A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism (33 page)

He called Priya. "Are you seeing this?" he said.

"I am." She sounded remarkably calm.

"Look," he said, "I think you should cover the position. I just spoke to someone else in the cabinet, an economist, and I have some reason now to believe that this rumor might have been false. I'm not sure, but they might be lying. Not lying maliciously, maybe, but they really don't have any idea what they're doing. So just close out now and I'll get back to you when I know more. Is that okay?"

"No problem at all. Hold on." There was a short pause. Gabriel could hear muffled voices as she and Paul spoke. She returned. "Okay."

"You're out?"

"That's right."

He didn't want to linger in the business center. "I've got to walk and talk, so if we cut out—"

"Fine."

"I'm going to look into this and I'll be back in touch soon."

"Great." For the first time since he'd met her, she seemed in no way impatient with him. She seemed serene. She'd made—well, he had no idea how much money she'd made so far that morning, but it was probably in the millions.

He exited the door by Hotel Gloria's cafeteria and headed uphill, still on the phone. He'd been pacing long enough that his feet hurt. He had a headache, and his stomach was churning. He'd barely touched food since Lenka had told him what she knew, and it wasn't because of the arrival of his mother, it was because of this. As he huffed around the corner into the alley that led to Plaza Murillo, he said, "Priya, tell me, is every day like this for you?"

"All day long."

He said, "I don't envy you."

She grunted, amused. "Sure you do, Gabriel."

"Yeah, well, I'll be back in touch soon." He hung up. Ahead of him men in polyester shirts clutched fistfuls of sunglasses, their lenses glinting in the sunlight.

He walked quickly toward Calle Jaen. Jaen was an old street that had been preserved in its colonial glory and was now a popular tourist destination. It emptied out onto the square with his favorite salteñeria. Gabriel stopped at one point to catch his breath on a quiet back street. He'd been charging for the last three blocks, and his lungs ached. Then he ambled on, more slowly now, between ochre colonial houses with wrought-iron balconies. The headache was brutal, so he stopped in at a pharmacy. He bought two ibuprofen and swallowed them with a tiny cup of tap water that the pharmacist handed him.

Jaen was a narrow and curved street, inaccessible to cars. It had been laid, painstakingly, with millions of smooth rocks, each embedded into asphalt. Like cobblestones, but the size of a golf balls. The stones massaged his feet through his shoes as he walked up the road. The sky was dreary, and the street quiet and empty. The doors and windows were shuttered; the narrow balconies lingered aloft, unadorned. He passed a plaque indicating that one of the houses was the former residence of Don Pedro Domingo Murillo, for whom the plaza had been named. The residence was now a museum. Various other museums filled the narrow road, which was supposed to be a tourist hot spot. It looked exactly like a narrow street in some antiquated and gorgeous Iberian town, picturesque, if somewhat unremarkable by European standards. In Bolivia, it was absurd. It was an isolating and lonely place to be, a narrow gorge hidden in the city; it looked nothing like what surrounded it. Not that it was contrived. The buildings were real, hundreds of years old, but it was ludicrous regardless. If it looked strangely European, the reason was that the alley had been created by and for the wealthy Spanish occupiers of centuries past, who lived there when gold still tumbled down the icy waters of the Choqueapu. Though himself a resident of that grand road, Murillo had broken ranks to fight for independence, and being a proper Bolivian hero, he'd lost. Before he was hanged in the plaza on January 29, 1810, he uttered his final words, which—like those of Tupac Katari half a century earlier—would become ingrained deep in the national consciousness: "Compatriots, I am dying, but I left a fire that never will be put out. Long live freedom!"

Gabriel had to get to the palace soon, he knew, but he didn't want to deal with it. He could just call it a day and be done. It had been a winning day. The problem, of course, was that he needed to correct the rumor or run a much greater risk that his manipulation would be discovered. If the truth came to light with no help from him, the SEC would be more inclined to say that he had circulated a lie in order to manipulate the stock price. He needed to "find out" the truth and correct the mistake, not just for reasons of profit, but in order to cover himself.

He'd made it halfway down the hill when his phone rang. He looked at the number. It was Catacora. He'd forgotten that Catacora had promised to give him a sense of Evo's plan before Thursday. He sat on the curb and answered.

