The Best Women's Travel Writing (19 page)

Karen had hopes for one of the omunbungus. Last year a professional “nose” had come to Orupembe, a man sent by the perfume industry to evaluate the region's scents. He walked past one of the hyena trees, a type known for its awful stench, and paused; he leaned down, sniffed, and scooped a gob of sap onto his fingertip. He smelled it, his face expressionless. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out an orange peel from earlier that day, upon which he wiped the sap. This time, when he sniffed it, he smiled.

“It was remarkable,” Karen remembered. “It smelled … amazing. Somehow he just knew, knew that the orange peel would bring it out.”

The Himba were perplexed when Karen expressed interest in the hyena tree. But they humored her, as an adult humors a child's illogical requests, by collecting a sample. The perfume industry liked it. Now, to the Himba's bemusement, Karen wanted to know whether an omunbungu harvest, like the omumbiri's, would be sustainable.

While Karen and I counted omunbungus, the Himba women collected resin. Komungandjera was in charge; she would gather the women and speak to them, pointing to assign their routes. She still never smiled, but she seemed less angry now; maybe it was just her manner. Karen handed out bags—a few younger women protested when handed burlap, sulking until Karen gave them a woven plastic bag instead, a type they could later unravel and braid into jewelry—and they scattered, silent and barefoot on the hot sand. Every now and then I'd come across one, crouched by an omumbiri, plucking hardened drops of sap from the tangled branches. One woman, carrying a tiny baby on her back, pulled an umbrella from somewhere in her skirt and opened it for shade. The umbrella, too, was coated in ochre; there was a hint of plaid pattern underneath it, but unless you saw it at the right angle, you'd never even notice.

We went camping in the desert, the Namib desert, with the Himba women. Anna wasn't pleased; she had to stay behind to work, and made me promise we wouldn't be gone more than a few days. We drove in two trucks, and Karen brought her car, a Toyota. She didn't offer seats to the Himba. “They know how I feel about paint on my seats,” she said. The Himba didn't seem to mind: they climbed cheerfully into the back of the trucks, clutching one or two babies each, and as the engines started several more women came running and clambered aboard.

Three hours later we pulled into a dry riverbed and pitched tents, started a fire. As dusk fell the Himba joined us around it, speaking animatedly to each other. One of the women stood up and began shouting, beating the air with her hands, and two others rose to calm her; they took her shoulders, whispering and stroking her arms until she sat down again. Karen translated quietly. A child had died that morning in the village, a small boy bitten by a snake. In the past few weeks, a law had been passed that all deaths must be reported to the government. To do this would mean a long journey by donkey cart to Opuwo, to reach the government offices there. Some of the women were inclined to oblige. What point is there? the others argued. By what authority does the government make these rules? We owe them nothing. Let us bury him here. Let us do it our way.

When the stars came out, the sky seemed made of static, a million shimmering pieces, as much light as there was dark. It curved overhead, and the smoke rose up and spread to fill it. The Himba took off their jewelry and hung it on a tree, and the babies wandered around in the dark. I slept outside in my sleeping bag and woke up soaked with fog.

In the morning, the women sat around the fire and played with each other's hair, smoothing ochre around each thick cord while the babies picked their noses and stared at the flames. Last night's argument seemed forgotten. The women giggled often; sometimes a single word would set them off. They touched each other constantly.

Back at Marble Campground, Anna was excited. She'd been approved to attend a two-week training course in Sesfontein for wilderness guides. Out of twenty participants, she was the only woman accepted, possibly the first woman ever to do this. If she graduated, the certification would allow her to apply for a promotion—a chance to become, as she said, “permanent.” And on the way there, she'd be able to stop in Opuwo and visit her mother.

“I want to take you somewhere,” she told me.

We set off in the late afternoon. She led me up a trail, around the skirt of a low hill, past the edge of the campground. Along the way we walked through the Himba's clearing, the place where they rested between commiphora expeditions. There was a small hut and a fire pit and the same large cauldron we'd eaten from the first night. The Himba were gathered around the cauldron, eating porridge with their fingers. They hooted as we approached, calling to Anna, offering porridge and juice. One little girl came up and took hold of my wrists, pulling me toward the others. When she let go, there were perfect red handprints on my skin. Anna linked her arm through mine and pulled me closer.

