by Laura Resau
In a new place, Layla’s priority is hanging up crystals of cut glass to catch the light and cast tiny rainbows everywhere. “It’s not just decoration, Z,” she says, if I point out that it might be wiser to address a gas leak or a broken toilet first. “It’s to help with chi flow.”
I finish the last of my yogurt, then wash my dishes and lay them neatly on a towel to dry. Layla emerges from her bedroom, her hair a tangled, glowing mess in the sunlight streaming through the window.
“Morning, love.”
“Morning.” And then I decide, This time will be different.
This time will be different!
This time my life will change!
In a voice that sounds more like a command than a question, I say, “Why don’t you call Jeff?”
“Huh?” She lights a match and starts a burner for tea, coming this close to setting her hair on fire.
“The guy from the plane.” I lean against the small refrigerator. “For once, can you date a man who’s not an artist or a clown?”
“What about that poet in India?”
“Call Jeff.”
“Why, love?” She cuts moon-shaped slices of soft papaya and arranges them in a star on her plate, with a dollop of yogurt in the center. She smiles at it, pleased.
“Listen,” I say. “I have three years left before college and I want them to be normal years. Normal.”
“Give up wanting what other people have.” She’s quoting Rumi. This line in particular always makes me gnash my teeth.
“Will you call him?” I push.
“Mmmm. This papaya is at the pinnacle of ripeness.”
I wipe the yogurt dripping from her chin. “Call him, okay?”
“I have no idea where his number is.”
I search her things for the business card as she drinks tea and eats her moon-star food on the balcony and marvels at the courtyard. “Look at those flowers! This is paradise! Every object, every being, is a jar full of delight.”
“Including Jeff,” I say under my breath. And then, in frustration, “Layla, I can’t find the card anywhere.”
“Then set me up with someone else, love. You pick.” The steam from her tea swirls around her face. She half-closes her eyes like a sleepy cat and recites in a murmur, “I should be suspicious of what I want.”
Rumi again. I roll my eyes. How can you argue with a mystic who’s been dead for seven hundred years? I grab my bag—a woven red one from Guatemala—and stuff my indigo notebook in the side pocket, then head out, on a mission to find what I want more than anything: a normal life.
Chapter 3
At nine a.m., the cobblestoned streets are bustling with people, many of them Otavaleño Indians. The women wear long dark skirts and shiny blouses and thick shawls with hundreds of tiny gold beads wound around their necks. The indigenous men have long single braids, and are dressed in regular jeans and shirts. And some people—who must be mestizos, according to my guidebook—look like they could be from anywhere in the world, wearing pants, shirts, blouses, and skirts that have probably been imported from China.
My guidebook says that the difference between being indigenous or mestizo doesn’t have to do as much with your skin color as it does with how you dress and wear your hair and what language you speak and your last name. I could probably pass for indigenous if I dressed right, if I walked in that tall, proud way.
Strange how with a little thought and effort, you can change who you’ve been forever. If Layla made an effort, could she change? I keep my eyes open for Dad-like men to set her up with.
This town feels almost cozy, in its valley surrounded by towering mountains, all shades of dazzling green rising into gray stone peaks. The sun’s starting to heat up the morning air, reflecting off the cement buildings, some painted pastels, some bright blues and yellows. The stores look welcoming and cheery with their doors propped open—Internet cafés, bakeries, narrow restaurants with whole chickens roasting in the windows, little pharmacies, travel agencies.
It feels good to hear the musical rhythms of Spanish again. I’m finding I understand the language effortlessly, even though the last Latino country we lived in was Chile, five years ago. Of course, Spanish has always been one of my favorites.
I zigzag down streets, cutting across a big flower-filled square with a fountain and trees, past a whitewashed church, trying to follow my guidebook’s route to the daily craft market at Plaza de Ponchos.
The first local I talk to is a blind man in a blue chair with a small orange plastic bowl on his knees. “I like your blue chair,” I say, realizing as I say it that he might not know it’s blue, might not even know what blue is. Feeling stupid, I drop a few coins into his bowl and keep walking.
