Sun After Dark (10 page)

The Bolivian, of course, seeing these same scenes, would see something very different. One day I stumbled out of my hotel, the Donald Duck cartoons it screened in its breakfast room for its pin-striped clientele still reeling through my mind (the front desk offered brochures for a “Museum of Play” on Calle Roosevelt), and, still a little woozy from the altitude (or from the gallons of coca tea I’d been drinking to offset the altitude), walked out into a demonstration. The whole central promenade—the present tense, as it had seemed to me at first—was taken over by block after block of ragged campesinos, shouting out their dissatisfactions. Every few moments, a firecracker of some kind would go off, the street would be rent with a thunderous explosion, and the Indian women, engagingly, would cup their hands behind their ears as if to protect themselves from the moment.

As I watched the banners marching past—THE ASSOCIATION OF JOYLESS WORKERS . . . GENERATION SANDWICH—a shoeshine boy came up to me and confessed his longing to go to America. To get rich, I assumed, or claim freedom, or at least to see Britney Spears. No, he said; he wanted to go and kill people in Afghanistan. His mouth was covered by a scarf, to protect him from the fumes of the traffic, and it wasn’t hard to guess that he was one of the 35 percent of Bolivia’s children who could neither read nor write. In the countryside, I’d read, some people did not even know how to put on clothes.

“It’s so calm here,” I said, thinking of the Lima I’d just come from, the Calcutta and Miami where I often find myself.

“Calm?” he said, and looked at me as if I was mad.

For people who travel in search of the past, if only because the future is too much with them, Bolivia is a tonic place, with witch doctors walking up and down the street outside the San Francisco church. It is a country—like Laos, like Bhutan—that seems to have decided to go its own way, alone, and to hold to its traditions as some of the children I saw in the swelling market cling to the ponchos of their mothers. One day, near Lake Titicaca, I went to see a central church, and found a friar in a brown cassock, eyes tightly closed, sprinkling holy water over a long line of SUVs. Votive candles, bouquets of flowers, bottles of champagne stood before the lucky vehicles, and after they had been baptised and driven off to celebrate their beatitude, nothing was left in the little square but the smell of spilled bubbly, the stench of spent fireworks.

There are still ceremonial fights in rural Bolivia in which people are killed, and many young Bolivians are surely glad to be free of their parents’ superstitions; but to the foreigner passing through, this often translates as a kind of sunlit antiquity. One evening, walking through the cobbled streets of the Spanish quarter after dark—the outlines of Indian women laboring up the hills, bags slung over their shoulders (with all the goods they’d failed to sell)—I walked down into the center of town, and into an aromatic mist. A long line of figures was gathered outside the entrance of the San Francisco church, and a young friar, busily chewing gum (or it might have been coca), was muttering prayers and placing his hands on the little cars, the miniature houses, even the dolls in baskets (representative of children at home or on their way) that were presented to him. Nearby, on the ground, slightly shabbier figures from the countryside waved sticks of incense up and down and promised more shamanic services, while little girls, caught up in the evening’s merriment, snuck under the ropes that protected the church’s crèche and came back, delighted, with replicas of the Virgin and of Jesus.

Left to practice its own rites in its own way, Bolivia had happily recolonized the past (the Spanish church made over with some highly un-Spanish ornamentation, put there by the Indian workers who had been forced to decorate the upper stories), and Epiphany (for that is what this was) had been translated into some local form. As long as the country could live on its own terms, and far from the world at large—and Bolivia seemed to sense this—some kind of rough peace was possible. But the foreigner is himself, of course, transporting a vision of the future to such places, and in our current global order, time is as violently thrown about as space.

For more than four thousand years the crop that has sustained Bolivia, in body and in spirit, has been coca, which, happily, can be harvested four times a year, or twice as often as rice and potatoes can. It is the way in which people on the Altiplano make contact with their goddess Mama Coca, daughter of Pacha Mama (or Mother Earth, as we might call her), and it is an integral part of weddings, festivals, and daily rites. When the Spanish came in and made peasants work forty-eight-hour shifts in the mines, chewing coca was also the way in which the locals got through the grueling hours in the thin air.

