fiction: No Pasa Nada
My head is bouncing lightly against the cool glass of the bus window, jiggling the fat of my cheeks. The sun is glaring against the white ground; I can barely look out the window. The last time I was awake, the bus was moving, and the scenery outside the window was shrouded in darkness, and not snow.
“What time is it?” I ask.
“You don’t want to know,” Aparna says. She’s clearly been awake for a while, drawing some wild design of shapes I couldn’t name in black pen.
“Is that snow?”
“Yep.”
It’s nearly impossible, in my barely conscious state, to wrap my head around the idea of snow, in July, in Argentina. Intellectually, I know that it’s winter in the Southern Hemisphere, and I know we’re in the mountains, a region generally fairly prone to snow, but I’m still not totally convinced, squinting against the frost that glides over the bumps of the rocks and spikes of the grass on the roadside, that it’s really snow.
“Where are we?”
“Tafí de Valle,” Aparna says. “The bus had to stop here on the way to Tucumán, because they closed the road down the mountain.”
“Because of the snow?”
“Uh, yeah.” It was a stupid question.
“How long have we been—what time is it?” I ask again.
“It’s eleven in the morning.” I am suddenly very, very awake.
“We were supposed to be in Tucumán twelve hours ago,” I say.
“I know.”
We’ve been on this bus for sixteen hours, ten of which have been sitting in a bus station, engine idling.
Okay okay okay, Monday, eleven a.m., our flight back to Los Angeles is Tuesday, 9 a.m., we get to the airport by 7 a.m. at the latest. I tally up the hours of the rest of our bus itinerary: two hours to Tucumán, then seven to Córdoba, and another seven to Buenos Aires, which gets us to the airport with four hours to spare, provided the mountain road opens sometime soon, we’re able to find a bus to every city with two available seats, we hit no traffic, and the buses make zero unnecessary stops in questionable parking lots full of stray dogs in the middle of the night. All things completely out of our control. An uneasy shared glance with Aparna tells me she’s done the same math in her head, probably hours ago. We’re going to miss our flight back home.
The first stop in our trip to El Norte was Purmamarca, famous for it’s Cerro de los Siete Colores. The hill of seven colors is exactly what it sounds like, a hill formed by multiple layers of sedimentary rock, all of different shades of orange and red and pink and white. Our first night in Purmamarca Aparna and I got drunk on cheap red wine at a local peña and climbed the roof of our hostel. The lights of the town illuminated the rooftops, the stars the mountaintops. The Hills of Seven Colors towered over the pueblo in black and white. Seven different shades of deep gray against a blacker gray sky, punctured with sidereal spots; both darkness and not. I wanted to take a picture, not to post on Facebook or Instagram or whatever, but so I could remember what it looked like, and if I did, maybe I would eternize this tiny slice of time. It might have been twenty minutes or three hours, with Aparna and with the hills and with the seven shadowed colors. When I brought up the picture the next morning, it looked like a row of street lamps surrounded by nothing.
We have decided to give up on the bus. The bus driver shrugs a lot and says “the road will open when it opens” maybe four times.
“Don’t people have to get to work?” I mumble, which either no one hears or no one responds to.
Tafí de Valle is shockingly cold. I can’t remember the last time I was this cold, and I lived the first eighteen years of my life in northern Minnesota. I pull on fleece-insulated leggings, jeans, a long-sleeved shirt, my college sweatshirt, a sweater I bought in Tilcara made of llama fur, and a North Face jacket, and I’m still shivering as we walk the road meant for our bus, and other cars. The road curves down the mountain in loops and hairpin turns, and my hiking boots, which I bought precisely for this trip, slide effortlessly down randomly placed sheets of ice.
Just past the road closure, there is a gas station, empty like the road, except for one van.
Aparna is getting exactly what she wanted, which was for us to hitchhike back to BsAs. Every time she brought it up, I responded with wary looks, and elongated umms, and aahs, because, while I want to be chill like Aparna and hitchhike and couch surf around the world, I also don’t want to get murdered.
“No, it’ll be so easy,” she said. “It’s actually harder for guys. But no one’s not going to pick up two young girls.” I imagine this was meant to be reassuring.
“My mom will be so mad at me if I get kidnapped,” I said.
Naturally, now that I’ve finally relented, we’re attempting to hitchhike on a closed road. I assume that Aparna has blamed me for our current situation. If we had hitchhiked straight from Cafayate to Buenos Aires, we could’ve missed the mountain road entirely. We’d be halfway home by now.
“I guess we’ll have to wait for the road to open up,” I say.
