A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism (10 page)

"My wife is a saint," he said. "We met before I took the job. She has the kids to think about, and many hobbies. Tennis. Knitting. This thing called Pilates—you know it?"

Gabriel nodded.

Oscar continued. "She has friends too; I don't know them very well. My wife and I used to talk on the phone often while I was away. Eventually, we accepted that the phone only makes it worse, so we don't do that anymore. When I'm gone, I'm
gone.
Sometimes, after I'm gone for a long time, I sleep in the guest room for a couple nights when I return, because it's as if we don't know each other anymore. My wife used to worry that I had a mistress, but she has realized that it's not possible. Because there is no place that I go. There's literally
nothing
there. When I am out there, I am nowhere. Do you understand?"

Gabriel nodded, although he didn't understand at all, yet.

EVO'S POLITICAL PARTY, MAS —Movimiento al Socialismo—had its headquarters in a large and desolate storefront two blocks up the hill from Plaza Murillo. Posters of Evo's beaming face and globular head with its truncated forehead covered every possible square inch of wall in either direction. The street was narrow, its sidewalk raised two feet above the street to reduce flooding during seasonal torrents, which poured through storm drains that fed the Choqueapu River, bisecting the city from top to bottom.

The Choqueapu, slick with toxic waste and frothy sewage, ran mostly underground now, where the stench wouldn't bother anyone. La Paz would never have existed were it not for the profusion of gold that had once glittered in that river's waters. By the time the conquistadors had finished wringing every nugget from it, the surrounding city was developed enough to sustain itself without the gold. And once the gold was completely gone, the conquistadors focused on silver in the south, mainly Potosí. The silver helped prop up a century of the Spanish empire. Once the silver was exhausted, the Spaniards' attention moved to tin. By the time the Spanish ceded control, in 1825, the mountains of Bolivia were honeycombed with mineshafts. Little of value remained.

The plundering of Bolivia came to be known as El Saqueo—"the sacking." For a century and a half after the Spanish departed, Bolivia was led by a colorful array of buffoons, descendants of the conquistadors or the lesser nobility who had been dispatched to manage the country during its occupation. Through a series of lost wars and bungled treaties, Bolivia's borders contracted.

Their stretch of the Pacific was home to a species of bat that painted the sandstone cliffs white with its shit. The bat guano was monetizable, however, as an ingredient in gunpowder. When Bolivia increased its tax on this bat shit, Chile (which harvested and processed most of the shit) attacked, and it was through the ensuing war that Bolivia became landlocked. A still more inglorious moment came some fifty years later when, in 1864, a stupid and vain president named Melgarejo traded a huge swath of oil-rich jungle to Brazil for a single white stallion.

For most of the twentieth century, Bolivia languished in deep but steady poverty.

Finally, in the 1990s, large natural gas reserves were discovered in the jungles to the southeast. True to form, most of the profits from this latest subterranean bonanza also ended up in the hands of the Spanish, in this case by way of the Spanish company Repsol, which, during the 1996 privatization of the gas industry, bought up more of the reserves than any other company did. Once again, El Saqueo: only a fraction of the profit would find its way into the pockets of Bolivians.

Evo and sympathetic liberals around the world, including Gabriel's mother, were furious that Repsol and a handful of other foreign corporations had taken most of the profits from the natural gas discovery. Evo's ascendency was fueled, so to speak, mainly by his commitment to re-appropriating the gas reserves from Repsol and other companies. His plan was to invert the profit-sharing ratio between the companies and the Bolivian people: 70 percent for the companies would become 70 percent for Bolivia.

Gabriel didn't object to Evo's plan. He understood why people were outraged, but he also thought the issue was more complicated than Evo made it out to be. In matters of economics, if the answer seemed straightforward, you weren't looking closely.

In the case of Bolivian natural gas, the new profit-sharing arrangement ran a strong risk of forcing certain companies out of the country. Then Bolivia would have effectively nationalized the industry, and the new Bolivian gas company would likely lose the high-paid (mainly foreign) specialists who brought in, and managed, the complex technology involved. Safety and environmental standards, a given for Repsol, would likely be brushed aside by cash-strapped Bolivia. Foreign investors would back off. Contracts would dry up. Jobs would disappear. Plans for pipelines would be scrapped, refineries would fall into disrepair, and the whole industry would slacken into toxic obsolescence. Also, Brazil, an important Bolivian ally that also held a significant percentage of the gas fields and that imported much of the gas, would be furious.

