By Emma Morrell
Bronze Solas Award-winner in the Most Unforgettable Character category
Twenty-five years on, I can’t remember why my friend, Katherine, and I, aged eighteen, were in Santiago’s main bus terminal with you when it was dark. Maybe we were early for the morning bus and had arrived before a 1998 autumn dawn. Or maybe we came before dinner to buy tickets for the next day’s journey to San Pedro de Atacama, near the border with Bolivia. The least likely, but possible scenario, was that our budget hadn’t stretched to include accommodation, and we arrived at the darkest point of night. Whatever the reason, we were there when it was dark, and so were you.
Much about that trip escapes me. I don’t remember leaving Santiago, or disembarking in San Pedro or, indeed, if we changed buses in Calama. I have no recollection of the bus stopping, although surely, it must have done so over the course of the nearly twenty-four hours it took to get to the northernmost tip of Chile. I have fragmented memories of barren landscape viewed through the bus window, and of Katherine and I leaning towards each other, listening to my discman, each with an earphone in one ear.
What I do remember is you showing up with your friend and three children. You barely came up to our shoulders and wore a black skirt with a woven poncho over a long-sleeved, collared white shirt. The children wore miniature versions of your outfit: tiny black trousers and teeny skirts plus dark, knitted, V-neck sweaters. Your skin was creased around your eyes. I couldn’t tell if it was from time or the elements. You probably weren’t much older than me but at the time, the gap between us might as well have been a chasm.
You nodded at us and sat down on the next bench. We smiled and, right away, your children attracted our attention. They waved quickly before looking away. I suppose we should have been more wary. The first time kids were used to distract us was several months earlier. Then, a bag had been silently removed from under a table while we slouched in a café in Quito after our second day at work.
Katherine and I were four weeks into travelling after volunteer teaching in Ecuador. It had been quite the education for a girl who’d spent most of her life in an English country village. After six months, we were so familiar with speaking Spanish, we even used local words with each other. The day in the restaurant when our friend’s bag had gone missing, it was only a waiter waving menus at a family quickly leaving that made us realise what had happened.
Maybe we were cautious in Santiago. Maybe we hung our bags where we could see them and twisted our feet into the straps of our backpacks so they couldn’t disappear unnoticed. Maybe we were glad our passports and travellers cheques were strapped in pouches against our stomachs, hidden by our clothes. Or maybe, just maybe, we took you for who you were, some Indigenous women and children on the way home to your village. Our cautiousness, or lack thereof, is just another thing I don’t remember.
Our travels had started slowly. Accustomed to the safety of host families and friends, we’d stayed with a family contact on arrival in Santiago, then spent a week exploring sullen grey-skied Valparaiso and Viña del Mar, wrapping ourselves in towels on the beach when a light but persistent drizzle began. After the coast, we’d bussed south to Pucón for five days to climb the nearby 2860m-high Volcán Villarica that belched lava and spewed smoke. A few days later, back in Santiago, we were heading north, which was how we ended up in the bus terminal with you.
Your children soon wandered over. Our light brown hair, clear eyes, and pale skin made us interesting to study. Their straight dark hair fell across eyes the colour of dark chocolate, and their puppy-plump cheeks were tinged pink from the cool night air. We hid our faces behind our hands in a language-less game of peekaboo, and they ran back to clutch at your legs. Wide eyes peered out from the safety of your skirt folds. Your whole face smiled when you realised what game we were playing. Your body, initially tilted a few degrees away from us, shifted slightly in our direction.
After some time — it could have been five minutes or half an hour, I don’t remember — you approached us and asked if you could sit. We enthusiastically scooted over to make room. You arranged your skirts around you, sat with the expectant air of someone who is about to say something and even took a breath a few times, as if you were searching for the right words but said nothing.
After several minutes, Katherine and I resumed our conversation but your presence distracted me. I wanted to take in the lace edging on your skirt and the embroidery of your shawl. Without knowing why, I craved a conversation with you. I realise now it was because I wanted to learn about matters I didn’t yet understand, like when far-off-but-future motherhood would come, what the immediate impacts of increasing tourism were, how my inevitable coming of age would feel, and everything in between.
To my delight, you eventually sat forward and asked where we were from.
