Travel, Politics, and the Cortapalos Pre-Party
By Marco Felix
Three days before traveling to Bolivia, I went to a clinic to have a PCR test done—a mandatory requirement for boarding a Boliviana de Aviación flight.
On my way back from the clinic, about two blocks from my house, I noticed a storefront illuminated by neon lights. Its sign read:
“Scientific Cartomancy: If You Don’t Believe, We’ll Give You Your Money Back.”
Intrigued, and setting aside my reservations—since I have never been particularly fond of superstition—I told myself, I’m going to find out whether what they claim is actually true or whether there’s a catch.
I knocked on the door and waited a few seconds that felt like an eternity. From a half-open crack, a voice with an agonizing tone asked whether I was of legal age. After verifying my identity, the sliding door opened. The moment I stepped inside, a blast of hot air nearly made me faint. A few instants later, I found myself face-to-face with the clairvoyant.
The fortune-teller very kindly said:
“Have a seat—and don’t take off your mask.”
The room contained every decoration one would expect from the solemn character of such a place.
In each of the four corners stood stoic candelabras with half-burned candles. Scattered everywhere were several baccarat bowls. Incense that smelled of koa drifted from the eyes of a plaster Lucifer mounted on the wall beside a little shrine to the Lord of the Rings. Cobwebs and crepe-paper bats hung from the ceiling, while the windows and lintels were decorated with a considerable collection of talismans.
From a speaker bolted to the roof’s cornice came the music of The Phantom of the Opera by Andrew Lloyd Webber. What more appropriate music could there be? I thought as I approached with mixed feelings and growing doubts.
I asked what tricks fate had up its sleeve for my upcoming trip to Bolivia. She lifted the lid of a ceramic skull and took out a worn, faded deck of Spanish tarot cards, weathered by years of use. She made me cut the deck in half and began reading my future.
She started with the usual story about the signs of the zodiac. When she was about to get to Gemini, I stopped her dead and said:
“Read my palm.”
I interrupted her because fortune-tellers charge by the hour, and the more nonsense they talk, the more they charge you.
She took my hand, rolled up my sleeve, and disinfected it with 99-proof alcohol. Then she began again, explaining how the lifeline crossed the line of love, and so on and so forth.
“Let’s get to the point,” I said.
She gave me a mournful look and exclaimed:
“Here it is, perfectly clear. It says that as soon as you arrive in Bolivia, there will be social unrest.”
Given the misadventures that usually befall me whenever I visit Bolivia—especially when I am visiting the marvelous city of La Paz—one might reasonably conclude that there is some kind of declared symbiosis between my presence and the social upheaval that erupts every time I set foot on Bolivian soil.
Or perhaps there is a conspiracy operating against me: a web of malicious intentions, a blue edict cooked up in the highest circles of the so-called process of change. All these omens and superstitions seem to have one objective only: to make my life difficult and sabotage my hard-earned right to enjoy myself and have a good time.
What usually happens to me as soon as I arrive in my homeland consists of familiar experiences—activities that are practically unavoidable, procedures governed by established rules but ending in entirely unpredictable ways.
The pattern is always the same, and the modus operandi never changes. Once the engines are switched off, I unfasten my seat belt just as the plane noses into the airport jet bridge. I step out slightly cramped, wiping the sleep from my drowsy eyes. The instant my feet touch Bolivian soil, customs officers and immigration officials awaken from their slumber. Like a royal retinue, they approach, circling me like harpies, apparently to welcome me while simultaneously delivering an axe blow to my back.
Although I was born Bolivian, the first thing they do is stamp a Wiphala in my passport and charge me the regulation 150 dollars for the unconstitutional privilege of being a tourist in my own country.
After the paperwork—which takes roughly half an hour—they begin the somewhat undignified task of raking my body. Armed to the teeth with a handheld metal detector featuring cutting-edge technology from the time of the kissing bug, powered by Ray-O-Vac batteries, they get to work.
The routine consists of passing and repassing the contraption over my entire body, from head to toe and from east to west. Each time they do so, the damn instrument—which is as sensitive and well-trained as a dead fly—detects even the nails in my shoes.
