The Dismal Science (30 page)

Tiny
humitas
filled a platter on a small vestibule. There was a bottle of Bolivian red wine, two bottles of water. A paint-spattered cassette player.

Lenka was harried, had been so since she picked him up. Coordinating such an event was presumably not easy, and she was, after all, new at this. “Do you need anything?” she said.

She was ravishing in her suit and he could barely suppress the desire to kiss her, although she had done such a splendid and diplomatically tactful job of deflecting his overture the previous day. “I—want to thank you for everything,” he said.

“No, thank
you
,” she said. She nodded. She was in a hurry to leave and tend to business. “You wait here for ten minutes, and I'll come get you when Evo arrives.”

“Yes,” he said, and then grabbed her hand and pulled her close. He kissed her on the mouth, cupping the back of her head with his hand, her silken hair spilling between his fingers. For a brief moment, a glorious sliver of limbo, the two kissed and he felt no judgment one way or another—no victory and no defeat. He laid his hand on her hip, lightly. She pulled out of the kiss, wiped her mouth, and glanced around the room, as if looking for something. Then she took her lipstick out of her bag and a small handheld mirror, and he watched her reapply it.

The spell was only half broken, and he didn't want to do any more damage, so he said nothing. Once she was done she looked at him, amused, warmly even, approvingly even, and shook her head. “You are a crazy person,” she said. She leaned in and kissed him on the cheek and left.

He glanced down at the pages of his speech again, sensing that perhaps it might not sit well with her as it was. It was beyond noncommittal. It was committed to an extended stay in limbo. Maybe Walter was right and Vincenzo needed to stake his flag somewhere, anywhere—and maybe he would come down with Evo and the leftists who adored him? He could tilt the speech in that direction. Picking up the pages, he scanned for a place where he could skew the rhetoric, where he could declare a kind of allegiance to Evo. Did that necessitate him renouncing his work at the Bank, though? This question protruded, because he was not prepared to do that. He found a place in the speech where he could digress about Evo's finer qualities. Pulling a pen from his pocket, he marked it with an arrow. In the margin, he wrote:

           
TALK ABOUT HOW EVO IS SUPERB HERE. ALSO MAYBE TALK ABOUT HOW THE BANK SHOULD BE BETTER.

An extended round of roaring applause outside signaled that Evo had entered the building. Vincenzo waited, feeling his blood pressure spike at the impending moment. Finally, the door opened, but it wasn't Lenka; it was someone in a sport jacket, a man.

“
Señor D'Orsi,”
he said. He was overweight, bald.

“Sí,”
Vincenzo said, wishing that he were better prepared for this, wishing he had found time to get this right, and wishing, moreover, that life didn't happen so goddamn fast—wishing it didn't come at you like so many flying daggers.

“Por favor, venga conmigo,”
the man said and Vincenzo did as he was told, following him out into a packed atrium. He spotted Lenka there amid the throng; she was dispatching orders to an underling, she was in charge, formidable. Seeing him, she waved the overweight man away and, taking Vincenzo by the arm, marched him through the crowd. People stared at them, but she parted them assertively and impatiently. Glancing around, he noticed huge translucent rectangles were dangling from cables and within each rectangle sat an array of bills, no doubt Bolivia's abandoned currencies. Each phase of currency representing a new fantasy of stability, each an imagined prosperity that eventually died. There were more bills mounted on the walls.

Lenka brought him into a long, narrow room, which was to serve as their makeshift auditorium. Evo Morales stood at the
back, grinning and talking with Walter, who was tilted predatorily at him, grinning maniacally.

They all took their seats and the museum's director, whose voice was radio-ready, spoke briefly about Evo and the art on display, about the country's rich history of rebellion. He mentioned the exhibition of money too—“A display that was developed with the help of the World Bank and
IMF
”—at which the crowd laughed raucously. Vincenzo smiled obligingly. A photographer snapped his picture.

Then the director turned his attention to introducing Evo, lavishing him with praise, going so far as to say he was “the most important and exciting leader this country has had since its independence.” Vincenzo wondered if that was true. And, if it was true, he wondered if what he had done was more important than even he understood. History would render its verdict sooner or later, of course, and then his kamikaze could be reassessed.

Evo kept his remarks brief, talking about his gratitude toward Vincenzo for standing up to the imperialist forces of his former employers, for sacrificing himself at their hands. Echoing—deliberately, perhaps—Kennedy's “ask not what your country can do for you” speech, he said that such selflessness was imperative for the Bolivian people, moving forward, as they were facing dire poverty, and only through personal sacrifice could they lift the country.

Evo concluded by thanking Vincenzo for “championing this little country. For too long we have been food for the globalization animal.” Finally, he beckoned Vincenzo to the stage.

In his best Spanish, Vincenzo said, “Thank you, Presidentelect Morales, for inviting me to Bolivia. I have never been
before, but I have found the country very beautiful; the people are some of the most lovely people I know. Modest and proud—nothing like us Italians.” A smattering of laughter filled the ensuing pause. The lights were bright and shined directly into Vincenzo's eyes when he looked up at the crowd, so he could not see much. Lenka and Walter were off to his left, he knew; Evo was off to his right, at the front. He could see the silhouette of Evo's distinctive head, but little else was clear to him.

Against his better judgment, he decided not to switch to English and, casting his eyes down at the page, he did his best to translate the speech into Spanish, saying: “I worked at the World Bank for a long time, since I was in my twenties, and I enjoyed the work. When I was hired, Robert McNamara was in charge and the World Bank was a different institution. We were smaller, for one thing. But, ahm—” Vincenzo hesitated, as if he'd lost his place. He read on, though there was nothing appealing ahead and now that he was getting the temperature of the room, the antiestablishment tone of the night, he could tell his rote talk about his career at the Bank wasn't going to work, so briefly switching to English, he said, “I'm going to skip ahead.” He flipped to the next page of notes.