“De Inglaterra,” we said.
“What language do they speak there?” you asked. Your friend and the children inched closer.
“Inglés.” You raised your eyebrows.
“Es muy lejos?” you asked. Is it far? We tried to calculate how long it would take to get home if we wanted to.
“Quite far,” we said.
What we didn’t say, because we lacked the words in either language, was that the UK seemed farther away than ever. We couldn’t imagine ourselves as at home anywhere else but in South America yet, sitting next to you, I was painfully conscious of never belonging on this continent even if I stayed forever.
With flights home booked and university spots secured, our lives would change in less than half a year. Letters from friends already studying there had highlighted how different our lives were: Instead of 9am lectures and essay deadlines, our plans that week had us travelling to see the barren plateau of the Atacama Desert and the almost blinding white pan in the Salar de Uyuni.
I didn’t know it yet, but Uyuni’s bleached salt pans would imprint themselves on my memory. The salt flats would radiate white, and we would take photos standing one-legged on little pyramids of grains. That glow was what lifted me out of the monotony of backpacking. After weeks of wondering why I hated the transient feeling of travelling, it showed me the payback of our perseverance. Just in time too, as days later La Paz would strike me down with altitude-induced fainting spells, and Katherine would call a halt to our travels. She had travel fatigue and was homesick for Quito.
You persisted. Determination flashed in your eyes. Were you always this forthright in your Mapuche community? Were you allowed? Or did you feel that with us it would be ok?
“How far?” We didn’t know.
“How long then?” you asked. “How long to get there?”
We thought again.
“Quizás venti cuatro horas,” we said. Maybe a day, you gasped, and I wondered how far you had to travel.
I’m ashamed to say I don’t know, because I never asked. I had no idea, then, about your straw-domed houses or any of your customs and traditions. I’d love to say your culture piqued my interest, and I later looked it up. I didn’t. What I will say is that you’ve visited my thoughts often since then. Your children would now be ten years older than I was then. I wonder if you remember me like I remember you.
I think of who I was that day, and who you were too. I was so open to new experiences and eager to embrace it all. You were so willing to ask questions of strangers you’d never see again. Both of us were ready to learn what we didn’t know. I want the connection we had for those few minutes and to tell you I still remember it. I want to know you deeper and better in every profound way that I never can. I want to go back to being the me who belonged everywhere and nowhere at the same time. When I travel now, I look for people who might teach me in a short conversation what it is to be like you were. I wonder if you seek connection when you meet other foreigners in your country and seek me, just as I hope I’ll find another you.
Back in the bus station, you translated our exchange to your friend and the children. Their eyes grew as big as yours had when you reached the part about a whole day. The chatter between you grew louder. Every now and again, you looked over at us, gestured with your arms, exclaimed something, and the discussion began all over again. When you came to sit back down, you were still shaking your head.
“A day,” you repeated. “Imagine spending a whole day on a bus.”
I don’t remember what I said next but I know what I didn’t say. I didn’t have the words to tell you I was realising that fitting in and belonging aren’t the same, nor that I was learning how time and distance can bend to make times and places feel closer and farther away all at once. I didn’t know those things back then, when I had so much more to understand. I wish I could say your response wasn’t a patronising punchline for a few years to nail a brilliant anecdote that says everything about the traveller I was then. I hope it shows nothing about the person I am now.
Maybe I just agreed and told you I was about to get on a bus for a whole day to get home instead of the truth, that after day on a bus I wouldn’t even have left your country, much less travelled all the way to mine. Or, possibly, I said we were looking for the ticket counter and asked if you could help. The truth is, I don’t remember.
Sitting in that bus station next to you on hard plastic chairs joined by a metal rung, I didn’t know what I was looking for besides bus tickets. I was at a gateway between a well-trodden, familiar life at home, a current life I knew would evaporate into memories, and a future life I couldn’t yet imagine.
I certainly wasn’t looking for you, but you found me anyway.
~ ~ ~
Emma Morrell has lived more than a third of her life outside of the UK in 10 cities on four continents as well as traveling extensively with and without her family. She mainly writes about travel from an expat and a family angle. She has written for publications in the UK, US, Middle East, and in South East Asia.