VALPARAÍSO (13)
III.
Fate’s Angels
21.
Valparaiso’s only prison, the Complejo Penitenciario, looms on a street high in the cerros called Camino La Pólvora, Gunpowder Road. Following my brother’s arrest, I went there every day at noon, Alex’s lone visitor but for a state-appointed lawyer. His arraignment hearing was to take place the following Friday on charges of having murdered Arturo Wright. No bail had been set.
I’d awaken early on those days and walk to the harbor in search of coffee - Nescafe as often as not in Chile, with water or heated milk – then head up “the infinite hills,” avoiding Cerro Alegre and Arturo’s house, taking instead the creaky ascensores of Bellavista, Espiritu Santo, Reina Victoria, or Muelle Baron, into crevices and canyons among the awakening poor. No hillock or bluff to hide behind, only the sheer scarp of the cerros, the strip of el plan below, the sea’s unblinking azure gaze. Descent always landed me back at the waterfront among fish heads and refuse, looking out at the ships in the harbor, trying to grasp what had happened, and what Alex was telling me each day.
My morning rambles would end back at the Residenciál Valdivia where I’d meet Marimar, returning from her night shift. There we’d cling to each other in loss and confusion. She was sleeping at home to keep her mother company since her father had shipped out on a copper freighter bound for Hamburg. I kept recalling my lone glimpse of that sailor climbing Cerro Concepción, a canvas knapsack on his broad shoulder.
On my prison visits, I’d sit on the other side of the Plexiglass partition separating us, listening to Alex, shorn and somber in blue prison scrubs, tell me of his missing weeks.
The day he’d arrived in Valparaíso, Alex had wandered the cerros looking for a house shaped like a boat. After some hours, hopelessly lost, he found his way to the German Hospital and asked for the nurse Harry had told him about, but it was Marimar’s night off. He slept somewhere in the cerros, he didn’t remember where, and the next day drifted through the city until nightfall when he returned to the hospital and found Marimar. She told him how to find Arturo Wright’s house but warned him that he might have already left on his yearly trip to the Bolivian jungle.
That night Alex climbed Cerro Alegre to Arturo’s house. There was a light on inside, he said, but when he knocked nobody answered.
“What were you thinking?” I asked Alex through the glass.
“I needed to know if Harry had been right. That this Arturo Wright was really Dryden.”
“What were you going to do if he was?”
“Face him.”
“Did it matter, after all these years?”
Alex looked at me. “Has it never not mattered? Look at our father. And what about you?”
I thought of Lara Tree’s charge that day at the beach in Santa Monica. No, none of us had ever put it behind us: Alex loveless and alone with his music collection; Dad with his sandcastle conspiracies; me mired in a pallid writer’s half-life. We all awaited release.
Alex told me how he lingered outside Arturo’s house that night then tried the door, which to his surprise opened. Inside he found the house empty, just the single light on, and a note from Arturo to Marimar in Spanish on the kitchen table telling her he had left for Bolivia by bus that afternoon.
Alex stayed there that night, napping fitfully on the couch, jumping up to stare at the framed photo of the man in the jungle, trying to read through the lean figure in the wrinkled suit to a boy at eighteen: Dryden Poe with his heroin and his dogs. He saw Harry Winter’s warped, unstrung cello body leaning in a corner at the top of the stairs. Rummaging through photos and books in Spanish, serums and manuals, Alex began to doubt that Dryden could ever have given birth to this Arturo Wright. In the same drawer I’d opened, he came upon the Beretta pistol, wrapped in its cloth. He took it out, as I had, thought of taking it, then replaced it.
Somewhere after dawn he stood sleepless at the little upstairs porthole window, watching light spread over the harbor, when he heard a sound below, the closing of a door. He turned and saw a shadow ripple across Harry Winter’s cello body.
Then he heard, clearly, “Rima.”
He put his hands over his ears, willing the music to stop. Instead the shadow re-crossed the cello frame.
Alex saw a thin boy at the foot of the caracole stairs, dancing one of Arturo’s puppets to the music coming from a cassette player.
“Who are you?” the boy said, looking up.
“A friend of Arturo’s.”
