We paused at the iron gate outside the travelers’ house where we would stay, not sure if it was locked, not sure if we should push or pull or if the gate might creak. On the other side, the house was a bleached green, the green that sneaks into sunsets, and overgrown with plants that must have been hearty to survive the desert climate. I remember trellised rambler roses with no thorns. I remember wisteria, which is not native to Chile’s northern provinces.
Both of us needing sleep, not desperately, Angelica stepped forward and I followed. I noted that dust had invaded my sandals and painted the soles of my feet, and I was already picturing a warm-running faucet, a muddied drain. The gate’s hinges were reluctant and woke the dogs. In turn, their yips woke our host, or she’d stayed up for us. We were let in and shown our room, its door that led to the back garden and the neighbor’s hen house. We said our thanks and our good nights, I soaped up to my ankles, we were quick to sleep.
And then there were mornings. No matter how early we rose, we never beat the sun, eager as it seemed to prove its strength compared to starlight. It was an easy climb up the barren tree at the back of the house, a tree with mercifully smooth bark. So long as we curled our toes and did not catch them in the dry gutter, the hop from the tree’s strongest branch to the house’s flat roof was easy, too. Each day we woke and rushed to lay on the roof’s fine gravel, bellies down, for minutes or hours until we itched for coffee. I burnt the back of my neck to a blister in just two days, and as Angelica turned browner, the milky birth marks that always dappled her shoulder blades grew more distinct. Sitting up, I scratched her back slowly and I think she knew I meant it as a compliment when I told her she looked like one of those spotted horses, a calico animal. When we stood, the gravel stuck to our bare thighs and left craters behind when we brushed it away.
In the communal kitchen, spilling wet ingredients from one glass bowl into a well of dry in another, stood our host, Connie. She kept her shoes on in the house. It turned out that she was only a few years our senior and usually lived hours away, in Buenos Aires, where we lived, too. Some weeks earlier, she had wanted to escape dog shit and newly poured concrete and too much electric light, and so had come to the house in the valley to work in exchange for a stay of a few or five months. She said she had discovered new depths of boredom and did not seem happy about it. By way of greeting in the morning: What will you do today? In the afternoon: Did you do anything? At night: Are you leaving tomorrow? Have you run out of things to do? We laughed and envied her hip-length hair.
Many days, what little we did, we did with Connie. In the kitchen, she taught us to make yogurt, to make pickles and jams and other dark things that live in jars, to make flavorless white bread with a lazy appliance that let out a crazy-making whir. Out back, we helped her wring water from laundry—worn bed sheets and awkwardly-sized bath towels and sometimes socks and underwear and camisoles, all white—and pinch the fabric to clotheslines that paralleled our bedroom window. The clothespins must have been pink and blue and green once, as plastic things can be, but now they were gray from use and sun. We did a terrible job squeezing water from the sheets; when we were finished, we were drenched and giddy.
Afterwards, we looked through our bedroom window and thought we saw steam—so like smoke—rising from the drying linens hung helpless like curtains on fire. Then, on one occasion, rare downpour. We were slow in realizing that the still-wet articles weren’t meant to be that kind of wet, and we sat for a full minute witnessing the shower. Connie rushed from the house and into the fresh mud on the other side of the glass, wearing socks but no shoes, for some reason, leaving the door open. This was the only time I saw Connie in a hurry, and her long hair was even better in motion. I remember thinking that her limbs, too, were unusually long, thinking about weighty femurs and trying to remember the names of the bones in an arm, before realizing, late, the reason for Connie’s rush. We sped to action, then, met her outside—Angelica donned a hat first. Saying nothing, laughing stupidly at our delay, we collected the already-soaked sheets and towels and socks and underwear and camisoles, all white, dragging several through the mud and later washing them again. Plenty to witness for one day, plenty of futile labor and sensation.
Most often, sitting on the covered porch, we watched no cars drive by and no water run through the dry riverbed across the road. There was a swing set in disrepair in the front garden; it framed our view. Connie smoked and asked what we thought about her country’s outgoing president and the activist whom the police claimed had drowned; we shared her anger, tentatively. Usually, she spoke English, our native language, and we responded in Spanish, hers, a clumsy arrangement.
