American Visa by Juan de Recacoechea

with three cups of jasmine tea.
    â€œIt’ll take awhile to walk off all that food. You’re gonna catch a cold, it’s chilly out.”
    â€œYou should see me at work in just a bikini and panty hose.”
    She paid the owner, an obsequious Chinese guy with a cynical smile à la Fu Manchu. He offered us a cigarette on our way out. Nightfall appeared behind tiny amber clouds that gently covered the city. We strolled in silence down Avenida del Ejército until we arrived at Las Velas, a bustling outdoor food court. The wind suddenly started to gust and shortly thereafter the rain came. Balls of hail began to fall and then a veritable scourge from heaven was unleashed upon Miraflores. As everyone ran for cover, we hailed a minibus headed for Villa de La Merced.
    Blanca giggled like a schoolgirl at the deafening sound of hail smashing against the roof of the minibus. Streams formed along the edges of the sidewalks and the water rushed violently south. The driver barely managed to force the door closed. It was as if the passengers had all morphed into an amphibious mass. Blanca’s buttocks were funneling heat into my lap. She smiled at me knowingly. The driver cussed in Aymara and Spanish as the minibus, a 1970s-era clunker, inched along painfully. Nobody dared get out. The water engulfed the tires and threatened to seep into the motor. It took us a whole hour to reach the red light district, where Blanca and I got off along with five other prostitutes headed for work.
    The hailstorm stopped, but the rain kept falling. Villa Fátima looked like Oruro in its worst days, desolate and cloaked in shadow. Blanca walked up to a food stand and greeted a woman who must have been a twenty-year veteran of the pickup business. Her face looked sad and carnivalesque, like a painted mask. After eyeing me from head to toe, she told me she had never been to Oruro, but that she once worked in an exotic dance club in Caracas. For dinner, she ate a bowl of soup mixed with rainwater in which pieces of potato and a few strings of meat floated like tiny islands.
    Blanca bought a pack of gum before we headed down an excruciatingly steep byway that dead-ended at a cliff by the edge of a garbage dump. In the doorway to the brothel, a drunken bouncer eyed me suspiciously. The house had an enormous patio, a lounge with a dance floor, and private rooms on all sides. Clearly, it had been built for only one reason. I could tell it was somewhat respectable because there weren’t any half-breed tramps. About twenty guys leaned back against the walls, hands in their pockets, checking out the harlots.
    â€œThose whack-offs come here every day,” Blanca explained. “They stand there for hours without moving and don’t spend a cent.”
    Blanca’s arrival in the ring stirred up a small commotion among the regulars at the dive, which was called El Faro.
    â€œI’ll go change,” Blanca said. “Wait for me in the lounge.”
    The lounge was strategically illuminated by colorful lightbulbs. This worked in the girls’ favor, since you could only partially make out their bodies in that light. If you were to see them in the light of day, they were the kind of girls you would run away from. On one side of the room stood a mounted stage on which a band had set up the equipment. I made out an organ, a set of drums, three electric guitars, and a microphone. Several members of the band, dressed in cheesy blue tuxedos, busied themselves with hooking up the sound system. The lead singer, who was about the size of a jockey, smiled smugly as he tested out the microphone. In the middle of the room a half-dozen whores warmed their bottoms by the fire of a gas stove. Another dozen or so were crammed in back beside a small window, waiting for their drinks. The madam, an old wrinkly hag, kept watch over her pupils from a tiny bar situated in one of the corners, her lips forming a bitter and disdainful grin. She jotted