The Travel Writer (7 page)

“You keep putting me off.”

“I’m sorry. There are so many people here.”

I nodded, though I had hardly noticed them, except Kenny. “Does anyone else know?”

She shook her head. A secret so important she could tell only me, out of all the world. She had no one else.

“Tell me what to do, Pilar. I want to help you. That’s why I came.”

“You came because I paid for your ticket.” The snap in her voice heartened me.

“I understand,” I said. “If I were you, I wouldn’t have forgiven me either. I hated myself for lying.”

She evaded my eyes and dropped one finger down to her offended boot to press on her toe, like a button. “I didn’t hate you because you lied. I hated you because you could think so clearly. Always three thoughts ahead. Saying just the right things to get me to love you. You did it so well.”

“I’ve never had anything else in my life that meant anything except you,” I said. “And then I blew it.” She didn’t seem impressed. “I only lied once,” I added.

“You only got caught once.” She opened her handbag and began fishing through it,
sighing. “You’ve been easy to forget.” She found a small bottle of lotion and squirted some on the back of her hand.

“Really? Then I won’t pester you any longer. I’m not going to the Matamoros. I’ll stay in La Paz for a few days and then go home.”

“I’ll rescind your ticket.”

“I can afford a one-way back to the States. Maybe I’ll stay here longer, on vacation. Write up your competitors.”

“Please, Jacob. I can’t joke about this. I need you.”

“I know. Tell me about Hilary. I want to get started.”

“Not here. I’ll be in La Paz tomorrow night.” She took one of her business cards out of her wallet, scribbled on it, and gave it to me. It said, “Pig & Whistle, Calle Goitia 155, 9:00 Thursday.”

“Is your parents’ picture still in there?” I asked softly, nodding at her wallet.

She looked away, as if I had shown her something disgusting.

“No,” she said. “That’s all over.”

“I’m sorry, Pilar. Everything I do around you is wrong, but I can’t stop trying to prove myself. I’ll do anything you need, and if afterwards you tell me to fuck off forever”—I thought of Kenny—“I’ll be satisfied. As long as you forgive me first. Why can’t I get started? Why can’t you tell me everything now?”

“I want to! But I don’t yet have”—again she searched for the word—“the data.” Her blunted gaze found my face again. “But we’ll talk tomorrow night.”

I nodded. The important thing was that I had another date.

She left to meet her Colombians at the gate. I retrieved Kenny, who was nervously examining his
Idiot’s Guide to Speaking Spanish
.

“Let’s find a taxi,” I said.

I had met Pilar almost three years before on a press trip with Guilford Associates, the travel-industry PR agency. I often accompanied the Guilford Gang on their minivan hauls through deservedly overlooked domestic hinterlands, such as East Tennessee (the press packet was entitled “There’s More to Pigeon Forge than Dollywood”), upstate New York (“Breathless in Buffalo”), and west-central Florida (“Swimmin’ with the Manatees”). My fellow “journalists” on
these trips were usually midwestern housewives and househusbands who contributed sporadically to the travel pages of their free local weeklies or retirees who wrote for the sorts of senior-oriented magazines you don’t even find in doctors’ offices. In general, established writers refuse such inglorious offers, but I jumped on any sort of free travel, having lots of free time, all the energy and shamelessness of youth, and no reputation to protect. Already I was discovering that a healthy revenue stream of new pleasures was essential to my peace of mind and self-respect. I had even begun to scorn those who waded in the static pleasures of family and career, despite my nagging suspicion that maybe those people were as happy as they appeared.

That summer, the Ecuadorian Tourist Board, ignorant of Guilford’s reputation and short of cash, hired the agency to organize an all-expenses week in the Ecuadorian rain forest. Guilford dubbed it “Witch Doctors, Piranhas, and Sloths: Oh My!” With this trip, Guilford was finally able to attract the attention of those Sunday
New York Times
–level travel writers who would not normally have deigned to open a Guilford envelope, let alone read past the line in the itinerary that said: “Spend night 1 at homey Ramada in laid-back Benson’s Hole.” Unfortunately for the ETB’s budget, Guilford chose to swell the journalistic ranks of the trip by including, in addition to the superstars, several Guilford regulars, including myself. “Who knew Ecuador had a rain forest?” Marianne Hill, contributing writer for the
Sacramento Free Press
, asked, as a gaggle of us met at the airport in Miami, and several fellow regulars laughed with her in cheery camaraderie. I adopted the policy of shunning anyone I had met before and trying to chat up the full-timers at dinner. And why not? I had been writing chapters for guidebooks for almost two years—and several times on countries or regions in South America. I permitted myself to feel, for a change, that I deserved the freebie.

