American Visa (2 page)

One of them stopped flipping through a fashion magazine. Her hot gaze settled on me for an instant. Solidly built, she possessed a certain primitive sensuality; her cinnamon skin radiated seductive and suntoasted fragrances. I tilted my head like an altar boy and she smiled.

In response to this, the manager abruptly struck a small nickelplated bell on his desk. The shrill jingling ripped through the air and returned with a shy echo from the thick walls of the big, ancient house. At that moment—I don't know from where—the bellboy appeared, a youth about fifteen years old with his hair combed stiffly, looking like he had just received an electric shock. His breath smelled like the neighborhood. His round face, covered with pimples, resembled a beat-up rag ball. The manager returned my ID and ordered: “Show the gentleman to room forty-five.”

Immediately, we submerged ourselves in a labyrinth of passageways and staircases. Before long, we passed by a confused tourist apparently lost in that avalanche of tunnels, which seemed not to lead anywhere. The bellboy panted as if he were running a marathon, grumbling and thinking out loud, muttering curses. Eventually, we found a spiral staircase that led us to the second patio. I realized that the hotel was nothing but an old remodeled estate, probably constructed at the beginning of the twentieth century, a time in which the landowners of La Paz were masters and gentlemen from the Andean plateau, from the narrow warm valleys, and from the subtropical forests. It was their custom to build enormous mansions in the newly formed city to receive the frequent mule trains carrying potatoes, cereals, fruit, and coffee. At the center of the patio a half-dozen withered trees swayed, rocked to sleep by the nocturnal breeze in what was once a garden. This far corner of the hotel consisted of a single floor, its slovenly appearance suggesting that it was intended for guests of low status.

The bellboy opened the door to room forty-five and placed my suitcase beside the bed. I had resolved to administer my meager budget with Swiss meticulousness, which is why I only gave the kid a fifty-cent tip. He stroked the coin, flipped it in the air, caught it, and observed me with visible resignation. Once he realized that I wouldn't budge, he left without closing the door. My sad lodgings didn't resemble any- thing like a guest room; they were more like a cell for a Trappist monk. Beside the bed, I noticed a wardrobe intended for someone the size of a dwarf, a wooden crate painted blue that was supposed to pass for a night table, a rickety chair that at the least contact emitted a pitiful groan, a frameless mirror, and an ancient-looking chest of drawers. The floor was ice cold and made of brick. The naked lightbulb hung tenuously from its socket, oscillating to the beat of sharp wind gusts slipping under the dilapidated door.

I pulled back the linen curtain. Menacing iron bars rose up behind the glass. The small window faced a narrow alleyway in which a homeless dog, emaciated and despondent, timidly sniffed a trash can. I went out to the patio to look for the bathroom and found it in the back, next to the washing machine: a cement toilet, a chipped sink, a shower from which trickled apathetic drops of freezing water. In one of the corners lay a plastic bucket that apparently served to flush the toilet. I returned to my room. Confused flies and moths fluttered around the dim bulb. I emptied my suitcase; I owned less clothing now than when I joined the military as a buck. After hanging my single pair of pants on the clothing rod in the wardrobe, I arranged my three shirts next to my extra change of underwear on a shelf below and placed my dress shoes at the foot of the folding bed. I picked up my gray English cashmere suit—the one I would wear for my visit to the imperial consulate—as if it were a glass doll, looking it over carefully for any compromising stain. Upon seeing that it shined impeccably, I placed it on the back of the chair. I felt the bed. Only one homemade blanket, mended like an old lady's underpants, and a pillow as hard as a rock, meant for a poor man to sleep on. A couple of nights in these conditions and I'd be ready to catch pneumonia.

I went out to the patio again, intent on demanding an extra blan- ket from the manager. I noticed, then, the presence of a hunched-over old man who seemed to be returning from the bathroom, a red jacket with blue stripes draped over his back. He was wearing corduroy pants of a dull, undefined color, bulky mountain-climbing shoes, and, on top of his head, a brimmed wool hat, a relic of better times. He walked painfully, supported by a strange cane resembling that of a witch in
Macbeth
. He looked up and inhaled three times; each time he did so, an asthmatic whistle heaved up from his chest, accompanied by an unsettling rattle.

