The French woman comes down from the mountain talking about Nietzsche.
I hear her coming. I step outside.
She isn’t alone. She stops, takes water, glances toward the doorway where I am standing while her companion, who apparently was no real companion, continues on, waving bye. I watch them interact, or I watch as they cease interacting, and as each turns away and resumes their own solitary, wandering identity:
“So long . . . ”
“Bye . . . ”
The woman sits down at the table. She removes her very small bag. The daughter-of-the-house approaches her and asks if she would like anything, food, drink. The woman says no but she is looking at me, implying that I should order something for us both. I come over and sit.
But I haven’t read the situation well, so I don’t order anything.
Her name is Lucie. She tells me that she has been thinking a lot about Nietzsche’s concept of Eternal Return and how this mixes, or doesn’t, with the Buddhist version of reincarnation. I am only half-listening (we’re in Nepal, reincarnation keeps coming up) until she says, with unexpected drama in her tone, “I can’t imagine going back.”
I look up at her. Now everything’s paused. “You have to be willing to go back,” she explains. “Until everything’s enlightened.”
Her knee is bouncing.
I say, “Why don’t you want to come back?”
But Lucie seems only to repeat herself, saying, “I don’t think I could do this again.”
The son-of-the-house joins us outside. So he, too, had been watching Lucie. After some minutes of small conversation, Lucie asks him what it’s “actually like” living here.
“We have tigers, at night,” he coolly says.
Lucie seems to know this is only a line. She smiles not at him but at me. The son-of-the-house returns inside. I think maybe we have offended him but he returns with a flip-phone and plays for us a recording of someone singing and strumming a guitar. “Is that you?” I ask.
He nods and says, as if to explain himself, that he likes “the band Metallica.” And when I still haven’t managed to respond to this statement he asks me, “Do you like Metallica?”
I answer by saying that I saw a member of that band buying a salad “one time.”
Lucie is unafraid to say that she does not like the band Metallica. And because she is bored, or because she is a traveler and travelers keep going, Lucie stands up, signifying that she is about to leave, but then she invites us along, down the mountain, to come dancing: “There’s a bar back in town,” she says, “with a real band.”
I had been going in the other direction, up the mountain, not down. But the son-of-the-house says that he’ll come. And Lucie smiles at him.
And now all of a sudden I’m agreeing to come too.
Only once I have left do I realize that I have left all my things, my backpack and everything, in the room I am renting. I tell them to continue ahead while I quickly return; of course it occurs to me that I could simply keep going. I take out my passport and cash. That’s all I really have. Then I locate the father-of-the-house and I explain to him that I’ll be back in a day or two, and could he keep the room for me?
He dismisses this, keeps doing what he’s doing.
Returning down the trail, I find a feather which I had passed over minutes before, or it had just now fallen. It’s the size of a coin and brilliant green. I pick it up and spend an entire minute trying to stuff it into my pocket in just such a way that it won’t be damaged.
I’m in sandals, and the earth itself is warm, and I do think I would choose to do this again.
I keep on running.
They’ve stopped on the trail and are talking, waiting for me, though when they see that I’m coming they resume walking, leaving some distance between us. I follow, letting the distance remain.
The trail runs into a road. We begin walking along it. A man on a dirt bike slows down next to Lucie. He is wearing no helmet and he offers Lucie a ride.
Lucie cracks up laughing, which seems to insult him, and he speeds off, alone.
I watch the son-of-the-house relax when he does.
We find where to wait for the bus. Lucie squats and shows her face like it’s a small, touchable sun to the many little children who are waiting there too. I have to look away. She is touching their shirts, their hands. A bus arrives. Lucie directs the children onto the bus, speaking to them in French; like this she tries to sneak on. When the driver informs her of the fare, she admits without any sadness that she has “no money,” but, having noticed several locals get on the bus without paying, she requests to pay the fare “of a local” instead.
The son-of-the-house intervenes: he talks to the driver and then he pays for her.
