With Molly leaving soon to travel with Mark, the three of us decided to blow out after our shifts one night. Just to smoke and drink and laugh, feel alive and be together. Arm in arm, we strolled along the Eastern Promenade, a bright string of nightlife packed with markets, where every imaginable fruit seemed blown up to two, three, five times its normal size: huge, creamy Brazil nuts; tart guavas; bittersweet maracujas, or passionfruit. Baby toucans sold as pets squawked in their bamboo cages under shelves groaning with wallets and purses made of anaconda hide. Two-foot-tall, stuffed baby black caiman—alligators that grew to over twenty feet long in the slow-moving waters of the Amazon, what I wouldn’t have given to see them in real life!—had been posed on their hind feet dressed in pink tutus and carrying matching parasols. A sign propped under them said in Spanish: PERFECT TO FIT IN YOUR LUGGAGE!
Under a hand-scrawled poster that read chamánicos, or “shamanic,” a wizened man in a vermilion poncho puffed on a fat cigarette. He sat at a low table; two stuffed and mounted jaguar heads snarling at each elbow. Across from him, a young woman held a baby whose top lip indented toward its little nose, exposing a wedge of pink gum. A thousand lines working in his face, yellowed eyes on the child, the man chanted as he waved his gnarled hands over its swaddled form.
We meandered through the cloud of tobacco smoke surrounding the woman and her baby, the droning incantations of the shaman low and constant. I stopped to watch, even as Britta nudged me away. “Come on, Lily, what are you doing? Thirty-five centavos to cure a cleft palate? I don’t think so,” she said with a sneer, trying to catch sight of Molly, who’d been whining about getting wasted since early that morning and was probably already at the bar.
I waved her on, but she put her hands on her hips and squared off with me. “You’re really interested in this hocus-pocus bullshit? Like, abracadabra, your face is all better? Give me a break.”
“Look, Britta, I’ll catch up, okay?”
She rolled her eyes and strolled away, shaking her head as she went.
Of course his sorcery wouldn’t work. I knew that, and maybe the mother did, too; still, I couldn’t take my eyes off her—she was rapt, spellbound, lit from within. I felt a stab of sadness, even jealousy; how comforting to believe in a magical world, one where things could actually change for the better. Nothing anchored me anywhere.
I joined my friends at a café under a broken neon sign on the Prado. Around us, couples sat nuzzling; at other tables, tight knots of men played cards in tense silence. Encircled by mountains that jutted up into the night, I had the comforting sensation of sitting at the base of a vast, jagged-edged bowl. Far from the city center, ours was the last bar on a dead-end street that dissolved into a copse of trees, their branches interlocking thickly above us. To be in the city yet at the jungle’s door; this element of Cochabamba never ceased to astound me.
“Lily,” Molly said, getting to her feet. “Nice of you to show up. What’re you drinking?”
“Tequila.”
She made the sign for loco before heading for the bar.
Britta swept up her gorgeous hair in a messy bun, fully conscious of the men’s turning heads. “You crazy American bitch,” she said with a smile. “Did I tell you what I did the last time I drank tequila?”
“Fucked someone you shouldn’t have? Again?”
“Have you been reading my diary? Again?”
We had a good laugh and I loved her anew. She took a swig of her beer and glanced around. A few men at a table not far away laughed with one another as they ogled us, as if daring each other to go first.
“Ugh, here we go.” Molly slid between us with two tequilas.
“Easy for you to say, Little Miss I’m-Outta-Here,” I said, checking out the men on the sly.
“Don’t tell me you like Bolivian guys.”
“What’s wrong with them?”
“They’re all macho, drug-dealing assholes.”
“Maybe she likes macho, drug-dealing assholes,” Britta said. “At least they have cash.”
Working at the hostel afforded us our pick of single male travelers: the long-limbed Germans and Swedes; the gung-ho Americans; the big, brawling Australians. An international all-you-can-eat buffet walked through the doors of the Versailles every single evening. Still, in my three months at the hostel, only one backpacker had ever really appealed to me, this sweet French guy who read Camus and smoked continually, but after hanging out for a few weeks, he just took off one morning—bed perfectly made—and I never saw him again. In the end, most of the guys seemed sanitized and self-important, or privileged and full of shit, on their way to Machu Picchu in their high-end hiking gear, on the phone with their girlfriends back home in between lame pickup attempts.
