Indecision (16 page)

Brigid looked at me as I took a last swig of water. “You will burst.”

“Burst, shmurst.” I offered her the lees. “Hey”—something had occurred to me—“are you Jewish?” She congratulated me on finally a correct guess (dad being half Jewish), and I asked her what it had been like being such a double foreigner in Belgium as a kid.

“I don’t know really—I find it impossible, in a way, even to think—”

“Right,” I said. “It’s too close to home.”

“To think about home? Yes it is.”

Looking out the window, I commented that the Andes didn’t look like the other mountains of my experience. “Jagged. Yet soft.”

“Good way to put it.”

“Hey where did you learn English, by the way?”

“In fact I was studying for three years in New York.”

“Really? I wonder if maybe we passed each other on the street one day.” I looked at her and doubted it.

“No,” she said firmly.

“Yeah but you didn’t know I was me then. So you weren’t looking. You know, my sister’s also an anthropologist and she teaches in New York, at the New School.”

“Not really? Another anthropologist?”

“Yeah, Alice, Alice Wilmerding. I even have her book with me.”

“You see—there are too many of us. Good that I quit, no?”

From my day pack I fished out
Consumer Survivalism,
n+1 Books, $18.95, paper. “I think the idea is how people buy more things than they could ever actually
use
in order to like secretly convince themselves that they’ll live some absurdly long time. Like long enough to actually use all the stuff they buy.”

“Not a problem in Ecuador.”

“No yeah it’s more about American garage-filling culture. See, in her appendix there are these inventories of select American garages that she prints side by side with—look—with all these actuarial tables. She says it proves dad hasn’t read the book because he never complained about—see—that’s a picture of his garage. She’s like, ‘That’s another thing’—because everything always proves everything with Alice—but she’s like, ‘That’s another thing, people like to accumulate big trophy books they’ll never get to.’ But I’m like, ‘Dad reads
everything,
Al.’ And she says, ‘Except what
I
write.’ So we’re sort of at an impasse. In lots of ways actually.”

“You don’t share your sister’s politics?”

“I don’t know. Haven’t finished the book yet. My opinion is that good books, just like bad ones—don’t you think they’re better if they’re short?”

Life
was short, I was thinking, a thought not original with me. But it got a fresh context as the bus hung and turned on a precipitous mountain curve. And looking outside I saw a clutch of Ecuadorians (as it turned out they were more officially called) peering from the roadside down a steep green escarpment to where some car or bus must have plunged.

“Yikes,” I said to Brigid. She looked unsurprised. Or else it was just that she was a serious person, and therefore a little sad and unsurprisable. Because the thing was that when her ready smile stopped, it stopped absolutely, with no leftover glee—and then all you had then was an impression of her close-kept sense of her own significance, which she seemed to carry somewhere hidden on her person like diplomatic papers. The question was: did I enjoy her company, and what did I want with it? I had little to no clue, and this made me wonder whether I’d been mistaken in thinking the drug was working.

Arriving in Baños at dusk I dashed into the HOMBRES room of the bus station and stood pissing into the reeking urinal with fantastic mightiness. It did me a lot of good, releasing the suffering contents of my bladder. And as my pain gave way to half-happiness I thought of how I loved to piss, and in fact to sneeze, to shit, to remove wax from my ears or snot from my nose, to ejaculate or to spit, and even when sick to vomit—anything at all along those lines. I might never become a wise and decisive person, but at least an entire lifetime of excretion and other removals remained before me, and faced with the prospect of such cost-free, morally neutral, and abundantly available pleasure, how could I ever regret my disgusting life on earth? I am the poison that is in me, I thought, and I love getting rid of it!

“You are relieved?” Brigid asked outside on the street.

“I feel like a million bucks.”

“That will buy you a lot in Ecuador. For now we look for a fifteen-dollar pensión.” So we did, though my gaze kept lifting from the street to where on the far side of town a waterfall poured from the lush darkening mountainside, the spout so white it seemed to light itself by friction from within. Stars were coming out higher up, as well as the sound of insects all around.

