A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism (6 page)

She looked at him sympathetically, and he could see then that she was three-dimensional after all. The height and width had been obvious from the first, but the depth (her sorrow, it might be called) had eluded him. Now it was there: naked too, and just as proud.

"I used to adore room service," she continued. "The whole fact of room service. That was what I loved: ordering meals and having them delivered to my room. There was something so fun about that. I could just sit there naked, eating whatever I wanted, watching horrible television, and there was no one to complain about it. I got used to the convenience of an in-house gym, laundry service. I got used to being naked all the time, eating whatever the fuck I wanted. The novelty does expire, though." She had a drag and blew out the smoke immediately. "Maybe you'll disagree?" She shrugged. "But I've never met anyone who disagreed."

Gabriel looked at the cathedral beside the presidential palace. There were pigeons embedded in the façade. Huge tattered vultures groomed themselves in the spires. Gabriel watched as one vulture waddled after a pigeon that got too close. The spry pigeon hopped out of reach and fluttered off to a nearby ledge. The vulture lost interest, returned to its perch.

During Gabriel's interview at Calloway, Priya had spoken about the need for secrecy. "Especially," she said, "with poorer countries, which are usually one- or two-industry economies, the fact that we're interested at all will tip our hand. With a bigger economy, like Brazil, there are hundreds of potentially attractive inroads. But if someone finds out that we're looking at, say, El Salvador, they'll be able to instantly deduce which corporation we're interested in."

"I won't tell anyone unless I think it will be advantageous," he had said to Priya.

But now, though it had little strategic value, he couldn't resist the temptation to set Fiona straight about himself. Maybe once she knew she wouldn't keep talking to him like he was an intern in the press pool. In any case, she was leaving, so it couldn't hurt too much. He took a deep breath and said, "I want to tell you something, and it has to be off the record."

She smiled. "Please don't tell me you have herpes."

"No, that's not it."

"You're Spider-Man!"

"No." He laughed. "But almost—I kind of am leading a double life." He watched, inwardly pleased, as her smile faded. "I'm not really a freelance journalist." He let it sink in. She looked appropriately shocked and impressed, so he went on. "I'm an analyst for the Calloway Group."

Her expression drooped. She was disappointed that it wasn't something more interesting—a spy, maybe. His swelling pride began to deflate. "Priya's looking at Bolivia?" she asked.

"Oh—" He stalled. She knew who Priya was. Of course, he should have known better. Fiona was not impressed by boys like him, whether they worked for hedge funds or not. Still, now that he'd started on the path, he had to see it through. "I'm just trying to figure out what's going to happen in Bolivia. We're interested in Evo. So, if you—"

"
That's
why you're here?" She cut him off. For the first time that day, she sounded annoyed with him. "Gabriel, is it possible that they're testing you? Is this your first assignment with them?" When he didn't answer, she said, "Do you know Oscar Velazquez?"

"He's the other analyst for Latin America." She knew Oscar too. Attempting to put a floor under his sinking ego, he said, "Same job, different jurisdictions."

She wasn't having it. "Oscar covers the rich parts and you do the poor?"

Again, he didn't answer.

"How do you know Oscar?" he said.

She shrugged. "Similar circumstances."

His comeuppance complete, Gabriel leaned back, crossed his legs. Neither of them said anything for a while.

He watched a pigeon pecking at an empty box of matches near one of the old men on a bench. The man had an astonishing face, its contours chiseled by the sun. It was a face like the countryside itself, bare, brown, ragged with canyons and cliffs—it looked formidable, secretive. The old man wore no socks, and his old black wingtips were buffed to a glassy sheen. He wore an elegant double-breasted suit, a pressed shirt, and a burgundy tie. He was alone, a newspaper on the bench beside him. He stared at the dry fountain.

