¡Español! she says, then snatches the pills from your hand and throws them into the hallway.
A pair of turistas passes the open door, enormous backpacks looming over their heads. One of them picks up the foil strip and as you take it from him you wonder what country he’s from. You notice the airline tags on his pack, from all the countries you’d planned to visit, and wonder where he’s headed next.
You are not the kind of man who runs away, you remind yourself.
But what kind are you?
The morning after the incident with the taxi, la jefa informs you, “I am take you to una fiesta. In the Valle Sagrado.”
No sé, you say, anxious, a little hung over. But you’ve been meaning to visit the Sacred Valley, the Incas’ ancestral homeland [sic] and one of the empire’s main points for the extraction of natural wealth.
Cariño, she pleads, batting her eyes while the waitresses make kissing noises from the kitchen. Por favor.
The bus trip is a queasy blur, jouncing across the light-smashed plateau. An icy wind seeps through the windows. After three hours, the bus starts twisting down long switchbacks, pitching and grinding its gears, the river leaden and lethargic two thousand feet down. The driver passes a slow-moving dump truck, drifting toward the exposed shoulder until you can no longer see the road, only the drop.
In the valley, the air is balmy, oxygen so plentiful you feel lightheaded, almost drugged. Unpaved streets throng with people, the plaza awash in color and noise, a brass band in which no two instruments play the same song. La jefa stops at a street corner, beaming, clapping along to a rhythm you can’t hear.
“Here I born and live until colegio,” she shouts. She hooks her arm through yours. “Always I want bring you here.” Church bells start to ring—you can see them in their towers: two knobs of iron swinging out of sync.
¿Por qué? you ask.
¿Por qué? She shakes your arm. “Why this question, amor?”
A surge of people carries you into the street, showering you with flower petals. Firecrackers seethe at your feet. You extract your arm, fumble for a cigarette. “Where are your children?” you ask.
La jefa stares. She’s not sure she heard you correctly. And then she is.
¿Dos hijos? you’d asked Teresa, last night in the discoteca. ¿Dos? Somehow the number had made it worse. If it had been uno, that would be another matter. But dos?
La jefa picks a petal off your shoulder. En la casa de mi mamá, she says.
¿Por qué?
A group of revelers stumbles into you, sloshing beer at your feet. La jefa stands her ground. Porque allí viven, she says. Because that’s where they live.
You watch her another moment, dazed by sunlight, the smell of burning meat. From outside yourself, you see the scene you’re making: the glower of disapproval on the gringo’s face, the proud defiance of the peruana. You’ve seen this before: Teresa and Javier, Flor and her German. It’s perfectly normal, you think, just part of life for the people who live here, who aren’t just passing through. People like you.
“Come, mi amor,” la jefa says, dismissing the matter. Vamos a bailar, she says, as the crowd sweeps you away.
After the fiesta, she leads you up a long avenue cluttered with trash, down side streets where concrete and rebar give way to stone huts, courtyards where goats stand munching cardboard. She stops next to a battered door that hangs on rotted jambs: Turns out, la jefa has the key.
A tiny, dilapidated house sits at the back of a blighted field: dead grass, rusted tools, old laundry petrified and pinned to wires. This is where she slept as a child, la jefa says. The inside smells of wet wood and camphor, gray light slumping from a single window. A gutted stove sits to one side of the room, a sturdy bed in the other, topped with a bare mattress. Bésame, amor, she says.
Espérate, you say, but she pushes you onto the bed, kisses your face and neck. She pulls her dress over her head and wrestles with your belt.
Te quiero, she says. Te quiero.
Espérate, you gasp, groping in your pocket. Carina, espera.
Te quiero, amor, she says, straddling you. You find the condom and try to unwrap it, but she pushes your hand away. “I no want.”
¿Por qué? You try to hold back but she flattens herself against you, grinding her hips, riding you hard. ¡Espérate!
¡No! She takes your chin in her hand, her eyes bright. No soy brichera, ¿me entiendes? No soy así.
