The Dismal Science (25 page)

So he nodded as if he agreed completely and he let that subject die, too. Was this how courtship worked: Did you dodge mines until the commitment was solid enough that you could exchange maps detailing the whereabouts of all the remaining mines?

During the ensuing silence, he had a sip of coffee and looked around the room, but Luz Elena was nowhere to be found.

Vincenzo spent the rest of the morning eating paracetamol, drinking coca tea, and walking around an adjacent neighborhood called Sopocachi, which was where Lenka apparently lived. It seemed to be home to the city's middle class, such as it was. Stopping at a bakery for a
salteña
and
café con leche
, he noticed that the headache had temporarily vanished. Soon, however, it was back, so he went to his room to lie down. He drank more coca tea, per the recommendation of the concierge, and tried to push on toward the third terrace of
Purgatorio
, but couldn't manage to focus on the words. He watched
BBC World News
instead.

He awoke from his nap to the sound of the telephone ringing. From the digital clock on the nightstand he saw it was three thirty. He answered. It was Lenka, downstairs. It was time to go meet the president. Vincenzo quickly put on a tie and blazer, straightened his hair. Downstairs, Lenka was waiting beside her Datsun with her mobile phone at her ear.

Steering halfheartedly as she drove up the main avenue bisecting the city, she remained mainly engrossed in her phone call. From what he could understand, she was talking to her boyfriend about the fact that she and Evo were leaving town today, and she couldn't see him for a while. “
Tenemos reuniones ahora, y despues vamos directamente al aeropuerto. Pero te llamo prontito, mi amor,”
she said.

When she hung up, Vincenzo said, “Your boyfriend?”

She didn't say anything for a moment, and then she glanced at him with her wickedly smart eyes and said, “He is a liar and a shit. We are not going out anymore.”

He nodded steadily, very cool, although he adored her now, almost overwhelmingly so. Her self-assurance and muscular social style. That she could be coolly dangerous, too, was indescribably alluring. It seemed that she'd been talking rather sweetly with the boyfriend/ex-boyfriend a few minutes before, which didn't quite connect with her suggestion that they'd broken up, but Vincenzo thought better of asking her to clarify. Was this how people dated now? Everything was civil, even hatred. The terms of a contentious breakup were hammered out in dulcet tones: “Pumpkin, I don't think we should see each other anymore because you're a foul slag and an idiot—I hope that's okay.”

She said nothing else on the matter but her silence let him know that she was bothered. Maybe her oddly and inappropriately mirthful tone had other, more complicated sources. Maybe she, too, was just badly heartbroken and trying to get on with things, leaping through the Kübler-Ross gauntlet.

They veered into a denser downtown area and pulled up outside another hotel—a gaudier place—mirrored windows, fluorescent-lit placard declaring its name: the Presidente Hotel.

“Let me get him,” Vincenzo said.

“Hurry,” she said, and picked up her cell phone again, put a hand to her forehead, and called someone.

Vincenzo encountered Walter in the lobby and the two men hugged.

“The flight?” Vincenzo asked, surprised by how relieved he was to see Walter.

Walter shrugged and glanced at his wristwatch. “Don't we have an appointment with our biggest fan?”

“Our chariot is outside. It's that woman Lenka.”

“Of the e-mails?”

“Of the e-mails,” Vincenzo said as he led the way toward the doors. “How is this hotel?”

“It's resolutely mediocre, but I know it well. I've stayed here one or two million times.”

“The altitude? Is it . . .”

“Nah, I'm immune to such things!”

“Ha! Of course you are. My brain is cooked.” Vincenzo opened the door to the backseat for him. “When we play chess you'll have to give me a handicap.”

“Ha!” Walter said and got into the car.

Lenka drove them four blocks and then steered onto the sidewalk outside an anonymous-looking office and pulled up the parking break. That would, apparently, be her parking space.

They found Evo Morales in a large and bland office at the back of the building, not far above the sidewalk. The windows looked out on the narrow street jammed with cars, the opposing walls riddled with graffiti and Evo's own campaign posters. It was uncanny to sit there, facing the man whose grinning face was repeated, like some epic Warhol painting, on the wall outside his own window.

Evo, with his bizarrely enormous head, encased in its thick helmet of hair, was on the phone, his computer screen at an angle, displaying a blank Word document. He laughed into the phone and Vincenzo looked out the window at all the other Evos, the smiling Evos, all promising
Adelante
—forward progress. The Evo in front of them said,
“¡Te amo! ¡Te amo! ¡Pero tengo que irme!”
into his phone. He listened while the other person talked and was maybe amused, but also visibly eager to cut the conversation off. Clearly new to politics, he hadn't figured out how to organize his facial expression, permanently, into a mask of something dull and enticing. Eventually, he slammed the phone down and sighed loudly.

