Free A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism by Peter Mountford Page A

window was open. Exhaust filled the car. She didn't seem to notice. Down there, at street level, the cacophony was simply astounding.
    Watching her drive, he felt even more attracted to her. It made no sense, but he'd noticed that he got turned on by women doing monotonous things: sitting in traffic, sewing buttons on a shirt, cleaning eyeglasses; it was all wildly, weirdly sexy. There was something alluring about the habitual execution of a dull and necessary task—like a preview of married life, but viewed through an enthralling lens of newness.
    "What do you want to know about Evo?" she said.
    "As much as possible," he said. "Like, what's he going to do once he takes power?"
    "He hasn't been elected yet," she said.
    "Right, but has he picked his cabinet members? The finance minister?"
    She glanced in the rearview at the traffic. "We're going to be here all day," she said and pushed into first gear, yanked the steering wheel to the right so that the passenger side of the car lurched up on the sidewalk, and then accelerated around the car in front of them.
    In this way, half on the road and half on the sidewalk, she sped past the traffic and then turned, wheels screaming, at the intersection. The underside of her car scraped against the curb as they swerved back into traffic.
    When she turned to him, Gabriel let go of the dashboard. "Sorry, I'm impatient," she said. "So, you wanted to know who the finance minister will be if Evo wins the election?"
    "Yes," he said.
    "Well, I can't tell you," she said. "Evo wants these decisions to be completely secret. If he wins, he'll announce all of the cabinet appointments at once the week before he takes office."
    "We don't have to talk about Evo," he said.
    "I don't know how to talk about anything else anymore. You understand?"
    "I do."
    They pulled up outside a school in a dreary neighborhood halfway up the hill to El Alto, and Ernesto jogged up to the car and leaped into the back seat. He leaned forward and kissed his mother on the cheek.
    Gabriel held an open palm up to the back seat and Ernesto didn't do anything for a while, and then he punched it quickly twice. "Well done," Gabriel said.
    "How was school?" she said.
    Ernesto said it was fine. Lenka asked if he'd spoken to his teacher about Friday, and Ernesto nodded.
    They drove in silence through La Paz's congested streets. These were neighborhoods that Gabriel hadn't seen. Some of the streets were so steep they were nearly walls. Messy nests of black wires perched around the tops of crooked telephone polls—all of it jerry-rigged. Homeowners had taken it upon themselves to patch potholes near their houses, but they used different fillers, so the road looked like an asphalt quilt. Still, these were not slums exactly. Gabriel looked at the buildings rolling past: all blocky two-story structures with large rectangular windows. Concrete posts rose like stalagmites from the roofs; rebar poles stretched forth like exposed bones. The rebar represented hope, he knew—it meant another level could be added to the structure, if money ever permitted.
    The second time he had visited South America—for a semester of intensive study in Quito in his senior year at Brown—he hadn't wanted to leave. The day before he was to depart, he nearly tore up his ticket. It would sound trite, and it was trite, maybe, but he simply felt more
alive
down there, away from the strictures of the First World. It had been easy to overlook those strictures growing up in Claremont.
    Lenka parked outside a huge and bleak house, shaped by architectural shorthand and painted a Soviet shade of pastel blue. Lenka and Ernesto got out and went inside while Gabriel waited in the car. Ahead, he could see a hazy slice of south La Paz, where the upper classes lived. Down there, the rocky hillsides gave way to soft dry soil and clay-rich badlands, which eroded into steep arroyos and vales of hoodoos. The earth beneath those suburbs was in a constant