It was the first time it pleased me to see a street parade in Bolivia. Although perhaps street parade is the wrong term. Around the corner, as promised by the deafening, blasting brass, the drunken horde stumbles and dances. Gigantic women made only of pork fat, and young stick thin boys. Ancients all of wrinkles, sun-blackened , hardened skin. Men with shining, round brown faces, huge bellies and dirty shirts. Wide-skirted-bowler-hatted-women. And all of them in some wonderful drunken oblivion.
One of the pork-fat-ladies tears from the crowd, half-dances to the music, and waves a plastic bottle of about four litres in the air; almost empty, the last remaining contents swilling around, lime green, with the movements of a flabby arm. Others behind her wave glass bottles, those too, half empty, the glistening golden dregs of 5pm.
A sober plaza watches the parade. The melody is simple and repetitive, but the band are struggling. Round, sweaty faces, and staggering feet. The band wear white sashes around suit jackets - on them written the numbers, 2009. And though the music wavers, slows down, falls apart, and finds itself again, each player seems to be enraptured as though you might be watching something brilliant.
The pork-fat-lady is drawn back in, unfalling and backwards, glee or drunken joy shining on her face. What is remarkable is that the crowd of all ages, shapes and sizes has become one thing - one gloriously drunken being that has forgotten how to dance, its many legs keeping vaguely to a beat, its hands waving bottles of all kinds, and its many faces beaming, as the afternoon air grows cold.
The same sequence of notes stumbles slowly up the street and I go back into the cafe and carry on talking to Alexis.
"Every day?"
"Everyday this week."
"What´s it for?" I ask, referring to the several gigantic drunken beings marauding outside.
"It´s a festival for... for..." she doesn´t know. "We have so many festivals in Salinas." Alexis asks around the cafe. Nobody seems very sure. A middle-aged man, sat alone, offers a a vague answer. "It´s a festival for a saint."
"It´s a religious festival?" I don´t know why I´m surprised, but I am.
Alexis wants to go to Paris. She wants to go there more than anywhere else in the world. She likes the way they talk.
"How do you say te amo in French?" she asks.
"Je t´aime, I think," I say "but maybe that´s more like te quiero." and the words stick out and hang loud in the room. People glance round to look at the gringo who just said ´I love you` to a 17 year old girl he just met, and drunks make obscene gestures, laughing behind her back.
A perfectly timed crescendo outside fills the cafe; a wail of trumpets drowning out all words, and the attention commanded falls away.
Alexis wants to go to Paris, but doesn´t have any money. And I have that thousandth conversation - the one that goes, it´s much harder for you than us, and I´m sorry I was born in Europe, but if you really want to, and you really try, it´s possible.
"Yes," she says. "It´s my dream to go. I´ll try." There is silence. "Where do you go tomorrow?"
"The salar. It´s beautiful, right?"
"I don´t know."
"You´ve never been?"
"No."
"But you live here. Why not? It´s supposed to be one of the most incredible places in the world."
"I don´t have any money," she says, looking straight at me.
"It´s 10km away. You can walk. I´m cycling there tomorrow. You don´t need any money." And she doesn´t say anything and I begin to doubt that she will ever go to Paris at all.
As I fall asleep later tireless trumpets, tubas and trombones sound. Still the bottles fly in the air, now in the frozen black of night, and shouts filter through the window from the street.
In the morning I wake to the same tune. Outside, a man already falling about alone is directed again towards the gathering hordes, and as he joins them I see that the drunken being is already alive, and haggard.
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