American Visa by Juan de Recacoechea

love. My teacher’s salary wasn’t enough to cover even our basic necessities anymore, and so I left the rich and precise language of Keats to work in contraband, a line of work that’s looked down upon but that brought in three times more money for me.
    That still wasn’t enough to get Antonia’s attention. She slept alone in a separate room and couldn’t have cared less whether or not I went out whoring. One day she declared she was leaving for Argentina to reflect on her future, on the essence of her womanhood, and a bunch of other nonsense. When she said goodbye, we clasped hands and she kissed my son on the forehead. I haven’t seen her since. Years later, people told me she was living in Mendoza with some guy who sold empanadas on the road to Chile. One Christmas, I got a photo in the mail of her beside a lake. Poor thing . . . she revealed that the trip was helping her find herself. With her callow, empty bumpkin’s mind, I don’t know what the hell she was going to find. Luis Alberto Carlos had become an easy-going, handsome, dark-skinned kid and he was getting bigger; soon he’d grown taller than my shoulder. I did a brainwashing job on him to make sure he didn’t feel anything for Antonia. He burned all her pictures and proclaimed that she was dead to him.
    After graduating from high school at the age of eighteen, my son got the preposterous idea of moving to Canada and nearly pulled it off. A cousin from my mother’s side owned a fur shop in New Orleans and was married to an American. He came down to Oruro on vacation once and hit it off with my boy. He told me that Bolivia was going nowhere and that if I wanted a better future for Luis Alberto Carlos, he could take him along to Louisiana as his helper to teach him the fur business. If the kid felt like studying, he would have the time and the money for it. The idea hardly made me jump for joy, but it was a good option for my son’s college education.
    My relationship with my son was based on mutual respect: He was my companion, my friend . . . and sometimes my confessor. I didn’t have a lot to give him. Contraband sounds romantic, like a lot of money, but that’s only true for the guy who puts down the dough himself and then sells the merchandise. I was just a middleman, a ten-percent-plus-travel-expenses kind of guy.
    I let my son go even though it meant I’d be as lonely as a priest in the boondocks. It was best for him to take his chances on the American dream. Just like Borges, the Argentine, I’ve always had a weakness for Anglo-Saxons. Not so much the Brits as the Americans, most of all because of their crime fiction. So the fur dealer had his helper, and my son promised to write often and to send me a ticket as soon as he could scrape a few bucks together. Back then it was relatively easy to do the paperwork to go to the United States. I don’t think my son had to go through as much agony as I did later. In spite of his promise, I didn’t hear a peep out of Luis Alberto Carlos for three months. Then one day I received a four-page letter in small handwriting that read like a last will and testament. He explained that he’d left New Orleans because my cousin was exploiting him like a Chinese laborer and paying him a pittance. So, it turned out my cousin was a real son of a bitch. Luis Alberto Carlos set off for Chicago, where he worked in a gas station and later in a hotel. He said the winters were freezing there with biting winds. The manager of the hotel, an old Armenian hag who smelled like olives, wanted to get into his pants, so he was planning to head back east and relocate to Miami, a tropical paradise inhabited by a teeming mass of Hispanics.
    Another six months passed before I received a second letter, this time two pages long: He was studying Business Administration in college and waiting tables at a seafood restaurant. His tips were outstanding and his female coworkers