The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost (23 page)

“You don't like change,” my brother responds loudly.

I'm in no mood for a lecture. “Then why am I traveling all over the world?”

He thinks for a moment, then revises his theory. “Okay. You like it, you are compelled by it, but it scares you, so you make a plan to leave or start something new, but you don't take care of any of the details because subconsciously you don't actually want to go.”

Is this true? Do I have two struggling selves? Does one part of me wish to move forward while the other half of me wants to stand still? I think about all the dorm rooms I've left unpacked until the morning of a move. Although in other matters I'm compulsively organized, I am forever letting my mom show up to a place overflowing with half-filled boxes. “Right,” she'll exhale, readying herself. She knows by now to bring her own packing tape. I never, ever have tape.

“Is that your diagnosis, Freud?” I challenge my brother. “Even if you're right, people change. I've changed.”

“People don't change,” he says nonchalantly. “Not really. Not deep down.”

“How can you possibly believe that?”

He shrugs and turns back to an ancient copy of
National Geographic.

The nurse calls my name. While I wait for the doctor, I examine myself in the full-length mirror. What I had always interpreted as an adorable crop of freckles that sprouted on my nose in Sydney now looks more like dirt. I rub my nose to see if any come off. Nothing.

The doctor injects me and hands over a box of malaria tablets, another item I did not realize I needed. Incidentally, the bill for this visit—about sixty dollars—will float through the mail system for the next three years trying to find me, lost amid all my forwarding addresses, ultimately locating me via a collection agency, a small indiscretion that punishes my credit rating for a dishearteningly long time.

In an effort to prove my brother wrong, I call the airline when we get home to confirm my flight to Rio de Janeiro. The attendant tells me cheerfully that everything is on time, but flights typically aren't delayed forty-eight hours in advance. She asks me if there is anything else she can help me with, then reminds me to bring my passport and Brazilian visa.

“Right,” I say, doodling on a Chinese menu. “Passport and Brazilian vi—” Wait. “Excuse me. What do you mean by ‘Brazilian visa'?”

“You need to have a visa to get into Brazil. It should be stamped into your passport.”

Remain calm.

“Hmm. No, I don't seem to have that.” As though I've misplaced a sock. “I'll just get one in Brazil.”

A moment of silence passes during which I can almost hear the viscous sound of eyes rolling.

“No, that's not possible. You must have it before you enter
Brazil, and it takes three to four weeks to obtain from the embassy.”

“Well, surely if I explain the situation …” The explanation being that I had no clue I needed a visa.

“No, I'm sorry. Even if they allow you on the plane, you are sure to be sent back once you reach Brazil. I suggest you allow me to change your flight. There aren't any flights into São Paulo for another two weeks because of Carnival.”

Ho. Ly. Shit.

My timing is terrible. Last month Brazil began requiring American citizens to be photographed and fingerprinted. These new security measures match the U.S.'s own changing policies for Brazilian visitors. The increasingly complex process of entering has become a sore spot between the two nations, and I am stuck in the middle of it. If I had been keeping up regularly with the news while traveling up the east coast of Australia (a much lower priority on the road than at the Dawsons' breakfast table), I would have read about two Americans who were recently arrested for expressing their annoyance at Brazil's new procedures in the form of an apparently internationally recognized hand gesture. Understandably, this did not improve the tense relations.

I look back at my family playing Scrabble. My poor unsuspecting brother and his new wife are about to have an unexpected (i.e., uninvited) houseguest for ten more days. I think of Carly, who is thirty thousand feet in the air, sleeping peacefully on a red-eye to Brazil, where she plans to spend a day with friends before I meet her in Rio.

The airline agent clears her throat.

“I'm not sure what to do,” I whisper. I don't want my brother to overhear before I can come up with a proper defense against his prophecy.

More silence.

“Where else can I go?”

“I can get you on a flight to Buenos Aires in five days,” she says.

Buenos Aires: Borges, Evita, tango, economic collapse—these scant details are all that leap into my brain. I take a deep breath. “Okay, let's do that.” She exchanges the ticket, and I throw the hundred-dollar change fee onto my credit card with all the other charges piling up.

Carly ends up waiting for me at the airport for three hours before checking her email and finding my frantic, apologetic message. We make a plan to meet a week after I arrive in Buenos Aires. She'll head west through Brazil. I'll travel north up Argentina, and we'll reconvene somewhere in Bolivia, a country that conjures up even fewer details than Argentina. In the meantime, I'll have to land alone in South America. Despite my recent successes as a solo traveler in Australia, it's a daunting proposition. Looks like I've got ten days to learn Spanish.

When the airport's nether regions have borne their last piece of luggage through the black rubber curtain that divides us, I am empty-handed. The woman next to me asks someone in a uniform:
“¿Nada más?”
I repeat the phrase hesitantly, pretty sure it means I'll be wearing the same underwear for the next twenty-four hours. I carefully print the address of my hostel on the missing-baggage form. When I called there a few days ago from San Diego, the Argentinean woman on the phone chuckled a little when she took my name, saying, “You are very planned.” It didn't sound like a compliment. Now, however, I'm glad I made the booking, even though in under twelve hours, this same woman (who has by then met me in person) will swear up and down that I am not a guest, nonchalantly turning away my precious backpack like a scorned lover.

The airline agent hands me U.S. $50, a small fortune at this juncture in my financial life. I plan to stretch it for several days.
I possess under two thousand dollars for this three-month trip, leftover Australian earnings and unused American tips. Even with favorable exchange rates, it's a paltry sum. Luckily, Carly and I are the perfect monetary match: she is cheap, and I am always broke. A few steps away is a
cambio,
a currency-exchange kiosk. It is a silent exchange, with
hola
and
gracias
bookends. Not knowing much of the language has added a new dimension to my arrival disorientation. Obtaining a bus ticket to the right area of the city now seems like a monumental task.

