I was the only student in my Spanish school. The gorgeous Andean mountains that I heard surrounded me were covered in rain clouds. So I spent the first couple of days passing the hours watching the rain fall from one of the town’s many warm Swiss-chalet-looking chocolate shops. I took myself to the parrilla (barbecue joint) for steaks a couple of times, and read in my guidebook about the wonderful skiing and boating one could do in Bariloche the rest of the year.
Well, hello, Void! How’d you find me way down here?!
And so I asked out my Spanish teacher.
Diego might not have caught my eye had the town not been so deserted. He was tall, and kind, and cute enough. But, more important, he was the only thing to do in the place you’re supposed to do it. So, after our second day of class, I asked if he wanted to grab a drink.
It was during those two weeks with Diego that I started really speaking Spanish. I can’t recommend sleeping with your Spanish teacher highly enough. I moved out of my hotel and into his little room in a charming wood building above a queso shop, right on the shores of Nahuel Huapi Lake. We watched the rain fall on the Andes from his little twin bed, an arm’s reach from his “kitchen”—a hot plate—and his “half bath”—a toilet underneath a shower head. He kissed body parts, then tested me on the Spanish words for them, obviously. He reported that I was even speaking Spanish in my sleep, which felt like an enormous triumph. He taught me how to conjugate important verbs like arracanzar—to come.
Arracanzo, aracanzas, arracanzamos …
On our very first date, Diego proved to be a proper Latin lover, not at all too religious for The Deed, which felt great after my departure from the decidedly less infatuated Father Juan. We took weekend trips around the lake, and walked in Los Arrayanes National Park, a stone’s throw from Chile. Diego and I spent a couple of days doing said deed in a hotel room that looked out across the lake in a different direction, at a different part of the Andes, and watched Chile’s rain and Argentina’s sun make international rainbows. We said they were a metaphor for us, and didn’t find that cheesy, like we absolutely should have. We also had some awkward language moments:
“Que feo,” Diego sighed one night, amorously. Which means “How ugly.”
Most upsettingly, he said this while his face was buried deep in a place that a girl hopes won’t ever be called anything but spectacular. My horror subsided when Diego explained to me that que feo is an expression Argentinos sometimes use when they mean that something is very, very beautiful. Like saying something is “ridiculous” when it’s over-the-top fantastic. Phat instead of fat. He meant feo with a ph.
Hopefully this is the truth. My vagina is pheo. Please don’t tell me if you happen to know differently.
Diego told me that he’d just lost eighty pounds. (He told me in kilos, so maybe it was forty, or two hundred, I’m not really sure. The metric system is stupid. But a lot.) So getting hit on by visiting American girls was a new phenomenon for him. We communicated very slowly, very basically, often unsuccessfully. He thought I ate an awful lot of salad and chocolate. He looked at me like he couldn’t believe his luck. And he made me feel like I had gotten an A+ in my Patagonian Adventure.
But the most romantic day I had in Bariloche was a day I spent alone.
Up until that day, the prize for “Kristin’s Happiest Extended Period of Time Ever” was still held by a blissful two weeks that happened more than ten years earlier. It was at the end of my junior year in college, when I drove across the country with my first love, Vito. We were a few months into our six-year relationship, finally together after our two-year-long will-they-won’t-they-Ross-and-Rachel-thing. (That was a timely reference back then.) We were driving my car from Chicago home to Los Angeles, and we took the long way home. It was the first time either of us had driven cross-country, the first time no one in the world knew where we were, the first time we were so completely in love. There were no cell phones and no talking GPS systems, so we could get lost in that great way in which no one will ever get lost again. We read aloud to each other, and dangled our feet out the window, and sang a lot of “Me and Bobby McGee.”
“Feelin’ good was easy, Lord, when he sang the blues …”
We pulled over a couple of times a day to make love, sometimes in front of geysers in Yellowstone or against a tree under Mount Rushmore, while Burgess Meredith narrated a Mount Rushmore movie in the background. (“Dakota. SOUTH Dakota.”) Sometimes, on particularly deserted stretches of road, we didn’t bother to pull over. At night we sat in front of our tent, and drank wine, and somehow knew enough to know that it was amazing that we didn’t have any entertainment other than each other, and yet were completely entertained. And I was blissfully, constantly, swoon-inducingly happy.