At the center of the fountain, Neptune, in blackened bronze, stood on a raised goblet of sorts, completely naked, trident slung over his shoulder. God of naval armadas and the patron deity of colonists, he'd been put there by the Spanish conquistadors two centuries earlier, when the plaza was home to a well from which locals drew water. Now that the country had forfeited its entire coastline in a series of lost wars against its neighbors, the irony of having such a conspicuous Neptune might have seemed bad for national morale, but this was, after all, the same landlocked country that refused to disband its navy. Indeed, La Paz held a celebration once a year in Plaza Avaroa, named for the general who lost the war with Chile for the Pacific. The loss, which had occurred in the late 1800s, continued to transfix the Bolivian people in much the same way that the lost Confederacy remained—culturally, if not otherwise—a fixation of the U.S. South. The eventual reclamation of Bolivia's coastline was a powerful fantasy, and the futility of the issue was well beyond the believers' comprehension. They couldn't accept that the Bolivian coast would not be reclaimed, ever. Mexico might as well ask for the return of California.

When Gabriel had interviewed the director of one of Bolivia's larger banks two days earlier, the man had said, "The magical thing about Bolivia is that our history does not move in a line like other histories, it does not march; our history stands in one place and observes itself in a mirror, amazed."

Gabriel appreciated this fact about Bolivia, that it was a country that openly preferred to see things as they
should be,
rather than as they were. A long-standing pattern of humiliation brings that out in a nation, just as it does in individuals; an active imagination is most useful to those for whom reality is a great disappointment. In Bolivia, a national bovarysme had taken hold. Fantasy was just as important as reality, the citizens seemed to insist. Gabriel was no stranger to the allure of a well-manicured daydream. He knew that those dreams, if cared for properly, could grow like bonsai: trimmed back constantly until they'd matured in miniature, shrunken lives. Perfection was much easier to achieve at that smaller scale. And if daydreams were just the mind's mechanism for giving space to a perfect vision of life, then maybe daydreams could be read backward to find a person's most fundamental desires. In his own case, Gabriel had for some years entertained fantasies of being a Pulitzer Prize—winning journalist—someone not unlike Fiona. Read backward, it was about the fact that he wanted to be not only rich and famous (banal, if pervasive, features of most daydreams) but also respected for his efforts. And, still generically, he wanted to make the world a better place in his own little way.

That whole daydream ended when he started at Calloway. After years of cultivation, it just stopped. The one that replaced it was peculiar in that it didn't involve him winning any Pulitzers or fame. Instead, he merely dreamed of money. He didn't need gazillions. He just wanted to buy his way out of the question of money itself; $3.5 to 4 million would do it. With that, even the most conservative portfolio could be counted on to generate $200,000 a year in pre-tax revenue.

Neither Gabriel nor Fiona had spoken in a while when a woman in a moth-colored skirt approached, a little boy maybe five or six years old a few steps behind her. "Excuse me," she said to Fiona in heavily accented English, "are you Fiona Musgrave?"

"Yes," Fiona said in Spanish, "are you Lenka?" Fiona's Spanish was nearly as fluent as Gabriel's, but it was marred, badly, by her accent.

The woman nodded. Fiona and Gabriel stood. They each kissed the woman hello and introduced themselves, in Spanish. Then Fiona bent down and asked the boy what his name was, but he just shook his head and ducked behind his mother's legs.

"His name is Ernesto." Lenka had settled into Spanish now as well. Gabriel had noticed that a delicate linguistic dance occurred in first meetings between bilingual people, though he had yet to figure out how they decided on one language or the other. The woman, he gathered, worked for Evo Morales. She was attractive, with a long neck and a cinnamon complexion. On her chin there was a splash of reverse freckles, a spray of paler, vanilla dots fanning up toward her cheek. Her eyes and nose were Asiatic, her cheekbones Amerindian, and she wore her long hair wrenched back in a no-nonsense ponytail. Why had she brought her child? He scanned and saw no ring on her finger.

Gabriel crouched to talk to Ernesto, who eyed him suspiciously from behind his mother's legs. She wore the kind of dull, flesh-colored pantyhose that Gabriel's mother wore often, and which men sometimes pulled over their heads before robbing a bank. "How are you today?"

Ernesto's smile widened, veered mischievous, and he shook his head. He stuck several fingers in his mouth.

"Come here," Gabriel said, beckoning. Ernesto emerged from behind his mother's legs and approached warily.

Up above, the women were talking business, but Gabriel could sense that both were glancing down at him, and at Ernesto too. So he led Ernesto away, back to the bench, where they both sat down.

"Tell me about your school," Gabriel said.

