A Round Trip to Bogotá

Gerry Klein

PROLOGUE

While cleaning up after a recent flood in our house I came across a letter I had written and sent to a Swiss friend 46 years ago. He had returned the letter to me when his marriage broke down and he was forced to leave the family home and no longer could safely store extraneous papers.

The letter dealt with a period in my life when I had experienced some extraordinary events, including walking through the now infamous Darien Gap. The Swiss man had asked, if I were to survive the trek, that I should describe my experiences so that he could vicariously make the trip with me. He would have volunteered to do the trip with me but he was travelling with a very beautiful, very dainty woman who would later become his wife and then, if his subsequent communications were to be taken at face value, his worst enemy.

I remember writing the letter at a table in a quiet and spartan restaurant in Bogotá. It was one of two I painstakingly wrote that day, printed in small script to fit on sheets of airmail paper. One for him and one sent to myself at my parents’ address where it was carefully stored away unopened until I could retrieve it some years later, then move it still unopened to my home in Saskatoon where it was ultimately flooded when sewage backed up into our basement during a thunderstorm.

I was fortunate in that the letter from Switzerland showed up after the flood but it also sat unopened and unread until our recent water leak. As I read the words I wrote nearly half a century ago about an event that was in many ways transformative for me, I realized my memory of what happened was distorted by time for the 2024 me reading the words and by illness for the 1978 me writing the words. I was still recovering from typhoid as I wrote the letter (I remember my finger and thumb were able to touch each other when I circled my hand around my jacket-covered bicep) and I remember struggling to make what I did remember of the trip align with what I knew of the geography.

I mention this disconnect between memories – particularly those distorted by illness – and facts because the story that follows is about events as I recall that took place in the days and months after I wrote those letters and I can’t swear that they occurred exactly as I set them out. We are more creatures of our memories than of reality, however, as much as my current character was forged by my past, these are the memories that went into the process.

I don’t remember where Maria came from.

I know she had been the lover of my blind Texan buddy who crossed the Darien Gap with me but I don’t know how she came to be in my bed.

I was living on a side of Bogotá where the police told me it was so dangerous they would not come to my rescue should I be attacked on my way to my room.

I had recently fought off typhoid in a cheap hotel room in Medellin, dubbed in Spanish as the City of Eternal Spring but then a metropolis with a reputation as a place violently run by and for drug lord Pablo Escobar. I survived the dangerous crossing of the Darien and the violence of the drug wars but typhoid left my body beaten and emaciated.

Weeks after the fever broke and I had made it to Bogotá with Texan. Someone invited us to a session at a health spa, where I weighed in at 98 pounds. I was so pathetic looking Colombia’s notoriously corrupt secret police on day picked us up on the streets then unceremoniously tossed us from the back of their Land Rover when I told them I had some possibly contagious deadly disease.

By the time Maria came to me Texan had been deported, having entered Colombia from Panama through a rarely used jungle trail without a proper visa. I know he was there for me as I fought through typhoid and during my early recovery but I don’t have clear recollections of him, my memory of this period nearly half a century ago having long been distorted and decimated by time and the disease.

I don’t remember how he met Maria but I remember listening to them making love while I would doze on another bed in the same room. After Texan was deported Maria came back to check on me and stayed.

Maria was a voluptuous Latina. She was unilingual Spanish and my still poor grasp of the language was made worse because of the mental fog I experienced since typhoid. I had difficulty concentrating and would become easily exhausted.

She was a voracious lover. She approached sex like a starving man might a giant T-bone. Like the rest of me, my libido was exhausted and I had difficulty not popping off like a two-bit pistol. She did all the work and she did it often and very well. In order to delay the inevitable, I took to thinking about the battles from D-Day to victory in Europe based on a book I had picked up off the street to try learn Spanish. She would gyrate on top of me, moaning, and with her ample breasts heaving while I would be thinking of Montgomery and the German Seventh Army. After, she would collapse beside me panting while I lay beside her feeling very much like an emaciated reserve dog, all cock and ribs.

