In Bolivia Sports Was More Than A Mere Pastime

The paste was still wet, smearing the words Bolivia Sports, making Bolivia look more like Bovada. Of course that’s what they had meant all along, but on these walls in this city the difference didn’t matter anymore.

Along the torn edge of the poster somebody had tried to peel her from the wall, a little of the previous woman showed through: half an eyebrow, the pearly corner of a tooth. I stood close enough to smell the flour in the glue. BOLIVIA SPORTS ran above and behind her in tall gray letters, partly obscured by flowers. I had come upstairs to remove it. In my coat pocket was a razor wrapped in the receipt for a pair of gloves.

The corridor had come to life the instant the lights began to fail. That greenish light from the fluorescent tubes that makes everyone look recently tortured and newly released fell across the linoleum, dimmer with every passing day. At the far end a door stood open six inches. Through the gap I could see a black stocking hanging from a chair, its foot still bearing the shape of toes. There was no sound from the room. Beneath my glove, sweat gathered in the crease of my palm and stayed there, a small private sea.

I had printed her face myself. Three colors first, then black, the heavy press working downstairs with its flywheel turning beside my hip. Bolivia Sports repeated over and over and over until the words were meanlingless. I adjusted the pressure on the press plate after her left eye kept filling with ink. A fraction too much and she looked asleep; less, and something watchful appeared that hadn’t been in the photograph. I had wasted forty sheets getting her to look directly at whoever stood here. Now I couldn’t get out from under those eyes. Even examining the orchids felt like an intrusion she would condemn.

Their white petals had the thickness of folded hotel stationery. Deep in one yellow throat was a staircase, carpeted, ascending around a brass cage elevator. The cage was too narrow for a person, yet I knew I had ridden in it with a suitcase between my knees. There had been a terrible smell of hot pennies. Floor after floor of women’s coats, hanging empty from pegs, their linings turned outward; on the top floor, a bathroom in which every tap had been wrapped with hair. I remembered none of this until I looked at the flower. Then it was where I had always lived.

Her scarf was knotted above the temple. Red cloth went into the knot and emerged blue, with a narrow yellow seam disappearing inside. I followed that seam until my eyes hurt. It was possible that the whole corridor had been pulled through there, the rooms compressed into pleats, the tenants folded along their spines and tucked away with their unpaid bills and bedside water glasses. In Bolivia sports was more than a pastime.

I could see my own room in a crease. The pillowcase needed still wet with last night’s fever.

She had sat for the photograph in a basement with a damp patch behind the chair. I remembered her arranging the collar herself, refusing the photographer’s fingers by moving before they reached her. No smile. She had a chipped thumbnail and a strand of black thread caught on her sleeve. I had removed both from the plate. It was a small part of the work, making her less particular, easier to paste over other women. The order came with cash and a betting slip from Bolivia Sports. Sometimes an address. I kept the photographs in a biscuit tin, faces down, although nobody ever searched the shop.

Under the yellow necklace, just where the collar opened, the paper seemed bruised. I leaned nearer. The little beads were holes, and through each hole I could see a different portion of the room behind the wall: a bed leg, a saucer, the brass jaws of a handbag clasp. In one, an eye. It was my eye, absurdly enlarged, wet along the lower lid. I was inside, bent toward an opening, looking out at a man in gloves who had been hired to remove the evidence. His mouth was slightly open. Mine was dry.

The razor had worked free of its wrapping. I could feel its edge through the pocket lining, resting against my thigh with such precision that breathing seemed likely to finish the cut. I wanted to put my hand there, hold the cloth away, but her face occupied the distance between wanting and doing. Behind her exposed eyebrow, the earlier woman waited. Behind that woman another, the pasted layers thickening inward, until I understood why the doors along this corridor barely opened and why the rooms were getting smaller. Downstairs the press held a sheet between its rollers. Black ink waited above the eyes. My signature was on the order, beautifully legible, and under my glove the sweat had reached the place where the lifeline ended. Nothing had fallen. Nothing would give me the relief of happening.

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