Amor—you say, but your voice is too feeble. You know you should stop, but as you find yourself clutching her hips you understand that stopping was never the plan. ¿Por qué? This is the question you will ask yourself one day. But now, over the creaking of the bed, the sound of her protests—no soy así, no soy—you hear another, familiar, voice: Amor, it says, in perfect Spanish. Te quiero, amor. Its accent is very convincing.
¿Sí? she gasps. ¿Sí, mi amor?
Medical abortion providers note that some women have complete expulsion of the pregnancy within 1 to 2 hours with relative comfort throughout the process. Others have more discomfort.
It’s been 54 days since LMP. Your flight is in less than a week.
Amor, you say. But she won’t talk about it. Amor. You hold up the strip of pills. You carry it with you everywhere now, like your passport: just in case.
She goes back to the clinic, tells the gynocólogo it didn’t work. When she asks for another injection he grabs her arm and pulls her to the door. Ask your gringo boyfriend to help you, he says. Maybe he remembers your name.
It’s been 55 days. Déjame, she says. “Leave me alone.”
You won’t leave her alone, you say. You are not that kind of man.
“Go back your country,” she says. Así son los gringos.
You find yourself holding her wrist. The air in the room has become very still. No soy gringo, you say slowly, squeezing just a little.
Sí, she says quietly, peeling your fingers back one by one. “You are my gringo boyfriend.”
In the middle of the night she flings back the blankets and disappears into the bathroom. You hear her crying through the door, but you don’t get up. You don’t want to upset her any further, you tell yourself. In the morning when you wake up she’s already gone to work. You’re on your second cigarette before you notice the foil strip—twisted and torn at one corner, two small pills gone.
She bleeds through your last few days. She sleeps in your bed without crying and without touching you. In the mornings she’s pale, slow to wake; when she gets up she grips the back of a chair to steady herself. The blood is heavier than she’s ever seen, she says. At work she’s glassy-eyed, doubled over with cramps, the veins at her temples thick and blue. Teresa takes charge, shouting at the other girls, lugging tubs of dishes to the kitchen. None of the waitresses will look at you.
You stay at the café all day, drink coffee after coffee, and ask, maybe every fifteen minutes, how she is now. Now? What about now?
Amor, you say, standing at the counter. ¿No quieres un médico?
La jefa squints at you. Amor, she sneers. “Who is amor?”
You ask what you can do, can you get her anything? “Let me help,” you say, but she only sobs in frustration, then walks past you into the forbidden kitchen, where the radio plays loudly, blaring its canciones of love and despair.
On the morning of your flight, she wakes before you and dresses quickly. She sits at the edge of the bed as you shove the last items into your backpack. Standing in the door, you’re struck by how small the room is, how dark and shabby. There’s a strange smell. How did you live here for so long?
“Are you sure you’re okay?” you ask in the taxi. “Is there anything you need?” you ask at the airport gate. “Tell me the truth.”
¿Por qué?
Porque te quiero, you tell her, taking her hand. Passengers are boarding behind you, the door of the jetway exerts a kind of gravity, pulling you in. Lulled by fluorescent light, you stroke her hand and close your eyes: You’ve made it, both o
f you, swum safely out of the riptide and back to shore. Only one thing remains to be said, and you say it:
¿Quieres que me quede?
La jefa laughs, yanks her hand away. “You no want to stay,” she says. She watches the passengers shuffling past—bags stuffed with local crafts, the careless voices of travelers on their way home. No soy estúpida, she says.
Later, you’ll remind yourself: I offered, and she refused.
When the line dwindles, flight attendants waiting at the door, she turns to go.
Espérate, you say, suddenly reluctant to leave her. She’s still so pale, a tremor at one eyelid. Gracias, amor, you say, before you can think better of it.
La jefa scowls. ¿Por qué?
For the Sacred Valley, you tell her. For the Spanish lessons. For helping you understand. There’s more, but you can’t find the vocabulary.
