Often on cold mornings, I stayed in bed for a while after Juan Pablo went to work and thought about home. I had turned down a job leading wilderness trips in New Mexico to return to Chile, and the opportunity costs of my decision played through my head while I lay alone in the darkness. I did not regret the decision, but I idealized the hot desert summer and missed being around other young, outdoorsy people. I resolved to not return to southern Chile during the winter next time, and to wait until a trip to the southern hemisphere would be an escape from the northern cold.

When I finally got up, throwing off the blankets with a sharp intake of breath, I lit the space heater and crouched in front of it. I always feared it would explode. It was just a caged metal screen soaked with gas that purred when ignited. I spread my hands in front it, my chest and stomach roasting while my backside froze. Most houses in the south were heated by a wood stove, but not this one. People took advantage of the radiant heat and constructed metal drying racks that attached to the stovepipe or the wall behind it, so that the wood stove was frequently adorned with panties, undershirts, and socks. This drying method ensured that they would carry the smell of smoke with them when they left the house.

Not having a stove meant that our clothes never fully dried; everything we owned smelled like mildew. During the morning when Juan Pablo worked, I stayed at home reading about the forestry industry — the subject of my senior thesis and the official reason I was there — but I also vacuumed the apartment, cooked lunch on the small two-burner stove, and washed our clothes. On the porch landing, Juan Pablo had knotted short pieces of cord together to make a rope, and looped it back and forth between hooks he had hammered into the studs underneath the roof. I stood in bare feet on the damp porch while I hung our clothes, wet but not soaking from the washing machine he had purchased on credit with his neighbor. The sounds of the woodshop behind the apartment floated up to the porch. The Caribbean lilt of cumbia music from a local station alternated with the flat banging of a hammer, a saw ripping into wood, and the sharp sudden laughter of men. It seemed fitting that my neighbors were wood workers, since I spent so much time reading about forestry.

I stepped back inside, rubbing my hands together and held them in front of the heater. I had dragged it into the main room before hanging the clothes so that when I came in from the porch the chill would be gone. Sitting next to the heater at the one table Juan Pablo owned, I cupped my mug of tea and opened my laptop. Juan Pablo stole wireless internet from next door, and it was hit or miss. On the mornings it did not work I felt especially isolated, and usually walked into town to use the wifi at a café. But today I was in luck, and I began writing a long email to a college friend, Anna, who always responded quickly and with equally detailed letters. We were both outsiders in someone else’s home that summer; she had moved in with her boyfriend in his hometown in upstate New York. They lived across the street from his childhood home in an apartment his family owned, and in spite of a stint at a bakery in town, she had ended up working for the family company alongside him, his parents, and his brothers.

“Everything is his,” she would write to me. “I feel like there is little here that is mine alone.”

I felt the same way in Chile. Although Juan Pablo had recently moved to Puerto Varas, compared to me, he had been there forever. He blended in on the street, understood the puns in the newspaper that went over my head, and never needed to calculate how much something cost in dollars before comprehending how much it was worth. We visited his friends at night, he gave me places to stay while researching in other cities, and he picked our weekend destinations.

“It makes me angry sometimes that he takes his belonging for granted,” I wrote to Anna. “All I want is one thing or place of my own, something to show off to him.”

My desire to have experiences independent of Juan Pablo drove me away from him for some time. I also needed to do research at a university library, so I spent weekdays in Valdivia, a coastal city three hours to the northwest, coming back to him on weekends. He had introduced me to some family friends there, Oscar and Celia, who welcomed me into a small spare bedroom tucked underneath the stairs. Oscar worked for the forest service, and even though his experience had awarded him an administrative position, he still wore flannel shirts, canvas pants, and boots to the office every day. Celia stayed at home, and through the thin walls I could hear her singing in the living room and kitchen as she prepared dinner or once, afternoon tea. The house smelled faintly of oranges because Celia set the skins to dry on top of the stove.

At night their friends came over, and often I joined them around the small kitchen table. Under the buzzing fluorescent light I tried to laugh along with them, but they talked so quickly. The jokes were the worst because not only did I have to understand what they said, but why that certain combination of words was funny. When Oscar laughed, he removed his glasses and pinched the corners of his eyes, his great belly and broad shoulders heaving. Celia would nudge or wink at me, but the best I could do was smile and nod. Sometimes they stopped to explain it to me, but this just made me feel more out of place; besides, a joke explained is never as funny as it is the first time.

But on other nights, when just Oscar, Celia and their two grown-up children were home, the conversations were warm and inviting. Often we camped out on the floor and watched the news. Celia and I knitted while the others taunted us, asking if we were ever going to finish. I sat next to the wood stove, and the kitten that always curled beneath it played with the ball of yarn.

In those moments, I didn’t miss home. When I did, though, I ached for it. I had to limit myself to an hour a day of computer time, usually after breakfast. I wrote emails to friends and checked their Facebook profiles, feeling panicked if I had no interviews or research planned for the day. My mind would wander if given too much free time, and I had to schedule myself activities to keep busy.

One particularly lonely night, I made a list of the good things that had happened that day in an effort not to be so negative. I surprised myself and wrote more than I expected. I began with “good, cheap mandarin oranges.” On a whim I had walked a different route home and stopped by a fruit stand. Wooden crates overflowed with bruised fruits that had been rejected for export — grapes, apples, and mandarin oranges. I picked myself two-dozen of the best-looking ones and took them home, eating a few along the way. As I walked, I threw the peels into vacant lots where they shone among the wet grass and trash. The oranges were delicious, sweet and not at all sour.

Another high point of that day had been “the run in the morning to Fundo Isla Teja Norte.” The fundo was a nature preserve on the far corner of the large, suburban island where Celia and Oscar lived, and I frequently ended up there on my runs. I set out from the house, jogging down the street through the mist and smoky air. I crossed the avenue, feeling tense as I anticipated the inevitable whistle from the construction workers repairing the street, and then up the hill, past the charred house that had burned down just the week before — a fact of life in a city heated by wood.

The nicest homes sat at the top of the hill overlooking the River Cruces. All the streets were named after Chilean painters, musicians, and artists. The homes themselves were expensive and interesting, with large metal prows, turrets, or curved archways. I ran past these homes, squeezed through a fence that had been cut back for such a purpose, and into the vacant lot that separated the homes from the preserve. Horses grazed in the tall grass, and occasionally I glimpsed a young couple lying together on a blanket.

On the far side of the lot, horse trails wound through the lush woods. Hanging vines wrapped around the branches and trunks of huge trees, and I leapt over puddles decorated with fallen leaves. The woods smelled fresh, a mixture of mud and the ephemeral scent released by wet leaves after a hard rain. As the trail approached the river, I could see a tugboat quietly churning down the narrow channel. A small clearing had been cut in the forest on the far corner of the preserve, and I sat here and looked out over the river. The forest grew textured and thick on the far shore before giving way to delicate waving marsh grasses and finally the steely gray of open water. The grasses bowed over when raindrops struck them, and the surface of the river seemed to vibrate. When I sat there, I could forget I was in Chile. There were no Spanish signs and no one to speak to. But as soon as I ducked back around the fence and jogged down the street, the street signs, micro buses and conversations I overheard grounded me in Valdivia.

