A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism (20 page)

"Don't come down tomorrow, Mom. It's not an emergency. The doctors tell me I'm going to be fine. I'd love for you to come, but—please don't come tomorrow. If you want to come, what about, I don't know, maybe later in the week. I have obligations."

"Obligations? Why do you need to prepare for me? What are you doing down there?"

"I'm working."

"Working? BellSouth?"

He held the phone against his good ear and waited. Gaping silence sometimes had a way of registering as a cautionary note with her. It gave her time to collect herself and realize that he had a reason for his position, whether or not she understood it.

At last, she pulled back, saying, "Well, I'm going to call you twice a day until I see you next. If I'm not allowed to come down, at least let me do that."

"Okay," he said. "You can do that."

"I'm worried about you, Gabriel."

"I know." He didn't have the heart to lie to her that night, so he didn't tell her not to worry. "I'll leave soon," he said. "In a week, I think. I have to go now. My batteries are dying."

"Fine. Be careful."

Later, the pain sneaked up on him, and the nurse upped his dose of painkillers. Then Lenka arrived. There was a television in the corner, up high, and it played a fuzzy local channel. He'd faded in and out, watching dubbed
Saved by the Bell
and
The Simpsons.
Lenka sat down and he gazed at her, blissed out on Percocet. She kissed him on his good cheek. The bad cheek pulsated. It felt hot under the bandages. "
Te amo,
" she said.

"
Te amo a tí
," he said and nodded, opened his eyes. He hadn't even realized they were shut. The opiates had made him itchy all over. They muddled the boundary between consciousness and unconsciousness so that he could drift in and out of his nods without ever quite knowing he was one way or the other. It was all just easy. Still, despite his creamy beatific feeling, his gentle sweetness, his airiness, he began to cry a little. He whimpered feebly and tiny teardrops formed, just big enough to blur his vision. He frowned at her. "I want to go home," he muttered in English. He'd never spoken to her in English before and didn't know if she spoke the language well enough to follow.

"I know," she said, also in English. She held his hand, kissed him on the cheek again. She was, of course, used to ministering to tearful boys. And if it hadn't quite been clear to him before, he could tell then, even in the blur of that moment, that he was in love with her.

A little later he opened his eyes again and looked up at her. Some time had passed, he didn't know how long. He held her hand firmly so she wouldn't move. With his free hand, he reached over and had a sip of water from a plastic cup. His mouth was pasty, his tongue thick and awkward, coated in salty foam. He put the water cup back. He didn't know if it was tap water or bottled water but he didn't really care. His eyelids drooped shut and he forced them open.

"Are you going to leave?" she asked in English. Her English was good, apparently.

He shook his head. "I can't. It was..." He closed his eyes for a while. His mind flickered, dodging shadows that ran along in dark spokes, clicking as they passed. The spokes of a bike he'd owned when he was young—he saw them spinning in shadow on the asphalt in the setting sun ... An itching area crept up his arm and he scratched it, opened his eyes again. "This was such a mistake," he slurred in Spanish.

"You couldn't have known—" she said, also switching to Spanish.

"No, no, no—no, not that," he said. "Not the dynamite.
You.
You are the mistake. You're going to ruin this for me."

She blinked slowly, fanning him with her eyelashes. She grinned in a way that he didn't recognize. "You too," she said. "You are my mistake." She kissed him on the nose, and brushed his hair off of his forehead. She kissed him on the temple.

He closed his eyes.

"Do you want some tea?" she asked later. His eyes were still closed.

He nodded, but didn't bother opening his eyes. He felt queasy. He had too much saliva in his mouth. "Please," he said. He opened his eyes and saw the outline of his own legs in the blanket in front of him. His knee itched. He scratched it. Then he turned and saw, to his tremendous relief, that she was still there.

A TAXI DROPPED GABRIEL OFF at the hotel the next morning and he went up to his room and took a shower, careful not to get his head wet. They had replaced his bandages before he left the clinic and the new ones would be good until that night, when he'd have to change them himself. He plugged his phone in—the batteries had died—and lay down on his bed, turned the television on. He watched CNN International for a while before one of the anchors, a pretty Indian woman, mentioned in passing that it was Christmas Eve. It hadn't occurred to him.

