Indecision: A Novel Read online

  “Oh she will be all right. Natasha is quite tough, don’t you think so? And I suppose I am less than fully in sympathy because—because she is not a very constant sort of person, do you find? To leave us without warning . . .”

  I was still feeling dizzy. Maybe I should have eaten more than just the one piece of toast.

  “So I am surprised, yes,” Brigid said. “But also not surprised. You can see?”

  “Totally.” Except I didn’t know if Brigid’s familiarity-of-the-strange idea was meant to characterize a) Natasha, b) the world, and/or c) her own cast of mind. Still, one way to get on a good footing with people is to agree with them without knowing what you are agreeing to, and from there the rest should follow, or proceed. “So you’re still cool with going to—”

  “Perfectly cool.” She shrugged with one shoulder. “I am free.”

  The tram picked up more and more passengers at each station until it became so extremely crowded that when the doors opened people yelled out to the hopeful faces on the platform, “No hay donde! No hay donde!” Even I got in on the action, once informed what I was saying. Then somewhere in Quito we stopped, and stayed stopped. The stillness of the car, combined with the rapidly changing circumstances of my trip, made for a weird sensation. Then a loud kind of pluckily mournful song came on flecked with static over the speakers above us, and everybody, very much including Brigid, chimed in with the wailing female chanteuse. The passengers sang the song through twice, all mouths in concert, wailing with happy expressions until the trip resumed. Such a musical people, the Ecuadoris! I felt left out along with the crying infants and sullen old men and wished to learn right away this apparently national song. And when Brigid and I were able at last to squeeze out through the pressed bodies and raised-up arms into the thin cool air of drizzling Quito, I requested a translation.

  “The chorus? A love—that is deceiving me. My heart . . . is in your hands.”

  “My heart is in your hands.”

  “I despair but lack for the courage to . . .”

  I waited. “To what?”

  “To leave you. My love.”

  “But that’s so sad. And they all seemed so happy.”

  “Poor country, happy music—a correlation all over the world. Have you been to India? But no more . . .” She waved the noun away. “I should remember I have abandoned my dissertation.”

  “Was your dissertation set in Quito?”

  Standing hugging herself against the cold with gooseflesh on her arms, she said, “Set? No, it more concerned the jungle. But now two weeks ago I gave it up.” Unconvincingly she shrugged. Then smiled: “So I too have no reason to be here.”

  We laughed and walked off rehearsing the song—“un amor que no es amor”—to Natasha’s abandoned apartment. My dread from the night before appeared to have gone away. After all I’d decided without reservation to learn the song by heart, just as I’d suddenly decided to travel around the country with Brigid the foreign stranger, and in this second decision I was so blissfully free of even the most rational misgivings that I suspected the Abulinix must already be flooding my system and lighting it up.

  ELEVEN

  We were sitting pressed together on a torn vinyl seat, knees up high like overgrown kids, when the dirty diesel engine sputtered up at last; and yet even with the bus turning out onto the road, all these ragged entrepreneurial dudes still kept on boarding with sweet and savory things to sell, and bottled water.

  “Here we have the great question of travel in Ecuador,” my new friend Brigid was saying. “Does one prefer intense thirst or else the persistence over many hours of the need to urinate?”

  Our ETA in the town of Baños was six hours away. So instead of H2O I just purchased these soft fleshy beans bathed in clear liquid in a plastic sack. The beans looked appetizing and tasted that way too, salty, squishy, and with a definite tang of je ne sais quoi. “What are these things I’m eating?” I asked as we watched the last of the vendors scramble down the aisle, hop off the bus—which had by then attained a serious speed—and stumble headlong on the roadside, nearly biting the dust.

  “I do not know, Dwight.”

  “Well they’re excellent.” With a pinching of the fingers I squirted the beans, or at least they seemed very fabaceous to me, into my mouth one by one. Our plan, excitingly pointless in the way of modern or postmodern travel, was to stay in Baños tonight; head to famous Cuncalbamba with its ideal climate in the morning; and then wind up drinking rum-based cocktails on the dazzling Pacific coast, an aspect of the plan which in fact we never realized. “Baños . . .” I said. “Sounds like baths almost.”

