Sun After Dark (9 page)

Then, as suddenly as they had materialized, the guns were gone again, and we were bumping along in the dark, mountains on one side of us, a precipice on the other. I tried to sleep, but every time I fell away—seven, ten times in the night—I woke to find us stopped, guns in front of us, and faces at the window. The driver shoving banknotes into a hand, or laboring out to what looked like a rebel guardpost. Boys, clamorous, full of their own strength, asking who I was, peering in to get a look.

There were painted windows made of glass in the six- or seven-story houses beside us and when the lights were on, the panes shone like stained-glass across the darkened mountainside. Sometimes, as I slept, I woke to rain, the creaking wipers of the car moving frantically back and forth while the car skidded across the road and the man swerved furiously, so we were spinning towards the mountain. At times he turned on a radio—mad wailing in the dark—to keep himself from falling asleep, his stash of
qat
beside him.

When there was a light above us on the road, I looked at my watch—11:41, 1:53. The capital never seemed to come closer. The driver stopped, to relieve himself in a ditch. Again, to get some warmer clothing out of the back. He stopped again, to catch his breath, and I pointed angrily at my watch; he came back from his stop with a can of 7-Up, two bars of chocolate, for me.

Occasionally, we passed a sudden light in the dark mountains—a circle of figures around a shack for some reason open at 2 a.m. Then, it was only darkness again, the plain far below, the sound of thunder from the mountains. Rain, and boys waving at us to stop; guns at the window, and the air appreciably cooler in the high places, the tower-houses all around shuttered fastnesses.

As the first call to prayer rose up—3:45, I guessed—we came to what seemed to be buildings, larger roads (the capital?), and boys who now stood at intersections in the brownish light. Guarding their turf as if in East L.A., oil drums blocking the way, and coming to our window to demand tithes, local taxes, or blood money. The driver turned left onto an empty road, then right onto an empty road, and I realized that he had no idea where he was going.

At last, long after 4:00 a.m., we saw a tower, even higher than the tower-houses all around, and I recognized the building where I had been admitted into the country a few days before, the
khareef
just behind me. A group of Chinese traders was passing through a security check; a man who slept on the sofa in his office got up to offer me Saudi rials. I got in a plane and flew to Dubai—Internet connections in the airport hotel, a seven-star hotel only a short drive away—and saw the monitors at every departure gate announcing New York, London, Tokyo.

Less than six weeks later, as it happened, two planes flew into the World Trade Center in New York, and Aden, Oman, were suddenly pulled out of the subconscious, back into the forefront of our minds. The bored soldiers I had seen in the hotel lobby began steaming towards Afghanistan, to fight, and southern Yemen, near Aden, where Osama bin Laden’s home village lies, was taken to be the center of all evil. Aden, everyone now recalled, was the site of the most recent terrorist attack on America (the bombing of the USS
Cole
eleven months before, in the harbor outside my hotel), and a place that most of us had consigned to myth, somewhere behind the mists of the
khareef,
was suddenly dragged back into the present tense.

I sat in California and listened to the imprecations—Aden now deemed the opposite of Milton’s “Araby the Blest”—and thought back to the driver who had got out in the middle of the night to buy me chocolate, the woman turning to the little girl in the airline office, my sad-eyed guide pointing to the graves of his mother, his sister, the Indian nuns, the British officers. Many of them, I suspected, had friends and loved ones of their own in New York (even in the World Trade Center), whom they must be worried about even now. In the streets—it wasn’t hard to imagine—the children would be playing tag in the dusk, their high voices rising up along the empty boulevards, while we sat in our mansions, watching versions of their lives onscreen, and wishing destruction on them all.

2001

A JOURNEY INTO LIGHT

If you look at Bolivia in a certain light—and light is the sovereign element here, glinting off the tin roofs of the valley and turning the windows of the high-rises into panes of gold—the city of La Paz offers a visitor a near-perfect diagram of the tenses. Right at the center of town is a model of the colonial past: a classic Spanish plaza with a legislative palace on one side of it, a presidential palace (and a cathedral) on another, and, on a third, the “Gran Hotel Paris,” a now-fading relic of yesterday’s glories that beams out the single word “Paris” across the skyline after dark. At the center of the plaza is a statue—GLORY, UNION, PEACE, and FORCE, cry out its four sides—and all around it are nymphs, standing for some of the classical arts.

