Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,

Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.
—Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven

They Caught Us

They hadn’t even finished eating the cake when, by some cruel blunder of destiny, we were discovered, and in the blink of an eye everyone realized we had dropped into that wedding in the capacity of parachutists.

There’s no doubt we were caught on account of the scandal and the colossal ruckus we kicked up, since, as they told us afterward, quite apart from spinning around like spindles we had tippled well beyond our quota, to the point that the bar service dwindled considerably; and from that moment on the waiters had no other recourse but to circle the hall with their trays held high, dispensing minuscule rations of liquor by the eyedropper and keeping accounts on the napkins in order to prevent certain scoundrels from taking advantage of the situation and attempting a second dose.

Another of the reasons we were found out, according to certain capricious commentaries that circulated in the press, was the brazenness and utter want of decorum we displayed by leaping about like harlequins, with undulating movements of the pelvis, around the bride and groom during the little dance of the customary wedding march. And as if that weren’t enough, we had perpetrated the whole debacle in stark contrast to the fragile and timorous conduct of the betrothed, who danced like two little angels come down from heaven to the cadence of some divine melody, placing their feet into the void as though they were treading on eggs or handing out condolences at a wake.

The Capers of the Scandal

The assembled guests were struck dumb with astonishment at our capers and the apotheotic manner in which we sprawled ourselves about. It was clear that, in the space of a heartbeat, we had turned the banquet into a farce never before witnessed and into a bacchanal of epic proportions; it was indisputable that we were enjoying ourselves with such zeal and such passion that we nearly bored holes through the tongue-and-groove floorboards from so much stamping to the “imapaj casarum, imapaj casarum.”

Everyone looked at one another, dazzled at witnessing such a pandemonium. Suddenly bewilderment took possession of the party and, in the midst of the confusion, they began pinching each other to verify whether they were awake or dreaming, because they could not credit what they were seeing; they were so frightened that their hair stood on end and they went stiff as stones.

The Inquisitorial Committee

No sooner had they shaken off their stupor than they realized the party was slipping out of their hands. Had they remained there thunderstruck doing nothing, nothing would have been left to them but to content themselves with the leavings of the buffet and beg the band to play and sing a capella to enliven their dances, and thus at least spare themselves the mortification of dancing to the vagrant notes of borrowed music. Faced with that eventuality they formed an inquisitorial committee, screwed up their courage, set aside the visible “entertainment inferiority complex” they suffered from, and began making inquiries.

A couple of minutes later, having put two and two together, they arrived at the conclusion that the revelry had, quite simply and plainly, been infiltrated by a rabble of illustrious unknowns who were not only enjoying themselves with great impudence and audacity, but had also brought the supplies of food and drink to the brink of extinction — a thing that beggared understanding, since they had ordered fifteen tubs heaped with cold-cut canapés, eight drums brimming with refreshments and more than a hundred demijohns of bulk singani, enough to brutalize an entire regiment.

Fortunately for the serving staff, in those critical moments of the investigation nobody managed to deduce that, the instant we burst into the bash, the first thing we did was to grease the palms of the waiters and barmen so they’d pour us triples and never let us run short of fuel. Had anyone caught on, they would surely have been executed on the spot, blamed for the disappearance of the hooch and charged with the irremediable consequence of the drinking drought then being endured.

Padlocks and Stonings

Immediately after the tattletales confirmed to them that a handful of rogues had taken the party by storm, kidnapped the beverages and treacherously appropriated the entire merriment, the bride and groom decided to take the matter in hand: they barred the main door with padlocks and fitted the windows with bolts and staples so that not so much as a fly could escape.

They forced their way through the fawning mob that was at that moment queuing up to pin alasitas dollars on the lapels of the groom’s suit and on the taffeta trim of the bride’s veil; they climbed onto the improvised platform and ordered the music stopped dead; they snatched the microphone with one yank from the singer, who had been struck mute by the seizure, and they shouted at the godparents, the master of ceremonies and the official guests to stone us publicly right there in the ballroom, to chase us with cudgels to the outskirts of the city, to give us a tremendous thrashing on top of it and, by way of a lesson, to flog our backsides with bundles of itapallu, so as to make amends for such an outrage and to ensure we would never again have the effrontery to crash a party uninvited.

