Born to Run (29 page)

IN her excitement, Elia phoned Simon as soon as the Falcon tri-jet they’d chartered reached cruising altitude. She’d forgotten her boyfriend would still be asleep at
home. “You won’t believe this thing. It’s got phones… well, obviously. And beds.”

Simon wasn’t impressed; he would have been if Elia had confided why she was going to an unnamed destination, or if he was the one sipping French champagne for breakfast, though Elia and
the other FOX crew would have been wiser not to have indulged. By the time they were preparing to land in La Paz, even the burly cameraman—who’d guzzled more fizz than the others
combined—had to pause taping the view from the air to press the sick bag up to his face.

Elia looked up in time to be sick again herself. In that instant before her head plunged into the brown bag, she noticed that the plane was on final approach into La Paz-El Alto airport,
travelling at a crazy high-blower speed with the snow-capped mountains looming above them. Her eyes clamped shut as the wheels screamed along the icy runway.

The pilot ignored all the groans and, over the intercom, explained that, while fighting a thirty-knot cross-wind, she had needed to make the landing at twice the normal speed to avoid the
engines stalling in the wispy thin air.

Elia reached for another sick bag.

Y
EARS AGO, LA Paz had attitude, but now, altitude was virtually all it had left to hang onto.

Spilling down the sides and across a rugged mountain bowl at around 13,000 feet, the Bolivian capital city had once held up its head, poised in a strategic sweet spot between the nation’s
bountiful silver mines and its critical Pacific Ocean ports. But things turned sour over a century ago when Chile and Peru ganged up on their small neighbour, with Chile nabbing the seaboard and
Peru the rich lodes of ore.

Today, La Paz’s remaining accolade—that it was the world’s highest city with the highest airport—didn’t feed the 30 percent of Bolivians living in poverty. They
couldn’t give a
miéchica
that their airport could headbutt Switzerland’s Matterhorn on a clear day. Instead, with many scraping by on a measly five dollars a week, they
hankered for the Swiss banks to reimburse the loot that some of their former kleptocrat leaders had secreted in their vaults.

In La Paz, the air was so thin that jogging would turn your legs to jelly. But few jogged here. There weren’t too many places worth going.

ELIA had organised to do the shooting up in the slums of El Alto that evening, so her plan meanwhile was to wrap herself in the traditional
aguayo
shawl she was about to purchase and
stroll around the old part of La Paz city. With snippets from
Lonely Planet
that she’d read aloud to the others on the plane, she’d captivated enough of the crew to join her; all
except Shannon Reynolds, the face who Mr Devine had assigned to front the interview.

Reynolds decided to stay in. The flight had been nauseating enough but when the hotel bellhop slid the van door open, the precious star’s stomach almost upended at the reek of the puddle
of piss he’d stepped into. Spontaneously, he decided to leave exploring the marvels of this place to others. A market where you could buy llama fetuses, even dried ones, was suddenly of zero
interest to him.

He commanded the bellman to wipe his boots. The withering look Elia gave him had nothing to do with the sharp smell. Disgusted with his
Don’t you know who I am
arrogance—and
no, the locals didn’t have a clue—she and the others left their bags and a tip and made off, leaving him to drink alone.

Along the cobblestoned streets, the group kept bumping into women wearing shawls like the one Elia had bought, as well as voluminous layered petticoat
pollera
skirts and black bowler
hats. According to the guidebooks, if a woman’s hat was tilted to the side, she was single; square on top, she was married. Their skirts and striped shawls, brilliantly vibrant, were
something else. Bizarrely, the shawls were often smeared with thick oily pig fat; at least they smelt like it to Elia. She’d bought one without the fat. It cost her less, though she would
willingly have paid more.

Beggars wrapped as tight as mummies lay asleep, or dead—it was hard to tell the difference—under awnings or in doorways, and a loud gang of soldiers passed by, leering their
gap-toothed smiles at Elia from under their riot helmets and waving their assault rifles. The grease they used on their weapons hung heavy in the still, dry air mixing with the thick fetor of pig
fat. She decided that breathing through her mouth was a good option.