Just a few minutes’ walk away from that official center of imported power is what might seem to be the present tense: the flower-filled elegance of the Prado, the closest thing La Paz offers to a grand avenue in New York. Indian women are everywhere on the sidewalk, occupying every nook and cranny of free space with their pyramids of Pringles cans, their pirated videos of Ricky Martin, and enough copies of Peter Drucker’s works on neoliberalism to occupy the citizenry for a century. But all these sights are dwarfed by the signs of modernity all around. Outside a chic McDonald’s an armed man stands guard, protecting a place whose prices are higher than those of the Parisian café next door. Across the street are kids with cell phones, and Internet cafés. At the place where the boulevard ends, a long straggly line of laborers is gathered, almost every day, around the base of a plate-glass skyscraper on which, too fittingly, is written, THE FUTURE OF BOLIVIA.

In fact that future lies a few minutes’ drive away, through Sopacachi (the embassy area, full of “Latin jazz” clubs and Tex-Mex hangouts), down in the valley to the south. The Burger King in the Zona Sur is as large as a Mercedes showroom, and the Hypermarket on the corner seems to invert everything that swarms and sprawls across the Indian market up above. The names that govern the straight streets are the traditional ones— “Calacoto” and “Cotacota,” “Achumani” and “Chasquipampa”— and yet the whole clean suburb has been made to look like what the affluent, at least, might hope for in the future. The karaoke parlor here is called “America,” and the shopping mall “San Diego.” As I sat one night in a pizza joint, which boasted prices higher than in Miami, a high-school girl at the next table, soignée as Catherine Zeta-Jones, shut her eyes and sang along, transported, to “Hotel California” on the sound track.

Yet the saving grace of Bolivia, and what makes it almost irresistible for anyone eager to escape the simplicities of the moment, is that in reality it stands all such theories on their heads. The actual center of town, just blocks away from the Spanish Plaza Murillo, is the Indian marketplace, the living past, where women in bowler hats offer llama foetuses and aphrodisiacs along with copies of Francis Fukuyama’s
The End of History.
The costumes they are wearing are themselves something of an illusion: the plaits, many-colored ponchos, and bowler hats that we take to be such a picturesque aspect of the native culture, are, in fact, the result of the mandate of an eighteenth-century Spanish king. And where in cities like Lima you may occasionally see a splash of Indian culture in the middle of what is really a Spanish city, in La Paz it can be startling to see occasional pieces of Spain in what is, to all intents and purposes, a province of the fourteenth century. The future, you cannot help but feel, lies for Bolivia in its past.

The traveler, if he comes from a place of comfort, travels, in part, to be stood on his head; to lose track of tenses, or at least to be back to essentials, free of the details of home. “Teach me,” as Thomas Merton wrote in his journal, “to go to a country without names and words and terms.” Yet if he is to travel far enough away from the places he knows, the traveler is also obliged to see everything in two ways, or two languages, at once. On the one hand, he’s a newcomer who’s walking down the street, unable to read the signs, with the map in his hand held upside down; on the other, he has traveled to look at himself (and his world) through the eyes of the local, for whom the real source of comedy and strangeness is that newcomer, walking the wrong way down the street.

In Bolivia, this doubleness confounds you at every turn, in the most indigenous country in South America, where the people around you are speaking languages for which there is not even any written form. And so all the guidebook facts, the World Bank figures, that you’ve brought along with you go swiftly out the window. You’ve read, perhaps, in the
New York Times
that Bolivia suffers from the worst rural poverty in the world (97 percent of the people in the countryside, according to the U.N., live below the poverty level); yet as you walk along the Prado, fathers bouncing their children on their shoulders while Goofy and Mickey share a sleigh with three rival Santas, “poverty” is not the first word that comes to mind. You’ve seen, no doubt, in the
Guinness Book of World Records
that Bolivia enjoys the unhappy distinction of having suffered more changes in government than any other country (188 in 157 years); yet as you stroll among its people, girls drifting arm in arm with other girls, policemen walking hand in hand with their wives, a Nativity scene even above the Ministry of Justice, you can easily feel as if Bolivia has come to a kind of peace with its perpetual unrest; the word you hear most often is
tranquilo.
And you’ve read, if you’ve been to your local library, about a country filtered for us through accounts of Hunter Thompson and Che Guevara and Klaus Barbie (the ex-Nazi who lived in comfort in La Paz in the middle of the 1980s); yet when you arrive in La Paz, the light so resplendent that you feel as if you’re very close to the heavens, the lovers pressing against one another in the shadows of the colonial quarter after dark, you wonder how much any foreign visitor can explain about the place.