But as bad a lover as I was, she stuck with me. We would walk Bogotá parks trying to catch rare bits of Bogotá sun or we would sit on city park benches to watch the feral street children that haunted Bogotá streets like the racoons do Toronto’s.

We also watched movies – mostly European art movies that showed at a centre where one paid to get inside the venue then could go from theatre to theatre watching movies and eating street food between. It was a cheap way to kill time and I studied Spanish from the subtitles.

When I left Bogotá to go to someplace warmer (tierra caliente) Maria came with me. I wasn’t sure why but she said she wanted me to meet her family in a small city on the road to Cali.

The country was in the midst of a prolonged period of political violence that devastated its economy and impacted on almost everyone. Maria’s brother had recently been killed by two young, drunk reservists. He had stopped to chat with a girl with whom he had gone to high school. She now worked as a prostitute and had spent an afternoon drinking and seducing the two young servicemen.

When they came back from having a pee and saw her talking to Maria’s brother they mowed him down with their service rifles. In a testament to her humanity, Maria’s mother begged the court to commute their death sentence so their mothers wouldn’t have to know the pain she suffered.

This period of violence was bad for Colombia but good for anyone wanting to take on a cheap hotel room. In an erstwhile resort community in the tierra caliente we found a hotel perched on a cliff above a scenic river where I enjoyed the sun and the beer.

One morning after we had breakfast, we went to a patio overlooking the river. A server was leaning over the rail cheering at an iguana and chameleon that were locked in a territorial dispute over a small rock perched over the rapidly moving river water.

The young man looked at us then had a thought. He gave us a mischievous grin, ran inside the hotel and we heard a toilet flush. He rushed back out in time to see the flood of water he unleashed strike the two reptiles. They were both washed away in the river. I blanched to think about where my flushes would go. Ever since I had typhoid I was paranoid about spreading the disease (Texan called me Typhoid Gerry).

We met some university students who invited us to go swimming under a waterfall. There was a young mother and a couple others and they wanted to go skinny dipping in the cold water. I decided to stay behind and babysit the months-old girl while they all stripped down and dived into the water. It seemed like a dream.

I perched on a rock above the pool, taking in the sun and the baby slept on my chest. When I placed my hand on her back I could feel her move with my heart beat. I was amazed I still had such strength in my heart.

Maria’s family treated me with a mixture of politeness and fear. They didn’t believe I was what Maria needed for stability but they had never met a North American before. They interviewed me in a parlour that was situated at the small end of an L-shaped series of rooms bracketing their garden. The kitchen was at the opposite end and the family parrot was in the kitchen but curious about the commotion. I watched it hop off its perch and sneak into the room adjacent to the parlour and creep under the sofa to catch a glimpse of me. When I told the family the parrot had joined us, they at first refused to believe it because it never left its perch.

The parrot stuck its head out from under the sofa and giggled nervously. It eventually crawled out from the sofa and climbed onto my lap – something else it had never done to a guest. It was enough to convince the family that this long-haired skeleton had the psittacine’s stamp of approval.

I had anticipated Maria would be staying at her family home but she accompanied me to Cali. There we had a fight and when I advised her to go home, she told me she didn’t have enough money. The next day we hitched a ride on a five-ton truck hauling a Massy Ferguson farm tractor with a three-point hitch.

It was hot and the highway was dusty so the drivers offered to keep Maria in the cab while I crawled onto the back with our packs. I could see the trio in the cab through a back window. Maria was perched on a centre console with the driver and the swamper in the seats. We barely hit highway speed when the swamper grabbed at Maria’s breast. She swatted him away. I dug my machete out of my pack and banged the handle on the top of the cab.

Both the driver and swamper looked at me and laughed. The swamper pulled Maria’s shirt, tearing it. I banged again and could see Maria was terrified.