The trip proved more grueling than usual. On day four, the writers were loaded in motorized canoes and pushed down the river toward a traditional indigenous settlement (though no more traditional, we were told, than the ones we had visited the day before, upriver). I, however, decided that I had earned a break from high-humidity sightseeing. I hid in my hut, until I was sure the rest were gone, and then flung open the door to step out alone into the jungle wilderness.

But it wasn’t the jungle, really; from the threshold of my hut I could see not the green mosaic of the rain forest canopy but simply a clayey, tree-stump-lined dirt path by the river. And Pilar, one of the Guilford organizers, who was sitting on a stump.

She held something between her palms and seemed to be blowing, or whispering, into it. When she heard my approaching footstep, her body jerked, and she palmed the object like a cardsharp hiding a fifth ace.

“You missed the boat,” she said disapprovingly.

“What’s that in your hand?” I said, to cover my embarrassment.

She wiped an oily string of hair out of her face (there are no hot showers in the jungle), hesitated, and then showed me a picture of a jolly grinning couple, the man hoisting a pint of Guinness, the woman a half-pint. The man was a few inches shorter, but still he had rested his hand protectively on top of the woman’s head.

“My parents,” Pilar said. “They died when I was nine. They loved Ireland best of all.”

I didn’t know Pilar well, but on previous trips I had chatted with the other Guilford Girls, the squad of junior organizers in charge of keeping the journalists fed, happy, and on time to the next restaurant or attraction. All of them were fierce and indefatigable gossips who liked nothing better than to spill secrets over a Miller Lite at the Holiday Inn bar. They told me immediately that Pilar was from Spain and that her parents had passed away when she was a kid under mysterious circumstances, though whether the circumstances were mysterious to Pilar or only to the Guilford crew was unclear. The girls’ guesses included a murder-suicide after a quarrel, an accidental killing followed by a suicide, a double suicide, and a traffic accident. Afterward—and this part Pilar later confirmed—she was shipped off to live with an aunt in Miami.

The Guilford Girls at first tried to see the proud and lonely orphan in Pilar, but they gave up quickly, as she failed to exhibit the required air of humility and despair. Still worse, the girls couldn’t see much of themselves in her, which made the puzzle of Pilar, from their perspective, ultimately worthless, however interesting on a purely intellectual level. She never accompanied them to after-work happy hours, never complained about a boyfriend, never showed the slightest interest in getting married.

All I myself had gleaned about Pilar was that she was less perky than the rest but spoke perfect Spanish, which must have been why she was kept on.

“And now you’re showing your parents the jungle,” I said.

She nodded. She was making no effort to excite me about the landscape or adventure-tourism possibilities of the area; perhaps it was her day off. I should have left her alone, but she was good-looking and sensible and at the moment exuding that romantic air of pensive sorrow that her co-workers had sought so hungrily and never found, so it was really too much to ask.

I tried to think of a good question about her parents, but nothing came immediately to mind. As I listened to the violent buzzing of the insects all around us, I felt more and more superfluous to the scene.

“Are you itchy?” she asked politely and pulled a bottle of insect repellent from the pocket of her cargo pants.

“Thanks,” I said. “Were you talking to them?”

She nodded. Her expression didn’t quite convince me that she didn’t mind that I knew. “I
like to ask them questions,” she said. “Whenever I have a career decision to make. Sometimes even when a boy asks me out.”

There was no more room on her tree stump, so I eased myself down in the dirt below her. My pants were already saturated with mud from two days in the jungle; they couldn’t get any dirtier. I had to look up to see Pilar’s shiny face. At this point she and all the rest of the Guilford Girls, for the first time in my experience and possibly in their postpubescent lives, were eschewing foundation.

“Do they answer you?” I asked.

