The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost (34 page)

This was a new concept for Carly, who was used to taking care of herself on her travels and in general. On this trip, I had learned I was stronger than I initially thought, and Carly discovered that it didn't make her weak to rely on someone else once in a while. She didn't have to be an island. It wasn't simply about having one of us watch the packs so the other could wait in line to buy train tickets, or whatever other practicality, though that was an advantage; it was also good to be able to share our travel experience, to be in this together, hangovers included. I've also
secretly been entertaining the idea of seeing Martyn again, so the idea of putting off Machu Picchu for a day isn't all that disappointing.

A word of caution: don't ever postpone your trip to Machu Picchu. It will not go well for you. It turns out we'll have to wait until Saturday to get new spots on the train and on the two-day hike we booked, nearly an entire week to see the ruins we've come so far for. At least there is a warm, clean bed with a day to sleep off our hangovers and the possibility of meeting up with Martyn later on.

In the afternoon, we head into town to book a hostel closer to the plaza. It's a grimy little abode with uneven floors at the end of “gringo alley”—a long row of restaurants, shops, and buskers selling handmade jewelry spread open on blankets they rush to scoop up whenever anyone gets a whiff of the authorities. Our room has two twin beds that squeak bloody murder every time you move a muscle. The walls have cracks and holes and are decorated with the strangest pair of paintings. Each depicts a naked female body with ample breasts, but the head is a man's, with sideburns and mustaches, the whiskers of an incoming beard. Our strange room has no private bathroom, though it does have a small barred balcony where we can sit and people-watch. The first day we are lounging on this balcony, two familiar voices float surreally up to us.

“Would you look at this, love?” says the man.

“What's this, now?” a woman replies.

“It's a handmade necklace. Let me hold it up to the light. Yes, yes, I thought so. This reminds me of the beads those old Indian women in Calcutta use. Do you remember that, love?”

Travel is a funny thing. Just when you expect never to see someone again, you run into him or her in an entirely new country on a day you weren't even supposed to be there.

Down below us, the Wild Thornberrys are characteristically
captivated by some vendor's wares. Before Kevin has the opportunity to examine the beads further, no doubt licking one or sticking it up his nose to test its medicinal properties, we race down to them.

“Girls!” Anne cries. “How are you both?”

I half expect Kevin to examine us and conclude, “Ah, yes, love, these two look just like the ones from that jungle in Bolivia, remember?”

It is also from this vantage point that I watch Martyn make his way toward me the next couple of days and nights. Sometimes he's with his friends and we all go out to eat. Other times he wanders up alone and we spend our time sharing the earphones of his CD player and drinking wine on the balcony. One night he stays over and we cuddle chastely, since the bed squeals every time we move and Carly is not shy about telling us to shut up.

“He really likes you,” Carly says the next morning.

“I'm not sure,” I hedge, because my feelings for him are so much stronger than I've ever experienced that I don't want to jinx it. I know I could very well be just some chick he hangs out with on the road for a few days.

“He went
shopping
with you instead of motorbiking,” she says, amazed or disgusted, I can't quite tell.

It's true. The day after we met, I emailed Martyn to say my Machu Picchu trip was off and I was heading to the markets. He showed up at the hostel within the hour, mumbling something about needing a new pair of pants. His two friends had rented motorbikes for the day but Martyn had begged off, sending Carly scampering out to see if she could join them before they took off.

Martyn and I spent the day browsing and flirting and buying hats that will be ridiculously out of place once we leave South America. When I returned to the hostel, I was flushed and smitten;
Carly looked the same way after having spent the afternoon racing around Cusco's countryside with the Kiwis.

