What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding (13 page)

Despite Father Juan’s recent nebulous e-mails, I held out hope for a possible
progression
in our relations. He
was
a thirty-one-year-old Latin Man who had been out of the seminary for almost two years after all. Nature is nature. You can keep a sheepherding dog in an apartment in New
York, but it’s eventually going to try to herd your dinner guests.

Juan came over to take me out to lunch, and he looked beautiful, and nervous. I had grown out my hair to try to look more like the effortlessly gorgeous, long-haired Argentine girls, and had stopped eating a month earlier, so I hoped he thought the same about me. We walked to a nearby restaurant, and he chatted about his recent college graduation, and his job at an ad agency, while I tried not to sniff his neck or crawl inside his shirt. And then, over
pizza a la parrilla
, he told me that he had a girlfriend. And since Father Juan is not like other Latin Men, it did not need to be said that he was not going to cheat on her.

He gave me this news apologetically, like he was certain I was mostly back in Argentina to see him again, and that this news ruined my trip. I assured him that I was perfectly fine being friends, and that I mostly wanted to see
Argentina
again, since it was
Argentina
that had redefined me, given me a new voice, changed my perspective on the world
blah blah blah.

That night I made out with a bartender named Oscar. Behind the bar, on the bar, under the bar, after closing time.

M
eanwhile, Sasha slept. Whenever I stopped home to check on her, she was asleep. So, after a couple of hours, I would go back out. I reconnected with my expat friends, whose lives were exactly as they had been the year before, and met up with my new naughty-eyed, curly-haired bartender, Oscar, who turned out to have a delightful habit of
taking me to parks, removing his shirt, and kissing me in the sun. While this was happening, Sasha was apparently waking up to an empty apartment, and getting sicker, both physically and emotionally, as three or four days went by without talking to her husband, who was detoxing in California. Which sounds a lot more rock-and-roll than it felt. And so, one night, she broke down.

She accused me of abandoning her, and not caring, and being selfish … basically all of the things you have been wanting her to say to me. I felt horrible, and guilty, but I was also shocked, because I had offered to take care of her and she had sent me on my way.

“WHO THE FUCK WOULD LISTEN TO ME IN THIS SITUATION?!” Sasha screamed from the kitchen floor, where she was weeping.

That was the moment I learned to ignore people in trouble when they tell you they don’t need anything.

This all happened late at night, but I tried to fix it. The truth was, I
had
put my need to re-create my Argentina magic above taking care of my friend, and, deep down, I had known it. I called the expats and got the location of a nearby emergency room, but Sasha walked in, looked around at the filth and poverty and crowds, and turned right back around. We retreated to a cab, where my sick friend had a stroke of genius, and said four magic words to the driver:

“Four Seasons,
por favor.
”

One of my mother’s favorite pieces of advice, based on a week she spent in the Singapore Mandarin Oriental with the flu, was that when you find yourself sick in a foreign
country, ignore the cost and check yourself into the nicest hotel in town. High-end hotels have doctors on call, room service, and daily clean sheets, and accept credit cards. Since Sasha had basically grown up in my house, she and I had heard this advice from my mom as many times as we had heard her say, “Look both ways before crossing the street,” “Nordstrom’s has the best shoe sales,” and “Always carry twenty bucks for a cab and I.D. so they can identify the body.” So we took Sasha to the Four Seasons, checked her in, got her settled in white sheets under a tray of soup, and then she sent me back to our apartment, chastened and feeling like shit.

Meanwhile, Hope was still back in Los Angeles. On the day she was to leave for the trip she discovered that she couldn’t find her passport. By the time she got a new one, and got stuck for two strange days in Detroit due to weather and a weird connection, her trip had been chiseled down to about four days. When she finally got to Buenos Aires, Sasha was recovering, but there was still a chill between us, and we needed Hope’s energy. Unfortunately, Hope brought the rain with her, and so my attempts at taking my friends around my favorite city were gray and wet, and not as enchanted as I wanted. I was really sad about it.

“Kristin, this always happens. You set your expectations too high for a particular version of perfect and then you get so crazily sad when it isn’t,” Hope pointed out, for the twentieth time in our lives.

