A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism (4 page)

Gabriel did one line of cocaine and then abstained. The burst of enthusiasm did not last. Watching everyone, he noticed a conspicuous lack of feeling among them all—himself too. The intoxication should have been an escape mechanism for the world-weary, but it seemed plainly intended to do the opposite: to generate connections and stimulate feeling.

When someone mentioned that it was four in the morning, Gabriel decided he would not wait around to see if Fiona would kick everyone else out. If she decided to sleep with one of the other men, he would be either angry or not angry, but he would not tell her either way. He drained the last of his stale beer and stood. At the door he bowed, deeply, before shuffling into the hall. Then—booze burning the belly, cocaine numbing the nostrils—he was pitched against the wall of an elevator going down too fast.

A lobby!

He waved goodbye to one guard, walked outside, crossed a narrow street, and said hello to another guard, confident that a joke was in there somewhere, even if he couldn't locate it.

He entered his room still nowhere near sleep. In their week together, Fiona had not been there once. He had spent five nights in her bed. He was, rationally if not otherwise, aware of an enormous sadness about them, together and separate. He sat at the desk and looked out the window to north La Paz, where the city lights sprayed up around the walls of the valley like jaundiced, sagging stars. Behind him, the television played badly dubbed soft-core porn.

On Hotel Gloria stationery, he wrote:

The thing about that map on Grayson's wall is that it makes Bolivia look like the sickly enlarged heart of a torso, w/ Chile as her swooping spine, Brazil as her big breasts. And also I predict that the results of Fs poll will change things for me.

To do:

1. Become indispensible to Priya
2.

He put the pen down. In tenth-grade biology at Claremont High, he'd learned that the horseshoe crab hadn't changed in five hundred million years. It didn't need to evolve any further. It wasn't glamorous, but it perfectly occupied its small niche. Gabriel could see, even under the dull light of his late-night gaze, that he needed to become similarly useful to Priya—or at least appear so—if he was going to keep his job. He would do well not to shine too much. Better to establish himself as useful in a way not difficult to sustain.

She should have been more impressed by his information yesterday afternoon. Maybe she'd be pleased after the news had played out in the markets. It seemed unlikely.

She would want to know first and foremost whether Evo Morales was serious about his campaign promises. Evo had promised to nationalize the natural gas industry, Bolivia's largest source of revenue. The Bolivian gas industry had been bought up by foreign companies when it was privatized in the eighties and nineties. Those companies had seen a tenfold return on their investments, and when the extent of their profits came to light in 2003, protests—mostly led by Evo—swept across the country. One president was ousted. The chief justice of the supreme court, Eduardo Rodríguez Veltzé, took over—yet another in a long line of pale-skinned men with degrees from Ivy League universities to hold that office. Now, Veltzé would be succeeded by Evo Morales.

Evo proposed to buy the entire natural gas industry back from the foreign companies for a fraction of their real value, then pass the revenue to the poor. He insinuated that he might nationalize or expropriate other foreign-owned businesses. The mathematics for Priya were very straightforward: if a foreign company's Bolivia-based income represented a significant portion of its overall revenue, then Evo's decisions regarding that industry would have a significant impact on the value of the company's stock. Whatever his plans, if she knew them in advance of her competitors, she could make a tidy profit on the companies in question.

Gabriel was no doubt the only analyst for a hedge fund who was actually in Bolivia studying the situation, so Calloway had a unique advantage, assuming Gabriel could deliver usable information. Priya would be the only fund manager positioned to make an informed play on the Bolivian situation. So Gabriel would
not
be called back to New York, not soon anyway. Not until after the election. The election would be in December, the inauguration in January, he reminded himself. He needed to keep track of these things.

He opened the calendar in his cell phone. It was November 26, a Saturday. The election was weeks away. Looking at the dates, he discovered with a little dread that he would probably have to spend Christmas and New Year's in Bolivia. His mother would not be pleased.

And what about Thanksgiving?

If it was already the end of November, what had happened to Thanksgiving? How could he misplace such a conspicuous holiday? It had to be very soon. His poor mind struggled in a dim bog. Then it became clear: Thanksgiving had passed. Thanksgiving had been two days ago.