"I'm sorry I didn't get back to you before," Catacora said.

"It's no problem," Gabriel said, "but I've seen that there's a rumor circulating on the Internet today that Evo is going to expropriate gas in his first year. Have you seen this?"

"Yes, I heard. I'm amazed that it's out already. Who leaked it, do you know?"

"What do you mean? It's not true, right?" he said.

"Well, no, it
is
true, in a sense."

"
What?
" Gabriel felt his stomach drop. "What do you mean?"

"That's why I am calling. I'm sorry I didn't tell you earlier, but Evo was gone, and—"

"Wait, let me get this straight: Evo is going to seize all of the national gas, including the Brazilian companies, in his first year?"

"He's not going to
seize
them, of course. We can't do that. And it's not going to happen at once, but we will announce an offer in May. We're going to give them a chance to renegotiate their contracts by the end of the year. In the meantime, between May first and the end of December, they will take seventeen percent of the profits—assuming they want to cooperate."

"And if they don't want to renegotiate their contracts?"

"They will have to leave."

"That's not what I heard was going to happen," Gabriel said.

"I don't know who you were talking to, but that person either doesn't know or is lying to you. I talked to Evo about it this morning after the rumor surfaced."

Gabriel didn't say anything. His mind scanned the possibilities, trying to see how it could be. Maybe Lenka had made a mistake? He thought about it a little and understood that it wasn't likely. No. It wasn't possible. Rather, she had lied to him. She had lied to him when they met at the café. He couldn't guess why, but that was it. He was so astonished that it didn't even sink in, emotionally. It ricocheted off his heart.

"Oh my God," he said. He said it aloud by accident.

"What?" Catacora said. He waited a moment and then said, "Are you there?"

"Yes. Did—" He had no idea what else to ask. There was nothing to say. He needed to try to comprehend the thing, but he was supposed to meet the president-elect and his mother, and possibly Lenka herself, in ten minutes. It seemed like it should be funny. He wanted to laugh about it, but on some level, he knew it would have deep repercussions. And it was horrendous.

"Did
what?
" said Catacora.

"Nothing." He took a deep breath. "What, um—what about Brazil? Won't Lula—"

"Evo already talked to Lula this morning. Lula is not happy, obviously, but our countries have a lot of common interests, and I think Lula respects that this is Bolivia's most important resource and that we are in a dire situation economically. He understands how important it is for us, and for the region, that we are able to lift our country up."

Gabriel didn't say anything. He was searching for an angle, trying to see how Catacora might be attempting to deceive him—looking for some way that meant Lenka had been telling the truth—but it didn't make any sense. It began to dawn on him what it meant. It began to dawn on him how serious it was that Lenka had tried to sabotage him.

Gabriel stayed quiet. Catacora said, "Is that what you were looking for?"

"Not exactly," Gabriel said.

"Excuse me?"

"Yes, I mean. It's fine. Are you
sure?
"

"I'm
sure.
It's going to be a secret for the first couple months of the year, and the policy will be officially unveiled on May Day and effective immediately. I'm sorry if this rumor has already made it out. You can still have the exclusive on the story of my appointment."

"Thank you. Excuse me, I need to go."

He hung up the phone, turned around, and walked back up the hill.

At the crest, he found a plaza and sat on a bench. He had a few minutes. The palace was three blocks away. A young boy in a black ski mask offered to shine his shoes and Gabriel accepted, adding that he was in a hurry. Gabriel looked at the boy's blackened fingertips rubbing inky liquid into his shoes. He'd bought those shoes, narrow oxfords with chunky heels, before he'd started working at Calloway, and they'd seemed expensive then. They were made by Hugo Boss and had cost eighty-five dollars at the Loehmann's in Sheepshead Bay. He'd bought them on a Sunday and had taken the bus back to Greenpoint afterward, listening to his iPod and making eyes at a waifish pixie hipster nearby. It was a warm spring day. She wore a tank top and had lovely breasts. On the back of her hand, a new tattoo showed two skipping dice—the dice were green and the surrounding skin puffy and inflamed.

