The Travel Writer (17 page)

“Why didn’t you tell Pilar what you were doing last night?” I asked. “Threatening me. As you did with your friends from Condepa.”

“Pilar knows where I was. We had a very important conversation last night outside your English bar. I arrived early to meet her before she met you. Maybe six-thirty. You came later. I wanted to prevent Pilar from making a great mistake.”

“What great mistake?”

“Having a drink with a disgusting neoliberal. All you want is gossip about the writer who disappeared. Pilar thinks you can help the hotel. She trusts you too much.”

“Then … I don’t understand. You prevented her from meeting me? How did you know she would be there?”

“You wrote it on your business card.”

He cackled, delighted with himself. I remembered that Pilar had written the time and the name of the bar on her business card—the one I had shown to the Condepa chief in El Alto to dissuade him from having Dionisius beat me into powder. He must have ordered Arturo to head her off. But why?

It didn’t matter. She
had
wanted to meet me. She had been there, waiting. Early. The subsequent events of that night had pushed away my initial disappointment, but it was still sweet to see it defeated again. For a moment I was so elated I forgot about Dionisius. When I came back to myself, I swore I would find her no matter where he took her.

After an hour, the jangles on the road evened out and the car gathered speed over honest to God asphalt. Each year the pavement started a little sooner. For years, Bolivia had flung much of the nation’s transportation budget at a paved, two-lane highway, complete with a kilometer-long tunnel under a mountain, to replace the existing thin, fearsome snake of dirt. It was the
greatest and costliest public works project in Bolivian history. The day the tunnel opened was declared a national holiday. Arturo hooted in triumph as we plunged into its depths.

“The Grand Bolivian Tunnel!” cried Arturo. “Without it, there would be no Hotel Matamoros. Did you know that?”

“No.”

“Then you are evidently unfamiliar with the story of the establishment of the Hotel Matamoros, correct?” The paved road clearly required less of Arturo’s concentration.

“Tell me,” I said.

“Will you translate for your friend? No, don’t wake him. When my English improves, I will be able to enhance the visits of English speakers; as of now, I am only permitted to accompany Spanish speakers to the hotel. I begin.”

Arturo launched the story. Apparently, Enrique Matamoros, the wealthiest of local plantation owners and an aspiring hotelier, had been present at the ribbon-cutting festival dedicating the tunnel. According to the Matamoros’s PR spiel, at one point in the all-day affair, which came complete with parades of local villagers dancing in full indigenous regalia and performances by the La Paz university orchestra (to lend class to the proceedings), Matamoros gazed up over the mouth of the tunnel at one of the hillside terraces nearby, cut by the Incas but long since abandoned. The hill that got his eye was no more beautiful than any other in the region, but no less, and the widest of the terraces seemed like a pedestal waiting for a masterpiece. At that moment he decided to build a hotel.

Arturo’s story glossed over the tedious process of cajoling, politicking, threatening, bribing, blackmailing, and other essential acts of red-tape cutting that must have ensued, and proceeded straight to the hotel’s construction. Matamoros cut a dirt road up from the highway to the terraces, to bring in heavy machinery and laborers, and started building. Men and boys left their coca fields and papaya groves to do the muscle work, but anything more technical than hauling bricks was done by the finest crews from La Paz or even Cochabamba or Santa Cruz. The project was almost unimaginably expensive (for Bolivia), but Matamoros was rich and had the support of his government.

“What about the rumors?” I asked.

“What rumors?”

“About the origin of Matamoros’s money? They say it came from narcotraffickers.”

“Jealous lies of competitors. Matamoros owns coffee plantations as I own underwear.” Arturo chuckled; he liked that one.

The rest of the story I knew myself, from travel writer scuttlebutt and what articles I had read in the English-language press. The hotel opened to great local and national fanfare. Bolivian
Kallawayas—medicine men—were imported from the highlands to entice the international New Age Nut market. Jeeps, horses, mountain bikes, and expert guides were provided for well-heeled adventure travelers. The infinity pool was the length of a soccer field.

