A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism (16 page)

He made many flawed assumptions about Bolivia's readiness for his revolution, the most crucial being his belief that Bolivians were as outraged by their condition as he was. When he got to the spot he'd identified, he found that few locals were interested in taking up arms. Most believed that they had already had their revolution, in 1952, when dynamite-toting miners revolted. So in the 1960s, when Che pointed to the direness of their living standards, they were, if anything, offended. The locals turned on him. They gave him away to the CIA.

He had a small, poorly armed force. Their position was not ideal, as it had been in the mountains of Cuba. It was marginal, and it was impossible to defend. Che's last stand took place in the early days of October 1967, at La Higuera, in the jungles of southern Bolivia. He was captured, briefly tortured, and then shot by a firing squad.

Félix Rodríguez, the CIA agent who had followed Che to Bolivia and who was there in La Higuera during Che's final days, still wore the watch he'd pried off the dead revolutionary's wrist. Rodríguez had been there when a doctor sawed off Che's hands. The hands, preserved in jars of formaldehyde, were sent to Argentina for fingerprint analysis. Once their identity had been confirmed, the hands were forwarded to Cuba, as a message.

In 1781 Tupac Katari was ripped apart by four horses in El Alto, and his severed limbs were sent to the outlying Aymara villages, also as a message. Katari, like Guevara, would take on a mythic status in Bolivia once executed. Total failure had come to be seen as a badge of honor in the country where only villains won. The country's history was itself a litany of defeat, plunder by foreigners, and further defeat, so it made sense that all of the national heroes had failed to accomplish what they'd set out to achieve. On the Plaza Avaroa, near Gabriel's hotel, a statue of General Eduardo Avaroa commemorated the man who had been roundly beaten in the battle for the Pacific, when Bolivia lost its coastline to Chile. The statue showed the fallen general with his hand outstretched—either to keep fighting or to ask for help, it wasn't clear.

And yet, now it finally looked like the country was wresting control of her fate from others, striking out for victory. That was the narrative favored by left-leaning intellectuals anyway, who were keen on erecting Evo as an avatar for some kind of liberal resurgence. But how many Bolivian leaders had been elected in order to fight corruption? More than half. And how many had eventually been kicked out for becoming corrupt? Almost all. Gabriel, and many other onlookers, had been leaning toward a pessimistic view of Evo at first, guessing that he'd backpedal once in office, but Lenka had successfully convinced Gabriel that Evo was the real thing. Investors, meanwhile, put a 60 to 65 percent chance on the likelihood of Evo's sincerity. How long would he last? Estimates varied. Most of those in the business of prognosticating regional political and financial shifts were not yet prepared to speculate on whether he would survive his first year in office.

As far as Gabriel was concerned, the question of whether Evo would last or not was secondary. The real question was whether Evo's commitment to his ideals would yield the desired results. Could the country find enough footing to begin building sustainable economic growth under Evo? Gabriel was completely undecided on that matter. A good economist would argue against Evo's anti-market ideas, but Gabriel believed that good economic theory didn't function very well in all situations. Piloting an impoverished country through such intense macroeconomic chaos was like flying a tiny airplane through a hurricane: the laws of physics could, in the immediate term, be overruled by meteorological circumstances.

In any case, Evo would be the first Bolivian president to claim power with the passionate support of the poor and the opposition of the rich, which counted for something in terms of his potential life span. The Bolivian poor might never have managed to elect one of their one before, but they had certainly ejected their fair share.

The story, cited often in Bolivia, was that just before Tupac Katari was drawn and quartered, he said, "You can kill me now, but tomorrow I will return, and I will be millions."

When Gabriel had stood at his hotel-room window on Election Day watching those thousands of people milling around on the streets below, it had occurred to him that Katari's prophecy might yet be realized.

***

Gabriel hailed a taxi outside of the Monoblock and continued down the hill to the Tennis Club for his meeting with Foster Garnett. Memberships at the club were de rigueur among well-heeled expatriates. A foreign diplomat could have a temporary membership for $250 a month, while a Bolivian had to either inherit a membership or pay $18,000 to initiate one, along with the $250 monthly fee. Foreigners stationed in cities like La Paz didn't have that many options socially and were happy to pay dues for the ability to congregate daily with their peers. They needed somewhere with tennis courts, a swimming pool, a bar, and a serviceable restaurant. It had to be kid friendly. So places like the Tennis Club could be found hiding behind tall walls in most major Third-World cities, and in every such club at least half of the members were foreigners.

