Born to Run (7 page)

Maria Rosa slides very, very slowly out of bed. Ignoring the stains on yesterday’s dress, she slips it over her head. She looks around the trailer, nodding approval at Isabel’s
housework, and whispers: “
Vaya
, go to school,” and adds, “
Rápidamente
,” as if she needed to. Isabel is happy to escape from Wolfman.

She is an odd fifteen-year-old: she loves school and hates weekends. Maria Rosa’s boyfriends fancy their Friday and Saturday nights wild, so there’s hell to pay on the mornings
when there is no school to flee to.

Her mami walks her to the trailer park gate, one of the few tokens of motherhood left. It’s as much routine as mami can muster. Very gently she stretches up to brush the bruise around
Isabel’s eye with her lips, smiles and says, “¡Chao pescado!” See you later alligator, or a close approximation of it. It was her father’s expression
,
apparently.

Isabel embraces her mami, careful to avoid the welt on her back, and leans down to kiss her beautiful cheek, and caresses it, knowing to ignore the foul breath of morning and alcohol.

They part, and Maria Rosa turns around to saunter back.

Isabel stands at the gate watching her.

Her mami is singing the bolero hit she’s sung ever since Isabel was in a stroller: “
Bésame, Bésame mucho…”
Isabel thinks it’s for her, but
her mami is singing, and swinging her hips, in the hope that Willy the trailer park manager will see her.

I
N 1968, LAND-LOCKED Bolivia was South America’s most destitute country. Within its rigid, polarised society, the grinding poverty of the
Andean Indian majority had more in common with sub-Saharan Africans than with the lifestyle led by their Spanish-descended elites.

The host in the presidential library tonight is
el presidente
Barrientos. He drops into the sad leather armchair. He and all his guests are smoking the prized new Cuban
Cohibas
.

Despite the President’s summons to sit, Dr Hernandez Diaz remains standing. A slug of thick grey ash precariously dangles from the tip of Diaz’s smoke.

Barrientos’s teeth crunch down onto his cigar and his stomach tightens. He waits. The President’s shameless eyes look down at his other freshly imported extravagance, a hand-knotted
silk rug that almost floats under their feet, a one-thousand-knots-per-square-inch red and gold Persian tapis. His eyes flick back and forth between the carpet and the ash from the contemptuous
Chilean dog.

Alfredo and the others watch silently, knowing from experience that the insult will not go unanswered. But there is time. Here, there is a time for everything.

At over 13,000 feet above sea level, La Paz boasts it is the world’s highest capital city. Yet, economically Bolivia is rock-bottom though
el presidente
René Barrientos
Ortuño, gallantly propped up by his CIA friends and his cronies at Gulf Oil, regrets he has little time to dwell personally on his people’s poverty. But he is a fine orator, in
indigenous Quechuan as well as Spanish, and his diamond-encrusted finger always points to where the blame really lies: the irksome Cuban-inspired insurgents or, when it suits him, Bolivia’s
land-thieving neighbour and Dr Diaz’s homeland, Chile.

At least, Barrientos smiles to himself, the insurgents no longer pose such a problem. Sawing off both of Che Guevara’s hands after his murder was a nice touch by his colleague and former
junta co-president General Alfredo Ovando Candia. Earlier that evening, as they were slicing into their steaks, the subject of Che had come up, with Alfredo accepting the plaudits with all the
grimness his high forehead and clipped paintbrush moustache could muster. To Barrientos, Alfredo’s stern appearance seems a little comical: his thin, pursed lips make him look as though he is
secreting one of Guevara’s rings in his mouth.

The old chesterfields lend an enveloping cosiness to the animated after-dinner discussion that hardly reflects the roles of these six men, or the tension tingling in the room.
“
¡Ruiro siki!
You round ass!” laughs Barrientos only just concealing his loathing for Dr Diaz, the only one still on his feet. Is Diaz standing to show he can or because
his stature, such as it is, will be lost in the sofas?