Bolivia, in fact, stands apart from all your theories and ideas, much as the Indian women, with their boxes of Windows 98 software and books by the Dalai Lama, sit apart from the future that saunters past them on the street. As I walked through the city my first day in La Paz, the women who lined the sidewalks in their colorful clothing never once made an approach to me, or shouted anything out, or tried to catch my attention with their wares. They seemed content to sit where they were, as (it was easy to believe) they had always sat. When, once, the sky suddenly turned black and torrential rains began to pelt down on us all, they got up wordlessly, draped some tarpaulin over their shacks and then sat down again, as silent as before.

The other dimension that turns everything into uncertainty in La Paz is, of course, those very skies, which govern every moment and make the humans who walk under them seem very small indeed. Water boils at eighty degrees centigrade in the thin, unnatural air, and drivers have to let out the air from their tires before entering the city. Planes flying into La Paz have landing speeds less than half those they’d have in Lima (and when my own arrived, in a near-silent international terminal, all I saw was a Narcotics Control passport desk, unmanned; eleven little suitcases unloaded from my plane onto a solitary baggage carousel; and a small space marked out as an “Oxygen Room”). The friendly taxi driver who greeted me outside, with the warm, weathered face of Tibet, drove me through the shantytown of El Alto and into the great valley of light, and I realized, almost instantly, that I would have to learn to move and breathe differently in this city two miles above the sea.

I had strange dreams in La Paz every night, and awoke at three in the morning, convinced that I knew everything that was wrong with my life and my work (I would scribble down excited notes in the heat of inspiration, and, a little later, looking back on them, see nothing but hallucination). Often I would vomit on an empty stomach in those early days, or throw myself onto my bed in a fit of sleeplessness. A knock would come at my door, and I would stagger over to see a chamberman—Bolivia has men who clean hotel rooms, instead of women—standing silently in front of me with a tray of marzipans shaped to look like watermelon slices. Another knock would come and I would find a man at my door with a canister of oxygen for me to breathe.

I learned very soon, amidst Bolivia’s turbulent skies—the sun picking out a single building in the far-off mountains, and the clouds lined with gold—that it was folly to plan anything; you are ruled by the heavens in La Paz. One bright afternoon, when the sun was so sharp above the snowcaps that they looked like painted ornaments—clouds in a different part of the city were weeping rain—I went out into the midsummer streets to go and visit the rock formations that sit beside the affluent houses of the Zona Sur. As I stepped into a minivan, a few drops of rain began to speckle the windshield.

Within ten minutes or so, following the mountain road that cuts through the city on one side, we were in the privileged world of condos and fancy new lodges. As we began to drive through the well-paved streets, suddenly the rain began to come down, and then hail, so furiously that we had to stop the car. We sat in the middle of the road and, all around, what looked to be a flurry of snow blanketed the whole city (so thick was the hail, so fierce). Brown waterfalls sprang to life in the slope around us, and the road that had brought us down into the valley was now a mountain path, impassable and icy. A few weeks later, a similar storm, depositing almost a gallon of water per square foot across the city in less than an hour, left boulevards and whole neighborhoods collapsed and took sixty-nine lives or more, the broad avenues of downtown turned, within minutes, into surging torrents, and the people who ran into underpasses to take shelter swept away along with everything else.

When at last the rain subsided and we labored our way back up into the center—the well-ordered streets looking now like a jungle—I asked a
paceño
in the car where the sacred sites of the city were, the places where the local people worshiped.

“Over there,” he said, pointing to a hill on top of which there were no trees. “Wherever there is a space open to the skies.”

Everywhere I looked, in short.