“Tonight,” Molly said, setting her shot glass down with a thud, “I’m celebrating being an expat. We’re the coolest, am I right, ladies?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “Fuck McDonald’s. Fuck Burger King.”
“Fuck all the Burger Kings in Austria,” Britta said with a little beer burp. “You know we have those, right?”
“Fuck malls,” I said. “In fact, fuck America, that place is so screwed up, pulleeze!! I don’t care if I never go back!” I knocked back my drink with a wince and thought: I am not a child anymore. Friends will have to do. I slammed my glass down. “Fuck everywhere we’ve lived before here, and everyone we ever knew before us. And fuck guys, too, right, Britta?”
She winked and smiled and said, “Anytime.”
I glanced up at a nearby circle of men gathered around a card game. They stubbed out glowing cigarettes in overflowing ashtrays, countless empty beer bottles scattered around their table. One of them seemed utterly disinterested in the game. He sat tilted back in his cheap plastic chair, arms crossed behind his head, a smile playing at his mouth as he stared at me through a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. I squared my shoulders and looked away, kept talking shit about America and how we were going to be intellectuals and artists and save the world from its asinine self. All the while, hot embarrassment at being watched licked up my neck.
Something clammy and small groped my forearm: a little boy’s brown hand, fingernails ringed with dirt. I pulled away, but he stood his ground, staring up at me with thickly lashed eyes. With his other hand, he thrust at me a sweaty bunch of heavy-headed purple and crimson flowers. After I accepted them, he turned and hurried back to the man who’d been staring at me, and was slipped a coin or two before sprinting off down shadowy streets.
Britta’s eyes grew wide. “Fuuuck. Lily, somebody likes you!”
Molly narrowed her eyes and sucked hard on her fat, hand-rolled cigarette, blowing smoke out both nostrils like a dragon. “Lily, you have to return the flowers, otherwise that means yes!”
But I was already smelling them; inhaling traces of tuberose, white lily, plus a spice, like clove mixed with grass. “Yes to what?”
Molly rolled her eyes. “What do you think? These guys are not subtle . . .”
I felt him before I saw him. This push of air, a cool shadow over us where he blocked the brash overhead lights that ticked and swayed in the breeze. A flame of self-consciousness, of awareness of beautiful male, zipped up my spine. All this, and I hadn’t even looked up from my stranglehold on the bouquet. A long-legged black insect emerged from the throat of one of the fluted flowers, tending one of its delicate limbs into the scented night air. My friends shrank back into their chairs, stared holes into me, breathless for me to say something.
“Here,” I said, thrusting the flowers in his direction. “I can’t accept these.”
That’s when I finally looked at him. A gymnast’s build, a bit taller than me, inhabiting his clothes—short-sleeved shirt a size too big and unbuttoned over the universal white wife-beater, baggy American shorts cinched with a colorful woven belt—like he wasn’t aware of them. Thick black hair cut short, missing the usual pomade Bolivian men used to slick it back or spike it up. Under the blocky glasses, carved, high cheekbones shadowed a wide, full mouth. Around his neck hung a black cord strung with the incisors of a peccary, a wild hog deadly in herds; lots of guys wore them, but on him it looked right. Cheap American sandals, the $1.99 type, wide feet, beaten and dusty looking on the sides; they looked unused to being in shoes of any kind.
His fierce brown eyes, magnified by the lenses, lasered into me like he’d found something he’d been looking for, and who was I to stop him? Like what was wrong with me for not remembering who he was. Of the three of us, Britta was the knockout, hands down, so I couldn’t stop wondering, Why me, dude? And what was with the Clark Kent glasses? Bolivian men, many of them slick and preening, often acted like they were doing you a favor offering to bed you down; this guy, handsome as he was, looked like he got dressed, cut his own hair, and combed it in the dark without a mirror.
“Where are you from?” he said in Spanish. He made no move to take the flowers.
“I said, I don’t want them.” I carefully laid out the flowers on the table as if I was showing my losing hand in a card game. I kept my eyes on the heavy velvet petals as my fingers lingered there.
