Andean Express (4 page)

T
he train left the El Alto district
and traveled deep into the Andean plateau. Tiny mud and straw huts were scattered across the countryside, which grew increasingly barren as the city was left farther and farther behind. By the time Ricardo entered the dining car, nearly every table had been taken. The better-off second-class passengers congregated around the snack counter. In exchange for a few pesos, the waiter led Ricardo to a table with two chairs. Ricardo settled in, looked around, and noticed a table marked
Reserved
in the middle of the car. It was probably for the Alderetes. Ricardo was intrigued and wanted to know more about Gulietta and her strange marriage. She had introduced him to her world and he wanted to be part of it, at least for the duration of the twenty-four-hour trip.

The remaining guests from the sleeping car continued to arrive. As was to be expected, they had changed clothes for the occasion. Ricardo's uncle, Pepe Tréllez, was sporting a brown suit, white shirt, striped tie, and Panama hat. When he saw that Ricardo was alone, he went to join him.

“You're looking good,” Tréllez said.

“It's the thought of traveling to the coast.”

“Did you pass with flying colors?”

“Not really.”

“Well, what matters is that you passed.”

Pepe Tréllez was wearing too much cologne. He reeked like a high-class chorus girl. Assessing his next move, like an actor before a mirror, he eyed the other passengers with an air of superiority. “There's nobody worth going for.”

“The Carletti girl,” Ricardo said.

Tréllez smiled. His brown eyes, ever in search of surprises, looked amusedly at Ricardo. “Do you know the story?”

“No. But I can imagine.”

“It's no soap opera. It's more like one of those depressing Vargas Vila books.”

The Marquis was letting himself be seen with Anita. He had on a blue suit, a light blue shirt, and a wild green and yellow–splashed tie that resembled a slice of the jungle. Anita—La Paz's most famous madam—was wearing a girlish pink dress and looked like a doll out of a nightmare.

“The Marquis puts too much powder on his face. He thinks life is one long cabaret.”

“The poker player told me Anita is a madam.”

“She's the most experienced one,” Tréllez said. “She was very beautiful until just a few years ago. She knows everyone in La Paz.”

A waiter cleared a table for four next to the kitchen where some railway employees had been sitting. He invited the Marquis to sit down.

“How have you been, Pepe?” the Marquis said in greeting.

“Worried,” Tréllez replied.

“Why?”

“My Indian farmhands are getting riled up over all this Marxist bullshit.”

“Sell your land before the holocaust.”

The Marquis was waiting for the man and the woman Ricardo had seen on the El Alto station platform. As the couple entered the car, they recognized Pepe Tréllez and waved. The man was wearing a light green tweed jacket, khaki pants, and boots.

“That's Ian Durbin, an Irishman who works for the Bolivian Railway. The quiet, sad-looking woman is his wife. She's from Potosí.”

“Durbin is huge,” Ricardo said.

“He weighs around 220 pounds. In his younger days in Dublin, I think he was a boxer. The guy is a serious drinker. He can finish off a bottle of whiskey in half an hour by himself.”

The waiter placed two bowls of
chairo
soup on the table and asked: “Anything to drink?”

“A beer,” Tréllez said. “Do they let you drink beer?”

“I'm eighteen,” Ricardo said.

“How time flies. I remember when you used to ride that tricycle around your house on Federico Zuazo.”

Tréllez poured hot sauce into his soup. “Here comes Alderete. Poor girl. To have to put up with a pig like him.”

Alderete couldn't hide the angry grimace etched on his dark face.

“The one behind the girl is her mother,” Tréllez explained. “Doña Clara is from La Paz's crème de la crème. She arranged the marriage.”

“Really?”

“Alderete cheated her late husband out of his mine. He was the guy's accountant.”

Doña Clara was the image of simplicity. Half her body was wrapped in a gray shawl. Gulietta was wearing a bluish skirt and a fine sweater of braided wool. She turned her gaze on Ricardo and caught him staring at her, spellbound.