The man pulled her off the console and onto his lab, ripping at her clothes and pulling her pants off while the driver laughed. I walked around the tractor. I used my machete to short out the starter and the tractor coughed to life. I went to the front end, which was facing the back of the truck, and undid the chains holding the axles to the truck frame.

I jumped on the seat, lowered the three-point hitch and backed the tractor into the cab, using the hydraulics to rip up the front of the box.

Upon hearing the noise, the driver stomped on the brakes which caused the tractor to lurch backwards until the hitch broke through the cab’s rear window. I used the hydraulic to tear off the roof of the cab.

By then the driver knew something serious was happening and he swerved to the side of the highway. I grabbed our two packs and threw them overboard then rushed to the driver side just as the driver was climbing into the box to see what was happening. I put my machete against his juggler and told him he was about to die. He blanched.

I told the other guy to let Maria out of the cab and as soon as I saw she was clear I scrambled over the tractor to the passenger side. I hit the lever on the throttle until the little diesel was screaming, then I hopped over the edge, worried I would skewer myself on my machete when I hit the ground.

The truck jerked back onto the highway. Cars zoomed past while Maria stood there naked and crying. I took off my dust-covered T-shirt for her and looked back down the highway for our packs. A Land Rover had pulled over beside the bags. A woman jumped out, picked up the bags and threw them in the back of the Rover. They then drove up and the young woman jumped out and wrapped Maria in a blanket. We were ushered into the back of the vehicle where their two children were standing on the seat looking terrified.

The young family drove us all the way to Popayan, apologizing for their countrymen.

We made our way to Quito where it occurred to me that this was the first time in her life Maria was in a foreign country, an odd concept for me considering I was so far from my origins and her so close. It complicated getting her home.

On the fall equinox I offered to take Maria up Mount Cayambe as far as the snow. She had never seen snow and I thought it would be cool to make a snowball while standing on the equator with the sun directly overhead.

Climbing to the snowline at the equator is harder than one might think. We started out happy but Maria turned back when the lack of oxygen made each step an exhausting chore. I pushed on.

My head began to throb but I pushed on, step after painful step with a rest between each. By the time I reached a patch of snow hiding under the shade of a rock my head felt ready to explode. I have since read about what happens to a person’s brain when they are afflicted by altitude sickness and how the swelling can cause permanent damage or even be fatal but then I thought it was probably just a side effect from the typhoid. I believed once I made it back to the coast my headache would go.

It didn’t.

We found a place on a beach where for very little money we rented space where we could tie our hammocks between palm trees. We set up a permanent camp and spent days watching the gringo tourists.

There was a New Zealand couple who wondered why I involuntarily laughed when she told me that since he had contracted the clap from a toilet in Thailand before she joined him on this trip, they now covered the toilet seats with rare and expensive toilet paper before every use.

There was a beautifully formed French couple who every evening would set themselves a civilized table, light the candle, sip wine and gaze into each other’s eyes. The rest of us in the campsite would watch them from our messy sites, eating our meals from the pots and sigh at how perfect their love appeared.

There was an American woman from Oregon who, in her early 30s, was considered the older, wiser tourist. She had lived in Ecuador for years, dated the locals, spoke perfect Spanish (although she had the habit of saying in English “you know?” after most sentences) and freely shared her knowledge of the country and the culture.

There was a creepy jaundiced guy who claimed to be a Canadian from Vancouver but he couldn’t speak English, just Italian. Personal hygiene can be difficult on the road but he wore his dirty cloths and hands with pride. His teeth and eyes were matching yellow, his breath smelled of rotting teeth and his aroma of crap and sweat caused us to generally shift to the other side of the bar when he came in.

