Indecision (15 page)

To go to the airport? But I’d bought a return ticket! What kind of a country was this anyway? I paused and waited for clarification. Finally I had to say, “What?
What
is illegal here?”

Brigid scowled, put her finger to her lips, and glanced over at the grave sweet-looking nun. She walked off, sat down on a pale stone step, and waited for me to do the same. This seemed to mean giving up, and I could hardly do it. I looked down and saw that the trampling of childish feet had worn a shallow basin in the stone. It seemed like a pretty hard thing, asking me to give up what I hadn’t even had. Still I commanded myself to sit, like I was my own dog—so then I sat down.

“Ecuador, you can see, is very Catholic. Abortion is prohibited here.” My face must have confessed how I still didn’t get it. “Maybe Natasha does not say this in the letter for you? Oh I am more blunt than our friend.”

In the courtyard the kids were singing to the point of shouting, goaded on toward joyful madness by a woozy accordion.

“I think there is nothing for us to do.”

She stood up and I followed suit, brushing off my seat—excessively. It was a gesture that made sense, so I overdid it. And then we were walking out the door, into the future, and I was saying “Gracias” to the nun, who blessed me with the sign of the cross—I blessed her right back—while Brigid was just like, “Adios.”

Outside on the jostling crowded street I said, “So when’d she learn she was . . . ? And do you have any idea who the dude is?”

“Who who is?”

“The man,” I said as some stranger bumped against me. “The inseminator!”

“I don’t know these things.”

I figured it would be impolite to ask to see Brigid’s letter. But I wasn’t going to be overpolite. “So who
are
you anyway?”

In a tone of strange flirtatious courtesy, like this was some sort of cocktail party gambit on my part, she said, “And who are
you
?”

“Yeah yeah yeah. But how do you know Natasha?”

“I am—or I
was
here to work on my thesis. But now, since two weeks ago—”

“And are you at all related?”

“Pardon me?”

“Do you and Natasha have any, like, recent common ancestors?”

She shook her head no. I asked her how long they’d known each other. Three months, came the shrugging answer. At last in exasperation I was like, “I don’t even know your last name!”

“But I have learned yours. Wilmerding, no?”

It was like she deliberately mispronounced it. “It’s not Vilmerding. We’re not Viking.” I shook my head. “None of this makes sense.”

“Well. Amid this plentiful nonsense”—she kept up a slight, determined smile—“I am Brigid Lerman.”

“Enchanté,” I said sarcastically.

“Wait a moment.” Literally she put her foot down, lightly stamping twice. “Natasha abscondating is not a fault of mine. Okay? Maybe complain to her about it—not to me.”

She headed back down the street, and I followed after her toward the actually existing tram, as opposed to the one the Ecuadoris couldn’t afford. Why, again, had I traveled to this shitty little godforsaken country of orphaned papists who couldn’t afford another tram? I lagged behind Brigid feeling crestfallen, would be the word, that Natasha had abscondated. To have staked my heart on her would seem to have been a mistake. She was so confused herself, not to mention pregnant. Yet it also might be—or might
have
been!—that if you took two confusions and fused them, then the dialectical result would be a kind of lucid understanding otherwise unavailable to either party. . . .

Brigid and I stood waiting for the tram as a silent pinpoint drizzle materialized out of the air.

“I am sorry,” she said. “You liked her very much.”

I looked around and took in the dilapidated mud-brick buildings, the guilty-looking bedraggled mutts, the teenager in a soccer jersey carrying home some firewood, the palm trees with their shivering fronds—all in all, a much colder town than it appeared, like they’d shipped a Mexican town to Scotland by mistake. “What am I doing here?”

To indicate that this was my affair she made one of those
bof
sounds possibly common throughout the Francophone world.

I was blinking a lot and feeling dizzy.

“But still do you want to go to Cuncalbamba, Dwight Wilmerding?” (pronounced correctly). “I am indifferent. But I am free.”

“Let me think.” I continued thinking, or at least blinking.

“And this takes a long time?”

I glared at her.

“I am sorry,” she said again. “You may think. Natasha says that you really
are
a philosopher.”