I watch this happen, then I pay for myself and I go to sit next to him. I offer to reimburse him (I had been slow to understand the situation and should have been the one, not him, to pay for Lucie), and after studying me for a moment he takes the two coins I am holding out and he shakes his head from side to side, meaning, in this particular situation, as you wish.
The children are grouped around Lucie.
They are watching her hands and fingers more than her lips and eyes; they are used to receiving candy or money from female tourists, I think. I think this because I have seen it.
I notice the son-of-the-house is watching her too. “They cannot understand her,” he says.
I realize at that moment that he and I have a common understanding of Lucie.
“She’s not so bad,” I reply, though by this I am indicating that I basically agree, she is foolish at best; then I add, “She’s just trying to show them who she is.” Like it matters, being seen by children.
“Do you understand her?” he asks.
“Her French? A little . . . she’s describing Marseilles.”
I move ahead in the bus.
To disarm her or to take her attention away from the children I ask Lucie what she does “back in France.”
“I was a masseuse,” she explains, but that was “a lifetime ago.” She has been here nine months; she lost her passport, she overstayed her visa. “They stop bothering you eventually. The officials.” Then she says, not to the children but to me, “So I really don’t have any money! That was true!”
“Can’t you get a new passport?” I ask.
“I tried.” She shrugs and begins to gaze down the long, crowded tunnel of the bus.
I can’t really believe this and I am sure, somewhere, in her story, she is lying. Still, either because I am impressed by her story or impressed by her lie, I offer, “We could go to Kathmandu. I could help you.”
She glances at me, then her eyes soften in her reappraisal of who I am.
We come into town. Lucie thanks the driver. The town is smoky and loud. On the sidewalk she clarifies that she’ll be meeting up with us “later,” and before I can get a good look at her, either to gauge what she’s about to go do or if she’s safe, or if she’s sane, or if she even plans to meet us later, Lucie has turned around and is walking away.
It’s five in the afternoon.
So she had tricked us, I think.
She had needed a ride back to town.
So what?
People should have the right to do that, pretend, misdirect.
I turn to the son-of-the-house. “So what should we do?”
“She is not a good person,” he blankly says.
My reflex, again, is to defend her, or to minimize the issue, but before I can do this the son-of-the-house looks me in the eye and says, “Do you think she will sleep with me?”
It is a thought which has made his face very serious.
I crack a smile. “Have you done that before? With traveler-women?”
“Once,” he says, and he glances up at me as though to confirm that she’s his to pursue, but it’s a meek glance, a hopeful glance, like actually what he’s asking me to do, through my nod and assent, is to believe in him, to encourage him: yes, you can! You still have a chance! You can make it! So, grinning, I nod my head from side to side, meaning, in this particular situation, by all means.
“So what should we do?” I repeat. “We still have a few hours. . . . ”
“Would you like to meet my friends?” he asks.
“Totally.” I grin.
“Okay. I will call them,” he says. We begin walking and he takes my hand. This is a place where men hold hands.
Only one friend is free.
The son-of-the-house takes me into a shop and then through the shop to the courtyard behind it, where there is garbage and sunlight. The friend comes out (“Namaste, namaste!”) and following him into the courtyard there comes an old man who directs his questions to the son-of-the-house though he is staring at me.
I smile, my only way of communicating.
The old man turns around and he walks away and, as he is returning inside, begins suddenly yelling, apparently to chastise someone who, I gather, had been watching us from inside the door.
I feel confused.
The friend suggests we go somewhere to eat, a good idea.
But then a little boy runs out of the building and he hands us each an orange soda.
“Oh,” I say, stunned, and take the soda and look at the boy who is looking at me, and then he runs back in, a generosity I cannot dismiss as mere manners, or even culture, or even interpret. I try looking inside to wave or to thank him, and in that moment the old man comes out, and this time he is holding a shiny, marigold-colored scarf which, without any explanation, he drapes over my shoulders and neck. It is a blessing or something.
I try shaking his hand but the gesture falls flat; his hand stays limp and non-kinetic in mine, and he holds it longer than most Westerners would have. Then he returns inside.