In recent times, however, as everyone knows too well, outsiders have found that coca can be turned into cocaine, and so, you could say, a religious prop and herbal sedative has been converted into a modern stimulant. Though one part of Bolivia surely protested this violation of its past, another shrewdly saw it as the future: in the 1980s, coca brought in roughly half of the country’s export earnings. But when the U.S.—alarmed at the fact that its people, representing 5 percent of the world’s population, accounted for 50 percent of its cocaine usage—found that it could not wipe out consumption at home, it decided to try to eliminate it at the source. Suddenly, Bolivians were told to forsake their ancestral crop because the affluent in New York and L.A. could no longer control themselves. In 1995, an American congressman actually vowed to drop herbicide on Bolivia’s crops from airplanes kept on aircraft carriers “off the coast of Bolivia.” Apparently no one had thought to tell him that the single most famous fact about Bolivia is that it’s landlocked.

The day before I was due to leave Bolivia, having taken in all the other places mentioned in the guidebooks (the high, lonely emptiness of the Altiplano, as desolate as a pair of panpipes played on a quiet evening; the strange enigmas of Tiahuanaco, one of the great mysteries of the world, a few statues looking out on the unbroken plains all around, the sun casting huge shadows across the nearby hills; and the handful of tourists here—New Year’s Eve—reduced to just stick figures in the distance), I decided to make my final attempt to see how Bolivia looked to the Bolivian, by going to the final site mentioned in my guidebook.

Just three minutes away from the Prado, where children were flying balloons and a merry-go-round, its cars shaped like the characters of Pokemon, was waiting to take them up into the air, there is a large building, on a street called Calle Canada Straight, that looks like an impregnable fortress. I slipped between two handsome buildings on the main street, mansions from the nineteenth century, and instantly was away from the commotion of the crowds, and in front of this building, the San Pedro Prison. Prisoners in Bolivia are required to pay their way through their years of confinement—the government, presumably, does not have enough money to support them—and one inmate, the guidebook explained, had decided to put together a living of sorts by offering visitors tours of his new home. The place was said to be a microcosm of the society around it: some people lived in “cells” that were as well appointed as five-star hotels, while others were squeezed, by the hundred, into spaces originally intended for twenty-five.

When I arrived at the prison, and the little park set across from it, there were only a few other foreigners milling around, most of them somewhat ragged types from Israel. I didn’t know whom (or what) exactly to expect, and the other foreigners did not seem very eager to answer my questions, so I stood around with them and waited to see what the drill was. Suddenly a man came out and said, “Put your hands against the wall.” We stood against the wall, and felt rough hands patting us down. Then we were told to stand there, in a line, and wait to be led in. Already the division between the innocent and the criminal was blurring.

We waited a long time in the hot sun and then at last two policemen came out and led us into a tiny, dark corridor, barred on both sides. A gate clanked shut behind us. In a courtyard—we could see through the barred windows—prisoners were everywhere, some standing in front of what looked to be a chapel, others wandering around with girlfriends or wives, or unpacking shipments from mothers, grandmothers.

A little boy was walking around the small space, his hand in his father’s. The older man was looking down, as if distracted, and on a forced march. A young woman, pretty in T-shirt and new jeans, her tight ponytail swinging behind her, stood under a Sprite sign with her children, waiting for a husband or a friend.

As we looked out at the bleak situation, a man came up to the bars and started shouting to us in English. “Deny everything!” he said, as if he were a lawyer. “Deny it! If they find anything on you, just deny it! Don’t give them anything!”

There was no room to turn in the narrow space, and the ear-ringed, shaven-headed Israelis looked no more comfortable than I was. We were pinned, all of us, in a space large enough for six, and every now and then a door would be opened, one figure would be led off, and then we would be one fewer. But it still felt as if there was no more room.

The prisoner outside kept shouting at us, and the armed guards who were in charge of us looked not amused at all at these tourists making their lives more complicated with a Sunday morning excursion. The whole expedition began to feel like a very bad idea.