The three of us made a low-stakes game of retrieving treasures that had fallen between the irregular slats of the porch. We bent wire hangers that we would discard when our game was through, and taped sticks that snapped easily to scraps of cardboard we folded like trowels. I was surprised by our success. Our yield included:
- a single acrylic fingernail, painted blue;
- a handful of lighters, several still full of fluid and functional, one white and the subject of some discussion (Connie was superstitious);
- scraps of plastic snack wrappers that seemed to misunderstand the purpose of our searching—this was a treasure hunt, not a beach clean-up;
- coins from this and other countries, including three silver ones engraved with little birds (these were my favorites);
- checkers—only red ones, for some reason, evidence of a losing team, we guessed;
- a whole deck of cards (in its box);
- and the tab from a can of beer, Connie said, or a soda, Angelica said, which was badly bent.
We were pleased.
There were days when Angelica and I left Connie to her work alone and crossed the road—running, though no cars were near enough to threaten us—and scuffed our shoes in the dry riverbed, following its path west, the way the water would run in winter. There were vineyards and clusters of houses westward, and three low earthen buildings in a row with goods for sale: the first had vegetables, mostly rotten but we bought them anyway; the second, gigantic geodes; and the third, eggs and rounds of goat’s milk cheese the size of dinner plates. We collected ingredients for shakshuka—palming tomatoes and eyeing the reddest peppers. Thanks to a small painted sign, we knew we could buy the eggs we needed from the neighbor whose chickens we heard scratching day and night, so we skipped those. We asked after crusty bread, still not won over by Connie’s soft, plain loaves. Maybe improbably, it was the man with the geodes who delivered.
Cradling produce in our arms, we walked slowly—uphill? The journey had not been downhill, or this far, in the other direction—back to the house. We followed the road, not the river, this time, so as to avoid dry orange brush that scraped, at first sticking to the pavement’s edges, then growing bold and walking heel-to-toe on the single faded line of paint that split the concrete down the middle. Angelica and I wondered if Connie knew we bumped hips and held hands as we walked or kissed in our shared bed; we knew she knew. We knew from her tattoos and age and place of origin and politics that there was no danger, and also no point, in telling. We giggled at our safety. We passed a cement wall with a shallow man-made alcove that could only be a bus stop—something else to talk about. We had arrived in a collective taxi whose rearview mirror was draped with bright rosaries. But of course there were buses that journeyed through here and we vowed to watch the road more carefully and maybe catch the next one we saw, finally doing something and pleasing Connie.
By the time we were home, it had begun to be dark. Connie sat on the porch, as she often did, with a pay-as-you-go cell phone that illuminated her face from beneath her chin, spookily. She was chatting with one of the boys she always spoke to after dark, one of the boys to whom she would return when her stay here was finished in however many weeks or months. We laughed with her, she called them stupid boys, she said stupid, stupid boys, and we laughed. Each of her tattoos seemed to be dedicated to one of her stupid boys and she pointed them out with as much affection as derision: a lion for Ernesto, who was born in August; the portrait of Bob Marley on her rib cage, which she said was expensive and had something to do with Naldo; two marigolds, two years with Caco; and a cartoonish six-fingered hand making a two-fingered peace sign for an unnamed deepest love.