“Good evening,” I said in greeting.

The old man adjusted his glasses and his gray-clouded eyes studied me with malicious irony.

“Above all, a cold evening,” he replied.

“I'm in room forty-five,” I said. “I just arrived. Do you think I'll be able to get an extra blanket?”

He ran his fingers through his magnificent Prussian moustache, gray-haired but still martial. “I tried to get the same thing three years ago,” he said, “and I'm still waiting. The doorman is as stubborn as a Scotsman, but perhaps with a few pesos . . .”

“It's colder in my room than it is out here,” I commented.

“The owner couldn't care less about that. We in the second patio don't enjoy prerogatives. They tolerate us, but they don't let us complain.” He put his hand on his chest and smiled. “I'm an asthmatic and every trip to the bathroom exhausts me. That's what I get for making a pittance of a salary. How much time do you, sir, plan to stay in this Ritz of the upper barrios?”

“Until I get my American visa. I'm going to visit my son who lives in Florida.”

The old man smoothed out the few hairs he still had on his head and, with trembling fingers, scratched his scalp with a slow and exasperated motion. With each breath, he seemed to be gasping for air. “So you're only at this resort for a few days? What blessed luck. I, unfortunately, didn't have any children. Otherwise, I wouldn't be in these parts. What's your name?”

“Mario Alvarez.”

“Is your family from La Paz?”

“We used to live in Oruro, but I was born in Uyuni.”

I noticed a sudden expression of disenchantment cross his face. “I was in Uyuni forty years ago,” he commented. “In those days it was a progressive little place, but now, as far as I know, it's turned into a ghost town.”

“The only thing that moves out there is the wind.”

“One of those useless doctors at the public hospital advised me to go to Uyuni or to Río Mulatos to live, because of my asthma, which is constantly worsening. He told me the higher you get, the drier it gets, and the drier the better. But who the hell would I talk to in Río Mulatos? Better to die of asthma than of boredom. For all their defects, these accommodations are a cure for my solitude. Here we have whores and vermin, but it's better than deafening silence.”

“How long have you lived here?”

“Three years. An extraordinary feat, when you consider all the viruses floating around, not to mention the fact that I'm always strapped for cash. Of course, we in the second patio are allowed to pay on a monthly basis. This is a pious act on the owner's part. He's a diabetic gentleman who lives cooped up on the first floor of the hotel in the company of his wife, a terrible woman who brought him here from Potosí. She's a nurse and takes care of him the entire goddamn day. Some say it's for his own good, but I see him deteriorating. Rumor has it that she wants to send him to the other world as soon as possible and take his fortune. The man's a millionaire. Besides this dumpy little hotel, he owns three or four houses scattered throughout Miraflores, not to mention a pair of apartments in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Imagine that! He prefers living in this run-down Rosario neighborhood in La Paz to the Queen of the River Plate. Who could ever understand our poor rich people? The nurse, the manager, and that rich guy make a sensational trio.”

“I've only met the manager. Where did he get his reddish hair?”

“His father was a Scottish engineer who got hired by the Bolivian Mining Company as an economic advisor during the first Paz Estenssoro government. He stayed a few years, enough to make a killing, and then he left. Nothing else was heard of him. In the meantime, he had impregnated a poor, naïve cashier at the Central Bank. He'd led her to believe that they'd get married and live a grand life in the bleak city of Edinburgh. The manager is the kid who was born from this exotic union. He speaks the queen's English and botches Spanish like a peasant. He cordially hates all of us in the second patio. He hates me for being broke, he hates the transvestite from room forty-two for being who he is, he hates the wine vendor for not wanting to slip him a single bottle of Chilean merlot, and he hates the ex-goalie for Chaco because he occasionally sleeps with one of the girls from the Tropicana cabaret. He can't stand competition . . .”

