The Travel Writer (16 page)

Pilar laughed.

“Are you sorry now you destroyed the photo?” I asked.

She let go of Kenny’s head. He straightened up, slowly, a blade of grass after the gust has died away.

“No,” she said. “My parents have traveled enough.”

An apology rose like bile in my throat, but I swallowed it down.

“How did you meet Hilary?” Kenny asked, tired of being left out of the conversation.

“At my old job, on a trip to Citrus County, Florida. Manatees,” Pilar added. “We liked each other right away. One night when she was here, we stayed up at the lounge, talking, almost until dawn. Several men tried to buy her drinks, but she wasn’t interested.”

“Told you,” said Kenny to me.

“Until dawn? Kenny says she could get pretty sauced,” I said.

“If you had the life she had, you’d get sauced too,” said Pilar. “Let’s not talk about her now.”

I wondered what miseries Hilary could have recounted to impress an orphan like Pilar. Had they really become fast friends over a long night of girly drinks at the Matamoros lounge?
Perhaps the talk had turned to old boyfriends. Perhaps Pilar had told Hilary my lover’s secrets: what I was good at and not so good at, how happy or unhappy I had made her. I imagined the two of them laughing and sharing healthy disdain for the people who’d failed them. I didn’t mind. Hilary and I now had something in common—we were the only two people, to my knowledge, ever to win over Pilar.

“Are you joining us at the Matamoros, Kenny?” she asked.

“If I’m invited.”

“Of course.” She lowered her voice. “But you’ll have to pretend to be a photographer working with Jacob on a review of the hotel. You can’t tell anyone”—she nodded at Arturo—“why you’re really here. Can you pull it off?”

He nodded and beamed. She’ll be another Hilary to him if she’s not careful, I thought, and then analyzed my surprising jealousy. How readily it subsumed more useful emotions—distrust, for example.

We came next to the village of Chuspipata, a massive truck stop and checkpoint. Minivans and open trucks packed with workers pulled over so that drivers and passengers could pay tolls, sign papers, relieve themselves (in the bathroom—the fine for peeing on the roadside was well advertised and unaffordable to any worker), and buy water, Coke, soup, or snacks from the roadside stalls. Kids formed chattering packs. European tourists patrolled the strip on foot, looking for the neatest stall, the least questionable food. Arturo abandoned us to attend to the authorities, while Kenny went for a leak. Pilar pretended to doze. I wasn’t fooled.

“He and his Condepa friends threatened me over Hilary yesterday morning,” I said to her. “Do you know how dangerous he is?”

Her eyes snapped open. “Sometimes I forget how dangerous you are,” said Pilar. “Did you tell him any lies? I know you. You told him Hilary was your sister, or your lover, but he caught you out quick—quicker than I did.”

“You never caught me. I came clean on my own. I apologized.” I hated having to defend myself. Love should be a joyful charge to victory, not a wary advance under fire. But why should I think she’d forgiven me just because we screwed last night? “Does he know Hilary’s alive?”

“Shut up about that. For once. No one else knows. Don’t get me in any more trouble.”

“You? I could have been killed.”

“They don’t kill people. I told you: Condepa is a political party that grew out of a syndicate of drivers. You can’t find a driver that doesn’t belong. Condepa’s done a lot for them. And not only for them. Like I said—half the hotel votes Condepa.”

“They must be more than a group of taxi drivers. What about their Mallku? I’ve heard all about him. Cocaine? Is it cocaine?”

“Don’t be such an American.” She opened the door. “Let’s find Arturo.”

We passed an open truck, and I examined the bored, expressionless faces of the workers standing in the back. Like commuters in the subway: packed close, none of them speaking. Except that these workers would all be wet soon from the waterfalls that drenched several parts of the road.

Nearby, a crowd of men sat or crouched on rocks by the roadside, opposite the line of stalls and bathrooms, and squinted up at Arturo, who was gesticulating and pantomiming before them. I sidled closer to hear. Pilar held back, amused. She had seen the act before.

“Here’s my friend the gringo!” Arturo said. The audience turned to stare, grinning, as if I were part of the show. “A good guy, but, ay! Does he get anxious when he sees Dionisius.”

Before my eyes, he became a contemptible, sniveling coward, cringing in the face of an imaginary assailant and pleading for his life. He spoke clearly and slowly, so that I too could savor every word. Then he straightened to deliver the epilogue in his own voice.

