A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism (18 page)

That wasn't an option. But that didn't mean that he needed to be
wholly
corrupt. He could retain some measure of poise, and he should.

So when he sat down to his rank breakfast—the scrambled eggs wafted queer and fishy that morning—Gabriel decided he would call Fiona later and tell her not to come around like that again. He would say it had been fun—wonderful, even—but it wasn't appropriate, not when he was dating Lenka. It was not just that Lenka would be heartbroken if she found out; somehow, because of the unusual nature of their relationship, the question of fidelity was all the more important. It was precisely because they spent their days dealing with connived half-truths, a mess of people (themselves included) trying to maximize some professional angle, that the honesty and faithfulness of their partnership, such as it was, needed to remain pristine. At least, his thinking went, there could be purity in this
one
corner of life.

He abandoned his breakfast after a last bite of stale toast, washed down with coca tea. He stood and thought about the forthcoming conversation with Fiona, dreading the awkwardness.

No,
he realized, it was a bad idea to do it that way. He was right to call it off with her, it had to happen, but to do so that afternoon would be premature. Better to speak to her about it after she'd had her interview with Evo. Just in case she came up with something he needed.

There was a protest on Prado, as usual, and the streets were clogged. Gabriel had been up to the market again to buy Lenka's Christmas present, and now he was back in the valley, and the whole city center was jammed up around the protest. It was the miners. They had no specific gripe, they just wanted to let Evo know that even though he was an indigenous peasant, like them, they weren't going to make it easy for him. Among the many powerful labor groups in Bolivia, the miners held a special place. They were numerous, truculent, did horrendous labor that generated a sizable portion of the country's GDP, and they wielded sticks of dynamite. In terms of sheer numbers, merchants beat them, but the merchants were poorly organized. The bus drivers had the most effective tool—buses parked across the country's major roads—for twisting the government's arm, which was why the Bolivian government persisted in spending so much on a gasoline subsidy instead of on things like education, health care, and infrastructure.

Today, though, it was just the miners. They tossed quarter- and half-sticks of dynamite periodically, and the explosions jangled windows throughout the valley. Cabdrivers refused to go anywhere near them, and traffic came to a standstill.

So Gabriel had to walk all the way down to his meeting with Professor Catacora. He steered clear of Prado, sticking to Potosí. Explosions lapped up and down the narrow streets, each making a staccato cracking sound. The sound sliced the air like the sonic boom of a low-flying fighter jet. Gabriel remembered that sound from September of 2001. He had graduated from Brown and gone down to New York City that June. He had his job at
IBI
by August. He'd been on his way to work one morning when he saw a huge mob of people gathered by the L stop at Bedford. They were all looking toward downtown. Someone said that the World Trade Center was on fire. "Jesus," Gabriel said and craned his neck to see. He noticed that it was, in fact, on fire, up at the top. Then he skipped quickly down the stairs, swiped his card, and headed down to the stinky platform. Standing there, he realized it must have been a huge fire. He'd been up on one of the towers that summer and had a sense of the scale, and by his estimate at least twenty floors were burning. Maybe it'd been a bomb? He rode into Manhattan, thinking about that fire. By the time he emerged at Union Square, the entire city was outside, staring, stunned. They crowded on the west side of Sixth Avenue, from where they could see the towers. He was walking up the side that was empty, enjoying an unimpeded rush-hour sidewalk, when he heard the mob across from him gasp as one. Unable to see what they were seeing, he watched the crowd. A blond woman spun around and vomited into the street—an image that would soon come to centerpiece his personal narrative of that day.

Nine hours later, rattled and exhausted, he walked over the Williamsburg Bridge with tens of thousands of other Brooklynites. For the next month, a noxious odor—like burning plastic—blew occasionally into his apartment. And F-16s screamed overhead sending thunderous ripples through the neighborhood's tight grid of shallow gullies. Not until that morning in Bolivia with the miners' dynamite, four years later, had he heard a sound so baleful and monstrous and immediate.

