A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism (14 page)

"Damn it, you're here already?" the woman huffed, turning around. This was Lenka's mother, Gabriel supposed. Lenka had told him that her name was Mirabel. There was only a passing family resemblance. The woman had a face like a tuber. Her eyes were wet flakes of siltstone.

Mirabel shuffled out of the way and Gabriel attempted to cram the piglet into the refrigerator. It was too long bodied, though, and the spine was too stiff to bend. The three of them stood back, surveying the situation: food scattered in front of the gaping refrigerator, its door propped open by the stiff pig wrapped in heavy plastic, its two daintyhoofed feet dangling out. Dark brown blood dribbled through the cinched end of the plastic onto the yellow linoleum.

"What an impressive swine!" said a man in a brassy baritone that sounded as if he were speaking through a trombone. This was Luis, Gabriel knew.

Gabriel turned around and found a stocky battler, with a scar from where he'd had a harelip crudely sewn up. Though he was as thick and brutish as an Incan foot soldier, his eyes had a bright and even playful twinkle as he squinted at Gabriel. Despite the burliness, the man's resemblance to Ernesto was evident, particularly in his conspiratorial glint. He squeezed Gabriel's hand hard and shook it once, firmly. "A pleasure!" The voice was uncanny. The depth surpassed something that would seem manly and came off almost inhuman, it reminded Gabriel of the groaning bison he'd heard at Yellowstone when his mother took him there as a child.

The two men had barely broached the niceties when Ernesto materialized. Luis picked him up, kissed him, and asked if he knew Gabriel. Ernesto nodded: "Yes, Gabriel is a friend of my
mami.
"

Luis chuckled and, much to Gabriel's surprise, handed over the boy, who seemed too old to be passed around like that.

Gabriel had seen Ernesto several times since their first meeting in Plaza Murillo, mainly at Pollo Copacabana for fried chicken after school, but he had never held him. He didn't quite know what to do with him now and found himself gripping Ernesto by the rib cage. He felt embarrassed, and was further embarrassed by the fact that he was embarrassed—as only a gringo would be—but Ernesto and Luis didn't seem to notice. Ernesto just slung an arm around Gabriel's neck. He was heavy too, and Gabriel realized he couldn't hold him like that for long. He hoisted him up to get a better grip and said, "How are you, kid?"

Ernesto beamed and pointed at his own beaming face, and Gabriel kissed him on the cheek and then plopped him down on the ground. He looked back at Luis, who patted Gabriel on the shoulder firmly, winked. He indicated Lenka with his ogre's chin—she was bent over the refrigerator with her mother now—and whispered, "Good luck. She's fucking insane."

"Oh?" Gabriel said.

Lenka glanced over her shoulder at her ex-husband. "What'd you say?"

"Nothing!" Luis replied, and winked at Gabriel again. The madness of such a union, that they had ever believed that they were well suited for each other, required a special kind of shared craziness.

Luis took two steps over to the refrigerator, brushed his ex-wife aside, reached in, and pulled the pig out by the hooves. "I should break its spine," he suggested helpfully, addressing his former mother-in-law. "If I do that, it will fit, right?"

"How?" Mirabel said.

He ripped open the plastic and pulled the pig out, set its damp body down on the nearby kitchen table, dropped the bloodied plastic onto the floor, turned, and yanked open a thin metal drawer nearby. He snatched up a rusty claw hammer from a mess of metal tools inside, shoved the drawer closed.

"Here," he said. "I'll break it here." He tapped the pig once in the center of the spine, and then swung hard and fast. A direct hit! The bone cracked. There was a small dent in the flesh.

He hit it again, just as hard. This time the hammer left a deep imprint slightly beside the spinal column, but close enough that the outer edges of the spine were clearly visible through the stretched skin. He hit it again, even harder. This one landed directly on the spine. The skin split, exposing a mixture of gristle and crushed bone, a crunchy and gelatinous substance like half-frozen yogurt at the back of the refrigerator.

"That's it," Luis said. He put the greasy-tipped hammer down on the table.

