He commanded the bellman to wipe his boots. The withering look Elia gave him had nothing to do with the sharp smell. Disgusted with his Don’t you know who I am arrogance—and no, the locals didn’t have a clue—she and the others left their bags and a tip and made off, leaving him to drink alone.
Along the cobblestoned streets, the group kept bumping into women wearing shawls like the one Elia had bought, as well as voluminous layered petticoat pollera skirts and black bowler hats. According to the guidebooks, if a woman’s hat was tilted to the side, she was single; square on top, she was married. Their skirts and striped shawls, brilliantly vibrant, were something else. Bizarrely, the shawls were often smeared with thick oily pig fat; at least they smelt like it to Elia. She’d bought one without the fat. It cost her less, though she would willingly have paid more.
Beggars wrapped as tight as mummies lay asleep, or dead—it was hard to tell the difference—under awnings or in doorways, and a loud gang of soldiers passed by, leering their gap-toothed smiles at Elia from under their riot helmets and waving their assault rifles. The grease they used on their weapons hung heavy in the still, dry air mixing with the thick fetor of pig fat. She decided that breathing through her mouth was a good option.
The wispy river Elia had spied as they had corkscrewed down the eight miles from the airport was nowhere to be seen, having oozed its squalid water under the city, the roads having been built over it decades ago.
CARLOS, Elia’s local researcher, had arranged for them to meet the woman he claimed was Isabel Diaz’s mother, Maria Rosa, up in El Alto over a watia, a dinner cooked in a traditional Andean earth oven. For colour, Elia had planned to stretch the interview across the meal.
Reynolds scowled as they drove into the worst slum he’d ever seen, or smelt. He knew of the Juhu slum in Mumbai, India—though the closest he’d come to it was watching the movie Slumdog Millionaire—and this was far worse. For starters, he was physically here. It was not a good place for someone with his finely honed nose for wine, or so he whinged.
“Let’s skip the meal thing,” he said, his throat gagging with the thick cloying stench of human sweat and shit, as well as other odours he couldn’t avoid picking out: pigs, decomposing trash, rotting damp cardboard, wood smoke and the pungent ammonia tang of yet more urine.
“Is fixed, Se?or,” said Carlos. “We cannot cancel.”
“Sure we can. We’ll peg our noses, pick her up and take her back to the hotel. We can do the interview there.”
“Not possible. Se?ora Diaz is spending many hours to dig meal for dinner.”
The street—if you could so dignify a dusty dirt track strewn with scrabbling chickens, wandering pigs and, despite the chilly conditions, half-clothed urchins—was hemmed in by squalid shanties and lean-to huts.
An old woman shuffled out of a rickety metal and cardboard shack as their van approached. Maria Rosa’s bowler hat sat flat on her head. Even if the bent old lady could stretch straight, she was nowhere near as tall or attractive as the woman she claimed was her daughter.
A few times, Carlos had to repeat things to her, and Reynolds got more and more irritable. “She’s deaf, can you believe it?” he asided to Elia. “Of the five senses you’d be willing to lose up here, you’d go for smell, right?”
Carlos asked a question in Quechuan, slowly and loudly. Se?ora Diaz replied in broken English, “Paper is inside.” She loosened her shawl and slipped through her doorway curtain, shortly re-emerging with a metal cash box, its red paint peeling. Pulling on a string around her neck, she drew up a key from between her ample breasts, then unlocked the box.
The page she withdrew from it and carefully handed to Carlos was yellowing and brittle and, handling it like a diamond nestling in his palm, he passed it to Elia.
“Bingo!” she said, her smile cracking through the cold. “A US entry visa… issued to Maria Rosa Diaz and dated… yes, just a few months before Isabel was born. Perfect.”
Maria Rosa innocently looked up at Elia with an even more eager-to-please smile, though these days she had no teeth at all, distastefully prompting Elia to recall the trailer park manager’s sleazy pet name for her.
“Can we just do this?” complained Reynolds, pushing forward. Three mangy dogs were nuzzling at his sharp-creased chinos and he wanted to get out of here before the mutts confused him with a lamppost. He surveyed the area and wrinkled his nose, indifferent as to whether he offended anyone, and his eyes settled on the hundreds of empty bottles piled up against a wall of Maria Rosa’s shack. “She’s a drunk,” he boiled toward Elia. “I’m interviewing a soak? Puh-lease.”
“She not have one drink today,” Carlos interrupted. “I promise her ten bolivianos extra if she stay sober for you.”
“That’s what? About $1.40?” said Elia, peeling the money off her clip.
Carlos quickly wrapped his hand over Elia’s, “No show money,” he whispered. “No safe, here. Money you got in your hand is enough for food for many families for one month.”