A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism (38 page)

On the tour, they had also learned that those disembodied babies' heads with wings hovering around the edges of many devotional paintings were cherubs who had enjoyed the pleasures of the flesh too much and had therefore been deprived of their bodies. Their guide at the church had been a beautiful young woman with a frightening cough. Gabriel and his mother had been the only ones on the tour, and his mother had been relentlessly inquisitive. She'd badgered the ailing woman with questions and had extracted everything she deemed interesting from her. Still, the questions persisted. She picked the bones clean. During the final minutes of the tour, the guide knew almost none of the answers to his mother's questions.

In the past six weeks, however, Gabriel had not once gone to take in a view of the city or to appreciate some cultural attraction. He hadn't even brought a camera. He hadn't sent a single postcard. Other than to occasionally check out a restaurant, he hadn't opened his
Lonely Planet
guidebook since the flight down. He'd had grand plans, initially. He foresaw that the new job would help him develop a rich and detailed familiarity with the best of Latin America.

On the flight down, he'd dog-eared pages for Cusco, Potosí, Copacabana, Coroico, and the rest of Yungas, for Cochabamba, and for Santa Cruz. He'd hoped to come away from the assignment a minor expert on Bolivia's many splendors. Instead, he knew the staff at a couple of hotels by name and he knew his way around central La Paz, but he didn't have delightful recommendations to share. He had no madcap tales of Third-World misadventures that might make for charming dinner-party chitchat. He decided he'd ask his taxi driver for information about the country.

Gabriel packed. After depositing his bags behind the front desk, he went upstairs to the business center one last time to check his e-mail.

There was only one message. He knew who it was from even before he saw the name. He clicked on his in box and confirmed that it was from his mother.

The title said it all:
Calloway Group.

He felt an aching lump in his throat right away. He coughed but couldn't clear the knot. He took a shuddering breath, set his mouth firmly to stop the crinkling in his chin, and clicked on the message. It was in English.

Dearest Gabriel,

As you probably know by now, Lenka told me about your secret. That's why I left so suddenly. I'm sorry I didn't leave a note—I just couldn't think of what to say. I thought of calling you to have you tell me that she was wrong, or that she was lying, but it was clear to me who was lying. My fears have been confirmed now.

I have to say that I am both dismayed and impressed, but mostly dismayed. More than anything, I am sad that you lied to me. But you know that. You know it all before I can even say it. I wonder if I brought you up this way, or if you learned it from someone else? Don't answer that question, please.

I wish you had taken this job to spite me, as some act of rebellion, because then at least it would be personal—from the heart. But it's not that way and I know this. If you were trying to defy me, you would have thrown it in my face. But you hid it, carefully—lied about it and then covered that lie with another lie. You lied because you joined with these people for private reasons. With them you are feeding a desire that you are ashamed of.

Most of all, it makes me sick to realize that I might have unknowingly aided and abetted your work by offering you the chance to ask that question of Evo. If that question earned money for your employers, letting you come to that interview will be one of the greatest mistakes of my life. In any case, you lied to me, manipulated me.

So I want you to do a favor for me. Please
do not
respond to this note.

The fact is, we are both adults now, Gabo, and I'm sorry to say that this is too much for me. It's too much, not just as a mother, but as a person. I am truly sorry I can't see past this. Maybe that is a failing of mine. Probably! But it doesn't matter. Though I don't want to abandon you, it's clear you can take care of yourself. And I believe we need to be apart until you are through this phase. So I am telling you now that until you have quit this path, I will not answer your calls and I will not answer your e-mails.

I love you more than I love anyone else alive. I look ahead and I dream only of you returning to my life. Until that dream is true, my heart is more broken than you can possibly understand.

—Your mother

He read the e-mail twice more. By the end of the second time, his vision had been completely blurred by tears. He blinked them away and they skipped warmly off his cheeks. He wiped his eyes and sniffled. He swallowed the knot in his throat again and again, but it was no good. Then he got up and went to the business center's bathroom to blow his nose and wash his face. He considered calling her to try to convince her that he'd been doing it as an act of rebellion, that it was all about her. But he couldn't bring himself to lie to her any more.