Unresponsive to Barrientos’ jibe and feigning indifference to the damage his cigar ash would do to the rug or his smoke inflicts on the prized volumes lining the walls, Diaz, whose
doctorate is in Spanish literature, pulls a heavy early edition of
El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha
off a shelf. He weighs it in his hands and loudly contemplates the irrelevant
coincidence that its author, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, and William Shakespeare died on the same day: April 23, 1616.

Diaz rests the book on the lid of his pot belly, round as his head is bald. He tugs the antique leather-bound cover open to find the contemporary hand-written inscription:

US President Lyndon B. Johnson’s personal message is dated three weeks after the 1964 coup that installed Barrientos as Bolivia’s president. Diaz masks his disgust
with a long puff on his
Cohiba
and replaces the volume.

Chile and Bolivia broke off official relations in 1962, years before Diaz was sent by Chile to quietly negotiate their reopening. “You Bolivianos have such light-headed views. Perhaps it
is because La Paz indeed touches the sky.”

“
Baja la música.
Turn down the music,” Barrientos grunts to an aide who obeys immediately.

Diaz is disappointed; the turntable is spinning one of his favourites: Lucho Gatica singing the bolero hit
Bésame Mucho
. The orchestra played it five times at both of his wedding
receptions—the first in La Paz and the other in Santiago. Oh, the tedious lengths an envoy must endure if he marries a local girl. Despite the cheerless outcome of that politically convenient
tryst, he still loves the song.

“Hernandez,” continues the President, one of only two present with no moustache but possessing the gravitas to interrupt Diaz using his first name, “The music
is like the poetry, si? It can sometimes be prescient.” Barrientos tips his widow’s peak lightly as if signalling a farewell. Diaz doesn’t quite follow, but sees the others
understand.

He almost lets his suspicion screw up the folds in his pudgy face, but he restrains it and forces a smile, allowing Barrientos to continue uninterrupted.

“Why do you tell such stories, Dr Diaz? Maybe it is because you Chileans get to enjoy the sea air that Bolivians cannot. Is it so fanciful that Chile should restore to our beloved country
her legitimate rights to her Pacific coast?”

Not even tonight, ostensibly a social occasion, can Barrientos restrain himself from rebuking his guest’s nation for strangling the economy of his own.

Once more, Diaz sighs. It is tiresome, having to tolerate this monotonous gripe time and again. He knows the whining is just a crowd-pleaser, even tonight. It has been the same all along the
conga line of Barrientos’s predecessors, ever since Chile’s glorious victory in
La Guerra del Pacífico
in 1883. Name just one Bolivian administration in the eighty-odd
years since, he ponders, that has not sought to smokescreen its own economic bungling by agitating against Chile’s seizure of the Atacama coastal corridor.

Diaz dares to yawn, secure that Barrientos’s own jingoistic arrogance will not interpret it as the disrespect he so unquestionably intends; Bolivians have a saying that if La Paz itself
won’t take a foreigner’s breath away, the altitude will. There is truth in this.

Diaz also blames the thin air for his brainless decision to marry Maria Rosa, but he will not share that regret with these Bolivianos.

“Señor Presidente,” says Diaz eventually, without looking at Barrientos as would be the custom, “your hospitality is, as always, magnificent. But I have an early meeting
with the
yanqui
, Señor Smith.”

All present are well-acquainted with the sharp, green-eyed Smith, a CIA operative whose real name has been the subject of continued speculation. Barrientos owes Smith and his colleagues big-time
for providing the intelligence that enabled his US-trained battalion of Bolivian Rangers to track down and kill Guevara, ending Castro’s efforts to spread his leftist revolution to Bolivia.
Between Chile and Cuba, Barrientos had previously had his hands full; now it is just Chile he needs to worry about.

Diaz also owes Smith. Kindly—too kindly?—Smith had procured a US visa for Diaz’s wife Maria Rosa, no questions asked. Why Smith was so helpful still isn’t clear to Diaz.
Perhaps Smith has eyes for Maria Rosa. But with the escalating troubles, there was no way Diaz could let pregnant Maria Rosa stay here in La Paz. He couldn’t pack her off to Chile; his
diplomatic career would not survive long if he let a woman like her loose in his country. It was the best way. He would probably have had to find another, regrettably uncivilised, method if Smith
had not been so cooperative.

