La Paz

La Paz, La Paz…where do you start with La Paz? And, more to the point, where do you end? The seat of the Bolivian government – as opposed to the capital, status retained by the august Sucre – is the city of my youth, the place where I knocked on the gates of life and life opened them to me. It didn’t open them wide, mind you, but wide enough to let me in, with full citizenship rights even though I was yet to turn sixteen when I left the family home to try my luck in La Paz. That was in the mid-seventies, when you still had to be twenty-one to be legally deemed an adult. Here I studied, worked, struggled, suffered, healed, made friends, fell in love, suffered again. Here I attuned myself to the mystical beauty of the city’s surroundings, the wild contrasts of its topography and the contained violence latent in its inequalities. I would not have left La Paz but for that foolhardy young man’s wanderlust, that mirage that deluded me into thinking that fulfilment was only to be attained in foreign countries. What a fool I was. If only I had known what leaving La Paz would get me to! But leave I did, and more than four decades were to pass before I returned for anything better than a flying visit. Returning as a sixtysomething, I ruminate on the calamitous turn my life was to take, as I take on the calamities that have befallen La Paz, too. Would I have survived its anarchy, its merciless weather and, worst of all, its transformation from open-gated bohemian enclave to forbidding battleground of social and racial strife?

The two icons of my nostalgic longings are not what they were when I was a resident devotee. One, the high plateau, vast temple of cosmic worship that inspired the pantheism of my youth, is, of course, still there, but its hieratic expanse is now urbanised to such an extent that you have to travel a long way to leave the city behind and experience the Altiplano. Not only has it been built on: the starkness of what has been built has laden it with an oppressive character that belies the amplitude of its geography. The other icon is mount Illimani, colossus that presides over the city with prodigious majesty. Illimani is where it has always been, but it is no longer ubiquitous: the city’s upward expansion has hidden the mountain behind a forest of concrete sequoias that not even Illimani, the lord of the Andes, can get through. You can no longer see mount Illimani from much of La Paz. The snow-capped divinity can no longer watch over its subjects. The body of the city has sprawled so much, sideways and especially upwards, that its soul has been banished, leaving its inhabitants at the mercy of themselves and of each other. No wonder life is the maelstrom it is.

Instead of those two divinities that once defined it, there are now two pagan fiends that dominate La Paz. One is road traffic; the city is ruled by the motor vehicle, and none more oppressively than the minibus. The buses of yore have all but disappeared, giving rise to a swarm of privately-owned fifteen-seaters that trundle passengers up and down the city for a pittance. The state subsidy on fuel makes the business viable in spite of the regulated fare, held down against market forces at 2.60 bolivianos for a cross-city ride (about 30 pence). There is an attempt at publicly-run transport, the Puma Katari, a proper bus like La Paz had not seen before, spacious, clean and well organised. It is the apple in the eye of the city council, which much of the time is run by the opposition. This makes it a symbol of independent political thought, a hazardous thing to be in today’s Bolivia. In 2019, the last time there was major unrest, pro-regime squads invaded bus depots and burned down much of the fleet. It has been painstakingly restored since, and now, like before the troubles, to travel on it is an oasis of order in the prevailing mayhem. The Puma Katari’s drawback is its limited reach. Lucky is the time your intended route goes from and to a place Puma Katari can take you. Any attempt at expanding the service would meet fierce opposition from the minibus trade union, and anybody who has lived in Bolivia knows what transport unions can do to the country if their wrath is incurred. They have been known to bring the whole country to a standstill.

So for most travel needs you have to commend yourself to the minibuses. They go in most directions and quite frequently, often several at a time. You need to be civil; buenos días and buenas tardes are de rigueur, a necessary lubricant for all the twisting and bending needed to get in and out. In the vehicle there is no central or lateral aisle leading to the back seats; the space that may have served that purpose is now occupied by extra fold-up places. This means that when somebody from a back seat needs to alight several passengers have to get out first, the person coming behind having the duty to fold up the seat vacated by the person who was in front. I have never witnessed any complaint or impatience at this cumbersome choreography. But worse is what happens between stops. The minibuses’ suspension is virtually nonexistent, which is painfully evident as the vehicle goes over the myriad potholes that grace La Paz’s streets. No part of your anatomy is spared the effect of each jolt. Add to that the paucity of legroom; in the streets of today’s Bolivia I would not stand out as particularly tall, but inside a minibus my height and leg length feel distinctly outsize. I have to bend into elaborate contortions to knot my legs into the space available, which invariably involves hitting my head against the roof every time I try to rearrange myself. The people of La Paz have made a name for themselves for their vociferous anger at the slightest offence from the powerful, but in the minibus they bear their cross with a stoicism you could describe as saintly.