Twenty minutes late, he arrived at Catacora's office in the aptly named Monoblock, and the two of them set off up the hill for pizza at Eli's. Catacora, expansive once again, held forth in a lecture on Katari's siege of 1783. "It's about geography," he said in English and waved at the hills, "and nearsighted urban planning. La Paz was born and raised around the Choqueapu's gold. But from a defensive standpoint, the location couldn't be worse. It's easy to besiege. We still have only one real highway in and out. And do you know where it goes through?"

"El Alto," Gabriel replied, through gasps.

"That's right. So the peasants in El Alto, they live in a very cold place, but they also have a tactical advantage over the elites. They can easily block off access. They do it all the time now, with buses. And that is what Katari did. He was there"—Catacora pointed at the ridge—"and the Spanish were here, starving. They boiled their shoes."

Gabriel got the point. He urged the conversation back to the situation at hand. "What will stop them from throwing out Evo?" he said. "I mean, I know he wants to be a completely different kind of president, but will he be able to do that?"

"Why not?"

"Well, it's one thing to cut off the road to La Paz and force the leader's hand, but it's another thing to be the leader yourself. If he tries to expropriate Brazilian gas companies, he could lose the support of President Lula. Of all countries, Bolivia needs to be on good terms with its neighbors."

"True," Catacora said. Eli's was on the far side of Plaza del Estudiante, a hazardous spot for pedestrians to reach because they needed to cross multiple lanes of speeding traffic. Catacora paused, weighing the best route. A garbage truck ambled past, one of the men on the back clanging the truck's giant bell. Storeowners rushed out with their garbage, tossed it into the back. Catacora, seeing an opportunity, led Gabriel on a dash through the noisome wake of the truck, and through a temporary blockage in the traffic. By the time they got to the other side, Gabriel had lost his place in the conversation.

They settled into a small table in Eli's, a dive-y pizza joint that claimed to sell New York—style pizza, although it was very much Bolivian-style pizza: a thick pelt of white cheese over a puddle of slick marinara on a pale, doughy crust. Customers could have their pizza garlanded with a variety of canned vegetables and/or desiccated lunchmeats.

Catacora and Gabriel shared a twelve-inch pie, and Gabriel did his best to redirect the conversation. "Have you heard of Santa Cruz Gas?" he said.

"A Brazilian company?"

Gabriel nodded. "An editor asked about it." Gabriel was aware that in theory, he should have an advantage in this conversation because he had more information about the state of affairs than Catacora did. But finding a way to exploit his advantage was proving complicated.

He had written to Priya the previous afternoon to say that he was making a little progress on Santa Cruz, and he was hopeful that he'd have more soon. Taking a step toward specifics, he'd said that he should be able to find out the identity of the finance minister in a day or two.

She had fired off a reply stating that this was good, and she was eager to hear more.

He'd replied that he'd know more soon. He planned to tell her Catacora's name that day. He hoped that by the time he sent her that e-mail, he'd have more on Santa Cruz, so that he'd have something else to dangle in front of her for a few days. He needed to keep one move ahead: promising only what he'd already achieved. This next step, finding out about Santa Cruz, didn't look encouraging.

Priya was eager for
something,
though, and he hoped that giving her the name of the finance minister would hold her for a little while.

"Why does your editor want to know about that company? It's very small."

"I don't know. It was just an e-mail. She said, 'What do you know about Santa Cruz Gas?' and I said I knew very little. I suppose people want to know how Evo will actually go about expropriating these companies. Like, is he going to treat them all the same?"

"I wouldn't know."

"Right, but if you were Evo, how would you do it?"

He shrugged. He thought about it. "I would talk to my counterparts in neighboring countries before I did anything, I suppose."

Gabriel nodded. "Oh?"

"What? You look surprised."

Gabriel shook his head. But he
was
surprised—surprised that Catacora had let that slip. Judging by what he'd said, it seemed likely that Evo was, in fact, planning to wait. He would clear the expropriation plan with Lula and other foreign leaders before he went through with it. Gabriel wasn't positive of this, but assuming Evo and Catacora had already discussed the matter, surely Catacora wouldn't say anything that contradicted their official plan.