Appropriately, during that week in Buenos Aires, an odd thing was happening on television. A national channel had a twenty-four-hour camera trained on the Perito
Moreno Glacier, which is a huge ice formation in Argentine Patagonia that comes down from the Andes and calves into a gorgeous turquoise lake. The glacier camera never moved, and there was no newscaster speaking. It was just silent twenty-four-hour coverage of this huge wall of ice. Every so often, an enormous hunk would fall, and cause a huge splash, but other than that … you were just watching a wall of ice.

I found out that this Glacier Cam broadcast happens every few years. The nature of Perito Moreno is that it advances (one of the world’s last glaciers to be doing so, rather than retreating) in such a way that, over the course of between one and four years, it reaches a finger of land and effectively cleaves the lake in half. The two wings of the lake then fight back, slowly melting the stories-high ice from both sides. This two-pronged attack eventually allows the sides of the lake to meet again in the middle, but in the process the lake slowly creates an ice bridge over itself. That bridge then melts and cracks and thins until suddenly, in one majestic moment, the arch is thinned enough that the entire thing cracks, and falls into the lake, creating a splash that is hundreds of feet high.

It was supposed to happen any day, so for this entire week the Glacier Cam was trained on the glacier. Tourists also flock to the region for the “rupture,” to sit and stare and hope that they catch it. I found this entire thing very funny, and yet I also found myself turning on the Glacier Cam feed whenever I was back in the apartment. The hope that you would catch the moment was catching.

And it turned out to be incredibly relaxing to just stare at a glacier. Sasha, Hope, and I took to lying in Sasha’s big bed at the Four Seasons together, watching it as we fell into an eight p.m. pre-dinner nap, a necessity in the seemingly sleep-free world of Buenos Aires. When a hunk of ice would fall, it was exciting, like a great plot twist in a thriller.

“Whoa! Can you believe the size of that splash?!” one of us would exclaim.

“Awesome. Didn’t see that one coming,” we would agree.

Ultimately, the bridge fell in the middle of the night, when no one, including the cameras, could see it. The glacier would not perform on command.

O
ne wet, gray night, Sasha went to bed early, still trying to fully recuperate, and my bartender, Oscar, took me and Hope out for a drink. It was Sunday, and most things were closed, but he had a friend who owned a bar named
Sálvame María
—Save me, Mary. It turned out that the “María” was not the Virgin Mary, but Oscar’s pudgy male friend Jose-María, who owned and ran the bar. We were the only customers, and I was disappointed I wasn’t showing Hope a better time. I needed a great night of South American travel magic, preferably involving romance with a local, and my conscience really needed to deliver something great to at least one of the friends who desperately needed some fun, too.

Oscar tried to do his part for my romance needs right
there on my barstool while María fed Hope approximately as much wine as was probably consumed by the
other
María’s son at the Last Supper, but I eventually extricated Oscar’s hands from my clothes and the four of us went on a hunt for some fun. The guys took us to a lively Irish bar nearby, where, unfortunately, Oscar, Hope, and I were waved in, but María wasn’t. He apparently didn’t make the once-over cut. The night looked ready to stall out there, but Hope gamely suggested we all move the party to María’s house.

“Are you sure?” I asked her, Oscar’s hands in my clothes.

The sweetest wingwoman in the world nodded drunkenly, flashing me a purple-toothed wine smile. “Why not?” And not much later, my dear, dear friend made out with a fat man named María who was not good-looking enough to get into an Irish pub.

It came time for me to go on my solo adventure to Tierra del Fuego. I had introduced Hope and Sasha to Father Juan’s brother, Fefe, who was as bad as Father Juan was good, just like in a
telenovela.
But they shared their family’s physical genes, at least, and so Hope was delighted to make his acquaintance. Fefe invited Hope and Sasha out to Punta del Este, Uruguay, for a few days, where their family had a beach house. Punta is the beach resort of choice for
porteños
, sort of a Hamptons/South Beach of South America.

