After a while sitting under the midday sun, eating jello with whipped cream and observing the so-called reloj del sur that adorns the facade of the Legislative Palace and whose hands travel “backwards,” that is, in the opposite direction of a “normal” clock, I decided to take off towards Comercio Street. Enough had been written about that clock in the papers of late.
My hands in my pockets, I perused the window displays and products being hawked by street vendors. From some speakers stationed at the door of a Bata shoe store emerged, at full volume, the song where Becky G sings that she’s ni mala ni santa, neither sinful nor saintly, that una como ella a uno le hace falta. I paused, drawn in less by the song’s sensual back and forth than by the sight of someone dancing with disinterest, barely swaying her hips, tired or perhaps bored, a woman wearing a visor featuring the Venezuelan flag and its many stars. She had on a white shirt and tight jeans that clung to her beautiful curves. Several men, myself among them, stood gawking for a few seconds before buying what she had for sale, some Bon O Bon chocolates at three times the price charged by our native-born poor children on the same streets. When, without taking my eyes off of her, I brought the chocolate to my mouth, a man spoke to me.
“Padre,” he said in that Caribbean accent heard more and more frequently around this city, “help me.”
He pointed to my aging tennies and explained that he offered a service to make them look better and last longer. I struggled to understand his words that, to my Andean ears, rushed forth too quickly. He had pliers and some circular metal pieces that he wanted to put in the shoelace holes. I wanted to decline; I was not interested in spending any more money that day. But the Venezuelan insisted: “Please, padre, I need to eat.”
“How much?” I asked, thinking, now there’s a good story, something about immigrant hardship, a topic worthy of deep reflection.
He murmured a number but I didn’t quite catch it. I figured it couldn’t cost more than fifteen bolivianos for that sort of thing.
“I only have twenty,” I warned.
The man didn’t respond. He bent down and took one of my tennies. He cleaned it a little and untied the laces with care.
“I write,” I said awkwardly, almost wanting, deep down, for them to slam the door in my face as I continued: “I’d like to write a story about the two of you.”
“Okay, well,” he answered, gesturing to the woman selling Bon O Bons, “my wife and I came from Venezuela because you can’t live there anymore.”
He worked the pliers with speed, efficiently, as if he had been performing the task all his life.
“So you write stories, padre?” he asked with a grin that was somewhat mocking but eyes that were red, as if he were about to cry.
“Yes,” I said, suddenly remembering an interview with the great Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinsky where he said that he had never interviewed a single person in his life. “You both must have a lot to share. What city do you come from?”
He finished up the first shoe and took the other to repeat the process.
“Maracaibo,” he said without looking up. “But I’m tired of talking about it, padre, it’s not a pretty story.”
I felt the same way I had felt—this time in the form of a question—the time I interviewed some parents who had lost their son and were still looking for him persistently seven years later because they had never found his body: at what point does an insignificant newspaper writer turn into the shameless equivalent of an ambulance chaser? I decided to respect his silence and didn’t ask any more questions. He finished his work. While I put my tennies back on he did the math and said, “It’s sixty bolivianos, but I’m only gonna charge you fifty because you’re a writer.”
It was too much.
“I told you I only had twenty to spend.”
I took out the fifty bill from my wallet and as soon as he saw it, he grabbed it and took off towards the Pérez Velasco footbridge. I went after him, obviously, seeing as I had nothing left for the bus fare home after spending my last coins on the chocolates I bought from his wife. My untied laces impeded my pursuit.
“Thief!” I yelled, and he turned back, offended.
“I’m not a thief!” he responded, balling up his fists, and just then I realized that he was taller and stronger than me. I ducked to dodge a punch and managed to kick his leg, which he barely registered.
When I backed up to defend myself a pair of police officers walking by broke up the fight. We both explained the situation and they made him return thirty of the fifty bolivianos he had taken from me.
“Now go,” said one of the cops once the mess was sorted. “You this way and you that way, and we don’t want to see you fighting again because we’ll arrest you both.”
I tied my shoelaces and began climbing the steps that lead to Ingavi Street. I found my way back to the Plaza Murillo. I bought a new jello and whipped cream. I asked the casera that sold it to me what she thought about the Southern Clock. She told me she found it beautiful but she preferred the old clock, which had Roman numerals, because her late husband, a weekend charango player and amateur luthier, had once helped oil its gears. I decided to write up that story.