The Flight

Before the hosts of invited guests could lay hands on us, we quit the nuptial occasion without ceremony, like javelins launched by the emergency of the moment, galloping like horses whipped by dread and — feet, don’t fail me now — running swifter than a puff of breath; we took flight in a state of hurried levitation.

We escaped like souls the devil is carrying off, through the breaches and the crannies of the event. Once outside the premises we quickened our trot, dodging the stones and the insults hurled after us, and we continued the flight stumbling over the rubble and the sleeping cobblestones of the narrow little streets, by now with no air left in our lungs and on the verge of collapse, until we managed to halt that headlong stampede at the very lip of the precipice: without noticing, we had arrived at the edge of the city. We stopped, afflicted by a tachycardia for the anthologies, and sat down a while to rest at the roadside.

Little by little, and with the help of a few unfiltered cigarettes, we got our wind back. We turned to look behind us and, despite the darkness, we could make out the dust cloud turned to fog that we had raised with that frantic flight, and that was how we realized our pursuers hadn’t managed to catch even the silhouettes of our shadows. Then, right there, in complicity with the solidary wink of the full moon and the sardonic glitter of the stars of Cassiopeia, we laughed our asses off recalling the particulars of such an escape. But when the echo of our guffaws had faded, fear crept in and we grasped our sorry predicament.

The Mute Midnight

It was nearly midnight in the Villa Imperial, and an almost supernatural stillness had taken hold of the air, despite its being a Saturday. The city was so silent you could hear the furtive footfalls of cats in heat padding stealthily across the rooftops in search of lovers willing to commit the sin of the flesh; that near-sepulchral silence was broken now and then by the whistle of claws and by yowls that mixed terror with pleasure, the product of the brawls and the affairs of those slum-dwelling cats.

Save for the hoarse honking of some drifting car or the distant barking of street dogs, the night was intolerably mute, stripped of the raucous noises that are the unmistakable hallmark and the raw material of rowdy Saturday nights. That silence, infected with aphasia, was nothing less than a conspiracy against our constitutional right to amusement, some of us reasoned; or perhaps it was merely a temporary prank of destiny, others speculated.

Nobody could explain with any precision the cause of that catacomb silence. It was probable that midnight had fallen victim to a sudden fit of apathy and indifference; what was evident was that these two incompatible states of mind had coupled in a rite of necromancy with the clear intention of conspiring behind our backs and, by means of their otherworldly sorceries, dismantling our plans at a single stroke.

They were ignominious signs, impossible to ignore: they indicated as clear as water that the promoter of the merriment, that jovial and enabling darkness, fully intended to kick the bucket, afflicted with the syndromes of indifference and not caring a fig for our desires and our restlessness. Were we to stand paralyzed and do nothing about it, it would inevitably leave us standing on the platform as the train of recreation pulled away; and in that case we’d have no choice but to entertain the notion of ending the spree at half throttle, chawarados and with our guts wide open, and to shuffle home with our tails between our legs.

Turn In or Carry On

Like an undeserved gift, the imminent farewell of midnight bestowed on us a grand dilemma, a perverse fork in the road that put us between the sword and the wall, since it obliged us to choose between turning in and carrying on. The mere mention of the first option generated a terrifying panic among the revelers, because everyone knew the outcome would plunge us into a state of irreversible dejection; the only remedy for such an affliction was to choose the second alternative, which meant locating on the fly another party or presterío or, in the worst case, some last-round dive in which to see the night off as God intended.

To resolve the problem of that impasse, someone suggested flipping a coin to decide our course. We discarded that hare-brained idea, given that mathematically it offered no better than a fifty percent chance of getting our way, and in the end we resolved to hold a vote and settle the matter. The result could not have been more emphatic, since nearly everyone expressed his desire to press on with the carousing, with the exception of one of our friends who decided to go home because at that very moment the symptoms of saturnine colic began erupting in him, seeing as two hours earlier he had swallowed three glasses of sour posk’o api at the market.