Brigid told the stout hatchet-faced woman at the desk that we’d like a habitación matrimonial—a presumption that might indicate thrift, affection, we’re-in-this-togetherness, who knew. It could be prelude to a seduction or a peremptory announcement that our relationship was to be deromanticized right away by the sharing of a toilet. Not to mention that Brigid too was a live and free creature who wouldn’t necessarily know these things herself. Maybe I was going to get lucky, something which, I reminded myself, following her up the stairs to our room and giving her ass a good review, wasn’t always a piece of unmixed luck, and shouldn’t automatically be hoped for any more than feared. Did any of the world religions, in some of their sects, recommend the perfection of ambivalence as a spiritual course whereby the novice ensures that he’ll never be completely disappointed even as he also disqualifies himself from any true satisfaction? I wondered this.

“Doesn’t seem very matrimonial,” I said about the dingy yellow-painted room with bunk bed and single bare overhead bulb.

“No—they had no more left.”

Brigid dragged her backpack into the bathroom. A grunt and a sound of wrestling ensued, and when she came back out she’d put on lipstick and eyeliner and a wrinkled beige dress. I wondered whether this was typical of Belgian backpackers in Latin America.

We went out together in the new dark and chose at Brigid’s suggestion an Italian restaurant where we drank bad wine and ate pasta that was more like Play-Doh made from cornmeal and subjected to marinara sauce. “I am so sorry,” she laughed. “It is like a copy of Italy after many many times through the machine.”

I asked her if she had ever played the game of telephone, in which a whispered message circulates from ear to ear accumulating distortions as it goes.

She shook her head gamely. “But I will try.”

“No. See there’s only two of us. So we wouldn’t be able to get enough distortion into our communication.” I took another sip of the bad, effective wine that was like a libel against the whole Chianti region. “We’re condemned to understand each other.”

“Okay. Too bad.” Then she smiled with a pleasant faux wickedness not displayed before all day. I could really see why alcohol is so heavily used in Western civilization.

But all we did later on was climb up to the gazebo-y or belvedere-ish half-enclosed room atop the pensión, and play three games of Connect Four. I got routed in the first two, but the last one I won. And then I felt so high on benevolent novelty that I declined a fourth game and went out by myself, making last call at one of those emailerías cropping up wherever backpackers go. After using primitive universal sign language to explain my desires to the proprietor, I was able to write Natasha:

FROM: [email protected]
TO: [email protected]
SUBJECT: Hola

Dear Natash, in a rush. Don’t worry about anything and do what you need to (the universal law). I hope you are okay in terms of whatever crisis or procedure or experience you may be undergoing. All’s cool down here. Like Ecuador a lot and enjoy Brigid as well who is less sold on me. What did you *say* to her? Just kidding. In Banyos. Nice town—waterfall! Important thing: I love you.

I had never said this last thing to her before and didn’t mean it in any binding sense. But in light of the morning’s whole Santa Claus–esque experience, plus being a little drunk, I wanted to strew kindnesses throughout the world. Sharply, strangely happy was how I felt (also patient, restless, and free) as I strolled back from the emailería along blue dusty streets, under the nearby rising moon.

However as soon as I returned to our room I had to confront the problem of happiness’s nontransmissibility—from which I imagine very happy people must really suffer terribly. Because there was Brigid stumbling back as she opened the door for me, and looking more or less miserable with her lipstick smudged and the mascara having run beneath her eyes.

“You wish Natasha were here. So do I!” She sat down hard on her bunk.

I tried to console her for her loss. “No, it does suck. Because Natasha’s just so great.”

“I know it.”

“A fine woman,” I said, although the whole concept of Natasha had come to seem a little vague. “So don’t think I’m not commiserating.”

“It’s a disappointment without her.”

“That’s right.” I wanted to emphasize this in order to seem to be paying less attention, or attention of a less lecherous kind, to Brigid herself in her shorts and little nighttime camisole. Next to the camisole, and presumably underneath it—except at the nipples, which would naturally be darker, though there was no predicting their size, much less their responsivity—Brigid had this nice pale olive skin that seemed touched with some old nostalgia for the sun. It was such nice skin that I looked away, and climbed up to my bunk. “Tomorrow Cuncalbamba?” I said.