On the way back to the house, the rain stopped for about ten minutes, a fleeting break in what had been six continuous days of rain (I would note this moment in my list that night). In New England, where I’m from, it rains but it comes and goes throughout the day. Puddles may not dry up immediately, but between the rains the pavement smells metallic and steams into the clearing air. Here, it doesn’t stop and the light is gray and even, hardly changing between morning and evening. On the third day I asked the Chileans I was staying with if this was normal, and they shrugged. But by the sixth day they were complaining along with me and poring over the weather page in the newspaper, looking for a respite. Rivers swallowed bridges and swamped roads, isolating rural communities for days after the storm ended.

During the storm, I was staying in Valdivia, which stretched along the banks of the confluence of three rivers. One day I had put on my raincoat and waterproof pants and walked down to the nature preserve to mark how high the water had risen. Roots of trees disappeared under the silty waters; a bench became no more than a submerged backrest. The day after my run, the rain let up, and I stood outside in the sunlight that glinted silver on all the puddles. If the rain was good for something, it was moments like these: my upturned face seeking the fleeting winter light, the rich smell of mud and wet leaves.

By the end of the summer, my list of the simple pleasures that brightened what were frequently dreary, long weeks of research had grown. I took a bus to the coast on a whim to find the beach deserted except for two men who were sawing up an enormous tree trunk that had washed up on shore and towing the wood uphill in an ox-cart. I had discovered a café that served tea in glass pots so that you could see the tea swirl through the darkening water. Once, when I was locked out of Oscar and Celia’s house, I had knocked on their neighbor’s door and started chatting with the woman who lived there, a Colombian veterinary student named Bibiana. She served me tea as we waited for someone to let me in, and we talked about being foreign in Chile. I assumed that as a South American, she must be having an easier time than me, but as I listened to her, I began to doubt my assumption. Her fiancé lived in Colombia, and although she called him every day, it was obviously not enough. She enjoyed her studies, but felt excluded by her Chilean classmates. She described the women as cold and the men as either too interested or not at all. Her few friends were all exchange students. Eventually I heard a car pull into the driveway, and I thanked her for the tea. We exchanged phone numbers and I and went back to Oscar and Celia’s, excited about my new friend.

When I returned to Puerto Varas the following day, Juan Pablo met me at the bus station — another one of my simple pleasures. I loved watching him step out of the car he had borrowed to pick me up and move through the small crowd that had gathered outside the bus to hug me as I descended. As I wrapped my arms around his warm, solid body, I looked around at the other passengers who were embracing relatives of their own, making impatient calls on their cellphones or waiting for someone to arrive. For once, I felt equal to them: we had all traveled alone and we were all being picked up by someone who cared about us. The sense of belonging, of having a place and a person to return to when I was so far from home, never ceased to be a novelty to me; every time he met me at the bus, I felt that simple joy.

In the car on the way back to the apartment, Juan Pablo asked me how my week of research had been. I dutifully recited the research highlights — an interview with an ex-guerrilla, and a relevant book I found — but enthusiastically told him about Bibiana in a level of detail I reserved for exciting stories I thought would impress or entertain him. She was mine to describe, and I did so with pleasure.

That weekend we visited a national park neither of us had ever been to. It was named after the slow-growing alerce, similar to the redwood, a tree native to the wettest parts of the temperate rain forests near Puerto Varas. After an hour of driving down steadily worsening roads, we parked in front of a homemade sign that indicated the one trail into the park. We opened the cattle gate and let ourselves in.

Juan Pablo hiked slowly because he was always pausing to take pictures. Frequently I turned around to find him crouching to photograph the tendril of some vine or the soft petals of tiny flowers. He noticed things I did not — a blade of light that cut through an opening in the canopy, electrifying one fern, and the pattern drawn by yellow-tinged rot on fallen leaves. But I detected odors he could not; ever since a motorcycle accident the year before, he had been unable to smell. The injury’s only visible scar was a thick white line that ran over his scalp from ear to ear. The doctors had peeled back his face and replaced the fractured bones with metal plates. When the swelling had diminished a few weeks after the motorcycle accident, two things had changed: a light touch to the space between his eyebrows could now be felt on his cheek, and he was unable to smell.

I didn’t know him before the accident, so there was nothing to say when he claimed it had changed him. But I didn’t doubt him; even simple things were different afterward, like the way he cooked. He no longer cared to add spices to his food, only doing so when I complained that it was bland. He bought cilantro for me when I visited because I liked it; to him it was just a bouquet of expensive leaves.

More infuriating to him was the way he experienced the outdoors. In between snapping pictures, he stopped me to ask, “What does it smell like here?” And I would tune in, trying to describe the ulmo flowers that made the most delicious honey, the sweetness of crushed grass or the raw smell of water beneath a cascade. Fortunately he had experienced all these odors before, so I didn’t have to describe the intricacies of each one, but merely name them as they came to me. Even though it frustrated him, I liked this game because I had access to something he did not. I had something to offer him, for once.

We returned from our hike wet and cold, as usual. We turned the space heater on high and burrowed in the bed as we waited for the apartment to warm up. Juan Pablo pressed his face into the back of my neck, whispering that he was trying to find the taste of my scent, el sabor de mi olor. He said if he sniffed hard enough he could feel certain odors as a tingle on the back of his tongue. I think that he knew he was going to lose me; I was going back to the United States after my winter of research and would not return. So he pressed his nose into my skin, inhaling, trying to find at least a trace of a taste. But taste is not like smell. We do not stumble into tastes, only to find ourselves suddenly transported to some distant place.

But I can smell, and certain odors make me remember him. I left Juan Pablo and our relationship in Chile at the end of that August, but on various occasions since then I have stepped out of my house in Maine and smelled the woodsmoke in the rain. The wood here is native to Maine and smells differently when burned than Chilean wood, but the way it hit me jolted me back to the lingering dampness and wet darkness of that winter.

The bread section of a large grocery store will be mobbed around 6 p.m. Bread is baked on-site and sold out of wooden bins that each contain a different kind that all taste sort of the same — bland and a bit doughy. The popular pan batido, a fluffy white bread that could be easily ripped into quarters, is piled in a bin next to hallulla, a round roll that was often dense and spongy; pan amasado, similar to hallulla but less dense; pan doblada, triangular folded bread with a crunchy crust, and the least desirable, pan de molde, sliced bread. The warm rolls steam up the flimsy plastic bags that shoppers rip off a roll like Americans do in the produce department. If the bread bins are empty, people linger around them, waiting for the rolls to tumble into the bins from a slot that leads to the kitchen.

On Christmas, the wait for the fresh bread was the longest I’d ever experienced. Most stores had closed for the holiday, which left a horde of people that had waited until the last minute to buy bread wandering around Valparaíso looking for an open bakery. My friend Katie and I were among them, and we had all discovered the same tiny bakery.

