basement of an old house that was about to be bulldozed. The windows on the first floor and on the upper floors had been boarded over. A couple of day laborers were busy nailing a poster in the doorway that announced the construction of a shopping center. The bar was the only sign of life in that decrepit adobe structure. I had hardly put a foot down in the place when a European-looking guy invited me to sit at his table. It was the owner, a Balkan, last name Landberg. He recommended the house specialty—suckling pig with a side of potatoes and salad, all for five pesos. A beer was the solution to help me digest the meat. After jotting down my order on a scrap of paper and handing it to a waitress, Landberg offered me his life story as an appetizer. He said that he was born in Riga, Estonia and had lived in Bolivia since the '50s. He confessed to me that he had helped the Germans during the Second World War because he was ethnically German and hated the Russians and the Poles. At first, while the Germans still had the upper hand, they had promised him a whole lot of land in the Ukraine after the war was over. In a shockingly sadistic manner, he told me about how he had dynamited a train full of Russians just as it was crossing over a bridge.

“A lot of people died,” he explained seriously. “That's why the Germans awarded me a medal.” He added that he made it to the outskirts of Moscow just as the rains started and got trapped in the mud, cold, and snow. He paused as the waitress set down a pitcher of beer. Later, they chased him all the way back to Germany, where he began to sense they would lose the war. He fled to Italy and then traveled to Argentina in the hold of a ship. The waitress put a piece of roast pig exuding a pleasant aroma right in front of my nose. Landberg waited for me to take a bite and then claimed it was impossible to eat pork that good, that cheap anywhere else.

“It won't give you trichinosis,” he reassured me. “It's pork from Stege, nothing like what the half-breed girls here raise in the garbage dumps.” After a moment, he continued: “I never got used to life in Argentina because the men there yell like Italians. So I decided to try my luck and got on a train to the Andean plateau. I had nothing to lose. I got married twenty days after arriving in La Paz. I got married three times and my third wife taught me how to cook. I landed a job in the Interior Ministry; this was back when the MNR was calling the shots. They needed guys with my kind of experience.”

His story about the bridge reminded me of the one that Gary Cooper blew up in that movie about the Spanish Civil War,
For Whom
the Bell Tolls.

“Fucking Reds,” he muttered.

“Is she your third wife?” I asked, nodding in the direction of the young woman working the cash register.

“No, that's Lola. She's just a friend who helps out around here.”

“So they're going to knock this place down?”

“Not until they pay me ten thousand dollars to leave. If they hand over the ten grand, I'm gone the next day. If not, they can bulldoze this place over my fucking dead body.”

“Don't you pay rent here?”

“Not a cent.”

The pig went down like a piece of lead, and my conversation with Landberg didn't help any. Luckily for me, the Balkan gave me an after-dinner drink. It turned out that the guy had salami syndrome: First he tried to sell me an old car, then a television set, next a plot of land in Alto Beni, and finally a Hungarian salami.

I felt a little dazed and had a stomachache when I left the place. I headed over to the restaurant at Club de La Paz and gulped down three cups of coffee. The coffee reminded me of the American visa, and the America visa made me think about how pathetic my situation was at that moment. My other problem: I was nearly flat broke. I had fifteen pesos, fifty dollars, and ten grams of gold that, for all the good wishes of my dead old man, weren't multiplying for a damn. The Brazilians say, “If there's no solution, there's no problem.” Aren't they smart! In Bolivia it's like we're all made of stone and whatever sticks to the stone, in time, turns into stone. I had a problem that was getting bigger and bigger with the passing hours, kind of like a giant snowball. Although I knew I didn't have any answers and that I was probably out of luck, a tiny light stubbornly burned on inside of me. Eight hundred dollars was the same as eight thousand or even eight million dollars to me. I thought about my godfather, and then about Blanca. My godfather was miserly and distrustful. Maybe Blanca could give me eight hundred dollars, bit by bit, under the condition that I protect and accompany her. As for my offspring, he wasn't giving any signs of life. That kid never did have his head on straight. Like father, like son.

I didn't feel like going back to the hotel or embarking on another drunken binge. My hangover was exacerbating my desperation. The best I could do was take a walk downtown to people-watch, window-shop, hike up streets, and then walk back down them again. I ended up sitting on a bench in the Plaza Murillo, staring at some pigeons munching on corn, and at congressmen and senators posing for the TV cameras. With their elegant attire, they looked happy and arrogant. A few were in full suits and the rest were wearing sporty dress shirts, unbuttoned at the top as was fashionable among the moderate leftwingers. I was lucky enough to catch a glimpse of a foreign ambas- sador climbing out of a limousine and entering the palace to meet with the president. He was wearing a morning coat. The palace guards paid their respects as the regiment's band started up with a tune that sounded something like a polka. A half-hour later, a group of peasants marched on the palace to defend their right to grow the millenarian and beneficent coca leaf, and not the damned coffee the gringos and their slaves in Bolivia's parliament imposed on them. They paraded in front of the palace shouting yays and nays, but nobody paid them any mind, not even the palace guards, who stood there straight as toy soldiers. An old pensioner, whose exact age was difficult to judge, started yakking at me about his sleepless nights in a public nursing home.

That was when I decided to head out. I left the scene with no set destination in mind.

Chapter 6

I
started down C
o
l
ó
n,
my hand braced against the wall so as to avoid falling flat on my backside. I walked all the way down to City Hall, took a seat on a dilapidated wooden bench, and asked a heavyset shoeshine boy to clean my boots. His face was swollen from too much boozing. He was talking up the new forward playing for Bolívar to another shoeshiner, who, being a fan of their rival, El Tigre, wasn't having any of it.