“If we were going to do that, we should’ve just stayed on the bus.”
“Maybe we should’ve just stayed on the bus,” I say, but not loud enough for her to hear.
We wander around the gas station, trying to figure out the best location to stand so if someone actually ever passes, they’ll see us. We walk to the north side of the station, then the south.
“Maybe someone will come up here to get gas, and pick us up,” she says.
I think this is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.
Ten minutes later, we are sitting on top of a cooler inside the orange, apparently not-rapey Mystery Machine. A harmless married couple in their mid-40s ended up being the owners of the van. They had come up the mountain to get gas, and picked us up.
“We were trying to get up to Tafí de Valle today,” the woman explains. “We saw you girls standing out here.”
I stop listening as Aparna asks them about their lives, which is probably an interesting conversation. Aparna’s Spanish is so much better than mine, even though she never studied it in college like I did. Sometimes it’s just so much work to keep up.
I watch the trees get denser and greener, and I would try to take pictures if the van wasn’t moving so fast. I haven’t seen snow since I was half-asleep on the bus last night, and when I press my hand against the glass of the van window, it is finally, gloriously warm. It’s an incredible feeling to be inside of a vehicle that is moving.
I chime back in when the conversation gets more on my level.
“Do Americans really eat eggs for breakfast?” the man asks, a question I have been asked approximately five thousand times in the last six months.
“Yes,” I say. “Not every day. But—“
“Agh, that’s so gross,” the woman says. “I don’t know how you could eat eggs in the morning.”
“It’s good, you know, with bacon, and sausage,” I say.
“We only eat eggs for dinner,” she says. “Do you really eat dinner at five o’clock at night?”
“Sometimes, yeah.”
“Aren’t you hungry when you go to bed?”
The couple laughs at their own joke before I can answer.
I liked to equate myself with Aparna in that we had both given up our lives back home to come find ourselves or something, but the truth is that Aparna actually had things to give up. She quit a full-time, well-paying job as a calculus teacher at a one of those hipster charter high schools where the teachers don’t need teaching certificates; she left behind her brilliant novel-writing boyfriend, who was too in love with her to break up with her, she also casually hosted a show on a local radio station that played only the kind of nauseating, trance-y music that made me feel like I was having a nightmare. I had graduated from college with a bachelor of arts in dance, and surprising to no one, no job, or even job prospects, so I thought I could put my Spanish minor to use, to become the kind of world-traveling, trail-blazing, Changer of Lives for the third world children in white girls’ Facebook profile pictures.
Sometimes I nearly forgot, or maybe just liked to forget, that Aparna and I didn’t know each other before Argentina. I sat directly behind her the first day of orientation for our English-teaching program, and didn’t even mind when her mass of tight black curls brushed my face as she transferred them from shoulder to shoulder. She had blemish-free brown skin that didn’t require make-up, and she was thick but in the way that boys are into. Aparna was the only person I knew that could rock a single feather earring and those multi-colored genie pants that don’t look good on anyone. And she talked to me first, for some reason. We realized we were both from Los Angeles, and mostly bonded over talking shit about everyone else in the program. There was Sonam, born in Nepal and raised in New York City, who had already found an Argentinian boyfriend she would not fucking shut up about; Milicia, born in Russia and raised in Wisconsin, who would not become friends with any female who wasn’t completely hairless (that included arms); Kati, born in Jersey and raised in Italy, who refused to speak anything but Spanish with the English teachers; and Robert (not Rob), born and raised in a suburb of Chicago, who tried so hard to go full porteño at the first meeting, he brought a full thermos of yerba mate, only to spill it all over himself. It was entirely possible that Aparna and I were friends as a result of her lack of options, which was really driven home when she discovered I actually knew all the names of the Kardashian sisters, but didn’t know what mescaline was.
The couple is not going all the way to Tucumán. They say they can take us all the way to the other side of the mountain range, but from there, they’ll go south.
A kiss on the cheek and a “cuidáte” for both of us. I barely know them, but already I miss them. They’re waving from the Mystery Machine, and we’re left on the side of Ruta 38.
“Bummer they weren’t going to Tucumán,” I say, but Aparna already has her thumb perpendicular to the highway, walking backwards, framed by fields of yellow flowers and the mountains we just escaped. I take out my camera and snap a picture, and Aparna smirks at me. A car passes every two minutes.
Within a half hour, a white sports car pulls over several yards ahead of us. Two tucumanos we can barely understand (after six months of getting used to the porteño accent) ask us where we’re going.
