Bolivia (A story)

Lily flew into Santiago screaming. She was excited anyway; she’d made the decision to visit her brother all in a rush. And then there was her fear of flying, which meant four double vodkas in the air, and not quite sleeping, and then, of course, the plane went into its descent. She screamed delightedly. Or mock-delightedly, she wasn’t sure.

Santiago was wild. Lily jabbered at the taxi driver, prodding his shoulder and demanding an explanation when they passed an Easter Island statue (was it real?) and then the river, which was just a sullen trickle. (Why did they bother building bridges over it?) The Moneda Palace gave out a kind of hospital glare. There was a demonstration in the Plaza de Armas. The speaker thumped his heart, waving a book in the other hand, while, next to him, there was a statue of a man holding his own head at chest level. You could see it as a sort of oblique commentary. Well, Lily could.

But then making connections was what you did when you were at this stage of the cycle. You had what she called the super-excitement – the feeling of surfing the spume of a wave; of teetering at the high point of a rollercoaster (the toppermost of the poppermost!) – and then you crashed. You’d be more frightened of the approaching damage if you weren’t so fired up. And she was fired up! That night, she went drinking in the Barrio Bellavista. She peered in the windows of the expensive restaurants but they all looked just like bad TV; like a reality show at three o’clock in the afternoon, when you feel like the only one watching. The bars on the main drag were better. You sat on plastic furniture and listened to music pulsing - no, pounding - from the open doorways. It thudded at you, making you move your head as though you were being punched. Listening was way too passive a word for what Lily did; she moved her shoulders and upper body as though the song was an element that she was swimming in. She closed her eyes sometimes and stretched her neck, shaking her hair so that it brushed at her shoulders. Her father had always told her that it made her look cheap and so she’d done it whenever she could, to goad him, and now it was a sort of habit. Exciting, too – the power. You’d come round, sort of (you didn’t know yourself if you were putting it on), and there’d be somebody who suddenly had to look somewhere else.

Like Carl. She hadn’t noticed him at first. His face was a sort of first sketch for a face. He had a weak mouth – a wavering line – and he was pale, but not so you’d really notice. His hair went up in a gelled peak, which only made him look more forgettable. And, of course, it was easy: she only had to hint, ever so softly, at a growing fascination. She’d always revelled in role-playing; in the rush you got from cutting yourself adrift. You could be anything you wanted, that was the thing. Tonight, she was a veterinary nurse, from Southwark. She had tears in her eyes already.

“They come in like this”, she said.

Her fingers were clasped together, like bird’s wings, one hand lying awkwardly on the table.

“They struggle.”

Her hands were shaking rapidly now.

“And you have to wait. You have to hold them firmly, and then you just …wait. Until they stop fighting you. Their hearts are going like this.”

She panted rapidly.

“But you can see that they’ve calmed down. It’s like they trust you. Like they know that you won’t hurt them.”

She wiped the back of a hand across her eyes. Carl said,

“I saw this sparrow.”

But she was already bored. She slipped her hand slowly between his legs and leant into his ear.

“Why don’t you show me your hotel?”

He was a boy; it was all over in a moment. But then she worked on him. She was somebody else again now, could he tell? The empathy – the pathos – of the nurse had disappeared. She kissed him everywhere, she straddled him but then, out of the blue, he grabbed her hair. Staring her down, he pushed her on the bed. It was the last thing she expected, and when it was over she was nuts about him.

A boy. She liked that, though – the drama of it. She looked into his eyes and said,

“I’ll hurt you. I always do.”

He shrugged, rather charmingly. His room had turned out to be an attic, more or less. He had been sharing it with a friend, Rory, who hadn’t, in the end, been able to bear being away from home. Carl had two tickets that they had booked up to the north of Chile. From there, they’d hoped to travel through Bolivia. Bolivia! Lily stroked his chest, her eyes wide, willing him to ask her. She had forgotten all about her brother, and didn’t remember him until they were in the air. By the time they had taken a bus, from Calamar, to San Pedro de Atacama she had forgotten him again.

