Advance Praise
“What’s in Uruguay?” by Kent Nelson opens as a straightforward account of an aging expatriate writer living in Maldonado, Uruguay, but gradually deepens into something more resonant—a meditation on longing, obsession, and the subtleties of cultural distance. Through vivid detail and quietly arresting scenes, the piece reveals the traveler’s—and the artist’s—essential solitude, as well as the uneasy ways in which art and life continually press in on each other. Nelson’s blend of emotional honesty and finely tuned storytelling makes the piece both provocative and compelling.”
—John Tait, judge, and winner of the Gival Press Short Story Award-2024
What’s in Uruguay?
by Kent Nelson
Across the street from my second-floor bedroom window is an orange house with a terrace on which a circular table is shaded by a tattered blue-and-white awning, the colors of Uruguay. The sun is mid-morning. A woman appears on the terrace in shorts and a halter top—pudgy, hair-disheveled, maybe fifty. She neatens the six white chairs and clears away wine bottles, glasses, napkins, and a few plates from last night’s gathering, which lasted past midnight—talking and laughter, cars starting and driving away. The orange house is on the corner, and my view is straight down the Calle Rubioso.
Sunday morning is tranquil. Cars and mopeds, bicycles, and dented trucks are parked in the yards and along the curbs. A few dogs bark in the distance, but nothing like the war of sound last night, when, in addition to the parties, a dozen dogs were yapping and howling. The horizon is low buildings, palm, acacia, and coral trees with a gray-white sky behind. It doesn’t matter if they’re high clouds or mist from the ocean. The rooftops tell a history of storms. Some are broken tile, others tar paper and tin. Most are covered in places by blue or yellow tarps held down by cinder blocks. On the other corner is a neighborhood dumpster that, in my six days here, has been emptied three times.
I came to Maldonado because I wanted to escape the winter in Billings, Montana. A year ago, my daughter had come to Buenos Aires to shoot a documentary about the junta that, in 1978, chose five hundred pregnant women associated with or married to opposition activists, murdered the boyfriends and husbands, and, when the babies were born, distributed them to junta sympathizers. The mothers were then dropped from airplanes into the ocean.
During a lull in filming, my daughter ferried across the Rio de la Plata to Colonia, Uruguay, a charming city built in 1680 by the Portuguese. “If you want to be warm,” she said, “why not go there?”
“Uruguay?” I said. “What’s in Uruguay?”
“When it’s winter here, it’s summer there. What else do you want?”
I thought of Hobart, Tasmania and Cuzco, Peru. I’d been to Costa Rica, Ecuador twice, and Mexico, so I looked up Uruguay. Montevideo wasn’t much and Punte del Este was expensive, but Colonia, on the peninsula, had cobblestone streets and good restaurants.
I write fiction, but I dabble in truth. Do I have a daughter? Yes. Did the junta murder all those men and women? Yes, some of their bodies washed ashore, and DNA matches determined who their children were. Maldonado is four kilometers inland from Punte del Este. There’s an orange house on the corner of the Calle Rubioso. My name is Keith Pomeranz.
Maldonado isn’t Colonia, but since I was going to be in Uruguay for three months, I wanted to explore different towns and find birds we don’t have in Montana. Hence, this Air BnB. I have a bed, a desk, and a fan for twenty dollars a night. Carmine Ortega owns the house and also runs a mini-mart in back where she sells vegetables, canned goods, frozen food, and beer and wine. I’ve shown her my novel, A Long Way to Nowhere, so she knows I’m a writer. Breakfast comes with the room—instant coffee and crackers. I have no car and no restaurants are close by, so Carmine offers lunch and dinner for 1500 pesos, which is around four dollars. She cooks for her twenty-year-old son, Rodolfo, anyway, so I’m not a huge added burden. Every few days, I buy a six-pack of Pilsener from her and a magnum of vino tinto. Today is December 15th, and it’s 29 degrees Celsius. Billings this morning was minus three degrees F, wind chill of minus twelve.
It’s hard to claim I’m poor when I’ve been to Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Europe, but I don’t waste money in restaurants, have no use for fancy clothes, and drive a 1986 Toyota Tercel. Writing promises so little money that, unless I luck into selling a big novel, I’m doomed to loving what I do. I’ve published stories, and my two novels had good reviews but modest sales, which, in the publishing world, is the kiss of death.
Because of my reviews, I’ve had semester gigs in Texas, Alabama, and Colorado. I didn’t want tenure, because, I mean, what great writer ever taught? Joyce, Hemingway, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky? Writers endure desperation, alcohol, and depression, and still they write. So I’ve done shifts at 7-Eleven, worked on an alfalfa ranch outside of Billings, and tended bar.
Mopeds buzz up the Calle Rubioso and pass along the Avenida de Caracara—people off to work. I’m at my laptop on the desk in front of the window. I’ve started a novel called The World of House, which parallels the remodeling of my Victorian moneypit in Billings. When my parents died, I traded my half of their leather goods store to my brother for his half of their house, which I was going to flip. The house had so many hidden problems, however, that I wasted two years on it and missed the uptick in the market. In the novel, my character thinks, as I did—fix up the house, sell it, and get free. I’m not the protagonist, though; Aves is. She’s half-Anglo, half-Hispanic, and is so named because, when she was born in Las Cruces, mockingbirds were singing out the open window. She does construction in Colorado, the last rung on a ladder of men. Her boyfriend, Adak, has disappeared a couple of months earlier in an avalanche in the high country, but his body hasn’t been found yet.
Her Anglo father was smart—no denial of paternity—and, growing up, his parents provided Aves with summer camps, music lessons, and an allowance. Her mother, Nazarena, has had two more kids with anonymous Hispanic fathers, so Aves’s step-siblings’ life-arcs are different from hers. I have to be careful not to play into stereotypes, but facts are facts, even if I invent them.
When Aves was twelve, Nazarena moved in with her sister Sorana, who had a bungalow in Corrales. north of Albuquerque. Aves had six years on Dahlia and nine on Ochoa. She sympathizes with them and is torn between helping them and wanting to escape from her chaotic home life. Nazarena’s often in absentia, and Sorana is usually at home drinking beer.