The wispy river Elia had spied as they had corkscrewed down the eight miles from the airport was nowhere to be seen, having oozed its squalid water under the city, the roads having been built
over it decades ago.

CARLOS, Elia’s local researcher, had arranged for them to meet the woman he claimed was Isabel Diaz’s mother, Maria Rosa, up in El Alto over a
watia
, a dinner
cooked in a traditional Andean earth oven. For colour, Elia had planned to stretch the interview across the meal.

Reynolds scowled as they drove into the worst slum he’d ever seen, or smelt. He knew of the Juhu slum in Mumbai, India—though the closest he’d come to it was watching the movie
Slumdog Millionaire
—and this was far worse. For starters, he was physically here. It was not a good place for someone with his finely honed nose for wine, or so he whinged.

“Let’s skip the meal thing,” he said, his throat gagging with the thick cloying stench of human sweat and shit, as well as other odours he couldn’t avoid picking out:
pigs, decomposing trash, rotting damp cardboard, wood smoke and the pungent ammonia tang of yet more urine.

“Is fixed, Señor,” said Carlos. “We cannot cancel.”

“Sure we can. We’ll peg our noses, pick her up and take her back to the hotel. We can do the interview there.”

“Not possible. Señora Diaz is spending many hours to dig meal for dinner.”

The street—if you could so dignify a dusty dirt track strewn with scrabbling chickens, wandering pigs and, despite the chilly conditions, half-clothed urchins—was hemmed in by
squalid shanties and lean-to huts.

An old woman shuffled out of a rickety metal and cardboard shack as their van approached. Maria Rosa’s bowler hat sat flat on her head. Even if the bent old lady could stretch straight,
she was nowhere near as tall or attractive as the woman she claimed was her daughter.

A few times, Carlos had to repeat things to her, and Reynolds got more and more irritable. “She’s deaf, can you believe it?” he asided to Elia. “Of the five senses
you’d be willing to lose up here, you’d go for smell, right?”

Carlos asked a question in Quechuan, slowly and loudly. Señora Diaz replied in broken English, “Paper is inside.” She loosened her shawl and slipped through her doorway
curtain, shortly re-emerging with a metal cash box, its red paint peeling. Pulling on a string around her neck, she drew up a key from between her ample breasts, then unlocked the box.

The page she withdrew from it and carefully handed to Carlos was yellowing and brittle and, handling it like a diamond nestling in his palm, he passed it to Elia.

“Bingo!” she said, her smile cracking through the cold. “A US entry visa… issued to Maria Rosa Diaz and dated… yes, just a few months
before
Isabel was
born. Perfect.”

Maria Rosa innocently looked up at Elia with an even more eager-to-please smile, though these days she had no teeth at all, distastefully prompting Elia to recall the trailer park
manager’s sleazy pet name for her.

“Can we just do this?” complained Reynolds, pushing forward. Three mangy dogs were nuzzling at his sharp-creased chinos and he wanted to get out of here before the mutts confused him
with a lamppost. He surveyed the area and wrinkled his nose, indifferent as to whether he offended anyone, and his eyes settled on the hundreds of empty bottles piled up against a wall of Maria
Rosa’s shack. “She’s a drunk,” he boiled toward Elia. “I’m interviewing a soak? Puh-lease.”

“She not have one drink today,” Carlos interrupted. “I promise her ten bolivianos extra if she stay sober for you.”

“That’s what? About $1.40?” said Elia, peeling the money off her clip.

Carlos quickly wrapped his hand over Elia’s, “No show money,” he whispered. “No safe, here. Money you got in your hand is enough for food for many families for one
month.”

“Listen, Elia, do we really have to do the whole dinner shtick?”

Carlos cut in. “Is arranged, Señor Reynolds. Everyone make big preparations.” For another five bolivianos, Carlos had got Maria Rosa’s neighbours, whose hovel shared a
rotting plywood wall with hers, to shift their chicken coops and pig swill to make enough space for the dinner, the cameras and the gas-bottle portable heaters he had hired, which were being fired
up as they argued. He pointed Reynolds to a small hole dug in the ground with clods of earth piled next to it. “Is oven,” he smiled, with more than a hint of local pride.