There was a young German man with white, white skin, blond hair and pale blue eyes who dismissed my warning about the power of the equatorial sun and insisted he had only a week to get the same kind of tan I had after two years in Latin America. He stayed on the beach in his Speedo and slowly turned deeper shades of pink. He moaned all night and by morning, and when he limped to town to take the one bus a day that left for the city, the blisters on his body had spread from the top of his blond, blond head to the soles of his feet.

My headache was reluctant to subside. When Maria initiated sex the pain became excruciating – it scared us both.

I spent most days gossiping with tourists and translating it for Maria, who desperately wanted to be considered a cosmopolitan gringo rather than a local Latin American.

We cooked on a shared fire pit and spent our days surfing in the warm ocean, wandering the sandy beach, and sipping cheap beer at the nearby village. I made friends with the local fishermen and would exchange a litre of beer for a dorado or crayfish for supper. I fell in love with a parrot that would spot me at a distance and call out to me, cooing and giggling when I would let him snuggle his bill in my beard. He would look at me close and bark like a dog we could hear far off in town. I barked back. Then he would cry like an infant crying on the other side of the market. I cried and his owners would laugh uproariously.

Except for the persistent headaches, life couldn’t be better. One day while I was watching the birds do their mating dance I heard the unmistakable sound of two humans doing the same. I glanced over the dunes and saw the Italian-Canadian’s dirty bum humping up and down on the moaning French woman. When they were done they walked together back to the beach where the long-term residents watched in shock.

Over the course of the next few days their affair became the talk of the cabanas. The male half of the perfect French couple now spent his evenings staring out at the setting sun or drinking beer with the rest of us mortals until his girlfriend would come back and join him before bed.

One morning I heard a commotion outside our door and when I went to see what was happening it was the French man wanting to know if I knew when the bus to the city came. It was imminent, I told him. The French woman came running, demanding to know what he was doing.

“Leaving,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because it’s over,” he replied.

“You said we were free to have other partners,” she insisted.

“So we are but now I’m leaving,” he said.

“But I’m not packed,” she said.

He shrugged. She ran home and came back with a backpack with still open pockets. She was crying and he was determined as she followed him to town. We never saw either of them again.

Maria had become frustrated by my lack of sex drive and we fought often. I told her I would pay for her ticket home but she insisted on staying.

After one fight she stormed off and had a beer with the woman from Oregon. When she came back she was unusually quiet.

“She kissed me,” she finally admitted. She was confused.

“Well, that’s natural,” I said. “You were upset and she cares about you.”

“No,” she insisted. “She KISSED me like you do. I didn’t know what to say.”

“There’s nothing unusual about her being attracted to you and you should just do what you want to do.”

Before the kiss we had all being camping in a coconut grove just off the beach until the opportunity came for us to share a cabana. Maria and I slept on the bed while Oregon had been sleeping on the lower bunk. Our luggage was stored on the top bunk.

She was late coming home on the night of the kiss and sheepishly crept into the cabana after we were in bed. I made a point of normalizing events and by morning things had gone back to the way they were before.

One weekend we were at a campfire with local teenagers further up the beach. We were smoking grass and cooking seafood on the fire when, after dark, the teenagers decided they wanted to go skinny dipping. The thought of it appealed to Maria but I had no desire to show off my skin-and-bones body. I stayed behind with Oregon and a local indigenous fellow.

Oregon asked me if I had ever done mushrooms.

“Nope,” I said.

“Do you want to?”

“Sure.”

They were bigger than I anticipated they would be and it occurred to me I had no idea if this local fellow knew what he was doing. But they had the desired effect. When someone threw some paper on the fire and it burst into flames then floated over me like a billion sparks, I realized I didn’t have the co-ordination to protect myself from bursting into flames.

And when two Land Rovers full of teens pretending to be police came rushing across the sand with lightbars blazing I realized I didn’t have the wherewithal to protect myself. I suggested we should head back to the cabana.

We walked along the beach and I was awed at the effervescence in the waves. We were still talking about it when we went into the cabana and Oregon came with us rather than her custom of waiting until we were in bed. We sat on the big bed while Oregon sat on her bunk and I pulled Maria’s top over her head.