*
A week before the government instituted coronavirus-related quarantine in March of 2020 I ran into a couple of Venezuelans on the minibus. At that point no one could say with any certainty what to expect given the rapid approach of the unstoppable disease; there were only rumors. As such, people were very nervous. Most tried to stock up on food and medicine of all sorts. The anxious frenzy to buy things led to chaos in the streets, in addition to a spike in prices.
I procured a five-kilo bag of noodles at a fair price in the city’s Zona Norte and had been carrying it from Max Paredes Street to Plaza San Francisco, a half hour’s walk. There I found a minibus that would take me to Chasquipampa, the sector that includes my neighborhood, Nuevo Amanecer. While I was still catching my breath and wiping the sweat from my brow, the Venezuelans boarded the vehicle. They were both wearing those distinctive jackets emblazoned with the colors and stars of their country’s flag and jeans cut off at the knee. They spoke in shouts and the other passengers, unaccustomed to the torrent of words, eyed one another in silence, ill at ease. From the little I caught I understood that they had made almost no money, that they would be better off in Chile, that it was fucking cold here and that selling arepas in Bolivia was a lost cause.
I was surprised when they stayed on the minibus beyond the Church of San Miguel, the center of La Paz’s Zona Sur and home to the city’s most well-to-do neighborhoods. The area around the church and along Montenegro Avenue is where a variety of street vendors tend to congregate, including various Venezuelan immigrants. I was even more surprised when I got off with my load of noodles at 53rd Street in Chasquipampa and they did too, then boarded another minibus, the same one that would take me to Nuevo Amanecer. It was the first time, to my knowledge, that foreigners had sought out my neighborhood for reasons other than tourism. When we arrived at the bus stop our paths diverged; I headed for the dusty streets to the left and they began a rather difficult walk, which made their breathing heavy, up the neighborhood’s steepest street, so steep that even some cars can’t handle it, but which has the most beautiful view of the city. The high plateau that is El Alto is at the back of whoever makes the climb, and in front sit the spiky mountains that look like gigantic, inverted stalactites and mark the beginning of the famous Valle de las Animas.
I realized that although I had been interested in writing about them, I had never asked myself where it was that the hundreds of Venezuelans arriving in La Paz found lodging. Perhaps the answer would have been quite simple: on the street, in municipal shelters, or in downtown’s or El Alto’s cheapest rooming houses. That they would breach the intimacy of our most far-flung neighborhoods had never occurred to me. I was happy about the situation, which I saw as a new, more nuanced opportunity to write the story that had gotten away from me after the unpleasant incident near the Pérez Velasco bridge.
It wasn’t at all hard to find out exactly where and how they were living. All it took was asking a few questions of doña Rosalinda Paucara, the owner of Nuevo Amanecer’s biggest corner store. I now knew that they lived in a small adobe room rented to them by don Estanislao Flores for three hundred bolivianos a month, a very cheap price owing to the fact that, in addition to being tiny, the room, which did have a bathroom and well water, lacked electricity. I learned that they sold arepas on 21st Street in Calacoto, outside the Church of San Miguel and on Montenegro Avenue, though who knows who prepared them or where because they never left their adobe room with any. They also sold the thousands of devalued bolívares they had brought from their country—doña Rosalinda showed me some of the bills they convinced her to accept for two bags of milk and twenty rolls the day they moved in. She also told me that the first day she saw them they were with a woman wrapped in a black shawl who shivered like she had a fever and seemed to want to hide her face. She never saw her again.
The second time I saw the Venezuelans, a few days after the first, they were again wearing their flag jackets and had their hands stuffed in their shorts pockets like they were very cold. They were at the minibus stop, waiting. As I approached, their lively conversation turned into a unanimous silence and they did not speak again until they got off the minibus at the Church of San Miguel. Their sudden reticence once again cast doubt on my intention to write about them.
*
I ran into the Venezuelans a few more times, on the minibus and at the bus stop. The response, which no longer seemed a mere coincidence, to my and other neighbors’ presence was always the same: silence.
Doña Rosalinda took it upon herself to shed light on my concerns when I spoke to her about it. Tunta and Chuño, the Mamani twins, muscular bantamweight boxers who were leaders of Los Tres Puntos, the old neighborhood gang currently in a state of decline due to a lack of members and hostility from the police and neighborhood justice system, and who were always walking around with knives in the pockets of their wide-legged pants, accompanied by a fighting Doberman that various thieves had tried to poison without success, had approached the Venezuelans to warn them not to try any funny business with any of the neighbors, to not even think about any sort of delinquency, and to stop with the shouting that kept the honest working people from resting in peace, or they would answer to them.
