American Visa (27 page)

“When is the burial?”

“Tomorrow morning at 11 o'clock. The procession leaves from the plaza. The president and part of his cabinet will be there.”

“All the crooked politics around the murder are confusing me. Don't you think the police are playing both sides, publicly accepting the story about the heart attack as a compromise while they go after the murderer?”

“Who knows? Maybe.”

“Arminda could be in on it with the guys who killed him,” I said.

“If they go out looking for the murderer or murderers, it'll be on their own dime and it'll be criminal against criminal.”

She stopped at the corner of Comercio Street and looked at me with those eyes I would never forget. I kissed her on the lips, quickly and somewhat timidly. The contact with her skin made my head spin like an undertow. She opened up her purse, looked for a card, and then handed it to me.

“Ciao . . . keep in touch.”

“Ciao . . .”

I couldn't find Blanca in the hotel. I knocked on her door several times but no answer. I descended to the lobby—her key was in her box. Just to make sure, I went looking for her in the room where the Tropicana hostesses lived. The two of them were drinking homemade tea with rice bread. Patricia told me that Blanca had gone to meet a client from Santa Ana, a cattle man who called her every time he visited La Paz. The guy was crazy about Blanca; he had even proposed to her after divorcing his wife, a woman from Pando whom he detested.

“You're the favorite,” Patricia said. “Blanca doesn't like really old guys. This one's around seventy.”

“What time will I be able to see her?” I asked.

“Who knows. Sometimes he has her for as long as two days.”

Fresia appeared, covered in a skimpy bathrobe.

“You owe me ten dollars,” she said.

“Did Don Antonio get it done?”

“Not really. Afterwards, he told me that with the forty dollars we could go out for some pork rind. The old man's got some nerve. I didn't accept. He groped my legs for about ten minutes and then fell asleep.”

I handed her the ten dollars. “If Blanca shows up, please remind her that we have a date.”

“If she finishes with the cattle man, she might go up to Villa Fátima later.”

I didn't feel like talking to anybody. I was nervous and close to losing my cool. I didn't know what to think about the way the coppers were acting. If Arminda had taken all the money, she must have told them that the killer ran off with everything. The police would get on that guy's trail—that is, on my trail—secretly detain him, and then finish him off. They were probably looking for a villain with a long record of stealing gold, jewels, and dollars, a professional assailant or a hood who, upon being caught red-handed, had turned into a murderer. The underworld was familiar territory to them; they bankrolled snitches and informants who had their ears to the ground. If that were the case, then I was safe. All the authorities had on me in their files was a drunken mêlée in Oruro and the time I ran into a motorcycle while driving my Yugoslavian boss's car; not a single major offense. Yujra was the wild card. If the ex-boxer put two and two together, I would be up a creek.

It wasn't hard to get the picture: My hide wasn't worth much. On the other hand, maybe Arminda had cut a deal and split the booty with the police. That would be better because then they wouldn't go looking for anybody. Regardless, it was best to keep my guard up. I needed twenty-four hours—if I was lucky enough to get the visa to fly north.

I left the hotel and entered a café on Evaristo Valle. I called Ballón to ask about the visa. He answered the phone himself. He calmed me down by telling me that my passport was already at the consulate. The visa was almost a sure thing. I told him to book me a seat on Lloyd Bolivian Airline's red-eye flight the following night.

“That'll be tough,” he replied. “If you don't put down a few pesos, you won't even get a seat in a week.”

“How much?”

“At least a hundred dollars. They're always upping the price.”

“It's impossible to live in a country like this,” I protested.

Ballón laughed. He said he would advance me the hundred dollars and charge me when he returned the passport. I told him that was fine.

I had dinner at a Chinese restaurant on Juan de la Riva. It was six pesos for the special and a beer. I asked them to turn on the TV. At 8 o'clock the Channel 2 news came on. It was more than fifteen minutes before they showed a clip of the wake at the Senate. The anchor interviewed Don Gustavo's wife, who explained that her husband worked too hard and that the “stress” had killed him.