Oregon leaned forward and kissed her then kissed her breasts. Maria let out a whimper turned away.

Oregon apologized and went to bed.

Early next morning Oregon was already outside with her bags packed. She told us she was going to the city, picked up her backpack and she was gone.

For a time, I could maintain a sex life. Not only was I receptive to Maria’s advances but I even initiated having sex. We stayed on that beach perhaps for another week but without Oregon the cost of the cabana became hard to justify. We caught a bus for Otavalo.

One day I was in a restaurant talking with a young man from Quebec when Maria came in.

“Come here, I want to show you something.”

She was often looking to buy mementos of the trip and I would have to tell her I neither had the money nor the space to be carrying such things.

She took me to a nearby park and there was Oregon, sitting on a bench beside her backpack.

“She is here just for a day and I told her we should share a room,” Maria said.

We found a room with a double and a twin that had window access to an outside roof where we could smoke dope without leaving a telltale smell.

Oregon brought the dope and when we came back into the room I was quite stoned.

Oregon sat on her bed and Maria crawled in beside me. I don’t recall what we were talking about but when Maria lifted her top over her head it was quite a non sequitur. She reached toward Oregon with her palms raised.

Maria then melted back into the bed with the beautiful Oregon kissing her. I desperately tried to imagine the terrain around Falaise in Normandy where Canadian and Polish troops put the final boots to the German 7th Army.

Oregon left the next day and for a time Maria and I had a relatively normal relationship. We got a room on the second floor of a hotel across from the beach in Salinas, outside Guayaquil. I wrote short stories to keep Maria amused and we had sex during the day, in the evening, and at night. She was happy.

It didn’t last. We were fighting constantly.

We arrived in Piura in a sand storm and had to walk to the town centre from the TransAmerican Highway. I got a hotel room, we showered, and went exploring. A girl joined us and eventually told us she was being molested by her brother and she asked us to help her leave Peru.

We brought her to our room and I went out to find something for all of us to eat. When I got back Maria was aggressively trying to seduce her.

I got angry and Maria became confused. I walked the girl to a bus stop and was still heated when I got back to the hotel. I knew it wasn’t the girl Maria wanted but the relationship we had for a time after Oregon. When I got to the floor with our room I could hear the hotel clerk calling through the door. I thought Maria had done something to herself and rushed inside. She told me the clerk was insisting he wanted to have sex with her, having concluded she must be a prostitute to be hanging out with a gringo.

I went down to the front desk, looked at the clerk and said we have cockroaches in the hotel. I warned him that if I catch a cockroach in our room I would kill it.

He blanched.

I told Maria I didn’t want her to force herself on a young woman just for me. I was not withholding sex to bully her into having sex with a woman, but I was withholding sex because I wanted her to leave me and go home.

I told her I understood she was unhappy and that I would buy her a ticket to Bogotá. She reacted violently. Finally, she admitted to me she was afraid she was losing her mind. Her hormones had gone crazy and she was long overdue for her period.She had asked old indigenous women in the market for remedies for unplanned pregnancies but nothing seemed to work.

We were told of a gynecologist who lived outside Piura and helped women in trouble. The taxi left us on an unpaved road at the bottom of a hill with one house up the street. When we arrived at the house we were on the backside and walked past a well-kept but walled garden and through a garage that had a boat on a trailer and a modern pickup truck.

The clinic was clean but the waiting room was packed. I was the only male there. There were young indigenous girls, middle-class women, mothers with their daughters, Maria and me. The doctor was kind and refused to charge the very poor, making up for it with the wealthier. He lectured me on safe sex and charged me $150 – about what I would spend in a month.

After the abortion we were both cool to one another. I decided I was going to go into the Andes along a string of towns that didn’t seem to have a road connecting them, until I could get to Cajamarca, the city where Pizarro captured the Inca king. Maria was angry because she thought the trip would be suicide.