“But they’re not all wrong, those young men,” said doña Rosalinda, and reminded me of what happened in November 2019, after Evo Morales resigned from the Bolivian presidency.
The day of the resignation people hurled Molotov cocktails at the municipal-owned buses, the Puma Katari, and the sound of the gas tanks exploding was heard as far as Nuevo Amanecer, almost half a mile away, like a mountain razed by dynamite. I even went to my window to see if the Muela del Diablo was still standing, but all I could discern in the dark distance were small bonfires that were, in reality, roaring infernos. People had also burned down the Police Station since, after the mutiny that was one of the factors that hastened the head of state’s departure, the police had withdrawn and left the entire city unguarded and unprotected. That day we watched on television, thanks to cellphone recordings of the furious mob captured from the buildings in Cota Cota, as the Mamani twins smashed the windows of the pharmacy on 28th Street, which was then looted.
Things got worse over the following days. Politicians from both sides and journalists saw their houses burned to the ground. Threats to our neighborhood arrived via WhatsApp groups. If we didn’t come out to protest in favor of the man who had up until recently been our president, our homes would meet the same fate. No one was sure of the exact origins of these threats. Neighborhood watch groups were formed; men armed with rocks and sticks were stationed on each street, and we were told to be alert to the movements of any stranger in our territory.
Behind my house is an empty lot. One of those nights I heard foreign-sounding voices, I’m not sure whether Colombian or Venezuelan, but from that part of South America. I ran to alert the neighbors on watch and we pursued a group of strangers who, running swiftly as if they knew the terrain better than we did, slipped away without a trace.
The night after that a neighborhood meeting was called. We would organize a better defense of the neighborhood, to not just chase away outsiders but ambush and capture them. Don Arturo Mollo, one of the many minibus drivers that live in Nuevo Amanecer, asked to speak:
“They want revenge,” he said, “the people from City Hall. They are the ones coming with hired thugs. They know it was us who burned the Puma buses and now they want to burn our minibuses. They’ve hired those foreigners, those Venezuelans, because they don’t like to work and if the money is good they’ll do anything.”
He was interrupted by doña Eduviges Poma, an old woman who sold tucumanas near the minibus stop.
“Yesterday morning one of them came by. He said something, but I didn’t understand. He was a foreigner. He had on a leather jacket and was tall and pale-skinned. Where he was from, I can’t say. He was on a moto. He was taking photos. I was frightened. ‘What are you doing, joven?’ I asked. I wanted to call for someone, to yell, but I was too scared. He realized and took off on his motorbike, fast. Later I was talking with don Cipriano and he saw the motorbike too. So I can’t be lying.”
Don Cipriano, the mechanic, nodded at what doña Eduviges had said: “It’s true, brothers and sisters,” he said.
Don Arturo Mollo went on:
“Everyone here knows one another. Now, they’re going to come and ask who set fire to the Puma buses. Those of us who went know each other and we are not gonna say a thing. You all know that the Pumas are stealing our passengers and we just want to earn enough money to live on, like all of you, esteemed neighbors. We have to guard this secret deep within our hearts. ‘I don’t know,’ that’s all you have to say. Otherwise, they’re going to take their revenge by burning down our humble homes. They are the ones threatening us. And they’re going to take revenge on all of us because here we are all equal.”
That difficult November did pass. We would not experience such terror in the neighborhood again, but there were things we didn’t forget.
*
It was the first week of September 2019, about fifteen days after the ugly incident with the Venezuelan and my tennies near the Pérez Velasco, when I ran into my old school friend Salomón Mayta at the food stalls of Cota Cota’s 25th Street public market.
I was still annoyed by what had transpired and after watching, while we ate, the 1993 Bolivian national team’s seven goals against the Venezuelans in Puerto Ordaz that the Facebook pages devoted to national sports reposted again and again to keep us from remembering, among other things, that during the most recent match, in Maturín in 2016, the Vino Tinto had beat our Verde five to zero, I told my friend how the Venezuelan had almost taken my fifty and left me with zero.
“I would have had to walk like four hours to get home!” I told him. “Now I don’t want to buy a thing from any of them, not a single candy, not even if they have their crying children in their arms. I’d rather find a Bolivian child or old man and give him a handout so I don’t feel like a miserable dog.”