“He’s an American, and you know they don’t like danger. They fly above and drop explosives and defoliants, or dollars if their digestion’s been good.”

A horn sounded, and the men slapped their hands together, wiped the dust from their butts, and trotted off to their vehicles.

“Your friends?” I asked.

“Drivers. A good bunch of Indians. They love me.”

We walked back to the car. Kenny was inside already, peering anxiously out the window. How would he fend for himself if we abandoned him? He’d wait for a tourist van, and try to find someone who knew English, but they’d all say they were too full to take him. Perhaps he could hitch a ride on a minibus or pay a dollar for a spot on an open truck filled with workers heading back up to the city. He’d spend the next two hours vomiting out the back while his glaring fellow passengers gave him as much room as possible.

“Listen,” said Arturo to me. “This Hilary, she was a wild one, but she didn’t deserve what happened to her. She had a lover at the hotel, you know. A groundskeeper, I think, or maybe it was the man who cleans the pool.”

“What gossip!” said Pilar. “You’re worse than an old woman, Arturo.”

“The captain of the bellhops himself informed me,” he insisted. “You can’t keep a secret
from me. But listen: no one deserves to suffer. Not Hilary, not anyone. Isn’t that right?”

“No one deserves to suffer,” Pilar agreed.

“Then we are all in agreement about this girl.” Arturo grinned and clasped his hands to emphasize our consensus.

“What else did you hear about her?” I asked.

“They say she smoked marijuana with the security guards, swam nude in the pool at midnight, and kissed a bartender and a guest in full sight of all,” said Arturo. “That’s in addition to the lover. A rich, wild white girl on vacation. But don’t Bolivian girls drink too much and kiss boys? And the boys are ten times as foolish. We’re all idiots from time to time.”

Pilar reached for the door handle and hesitated. Inside the car, Kenny slunk back against the seat, reddened, and gazed guiltily into his lap. Pilar looked back at me, her eyes full of a deflating disappointment. I almost moved to catch her, though she wasn’t falling.

“I’ll drive you, señorita,” came the voice from behind.

It was Dionisius, accompanied by two men only slightly less massive that himself. Pilar must have seen his reflection in the window of the car.

“There’s room in my vehicle,” he said.

“You drive for the Matamoros too?” I asked. My courage, in Spanish, seemed almost natural.

“Of course. And at this moment I have to speak with Miss Rojas.”

Dionisius looked like a judge and his bench and his gavel all in one.

“She’s my guide,” I said. “She is necessary to me. I need her services. For my article.”

“Pardon the disturbance,” he said. “The hotel requires that she accompany me.”

Arturo pushed his butt backward onto the hood of a car and kept on watching the show.

“Very well, Dionisius,” said Pilar. She pronounced the name slowly, so that every soft Spanish-style
s
seemed to fill the space between heartbeats.

I grabbed and twisted the fabric of her sleeve, like a child getting his mother’s attention. “Don’t go with him,” I said in English. “You don’t want to. I can see it.”

She bent her head toward me as she detached my hand. “They’ll want to impress you with the medicine man immediately,” she said, quietly and quickly. “See him first.” I nodded, as if I understood. She placed her hand on my chest, and for an instant I thought she was going to kiss me (goodbye?), but she was just pushing me aside as she passed, or perhaps using me to steady herself. Dionisius’s two companions stepped in front of me as she went, like bodyguards protecting a star from an adoring fan. I watched her walk away alongside Dionisius. Dust rose behind their feet like morning mist. A group of children swarmed behind them, a few cars passed, and they were lost. One of the two bodyguards nodded at Arturo, and then they left us.

“Why did he take her?” I asked.

“He has to talk to her,” said Arturo. “You’re too suspicious. My father’s that way. My mother died right after I was born, and ever since he watches me. Any cold and again with the medicine, the herbs, the coca tea. He always watches me closely, like I’m trying to get sick.” But he kept looking through the dispersing crowd, as if to find Pilar and reassure himself.

“Where are they going?” I said.

“To the hotel.” He pointed to an SUV already shooting up the road ahead, followed by a bushy, brown tail of dust. “They’ll get there much faster than us.”

What would happen to Pilar along the way? She had indeed been in danger all this time, more than I’d been, and I had hardly believed her.