Once it detects the presence of an American coin, it howls like a 911 siren and illuminates its outline with intrusive lights reminiscent of Darth Vader’s rays. At that moment, everything freezes. The eyes of friends and strangers alike focus on the spectacle. Suitcases pile up, and complete silence takes over the room.
I, a man who loves “action,” become perfectly still—more motionless than a dry leaf—waiting for the ordeal of the metal-detector inspection to end. Almost every time, I become the star of the circus and barely escape the show without even having time to zip up my fly after it has been detected.
Once the mandatory raking is over, the officers leap into action with greedy eyes and drool running down their chins from excitement. Their adrenaline rises and falls like a wave. They open my suitcases with flawless methodology and impeccable efficiency—an efficiency never before witnessed in public administration.
They inspect my belongings down to the last detail. They rummage through the deepest recesses of my luggage, hold my possessions up to the light, and analyze them with the wisdom of Sherlock Holmes. They scatter my clothes, shake them, and smell them with the precision and dedication of hunting dogs.
Perhaps they are looking for traces of imperialism that might place me in conflict with the impoverishing ideology of the reigning socialism.
Apparently, every time I arrive, the country switches into “pitita mode,” and social unrest automatically erupts across the entire nation. Wherever I go, this unavoidable shadow follows me: a symbiotic relationship between social and political turmoil.
These spontaneous, street-level experiences that I am forced to endure are events that come together as naturally as fingernails and dirt. They appear to happen at random, but deep down, as someone astutely observed, they are as corny as the lyrics of that Fonsi song:
“You are the magnet and I am the metal,
I’m getting closer and putting the plan together;
Just thinking about it makes my pulse race.”
It would seem that the disturbances and I are attracted to one another because we are opposite poles. The truth, however, is that we are poles of the same kind. The only thing we have in common is our mutual dislike: the MAS’s despicable political machinations on one side, and my demonstrated good nature on the other.
Disturbances and uprisings differ in form and substance, but in essence they are always the same—two curses directed at whatever government happens to be in power. They share the same causes, and their methods of expression have hardly changed since at least the beginning of the 1980s, when I and a multitude of young people were involved in those struggles.
To cite just a few examples of those schemes, demonstrators—regardless of which side they belonged to—would set fire to old belongings and tires, creating popular bonfires. On other occasions, the usual suspects would set about prying up the paving stones from the streets and stacking them into little walls resembling pyramids, blocking the passage of vehicles and, above all, making life difficult for visitors from the empire.
If we consider the events that are yet to occur, it would appear that Evo Morales in particular, and the MAS in general, somehow learn through some form of black magic that I am about to arrive.
They immediately organize congresses, workshops, and seminars on how to dismantle the pititas blockades. They issue instructions to prevent food from entering the cities. Without hesitation and regardless of what anyone might say, they begin distributing pamphlets containing repressive recipes for defending the much-touted process of change—and its inevitable retreat.
And so, in the middle of that mad discord, I inevitably find myself at the center of the scandal. Without intending to, I somehow end up adding fuel to the fire.
For example, I remember one occasion when American Airlines was still flying the skies. I had a return flight scheduled from El Alto Airport, but because conflicts broke out that day, American Airlines decided not to fly to La Paz and instead arranged to depart from Viru Viru Airport in Santa Cruz.
The flight was scheduled for noon the following day. The first flight from La Paz to Santa Cruz departed at 7:00 a.m., which gave me plenty of time to catch my midday return flight. However, by the previous evening, roadblocks had already begun appearing throughout the marvelous city.
I had no choice but to make my way to the airport around midnight, dodging nail boards and the occasional bonfire strategically placed along the side of the highway.
I hired a transformer—a battered taxi equipped with a miscalibrated compass instead of GPS—but the driver reassured me by announcing that he knew every shortcut leading to the airport.
Given the circumstances, there was nothing left to do but spend the night on one of the uncomfortable wicker chairs in the café called La Wistupiku, conveniently located in the middle of the airport.
My sisters had been agitated all day by the political situation. Knowing that the world’s highest airport had no heating, they gave me fleece ponchos, second-hand alpaca scarves, and goat-leather mittens to help me face the freezing night.