That’s how far I’ve got in the novel.
My evenings’ entertainment is beer and wine and watching YouTube. I like movie clips of Casablanca, Thelma and Louise, On the Waterfront, A Man and a Woman and music—Dylan and Leonard Cohen, Amira Willighagen, Gram Parsons, Emmy Lou, James Taylor, Simon and Garfunkle, Jon Bon Jovi, and Bryan Adams. Sometimes, I watch sports highlights, like Lionel Messi’s phenomenal goals, Larry Bird’s clutch rainbows, or the Great One’s deft passes. I’m killing time to get to the morning to work.
At night, the window has to be open, even with the fan whirring. Ear plugs minimize the dogs and cars, but I squirm under the single sheet and conjure what problems Aves will encounter next. She’s better in school than her friends. I’ve written a description of Sorana’s house, snippets of dialogue, and so on, but I don’t want to go too soon to backstory. The opening is of Aves driving her pickup full of lumber, sheet rock, tools, and groceries to her fixer-upper in a cul-de-sac in Chapman, Colorado. I’m god, so what happens is what I make happen. She’s twenty-eight, because that’s what I say she is. It’s dusklight when she arrives home, and she sees a light go off in her house—an intruder?
How can I sleep? This is the trap I fall into, and where my own life goes off the rails. In a story, I make it rain or snow, create a drought or a hurricane, but in Maldonado, tossing in bed, I control nothing. Behind my earplugs, the neighborhood dogs bark, cars drive in and back, people carry on. I have to create for Aves circumstances that have tension. Carpentry presents challenges, she struggles with her mother and siblings, and what about the missing boyfriend?
In the morning, I’m back where I was, in Maldonado and figuring out what’s next in my novel. I get my crackers, coffee packet, and a thermos of hot water and sit at my desk. In Billings, in my work shed, if someone knocked on my door, I jumped, because I wasn’t there. I was in South Dakota working on an alfalfa ranch, or in Arizona with a woman birder searching for a trogon, or in Hawaii, where I’ve never been, climbing Mauna Kea. I experience what my characters are doing as I tap them into reality. I start with someone in a place—man or woman, it doesn’t matter. In my Atlantic story, a kid named Ultimo crosses the Mexican border and walks twenty-six miles to Hatch, New Mexico. In “Castroville,” a single-mother with three kids takes workers to the artichoke farms, and in “The Plains Wanderer,” a woman searches for a bird that may or may not exist. As I learn about the characters and what they’re doing, I retype and add, always on a Selectric II, so I can’t move text around or delete.
Here in Maldonado, though, I’m victim to my laptop.
My stark room has nothing on the walls, and the neighborhood lacks amenities. The Avenida de los Gauchos has shut-down stores and vacant lots with rubble, but a panacería in the next block is solace in this forgotten backwater.
And though I’m obsessed with the novel, I live in the world beyond the screen. A novel needs tension, and, as I get deeper into Aves’s life, I wonder about my own—can I get through three weeks here without a personal drama?
By noon, all I’ve done is drink coffee and hit a few keys on the laptop, but I’m exhausted. Downstairs, stew’s on the table.
Rodolfo’s a gangly stringbean with a good smile. We chitchat through Google translator about the apartment he wants to build for himself at the back of the house. First, though, he has to remove the cement pads and wooden walls of the animal stalls that were there before. He asks me what I’m doing in Maldonado, and I say, “Nothing.”
After lunch, I stroll the grid of streets around Carmine’s house with my binoculars looped around my neck. Monk Parakeets and doves and flyover gulls are common, so I pay more attention to how people live here. It’s a work day, but bikes and cars are crammed into yards and along the curbs, and children old enough to be in school run crazy. What do I know? People maneuver through their lives as best they can.
I pass a woman unloading groceries from a shopping cart and help carry them into her house. An old guy is pruning a coral tree, so I lug the branches to the dumpster. A young man’s shoring up his porch, so I ask, “¿Puedo ayudarte?” and together we get two posts upright.
Three blocks up is Seferino de la Torre, but I’m disoriented because, inland, an ocean gives no guidance to direction like mountains do in Montana. I pass a cement house painted lilac, a yellow one with a red bougainvillea on the front wall, a beige bungalow with a Tacoma pickup in the driveway, hood open, and parts strewn nearby on the ground.
I turn right onto Juan de Spikerman, and, from halfway down the block, comes the call of a kiskadee. I pick up my step and trace the bird to a willow tree at the side of a house where a woman is kneeling in her garden. The bird is a handsome tyrant flycatcher, brown and bright yellow, with a black-and-white mask. Its call is its name.
My binoculars bring the bird in close, and when I’ve had enough, I scan down through the tree to the woman digging in the earth. She’s maybe thirty, black hair loose over one shoulder. She has on a tank top and shorts, and the red bandanna around her forehead is soaked with sweat. What seeds she’s planting is a mystery—the binoculars aren’t that good—but I make them beans and carrots.
What is beauty? We’re conditioned by movies and magazines, art critics, tastes of friends, and popular fashion. Cultural norms determine what the human form should look like. In some societies, fat is fashionable. In Western countries, male body type is supposed to be tall and muscular—I fail—and the female form has good breasts, a narrow waist, and a round butt. Why?
It’s hard to tell where, from her kneeling posture, this woman fits into my definition of perfection. I like her angle to the ground and her intensity in her digging. The willow tree is a soft green background. To draw her attention, I give a loud whistle, not at her, but down the street, pretending I’m signaling to someone else. She glances at me, whisks hair from her eyes, then looks back to the earth.
Her house is a bungalow with a maroon Renault at the curb. On a side terrace are two kids’ bikes and a plastic castle with a turret. The house is well-kept, except for a blue tarp draped over one side of the roof. So the woman’s married with children. She’s still beautiful.