The Tennis Club was tucked away in a crevice at the southern end of the city, where the upper classes lived. Because of its altitude, La Paz had an upside-down layout. In most cities, the wealthy inhabited the peaks, and the poor pooled in the valleys. But in La Paz, the rich filled the deepest ravines, where the altitude was less oppressive, while the shantytowns were splashed on frigid, windblown perches.

At the front desk, Gabriel announced himself in English lest he be mistaken for a local by the guard. He gave the Americanized version of his name too, with the broad
a
and no trill on the
r: GAY-bree-el.
That was what he liked most about his name, the versatility of it. When speaking to a gringa at Brown, he'd use the Spanish version. With Latinas he could do either, depending on the context. A heavily lipsticked girl in a discotheque in Bogotá would get the Americanized name, whereas a tattooed indie rocker Chicana at the Glasshouse in Pomona would get the Spanish:
Gah-bhrri-el
.

The guard glanced over a list and found him. There was a note: Foster was playing tennis and would not be available for another hour, but Gabriel was free to make himself at home.

Gabriel walked through the lobby and out to the grounds, where Aymara governesses clad in boxy maroon uniforms chased giggling children around the pool while somber-faced parents in mirrored sunglasses dozed in the blinding sun, occasionally waking to sip colas and paw at bowls of peanuts. A robust lawn rolled away from the pool to a series of tennis courts, delineated by tall hedges. A squad of leathery men in coveralls misted the clay of the empty courts with hoses while members in gleaming tennis whites lunged around in nearby games. Apart from the sounds of grunting players and their
thocking
balls and the splashing children, the place had a hushed tone, a dreamily serene quality—like a singular somnolent oasis in that coarse terrain.

Gabriel loosened his tie and wandered. It occurred to him as he walked that thanks to the layout, a person, once inside, could not see any evidence of the city of La Paz in any direction. What he could see was a gigantic pale swath of sky, some burly shrubbery, the jagged peaks of a few mountains. Gabriel hadn't realized how tense the poverty was making him until he got away from it. Now he felt a little drowsy and decided to go inside to wait for Foster. Upstairs, the restaurant was empty. Adjacent, a handful of graying gentlemen were gathered at a bar, which had a sign gently explaining, in cursive, that under-twenty-ones were not allowed. Gabriel sauntered in, eyed his options, and selected a stool at the bar. He looked over the questions he'd planned to ask Foster, which he'd arranged into two categories: mild and aggressive. None of them were going to do the trick, he sensed. His attention wandered.

The walls were paneled wood, stained a rich, if improbable, mahogany. The furniture was bulky, embellished with too many brass buttons, which pinned the burgundy leather down tautly. On the wall by the bar, he saw a deeply contrived series of paintings of English fox hunts, red coats on the riders and all. He asked for a glass of water and the bartender poured him one from the tap. Gabriel asked if he could have a bottle of water. The bartender explained that the water came from a well and was purer than bottled water. Gabriel accepted the glass and had a sip. It tasted like stagnant pond water, an amoeba velouté. He thanked the bartender and put the glass down.

The other men in the bar were conferring in whispers. They drank cognac from bulbous snifters. Taking it in, Gabriel found that all of it—the brazen excess, the fierce allegiance to the patrician pretense—made him miss the actual cushiness of the north even more.

For most of his adult life, he had not cared for cushiness at all. He had scoffed at the comfort of hotel rooms and preferred the two-dollar-a-night flea-ridden bed in Quito's Taxo hostel, where slugs held sway in the kitchen and laced every surface available in their silvery tinsel trails, so all the guests had lived on takeout pizza and cheap beer. He'd stayed there happily for two months. A year or two ago, though, Gabriel had undergone an elemental transformation. Everything he had desired before, everything he had coveted, had been surreptitiously replaced by other things. His daydreams themselves had molted while he wasn't paying attention. Now he came to a place like the Tennis Club and, though he still felt a light scorn, instead of wanting to retreat into the dingy alleys of La Paz, he pined for genuine luxury. This would have seemed a gross turn to the person Gabriel had been two years before, but he wasn't that person anymore. He didn't even know what he would say to that person if he met him. Life was, finally, too haphazard for such straightforwardness, for such clarity.