One of the women stood up and spoke vehemently, waving her arms. There was a moment of silence, and then everyone began to howl. Anna translated, laughing. “She says I will lose you in the quarry, because your skin will not show against the white rocks.”

We continued on, the sun low in the sky behind us. As we rounded a hill, the quarry appeared, brilliant white against the yellow-brown of the hillside. It looked as if an enormous mouth had taken a bite from the base of the mountain, leaving gnawed-off blocks of white rocks, sharp edges, tiered ledges leading down and around the cavern. The marble faces were cool even in the sun, cut perfectly flat and surprisingly rough, like fine sandpaper. Little chips were scattered about, glistening. Anna pressed her cheek against the rock wall, closing her eyes. I walked along the bottom ledge, then climbed to a higher one. I had never seen anything so bright.

Anna climbed up beside me, and we sat in the shade of one of the walls. We were silent for a while. “Someday,” she said suddenly, “I would like a cat.” She pushed a chip of marble around with the tip of one finger, flicking it away and pulling it back again. Then she said, “I think I must be beautiful.”

“You are beautiful,” I said.

“That's what
they
say,” she said, after a moment. “The men who come here. Men from—England, Germany, I don't know where. They come with their wives.”

She was sitting very still. We both were.

“Sometimes,” she said, “they want to—” she stopped.

“What do you do?” I said, careful to keep my voice neutral.

“I tell them—” she cleared her throat and tried again. “I tell them I have a boyfriend.”

The pebble had rolled too far for her to reach. I stood up and brought it back for her, then sat down again. She took it and flicked it some more. Shelf by shelf, the quarry was falling into shadow.

“Anna,” I said quietly. “Then what happens?”

She didn't answer. I thought about the pictures on her walls, the women in ball gowns, bikinis, designer jeans. The jewelry advertisements, the perfume. I thought what it might mean, to be admired by a man from the same world as the magazines come from.
My
world.

Before we left the quarry, I pulled a notebook from my bag and we exchanged addresses. Anna's was care of the Marble Campground's post office box in Opuwo. “Tell me when you become permanent,” I said. Anna squeezed my hand.

“My real name is Wakakomba,” she said.

On our way back to the campground, we passed a group of women talking excitedly on the path. One of them said something to Anna, who shrieked.

“Did you hear?” she said to me. “Komungandjera has had a baby! A boy. Her sixth!”

She turned back to the women and opened her arms, a question. Where was it? The nearest woman pointed down the trail, toward the village. She called out to the group, and as one they turned in that direction, half-skipping in their haste. Several of the women waved goodbye, but they did not slow down.

“He is home in the village,” said Anna. “With his mother. A boy!”

We came to the place where the path split, and after a hug we separated, Anna toward the stone shed and me toward the tents. It was dark now. A light wind rustled the mopane trees by the office and carried with it the sound of a donkey braying. When I passed the barrels where the omumbiri was kept, the air seemed to grow warmer. It took me a moment, but eventually I found it: the slightest, drifting scent of lemons and salt.

Blair Braverman is an MFA candidate at the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program. Her writing has appeared in
Orion, Agni, High Country News
, and other publications. She has worked as a dogsled guide in Norway and Alaska, a naturalist in Colorado, and a mapmaker in Maine.

LAYNE MOSLER

Passion and Pizza

A slice of seduction in Buenos Aires.

I
can't take you anywhere, because my favorite restaurant is there.” The pot-bellied
taxista
with the silver hair pointed across the intersection, where three plastic pigs danced on top of a sign that read “
Los Chanchitos
.” The Little Porkers.

“Get in,” he said. “I'll drive you.”

It was silly for him to wrestle his cab across the street when I could easily walk, but I got in anyway. I looked at the pair of sky-blue baby shoes hanging from the rearview mirror. The
taxista
wasn't flirting with me. He was just being kind.

“I don't want to cheat you,” he said, making a U-turn and braking in front of the restaurant. “Go in and have a great lunch.”