“But doesn’t this surprise you? The whole Natasha taking-off thing? Because you don’t seem all that surprised. Or concerned. I mean, I’m pro-choice and all, but still, an abortion . . .”

“Oh she will be all right. Natasha is quite tough, don’t you think so? And I suppose I am less than fully in sympathy because—because she is not a very constant sort of person, do you find? To leave us without warning . . .”

I was still feeling dizzy. Maybe I should have eaten more than just the one piece of toast.

“So I am surprised, yes,” Brigid said. “But also not surprised. You can see?”

“Totally.”
Except I didn’t know if Brigid’s familiarity-of-the-strange idea was meant to characterize a) Natasha, b) the world, and/or c) her own cast of mind. Still, one way to get on a good footing with people is to agree with them without knowing what you are agreeing to, and from there the rest should follow, or proceed. “So you’re still cool with going to—”

“Perfectly cool.” She shrugged with one shoulder. “I am free.”

The tram picked up more and more passengers at each station until it became so extremely crowded that when the doors opened people yelled out to the hopeful faces on the platform, “No hay donde! No hay donde!” Even I got in on the action, once informed what I was saying. Then somewhere in Quito we stopped, and stayed stopped. The stillness of the car, combined with the rapidly changing circumstances of my trip, made for a weird sensation. Then a loud kind of pluckily mournful song came on flecked with static over the speakers above us, and everybody, very much including Brigid, chimed in with the wailing female chanteuse. The passengers sang the song through twice, all mouths in concert, wailing with happy expressions until the trip resumed. Such a musical people, the Ecuadoris! I felt left out along with the crying infants and sullen old men and wished to learn right away this apparently national song. And when Brigid and I were able at last to squeeze out through the pressed bodies and raised-up arms into the thin cool air of drizzling Quito, I requested a translation.

“The chorus? A love—that is deceiving me. My heart . . . is in your hands.”

“My heart is in your hands.”

“I despair but lack for the courage to . . .”

I waited. “To
what
?”

“To leave you. My love.”

“But that’s so sad. And they all seemed so happy.”

“Poor country, happy music—a correlation all over the world. Have you been to India? But no more . . .” She waved the noun away. “I should remember I have abandoned my dissertation.”

“Was your dissertation set in Quito?”

Standing hugging herself against the cold with gooseflesh on her arms, she said, “Set? No, it more concerned the jungle. But now two weeks ago I gave it up.” Unconvincingly she shrugged. Then smiled: “So I too have no reason to be here.”

We laughed and walked off rehearsing the song—“un amor que no es amor”—to Natasha’s abandoned apartment. My dread from the night before appeared to have gone away. After all I’d decided without reservation to learn the song by heart, just as I’d suddenly decided to travel around the country with Brigid the foreign stranger, and in this second decision I was so blissfully free of even the most rational misgivings that I suspected the Abulinix must already be flooding my system and lighting it up.

ELEVEN

We were sitting pressed together on a torn vinyl seat, knees up high like overgrown kids, when the dirty diesel engine sputtered up at last; and yet even with the bus turning out onto the road, all these ragged entrepreneurial dudes still kept on boarding with sweet and savory things to sell, and bottled water.

“Here we have the great question of travel in Ecuador,” my new friend Brigid was saying. “Does one prefer intense thirst or else the persistence over many hours of the need to urinate?”

Our ETA in the town of Baños was six hours away. So instead of H
₂
O I just purchased these soft fleshy beans bathed in clear liquid in a plastic sack. The beans looked appetizing and tasted that way too, salty, squishy, and with a definite tang of je ne sais quoi. “What are these things I’m eating?” I asked as we watched the last of the vendors scramble down the aisle, hop off the bus—which had by then attained a serious speed—and stumble headlong on the roadside, nearly biting the dust.

“I do not know, Dwight.”

“Well they’re excellent.” With a pinching of the fingers I squirted the beans, or at least they
seemed
very fabaceous to me, into my mouth one by one. Our plan, excitingly pointless in the way of modern or postmodern travel, was to stay in Baños tonight; head to famous Cuncalbamba with its ideal climate in the morning; and then wind up drinking rum-based cocktails on the dazzling Pacific coast, an aspect of the plan which in fact we never realized. “Baños . . .” I said. “Sounds like baths almost.”

