Andean Express (5 page)

“Is something wrong?” asked Tréllez.

“It's nothing, uncle.”

“You look strange.”

“It's the altitude.”

“You think I'm stupid, don't you?”

“Not at all, uncle.”

“Some people think I'm absentminded, but I do notice details. It's the Carletti girl. She's getting to you, isn't she?”

“I can't hide anything from you.”

“I can hear your heart beating.”

“She's married and she's on her honeymoon.”

“Let's call it a total lunar eclipse. It's best not to see that guy at night.”

The waiter left the bill and smiled routinely.

“This one's on me,” Tréllez said. “You'll buy me a cognac at the Hotel Pacífico in Arica.” He then stood up and sauntered over to Alderete's table. Gulietta and Doña Clara looked up while the ex-accountant, who was drinking coffee, remained oblivious to Pepe Tréllez's silent presence. He took off his hat, bowed Japanese-style, and said: “Gulietta, allow me to congratulate you on your marriage.”

Doña Clarita smiled uncomfortably. Gulietta simply looked away. Alderete had not seen a ghost from his past in a long time. Once he noticed Tréllez, his mop of hair stiffened.

“I think you'd best be on your way, back to those French broads you love to pimp,” Alderete said.

Pepe Tréllez was a gentleman raised in the age-old tradition of chivalry and good manners. Upon hearing these words, he went cold and turned pale. A few seconds passed in absolute silence. The waiters stopped making their rounds and the cooks ceased their pot banging. Tréllez passed through every color in the rainbow before his skin turned a cherry hue. “How dare you speak to me like that; you're nothing but a prick who steals mines!”

Alderete abruptly stood up, but Doña Clara was seated between him and Tréllez. He asked her permission to hit him. This pause would prove fatal. Tréllez seized the moment and slapped Alderete twice in the face, leaving him speechless and overwhelmed by a strange inertia. A roar of laughter arose from the corner where Durbin, the Marquis, and the poker player were sitting.

“Sit down, don't pay any attention to him,” Doña Clara advised.

“He's embarrassed,” Alderete stammered. “Years ago, when he was the ambassador in Paris, he brought a French girl back with him and hid her in his pad on Seis de Agosto, near San Jorge. His wife caught them in the act.”

Alderete sat down. His initial bewilderment gave way to an expression of satisfied revenge. A forced smile deformed his swollen peasant face.

Tréllez leaned over the table and muttered: “What your wife doesn't know is that once you realized you couldn't win over the French girl, even with all your stolen money, you sent a handwritten note to my wife telling her everything, including the address of the apartment.”

That was enough for Gulietta and Doña Clara. They stepped away from the scene of battle.

“Poor girl, so removed from reality,” Durbin said in English, in a voice like that of a Shakespearean actor.

The car emptied in no time at all. The passengers traveling second class surely thought it was a problem between “gentlemen” and headed for the exit. The laughter continued at Durbin's table as someone yelled, “Way to go, Don Pepe!”

Alderete's anger was building up like a boiler without a pressure valve. He felt a sharp pain in his stomach and an uncontainable rush of gases. He was on the verge of letting loose the loudest fart in the history of the La Paz–Arica train line; that would be his revenge. He stood up and pointed to his derrière.

Standing in the center of the car with his arms crossed, Tréllez smiled tauntingly. The gases played a mean trick on Alderete. Instead of exiting, they went straight up and pressed against a heart already tormented by rage. They imprisoned it like the tentacles of a giant octopus. He grew short of breath, and at that altitude, finding extra oxygen was highly unlikely. Gripping the seat backs, Alderete left the dining car and moved down the hallway to his cabin. He banged on the door repeatedly. Nobody answered.

“I'm choking,” he said. “Gulietta . . . where are you?”

The steward helped him inside. Alderete collapsed on top of his bunk. Several minutes later, Gulietta came by to see what was happening.

Alderete looked at her with his eyes wide open. He was breathing with difficulty through his mouth and he clutched her shoulder with one hand. “A glass of water,” he begged.

Gulietta took a pitcher from the counter and poured water into a glass.

“I have high blood pressure,” Alderete said. “I don't handle these blowups well.”

Doña Clara appeared, looking as calm as a nun strolling through a park.

“I'll tell Ricardo to look for a doctor in second class,” Gulietta said.

Alderete let out a groan. Doña Clara unbuttoned his shirt and put her ear to his chest.

* * *

There was a wide range of odors in second class despite the country air that penetrated the few open windows. Ricardo saw construction workers, contraband dealers, carpenters, and illegal immigrants, but a doctor was nowhere to be found. At the end of the second car, an apprentice nurse headed for Santiago turned up. She was seventeen years old and was only trained to give injections. Alderete would have to fend for himself.

Ricardo asked if anyone knew if they were near any big towns. He didn't recognize any of the names. Someone suggested a cup of coca tea and even a suppository. Ricardo looked around and saw a disheveled, bearded painter with the eyes of an insomniac. His face was brimming with annoyance. A greasy mane fell over his shoulders.

“Is he Chilean or Bolivian?” the man asked.

“The sick guy? What does it matter?”

The painter smirked.

On his way back through the dining car, Ricardo heard Durbin remark, “The guy's got nine lives, like a cat.”

“It takes something extra to kill someone like him,” Tréllez said.

The sun was beating down hard. The Altiplano
*
looked like a desert on fire. The only shadows came from solitary trees rimming the walls of the peasant huts.

Ricardo found Gulietta in the dining car. “There's no doctor,” he said.

“He's already better. It's pure theater. He just wants to impress me.”

Ricardo touched her hand. Since she made no effort to pull away, he began caressing it, at first softly, and then he clasped both his hands around it.