“Why should I tell you?” She was definitely off duty. “It’s just some crazy thing I do.”

My heart was pounding. I opened my mouth and almost told her that her mother was beautiful, but a bug flew in and ignited a fit of coughing and spitting. I was too worried about malaria to be squeamish about etiquette. Pilar didn’t seem to mind. My throat clear, I tried to recapture the moment by turning to stare reflectively at the lacy veil of mist over the river.

“It’s only crazy if you hear them talking back,” I said.

“I tell myself I can hear them, but I’m just lying. Why do I bother lying to myself? I’m not an idiot. I’m just pretending I still love them. They used to speak in my dreams, but not anymore. Not for years.”

The buzz of the insects and the gauzy mist rendered everything indistinct except my own thoughts and Pilar’s voice. The perfect thing to say flashed into my mind, and in this strange tropical world, there seemed no danger in letting it loose.

“My parents died almost five years ago,” I said. “Their car slid off the highway in the rain, late at night. For a while I talked to them, like you, but then I realized the only voice I was hearing was my own. I had lost their manner of speaking. I tried to remember their catchphrases, but all I had were the ones I still used myself. That’s when I knew they were gone.”

This was almost true, except that the reason I no longer heard my parents’ voices wasn’t that they were dead but that I’d been avoiding their phone calls.

Pilar and I compared perspectives on our losses, and then we relocated to the riverbank, where we sat heedlessly in the mud and slapped mosquitoes and continued the conversation. When the heat began to oppress us (or really, just a bit before), we agreed it was time to withdraw for a siesta, and since the boat with her colleagues and clients and boss wasn’t due back until early evening, we further concluded it would be safe and companionable to retire to my hut, which was nicer than hers and not so cluttered with Guilford Girl skin-protection products.

We sat on my cot. “You’re not like the other Guilford Girls,” I said, hoping flattery would get me over the last tricky climb to the peak.

She lay back on my cot and let her gaze lose itself in the thatched roof. I was half afraid she’d say, “You’re not like the other writers,” forgetting the new
Times
-quality hotshots, but I shouldn’t have worried. “I try
so hard
not to hate them,” she whispered instead.

“Spoiled Daddy’s girls,” I said. “Keeping themselves busy until they can land a rich-enough guy.”

She pulled her gaze back down to earth. “It’s not their fault. They just want enough money so they don’t have to worry. That’s what I want. Someday.”

“I don’t worry about money,” I said. “I have no family and no girlfriend and no one to depend on me. I live for moments like these, in strange and new places. Moments I won’t forget. New stories to add to the old ones.”

“But when you get home, who do you tell the stories to?”

“I don’t need to share them. I just need to remember them.”

“That sounds lonely.”

“I don’t mind.”

“You will someday. And then you’ll fall in love and get a job and start worrying about money like all the rest of us. But some of us have so much more to worry about than others.”

“They don’t pay you a lot, do they?” I said.

“And I have to send so much to my aunt.”

I took her hand. I hoped she didn’t mind that my fingers were soggy with sweat.

She didn’t. She beckoned me down to her, with a smiling laziness so appropriate to the jungle, and unbuttoned my cargo pants as we kissed. That night she snuck into my pitch-black hut again and slipped under the mosquito netting. I liked that better; after we were done, our huddled conversation amid the darkness and the weird noises of the jungle symbolized for me the triumph of human rationality over chaos.

Pilar somehow managed to maneuver me onto almost every one of the press trips she helped organize for the next eighteen months; I forsook even superior freebies for Guilford, without a second thought. Sex with a beautiful, contemplative foreigner was another type of freebie, to be cherished even more than a weekend in an all-inclusive on the Virgin Islands. I had no qualms about accepting Guilford’s hospitality on false pretenses, but I did mind continuing to lie to Pilar. We didn’t—thank God—analyze the psychological consequences of our orphanhood every time we met, but she did bring up the topic now and then, most often in ruminative emails sent just after one of our encounters. I felt I was capable of experiencing the emotions I described to her and convinced myself that I had endured similar ones the last time I’d hung up on my mother, but I discovered that being a hypocrite and being desperately in love were, for me, incompatible. So I wrote her a letter admitting the lie, apologizing, and openly begging for the
forgiveness I knew I didn’t deserve.