“He dedicated his life to the community,” she said. “He is watching us from heaven as we mourn him. That is his greatest reward.”

He was probably watching me too, his killer, and thinking how much of an idiot I had been not to make off with the entire loot. So, the heart attack story was the official one. I ate calmly. The beer loosened me up somehow; it whetted my appetite for more beer. I paid, and after roaming about for fifteen minutes or so, ruminating and dillydallying, I came across El Putuncu, a watering hole on Potosí Street. Fifty or so drunkards were making a ruckus, imbibing beer and playing dice games. They seated me at a table next to a couple of quiet boozers, the kind that blurt out something after every drink. They were so tanked that when they turned their heads, they remained still like a couple of antique dolls and then struggled to bring them back to their original positions. Three-quarters of the way through a pint of beer, it occurred to me to ask them if the place was always so rowdy.

“It gets worse later,” one of the guys commented. He kept his mouth shut for a whole half-hour, then said out loud, “How much money must these owners make?”

His companion fell asleep sitting up. Periodically, he shot suffocating blasts of his buffalo breath our way.

The clock struck 8 and I had to exchange some dollars to pay the tab. The waiter converted the money and took a cut for himself. I decided to call the hotel and ask if Blanca had arrived. The manager responded in jest: “Blanca who?”

I stumbled through Pérez Velasco. On the cement terrace, a policeman was busy emptying the pockets of the shoeshiners. Boys between the ages of ten and twelve years, high on paint thinner, were trying to hide the residue of various toxins in little boxes, hats, and shoes. Three gay vagrants, dressed in rags, huddled together on a bench and watched the rascals play cat-and-mouse with the cop. Onlookers made fun of the solitary policeman, who ultimately gave up and left. Around twenty shoeshiners emerged from the La Paz night and began to inhale paint thinner in a sort of group dance.

On the steps that link Comercio and Ingavi Streets, a scruffy-looking, completely intoxicated rabble-rouser delivered an impassioned speech to the masses. Nobody understood a damned thing.

The man would laugh, shout, and, from time to time, point to his own behind. Through his shredded pants you could make out a pair of skinny thighs, black with filth. The unavoidable Christians wasted no time pulling together a chorus of paid spectators and a country bumpkin guitarist who started singing a ballad in praise of Christ. The La Paz night felt like a labyrinth around there. Thousands of the city's inhabitants ambled from place to place for no particular reason.

I escaped the crowd and took a taxi to Villa Fátima. The red light-bulbs showed me the way to the brothels. In the house where Blanca worked, the oglers were congregating. The madam, escorted by the Peruvian gorilla, was surveying the action with a crabby face. I asked her about Blanca.

“She should have been here already,” the woman answered. “Today's the busiest day of the week.”

The Peruvian stuck out his chin and added, “If she's not here by now, then she's not coming.” I didn't trust that brute's judgment, so I waited a little while longer.

At 9 o'clock, El Faro was a market for sex slaves in constant motion; on Fridays, the whores of Villa Fátima worked from 8 at night until the break of dawn. Twenty pesos at a time, they filled their pockets with the wages of sin at the expense of dozens of lowlifes who had climbed the city in search of erotic detoxification. Unfortunately, the sessions lasted at most ten minutes. For the first time in the history of Bolivia, the Indians had access to white pussy.

A few years earlier, a white hooker wouldn't have slept with a peasant for all the gold in the world. But now, the fanciest clients were the Indians whose payments of ten to twenty pesos allowed them to earn their daily bread. The hookers had gotten used to these interracial exchanges, dispatching their clients with extraordinary speed.

Bored of waiting, I went back downtown. If Blanca had passed up the busiest night of the week, it was because she was walking arm in arm with that cattle man. I would have liked to see her, invite her out to an expensive restaurant, take her dancing, and seriously propose to her that if I was successful up north and she was willing, I would send her a ticket so that she could join me.