They gave me the entire winter outfit because they feared I would die of hypothermia. As an added bonus, they placed in an aguayo shoulder bag a bundle of coca leaves from the Yungas and half a small bottle of bulk singani, along with two lemons, so that I could gargle if the night became unbearable.
With the help of the taxi driver who took me to the airport and a relief flight attendant, I wrapped myself up like a mummy in the clothes they had given me. I made sure they wrapped my left arm a few inches from my mouth and tied a small crystal glass to my hand in case I suddenly felt like drinking a chuflay.
I slept like a log. When I woke up, the crowd was on the verge of overwhelming airport security, and the plane departed, as they say, in a great hurry.
On another memorable occasion, I was near the Obelisk of La Paz, in the vicinity of Camacho Avenue, negotiating a currency exchange with a money changer. Suddenly, without warning, the sticks of dynamite thrown by miners belonging to the Bolivian Workers’ Center began exploding.
This was back when the COB was truly the COB—the guardian of workers’ interests and rights.
As expected, the police on duty began firing tear gas indiscriminately. In an instant, the gas rose like an undeserving general and spread like a red sunset across the patch of sky stretching from Murillo Square almost to the city’s Prado.
The eternally bustling avenue, overflowing with people, suddenly looked like a lithograph of the Day of the Dead. It resembled a cemetery filled with statues and ghosts drifting in slow motion through the strange, polluted air, permanently suspended in a state of levitation.
Amid the chaos, I spotted the only open door and rushed inside, dragging the impatient money changer by the neck. If the police caught him, there was no doubt they would execute him on the spot.
Once inside the Social Club 16 de Julio, a measure of calm returned. Tempers subsided. The doormen closed the windows and bolted the doors. They switched on a few fans and, if I remember correctly, the waiters boiled eucalyptus incense to purify the air.
The money changer sat across from me at a round table. I noticed that he was clutching a snakeskin briefcase, worn across his body like a shoulder bag, with an enormous padlock in the middle. He had fastened it to his left wrist with a stainless-steel chain.
It took about three hours for the air to clear, and only then were we able to leave the premises. Before doing so, we drank several rounds to celebrate our survival and the fact that neither of us had been assaulted or robbed.
Before saying goodbye, the money changer told me that he normally earned about five points on every transaction. But this time, he said, he would exchange my money at the official rate without making a single centavo.
And, naturally, he would even give me a small discount as a token of gratitude—not only for saving his hide, but above all for saving his entire fortune.
During my most recent visit, things were not much different. As has become customary, the trip was once again plagued by conflicts and confrontations, this time provoked by popular uprisings demanding that the government repeal the accursed law.
I arrived in the country’s administrative capital as a guest at the wedding of my eldest nephew. Even amid the festivities, we heard rumors that people were preparing actions throughout much of the country to confront the government’s repression of the pititas.
My stay in La Paz was brief but substantial. It gave me the opportunity to visit friends I had not seen in at least three decades, particularly one great friend who is now one of the country’s foremost political analysts.
The following evening, I was invited to a magnificent dinner at the apartment of my dear friend Cuqui.
The social upheaval announced across the country did not lead to concrete action in La Paz, largely because of the heavy police presence stationed at key points under the orders of the blue party bosses.
Even so, I did not want to take any chances. Before my flight to the city of four names, I set out to explore the marvelous city from end to end like a mountaineer without a compass. In a kind of synchronized systole and diastole, I went up and down the colorful cable cars that crisscross the La Paz basin.
It was around seven o’clock the following evening when I landed on the tarmac of what looked like a warehouse with a corrugated roof—an airport grandly, and misleadingly, called Alcantarí International Airport, located in Yamparáez Province in the Department of Chuquisaca.
Charles picked me up, and we went directly to the center of the White City, fully intending to eat some mondongo or Chuquisaqueño sausage. Unfortunately, and to our great disappointment, all the establishments serving traditional food had already closed.
The next morning was somewhat cloudy. Suddenly, the first drops of a gentle drizzle began to fall. I thought it was a bad omen because, around midday, the cortapalos were scheduled to gather for a celebration at our host Charles’s house.