For the rest of my walk, I re-imagine Aves in the physical form of the woman I saw digging in her garden. I knew already Aves didn’t resemble either of my ex-wives or any former girlfriends, but now she fits on the continuum of physical beauty. This creates a writing problem. If she’s model-beautiful, she wouldn’t be doing construction. Conversely, if she’s plug-ugly, she wouldn’t have to fend off men. I want her to be ordinary and special and imbue her with a moral voice, so I give Aves a limp. She was thrown from a horse in Corrales when she was eight.
At four o'clock, I have a couple of glasses of wine and listen, for the fifteenth time, to Amira sing “O Mio Babbino Caro” with Andre Rieu and the Vienna Orchestra. I follow a few of Daniel Negreanu’s poker hands, and watch Adam Webb set a national high-school mile record of 3:53.43. The Boss sings “The River.”
Dinner with Carmine and Rodolfo is chicken, rice, and broccoli. I ask Rodolfo, “¿Cómo estuvo su día?” and understand not a word of what he tells me. Afterward, I wash the dishes, which Carmine thinks is an exceptional gift.
At eight, I sit outside on the cement deck above the street with a final glass of vino. The dogs howl. Cars zoom beneath me, and traffic on the Avenida Artigas is ablaze. A bass guitar thrums in the darkening, humid air. A faint glow from Punte del Este lights up what I think of as south.
In college I majored in political science because I had vague aspirations to be governor of Montana, so I also applied to law schools. Senior year, I took a fiction-writing class. Who’d think I’d win a story prize? This honor gave me pause and put flames in my fingers. But law school—I muddled through torts and contracts and read novels. To write, I needed to know what had been written before.
After law school, I married Aoki, who’d gone to Wellesley. She liked the privileges money provided, and I’d had an offer from a good firm in Missoula, but before we settled down, she agreed to a year in Europe so I could get writing out of my system. “What do you have to write about?” she asked.
In Switzerland, we found a mid-level hotel where, for room and board, I washed the dishes. At seven every morning, on a Triumph typewriter, I tried to figure out how to write a story. I don’t like “tried to.” Did I, or didn’t I?
Aoki slept late and chafed under my regimen. She could spend only so many hours reading, doing yoga, and looking at the lake and mountains. Her instinct for action was stifled, and sex, for her, was insufficient recompense. Less was more, and more was less.
Once I started writing, I couldn’t stop, and I don’t blame Aoki for escaping a life she hadn’t foreseen and didn’t want. But, re: the law, if you could see thirty years ahead into the future, why go there?
So I was left alone in Gieselberg. I wrote, I revised, I ate schnitzel, I sent stories to magazines. I revised again; I wrote new stories. When the hotel owner died, I retreated to Billings and stayed on my aunt’s alfalfa farm, where I fixed fences, plowed ground, irrigated, and ran a windrower. There, birds entered my life—rails in the marsh, eagles overhead, warblers in the low bushes, bluebirds hovering over the fields. I learned the songs of wrens, Dickcissels, and sparrows. That fall, I sold two short stories.
That next winter, my father paid me twelve dollars an hour to work in his leather-goods store, and I taught a night class at the community college. I drank too much, had a girlfriend, and started a novel about an ornithology student writing a thesis about the Sharp-tailed Grouse.
At that time, I was seeing Marcie Treadwell. She had an imperfect command of English, but a natural intelligence. She’d recently retired from barrel racing because she’d suffered a broken leg and was concerned about preserving the habitat of—duh—the Sharp-tailed Grouse.
Haley was born the next spring. Marcie’s parents were all for her not marrying an over-educated, already-failed writer, and they were okay with her being a single mom. I wrote the grouse novel, spent the summer on my aunt’s ranch, and handed over to Marcie what money I could. I never sent out the grouse novel, but that winter I went to Yaddo and started a book—Desperate Enterprises—about a cowboy who single-handedly builds a cattle bridge across the Big Horn River. I sold shares in the novel to friends who thought they were throwing their money away, but Viking bought the book for $50,000, so my investors got back their stake, plus interest. I set aside most of that money for Haley’s education.
Desperate Enterprises got good reviews and won the Montana Book Prize, but, because Viking skimped on publicity, it didn’t sell that well. Still, I was hired for a semester at UT Austin, where, in class, I babbled about structure, plot, and character. But what teacher can tell another writer what material is worthwhile or how to order words? “Not I,” said the blind man, who picked up his hammer and saw.
I published more stories, won another prize or two, and taught more semesters, one at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Enter Diane, a lanky redhead with a mind that crushed the opposition. Under the covers, Diane and I had phlogiston, but in daily life less so. We got married and had a son, Kevin. She gigged as a commentator on NPR, though her pieces were a thinly veiled version of yours truly cast in an unflattering light—how breakfast got managed when the husband couldn’t scramble an egg, how the husband flossed at night with trout leader, how the father taught a second-grader how much he didn’t know. These were collected into a book that became a best-seller. We got a speedy divorce.
Fast backward: the house flip didn’t go as hoped. I wasted two years and sold it for a loss. With the welcome cash, though, I bought forty acres on the Absaroke River, where I built a cabin and forged a good life in summer and fall, especially when the aspens turned. But it was muddy in spring and damn cold in winter.
The world over, everyone wakes to a new day. I like that. I’m stunned after my dreams to find myself where I went to sleep, which, now, is my room in Maldonado. A few minutes before, I was on a bicycle chasing a giraffe down the Avenue of the Americas in New York, and after that I woke in the arms of the woman I saw yesterday in her garden. In fiction, dreams alert the reader to look for Deep Hidden Meaning and breaks the bubble of realism. A created character can only have made-up dreams, a double-whammy. And what are dreams, anyway, except random electrical synapses, sublimated desires, pathways to the subconscious, and ways to relieve stress?
My day unfolds as yesterday—I get hot water for coffee and eat the crackers Carmine sets out. I get to G on the NYT Bee but postpone the crossword because Aves calls me. She thinks an intruder’s in her dark house, so she takes a pistol from her glove box, and goes inside with a sack of groceries in one arm. No one’s there, but she’s unsettled. Still, she carries in the lumber, drywall, and the rest of her groceries. Later, lying in bed, she considers who, among her friends, can ease her fears—Gail, the clerk at the hardware store; Dahlia, her step-sister; Lucinda, the woman who works on a competing construction crew; or Mavis, a newcomer whom she helped unload a U-Haul. Her mother isn’t an option. I have no idea who she’d turn to, because I don’t know these people.