Ernesto was mature enough to grasp the concept of body language, if not its nuances, so he threw up his hands, apropos of nothing whatsoever, and said, "It's nice."

Gabriel asked Ernesto if he had any girlfriends and Ernesto raised one index finger. "Only one?" Gabriel said, as if disappointed.

The boy shrugged, brought up three little fingers, and giggled.

Lenka and Fiona approached, and Lenka smiled at her son, then glanced at Gabriel appreciatively, warmly. "
Muy precioso tu maldito,
" Gabriel said to Lenka, who rolled her eyes and laughed.

"Yeah, he's a little bit of a menace," she conceded, also in Spanish.

Ernesto was shadowboxing now, so Gabriel held up his palms and Ernesto punched them.

"Take it easy," his mother said to him.

"Yeah"—Gabriel withdrew his hands and shook them off as if they were hurting from the tiny fists—"you'll break my hands."

Ernesto growled at him fiercely, adorably, and Gabriel looked back at Lenka. "You work for Evo?"

"I'm his press liaison." She was staring at him now, her face tilted down slightly. "Are you a member of the press?"

"If I were, would we be able to meet sometime?" He stood up.

"Okay, Gabriel," Fiona interrupted in English, "the president-elect is waiting for us. I'll see you when I return in a couple weeks, I hope—assuming you'll still be here."

Presumably she'd returned to English because that was their native language, but it was still awkward, since Lenka was clearly more comfortable with Spanish. That was the point, no doubt, to highlight Gabriel's foreignness to Lenka, and to douse their flirtation.

"I'll still be here," he said to her. Then, turning to Ernesto, he said, "
Un gran placer conocerte. Y tú también,
" he added to Lenka, making sure his accent was natural enough to make it apparent that he spoke like a native. He asked Lenka if he could have her card. Maybe they could get lunch someday.

"I would like that," she said and opened her handbag.

While she fished around in her bag, he turned to Fiona, who was frowning in a way he didn't know how to interpret. Could it be jealousy? It was hard to imagine.

"Keep in touch," he said to Fiona, switching to English now himself.

"
Te llamo cuando vuelvo,
" Fiona replied, her cadence stiff with her bad accent.

They kissed each other on the cheek.

He took Lenka's card and told her he'd call tomorrow morning.

"I look forward to it," she said.

They kissed cheeks a second time. He mussed Ernesto's hair. "
¡Nos vemos chico!
" he said and turned and walked briskly into a swarm of pigeons, which batted aloft. The old man on the bench looked up and tugged on the brim of his fedora in greeting as Gabriel passed. He decided to grab a coffee from the café there on the plaza and then head up the hill in search of a chicken salteña. At the far side of the square he glanced back, hoping to see Fiona and Lenka again, but they were already gone.

ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, when Priya was new at Calloway, their offices were on the twenty-second floor of the World Financial Center, opposite the World Trade Center; according to Oscar—who was in Argentina at the time but heard about it when he returned—she and Paul were at the office when the first plane hit, and the explosion nearly blew their windows out. Then, while the rest of the building was busy evacuating, she and Paul started setting up hedges against the inevitable crash. Outside, paper drifted down like a ticker-tape parade. Markets in New York were not yet open, but Priya and Paul were able to sell most of their long positions in Brazil and set up some short sales on the FTSE. They preemptively called in various futures. Then, when the second plane hit, she and Paul grabbed their laptops and set off. They headed uptown. Paul's place was closer, in Tribeca, so they went there. By the time the first tower fell, they were back online, reinforcing their defensive positions. All capital from the sale of their substantial LAN Peru stake went directly to futures on Lockheed Martin.

A month later, quarterly statements went out to Calloway's clients, and dozens called to ask if there had been a mistake, because it looked like the portfolio had grown by 4.28 percent in September. No other New York fund had managed to pull off gains that month.

The staff at Calloway was forbidden to discuss the matter in detail. "Tell them the numbers are correct, but do not under any circumstances explain how we achieved them," Priya wrote in a memo, according to Oscar.

During Gabriel's orientation, Oscar said, "I had that memo in my briefcase, and my wife saw it. She was shocked. I tried to explain what Priya was thinking, because I understand it, as I'm sure you do, but it's not the kind of thing I could explain to my wife, you know?"