Now
that
was a worthy joke. He smiled glumly as the dread descended in a twisting motion, like a giant corkscrew burrowing through his torso.

He had spent all twenty-six Thanksgivings of his life so far with his mother, who, although Chilean and ferociously liberal, hosted an elaborate dinner for the holiday. Her party was a celebration out of spite. In the fourth grade, his mother had been called to the principal's office because he had said, on the Wednesday before the holiday, "The English settlers were more bloodthirsty than the Huns." His mother said to the principal, "It's true, isn't it?" And then, aghast, "Do you
disagree?
" That was the end of that conversation.

On every Thanksgiving—which she'd celebrated this same way ever since she'd moved to the United States, in 1978, when Gabriel was little more than a zygote—she would say, in lieu of grace, "This is a conquistador's celebration, but tonight we dine for the conquered, for our exterminated ancestors."

Gabriel was an only child. His mother had fled Chile during Pinochet's regime, in the early seventies. She'd been offered amnesty by the Soviet Union and had gone there to study anthropology at Lomonosov University, in Moscow, where she met a man. The man, also a student, was Russian, handsome. He did not welcome her pregnancy, however, and refused to marry her. Distraught and pregnant in Moscow that winter, she decided to defect to the United States. To Southern California, specifically, the sunniest city in the country. By the time Gabriel was born she had resumed work on her dissertation at UCLA.

Most of his mother's family members were either dead or still in Chile. One cousin lived in Chicago, but he and Gabriel's mother were estranged because he'd given passive support to Pinochet, who had ordered Gabriel's socialist grandfather, his mother's father, murdered in 1973.

So the Thanksgiving guests were nonfamily, mostly colleagues from Pomona College, where his mother was a professor of anthropology. For two decades Gabriel and a handful of other children sat once a year at the kids' table, trying to ignore their impossibly verbose parents volleying abbreviated lectures across the long table in the adjacent dining room. Actual literacy was preceded, in Gabriel's case, by a working knowledge of the
Communist Manifesto.

That he had not only skipped the party this year but had forgotten even to call would require weeks of amelioration. Aftershocks might be felt for years. He'd be hearing about it, in one form or another, until one of them died. She might have abandoned the Catholicism of her childhood, but the need to absorb and impart whopping doses of guilt would never leave her.

But how had Thanksgiving slipped his mind? What had he done? And why had no one mentioned it? There had been no sign from the other North American journalists that they knew it was Thanksgiving. No one had even ordered a turkey sandwich for dinner. He and Fiona stayed up late, he remembered. Later, they had screwed slowly in the darkness. Afterward, she smoked and he saw the dull orange spot of her cigarette brighten in the darkness when she inhaled. The smoke was caustic. Her clothes were crumpled by the foot of the bed. Her underwear shone white at the crotch of the splayed slacks. Still unable to sleep, they watched bad action movies dubbed in Spanish. They laughed a lot at the movies. She smoked several cigarettes and Gabriel wondered if maybe he could eventually get used to her smoking after all. Outside, the cacophony had settled back into silence. He and Fiona said very little to each other that night that he could remember. Of course, there was very little worth saying.

IN THE MORNING, Gabriel read his sloppily scrawled note about Bolivia being the "sickly enlarged heart" of South America, which he took as evidence that he had been a very serious-minded drunk the previous night. He tossed the note and had a long shower, but it didn't help his hangover. His blood was plaster in his veins. A mess of half memories scrimmaged in his aching mind. He ate four aspirins. Measurements of things were off at that altitude, he knew. Water boiled at 80 degrees Celsius, the quantity of oxygen in the air was nearly halved, and doses for painkillers needed to be doubled. He went downstairs and checked his e-mail at the hotel's business center. There was a message from Priya telling him to call.

Fiona had e-mailed her article, along with a note saying that she was going to do a quick interview with Evo Morales at 10:45 before catching the 2:20 to Lima. She wanted to meet Gabriel at 10:30 at the lamppost in Plaza Murillo where Presidente Villarroel had been hanged.

