Wanderlust (34 page)

chapter twenty-seven

I
n between grad school and a job
I've been offered in London, I do what I do best. I fly to Lima, Peru, and then up to the mountain city of Cusco. I've urged Paul to come with me, but he's declined, saying he needs to look for a job. Our friend Mike is spending part of the summer studying in Cusco, but he's leaving to go down to Lima several days after my arrival, so he shows me around, introduces me to some people he's met, and leaves me on my own. I feel primed for something to happen, and the tension of anticipation makes up for the self-consciousness of being alone. In the evenings I buy cornhusk-wrapped tamales from one of the street vendors, and take them up to my room to eat alone, but in the mornings I have granola on the balcony of a café, overlooking the main square.

Cusco is a Spanish colonial city built atop the capital of the Inca Empire. The fountain at the center of the Plaza de Armas is baroque, with curling friezes and horn-blowing statues, but the vast gray stones that line the side streets are pre-European; their proportions violate the Mediterranean eye and the weight of each one bespeaks forced labor. From the northeast side of the plaza the city sprawls steeply up, and the streets become too narrow and inaccessible for cars, so that to reach the little hotels and hostels you have to climb on foot. In my first few days I'm light-headed from the altitude; Cusco sits above eleven thousand feet.

I go on hikes by myself, first up to Sacsayhuaman, a megalithic complex built by pre-Incan people called the Killke, whom I've never heard of before. It's one of those places, like the Egyptian and Mayan pyramids, that fanciful minds have declared suspiciously alien, and Europeans and Japanese are arrayed around a high ceremonial platform, testing the possibilities for spiritual solace. I go higher, winding through the hills above Cusco. I've rarely hiked alone, and it makes me feel self-reliant. On my way back down to Cusco I think I feel my lungs expand. Together the inrush of oxygen and my sense of accomplishment make me elated.

Friends of Mike's—two Britons trying to start a newspaper, or open an Irish restaurant, or, in any case, not go home—invite me to one of the nightclubs on the main square. The city is constantly cold and dry, and Peruvians and foreigners alike wear jeans everywhere. In the club we strip down to tank tops and T-shirts, piling Gor-Tex and fleece on a chair. A boy with messy sun-bleached hair bobs his head and watches me, and so I say
“hola,”
and he says
“hola.”
We're both obviously not locals.
“Cuál es tu lengua materna?”
I ask. What's your first language? For that one suspended moment, neither of us is from anywhere. We could say anything, make something up right on the spot about who we are. When he tells me his language is French, I tell him, in mangled French, that I speak it too. I don't yet tell him where I'm from, because I want to draw out this moment of cultural anonymity. I free-float, enjoying the sense that I could be anyone, and it's like dreaming about flying. I look down on all the possible identities I could choose, before finally telling him who I am. It turns out that Raphael is from Paris, and we settle into a mishmash of Spanish, French, and English, one of those in-between languages made up on the road.

He's on a bicycle ride, he says. From Ushuaia, at the southern
tip of South America, to Alaska. I could love him just for that. Raphael, then, is the thing for which I've been on high alert. He suddenly puts me in a world where no one cares about banking careers or Ivy League schools, bringing me back to my traveler self. And what's the harm? I'm just taking a break between one real-life thing and another. Pretty soon I'll be at my job in London.

I let him chase me for a few days, during which we make little dates to meet for coffee on the Plaza. He leaves me handwritten notes at my hotel. He's superlatively fit and also chain smokes, which I would normally mind but don't in this case, because I know it isn't a serious thing. One night I invite him to my cold room—it's a high dry southern winter, and these little hotels don't spring for heating. I let him kiss me, then let him into my bed. I don't think of Paul, because this feels like another world.

Raphael, who is twenty-six, is cycling with two teammates, another Frenchman and a Quebecois. They're radio journalists, recording stories along the way. Usually they ride every day, but they've stopped in Cusco for a few weeks to make repairs and receive a visit from Raphael's mother, Elodie. She arrives a few days after I meet him, bearing paté and other gifts. She's prone to crying jags brought on by her recent divorce from Raphael's dad. Raphael is preoccupied with caring for her, trying to make sure she's comfortable in the windowless stone room that he's rented on his minimal budget. He listens patiently for hours, the two of them smoking, while she repeats her miseries, and together they tell me about when their family was intact and living in Oman. When I insist that Raphael get lip balm, because his lower lip is so chapped it looks cut, he tells me he's touched that I'm caring for him.

We travel together to the remote village of Paucartambo, where a multiday festival celebrates the Virgin Mary and murkier
pre-Spanish beliefs. Thousands have come. Groups of devotees, who've spent a year preparing and stitching costumes, dress up as characters, so that the streets are filled with masked buffoons, feathered warriors, and devils. One group wears satin stripes in green, yellow, blue, and red, with trousers spiraled like barbershop poles. Another wears nurse and doctor uniforms, and carries grotesque yellow masks. One of the masks is skull-shaped and gushing blood, some have head wounds, and one has a nose that looks for all the world like a dildo. The players heap the masks onto the graves, acting out a drama I don't understand.