It was located in a part of the city that was usually bustling, the sidewalks overflowing with people and produce stands. As soon as the bakeries and pocket-sized markets opened their gates in the morning, shoppers flocked to them like bees on blooming flowers. Normally shoppers would divide themselves evenly between the stores, lingering while they bought a cut of steak wrapped in white paper at one, then walking deliberately past a slew of identical stores to stop at another that seemed no different than the rest, where they would buy avocados. But today everything was closed, except for the bakery.

Outside a line had formed — remarkable in itself. I had found that Chileans initially formed lines, but quickly abandoned them in favor of elbowing and pushing to get what they wanted — the attention of a bartender, a seat on the bus, or admission to a club. The only orderly lines I had seen were in government buildings or post offices, where stone-faced people waited with their arms crossed, documents in hand, shifting their weight from one foot to the other.

I peeked over the heads of the people in front of me. Inside, no one was moving. Elegant pastries and cakes were displayed in the window at the front of the bakery, but everyone seemed to be keeping an eye on the bread bins at the back of the tiny shop. I knew that the bakers had dumped fresh bread into the bins when the line lurched forward, like we were all passengers on a stalled subway that suddenly began to move. Six or seven pairs of greedy hands quickly emptied the bins as soon as they were filled, leaving everyone else to wait for another ten minutes or so. The victorious shoppers hustled out of the bakery, holding their bread bags protectively.

After two rounds of this we had only just made it inside the door. A man behind me turned to face the person behind him, shouting to no one in particular and gesturing wildly. “This is ridiculous! It is unjust to have to wait this long for bread on Christmas! I cannot believe there are no other bakeries open today!” He slapped the doorframe for emphasis, and Katie and I jumped.

I was also frustrated by the wait, and would have deserted the line if I had stood there much longer. But no one else seemed to be budging, preferring to stand and wait for up to 30 minutes for a baggie filled with warm rolls. In the United States, I doubt anyone would have waited that long for bread, especially on Christmas.

But Chileans eat bread, in one form or another, at almost every meal. I experienced its ubiquity while living with a host family during a study abroad program. In the morning I awoke to find last night’s bread, just beginning to harden, covered with a cloth in a basket on the dining room table. Beside it, an oddly shaped block of white cheese and thin slices of ham were arranged on small plates. When I arrived home from my classes in the afternoon, the table had been cleaned and re-set the exact same way. This time a bowl of mashed up, salted avocados accompanied the now fresh bread, meat, and cheese. If I had been home for lunch, I could have eaten more bread with pebre, a mild, watery salsa.

Many travelers lament bread’s starring role in the Chilean diet. An Englishman I met at a hostel grumbled as we sat down to a breakfast nearly identical to the one I ate every day at my host family’s. “Oh wow, bread,” he grumbled, reaching past the basket of hallulla for the Nescafe instant coffee, another Chilean favorite. “What a surprise.”

Chilean’s reliance on bread can create chaos if it is suddenly absent from the table. An empty bread basket means a giant, bread-shaped hole in the universe has temporarily opened and must be filled before mealtime by a last-minute run to the store.

People on an eleventh-hour bread run don’t want to barge into bakery after bakery only to discover the bread bin is empty. Sympathetic (or savvy) shop owners, understanding the urgency of the bread run, frequently put up signs in their windows to let consumers know when bread is available; indeed, the hand-lettered HAY PAN (THERE IS BREAD) sign is nearly as ubiquitous as bread itself. The plethora of bread signage once led a sarcastic American traveler to comment, “Oh, great! There is bread! Because I was worried we’d run out.”

But on Christmas 2007, the impossible happened—there was no bread.

At least not for a while. After half an hour of waiting punctuated by frantic shuffles toward the store, Katie and I filled our own baggie with pan batido. As walked up the hill to our hostel, we were passed by some of the other last-minute bread-buyers. I tried to acknowledge them as they passed, but they blew by us, walking fiercely home.

I did these things for a number of reasons. There were some bragging rights involved — I wanted to be able to list off all my romantic adventures like I just did. But I also wanted to learn more about the “real” Chile, not the one presented to me by my professors. After the first two weeks of classes I decided that I could learn about the country and improve my Spanish more at the bar than in the classroom.

In the beginning, I thought I could become friends with Chilean women by chatting with them at bars, but they intimidated me too much to even try. They traveled in small, tight packs that seemed impenetrable. Even when I caught one ordering a drink alone, they seemed oblivious to me. Men, on the other hand, seemed overly interested in my gringa friends and me. They approached us alone or in small groups, first staring from across the crowded, smoky room and then sidling up to us and leaning in close to ask us to dance.

I always tried to turn these flirtations into a conversation about where these men came from, their views on politics, their families, etc. They were my unofficial professors and participants in the anthropological research that is “studying abroad.” In my head, I made lists of topics to cover on our dates — educational reform, machismo, and natural resources, for example. When I first met these men, I tried to judge what they could teach me. One guy I dated for a few weeks racked up points early on because he studied psychology, was born Punta Arenas, the southernmost city in the country, and had ancestors from Germany who settled in Chile in the 1800s. I decided he was intelligent and could teach me about a region I’d never been to, Chilean colonial history, and current affairs. Another studied agronomy and knew all the city’s best bars, so I learned a lot about viticulture and holes in the wall.

These men were an educational resource, but more important, they provided me with a sense of belonging. When I am somewhere new, I become overwhelmed by the desire to intimately know that place and feel like I belong. I hated not knowing my way around Valparaíso; I was tired of having to constantly question bus drivers and fellow passengers about where I was headed. When I stopped people to ask for directions, they often asked where I was from before responding. I never understood the puns in the newspaper that my host-family chuckled at, and I was sick of constantly calculating how much something cost in dollars to know what it was worth. On a previous trip to New Zealand I had discovered the warm, smug feeling of belonging, and now I was addicted to it. The need to feel this way was so strong that it consumed me, and I became desperate to be accompanied by someone, anyone, who fit in.

In exchange for the sense of belonging that they granted me, I provided these men with companionship and intimacy. And while I never slept with any of them, I understood that physicality was supposed to be part of the deal. Many Chilean men like to date gringas because we have money and an exotic appeal. They also assume that we’ll “put out” more easily than Chilean women and that we’ll be leaving the country in a few months, freeing them of any real commitment. I like to think that some of them may have actually been attracted to me, not just my stereotype, but I’m not sure. After all, what interested me most about the men I dated was what they could teach me, not who they were.

Usually these relationships were short-lived. The first one began when I wrote my phone number on a napkin for a waiter at a pizza place. On our first date, we met at a club and left together, alone and drunk. He assured my friends I would be fine and took me home in a cab. I didn’t know where I was when we got out, and I had to depend on him to walk me down the dark streets to my house. That night it felt exciting to be escorted home, but the next morning I shivered when I thought about what could have happened.

We met up once more, this time in a café during the day, and I realized he wasn’t as smart or as attractive as I thought. When he texted me later that week I said I wasn’t interested anymore. Weeks later I ran into him at a fish market; he reeked of liquor and his eyes were narrowed and blood-shot. We circled awkwardly around each other as he lurched toward me, telling me how he wanted to see me again, and I backed away. I told him off sharply and disappeared into the crowd, nervously looking over my back the whole way home.