Hope and Sasha and I said our good-byes. They hadn’t had my experience of Argentina. It hadn’t saved them during their times of crisis the way it had saved me. But they hadn’t expected it to; only I had. I realized they didn’t
look at travel the way I looked at it, like medicine, like my chance to right all of the wrongs that might exist in my life. They just had a few interesting days in South America, and went home not too disappointed, but not too changed, either.

I sent them on their way with Fefe, and they were hit with more rain on the beach. It seemed their trip was not destined to succeed. But they apparently played a lot of hands of poker in the casino, and Fefe gave Hope a nice heap of attention, and we do still have a handful of stories from that week we can laugh about. When Sasha went home, she picked up her husband from rehab and got pregnant with her first child a month later, a new life officially begun.

As for me, after my friends left Buenos Aires another travel mishap intervened: I discovered the morning of my flight to Tierra del Fuego that I had left my passport at an Internet café the night before. I discovered this at five a.m., the flight was at eight, the café was not open until nine, there was only one flight a day, which was going to get me to Ushuaia just hours before the one boat of the week would leave … Basically, I had to get on that plane, or not go at all. I decided to just see how far I could get.

I had a copy of my passport, and so managed to get on the plane that took me to Ushuaia, a little town at the Argentine tip of Tierra del Fuego, but they would not let me on
the boat for Chile without the real thing. My big, expensive, carefully planned trip, where I imagined myself as a lonely, romantic figure staring out at the icebergs, was not to be.

So I cried a little, and watched the other passengers load onto the boat, all fifty- to seventysomething couples who would have been my companions on the trip. I then found a liquor store, and a little hostel above town, which happened to be new and clean with heated wood floors for twenty dollars a night, which I knew would attract fun single travelers. I regrouped, drinking beer in the warm upstairs lounge that looked down at the ocean, and up at the glaciers above town.

After a few minutes, three young Israeli guys sat down nearby.

“Grab a glass,” I said, holding up my big bottle.

They did, and we shared my beer while we watched my boat literally sail off into the Antarctic sunset, blowing its horn like the Love Boat.

It turned out that the Israelis were fresh out of the military, where one of them had flown F-16
S
. South America and Southeast Asia are lousy with backpacking Israelis, all having a year or so of low-cost travel fun between their military service and college. Sometimes they get a little “stuck” during this travel time after the army, and the year turns into longer. The Indian, Thai, and Brazilian branches of the Israeli embassies have taken more than one frantic call from the parents of these wayward beachcombers, requesting that they retrieve these nice, stoned Jews and ship them back to their families in the Holy Land.

Anyway, wherever in the world you find these ex-soldiers, they’re always up for a good time. So my boat sailed away, and then I went to dinner with my new buddies who couldn’t believe I was as old as twenty-eight (I was thirty-two), and then the four of us met a posse of other foreigners who became my travel compadres for a few amazing days.

A brief breakdown of the crowd: first there were the three Israeli pilots. One of them, Avi, had ice-blue eyes, a crazily naughty smile, and, despite the fact that he was built like Kate Moss and was probably too young to legally drink in the U.S., both he and his friends seemed confident that he would be taking me to bed. (In Israel I was told a joke about fighter pilots, and the punch line had something to do with them thinking they could cut diamonds with their penises. So, there’s a swagger.) Later in the night we met Alfred, a German hippie mountaineering guide who was taking a few days off from his job in Torres del Paine—the national park in Chile where I was supposed to be. He was as goofy and cheerful as Germans rarely are, with white-guy dreads and a deep joy from getting to sleep indoors for a few days. There was Elizabeth, the tall, blond Australian student/​waitress/​singer, who was traveling around the world for a year on her own. There were Noa and Eli, a lovely Israeli couple on their post-army trip together, who had met during their tours of duty in the Israeli equivalent of the USO. She sang for the soldiers, and he set up the sound system, and they were the kind of in love that made you want to take pictures of them in the sunset. And, lastly, there was Nick, an adorable blue-eyed
science teacher from Maryland who had just come in from a week backpacking alone in the cold wet tundra of Tierra del Fuego, and who, it turned out, was hungry for some warmth and company. But more on him later.