But I hadn’t had such a long, sustained period of bliss since then. I had certainly never been with anyone about whom I was so unambivalent. But even aside from the men of it all, nothing had ever been so simple, so 100 percent, so easy. The peaceful moments would come, beautiful, fragile butterflies that would alight for a brief time on my annoyingly restless, neurotic soul, but sooner rather than later there would be a soul itch that needed scratchin’, and the sudden movement (and tremendous amount of talking) would cause the happy moments to flitter away. That made me so sad—in more than ten years I hadn’t topped myself. I decided it was because that bliss had been born of a perfect storm of firsts, and, at thirty-one, there weren’t many firsts left. I figured childbirth was my next shot at that kind of first-time bliss.
But then I went to Argentina.
I realized that Argentina had topped that drive on my first sunny day in Bariloche. Diego was working in the Spanish-school office, and so I was alone as I walked down from his apartment into the sun, and saw that the mountains that had been covered by rain clouds for the last week were suddenly in front of me, and covered in snow. The snow line was just a couple of hundred feet above town, which was still filled with autumn color.
I took a bus out of town to a gondola that went up one of the mountains. There was apparently a rotating restaurant at the top, where one could eat and take in a glorious view of the lake and the snow-covered Andes. I rode up alone, and the view was amazing … for about two minutes. Then the lake and the mountains disappeared as my gondola entered a sopa of thick white fog. I laughed as I realized that the restaurant at the top of the gondola was sitting in a cloud, and I would be dining to a rotating view of whiteness.
The waiter snapped my photo in front of all that white, as I sat alone in the empty restaurant, eating yet another steak, looking out at the white, well, void. I paid the bill and was on my way back to the gondola to ride down, when, suddenly, the clouds parted.
Now I was alone on top of this mountain, with blue sky, the crazy-clear Patagonian sunlight, the sparkling lake, the untrampled fresh snow. I made a snow angel, thinking about the parents and grandparents on both sides who had taught me how to make one long, long ago, back when I was so small that they could hold me out in front of them like a plank and then let go and poof! I’d drop into the snow and make a perfect angel imprint. I took a picture of the snow and the lake and the angelic version of me, and then started walking.
I walked for about five hours, in a vaguely downward direction. The snowy trails were covered in a canopy of red and orange and yellow leaves. I walked and walked and walked, no real idea where I was going, just in love with the fact that I was alone on the top of a mountain at the bottom of the world, that I had just gotten on a plane and made this happen. I’d had two months’ worth of firsts. I had two dozen new friends from a dozen new countries, and two Argentine lovers. I had learned Spanish, and the tango, and how to buy vegetables in Argentine supermarkets (which is more confusing than you would think). I had learned I was brave. But, most important, I felt just as free and alive and sure of where I was and what I was doing as I had on that car trip, lost in the middle of the country with my first boyfriend. And I was feeling that way all by myself. And that made me
feel as unambivalent about myself as I had been about my first love.
I had no idea where I was going, but, eventually, I ended up back at the road, and found a bus back to town, and spent a couple more days in Diego’s bed that were sexy and warm but weren’t nearly as fulfilling or romantic as that unlonely walk alone.
Two weeks into my time in Bariloche, my cousin Emma came down to visit. Simultaneously, I came down with a terrible flu. We decided to treat ourselves to one night in the glorious Llao Llao Hotel. It’s a grand old lodge-style place right on the lake, the place where presidents stay when they come to Argentina, and I went straight to bed in the crisp white sheets, while the rain outside finally turned to perfectly white snow. Emma got her own room for safety, and I called Diego, who took an hour-long bus ride from town to take care of me.