“Gracias, señorita,” he calls after me.
Soon I turn a corner, and there it is, Plaza de Ponchos, a sea of tarps and tables spread with fuzzy scarves and sweaters and bags, flower-embroidered shirts, sparkly silver jewelry, woven rugs, heaps and heaps of colors spilling out everywhere. I weave through the tunnels of stalls that smell of wool fresh off llamas and sheep and alpaca, an earthy animal smell mixing with the exhaust of passing cars. Tourists are chatting with vendors, reaching out to test the itchiness level of a poncho, or holding up a brown sweater beside a gray sweater to decide which color looks best. Meanwhile, the vendors are cajoling in singsong voices, a mix of Spanish and heavily accented English, “All-natural dye, special deal for you, three for twenty dollars, come on, buy, buy, buy …”
And then, at the end of a row of scarves and sweaters, seated behind a table, I spot a great big woman with a million gold beads winding up her neck and coral beads snaking up her arms, all the way from her wrists to her elbows. She sits like a queen on a throne, her blouse shining with hundreds of tiny blue flowers and wide, soft lace at her forearms. But the thing that sets her apart from the other ladies is her smile. A smile that’s one hundred percent real, not the halfhearted smile of vendors just trying to sell you something. If you know you’ll only live a year in a place, you want to start being around a smile like that right away.
I’m not a naturally outgoing person, but I’ve learned to be. I’ve learned to walk right up to people who look interesting and introduce myself—it’s the only way to make friends when you move around so much.
You make yourself bigger than life. You walk with your head high and your shoulders relaxed and a little swagger in your hips. You act like you never wake up at three-thirty a.m. in a nervous sweat. You exude a confidence you don’t have.
I smile at her and hold out my hand and say in Spanish, “Buenos días. I’m Zeeta.”
Without skipping a beat, her hand meets mine. “Mucho gusto, Zeeta. I’m Gaby.”
I forget my Dad-candidate search for the moment and say, “Gaby, what matters most to you in life?” because another thing I’ve learned is that you have to dive straight into the important questions, the kind that pierce through small talk and jump right into a person’s core. The kind that would otherwise take years to figure out.
“Breathing,” she says. “If I weren’t breathing, I wouldn’t be alive, would I?” She closes her eyes and takes a long, deep breath that looks as if it tastes like lemon sherbet.
“If you had one wish, Gaby, what would it be?” And after a moment, I add, “Except world peace or something noble like that,” because she seems like the type who would wish a selfless wish. “And besides more wishes,” I add, because she also seems the clever type.
“Happiness,” she says matter-of-factly.
“But I mean specifically, what would bring you happiness?”
She shrugs her big shoulders. “The way I see it, people think they know what they want, and it turns out they don’t have a clue.”
She answers a few more questions, which I record in my notebook, and then she interrupts herself to call out to a passerby. His hand just barely grazed the soft alpaca scarves on her table, and she must have noticed. “Five dollars, señor! But I’ll give you a dis
count since I like your eyes!”
The guy smiles, and after a few moments of teasing and bargaining, he buys three for ten dollars. “I really do like your eyes!” she calls after him, giggling at him as he leaves, looking pleased.
She turns to me and says out of the blue, “Wishing is tricky, Zeeta.”
“Tricky?”
“When I was a girl, my ñaña—”
“Ñaña?” I ask. I’m fluent in Spanish from living in Chile and Nicaragua and Guatemala, but each country has its own slang. It always gives me a little thrill to discover new slang, like finding a coin or jewelry on the ground and slipping it into my pocket.
“My ñaña,” she repeats. “My sister. She wanted nothing more than to be mestiza. For her, that meant being rich and beautiful. So she refused to speak Quichua and stopped wearing her anacos and blouses and got a perm and highlights.”
“Is your ñaña happy now?” I ask.
“She’s been a maid for a mestizo family for thirty years. No family of her own, no business of her own, no passion in her life.” She clucks. “And look at my two sons. They live in Spain, play music there. When they’re in Spain, they want to be here. When they’re here, they want to be in Spain.” She laughs and tilts her head at me, curious. “Well, what about you, Zeeta? What would you wish for?”