As I waited there, with nothing else to do—the prisoner (a gringo, like us, who’d been found with drugs?) shouting advice, the guards patrolling the space outside our bars, occasional Bolivian families walking into the courtyard to check on their loved ones—I began to feel obscurely guilty: furtive and soiled. There must be something I had done, I thought, on which they could have me up; there were any number of irregularities of which I could be accused. The previous day, crossing a small lake in the countryside on a rowboat, I had come to a routine customs check—a little shack in the empty place—and the officers had taken away my passport. So now I was even less official, my formal identity taken away from me.

Around me all the faces I could see were hard, with scars. The gringo, himself disfigured, shouted and shouted as if in an asylum where it is only the sane who are taken to be abnormal. I began, as the minutes wore on, and nothing happened—the Israelis impatient, as I was, in our pen—to wonder if I’d inadvertently joined a group of real criminals, who were being brought in for drugs. After all, I had exchanged no words with them when I joined their group outside the prison; for all I knew, they were not tourists at all but suspects brought in for questioning of some kind.

What if someone planted something on me? Or if . . . ? Who knew what could get lost in translation?

I decided to get out. It was a difficult decision, and not a popular one, and the Israeli boys hardly made room for me as I tried to squeeze out. If coming to the prison on a Sunday morning as a tourist was a bad idea, suddenly deciding that you didn’t want to come—after you’d brought yourself into a pen, a locked door behind you—seemed an even worse one. My fellow travelers snarled and muttered curses as I tried to push past, pressing themselves up against the bars in the narrow space.

“Is it going to be twenty minutes?” I asked one. “Do you know what’s going on?”

He looked at me in disgust, and turned away.

When I got at last to the gate behind which we were locked, the guards looked at me as if I were a prisoner who had decided to let himself out. What did I want? they asked with their faces. I’ve decided to go home, I said in broken Spanish. Without a word, they pushed me into a tiny cell with a bare bed against one wall. There were two officers in the place, and barely enough room for anyone to move.

They motioned for me to strip, completely, and one of them started prodding my genitals with a truncheon. They motioned for me to empty my pockets, and I started taking everything out. My wallet, a comb, some keys. A pen, a handkerchief, a Japanese temple charm I carried around with me as protection.

My passport?

No, I said, I didn’t have it here.

One of the guards picked up my small, inscrutable temple charm—a pouch with some characters in Japanese written on it—and, poking inside, found a piece of paper there. (I’d never known that the little pocket contained anything.) He took it out and began to sniff it. He unfolded it, folded it again, unfolded it. It contained a Buddhist prayer, I saw now, some words of good luck written out for anyone who purchased such a talisman. But the words were written in a language that none of us could read, and the guard continued looking at it. Why did I have this? What were these papers doing inside?

I looked around, and thought: who knows, but they could put something else inside the charm now, and then discover it. They could find anything they wanted, if they so chose, the way a tourist, confronted with sentences that he doesn’t understand, draws the conclusions, makes the observation that suits him. The contents of my pockets—they might as well have been my entire life—lay scattered across the bed: a bronchial inhaler, a snapshot of a girl I know in Japan, the key to my hotel room. The previous day, at the customs shack, the inspectors had noticed that my height, as listed in the passport, hadn’t been changed since I was a child. They’d looked and looked at me but hadn’t been able to make out the childhood scar listed in the passport as a distinguishing mark.

“It’s okay,” a woman behind me in the line had said. “They think you’re a terrorist.” A few of the men who had flown the planes into the World Trade Center, I now learned, had been planning the assault while staying in cheap hotels here in La Paz, on Calle Saganagar. It was the perfect place in which to hide.

This morning, at breakfast, in deference perhaps to Camus’s famous dictum—“What gives value to travel is fear”—I’d been reading Graham Greene’s
Ministry of Fear,
an exploration of Kafka’s themes which asks: Which of us, if suddenly brought before a tribunal, has an entirely clear conscience? Which of us has nothing at all to hide?