“
¡Familia!
” he said and stood up—he'd been on the phone with his family, apparently; but, as Vincenzo understood it, Evo was a bachelor.

Evo shook both men's hands and started talking to them quickly in Spanish, until Lenka cut him off and informed him that they had to speak English, because neither man was any good with Spanish.

Evo sat down again and switched to English, though his English was halting and unsteady, full of unnatural pauses. But it made sense, at least.

“Thank you for coming to Bolivia,” he said.

“Thank you for having us,” Walter said.

Evo held forth, speaking in broad terms, as politicians like to do before they take office: he talked about correcting imbalances, he was confident and vague. Each idea was lovelier than the previous. It reminded Vincenzo of Jonathan Paris, with his talk about how the World Bank should focus on doing right by
the helpless and majestic trees in tropical forests. There was a sense even that history had ordained these events because history knew best and was excited about this proper agenda—the righting of old wrongs, the punishing of the wicked, and so on. Having seen some of these issues from the messy interior, Vincenzo was not as confident that history had a plan, or that the trees and the poor were best served by any of the ideas Evo had to offer. Admittedly, he didn't have any especially useful suggestions of his own, but he was quite sure that a general simplification of the issues wasn't going to help.

The central problem, the one voters tended to struggle with, was the idea that people or things were
supposed
to be a certain way. No one—not Jonathan Paris or Evo Morales, William Hamilton or Paul Wolfowitz—seemed able to cope with the stark reality, the abject arbitrariness and stupidity of the world, that life was an insult to everyone's plans.

Evo, though, for the time being, was nowhere near that messy reality.

Sitting there in front of this man, Vincenzo found that he didn't look at all like any politician he'd ever met. Politicians, from his experience, regardless of their nationality or race, were physically potent in a way: a presence that demanded attention. Evo, however, was not like that—he looked exhausted and suspicious.

Addressing Vincenzo, he said, “For Bolivia, you have done a great service. It is a sacrifice you have made—and with the help of this journalist.” Then he turned his big face to Walter and Walter smiled his vacant smile, the one he presented when his mind was calculating something else. Then Walter jotted something in his pad, a strangely unnerving accessory, that pad.

While his pen was still moving, Walter cleared his throat, looked up, and said, “I would like to do a more complete interview with you while I'm here.”

“Yes, of course!” Evo laughed. It was a hearty laugh, a bodily event, but surprisingly forced—he laughed like a person without much of a sense of humor.

Lenka shook her head as she laughed along with him. She seemed determined to bolster the unconvincing jollity, but Walter and Vincenzo just smiled.

When he'd stopped laughing, Evo looked at her and she glanced at her watch. “
Cuatro minutos,”
she muttered and Evo relaxed and looked back at the men, as if they had all the time in the world. Lenka stood up and walked out of the room.

“When are you going to expropriate the gas?” Vincenzo said. Walter grunted, quietly, clearly displeased that Vincenzo had asked that.

“I'm going to do what is best for the Bolivian people. The gas is our primary export, our great national treasure, but we don't see . . .” The points unfurled in this way, very pro forma, all delivered with the kind of mechanical certainty that public figures often develop after being compelled to recite the same lines again and again for months.

When the recitation was over, Vincenzo said, “But what would you do if the international community withdraws support?”

“Fortunately, you have helped us to draw attention to this threat. Because of the thing that you two men did, those people will be more reluctant to punish Bolivia for being an independent country.”

“But what if it happens later?” Vincenzo said.

Lenka ducked in and nodded at Evo, who acknowledged her, but stayed, saying, “I will find support elsewhere.” Vincenzo sensed that he thought Brazil or Venezuela or others could fill any void left by irate wealthy aid-providers. The paradigm had changed, he was saying. Vincenzo was not convinced it had changed that much.

Evo stood up and apologized for having to leave early.

Vincenzo said, “What if these other places don't give you the kind of support you need?”

Evo smiled innocently, amused, and shook his head. “We will see!” But beneath his smile there was a palpable fury, a river of rage, and while that rage might be understandable, Vincenzo sensed it would steer his governing style, too. Evo
appeared
to be a principled leader because he
was
a principled leader, and he was a principled leader because he was so furious that he could not be anything other than honest.