Wasted by Elspeth Muir

Author:Elspeth Muir
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2016-05-30T04:00:00+00:00

13

DEAN

By the end of summer, I was losing air. I started laying plans to leave Buenos Aires. I wanted to make my way down to Patagonia, and I asked Rodrigo if he would come with me for a while if I bought him a bus ticket.

We caught an empty night bus to the provinces one weekend, to a town with a huge lake, midway down the country. Rodrigo had brought his tent and we found a place to camp right on the lake, just outside the town. In the evenings we roasted sweet potatoes on hot coals. I drank plastic mugfuls of wine and Rodrigo sipped maté. Every morning I went swimming in the freezing water. During the day we tramped around the mountain.

Like his city, Rodrigo stormed and stilled quickly. Midway through our trip we left the lakeside town and went further up the mountain to a small village. When we arrived I asked a handsome German man for directions to a campground. Maybe I blushed when I was speaking to him, because as we walked off Rodrigo turned to me and yelled: ‘I’m going home!’

‘Why?’ I said.

‘You think that man is pretty. But I do not think he is pretty. You are stupid.’

‘I didn’t think he was pretty, Rodrigo,’ I said, although I did. ‘I was just asking for directions.’

‘You are stupid. I am leaving.’

‘Please, Rodrigo, just come with me to the supermarket to get a few things. Then you can leave if you still want to.’

Feelings I would only have voiced after a few bottles of wine spilled out of him regularly and easily, without the aid of alcohol. And as soon as he’d unburdened his irritation he became happy again. I was used to being taciturn out of politeness or embarrassment, and used to taciturn people. I found his fearless communication alternately amusing and confronting. I couldn’t tell if his ease in expressing emotion was a result of his limited English, or if it was his personality, but I think it might have been a common trait among Argentine people.

On our way back from the village we stopped to wait for the bus. A gaucho rode up to the picket fence of a small house across the road. He stopped and called out a name. A short, middle-aged man with grey-flecked hair and a daffy smile walked out and stood in the yard. He and the gaucho began conversing in rapid Spanish. The gaucho got louder and louder, until he screamed out a final, violent string of words. There was silence. Rodrigo started laughing.

‘What did he say?’ I asked.

‘He said to the man: “You laugh at the misfortune of other men.”’ It was such a beautiful, impassioned phrase, more suited to a daytime movie than an encounter opposite a bus stop on a dirt road. I started laughing, too.

Rodrigo ran out of money after a few weeks and went back to Buenos Aires. I was sad to see him go, but we quickly fell out of regular contact.

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