Lunch is leftover stew with potatoes, carrots, and puerco. Rodolfo’s busy, so Carmine gibbers at me until a customer at her store at the back of the house rescues me. I finish my stew and bread and wash the dishes. Rodolfo, I discover, is filling a wheelbarrow with chunks of cement, boards, and dirt, so I pitch in. He wheels the barrow, and I carry two buckets. We angle across the street to the dumpster, where Rodolfo has set up a plank for the wheelbarrow. I step up on a cinder block and rattle in the debris in my buckets.
Two hours later, in the shower, I wash my underwear, tee shirts, and the pair of shorts I’ve worn for eight days. In hot weather, it’s easy to get by with less. I’m clean and shaved, and I strew my wet clothes across the deck. I want to siesta for an hour, but it’s too hot to sleep.
In an hour, my clothes are dry, so it’s time to explore.
The neighborhood between the Avenida Artigas and the Avenida de los Gauchos is a hive of human survival, a honeycomb of beaten-up shacks, bungalows, and shanties. In my heart, I’m a working person, so I sympathize with the physical day-to-day laborer, the clerk, the drudge, and the writer of stories. I retrace my path from yesterday. Insanity is repeating the same behavior and hoping for a different result, but anticipation sustains me. I wave to the man whose porch post I helped put in; a moped is wrecked against a telephone post—that’s new; dogs have spread trash in a yard. Passing a hedge of yellow flowers, the scent of jasmine comes to me.
I turn down Juan de Spikerman but don’t hear the kiskadee. The woman isn’t in her garden, either, but a kid of five or six is running through a sprinkler, so I’m reminded I’m a foreigner who doesn’t speak much Spanish, so nothing’s going to happen here.
I wander on to the end of the street, turn right, and right again. I’m always right except in politics. I weave down the next street where the sun slants across, making shadows of trees and the houses. People barbecue meat on their sidewalk grills and drink beer on their porches. Ahead is the same pickup with its hood up, but, today, legs protrude from beneath the back bumper. A repair of the exhaust system is underway.
As I come nearer, an old man appears on the stoop and calls out, “¿Jaime?”
A voice answers from under the truck, “Estoy aquí.”
“La cena está lista.”
Jaime wriggles out a few feet and, with his hands on the bumper, pulls his body forward. A thin manboy emerges. His hands are grimy; his hair is long and messy; his T-shirt is oily. I have no reason to stop, except the boy is beautiful.
“Mucho trabajo,” I say.
“Si muchos problemas,” he says, “but I must eat dinner now.”
The old man looks at me. “¿Quién eres tú?” he asks.
“Ninguno,” I say. “Soy americano.”
“Come and eat with us,” he says in English.
Jaime wipes his hands on a rag. “Bueno,” he says, “vamos.”
Saying yes is better than saying no, so I shrug an agreement and follow the abuelo through the house. He calls himself Téo. “You speak English?” I ask.
“Un poco. I lived in Dallas for a year.”
We come out onto a cement slab and a dirt yard littered with tires, bikes, and blown-in papers. Eight or so people are there. Jaime’s mother and father are grilling meat—they’re the right age, and the mother’s as pretty as Jaime. I introduce myself, and, in my limited vocabulary, explain I’m a writer staying at Señora Ortega’s and enjoy los pájaros. I hold up my binoculars. They laugh, and their Spanish flies at me like a horde of bees, but I get the drift—I’m welcome.
Jaime appears in the doorway. He’s cleaned himself up and changed clothes, but he still has smudges of grease on his cheeks, and his hair is unwashed. In disarray, he’s even more beautiful. The family’s intent on beef and pork, green peppers, potatoes, and cauliflower, so I can watch Jaime at ease with his relatives. Of a sudden I get it—he’s Aves’s boyfriend Adak missing in the avalanche. Adak’s older, but he once was someone like Jaime. He’s a man Aves can love.
At eight o’clock, I’m in my room. I sit at my keyboard and tune out the dogs and cars. Aves and three of Adak’s friends meet at a parking turnout on the pass below where the avalanche ran. CDOT hasn’t shot down this particular slide because the highway wasn’t threatened, but now, in May, the snow’s receded. The group can’t climb the steep chute because it’s littered with tree branches, so they drive up a nearby gravel road that gets them altitude. When the road’s blocked by snowdrifts, they hike cross-country, and, at ten thousand feet, intersect with the upper portion of the avalanche. They scan the debris on the snow, but no one picks out colors that might be a parka, a hat, or a broken ski. They search for a couple of hours across the avalanche but find no trace of Adak.
I make a note to myself to create a backstory for Adak. He’s a world-class mountaineer and has climbed Denali, Chimborazo, and the Piz Gloria. He’s run rivers, spelunked, and skydived. When he went missing, he was planning to kayak the Kuskoquim River in Alaska from its headwaters in the Brooks Range to the delta below Bethel. That he now appears in my mind as Jaime makes him more vivid.
I stop at the beginning of a new section: Dave, Aves’s boss, has assigned her to put down underlayment on the roofs of several townhouses. Something has to happen, but bed awaits. I lie on the sheets in my underwear. It’s too hot for personal sex, though I haven’t forgotten the woman digging in her garden, or Jaime, the beautiful boy.
A few years ago, I was teaching a semester in Miami and was grading papers on a bench in International Gardens Park when a guy about my age sat down next to me—slender, in shorts and a polo shirt. No words were exchanged. I ignored him but was conscious of his being there. Ten minutes went by, and the man got up and left. Afterward, it struck me the man had been hitting on me. I was anonymous and could have experimented. I didn’t and wouldn’t have, but it occurred to me. I hark back to this now, because, lying in bed, a woman whose name I don’t know and the boy Jaime are simultaneously in my head. I mumble a few words to myself about being crazy and close my eyes.