Thank God, Sucre’s climate is friendly to revelers. To our great satisfaction and delight, at about eleven in the morning the clouds dispersed, making way for a radiant sun. It was a glorious day, and the honeysuckle and jasmine in the garden began perfuming the air as an appetizer for the afternoon of merriment that lay ahead.
The pealing bells of the nearby La Merced Church announced the arrival of noon.
Our old friends began trickling in, and before a rooster had time to crow, a colossal party had taken shape—a kind of pre-party for the first gathering of the cortapalos diaspora in nearly four decades, scheduled for the middle of December of that same year.
As expected, the celebration featured special guests: bales of Potosí beer, a suckling pig cooked to perfection in a Chinese box, and—especially for those suffering from gout and arteriosclerosis—the host’s thoughtful provision of nonalcoholic beer and cucumber water.
Minutes after the sun went down, bottles of Turuchipa singani appeared from nowhere like the retreating tide. Our cousins Johnny Walker and Jim Beam were also present.
This entire menu of happiness was accompanied by a great deal of old music, performed by singer-songwriters Hippie Noya and Lalo del Carpio, as well as by the incomparable voice of our friend Cacalaco.
Above all, we had reunited to remember old anecdotes, catch up on one another’s lives, and keep alive the memory that our friendship had been forged in Potosí during the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Back then, we held long conversations sitting on bench number two in the main square, facing the cathedral.
The gatherings and get-togethers we used to have when we were young were very different. In those days, our conversations involved confessions of unsuccessful seductions, strategies for dealing with the aftermath of unrequited love, yoga and meditation techniques that supposedly allowed one to be reincarnated as a pig—simply because those creatures of God engage in multiple sexual encounters lasting an average of thirty minutes—and emergency procedures for when we devoted ourselves to the complete athletic lifestyle.
That lifestyle included not only calisthenics and soccer matches, but also the consumption of industrial quantities of alcoholic beverages.
When we saw one another with our hair already turning gray, we briefly lost our nerve and began singing a cappella:
“The snows of time have silvered my temples…”
It was the famous tango Volver by Carlos Gardel, offered as a testament to our existence.
We realized that time had passed in the blink of an eye. Although our desire for partying and debauchery had remained intact over the years, our conversation topics had changed. They now made room for the complaints and ailments proper to our age.
Judging by the seriousness of the discussions, the gathering seemed more like a meeting of doctors than a typical cortapalos evening. For a moment, I was unsure of where I was. I thought I might be in a pharmacy rather than at a get-together with my friends.
But when I saw their innocent faces, completely detached from reality and enjoying themselves as if they had a clear conscience, I realized that despite the topics under discussion, these really were my friends—the cortas.
Here are a few lines rescued from those speeches:
So-and-so: How many milligrams of fenofibrate do you take to lower your triglycerides?
Such-and-such: How did your prostate test results come out?
Another fellow: Gentlemen, keep in mind that paracetamol is for preventing COVID, not for curing your rheumatism.
Yet another: We don’t believe for a damn minute that you haven’t lost your testosterone and that you’re still ejaculating the way you used to!
To disguise the subject matter a little and lighten the tone of the conversations, they changed the topic and asked one another:
“What kind of mixture do you use to dye your hair that beautiful dark-brown color?”
As usual, no gathering would have been complete without mentioning the country’s political situation. But, as always, even that subject took on a distinctly personal and familiar tone.
If you’ll allow me, I will name the sin but not the sinner.
One of the fellows began explaining:
“To be honest, I have tremendous respect for Pfizer. In a relatively short time, they came up with the vaccine for COVID-19, and I am extremely grateful for that. But as far as I am concerned, I have not had any romantic relations since the pandemic began because I refuse to take Viagra. Not because it was created by the same Pfizer, but because the pills are blue, just like the masistas. I only have to think about that, and I lose all desire.”
It was wonderful to reunite this time with Charles, our host; Benjo; Braca; Fito; Mario—Naupa; Cacalaco; Hippie; Lalo del Carpio; and yours truly.
Until next time.