I wished Liliana were with me when the
taxista
refused the pesos I offered him. A few days earlier, over coffee at Café La Paz, when I told my Argentine tango mentor that I was getting into random cabs and asking drivers to take me to their favorite restaurants, she tore off the end of a
medialuna
-croissant and shook it in my face. “
Taxistas
are the biggest cheats in Buenos Aires!” she said, “They'll drive you in circles, or rob you, or rape you, maybe even take you someplace dangerous.”

Perhaps she was right. So far I'd only taken a few taxi adventures, and maybe I was just lucky nothing horrible had happened. But when the silver-haired
taxista
shooed me out of his cab and into “The Little Porkers,” where the pancetta-wrapped pepper steak was so tender I could cut it with a butter knife, I felt it was more than luck. We were dealing in trust.

Months later, I was looking for a cab at the corner of Diagonal Norte, near the mad midday traffic around the
Obelisco
in downtown Buenos Aires, wondering where I was going to eat lunch. Buses wheezed by, mopeds wove between the Fiats and Renaults on Avenida 9 de Julio, and I could hear the drums of a workers' protest getting closer when a taxi stopped in front of me. I climbed in.

The last thing I wanted was an
aventura
with another Argentine. After the fling with Joaquín ended, I carried my disappointment all over the city: I didn't know where he ended and Buenos Aires began. As predictable as the end was, as stupid as I'd been to believe Joaquín would keep calling me—who ever heard of a sustainable relationship with a tango teacher?—I still felt sliced in half.

I glanced at the cab driver. His eyelashes were so long they brushed against the lenses of his sunglasses. Even if this
taxista
was the most beautiful man I'd seen in a city full of beautiful men, I told myself the only thing I was interested in was his food. If he had to leave Buenos Aires tomorrow, I asked him, where would he eat today?

“Aren't you going to invite me to eat with you?” he said.

I rolled up the window. There are few things more dangerous than a man who's well aware of how good-looking he is, except maybe an Argentine man who's well aware of how good-looking he is.

“Only if it's lunch and nothing else,” I said.

“No kisses?” He turned down the techno on the radio.

“No kisses,” I shook my head.

“Not even a kiss on the cheek?”

“
Mirá
,” I said. I wanted my heart to slow down, and I wanted to stop blushing, but that only made me start to sweat. “This is how it's going to be. You take me to your favorite restaurant. We have lunch. I take the bus home. You drive away in your taxi. And that's it.”

“So it has to be on your terms?” he asked.

“Yep,” I said.

“Then I don't accept.”

I laughed. I was tempted. I was flattered that the
taxista
with the Johnny Depp cheekbones wanted me, even though I tried to remind myself that flirtation was a fact of life in Buenos Aires. The cab driver was no different from the bureaucrats at the immigration office or the dentist who'd given me a root canal. If I wanted to keep from repeating my mistake with Joaquín, I had to learn to handle seduction the way Liliana embraced sweet talk from her tango partners at the
milonga
: “Lie to me,” she said. “I like it.”

“Once I picked up this redhead near the casino,” the
taxista
began, ignoring a red light on Avenida Córdoba. “She was about forty.
Belleza
. We got to talking, I invited her for coffee. We ended up at my house, in the shower, didn't come out until dinner the next day. I took her to La Taberna de Roberto—”

“Oh, yeah! I know that place,” I said. “It's great!”

The
taxista
went on uninterrupted. So I listened to his stories of his conquests—he'd met most of his girlfriends, and other men's girlfriends, in his cab. I was hungry—my stomach had begun growling when we'd started our journey, and now I was in that dangerous, hypoglycemic zone that's the reason I always try to pack a snack in my purse. I was also confused about why such a beautiful man felt he needed to go over his sexual resume, wishing he would try to seduce me some other way.
Lie to me
, I thought,
I need it
.

We crossed Avenida Rivadavia. The asphalt ended and the cab bounced over the cobblestones. I felt the same vertigo I experienced every time I started to tango: I didn't know where I was going or how I was going to get there, and I was leaving it all up to a stranger.

“Have you ever had a one-night stand?” the
taxista
asked.

“That's something you'll never know.”

“Oh, come on! That's not fair. This is an even exchange, isn't it?”

“I'm guessing you've had a few?” I said.

“Of course.”