In the morning, I’m still here. So is Aves. I have my coffee and nibble a cracker. Aves is on a townhouse roof with Lopez and Esquebel. The guys nail-gun plywood, while Aves, coming behind, lays down tar paper and ice-and-snow shield. Before noon, Boss Dave climbs the ladder and complains the Mexicans aren’t working fast enough. Lopez and Esquebel don’t understand much English, so Aves defends them—they’ve been working all morning without a break. Dave tells Aves to shut her trap, which prompts her to give him the finger and quit. She storms down the ladder and pushes it over, so Dave is trapped on the roof with the Mexicans. Good, it’s satisfying to make the asshole boss get what he deserves. But now, without a job, Aves is up shit-creek without a paddle.
I waste a few minutes on a Ken-Ken, write my daughter an email, and do the Spelling Bee. The panacería opens at seven, so I tiptoe downstairs and out the front door and feel in my pocket for change. The bakery advertises through its open doors. Inside, the glass cases show off churros, cinnamon rolls, and loaves of bread, along with specialty items made with cheese or fruit. I already know I want a cream-filled doughnut—bolas de fraile with dulce de leche in the middle.
A couple ahead of me in the line yammers about the government with Eladio behind the counter. He spouts his own opinion, but in the end Eladio sells them the bread they want. When it’s my turn, I say, “Quiero tres de esos,” and point at the doughnuts.
“Dos cientos y cuatro,” Eladio says.
I understand the numbers and fumble through the coins in my hand.
“Two hundred and four,” says the woman behind me.
“Lo sé.” I count out the money and hand it over.
I accept the doughnuts, turn around, and see the woman of consequential beauty—black hair, glistening eyes, and smooth skin. “I saw you in your garden,” I tell her.
“You whistled at me.”
“Not at you, no, but. . .”
“¿Próxima?” Eladio says from behind the counter.
The woman steps past me with her list.
I have no reason to wait, but also every reason. Outside, my stupid heart tells me to sit on the curb, where the bakery smells waft over me. It’s a little before eight. I breathe in the whole neighborhood and eat a cream-filled doughnut, while at the same time transpose my sitting on the curb to a scene in the novel—Aves, say, in Chapman, waiting for a friend to come out of the bakery. She has hardship ahead, because she’s quit her job and her house isn’t ready to sell. Without a salary, how will she pay for the materials she needs?
The sun slides through the over-arching palm trees. A dove calls. The woman I’m waiting for comes out with four paper bags, one with two baguettes protruding, passes me without a word, and crosses the empty street, which is a mishmash of cobblestones and broken cement.
I stand up and brush sugar from my shorts. Back to work. But at the far curb, the woman stumbles and sprawls into the weeds between the street and the sidewalk. Her bags break open, and pastries and churros tumble out. The baguettes lodge against the fence at the edge of the orange house.
Anyone witnessing this would help. I am anyone, so I run across the street. The woman’s scraped her knees, but she’ okay, so we chase down the rolls that have rolled, along with a few apricot tarts, and churros. I fetch the baguettes. Only one of her carry-bags can hold anything, so I fold open the bottom of my shirt, and she puts what she can into the pouch. We balance the rest of the stuff against our bodies. She lives in the next block, as I know, so we walk.
“You must have a name,” I say.
“Everyone does,” she says. “Flora, for Florencía.”
“You speak perfect English.”
“Until a few weeks ago, I was living in Brooklyn, but circumstances got bad, so I came home. What are you doing in Maldonado?”
“Being warm.”
“You could be warm in Miami or Mexico City. You don’t work?”
“No, I write stories. I’m staying at Señora Ortega’s, right over there.”
“I’ve known Carmine for forever,” Flora says.
The maroon Renault is still parked in front, and Flora opens the iron gate. I expect one of her kids to help us, but instead a woman, slightly older than Flora, appears holding a cloth satchel. She relieves me of what’s in my shirt. “Pobre chico,” she says.
“Él no habla español,” Flora says.
“Un poquito,” I say.
“Esta es mi hermana, Elena,” Flora says. “Vivo con ella mientras busco trabajo. Did you understand that?”
“Elena’s your sister, and you’re living with her.”
“Until I find a job,” Flora says.
Elena leads us through the house to the kitchen, where we set down the rest of the goods. In the novel version of this scene, I’d be invited for coffee and to partake of a sweet tart, but instead we share an awkward pause. My mission’s been accomplished. “Encantado,” I say, but I can’t come up with the words “to meet you.”
“. . . de conocerte,” Flora says. “Same here.”
Flora accompanies me to the door, where she kicks aside a beachball. “So the kids are your sister’s?” I ask.
“Dos niños,” Flora says. “Her husband works on an oil rig in Paraguay. Gracias por tu ayuda.”
“De nada.”
That’s it. I walk out through the gate, and in minutes I’m back at my laptop. The water’s still hot in my thermos.
Aves’s money is invested in her house. It’s taken longer and has been more expensive to fix up than she hoped. Adak might have helped her out—he was her parachute—but he’s dead now, maybe. Or he’s disappeared. That’s her new idea: He was skiing in the high country, came upon an avalanche that had already run, and skied down through the trees to the highway, where he hitchhiked south. The falling snow covered his tracks. He had money, and, with cash from an ATM, he could have traveled wherever he wanted.
The problem with writing is you think of too many options. If Adak is dead, that’s one thing, but if he’s disappeared, that’s another. Anyway, now she’s a crew of one, drywalling. She can’t by herself hoist a four-by-eight sheet of drywall to the ceiling, so she cuts the sheet in half. This means more taping and sanding, but it’s doable. Her labor is anger therapy for the way Dave treated Lopez and Esquebel and for Adak’s not being there to help. I write Aves through one pass of taping and mudding, in the midst of which Lucinda calls her. She wants Aves to help with a moonlight kitchen remodel—replacing a slider with a bay window, putting in an island for counter space, and running a gas line for a stove. Is Aves interested? “Yes,” she says, “I need the money.”