While walking up Prado toward his hotel after lunch, he stopped at a narrow cybercafé and sent an e-mail to Priya:

TO
:
[email protected]
FROM
:
[email protected]
SUBJECT
: finance minister

The name of the next finance minister is Luis Alberto Arce Catacora, a professor at the University of San Andrés. I just had lunch with him. He hinted that Evo will consult with his neighbors before doing anything. I'll pursue further and give you more after Christmas.

—G

He clicked Send and then logged off.

He continued trudging up the hill. The grade of the street's incline was so subtle he wouldn't have noticed it at sea level at all, but up there, it was obvious.

He stopped for a breather in front of the city's main post office, which was on the ground floor of the immense Comibol building (Corporacion Minera de Bolivia). The miners had migrated there, at the intersection in front of Bolivia's mining headquarters. There were maybe a hundred of them. Some carried signs, but not many. They wandered around listlessly, muttering among themselves. The riot police, clad in green and black, had set up across the street and were now leaning on their plastic shields, which were the approximate size and shape of Roman centurions' shields. They wore helmets, the plastic visors up. Some had grenade launchers—loaded with tear-gas canisters—slung over their shoulders.

Gabriel had seen a lot of protests in the month since he'd arrived, and this seemed no different from any of the others. Most of the miners had lumps the size of walnuts in one of their cheeks, from wads of coca leaves. The quantity of drug released by chewing it that way was not insubstantial and Gabriel thought the men seemed keyed up and agitated. They were frowny, clean-shaven.

The mountains were latticed with an endless series of mines, and the regional mutation of Catholicism had it that those mines were part of hell itself. The earth was the realm of the goddess Pachamama, the heavens were God's domain, and the mines were Satan's. At least while they were under his jurisdiction, the miners should worship Satan. The miners needed to honor the correct deity when they were underground, so they burned candles to Lucifer at makeshift altars at the intersections of their tunnels.

Gabriel noticed to his alarm that the miner nearest him, who was maybe fifteen feet away, had lit the fuse on a half-stick of dynamite and was waving it around. He wore coveralls, huge Wellington boots, and a sky blue helmet, just like the rest. He was possibly drunk, because he was hollering a diatribe in what sounded like Quechua but might have been very badly mangled Spanish. Gabriel took a step back, not wanting to be too near, but he lingered, out of curiosity. Other than a handful of pedestrians who hurried past, there was no traffic on the normally very busy street. Gabriel was contemplating leaving and heading back to his hotel for a little work when the ranting man's hand exploded.

The blast tackled Gabriel, shoving him onto the pavement.

It knocked the wind out of him, and it took him several moments to catch his breath. It felt as if he'd been sucker-punched, hard. It felt like the time in eighth grade when Terrance had thrown a basketball at his face, point-blank, during lunch. He'd had a black eye after that, and Terrance had been made to write a letter of apology. Now, Gabriel rolled over and opened his eyes and saw yellow and red. He blinked and saw a plume of smoke swirling airily in front of firm packs of cumulus clouds. It smelled a lot like fireworks. He was reeling, lying on his back, too stunned to make out the circumstances. A bell rang in one ear and he couldn't tell if it was an alarm from a nearby building or if it was in his head.

He staggered up, shot straight into idiocy. It was bad. He knew that much. Bad enough that he thought he might have lost his hearing or something, he didn't know what. The miners had been shot aside. They'd been scattered. It was a mess there. There was still smoke in the air. The man who had been holding the dynamite lay on the ground awkwardly, face-down, his legs splayed behind him. He was wearing only one boot now. The other one was gone—elsewhere. He had one arm beneath his torso and the other ... it was gone. Gabriel looked at him a few seconds more to verify. There was an image and he needed to be sure it made sense. The top of the arm was still there, but it came to a ragged and fleshy end a few inches below the shoulder. Gabriel could see white bone in the damp meat. The skin hung in sloppy flaps. His face had a black smear. The man's eyes were wide open and he looked thoroughly dead.

Gabriel glanced around. No one else seemed hurt. The others who had been nearby were standing up again. Did this mean he was fine too? Probably. As his wits slowly returned, he felt a spike of panic at the possibility that he was hurt. His ear was still ringing and it ached. He reached up and touched the ear. It was wet.