She scans your face as if you were an odd little insect. “You no understand,” she says. “You think you understand my country? ¿Mi pueblo? I know my country,” she says. “I am here. In my country. You are leave.”
You reach for her hand, but she’s already turning away.
Ciao, amigo, she says.
On the plane, the glare is too bright, the air from a broken nozzle too cold. The Andes drift by the window, dazzling and lunar. The glaciers make you shiver. Soon, you’ll be home, you remind yourself. You’ll sleep for days, have a real hamburger. Restless, you read the in-flight magazine, the safety card—Place the oxygen mask over your face and secure the straps before assisting others—but you can’t get comfortable. The flight attendants and the captain say their parts but it’s all lost on you, as though your Spanish had been left behind—detained at customs, maybe. You imagine your Spanish—locked in an interrogation room under hot lights, the angry face of the comandante—and laugh to yourself, then out loud. You can’t stop laughing. Soon you’re shaking in your seat, your teeth chattering.
In the bathroom, you wash your face as best you can, bending to the pitiful sink, hammering the flimsy levers. Your whole body itches; your clothes are too loose. You’re still shivering. You squat against the bathroom wall, and something stabs your thigh, something sharp in your pocket: a torn strip of foil, two little silver mounds left. You turn it over in your hand, poke your fingertip with a corner. You pull it open, tentatively put a pill on your tongue. A bitter, metallic taste washes across your palate and slides to the back of your throat. Before you can think you’ve spit the pill into the toilet, where it sticks to the gray plastic. When you flush, it disappears in a whirlpool of blue—but then, somehow, it’s still there. A knock comes at the door. You flush twice more but you can’t dislodge the pill, tiny and accusatory, clinging to the plastic. You look for something to pry it loose, or crush it—finally you dig it free with a fingernail, flush once more to be sure. Then you head back to your seat to dream away the hours until the plane touches down in a distant country, where you’ll walk for miles through bright corridors, lugging bags of unfamiliar objects, pale and shaky but alive to every detail, stand in a crowd of strangers and wait for admission: one line for citizens, another for foreigners.
It will be years before you tell the story. Friends coming back from Peru will tell you the café you recommended is no longer there, the discoteca is now a cell-phone store. They’d stopped by the hostal but it was too shabby for their tastes—and of course no one there remembered you.
But it enters your thoughts again, and you’re surprised by its insistence, the memories suspended in a solution of nostalgia and dread. For days you try to piece it together, but it’s all grown cloudy, events jumbled and conflated, time collapsed. You can’t recall exactly what happened first, what led to what, or why. You’re a writer now, a novelist. You decide to write it all down. It’s what you do: shape images and emotions into stories that make sense. You will do this for the story of you and la jefa, you decide. You will set it down, after all this time, try to understand what it meant.
You will use the preterite tense.
You’ll start with details: the way the streets gleamed at dawn, the cobblestones washed by shopowners; the stench of a public toilet built into the side of a church; the sound of a woman singing as she washes her hair under a pipe. You’ll describe the freezing air, the pestilential shoeshine boys, the crush of bodies on the dance floor. You’ll remember your first day, how the altitude hit you so hard you nearly passed out in a pleasant café. You’ll remember the city tours, a party at someone’s hostal, the beer you drank after hiking to Machu Picchu. The afternoon when Teresa and Javier broke up —“¡Tu eres un gringo, verdad!” she cried, to which he replied, “¡Y tu eres una brichera!” and the other waitresses ran to the window, hurling insults as he retreated down the alley.
The night you and la jefa came home from the Sacred Valley: how the glaciers seemed to be glowing, bathing the altiplano in ghostly pink light, how you held her hand in the back of the taxi, every stone and blade of grass illumined, and thought you might never leave. Te quiero, you whispered while she slept. Te quiero, amor—trying it out, seeing if it fit.