Clutching both front quarters with one hand and both hindquarters with the other, he lifted the carcass and pulled the two sides together until the remaining bone fragments in the spine buckled and cracked noisily. He stopped only when the pig was completely doubled over. The gash at its back had split another inch on either side, exposing tender flesh, pink as the inside of a baby's mouth. Once the pig's snout was lodged neatly between its stiff hindquarters, he brought the animal back to the refrigerator, pushed it in, and swung the door shut.

Mirabel applauded and said, "Very good, Luis!"

"That's impressive," Gabriel said, because it was impressive.

Lenka shot Gabriel a short, dissatisfied look. "Come. I want you to meet the rest," she said and led the way into the next room, while Luis and Mirabel remained behind to clean up the mess.

There, Gabriel met the rest of the brood. They were evenly distributed across the generations: gurgling toddler to milky-eyed patriarch who couldn't manage to stand up in greeting; their coloring likewise ran a broad spectrum, so broad, in fact, that Gabriel wasn't entirely sure they were all related. In greeting him, each of the men stood and shook his hand, gave a warm welcome, and managed to abstain from allowing the match on the television to pull his gaze away. A little while after, everyone settled back down and resumed watching the match and talking among themselves. Gabriel and Lenka were sitting at the back of the room near a scrawny elderly lady named Leti, who instantly started rambling about her deceased husband, an inventor, who she claimed had come up with the blueprints for a perpetual-motion machine but had been unable to locate the funding to make it a reality. "Then he died," she said and patted Gabriel on the knee, as if to say:
Do yourself a favor and try not to die before you finish building your invention.

He glanced at Lenka questioningly, but she just smiled back at him lovingly.

A little later her mother entered, griping about Luis's treatment of the pig. Not satisfied with their earlier introduction, she beckoned Gabriel to his feet again and kissed his cheek. Then she clutched his shoulders and gazed at him appraisingly for a moment. She sighed and turned to Lenka, her hands still on his shoulders, and said, "Why didn't you say that he was so pretty?"

Everyone laughed at that. Gabriel blushed and shook his head.

Lenka stood up and put an arm around his shoulders. "Stop," she said to the assembled, "he's shy—don't make him blush!"

Leti cleared her throat and said, "But he looks
even prettier
when he blushes!"

That sent them into hysterics. Gabriel shook his head again, laughing, then plopped back down in his seat, waving them all away.

He looked up in time to see Luis swagger in from the kitchen and say, "What is this?"

"Luis," Gabriel said, "can you do that trick with the hammer on people too?"

And the room went wild.

In his hotel room at Gloria that night, he and Lenka recalled the meeting in detail. She assured him that they had adored him, and he told her it was mutual.

They ate two baked trout from Lake Titicaca with white rice and the kind of neatly cubed vegetables often found in TV dinners. This was room service from Gloria. They had yet another bottle of cheap Bolivian white wine. The ritual of ordering and eating room service had become a major part of their relationship already. They knew the menu by heart. The room service, like the room itself, was a manifestation of their relationship's organizing principle. Being at her house today together, however briefly, had been a violation of that principle. Apart from a few odd hours with Ernesto once in a while, they spent no time together with other people. What they had, instead, was a kind of nocturnal hermitage in Gabriel's room. By day, their lives were blindingly public and relentlessly social. She was on the phone for hours, talking with scores of people; her meetings were stacked up tidily, constructed of ten-minute increments. Gabriel was out in the city, making the rounds, meeting political figures and bureaucrats in their offices, reporters at cafés, he was still trying to make use of his crummy freelance-journalist cover. It was, for both of them, a brutally public existence. They spent most of their days talking to strangers, navigating a familiar series of motivations. For both of them, it was new, and it was alienating. For Gabriel, it was all the more acute because he was so far from his country and from everyone he knew, and was further isolated by his moat of lies. Lenka felt to him like a refuge from all that.

She didn't have it much better, he could see, having been blindsided by her boss's abrupt elevation; she was suddenly spokesperson for the biggest celebrity the country had had in a generation. And after a long day, she was supposed to go back to her overcrowded house and play normal. Now that he had seen the inside of it, Gabriel knew why she was eager to spend her nights away.