But no one thought it would work. Despite the exhortations in my guidebook, few tourists, in general, visit Bolivia. A few come to Lake Titicaca and La Paz, fewer still to the old colonial towns of Potosí and Sucre, some hardy souls to the mountains or the Great Salt Lake of Uyuni—it doesn’t add up to much. So Matamoros went straight for the international press. He filled rooms by providing them to foreign journalists for free (no big deal), along with free airfare and transfers to La Paz (unheard of). The French came first, and reviewers from all the well-heeled nations followed. The adulation was universal.

We passed through the great tunnel and shot into sunlight. All around us was the sparkling greenery of the Bolivian tropics.

The road unfurled one last time, and before us was a colossal statue of a Kallawaya. His toes were like footballs; his hat, like the upturned hull of a yacht. His brown plastic face was lifted to the sacred peaks to the north, and below his oak-tree staff was the dark mouth of a cave, gaping as if flabbergasted to find itself beneath the bare feet of a thirty-foot-tall Kallawaya. Flanking the cave were two armed men in camouflage, slouching against the rock. As we approached I could see little pockmarks in the Kallawaya’s robes, made by falling stones or maybe low-caliber bullets used for target practice. Arturo honked his horn, and the guards lifted their rifles in salute. I caught one of them yawning as we passed.

Arturo gunned the engine and plunged us into the middle of what appeared to be a vast chandeliered neoclassical ballroom, with a concrete floor instead of parquet. A bewildering network of entrance and egress routes was marked in dotted lines across the floor. A forest of Corinthian columns upheld the ceiling. I turned around and couldn’t find the tunnel through which we had entered. Perhaps the giant Kallawaya had stepped down to roll a boulder before the entrance, trapping us forever in his prison of kitsch.

“Here we have arrived deep in the heart of the Hotel Matamoros,” announced Arturo. “As you can see, Matamoros Station was carved out of the living rock of the hill, just as the mines were carved out of El Cerro Rico in Potosí. The ceiling is painted gold and silver, to remind us of the ancient wealth that flowed from the bowels of Bolivia to nourish the Old World in the time of
Spanish rule. Did you know that, at one time, our city of Potosí was richer than Paris?”

“Yes,” I said. “Do you think Pilar is here already?”

“I imagine so.”

“I want to see her. Immediately.”

Our vehicle had passed through the ballroom colonnade and was navigating a maze of bubbling fountains. “She’s probably busy,” Arturo said. “She has a very important job. You are the least of her concerns.”

“I want to speak to Dionisius as well.”

“This you do not want.”

Arturo eased around the last fountain and stopped beside a mahogany-colored platform, where three bellhops with much better posture than the guards outside waited to assist us with our luggage. I shook Kenny half awake but still had to open his door and drag him out. Arturo waited patiently in the car. When we were clear, he glided off to park—engine sounds were muffled in this neoclassical underground garage. I thought of a ghost searching silently for its resting place in a mausoleum.

“What do you think, Kenny?” I said. “They carved this whole thing out of rock.”

Kenny blinked the crystallized gunk from his eyes and examined his surroundings. He had been sweating in the car, and his hair was matted kelp.

“I’ve been to Disneyland,” he said. “I don’t care how flashy this place is. This is where they lost Hilary.” He craned his neck to gaze up at the gilded ceiling, as if she might be hanging like a bat. I felt the urge to clap him on the back. He was a dork, but he was my dork.

Two of the bellhops shouldered our dusty bags and bore them to the service elevator, smiling to make their pleasure in the task as obvious as possible. Too bad for them; I had vowed not to tip in the Matamoros, where anyone could be a murderer or kidnapper.

Their leader, unsullied by baggage, approached us only after my glance unfroze him. “Mr. Smalls!” he said, smiling like a gruff old man trying vainly to disguise his delight. Despite my aching head and anxiety, I nodded in approval. Good service never fails to impress me. “Have you brought a guest?” he said in English.

“We’re here on business,” said Kenny.

“Very good, señores. This way, please. Fernando, take these men to the lobby!”

You could have driven a minibus comfortably into the elevator; perhaps the drivers did for busloads of older or handicapped guests, or those who insisted on magnificent feats of service to justify the magnificent rates. The elevator walls were hung with woven Andean textiles. Fernando, the elevator operator, stood at attention beside the controls, which consisted of a single button the color of jade. He started to press it, but another van came honking like an angry
goose, and we had to wait while more passengers unloaded.

