A disheveled man with a weathered face struck up a conversation with us in the bus station in Buenos Aires.
“I live in Oklahoma,” he said, his eyes wide and expecting, as if to say “What do you think of that?”
I tried to ignore him, but Thushan decides to humor him, and in the process we find out he was Ecuadorian, traveling alone, and had a peculiar train of thought that gave off the impression that he was either mildly drunk or perpetually confused. He said he ran a Spanish language newspaper in Oklahoma City. “It makes a half a million dollars,” he said. “But then, you know, I have to pay everyone.”
“This city’s nothing compared to Iquitos,” he declared, before revealing he had only spent one day in Buenos Aires. “I payed the taxi driver to drive me around all day. I saw the whole thing.”
“We liked Buenos Aires, a lot,” replied Thushan.
“Really?” he said, at this point almost laughing at us. “What did you like about it?”
His stories were confusing, rarely had endings, and were hard to believe, but just barely believable, like this one: “I lived in London a long time ago. I was the ambassador for Ecuador. But my wife is American, she wanted to live in the States. You play the guitar?”
What?
As luck would have it, he was on the same bus as us, headed to Iguazu falls, alone except for a very expensive professional video camera. We passed him as we enter the bus. “Sit down here, with me,” he says excitedly.
“We have seats 33 and 34,” I say, silently rejoicing in the fact that not only were we at the back of the bus while he was at the front, but that the bus was a double decker, and we were on a completely different level.
“There’s assigned seats?” was the only response he could muster.
Arriving in Iguazu, we headed to the nearest cheap hotel, and found the prices were a bit steeper than we thought. After a moment’s hesitation, in walked our man. “Hey! I was wondering where you guys went. Are you staying here? Why don’t we share a room, its cheaper that way.”
Even in hindsight I’m not sure what happened in that moment. Were we stunned into stupidity by his surprise entrance? Feeling the pressure of a tight budget after a pricey bus trip? To this day Thushan claims he never thought it was a good idea, and I argue that the look he gave me made it seem like he was all for it. Either way, the next thing we knew we were in a dark cramped room with a television and three beds, neatly in a row, listening to more stories.
“There are lots of rednecks in Oklahoma. I ran an editorial saying people in the U.S. should learn more than one language, and they keyed my car,” he rambled. “I’ve helped so many politicians get elected—mayors and state representatives—but they forget about you as soon as they get elected. It’s better than being a journalist in Mexico. Or Colombia.”
He was anxious to see the falls, and equally anxious for us to see them. Waving the flier he had picked up on the street, he tried to convince us to join him on a full boat tour of the falls from the Brazilian side, which included a boat tour and complementary yellow fever injection, for only $70. Finally, we discovered some semblance of a backbone, and told him we had already gotten yellow fever injections, and would be going to the park on the Argentina side, for $10. For a moment, he looked truly disappointed.
We spent several blissful hours at the falls, free of his sideways comments. When we returned to the room he was nowhere to be found, and after eating, he still hadn’t returned, but we were knew it was just the quiet before the storm.
Just before 9 p.m. he stumbled through the door. “Oh, man. I missed the last bus back, I had to take a cab. Cost me more than the hotel room. I was going to stay the night over there but I thought ‘My friends are going to wonder where I went,’” he said.
Silence.
He continued: “I tell you, I got some good footage on video today. I think I’m going to sell it to a tv company, make some money. My wife doesn’t like it when I travel, unless I tell her I’m making money.”
Silence.
“You play the guitar?” he said, eying the instrument in the corner of the room. He had apparently forgotten that we had had that conversation. “I got a guitar in the states—a Yamaha— for $700. In Ecuador the same guitar cost $200. I paid too much.” He seemed to be amazed at himself. “You mind if I play something?”
He sauntered over to the guitar and situated himself at the base of our beds, as if we were his audience. The television bolted to the wall over his head silently displayed the headlines of Spanish language CNN, illuminating only the fringes of his comb over. He strummed, he plucked, his hands danced across the frets with the flourish of someone who was once a serious practitioner of the instrument.
Thushan and I exchanged a glance. It was a glance that reluctantly said it was official, this man had managed to be weird enough to get make it into our story. As much as we tried to keep his quixotic commentary from grabbing hold, he deserved credit for his relentlessness. There was nothing we could do.
Thushan grabbed his camera and snapped the picture.
This entry was posted on Monday, February 11th, 2008 and is filed under the people we meet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.