  “Baños is baths—the word is the same.”

  “So I’m one for one so far. All right. Sure you don’t want one of these—?” She shook her head. But even if she didn’t know what I was eating, and very happily chewing, and kind of rationing a little, because they were so, so good, and how would I ever ask for them again, not knowing the name?—otherwise Brigid was this fount of knowledge and total information awareness. We paid for everything in dollars—right, American dollars, the familiar dirty presence of which only made the novelty of everything else that much sharper—and this, she explained, was because the government had wanted to halt the hyperinflation of the sucre, the venerable currency named after one of Bolívar’s best officers, who had defeated the Spanish and secured Ecuador’s independence in 1822 at the Battle of Pichincha, Pichincha being a mountain we were about to pass as we descended in this crowded rattletrap bus through “the avenue of volcanoes,” as the great traveler Humboldt (whose fame never reached me) had called it. And the tall pale spotted trees with their waving islands of broad leaves? “Eucalyptus.” And the men’s felt hats that the Indian women in their rainbow-colored shawls wore tilted above their sharp handsome faces? “A porkpie hat, I think is the word.”

  “Damn Brigid I listen to you and I feel like what was I thinking, studying philosophy? I wish I could have studied just the facts.”

  “I have met many Americans, but you are the first who is what I always imagine a true American is like.”

  “Really? That’s funny.” I couldn’t tell if I was being defensive or playful. “Because I’d been thinking how totally Belgian you are. Belgian as frites.”

  “As what is?” She laughed in this sharp way of hers that seemed to separate the comedy of laughter from the charity part.

  “I think you heard me,” I said.

  “So . . . Do I seem to you a Walloon? Or a Fleming?”

  “Yeah well just very pan-Belgian is how you seem—with your love of neat distinctions and precise terminology.”

  “You make me very impressed with myself! Because I am not born in Belgium.”

  “Oh.” Nothing was seeming to be what it seemed today. Moodily I ate another so-called bean.

  “Maybe I should have told you this. Only my mother is Belgian. Papa comes from Argentina, this is where we lived until I was five. I was Brígida until in Belgium they removed the letter and of course changed how to say it. However,” she said with a certain residual air of defiance, “I would not allow them to spell me as Brigitte.”

  “So you’re half Belgian. Maybe you overcompensate and that’s why you seem so Belgian.”

  “Not to the Belgians! Who care more about the family lineage than anyone. Every year the book on the aristocracy, Le Bottin Mondain, it sells very well. Bof—Belgium. You know the Belgian delicacy, les petites crevettes grises? So this is what my father calls the Belgians: the little gray shrimps. No Belgian I know is the least bit wild.”

  “And yet you seem so sort of proud—”

  “Really it is of Argentina that I’m proud. And yet I have hardly a memory of Buenos Aires, so to me it comes to seem almost that I am merely pretending to be from another country, almost that I am being pretentious to feel that I am so unique a Belgian.”

  I told Brigid she seemed like a pretty complicated person.

  “Really I am extremely simple in my�
��my . . .” She gestured vaguely at herself.

  “Dans ta coeur?” I suggested. “Dans ton tête?”

  She looked puzzled for a second, then said, “Somewhere, yes, I am a deeply simple person.”

  Somehow this tantalizing admission was the cue for us both to stop talking and look out the window, watching the world, or really the third world, pass by. Pale faces gigantic on a billboard looked down on the encampment of tin-roofed roadside shacks while on a dusty street two kids were passing a bald gray soccer ball universally between them. And beyond the scattered human stuff stood a green volcano terraced and planted with corn at the base and topped up above by a blank toupee of snow.

