I got to Ezeiza without any destination in mind. It didn’t matter as long as it was somewhere far away. I found a flight that left in an hour for Miami and there were still some seats available. I had a visa to get into the United States; we’d gotten it for me after getting married but before Federico was born. Mariano had a convention for work near San Francisco, a few days, less than a week, and I went with him. I never used it again. I wonder now if that visa, which I’d used for only three days, hadn’t been obtained—in one of those twists of fate we only see after the fact—so that the day I left I could take that plane to Miami and nowhere else, to be seated three rows behind Robert and nowhere else.
I was in a state of shock. That dazed woman going through the motions was the person I’d now become. Taking the steps necessary to purchase the ticket and complete check-in, get as far away from her son as possible, as quickly as possible. Without thinking, without crying. Without doing anything besides what it took to leave before she had time to regret it.
In the line to check my bags, I realized I should’ve picked a different destination. With just a quick look around I saw a few familiar faces. I couldn’t quite place them, I didn’t know their names, but they were faces I’d seen before, around the neighborhood or at school. I put on my sunglasses, lowered my head, kept my eyes fixed on my suitcase. Even if I didn’t know who they were, they’d surely know who I was: the woman who crossed the train tracks when the barrier was down and killed a little boy. A woman who would’ve gone completely unnoticed if she hadn’t become a sad celebrity after that incident. A horrible woman, as the pharmacist in Temperley said to me a few days before I started writing this text. A woman damaged, as Robert said. It was too late to change the destination now, but as soon as I got to Miami, I’d find a cheap flight to any other city in the United States, one I’d never even heard of if possible, where it would be harder to run into anyone who knew me. A city that by chance ended up being Boston.
I met Robert on the plane after he changed seats with the woman next to me. A little luck changed my fate. If I’d never met him, I might have just let myself die as soon as I reached Miami, or whatever unknown city I ended up in. Not suicide, by just letting my life slip away, little by little, like the thread of smoke from a cigarette as it turns to ash, without doing anything to stop it. But there, on that plane, was Robert, three rows in front of me, in the emergency exit row. The woman next to me was traveling with her son, who was seated somewhere else. She complained to the flight attendant, who told the woman to wait, to be patient, that they’d try to sort it out once all the passengers had boarded the plane. But the woman would not be patient and instead tried to solve the problem herself by speaking directly to the person seated beside her son, but the man said no, that he could only sit in an aisle seat, he didn’t want to swap it for a middle seat. I don’t know why she didn’t ask me. Maybe she didn’t want her son to lose the window seat he’d been assigned. Maybe it was just the look on my face that intimidated her. Or maybe she did ask me but I didn’t hear her. I had my eyes fixed on the seatback in front of me, only seeing things around me out of the corner of my eye, like a horse with blinkers on so it doesn’t get spooked. But even if I wasn’t paying much attention, I understood what was happening. The woman was going up and down the aisle, blocking people’s way as they tried to board. The flight attendant asked her several times to sit and wait, but the woman would just step out of the way for a minute and then wander back into the aisle. Until Robert, who was six feet, six inches tall, gave his seat—at the bulkhead, the most comfortable seat in economy, which he’d surely booked in advance—to the passenger seated beside the boy. So the mother moved into the man’s seat and Robert came to sit in the middle seat beside me.
I had to stand up so he could get by. He apologized in English and in Spanish as he stuffed his large body into that small space that was now his spot on the plane. I caught a whiff of a cologne that I recognized from somewhere, but it was not a cologne Mariano had ever used, it was something sweeter and softer than the ones worn by the person who had been my husband until that morning, just a few hours prior. I searched my memory for that smell but I couldn’t place it. The feeling it produced in me was as if my father had worn it. Except my father had never worn cologne. Maybe it was an aftershave. Today I think it might have been the same cologne Maplethorpe wore; I’m not sure, all I know is that, in the state I was in, that smell made me feel like I could trust him. In a moment in which no other auditory, visual, or tactile sensation could reach me, Robert’s cologne managed to breach the shield I’d put up. It told me that this man now sitting beside me wore the same cologne as someone I trusted. The plane took off and there was no window near enough for me to take one last glimpse of this place I knew I wouldn’t be seeing again for a long time. I’ll never see this place again, I thought. But I was wrong, because here I am.
