God Bless the Child That’s Got Her Own

In Santa Rosa many things were running on empty. The day Sonia’s nephew brought the television that got three channels so badly they made me question the impulse to have a television, it arrived tied to a wagon with clothesline and pulled by a lorry. I was already a person who received regular deliveries of water, also delivered in a three-wheeled lorry, to my home, a “studio” above Blanca’s garage, sealed by two ornate but thin doors and locked with a key that looked like the map to an underground nuclear testing facility. The floor of the apartment was worryingly flimsy, and it felt as though you might fall through it into the garage at any minute, which imbued it with a slight sense of adventure.

Every year Santa Rosa is allotted a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant by the US State Department, and I believe every year it is a struggle to find somewhere for her to live, or to find someone willing to find it. Sonia had, at one time, been a Fulbright scholar somewhere in the American South, and she poured out her passion for Faulkner every time I saw her, making me wish I had finished The Sound and the Fury so as to be less of an unfit audience. I relied on her completely to arrange the apartment over Blanca’s garage—no one in Santa Rosa had a reliable internet connection; they certainly didn’t advertise on international sites. I was grateful to her, even though everything in the apartment was a slightly tragic version of the thing it was meant to be.

The toilet had water in it and usually what you put into it disappeared after you depressed the handle, though you were never to put in anything that didn’t absolutely need to be there. Certainly not paper. Next to it was a wastebasket no heavier than a peso lined with one of the sheer, mini plastic bags they give you in produce stores in Latin America. It was never long before this little system made the whole apartment smell like human problems. The shower was a smaller cube within the cube of the bathroom in the already small cube of the apartment, and you could be happy there for eight minutes before the hot water was exhausted and took two hours to replenish. The bed was a thick, waxy frame with a wire base on top of which a dark blue mattress of no particular texture lay. I realized after a month that the mattress held the shape of my body permanently and the sheet held my image in blue, reminiscent of the Shroud of Turin. It gave me the impression of being dead.

I took a good attitude toward the challenges presented by the kitchen because, as Argentines often lamented in all kinds of situations, it was lo que hay, and because for that year cooking was about the only thing I enjoyed. There was a small stove with an oven that could be “on” or “off.” There was also a sink in which I washed all my laundry because everyone I asked where they did their laundry responded, What do you mean? I had one cooking vessel, a mustard-colored aluminum pot. It became my mission to successfully fry eggs in it and then extract them, a project that sometimes seemed to advance but ultimately affirmed the initial evidence that aluminum and albumin do not care to part. The tiny fridge was in a different part of the apartment, but that only meant twelve feet away. It was a testament to the overall emptiness of the apartment that it could be said to have had sections. In the first window section, the refrigerator stood next to the water cooler I bothered with because every time I mentioned that I was drinking the municipal water whoever I was speaking to prayed for me. The refrigerator was shorter than me, with no real freezer or capacity for ice. Still, it tended to freeze lettuce. On top of the water cooler was the...