  The bus stopped in Latacunga, where, feeling super-thirsty, and with the idea that moisture must be good for a fluid decision-making style and a pro-growth mind, I bought a liter of water. And so all the way to Baños my bladder acquired a very stoical temperament. Plus I knew my suffering must be scandalously mild compared to being tortured and disappeared by a fascist regime, as luckily hadn’t happened to Brigid’s dad when the generals took over Argentina and he fled with his shrink-cum-wife.

  Brigid looked at me as I took a last swig of water. “You will burst.”

  “Burst, shmurst.” I offered her the lees. “Hey”—something had occurred to me—“are you Jewish?” She congratulated me on finally a correct guess (dad being half Jewish), and I asked her what it had been like being such a double foreigner in Belgium as a kid.

  “I don’t know really—I find it impossible, in a way, even to think—”

  “Right,” I said. “It’s too close to home.”

  “To think about home? Yes it is.”

  Looking out the window, I commented that the Andes didn’t look like the other mountains of my experience. “Jagged. Yet soft.”

  “Good way to put it.”

  “Hey where did you learn English, by the way?”

  “In fact I was studying for three years in New York.”

  “Really? I wonder if maybe we passed each other on the street one day.” I looked at her and doubted it.

  “No,” she said firmly.

  “Yeah but you didn’t know I was me then. So you weren’t looking. You know, my sister’s also an anthropologist and she teaches in New York, at the New School.”

  “Not really? Another anthropologist?”

  “Yeah, Alice, Alice Wilmerding. I even have her book with me.”

  “You see—there are too many of us. Good that I quit, no?”

  From my day pack I fished out Consumer Survivalism, n+1 Books, $18.95, paper. “I think the idea is how people buy more things than they could ever actually use in order to like secretly convince themselves that they’ll live some absurdly long time. Like long enough to actually use all the stuff they buy.”

  “Not a problem in Ecuador.”

  “No yeah it’s more about American garage-filling culture. See, in her appendix there are these inventories of select American garages that she prints side by side with—look—with all these actuarial tables. She says it proves dad hasn’t read the book because he never complained about—see—that’s a picture of his garage. She’s like, ‘That’s another thing’—because everything always proves everything with Alice—but she’s like, ‘That’s another thing, people like to accumulate big trophy books they’ll never get to.’ But I’m like, ‘Dad reads everything, Al.’ And she says, ‘Except what I write.’ So we’re sort of at an impasse. In lots of ways actually.”

  “You don’t share your sister’s politics?”

  “I don’t know. Haven’t finished the book yet. My opinion is that good books, just like bad ones—don’t you think they’re better if they’re short?”

  Life was short, I was thinking, a thought not original with me. But it got a fresh context as the bus hung and turned on a precipitous mountain curve. And looking outside I saw a clutch of Ecuadorians (as it turned out they were more officially called) peering from the roadside down a steep green escarpment to where some car or bus must have plunged.

  “Yikes,” I said to Brigid. She looked unsurprised. Or else it was just that she was a serious person, and therefore a little sad and unsurprisable. Because the thing was that when her ready smile stopped, it stopped absolutely, with no leftover glee—and then all you had then was an impression of her close-kept sense of her own significance, which she seemed to carry somewhere hidden on her person like diplomatic papers. The question was: did I enjoy her company, and what did I want with it? I had little to no clue, and this made me wonder whether I’d been mistaken in thinking the drug was working.

  Arriving in Baños at dusk I dashed into the HOMBRES room of the bus station and stood pissing into the reeking urinal with fantastic mightiness. It did me a lot of good, releasing the suffering contents of my bladder. And as my pain gave way to half-happiness I thought of how I loved to piss, and in fact to sneeze, to shit, to remove wax from my ears or snot from my nose, to ejaculate or to spit, and even when sick to vomit—anything at all along those lines. I might never become a wise and decisive person, but at least an entire lifetime of excretion and other removals remained before me, and faced with the prospect of such cost-free, morally neutral, and abundantly available pleasure, how could I ever regret my disgusting life on earth? I am the poison that is in me, I thought, and I love getting rid of it!

  “You are relieved?” Brigid asked outside on the street.