It was not unusual to stay up yawning in pursuit of constellations, but the next night, Connie encouraged Angelica and me to seek out a distant neighbor whom she said had an extraordinary room dedicated to telescopes and taxidermy and maps of the sky. We napped from six to ten and he came by the house around midnight; his beard was so thick and wild and only sort of gray. His car had four-wheel drive, and he held Angelica’s hand as she climbed in on the passenger side, then he held mine. She was usually suspicious of older men, but I could tell that she felt at ease because she asked him to turn the radio on and she rolled the window down—it was a manual crank—and seemed to be looking in the car’s side mirror and nodding to herself or to the things we passed and left behind. We traveled in a straight line for some short way, rounded our first corner—suddenly, a cluster of trees no taller than my shoulder, infants, I thought, in silhouette—and arrived. The car was high and, stepping blindly down into the dark, I heard a suck and sank into deep mud. I liked the sound of it but fell behind my companions, dragging my foot on the uneven ground, hoping to be rid of the residue. The man’s house sat a few yards ahead in a perfect clearing. Before reaching it, he stopped and pulled a flashlight the size of a wine cork from his pocket, illuminating a white ornament on one of the little trees. Shifting the light, he exposed another small globe, and others on all the brittle branches of all the trees, like strings of holiday lights or an infestation. Cotton, he said. He shrugged just one of his shoulders and turned toward the house. Angelica whispered to me, urgently, I thought they bleached it, and I made my eyes widen in the dark and nodded and breathed out a laugh through my nose, because I had thought so, too.
The surprise of the bright white is what most impressed me that night and what I most remember now. I know we saw the Andromeda Galaxy and pinpricks of strangely colored light we were told were planets, and all those things were wonderful and confusing, and I know Angelica and I scooted closer to each other on the log in the clearing outside the man’s house, the seats of our jeans wet with moss that faced north. I know we felt or feigned some new emotional closeness in light of the scale this expanded sky seemed to evidence. What is that? A humbling, a resigned gratitude for small things if all things are small—maybe this.
Around two in the morning, the man’s wife joined us on the log without saying more than a few words. She wore practical knit leg warmers. After some silence, she asked if we wanted coffee with sugar, and though we knew we would never sleep, it seemed impolite to refuse and in fact we did want it. The sugar she brought, in a squat ceramic bowl, was dark brown and sticky—I got it on my fingers—and everyone, the man and his wife and me and Angelica, added spoonful after spoonful to our drinks until they nearly overflowed onto our laps, like we were children and masking the bitter taste of ground beans, pretending at a grownup palate. We pretended, too, not to look at anything but the sky, pretended that we didn’t see each other slurp the last of our coffees and tip our mugs back, all the way back, necks bent more than even a planetarium requires, pleading with the last trickles of syrup, more sugar than coffee, to roll onto our tongues.
In a few days, another week, a bus passed by the house while Angelica and I sat on the porch, and, tying our shoes, we missed it. Strange cocktail of disappointment and relief. It seemed time to do something, this being our last afternoon in the valley, so we walked, east this time. A church and, a little further on, a man renting hilariously red bicycles. He said we could reach a distillery in fifteen minutes if we rode quickly.
Worried, not so much, that we’d be too drunk to ride back, we rented two bicycles and decided on a detour that would allow us to visit the church we had passed. We reached it without losing our breath and abandoned the bikes on its steps, shoving through the tall doors, heavy like every door to every church. We discovered blank, not-quite-smooth cement walls, like those of a too-modern art gallery. We paused in the threshold. The austere, unfinished walls stood in stark contrast to a gaudy crimson and gold crucifix hung up front. The cross was the size of a car, the Christ splayed across it as if flung through the windshield. For a moment, I felt we had the choice to delight or despair at this unexpected brutality. So alone in that long and empty, anonymous room filled with so much dead air, it struck me as a conspicuously bloody monument. In retrospect, crucifixes are. Silent for a moment, then swiveling and retreating, lest the bikes be stolen while we contemplated this holy, gory house.
The rest of the ride, which lasted closer to one hot hour than to a quick fifteen minutes—and still we would have to go back—was tense. I wasn’t fast, but Angelica was slower, and, pausing at intervals, looking back, I took unflattering pictures of her pedaling, as if faked laughter or cruel shots at vanity might help anything. Finally, we arrived: one sour each, mine tossed back, hers sipped dutifully. We declined a tour of the facility. I hardly remember that second bike ride, rushed as it was—downhill, this way—and a means to the end of our hapless excursion.