“Hola,”
I exhale. I struggle through two sentences, pointing to my guidebook map and smiling like an idiot before one of the two women at the information desk holds up her hand as though stopping traffic.

“Let me explain what you must do,” she responds in perfect English. “It is very simple, yes?”

An hour later, a bus deposits me on a narrow street across from a dilapidated grocery store. A few laughing backpackers clamor out of the hostel, holding the door open for me as they go. I wander up a dark staircase. At the top is a sunny yellow room. Two girls my age are chatting animatedly. They are beautiful, short and slim, with caramel skin and auburn hair.

“Hola,”
they greet me.

“Hola,”
I respond, and then we stare at one another for a few calculating seconds.

“¿Inglés?”
the shorter girl inquires.

I nod helplessly, an infant waiting to be attended to.

She fans her face while she counts my pesos then shows me to my dorm room. It's full of blue bunk beds and yellow curtains, and it will soon be the setting for a lesson in the advantages of earplugs after I am kept awake all night by the honking city traffic. I choose a top bunk, just like I did at summer camp, based on the same logic as when I was twelve, which is that there is a greater chance of being crushed to death by a top bunkmate if the unit collapses than of tossing and turning in my sleep so
much that I roll off the bed and onto the hard floor. It's entirely faulty reasoning, since while I have never seen anyone squashed, I have been woken up by a crying girl lying bewildered and bruised on the floor, one leg stretched unnaturally behind her ear. Regardless, I throw first my small bag and then my body up onto the bed. I loosen the money belt chafing at my belly and let out the gigantic sigh of someone who is contemplating letting her exhaustion fully take over. But just outside my window, Buenos Aires is waiting, unwilling to be ignored in exchange for a nap.

Buenos Aires has the air of a dazzling but crumbling European city, of better times not so far in the past that they are forgotten. Its marble neoclassical façades, grand balconies, and imposing columned structures are chipped remnants of a wealthier time before the recent economic collapse. The peso used to be almost equal to the dollar, but now it's worth a third of it. You can dine like a king here at an all-you-can-eat buffet, where the meat is so tender it yields to a butter knife, for under five U.S. dollars. The city is abuzz during the day with perpetually packed cafés and bookstores and at night with clubs that pulse with sensual bodies.

I burst out onto the chaotic streets, some so narrow you could reach your hand through the open windows of the compact cars that clog them. I think back to my hesitant arrival in Dublin, how uneasy and unsure of myself I was, and can't believe it is the same girl who stomps through this new foreign city, ready to explore.

I turn left once, again, and then stop short at the edge of the busiest and broadest street I have ever encountered. Avenida 9 de Julio is a monster of a road, with twelve huge lanes stretching across it. It makes California's Highway 5 look like a park trail. Down one end of the avenue is the huge white Obelisk, one of Buenos Aires's most well-known landmarks and the place where
parades and celebrations often begin or end. Several sets of lights line the pedestrian intersection, and people appear to be crossing the road in phases, stranded on islands every few feet, the wind of the racing cars and buses blowing up hair and skirts. I watch for several minutes, but no one succeeds in negotiating it in one go, although one sprinting man nearly gets flattened as he momentarily considers braving the last little section of concrete before changing his mind and jumping back. I stalk an unsuspecting woman, letting her guide me to the other side in three heart-stopping takes. She's wearing a colorful suit and fantastic pink stilettos. I'm sporting my Aussie-uniform flip-flops, and the grimy streets have already stained my exposed toes.

As is my new first-day-in-a-foreign-city custom, I do absolutely nothing other than walk aimlessly and stop at bustling cafés to sip café cortados and gobble
alfajores
(cookies layered with dulce de leche that I can already tell will be my Argentinean substitute for Tim Tams). The Spanish spoken in Buenos Aires—by
porteños,
as the local residents are called—has a distinct Italian accent, due to the vast numbers of Italian immigrants who settled here in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I studied Italian for two years in college, so when I first hear conversations flying about, I am disoriented by the unfamiliar wrapped in the familiar, like a present packaged in a box from another store. People say the transition from Italian to Spanish is easy, but I think this is the case only if you are fluent in one of the languages before switching to the other. I catch just the most basic words drifting by:
café, bueno, gracias, mucho.
My ears need some time to adjust to the pace of the language. If Sydney's English moves as unhurriedly as island life, eliding certain words, disregarding some consonants altogether, then Buenos Aires's Spanish is as fluid yet precise as tango. At first I try desperately to keep up, but soon I find it's easier to let go and allow the words to wash over me. There is a certain bliss to being in a foreign place with a foreign
tongue. It leaves you free to wander about and take it all in experientially, without language as one more barrier to meaning.

I walk without intention. I have no place to be. There is only the decision to turn left or right, to stop or keep going. All that exists is the “what now?” of the present moment in Buenos Aires. I get lost several times and ask for directions in tentative Spanish. One hunched, becapped man points me south, but soon I realize he is mistaken, and I ask a passing woman who duly points me west; a third local points me south once again, and I am no closer to my destination. This is the beginning of a common experience in Buenos Aires. No one ever says, “Sorry, I'm not sure where that is”; it's perfectly acceptable to point in the general vicinity of where you
think
something might be rather than admit you don't know. Maybe there is a tell that gives away those who know from those who are bluffing, but each direction-giver is monumentally confident, so I always totter off gratefully, getting where I need to go about 50 percent of the time. It doesn't matter. I'm not scared of getting lost the way I used to be. At dusk, I meander back to my hostel. I announce myself at the door to be buzzed in, yet again confusing the same girl who checked me in and later turned away my luggage and who appears to have a mental block against my very existence.