Although I miss him disproportionately to the amount of time we've spent together, I'm glad that Martyn leaves for Machu Picchu the day he does because it's the same day Carly and I get so sick we think we're dying. We have eaten the local food throughout our trip with nothing more than the occasional irritated stomach. We've carefully avoided raw vegetables and any suspect water sources, but these precautions aside, we've congratulated ourselves heartily on our willingness to sample the local cuisine and our obviously strong constitutions. So the irony of becoming ill in the most touristy town in South America is thick. We think the culprit was a fresh salad we splurged on at a restaurant down the street. We hadn't had lettuce in months, and it looked so clean and crisp, but who knows what did it? All I know is no culinary sin in the history of womankind ever deserved this degree of punishment.

We get ill within five minutes of each other. We've just left a late showing of the film
Psycho
that was playing at one of the many movie houses around town. There we overindulged on popcorn, soda, and chocolate bars, then wandered back to our hostel. Two blocks away, a sharp shooting pain rips through my stomach, buckling me.

“What's wrong?” Carly asks.

I grimace. “Not. Good.”

“Okay, okay.” She puts her hand on my back. “Let's get you to the hostel.”

No sooner have we passed the lobby and are rounding the corner to mount the stairs than Carly puts a hand on her own stomach and inhales sharply. The uneven floors seem to rush at her, and she trips over herself. We race as quickly as the nausea will allow to the hostel's shared bathroom and proceed to emit sounds no other human being should ever have to witness. I stay in the bathroom for what feels like hours, dozing in and out of
consciousness. Carly is back in the room when I stumble in. She's shivering and curled in a fetal position. I collapse groaning on my bed, and there we both stay, trapped in our own private hells, for the next twenty-four hours. We set each other off every hour or so, Carly's throwing up into the plastic bag beside her sending me scurrying back to the loathsome shared bathroom to do the same. Neither of us has the strength to help the other or even say anything comforting; we just toss and turn in our neighboring beds. When there is nothing left in our systems, we are too weak to move, too weak even to take a drink from the nearby water bottles. We need help, I think, but even the thought is exhausting.

My thoughts wander psychedelically from one subject to the next, though my brain is too tired to sustain anything more than fragments. I consider the hermaphrodites on the walls, who put them there and why. I think of Martyn. I have long cinematic visions of him trekking the Inca Trail, which in my mind is an ethereal Narnia-like tunnel into another world. I have never been so sick away from home. I have never been this sick in my life, sick to the degree that I seriously think we might waste away in this room. When I was ill as a child, my mother always made me chicken-and-stars soup and French toast and wrapped me in the coziest comforter to while away the day on the couch.

“I want my mom,” I whisper into the dank room, tears streaming down my face.

“Me, too,” Carly says.

But we are alone.

I think back to my freshman year at music school. Like clockwork before my lessons, I'd find myself in the bathroom, offering up my insides from the stress. I remember the freezing, endless winter my first semester. I'd lost weight since I started college in the fall, ten or even fifteen pounds off an already smallish frame, and was like a little old lady, perpetually shivering away.

My teacher, a violist in the Boston Symphony, was famous and
brilliant and incredibly intimidating and never said much during my lessons. Instead he perched mere inches from me in a stiff-backed wooden chair, his callused fingers neatly laced in his lap, and winced noticeably every time I played a note even a hair out of tune. He considered his lessons no less than a Carnegie Hall performance where he was audience, critic, and instructor. His reputation for screaming at, then promptly kicking out, those students who didn't live up to his expectations was legendary. I waited for this moment; deep down I secretly hoped for it. But it never came. Other than the involuntary wincing, his behavior toward me verged on kindness, and that was how I knew I was absolutely hopeless. I was not even worth his anger.

Finally, one day when the Boston snow was still piled high as the tops of car tires and I'd just finished a blistering performance of Hindemith's concerto, he asked bluntly, “What is going on here? You appear to be getting worse.”

It was true. All the deconstruction of my technique—posture, bow hold, vibrato, and on and on—had made me self-conscious to the point where every move I made was stilted and clumsy. On top of that, I couldn't get my brain to halt its constant, harsh critique, and this brutal self-commentary had snuffed out my passion for playing, the wondrous feeling of abandon that used to come so easily.

“I know,” I replied. He stared hard at me. “I'm sorry.”