“A home,” I say. “A normal home. With a normal family.” I raise my eyebrow at her defiantly. “And I know for a fact that would make me happy.”
She nods, obviously unconvinced.
I change the subject. “So, Gaby, you probably meet lots of eligible bachelors here at the market, right?”
She raises an eyebrow.
“If you come across anyone who might make a nice, boring dad, let me know.”
She shakes her head and gives a deep belly laugh and I feel very grateful for my first friend in Otavalo. I suspect that when I wake up at three a.m. tonight, my room won’t feel quite so empty or strange-smelling or terrifying.
Chapter 4
Back at the apartment, jet lag hits me like a sledgehammer. I have a sudden, desperate urge to take a nap. It’s three a.m. back in Thailand. Layla’s looking amazingly bright-eyed, sitting on the balcony next to a twenty-something guy in superbaggy pants with orange patches on the knees and a faded, threadbare shirt that says SOMEONE IN RHODE ISLAND LOVES ME.
“Zeeta, love! This is Giovanni. From Venezuela.”
I’d bet my life he doesn’t have a retirement account. “What do you do, Giovanni?”
“Teach surfing. Travel all over the coasts, stay a while in each town.” He pulls something out of his pocket. Balloons. He blows up three, twists them into a flower, and presents it to me, grinning. “And in the off-seasons, I’m a clown.”
Layla gives me a sheepish look and the tiniest shrug of a shoulder.
The flower balloons dangle from my hands. “A clown?”
“A clown.”
After he leaves, I scream, “Another clown?”
“Well, this one’s not an artist clown. He’s a surfer clown. And he’s Taoist.”
It turns out he lives in the apartment next to ours, but he’ll have to leave unless he can scrounge up rent with a new clowning job. I’m secretly hoping the clown market is saturated here.
Over the next week, I take lots of naps, slowly recovering from jet lag. Layla hangs out with me and the clown on the balcony after her English classes. He’s nice enough, but when I ask if he’s saving for retirement, he says, “Amiga, I don’t plan on living that long.”
Gaby’s found a few possible suitors for Layla, mostly other vendors at the market, some of whom are saving for retirement. There’s the friendly, tubby antique trader who knows so much about the sixteenth-century Spanish conquest you’d think he’d lived through it himself. When I bring Layla by the market to casually check him out, she chats with him about his antique Virgin Mary statues, and then, after five minutes, drags me away, whispering, “Notice how spittle collects at the corners of his mouth? No way could I date someone like that!”
My favorite candidate is the Beatles-obsessed twenty-something jewelry seller with the handsome chiseled face (which I feel makes up for the male pattern baldness). Their conversation lasts for a full half hour, but in the end, she murmurs to me, “I just can’t get past the hair.”
“What? Not scraggly enough for you?”
She shrugs. “My new clown is much cuter. And more soulful.”
Apart from the failed setups, I spend my days gathering basic necessities—mattresses, a mop, shampoo—and writing in my indigo notebook and exploring. Already, I’ve gotten to know a bunch of locals—the sisters at the bakery where I buy my midafternoon pastry snack, the elderly landlady who’s always bringing us food, the blind man in the blue chair with the orange plastic bowl.
The blind man interests me. He’s already filled seven pages in my notebook. He sits in one place for a few hours, and then, when he feels like it, he picks up his little blue chair, walks a few blocks, finds a new place, sets down his blue chair, gets comfortable, and puts the bowl back on his knees. I watch him from a distance sometimes. I wish he could see how comfortable and cheerful and perfectly at home he looks sitting there.
A week after our arrival, I’m heading toward Gaby’s booth in Plaza de Ponchos. I’m all tropical orange today: wrapped in a papaya sarong from Thailand with tangerine flip-flops, licking a mango ice cream cone, starting to like this town. The sun’s beating down on the cement and cobblestones, so bright I’m squinting. My guidebook says Otavalo is less than twenty-five miles from the equator at an altitude of eight thousand feet—much closer to the sun than most places on earth, which explains how, when the sun shows itself, it feels almost blinding.