I had come to La Paz at the end of 2001 to get away from a world that was preoccupied with the war between the future and the past. A few weeks earlier the war had grown intense, as Islamic terrorists had sent two planes crashing into the World Trade Center in Manhattan, and the very symbol of the modern global order had gone down in flames. A few days later, in response, Washington, flailing around for something on which to take out its anger, had settled upon the past—an undeveloped Afghanistan ruled by a government that wanted to drag it back into an old world of veils and universal proscriptions. The Moslems, clothing themselves in the words of the Prophet, were calling, it seemed, for a return to the old ways, and to ancient notions of community and ritual and devotion; the postmodern order, by contrast, America—home of the very images that classic Islam forbids—was calling for a race into the future, the man-made, the new.

La Paz, however, seemed to sit outside all such ideas, and not only because it had few radical Moslems in residence, and not much investment in the future. For centuries the particular allure of the city named for peace had been that it sat apart from the world, off in its own dimension. Queen Victoria, in fact, had pronounced that Bolivia did not exist (when an ambassador of hers in La Paz refused a drink offered him by one of the country’s tyrants, and was forced, in response, to drink a barrelful of coffee and be led backwards through the streets on a mule); Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, detective-story writer turned spiritualist, had set his “lost world” in Bolivia. During the 1980s, when all the world watched Washington and Moscow pronouncing “mutually assured destruction” on one another, La Paz was said to be the safest place to hide in the event of a nuclear crisis.

And even in the midst of all their very real problems— 125 beds, so they said, to serve the fifty thousand physically and emotionally disturbed people in the slum of El Alto—the residents of La Paz seemed to have a very different notion of a “market economy” from the one unveiled by the young, Texas-educated local president of the time, speaking his fluent English on TV. In the week before I arrived in Bolivia, Argentina next door had seen three different presidents, and dozens of demonstrators lay dead along its elegant streets; on the way up to La Paz, I had stopped off in Lima, and found an angry, swollen metropolis across which people had scrawled cries of rage, and where even the windows were barred. Like many of the countries of South America, both Peru and Argentina seemed to have been left by the Spanish stuck between a vanished colonial notion of glory and a future that never arrived; in desperation, often, not fully European and not really themselves, they’d tried to make up the gap with pomp. Bolivia, by comparison, gave an impression of self-containment: a poor country, yes, but one that did not look as if it ever expected to be rich.

For me, then, Bolivia was pure magic. I drew back the curtains in my room and saw everything picked out with uncanny sharpness in the summer light. Mountains almost four miles high stood at the end of narrow streets, and at night the whole center of town began to glow with the lights of the little houses around the hills. The shantytown of El Alto, which I visited one morning, was a shocking place, in some ways, with its corrugated-iron shacks and its unpaved roads, and yet, compared with what I was used to seeing, in Bombay or even L.A., it did not look so dark. On market day, the streets were thronged with people snapping up manuals of 1986 Opals and copies of Tom Peters’s guides to financial success, whole minivans and buses for sale in the giddy sunshine; at a time when the Prado, down below, was closed to traffic for the holiday, El Alto was so packed with cars and trucks that one could hardly move.

The growing stain of huts across the hill (which happen— such is Bolivia’s freedom from conventional logic—to enjoy the best views in the city, all the way across the valley of light) is a sobering reminder of what happens when the country swallows up the city, and a ragged past comes to claim the present and the future. The walls around me, though not as furious as those in Lima, were inscribed with slogans hardly less poignant—“I do not believe that justice and equality exist,” “We respect those who respect us”—and El Alto, thanks to the floods of rural poor hoping to redeem themselves in the city, has become the fastest-growing city on the continent. And yet it was hard, at the same time, not to be touched and warmed by the Ferris wheels and foosball tables that had been set out in the middle of downtown, or the sign (in the shape of a Christmas tree) up at the Internet café: THE THREE WISE MEN BROUGHT A SCANNER! It is often noted that Cervantes himself, father of Quixote, once tried (in vain) to be mayor of La Paz; and he, at least, might have rejoiced in the fact that even a massage parlor, in the national newspaper
La Razon,
offered an open-hearted message as the old year came to an end: “On the occasion of the coming of the New Year, the Flor de Loto offers its distinguished clientele peace, happiness, and divine good fortune for the realization of all your dreams and plans.”