“This is the thing,” he said. “You must be one of two things at this point in your career. You must be a prodigy, which you are not. Not many are. Or you must be willing to work hard enough to make up for not being a prodigy—so hard that you give up everything else, all your other interests, relationships, desires. Do you think of nothing else besides music? Are you willing to sacrifice everything for it?”

I looked back up at him. I parted my lips to say yes, yes I was
willing to do whatever it took, it was all I had ever wanted, it was the only thing I
was,
but for a split second no words came out.

“Too long,” he said.

On the third day, Carly and I totter like an elderly couple the few steps it takes to reach the nearest market. We buy a bag of oranges, then retire back to the room to attempt the daunting task of eating them. I place a little orange in my lap—it's no more than a clementine, really—and stare at it. I wrap my fingers around it. Peel the orange, I tell myself, but the idea of digging in a nail to get out that first section is just so tiring. We both know we have to eat something. When we stood to dress ourselves for our outing, both of our stomachs were ghastly concave.

“There's nothing to you,” I told Carly.

“I can see your ribs,” she said back.

I thought of a girl I met in Argentina who was excited to be in South America because she had heard traveling there was the ultimate diet. “Parasites, here I come!” she squealed with excitement.

In the end, I bite straight into the orange, peel and all.

On Saturday we awake at four
A.M.,
healed and energized by our impending train trip and two-day hike to Machu Picchu. A representative from our tour group piles into a taxi with us, and when we roll up to the station, I think how funny it is that one of the PeruRail employees is present to meet us.

“I'm sorry, no trains today,” the representative informs us. “Mudslide.”

He's nonchalant, but the destructive mudslide turns out to have wiped out a whole section of the rail line and killed five people in the small town at the base of the Inca Trail where all
the tourists spend the night before or after their treks, Martyn included. That evening I get an email from him letting me know he's thankfully safe. It ends:
I'll walk through landslides and see you soon I hope.

Cusco is a mess of people annoyed about their missed tours and trying to get tickets on a train that does not promise to leave any time in the next week. Carly and I decide it's time to move on altogether—me because I believe in signs and Carly because she is sick of being stuck in one place for this long. Martyn doesn't make it back the following night, so we plan to meet in Buenos Aires two weeks from now. It will be the end of both of our trips. He is off to London to live abroad for a few years, and I am heading back home to do who knows what.

We spend the rest of our time in Cusco trying to get back some of our money from the expensive Machu Picchu tour we're no longer taking. It would be a difficult enough task anywhere, but in Peru it seems insurmountable. Since Carly and I started traveling in South America, I've grown accustomed to letting her do the talking when we're in sticky situations like this. Or I pretend to be Canadian. What I've found is that Canadians are given the benefit of the doubt, whereas Americans are not. When demanding something from a Peruvian or Bolivian travel agent, he may ask where you are from. If you tell him you're American, he looks knowingly down at you, as though saying, “Of course you're causing trouble, then. That's what you people do. What—are you going to get a lawyer and sue me?” If you claim to be Canadian, however, he appears satisfyingly confused. Then he looks a little bit sad, as though he never intended to bring such a peaceful and rational person to the brink of insanity. You still won't get what you're asking for, but he'll let you yell at him a little bit longer as a courtesy, to get it out of your system and all.

But I'm sick of being the apologetic American trying to disprove
stereotypes. The possible loss of both Machu Picchu and several hundred dollars is too much, so I do the only thing I can think of—I lie. I tell an elaborate fib to the tour operator, whereby I am the daughter of the American ambassador of tourism and Carly is the daughter of the Australian ambassador to Peru (I want it to seem believable, hence our not being daughters of exactly the same imaginary positions). We are in Peru on a tourism fact-finding mission, a kind of tourism ambassador internship, really, and boy, do we know people in high places. Does he think it's a good idea to upset the peaceful balance between our nations? Does he? He does not, so says the plain envelope he finally tucks in my palm with our cash nestled inside.