I bought her a bus ticket to Bogotá and we parted in the morning. Her to the bus depot and me to the highway, where I would hitch a ride into the mountains.

When the roads ran out there was a trail. I carried enough food for one meal a day and coca leaves to ward off hunger and thirst.

When I would arrive at those villages that were strung along the map like a necklace, people would ask me if I came to rescue the people from Switzerland. They would tell me that some people from Switzerland had come through their town, either days, months, or years earlier and there were between two and six of them. They had horses and donkeys and had died violently after being set upon by robbers or falling off cliffs.

I never did see any sign of them.

Finally, I arrived at a town where they hadn’t heard of the Swiss party. I suspect they either died before arriving there or, more likely, went along the altiplano on a trail that would take them almost 2,000 kilometres south toward Cusco.

I arrived in this town just as school was letting out and as I walked along the main street groups of children began to follow me. I finally sat on a bench and tried to talk to them. They stood and stared but never answered my questions. I picked up a torn paper, perhaps a ticket stub, and tried to read it to deflect my awkwardness.

An old man had come to sit beside me and he grinned at me with blackened teeth. His breath smelled like that of a donkey and I realized it was because he was chewing the same coca leaves that I was using to ward off hunger and thirst.

Gesturing to the paper, he spoke to me in an indigenous language I couldn’t understand. I was relieved to have someone talk to me but I told him I couldn’t understand him. Finally a voice from the back of the crowd of children spoke up, saying: “He’s just a crazy man who tells stories.”

“Who are you?” I asked.

“I am the school teacher,” he replied. “Don’t worry about that man, he is just crazy.”

“He seems to really want to tell me something, what is he saying?”

“He says he wishes he could read and write like you. Then he would write a story for you to read.”

“What story?”

The old man talked and the teacher translated. He told of a mayor or leader who was kidnapped by bad men and held hostage. The people were told they had to fill one room with gold and the other with silver. People worked hard to bring all these riches to the bad men and after they had filled the rooms the bad men killed the chief.

It was years later while at university that I read the story of Pizarro’s conquest of Peru so I never understood the significance of what was happening.

I was exhausted and dirty by the time I made it to Cajamarca. I got a room and next day went to the main square. I was there only a few minutes when I saw Maria walk across the square with a young woman from Germany. She sat beside me as if I would be expecting her.

She had gone to the bus depot and traded in her ticket. She then made her way to Cajamarca where she met the German and they were sharing a room.

The German, a very small blond woman with deeply intelligent eyes, looked sheepish. We went to her room to collect Maria’s bag. It was clear German had been sorting her stuff out to pack her bags. She was returning to Germany in the morning.

There was one, unkempt bed in the room that German tried to organize as we walked in behind her.

She had a bottle of scotch that we sampled, then she gave the remainder to me. “I can’t take it back with me,” she said.

Maria moved into my room and described for me German’s body. It had the desired effect and we just took up where we had let off.

Our relationship became like a predictable game. I would either tire of Maria or begin to withhold sex and she would seek out another woman she could use to get me aroused. There was a lesbian from Milan in Lima who fell head-over-heels for Maria and resented the fact I couldn’t feel anything.

Maria would coerce her to perform sex acts on me and, although I was disgusted by it, I was unable to resist. Milan would weep while kissing me and then whimper back into Maria’s arms.

In Ayacucho she met an American woman. I had received mail from Canada including letters from a former girlfriend from Switzerland who was going through a personal crisis. I was trying to respond to the letters while Maria snuggled under heavy blankets with the American woman, who kept begging her to stop her kisses but, like me, seemed unable to prevent the inevitable.

While back in Lima on our way into the Amazon I met an American who had bought a bag of cocaine for a friend back in the States. He initially intended to smuggle it back but by the time he met me he just wanted to get rid of it.

