“For horsemen only, eh?” I cried, in the voice natural to an all-day fast. “Where does the corregidor live?” What are gobernadores in Peru become corregidores in Bolivia.
“Down the street,” mouthed a half-drunken fellow, with a lazy toss of the head in no particular direction.
I snatched a youth out of the group and pushed him before me. Some way down the foot-torturing cobbles he halted at the open door of the usual slatternly, earth-floored room, saying:
“The corregidor lives here.”
“Go in and fetch him,” I answered, blocking his attempted retreat. He called out two or three times in the singsong with which neighbors greet neighbors in the Andes, then obeyed my order to enter and summon the “authority”—at least he disappeared inside the building. Some time later two chola girls appeared at the door to ask in pretended surprise what I desired.
“Where is the corregidor?”
“He is in the country. He doesn’t live here,” they replied respectively in one breath, betraying themselves by their carelessness in not rehearsing the reply before appearing.
“Where is the boy who brought me here?”
“Escapado—he escaped—through the back door.”
I had long ago learned this trick of local “authorities” in Andean villages of hiding away at the approach of a stranger bearing orders from the government, and the complicity of all the population in the concealment. But I had learned, also, one means of bringing him to light. I marched into the house and, throwing my pack on an adobe divan covered with blankets, announced that I should sleep there. The cholas would call the corregidor at once, they had called him, they couldn’t call him, he was coming in a minute, he did not live in town, and a dozen other falsehoods poured in a chaotic flood from their lips. For an hour I held to the divan. But as evening settled down, it became evident that the ruse of Peru would not work in Bolivia; that though I might sleep there by force, I should remain thirsty and hungry. I shouldered my bundle and hobbled back to the plaza. There ten centavos spent for chicha convinced the sceptical inhabitants that I was not penniless, and in time it paved the way to a request for food.