Then, thinking better of trying to do an impromptu translation of his speech, he said, “I will read the rest in English, if that's okay.”

The crowd was painfully silent.

“It's, um—fine, here: the World Bank was conceived in 1944 by the Allies, because they needed—” He paused again because this was not of any use, either.

He wiped sweat from his forehead. “Sorry,” he said. He skipped ahead, and read, “The future of the Bank is—” But he gave up right there, blushing, as this travesty came into focus—and said, “I'm sorry, I can't read this.”

The crowd chuckled uncomfortably. There was some scattered applause. Vincenzo didn't talk for a while—he wasn't sure what he might say. He should praise Evo, he knew. He was supposed to align himself with the liberals in the room; or, that had been the plan, such as it was.

He wiped more sweat from his forehead and said, “I quit the World Bank because I hated what had become of my life while I worked there.” This was true. “It wasn't the job, actually.” This, too, was true. The truth was, if not liberating, simpler than trying to concoct some other tilt, some advantageous hue, so he relinquished himself to the truth. After all, he was starting to suppose it was all a wash in the end anyway. And, continuing, he said, “I know that this won't be a popular thing for me to say here, but I think that the World Bank is a good institution. It's more useful than
NATO
, probably. Everyone who works there, including the president of the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz, whom I and many of my colleagues expected to hate, means well. Believe it or not, Paul is a good person. And he is a smart person, and he cares about the world more than most people. He works hard. He—well, I don't know. All of my colleagues there worked hard. Me too. I did it for more than two decades.”

Some people hissed. Fortunately, most seemed too stunned to react.

“But I worked too hard. I gave too much of myself to this thing—this work. And I came to resent it when my life fell
apart. I'm middle-aged now and I—I am very angry. I thought that we should be doing better. And when this man, this representative of the Bush administration, came up to me one morning and asked how ‘we' were going to respond if Evo Morales won the election, I was infuriated. I was more than that. I was so upset. I felt—I was not
with him
, this man. I hated him and I hated his boss, George Bush.”

There was scattered laughter, applause. He tried to see if Lenka was applauding, but he couldn't locate her in the darkness spread before him. He could see no one, really—just the shapes of them—and he could hear them and smell them, the bodies packed into that space.

“But I'm here to tell you that the World Bank is a big and complicated place,” Vincenzo said, as he finally started to relax into the moment. “You know, many of my colleagues . . .” He stopped, realizing that he was about to digress altogether too far, talking about the colleagues he liked and how they hadn't gone to work for investment banks despite the obvious financial incentives. Instead, he got back on topic and said, “I congratulate Evo Morales on his win. I hope he can do more for this country than those who have come before him. His job is very difficult. I wouldn't wish it on
anyone.”
No one laughed. Lenka would not have liked that, he realized. “The odds against him making it a full four years are very significant, but I know he means well, too. He is here because he cares about Bolivia. He has said he is going to slash his own salary by half and I believe him. I spoke to Evo a little while ago, a few days ago. We met in his office and he is a very pleasant man and he is sensitive, and I know he means what he says. That should count
for something. I think it should, anyway. I have met quite a few presidents in Latin America, and most of these men don't mean what they say, not in the way that he does. He is
real.”
No one stirred. There was nothing else to say. The presidentelect had flown him down and he had taken the stage, rambled incoherently, and all but insulted his host, before finally losing his place once again. It had been a flawless disaster. He'd managed to please no one at all. Before they took the microphone away, before his platform was erased, he concluded, “I hope—I hope that doesn't change about Evo. I hope that he can make a difference. But I must confess that I did not do what I did because of him.”

Vincenzo stepped away from the podium.

The crowd hovered, motionless, uncertain of what to do. The applause began inside the narrow room and spread out to the atrium. The applause was rapturous, too enthusiastic to be sincere. Were they delighted by the awkwardness, or did the halting and naked honesty somehow overwhelm them with a more visceral pleasure than they'd planned for? Maybe they just didn't understand his English. In any case, it was over, the move—such as it was—had been played. Vincenzo waved at the audience. He wiped his brow again and walked back toward his seat.

Evo laughed too forcefully, unnaturally, while shaking Vincenzo's hand, and asked Vincenzo if he was drunk.

Vincenzo said he was not, but that he hoped to be soon.

Walter's expression, meanwhile, was frozen in a kind of shock that only Walter could experience—equidistant from horror, amusement, and bafflement. Vincenzo hated Walter for being amused at all. It was maddening, and he hated the thought that this, too, had been another dose of material for Walter's dispatches. This look here, this pseudo-amused look from Walter, clawed at him as other people started approaching him; they wanted to shake his hand and speak to him. Miming his way through the conversations, shaking the hands, he looked at the faces, noticing that most of them were laughing or smiling at him like he was a chimpanzee in a top hat. There had been two video cameras, Vincenzo now saw, and the cameramen were chatting animatedly among themselves, while one of them casually reviewed his footage on a small screen. Lenka, locked in somber conversation with several people—maybe press, maybe colleagues—was stranded on the far side of the room, and when Vincenzo finally excused himself from the swarm around him to go see her, he saw her glance at him and he saw her face harden and he knew, right away, that she was not happy.
Of course
. This event had been her idea, in a way, what part of it wasn't his. It had been her responsibility and he had blown it. She, too, had wanted him to perform a certain way, and he had not managed to do so.