The son-of-the-house and the friend have finished their sodas and they set their empty glass bottles directly onto the ground while I, for reasons of manners or shame, keep mine. It is transparent in the light. We return to the street.
When the street is wide enough we walk all three holding hands: I’m on one side, the son-of-the-house is in the middle and the friend is on the other.
Then the friend moves to the middle, displacing the son-of-the-house; he’s humming.
We find a cafe and we sit on some elevated chairs. The friend removes a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from his pocket and he places them on the table and he pushes them toward me.
“I’m good,” I say. “Thanks.”
The friend looks down at the pack. Now he doesn’t take one, either. But he leaves it on the table and the son-of-the-house opens it and takes one out and lights it and, smoking, walks into the street.
I ask the friend what he does.
He says he works in a cafe “a lot like this one.”
I look in a circle. It is a cool concrete room with a garage door for a front.
His is called “Global Cafe,” he says, and he tells me to visit him there.
“Sure,” I say, which, though to me this evokes non-commitment, to him might mean yes, which I regret and am confused by. He asks me what I do. “I’m a student,” I explain, and I feel very weak, very pointless, saying this. I know from other students this is the normal experience. When he asks me my age I say that I’m 19, which is true, and I ask him the same. He’s 18. His knee is bouncing. He takes a cigarette. So I take one too.
He smiles at me though the smile is quick, like an afterthought, and then he says, “I have a friend in Portugal,” and while my assumption is that he is saying this in order to establish something common between us, a life across boundaries, he continues, “I want to go there; many go to Qatar, or China.” For work, he means. As migrants. And although this information has caused me, in alarm and in shame, to stop smoking, the friend continues, taking careful, bored drags. And so I resume, or try to, and my hand shakes from the tender grip required.
The son-of-the-house returns to the table and, seeing that we have both now started smoking, slaps a hand on each of our necks and says, “You see. Best of friends.”
I feel like crying.
I feel like I look like the worst kind of tourist.
I feel like defending myself.
I feel like saying something stupid like, it’s hard traveling, you’re confused all the time.
You never know how you’re coming across, or what you’re actually doing, or if what you’re doing is right.
I don’t even know their names, I realize.
And this hadn’t mattered before. But it matters now.
And now it’s too late to ask them. I stand up and I walk to the counter and I ask for three San Miguel. Then I set them down on the table and I open the bottles and I hand them out. “To friendship,” I say, and I mean it, and this makes me feel worse, but I am trying, and they’re smiling and smoking; they’re kinder than me, and that makes the moment okay.
When evening shifts into night we leave to find Lucie.
It’s dark now and the lights are weird and vibrating and way too white.
We return to where the bus had left us and then proceed in the direction she had described.
Turning a corner I see the hostel, its sign.
The son-of-the-house and the friend are still smoking and so they continue upstairs to smoke on the roof while I search the halls for Lucie. At last, through a part-open door, I spot her.
It is a large closet, full of backpacks and suitcases and Lucie is sitting on the floor amid a mess of her clothes and she is trying to unstick the zipper on a ragged, huge backpack; her hair is damp and dark and she has changed into a new, looser outfit and the fabric is clinging in spots to her bronze, wet skin and for that reason I delay, just a moment, before announcing my presence. She looks up.
She smiles widely, even innocently, indicating the mess she has made. She explains: they know she doesn’t have any money, and they let her store her backpack here, at the hostel. “They really are the nicest people.”
“Do you have a room here?” I am all distracted, and she can see this, I know.
“No,” she says, regarding me now with her warm, level eyes.
“Do you know how much it would cost?” I say.
“For a bed?”
“Yes.”
“A thousand rupees.” She shrugs, then breaks into a smile. “I don’t actually know.”
We climb to the roof. There, in two wire chairs, the son-of-the-house and the friend are smoking.
They shout when they see us.
There is a third and fourth chair on either side of them and Lucie and I have to separate, sitting.
Lucie reaches over the lap of the son-of-the-house in order to shake hands with the friend, who she is just now meeting. Though the friend misunderstands the gesture and hands Lucie his cigarette which, in equal confusion, Lucie accepts but does not smoke from: she looks at it, smells it, then hands it right back. Then she says to him and to everyone else, “I would have a beer, though.”