He asked if I would take it because he was too paranoid to flush it or throw it out. I didn’t trust him and he didn’t trust me but I felt I had little to lose so I met him in a dark square, he gave me the bag and we both ran back to our rooms, looking over our shoulders both ways.

In the hotel Maria had met a woman from rural Quebec. She was delighted to sample the cocaine and taught Maria to use it on her clitoris to prolong sex. She was the first woman with whom Gloria performed cunnilingus.

By now I felt like my life had spiralled completely out of control. I was unhappy and suffering from inflamed kidneys caused by infections I had acquired after taking antibiotics for the typhoid. I was getting weaker physically and was numb emotionally and had no resistance to Maria’s manipulations.

We had to go over the Andes to get to the jungle. I got altitude sickness on the way out and it refused to clear up.

We finally secured passage on a tug boat that was guiding a barge of beer to Iquitos.

We were given space on the upper deck with instructions not to mingle with the “Indians” down below. The captains brought us cases of beer (“I’ll just tell them they fell overboard.”) and we mingled with the other gringos. There was a couple from Argentina, she was in her late 20s, he in his late teens. There was a woman from France, two male doctors from the Netherlands and another Canadian man.

I liked having so many people around with little chance for privacy. The Argentine couple would sneak off onto the barge where they could make love among the beer crates while I would watch the jungle and tell anyone who would listen stories about the Darien. Maria tried to seduce the French woman but I ignored them both.

One day I decided to have a bath on the lower deck by dipping a bucket into the river. The indigenous people thought I was hilarious. Maria came next and by then the interest was starting to grow. French came next – she and Maria were stripped to their underwear while I poured water over them.

Then the Argentine woman came. She was tall, athletic looking and had been bronzed by the sun. I had to step close to her to reach to pour the water over her head. I saw goose bumps rise along her neck and her nipples protruded through her bra. I couldn’t hide my excitement and it was obvious to her and everyone who had gathered to watch.

She smiled, which didn’t help my predicament.

Maria fumed.

That evening Maria sidled up to the French woman to recapture my interest. The Argentine woman mumbled homophobic slurs under her breath. The young Argentine man told me that his girlfriend has been fantasizing about me when they made love. I found it hard to believe.

We were passing around a bottle of beer when I brushed against Argentine’s back. She shuddered and her skin again broke out in goose bumps.

Maria left the deck and one of the doctors followed her. He came back and told me I had better see to her because she was talking about jumping in the river.

It was a tough trip from there to Iquitos. Once in the city the doctor secured some Valium and suggested to Maria she may need to take it to calm down.

We were trying to find another boat to go down the river. I talked a local fisherman into taking us on a tour of the river, but Maria and I paid him half the cost of what the tour companies charged. He took us to his local indigenous village and showed us monkeys, snakes, piranha, and a safe place to swim.

Maria was still angry about the Argentine woman and crying. She went into the bathroom and told me she took all of the Valium. I got the doctor and he told me he had found the pills on the floor so I shouldn’t worry.

We made our way to Leticia on the Colombian border and from there flew to Bogotá. I took Maria back to her parents’ house. Her mother gave me a cold look when I showed up. She knew what I was doing.

When we were in Peru I had made arrangements with a British man who said he wanted me to guide him and his 1950s-era Land Rover back through the Darien to Panama. We were to meet in Medellin. I had very little confidence he would show, and he didn’t.

I bought a plane ticket to Belize but by now I was out of travel money and unable to get more sent to me. I began the long hitchhike home.

It never occurred to me that Maria might actually be in love with me. It seemed our relationship was more of a contest than a loving union. It wasn’t until years later when I was married and had two beautiful girls that I received a letter, forwarded by my mother, from Maria. In it she declared she still loved me and would do anything for me. She said her mother had been withholding all the letters I wrote to her and she begged me not to give up.

Perhaps it’s my Catholic upbringing but I did many things for which I feel shame. Maria is perhaps the worst.