San Pedro was like a set in a Western. But it was deceptive; the primitive exteriors were hiding restaurants and natural juice bars. Lily found it all delightful.

“It’s just like Disneyland!”, she said.

It wasn’t. But the harsh light, alternating with thin strips of shade, made a chiaroscuro effect. So-called stray dogs were nuzzling at each other, lying paws upward, grinning. If you walked past the restaurants, you heard a kind of disjointed soundtrack; jazz, mostly, but also dance music and the Beatles – your mood could alter from doorway to doorway.

“We’re in a film”, she said. “A road trip!”

It never rained here, and there were square holes in the roofs of the restaurants. On their first night, they ate and listened to a house band: a guitar, a miniature guitar, a violin and a man playing what looked like scaled-down organ pipes. He was good-looking actually, white but with dreads. Lily began to sway from side to side, clicking her fingers, but Carl was staring down at his plate and in the end she stopped. It was the same in the travel office the next morning. Lily spoke slowly and loudly, miming manoeuvring a steering wheel. She drew a hotel in the air. There was a rapport, she felt, between herself and the woman behind the desk – the woman was laughing immoderately; her shoulders were shaking up and down - but then she saw that Carl was studying the space between his feet. She had to fight an urge to ruffle his hair. Laughing, she led him back to their hotel and let him do whatever he wanted with her.

They had booked a trip to the salt flats in Uyuni. They had seen pictures of it, a vast white space with islands covered in cactii. From there you could either travel upwards into the interior or go back to San Pedro; they hadn’t decided yet. In the morning, they were driven by minibus to a passport check a little way outside San Pedro. Then, just a little further, there was another one; a low one-roomed border post, like a cardboard box. The landscape so far had been barren – lunar, almost – and there was still only a little variety: the upcurve of the mountains in the distance; a single cactus in a ring of stones. The wind came rushing along the plateau and they had to shelter behind a wall. They were being separated into smaller groups then transferred into landrovers and Lily found herself regretting the loss of the Israeli boy who had been sitting at the front of the bus. He had a pierced eyebrow, wild curly hair and an “I love New York” T-shirt. Without asking, he had pushed a tape, a disco mix, into the music system and turned it up. A bully, Lily thought. Carl had turned out to be a pussycat; all his ferocity was willed – his way of proving himself a man in bed. Now, he was shivering and banging his hands together. The tip of his nose had reddened. Lily didn’t know whether she wanted to kick him or pat him on the head.

Their driver was called Cesar. He was a dynamo – a squat, smiling Bolivian who slapped the other guides on the back then jumped into the driver’s seat, shouting “Vamos!”. They had been told, the day before, that they were going to pick up a group of four, all from the Czech Republic, and here they were suddenly, all hunched, heads down, into their fleeces. Frederick, the English speaker, shook their hands. He was slight but self-sufficient looking; he took his friends’ bags one by one and threw them, easily, onto the roof of the landrover. Carl struggled with theirs. Frederick’s friend, Ivan, was a giant. Lily and Carl had got into the seats over the wheel arches but even so Ivan was still crammed in, his knees up by his mouth. His girlfriend, Lotty, leant her head against his shoulder. She was pretty but insipid; a giggler. Frederick’s girlfriend, Magda, looked, and stayed, morose. A would-be gamine, Lily thought. High maintenance.

The Czechs were horribly self-sufficient. It wasn’t so much that they were humourless, it was just that the humour, what there was of it, was all turned inwards. At the first stop, they wandered off to have a cigarette. Cesar had driven them into a “fauna reserve” – the tickets had coloured photographs of flamingos on them - and parked next to a group of landrovers. They were beside Laguna Verde, a brilliant aqua marine. The guidebook said that it contained high concentrates of lead, sulphur and arsenic. It had a sort of tainted beauty, Lily felt –it could probably kill you if you swam in it or drank from it – which made it glamorous. Behind it was a volcano, its peak a broken crust. Lily said,

“The Incas used to take young men up there, as a sacrifice. They let them freeze to death.”