She sighed. “Tomorrow again the bus.”

TWELVE

We hoisted and donned our backpacks and set out toward the station. Glare rose off the dusty streets like dirt from a beaten rug, and there among the mountain-humbled buildings I seemed to feel purposefulness and good cheer bubbling up in me. Brigid however was still seeming a little sullen, possibly because she was still disappointed that I wasn’t Natasha, or possibly even because she thought
I
was disappointed that
she
wasn’t.

I was on the verge of trying to clear the issue up when a small powerfully-built teak-colored man wearing glasses, tiny running shorts, and one tall rubber boot, ran out of one of the dim shops along the main drag yelling “Brígida, Brígida!” like it was Eureka! Eureka!

Alarm changed to surprise on her face, and then delight, with maybe a taint of pity too, as Brigid shook off her pack and braced herself for the impact of this scrambling bowlegged man. They joined in a sort of two person huddle, demonstrating the strange custom of presumably some culture or other as they clasped shoulders and leaned their foreheads together. They talked for a minute excitedly in Spanish, then Brigid shoved the guy in my direction. He wore his black hair in a bowl cut that made you think of boys sent off to school, and had something shy and undefended in his broad-nosed face. Still he walked up to me with his hand struck out and introduced himself—that much I could tell—as Edwin.

“Estoy Dwight Wilmerding,” I ventured. “Me han robado.”

Perhaps the phrase book had betrayed me? Because Edwin looked confused. But Brigid was looking more perplexed by Edwin than by me. “His name is not Edwin.”

“Sí,” the man said to me in apparent agreement. “Me llamo Edwin.”

I nodded my head at both Brigid/Brígida and Edwin/not-Edwin and left them to work it out. Brigid emerged from a short parley with the following somewhat frowning report: “All right, now he is Edwin.” Apparently he’d been Dica back when she’d begun living with and studying his tiny forest-dwelling clan on and off in the Oriente.

“Huh? Which clan? In the where?”

“
Oriente
means east, the jungle, the Amazon.” And apparentlyit was Edwin’s clan that she’d spent the last four months with—whereas Edwin hadn’t seen them at all in the year and a half since they’d moved further downriver and he’d left to make his living as a jungle guide. “And I have not seen Dica—or rather, I suppose, Edwin—”

“And why the switch?”

“He says he wanted a cannibal name.”

I nodded at Edwin as if to confirm the reasonableness of this desire.

“Cannibal is what they call everyone who is not a Haponi.”

“They’re all vegetarians? The . . . Haponi people? Of the Oriente?”

She laughed. “No, they eat quite a lot of monkeys, capybaras, peccaries, tapirs, all these things.”

At least I knew what monkeys were. “They eat monkeys and call us cannibals? Monkeys basically
are
humans. Look how hairy I am.”

“I have noticed,” Brigid said with heartbreaking neutrality.

“We’re not cannibals. Exactly. All we want is to look nice and have cheap sources of energy. What are we?”

Meanwhile Edwin was shaking my hand a second time and telling me things in Spanish which seemed to include the words
hombre afortunado.

“Huh?”

“He is congratulating you.” She was laughing.”He is saying that the Oriente is excellent for a honeymoon!” She resumed talking to Edwin, who sent a look of sincere consolation my way. “I told him we are not so much as engaged, we have only just met.” Then changeable Brigid went serious again in her mobile-featured face: “He is saying he has a fiancée in town nearby and he guides the tours to make enough money to marry her.”

Edwin looked at me in this way that basically conveyed the pathos of his situation.

“He doesn’t make enough. He is not a good salesman.”

But it seemed untrue. Because now Edwin was addressing directly to me an admirably fervent pitch of some kind, and whatever it might be, he sounded so convinced—and convincing! “What’s he saying?”

She seemed reluctant to translate, but I insisted.

“He wants us to go with him.” She looked off to one side as if to appeal to someone not there. “He is telling you that five days are enough to go deeply. But—” She evidently began to break the news in Spanish that we were going on to Cuncalbamba. I saw the hopefulness start to drain from Edwin’s face.