Now, a couple years later, sitting on that bench in La Paz and having his shoes shined, Gabriel reached back for the moment, and although he remembered the day vividly and fondly, it was completely foreign to him. He looked back and he couldn't identify with the person he had been. When he'd left Claremont for Brown, he'd looked back at life in Claremont with a similar detachment, as if it were someone else's memories that had become misplaced and ended up in his mind. The experience was absolutely inaccessible. He could not put his finger on a single way in which his outlook had changed in the last two years, yet it was obvious that everything about him was different. It had all somehow changed when he wasn't paying attention.

Though the inauguration was weeks away, Evo and some of his core staff had been given a section of the palace's second-floor offices for the purpose of organizing a smooth transition. Gabriel showed his passport at the door and was waved along to a desk, where a scrawny bureaucrat with a thin beard took down Gabriel's information. At an adjacent desk, Gabriel spotted the zaftig receptionist from the front of MAS's office typing away on a computer.

One of the guards escorted Gabriel through the palace, which was, Gabriel could tell, really just an immense brownstone. Upstairs, he was directed into an elongated reddish room with a window facing the bright square. From across the dark room, the air outside appeared to be ablaze. In the dim foreground, he saw Evo and his mother seated in the center of the room, beside what looked like a nonfunctioning fireplace. Another man, some unfamiliar assistant with a dreary gaze, sat on a nearby chair with a folder on his lap. He might be security or he might be a secretary or he might be something else. Gabriel's escort announced his name before ducking out. Gabriel approached, apologizing for being late and saying it was no one's fault but his own. "I got lost," he said. "It's a beautiful city, but it's confusing too."

They were seated on dainty Georgian furniture. Evo looked at Gabriel uncertainly. It was an odd place to encounter a man like Evo, who was nothing if not down-to-earth—down-to-earth in such a way that the cliché itself seemed damaged by his sincerity. Being a farmer and the child of miners, he was
genuinely
of the earth, as connected to terra firma as a person could be. Gabriel had supposed, though he'd never say it to anyone, that Evo was the inside-out version of George W. Bush: overreliant on a political persona both ballsy and blue collar. Evo too
felt
his way to his conclusions instead of thinking his way there. Both men were defiant cowboys who trafficked domestically in a kind of folksy populism that won them huge majorities among the ill-educated. Looking at Evo now with his mother, Gabriel knew Evo was genuine, and he knew what it said about his mother that she so ardently supported this man.

"My son," she said, "I was just telling you—"

"It's a pleasure," Gabriel said and extended his hand to the still-seated Evo.

They shook hands and Evo didn't stand up. He looked a little curious, as if he half recognized Gabriel.

"We met the other day," Gabriel explained. "I interrupted your meeting at your office around the corner."

"An interview with Lenka?" he said, remembering.

"Yes. I'm a freelance journalist." Gabriel could feel his mother look away when he lied to Evo; he could feel her horror.

He sat down on the sofa beside the unnamed adviser. Lenka was nowhere to be seen and Gabriel knew why, now.

And if she showed up, what then? Would there be a scandal? Would she make a scene and tell the assembled the truth about Gabriel? No. To do so would be to condemn herself too. Would she mind ruining her own career? Definitely. It didn't make sense—she had too much riding on this to sacrifice it all. Still, what would happen if she did out him? He pondered it quickly, tried to organize some probable outcomes. Some were obvious:

a. Evo kicks him and his mother out of the offices, and then bad things occur.

b. Evo kicks him out of the office and keeps his mother there; same outcome.

c. Evo has him arrested (was this plausible? He didn't know. Probably not. No, certainly not).

Nothing else came to mind right away. Except that maybe, just maybe, Lenka had somehow made an honest mistake. Or maybe Catacora was misleading him. Could Catacora be wrong? Someone was wrong. But this was not a normal mistake. How could two people so close to Evo have such different stories about his plans? Unless Evo was telling different advisers different stories, which seemed unlikely. The only thing Gabriel knew for certain was that one of the two, whether by design or accident, was wrong. And if that was true, then why had Gabriel chosen to believe Catacora so quickly? Only Evo could sort out the confusion, and fortunately he was handy. Unfortunately, proximity aside, Gabriel wasn't in a position to ask Evo whatever he wanted. He was tagging along with his mother, and there were expectations.