Before Diego arrived, I called down and asked for a doctor. They sent a lovely woman who spoke no English, so we struggled through my examination with my broken Spanish. She wrote me a prescription for antibiotics, and since antibiotics tend, grossly, to lead to yeast infections, I tried to explain that I also wanted the pill that keeps that from happening. She couldn’t understand what I was concerned about, but finally understood, and said triumphantly, “Ahhhh! Infección vaginal ocasionada por hongos!”
Vagina mushrooms. Actually, literally, vexatious vagina mushrooms. That’s what they call it.
Horrified, I nodded as she handed me a pill.
Vagina mushrooms averted, Diego showed up and brought me a stuffed donkey, because my stubborn streak had led to him nicknaming me “Burra.” (I called him “Perro Contento”—Happy Dog—because when he would get particularly excited in bed he had a tic where he would quickly pat me with his hand over and over, like a dog shaking his leg when you scratch his belly.) He spent our last night together nursing me, telling me that he knew I liked him the moment we met, and asking if I believed in love at first sight.
When it was time to leave Patagonia, Diego borrowed a car and took me and Emma to the airport, and after he drove away, texted me:
“Creo que te amo.” I think that I love you.
And, because I was about to get on a plane, I shrugged, and texted back:
“Te amo tambien.” I love you, too.
Why not? So much easier to say in Spanish.
San Carlos di Bariloche Teniente Luis Candelaria → Cataratas del Iguazu → Buenos Aires Ezeiza → Los Angeles International
Departing: May 28, 2005
Emma and I went from Bariloche up to Iguazu Falls, a two-mile-wide expanse of about three hundred waterfalls in the jungle where Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina meet. It’s one of the natural wonders of the world, and the constant roar of the water has the effect of about ten Valium. Local legend has it that the falls were created when a god wanted to marry his human lover, Naipi. But she wanted a life with one of her own kind, and so fled with her mortal lover in a canoe. The god then used lightning to slice the river in front of them, creating the falls and condemning the lovers to an eternity of literally falling in love.
We spent a couple of days in the thunder of falling water (and love?), walking over and under and around the falls. We finally took a little open-air train up the river that turned into these awe-inspiring monsters. There is a wooden walkway that goes over the river, and the water is wide, and quiet, and appears to be slow moving … until it suddenly hits the cliffs that transform it into the huge, mind-blowing phenomenon that it is. We sat over the river, and talked about how the river had become something unique and amazing just by cruising along on its path. How even if your life seemed quiet and typical, you never knew if around the next bend you were about to become something spectacular. Or fall spectacularly in love. We talked about how that was probably how I wanted to feel when I fell in love, like I was going over a waterfall for all eternity, and how that might just possibly not be sustainable, or, if you really thought about it, enjoyable. Then we made fun of ourselves for getting so deep, man. Kristin-Adjacent can get pretty cheesy.
Later that day, we sat in the hotel bar and started chatting with two guys who turned out to be fast-talking New York Wall Street types. They asked me what I did, and I told them I was a comedy writer.
“Huh. No offense, but you don’t really seem like a comedy writer,” one of the guys said. “You seem too mellow. The comedy writers I know are all super loud and fast and frantic.” Emma laughed really hard.
Emma and I went back to Buenos Aires for a couple more weeks, and I saw Father Juan a few more times. He took us to a birthday party for two outrageously beautiful twin brothers, and we met his friends, each more gorgeous and well-spoken and well-traveled than the last. But Juan still stood out, for his peacefulness and his quiet sweetness. The partygoers all loved him ferociously and a little protectively, but he was a little on the outside of the boisterous bar scene. He and I sat outside, looking at the boats in the tony waters of Puerto Madero, and he told me about why he had joined the seminary, mostly because of his father’s and sister’s deaths. Then he took me home, for mimitos, and in the morning I sat on my hands to keep from grabbing my camera when he pulled his crisp white shirt over his perfect skin.
Diego would text me constantly from Bariloche, things like, “Tengo una grande problema con vos.”
I have a big problem with you.
The day before Emma and I finally flew home, Father Juan came over. We walked to the park near my apartment and took pictures of ourselves lying in the grass, Juan smiling as I nibbled on his neck. I cried, talking about what Argentina had meant to me, and he promised that I would be back.