“In Buenos Aires you could have asked me out to the movies,” Gulietta said.

“An animated film? We were too young back then.”

Gulietta stroked his chest. Ricardo was sporting a fashionable, loose-fitting New York–style shirt. It was impossible to stay indifferent to her barely perceptible touch.

“I don't know what I'm going to do,” Gulietta said.

“With Alderete?”

“He's my husband.”

“Why did you marry him?”

She was silent. She was caught in a whirlwind of emotion. Her beautiful brown eyes teared up. “Poverty scares me more than death,” she finally said.

“Some of the other travelers don't exactly respect your husband. Tréllez says this trip is like your lunar eclipse.”

She laughed, which made her look even lovelier. She was a captivating girl. Her parents were European, but her genes seemed to have skipped a generation: She was dark-haired, of medium height, slender, and very feminine. Her skin was olive-toned, like that of an upper-class woman from India. Her body was harmonious; there was a delicate sensuality about her. Ricardo was under the impression that, up until then, her life had passed by as if it were a dream, like water flowing down a river without whirlpools or rocks to disturb its tranquility. But Gulietta had not recovered from the shock of her sudden impoverishment and her marriage to her father's ex-accountant, a man she disdained.

Ricardo wasn't sure her character was strong enough to put up with Alderete for long. The humiliation of being at the beck and call of the bean counter was probably an unbearable punishment.

“I have to go check on him,” Gulietta said. “I'll see you later.”

Ricardo liked the girl, but he knew that train romances nearly always ended abruptly and prematurely. This would be no exception; besides, Gulietta was traveling with her husband, who, having survived an acute episode of high blood pressure, was going to be just fine. In any event, part of the afternoon had already passed, then night would come, and the following day, in a matter of hours, they would be on the Chilean coast.

It wasn't like the Paris-Istanbul or the Trans-Siberian line, where the trip lasts nearly a week and relationships have time to begin, develop, and find reason for hope upon arriving at their destination. The affair between Captain Vronsky and Anna Karenina began on a train and continued until the curtain call in Moscow. If it had happened on the La Paz–Arica line, the game would have been over for Vronsky. Timing is everything. Ricardo was at the age where it made sense to either rush into a sexual adventure—a casual tryst that would just as soon be forgotten—or pursue the classic courtship of a girl of his social standing, which generally involved a degree of mutual attraction and the occasional absentminded caress, and no more.

He understood that it would be nearly impossible to make a move on her, even if the circumstances were favorable; furthermore, the naïve bourgeois flirting game was absurd and would only end up frustrating him. Ricardo decided to let destiny play Cupid. He didn't hold out much hope, but his gut told him that something unexpected could occur.

*
On May 27, 1812, a group of women and children mounted a last-ditch attempt to prevent the seizure of the city of Cochabamba, Bolivia by forces loyal to Spain on a hilltop called “La Coronilla.”

*
Spanish initials for the Socialist Republican Union Party, a coalition of right-wing parties that supported a military takeover in 1951 under the rule of General Hugo Ballivián.

*
The high Andean plateau extending through portions of Bolivia, Peru, Chile, and Argentina.

E
dmundo Rocha woke with a start,
sweating. With his left hand, he reached for a flask of
pisco
on the floor and took a long swig. For years, he had done nothing but drink
pisco
and sometimes pure alcohol, the kind that's sold in cans and intended for hardcore vagrants. Despite an overwhelming desire to finish it off, he left the bottle on top of the chair next to his bed. He lit a cigarette and sat up. He was wearing striped underpants that had been cut out from an old pair of pajamas. The stump that was his left leg stuck out grotesquely, shamefully. Rocha stared at it for a good while. He was alone in the cabin; the upper bunk was undisturbed. He knew that nobody would occupy it because he had two tickets in his jacket pocket: He had bought an extra one so that nobody would bother him.

As usual, he had been dreaming and his dream had turned into a nightmare, the same one as always. It used to happen at night, but lately it had begun plaguing him during siestas and post-binge sleepiness. The visions had a spine-chilling clarity to them. They would start with the cursed scene of him descending into the mine shaft on the ore car and then continue as he penetrated deeper into the mine. The naked torsos of his fellow workers were mirrors in which his own anguished face, his mop of hair, and his long, disheveled beard were reflected. He wanted to get out of the car, as it increasingly became one with the darkness and the silence, but it was impossible to move. His legs didn't respond and when he tried to shout, his throat went dry like a desert sandpit. There was nothing to be done. An evil force was leading him to the thick rock, which he was supposed to blow up with dynamite. His sweaty hands grasped the dynamite stick while Alcón, his mine buddy, chipped away at the rock with a pick. Alcón was making strange noises that sounded like wails. When he determined that the dynamite had been inserted deep enough into the rocky wall, he lit a match and they both started to run. The nightmare would pause there, with him escaping in slow motion. Then the other nightmare would begin, the one Rocha would see while waking up. The subsoil was slippery, the sticky underbelly of a mountain suffering at the hands of men tearing apart its insides. Rocha was desperately stumbling and falling. He would try to pull himself up, but he had lost time. No sooner did he succeed in standing up, than he heard the boom of the explosion and the burning gust propelled him several yards forward. Alcón shouted and pointed to the arch above, which was coming undone in thick and rough sheets of rock that were crashing down on both his legs. He managed to save his right leg, but his left leg got jammed under an enormous rock, turning it into a gelatinous, irrecoverable mass.

It's all that asshole's fault. If he hadn't sent me into the mines, I'd still be standing on two legs.

Rocha placed the crutches under his armpits and started to move from one side of the cabin to the other. Someone knocked on the door. The slightest noise could provoke a certain desperation in him.

“Who is it?”