He printed her article and took it with him to the cafeteria above the lobby. At lunchtime, the cafeteria served a delicious vegetarian buffet, popular with local business folk, but the breakfast was foul, and he had the whole place to himself. He ate a bowl of partially frozen watermelon and drank a pint of tepid coca tea, which tasted a little like green tea but felt like a shot of epinephrine jammed straight into his soggy brain.

Fiona's piece had been—presumably because of Bolivia's geopolitical insignificance—packaged as one of the
Journal's
elliptically titled page-one curiosities, or, in the paper's own jargon, A-heds. The headline, in this case, read "Bolivian Election: Populist Morales Ahead; Indigenous Win; Gassers Lose." Her lede trumpeted the results of the poll: "Morales holds a 15% advantage over Jorge Fernando 'Tuto' Quiroga Ramírez..." Ramírez, she went on to explain, was "a generic Bolivian technocrat and self-described 'corporate yuppie.'" The gist of her story was that this was only the latest in a string of such moments in Latin American history. It was further evidence of a continentwide—perhaps global—sea change: a grass-roots shift to the left. "The era of investor-friendly Latin American leaders might be coming to an end," she wrote. Gabriel was close to the end of the article when he checked his watch and saw that he was supposed to meet her in twenty minutes. He deposited his tray on the conveyor belt and headed back up to his room.

He sat down on the bed and dialed Calloway's office in Weehawken. He keyed through to Priya's extension. She answered on the first ring. "You sleeping late down there, Gabriel?"

"Not exactly. What did you think of the piece in the
Journal?
"

"I thought, 'Gosh, I'm glad I sent Gabriel down to Bolivia, because otherwise I wouldn't know this exciting information already.'"

"I'm meeting the author in fifteen minutes."

"Fine," she said.

"How do you think the markets will react?"

"Barely, with a few exceptions. Paul's on it. So, Gabriel, now I want to know more about Evo Morales. When does he take office?"

"January."

"Well, as soon as possible I want to know which foreign-owned companies he's going to expropriate, if any, and I want to know what he's going to do with them."

"No problem."

"And what will the World Bank and IMF do if he does expropriate foreign property? Will it affect Bolivian aid? And—and this is the most important—if Bolivian aid is cut off, how long before the Bolivians are angry enough to throw out their new leader?"

"That last part will be conjecture."

"I know, Gabriel, but you're not a journalist anymore, you're an analyst. Conjecture is a big part of your job." He heard her begin typing.

He cleared his throat. "This could take a month. You want me in Bolivia for that long?"

She stopped typing. "Yes. In Bolivia, if you fuck up, it won't hurt us. If you succeed, there might be some valuable upside, but that's not the point. The point is that you're flying a shitty worthless Cessna, not one of our gold-plated seven-forty-sevens."

Charm was not among Priya's gifts. She was lean, like Fiona, and she too was ambitious and had a temperament of hammered iron. But the similarities ended there. Priya was from Bombay and had been in charge of emerging-markets equity for the Calloway Group for five years. She had studied at Oxford in the nineties and when she finished there had promptly been launched as a fund manager at Lehman, where her portfolio was the only one to turn a profit during the Asian crisis. A millionaire by twenty-eight, she could supposedly intuit peaks and troughs in the market as well as Warren Buffett could. Every day she spent an hour at the gym with her personal trainer, ate a great many vitamins, and drank two liters of green tea. She didn't touch alcohol or cigarettes. "I would like to outlive my own children," she'd said to a
Financial Times
reporter in an interview in 1997. But as it turned out, the conception, carrying, birthing, and rearing of children were not activities that interested her much.

When he'd sat down with her for his interview at Calloway's office in Weehawken, she'd stared at him and said nothing. He held back too. He had already decided to say as little as possible. Better to lure her out. Oscar Velazquez—Calloway's analyst for the wealthier Latin American countries, and Gabriel's first interviewer—had said she was thirty-seven, which would make her ten years Gabriel's senior, but she looked like a child. Even in her austere gunmetal gray Helmut Lang suit she looked juvenile: the most solemn and ponderous adolescent on the planet, but an adolescent nonetheless.