Braver Than You Think

by Maggie Downs

  Barbara, on the other hand, admires their blithe, casual lifestyle. She believes important skills are learned outside of the classroom, and these kids are picking up things that will prove valuable later in life. They know how to create their own fun without relying on TV, video games, or other manufactured forms of entertainment. They know how to climb trees and fend for themselves, and they are quick to pick up Spanish. And they are practically welded to each other, so tight is their bond, since they have no one else.

  “At least we’re learning about the culture.” Barbara shrugs.

  “How are we learning about culture when we’re in a farmhouse, babysitting three American children?”

  A voice from the bedroom interrupts our bickering.

  “You guys,” Ashley the Babysitter yells. “I think my cyst is coming back. Could one of you come look?”

  With this, Barbara finally agrees that our time in Argentina might be better spent elsewhere. She and I leave the next morning, headed for the city of Mendoza. When I walk toward the dirt road, Liam clings to my leg. I shake him free, then crouch down to look at him face-to-face. I swipe a lock of blond hair from his eyes.

  “I’ll miss you, buddy.”

  “Not as much as I’ll miss you,” he says.

  I have to keep moving before he sees me cry.

  IF YOU TASTE SOMETHING DELICIOUS IN ARGENTINA—creamy gelato, crackly pan de campo country bread, vibrant popsicles infused with lemon verbena—chances are it emerged from Mendoza’s rich food culture. The region is the nation’s leading producer of garlic and tomatoes, which grow as plump as red delicious apples. The empanadas are the flakiest in the whole country, and the olive oil tastes just like fatty sunshine. Orchards line the rolling hillsides.

  Of course, there’s also the wine. With the largest acreage of malbec vines in the world, Mendoza is particularly known for this silky, mineral-rich wine, produced from a thin-skinned grape that needs a lot of sun and heat to mature.

  Although this is an extremely dry desert region, Mendoza has an elaborate artificial irrigation system, diverting melted snow from the nearby Andes into reservoirs, which allows for extensive greenery. That includes the picturesque, tree-lined city avenues, as well as the more than 800 bodegas that produce most of Argentina’s wines.

  Barbara wants to get some exercise, and I want to sample some of the local products. She and I compromise with a bodega bike ride, which pairs cycling—a traditionally healthy activity—with binge drinking.

  We find a rental place, where we get one map and two wobbly red bikes. Mine doesn’t have brakes, but it does have a bell. The owner, Mr. Hugo, also promises us unlimited free wine when we return. A backpacker’s dream come true.

  Our plan is to ride to the farthest bodega on our map, then work our way back toward Mr. Hugo’s, hitting several more bodegas along the way. That way, we will only have a short distance to ride when we are most intoxicated. It is a good plan, but it is quickly derailed.

  Barbara and I pedal past a winery that we can easily see from the gravel road. It looks deliciously inviting—a sunny patio, an arch of flowering purple vines, and a big, whitewashed sign that says, “Sip back and relax.”

  “Should we stop here before we go on?” I say.

  “Might as well,” Barbara agrees. “We’re here anyway.”

  In exchange for a few pesos, the winemaker himself bends toward us, showcasing one aromatic wine after another. My first sip of malbec is crushed velvet in a glass. The taste is jubilantly spicy and snappy—ripe berries with a twist of black pepper.

  “To backpacking!” Barbara says.

  “To Mendoza!” I say.

  Just then, a cute boy walks toward us, a girl on each arm.

  “Ari?” Barbara says.

  Ari is a nineteen-year-old whom Barbara slept with back in Bolivia. He doesn’t look at Barbara, but his features twist into an uneasy expression.

  “Ari. Over here!” Barbara waves her hands in the air. Ari abruptly pulls away from his female companions and turns the other direction.

  “I forgot something,” I hear him say. “Come on, let’s go.”

  He jumps onto his bicycle, which is parked on the bike rack next to ours.

  “Wait!” Barbara runs to her bike too.

  “Where are you going?” I yell after her.

  We still have two almost-full glasses of perfectly good wine. Why should we have to sacrifice those?

  Barbara is already on the street, pumping the pedals hard to catch up with Ari. She doesn’t care that he’s accompanied by other women—and he seemed happy about it too. I toss my wine back like a shot, then do the same with Barbara’s glass. I straddle the wobbly bike and start after her. I pedal until my feet are as dizzy as my brain. Are my legs always this drunk?