Gabriel opened the front door of the MAS office and found a worn but capacious space, dun-colored. Overhead, fluorescent lights buzzed; beneath, a flurry of activity within a dense grid of vintage metal desks. He did not see Lenka anywhere.

A zaftig receptionist, her makeup glistening slightly under the artificial light, smiled drearily at him.

Above her a large nylon banner read:

ADELANTE BOLIVIA! MAS!
VOTA EVO!
MAS!

The banner had zero graphic sophistication. It was just that black blocky text on a white backdrop. Gabriel admired the bluntness, that distinctly Bolivian lack of flourish or pretense.

He asked the receptionist in Spanish if Lenka Villarobles was in.

She looked him up and down. Her lips were as glossy as glazed pottery. Her crimped hair looked like the dark tendrils of a sea plant that had dried stiff at low tide.

"She is expecting me," he said.

The receptionist dialed a number, then turned away and whispered into the phone, glancing back at him. Then she hung up. "Please you will wait here," she said in heavily accented English.

He picked up a campaign circular and sat down. On the cover, Evo, visiting a mine, wore a yellow hardhat. In the background little boys spattered in slate-colored mud, burgundy hardhats on their heads, too-big rubber boots on their feet, stared at Evo in wonder. Gabriel flipped the page. More of the mines: a glimpse at a chillier and darker atrium in hell's labyrinth. It was an infinite landscape of gray: pebbles, boulders, and sheets of slate, gentle shale, half mulched, as if attacked by an army of rock-eating termites. There was nothing else. Just as Gabriel began wondering if Lenka had anything to do with this leaflet, she appeared.

He stood and lunged into the greeting awkwardly. She flinched, almost, then leaned in, and they kissed each other on the cheek quickly. Though acutely aware of the many eyes on them, he had no idea if the attention was as a result of something she'd said about him, or if this was just because a young man had arrived and seemed to know her.

"You like that?" she said, referring to the brochure.

"Did you make it?"

"No."

"Then it's just okay."

She smiled at him and he caught a glimpse of warmth.

She led the way across the floor to her office, on the far side of the room. The only window in her office was a floor-to-ceiling sheet of glass facing the main floor. She sat in front of her computer. Her co-workers outside sort of pretended not to stare.

Gabriel looked at the chaos on her desk—piles of paper teetering precariously or, having already cascaded, forming text-filled lagoons on the floor. In the corner of the room, towering stacks of newspaper threatened greater disarray. On the walls, irregularly shaped clippings about Evo were Scotch-taped at haphazard angles, as in a stalker's lair. "So, are you going to introduce me to Evo?" he said.

"I don't think so, I'm sorry," she said and glanced outside. He could tell she was hyperaware of the possibility that they were being watched. He realized that she had not told her coworkers anything about him. To the extent that there was something going on, it was, for her part, on the down-low.

She had to finish an e-mail, she said. He watched her type, her face bunched in concentration. He would have sat, but the only other chair was occupied by a banker's box.

Lenka finished her typing and then chewed the corner of her lip, reviewing what she had written. He loved watching her at this—lost in thought. It reminded him of the expression on her face when she drove.

She grabbed her jacket and led the way outside. They walked up the hill.

"What would you have asked him?" she asked.

He was tempted to say something flirtatious, about how he'd ask Evo where he'd found such a lovely ... but he stopped himself. It was precisely that kind of maneuver that had scuttled so many promising beginnings for him. So he decided to be honest. "I would have asked him if he had decided who his finance minister would be."

She shook her head. "Please, Gabriel."

"I know. Believe me, I'm sorry to be persistent," he said. He wanted to back off, but there were no alternative routes. There was information that could result in profit, and there was information that couldn't. Everything else was just filler. It wasn't journalism—and it couldn't be faked. One small victory and Priya might decide he'd passed the test. That's how he saw it. He needed to give her something, and this seemed the most feasible option.

