The Best Travel Writing

by James O'Reilly

  Then, licks of blue, gold, fuchsia, and white teased the dusty sky and dun landscape like flames. And he was on our street. A pushcart full of fabrics—billowing from poles, folded in neat rows, nearly engulfing the wiry man behind it all.

  “Chador au chadori …Chador au chadori.”

  He was selling chador, headscarves, and chadori, burqas. On each corner of the cart, a post held a chadori, striated by dozens and dozens of tiny pleats, billowing in saffron, snow white, and dusky blue, the most commonly worn shade. The veils filled with hot Kabul air to assume the ambiguous forms of their future wearers. I studied the oval mesh face-screens at the tops of each one, as opaque and inscrutable as they were when actual women were behind them. The borders of the screens were embroidered with repeating floral patterns, works of delicate craftsmanship. Then the wind picked up, and the hanging ghost-women evaporated as the veils became flags, horizontal in the breeze.

  “Chador au chadori …”

  The walnut-skinned man wore a white prayer cap. His baritone was languid, his Rs liquid, and the rising and falling notes of his tune so familiar. Had I heard him before, in my sleep? As he approached, I slipped behind the front door—a scarf and veil salesman surely would expect female modesty. But just after he passed, one more look.

  “Chador au chadori …”

  As he disappeared from sight, the voice faded. I had heard the tune before. It was not in my sleep, and not here in Afghanistan. From the time I was a child, I regularly visited my grandparents in Taoyuen, a mid-sized city in Taiwan’s north. The United States was the only home I had known, but with repeat visits to Taoyuen, the city—the damp, tropical air; the people who spoke Mandarin with accents like my parents’; and the bitter scents of Chinese greens and ferric waft from organ meats at the outdoor market—had become a part of me.

  For as long as I can remember, every morning in Taoyuen the same chant rang out over and over, carried by a tinny amplifier, often muffled by rainfall. The voice was female, and I can’t say if it belonged to the same woman for all those years. But the words and the tune were always the same:

  “Man to bau, man to bau …Man to bau, man to bau”

  The woman pushed a cart full of man to, steamed rolls, and bau, stuffed breads, around the perimeter of the outdoor market. Her deep voice rose and dipped, stretching out the round vowels. The chant faded and grew as she made her way around the neighborhood. I saw her once, a woman in a conical straw hat and a weathered face the color of weak Oolong tea. Her cart was packed with round, stacking stainless-steel containers full of those creamy white rolls, each as big as a fist. The steaming dough trailed milky-sweet clouds in her wake.

  “Man to bau, man to bau …”

  “Chador au chadori …”

  The six-syllable, rising-and-falling cadences of her cry and his chant were echoes of each other. Different languages, different products; same song, same notes. Was it just that these two countries, in their varying trajectories toward modernity, still had economies that supported chanting, cart-pushing street vendors? Perhaps. But when I heard that chant in Afghanistan, I felt at home there for the first time.

  I heard the scarf and veil salesman a few more times, always upon waking from my nap. Once, I peered out the front door to get another glimpse of him; the other times, I just languished, half asleep. For the rest of my time in Afghanistan, I never again woke up feeling dislocated.

  “Through metaphor,” Cynthia Ozick wrote, “we strangers imagine into the familiar hearts of strangers.”

  Those six syllables had rendered the differences between the four words for home irrelevant. A week ago, this house had been foreign to me, filled with strangers who welcomed me with open arms and hearts. Now, I had a little bit of birthplace, country, and homeland wrapped up inside this compound, with its fig trees in the courtyard and rooms lined with pomegranate-hued rugs—and with Nafisa and Nazo.

  Angie Chuang is a writer and educator based in Washington, D.C. Her work has appeared in two volumes of The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2012 and 2011. “Six Syllables” is adapted from her book manuscript The Four Words For Home, about her post-9/11 relationship and travels with a family divided between Afghanistan and the United States. She is on the journalism faculty of American University School of Communication. Note: Names of Afghan and Afghan American family members have been changed for their protection, as some of them have been threatened for cooperating with an American journalist.

  MATTHEW GAVIN FRANK

  Catalina

  A street girl plays music you won’t hear anywhere else.

