American Visa (9 page)

We both got our education degrees, and as soon as we'd finished our obligatory one-year teaching assignments in the countryside, we were married in a simple but joyous ceremony at a friend's house that started off discreetly but ended with several of our guests behind bars. Antonia's father, who worked at a bank, helped us secure a two-thousand-dollar loan with which we bought ourselves a four-room, one-bath bungalow with a fifty-square-foot rose garden in Oruro's Chiripujio neighborhood. I bought a bicycle and dedicated my heart and soul to teaching. I was hopeful about the future. I lived modestly, but I wasn't hard up. I was healthy as a buck, my wife was a dedicated worker, and we had plenty of friends. Combining our two salaries, we were sometimes able to put aside savings. We dreamed of emigrating to Córdoba, Argentina and kept a collection of brochures, newspaper clippings, and letters from people we knew describing the city's beauty and pleasant climate.

Within a year our son was born and we baptized him Luis Alberto Carlos. He came out pearl-colored, with his mother's black hair, bawling like there was no tomorrow. Antonia was attractive, thin, soft-spoken, and discreet. You barely noticed her during the day, but she used her imagination, repressed by years of studying at a Catholic girl's school, to fill our nighttime lovemaking sessions with surprises. In spite of living in a poor, unstable, troubled country, I couldn't complain. I had a satisfying existence—low on means, but high on hope.

My only real worry was my father's decline into a state of profound neurosis. He started getting irritable and any old thing ticked him off. One day he took me aside and confided to me that he'd lost his virility. I told him it was just a temporary problem that a good sexual-enhancement drug could fix, which consoled him.

My little boy was growing up, happy and healthy. After working for four years as a teacher, I bought myself a motorcycle and became the envy of the neighborhood. How did it all go to hell? I remember that my wife always used to come down with colds, and then one day she had to go to the hospital with a fever and a nasty cough. The doctor who took care of her told me she had a spot on her lung, but that it wasn't serious and she'd get over it with a little rest. After leaving the hospital, she quit working and tried staying home for a while. But as soon as she started getting active again, the symptoms reappeared: fatigue, night sweats, and a cough as stubbornly persistent as a leaky old roof. I blew all my savings on medicine, and before I knew it I was in debt and drinking more than usual. Bolivia was in bad shape back then; it's always been in bad shape. I sent my wife away to Tupiza Valley to stay with an aunt who owned a grocery store, and to breathe warmer air. With the passing months she got noticeably better; she started to gain weight and she got her good looks back. Her sense of humor returned and so did the color to her face.

The tragedy is that although the spot did disappear from her lung, Antonia no longer felt anything for me. At first she didn't want to make love because she wanted to recuperate. Later, she needed time to feel like herself again. In the end, she just didn't love me anymore. She didn't even want me to touch her. My caresses were pure torture for her. I was too dumb to realize she'd latched onto another guy, a new-wave, right-wing, pro-military, boot-licking politician who'd gone from opportunistic trade unionist to labor advisor for the Armed Forces. While I taught English at a public high school to a bunch of do-nothings, she spent the whole afternoon in bed with that rich bastard. I couldn't bring myself to kick her out of the house because our son was still so young. I swallowed it . . . I swallowed it, anxiously hoping that Antonia would get bored with that guy. I used to see him from time to time in town, strutting around with the other politicians, regular louts and sleazebags every one of them. I thought about buying a revolver and putting a bullet in his head, but killing him wouldn't have solved anything. I would have gone to jail, my son would have died of hunger, and Antonia would have found somebody else.

I went from brothel to brothel screwing tarts until I started getting an ungodly discharge that I was only able to cure with a mail-order medication from Germany. I became a self-denying cuckold who was still hopelessly in love. My teacher's salary wasn't enough to cover even our basic necessities anymore, and so I left the rich and precise language of Keats to work in contraband, a line of work that's looked down upon but that brought in three times more money for me.