Juan brought me a photo he’d taken of a horse, and a copy of a story about a man who rode a horse from Buenos Aires to Los Angeles at the turn of the century. He was inspired by the story … the journey could be made, with the right horse and enough determination. The cities weren’t so far apart.
My landlady came to pick up my apartment key, took one look at Juan, and raised her eyebrows.
“You had a really good trip,” she said, looking steamy.
On the plane, I found a note from Juan on the back of the photo: “When we are old we will smile about these times we have together when we where young.”
I had changed my return ticket to Los Angeles three times, pushing it back until the very last day before I had to be back at work in the That ’70s Show writers’ room. I thought all of the English at LAX might break my heart, and when I walked into my house for the first time in months, I burst into tears.
But back in the writers’ room, the speed and quality of the conversation were like fireworks. I was still in slow, Kristin-Adjacent mode, and couldn’t keep up that first day, so basically just watched the words fly across the room. And … it was really fun. It turned out I had missed the linguistic acrobatics of my American life, even if the new “room bit” upon my return from South America was that I was constantly, at any given moment, either in the process of getting impregnated or getting an abortion. (For the record: I’ve never done either.) The proximity of the two events meant that in the routine I was also getting knocked up by the abortionist a fair number of times. Welcome to comedy-room corporate-speak.
As I came back up to my normal speed, I also fell in love again—with my job, with my coworkers (to comedians, making abortion jokes at your expense is really just a way of expressing love), and with my friends. As much as I loved Argentina, it made me appreciate home in a way that I hadn’t before, too. And when I would start to get blue about being in Los Angeles instead of somewhere exotic, I developed some tricks to snap me out of it. I started writing in hotel lobbies, because even though I’m working a few blocks from my house I can pretend I’m on vacation somewhere sexy. I started a routine where I would walk around the city imagining that I was just visiting, trying to see the familiar streets of my hometown through the eyes of a girl on vacation by herself in the exotic city of Los Angeles, California, U.S.A. It’s like when an old married couple imagines their spouse is someone
else in bed, spicing things up by pretending they don’t belong to each other. The trick almost always gives me that new-love zing for my life, and my city.
I started to dream of a perfect life—not exclusively away from Los Angeles, which I realized my people really made “home”—but one that involved leaving it for a few months a year, so I could have the break that seemed to be required to love it. I also wondered if Juan had been my final fling before I would meet my husband. If the trip to Argentina to prove that I could take on a continent alone was the thing I needed to get to the place where I could merge with someone else again, be half of a whole, and feel good about it. Maybe that was my last crazy single-girl fun, I thought as I unpacked my bags.
But that was only the first of my three trips to Argentina.
5
“You Can’t Go en Casa Again” (Argentina, Part 2)
Los Angeles International → Buenos Aires Ezeiza
Departing: March 9, 2006
It turned out I couldn’t get back to Argentina fast enough. The trip had redefined me: I was now the type of woman who gets an apartment in exotic locales by herself for a few months, learns the language, makes dozens of new foreign friends, acquires lovers, and uses the word lovers. I spent the nine months between my trips to Argentina starting so many stories with the words “You know, in Argentina …” that people would sarcastically snap things like, “Whaaaat?! You went to Argentina?! Oh my God, I had no idea!”
This new type of woman I had become loved to regale passersby with geographically based dating rules culled from the many miles of road she had seen. So I would trill at cocktail parties how I loved romance abroad because I could abandon my tiresome Stateside need for quick-wittedness in a mate. In a non-English-speaking country, I might chirp, “I’m the one who can’t keep up with the conversation. Who knows if they’re smart or not?! And who cares?! I’m certainly not quick with the German or French or Israeli or Portuguese bon mot, so why should they be?” I’d observe that if I was actually in another English-speaking country, where I could, ostensibly, ascertain the smarts and humor of my companion, I’d be too distracted by those accents to give a hoot. Accents also, I would add, mysteriously make men seem older, which is a handy way of fooling oneself into warming one’s lonely hotel bed with an inappropriately young suitor, another no-no for me on home soil.
What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding Page 8