When Gaby catches my eye, she motions excitedly for me to hurry, which isn’t easy to do in a sarong and flip-flops.
“What’s up, Gaby?”
“Mire. Look at that guy.” She points across the square toward the rug section. “The gringo.” I scan the crowd for an American—someone decked out in a fleece jacket and khaki shorts and Tevas, his skin and clothes bland next to the rainbow colors of wool and the locals’ warm, brown skin. But there is no pale tourist in the direction Gaby’s pointed.
“Where?” I ask.
“There. By Alfonso’s carpets, by the blue tarp. He looks like us Otavaleños but I think he’s really a gringo.”
And I spot him, a teenage guy about five and a half feet tall, my height, short for an American guy but average around here. He’s wearing shorts and a white raw cotton shirt, embroidered with white zigzags, the kind they sell at the market. Local guys, on the other hand, seem to prefer long pants and store-bought clothes. Now that I’m focusing on him, this guy seems American except for one thing: apart from his clothes and his gestures, he looks like any other Otavaleño. He has their strong cheekbones and the same cinnamon shade of skin. And like most Otavaleño guys, from boys to old men, his black hair is long and braided.
But he walks like a bumbling American, taking long strides without finesse, his backpack knocking sweaters off tables, and then, as he bends down to pick them up, knocking off some scarves. If you live in a different country every year, you notice that each culture has its own way of walking, moving, standing, sitting, talking, looking. It’s hard to put your finger on what exactly the differences are. With Americans, it’s a kind of klutzy confidence, hovering between endearing and annoying. Looking at this guy, I agree with Gaby; he must be a gringo.
“What’s he doing here?” I ask.
“Who knows. He can’t speak any Spanish, poor boy.” She shakes her head. “We think he’s lost. All morning, he’s gone from booth to booth, saying, ‘Mamá, Papá.’” She grabs my arm. “Look, Zeeta, he’s coming this way!” She waves her arms, trying to get his attention. Finally, she catches Alfonso’s eye and yells in Quichua across the square. Quichua is the language of the Otavaleños, apparently what they use at the market when they don’t want you to understand them. I imagine she
’s saying something like, “Hey! Tell that clueless kid to get his butt over here!”
Alfonso laughs, shouts back to her, and points our way. He gives the boy a friendly shove in our direction.
The boy stumbles toward us, politely stepping aside for people, only to get even more jostled by the crowds. Those Americans. People assume I’m American because Layla is technically American. And although my accent is hard for people to pin down, most say it sounds more-or-less American. But the truth is I have no country. I was born in Italy but left before I was a year old. I am nationless.
Finally the guy reaches Gaby’s booth and shrugs off his backpack. Little beads of moisture cling to his face. He wipes his forehead with his sleeve and takes a sip from his plastic water bottle. That’s another telltale American thing, the ever-present water bottle.
“Hi,” he says in English. “I’m Wendell.” He smiles a hopeful smile, and that’s what makes me recognize him, the way the corner of his mouth turns up. The boy from the plane who had problems ordering orange juice.
“Zeeta here.” I shake his hand, which is damp with sweat. “And this is Gaby.”
Gaby nods and shakes his hand, discreetly wiping it on her skirt afterward. “Mucho gusto.”
He turns back to me. “You were on the plane, weren’t you?”
I nod. “Across the aisle.”
“In between your parents, right?”
“Layla’s my mom. But that was just some guy we’ll never see again.” And then, before he can ask why Layla and I look nothing alike, I say, “Wendell, what do you want more than anything?”
“To find my birth parents,” he answers without a pause. And before I can move on to ask his favorite place in the world, he says in a voice so sincere it sounds naked, “Will you help me, Zeeta?”
…
We find a nearby café, and as he reads the menu, his eyebrows scrunched together, I study him. What is he like on his own turf? My guess is that in school he teeters on the edge of popular, enough to make him self-assured, yet not cocky. Judging by the muscles in his calves, he probably plays some school sports, track maybe, or cross-country.