I envision now Flora as Aves, which is confusing, because my realities are split. Flora is real, and Aves is imaginary. I’ve conjured up a lot of best friends over the years, but, in the main, my life has been ordinary—college and law school, a couple of children, two divorces, a few girlfriends, and a little travel. But my life in writing had been crazy. I kill, cheat, and try out all the deadly sins; I experience horrible pain without the actual pain, revelation, and occasional joy, but I still have to pay my taxes, buy groceries, and sleep at night.
Now that I think of it, I’m in Uruguay because, from my characters, I’ve learned to take risks.
Lunch is chicken soup, complemented by bread and cervesa. After that, I walk up to the tienda on Avenida de los Gauchos and replenish my wine supply. My logical return doesn’t go past Flora’s sister’s house, but that’s my detour. No one’s home, or at least the maroon Renault isn’t in front. In the absence of information, I create their visit to relatives, a mall outing, or an excursion to the beach. I continue to the end of the block where the street makes a non-geometrical arc onto Juan de Spikerman. Téo’s house is a bit past the middle of the block, where, on the opposite side of the street, a huge guarumo tree displays thousands of orange blossoms.
As before, the hood of Jaime’s truck is open, but many more tools are scattered on the ground, suggesting Jaime doesn’t know what he’s doing. His greasy tee shirt is thrown onto a hedge, but he isn’t there. He could be drinking lemonade in the house, on the phone with a parts store, or screwing a girlfriend in the garage, so I lean my head over the engine. Wires are disconnected from the alternator, which is absent. Ah! The battery terminals are corroded from the sea air, so with a pair of pliers I remove the cables.
A writer has to know everything, which I don’t, but I’ve learned what my characters require, like glass-blowing, piano composition, upholstery, tennis, and growing chiles. I know carpentry from messing up my parents’ house and auto repair from my father, who rebuilt Saabs and heavy machinery.
I’m reconnecting the cleaned-up battery cables when, down the street, a motorbike careens around the corner. From the hair flying around his head, I know it’s Jaime. He brakes before he reaches the guarumo tree and slides sideways to a stop in front of the truck.
He smiles. “Mi amigo,” he says. “¿Qué está pasando?”
I haven’t the vocabulary to explain in Spanish what I’m doing, so I gawk at his tangled hair, his sleek forehead, and his smart eyes. “Maybe your problem is the ignition switch,” I say in English.
He laughs, and so do I. He’s bought a rebuilt alternator. He puts it in while I hand him the tools. In a few minutes, he gets into the cab and turns the key. Nada. Not a click. “Tengo que vender este camión,” he says.
“You can’t sell it if it doesn’t run.”
He’s unsettled and takes a couple of beers from the cool-pack on his motorbike and hands me one. Our conversation is halting and not altogether clear to either of us, but I gather he’s selling the truck to get work in Argentina, where he’s seen pictures of mountains and lakes. “Uruguay,” he says, “no tiene las montañas.”
I drink my beer and look at Jaime. “This too shall pass,” I say.
Every man is a fool for sex. Caesar, Napoleon, John Kennedy, Tiger Woods, Donald Trump and thousands of others. Men are so obsessed with their immediate desires, the consequences of their behavior don’t matter. The joke is men think with their genitals, but I have other priorities, like getting myself to my next destination, which is Villa Serrana in the interior. I’ve researched online, and there’s no way to get there from here. I’d have to take four different buses, the last of which would let me out on a highway five kilometers from where I’m staying. A taxi is a last resort, say, from Minas, if I want to spend a couple hundred dollars.
To keep my mind occupied, I help Rodrigo schlep debris to the dumpster. In passing, I ask if he can find an ignition switch for a ’98 Toyota Tacoma. “¿Por qué? he asks, which is a reasonable question.
“You know Nike?” I say. “Just do it.”
Evenings, I find solace in Aves. Her mother visits, hits an elk with her new car and sleeps with a Republican neighbor. Meanwhile, Aves parlays the kitchen remodel into the idea of a women’s construction business, the All-Girls Gang. Lucinda’s willing; so is Gail, the hardware store clerk; Myrna’s father was a contractor in Iowa; a young Hispanic, Miranda, does tile work. The business is touch and stop, but over a month they build a deck, do three window replacements, and a garage apartment. Other possibilities crop up—a sound studio for a country-western singer and a straw-bale house—but the AGG doesn’t have signed contracts, so Aves keeps the girls busy working on her house. They shore up the foundation, paint the guest room, and rebuild the front porch.
Aves’s limp doesn’t hinder her movements as a carpenter, but, when she walks, she’s distinctive. Plus, over the years, her disability has given her inner strength.
The next couple of days flash by. I drink coffee, collect doughnuts from the panacería, and stay close to home. The All-Girls Gang gets a contract for the sound studio, and the deal for a straw-bale house is on the verge. A banker friend gives Aves a tide-over loan and tells her Adak has a safety-deposit box someone might have to get permission to open. I’m getting to another search for Adak’s body, when, Friday afternoon, I hear footsteps come up the stairs. “Señor Americano,” Carmine says, “alguien ha venido a verle.”
“Quién es?”
“You see.”
Who knows where I am except Flora? I brush my hair, change the shirt I’ve had on for three days, and amble down the stairs, where I see Flora’s sister, Elena. She shoots bullets of Spanish at me I can’t dodge quickly enough. They could be accusations, but I haven’t done anything wrong. “Más despacio,” I say. “I’m only a genius in English.”
“Lo siento,” Elena says. “Mi inglés es muy terrible. We have a festival manaña. Mi aniversario con my esposa, y Florencía, her birthday. She wishes you come a las seis horas.”
I bow twice. “I’ll be there,” I say. “Muchas gracias.”
Elena goes away, and I retreat to my laptop, but I sit for a few minutes while the future coalesces. I’m going to Villa Serrana and, after that to Colonia, so I thought I’d never see Flora again. Not so.
I work another hour, and I hear Rodolfo shout up from the street. I go out onto the deck. “Who what?” I say.
He has the ignition switch I wanted.
“Excelente,” I say. “¿Cuánto cuesto?”
“You help me. No cuesta nada.”
“If it’s nothing, then add a twenty-percent finder’s fee.”