The Agony of the Night

Oblivious to our machinations and our democratic deliberations, and as though it wished on purpose to worsen our rotten luck, in those final instants the complicit night was still stubbornly torn between dying in peace and enduring the sustained agony of prolonging itself into the first beginnings of dawn so that we, the kings of debauchery and excess, might carry on with the revels.

In anticipation of any eventuality, we raised our supplications to the Maker, that he not permit the night, our friend and confidante, to go out, but rather grant her strength to keep the embers of the racket alive. Yet despite our most heartfelt entreaties, that noble companion, faithful and withered procuress of our nocturnal escapades, had grown weary and finally decided to pass over to a better life, hounded by the impetus of the new day’s arrival and pressured by the indecorous precepts of prudence and the commandments of good behavior.

The incontrovertible proofs of her departure would be confirmed mere hours later by the first rays of sun, which would inexorably begin to let themselves down like a brotherhood of killjoys from the ridges of the great mountain, and by the deafening uproar that, as always, the sleepless roosters would raise with those bucolic songs which, instead of announcing the coming of the dawn, would sing the condolences for the night’s tragic passing.

The Last Round

The night now good and finished, nothing remained but to press on with the fantastic odyssey of the binge at the very frontier of daybreak. Inevitably, and almost at the razor’s edge of first light, tired and battered, defying the gales and the brutal breezes of the dawn, we would present ourselves at whatever tavern was open in order to continue the guzzling and give a decent burial to the unfinished spree.

To do the last round as it deserved, we always did it with the aid of a few cortafríos and some room-temperature beers. And so as not to squander energy during the sanctified act of bending the elbow, we sat motionless as monoliths, half dead with cold, ensconced in the rickety and time-worn chairs of those establishments of dissipation, waiting for the darkness to disperse and the gusts of morning wind to abate; and once the sky brightened at the break of day, we would come out of those dark burrows the way vizcachas come out, with red eyes, rubbing our hands together and our breath all but frozen, to chase the elusive rays of the Inti.

We arrived at those little dives, sheltered by the gloom and the circumspection of the small hours, in a calamitous state, many times against our own will, dragged along as if by magnets by the smells and the flavors, by the noises and the murmurs, by the reverberating resonances of that music proper to bedlam that emanated from the very bowels of the joints.

At other times, however, through unknown causes and chances, or because the squandered night had taken it into her head to break earlier, we ended the evening seated around the fountain, on a wall footing of lime and stone, guitar in hand, beneath the mantle of the cypresses and the numbed foliage of the pines of some anonymous little square, waiting feverishly for the blessed dawn to catch us.

La Isica and La Mamacita

Unmoved by the merciless passage of time, the hands of the cathedral clock read 3:33 in the morning, the exact numeral of the ominous devil’s hour. As one may suppose, at that stage of the incipient sunrise the options for continuing the revels were not many, but one almost obligatory destination was to reach La Isica or, failing that, La Mamacita’s, at any cost.

La Isica was a two-story dive in the vicinity of Calle Cívica, where they served beer over ice and, above all, a fricasé that, in the judgment of the gourmets, was fit to make you lick your fingers. The fricasé was cooked over a low flame with enormous chunks of pork, with hulled corn and tunta and a great many other native ingredients that, when served up in those Chinese porcelain bowls, gave the impression that the food was swimming in a broth of spices and hot ajíes redder than the wines of the sacristies.

If by ill fortune La Isica’s doors were shut, then the destination was the holy chambers of La Mamacita’s bar, whose geographical coordinates placed it at the corner angle of Smith and Bustillos, very near the arch of San Roque and the square of the dogs, a few short blocks from the cabarets and brothels surrounding the city cemetery. One came to this joint not only in search of shelter and warmth, but also to sample the laguas and the llallaguas and other beverages of low breeding which, in spite of the early hour, were served in that establishment.

The Bar Quito

But if for reasons beyond our control the epilogue of the spree found us around the university, near the coca sellers’ block, in the vicinity of Calle Oruro to be more precise, then we would invite ourselves to the oldest bar in the city — the one about which don Segundino, its owner and proprietor, used to tell that once word got out about the existence of a “barquito,” a little boat adrift in the landlocked heart of Potosí, an official delegation of sailors and frigate admirals came all the way from Mejillones, in the north of Chile, to present him with a wooden ship’s wheel — the very one that hangs today, most proudly displayed, behind the bar. They surely gave him the wheel because they thought a little boat without a wheel was inconceivable; but what the generous delegation did not know was that the bar was in fact called “Bar Quito,” in honor of the capital of our brother country Ecuador.

