Shining Armor Is Overrated

In Cuenca, something slightly scary happened. We'd been keeping our wits about us all week in Ecuador, sitting on buses with our bags on our laps instead of on the floor, taking taxis after dark in dodgy areas rather than risking the walk. We were determined not to be paranoid---I'd hate to think that scare-mongering could deter someone from traveling to a country rumored to be dangerous, as if a hundred cities in America aren't just as dangerous, too---but we certainly tried to be careful and use our common sense.

And nothing happened. And because nothing happened, we got lax.

All day, we'd been walking around Cuenca. It was five or five thirty and the sun was at that gorgeous golden stage, when everything's lit up and syrupy and the sky is still blue and it's chilly but you've got something warm on, and there's nothing for you to think about beyond how you're going to order your steak for dinner (we ate a lot of steak.) Exhausted from sightseeing, we looped around to the river and sat on some steps overlooking the water, the only people around. We had our books with us and we started reading, my bag by Sean's foot, his camera next to it.

We'd been that way for half an hour maybe, just reading on the steps in the early dusk, when suddenly---honestly, it was almost supernatural how suddenly he appeared---there was a man in a yellow t-shirt right next to us, squatting down beside me, and it all happened at once, it all happened in the very same second, these three things: the man grabbed at Sean's camera, Sean grabbed at it too, and I realized with a desperate thudding panic that we were all alone by the river.

Sean and the man wrestled with the camera, and you have to remember it was a big camera, an expensive camera, and as Sean pulled it in one direction, the man pulled it in the other, and all the time, the man was saying in Spanish "let me take a picture of you, let me take a picture of you," and Sean was saying "no thanks, it's okay, no thanks, we have enough pictures," like this man was some overeager uncle at a family picnic who wanted to give one of these new-fangled digital thingamajigs a go.

They were standing there, Sean and this man, the camera between them, both of them with their hands around it, gripping it tenderly like it was a newborn baby that neither of them wanted to drop. It was such a bizarre intimacy they were sharing, such a strange situation, and I was simultaneously frightened of this man and angry at him, angry at him for barging into our peaceful sunset reverie with his scare tactics and his demands. "Hey, give me a dollar," he said, "Give me a dollar, give me a dollar, give me some money." He had an awful smile on his face, a calm, eerie, handsome sort of smile---he was a young and handsome man, that's what I remember thinking was strange, nothing like the crackheads I'd always assumed I'd be accosted by at home---and all this time, my heart was beating in my chest, that awful pump and prod of adrenaline.

This is how I would have handled the situation: I would have screamed and shouted, yelled obscenities, possibly kicked the man in the groin. I would have responded in fear, and who knows how much worse that might have made it? Much worse, probably. No-one likes an angry woman shouting empty threats.

But this is what Sean did: he said, quite calmly, "hey, what's your name?" And this caught the guy totally off guard, I mean, really, he just wasn't expecting the cocktail party chitchat, not when he was attempting (albeit in a sort of half-hearted, strange, lackadaisical way) to rob us blind. "It's Steven," he said, surprised, and Sean said "okay, Steven, I can give you a dollar, that's fine," and with his free hand, he started rooting around for a dollar in his pocket, and all this time, he was talking, talking to Steven in Spanish, asking him where he was from (Colombia), why he wanted a dollar (to give to his family), what he'd been doing that day (I can't remember, possibly scaring the living crap out of other innocent tourists.)

I mean, it was genius. Sean just talked to him. And all this time, I was gathering our stuff up, shoving it into our bag, and Sean was keeping Steven calm and distracting him, and lo and behold if the guy didn't let go of the camera, freeing us up to speed-walk the hell out of there, in the direction of the nearest bar. And right then and there, I decided that I absolutely, unequivocally had to spend the rest of my life with this man, this calm, brilliant, clever man who could get us out of danger using not "fuck you" but "how are you?", which, really, you have to admit, is a pretty damn good life skill to have.

(PS: Pictures of Cuenca are here, and pictures of Banos are here. Sadly, there are no pictures of Steven.)