  “I feel like a million bucks.”

  “That will buy you a lot in Ecuador. For now we look for a fifteen-dollar pensión.” So we did, though my gaze kept lifting from the street to where on the far side of town a waterfall poured from the lush darkening mountainside, the spout so white it seemed to light itself by friction from within. Stars were coming out higher up, as well as the sound of insects all around.

  Brigid told the stout hatchet-faced woman at the desk that we’d like a habitación matrimonial—a presumption that might indicate thrift, affection, we’re-in-this-togetherness, who knew. It could be prelude to a seduction or a peremptory announcement that our relationship was to be deromanticized right away by the sharing of a toilet. Not to mention that Brigid too was a live and free creature who wouldn’t necessarily know these things herself. Maybe I was going to get lucky, something which, I reminded myself, following her up the stairs to our room and giving her ass a good review, wasn’t always a piece of unmixed luck, and shouldn’t automatically be hoped for any more than feared. Did any of the world religions, in some of their sects, recommend the perfection of ambivalence as a spiritual course whereby the novice ensures that he’ll never be completely disappointed even as he also disqualifies himself from any true satisfaction? I wondered this.

  “Doesn’t seem very matrimonial,” I said about the dingy yellow-painted room with bunk bed and single bare overhead bulb.

  “No—they had no more left.”

  Brigid dragged her backpack into the bathroom. A grunt and a sound of wrestling ensued, and when she came back out she’d put on lipstick and eyeliner and a wrinkled beige dress. I wondered whether this was typical of Belgian backpackers in Latin America.

  We went out together in the new dark and chose at Brigid’s suggestion an Italian restaurant where we drank bad wine and ate pasta that was more like Play-Doh made from cornmeal and subjected to marinara sauce. “I am so sorry,” she laughed. “It is like a copy of Italy after many many times through the machine.”

  I asked her if she had ever played the game of telephone, in which a whispered message circulates from ear to ear accumulating distortions as it goes.

  She shook her head gamely. “But I will try.”

  “No. See there’s only two of us. So we wouldn’t be able to get enough distortion into our communication.” I took another sip of the bad, effective wine that was like a libel against the whole Chianti region. “We’re condemned to understand each other.”

  “Okay. Too bad.” Then she smiled with a pleasant faux wickedness not displayed before
all day. I could really see why alcohol is so heavily used in Western civilization.

  But all we did later on was climb up to the gazebo-y or belvedere-ish half-enclosed room atop the pensión, and play three games of Connect Four. I got routed in the first two, but the last one I won. And then I felt so high on benevolent novelty that I declined a fourth game and went out by myself, making last call at one of those emailerías cropping up wherever backpackers go. After using primitive universal sign language to explain my desires to the proprietor, I was able to write Natasha:

  FROM: [email protected]

  TO: [email protected]

  SUBJECT: Hola

  Dear Natash, in a rush. Don’t worry about anything and do what you need to (the universal law). I hope you are okay in terms of whatever crisis or procedure or experience you may be undergoing. All’s cool down here. Like Ecuador a lot and enjoy Brigid as well who is less sold on me. What did you *say* to her? Just kidding. In Banyos. Nice town—waterfall! Important thing: I love you.

  I had never said this last thing to her before and didn’t mean it in any binding sense. But in light of the morning’s whole Santa Claus–esque experience, plus being a little drunk, I wanted to strew kindnesses throughout the world. Sharply, strangely happy was how I felt (also patient, restless, and free) as I strolled back from the emailería along blue dusty streets, under the nearby rising moon.

  However as soon as I returned to our room I had to confront the problem of happiness’s nontransmissibility—from which I imagine very happy people must really suffer terribly. Because there was Brigid stumbling back as she opened the door for me, and looking more or less miserable with her lipstick smudged and the mascara having run beneath her eyes.

  “You wish Natasha were here. So do I!” She sat down hard on her bunk.

  I tried to console her for her loss. “No, it does suck. Because Natasha’s just so great.”