“So your taxi is literally your vehicle to love,” I said.

“Love? No, no, no. Passion, maybe. But not love.”

We were in Boedo now, on the south side of Buenos Aires, where abandoned factories faced soot-covered houses. I still didn't know where we were going. I didn't like the uncertainty, but I had to contend with it. Now I was in a neighborhood I didn't know, and I was starving.

“Do you like pizza?” he asked.

“Yes, I love pizza. Yes.”

He stopped the taxi on the corner of Avenida Boedo and Juan de Garay, in front of a pizzeria called “San Antonio.” There was a life-sized painting of a halo-topped, brown-robed, pizza-bearing saint on the window. Behind the saint, the restaurant was full.

“Are you sure you don't want me to come with you?”

“Well …” I wasn't sure.

“At least let me kiss you,” he took off his sunglasses. His eyes were hazel, a lighter shade than Joaquín's.

“By the way, I'm Hernán.”

If I started to kiss Hernán, I reasoned, I wouldn't be able to stop, and I'd become the brown-haired gringa he told his next conquest about. Also, if I started to kiss him, I'd have to wait who knows how long before I could eat his pizza.

“I'm Layne,” I said, quickly shaking his hand, “You know, like Luisa Lane. Superman's girlfriend?”

He grinned.

“You don't want to kiss me,” I said. “I'm too much trouble for you.”

“What? You have a boyfriend?”

“Yes.”

“I don't believe you.”

“You're right,” I said, “but believe me when I say I'm too much trouble for you.”

I handed him ten pesos and climbed out of the taxi.

“Wait!” he called, “Luisa! What about your phone number?”

I shook my head, staring at him as he leaned out of the passenger-side window, trying to memorize the sculpture of his face—the Roman nose, the dimpled chin, the double curve in his upper lip. I blew him a kiss, then turned around and walked into the pizzeria.

I was still thinking about Hernán's eyelashes when I squeezed into the only free seat and studied the menu on the wall. Like most
pizzerias de barrio
, San Antonio's pies fused Italian pizza-making techniques with the Argentine preference for puffy dough and excessive cheese.
Fugazzetta
—a Buenos Aires staple that was invented in the late 1800s when local pizza makers added heaps of mozzarella to the focaccia that their Genovese ancestors brought across the Atlantic—was what I noticed on most people's plates. There were two men at the bar, bald spots gleaming under fluorescent lights, eating their
fugazzetta
with slices of
fainá
—chickpea flat bread—stacked on top.

A server in a thin white dress shirt shared a joke with the beer-drinking retirees at the table next door before he took my order. He returned minutes later with a piece of
fugazzetta
and a slice of
fainá
. Individually, neither was anything special. But together, the
fugazzetta
—a mound of melted mozzarella and a pile of sliced onions on an inch-thick crust—and
fainá
—garbanzo bean flour and olive oil baked into a dense slice—made a delicious combination. Chickpeas checked the richness of the cheese. Onions, oven-roasted and paper-thin, added a strong, sweet accent.

I watched the neighborhood come and go as I ate my lunch. The retirees nursed their beers, studied the soccer scores in the
Clarín
, and pretended not to notice me. Young couples fed toddlers who couldn't sit still. Teenagers in school uniforms schlepped stacks of twine-bound boxes of pizza to go. I spotted a sign between a pair of thirsty philodendrons: the pizzeria had been there for more than sixty years.

I was almost finished with my
fugazzetta
and still wondering whether I'd been an idiot to turn down Hernán's proposition—I couldn't deny that the attraction was mutual. It was only for a ride, but he'd distracted me from the pain of Joaquín. And after all my doubts about where he might take me, the
taxista
had led me to this spot. I felt like I was on the inside in this slow old neighborhood. A wooden statue of San Antonio watched over the dining room from a shelf above a plastic Pepsi sign. I stared at the pile of mozzarella and the tangle of onions on my plate, glad I had a few bites left.

Layne Mosler is a writer who did restaurant reconnaissance and danced tango in Buenos Aires for nearly four years before moving to New York City to drive a taxi. This story is an excerpt from
Driving Hungry,
forthcoming in 2014, a book based on her
taxigourmet.com blog
.