The two little girls bounced through the subway car passing out little cards as though their hair weren’t matted to their heads, as though they wore shoes, as though the dirt all over them were simply a part of their costumes for some game or errand that took them from person to person from car to car. There eyes told other stories than their motions, of course, and we took out a little bit of money to give them–nearly nothing. The smallest one, no more than four or five, pointed to the sack of food we’d prepared for our lunch. We pulled out a package of biscuits and handed it to them, but she was persistent, shoving the cookies back into my hand and poking out her finger again to indicate she wanted the oranges instead. It was the first time in all these months that I’ve encountered street children demanding fruit rather than money or candy. And of course we gave them the oranges.
And the next day we saw the same little girls, this time with others. One, perhaps six, sank to the floor and pressed the coins to the metal beneath her and issued a kind of controlled tantrumwhile a boy with her tried to give her his bread; the smallest boy sat calmly on the seat next to me, oblivious to the scene, and turned to smile and ask me for some change. And these are like the boy we saw a few days before, singing for change in the subway with a gorgeous broken wail, stamping his feet and pressing his lungs against the roof of the car, against our faces and the noise and the inevitability of everything around him. And I wondered about the group of kids we met in Cuzco, all tiny and wearing the same posture and tattered clothes and grins as these girls; I stood outside the store with them, picking them up above my head with one hand again and again while Annika went inside to buy them food. So many kids in so many cities that it seems glib to mention them–sifting through piles of trash, serving food, carrying buckets, selling gum, mending clothes, huddling together or alone or with parents, performing circus routines and flashing smiles or masks of smiles. And I realize that the more present they all are in my life the easier it becomes not to think much about them.
Perhaps this will be one of the measurements, part of the index of this trip, even as I resist trying to measure and index. But it could be instead the music I´ve listened to, all the sad Americana that somehow has seemed precisely right for my movement. Or instead I could mark these months by something like the number of times I’ve pinched my finger in the old belt I’m wearing–a belt borrowed from Sachin in Mumbai, my fingers pinched as I closed the clasp just south of Darjeeling, again in an alleyway outside of a rural train station in Vietnam, again in some place I’ve forgotten in Bolivia, again in a cinema bathroom in Buenos Aires. But a more interesting index will be the one I can’t piece together, that refuses me.
And I’m alone again. Annika is gone; Allison is gone. And the rhythm of this trip, of me moving about and waking up and eating and thinking without someone next to me, has begun to take shape again, even if it will be dissolved in only a few weeks, when I return to another life, or a new one, one that I don’t know how to think about right now. But today I’m walking around Buenos Aires, in the sun, listening to the music coming out of my headphones but not impatient for it to reach my ears, trying to be vulnerable to what’s around me.
