Holy City Read Free

won’t lift a finger for you. In factI’ll throw you out right now if you don’t tell me the truth.” Ana squirms on the blue corduroy armchair as if she has sat on an anthill. She starts to blink as though suffering an allergy attack so strong not even corticoids can calm it. She is suddenly if fleetingly aware of the seriousness of what she has done. “The truth or the street,” says Verónica, hurrying her up because she still has not lost all hope that the son of a bitch will come back, ring the bell, plead for forgiveness on the entry phone.
    Slowly but surely, she hears the truth. She has to disentangle it from all the unconvincing pouts her witness puts on, all her half-truths, her unwillingness to tell her everything. But the truth arrives.
    So Verónica concludes, without fear of being mistaken, that Matías Zamorano has already been dropped from Counselor Pox’s team and by his own men. It was not a good idea of Ana’s to try to double-cross him: could not have been worse, in fact, given these first results. “You can’t mess with those who run the game,” Verónica tells her; if they have reached that position, it is because they have learned a thing or two, because they have people to guard their backs, their asses, the whole caboodle.
    Veronica does not tell Ana this last part. She does not want to make her cry for real. She bites her tongue. You’re a racist Bolivian bitch, she would tell her if she really wanted to make her cry. But it is the truth she wants, not tears.
    â€œI’ve had it up to my ovaries with all the crap you Bolivians get up to. You should have stayed in Santa Cruz de la Sierra.”
    â€œBolivia doesn’t exist. Tomorrow or the next day, Bolivia is going to be more in the news than Iraq or Palestine. A dark night is coming, so don’t talk to me about my home country: they’re nothing more than a bunch of indians on the warpath, the lost tribe of the
puna
. They think Viracocha is going to come and save them—they’re worse than the Arabs.”
    Now Verónica understands what is keeping Ana from seriouslycrying: her hatred. She hates the place she has escaped from, that prosperous city on the Bolivian flatlands inhabited by cattle ranchers, corrupt bureaucrats and drugs barons. That was where only a year earlier she had been crowned Miss Bolivia: the blond, slender Ana Torrente, one meter seventy-two centimeters tall, as shapely as high mountains, light-green eyes, a cherub with tropical lips and tits. She signed a contract to take her round the world, “the ambassadress of Bolivian culture and beauty,” as the presenter said in the Santa Cruz amphitheater to applause, ovations, camera flashes, microphones and a contract she signed while still blinded by all the floodlights, deafened by the shouting and the fireworks set off to celebrate her coronation.
    Poor pale-faced Cinderella. The next morning, although her hangover made it hard to focus, she managed to read the small print of her contract. The world promised to her was not the whole planet—it was a tour of Ecuador, Peru and the Bolivian interior, a night in every miserable village of its jungles and high plateaux. She was the bait for the campaign trails of unknown politicians, ambitious subalterns of a power installed to help the affairs of the rich and powerful who do travel in the real world.
    Hatred, not tears, lends Ana that look of a fallen angel which so bedazzled Matías Zamorano he completely lost his head and thought he could double-cross the Pox.
    â€œThere’s a lot of money in it for you if you help me out. It’s a good deal, if I can get it off the ground.”
    Stony-faced, Verónica. “I disconnect my emotional hemisphere,” she says of herself when she listens to possible clients before deciding whether or not to rescue them from hell. She settles in her chair by the desk and listens. She is only