I stand up. “I’ll get some,” I say. Then I say to Lucie specifically, “I’ll get a room.”
She looks at me, confirming, with her warm, level eyes. “How many beers?” I ask the group. On purpose I am avoiding looking at the son-of-the-house. They each raise a hand, then the friend raises two. On the table beside him is a small amount of tobacco which he, the friend, had removed from the end of his cigarette: I look at this, and then I look at the friend, and then I look at the cigarette which he had tried handing Lucie. Then at last I understand. Seeing that I understood, the friend grins and he shows me (he had been waiting to show me) a small ball of hash on the palm of his hand.
And it’s night enough, I think.
And the air is black, and the lights are so white they’re nearly green. He hands me the spliff.
I take a hit, then another, then I hustle downstairs.
There is no one at the front desk. I walk around for a while, becoming definitively high over the minutes I spend taking random turns around the different floors of the hostel.
At last I find someone who works there but who, when I explain to her that I would like a room for the night and to buy six San Miguel, becomes so exhausted that I feel as though I have assaulted her.
I follow her back to the front desk.
I pay for everything.
The friend, glad for my participation, immediately trades me his spliff for a beer. I let it dangle from my lips as I hand Lucie a can, making eye contact. Then I extend another to the son-of-the-house, who does not look at me and who hesitates before taking it.
But he takes it.
Then I remember and I hand Lucie the key: “Room twenty-two,” I say, in French.
“I knew it!” she shouts. “On the bus! You were listening!” Her eyes shine, and she is a different person.
“A little,” I say, enjoying the feeling, surprising her and drawing her out.
The son-of-the-house butts in, asking Lucie for a massage; so he, too, on the bus had been listening. He’s smiling but he’s serious. He’s having fun or he’s trying to.
Lucie sighs, says something in French about “such little, little boys.”
But then she stands up and she walks around him and she touches his neck.
He falls forward in his chair, showing his spine through his shirt all grateful and defenseless.
Lucie looks at me looking.
She fake-sighs and says, “Oh, not you too. . . . ” For a few seconds she squeezes and prods at the back of his neck and then she sits him back up, extending her hand and asking for “one thousand rupees.”
He slaps her hand and she goes back to her chair.
She still has not opened her beer and now she hands it to me, to open for her, which I do.
The son-of-the-house is obviously watching. He finishes his cigarette. Then he takes the second spliff from the mouth of the friend (the friend had just finished making it) and he smokes it, slouched, as though to emphasize how alone he is in this situation (the friend takes his beer, which the son-of-the-house seems not to notice). Lucie, I assume in order to let things cool off between us, stands up and walks around on the roof. The friend and I chat, sharing the spliff he had given me, and then Lucie comes back and she lays her hands on my shoulders and she leaves them there, faintly, absentmindedly. I do shiver. Then she simply begins massaging my neck.
I don’t know why but I stand up suddenly. Her hands slip off of me.
I say not to her but to everyone, “Hey. Should we go?” The friend stands up and he chugs his beer and I hand him another, as positive reinforcement.
The son-of-the-house hasn’t moved.
“Have another,” I say, extending the sixth and final beer, but this changes nothing. Lucie is watching and I say to him, “Hey, man. Come on,” and I feel vulgar, cruel, and mannish while I do.
He looks at me, dead-eyed.
Then he grabs the beer and breaks it open and walks away drinking.
The friend follows him down, seemingly unaware that anything is wrong, and now on the roof it’s just Lucie and me.
She looks at me.
It’s not the same look as before.
She knows what we’re doing, and what we’ve done, and she’s asking me to stay close to her, now. Please. Not to soften the guilt, but to stay here, on her side.
“Go on,” I say. “I’ll meet you out front.”
“I’ve got the key,” she says, as though to remind me.
