Bad Luck

Red on red, there they were, on the rough black of the asphalt. The onlookers in a circle made way for the traffic policeman, who called an ambulance that arrived late and could do nothing.

José Ortiz received from the Ibero-American Development Bank a scholarship to study for a master’s degree at Harvard on the sustainable economic development of third-world countries. The condition of the scholarship that obliged him to return to his country after completing his studies was for him a protocol redundancy: he wanted nothing else. After two years at the Kennedy School of Government, on the banks of the Charles River, he returned summa cum laude to his homeland, in a sombrero pinta’o a la pedrá1, on an American Airlines flight.

After the obligatory sancocho2, the first thing he did the next day was take his diploma to the Directorate of Legalizations and Authentications of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In the cramped little room, he took a number and waited his turn. On the wall he saw the new logo of the Centennial of the Republic: the last time he had seen it before leaving for Cambridge, it had the silhouette of the first president, with his bushy mustache, beside some stars; now, on the other side of the stars, the president of the day had added her own face, as a monument to her Napoleonic narcissism.

After examining the diploma, bound in red leather and with the Harvard emblem stamped in gold, the clerk gave the young man a deposit slip and told him to go pay four dollars at the National Bank. José walked five blocks to the nearest branch of the Bank. When he got there he saw that the line reached all the way to the street. “Today’s payday,” an old lady explained to him. He walked the five blocks back under the noonday sun, and asked the clerk at the Ministry whether he needed a new slip to pay it some other day. A lady who overheard him said: “Sonny, outside there’s a man with a colored umbrella; he sells that stuff and charges five reales.” José went out to the street and saw the man, sitting under the umbrella beside a car with its trunk open, full of revenue stamps and paid deposit slips. Then he looked at the wall of the Ministry and saw an enormous poster that read:

“The purchase and sale of revenue stamps and the facilitation of procedures are prohibited, as is the presence of unauthorized personnel for these purposes on the premises and in the surroundings of this public office. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is not responsible for any harm caused to users who engage in these practices, and we therefore advise against the use of these services not authorized by this Ministry.”

José did not care to question why facilitating needlessly difficult procedures, saving someone else the line at the bank, was outlawed in a country where legislators who appear on television showing bribe money are reelected and dance tamboritos3 with the President. His stomach growled and the sun burned the back of his neck. He thought of going to the bank, standing in line patiently, and then going to La Inmaculada to have lunch and a chicha4, since its milkshakes—though still legendary—were no longer even a shadow of what they had been.

He walked the five blocks for the third time. When he was in front of the bank, he saw that the line now reached all the way to the pawnshop. He took a deep breath and held firm to his plan. As he was crossing the street, a “red devil” bus, which had blown through the red light, ran him over. In his last seconds of life, José thought of his mother and of his girlfriend, who had waited two years to see him back, of the blue sky of Cambridge that reminded him so much of the sky of Guararé, of the bribe dollars on his television screen and of the old man with the colored umbrella with the deposit slips paid in advance. His blood and the diploma lay there, red on red, on the rough black of the asphalt.