The old man extended his smooth, limp hand to me.

“My last name's Alcorta, my first name Antonio. My good friends call me Parrot for my magnificent Cervantine nose.”

“What time do you have?”

“It's 9:10, a terrible time for me. I have to look for my damned Tedral. It's a pill for asthma. During the day I forget to buy it and at night I have to go out and look for a pharmacy nearby.”

“If you'd like, I'll go buy it for you.”

“I appreciate your kindness. The people from Oruro are known for their generosity. However, after a long trip I don't advise you to walk up and down La Paz's steep streets. You could catch emphysema and fall into the hands of the doctors at the public hospital, which is like landing in the arms of Mengele, the famous Nazi doctor at Auschwitz.”

“I wouldn't be surprised if Mengele's an advisor to the Interior Ministry.”

“I hear he's been seen around here holding hands with Klaus Barbie, the butcher of Lyon,” he added.

I liked Don Antonio. He was a person without visible frustrations. His appearance revealed that his age was catching up with him and he was going through hell, but I could also tell that he was weathering the hard times with a certain grace. Heavy breathing aside, he seemed in good shape. His pinkish skin exhibited the vitality of a man twenty years younger. I excused myself and, as was to be expected, got lost for a good while amidst the tangle of passageways. Only some lunatic architect could have designed them.

In the lobby, the manager was sprawled across a velvety armchair, playing a game of chess with a bald man whose face was the spitting image of Groucho Marx. One of those Venezuelan soap operas was on TV showing pretty women and people screaming their heads off at each other. The spellbound audience didn't miss a thing.

“Could I have an extra blanket?” I asked humbly.

The manager looked up. He tilted his jaw to the side like a camel. “Coming from Oruro, I'd have thought this would be like spring.”

“In Oruro I don't sleep alone.”

“I'm sorry, but we don't have any extra blankets.”

“I'll give you two pesos if you can give me one blanket.”

The redhead stood up parsimoniously, smiled, and put his hand on my shoulder. “We'll see if I have any left.”

He twisted a door handle and disappeared behind the Chinese folding screen separating the two offices. He returned awhile later carrying a black blanket with yellow trim that smelled awful.

“It's all I could find back there,” he explained. He put it in my hands and added, “It'll be two pesos per day.”

“That's absurd,” I protested. “For four pesos I can buy myself a new one.”

“It's up to you, Señor Alvarez.” He smiled like a villain out of a 1950s movie.

“I'll return it tomorrow,” I said.

I went back to my room and faced the mirror. Pale and haggard, looking like a shipwrecked man who had just been rescued, I would surely be denied the visa. I urgently needed a shave and a good haircut. I nervously rubbed my chin and felt yet again that old unease and lack of self-confidence. In an attempt to cheer myself up, I downed some cheap
pisco
^*
from an exotic-looking little bottle that I kept in my jacket for emergencies. I undressed, put on a pair of wool pajamas like those worn by gold miners in the Klondike, and turned off the light. The problem was that I couldn't turn off the noise. In that neighborhood, night and quiet didn't seem to go together; for hundreds of thousands of Aymaras it was the start of a work day. Around midnight, the noise outside became almost unbearable. It sounded as if a horde of bees was rustling inside my eardrums. I heard Don Antonio's monotonous little cough. At 1 in the morning, finally, silence. After a few moments of complete darkness, the ocean appeared. It was a sign that everything was in order. I slept.

^*
A sweet liquor made from grapes, produced primarily in Peru and Chile.

Chapter 2

I
was violently awoken by the sound of ringing bells.
I cursed that medieval custom of calling the faithful to mass; priests can't care less about anyone else's sleep. From the bright maroon glare, I saw that it was sunrise. The bells of the parish church seemed to be tolling right in the back of my neck. It felt like the legendary Charles Atlas was pounding a gong deep in my brain.