  “Heeeey! Don’t leave without me!” I holler at Barbara, who is now a half mile ahead of me. Her blonde head looks blurry.

  Ari gains some distance on her and maneuvers a quick turn. Barbara stops at an intersection, unsure of which way he has turned. I catch up a few minutes later and slow my bike down by crashing into a tree.

  We stand on the shoulder of a gravel road, which stretches so far into the distance it looks like it’s headed nowhere at all. Barbara straddles her bike. Mine is a heap of metal at my feet.

  “I know that was him,” she says.

  “You don’t need him,” I say. “He’s just some silly nineteen-year-old.”

  “But I liked him.”

  “I know. But he’s a boy. A child. Seriously, he’s not mature enough to handle you.”

  “You know what I’m going to do?” Barbara says. “I’m going to go back to the hostel tonight and send him a really bitchy email.”

  “Just let it go. It was a fling. He doesn’t want a relationship.”

  “I don’t want a relationship either,” she says. She pauses, then sniffs. “It’s just—well, I guess I just wanted him to like me back.”

  I step over my bike and give Barbara a hug. “He did,” I assure her.

  I don’t know if he did, but it’s something she needed to hear. We sprawl in the grass off the side of the road, and I hold my friend. We are sad, and we are drunk, and the only thing I can do is sit in my friend’s pain with her.

  That evening we decide to split up for a while, and we don’t acknowledge the ways travel can strain a relationship. Instead, we chalk it up to our dramatically different to-do lists.

  I don’t know enough about marriage yet to understand how Barbara is struggling to navigate life again as a single woman. On the flip side, Barbara has two young, healthy parents and can’t fathom how it feels to have a mom die in slow motion.

  I’m headed toward the bustle and energy of Buenos Aires and everything that the city will bring. Meanwhile, Barbara has her eye on the ski resorts of Bariloche, which happens to parallel the trail of her nineteen-year-old flame. We agree to stay in touch over Facebook and meet up again before the end of the month in the capital city.

  Our final meal together is a shared platter of pasta in the town square, Plaza Independencia. We each lift a wineglass, and we toast to our separate roads.

  Scatter Your Heart Wherever You Go

  PEOPLE TELL ME I WILL DIE IN BUENOS AIRES.

  It began at the job I left behind, where my former colleagues started a death pool, placing bets on where I will meet my demise. The number-one choice was Buenos Aires, though nobody could provide a specific reason.

  This didn’t have much of an impact back in California. It was a dark joke, but I laughed. Now approaching Buenos Aires, I am both alarmed and superstitious. Compounding that are the stories gleaned from other backpackers in South America, who frighten me with tales of bag slashings, purse snatchings, and muggings gone wrong. Almost everyone has a friend of a friend who was kidnapped.

  It makes me paranoid. As soon as my bus hits the city limits, I am on guard, darting my eyes up, down, and sideways, observing every potential thief and murderer. I don’t like to be this wa
y—it is exhausting to travel while afraid—but I don’t know how to stop it either.

  I check into a hostel on Avenida de Mayo, the leafy, elegant heart of the Buenos Aires financial district. The owner gives me a map of local neighborhoods, a list of things to do, and some suggested attractions. Then he turns serious, his thin lips set in a long dash across his face, and he runs a hand through this hair.

  “Be careful out there,” he says. “Not safe for a girl alone.”

  With that warning clanging around in my head, the streets seem to transform as I walk them. I stand and watch a cook through the window of the restaurant on the corner. He slaps a sheet of pasta on a table and attacks it with a knife, and this innocuous act makes me jump. Every alley looks scarier and more shadowy than the last. Dramatic architecture appears to lean menacingly over the sidewalks. A man on a crowded street grabs a fistful of my ass when I pass by.

  I don’t want to eye every stranger as a potential attacker, but I’m alone and the city is bigger than anything I’ve encountered on my own before. I am smart about how I travel through it, but I look like a tourist—my face betrays me with a wide-eyed look of half confusion, half discovery—and I am treated as such. On the cramped subway, commuters packed hipbone to hipbone, I feel someone unzip the pocket on my hiking pants and shove a hand inside. There are limbs everywhere—it’s like riding the train with the multi-armed Hindu goddess Kali—and I can’t determine where the hand is attached. I clutch my small bag with my passport and wallet close to my chest and silently applaud myself for not keeping anything in my pockets.