Britta took a swallow of her tequila and head gestured at me. “She’s from the land of strip malls and Burger Kings. Ever been there?”
“No,” he said. His eyes burned into me. “My name is Omar,” he added in heavily accented English.
Molly snorted into her drink. “I don’t remember anyone asking you.”
I squirmed in my seat, swirled the dregs of tequila in my glass. Had no choice but to look up at him again. He gave me a quizzical look, like we’d had this appointment to chat and I was ignoring him. Clearly, he had no intention of going anywhere. I reddened as a flush of heat shot up the back of my neck. I felt chosen in a way that flooded me with joy. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before.
“What’s your name?” he asked in Spanish.
I told him, also in Spanish. Introduced Britta and Molly, who afforded him a desultory wave or small nod, tittering into their hands.
Britta said, “She doesn’t want to talk to you, okay? Get it?”
I gave her a wilting look.
“Okay, Lily,” he said. “So you don’t care about flowers. Do you like animals better?”
I looked up at him and smiled. “Absolutely.” I thought of the kitten I’d stolen from a shelter years ago, then hidden in my room at my group home. It curled onto my chest nightly, the motor of its purr setting me off into the deepest sleep I’d ever known. One of the other kids ratted me out and I had to take it back, but I never forgot the joy of being in the company of a creature not freighted with being human.
Molly couldn’t hold it in. “Lily, what are you doing?”
Britta just shook her head and smoked, casually cruising the other men at his table. Maybe she was pissed he hadn’t picked her—she was really used to that.
Omar ignored them both. They were fading into the background for me as well, with their sneers and snide comments and I-know-who-you-like-better-than-you-do attitudes.
“Come with me, Lily. It’s close,” he said. “Something a lot better than flowers.”
He pointed to the dark outskirts of the bar, past the blinking string of Christmas lights, toward a cluster of trees and a dense mat of branches with arrow-shaped leaves that drooped down almost to the leaf-littered earth. “I saw something back there. I think you’ll be amazed.” He took a step back as if I were already on my feet and following him. “Just give me a minute. That’s all. Then you can go back to your friends.”
My brain sputtered as to what to do next. I flushed and folded my arms. Sure my friends could be bitchy, but it was a cattiness I knew inside out and could handle in my sleep. They were my fellow warriors at the Versailles; after all, they covered my ass when I overslept or put aside a bowl of stew for me if I missed a meal. But how could I shove this guy in the trash heap of Bolivian men as they saw them? How could they know he had nothing to teach me? Didn’t they wonder what it was he was trying to show me—weren’t they the least bit curious?
Just beyond the lights of the bar, the tangled knot of green and black pulsated in the hovering gloom. I sensed the dark heart of something there. The desire to know what huddled nearby pulled at me, but more than that—to say yes to his delicious urgency to show me, and only me, something that thrilled him—found me slipping the strap of my backpack over one shoulder. Among the pouts and sighs of my girlfriends, I felt myself getting to my feet.
Omar, in fact, stood a few inches taller than me, but was even more powerfully built than he had seemed from my chair. “I’m glad you decided to give me a few minutes,” he said, his face blooming with a smile that lit small fires in his eyes.
I followed his shirt, which glowed white in the dimness down the three stairs from the stone patio to a shadowy stretch of high grass, stopping near the delicate branches of a eucalyptus tree. A soft night wind rustled the silver leaves as a full moon watched from behind feathery clouds.
He pointed into the nest of branches. “See? It’s looking right at you.”
I peered but saw nothing. Just fluttering leaves. As I inhaled the clean, bright smell of the tree my heart sped up—Is this a trick? I took a step closer and stopped short. Three feet from my face, a creature with thickly furred arms and legs hung suspended like a slack green hammock from a branch, five-inch curved claws locking it in place, its bandit-eyed face staring out at me. A much smaller, fluffier version, kitten-sized, peered from its hideaway on its mother’s stomach; same eyes, low forehead, rubbery grin. A mother sloth and her baby, something I’d seen only in photos before that moment.
I took a step backward.