What was it you wanted? What were you looking for? So hard to remember. What strikes you now is how little you saw, how little you understood. The slums up in the hills—you never set foot in them. The families of your amigas—you never met them. You never met la jefa’s children, knew nothing about them, never asked. ¿Por qué? Because they never existed for you, none of them did, they were characters in a story you were putting together, even then: a story about a tourist who thought he was different, about a tonto who wanted to be something else.
No soy gringo, you said a thousand times. There’s a photograph of you in the discoteca, sweaty and drunk, surrounded by la jefa and three waitresses, the girl on either side kissing your cheek.
No, you were no gringo. You were something worse.
You couldn’t find her now, even if you wanted to. And that’s fitting, you understand. Why should you have the chance to apologize? What good would it do her, after so many years, to know you regret what happened, to know that it shames you?
She’d only forgive you, after all.
You’ll work on the story for months, through scores of drafts. You’ll confront the usual problems: where to start, what names to use, how to handle dialogue. Whether to tell it in the first person—like a confession—or the third person, as if it were about someone else. You’ll abandon other projects, neglect your classes, focus on getting the story right. You’ll put it all in there, everything you can remember, but eventually you’ll set the story aside, unfinished, because you don’t have the balls to write the ending.
Medical abortion is considered a failure when surgical evacuation must be performed for any reason, including incomplete abortion, continuing (viable) pregnancy, hemorrhage, or patient request.
On the phone, long distance, she sounds different—a small, tentative voice pushing through static. You try to picture her face, the scent of her perfume, the feel of her strong body, but it’s already so far away.
¿Como estás? you ask, like an old friend, a blast from the past.
Bien, she says without emotion—or is it just a bad connection? ¿Y tú? Then she tells you: Walking to work the morning you left, she passed out in the street, her jeans heavy with blood. Una hemorragia, she calls it. A passing taxista took her to a hospital.
You ask her to repeat this, more slowly. Your Spanish is slipping after just four days. The literature clearly demonstrates that in-home self-administration is safe and effective! After surgery, she says, the doctors stood over her and asked ¿Por qué? Why did this happen? What had she done to make this happen?
She told them she didn’t know. No sé, she said. Had she been pregnant, they asked? Maybe, she said, and the doctors walked away without another word.
“I’m sorry,” you tell her, from the safety of another continent.
Through the phone you can hear the sounds of the café, the music from the kitchen radio, the garble
d conversations of turistas. It’s a terrible connection, rife with static, the ghosts of other voices blurting through.
Amor, I sorry, you say, but she doesn’t hear you.
That night in the hospital, she says, it was the worst night of her life. She lay in a room with five other women and stared at a crucifix on the wall. Five small, silent heads under white sheets, thin blankets. All night she lay awake, gritting her teeth against the pain, wondering if she might die, if she deserved to die.
“Never I think this happens to me,” she says.
Amor. The connection is getting worse. I sorry.
¿Por qué?
You can barely hear your own voice through the noise. I sorry I leave. I sorry I make for you this problem. The list goes on and on. Static whispers and wails, subsides to a simmer, holding you both in its blank current.
“No,” she says, before the tide goes out. “No, there is no problem. The problem is fix.”
LUKE MOGELSON
The Dream Boat
FROM The New York Times Magazine
IT’S ABOUT A two-and-a-half-hour drive, normally, from Indonesia’s capital city, Jakarta, to the southern coast of Java. In one of the many trucks that make the trip each month, loaded with asylum seekers from the Middle East and Central Asia, it takes a little longer. From the bed of the truck, the view is limited to a night sky punctuated by fleeting glimpses of high-rise buildings, overpasses, traffic signs, and tollbooths. It is difficult to make out, among the human cargo, much more than the vague shapes of bodies, the floating tips of cigarettes. When you pass beneath a street lamp, though, or an illuminated billboard, the faces thrown into relief are all alive with expectation. Eventually, the urban pulse subsides; the commotion of the freeway fades. The drooping wires give way to darkly looming palms. You begin to notice birds, and you can smell the sea.
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014 Page 16