“It’s all the same, brother,” replied Salomón, laughing. “I know of Bolivian families who rent out their babies to people who take them to beg on the street. Everything in this life is a sham. I saw it on the news. They’re bigger jerks than you and I combined. Our homegrown beggars will not be left behind. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen an old lady who begs for coins on Huyustus Street, but they say she built a house and now she’s a millionaire and still doesn’t stop begging! And we’re here working like mules for a few cents, if we’re stupid enough.”
“No fucking way,” I said while forcing a laugh to match my friend’s. “That’s crazy!”
“What you need to do,” said Salomón, “is what I do. I give work to their good-looking women compatriots. Nothing like screwing a Venezuelan to get the bad taste out of your mouth. I recommend it. If you want, we can go right now to Figue; that’s where they are.”
“I’m the one on the verge of prostitution,” I said, “down to just fifty in my pocket yet again!”
“Don’t worry,” he insisted, warming to the subject. “I’ll spot you and you can hit me back when you get paid. Or are you a faggot? No, I didn’t think so. You’re gonna see how good they are. Now you’ve got me craving one, you bastard.”
In forty-five minutes we arrived at the old Señor de Mayo building on Figueroa Street, the well-known, multi-story brothel that rises from the center of the city like a sad, emaciated phallus.
“The second to last floor,” he said with a big smile, “that’s where the foreign girls are. The rest is a hundred percent national meat, nothing spectacular, but sometimes it does the trick.”
“Fine meat from the Altiplano,” I said reflexively, reciting from the signs hung outside of butcher shops, and Salomón laughed until tears came to his eyes.
“You would know,” he said.
On the penultimate floor of the building several women walked around dressed in bikinis or miniskirts that showed their thongs. One of them, her breasts exposed, offered her services in Portuguese, being from Brazil. From one of the doors hung a sign that said “The Most Beautiful Paraguayans” and a couple of them were leaning against a wall. Salomón put his mouth to my ear so I could hear him over the shrill sound of the sensual music coming from the rooms.
“There’s my venezolana,” he said. “Come, I’ll introduce you. Her name’s Esmeralda.”
Salomón went over to speak to her and I stayed back, watching her. She was taller than me. Her breasts and butt were so prominent they didn’t look real. A pair of tattoos, a snake wrapped around a rose bush, adorned her thighs. The blond hair that fell seductively across her gaze did not succeed in hiding the dark circles under her eyes. Her face was more aged than her body. From time to time, in a rehearsed gesture, she smiled and twirled in her miniskirt to show off the voluptuousness of her well-rounded curves to all the men swarming around the place like filthy, hungry flies.
“She says it’s eighty bolivianos for as long as it takes you to come,” Salomón told me. “It’s good service, I can tell you that.”
“I don’t like her,” I lied. He looked at me in confusion.
“What? You want a man instead, then? Don’t be a puto, brother. You’re making our entire race look bad.”
“I don’t like this place,” I answered, laughing. “The putas seem dirty. I like natural women. And this dump smells like a dead clefero.”
“Ah, I see,” said Salomón. “I think I understand; let’s go somewhere else.” To Esmeralda he said: “Chau, my love, I’ll come back later by myself; my friend says he’s gay.”
We left the building and walked towards the El Prado pedestrian boulevard. We sat on a bench near the Monje Campero cinema.
“One time,” Salomón told me, “I came here and sat, tired, like you, of the filth of the whorehouse. A venezolanita came up to me. She was gorgeous, brother, hot, healthy. Twenty years old and a first-class little body. She wanted to sell me her sweets or pastries, I don’t remember exactly. I proposed she sell me her love for an hour. Five hundred pesos, she said. Four hundred, ya pues, I said. Nothing. Five hundred or I could go jack myself off. There was a fierce beast hidden behind that sweet face. So she came with me to the cash machine and I paid her a week’s worth of my labor in exchange for her attention. It was worth it, brother. I get you. Cleanliness has no price.”
“We should write a book about your adventures, you big, old dog,” I said, and we both laughed.
It didn’t take long for a young Venezuelan woman to approach us, selling arepas. We bought some and Salomón began to chat with her, asking her name and how sales were going. She spoke with half a voice, and we didn’t understand any of it. She wore tight blue track pants and a red shirt that clung to a nice figure that, though not as striking as the Señor de Mayo prostitute, possessed a more frank, natural quality. Her face, which was not beautiful, bore an expression of fatigue that in reality looked more like disgust.