“Don’t worry, they’re slow. They sleep all their life, sometimes they die in their sleep. That’s why algae grows in their fur, see the green? But watch out for their hands, their claws. Never let them get you in their grip, they’ll rip you up.” Magnified by the lenses, his eyes examined me. “Are you afraid?”
“No.” But I was, a little.
“Good.” He grinned. “They’re not very smart.”
As if to prove him right, the sloth lifted up one heavy arm—ever so slowly—toward a branch so slender it wouldn’t have supported her infant, curled her black claws around it, and tried to swing. She came crashing down with a thump; the infant rolled away down a short hill in a terrified ball of fur. Blinking, her eerie smile stretching wider across her face, the mother sloth lifted her head from the earth and swung it side to side with a soft bleating sound. She pushed herself to her belly, dragging her torso along like a creature not meant to be on the ground, slowly swimming herself among the long grasses toward her mewling infant.
Omar sprinted down the hill, scooped up the ball of fluff, and ran back to me. “Open your hands,” he said.
Insanely soft, the baby sloth rolled into my cupped hands. Its tiny eyes blinked against the light, its arms falling back as in a silent fit of laughter before curling forward in a ball. It breathed hotly into my palm before drifting back asleep as if drugged. Maybe even snored there. Omar took it from me and ran to the mother, who had only moved a yard or so, her version of top speed, unbearably clumsy as she scrabbled forward with outstretched arms. He placed the baby sloth in the grass next to her. With infinite tenderness, she found her infant, nudging her snub-nosed snout into its fur. The baby sloth woke and crawl-rolled, whimpering and snuffling, onto her back.
“Was I right? Are you amazed?” Omar said.
“I am.”
“You have a boyfriend, Lily?”
We stood too close to each other for me to breathe. The trees shadowed then revealed his face as the winds gently moved the leaves. “I don’t want a boyfriend,” I choked out.
He nodded and smiled. “How do you speak Spanish so well?”
“Studied it in school.”
“What do you think about teaching me English? Are you an English teacher here?”
I shrugged, reddening as I recalled my shame at the airport when I realized no one was going to meet me and sweep me away to some fabulous teaching job. “Sometimes. Nothing steady.”
The sloth had made it a yard or so up the trunk of the tree to the lowest branch; she swung from one arm and one leg, smiling her enigmatic sloth smile under her low forehead, her twin in miniature clinging to her chest.
“Let’s start tomorrow. Okay, Lily?”
I laughed and looked at him. Who was this guy? What did he really want? Then again, couldn’t he actually be who he appeared to be—somebody decent? Britta and Molly singsonged my name, motioning for me to return to our table. I didn’t wave back.
“What’s your number?” He reached in his shirt pocket and took out a book of matches and a stubby little pencil.
“I don’t have a phone.”
“Where do you live? I’ll be there at two o’clock sharp.”
I finally met his eye. “I don’t want to teach you English.”
He raised an eyebrow and laughed. “No? Then maybe we’ll just take a motorcycle ride. Have a picnic in the Beni.”
“No way will I get on one of those things.”
He looked confused, borderline hurt. Two parallel scars just above his right eye deepened momentarily. “I’m the best driver out there, the safest in Bolivia, like a magic carpet ride. You’ll be fine, I swear. I won’t let anything bad happen to you.”
I thought about what Molly had said when I’d remarked that all the guys drove their bikes like maniacs through the streets of Cochabamba. She’d brushed that away. Those jungle guys, they can ride a motorcycle in their sleep. They’re hard-core. Even Molly had to grant Bolivian men this much grace. But more than that, the man had offered to take me on a picnic! Had any man ever proposed such a romantic and gentlemanly date? So a few beds would be left unmade at the Versailles. Fuck it. What did I have to lose?
“Lily,” he said, like he knew me, all my disappointments, my desperate longings. Then he said it again. In his throat, the word thrummed down my spine, jellied my legs. “How can you be scared? That’s not possible. It’s my life, my motorcycle. It’s my horse, my city horse.” He handed me the matchbook. “Write down your address. Two o’clock.”
I wrote the address and handed it to him, thinking, Well, this is humiliating. I’ll never see this guy again. But I was dead wrong. Those few words and numbers scribbled on a scrap of matchbook cover changed my life forever.