  This is Rock ’n’ Roll, but not rock ’n’ roll music. This is some heroin addict losing a thumbnail on a G string, Al Green on his knees, Sleepy John Estes alone beneath a streetlight screaming, “Aaahh’m just a pris’ner!” into a Coors Light bottleneck. This is Mick Jagger finally castrated and Marianne Faithfull juggling his balls and a chainsaw. And this is accordion. Just accordion played by a Zapotec girl in a night alley that has no business being this orange.

  My wife is asleep in a Oaxaca motel named for the swallows who shit there, and I have what looks like blood on my hands; the motel has no A/C, and a hot plate where we cooked our dinner, and the blood on my hands is just chioggia beet and not blood. And this is nothing like the church group accordion that the upper middle class men played (in lederhosen) when I was a child at Strawberry Fest in Long Grove, Illinois, when polka was still as exotic as whiskey. This is accordion that virtuoso Guy Klucevsek can only swallow with an avant garde sleeping pill and a Transylvanian whore.

  I have to take a picture of this girl and her accordion, and the red cup that has only one peso in it, and the kids up the street destroying a piñata and eating its sweet organs, the simple pleasures of balloon and lightsticks occupying the children in the Zócalo before they take their shifts behind tarps, bearing clay burros, and yellow scarves, and wool carpets for sale to the tourists.

  My wife and I are in Oaxaca trying to find our place in the world again, aged after a year of dealing with our sick parents. We force ourselves to shed hesitancy and over-protectiveness, and all manner of adult things behind food carts steaming with pigs’ heads, girls’ fingers dancing over keys that were never mother-of-pearl. My wife sleeps and I walk, stop for this girl—motherless, pearl-less—and it’s all I can do to pull out my camera.

  I’m hungry. For dinner tonight: only two passion fruits and a cherimoya, a sautéed beet, the chile relleno with salsa roja my wife and I split at the Mercado Benito Juarez, passing so many stalls where intestines hang like ribbons. We’ve slept little, listened to so much music. But nothing like this. This tiny voice perched as if on a water lily, driven by some failing engine—a horsefly with too-wet wings, food for some larger animal with a poisonous tongue. This asthmatic accordion scoring its attempts to fly, right itself; the instrument itself failing, played-out after one too many cigarettes—dirty and ugly and struggling and beautiful. There’s a reason why Tom Waits has a pathos Celine Dion never will. That reason is this girl’s accordion and its emphysema.

  It’s all I can do to say, “Foto?” and I feel immediately blasphemous for doing so. You should know this: my wife is asleep and she cried before sleeping. Something to do with the bald old woman selling green maracas. Something to do with her knowing, in likely dream, that her husband is interrupting a nightsong.

  She doesn’t stop playing, but nods, her little sister running out of frame, standing beside me hugging my leg and the flash explodes. Only a few months earlier, this street saw the local teachers’ strike lead to violent protests, riots, cars set aflame, rocks hurled, barking guns, military intervention. I wonder where she played then. Now, only the firing of my camera, her little sister hanging on my forearm, reaching to see the photo, her feet off the ground. I’m glad it’s blurry.

  On the outskirts of town the streets turn to dirt, three-wheeler moto-taxis, stray dogs and squatter camps in the valley before the mountains. The buildings here spew their e
xposed steel cables like industrial squid, the cisterns slanted on the roofs, holding, for now, their collected water. I begin to wonder when dark becomes too dark; what the accordion player’s name is. Because I’ll never know, I give her the name I’ve always wanted to give a daughter. This is the word I will wake my wife with.

  Returning to town, the bustle has become a chug. The pushcarts of ice cream and mezcal and flan in plastic cups return home, their bells feebly ringing. At the cathedral-tops, bells more obese announce the crooked arrival of something holy: music or midnight.

  She is gone, but something of her endures—something beyond music and the instrument that acts as intermediary, beyond buttons and bellows and small fingers that can only press. In this accordion is translation. A language that can stave off, just as it ignites. In it is all music—the stuff my wife snores, the shitty Laura Branigan cassettes my mom kept in her car when she was well enough to drive, when Branigan was alive and sexy and rife with the lovely strength required to belt-out crappy songs.

