Snowstorms in a Hot Climate Read Free Page B

wish to discover Bogotá. I remember thinking at the time that I lived rather like a small animal. I would go only where the predators were the same size as me, and I did not stray into alien territory. It wasn’t just my paranoia. The first day I left the hotel the lady of the house (she was a surrogatemother to all of her “guests”) made frantic signs for me to take off my watch.
“No salgas con reloj. Es Malo. Malo,”
she twittered excitedly.
“Te lo van a robar.”
In the downstairs common room where the travelers congregated, the favorite topic was Bogotá horrors. One girl had her spectacles lifted off her nose as she walked down the street, while another had lost an earring. She had pierced ears and carried a bloody lobe to prove it. In the hierarchy of rip-offs, she was undisputed queen. I was insignificantly low down and determined to stay there.
    Maybe my lack of courage was symptomatic. I was feeling out of joint in all kinds of ways. Maybe I’d just been on the road too long. You know what traveling is like. Your only pasts and futures are names on a map, and the theft had suddenly swept away what little sense of purpose I had. I wasn’t ready to come home yet, but I didn’t know where else to go. Also I was tired of being on my own. An excuse, I know, but it doesn’t mean there isn’t any truth in it. Latin America isn’t easy for a woman traveling alone. It was my choice all right, but it took energy. Of course, there had been opportunities to change my status, and there’d been a fair number of encounters on the road from Tijuana to Bogotá. I’d met a great woman in Guatemala City who I would have traveled with, but she was going up while I was going down, and no one like her came along again. As for the men, well, that had its own pattern. A week here, a week there, always easy, always defined. That old on-the-road morality; fuck who you want when you want, and then move off, leaving no regrets behind. It’s amazing how your taste can be muddied by the fact that this one you won’t have to meet at the launderette or someone’s dinner party six months from now. In the days before AIDS and herpes descended like some plague from a revengeful God, anything and everything was easy. Even afterward we still took risks in the pursuit of pleasure. And theBogotá hotel at that time had a constant stream of unattached traveling males, many of whom were happy to be careless with their affections.
    I was quite a desired object in those days. I’d been on the road for over a year. My street credibility was high. Like everything else on the trail, there was an accepted hierarchy to mating. For example, it was always a coup to lay someone who had made it down to Chile or Bolivia, although the real star fucks came with Tierra del Fuego. Another continent scored high too. In terms of women, I was something of a catch: alone, fairly sussed, and with a clutch of passport stamps as aphrodisiacs. Just like home, really, only with the power structures based on different rules.
    Anyway, by the time I got to Bogotá I had begun to tire of it all. I was lonely and felt in need of some company, but I couldn’t bring myself to go through the foreplay of travel itineraries. So I opted out. Stayed in my room and read Trollope and two Jane Austens that I’d traded in my copy of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
for. I remember I got very into the eroticism of innocence. I lay curled between cold sheets and worried for Emma and Mr. Knightley. And when the Frenchman on his way north from Chile made a careless, grubby pass at me, I longed for a world where ankles glimpsed under long dresses ignited more sexual passion than naked breasts. After a while people began to leave me alone. I got that “English girl” reputation, remember? It was really quite a change for me—woman of easy virtue led to redemption and chastity through the study of nineteenth-century literature.
    My isolation made those weeks a little surreal.