That still wasn't enough to get Antonia's attention. She slept alone in a separate room and couldn't have cared less whether or not I went out whoring. One day she declared she was leaving for Argentina to reflect on her future, on the essence of her womanhood, and a bunch of other nonsense. When she said goodbye, we clasped hands and she kissed my son on the forehead. I haven't seen her since. Years later, people told me she was living in Mendoza with some guy who sold empanadas on the road to Chile. One Christmas, I got a photo in the mail of her beside a lake. Poor thing . . . she revealed that the trip was helping her find herself. With her callow, empty bumpkin's mind, I don't know what the hell she was going to find. Luis Alberto Carlos had become an easy-going, handsome, dark-skinned kid and he was getting bigger; soon he'd grown taller than my shoulder. I did a brainwashing job on him to make sure he didn't feel anything for Antonia. He burned all her pictures and proclaimed that she was dead to him.

After graduating from high school at the age of eighteen, my son got the preposterous idea of moving to Canada and nearly pulled it off. A cousin from my mother's side owned a fur shop in New Orleans and was married to an American. He came down to Oruro on vacation once and hit it off with my boy. He told me that Bolivia was going nowhere and that if I wanted a better future for Luis Alberto Carlos, he could take him along to Louisiana as his helper to teach him the fur business. If the kid felt like studying, he would have the time and the money for it. The idea hardly made me jump for joy, but it was a good option for my son's college education.

My relationship with my son was based on mutual respect: He was my companion, my friend . . . and sometimes my confessor. I didn't have a lot to give him. Contraband sounds romantic, like a lot of money, but that's only true for the guy who puts down the dough himself and then sells the merchandise. I was just a middleman, a ten-percent-plus-travel-expenses kind of guy.

I let my son go even though it meant I'd be as lonely as a priest in the boondocks. It was best for him to take his chances on the American dream. Just like Borges, the Argentine, I've always had a weakness for Anglo-Saxons. Not so much the Brits as the Americans, most of all because of their crime fiction. So the fur dealer had his helper, and my son promised to write often and to send me a ticket as soon as he could scrape a few bucks together. Back then it was relatively easy to do the paperwork to go to the United States. I don't think my son had to go through as much agony as I did later. In spite of his promise, I didn't hear a peep out of Luis Alberto Carlos for three months. Then one day I received a four-page letter in small handwriting that read like a last will and testament. He explained that he'd left New Orleans because my cousin was exploiting him like a Chinese laborer and paying him a pittance. So, it turned out my cousin was a real son of a bitch. Luis Alberto Carlos set off for Chicago, where he worked in a gas station and later in a hotel. He said the winters were freezing there with biting winds. The manager of the hotel, an old Armenian hag who smelled like olives, wanted to get into his pants, so he was planning to head back east and relocate to Miami, a tropical paradise inhabited by a teeming mass of Hispanics.

Another six months passed before I received a second letter, this time two pages long: He was studying Business Administration in college and waiting tables at a seafood restaurant. His tips were outstanding and his female coworkers had no inhibitions. Six months later came a third letter, one page in which he wrote that he'd had a successful first semester at school, that he'd been promoted to headwaiter and all he ever did was serve shrimp soup to fat-cat ruffians. The fourth missive didn't contain a single word, just a round-trip ticket. One week later, the fifth letter: five lines in which he announced he'd found me a job at the House of Pancakes in Miami and told me to work on getting fake papers to dupe the gringos for a visa. In the postscript, he wrote that he didn't have a stable address for the time being but that he'd stop by the House of Pancakes every week to look for me. Next, the address of the House of Pancakes where I was supposedly going to work, and that was it. My boy was off his rocker, but what else could I do? It was my frustrating destiny . . .

“Another drink?” the waiter asked. Just walking from table to table, the guy must've lost two pounds each night.

I got up to pee for the second time. The john was packed with boozehounds trying to figure out how to avoid pissing all over each other. I realized I'd reached my limit and that another drop of beer would send me into uncharted territory. It was time for me to leave.