“Careful,” Kenny whispered. “This guy might speak English. So what did they tell you? Where’s Pilar?”

“Arturo says she’s already here,” I said, in a normal voice.

“Are you a dummy or something?” Kenny hissed. “Take it from me: you can’t trust these guys. You shouldn’t have let her get out of sight.”

“Please don’t give me advice. You don’t even know which side of the equator you’re on. Do you?”

“Maybe I don’t know everything,” Kenny said. “I’m no hotshot writer like some people. But guess what? I’ve done a few things right.”

“Name one.”

“Scored with Hilary. Can’t take that away.”

Fernando took no notice, politely pretending to have lost both his English and his hearing. What would it have taken to make him flinch? Here was a prince among elevator operators. Perhaps he was filing away our conversation for a report to his superior, which would later be distributed to rest of the hotel staff, including Arturo and the other drivers. Still I admired his unobtrusiveness.

“Now who’s being the idiot?” continued Kenny. “You. Call yourself an investigator. You ask questions, but you can’t see what I have in my brain. I have memories. You’ve never even seen Hilary. I talked to her. I had beers with her. I felt her lips. You know what that’s like?”

“Of course I do. So does everyone else over fourteen.”

“No way.” There was no doubt in his voice. His mother had kissed him, maybe a fourth-grader in the school yard had, on a dare; Kenny knew kisses. Hilary’s was different.

I turned to watch the bustle around the van. A pale, wrinkled woman clutching the hand of the man behind her stepped uncertainly from the van to the ground, like a calf testing its legs. The team of bellhops waved us on; unloading the van would take a while. The elevator doors closed.

“Did you kiss Pilar last night?” Kenny asked, as the floor pushed at our feet.

“Yes.”

He paused. “You know what?” he said. “She knows this country; she’s a smart cookie. She’ll be okay.”

Shame and gratitude surprised me suddenly; this smart-ass virgin (who ever heard of such a thing?) had taken pity on me. I noted his grotesqueries: his bristly Adam’s apple pulsing, his latex-tight sweater (mine) dying at his forearms, his high-top sneakers dirty and limp at the tops. Who had ever pitied him? No one who knew him.

* * *

The elevator door opened, and we exited beneath an arena-size dome of glass, stretching from the heavens to the floor. This huge room was somehow perched atop an outcropping of the mountain. All around us, beyond the glass, was the tropical forest, rising and falling in a stormy sea of green. It was as if we were flying.

I stepped carefully forward past a grove of banana trees to the end of the floor, until a shimmer of reflection warned me from bumping my nose. A lone hawk skimmed the treetops far below, not even shaking his wings. Patches of fields, probably coca or coffee, rippled up the hillside or held their ground on the ancient terraces. The river at the bottom of the valley glistened in the sun. I looked up at clouds directly above the glass dome and jumped as a man in a rope harness dropped like a spider, almost into my arms. He laughed at my fright and waved cheerily through the window with a rag. He was cleaning the glass. And really flying, or dangling at least, from a crane anchored somewhere on the mountain. His fine dark hair whipped about his eyebrows and his eyes, and I shivered with pangs of sympathy vertigo.

A man in a dark suit slipped up from behind us, his hands clasped behind his back. “Everyone is drawn immediately to the glass,” he said in English. “As if the view won’t be just as fine in another minute, or an hour, or the day to come.” His slicked-back hair shone wetly in the sunlight. Other guests clustered together across the long wave of glass, art lovers at a living gallery.

“Maybe they’re looking for their
missing
friends,” said Kenny, who was keeping two steps back from the edge.

The man nodded and lifted his eyebrow, as if impressed with Kenny’s perception. “Please, Mr. Smalls, make yourself comfortable. We have of course been expecting you. Your Orientation Specialist will be with you shortly. I am Victor Soldán, associate general manager. Can we offer you a tropical drink, such as a pisco sour, piña colada, mai tai, or tropical juice? I particularly recommend the guanábana.” He looked Bolivian, but his English sounded better than Kenny’s.

I declined for both of us. “This is my photographer, Kenny Rawls,” I added.

“Of course,” said Soldán.

“There, on the terrace.” I pointed, partly to flaunt my rudeness. “What are they growing?”