Despite the President’s summons to sit, Dr Hernandez Diaz remains standing. A slug of thick grey ash precariously dangles from the tip of Diaz’s smoke.
Barrientos’s teeth crunch down onto his cigar and his stomach tightens. He waits. The President’s shameless eyes look down at his other freshly imported extravagance, a hand-knotted silk rug that almost floats under their feet, a one-thousand-knots-per-square-inch red and gold Persian tapis. His eyes flick back and forth between the carpet and the ash from the contemptuous Chilean dog.
Alfredo and the others watch silently, knowing from experience that the insult will not go unanswered. But there is time. Here, there is a time for everything.
At over 13,000 feet above sea level, La Paz boasts it is the world’s highest capital city. Yet, economically Bolivia is rock-bottom though el presidente René Barrientos Ortu?o, gallantly propped up by his CIA friends and his cronies at Gulf Oil, regrets he has little time to dwell personally on his people’s poverty. But he is a fine orator, in indigenous Quechuan as well as Spanish, and his diamond-encrusted finger always points to where the blame really lies: the irksome Cuban-inspired insurgents or, when it suits him, Bolivia’s land-thieving neighbour and Dr Diaz’s homeland, Chile.
At least, Barrientos smiles to himself, the insurgents no longer pose such a problem. Sawing off both of Che Guevara’s hands after his murder was a nice touch by his colleague and former junta co-president General Alfredo Ovando Candia. Earlier that evening, as they were slicing into their steaks, the subject of Che had come up, with Alfredo accepting the plaudits with all the grimness his high forehead and clipped paintbrush moustache could muster. To Barrientos, Alfredo’s stern appearance seems a little comical: his thin, pursed lips make him look as though he is secreting one of Guevara’s rings in his mouth.
The old chesterfields lend an enveloping cosiness to the animated after-dinner discussion that hardly reflects the roles of these six men, or the tension tingling in the room. “?Ruiro siki! You round ass!” laughs Barrientos only just concealing his loathing for Dr Diaz, the only one still on his feet. Is Diaz standing to show he can or because his stature, such as it is, will be lost in the sofas?
Unresponsive to Barrientos’ jibe and feigning indifference to the damage his cigar ash would do to the rug or his smoke inflicts on the prized volumes lining the walls, Diaz, whose doctorate is in Spanish literature, pulls a heavy early edition of El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha off a shelf. He weighs it in his hands and loudly contemplates the irrelevant coincidence that its author, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, and William Shakespeare died on the same day: April 23, 1616.
Diaz rests the book on the lid of his pot belly, round as his head is bald. He tugs the antique leather-bound cover open to find the contemporary hand-written inscription:
US President Lyndon B. Johnson’s personal message is dated three weeks after the 1964 coup that installed Barrientos as Bolivia’s president. Diaz masks his disgust with a long puff on his Cohiba and replaces the volume.
Chile and Bolivia broke off official relations in 1962, years before Diaz was sent by Chile to quietly negotiate their reopening. “You Bolivianos have such light-headed views. Perhaps it is because La Paz indeed touches the sky.”
“Baja la música. Turn down the music,” Barrientos grunts to an aide who obeys immediately.
Diaz is disappointed; the turntable is spinning one of his favourites: Lucho Gatica singing the bolero hit Bésame Mucho. The orchestra played it five times at both of his wedding receptions—the first in La Paz and the other in Santiago. Oh, the tedious lengths an envoy must endure if he marries a local girl. Despite the cheerless outcome of that politically convenient tryst, he still loves the song.
Bésame, (Kiss me,)
bésame mucho, (Kiss me a lot,)
como si fuera esta noche, (As if tonight…)
la última vez, (…is the last time.)
“Hernandez,” continues the President, one of only two present with no moustache but possessing the gravitas to interrupt Diaz using his first name, “The music is like the poetry, si? It can sometimes be prescient.” Barrientos tips his widow’s peak lightly as if signalling a farewell. Diaz doesn’t quite follow, but sees the others understand.
He almost lets his suspicion screw up the folds in his pudgy face, but he restrains it and forces a smile, allowing Barrientos to continue uninterrupted.
“Why do you tell such stories, Dr Diaz? Maybe it is because you Chileans get to enjoy the sea air that Bolivians cannot. Is it so fanciful that Chile should restore to our beloved country her legitimate rights to her Pacific coast?”