The collective voice is something to be heeded in this city that in 1781 showed its collective determination by withstanding a 184-day-long siege, and in 1979 fought in the streets for 16 days to repel a new military insurrection. Now the rumble of that voice makes itself heard so often that rarely does a day go by without a street protest of some kind. This takes chiefly one of two forms: the demonstration and the roadblock. In either case the city or part of it is brought to a standstill. Some of the grievances are not homegrown, but are brought to the seat of government for maximum effect. The miners’ cooperatives operating in the north of the La Paz department are adept at staging coordinated roadblocks designed to paralyse the city. Their current grievance lies with the government’s attempts to regulate and tax the gold industry.

As you approach the main avenue at the bottom of the ravine in which the city is perched, the first warning of unrest is the sound of fireworks. Not those of gay colourful display, but ones that explode thunderously unleashing a plume of grey smoke. They may be intended to draw the public’s attention, but nobody can be immune to their intimidating effect, particularly on those old enough to remember the armed battles of the 1970s. If your business is pressing and you cannot turn back at these warnings, your approach will soon show you what the protest is about. You may see it in what the protestors are wearing, whose death they are chanting to and, if you get close enough to read their banners, what they are demanding. You will not see any police, unless they are there to guard a government building. The party currently in government being one that bulldozed its way into power through a relentless campaign of street protests, it is perhaps to its credit that today it lets the unrest be with no attempt at crowd control. A far cry from the practices of the military dictatorships of my youth. If today’s protests were less frequent I expect people would welcome the security forces’ impassiveness as a boon of the return to democracy, but, given their almost daily frequency, I have found myself wishing a strong hand came to impose some order. Many citizens express the same feeling in private.

The other fiend is commerce. If you live in central La Paz, you could be forgiven for thinking that selling goods on the streets is what most of the population does for a living. The pavements brim over with stalls, which are illegal and therefore susceptible to confiscation on the main road, but firmly established as you move uptown. Around traditional streets such as Santa Cruz and Illampu the pavement stalls and kiosks are inviolable. Up on Illampu and Max Paredes they encroach on the road itself, and at weekends they simply take over the road, blocking it to traffic, as is the case on Fridays at Rodríguez and on Saturdays at the more crucial Illampu and Max Paredes. It is around these low-brow, commerce-ridden streets that I have gravitated in my stays in La Paz, and this has been one of the main differences between my teenage years and my grownup experience of the city.

As a rule, retail is zoned by areas. There are sectors for mobile phones (where Santa Cruz meets Eloy Salmón), for white goods (down Eloy Salmón), for furniture (Vicente Ochoa), for clothes (up Tumusla), for alcoholic drinks (up Manco Kápac), for witchcraft accessories (where Santa Cruz meets Linares) and, of course, for food (all the area around Rodríguez, including the eponymous market). There are more detailed subdivisions but that is probably enough information for the purposes. Thus far the zoning regulates itself, backed by a tradition of decades, if not more. Where the assignation of zones goes topsy-turvy is in the deluge of jackets, jumpers and coats on Illampu towards Plaza Eguino. If you are looking for one such item at a discounted price this is where you want to be. If not, you may find it challenging to walk through this area, as I had to do every morning to get to the gym on Manco Kápac. The stalls overflow the pavements onto the street. Despite the constricted road width, the unforgiving two-way traffic pushes through the crowds regardless. And there is the additional traffic of porters, youngish men bending under the weight of towering bundles of clothing on their backs. Their cargo is bound from some undisclosed depot to its designated retail outlets, and the human burden-bearers are understandably imperious in their demands for passage through the crowd.