"Evo will not announce the names of cabinet members before he wins the election. That would be crazy for many reasons, maybe most important because it'd be very bad luck."

"This would be off the record."

"That doesn't help. I am his
press
liaison, and you are not the press." She had a knack for conciseness. But she didn't work on people or apply charm like others in her line of work might have, because, regardless of the particulars, she was finally a salesperson. The product she was hawking was not Evo himself, intrinsic Evo, but the perception of him as seen by those whose opinions determined his future (the Bolivian electorate, other politicians, bureaucrats, and so forth). That perception was shaped by the writers and journalists and editors who conveyed news about Evo to those people. So her job was to manipulate the messengers. That she did so without a surfeit of charm might have seemed to a cynic part of the everyman shtick that she aimed to sell. But Gabriel didn't see her as someone who was able to strategize so clearly. Her finest quality was her brusqueness, her sharpness. She was not merely smart-sharp, but cutting-sharp: filleting his argument before he got started. And that was what he adored.

They were walking toward a restaurant Lenka liked, called Cabra, that was near Plaza Mendoza. The restaurant did carryout lamb sandwiches. She said she hoped to seize an empty bench before the lunchtime rush. She walked quickly, apparently concerned that there would not be any room for them.

Against the evident futility of his situation, he said, "I could write a freelance piece about Bolivia. If I actually published something, would you want to talk to me then?"

"No. I know who your audience is. I looked up this Calloway Group. I read about them. You're not going to quit. You're going to do everything you can to stay with them and if you fail here, you'll go somewhere else and try again."

They avoided Potosí, because of protests. Gabriel had no idea who was protesting or what was bothering them, but as they walked parallel to Potosí, he glanced down at each intersection to see the protesters shambling along slowly and chanting, their nylon banners held up high. Some waved the rainbow-colored
wiphala
flags of Tupac Katari's revolutionary army. The country had hundreds of groups that were more than eager to take to the streets for a day of marching. Protest and insurgency were as fundamental to the national gestalt as the concept of liberty was in the United States. Butchers would protest the rising cost of beef beside students marching in opposition to rising tuition bills; some teachers would march in opposition to the students and some teachers would march in support of them; shop owners would hold a rally to protest all the protests.

Lenka had sunglasses on, and Gabriel couldn't see her eyes, though he wished he could. He'd felt warmth from her at first, but now he wasn't sure what she was thinking. He wanted to kiss her again. He worried that he'd repulsed her by talking business. For his part, he hadn't even brought a pair of sunglasses, and the sun was so bright he was having a hard time keeping his eyes open.

They stopped at a light. Midday, and the gridlock persisted. A flatbed truck's engine roared as it edged forward a few feet. Standing on the back of the truck a dozen or so soldiers in black fatigues held on to weathered black submachine guns and stared contemptuously down at the pedestrians. Above, the over-bright sun irradiated them all.

They walked another two blocks in silence and arrived at the corner of Plaza Mendoza. She stopped and looked around. The place was so mobbed there was hardly room to stand, let alone sit down for lunch. "Damn it," she said, anguished. "I'm sorry about this."

"We could grab some salteñas?" he offered. They were only two blocks from his favorite place for salteñas.

She sighed, apparently embarrassed and frustrated that she'd led them so far afield. When she didn't respond, he added, "Or we could go to my hotel and order room service." A naughty/funny flirtatious suggestion, he hoped, on the surface, with a clear option for her to take him seriously, if she were of a mind to.

Her expression didn't budge as she looked around at the droves again. Eventually, she turned back, cocked her head to the side, and gazed at him. "You want me to give you the finance minister's name why? Because it will help you? But what will it do for Evo?"

"Oh." He had thought they were talking about something else. Still, it was a valid question. This was, inevitably, the biggest challenge of his job: unless they were corrupt, which she clearly was not, government officials had little to nothing to gain from sharing information with him. He had, however, detected some insecurity about Evo's reputation as a steward of the Bolivian economy, so he said, "Do you know why there are no other investors looking at Bolivia? You know what they say about this country? Calloway actually sees potential here. Calloway's a powerful firm too; it attracts attention. If we actively bet on Bolivia, other firms might follow. Other types of investment might follow."