“You like her?” Salomón asked me, looking at her out of the corner of his eye.
“Yes,” I lied.
“Amiga,” he said when she was about to leave. “My friend likes you. How much would you charge him for an hour of your love?”
She looked at us both, wide-eyed. Her face grew red and her voice, now a scream, was like a knife: “I am not a puta!” she kept saying. “Help! These guys think I’m a whore! I am not! I’m not! Puta tu madre! Puta tu abuela!”
Salomón and I took off running. We crossed the street and got into the first shared taxi we saw, one headed to Los Pinos. We started laughing like a couple of maniacs. The driver eyed us in the rearview mirror, probably thinking we were on drugs.
“Puta madre,” said Salomón. “We forgot the arepas, and I wanted to try that shit; maybe they’re as delicious as she is!”
*
Around five years ago my cousin Agustín lived in Nuevo Amanecer. He was well-liked for his constant cheerfulness and easygoing nature. He left for Cochabamba when his girlfriend, Lucía, got pregnant. They married and she began to tend to her parents’ business, a well-stocked neighborhood corner store. He worked as a taxi driver, more because he liked to drive around listening to music than because he needed the money. However, when the pandemic quarantine was instituted he was unable to secure a special license. Sales at the store were not what they had been, and anyways, they’d rather stockpile food for themselves in case things got worse. So Agustín found a motorcycle so he could work making deliveries, a fast-growing trade in those days. We did not know about his new job until one night we saw him on the news, his face bloody, standing behind one of his colleagues who, also wounded, was explaining what had happened to a reporter who stood at a distance.
On the Cobija Bridge, right at Humboldt Avenue, there was a clash between the moto-deliverymen and the Venezuelans who slept on the grass beneath the viaduct’s arch. It turns out the outsiders had begun charging a toll from all of the people and vehicles that wanted to pass through the area. If anyone refused to pay, they responded with violence, and had already beaten up several folks. The delivery workers, taxi drivers, and a few neighbors organized and armed themselves with sticks and rocks to drive them out. The police intervened and announced through the media that the immigrants would be expelled from the country. They were not seen in those parts again.
A couple of weeks after his appearance on the news my cousin surprised us by knocking on our door. He had covered the more than 390 kilometers between his home and mine in ten hours on his moto, making various stops to refuel and rest. Now he was asking for a place to stay. Naturally, we received him with open arms.
“It was the most spectacular trip of my life!” he said after drinking two liters of water in less than ten minutes. “And that includes the time I spent smoking weed in Toro Toro!”
He told us that he had come to collect on some debts, that at the moment everyone was short of cash, that everything was fucked, compadre. We mentioned that we had seen him on the news and asked if he was okay. He shared what he would share with all the neighbors who approached him to say hello, and with the same effusiveness, like he was reciting from the script of a feel good play.
“I’ve become famous!” he’d say, from behind his mask. “Ever since I was on Unitel all my exes have called and I even have new admirers,” he laughed. “It was like a war, brother! We were defending our homeland. Those fucking assholes think Bolivians are going to put up with whatever shit they pull and not say a thing. They don’t understand that if they want to fight, go back to your own country. They seem to think we’re the enemy—insanity! As if we . . . let’s see, how many governments have we kicked out? And if we go abroad we don’t go to panhandle, no, we go to work harder than the bees. My wound? This scar is the fucking best, I didn’t even realize I was bleeding in front of the cameras. They hit me with a rock. I threw the same rock back but with better aim and took down a tall Black guy who lay conked out in the middle of the fight until the cops arrived. Scared of catching it? Me, when I eat chuño and chew coca every day! Nothing to worry about, little cousin. It’ll all become clear, tomorrow there won’t be a Nuevo Amanecer,” and he roared with laughter as we all applauded his way with storytelling.
*
In our neighborhood lived a very poor family, the Huancas. They were neighbors with the Venezuelans and lived in similar conditions. Don Estanislao Flores also rented a place to them, an adobe room with water but no electricity. He charged them just two hundred bolivianos a month, which we knew because sometimes when he got drunk with his friends in the doorway of doña Rosalinda Paucara’s store, he would say that he felt solidarity towards them. And two hundred bolivianos is barely enough for a case of beer, he was known to say. Poverty is hell, and he had lived it as a child, which is why he was so understanding today, he also liked to shout for all to hear.