A singular feature of this tavern was that its proprietor, quite apart from getting his clientele drunk, had it in mind to instill positive and altruistic values, for which purpose he collected thoughts, maxims and sayings of the sages and philosophers and wrote them on the walls or scrawled them on cards that he pasted on the window lintels and in every nook of the bar, in the hope that along with the drink a little culture might also get in. One refrain I remember very well was written on the bathroom wall, and it said, most aptly: “In this humble corner, even the manliest man drops his trousers.”

At the Bar Quito they served the popular drinks known as “te con te” and the ponches, which in their most primitive form are a mixture of boiled cinnamon water with singani, highly effective for cutting the cold.

The Mocko Teniente

Other times, depending on the geographical position of the racket, when the hour came to turn in we would poke our heads into the dark dungeons of the Mocko Teniente, out at the far end of Calle Chayanta. This bar is the Potosí equivalent of the “elephants’ graveyards,” those flophouses that populate the shantytowns of the metropolis of La Paz, where the terminally hopeless go to bid farewell to their disgraces and die, literally, at their post.

The regulars who inhabited this species of medieval dive drank in total anonymity, heads bowed, without muttering a single word, sheltered by the silence and the near-total darkness of the lugubrious walls of that den, which looked more like a hideout for souls in torment than a bar in a peaceful neighborhood. It was, however, very special, because it was a hundred percent last-round bar, and its doors opened at two in the morning.

La Cortina Rosada, La Colmena and the Drivers’ Hall

If the frenzied hunt for merriment caught us in the dusty neighborhoods of the rancho guitarras, in those parts where the devil lost his poncho, at the meridian of the old gunpowder street — Calle Hernández — then, without further deliberation, we would head for the bar La Cortina Rosada to drink cocktails out of plastic pitchers. Its owner, don Tito, a consummate guitarist, would offer as an appetizer a magnificent k’allu of tomatoes, locotos and onions so fiery it made even the dead sit up, but not before regaling us with a couple of tunes; and moments after spilling two drops for the Pachamama, we’d raise our glasses and with great euphoria join in, singing the Zamba de la Esperanza in chorus.

Otherwise, we would congregate inside the bar La Colmena, out there at the far edge of K’arkupila, very near the Miner’s Square, which we entered through its creaking sky-blue swinging doors to mingle and fraternize with the patrons, most of them union leaders, ju’kus and ore buyers.

If nothing encouraging appeared on the horizon, then almost as a last resort we ended up curled into balls, chewing wads of coca and, between one pijche and the next, polishing off jugs of drinks concocted from sultana tea, sprigs of cinnamon and a little anise, at the green tables of the drivers’ hall on Calle La Paz — which at the time stood just around the corner from the bar El Quijote, in the vicinity of the Plazuela 15 de Mayo, alongside the church of San Juan de Dios, across from the corner where they sold thayas of sweet potato and wheat pito tinted with the sap of ayrampo.

El Rosedal

Very rarely, when it was obvious that no social event remained open to which we might gain access in order to fulfill our Dionysian duties, we had to admit — grudgingly — that the night’s heyday had evaporated, plunging the city into an unprecedented calm. Consequently, and by way of an epitaph to the darkness and a welcome to the dawn, we would make our way to one of the low-class chicherías that swarm the outskirts of the city. One of them was El Rosedal, a dive of the lowest caliber where they served concoctions of dubious provenance and chicha mixed with cinnamon ice cream, wrongly called garapiñas, and where, as a mockery of irony itself, they gave the place a springtime name without minding that the nonexistent garden of the establishment was an orphan of plants and rosebushes.