He just logged out, closed the browser.

His flight left in three hours. He had an hour to kill, but he thought he might as well spend that hour at the airport, so he retrieved his luggage from behind the front desk.

The people at the desk seemed to want to talk to him, to see him off, but he was too upset to say much to them.

"Thank you," he said.

"Will you be back?" the female manager said. He'd seen her often as he'd come and gone, but he'd never talked to her, just dropped off his key or picked it up. She was petite, officious, of an indeterminate age. Her eyes were cold, circumspect, the color of gunpowder.

"I don't think I'll be back," he said. He was supposed to lie, of course. If ever there was a time, this was it. The lie was expected. He just couldn't bring himself to do it. "Thank you for everything."

As the taxi buzzed through La Paz, Gabriel asked the taxi driver a few questions about the country; the driver replied dutifully, but none of it was new to Gabriel.

Later, when they drove through El Alto, Gabriel inhaled deeply and could tell that the air was even thinner up there. The sky was clear, startlingly bright. He could see the flayed tips of a cirrus cloud above, a thin blotch of white splashed against an otherwise empty sky. There was no music in the car, only the sound of the blasting wind. Outside, El Alto was dusty, its streets patrolled by scrawny swine and mottled, hairless dogs. Chickens tiptoed around warily. Buildings abandoned halfway through construction, leaving only an empty collection of cinder-block walls, had become depositories for heaps of unidentifiable urban detritus, garbage that ceased to retain the qualities of its discrete ingredients. At the edges of each pile, scraps of this material flapped in the wind. He rolled up his window and the air suctioned in. The subsequent stillness in the car felt peculiar to Gabriel after all those minutes of steadily howling wind.

Approaching the airport, he could make out the squat control tower off in the distance. The airport in El Alto—confusingly named John F. Kennedy International Airport—was immense. Or, it was immense in a way. Like everything in Bolivia, the scale was crazy. The terminal was poky—only a handful of flights came and went a day—but the runway was twice the standard length. With the air so thin, planes needed to achieve double the ground speed required at sea level to lift off. Outgoing flights typically had a number of empty seats because a full flight would simply be too heavy to catch air at a sane speed. Incoming planes needed special tires to land at those velocities.

The driver caught Gabriel's eyes in the rearview mirror and asked how long he'd been in La Paz. Gabriel told him that he'd been there since November. He'd been doing research, he said. There was a lull, and then he added, "I went to a party hosted by Evo Morales last night."

"Do you know him?"

"No. Well—sort of. I met him. I was close with his press liaison. I was here on research."

"What do you think of him?"

Gabriel shrugged. "He seems honest. I think he means what he says."

"We could use some honesty. So you found out what you came to find out?"

"Yes."

The driver paused for a moment, seeming to consider something that he wasn't sure he should say. Eventually, as they pulled onto the half-mile-long driveway to the John F. Kennedy International Airport, he met Gabriel's eyes in the rearview again and said, "This is your job? You come here, find out something, and go home?"

"I suppose so."

"That sounds nice."

Gabriel nodded. "I know."

Outside, the airport was nothing but a flat grassy field that went on for miles. Beyond that, El Alto—a slum with more than a million inhabitants—sprawled in every direction. The driver cruised at fifty miles an hour along the drive. There were few other cars. The parking lot, far ahead of them, was tiny, a minuscule patch of asphalt next to a squat whitewashed terminal and a functional little control tower. Gabriel rolled the window down a crack again, and the wind bellowed. It sounded like the static from a television on the wrong channel turned up all the way. Though he inhaled deeply, his lungs were still hungry for oxygen. He exhaled and inhaled again. The air smelled like nothing at all.

THE CALLOWAY GROUP had booked the conference room for the whole day, but the meeting concluded in under an hour. It had been very simple. Gabriel had explained the offer, and the others had said they needed a week to consider it. That was it. They could have done it all on the phone. Gabriel called down to the front desk and canceled the catered lunch. He went to his room, put on gym clothes, and rode the elevator to the basement.