“She's really beautiful,” Ricardo said.

“And they say she's smart. What do you think of the trio, nephew?”

“A permanent short circuit.”

“I've always admired brave women, like Isabella of Castile and the Coronilla heroines
*
,” Tréllez said. “But anyone who can put up with that guy deserves to be canonized.”

“You don't seem to think much of him.”

“He's a son of a bitch,” Tréllez said in English.

The languid whistle of the locomotive sounded, announcing its arrival at a tiny village near an ancient-looking farmhouse. Alderete's hoarse and heavy voice was the only other dissonant noise, aside from the cars' incessant swaying from side to side. The train stopped in front of a small stone house covered by a red corrugated-metal roof.

A thin, bony man rang a bell heralding the train's arrival. Behind the building, at the end of a windy path, there was a farmyard in which a group of skinny cows rested alongside a small bull swatting flies with its tail. A solitary dog barked half-heartedly.

Ricardo was surprised by the sight of the contortionist walking deliberately alongside the train, toward the car in which her dog had been confined. The railway inspector followed behind her, talking to the wind. The station manager joined them, apparently unaware of what was happening. The contortionist touched the side of the car with one hand and cried out in pain.

“It's an oven in there. My dog must be suffocating from the heat.”

The inspector released a heavy lock and slid open the iron gate. The contortionist called out to her dog, which was named Sulfo.

“This is the last time I'll open it before Charaña,” the inspector said.

Sulfo was alive, but dehydrated. The heat had weakened him so much that it was painful for him to bark.

“I'll complain to the authorities,” the contortionist said.

“We are the authorities,” the inspector replied. “Enough of your complaints.”

The station manager produced a bucket of water and the mutt drank until he was satisfied.

The rustic silhouette of Father Moreno soon appeared. It was not exactly a divine apparition; he looked more like a well-fed medieval cleric. He ambled along the dry, hard ground, patting his bulky paunch.

“Father, you seem to appear every time this lady is making a fuss,” the railway man said.

“I have a way of calming people down. How's the little dog, Carla Marlene?”

“How do you think he is!”

The engineer broke the high-mountain silence and the locomotive sent a shudder through the line of cars. The Andean plain provided the only stretch where the train could reach a velocity of more than fifty kilometers per hour. Here and there, haciendas surrounded by green fields and grazing cattle appeared. Peasant huts were scattered throughout the surrounding area. Train-chasing dogs were in abundance, and even tiny, fleet-footed pigs occasionally joined the pursuit. There could not have been a more auspicious beginning to the afternoon: a clear blue sky and, on the horizon, reddish mountains. The air was clean and the sun painted an amber hue across the empty steppe. Ricardo lit a cigarette and Pepe Tréllez packed a pipe as they waited for their coffee.

“I don't see that Russian guy Petko around,” Ricardo said.

“He'll eat later. He doesn't like crowds.”

“He's a funny guy.”

“He's loaded,” Tréllez said. “He's the banker for all the Jews in La Paz.”

“He told me Alderete's a crook.”

“He's right. Alderete screwed me over once and he's going to pay for it. I'm waiting for the right moment. I'm a civilized guy but I crack if anyone touches my womenfolk.”

“Aunt Graciela?”

“No . . . no . . . no one bothers Graciela, not even drunks.”

“Then who are you talking about?”

“You're a curious one, nephew. First let me tell you something about the Carletti family.”

Pepe Tréllez's pipe was shaped like a seahorse. He lit it and watched the smoke rise to the ceiling.