“Please remember me to him,” says one of the other guests, though he needn’t have bothered. He is Mario Vargas Salinas, a member of the nocturnal detail that secretly buried
Che’s body in a grave outside the mountain town of Vallegrande. “We must thank Smith for ensuring the good doctor didn’t stay under our skin for too long, eh?” Salinas
laughs.

At first Dr Diaz takes this as a personal insult till he appreciates the joke: Salinas isn’t referring to Diaz, but to Che Guevara’s professional training as a dermatologist. Yet, in
the carefully worded world of diplomacy, Diaz can’t discount it as a double entendre.

“Maybe you should take Smith to the
Mercado de los Brujos
, the Witch Doctors’ Market, and buy him some dried llama fetuses,” suggests Salinas.

“A waste of time,” says Alfredo. “Smith worships power, not
Pachamama
, the goddess Mother Earth.”

“Unlike the six of us,” Barrientos laughs, though it is a little hollow. Barrientos—always pragmatic—certainly worships
Pachamama…
why cut off options
unnecessarily?

DIAZ wants to chew over the night’s events with a clear head, so he instructs his chauffeur, Felipe, to drive him along the road towards Coroico. Felipe raises his
eyebrow but Diaz waves him on. Hardly a road, more a one-lane track, it is cut into the side of a mountain and twists almost continuously with blind hairpins often with dripping wet rock overhangs
that obliterate the stars. For good reason it is known locally as
El Camino del Muerte
, the Death Road, and is possibly the most dangerous road anywhere. Diaz detests having a driver, even
more so on an exhilarating and challenging run like this, but both his position and the times dictate it. Felipe is also a crack shot.

Before they leave the grounds, Felipe jumps back out of the car into the freezing night air. Like Maria Rosa, he is a local. Diaz smiles. He has witnessed this ridiculous rite many times though
it is true that it has so far protected his life on their many trips on Death Road. Felipe takes a bottle of pure alcohol from the trunk and splashes the liquid on each tyre, blessing the vehicle
with a
cha’lla
. After taking off again, he stops at various points along the road to appease the
apus
mountain spirits, by making offerings of
mamacoca
coca leaf, and
adding a rock or two to several of the many rock cairns by the roadside that mark where people have died. Fortunately tonight, perhaps because it is so late, none of the mangy rabid dogs come out
to him angling for food. There are many deaths along this road, and not just from dog bites. Several vehicles per month tumble over the side, plummeting for 1,200 to 3,000 feet down precipitous
sheer cliff drops.

Tonight Felipe meets no oncoming vehicles, or one of them would have had to back up along the track several hundred feet to squeeze past the other—terrifying at the best of times,
unthinkable at night.

While Hernandez’s adored silver-grey 1957 Mercedes 300SL Gull Wing is the best car in the world, according to him, with state-of-the-art fuel-injection being just one of its features, it
is hardly the most appropriate car for this particular pastime. When Felipe has to lift the upward-opening door to climb out for one of his rituals, he has to avoid parking under the many rock
overhangs or his boss would whine about the hand-tooled llama leather seats getting soaked from the drips.

Diaz affectionately calls his car Rosinante, after Don Quijote’s scraggly horse. He loves this car and as a bonus, has found its whisper-quiet action useful.

Ten miles along the road, Diaz instructs Felipe to pull over at a wide bend, his favourite thinking spot, and to switch off the headlights. “The light will interfere with my
thoughts,” he says. He pushes up his half of the door and, with some difficulty, his rotund frame spills out of the automobile, leaving Felipe at the wheel. He buttons his coat, pulls on his
hat and gloves and waddles over to the edge, carefully. He sucks in the chill air. Apart from the stars and a fingernail of moon, there is nothing to see. Everything is black, even his thick coat.
He is cold and, even though he knows it will only make a psychological difference, he takes a cigar case and lighter from his inside pocket and extracts his own Cuban, biting off the end and
lighting it up.