For forty-five minutes he jogged on the treadmill, perusing reports that his assistant had sent. He kept the speed low and the incline steep. He did two hundred crunches while listening to CNN International. After showering, he dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt.

He stood at his window.

This was the second of two days in Lima. He had spent the last week in Santiago, negotiating the purchase of a minority stake in a midcap silver-mining operation, as well as much smaller stakes in an asphalt company and a glass manufacturer. Priya had been running, almost exclusively, options straddles and strangles since Lehman collapsed. It was pure mathematics now, so Gabriel had little connection to the bulk of Calloway's capital. At the same time, Calloway had shifted a few hundred million dollars to a cluster of managed FDI projects in Latin America. This subsection would operate, essentially, as a private equity firm. And it was, for all intents and purposes, Gabriel's.

He had only the one meeting in Lima. Tomorrow, he'd fly to Buenos Aires for a few days, then Caracas for few more, and then briefly go to Mexico City before returning to New York. Bolivia was no longer on the books in any way. He gathered that, although Evo had not turned out to be a fraud, he had certainly been lively. The previous year, he had expelled the U.S. ambassador for "fomenting subversion and national division," according to a statement delivered by Evo's press secretary, Lenka Villarobles. The statement was now available on YouTube. In the past few months, Gabriel had watched Lenka read it dozens of times.

In Lima, Gabriel stayed at the Four Seasons. The hotel was on a ridge above the ocean. His room faced the dreary sea. He stood and took in the view, arms akimbo. Even ten stories up and with the sliding glass door closed, he could hear the mob below. That familiar roar; he barely noticed it anymore, except at moments like that, when there was nothing to do but listen.

The air in Lima was always damp but not hot; the Pacific Ocean kept it cool. The weather in Lima never changed. It was cool at night and humid always. It never rained. It hadn't rained in ten years. It averaged a fraction of an inch of precipitation per year, mostly in the form of a predawn mist. Lima was hostile to life. There were few native plants or animals. It was so arid that the streets had no gutters, no drains. Roofs were flat and not very water resistant. Were it actually to rain, the city would be in chaos: ceilings would collapse, streets would pool with water, and disease-carrying mosquitoes would flourish.

When he'd come to Lima with his mother nine years before, they'd enjoyed a day trip around the city on a tour bus. They'd stopped at the fireworks market, which would ignite on New Year's Day a few years later, killing scores of people. As they'd continued through Lima, the guide, holding a battered microphone and speaking in broken English, pointed at buildings and described them. This is Moorish architecture, he'd said, and that is Baroque. To young Gabriel, the city had looked merely brown, an enormous smudge. The guide was stocky, his skin oily. His resting expression looked pained. He pointed out the American ambassador's house, gleaming white, and said it was bigger than the Peruvian presidential palace. The tourists chuckled politely, all but Gabriel's mother, who cackled loudly for too long, drawing stares.

Their final stop of the tour was a sixteenth-century cathedral and its adjacent Franciscan monastery. According to Gabriel's mother, who whispered her own parallel lesson to him while the guide lectured, the Franciscans were the most scrupulous order of monks with their vow of poverty; they were also the most ruthless missionaries in the New World.

Gabriel could already smell the catacombs. Over centuries, the stench had mellowed into something musty. Down the narrow stone staircase, the odor grew stronger, sharper, and the air cooled. Their guide led them through a series of chambers, where Incan corpses had been disposed of with an efficiency that would have impressed the commanders at Buchenwald. There were twelve wells in a row. A souring cadaver would be dumped into a well and covered with lime and charcoal dust. The next body could then be dropped on top, covered with another layer of lime and charcoal, and so on. When a well could hold no more bodies, the monks would move along to the next. After a year, they would return to a full well and exhume its contents. Upstairs in the monastery's courtyard, under the relentless sun, they would sort through the mud and bones. Smaller bones were cast into the sea, but they stored the sturdiest bones in a series of pits throughout the catacombs. There were separate pits for femurs, for skulls, and for pelvises. The largest pit, at least twenty-five feet wide, contained a painstakingly arranged pile of femurs and skulls—the elegant detritus of centuries of their labor.