Any sectionalisation of street retail is overridden at the approach of specific festivities, when seasonal goods take precedence over any customary zoning. More than once has it been my lot on New Year eve to wander alone along Illampu watching the stalls peddling fireworks, party hats, streamers, red knickers for love, yellow knickers for money, grapes and cherries to count in the twelve months, toy money to count at midnight and myriad more necessaries for the occasion. On such evenings the smell of palo santo smoke and other Andean ritual incenses is pervasive. The last time I engaged in such wanderings, the warm memory of happier times around a brazier impelled me to ask a tradeswoman if they were going to burn stuff in the street. With a sympathetic look on her face she told me that would be unlikely, since the tradespeople would be going home to their families before midnight. She meant well and did not know how that would resonate with me.

New Year’s eve necessaries on sale at Avenida Illampu

In a city prone to chaos, one service that works with blameless reliability is rubbish collection. The lorries do their rounds late at night, and it would take nothing short of an earthquake to break their regularity. Even if you are not standing by your window as I often am, you can tell their arrival by their unmistakable beeps and clanks which do not fail to be heard even at Christmas or on New Year’s. You are expected to dispose of your rubbish in the large green containers that have been placed at street corners and, in some areas, also between streets. They have a pedal along their bottom length which you action to lift the heavy lid. The fact that the pedal does not always work, forcing you to exert yourself to push up the lid by hand, does not mean that the idea is not splendid in principle, particularly if you have your hands full. Like the trolleys in Britain, these containers have hooks that a mechanism in the lorries engages to lift them up, tip them over and empty their contents. At a guess I would say that one of these containers must have the capacity of ten British trolleys, and they need to, since each of them serves all the residents and businesses in one length of a street.

If I dwell on the subject it is because many’s the time I had occasion to admire this reassuring regularity in the city’s disruption-prone existence, and because one of these green containers left a lasting impression on me. One fine morning I was walking down Sagárnaga and opened a container’s lid to dispose of some papers. I took a moment to adjust to what my eyes were seeing in the dark interior: a man was inside, and he was alive, and he was looking at me. His irritated expression told me that by opening the lid I was letting in unwanted light or noise or both. Feeling I had intruded, I swiftly released the pedal to let the lid slam shut. But my disquiet took a long time to subside. What was a man doing inside a rubbish container on a busy weekday morning? The height from which he had looked at me showed that he was sitting or squatting. Was he eating or relieving himself? Or was he just sitting, pondering what his life had come to? Although unwashed, unshaven and unkempt, he did not seem a man ravaged by alcohol or drugs. He could have been somebody who had lost his job — or his family, or everything — a few weeks or months before I saw him, long enough to plunge him into the depths of despair and self-neglect, but not yet long enough to give him that frazzled, sickly look of human wreckage you see in the habitual rough sleepers. The directness of his eye contact told me that he was still on this side of the threshold, that he was relating. He had only hit the depths, but still had a chance of redemption. I walked on down Sagárnaga nursing an unsettling mix of sympathy and disgust, but also a distinct awareness that my feelings were of much lesser significance than those which had thrust that man into the green rubbish container.

Back in the seventies, strong, enriching friendships had marked my life in this city. The memory of them remains fixed, but in this second decade of the twenty-first century I had to face the stark reality that the friends were dead, or had migrated, or were, to all intents and purposes, no longer friends. There were plenty of bear hugs, fond reminiscing and assurances of a get together that never materialised. The expressions of affection either were insincere recitations of an outworn script, or they were fleeting sparks which a half-arsed awareness of my plight was quick to stifle within minutes of the words “we must definitely get together” being said.

My lodgings were in a part of town previously little known to me: up Sagárnaga, past Illampu, past Max Paredes, in the vicinity of Plaza Gran Poder. The traditional name for this area, El Rosario, is not much in use these days. One local parish and its church, one hotel and a few other businesses bear this name, but it is not used in everyday parlance. The area up the hill from Plaza Gran Poder used to be known as Chijini, but this, too, is falling out of use. Back in the heady seventies I remember climbing up Illampu in search of a blanket, which I bought and used in the frosty Andean nights. That had been the extent of my exploration of El Rosario. Only now do I realise what I had missed in those seven years of impecunious gentility. In a city ruled by informal trade, El Rosario is the hub.