The crafty proprietors of this chichería, and of La Quivincheña and so many other “quintas,” resorted to subliminal tricks, driven by their vehement appetite to lend a Caribbean touch to their frigid establishments: they had painted on the walls of their premises whole ranks of tropical landscapes with four-leaf clovers, honeysuckle laden with gardenias and creepers of shrubby lilies, with never a shortage of palm trees overflowing with coconuts and trees of ripe mangoes; and on the false ceilings they had painted clouds of many colors with swallows and parrots in mid-flight and thousands of pregnant butterflies. Who knows whether they did it to throw off the tangible signs of dusk, or to hoodwink the customers and try to convince them that it was still daytime and that they were drinking on some country estate in Santa Cruz or in a valley chichería in Cochabamba.

To recreate the temperature of the valleys and combat the paralyzing cold, they lit torches and set a tin full of eucalyptus leaves boiling on a brazier, so that the vapors would perfume the air and at the same time incite the clientele to shed their inhibitions and throw themselves onto the dance floor to shake a leg to the rhythms of cumbias and the chords of vallenatos pouring out of the loudspeakers bolted into the rock faces of the patio. But perhaps the best of all was that the waitresses were genuine cholitas whom the owners brought in from the neighboring valleys.

El Rosedal was frequented primarily by domestic workers and their consorts, and by the cholos from the neighborhoods along the ring road. On paydays it was crammed with miners and palliris from Pailaviri who came down en masse, forming an endless procession, to pawn their meager wages in less time than it takes a rooster to crow; during the national holidays the place overflowed with generals and captains, with sergeants and stray conscripts from the military barracks, which stood right around the corner — a stone’s throw away, as the saying so aptly goes.

Julia

I, like many others, had my sporadic amorous encounters with one of these lovely cholitas, a fine-looking girl with greenish eyes and a wasp waist who had come from Villa Abecia, so she told me, to study dressmaking. Julia was her name, and to pay her tuition at the institute she worked, so she said, as a waitress from Monday to Thursday, because from Friday to Sunday she made herself chinka, vanished from the scene, since the little rascal would go off dancing at one of the Mayos, the 15th or the 25th, and to cap the party off in style she surely got herself dragged out beyond the city walls by some cooperative miner from San Benito.

Many years later I returned to the villa as a tourist, and I made inquiries as to her whereabouts and did not find her, because Julia had moved to the city of El Alto and, so I was told, in order to cure herself of her infatuation and her lovesickness she decided to become a wrestler, and I learned that this is how she earns her living, an undefeated fighter under the alias of La Cándida Eréndira.

It is the purest truth that we frequented those godforsaken bars, and we did it because there was no other solution, because we were addicted to debauchery and we loved chaos, and in short because we didn’t give a damn about the gossip of wagging tongues, of those prophetesses of doom who claimed that only the hopeless went to drink in such dens.

At any rate, if the spree ended for reasons beyond our control — as in the days of the dictatorships when the soldiers imposed states of siege and decreed prohibition — then you had to grit your teeth and take to walking, praying to the saints not to fall asleep on some corner of the villa, because at those hours forgotten by the hand of God there prowled the burglars, the gangs and the lovers of other people’s property, who could rob you even of your shoes. It happened to me once when I fell asleep in front of the university dining hall, though the thieves — who, incidentally, were wearing masks — managed to make off only with the left shoe. But however you look at it, you had to turn in, and that was that.

The Day After

And what might one say of the day after? It was no joke: it took a colossal effort to recover from the flatulent and all but comatose state in which one found oneself, prostrate in bed, frightened as a ghost at the imminent visit of Doctor Delirium Tremens, with violent spasms and convulsions, tormented by epileptic cramps, trembling like a sheet of corrugated iron from the effects of hyperacusis, and to top it all off with no control over our vents, which discharged gases in bubbles laden with vapors that stank of pestilence. And as if that weren’t enough, neither cold compresses wrapped around the forehead, nor poultices, nor intravenous drips, still less suppositories, could diminish the effects of the nearly fifty degrees of fever brought on by the microbes of contagious nausea.

Many of them, the inexperienced ones, tried to recover by resorting to thaumaturgic cures or in the most provincial manner possible, drinking a half-boiled lemonade stirred with a little brown sugar and sprinkled with molecules of alikal or Alka-Seltzer, trusting with blind faith in the fallacy of the advertisements that proclaimed these remedies an effective antidote to the effects of drunkenness; and so they drank those fizzing liquids as though they were purifying transfusions, to expel the miseries of the hangover. If they had none of those foreign remedies on hand, they’d send the maid or the younger sister to the corner apothecary to buy half a dozen mejorales and desenfriolitos to relieve the fever and reduce the recurring assaults of those criminal migraines which, left untended, could crack a skull wide open.