“Me too. I’m Luis.”
“Luis, could you please turn that music off?”
Luis was thirteen, he said, and lived two houses away. When Alex told him he was looking for Arturo, Luis took out old creased maps of Chile and Bolivia and spread them on the floor. “Look. He goes the same way every year,” he said, tracing Arturo’s route to the jungle.
After the boy left, Alex stuffed the maps and a kitchen knife into his bag. He left the house, hiked down the cerros, and boarded a bus heading up the long Chilean coast.
“I could have flown to La Paz and caught up with him there,” Alex said, as a prison bell signaled the end of our visit. “But I was less than a day behind him.”
The bus rumbled north through little resort towns, past beaches tainted with green sand from copper runoff. Copiapo, Antofogasta, Iquiqui. Long, bleak desert stretches then ocean again. Did Arturo Wright really go on these journeys to help people to see?
Twenty-five hours later, Alex disembarked, stiff and cramping, in Arica, Chile’s northernmost city. He slept that night in a harborfront residenciál run by evangelical Christians, and the next morning he boarded a bus heading east, across the Andes, to Bolivia.
High glacial lakes mirroring snowpeaks. Wool-hatted Aymara Indians herding vicuñas on desolate scarps. Did Dryden Poe see all this too on his yearly crossings? Had he seen the same view the day before?
22.
On the second day after Alex’s arrest, I made the call I dreaded.
“Dad, I’m still in Chile, Alex is here too.”
I told him Alex had found Dryden Poe alive and now Dryden was dead and Alex was being held as a suspect.
Heartbreaking to hear our father, who so loved his boys, break down sobbing. “Good God,” he said at last. “What happened?”
“I don’t know yet. The arraignment is in a week. They’ll present evidence. He sends his love.”
“Did he do it?”
“He says he didn’t.”
“What kind of shape is he in?”
“Shell-shocked. Lucid.”
I heard the old mania revving in Dad’s voice. “Bastards,” he said. “I should have known. I have to get down there.” Housebound with a broken hip, Dad wasn’t going anywhere. “We can’t take this lying down, Garth,” he croaked. “I’ll get to work on my end up here.”
I knew what that meant: ferreting in the files, massaging the secret data.
Afterwards I thought of calling Devi in Colorado then decided it would serve no purpose and could wait. Or maybe I just couldn’t face it.
The next day, in the visitors’ room on Gunpowder Road, Alex told me of his arrival at dusk in La Paz, Bolivia’s capital city, clinging to its walls at 12,000 feet beneath snowcapped Illimani. He took a taxi to the Hostal República, a converted governor’s mansion circled on one of Arturo’s maps. He found the name inscribed in the desk register the day before, but the clerk told him Señor Wright had checked out that morning.
Alex wandered the darkening city among small, robust Quechua and Aymara women in layered skirts and bowler hats, thinking for the first time since he’d left Berkeley of Cool Earth, Harry Winter, Dad, me. Dizzy and nauseous from soroche, altitude sickness, he found an internet café off the Plaza Murillo but could only stare at the screen, unable to muster words to tell us where he was or why he was there.
The next day, he boarded a minibus down a harrowing mountain road known as Camino de la Muerte, into the tropical region of Las Yungas. From the town of Coroico, following Arturo’s maps, he traveled east into the Bolivian Amazon by van, barge and canoe: three days through regions of coca and quinine, rain-forested lowlands swarming with yellow flies, fire ants and howler monkeys, past jungle towns whose names still echo in my dreams: Chulumani, Rurrenebaque, Mapiri. Down rainy rivers thick with piranhas and pink river dolphins - Río Beni, Río Madidi, Río Mamoré – through misty cloud forests of parrots and tree ferns, macaws and tapirs: habitats that merge in my imaginings with Green Mansions, and the exile Abel’s love for a bird girl.
Near the Brazilian border, by a fast-running blackwater tributary of the Río Beni, close to the last place marked on Arturo Wright’s map, Alex, feverish and sick, fell into unconsciousness.
He awoke in a clearing to see a lean, bearded white man standing over him, tapping an upraised syringe with his fingernail.
Alex screamed, then fell back into fever sleep.