The parish and church of El Rosario, on Avenida Illampu, on an unusually quiet morning

My wake up call would come before dawn, when invisible lorries offloaded their meat onto the countless butchers that operate around Gran Poder. Heavy crates of all manner of other goods were delivered at this time, too. The bottom of Eloy Salmón has now become an extension of the foodstuffs market (Mercado Rodríguez), but the vegetables and fruit were brought by other means: wheelbarrows, trolleys and the backs of hard-working porters. The first discernible street voice I heard every morning was that of a woman shouting Leche! or, rather, Leeecheee! Although usually not up this early, more than once I peeked through the window looking for the milkmaid, but never succeeded in catching sight of her. I was left to conjure up in my mind her capacious aluminum bottle, the hand-jug she would use to measure out the litres, and, more intriguingly, the source of the precious liquid. Did it come from a farm up in the high plateau? Did a cooperative of cowherds pool together to bring their milk at some ghastly early hour to El Alto, whence my potent-voiced lady would bring it down the hill? It must have taken me about a year to discover a surprising truth: it was not leche! the voice had been saying, but llauchas! The consonants are similar, but the vowels a world apart. What is it about street vendors? The tedium of proffering the same merchandise every day must make them prone to vary their call. I can no longer remember what the men who sell the Liverpool Echo used to shout in the Merseyside evenings, but I am sure that it sounded nothing like “Liverpool” or “echo”. As to the llauchas themselves , it is a kind of pasty, much loved by true Paceños as an accompaniment to api, a liquefied maize porridge. Together they make up api con llauchas, a classic street breakfast favoured by early risers on their way to work and all-night revellers on their way home.

There is a seething aggression in much of La Paz, and many of the societal tensions that were latent in my time are now out in the open. Whichever way you may look at it — and, no less important, whichever words you manage to put it into — there is no denying that race and class are prime factors of conflict. In this setting, my presence in the streets of El Rosario could have been something of a sore thumb. Comparatively lighter-skinned, taller and skinnier than your average paceño and sporting a thinning but conspicuous head of grey hair, I am instantly marked off as an outsider and, bizarrely, as a foreigner. Many’s the time some stranger in the street buttonholed me in English, usually wanting to sell me something, or to ask for money, or simply to say hello. Me, a gringo! Where does that come from? It cannot be my clothes, since they come mostly from the smugglers’ market anybody has access to. Have my travels left their trace on my face? Hardly possible. An English friend in La Paz put it down to a matter of deportment, but I would find it hard to believe that I acquired any form of body language or stance from the Britons who surrounded me during my stay in their country, long as this was. Be that as it may, the mistaken identity did me no harm in El Rosario. Instead of the cold reception often afforded to the whities from the south end of town, I was on the whole given an indulgent, almost protective treatment. At the local shops, stalls and markets I was generally treated with something akin to lenience, not to say friendliness — heaven forbid, this is La Paz. Far from giving me any indiscreet looks, the locals affected to take no notice of me, but that they were keeping an eye out became evident whenever something out of the ordinary caught their attention. The butcher at the corner was prompt to let me know if somebody had come asking for the lady of the house I was staying at, and the potato sellers at Gran Poder warned “you missed her” if they had seen said lady walk townwards before they saw me come back home.

But no sojourn in belligerent La Paz can be free of some kind of confrontation. My most unpleasant one was over a canister of gas. In the harsh highland winter I had bought a fresh canister of gas for the house’s heater, but once connected the canister produced no gas. I went back to the shop — an egg retailer with a sideline in gas — and began to describe the problem, but the short, stout egg lady cut in abruptly to say “And? Is that my fault? I don’t make the canisters”. A little shaken at the outburst but keeping calm, I chose to explain by analogy, telling her that if she had sold me a rotten egg she would have to accept responsibility for it even though she had not laid the egg herself. But she liked the sound of that even less; instead of arguing back she opted for walking out on me. That is when I lost my cool and, as she advanced towards the street along a narrow corridor between her chest-high piles of egg cartons, I moved to block her way and said firmly “I am talking to you”. In response she threatened to scream for help, which was enough deterrent to persuade me to let her go on her way. That could have been the end of it, but, later on, as I was fumbling for my keys down came the egg lady’s mother, a weather-beaten potato seller. She may have been waiting for me, but she acted as if she was casually walking past. Muttering between her teeth as I unlocked my front door, she said that I had attacked her daughter and that she would have me castrated. My assurance that I had only talked to her daughter did not seem to make a dent on her seething anger.