We, on the other hand — the professional revelers, the PhDs in debauchery — opted for the most natural and healthful course: we resorted to the experiment proven and ratified by decades of experience, which consisted of making our way, somewhere around half past ten in the morning, to the salteña shop El Hornito — on Calle Linares, across from the Bazar de los Pozos, which according to family lore once comprised, along with nearly the whole block, the property of this scribbler’s forebears — to slake the reigning thirst with a papaya Salvietti and to blunt a third-world hunger with those famous little saltucas which, being so tiny, fit three to a hand, and whose socially accepted custom was to eat six and pay for only four.

Curing the Chaqui

After that protocolary gastro-culinary act, the occasion required us to prowl the surroundings of the Plaza del Regocijo or to make endless circuits of the old boulevard until we bumped into some possessor of the five most important words in the endearing vernacular: “we’ve got to cure the chaqui.”

Around the old quarter of the city there exist a great many bars and restaurants where a man could soothe the effects of a hangover, but two establishments held preeminence on account of the strategic location of their premises.

The Club Internacional, which is nothing of the sort, situated right on the main square, was very easy to enter provided one was a member of the club; otherwise one had to be invited in by some member in order to gain admittance and thus be able to sit in those leather armchairs from the year of the bugle and sample the “tapados” — the San Pedro, the Majuelos — and the odd dusty bottle of whisky or Argentine wine. Let it be noted that such beverages were only broken out to celebrate the fall of the dictator of the moment or upon the death of a bishop, because in those days bottled liquors with corks were drinks that only the moneyed and the members of the moldering Potosí aristocracy could afford; but which, when all was said and done, after three drinks and a chat in the urinals turned out to be just another common garden-variety joint where people played cacho and talked bullshit exactly as in any other den in the villa.

A few blocks farther up, at the corner of Chuquisaca and Padilla, stood the Galey, domiciled on the second floor of a typical colonial house. It was a classic establishment, furnished with comfortable armchairs and sofas to accommodate its “distinguished” clientele, composed mostly of judges and legal hacks who came to the bar as though it were the supreme court, doubtless to escape their suits and lawsuits, and because it was moreover very conveniently located near the offices of the shysters.

This bar was much celebrated for its spectacular pichelitas and its delicious grilled kidneys. The pichelitas in question were a mixture prepared with lemon juice and bulk singani, stirred with a little sugar in small glass pitchers that the owner, don Acuti Pérez, would shake up and down and left and right like a lottery urn; and with those cardinal movements he generated a kind of miniature whirlpool in the pitcher’s belly, so that when he poured the liquid out into glasses so tiny they resembled a tailor’s thimbles, a white foam rose and gave the impression of a fine pisco sour or a legendary French champagne.

Another feature of the Galey was that it was governed by strict business hours, which were altered only during the city’s anniversary and every February 29th of the leap years. The place threw open its doors at eleven in the morning and closed them punctually at three in the afternoon, not a minute more nor a minute less, regardless of the tantrums and entreaties of certain customers who wanted, quite literally, to drink like lawyers — “until we lose all judgment and lie strewn on the floor like case files.”

Doña Laura’s

By this point it would be perhaps half past four in the afternoon. The reddened skies had given birth to a magical dusk, one of those in which even time itself gets lost in the distance of the horizon, and it was the propitious hour to put in an appearance at doña Laura’s establishment (may she rest in peace). We would go practically flying, like whistles propelled by haste, paying no heed to the envious stares nor to the muttering of the less fortunate.

The moment we reached the artisans’ market on Calle Sucre, one began to catch, in air nearly frozen with cold, the smells of lamb shoulders, the aromas of ajíes de gallina and the essences of cold cuts, finely complemented by the soporific perfume of offal broths. This whole cornucopia of effluvia promised to warm the frigid afternoon and to impregnate the entire city with the emanations of those sensational dishes and drinks, to such a degree that the exaltations of those fragrances were like a spell hard to shake off: they were worse than the enchantment of some libertine witch, dragging us along involuntarily the way magnets drag metals.