He looked at his notepad and was about to go over his notes again when he felt a tap on his shoulder. "Gabriel?" It was a familiar voice.

He turned to see Grayson McMillan—ruddy, stubbly, reeking of musty cologne. "Hey!" Gabriel shook the hand, motioned for him to sit. "I wasn't expecting to see you here."

"I'm a member." Grayson sat, ordered a martini from the bartender. "I wasn't expecting to see you." Grayson remained savagely handsome, remarkably fit; he wore an untucked oxford, the top three buttons open and the shirt splayed, exposing a hearty swath of chest hair. He was a marvel: a sort of well-tanned mascot for Gabriel's evolving ambition. Grayson's smile started hard and judgmental, but warmed quickly. "So, what the hell are you doing here?"

"I've got a meeting with Foster Garnett of the U.S. embassy, but he's playing tennis." Gabriel smiled at Grayson; it was good to see a familiar face, even if it was one he so disliked.

"I know him. Wife is perky and pleasant, as they go—he's on his way out, I believe, lucky fucker." Grayson cleared his throat, glanced around, then tilted his head to one side and regarded Gabriel appraisingly for a moment. He said, "Have you seen Fiona since she returned?"

"Not yet."

"Me neither."

Gabriel glanced out the window, saw a nurse in black scrubs wheeling an oxygen tank out toward the gym—for guests who felt lightheaded, no doubt. While he had Grayson, he might as well try to solve one of Priya's other questions. "I was wondering if the World Bank or the fund is going to cut programs here; do you know?"

Grayson shook his head vaguely. "What, you heard about the Italian?"

"Yeah." This is what Lenka had mentioned the night that they went to Blueberries. It had been in the news for a week or so afterward: an Italian vice president at the World Bank had very publicly resigned over the fact that he was being pressured by the United States to cut aid to Bolivia. The story had flared briefly, and then gone away.

More recently, Lenka had mentioned that the Italian had accepted the invitation she'd extended, on behalf of Evo, to come to Bolivia. Evo was going to have a party in the Italian's honor on the thirtieth of December, the day before she and Evo set off on the world tour, which she had been busy arranging.

"You think that'll affect the bank-fund approach to Bolivia?" Gabriel asked.

"I don't know. Off the record?"

Gabriel nodded. "Absolutely."

"I honestly don't know, but the way I see it, these days—with Wolfowitz already drawing a lot of fire at the World Bank—I doubt they'll want to appear to be accepting pressure from the U.S."

"And the Italian put Bolivia into play in that way."

"So if any of the aid institutions acts unilaterally against Morales, or Bolivia, everyone will assume that it's in response to pressure from Bush, and the scandal will flare up again. So, for now, Bolivia has a reprieve. It won't last, but I think it's too hot an issue for anyone in the aid community to take an interventionist position. Again, that's just my guess."

Gabriel hadn't thought of it that way. "They care?" he said.

Grayson shrugged. "Probably."

Gabriel looked around. Grayson seemed to pick up on his disdain somehow. "You think poorly of this place?"

"It's fine."

"Yeah, right," Grayson said. "But it feels good to be inside, doesn't it? Go on, admit it."

"It does."

Neither one of them said anything for a moment. Then Grayson, perhaps bothered by Gabriel's possible disdain for the club, said, "No doubt it's easier to turn your nose up at it if you don't live here." Gabriel hadn't expected him to be so defensive. Grayson had somehow convinced himself that Gabriel was an anti-elitist. Grayson wasn't as dexterous at his art as his reputation suggested. Reportedly a lethal diplomatic sniper, he was instead armed with a blunderbuss. Gabriel didn't quite know how to respond, so he just shook his head. "No, I'm just not really a country-club guy."

"So you're not a little bit of a socialist?"

Gabriel laughed. "No, no, I'm not a socialist—trust me."

Grayson squinted at him. "Where are you from?"

Gabriel shook his head. "Southern California."