As I described the two encounters to the lady of the house I was staying at, she in turn flew into a rage and rushed down the street to confront mother and daughter, who were by now together at the egg shop. I thought it best not to escalate the conflict by joining her, so I stayed put. I had to wait a while to learn that the potato seller had thought me a foreigner and therefore — presumably — a danger to natives. My presumed alienness, useful in peacetime, had been an aggravating factor in this conflict. On being told that I was as Bolivian as herself, the mother and daughter’s sense of outrage had visibly waned, my landlady relayed, meaning that her intervention could well be said to have enabled me to keep my private parts for the time being.

Needless to say, no gas or eggs were bought from that place for quite some time. Eye contact was studiously avoided, which was not easy given that both the daughter’s egg shop and the mother’s potato stall were very much on my way to everywhere. But I am a useless grudge-bearer. One morning, just as I was approaching the mother’s potato stall, some potatoes rolled down the pavement onto the street. They would have rolled on down the kerb channel if I had not stopped them with my foot and picked them up and returned them to my would-be gelder. This time she gave me her brightest smile and thanked me with a politeness that could have been ironic, but I chose to take it at face value. The ice was broken and my daily passage down the street and back up was more relaxed thanks to it.

The choreography described in the above paragraph may be easier to understand if I remind the reader that most streets in La Paz go down or up a hill, the gradient being sometimes spectacularly steep. This, added to the altitude of 3,600 metres above the sea level, turns everyday displacement into a physical challenge. This also means that the aforementioned potatoes, if I had not stopped them with my foot, might have rolled down the hill at gathering speed until they hit the kerb of Plaza Gran Poder and, the plaza being round, they might have spun on around the Plaza and into the even more precipitous Emilio Calderón street, not coming to a rest until reaching the market on a flatter section of Max Paredes — a journey totalling about 500 metres. You may think this journey far-fetched, but all spherical and near-spherical objects tend to roll down a hill, and all inanimate objects — of which potatoes are, after all, a subset — have an exquisite gift for taking the most perverse option available. The potato lady must have had this in mind when she gave me her uncharacteristically winsome smile. On my last visit to these parts she smiled again and she asked where I had disappeared to. Even her daughter, always ensconced among her egg mountains, greeted me with some joviality. Peace has been lastingly restored.

Seeing that I lodged around Plaza Gran Poder, if you know even a little about La Paz you may wonder, did I witness the renowned festivity that bears that name? Of course I did. For months beforehand and with rising frequency, the troupes of dancers had been practising on the streets. Everybody knew what they were preparing for and few would have dared to question its cultural importance, but there was no denying that the disruption to the traffic posed a mounting inconvenience. Respect for the local tradition is put to a harsh test when you are caught behind a slow-moving dance rehearsal on your way to collecting a child from school. The brass bands that accompany the dancers are more professional now, showing evidence of previously agreed arrangements. The players themselves are not above indulging in the odd bit of coordinated choreography, sometimes to exhilarating effect. As the big day approached, the brass bands became a constant soundtrack in the neighbourhood, sometimes starting at outlandish hours such as midnight or six in the morning. In the last few days the build-up rose to a pitch of intensity. The tautness in the air was palpable at the imminence of the big day when, impelled by a centuries-old imperative, the neighbourhood was going to assert its ancestral identity.

And the day arrived. It became clear that my digs were right at the start of the troupes’ route, which entailed starting from Plaza Gran Poder and then parading down Sagárnaga to turn left at Illampu. It was here, about forty metres into Illampu, that my companion and I, after a laborious jostle through the crowd down Sagárnaga, eventually took our seats. We had proper white plastic chairs, provided at some cost by one of the local entrepreneurs who profit from the occasion. The atmosphere was, for La Paz standards, buoyant. Sheltering as they best could from the ruthless sun, people smiled, chatted and, above all, drank. The tipple of choice was beer, that is, there was no other choice. The blond liquid flowed in astonishing quantities, and, for once, the sight and smell of drunkenness were not overwhelming. The prevailing attitude was good-natured, without the aggression that might be feared in a mass gathering in La Paz. Several passers-by stopped to bid me welcome to Bolivia, some of them in English, one of them insisting that I accept the treat a can of beer. The pressumption of my foreignness sometimes amused, sometimes irritated me, but today all was forgiven and I took the beer with good grace.

