The Indigo Notebook (3 page)

“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.

B
ack 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.

He looks pretty clean-cut, no tattoos or piercings, yet no name brands flaunted in your face either. His long braid is striking, the most alternative thing about him, and I wonder if kids at school consider it hippieish or elfin or exotic or what. His grades in school? Hard to say, but he’s definitely smart—alert eyes, observant, curious. And his way of talking—at least based on our brief conversation on the way to the café—includes no “dudes” or “f-in’” as a universal adjective.

His eyes plod over the menu, his lips moving.

“Need me to translate?” I ask.

“No thanks. I took two years of Spanish, so I can read it okay. It’s the listening and talking part that gets me. All the words run together, you know?” The corner of his mouth turns up. Endearing.

When the waitress comes, we order pastries and coffee with lots of milk and sugar. I haven’t said I’d help him yet. First I want to find out what I’d be getting myself into. I open my indigo notebook, pen poised, and ask, “So, what do you know about your birth parents?”

“Hardly anything.” He pauses, then says quickly, as though he’s just mustered up the nerve to jump into ice-cold water,
“I think they’re alive, at least my birth mother, because she relinquished me.” His eyes flicker to the TV blaring a comedy show in the corner. “I hate talking about this.”

I nod, trying to look professional. “Names?”

He shakes his head. “Spent all week trying to find records. No luck.”

I twirl my pen like a baton, a skill I picked up years ago in my school’s parade practice in Chile. “Pictures?”

Again, he shakes his head.

I stare. “How do you think you’ll find them, Wendell?”

He puts his face in his hands.

Immediately, I wish I’d softened my words. I’ve caught him in an in-between place. A time when emotions are raw and unclothed. I can relate.

He takes a breath. “I thought this was a smaller town. And I figured they’d look like me.” He glances at the other people in the café, most grinning at the TV. Several of the men have long black hair and fine, sculpted faces and tea-colored skin, just like Wendell. “Everyone here looks like me.” He looks disoriented, like when you wake up to a sudden, bright light.

“Don’t worry.” I keep my voice airy. “By the time you go home, all white Americans will look the same.”

He laughs. “My mom and dad—I mean, my real mom and dad—my adoptive ones, that is”—he taps his spoon on the table, a nervous rhythm—“they think my birth mom came from a village just west of Otavalo. But they don’t know the name.”

I want to take the spoon from him and press his hands together.

He pulls something from his pocket: a small crystal, the size of his thumb. The thing he was looking at on the plane. Carefully, as though it’s an eggshell, he places it in my hand. “They told me this was wrapped in my blankets.”

I examine the crystal. It’s a translucent, five-sided cylinder, coming to an uneven point. Parts are cloudy, parts clear.

Crystal
, I scribble in my notebook, surrounding the word with question marks. A pretty feeble clue.

“Let’s let our unconscious minds ponder this a bit,” I say, echoing one of Layla’s ex-boyfriends in Phuket, a self-pronounced psychotherapist who lived in a tent on a beach and offered free advice like a hermit sage.

Wendell and I sip our coffee and munch on flaky pastries layered with sweetened goats’ milk and he asks about the places I’ve lived. I recite the laundry list of fifteen countries. He asks me about each one, about the food and the people and the landscape, and when I get to Thailand, I linger on how Layla and I used to catch a
tuk tuk
to the market and eat coconut ice cream doused with condensed milk and sprinkled with crushed peanuts.

Now he’s pulling out an old-fashioned camera and screwing on a lens and filter. “I’m listening,” he says. “It’s just that your face is all lit up. And the sun’s hitting your hair at the perfect angle. You can see these reddish highlights.”

I keep talking, asking him more indigo-notebook questions, a little self-consciously now that he’s clicking the camera at
me. After we finish our third cup of supercreamy sweet coffee—which leaves me wound up—we stand, stretching.

Again, he smiles that halfway smile. “So.”

“So,” I say.