The Keys to La Buena Vida

German Vidal Isn't Just Selling Cars. He's Selling a Way of Life.

In car showrooms across America, where this line of work grew up as a chrome reflection of the nation's cunning can-do soul, the last day of the month is when the good salesmen know they've hit their numbers, and they strut like conquerors. The losers are sunken-eyed and reeling. It's perform or die, buddy, in the cruel and perfect Yankee meritocracy of straight commission.

At his desk with three phones and a large calculator, poised at the front of a giant fishbowl of a showroom overlooking a busy Bethesda intersection, German Vidal quells his nerves by thinking positive. He will sell a car today.

When he was tallying last year's record -- 348 cars sold -- he turned to his Casio and speed-keyed some numerical jazz: 365 minus 348 equals . . .

"Seventeen. Those were my days off and my birthday!" he exclaimed, laughing.

One of his phones rings. Vidal scoops it up.

"Ourisman Honda, buenos dias ," he says.

" A las dos . . . . Chao ."

He makes an appointment for 2 p.m. Beautiful. Maybe this will be the sale.

Sí, amigos, it's true: One of the top salesmen in the Washington area, one of the best in the country, is an immigrant from Bolivia, a naturalized American. Nearly half his customers are Hispanic. And his domain is pricey Bethesda, where Latin American is presumed to be a cuisine, not a market.

What's for sale in a showroom has always been more than mere transportation. That mythic car salesman forever at work in the national psyche dangles the keys to sex, status, power, possibility. He's an American archetype, permanently imagined in a plaid jacket, not to be trusted 100 percent, with a million-dollar smile and a gold-plated pitch:

Tell me what I can do to put you in this car today!

But when this archetype speaks Spanish? The meaning of the transaction shifts. He extends a promise to immigrants working hard to get off buses, out of junkers, away from the deadly and sidewalkless thoroughfares of their sprawling new frontier: This new machine, he tells them, will help you merge right into the mainstream. For his middle-class customers, trading up to a bigger car is a sign of continuing success in their adopted country.