She was aware that she sounded approving. It was the aesthetics she approved of; the seemingly perfect match between what they did and where they did it. Carl looked bewildered. The Israeli boy had dipped his finger in the water and was licking it. Lily gave her camera to someone and had a picture taken with Carl. She squeezed tightly against him, her cheek against his cheek, but was aware, even as she did it, that she was play-acting; that she was a little hysterical, desperate to perpetuate the feeling of the last few days. What would replace it if it died? She tried hard not to think about it. She tried to kiss him passionately but he withdrew, embarrassed. She kicked him on the shin.

“Ow! What was that for?”

“You’re fickle”, she said.

Cesar loved driving. He hunched over the wheel and talked continually to himself. He’d swerve, sometimes, and laugh. There were no roads, just rutted tracks, and Lily and Carl had the worst of it. If you weren’t careful, your head could bang against the roof. Lily was trying desperately to enjoy herself. She shouted “Yeehah!” and thumped the seat in front of her. At the hot springs – mud baths, producing thick wads of steam– she stripped off to her bra and knickers and took a dip. Carl concentrated on his food. She had jumped into the Israeli’s pool and now he smiled at her encouragingly. He spoke a primitive, resonant form of English that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up, but soon the landrovers were pulling out and she had to struggle back into her clothes. That night, in the refugio, she saw that he was glancing at her but she’d based this whole trip on a rush - a peaking wave - of feeling that she couldn’t now just dismiss. They were staying by Lake Colorada, which was a vivid red. The wind snatched at your hair, grabbing your breath and trying to push you backwards. Lily loved it. She held her arms out by her sides and tried to run directly into it but Carl was suffering from being at altitude - he had a headache, he said, and felt sick; could they please please just go inside? – and so she took his hand (a nurse again!) and led him back to bed.

The refugio had broken windows and no heating. At night, it went down to –20 and they had to put all their clothes on and get into Carl’s sleeping bag. They were sharing a room with the Czechs but it wasn’t long before Lily had slipped her hand beneath Carl’s trousers and thermal underwear. She could only just see him in outline and it felt like she could be seducing almost anybody. It excited her. Carl wouldn’t co-operate at first; he feigned sleep, even though she could feel that his breath was quickening, and then he tried, half-heartedly, to push her away. She wouldn’t be put off. She waited until she was on top, until there was no stopping him, and then she started to groan. She wasn’t too demonstrative, at least she thought she wasn’t, and she was, anyway, almost entirely submerged in what she and Carl were doing, but all the same a part of her – the part of her that always stood a little to one side of her – was relishing the thought that one of the others might be awake. She groaned a little louder. Carl’s hand reached for her mouth but she didn’t care. She let him muzzle her, she found the restraint delicious, and moaned louder still. She was aware, out on the edge of what she could perceive, that someone was turning over in bed. She thought she saw a sihouette sit up. It was too much for her; she found herself finishing with one last strangled shout. She collapsed on top of Carl, not caring if she was squashing him; not wanting to murmur to him, or touch his hair – all those endearments were superfluous now. It wasn’t Carl she wanted any more, but something that she knew was out of reach – some feeling, or sensation, the search for which would always, in the end, send her plummeting down that rollercoaster.

The next day, the sun was much too bright – things were either too vivid or took on a kind of furtive life. Flamingos in a lake looked incandescent, as though they were about to burst into flame. Rocks looked like claws or clenching buttocks. The Czechs, and Carl, avoided her eyes. She became convinced that Magda was talking about her; muttering things under her breath to Frederick. The Israeli had grinned and nodded at her approvingly, but now he was nowhere to be seen. Last night she had had a dream, she couldn’t really remember it. It had felt off, somehow. She felt as though she were trying too hard; as though she was critiquing it as she was dreaming it. She had woken up suddenly, gasping for breath. Now she shut her eyes and held on tightly to the seat in front of her. (How had they managed to get the seats over the wheel arches again?) The landscape felt completely empty – all sand and rock – and, in the afternoon, they went through an army checkpoint made up of strange brick pods. It was like being in a science fiction movie. Cesar’s tapes made it worse. It must have been local music, women yelping over what sounded like a music box winding down, but it was unsettling. It made her feel nervy and obscurely picked on.