“Alderete belongs to the PURS
*
. He's an active Ballivián supporter, just like the other mine owners. Up until a few years ago, he was just an accountant at a tin mine owned by Rafael Carletti, Gulietta's father, a guy from Genoa who emigrated to Bolivia after the First World War. With his money from Italy, Carletti bought himself a mine in Potosí on the cheap from a Croat who had worked it unsuccessfully. It wasn't too large, but the mine was big enough to provide a good living. Alderete worked with him for a few years without a problem. Carletti was an elegant, sophisticated fellow. He was good-looking, and one fine day, at a ranch in Río Abajo, he met Doña Clara, who is from one of the best families in La Paz. They married a few months later. They had just one daughter and they named her Gulietta. They led a regular bourgeois life, owned a beautiful home in Sopocachi, and traveled every year to Buenos Aires. Society life in La Paz, if you have money, is not bad. It can be a very pleasant city; the people are civilized and they have an enviable sense of humor. Everything was going great until our Italian friend met a woman from Potosí, the daughter of an Austrian man and a woman from Chuqui-saca, during one of his nights on the town. He fell for her their first night together. People who knew the girl—her name was Tomasita—say that she sucked him dry like a stalk of sugar cane. She was a human sponge.

“Carletti stopped going to the mine,” Tréllez continued, “and left everything in the hands of his accountant, Alderete. He dedicated himself to copulating as if his life depended on it. The half-breed girl drove him crazy. He bought her a house and a car. Since she didn't know how to drive, Carletti hired a chauffeur and the guy ended up bedding her. The two of them fled to Venezuela together. Carletti started drinking heavily, and by the time he bothered checking up on the mine again, it was about to be foreclosed. Alderete had forged Carletti's signature and taken out a million-dollar loan from the bank. Instead of using that credit to work the mine, the little accountant acquired property in La Paz in his cousin's name. On the verge of losing the mine, Carletti sold it for pennies to a guy who turned out to be a pawn of Alderete's. He went home to La Paz with little more than the shirt on his back.

“Doña Clara, who spent all her time back then playing rummy, listened to his entire confession one night and forgave him. Carletti forgot about Tomasa's thighs but he wasn't able to lay off the booze. He turned into a high-class vagrant and died of cirrhosis. Gulietta was at his side until the very end.”

While telling the story, Tréllez didn't once take his eyes off Alderete, who was stuffing himself with peanuts.

“Doña Clarita went through difficult times at first, but she toughened up with the passing months. She had sworn to get revenge on Alderete, but didn't know how. The opportunity began to present itself when she bumped into him at the Max Bieber café. Gulietta was with her. It was the fatal moment for Alderete. Just as the late Genovese guy had hitched up with the lady from Potosí, the social-climbing Alderete had fallen like a schoolboy for Gulietta's good looks. No one knows the details of how they arranged the marriage, but Doña Clara did benefit from it financially.”

“And Alderete didn't go to prison for forging the signature?” Ricardo asked.

“The Bolivian justice system is truly blind,” Tréllez said.

“Poor girl.”

“Alderete and Gulietta got a house in Obrajes and a pension for Doña Clara. They just got married. This is their honeymoon.”

“And why did they bring the old lady along?”

“She's not so old. A night with her wouldn't be such a sacrifice,”

Tréllez said. “I imagine it's part of the arrangement; leaving Gulietta alone with that gargoyle would be dangerous.”

“I still don't understand how Doña Clara could sacrifice her daughter like that,” Ricardo said.

“You're too young to understand these things,” Tréllez replied, signaling the end of the story.

The train slowed to a crawl; a pack of llamas was crossing the tracks. Despite the shouts of the peasant who was herding them, the animials blocked the train's path and paid no attention to the blaring horn. The train had to wait until the last llama had passed over the railroad tracks.

As the train resumed its forward march, the waiters began serving in the dining car. During lunch, Gulietta and Ricardo exchanged glances. Her glances were not casual ones; rather, they seemed to seek him out. Ricardo didn't know what to think. An erection that had begun as a light tickle was taking shape. Within minutes, he was at the mercy of the pole stuck inside his pants. Never before had a society girl turned him on like that with a simple stare. Using his left hand, he straightened out his “little friend” and trapped it with his belt.