Free American Visa by Juan de Recacoechea

blurted out as I left the room.
    An ice-cold beer awaited me at my table.
    â€œYou’ll have to pay up front,” the waiter said.
    â€œWhat? You can’t even trust a decent guy?”
    â€œSir,” he protested faintly, “it’s not that we don’t trust you. The thing is, we get cheated every day. They’ll have two dozen and say it was one, or five and claim it’s four. We don’t ask you to pay up front for nothing, sir.”
    I paid and got to thinking. Things were looking murky. The consulate would find out about my fake papers for sure. That guy at the agency just wanted to hustle me out of eight hundred dollars. What a bunch of crap. I’d saved exactly what I needed for a week in La Paz and to pay the airport departure tax, and I’d set aside a hundred dollars for my first few days in the United States. Before leaving for eternity, my father had given me a few gold nuggets, about ten grams worth. He told me they would “multiply like the loaves in the Bible and bring you luck.” Instead of spending them, I’d held on to them, hoping they’d multiply. But they still weighed the same as they had eight years before.
    I downed my beer in the time it takes a rooster to let out a morning crow. Why don’t you kill yourself? I thought. If I could just chug twenty beers and then go to sleep, they’d find my cold body the next day. It was the only death a screw-up like me deserved. The law of life states that he who cannot rise should make way for others. The world’s small and useless people are better off underground where they can’t be heard, awaiting the last judgment. That’s the day we’ll all be equal. Who was I kidding? Where had I gone wrong? When had I gone so far downhill? I was asking myself these questions for the thousandth time.
    Born into a comfortable middle-class family, my father had been an inspector for the Bolivian Railway and my mother the only daughter of a wealthy tin mine owner. My maternal grandfather was selfish, reactionary, and had been alone in the world ever since his wife died young, years before. He’d wanted for his little girl to climb the social ladder and never approved of her marrying a modest railroad inspector. My father secretly hated his bosses, Brits every last one of them. And he hated his father-in-law so openly that, just to spite him, he joined the MNR * , back then a progressive party with a statist platform that made landowners and mine owners’ hairs stand on end. I was born in Uyuni, then an important railroad town, along with my brother Osvaldo, who’s six years my senior. I came into the world in ’52 just as the revolution changed my family’s fortunes for the worse. The ruling MNR nationalized the mines, ruining my grandfather.
    At the time, my grandfather had been living comfortably in an affluent neighborhood in Santiago, Chile with a sweet, down-to-earth Chilean girl. He hadn’t suspected that the Indians would one day reflect on their bad lot in life and decide to take over the land and, by extension, the mines. He’d wasted all the money he earned from his mine’s profits on extravagant parties and trips to Paris. He didn’t despair when the money stopped rolling in, though, landing a gig as the headwaiter at a restaurant in Santiago, on Huérfanos Street.
    My father, on the other hand, benefited from the new social order. He resigned his post as a railroad inspector and got into the flour importing business. We moved to Oruro, and then a few months later my mother’s kidneys gave out and she died before we even realized what was going on with her. It was a terrible blow for us. Flora, my mother, had been a quiet, well-mannered, selfless woman, wholly devoted to family life. She was no beauty, but had delicate, distinguished features. My father, Jacinto, the only man she’d ever had, was strong and light-skinned, with a logger’s