Remigio Huanca, age thirty, was the head of the family. He cared for his mother, doña Apolonia, an old woman with a wrinkle-lined face and a back that was more curved each year, and his two daughters, each younger than five years old. The youngest was born less than a year after the first and, following a delivery overseen by a midwife from Apaña in the same adobe room where they still lived, Reina, Remigio’s wife, had bled to death. He worked, starting just before her death, as a salaried driver of one of the radiotaxis owned by don Estanislao. After the first month of rigid quarantine restrictions the family had no savings left and no way to generate new income.
Doña Apolonia went to plead with doña Rosalinda to lend her ten rolls and ten eggs to have with tea for lunch and broke down crying in the store; it had been two days since they had brought anything but water to their mouths, and the girls would not stop crying from the hunger pains flitting around their insides. Remigio—she relayed this part in Aymara, like it was a secret—did nothing but stare at the ceiling from bed, so unmoving he appeared bewitched, not even responding when spoken to.
Doña Rosalinda told don Raimundo Tórrez, president of the neighborhood board, about the situation, and he called an emergency meeting at the deserted minibus stop. We agreed that we would colaborar, to the extent we were able, and share what we had with the Huancas. Later that same day we all met again to deliver what we had gathered. On behalf of our family I brought the five kilos of noodles I had hauled from downtown the day I shared the minibus with the Venezuelans, which we hadn’t eaten because we still had other provisions. Most people brought bags of rice, lentils, or oats. Don Abel Pajsi, who had a stall on Buenos Aires Avenue where he sold cellphones and who had also been unable to open up shop, said that cash was running short and he needed to save but he was giving them a cellphone, not too old and with a big Sonic the Hedgehog sticker on the casing, for them to sell. Don Estanislao Flores said that he would pay the store up front for two months’ worth of ten rolls a day so they’d always have something for breakfast, and that he wouldn’t charge any rent until Remigio could go back to work. Then, hidden behind our masks and after disinfecting our hands with Guabirá rubbing alcohol, we all clapped excitedly like it was a festival day. The Venezuelans, dressed as always in their flag jackets, hands in their shorts pockets, watched all of this from the adobe room where they lived. The low wall that divided don Estanislao’s property in two allowed us to detect a certain darkness in the way they observed us in silence, perhaps still frightened, I thought, or possibly angry, because of the warning the Mamani twins had given them.
I later found out, thanks to doña Rosalinda, that the bag of noodles I had brought to the Huancas had ended up with the Venezuelans after doña Apolonia, moved by pity that no one had considered their needs, gave it to them.
All this happened a week before my cousin Agustín showed up in Nuevo Amanecer. A few days after his arrival, while we were eating dinner we heard shouting coming from the street. It was Remigio, who had one of the Venezuelans by the jacket. They were fighting. One punched the other while not letting go of the garment, and the other hit back with similar force. They weren’t doing much damage, but the racket caused all the neighbors to come out to see what was happening.
“Damn thief!” stammered Remigio, his face red with rage. “Give me back the cellphone.”
“I didn’t take anything, señor,” the other responded.
“Thief!” insisted Remigio, who seemed drunk.
The neighbors had formed a circle around both men when the Mamani twins arrived. They didn’t wait to hear an explanation, Remigio’s claim was enough to send them running at the Venezuelan and kick him to the ground. They were at it when the other Venezuelan showed up and tried to defend his compatriot. The twins beat and knocked him to the ground too, yelling: “What did we tell you, mierda? No delinquency. And what’s the first thing you do?”
Don Raimundo, the president of the neighborhood board, arrived running in his pajamas.
“We don’t want any trouble!” he shouted, words that seemed directed more at the twins than the foreigners, but no one paid him any mind.
Don Arturo Mollo, the minibus driver who had set fire to the Puma Katari buses and who did not contribute a thing to the Huanca family, also ran over at full speed and began punching the already bloodied face of one of the Venezuelans.
There, where all this took place, on the corner where the minibuses turn toward their stop, strung from the neighborhood’s tallest light post is a stuffed doll simulating a hanged corpse. Underneath the doll is a sign, common throughout La Paz and El Alto’s peripheral neighborhoods, that says: Thieves will be burned alive.