  I head for Hotel Las Golondrinas, something of clove and orange peel in the air. Tomorrow, we are going to Santa Maria del Tule, to the church grounds there to see the Montezuma Cypress whose trunk has the greatest circumference of any tree in the world.

  My wife is sleeping, so I am quiet when I enter the room. I take a long pull from the ass-pocket of mezcal on my nightstand that we bought at a market on the grounds of a different church. I need a sink, and its cold water. In the bathroom, I wash the beet from my hands, wonder what the accordion girl will have for breakfast tomorrow. I’m pulling for bananas and cream. I have no idea where she sleeps tonight, or where—if—she wakes up. Because I know there will be a fence around the trunk of that giant tree, because I’ll never know, I knife her name into the bathroom door.

  Matthew Gavin Frank is the author of Pot Farm, Barolo, Warranty in Zulu, The Morrow Plots, Sagittarius Agitprop, and the chapbooks Four Hours to Mpumalanga, and Aardvark. Recent work appears in The New Republic, The Huffington Post, Field, Epoch, AGNI, The Iowa Review, Seneca Review, Crazyhorse, Indiana Review, North American Review, Pleiades, Crab Orchard Review, The Best Food Writing, The Best Travel Writing, Creative Nonfiction, Prairie Schooner, Hotel Amerika, Gastronomica, and others. He was born and raised in Illinois, and currently teaches Creative Writing in the MFA Program at Northern Michigan University, where he is the nonfiction editor of Passages North. This winter, he prepared his first batch of whitefish-thimbleberry ice cream.

  CONNER GORRY

  Caribbean Two-Step

  Life goes on in all its glory, humor, and misery.

  1. Where the Sidewalk Ends

  I’ve known plenty of men like Paco. At the far side of forty and still devilishly handsome, his fading sexuality combines with his big mouth to expose him for the tropical satyr he is. A catty, almost vicious gossip, Paco laces acidic barbs with details of Cuba’s minor celebrities. Not insignificantly, he’s also an out gay man who will tell you to go to hell if you have a problem with that.

  Paco is my hairdresser.

  Getting a decent haircut in Havana—where the mullet remains popular—can be a challenge. Big Hair is still in here, along with Kenny G and spandex, as if 1980s tacky landed on Cuban shores, sticking like spilled oil on a duck.

  So imagine my relief when I was introduced to Paco, a hairdresser for the national film institute. He lives in a three-flight walk-up in Centro Habana and runs his private salon from his dining room. Paco is talented, experienced, and good at taking direction if he likes you, a prickly bitch if he doesn’t. Lifelong fag hag that I am, Paco and I get along all right and I turn up at his door every once in a while for my five dollar ’do. Today is one of those days, with my hair a mess of split ends like the splayed bristles of an old toothbrush.

  It’s one of those hot and sunny Havana May mornings and I’m performing a mitzvah by introducing my sister-in-law Flor to Paco. Like hooking up with a reliable, on-demand pot dealer in the United States, personal introduction is the preferred way to connect with the best entrepreneurs in Cuba.

  We alight from our begged ride on the uphill side of the university. It’s leafy and cool up there and we chit-chat about friends and colleagues—who’s working where, who’s staying abroad—as we make our way around the walled campus into Paco’s barrio. A blast of sun assaults us once we turn the corner onto L Street at the bottom of the hill, where the trees end as abruptly as an ocean pier. An apathetic crowd is assembled in the bright light of the shadeless concrete plaza, waiting for a bus.

  “What was her thesis about?” I ask Flor, shifting my bag to the other shoulder as we pass the wide, steep steps leading up to the university.

  “Equity in disaster management, but that wasn’t the problem.”

  “Oh, really?” I’m intrigued. The juiciest part is coming and I’m heartened that Flor is finally taking me into her confidence—even if it is just neighborhood gossip. The sun is beating down on my face and neck and I start opening my umbrella for some shade. “What was the problem?” I’m about to ask, but can’t.

  Everything has instantly gone dark. My eyes are open, but not working, like a sticky shutter on an old camera. In those seconds, my words and thoughts and breath are sucked away. The umbrella is laying half open on the ground.

  “I must have dropped it,” I think, before the shutter becomes unstuck and I realize it’s me that has dropped—hard and fast into a deep hole in the middle of the sidewalk. My breath comes back in a sharp, high-pitched inhale that peters to a hiss as the pain shoots from body to brain.