Connie met us at the gate when we got back and failed to ask if we had done anything (on this day when we had), instead waving a faintly blue and freckled egg in our faces. Look what the neighbor brought! The first half of this phrase in her language, the second in ours. Your last night! We cook! Her enthusiasm at this exception to routine, and this gift—nourishment that usually demanded payment—seemed to push the words out with no planning. For her benefit, we did what we could to put away our moods and made a show of clapping and stomping in the dust, a standing ovation for eggs and for chickens. Connie shook the egg like a tambourine, flipping her wrist, squeezing it in her fist—dangerously, I thought—and, with pursed lips and two fingers of her other hand , let out a sharp and impressive wolf whistle. A surprise from laidback Connie, who was barefoot now, lifting her heels high off the dry path that scalded as we caravanned back to the house. Her whistle started something, a new game, and we found ourselves cheering, yodeling. Back and forth, me and Angelica:
Scrambled!
Hard boiled!
Soft boiled!
Over easy!
Over medium!
Connie: Omelets, omelets! What is over medium?
We all three carried on, collaborating not countering; more ambitious now, imagining amber yolks:
Yes, omelets! Fried rice!
Moon cakes!
Quiche!
Steamed eggs!
Poached eggs!
Deviled eggs!
Easter eggs!
What a relief to laugh with this third woman, an outsider to puncture the dumb tightness between us. We planned our dinner. Finally, Angelica and I would teach Connie something in the kitchen, returning her kindnesses—how to make shakshuka, a wildly easy task the way we did it and a dish that she had never heard of. We had been lazy on previous evenings, opting for crackers and soups and anything anyone else had prepared, so our tomatoes and bell peppers, now on the softer side, were still resting in a wooden bowl on the counter. Still chirping about the next-door hens and their stupid boyfriends who woke us up each morning, we all went inside to do nothing, just talk and listen until the sun was down and we could cook and eat.
In the desert, the days are hot and nights cold, but it was still not yet night when my teeth began to chatter involuntarily. Sitting on a cushioned bench near the kitchen door, I watched Angelica strain, reaching for a skillet in a high cabinet. I listened to the gaggle of newly arrived, towheaded German lodgers, without comprehending, and admired Connie attending to them. My eyelids seemed to grate my corneas. We had already chopped the vegetables, mashed the garlic. It occurred to me to return to the kitchen counter and offer further assistance—when had I abandoned my station? From where this bench beneath me? Nodding at the Germans as they headed upstairs, and deciding on an exaggerated, comic smile in place of language, I stood, paused a moment with three fingers tented on the low table beside me. My fingertips were pale with the weight of an unsteady body. The tiled floor prickled. Angelica. Angel. She seemed amused, or annoyed. Her dark eyes so large; I was so lucky. Angel, I feel cold. Connie interfered. It’s hot. The oven is on. Then Angelica. You look weird. A flat palm to the temple, lips to the forehead. A declaration. Fever.
I am reluctant to admit it—I think I hide it well—but all evidence points to mine being a weak body. Traveling farther than a few hours’ drive away from home—home with its familiar tap water, regular sleep, and tedious, reliable food—usually yields at least one bed-bound day. Even that few hours’ drive makes me woozy with motion. Long weekends are useless to me.
So far, the valley had been kind, but it made sense that a fever would sneak in on our last night. I respected the fever, its patience or procrastination. I was aware of my joints. Awareness of the body is not always pain, and sometimes it is pleasure, but often it is something I would prefer to avoid. I wondered when it would end.
I took Advil or didn’t bother. There was nothing for Angelica or Connie to do but swaddle me in blankets that Connie pulled from a closet I had not noticed before. The outermost blanket was red with fringe and textured like popcorn. Then Connie unwrapped the goat’s milk cheese, Angelica took charge of the stove. The crimson and carmine-colored vegetables that come together to make shakshuka are first to go in the skillet, where they mingle for a half hour or a little less, complicated by cumin, cayenne, and paprika; then, crumbled cheese, usually feta but not in this case, as it was not on hand; finally, eggs cracked over sauce, skillet transferred to oven. The eggs go in liquid, part-transparent, and come out modest, stable, and smooth.