  The city makes me feel brand-new to the world, but not in a good way. It’s like I’m an infant attempting things for the first time, and it takes too long to do even the simplest tasks. When I try to mail a package home to my husband, I am at the post office for six hours before the box is finally stamped and thrown into a pile with other international mail. It takes another hour to find a Laundromat. When I do, I hand over all my clothes, forgetting that I will still need something to wear later that night and the next day too. This is my third month on the road, and I’ve apparently forgotten how laundry works.

  I go shopping and I don’t know how to say no when a slim saleswoman joins me in the dressing room and squeezes me into the wrong size jeans. The button sinks into my skin, and the waist leaves an angry, red ring around my middle. I can’t breathe, and I point to my rear and explain, “Grande.” I am tall, and my body is generous, and I’m angry with the space I take up; I’m mad I can be so large and still vulnerable. I wish my body were something else entirely.

  Mom was the same way. Around the time I hit junior high, our house became a world of weekly weigh-ins, diet gum, and Tab. I don’t recall my mom eating bread, only thin Wasa crackers at thirty-five calories each. Sometimes she binged on candy or ice cream, then berated herself. She spent years hungry, skipping breakfast and eating only the tiniest of lunches. She was consumed by her own consumption, and when she looked in the mirror, she punched her hips with dissatisfied fists, as though she could smash her silhouette into a smaller shape.

  The saleslady pulls another pair from the rack, equally tight but with more rhinestones around the pocket. She shoehorns me into them, wedging my thighs into the denim, and when she bends close to me, her elaborately teased hair smells like cigarettes and powder. When she nods with satisfaction, I give up and buy the jeans. Maybe this is who I am in Argentina, the kind of person who wears painted-on jeans bedazzled in bling. Maybe they will help me slip through the streets unnoticed.

  Wearing my jeans and walking past a gun store downtown, I step inside without even making the conscious decision to do so. I don’t want a gun, of course. It’s irresponsible and would make for some seriously impractical backpacking gear. But I do want the feeling of added protection, something small that I can keep close at hand.

  The walls of the shop are lined with glass cases that run ceiling to floor. They contain enough firearms to supply every actor in a Rambo movie. Including extras. Several weapons under the front counter look suspiciously like grenades.

  It is a small, cramped shop, so I don’t get far before a few employees descend and ask if I need help. At least, I think that’s what they’ve said.

  After the farmacia debacle in Bolivia, I now possess a Spanish-language guide. But it only includes basic sentences like “Where is the bathroom?” “Do you take travelers checks?” and “Those drugs aren’t mine.” I do not possess any real Spanish conversational skills.

  “Hola! No hablo mucho español,” I apologize. I furiously flip through the guide. Unfortunately, none of the words I need are listed.

  “Donde puedo comprar … pepper spray, por favor?”

  The employees stare. Nobody breathes a word.

  “Er, spray de pimiento?” I try again.

  Nothing.

  It is time to pull out all the stops. It’s time for charades.

  I give an Oscar-worthy performance: First I play the role of an innocent woman walking down the street. Then I hop a few steps to my right and act out the character of a brutal attacker who punches the woman in the face. Just as the attacker is about to make off with her valuables, our heroine pulls pepper spray from her pocket and shoots him in the eye, sending him kicking and screaming to the floor.

  I look up from where I am now crumpled on the dirty, stained tile. My wild charade has drawn a crowd of customers. I had no idea so many people would be shopping for guns on a weekday afternoon. I try again, “Spray de pimiento?”

  I’m out of breath and slick with sweat. I mime spray in my eyes and say, “Psssst.”

  “Ah,” someone finally says, and a few other people nod with recognition and exchange quick words in Spanish. A man tugs on the sleeve of an employee, says a few sentences, and motions to me.

  One of the gun-shop employees ducks behind a curtain. When she returns, she hands over a plastic-wrapped package of pepper spray.

  “Mace,” she says.