It was a formidable thing to watch the dance troupes in their full regalia showing off the results of their training. They came from all areas of the city, some of them from the high plateau — El Alto, Viacha, Oruro and possibly farther. Each troupe had chosen a specific dance and no two consecutive troupes performed the same dance. This gave rise to a mighty cacophony where to the dance taking place in front of you was superimposed the sound of the next dance approaching from Sagárnaga. In an ideal world Charles Ives would have been here to delight in the din. A few bars of the oncoming troupe were enough for my companion to recognise the dance and tell me its name. Although some of the dancers and musicians came to us showing already the effects of the beer ingested, or overexposure to the sun, or just tiredness, the majority gave a spirited display of their art, communality and utter swagger. It was impossible not to celebrate the mass effort, the setting aside of societal antagonisms, the coming together of the city with itself, its history and its strife-ridden present.

We stayed from mid-morning until mid-afternoon and then braved the tightl multitude to shove our way back up Sagárnaga. At Plaza Gran Poder we watched a little more and realised that, even though this was the nominal starting point, the troupes came already fully constituted down Segurola street into the plaza. Where did they actually assemble? I did not have the energy to find out. Coming home early afforded the benefit of sparing us the sight of the uglier kind of drunkenness and the smells that go with it. Popular festivities, of which Gran Poder is the largest in La Paz, are known for degenerating into something best not described here.

The sound of the brass bands kept blasting out until well past midnight and it was still there the next morning. Did still more dancers and players keep coming all night? I would not rule it out. Gran Poder is immense.

Among other strong experiences of my time in La Paz, I will mention my belated acquaintance with a great man, an icon of his city and of his country. My main interaction with him in life focused on his left foot, which it was my assigned role to lift with both hands at every step while three other people helped him up a staircase that seemed excruciatingly never-ending. His eighty-three year-old body was a heavy one. Heart-rendingly, my closest acquaintance with him came later, in the hours and days that followed his passing, giving me an unexpected immersion into the technical and bureaucratic aspects of death in La Paz. There were some macabre moments and many painful ones. It is bad form to speak in riddles — I did enough of that in the ill-fated blog Diary of Exile — but it would not feel right to say the great man’s name, because he does not deserve a passing mention in this account of my wanderings. He and his demise should not be treated as an incident; I will write separately about him, not here but in some other context where he will be the central figure.

While based uptown with the working classes, I had no shortage of reasons to visit the neighbourhood of my youth, Sopocachi. Every time I did, the contrast between the vivid imprints etched on my mind from olden times and the new reality gave me a tug in the chest. No longer bohemian, no longer stylish, no longer residential. Today the cobbled streets and stone-slabbed pavements groan under the weight of neon signs and the ubiquitous high-rise buildings which have replaced the neoclassical residences of yore. Instead of the discreet aromas from a few quiet restaurants, there are now clouds of grilled-meat smoke wafting in all directions. The invasion of the hamburger kiosk has not spared this former bastion of gentility. Sopocachi, the dreamy stage on which my entry into adulthood was once enacted, has been overrun. It is lost. Every time I see the area in its current state I make a point of glaring into its wreckage. For the good of my health, for the necessary amputation of gangrenous nostalgia, I force myself to absorb this present, grabbing myself by the hair and rubbing my nose into it. The violence of mindless growth and societal upheaval has killed the town that had cradled the illusions of my youth.

The crude fact is, Sopocachi did not undergo the spoiling alone. Streets in the historic city centre, like Comercio, Camacho and even El Prado, once designed to be a walkway for leisurely promenading — they have all been brought under yoke by the tyranny of informal trade. The spirit that built the city with love and a modicum of foresight has been banished, its surviving champions forcibly displaced and its few extant remnants drowned by makeshift stalls, gaudy lights and frying smoke.

Whatever sweet or heroic memories of it I may have cherished all these years, La Paz is no longer me and no longer for me. I may never be able to extirpate the affection that ties me to the place and, undeniably, some of the strong experiences of the last few years have left me with a stronger stake in the city than I ever had. Besides, the city still holds something that is dear to my heart and which, painful as it is, I will not give up easily. Albeit any illusion of a life in this city is vanished, La Paz and I are not quite finished.