I wish that this risky behavior was an isolated incident, but more often than not I put myself in sketchy situations just to feel like I belonged. A few weeks later, I met up at a bar for drinks with a guy I had met the night before and invited myself back to his apartment. I did these things because I felt that my judgment was impeccable, and therefore that the risks were minor and worth taking. But I also acted boldly with the men I met, because I wanted to be worth keeping.

I like to think that my forwardness was attractive and differentiated me from other women, but I wonder if it only confirmed the stereotype that American women are easy. My longing to accompany them and feel like I belonged led me to be more aggressive than I would have liked, but I felt like there was no other way to keep them interested. I wasn’t confident that my personality alone would keep them around, and I wanted a Chilean guy to spend time with. I wanted to meet up with someone at night for drinks and lean across the table to kiss; I wanted to wake up in someone’s apartment on Sundays and take the microbus home like all the other Chilean girlfriends.

The desire for others to think I belonged was all tangled up with my own longing to feel this way. On those rare occasions when I did walk down a busy street holding hands with a Chilean guy or huddled with one at a table in a crowded bar, I always wondered what we looked like to others. Did they think I was as legitimate as I felt? Did they even notice us?

Or worse, did they know it was an act?

I often found myself wondering this when I saw American women out with Chilean men. Once, a pretty American girl with a blond pony tail and lots of mascara sat down at the table next to me in the sunny outdoor patio of a café where I was reading the newspaper. Nothing identifies you as an American more than speaking English with another one in public, so I ignored her. Soon a greasy Chilean guy with gelled hair and acne scars showed up and, to my surprise, pecked her on the lips before sitting down across from her and resting his hand on her leg. I was shocked, and immediately questioned why someone as good-looking as her would be dating such an unattractive guy. Then I paused, and wondered if she was in it for the same reasons I was: to trick herself and anyone who was watching into thinking she belonged.

The desire to know their stories consumed me, mostly because, in the United States, I didn’t know many young pregnant women. Was the baby’s father the guy with the ponytail and Iron Maiden shirt, his arm loosely draped around the mother’s shoulder? Did they live together or did she still stay in her childhood bedroom, the only new addition the cradle in the corner? How did she react when she found out? I had never asked anyone these questions before. I grew up in a wealthy suburb of Boston and attended a private high school and college where pregnancy was something that was discussed abstractly in health or sociology classes. It was something outside the realm of my personal experience, something unfortunate that happened to “other women.” Even if I got pregnant, I could opt out of motherhood — abortion, birth control, and the morning-after pill are all easily accessible to me. But even imagining myself pregnant makes me shudder.

When I thought about the young mothers I saw, it was usually in the context of what they were giving up by having their babies. Or rather, what I would be giving up if it happened to me. I imagined setting aside the list of things I wanted to do — spend a few months rock climbing, work in Latin America for a few years, be a foreign correspondent — and resigning myself to at least a decade of domesticity and servitude to my newborn. The women my age who unexpectedly became pregnant must also have plans and goals they would be forced to abandon once they were taking care of a baby. Perhaps living in Ecuador or climbing in Wyoming were not on their lists, but I imagined there must be something similar that they cared about.

While the consequences of an unexpected pregnancy — an unwanted baby — frightened me, I was strangely fascinated by the condition. On the rare occasions that I saw a young pregnant woman in my college town, I couldn’t help but stare or sneak glances when she wasn’t looking. I encountered young mothers so infrequently that I forgot how much they intrigued me until I saw another one months later. But in Chile I ran into young pregnant women and mothers daily, and so I thought about them all the time.

At first, I just wanted to know more about them, but after a while, I began searching for a way to explain what seemed to me an abundance of young mothers. I learned that abortion is illegal in Chile. The conservative congress had recently banned the free distribution of the morning-after pill at public clinics and was trying to outlaw the IUD (intrauterine device), one of the most popular forms of birth control among Chilean women. The failure of the state to offer women alternatives to motherhood seemed to explain why I saw so many young mothers, and it infuriated me. How could the government restrict access to popular forms of birth control and the morning-after pill, knowing that poor women would suffer more than anyone else? Did they not realize, or worse, did they just not care?

On my second trip to Chile to research my thesis, I brought as many packets of the morning-after pill, or Plan-B, as I could get my hands on (I enlisted friends to pick up free pills from the college health center). Before leaving the United States, I translated the morning-after pill instructions into Spanish and made copies. I trimmed the packaging on the pills so that they would be unidentifiable and stuffed them into a vitamin bottle so that customs officials would not notice them. Once I had cleared immigration and settled into my research routine, I began to look for women to give the pills to. I assumed it would be easy to find someone.

The first candidate was María, a friend of a friend who had a two-year-old daughter named Valentina, or Vale. María was just a few years older than me and lived with her boyfriend Sebastián, Vale’s father, in a duplex in Puerto Varas, a touristy town that hugged the edge of a lake in southern Chile. Vale was born just after Sebastián and María had graduated from college, where both had studied business management and tourism. While Sebastián had gone on to work a ski center, María stayed at home with Vale and baked alfajores, chocolate-coated sandwich cookies filled with layer of caramel. She wrapped each cookie in paper, sealed it with a sticker that said Alfajores Valentí in curly red writing — she had named her company after her daughter — and sold the cookies at markets around Puerto Varas.

According to my friend, Pedro, who introduced us, all María cared about was Vale and her alfajores. I couldn’t believe this. Weren’t there things she would rather be doing than staying at home, melting chocolate and minding Vale all day? What about her degree in tourism?

“María was never that interested in school,” Pedro told me.

Didn’t she want to work outside the home, or travel, or party with her friends?

“Maybe,” Pedro admitted, “but look at Vale. She’s precious! Is it better for María to have her independence even if it means that Vale would have never been born?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. I didn’t see the situation that way, so I kept quiet.

When I looked at Vale I saw a pretty little girl with big grey eyes and curly hair who imitated funny faces and offered me raisins instead of eating them herself. But I also saw a tiresome, needy child who demanded the attention of her young parents, especially her mother. I didn’t see why the decision had to be between María and Sebastián’s independence and Vale’s existence. Why couldn’t Vale just have been born a few years later? Because María didn’t have access to an abortion or the morning-after pill, I answered myself. This was where I came in.

But instead of asking María if she wanted a pill packet, I hesitated. It felt paternalistic to be an American woman handing out birth control to Chilean women. If they had asked for it would have felt okay, but just giving it away seemed presumptuous. I didn’t want María to think I thought she was irresponsible, or that I was judging her.

I also was afraid that in giving her the pills, it would be obvious that I thought having Vale was a mistake. I realized that I didn’t know for sure that María thought the same way I did. She seemed content to wear her flowery apron, listen to the radio, and bake cookies while Vale played with toys on the kitchen floor. Instead of feeling strangled by her situation, she seemed to embrace it.