Once the phone had charged, he turned it on, dialed the office. Markets were closed, but he was pretty sure that wouldn't stop Priya from showing up.

"I had a problem," he said.

"Got drunk and spilled champagne on your laptop?" she quipped.

"Uh." He was too wiped out to cope with her weirdly cheerful tone. "No, I—"

He was about to explain what had happened when he heard a knock at the door. "Can you hold on?" he asked, and answered the door. It was Alejo, slouchy in the cheap black blazer with satin lapels. It looked like an old recycled tuxedo jacket. It was his uniform, along with a white shirt and a battered burgundy bow tie, black slacks. Very grand.

Alejo said, "Mrs. Lenka Villarobles called. She wanted you to have this." He held out a bottle of Bolivian wine. "She wanted you to know that she would be around later tonight."

"Thank you."

Gabriel could tell Alejo was looking at the mountain of bandages on the side of his face. Alejo expressed no surprise at all, though. Resentment radiated brightly from his face.

"Thank you," Gabriel said again. He took the wine, swung the door shut in Alejo's face. How incredible that the biggest threat to his relationship with Lenka—and therefore his work in Bolivia itself—would be a bellboy in an ill-fitting tuxedo jacket and lopsided bow tie.

"Are you there?" Priya said.

"Yeah, I'm here."

"So, what happened?" she said.

"Oh." He sat down on the side of the bed. "You're not going to believe this."

On March 17, 2000, the day after a team of forensic archaeologists working in conjunction with Amnesty International discovered Gabriel's grandfather's body in the Atacama Desert, his mother called to inform him that he
would
be accompanying her to Chile for the funeral in two weeks. "I'm in school, Mom. I can't just leave when I want."

"I know. I'm in a school too, in case you forgot. I bought your ticket. It's in the mail already." She didn't mention that she had also booked an extra three days in Bolivia.

She enclosed in the envelope with his ticket an article she'd clipped from
La Nación
about the discovery of the mass grave ninety miles from Santiago. According to the article, there had been eleven bodies. The desert had parched them out before bacteria or insects could get to work, so they were well preserved, neatly mummified. There were three women, eight men. They had been picked up and killed on a Sunday, and they were mostly in nice suits and frocks. Their hands and feet were bound. They had been gagged as well, which meant that they would have been speechless in the back of the DINA van as it drove out through the cooling summer evening toward the desert. Eventually, the van would have pulled off the road and the prisoners would have had to wait in the back, listening to their captors dig. They would have sat there quietly in the dark, aware that they were all going to share the experience of death together.

The exhausted guards eventually led them out. The guards probably would have been sweaty, even in the cool night. Their hands would have been blistered from the shovel handles. Overhead, the stars and the moon would have been bright enough to illuminate the desert. The prisoners were made to kneel in front of the hole. At the last minute, their gags were removed and thrown into the pit, presumably so that they could all say their last words. And then they were shot, one by one, in the back of the head. When it was done, the weary soldiers put down their rifles, picked up their shovels again, and returned to work.

The forensics team could not tell in what order they had been shot.

In the weeks after the discovery but before they went down for the funeral, Gabriel's mother called him regularly and wept on the phone. He did his best to console her. He said that her father had died honorably, one of the fallen heroes of the resistance. She didn't disagree. "But what was he thinking in his last moments?" she asked. It was almost as if it hadn't occurred to her until then—twenty-seven years after he'd vanished—that he might have died in this way. It was the story she'd told Gabriel his whole life, but now she seemed surprised by it.

"Why haven't you had a funeral yet?" he asked.

"We didn't know for certain that he was dead," she said. Then, "He might have been in some secret CIA prison."