Once we were riveted to the chairs of doña Laura’s bar, at the end of Calle Sucre, very near the infantry regiment and across from the Capitán Rojas stadium, we did not merely devote ourselves to the task of finishing off the spirituous liquids; we also applied ourselves to competing in the ancient sport of sapo or in the traditional cacho, which invariably led to “carrying on” — but solely and exclusively if someone invoked one of the axioms of the sacred trinity: “we’ll knock one back,” the ritual of the champinchada, or the obligatory “bottoms up, brother.”

The pilgrimage to doña Laura’s ended, more or less, depending on the size of one’s pocket, around seven in the evening. This was the hour when the retreat began, groping our way, crawling and rolling in puddles of other people’s piss and vomit, and, dazed, continuing to shoulder ourselves against the walls of the houses lined up along both sides of the serpentine Calle Sucre. We had to turn in, and barely managed it, while simultaneously railing at the top of our lungs against the colonial architects for having failed to foresee that individuals in this sovereign state of motor impairment needed broad avenues in which to stagger toward their destination.

El Paso de los Toros

Yet in most attempts the act of turning in ended almost where it began, because a mere few paces away stood the sadly famous bar El Paso de los Toros. Sad, because it was a joint of little consequence whose specialty was selling singanis manufactured from the leavings of the grapes of the neighboring valleys, known to all the world by the name of “hogs,” and because with its yellowed, soot-blackened façade it looked like a botched tracing of the famous chicharronería of La Paz. Famous, on account of the free-for-alls that broke out on the second floor between the regulars of the establishment and the quarrelsome patrons of the Liz Tigres bar around the corner, who came looking for altercations and brawls and who, after three drinks, would grow so violent that they wanted to take by the horns the bulls on the posters pasted to the walls. And tragic, because hundreds of the intoxicated ended their night injured, since at the hour of turning in they rolled like snowballs, spewing up their very consciences, down the steep, blood-drenched stairs of that godforsaken place.

The Boulevard

A block beyond, an inescapable trap, stood the imposing corner of the fathers of the fatherland, which marked the beginning of the old promenade of the boulevard, modeled on the ramblas of Barcelona. Those four flagstoned streets bereft of sidewalks, together with their surrounding arteries, constituted without a doubt the most famous passage and at the same time the most dangerous perimeter of the Villa Imperial. That chaotic esplanade, brimming with amusement and enchantment, had as its epicenter the popular sandwich shop La Calavera, on Calle Matos, three paces below the restaurant of la Charqui María, and it ended at the other extreme, at the corner of the aforementioned liberators, right where you collide with the Franciscan school adjoining the wooden cross that grows embedded in the side wall of the church of San Francisco.

So they say, very few had ever managed to traverse the boulevard from end to end without first falling struck down by the smell of cinnamon and Camargo singani of the calientitos dispensed right and left at the Caldera del Diablo, an establishment whose motto was “if you don’t fall, you slip”; or without being taken prisoner in one of the establishments of the popular trifecta, comprising the venerable Unión Obrera and her first cousins, the Fabriles hall and the Unificada — which, quite apart from being bars of impeccable lineage, were like libraries stocked with wisdom, armed with legends implausible even to the most habitual drinkers of the villa, and which were moreover the conspiratorial dens where the workers, the proletarians and the students gathered in cases of emergency or in the celebrations of the electoral contests.

All of these illustrious establishments cohabited thick as thieves, cheek by jowl with one another, along that open avenue of vice and perdition, distributed at a treacherous equidistance very difficult to dodge. They were like rivers impossible to ford, like a labyrinth with no way out; they were, literally, the tentacles of the octopus of misfortune, with which they seized within their inner sanctums every aimless vagabond reveler, whom they lured into their precincts with siren songs and compelled to drink that last glass, the colloquial one for the stirrup.

Now, how one ended up after the act of turning in is another kettle of fish and the subject of another essay. Viscarra said it before us: we were anthropologists because what we loved were the antros — the dives.