María had not become pregnant for lack of information or access to birth control. Although she was not rich, she certainly did not live in poverty and buying condoms or an IUD would not have been out of the question. So what happened?

Pedro offered an explanation that, in his mind, applied to many young women like María: she was just careless. Rather than attributing her pregnancy to contraceptive inaccessibility, misuse, or failure, my friend thought she hadn’t used birth control at all. He knew many women that didn’t, even though they knew it might result in a baby. In fact, nearly half of Chileans don’t use birth control on a regular basis. Only 60% of upper class and 30% of lower class Chileans claim to use protection during sex consistently. I assumed the low figure for the poor was due to cost and/or lack of education, but why did so many upper-class women forgo birth control if they knew what could happen?

Women in Chile have come a long way since their mothers’ generation, frequently attending college and working outside the home. But I wondered if they were still expected, or wanted, to wind up as full-time mothers and wives in spite of their education and preparation for other occupations. Perhaps they thought that if they would become mothers eventually, it didn’t really matter when it happened, especially if there wasn’t something else they would rather do. This resigned attitude towards pregnancy — if it happens, it happens — would undoubtedly contribute to mis- or non-use of birth control. Until I learned why so many young women had babies, I decided to withhold the pills. So they stayed disguised as vitamins, and for a few weeks I forgot about them all together and focused on my research.

I decided to conduct a few interviews in Neltume, an isolated forestry town tucked in the foothills of the Andes. I knew I was nearing the end of the long bus ride as the roads deteriorated from smooth to bumpy and finally to dirt. I asked the driver to let me out at the Fuentes Hostel, but when I stepped off the bus into a light mist, I didn’t know which of the small huddled houses was the right one.

I asked the only person in sight, a pretty woman who stopped pruning her rose bushes and pointed her gardening shears at the house down the road. I knocked on the door and waited. The house was larger than the others on the street, though only one story. Smoke drifted out of the chimney and a cat peered out from beneath a raspberry bush. A muddy truck was parked in the driveway. The door opened, and a large, cheery woman welcomed me into the house. She ran a pensión, an everything-included hostel frequented mostly by teachers and forestry workers. The living room of the house was spacious and had a polished tile floor. A wood stove glowed from the dark corner, and a small dog curled up on a ratty pillow behind it. The woman at the door served me tea while I sat in front of the wood stove and chatted with her daughter Xaviera, who was large and soft like her mother.

That night I stayed up late with the two women in the kitchen, drinking black tea underneath the flickering fluorescent light. They had stoked the wood stove they used to cook, and the room felt stuffy and warm. Xaviera sat on the counter by an open window, occasionally reclining into the dark night to exhale smoke. We had been discussing Santiago, the city where Xaviera had lived before she returned to Neltume to have her baby, now sleeping in one of the bedrooms. There was no mention of the baby’s father, so I assumed he still lived in the city.

“God, I loved Santiago,” she said, staring into her cup of instant coffee.

I imagined that she was recalling the nights spent in colorful, grimy bars, the endless throbbing avenues full of people and cars, and the sweaty dark discotecas. She had been working as a nanny with no intention of returning to Neltume when she got pregnant.

“Imagínate, me living alone in Santiago with a baby? No way,” she exclaimed. “Neltume is a good place to raise a baby.”

But was it a good place for her, I wondered? She was about my age, 23, and living in the isolated town she grew up in, population two thousand. Neltume was a place where everyone knew everything, where outsiders like myself received long second-glances. Was Xaviera suffocating here, or did she enjoy the homecoming? Was I just imposing myself on her?

“Did you want to have the baby?” I asked, taking a risk. I hadn’t yet asked anyone if their babies were planned or not, and I worried it was too personal a question. Xaviera didn’t seem to think so.

“Definitely not,” she responded immediately, and then she looked at the wall behind which her daughter slept. “But she’s a blessing from God.”

Later that night, I lay beneath heavy blankets and wrote in my journal. Explosions and laughter from the television traveled easily through the thin plywood walls, and I heard Xaviera cooing to her baby in the moments when the noises briefly stopped. It occurred to me that Xaviera might not think that the pregnancy had ruined her life. She seemed to love Santiago, but perhaps she did not see herself ending up in the city for good; maybe she didn’t have definite goals or plans that she abandoned by becoming a mother unexpectedly. I put my pen down and thought of Xaviera’s daughter skidding across the floor in her white rolling chair, playing bumper cars with the couch and dining room table. Xaviera had run out of the kitchen when the little girl crashed into the door and held her, murmuring softly. A baby could have given her a sense of purpose she might have been lacking beforehand, when she was an anonymous resident of Santiago, population seven million.

I thought about giving the pills to Xaviera, but again I couldn’t bring myself to do it. In fact, I didn’t feel comfortable giving them to any of the women I met that summer. I didn’t know what I would say to María; and I was terrified the conversation might ruin my relationship with Leslie and her family, whose house I stayed at later in my trip. I thought Xaviera might be offended and didn’t know Camila, a friend’s sister, well enough. On my last day in Chile, I still had them in my toiletry kit, but I was determined to rid myself of them before I left the country. So I traveled to Valparaíso to visit an American woman I went to college with who now lived there with her Chilean boyfriend.

On the bus from Santiago I rested my head against the tinted window. Endless vineyards sprawled out from the highway, abruptly ending where the low scrubby mountains rose out of the fields. We sped past roadside restaurants advertising Chilean favorites like empenadas and pastel de choclo, men riding bicycles in the shoulder, and countless metal shacks that grew like weeds along the highway. The bus groaned and slowed as we approached the hill leading into to Valparaíso. I hadn’t been back to the city since studying abroad there almost eight months earlier, and I felt a nervous excitement as the bus passed places I remembered—the decrepit green trolley cars, the crowded new supermarket, the shit-spattered statue of another one of Chile’s celebrated war heroes.

Sarah met me outside the bus station, and I recognized her right away, despite having met her only once. She was tall even by American standards, with curly light brown hair, and stood out against the mass of shorter, dark-haired Chileans who moved briskly along the sidewalk. We walked together to an outdoor market to buy vegetables for dinner. I hadn’t spent time with an American all summer, and I was surprised by how easy it was to relate to her. We were pleased by the same small things: the oil drums filled with spices, the wheelbarrows overflowing with cilantro and parsley, the glassy eyes of the fish packed whole in ice. We both loved wandering the city’s hills, dodging the taxis that sped down the hills like tumbling boulders, and riding the many funiculars that rumbled up rusting tracks, rattling the grimy windows that tourists pressed up against anyway to look at the view. It was so validating to be with someone who understood, without further explanation, what was so odd about the chorrillana, a pile of greasy French fries topped with hot dog, egg, and onions. I loved that I could understand her jokes and dry sense of humor, so similar to my own.

Over dinner in Sarah’s small cabin that she rented with her boyfriend, I asked her if she would take the pills and distribute them to her female friends. I was surprised by how easy it was to ask her, but maybe I shouldn’t have been. I had much more in common with her than the Chilean women I met that summer. It was more than our shared college experience, socioeconomic background, and interest in Latin America that let me understand Sarah. Rather, our beliefs, expectations, and personalities were rooted in the same shared experience of being a certain type of American woman.