“Have them return the cellphone and get out!” yelled the president, but no one listened. The blows continued and so did the screams. It was so loud. My cousin Agustín was relating what happened in Cochabamba for the umpteenth time and showing his scar to anyone within shouting range, but no one seemed to hear him either. I saw him pick up a small rock and throw it at the body of one of the Venezuelans who had stopped pleading for mercy and appeared to be unconscious.
“We must burn them!” said don Arturo Mollo as he lit a newspaper with matches he took from his pocket.
A few women cried but did not attempt to intervene. I heard doña Rosalinda lament, her arms clasping her prominent chest and using her skirts to wipe away tears from time to time: “No one deserves to die because of a cellphone, tatito,” but no one listened.
Don Arturo’s newspaper resembled a torch moving among us like another living thing. The Mamani twins’ strong arms held the defeated Venezuelans by the neck. The dogs barked, crazed.
“I’m gonna light these fuckers up,” said don Arturo.
Then suddenly, all was silent, even the dogs grew quiet. No one uttered a word at the sight of a wondrous apparition. The arrival of an angel. Her feet bare upon the cold, gravel-strewn ground, a delicate girl child dressed in a thin white robe, her huge eyes bathed in tears. A light wind rustled her long, coppery hair. As soon as she saw the fallen, bloodied figures, she ran fearlessly at one of the twins and started punching and kicking him. Her blows did nothing to the Mamani—I never knew which one because there was no way to tell them apart that night– but it made him release the Venezuelan he had pinned to the ground.
“Stop that,” cried the angel. “They’re my brothers. They haven’t done anything.”
Only then did the neighborhood’s women react and start shouting their support for her and denouncing the violence.
Don Arturo Mollo let the burning newspaper fall to the ground and stomped it out. One last time the fire’s light illuminated the beauty of the young Venezuelan, who, in a clumsy first impulse, I wanted to call Esmeralda, in honor of what I believed were her green eyes, forgetting it was the nombre de batalla of Salomón Mayta’s favorite Señor de Mayo prostitute. I never learned her real name and I never inquired because the only people who knew the answer were the ones she saved from a lynching.
“Make them return the cellphone and get out,” said Remigio, staggering drunkenly.
“But we haven’t stolen anything, padre,” answered one of them before spitting up some blood. The other gave his bloody jacket with the flag to his sister to put over her shoulders. He had nothing underneath.
“Have the president take a good look,” insisted Remigio.
Don Raimundo Tórrez went through the Venezuelans’ adobe room and found nothing. Just the open bag of noodles and a few pounds of rice, some clothes, and the small straw mattress the three siblings shared.
“There’s no cellphone,” he said.
“They’ve already sold it then,” groaned Remigio.
The entire inspection occurred in complete silence. The little girl, that sad apparition in the middle of the night, had left us stunned. It must be, I thought afterwards, like the sound of true music piercing through the meaningless din. Beauty silencing the swamp, illuminating the darkness, reminding us that we are more than animals.
That night I could not sleep, could not stop reproaching myself for having stood by like a drugged, frozen man. I should have said that everyone is innocent until proven otherwise or something else they say in the movies. It was four in the morning and I surveyed the neighborhood from my bedroom window. The three Venezuelans, the girl bundled up in warm clothes and the brothers in their flag jackets, were leaving once and for all. They walked slowly, limping, unable to hide their pain but taking care not to voice it. The dogs, who usually bark at the slightest disturbance, had decided to keep quiet and not alert others of their movements through the darkness, perhaps understanding what we could not.
*
Some time later, with quarantine relaxed and coronavirus cases on the decline, I went for a walk around the Feria de la 16 de Julio, that market where you can find anything. I was once again on the hunt for something to write about for the newspaper’s Sunday magazine, and thought the return of life to one of Latin America’s largest street markets was a great idea. I was still turning over the topic of Venezuelan immigrants in my head, but there was something preventing me from finding the right flow. I’m not sure how to explain the sensation; a gut feeling, perhaps.
As I was walking through an area known for cellphones, many of them stolen, I came across a familiar face. It was one of the Mamani twins, Tunta or Chuño, I never could distinguish between the two. He was selling two cellphones. One was a new-looking Samsung and the other was the one that had been donated to the Huanca family. I recognized it by the Sonic the Hedgehog sticker.
“Why, what a nice cellphone!” I said.
The Mamani twin produced a sullen smile, looked me straight in the eyes, put one of his hands tight around my neck and said: “One word and you’re dead.”
I slowly forced his hand away, coughed, spat on the ground near his feet, turned my back to him, and carried on with my walk.