“Baños
is
baths—the word is the same.”

“So I’m one for one so far. All right. Sure you don’t want one of these—?” She shook her head. But even if she didn’t know what I was eating, and very happily chewing, and kind of rationing a little, because they were so, so good, and how would I ever ask for them again, not knowing the name?—otherwise Brigid was this fount of knowledge and total information awareness. We paid for everything in dollars—right,
American
dollars, the familiar dirty presence of which only made the novelty of everything else that much sharper—and this, she explained, was because the government had wanted to halt the hyperinflation of the sucre, the venerable currency named after one of Bolívar’s best officers, who had defeated the Spanish and secured Ecuador’s independence in 1822 at the Battle of Pichincha, Pichincha being a mountain we were about to pass as we descended in this crowded rattletrap bus through “the avenue of volcanoes,” as the great traveler Humboldt (whose fame never reached me) had called it. And the tall pale spotted trees with their waving islands of broad leaves? “Eucalyptus.” And the men’s felt hats that the Indian women in their rainbow-colored shawls wore tilted above their sharp handsome faces? “A porkpie hat, I think is the word.”

“Damn Brigid I listen to you and I feel like what was I thinking, studying philosophy? I wish I could have studied just the facts.”

“I have met many Americans, but you are the first who is what I always imagine a
true
American is like.”

“Really? That’s funny.” I couldn’t tell if I was being defensive or playful. “Because I’d been thinking how totally Belgian
you
are. Belgian as frites.”

“As what is?” She laughed in this sharp way of hers that seemed to separate the comedy of laughter from the charity part.

“I think you heard me,” I said.

“So . . . Do I seem to you a Walloon? Or a Fleming?”

“Yeah well just very
pan
-Belgian is how you seem—with your love of neat distinctions and precise terminology.”

“You make me very impressed with myself! Because I am not born in Belgium.”

“Oh.” Nothing was seeming to be what it seemed today. Moodily I ate another so-called bean.

“Maybe I should have told you this. Only my mother is Belgian. Papa comes from Argentina, this is where we lived until I was five. I
was
Brígida until in Belgium they removed the letter and of course changed how to say it. However,” she said with a certain residual air of defiance, “I would not allow them to spell me as
Brigitte.
”

“So you’re half Belgian. Maybe you overcompensate and that’s why you seem so Belgian.”

“Not to the Belgians! Who care more about the family lineage than anyone. Every year the book on the aristocracy,
Le Bottin Mondain,
it sells very well. Bof—Belgium. You know the Belgian delicacy, les petites crevettes grises? So this is what my father calls the Belgians: the little gray shrimps. No Belgian I know is the least bit wild.”

“And yet you seem so sort of proud—”

“Really it is of Argentina that I’m proud. And yet I have hardly a memory of Buenos Aires, so to me it comes to seem almost that I am merely pretending to be from another country, almost that I am being pretentious to feel that I am so unique a Belgian.”

I told Brigid she seemed like a pretty complicated person.

“Really I am extremely simple in my—my . . .” She gestured vaguely at herself.

“Dans ta coeur?” I suggested. “Dans ton tête?”

She looked puzzled for a second, then said, “Somewhere, yes, I am a deeply simple person.”

Somehow this tantalizing admission was the cue for us both to stop talking and look out the window, watching the world, or really the third world, pass by. Pale faces gigantic on a billboard looked down on the encampment of tin-roofed roadside shacks while on a dusty street two kids were passing a bald gray soccer ball universally between them. And beyond the scattered human stuff stood a green volcano terraced and planted with corn at the base and topped up above by a blank toupee of snow.

The bus stopped in Latacunga, where, feeling super-thirsty, and with the idea that moisture must be good for a fluid decision-making style and a pro-growth mind, I bought a liter of water. And so all the way to Baños my bladder acquired a very stoical temperament. Plus I knew my suffering must be scandalously mild compared to being tortured and disappeared by a fascist regime, as luckily hadn’t happened to Brigid’s dad when the generals took over Argentina and he fled with his shrink-cum-wife.