I was confident that eventually I could overcome the gap that separated me from the Chilean women I met, but it had been naive to think I could do it right away, or that I could learn enough about their situations through researching pregnancy rates and reproductive rights legislation. Pregnancy was a completely different process for Chilean women than for upper-middle class American women. Because here it nearly always resulted in a baby, I could not approach it with the same lightness that I used with my friends at home.

After I gave the vitamin bottle with the pills to Sarah, she turned it over in her hand, rattling it absentmindedly.

“You know,” she said. “I don’t really have any close girlfriends here. I don’t know how easy it will be to give these out.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m giving them to you because I couldn’t find anyone else.”

But I wasn’t worried. All I cared about was that the pills stayed in Chile with someone who would have more time to puzzle out the unspoken barrier that separated Sarah and I from the women we met, or find a Chilean woman who somehow had been able to break through on her own.

I was visiting the area for my senior thesis, a history of the Chilean forestry industry. I wanted to interview smallholders about their woodlots and for that I needed to travel to Lake Neltume, a small town tucked among the densely forested foothills east of the town. The bus from Panguipulli dropped me at the fork in the road; no busses led to Lake Neltume. As walked down the dusty, empty road, I began to wish the day would end. Despite being young, female, and alone, no one had picked me up, and I was sick of walking. I wanted to be back in the pensión in Panguipulli sitting in the garden, wrapped in a blanket, eating raspberries and cream in the rich afternoon light, and writing about the day in my journal. I frequently felt this way while traveling alone: let me get through this day so that I may spend many pleasant hours later, remembering what happened.

But I was hours away from that. As I trudged along, I regretted my choice of shoes. That morning, I had been so confident that I would get picked up immediately that I wore flip flops. But nearly two hours later, I was still walking, and my feet were dirty and sore. I passed through patches of sun and shade, past second-growth native forest and sheep pasture. The forests ceded to fields bordered by homemade fences and barbed wire where alamo trees stood in rows to break the wind. When planted in a row, the alamos grow tall and narrow, their branches entangled with the tree next to them. Cows slapped their tails against their backs in the spotty shade beneath them, swatting the huge biting flies that infest the Andean foothills and forests in the summer.

Behind the fields rose the densely vegetated hills, and above the hills the sun reflected off the year-round snowpack of Volcán Choshuenco. At night, the clouds would wrap around the cone of the volcano, a gradient of pastels in the fading light. But at the moment the snow burned white in the blue sky.

Finally a pick-up truck stopped, and I got in the back seat. Three men were already inside, and they asked me how far I was going.

“Al lago,” to the lake, I said, and the driver nodded.

A rosary bobbed around the rearview mirror, and the car smelled like leather. More fields flew by the window, then a small tulip plantation and the entrance to an old logging roads. I glanced in the rear view mirror to see if the driver was looking back at me, but he stared straight ahead, as did the other passengers. They seemed uninterested in me, which was a shame because I was intrigued by them. After fifteen minutes of silence, they let me out at another fork and pointed in the direction I was to continue.

I began walking again, and after a short while I came upon a small mini-market, where flags of candy companies hung limp in the dead air outside the door. Inside, two men stopped talking as I entered. One was leaning on a glass counter that contained candy bars and chips, and the other had his arms crossed. I apologized for interrupting, but did they know the Guarda Salinas family, who had been recommended to me by a man who worked for the forest service in Panguipulli. He had given me a list of all the families in Lake Neltume that had management plans for their native forest and drew a small star next to the Guardas. “Visit them,” he told me. “They are conservationists.”

The men nodded and told me the Guardas lived at the bottom of the hill, first driveway on the right. I thanked them and left, lingering as I always did on the way out for some bit of their conversation, hoping they would gossip about me if they thought I was out of earshot.

In Lake Neltume I was rarer than in Panguipulli. I was tall for Chilean standards, pale, short-haired and wore American-style clothing. As I descended the hill, I received curious stares from the people I passed. Everyone I saw was walking, mostly in the opposite direction. A man with a wrinkled face dressed entirely in black — work boots, a collared shirt, and a wide-brimmed hat — nodded at me as we crossed paths. Later, two women appeared around the bend carrying between them a basket covered with a cloth. I suspected cherries or bread, but didn’t stop them to ask. Two small girls ran in front of their young mothers, who chatted loudly. Their long dark hair was pulled back with the plastic clips I saw everywhere in stores in Panguipulli, clipped onto strings that hung from windows and door frames. Did they whisper to each other after I passed? Did they point and giggle as soon as my back was turned?

Near the bottom of the hill, the forest began to thin out and soon I could see the outline of a house through the trees. Most rural homes were short, built from corrugated metal with plastic sheeting over the windows. But the Guarda house was tall, with glass windows and clean wooden siding. Alongside the tall house sat a smaller one, the kind I expected to see in the countryside, with rooms tacked on whenever money was available to construct an addition. The small house had been their permanent residence for many years, I would learn, and the taller one was still under construction.

I approached the gate and called out to a small boy who was running along the driveway.

“Oye!” I yelled. “Does Herna Salinas live here?”

He nodded and came towards me, pulling the heavy wooden gate open so I could pass.

“I’ll take you to her,” he said. As we approached the house, he ran ahead to get his grandmother.

“Hay una tía aquí,” he called out, there is an aunt here to see you.

I knew he was referring to me, since Chilean children use the word for “aunt” when addressing unknown women, something that took some getting used to. Herna emerged from the house. She was a small woman with clean, unwrinkled clothing and short white hair. I explained that I had gotten her name from a man who worked for the forest service and that I wanted to talk to her about how she managed her native forest.

“Of course, of course!” she said. “We’ll sit down.”

But the house she invited me into was the tall unfinished one, and she beat the dust from a chair before motioning for me to sit down. The table was covered with a plastic sheet, the floor half-tiled. The sun fell through the high, clean windows across the floor in wide stripes, and the air smelled like new wood. It was not until after her son Rodrigo had given me a tour of their property that I would be welcomed into their actual home. It felt like a test, invite the gringa into the larger, American-style house and see how she reacts, then, if all goes well, bring her in with the family.

Herna called for Rodrigo to help her explain the history of the property, why they hadn’t felled their forest and replaced it with pasture like the majority of the landowners in the area. From what I gathered, they had enough money not to destroy their forest. The same could not be said for other residents of Lake Neltume. I followed Rodrigo down the narrow roads cut into the hillsides over the generations the Guardas had owned the land. Herna’s grandfather had bought the land, the only non-Mapuche Indian in a completely indigenous area. The history of the property seemed to be a sensitive subject since compared to the Mapuche, who can claim ancestral roots to the land since time immemorial, the Guardas had just arrived in Lake Neltume. Herna stressed how long the family had been there, the improvements they had made to the land, that all the children had gone to the rural school.