“Thanks. You're all set,” the waiter said empathetically as I left.

The afternoon had changed color: a sea of gray clouds obscured the sun and threatened to smother the city like a blanket.

My drunken high led me straight home, where I fell asleep for a few hours. After sobering up with a cold shower, I went down to the lobby at around 7. I felt dejected and I was still a bit out of it, but the cold shower had brought me back to the reality of my insoluble problems. I ran into Blanca in the lobby. Wearing everyday clothing of T-shirt, jeans, and no makeup, she exuded a kind of youthful sparkle. Without her harlot's guise her bawdy sensuality was a thing of the past. She could have passed for an everyday girl from eastern Bolivia. She looked five years younger and like she didn't have a care in the world.

“How'd it go?” she asked.

“Bad.”

“Your breath reeks. You've been drinking, haven't you?”

“Just beer. I was hoping the alcohol would cheer me up, but all it gave me was a wicked hangover. I could use some aspirin.”

“I was going to get some Chinese food for dinner,” she said. “Wanna come?”

There are some looks that only women can give you, and this was one of those, an unmistakable signal that we could be more than just bedmates. We walked down Evaristo Valle, past street vendors preparing for the nighttime rush, before arriving at Plaza San Francisco. When I traveled to La Paz with my father as a youngster, it was worth the trip just to lay eyes on that plaza, a magnificent, austere jewel that brought to life the grandeur of the colonial era and filled me with pride. Surrounded by a fenced-in garden, it had a distinctive nineteenth-century flavor. Romantic and autumnal, it was a place that evoked bygone times. But then some crackpot developers destroyed the garden, creating a gigantic, open cement terrace that became a hot-spot for boisterous missionaries, rock bands, street vendors, beggars, drunks, shamans, and hobos at all hours of the day and night. At one end of the plaza, an eccentric sculptor had erected a hodgepodge of curious stone statues that looked like the remains of a colossal set long ago deemed unsuitable for television. Heartlessly, and with a healthy dose of stupidity, the city had concocted an enigma for the amusement of foreign tourists. The church, meanwhile, had lost much of its shine and magic.

We plodded down the narrow streets around the old post office before stumbling across a cheap Peruvian-Chinese eatery. The owners recognized Blanca immediately and escorted us with Asian courtesy to a table for two. Blanca asked for the menu and I contented myself with a cup of jasmine tea. After getting up to buy a pack of cigarettes at the counter, I returned to find Blanca chatting with a guy standing beside her.

“I don't know who he is,” Blanca said. “He's wasted and he won't stop yakking at me.”

The man stared at me with watery eyes. “I'm a pilot,” he declared.

“Excuse me,” I said, “can't you see she's with me?”

“Who're you?” he inquired.

“Her man.”

The pilot started shaking as if standing on the bow of a fishing boat on the high seas. He stared at me scornfully and repeated, “I'm a pilot.”

“Get out of the way. We're about to take off,” I said.

“What's her name?” he asked.

“Connie,” I said. “Connie Cockface.”

Blanca broke out in laughter.

Standing two hand-lengths from my nose, the man inhaled. “Some other time,” he grumbled. “When I'm ready.”

The pilot walked away, leaving behind a trail of booze stench. Blanca looked around indifferently.

“Every time I come I meet new Chinese people. I swear they're using our country to get to the United States.”

“If only they'd show me how it's done!”

“They work together and always find a way.”

A muscular bowlegged Chinese waitress dressed in a sweater and a skirt left an enormous plate in the middle of the table: a concoction of fish, chicken, and pork rind lathered in sweet and sour sauce, accompanied by a generous serving of Peruvian-style fried rice.

“I don't think you're getting enough calories,” I joked.

“The way I live, I'll get burned out in a month if I don't eat well,” Blanca said. “What are we gonna do about you? The gringos have ruined your appetite.”