They stayed in a village called San Juan. It was an eerily silent place. There was dust everywhere, even on the bottles of water that Cesar bought from a local shop. The hotel must once have been a delicate shade of pink but now it was covered in dirt and had damp patches on the walls. There were three rooms upstairs and three downstairs. A wooden staircase led up to a balcony but their room was out of synch; its doorway was above the staircase so that you had to step down gingerly to stop yourself from falling. Inside, flies had been mashed on the walls and windowsills. The dimensions were all wrong. Carl hit his head on the doorjamb when he went in. The sheets and coverlets were sticky. Downstairs there was one toilet and a filthy dining room. The generator had packed up and so they ate their dinner by candlelight. There were twelve of them, including the Czech couples, but the Israeli boy was nowhere to be seen. Lily was beyond that, anyway. Everything was exaggerated now: the distance between Carl’s seat and her own; the laughter at things she hadn’t heard; the odd sly glance from Magda. She sat and stared down at her hands. She took a plate but couldn’t eat the llama meat. She had seen one earlier that day, gingerly mincing across a dried-up river bank. She had identified with it; it was an exercise in empathy – a role play – that enabled her to leave the lurching, cramped confinement of the landrover. The tentative approach; the startled femininity: it was, she felt, her secret self. She pushed the plate away. Carl was saying,

“I found her in Santiago.”

He had clearly got over his embarrassment and now seemed terribly pleased with himself. He was patting her wrist. Approvingly, he said,

“She’s mad.”

She snatched her arm away, stood up and marched upstairs. Later, she wouldn’t let him touch her; kicked him, in fact. Lay in a ball, tracing the outline of the window frame, until she slept, or thought she did. At four o’clock, Cesar started to press his horn. It seemed to her, still half-asleep, that it was something bullying and big-snouted, blundering through the doorway at her. Coming downstairs, she saw that the Czechs had already taken their seats. Magda was getting out – she was actually getting out, just so that they could squeeze past her, into the back again. She had this shit-eating grin, what Lily interpreted as a leer of triumph, and it was that, she thought afterwards – that and the darkness and the cold and Cesar’s horn and Carl’s remark and something else: the knowledge that she was hurtling downwards now; there was no stopping it – that tipped her over.

“No”, she said. “Nonononononono.”

She was shaking her head and stepping backwards.

“I won’t”, she said. “No. I’m sorry. I can’t. No way. I mean: look at her.”

Carl tried to touch her. He was trying to offer a steadying hand, she was aware of that, but she was already screaming, “Get off me!”, flailing her arms at him so that he had to step swiftly away from her. There was always a kind of pleasure in the first few moments – in this surrendering of herself to something. Part of her watched herself dispassionately as she suddenly went for Magda, put her in a headlock and then toppled the two of them over, trying to punch her head with her other hand. It took three of them – Carl, Ivan and Frederick - to restrain her, and she was still trying to kick them and snapping her teeth together, trying to bite their hands, while part of her was thinking: yes, here it is, at last. The end always proceeded with a kind of dream-logic: she’d struggle and try to shout out “No!” but someone was always there to hold her down.

She let them carry her upstairs and lay her on the coverlet. Carl said,

“OK?”

He was standing above her, looking terrified. She nodded. Smiling, he stroked her hair. She felt a shudder go through her and had to close her eyes. He grew more confident, smoothing her forehead. It was what they always did: mistake hysteria for pleasure. Smear their hands across you. Her face was inches from his crotch. So easy, she thought, and sank her teeth into it.