Whatever I had left of a conscience was bothering me. She was nowhere to be found. To kill time, I decided to go to the movies. They were showing a David Lynch film at the Cinemateca. I wasn't much in the mood when I got there, but within ten minutes I had forgotten my fears and tribulations. It was called
Blue Velvet
, and it revealed a microcosm of American society, with all of its innocence and perversity: the United States laid bare, stripped of the American dream. If I was escaping misery, it was only to fall into the complacency of the absurd. Lynch really knew the human soul—as much as Ingmar Bergman—so well that it could drive a person crazy.

Afterwards, I walked into a wretched bar, a refuge for local bums across the street from the movie theater. There were four tables, an owner with a face like he'd died and come back to life several times, and a waiter who resembled a French buccaneer. I chugged two shots of stiff
pisco
and walked out into the mist. The sky was drizzling lazily, as if it didn't really want to. I traversed the high reaches of the city, which day by day were getting deeper under my skin. I arrived at the hotel and threw myself on the bed. I waited for Blanca to finish up her date and come to bed to sweat out her troubles, though she didn't seem to have any. I fell asleep and started having nightmares, then woke up around 3. A dog howling like a wolf marred the silence of Rosario. My head hurt and my heart was pounding as if it belonged to somebody else. It accelerated on its own and then quieted down without my consent. As I was already dressed, it didn't take much for me to go out to the patio, immerse myself in that whirlwind of twisting and turning hallways, and come upon Blanca's room. First I knocked a few times; anxious, I started to shake the door. Seeing as I wasn't getting any answer, I resorted to kicking it. I woke up the entire floor. A foreign tourist came out of his room and, pointing to his head, exclaimed, “You crazy fool! Is late!”

He was right. I returned to my room and read the paper five times before going back to sleep.

At 10 in the morning, Don Antonio was waiting for me with a cup of hot chocolate and a bread roll.

“Seems like you've been seeing ghosts all night,” he said. “You don't look good.”

“I couldn't get to sleep. I was thinking about my trip. Have you seen Blanca?”

“She's a nocturnal creature,” he replied. “But unlike me, she leaves the hotel, while I just stay up because of my damned asthma.”

I thanked him for the chocolate and resumed my search. Blanca apparently hadn't slept in the hotel. Putting aside my thoughts of her, I decided to set out for the Andean agency. Though the drizzle had ceased, it was still a cloudy, gray day with that high-altitude melancholy that can depress anybody.

In the taxi, I asked myself several times,
What on earth will I do if
Ballón hasn't been able to get the visa?
I didn't have an answer. I consoled myself by recalling over and over that the fat guy had assured me I would get the American stamp. I got out of the car, trembling. Ballón was in his office, chatting with a guy who had been cut from the same cloth as the tireless salesman from the Hotel California. The secretary was painting her nails and she asked me to wait a moment. A few min- utes later, Ballón received me with a smile that settled my nerves.

“There was no problem. We had to do some arm-twisting with our contact at the consulate, but I told him that it was for you, a serious person. I had a hard time getting the plane ticket from Lloyd; I spent a half an hour trying to convince a deaf bureaucrat to do the heroic deed. The hundred dollars softened him up. Here's your passport with a multiple-entry type B-2 visa, valid for three months starting today, and your ticket for the flight tonight. Be at the airport by 8 o'clock. You owe me a hundred dollars.” Upon receiving the greenback, he added, “Please, not a word about any of this. I don't want anybody to find out about the operation. People can be real nosy, know what I mean? They could screw everything up.”

“Mum as a painting,” I said.

“Have a nice trip. You'll be fine at the airport in Miami; everything's in order.
Adiós
, Señor Alvarez.”

I saw it and I didn't believe it. Out on the street, I stared at the visa that had cost me a brutal crime. It had been expensive, more expensive than the visa you need to enter Paradise.