Rodolfo smiles and waves.
Instead of dealing with the increasingly confusing scenarios with Aves—getting together Adak’s friends for another search, a glitch in the foundation for the sound studio, troubles with Myrna’s ex—I carry more buckets of debris to the dumpster.
At dinner Señora Ortega reduces my meal price to two dollars a day, because I’m working for Rodolfo, and I wash the dishes. I wish good deeds translated into writing success—not fame or money, but to be read. I don’t write for myself. I know what I have to say, even if I’m mystified how it gets from my brain to my fingers, but I want strangers to see the words and live through my characters. What is writing but interpreting one’s own life and giving the stories to others?
I struggle with desiring Flora and Jaime, which raises the constantly avoided question: What do I want? When my parents asked me that years ago, they meant it in a larger sense, like where did I want to live, how would I earn a living, and did I want a wife and children? I know what I thought I wanted—Aoki, Marcie, Diane—but I’ve learned since, what I want most is uncertainty.
That’s what I have. Is my novel any good? What will happen with Flora and Jaime? How will I get to Villa Serrana? True, I also desire peace and meaning and silence, though writing provides none of these. My stories are unsettling and never good enough and have no clear resolutions. What my characters seek is inchoate and perhaps forever unattainable. And writing is the antithesis of silence. It’s a constant noise in my head no one else can hear.
On that hot afternoon, I take the ignition switch to Jaime. He isn’t around, so I knock on Téo’s door and hold up the part. “I want to fix Jaime’s truck,” I tell him. “May I have permission?”
“Be my savior,” Téo says. “I want that truck out of my yard.”
Permission taken. The hood’s up, and I gaze into the dark jungle of loose wires and hoses. Grease coats most of the engine block. The ignition switch is behind the steering column, so it’s awkward to pull the dead one out and install the new one, but I do. I reattach wires and hoses. Without a key, though, I can’t test what I’ve done.
I wait a few minutes and marvel at the orange blossoms on the guarumo tree. Jaime doesn’t come back, so I leave a note: Pruebalo ahora, which I think means “try it now.”
Dinner at Señora Ortega’s is chicken, potatoes, and kale. Years ago, a kale farmer conspired with a TV chef to convince people that, not only was kale edible, it was restorative. Chewing slimy stuff was good for you. I’m paying two dollars a meal. I eat what I’m given.
By seven-thirty, I’ve retired to my room. I drink wine and listen to Bryan Adams sing “Straight from the Heart” to thousands of fans in Wembley Stadium. I wonder, as a writer, what would it be like to be a rock star? It takes weeks to write a story, weeks more to revise, and even if the story’s published in a magazine, the result is nothing like the thousands of Bryan Adams’s cheering fans who know every word and sing along. Once in a while, I might open a note from a reader, but, otherwise, I get silence.
Sleep doesn’t come right away. It’s cooled down, and the dogs aren’t barking so much, nor is there a party at the orange house. I work myself into worry—seven on a ten scale—about how I’m going to get to Villa Serrana. I can’t stay on with Carmine because my room is rented, and if I don’t go to my next reservation—I’ve paid already—what else would I do? My best idea is to eliminate multiple buses and hire Rodolfo to drive me to my destination. The guy who owns the place—a cabina with air-conditioning in the bedroom—hasn’t offered me any suggestions, and his directions are murky. When I spoke with him, he said “You need GPS.”
What I come to, finally, is the notion that the days will pass, and the problem will get resolved one way or another. That lets me sleep.
The next morning, the panacería has no doughnuts. To explain, Eladio delivers a barrage of words I have no clue about, to which I answer, “Sí, comprendo.”
I choose two apricot tarts and carry them in a circuitous path back to my real imaginary life on the second floor at Carmine’s. I summarize the novel so far. Aves is smart and intense. She’s trying to get beyond being born out of wedlock and into a dysfunctional bi-racial family. She was raped at nineteen—this is new—but Adak has calmed her through this difficult experience. That he’s dead—or has he vanished?—is part of her present. Meanwhile, with the All-Girls Gang, Aves is positioning herself for the future, but can the women be competitive? The AGG is part therapy, part determination to beat the odds, and part political activism. The other contractors in Chapman—all men—don’t like Aves horning in on their territory.
I work though the morning, wishing for the advance I’ll never see, the non-existent great reviews, and ghost appearances on talk shows. Not really. I’m not that needy.
In the afternoon, I help Rodolfo in his less-endless task of cleaning up his yard, and then I take another walk into the twilight zone. Elena’s bungalow and Jaime’s grandfather’s house are quiet. Drama needs pause.
Dinner is pizza heated in Señora Ortega’s microwave, and, afterward, I work on the laptop with wine in my blood. The group has assembled to search for Adak, but I can’t decide what the results will be.
In the morning, after coffee, I sneak out the front door and find Jaime waiting for me at the panacería. He’s exactly who he is—the beautiful boy—but no longer grease-stained or dressed in dirty clothes. He has on shorts and a blue tee shirt, and his hair’s a few inches shorter. “Me voy a Argentina,” he says. “Querría despedirme.”
“You sold the truck?”
“No, I’m driving it where I’m going.” Jaime holds out a wad of pesos. “I pay you.”
“The ignition switch—no, that was uno regalo, a gift.”
“Estoy agradecido,” he says finally. “Gracias.” Jaime pauses longer than he needs to. “Comprendo,” he says.
He’s grateful, but I’m not sure what he understands, whether it’s why I don’t want any money or that I’m attracted to him. Either conclusion leads to the same result: he’s going away.
He puts his arms around me and kisses my cheek.
When Jaime’s gone, I continue into the panacería. Eladio smiles at me. “You are one of us, señor,” he says. “People around you see what you do not.”
“Like what?”
“You are in love with Flora Almagro.”
“People don’t know that.”
“Are you are invited to the party in the coming night?”
“Because I helped Flora carry her bread home.”
Eladio laughs. “Today I created cream-filled doughnuts for you. How many are good for writing stories?”
“For that,” I say, “you can’t make enough.”
