Latin America Diaries Read Free Page B

blankets—a vague chill enters our bones.
    The next morning our boots are frozen and our feet hurt. The water in the toilets and even in our flasks has frozen. Unkempt and with dirty faces, we feel slightly anxious as we make our way to the dining car, but the faces of our traveling companions put us at ease.
    At 4 in the afternoon, the train approaches the gorge in which La Paz nestles. A small and very beautiful city spreads through the valley’s rugged terrain, with the eternally snowcapped figure of Illimani watching over it. The final few kilometers take over an hour to complete. The train seems fixed on a tangent to avoid the city, but then it turns and continues its descent.
    It’s a Saturday afternoon and the people we have been recommended to see are hard to find, so we spend the time changing our clothes and ridding ourselves of the journey’s grime.
    We begin Sunday by going to see the people who have been recommended to us and making contact with the Argentine community.
    La Paz is the Shanghai of the Americas. Many adventurers and a marvelous range of nationalities have come here to stagnate or thrive in this polychromatic, mestiza city that determines the destiny of this country.
    The so-called fine folk, the cultured people, have been surprised by events and curse the attention now being paid to the Indian and the mestizo, but I divined in all of them a faint spark of nationalist enthusiasm with regard to some of the government’s actions. 4
    Nobody denies that the situation represented by the power of the three tin mine giants had to come to an end, and young people believe that this has been a step forward in the struggle for greater equality between the people and the wealthy.
    On the evening of July 15, there was a long and boring torchlight procession—a kind of demonstration—although it was interesting because of the way people expressed their support by firing shots from Mausers, or Piri-pipi , the terrible repeating guns.
    The next day there was a never-ending parade of workers’ guilds, schools and unions, with the regular song of Mausers. Every few steps, one of the leaders of the companies into which the procession was divided would shout, “Compañeros of such-and-such-a-guild, long live Bolivia! Glory be to the early martyrs of our independence, Glory to Pedro Domingo Murillo, Glory to Guzmán!, Glory to Villarroel!” 5 This recitative was delivered wearily, and accordingly a chorus of monotonous voices responded. It was apicturesque demonstration, but not particularly vital. Their weary gait and general lack of enthusiasm drained it of any vitality, while, according to those in the know, the energetic faces of the miners were missing.
    On another morning we took a truck to Las Yungas. Initially, we climbed 4,600 meters to a place called the Summit, and then came down slowly along a cliff road flanked almost the entire way by a vertical precipice. We spent two magnificent days in Las Yungas, but we could have done with two women to provide the eroticism missing from the greenery that assaulted us everywhere we looked. On the lush mountain slopes, which plunged several hundred meters to the river below and were protected by an overcast sky, were scatterings of coconut palms with their ringed trunks; banana trees that, from the distance, looked like green propellers rising from the jungle; orange and other citrus trees; coffee trees, rosy red with their beans, and other fruit and tropical trees. All this was offset by the spindly form of the papaya tree, its static shape somehow reminiscent of a llama, or of other tropical fruit trees.
    On one patch of land, Salesian priests were running a farm school. One of them, a courteous German, showed us around. A huge quantity of fruit and vegetables were being cultivated and tended very carefully. We didn’t see the children, who were in class, but when he spoke of similar farms in Argentina and Peru I