Free American Visa by Juan de Recacoechea Page A

moustache and a serious face lit up by two youthful, sensual brown eyes.
    Still young and good-looking when my mother died, my father didn’t waste any time in starting after a girl who was fifteen years younger, a seamstress with the most eye-catching backside in all of southwestern Bolivia. The two lovebirds moved into an apartment together, leaving me and my brother Osvaldo alone in the old house. Osvaldo, who had always fought with my father over everything, couldn’t think of anything better to do than join the Bolivian Socialist Falange. * He started going through hell—beatings, detentions, a month behind bars—until he was finally exiled to Chile. He made his way to Antofagasta, where a Peruvian woman fell madly in love with him and gave him the money to start up a bakery. Osvaldo was the spitting image of my father, though dark-skinned. This Peruvian lady was so fascinated by the way he would get drunk and beat her that she bore him five kids. I last saw him eight years ago in Arica, Chile. He told me he’d sold the bakery and was working in construction. We went out to dinner a couple of times, and I found him changed. He was far more closed than before and he didn’t care about politics anymore, only money. He asked halfheartedly about our dad and then swore he’d never return to Bolivia.
    In ’64, General Barrientos took power and the revolution’s glory days came to an end. With the MNR no longer calling the shots, my father lost all his government connections. Practically overnight, he became an unemployed, impoverished, spiteful old man. As soon as his woman realized he didn’t have any money, she left him for a lieutenant with a promising future. I was still attending Bolívar High School, the cream of the crop in Oruro. I was a hard-working student with a lively imagination. With the new military “order,” we’d fallen from rising middle class to borderline destitute. My father had forgotten how to earn an honest living with the sweat of his own back and, just like my grandfather, had failed to save enough money to pay for his own funeral. Without pomp or circumstance, he found work at a tire importing company.
    He didn’t make much and he started drinking heavily. Since he didn’t have the money anymore to attract rich women, the best he could do was make love to half-breed harlots from the north side of town. He spent his weekends sunbathing and playing chess. Meanwhile, as soon as my eighty-year-old maternal grandfather found out that his political enemies had been defeated, he decided to return to Bolivia to revive his old mine. But luck would have it that, right as he stepped onto the train at Río Mulatos, his blood pressure shot through the roof and he ended up dying at a run-down hospital in town. They buried him at the local cemetery.
    As bad as things were, I managed to graduate from high school with a diploma that made my father cry. “I suppose you’ll go on to become a doctor or an engineer,” he declared. When I confessed to him that teaching was my calling, he sunk into a depression that only worsened when, a couple of days later, I introduced him to Antonia, my new girlfriend. Antonia studied education and dreamed of teaching Spanish. I wanted to teach English, a language that had fascinated me ever since I saw my first Leslie Howard movie.
    We both got our education degrees, and as soon as we’d finished our obligatory one-year teaching assignments in the countryside, we were married in a simple but joyous ceremony at a friend’s house that started off discreetly but ended with several of our guests behind bars. Antonia’s father, who worked at a bank, helped us secure a two-thousand-dollar loan with which we bought ourselves a four-room, one-bath bungalow with a fifty-square-foot rose garden in Oruro’s Chiripujio neighborhood. I bought a bicycle and dedicated my heart and soul to teaching. I was