Rodrigo led me down to the river that ran through their property, and I dipped my swollen feet in the cold water. He ran his hands through his thick black hair and looked up river. He was tall, tan, well-built, and I wondered if he was married. He didn’t wear a ring, but I knew this meant little in Chile; married men often kept their rings at home. He was by far the most attractive of the three Guarda brothers I would meet that day. I met the other two, Joel and Sebastián, while they were making charcoal on the top of a hill. They wore sun hats with bandanas draped over the backs of their necks and stood leaning on shovels. During my brief conversation with them they stared at me with the look that Chilean men reserve for pretty foreign girls. I must have seemed ephemeral to them, having appeared out of nowhere and disappearing just as quickly when Rodrigo escorted me away into a stand of native forest the family had been managing. He pointed out the different tree species and where the harvesting had taken place. The forest was spacious and free of undergrowth. Silvery lichens grew on the bark of the trees, and grass glowed neon in the sunlight. We continued down a hill and circled back around to the house, pausing in an orchard to sample cherries. I made a motion to leave, but Rodrigo insisted I come in for tea.

This time I was brought inside the kitchen of the crowded and warm house. Rodrigo sat me down at the table and retreated, leaving me with his señora, his wife or fiance (it was unclear), and a myriad of nameless children, some his and some belonging to his brothers. They sat three in a row on benches along the walls, but I was the only one seated at the table. Rodrigo’s señora sat in front of a window, backlit by the flat mid-afternoon light. She was young, probably about my age. A bowl of cherries rested on her very pregnant stomach. A small girl sat next to her quietly picking fruit from the bowl, her attention divided between me and the television, where girls in bikinis floated inside plastic bubbles in a pool in Santiago. The point of the program seemed to be to reveal as much of the girls’ bodies as possible, and when they inevitably fell over after trying to stand in the bubble their flawless backsides, barely concealed in G-strings, were upturned towards the camera.

Behind me, a metal pan clattered on the counter as Herna pulled loaves of bread from the wood-fired oven. She moved quickly and deliberately through the kitchen, glancing at the eggs popping in oil on the stove, prying open the lid of a stubborn can, stirring a pot. She didn’t look like a woman from the countryside — pearl earrings sparkled beneath her tidy, cropped hair — but she ran the kitchen like one. She had given birth to eleven children in that house, and I imagined her squatting and pushing her babies into the world. She was a tiny woman, no more than five feet tall, and if I hadn’t known that she had already given birth so many times I would have doubted her ability to do so.

“More tea?” she asked me, clasping her strong delicate hands to her chest.

I nodded.

Joel and Sebastián walked in and sat down, hanging their hats on nails above the window. They watched me eat what Herna served me: eggs with orange yolks, homemade bread and jam, and tea in a white cracked cup. After asking me where I was from and what I was doing there, a playful look overcame Joel’s face and he said, “There are not many women here. They don’t like the countryside.”

“No?” I asked, making eye contact with Rodrigo’s señora. She gave me a sly look and waved at Joel dismissively.

Joel must have been encouraged by this gesture because he pushed further, “We’re all single here. A bunch of bachelors.”

At this comment even the children laughed. I looked from face to face, unsure but smiling anyway. The señora rolled her eyes.

“He’s the only single one,” she said.

There was a pause, and then Sebastián asked me what I was going to do after college. He was seated next to Joel and a thin, tan boy peered over his shoulder.

“I’m not sure yet,” I replied, gazing between the various pairs of eyes that awaited my answer.

“You should move to southern Chile!” Joel blurted out, leaning forward in his chair.

We all laughed at this, and I almost responded, “I’ve already tried being with a Chilean, and it didn’t work out.” But instead I met Joel’s eyes and held my tongue. I had to pick carefully what they would know about me. I wanted no baggage; I wanted Joel and his family to think of me as a clean sheet, as someone who did not exist until I walked down their driveway earlier that day. But at the same time, I wanted to linger in their minds. “Do you remember that pretty American girl?” he would ask them. They would pause, then nod and think of my short hair, dirty feet, accented but fluid Spanish. “Oh Joel,” the señora would tease him.

When later that afternoon Joel offered to accompany me to the next person I wanted to interview, a man named Mario who lived down the road. I told him I would be fine alone.

“But the dogs,” he said, standing and removing his hat from the nail, “he’ll have dogs.”

So Joel walked me through the orchard and down the driveway, stopping to lower the branches of a cherry tree so I could reach the fruit. He wasn’t much taller than me, and had a patchy graying beard that I imagined would feel scratchy on soft skin. His hands were tan and hardened, the callused skin yellow and shiny. He wore a black collared shirt and work boots in a style I was coming to associate with men from the countryside, and his hat was sweat-stained and faded. He squinted at me as I slid a cherry into my mouth, and I began to sense my power over him. Yes, we were in his terrain. He could easily lead me to an abandoned farm instead of Mario’s and force himself on me, or worse.

But watching him watch me, I knew this was not the case. Instead I felt the sexual power that comes with being an American woman traveling alone in a country where young women infrequently travel alone, domestically or abroad. Choosing to make myself vulnerable by being by myself tended to project the opposite, that I was in fact confident and strong. My ambiguity — is she a strong, independent woman or a naive foreigner to be taken advantage of? — made me mysterious, inaccessible. I saw Joel in his home, had met his family and walked around his land. I knew his standing in life, but he could only believe what I told him about myself. I could be anyone.

In addition, I could tell he wanted me. The joking around in the kitchen was cute, but underneath, it was accompanied by a deep longing. It was probably true that few women visited the countryside, and even fewer presented themselves at his doorstep like I had. Spending his days making charcoal, felling trees, and holing up in the kitchen at night with his family, Joel had few opportunities to meet a potential wife. He was getting older, and all of his siblings were pairing off. So when I walked in, he suddenly was given a chance. Even though he must have known it was improbable, if not impossible, he still tried to win me over. And because of his efforts, I began to like him.

As we neared the lake, we passed another mini-market. “Do you want a drink?” he asked me.

I hesitated, not very thirsty. “If there is juice, sure.”

“Juice?” He yelled at the woman who sat on the porch of the mini-market, which was really a house that sold things out of the front room. She was rubbing white foam into her hair, which was plastered to her head.

“No,” she yelled back with busy hands.

Joel looked at me and I shrugged. We walked in anyway. The mini-market was in the center of town, but all that meant was that the houses were clustered closer together instead of tucked up steep hillsides and down rutted dirt roads. There were no true stores, only two small markets where the living rooms of the houses used to be. The residences resembled the Guarda’s old home, short and covered in sheet metal or plywood.

“Juice?” Joel asked the man who appeared from behind a curtained doorway.

“No,” he said.

Joel looked from me to the shelves that were stacked with bottles of fluorescent soft drinks, bags of lentils, and dried beans. The light was dim and filtered through the dust particles that floated in the air. The man tapped his fingers on the homemade counter.

“Soda?”

“No thank you. I don’t like soda very much,” I replied.

Joel looked flustered. “Ice cream?”

He asked the man, who shook his head.

“Yogurt?” He looked back to me.