We go down the stairs. Down the hall is a bathroom. I go in. I lock the door. I think about running; I’ve forgotten I’m high. I take out the pouch from under my beltline. I take out my passport and cash. All the bills and pages are damp with sweat. It’s the heat and humidity. I think about running; the damper the page, the more quietly and easily you can tear it apart.
I catch my face in the mirror. For a second I think I forget who I am.
When I emerge from the bathroom I see the son-of-the-house is now pressing Lucie against a wall. He is trying to kiss her. She is laughing and averting her face. It’s not violent, it’s nothing to intervene in, and then it’s over: the son-of-the-house steps back, wounded, rebuffed, and Lucie doesn’t even run away. He tries to talk to her. But she won’t stop laughing, and in the end he storms off.
When Lucie sees that I’ve seen this she starts laughing even louder.
The son-of-the-house turns around, sees me, and he’s too far down the hall for me to read the look on his face.
And could he have read mine?
He turns, leaves.
I walk up to Lucie.
I do not ask if she is okay.
In fact I feel angry with her. I hate her and am drawn to her and it is an incredible feeling; she still has her back to the wall and she is smiling at me. “You know I lied to you,” she softly says.
“I know.”
“I didn’t lose my passport.”
“Oh?”
“I burned it.”
“Do they even burn? Aren’t they plastic?”
“French ones do.”
“How dramatic of you.” I frown at her. But now my heart is pumping, pumping, and my hands are awake to the closeness of her hips.
“I thought I wanted to stay,” she admits.
“It’s crossed my mind a few times.”
“But that’s not why I burned it.”
“No?”
“No. No, it’s paradise here,” Lucie says with a weak, worried expression. “Maybe you won’t understand, but I knew I needed to lock the door behind me. Or else I would keep coming back.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“I can’t live that way; I have to be certain. . . . So I stayed; I broke the rules. I knew this way they’ll never let me back in.”
I kiss her and my hands, as they settle onto her hips, meet the small hard shape of the key in her pocket. “Are you like that too?” she asks me, looking up. “Always tricking yourself, just to get what you want?”
I don’t answer. But I take her hand. I walk her along the hall and I back her up against a door and I reach into her pocket, kissing her, and I pull out the key.
I put the key into the door and I open it and Lucie steps backwards into room 22.
An hour later Lucie and I walk to the dancehall, having lost or shaken off the others; of course they hadn’t waited for us. In the lights of the entrance Lucie’s skin shines purple and red; going ahead of me, she screams and runs into the dynamo of other dancers, who are almost all white, expatriates and travelers, while I go to sit with the son-of-the-house, who is alone on a couch.
I have nothing to say. I’m watching her dance.
He says, again, “She is not a good person.”
I don’t even look up. I just say, very calmly, “Because she won’t sleep with you?”
“No,” he says, with a flatness and deadness that causes me to doubt myself. I look at him. Then I look away. It’s for reasons of self-preservation, I know, that I do not challenge him further, or ask.
I know I’m more like her than I am like him.
The friend finds us. He screams and embraces me. He is horribly drunk.
He has bought a few bottles of water and he hands them out and then he returns to the dance floor, spilling his water as he goes. Someone shoves him. He looks hurt. Not physically hurt, but as though he feels misunderstood. Aren’t we having a good time? So he takes his bottle and jumps into the crowd, spraying and throwing water in all directions on purpose, then he is smacked across the face by a man working security and in less than 10 seconds is dragged outside.
I watch this happen. I stand up. I walk onto the dance floor.
Standing totally still amid the moving and flickering mass of other travelers and expatriates, I shout into Lucie’s ear, “I’m leaving, okay?” But Lucie misunderstands. “Do you want the key?” she teases, and begins dancing while dangling the key over her head; she is a good dancer. “No,” I shout. “I’m going back.” But Lucie still doesn’t get it. And what more can I say? So I take her hand and kiss it, which freezes her for a moment: I’m saying goodbye, I’m not a good person. She laughs at me, once. Then she spins around and away and continues dancing with the key lifted over her head, an inviting gesture, a taunting gesture, and in a flash I am sure that the name on her passport, the name she burned or may still have, was not Lucie, is not Lucie.
