I’ve been conscious of it. It’s grand even in the smallest of denominators: in the simplest terms I’m senseless.
Imagine this. 12am in El Alto, Bolivia. Only the foreigners will say more than two words to me, but they, too, need the bus down to La Paz. They don’t speak Spanish as I speak Spanish, my bald head and camo pants might make me look like a Colombian marine stationed in Titicaca more than an American yuppie, if only I could get the accent right. A round man took the bait, he called me a taxi, and even packed my bag in the trunk. I swear I saw him salute as the engine started, and the Europeans couldn’t get the signals on their phones to start. I told myself I couldn’t let them on out of loyalty to my country, but in reality I just forgot to ask.
Every day that week I found a new reason to unlike the French, they were like a plague in that city. What is it that attracted them so infestingly to La Paz? I watched one boil a whole chicken in a pot then eat it with a pound of rice, everything gray on his plate. Bzzt. Another smoked three cigars a day in the patio and had been in the hostel for a month, with no contacts for cocaine. Bzzt. The few times they spoke English at the dinner table was when the Uruguayan kid lit a blunt in their presence. Bzzt.
“Oh my god get me away from him, he’s from the North,” said to me the only French girl who wasn’t white, who I made better friends with, about a boy behind us while we walked back from a club.
“Isn’t American worse?” I knew how cool she thought I was for being from New York.
“Nothing is worse than France, north of Paris.”
So it wasn’t that they wanted La Paz to be a sleepaway camp for their compatriots, and most of them fucked off in all directions anyway. This same brown french girl had spent some time in Buenos Aires before fleeing the humidity up the Andes mountains to a cold and dusty Bolivia.
“It was too much like Paris, it sucked.” She said to me one night after I told her how excited I was to go and live along the Rio de Plata. “I didn’t come here for that.”
Were these French escapees sick of each other, too? Of course I couldn’t ask that, so instead I asked:
“Have you had the indigenous food yet? I don’t think salt and pepper are all that popular with some tribes, so everything’s just... different.”
“Oh no. I mostly cook here. I bought enough pasta in Salta to last me the month.”
That made sense. What didn’t was how impossible it was for the males to turn me on. Everything should’ve drove me to them: they were sweet, and fit, and enlightened from backpacking. They had big hands, and were tan. We were all below the equator. But if you’ve ever seen the honey mountains in La Paz you’d know that there isn’t a chance they don’t affect the magnetic field of the city. All ions must be positively charged, so much so that on my first night out, the most lion-looking one of them bought me three beers, and even in his beauty I didn’t think to know more about him than his name, Jacques, and his Lyon tattoo.
It made sense that I couldn’t feel but I did. Valeria was impressively Chilean, with an American accent she had acquired from the show Seinfeld, although she’d never been above that Equator. One time I had to beg her to please, speak to me in Spanish; and while she did that one time, I realized she didn’t see me as one of her’s, but she understood I wasn’t one of them either.
So I would correct her accent every time it fell because she asked me to. We talked about American things, she wanted to know too much about New York which is fair, about real rock music and guns. I wanted to know what her parents thought of Pinochet, for which she never gave me a clear answer.
“What about Bolivians?” I asked her while the French shouted around us. “You’re here because you like the way they do it, right?”
“I’m not planning on getting hit by a truck.”
It wasn’t that I planned on sleeping with her, or even holding her hand while drinking coca tea from the hostel roof watching the moon turn the brown snowy peaks blue (that one I probably did heavily imagine). No, it was the thin air that I wanted her scent to swallow. I wanted to see the ribs inside her jacket, see them turned, folded over her stomach, bent over her back. I couldn’t explain it, I remember working out on a mountain that looked onto ours, not waiting for her to leave, but often seeing it anyway. I wanted her to want these things from me, despite my unavailability to her.
How could that make sense? Out of the french there grew this flower, and I knew I couldn’t cut it, so I wanted it to snap in half for me.
On the last night before our departure, we gathered the three other non-french in the hostel, the Uruguayan and two Israelite women, and we descended our high white mountain to a reggaeton club. I was stunned to see all the lines on her face lead upwards in the red lights, she smiled at everything, and getting through the crowd with her meant sometimes holding that mythic hand--
I remember thinking about her hips making the cliffs crumble around us, two condors genetically connected by the glorious Andes, I wanted to be so drunk I’d kiss her but how could that make sense? It didn’t. I swear on everything she asked me to do it, in the middle of the dancefloor with the mountainous gravity to plant her a kiss, she did; I realized I never spoke about my obligation to men, and even in her perfect ignorance I didn’t think to say yes.
In the early morning she left La Paz for the jungle, and I fucked off to the desert.
11/17/19 11:32PM