  MY ROOM AT THE HOSTEL IS LAVENDER, AND THE WINDOW opens to a side street off Avenida de Mayo. I’ve been here more than two weeks. I haven’t needed to use my mace, nor have I even reached for it. I keep it tucked into a secret pocket in my backpack, which I keep in the room most days.

  The city buildings now appear whimsical and inviting. Most are stately and gray, a fusion of Baroque, Beaux Arts, and Art Nouveau styles. The cool stone is detailed with elaborate carved flowers and vines, gargoyles and fantastical creatures, an architectural landscape that rivals nature.

  Across the street is Palacio Barolo, once the tallest building in all of South America, now home to Spanish language schools, a dry cleaner, and some attorneys. The architect was inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy, and he integrated artwork, tile, and other design elements into the building to create distinct layers of hell, purgatory, and paradise. The building is one hundred meters high, one for each of the poem’s cantos, and the twenty-two floors represent twenty-two stanzas. On a clear day, they say you can see all the way to Uruguay from one of the tiny cupola windows, though when I climb to the top, I can’t see beyond the wide, sparkling expanse of the city. I don’t want to anyway.

  I take the English-language tour of Palacio Barolo twice. Then I return a few more times just to sit in hell, which is lined with attorney offices, and read books. It’s quieter than my hostel, and I am comfortable among the Latin inscriptions, a smattering of dragon sculptures, and the fire-patterned floor.

  Argentina is a country of immigrants, and the European influence is evident throughout the capital city, not just in Palacio Barolo. Many afternoons I duck into cafés to drink fizzy mineral water with an espresso or enjoy a cup of gelato, and everything about it reminds me of my mom and her Euro elegance.

  Before my mom became ill, her face was chiseled and fine, like the stone of the Italianate architecture. She also had grand taste despite our budget lifestyle. When given the option, she preferred sparkling water to still, cashmere to cotton, bitter dark chocolat
e to anything milky. Her German accent, which I didn’t realize was thick until I grew up and moved away for a while, confused my friends and prompted laughter. It was strange because I loved the way she spoke. Her voice sounded urgent and melodic at once, as if she were running to get in front of each word.

  She was a woman out of place, not suited for our small town in Ohio. Even though I loved her, as a child I was embarrassed by her foreignness. In a cafeteria full of bologna sandwiches, I carried a lunch box packed with liverwurst. A kid on my block said our house was the only one that smelled like sauerkraut. She didn’t wear jeans or have feathered hair, not like my friends’ moms; she never looked casual. And here’s the tragedy of it all: now that I’m mature enough to appreciate her specialness, the disease has taken everything that made her unique.

  She would have loved this city.

  At night I stroll through the Palermo neighborhood, a trendy barrio with cobblestone streets, tiny cafés, art galleries, and fashion boutiques. There is energy here, and it’s palpable, even from my outsider’s perspective. Every street feels like it unravels just for me, and I’m eager to be part of the throngs of people, the restaurants that don’t fill until midnight, the clubs that pulse until 6 a.m.

  I try on lacy dresses and find the European candies of my childhood. I settle onto a concrete bench in the park and watch young couples woozy with new love and old couples still in love. They hold hands and neck (people still neck?) and trade sips of hot maté served in dried gourds.

  I marvel at the people who pass by me—the people who didn’t exist in my world until that shared moment on the sidewalk. High-heeled women with swishy, camel-colored hair, old ladies with bright lipstick, elderly men who meet my gaze and wink. A man plays the accordion on the street, and the wheezy song sounds like something I might have once known, maybe something from one of my mom’s records. A woman walks past and compliments me on my jeans, the tight denim sausages with rhinestoned designs on the pockets.

  Tonight I go out to La Bomba de Tiempo, an improvisational percussion party held every week in a venue that looks like an industrial warehouse. The room is packed with hundreds of sweaty people, bodies moving together, all dancing to the same tune. Every strike of a tumbadora matches the thump of my pulse. I have always been a self-conscious dancer, but not tonight. Tonight the music is so loud that it feels like it’s coming from inside me. Tonight I dance almost until the sun comes up, sometimes caught in a wave of motion so strong, I’m almost hanging on for dear life. There are masses of people around me, and I don’t know them, but our relationship is reciprocal—we feed off the energy of each other. I leave exhilarated, smiling, feeling nostalgic for Buenos Aires before I even leave.