I walk back, once more, to the son-of-the-house.
I tell him I’m leaving.
I’ll get a cab and ride it back up the valley and he can come if he wants.
But he still won’t look at me. It’s hard traveling. You’re confused all the time. I try shaking his hand. His hand stays limp and non-kinetic in mine. “Where is your khada?” he says, at once, upon looking up at me.
“My khada?”
“Maybe you think it is a scarf,” he says.
“Oh.” It’s in the room, I realize. I had taken it off. And now the door is locked and the key is with Lucie.
“I gave it to Lucie,” I lie.
“Okay, man,” he says, disinterested, turning.
“Was that bad? Are you not supposed to give it to people?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he says.
“I’m just, I’m asking to know. . . . I don’t know the rules, here.”
“There are no rules. . . . You’re a tourist,” he says.
“Well . . . sorry,” I say, not sure if I mean it.
“It doesn’t matter,” he says.
“Yeah. So long.”
“Bye.”
I step outside. Blood pouring from his nose, the friend gloms onto me immediately. I tell him I’m leaving, but first I’ll help him get home if he wants. I’m not sure he understands. I help him walk. We find a cab and I lay him across the three, black faux-leather back seats.
The driver talks to him like an angry father in Nepali, extracting his address. Then I explain mine, which is way up the valley, but the friend asks the driver to drop me off first so that he, the friend, can rest and sober up in the back of the cab before going home to his grandparents.
I tell him it’s almost an hour up the valley, and he lives just a few minutes away.
But that’s what he means: this way he can sleep.
So we confirm with the driver, who asks for a double fare in this case.
And I am beyond caring.
I just want to go back.
So we go.
But the friend doesn’t sleep.
He lays his head on my lap and he holds my hand and he talks to me.
Every few moments he wipes at his bleeding nose, and twice he reminds me to come see his cafe.
I tell him I will.
But I think he knows that I won’t.
And this puts an accurate, if sorry distance between us. “Let me come with you,” he finally says.
I assume he means up the mountain, so I say sure, why not?
It could be fun, the adventure continues!
But then he says, simply, quietly, “There’s nothing for me here.”
I want to pretend that I don’t know what he means. But he’s holding my hand, squeezing my hand and in the darkness of the cab I can see only part of his face, the shine of his blood and his skin that is darker than mine and I tell him, as if to put him to sleep, “But you’re going to Portugal. . . . What do you mean?”
The rest of the way he lies frozen in thinking, just thinking, amid the silence and jostling of the broken rural road.
The cab stops. The friend sits up. On the side of the road is the trail I’ll take, where we had come down in the morning. But it is really very dark. The driver, who is confused by our destination, or rather lack thereof (there are no hostels or guesthouses anywhere near us), asks me where I am staying.
I say up the trail.
He doesn’t seem to understand.
I point at the trail, the forest, the mountain, and the driver says, “No, no,” and starts waving his hands. I ask him what’s wrong. The friend translates: “There are tigers, at night.”
The friend and the driver talk in rapid Nepali, deciding what to do with me. To think I had actually thought I could walk through the night. . . . The driver steps out of the car. He jogs up the road and starts banging on the door of a small, bleak house, all cinderblocks and tin. An old woman steps out. They talk. She peers at us: a tourist, lost, and a local, trapped. The driver beckons me over. I come, and he directs me to pay the woman “one thousand rupees” for the night. I can stay here, he explains. I can wait for the morning. Or else I’ll have to come back. I hand her several bills, more than I should have. Then I pay the driver and I thank him again. Then, at last, I run back to the friend.
His posture as he’s sitting in the cab’s open door is such that I am not invited to hug or to touch him; he’s going back, and he is resigned to this now, and in that sense he is already gone.
I ask him his name. “Buddhi,” he says, and I tell him mine. And I walk up the road and I follow the woman inside to a meager bed which now, because of him, I can only imagine belongs to a son in China, in Qatar, and I tell her, in the English she may not understand, “I am sorry.”
David Melone is an American writer living in Norway.