We got in the car. All the other waiting vehicles were lumbering out into the road, clogging the passage in front of us. We slogged forward behind a microbus, rolling over the stones in the road so slowly you could feel the car tilt each time the front tire rose and fell. I would have murdered someone for a motorcycle, or even a mountain bike. A military man waved at Arturo as we passed and went on interrogating the driver of a rusty flatbed truck.

“Where’s Pilar?” demanded Kenny from the backseat.

The insult of brake lights in front of us. We stopped completely. Infuriatingly. The SUV was now out of sight.

“She’s getting a ride with someone else,” I said.

“She went off with that big idiot. I saw the whole thing.”

“No fooling you, Kenny! Just relax, all right? The guy’s a driver for the hotel. Like Arturo.”

The microbus ahead of us released its brakes and started forward, relieving some tiny fraction of the pressure on my brain.

“Like who?” asked Kenny.

“This guy right here.”

“Oh. I didn’t know.”

Arturo feinted to the right, then shot to the left to pass the microbus. Success, but it didn’t matter; there were a half dozen more in front of us, and the road was narrowing, like a swollen throat.

The road between La Paz and the town of Coroico provides La Paz with a steady supply of fresh fruit, coca leaves, and postharvest laborers; and provides Coroico with vacationers, day-trippers, and empty trucks for loading. Most of the road is one winding dirt lane (mud in the rainy season), carved or blasted out of the sheer mountain slopes. As it descends, the tropics encroach: weeds, branches, and flowers grope for the roadside; waterfalls drench traffic from above. Coca fields and orange groves in respectable squares control lonely outposts of land in the distance, and high above, towering over the highest hills and even poking through a few of the clouds, stand the peaks of the Andes, like a spiked fence around a tropical garden.

To one side of the road is the lush mountain face; to the other, a sheer drop of often hundreds of feet into the topical river valley below. The road’s one lane is barely wide enough for a single descending minibus of weekenders from La Paz, or a single eight-wheel cargo truck dragging a full load of citrus fruit (or human fruit pickers) driving up from the valley. And yet the traffic is two-way.

We took a corner, and a fruit truck was roaring in our windshield like a dragon. Arturo hit the brakes and swung left, toward the precipice; the truck, barely slowing down, slipped between us and the rock face and motored on. Kenny looked outraged.

“The rule is traffic going down makes for the edge, and the traffic coming up for the cliff,” I explained, grateful for any respite from brooding over Pilar’s fate. “Lucky we were on a curve, where the road’s wider. If there’s no room to pass, we have to back up.”

“Why us?”

“Trucks coming up are loaded with fruit and can’t stop as quick.”

To unaccustomed passengers, the system seemed needlessly terrifying, but I had braved the route half a dozen times and knew the drivers could be trusted. They were no more reckless than New York City cabbies. Nonetheless, mistakes were made. Once an open truck loaded with Bolivian peasants plummeted into the valley, killing more than one hundred and making the
Guinness Book of World Records
for Deadliest Traffic Accident. No one, not even the Guinness editors, ever figured out exactly how many had died. The vegetation had swallowed most of the corpses, and several of the migrant victims found had had no families to claim them. Often even the vehicles disappeared into the guts of the jungle below, never to be discovered.

Arturo was a careful driver. He honked when rounding blind curves and refrained from accelerating through dust clouds. I noticed he had no protective Virgin Mary or other saint fixed to the dashboard or swinging from the rearview mirror.

“Do you pray before you do this route?” I asked him. “I’ve seen drivers feed pieces of meat to the dogs for good luck.” It was hard to hear myself ask an ordinary question of this conspirator, but I needed the distraction.

“I ask my mother for a blessing.”

“Was she a good driver?”

“She died after she was hit by a
trufi
. She would know now how to avoid traffic accidents, no?”

I agreed and had to feign clearing my throat to abort an “I’m sorry.” I envisioned a semitransparent woman of indistinct age seated serenely on the hood of his car, slowing oncoming fruit trucks with gentle blasts of her heavenly breath. Behind his unflappable exterior, perhaps Arturo’s mind was bubbling constantly with such fancies. A microbus came around the bend in the distance and chugged toward us. Arturo zoomed forward to a bulge in the road and pulled over to wait, sighing, like his father would perhaps, when he returned home from work and had to make dinner for his son. I tried to shake the static out of my head. I was so tired and muddled that I was daydreaming my adversary’s dreams.