Reynolds noticed small, uneven dark lumps scattered around the hole, preferring not to think about the pigs he’d seen wandering around. He shrugged and headed back to the minivan to
rehearse his intro. “Isabel Diaz,” he said aloud, not caring who heard him, “couldn’t be president because of a father she’d never met. But what of her mother, a woman
she hasn’t seen since she ran away from home at fifteen? I’m Shannon Reynolds for FOX. I’m in El Alto, Bolivia… a thousand feet
above
La Paz, the world’s
highest capital city. As you can see,” and this is where the camera would sympathetically pan, “it’s also one of the poorest. Tonight, I’ve been invited to a
watia
, a
traditional Andean Indian dinner cooked in the ground, like a Hawaiian luau, and my hostess is… Maria Rosa Diaz, the long lost mother of Isabel Diaz, former US presidential candidate and
soon, likely to be elected Speaker of the House. It’s freezing here in El Alto, but what you’ll discover tonight will make your blood boil. Stay tuned.”

THE cameras rolled. Isabel’s mother knelt in the dirt, the oven hole dug freshly in front of her. She selected the hardest clods and pressed them into the base to form
the foundation, and then more for the sides. She huffed herself up onto her sandaled feet and walked purposely over to the nearby open fire where, knees bent, she lifted a smoking metal bucket
filled with hot flat stones and brought it back to the hole, almost stumbling under its weight. Once again on her knees and this time with tongs, she placed the hot stones inside the makeshift
oven, one by one. She piled yet more of the clods of dirt around the mouth of the hole, stacking them up until the structure resembled a dome. The small holes she left here and there were for
ventilation, according to Carlos, and the stalks of
chaniua
she slipped in through them were for fuel.

When the oven was glowing red hot inside, Maria Rosa removed the stones with the tongs and replaced them with food: potatoes, raw leaf-wrapped alpaca, corn cakes and bananas. She covered it over
with more leaves and sand and dirt, wiped her hands on her apron and heaved herself back onto her feet, all the while chattering away to Carlos in a language none of the others understood.

“One hour till ready,” he said.

The cameras stopped filming.

“And we do what exactly during this hour?” asked Reynolds. “Sit on Mrs Gummy Bear’s porch sipping mint juleps and watch the sun set over the horizon?” He swung
around disgusted and almost tripped over the horde of open-mouthed children who’d come and sat silently behind them.

REYNOLDS and Maria Rosa ate seated on a brightly striped rug. It clashed with her shawl, but Elia let it go since everything clashed here.

So far as the cameras observed, all that warmed the diners was the heat radiating from the
watia
hole. “Alpaca. Mmm,” Reynolds winked to the lens, “I never thought a
sweater could taste so good.” The flare in his nostrils was almost convincing, but Elia and the rest of the crew winced anyway, and she knew she’d cut it.

“Señora Diaz,” he said after wiping his mouth. “You had a daughter when you were in America. Where was she born and what was her name?” He’d already learned
from their off-camera rehearsal that if he spoke slowly, Maria Rosa would hear him.

“Her name… Isabel Rosa Diaz. Beautiful name, si?”

“And where was she born?”

“Ah, you ask me before… She born in New Jersey… in Newark. We live there first when we come to America—was cheap rent, but big troubles so we move.”

“Tell me about Isabel.”

Everything Maria Rosa recounted about Isabel and her early life had the ring of truth about it. Without giving Reynolds the details, she confirmed her daughter had run away from her at fifteen,
when they were living at the Cactus Flower Trailer Park in New Mexico. After twenty minutes of what Reynolds would later describe as filler drivel, most of which would be edited out, he jumped in
for the kill. “Your husband, what was his name?”

“Hernandez Luis Rodriguez Diaz.”

“And what was his job?”

“He has big job. He work for Chile, for
gobierno
… the government,
si
? He is
embajador
… ambassador… diplomat. I meet him here. No…
there,” she said, pointing down the mountain to La Paz, “and we marry there.
Celebración grande
. Very
grande
. And ’nother one in Chile too, for him family. I
very pretty girl,” she said, dropping her eyes as a petite smile curled her lips.