Together, they had a sanctuary in his room. She arrived usually just after the cars and pedestrians below Gabriel's room had shut up. They would lie side by side in silence in the dark and for a while the pressures of the day receded. This had been a sudden, swift vertical climb for them. They were both, in their own ways, blasting toward the stratosphere, far above their expected orbits. So they understood each other's situation in a uniquely personal way. And, like any good love affair, it felt as if they were in on some intimate experience together that no one else could understand. There was them, and then there was everyone else in the world. They were both floating in the miraculous, if airless, stratosphere, far above everything and everyone they had ever known. Up there, they had only each other.

After the waiter dropped off their trout and the bottle of wine that Monday night, he lingered by the door. He was youngish, wore a bowl cut, like Ernesto. Nametag:
Alejo.
Alejo had a severe countenance, the harsh and gallant expression of a teenager who supports himself through hard work and has done so for some time. He lingered, scowling at them, wanting to say something but too shy to speak.

"Is there something else?" Gabriel said.

"I saw you on television," Alejo blurted. He was addressing Lenka.

"Did you?" she said.

"You were with Evo on the stage yesterday."

"That's right."

He nodded. "Tell him congratulations for me, please."

"I will," she said.

Alejo nodded again, staring at the carpet, and then, without another word, he left.

Gabriel set the tray down on the table and leaned over. "I think he likes you." She nodded, kissed Gabriel on the forehead. "I saw you too, you know," he added.

"Really? What did you think?"

"The same thing he thought, I suppose."

"Really, and what's that?"

"'I wonder what she's wearing under that skirt.'"

She laughed and punched him hard in the shoulder. She shoved him onto the bed. "Here," she said as she straddled him, "I'll show you."

Later, with the bones and skins of their trout strewn on their plates, they made love a second time. The first time had been furious, but the second time, a couple of hours later, it was softer, slower. Gabriel was sore already. The pain helped him focus, and he found that he actually hoped the pain would linger, because he loved the moment enough to want to capture it and sear it into his mind.

Approaching climax, he paused and kissed her on the eyelid, and she whispered into his ear, "
Te quiero,
Gabriel."

"
Te quiero tambien,
" he replied.

And it occurred to him then that maybe they really did love each other. If not, they could always try to love each other. He could start going to church with her. She could overlook the chasms between them. She could try to overlook his hunger as well, and its attendant vices, namely his comfortable way with deceit. They could work at seeing each other in a better light. And maybe that was, after all, what loving another person meant. Love required, above all else, a capacity for hope, some faith that the future would—given enough effort—improve upon the present. In any case, staying together for the rest of their lives couldn't be harder than spending the rest of their lives alone. Which might have seemed a callous thought on another night, but with the two of them in his room—lost in the cold and dark of their extracelestial orbits and temporarily out from under the burdens of their ambitions—it felt sincere, even sweet. But then, when the virgin light started to glow above the eastern peaks of the Andes once again, the voyage was already ending. They were falling back through the atmosphere, back down to the ground to rejoin the rest of the world.

He was still awake when she got up and dressed. He didn't move. He listened as she wrote a note in the bathroom, set it down on his laptop, which lay clamshelled on the desk. She bent down and kissed him on the forehead. Her lips lingered for a tiny extra moment, an aching moment, and in that moment he knew that she felt for him what he felt for her.

When she left, he let himself fall asleep.

He awoke a few hours later, at eight. He brushed his teeth, showered, got dressed. He picked up her note, written on Hotel Gloria stationery. It read:

The next finance minister of Bolivia will be Luis Alberto Arce Catacora. Good luck with that!

And ... burn this note, please.

XO—L.V.

He was stunned, first, then struck with powerful relief. But of course this was merely an opportunity to survive, if it came to that.

If he played this well, it could boost Priya's estimation of him, but it wasn't the kind of thing that she could turn into money, so it wasn't going to win the day for him. His best hope, as he saw it, was to track down this Luis Arce Catacora and interview him under seemingly innocuous circumstances—a young freelance reporter talking to a——(whatever Catacora's current job happened to be). Under that innocent premise, Gabriel might be able to cajole Catacora into hinting at the administration's real position on the natural gas question and, possibly, on Santa Cruz Gas in particular. It was a solid opportunity. His best lead so far. No officials wanted to talk to Gabriel, but Catacora wasn't an official yet.