When she said that, he recognized what was going on. It had always been a sort of unacknowledged subtext of the story. If her father had not been killed, the likelihood was that he was in Buenos Aires with a mistress, rather than in Guantánamo Bay with a hood over his head. She wept so violently now not just because she had to accept that her father was, in fact, dead, but also because she had to accept that she had, partially, at least, always both hoped and feared that he had just abandoned them and was alive and well elsewhere. Later, when he thought about this more, Gabriel would come to see that this uncertainty was one of the primary cruelties inflicted by the disappearances. The uncertainty warped people's minds, made them wish for terrible things. It turned a funhouse mirror on the survivors' innermost feelings about the disappeared person and in so doing made monsters of them until they turned against one another.

In Santiago, Gabriel and his mother stayed at his uncle Horace's house. Gabriel spent his time with two male cousins who were around his age. Having never had siblings, he often wondered what they might have looked like, and here was an answer. They got along fine, but the differences ran deep. They wore starched white shirts opened almost to their navels and they reeked of cologne. Gabriel wore a too-small vintage YMCA shirt, ancient jeans, and a pair of scuffed wingtips he'd harvested from a bin at the Value Village in Pomona that still stank of mothballs.

Once, the three of them were at a hookah bar drinking Turkish coffee, and the young women at the next table kept casting glances at Gabriel but not his near-identical cousins. Walking back to the car later, his cousin Nico speculated, "Maybe they heard your accent?"

"I have an accent?" Gabriel said.

Diego, the other cousin, laughed. He was the more furious of the two, the more political. Even his bitterness had a bitter edge. "It's not
that,
brother," he said. "He looks like a gringo."

"Bullshit! He looks exactly like us!" said Nico. Nico was the younger. He was the more handsome and more charming.

"Would you wear those clothes?" Diego replied.

Nico bit his lip and laughed. "Sorry, Gabo"—he looked at Gabriel—"but no fucking way! He looks like a bum!"

"
Exactly!
" Diego said.

"Exactly
what?
"

"Jesus." Diego shook his head. "You know what it says about a guy that he comes from a place where it's considered rebellious to dress like he's poor? He's so far in the other direction that he's going backward."

The funeral itself was as surreal as all funerals ought to be. It took place in a large old church in central Santiago, but there were only a few dozen guests, mostly family. Immediately before the service, Gabriel accompanied his mother to a brief viewing of the body in a rear room of the church. It was a small space with a tiny stained-glass window. Gabriel stood, his arm around the shoulder of his crying mother, staring at the desiccated cadaver. He was amazed that they had decided to have an open casket. The body looked simultaneously fake and all too real. The skin was deep umber, glossy; it looked like a dark resin had been painted on the withered body, like some macabre papier-mâché sculpture. A ragged hole the size of a golf ball in his cheek, directly below his left eye, marked the exit wound. Leathery wrinkles rippled around the sharper points in his skull. The skin around his mouth was pulled taut in a horrific gasp. Blue cloth covered everything beneath his jaw. What else could there be to hide? Gabriel wondered.

After the service, they went to Tío Horace's house. Gabriel was the only foreigner there, the only real outsider. He took a glass of wine and ducked out to the veranda at one point. It overlooked Bellavista's near-Parisian streets. The whole city was fantastically Europhilic, all the neighborhoods were named after countries in Europe. No wonder his mother wanted to take him to Bolivia as well. She followed him outside a little later.

"What do you think?" she said. It was one of the few times she'd addressed him in English since they'd come down. Just as Spanish functioned as a code between them in North America, so English functioned as one in South America.

"It's nice."

"
Nice?
"

He shrugged. "What else am I going to say? Look, thanks for bringing me here, Mom, but I'm looking forward to getting back to school. You know, I'm in the middle of a semester."

"I am too."

"Right, but he wasn't my father. I don't know these people and I don't know this place."

"But this is your country too, which is why I'm asking what you think."

"I don't know," he said.

Aware that she wasn't going to let him off the hook, he thought about it a little and said, "I don't think this is my country. The people are different from anyone I know. The cousins—I don't get them at all. They're
weird.
" There were other words he wanted to use, but he didn't want to offend his mother. The truth was that the cousins' obsession with the grandeur of their social station was embarrassingly naked. It was cheesy and it was coarse.