“Tucumán,” Aparna says.
“Or Buenos Aires,” I say.
“Or Córdoba,” Aparna says. They laugh.
“We’re going to Catamarca,” one of them, the driver, says.
“It’s on the way,” the other one says. Neither Aparna nor I have ever heard of Catamarca, but we don’t have too many options.
Our first stop is a gas station, where the guys, who have introduced themselves as Santiago and Martín, buy us Coca Lights and a bag of Doritos and sandwiches de miga, which sound very bougie but are in fact white bread ham and cheese sandwiches with the crusts cut off.
“You didn’t have to buy us anything,” Aparna says.
“You are our guests,” Santiago says. Jesus.
“Tiene novio?” Martín asks Aparna, and not me.
Aparna has cheated on her boyfriend with four Argentines, that I know of. The first was her roommate, Marco, who has since moved out. She didn’t tell me until a month after they started sleeping together, only because it just happened to come up; I didn’t ever think to ask. The last was the co-owner of our hostel in Cafayate, who had impregnated the other co-owner of the hostel, an unbelievably enigmatic French woman who we had decided was the most beautiful pregnant woman we’d ever seen.
She had been out with basically the entire hostel. I stayed in and read Game of Thrones, not because I didn’t want to go, but because I didn’t think of them really wanted me to go. At the end of the night, after everyone was sufficiently shitfaced, he’d offered to give her a ride home (just her, and no one else, which was weird right?), and she was like, “aren’t you the father of that baby?” and he was just like, “no pasa nada.” And so they hooked up in his Jeep while everyone else walked home.
We arrive in Catamarca just as the sun has set. I add up the hours left in my head. If we leave now, make no stops, and find someone going directly to the BsAs airport, we’ll make it.
Santiago is trying to get Aparna to go to a bar with him, “tomar algo” with him, and she’s trying to explain that we don’t have time.
Martín makes no such attempt with me.
“Do you really ride yellow school buses in America?” he asks me.
“Yes,” I say.
“Ah. Do you really eat eggs for breakfast?”
The pockets of my llama sweater are full of tucumano candy as we walk the main street of Catamarca. After fending off Santiago’s advances, he insisted that we at least come look in the trunk, where he has candy. I couldn’t have come up with a more stereotypical murder scene if I tried. Turns out he really did just have candy, these weird pink and white shells that hurt to bite into, but melt into grains of sugar in my mouth. I find them disgusting, and I’m not even hungry, but I eat them because, I don’t know, maybe it takes my mind off the straps of my backpack that are digging crevices into my shoulders, or the fact that we’ve been walking for an hour, and we’re not going to make that plane, no way in hell.
“I think we just need to get out of the city,” Aparna says. “Like, more towards the highway going out of the city.”
We walk until we’re out of streetlights and people. Cars pass, but don’t stop, despite Aparna’s very desperate thumb. The last shell candy is idling, barely melted in my mouth when my boot seems to fling itself against a rock with an unrecognizable force. As I stumble onto my hands, my teeth clamp down onto the hardened sugar, the pain shoots throughout my gums. I feel the sting in my eyes.
I don’t bother getting up. Any other day, I might’ve laughed at myself, and Aparna might’ve laughed. But right now, I have no problem sitting on the side of street in the middle of fucking nowhere, crying like a fucking six year old girl who hasn’t gotten her way. Because I haven’t. If we had just stayed on that fucking bus back in Tafí de Valle, we wouldn’t be wandering the streets of a town we’d never heard of two hours before.
Aparna sits down next to me, but she doesn’t do anything, or say anything. I don’t know why, but I really just want her to touch me, like hold my head or something. Or just tell me that she’s going to figure it out for me, for us.
“I just want to go home,” I say, without realizing I was thinking it. I don’t mean Buenos Aires, and I don’t even mean Los Angeles, which, according to the US Postal Service and even my parents, is home. I want to be in my bed in my mother’s first house in northern Minnesota, in my room that I shared with my sister and our dachshund who sometimes liked to sleep on my legs, underneath the quilt my grandmother made for me.
“We are going home,” Aparna says, softer than I’ve ever heard her speak.
“We missed our plane,” I say.
“So we’ll get another one.”
We sit in silence for several minutes, in which Aparna scratches her arm and I wait for those awful crying-induced hiccups to stop. Cars pass us but she doesn’t try to catch them.
A truck passes. Then it stops, just ahead of us. We both stare at it.