  “Conner! Oh my God! Are you okay?” I hear Flor asking, but she sounds muffled and far off, like she’s calling from across a lake.

  My heart is beating fast. I feel Flor’s hand on my arm and become aware of the crowd watching from the bus stop. I worry about my pants, the capris with the pink and yellow flowers my husband brought me from Brazil. “I hope they’re not ripped,” I think vainly. “My ass looks so good in them.”

  Next thing I know, Flor is hauling me out of the hole. I was in it to my waist, the entire lower half of my body suddenly below ground. She collects the umbrella and helps me hobble to the bottom step of the university’s famous staircase. I squeeze the first tears away, but my chagrin is not so easily vanquished. I imagine the bus passengers laughing at the sight of a gringa in tight pants swallowed by a sidewalk and start laughing a bit myself (which keeps me from crying—a tried and true Cuban survival strategy). Concerned bystanders begin coming to our aid and I wish I could disappear, though I love how strangers always jump to the rescue here in Havana.

  A homely woman in a cotton dress identifies herself as a doctor and cups my purpling foot in her palm. She tells me to move it this way and that, which I do with surprising agility.

  “It’s not broken,” she says in Spanish, looking at Flor instead of me, assuming I need translation.

  Just then a young man pulls up in a Coco Taxi—one of the three-wheeled buggies Cubans call huevitos because they’re the color of egg yolk—and idles at the curb, offering me a ride to the nearest clinic. His fare in back looks at me with concern. A tourist squats down to my level.

  “Are you all right?” she asks in a nice, but shrill way that implies I might need backup; that maybe these Cubans surrounding me aren’t properly equipped to help.

  “I’m fine.” I repeat twice, saying it a third time in Spanish for anyone with doubts.

  “It’s just …I have to get home,” I spit out.

  “C’mon, let’s go,” Flor says grabbing me under the elbow and steering me towards the Coco Taxi.

  “No, that’s okay. It’s not broken. I just need to get home and put it up.” I’m embarrassed and in pain. I don’t want to be a burden—to be dependent—on top of it. I’m also concerned that Flor should get a good haircut.

  “Call me later,” I tell her, before begging my second ride of the day and sending her off to meet Paco alone.

  Bracing myself between stairway wall a
nd banister, I hop up five flights on my good left foot which now hurts as much as the banged up right. It’s a slow, laborious ascent that leaves me covered in a gritty sweat. Wincing, I try not to make any sound as I fumble with my keys: I have to get inside before my neighbor comes out and takes pity. Basest coin in the realm, that.

  Hopping inside, I collapse on the red pleather (that’s plastic leather, the upholstery of choice here) loveseat near the door. More than an hour has passed since I fell in the hole. It will be a lost cause if I don’t ice it soon. I hop over to the Russian refrigerator older than me. It opens apathetically, the spent gasket giving way with a sigh as if to say: “Retire me already.”

  There’s no ice I discover upon removing the bent, soggy, cardboard that substitutes for a freezer door. And no drinking water either. I hop three steps to the stove and grab our pot for boiling water. Encrusted with years of boiled minerals, the pot weighs a bit even empty and it takes some tricky maneuvering to fill it with tap water and get it back on the stove. I’m sweating again and my foot has turned a ghoulish color. I pop a trio of Cuban ibuprofen, hop to the bedroom, and lower myself into bed.

  When I come to, I smell the “get well” soup my husband so artfully whips up on occasions such as these. (The man has many faults, but at attending my witchy, bitchy sick self with grace and aplomb, he’s peerless). “It’s early for him to be home,” I think as I swing my feet clumsily to the floor and lunge at the termite-infested bureau, hoping this isn’t the moment it crumbles once and for all. Working with just one foot, it becomes clear, is awkward and loud, like a gang of bored teens searching for meaningful experiences—or at least something Tweet-worthy.

  The little pot-bellied Buddha I bought because it reminded me of my husband clatters to the floor and rolls away, followed by an incense burner that once belonged to my dead brother. I’m looking down at it dumbly, wanting to pick it up fast in case big brother is watching (he had some eerie extra-sensory powers while alive which I have reason to believe linger in the terrestrial ether), when my husband appears.