At lunch, over fried ham and tortilla chips, I ask Rodolfo whether, for a price, he’ll take me to Villa Serrana. He consults a map on his phone. “Departamento de Lavallejo,” he says. “Dos horas, más o menos, pero no es possible.” He looks at his translator and pronounces the English words. “Last year I wrecked my mother’s car, and she won’t let me drive.”
“¿Verdad?”
“Mala suerte,” he says.
During my siesta, Jaime’s kiss burns on my cheek, but he’s on his way to Argentina. Anyway, my love was from a distance. I’m not von Ashenbach. I muse about the uncertainties Flora faces, but someday she’ll find work, get her own apartment, and become more who she already is. My thoughts are like dreams, so extrapolations are inconsequential. I’m in a misty garden searching for an exit from the circumstances I’ve created, but the trees high above obscure the gray air, and a thick tangle of brush is all around. Splits in the pathway give no clues. I’m not frightened, but I’m not calm. I’m not lost, but I’m not found, either.
I wake into reality, where I was when I went to sleep. In two days, I will be in Villa Serrana.
At Elena’s the next evening, a dozen people are gathered in the side yard drinking beer under the willow tree. Festival lights are strung between the trees and crisscross the paling sky. I’ve brought two bottles of wine and leave them on the table that serves as the bar. I’m a marginal foreigner, here as an afterthought. Naturally, however, I search for Flora but don’t see her, so I take a Pilsener from the cooler and stroll to the garden.
More people arrive. I often confuse pleasure with work, thinking I control events, but real time is fluid and nothing is as I want it to be. The kiskadee sings high up in the willow tree—true!—so I walk over and look up.
Then Flora speaks to me. “You made it,” she says. “It’s still a few minutes till we eat.”
“I’m hungry to be hungry. Thank you for the invitation.”
“I ran into Rodolfo. He says you’re going to Villa Serrana. Buddhists live there. Are you Buddhist?”
“Not that I know of. I asked to pay Rodolfo to take me, but he can’t.”
“To go in-country, it’s easiest to take a bus to Montevideo and start over.”
“That’d be six hours. With a car, it’s only two.” I pause. “How goes the job hunting?”
“I’ve found several negatives, but I’m holding out for a positive.”
“It’s easier to define what isn’t than what is.”
“So you are a Buddhist.”
Elena calls for Flora to serve the food, and the crowd descends on the grill.
Uruguay leads the world in per-capita consumption of beef, and I take three slices redder than the others. The potatoes are grilled, too, along with chiles, carrots, and broccoli. I take my plate and sit on the grass.
Mid-meal, out of nowhere, a middle-aged man approaches, and, in perfect English, introduces himself as Henri Bourgue. He was an attaché in the French embassy in New York, before he was assigned to Montevideo. He knows Flora. “She thinks you’re lonely,” he says, “so I am to entertain you.”
“I’m not lonely. I’m a writer with hundreds of imaginary friends.”
“Ah,” Henri says, “what do you write about?”
“What doesn’t sell.”
“So you’re good. What are you working on now?”
“It’s a long story.”
Henri smiles. “Flora worked for a friend in New York and was the most brilliant researcher. She knew where to find any answer, not only in books, but in her mind. But she had heartbreak, which is why she’s here. How do you know her?”
“I helped her pick up bread on the street.”
“She looked you up online and has read a few of your stories.”
“She didn’t tell me that.”
“Listen to me,” Henri says. “Treat her well.”
The party goes on into darkness, and the lights are close-in stars. I open a second beer and stand at the periphery and watch Flora weave through the people, consult with Elena, and clear plates and bottles. A couple of times she glances in my direction, but does she see me?
Neighbors and relatives depart and laugh their goodbyes, so I take my cue and thank Elena, who’s forking the last pieces of meat from the grill.
“Oh,” she says, “¿te vas?”
“Es la hora. Muchas gracias por la hospitalidad.”
“Pero mañana. . .”
I nod. “Mañana es un otro día.”
“Ella te esta llevando a Villa Serrana. Hablar con ella.”
I nod and smile. I get some of what she says, so I meander into the house, where Flora’s in the kitchen washing silverware. She has the same intensity as that day she was digging in her garden.
“Thank you for dinner,” I say. “Happy birthday.”
“I was looking for you,” she says. “I thought you’d left already.”
“I was in the shadows. Henri said you read a few of my stories.”
“They were good. You let the reader know who you are.”
“The characters, you mean.”
“I spoke to Elena. Since I don’t have a job, I can borrow her car and drive you where you need to go.”
“Really? If there were a god, that would be a send. I’ll pay for the gas.”
“Not necessary, but it’s Elena’s car.”
“This is such a relief. I can’t thank you enough.”
“Then don’t try,” Flora says.
We say good night with a cursory hug on each cheek—her hands are wet from the silverware—and a minute later I’m outside in the humid air, walking back to my room. I’m thrilled to have a ride to Villa Serrana, but already I’m making the trip into fiction. In the car we’ll talk about Brooklyn and what she did there. I’ll tell her about Aves. I’ll ask what she knows about Colonia. What can she know about me from my stories? Of course, she’ll stay over with me. When the heat goes out of the day, we’ll walk up into the rocky hills and look for birds, and at night we’ll sleep together in the room with air-conditioning. Mornings, I’ll write, because, as I’ll explain to her, I can’t not.
On the way back to Carmine’s, I walk past the lighted houses and shacks, and, under the street lamps, my shadow waxes and wanes. All who wander are not lost.
Aves, Flora—Flora, Aves. You see the dilemma. What will really happen tomorrow?
Copyright © 2025 by Kent Nelson.
About the Author
Kent Nelson lives in Ouray, Colorado, and has run the Pikes Peak Marathon twice. His fiction has appeared in many magazines, and his collection, The Spirit Bird, won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press. A novel Language in the Blood, won the Edward Abbey Prize for Ecofiction, and another novel, Land That Moves, Land That Stands Still, won the Mountain and Plains Booksellers Award for best novel. He is currently posting on Substack. Visit: www. KentNelsonWriter.com
Photo by Cynthia Freeman.