A small window over the sink shed little evening light between Angelica and Connie, their backs facing me. I probably wouldn’t eat tonight. The smells of this, a favorite food, put me off. I looked down and saw no exposed flesh, just feet in borrowed slippers at the base of my mountain of blankets. I wondered if underneath the red mantle there was more red—pink, really—another sunburn, and if damaged skin might have shocked the body, which now retaliated. I wondered if I had been hot on the bike ride but remembered only the vibration in my knuckles as I gripped the handlebars. Pedaling was only half as efficient as it could be, I thought; we push down and, untethered, waste the leg’s upward pull. Mountain bikers and road racers use shoes that clip; that must be the secret, one of the secrets, to their speed. Angelica yelped. Burnt with a metal utensil or finger slit with serrated knife and messy with blood? She kept up her noise, not words but staccato exclamations, surprised again and again. Connie said, Oh, oh, no, and laughed; Connie always laughed, but this laugh was short and flat, and Angelica did not match it, though she quieted.
The fence—
The coop—
The rooster must have—
But, the neighbor, why didn’t she—
Well, what do we do—
Do we, should we scoop?
You.
Me?
Connie lurched for the drawer by the fridge, the one just off its tracks that stuck if you pulled it open too quickly; it stuck. She forced it open and selected a large, slotted spoon. Angelica objected. Not that one. Both of them had stepped back from the stove, seemed to avert their eyes. I needed to stand up. The blankets constricted. I shook them off; I needed to breathe and rise and see.
I saw. The skillet contained: the pulpy red peppers and tomatoes, swimming together, congealed and bubbling; translucent slivers of white onion bobbing in the sauce; flecks of white cheese, softening; half of a faintly blue and freckled eggshell—Angelica must have dropped it in; and, as I had feared, a fetal mass smaller than a deck of cards, unmistakably bloody amidst all that edible red.
Now armed with a ladle, Connie scooped—Wait! Where do I—and dropped the thing—the bird; anyone could tell it was a bird—into the trash. Angelica tied the bag swiftly, lifted it, and carried it at arm’s length to the bins out back. When she came back in, I squeezed her hand, kissed Connie on the cheek; for me, time for bed. Quite enough life on this final day. In an exercise of bravery, the women may have salvaged the dish while, in the other room, I stripped off the clothes now causing me to itch and sweat. Perhaps they dipped our bread, stale, in the sauce, around the untainted edges of the bird’s very temporary nest. Maybe, as I pulled the bedsheets to my neck, kicked off the blankets, struggled for comfort, they cracked more eggs, peeking inside before dumping their contents into the pan. Or their appetites were diminished, and they followed my lead, cleaned up, and hurried to bed.
I woke when Angelica came in and roused me, insistent on a not-too-cool shower to right my temperature. It was night. I was already mostly naked, and suddenly so aware of the touch of sheets to my lower back, the touch of thigh to thigh, everything heightened. I did not resist and she propped me up, walked me to the waiting faucet. As she turned the shower’s mildewed knob halfway, she was already removing her socks, one foot stripping the other, pulling her sweater over her head, hair springing back to its place only slightly disturbed. The scar beneath her breast stood out to me, her only blemish. Together, we stepped under the water—not too cool—and stood with our chests touching, close together so the shower stream covered us both. The water beaded on her curls. I closed my eyes, my head lolled and our foreheads touched. She washed my hair, reaching around me, the flesh of her arms resting on my collarbones. Acute awareness of fine sensation, the scalp’s every follicle, tears in my eyes.
We woke on our last morning with stained sheets. I was menstruating, early, but my fever was gone.
Skipping coffee, hoping to make a train departing not-so-nearby, we hitched a ride with a young couple who had a melodica in their backseat; we nudged it aside to make room. I remember heat on my shoulder through the window. I remember a static radio broadcast, the boyfriend in the passenger seat humming along. Angelica made small talk with the girlfriend while she drove and offered thanks for the ride. We waved goodbye to the valley.