“Did he stop for us?” I ask. Before I can finish, Aparna is on her feet, sprinting towards it. Over the roar of the idling engine, I can’t hear what she’s saying. I’m staring at the ground, waiting for bad news, no longer able to keep hopes up.
“Sophie!” Suddenly she’s running back to me, grinning like an idiot. “He’s going to Buenos Aires.”
She’s so happy that I am, too.
Our last night in Tilcara, after Purmarca and before Cafayate, we decided to take a bus that left at two in the morning so we didn’t have to pay for another hostel. Of course, the only thing to do until two in the morning in rural northeastern Argentina is to get drunk on cheap red wine at the local peña. Our wine blanket wasn’t thick enough to protect us from the desert winter night, and so we sat at the bus station, losing feeling in our fingers and toes until three in the morning. We were sure we missed the bus, but what else could we do but wait? At some point, the wine and my frozen body told me that I should get up and start doing some ballet, and I did every grand allegro combination and turn series I could remember, tour jetés and grand jetés and battements and fouettes and everything I could think of. It was one thing that I could do well, that Aparna couldn’t do at all, and she even got all the other cold souls waiting for buses at two in the morning in the middle of the desert watch me and clap for me. I was almost disappointed when our FlechaBus rolled into the square, over an hour late.
Aparna couldn’t wait to yell profanities at the bus driver in Spanish.
“Cálmate, chica,” he said, smiling at her, through me. “No pasa nada.”
The first thing I see, climbing into the cab of the truck, is the dashboard drowning in little figurines. There are a few I recognize, like Mickey Mouse and Wonder Woman, and many I don’t, mostly friendly-looking cartoon-like animals, like something you’d buy your kid at the airport if you forgot to get them a real gift on a business trip to somewhere awful. Tampa, maybe. From the ceiling hangs a wider variety of tassels than I knew existed, every color and size and length you could imagine. I have no idea where, in Argentina or America, you’d buy any of this shit.
“Qué son esos?” Aparna asks. She’s camped out in the back of the cab, where there’s a spacious cot covered with bright red couch cushions, while I ride shot-gun.
Our new chauffeur Juan explains that he likes to keep his truck decorated, keep it “lindo,” or something.
He asks if we mind music, which we don’t, though perhaps he could’ve been more specific.
For the next three hours, he chain-smokes and plays three or maybe four consecutive CDs of 80s pop music, the kinds of songs you’ve heard your whole life, and somehow know all the words to, but would never actually choose to listen to.
“Where are you girls from?” he asks.
“Los Angeles,” I say.
“Both of you?” he asks.
“Sí.”
“So you came together?”
“No,” Aparna and I say at the same time. We get this question a lot.
“We met in Buenos Aires,” I say.
“Ah,” he says. “How long are you in Argentina?”
“Six months,” I say. “We’re leaving tomorrow.””
“Tomorrow? Back to Los Angeles?”
“Sí.”
“So you’ll stay friends when you go back to LA?” We’ve never gotten this question before.
“Maybe,” Aparna says before I’m able to respond. I look back at her, ready to laugh at her joke. But she isn’t looking back at me, or even smiling, she’s shading in the petals of some flowery vine she’s drawing in a sketchbook. “We should try to see each other,” she continues.
“Sí,” I say again, because I can’t tell her and Juan that the blood feels like it’s draining out of my extremities. That I’d spent the last several months daydreaming about us hiking together in Griffith Park, hanging out at grungy coffee shops in Silver Lake, showing her off to my college friends at our fairly boring parties. That I thought we were friends.
It might be four in the morning when a shiny rectangle gets bigger on the right side of the horizon.
“This is where I stop,” Juan tells us. This is what we’ve found out about Juan so far: 1. He likes American 80s hits, or perhaps that’s just what keeps him awake 2. He loves Marlboros, or perhaps that’s what keeps him awake 3. He lives in Tucumán, and once a week transports his 5,000 kilograms of sugar to Buenos Aires, which, as far as sugar trucks goes, is not even that much sugar. 4. For someone that picked up two strangers off the side of the road to accompany him on a fifteen-hour journey, he’s not very chatty.
I live under the firmly held belief that every person in the world has a life and a dream and vision just as complex and vivid as anyone else, and no matter what they are doing with their life, whether it’s running an art museum or driving a sugar truck, they are wanting of, and capable of more. But Aparna’s continuous attempts to get inside of Juan’s head are met with curt answers, and long drags of his cigarette.
Maybe he has been so desensitized by hours of the open road, and thirty-year-old Billboard Number One Hits, he has very little of himself left. Or maybe he is the one person in the world perfectly content to sit alone with his thoughts and his figurines for hours and days at a time.