I didn’t want anything, but I could tell he wanted to buy me something so I pointed at a box of fruit flavored candies. The man filled a small bag and Joel passed him a 100-peso coin.

“Thank you,” I said as we stepped into the sunlight. “Do you want one?”

We kept walking. I would have turned back if Joel hadn’t been with me; it was further to Mario’s house than I thought. The road was hot, and there was little shade. No vehicles passed in the hour we walked, and I began to feel desperate. I didn’t want to walk the whole way back. I asked Joel how far it was.

“Not much further,” he replied. A few minutes later he turned to me, smiling, “Do you want to stop at the lake?”

I said okay, and Joel led me down to the shore of Lake Neltume, just through the woods on the side of the road. I waded in the shallow water, looking across the lake, which was a shade of blue I had never seen in American water. The lake was small and narrow, but with a wide river outlet on the north end. On the far shore, some Australians had bought a fundo, a large farm, and started a pine plantation. The uniform green of thousands of identical pines stood out from the textured native forest on the surrounding hills. Up from the shore of the lake ran the gray ribbon of the road we had just traveled down. I turned back to Joel. He was standing in the sun, squinting at me with his hands in his pockets.

He beamed. “Want to go?”

I nodded.

Joel knew which unmarked driveway was Mario’s, and after another twenty minutes of walking, we stepped delicately over a barbed wire fence and began to climb the driveway. There were no tire tracks among the dust and pebbles, only footsteps, some of them from bare feet. The top of the hill was dotted with dingy metal shacks. A breeze ruffled the clothes hanging on the line and a pig rooted in the loose dirt. Two dogs emerged from behind softly swaying cornstalks. Joel picked up a stick and flicked it menacingly against his pants. I could see him calculating distance: two barbed wire fences, a path, a narrow patch of yellowed grass and a coiled hose separated us from the dogs. Because I didn’t know better, I went ahead, hollering through cupped hands “AH-LO? AH-LO,” a distortion of “hello” that Chileans used instead of hola.

Mario appeared from one of the metal houses and descended. We stood in the feeble shade of a small tree, and I told him that I wanted to ask him about his native forest. He was short, and his brown skin was very tan, with wrinkles that radiated out from his mouth and eyes. He stared at my sunburned feet, and I placed my bag on the ground to hide them. Mario sized me up and rested his gaze on my breasts a minute. I crossed my arms.

“You’re brave to come out here alone,” he said in the thickly accented voice of the campo, the countryside.

Rural Chileans, especially those from the south, have a singsong way of talking. Their voices rise and fall, and they use words that people from Santiago would laugh at, like galpón, a barn, or fogón, a bonfire for cooking. Chileans are known for speaking quickly, cutting off the ends of words and not enunciating, and Mario was no exception. I had to concentrate to understand him.

As we chatted, Mario told me about the history of his property. It was small and steep, and he had cut down most of the trees many years ago. Cows grazed on tough grasses and weeds, and a tiny patch of vegetables was tucked behind a metal shack. In the past, wheat, potatoes and peas had all grown in abundance in the now thin soil.

“Every year it gets worse,” Mario said, drawing a line in the dust with his leathery finger. “Almost nothing grows here anymore.”

He began to recite the stories he had heard in the news about juvenile delinquency in Santiago, the capital city over twelve hours away but very much the center of Chile, both geographically and in terms of culture, news coverage, and population. Nearly seven million people live there, in a country of only sixteen million. The city has swollen outwards and up against the Andes, which tower above the smog, skyscrapers, and shantytowns below. I didn’t know if Mario had ever visited Santiago, but he seemed well informed about the negative aspects of living there.

“In Santiago, you couldn’t walk around alone like you are now. They’d cut your throat.” He drew his finger across his neck. “Here in the campo, people are humble, good.”

I looked over at Joel, who was kicking one boot in the dust. He was standing in the sun in order to let Mario and me to occupy the shade cast by a skinny tree. His shirt was unbuttoned slightly at the neck, revealing a triangle of skin. I wondered what it felt like to press on that spot, the small hollow where his throat met his chest. In the few hours I had spent with Joel, I had developed a fondness for him, for the way he wore his loneliness and longing on his sleeve. I wanted to be able to give him what I thought he wanted, but I was afraid of abusing the power I had to give into him or to deny him.

On a previous stay in Chile, I had been accused of playing with people’s lives and then disappearing back to the United States, leaving them to deal with the consequences of my actions. I had met a young man named Gabriel while rock climbing in Valparaíso, a coastal port city in central Chile where I was studying abroad. It was my first trip to Chile, and I was consumed by the desire to meet “real” Chileans and break away from my group of Americans. I discovered that few international students went to the local bouldering area, a outcropping of black, overhanging rocks on the ocean north of the city. I met Gabriel and his friends climbing one afternoon, and shortly thereafter began going to bars and barbecues with them. After one particularly raucous evening, Gabriel walked me home in the blue light before dawn, and we kissed. I didn’t know he had just broken up with his girlfriend of three years until she began to call, text, and email me incessantly. She must have gotten my number from his phone. I ignored her for weeks, but she called so much that the sound of the phone ringing began to give me the chills. Finally I answered. Her voice was high and shrill, and she yelled loud and fast into the phone.

“Do you think this is a game?” She screamed. “You can just come here and fuck with our lives, and then leave us to clean up your mess. Is this fun for you?”

I assured her I didn’t know they had just broken up, and that I had never intended to cause trouble.

“You ought to think more about what you do, whose lives you ruin,” she spat. “You think we’re just players in your little travel game. But we’re not just here to amuse you. Are you done messing with us yet?”

As I started to reply, she hung up on me, leaving me standing alone on the patio of my host family’s house. Shaken, I put the phone away and tried to forget about the incident.

But now a year later, I could still feel the guilt that originated in my stomach and spread through my body after that conversation. I looked over at Joel and felt the same power that I had held over Gabriel and his ex-girlfriend. I could play the game, could see how intimate I could be with him in a day, then disappear. I could be a collector of colorful travel experiences with “real people” that I would savor from the safety of the United States. I could think about Joel as the subject of a good story to be recounted over drinks to friends. “Let me tell you about this man I met in Chile,” I would say. “I think he fell in love with me, the poor guy.” I didn’t want to look back on Joel with pity, and I didn’t want to string him along by indulging him. So I limited our experience together to that day, and kept myself at a distance.

Eventually Mario let us leave, and we descended the driveway. Joel walked ahead of me, looking back whenever I slid on loose pebbles. When I said goodbye to Joel, after a fortuitous car ride had returned us back to town, I would feel his beard on my cheek, his tough hand on the delicate skin of my clavicle. I placed my hand on his shoulder and felt his muscle underneath the thin cotton. The cheek kiss was a customary goodbye in Chile, but ours felt heavy with the weight of being the only physical contact we would ever share. Our eyes met briefly as his rough cheek withdrew from mine, but he was already moving away from me and into the dust that floated over the road. I don’t know if Joel thinks about the day as often as I do, but I find it ironic that it’s me who replays our encounter over and over, the memory faded and worn out from use.