Every street and square is crowded with people, all day and all night, and the disguised men prowl around among us, putting on shows between fireworks displays and marching bands. We stand in a square looking up at masked men leaping from balcony to parapet, reenacting a battle. It's hard to tell who anyone is behind their headdresses and trains and masks; neighbor might not even know neighbor. If I had a masked ball to go to every year, during which I could play a warrior or a devil, I wonder if, with that outlet at hand, I'd be more able to settle into my own time and place. I think of the carnivals in Brazil and the Caribbean, and the ecstatic dancers I saw during Ashura in Pakistan, bloodying themselves into another state of mind. I have no ritual to take me away. Halloween is a dull and distant cousin.

After the festival we camp on a promontory above the clouds. Down there is Amazonia, Raphael says. He'll be riding that way soon. We talk about hiking down into the clouds, and Elodie asks us what we're supposed to live on.
“D'amour et d'eau fraîche,”
Raphael says. And I want to do that more than anything. I want to climb down into the clouds and live on love and water, and not go to London or back to New York. I want to drop away from civilization again.

Instead we get a bus back to Cusco, where I grow morose and
frustrated on my last day, and Raphael consoles me by fucking me all night in our little red room with dripping candle wax beside the bed. Refracted through my impending departure, every sensation becomes acute. Every thrust is the last of its kind, and I begin to long for him even while he's inside of me.

The intensity of the night ebbs into affectionate resignation the next morning. I've become attached to him, and it's not just because I tend to love in the safety of impending separation, but because I love his wandering nature. He comes with me to the airport, and has a cigarette and an espresso while we wait. We know better than to make promises. It would be absurd, I can see that, even though a little part of me wishes that we would. We exchange email addresses and go on our way.

In New York the logistics seem bottomless, so much more complicated than they were in Peru. I'm no longer just dependent on a backpack. My employer is paying to ship my stuff to London, and it hardly seems worthwhile, but movers come to take my eight boxes and my futon. I'm going on vacation with Paul's family in Idaho, which requires a suitcase with outdoor gear, and then I'll fly straight to London, which requires a suitcase full of office clothes. I don't tell Paul about Raphael. I feel vaguely pleased with myself that I can be with these two very different kinds of men, whose paths would never cross, who would be unsympathetic to one another's worldview.

I go out for lunch with my friend Chelsea, who graduated from SIPA at the same time as me. She also has a job as a reporter, but hers is in New York, and she's found a new place with a roommate in the West Village. I tell her about Raphael, and she asks me what he does. “He's, uh, riding his bike from Argentina to Alaska,” I say, and she cracks up. She knows enough about my past to think that
Raphael sounds like my type: away on some romantic voyage, not remotely available in the here and now. When she laughs it's my first inkling that
I'm
becoming a type. I'm the gypsy eccentric who can't find pleasure in quotidian life, who'd rather pursue adventure and adventurers than stability in New York. When I was offered the job in London, it didn't even occur to me to say no, but now I see that another sort of person might have considered the choice.

Paul and I do make promises. We've been together now for a year and a half, and he plans to stay in New York. Once or twice I suggest that he look for a position in London and come join me. He doesn't consider this idea seriously, nor do I really expect him to. I suggest it in part to confirm my suspicion that he won't do it, that he's too staid to follow a girl that far.

Neither of us suggests breaking up. We plan to see each other on holidays and weekends. But I'm not twenty-one anymore, I'm twenty-eight, and long-distance relationships are different. Now we have email and cell phones, and we can afford to phone or fly. Reality intrudes on the perfection of the distant image. It's no longer possible to think of someone across the world the way I thought about Graham, longing for his perfect looks, his perfect loyalty, his perfect love for me, and burnishing my longing until it became a thing of beauty itself. In a long-distance relationship, you're always living with anticipation, which never disappoints, the expectation of pleasure being a pleasure in itself. But now technology and money have made long-distance romance mundane. Time and age have also done their part. The implicit permission to do anything no longer flies. Monogamy is part of the boyfriend-girlfriend deal, and forgiveness isn't assumed.

Paul, though, has become the line attaching me to New York.
I don't want to give it up, I want it and London both. I've loved New York, I've made friends here, it's a better fit than anywhere I've lived. I was never going to be the best skier or sailor or homemaker, in Vancouver or Auckland or Seattle, but here, other things count. In not breaking up with Paul, I'm holding on to New York.

In one of his romantic moments, Paul compared himself to a kite-flyer and me to a kite. He meant that a grounding force needed a freewheeling one, and vice versa. But I think of the metaphor again as I leave for London. I need to be connected to him, because some part of me is afraid of being too free.