I assume we’re stopping for gas, but Juan pulls into the parking lot, cuts the engine, and looks at us.
“This is where I sleep,” he says.
“Okay,” I say. Nobody moves and there’s something we’re missing, obviously.
“Back there,” he says, motioning to where Aparna is reading Murakami.
“Oh,” we both say at the same time.
“So—she should we…”
“Yeah, in there,” he says, pointing out the rest stop, “there’s food and drinks and, you can sit, you know. Just for a couple of hours.”
We’ve been kicked out. Neither of us had come to the realization that at some point, Juan would need to sleep.
Aparna and I sit in one of the booths for an hour, being eyed by the one employee covering whatever midnight oil shift this is.
“We should probably buy something,” Aparna says. I’m consciously attempting to not be too friendly with her, because I’m mad at her for not caring about our fucking plane, because she doesn’t even want to be friends with me, because no matter what I say or do, Aparna will be Aparna, and I will still be Sophie.
“I’ll get some French fries,” I say.
The fries are barely room temperature, which makes me almost laugh, and almost cry, I’m so tired. I don’t think I’ve ever been this tired, not in my whole life. This rest stop has apparently been lit by every fluorescent light in the country, and the volume of television is so loud even Aparna’s brand-new-but-made-to-look-vintage headphones don’t drown it out.
“How far away are we from Buenos Aires?” I ask the sullen employee.
“Mm, seis horas?”
We lay down on either side of the booth, legs and arms hanging off the side, trying to cling on to sleep the best we can, half-on and half-off of a hard plastic surface.
The morning entertainment news segment introduces the latest One Direction music video.
“Even in rural Argentina, you can’t escape 1D,” I say.
“I’ve never heard any of their songs,” Aparna says.
My head lifts off the bench, barely.
“How is that possible?”
“I don’t know.”
“No seriously. That’s actually kind of impressive. They’re like, impossible to avoid.”
“I don’t know, I mean, I don’t go to shopping malls,” she says.
“What?”
“I don’t really, like, go to malls.” I snort, hard through my nose.
“I don’t hear their songs at fucking shopping malls,” I say, and my chest starts to shake; it’s out of my control. I’ve never really been able to stay mad at anyone, and if it were to be anyone, it wouldn’t be Aparna. I can see half of her face, just under the table, giggling like I’ve never seen before, maybe like she did when she was little.
“Wait—“ she stops laughing for a second. “Did you ask the guy? How far from Buenos Aires?” We’re about to snap back to our reality—the plane that we won’t catch, the friendship that we won’t have, not really.
“Six hours,” I say. The way she picks up her laughter again, it’s like mine, uncontrollable and wild, fueled purely by fatigue.
We laugh at nothing, at our plane that we missed and we were always going to miss, at the manner in which we have missed it, at tiger and pony and little pinguino figurines, at tassels that seem hazardous to a truck driver’s attention, at One Direction and shopping malls and rest stops that serve lukewarm French fries. We laugh until the tears empty from our bodies, which shake the booth like the sugar truck on the road, until Aparna falls asleep, head resting against red plastic.
Through heavy eyelids, I watch the sun rise over the smooth and level campo. I’ve never seen a sunset so simple and lacking of life.
Seven hours later, the highway starts to thicken with cars, and the streets that come into view thicken with civilization; neighborhoods and streetlamps and people wearing suits. Every one of my electronic devices has died somewhere along the way, and I all I have to do is wait and watch the sun go down on a second day of unplanned travel. But I am not bored, or even anxious, watching the houses get closer together and the trucks get farther apart. Aparna teaches me how to fold pages of notebook paper into flowers, which we leave among Juan’s sea of dashboard animalitos. I hope he keeps them.
We’re starting into the outskirts of the city, and halfway through the third play of “Material Girl” when I hear an urgent whisper.
“Sophie!” The flash whites out my vision the second I turn around.
“Look,” Aparna says, handing me the camera.
I haven’t looked in mirror since I can’t remember when. On the screen of her camera, I see my hair coming out of its bun in crazy blonde wisps, my glasses are sitting too far down on my nose, which has allowed the flash of the camera to turn my tired eyes into bright red laser discs. I just look like I smell bad. My blank stare and slumped llama fur-covered form is framed by what could be hundreds of tiny animals and dozens of giant tassels flouncing into blurs against the jolts of the truck, and everything in the shot looks like it could belong to a serial killer (including me).
“I’m going to put this on my desk,” she says.
It is the best photo of the entire trip.
