“Listen, Elia, do we really have to do the whole dinner shtick?”
Carlos cut in. “Is arranged, Se?or Reynolds. Everyone make big preparations.” For another five bolivianos, Carlos had got Maria Rosa’s neighbours, whose hovel shared a rotting plywood wall with hers, to shift their chicken coops and pig swill to make enough space for the dinner, the cameras and the gas-bottle portable heaters he had hired, which were being fired up as they argued. He pointed Reynolds to a small hole dug in the ground with clods of earth piled next to it. “Is oven,” he smiled, with more than a hint of local pride.
Reynolds noticed small, uneven dark lumps scattered around the hole, preferring not to think about the pigs he’d seen wandering around. He shrugged and headed back to the minivan to rehearse his intro. “Isabel Diaz,” he said aloud, not caring who heard him, “couldn’t be president because of a father she’d never met. But what of her mother, a woman she hasn’t seen since she ran away from home at fifteen? I’m Shannon Reynolds for FOX. I’m in El Alto, Bolivia… a thousand feet above La Paz, the world’s highest capital city. As you can see,” and this is where the camera would sympathetically pan, “it’s also one of the poorest. Tonight, I’ve been invited to a watia, a traditional Andean Indian dinner cooked in the ground, like a Hawaiian luau, and my hostess is… Maria Rosa Diaz, the long lost mother of Isabel Diaz, former US presidential candidate and soon, likely to be elected Speaker of the House. It’s freezing here in El Alto, but what you’ll discover tonight will make your blood boil. Stay tuned.”
THE cameras rolled. Isabel’s mother knelt in the dirt, the oven hole dug freshly in front of her. She selected the hardest clods and pressed them into the base to form the foundation, and then more for the sides. She huffed herself up onto her sandaled feet and walked purposely over to the nearby open fire where, knees bent, she lifted a smoking metal bucket filled with hot flat stones and brought it back to the hole, almost stumbling under its weight. Once again on her knees and this time with tongs, she placed the hot stones inside the makeshift oven, one by one. She piled yet more of the clods of dirt around the mouth of the hole, stacking them up until the structure resembled a dome. The small holes she left here and there were for ventilation, according to Carlos, and the stalks of chaniua she slipped in through them were for fuel.
When the oven was glowing red hot inside, Maria Rosa removed the stones with the tongs and replaced them with food: potatoes, raw leaf-wrapped alpaca, corn cakes and bananas. She covered it over with more leaves and sand and dirt, wiped her hands on her apron and heaved herself back onto her feet, all the while chattering away to Carlos in a language none of the others understood.
“One hour till ready,” he said.
The cameras stopped filming.
“And we do what exactly during this hour?” asked Reynolds. “Sit on Mrs Gummy Bear’s porch sipping mint juleps and watch the sun set over the horizon?” He swung around disgusted and almost tripped over the horde of open-mouthed children who’d come and sat silently behind them.
REYNOLDS and Maria Rosa ate seated on a brightly striped rug. It clashed with her shawl, but Elia let it go since everything clashed here.
So far as the cameras observed, all that warmed the diners was the heat radiating from the watia hole. “Alpaca. Mmm,” Reynolds winked to the lens, “I never thought a sweater could taste so good.” The flare in his nostrils was almost convincing, but Elia and the rest of the crew winced anyway, and she knew she’d cut it.
“Se?ora Diaz,” he said after wiping his mouth. “You had a daughter when you were in America. Where was she born and what was her name?” He’d already learned from their off-camera rehearsal that if he spoke slowly, Maria Rosa would hear him.
“Her name… Isabel Rosa Diaz. Beautiful name, si?”
“And where was she born?”
“Ah, you ask me before… She born in New Jersey… in Newark. We live there first when we come to America—was cheap rent, but big troubles so we move.”
“Tell me about Isabel.”
Everything Maria Rosa recounted about Isabel and her early life had the ring of truth about it. Without giving Reynolds the details, she confirmed her daughter had run away from her at fifteen, when they were living at the Cactus Flower Trailer Park in New Mexico. After twenty minutes of what Reynolds would later describe as filler drivel, most of which would be edited out, he jumped in for the kill. “Your husband, what was his name?”
“Hernandez Luis Rodriguez Diaz.”