I didn’t cry on the flight, but I shook the whole way. From takeoff to landing, I trembled from head to toe. Sometimes it was a gentle quiver, almost imperceptible. Sometimes it was a violent jolting. The passenger in front of me even turned around to complain that I’d kicked his seat. Robert gave me a wink to let me know he was on my side and not the side of the man who was annoyed by my movements. During dinner service I didn’t even open my tray table and firmly shook my head at everything the flight attendant offered. “Maybe a glass of wine would help settle your nerves. Un poco de vino?” Robert said soothingly, in an accent that sounded British to my ears. I smiled. I don’t know where I found the strength to smile at him. He was a warm man, trustworthy, someone who’d forgone personal comfort so that a woman he didn’t know could travel beside her son. And who wore a cologne that somehow managed to penetrate the wall I’d built around myself so that nothing—no feeling, sensation, thought—could get through to me and make me feel pain, sadness, love, devastation, or anything. But that cologne —although I wasn’t able to connect it to any specific person—and the feelings it evoked could. I smiled but I didn’t answer. “Do you have a fear of flying?” he asked me. “No,” I answered. Without any further explanation, just no, and I kept on trembling. “If you need anything, just let me know,” he said, and he didn’t speak to me again for the rest of the flight.
But he was forced to speak to me when we landed and I refused to stand up. Almost all the passengers had already gotten off the plane and I was still sitting there, unable to move. He waited, patiently, until he must have concluded that if he didn’t ask me to get up, he’d be stuck there forever. So I finally stood up, collected my purse, and walked toward the exit, without saying anything, without smiling. He trailed behind me. And a little while after walking off the plane and down the passenger ramp, on one of those long hallways leading who knows where, I fainted. I don’t know exactly what happened after that, but I came to in a room that looked like an infirmary. Robert was standing beside the doctor who was examining me. He said that my blood pressure had dropped, that it was no big deal, that everything was fine. The doctor nodded, as if Robert had repeated her diagnosis word for word. But once I’d recovered, we were shown into a nearby office where some immigration agents started asking questions, most of which I was unable to answer. The most important one: the address of the place I’d be staying during my visit to the United States. The third time they asked the question without my answering, Robert answered for me: “She’s going to stay at my house, in Boston, as my guest.” Then they asked him several questions too quickly and in too strong of an accent for me to follow. I caught some of his answers: his name, Robert Lohan, that he was a school principal, that he didn’t have a family, that he lived in Boston. They took our passports and left. We waited for a long time. When they came back they started saying things to Robert that I didn’t understand, but every once in a while I thought I caught the word Vietnam. It was the only time during the exhaustive interrogation that I thought I perceived a certain tension in Robert’s voice. Finally, they let us go. We walked silently down another one of those endless airport hallways. And once we were far enough away from the place we’d been interrogated, Robert asked me to sit for a moment and then he sat down beside me. He spoke to me in Spanish, a stumbling and stuttering Spanish that left out many words and mispronounced all the rest. Trying to speak my language was his way of showing that he wanted to help: “I don’t know who you are, I don’t know why you’re shaking so much, but if you don’t have anywhere to go, you can come to my house. I live in Boston, and I have a room I rent to students sometimes. It’s empty now and you can use it until you stop shaking and you figure out where you want to go.” “I don’t know where I want to go,” I said. “I can see that, that’s why I’m offering to let you come to my house and take some time to think about it.” He smiled at me. I smiled back. What else could I do.
I let myself be swept along. By that time, Robert had missed his connection to Boston, so we went to book my ticket and to rebook his for the same flight. “What’s your name? Blanche DuBois?” he said to me as we were waiting. “Sorry, you said it in the infirmary, but you seem like you could be a Blanche.” I just stared. “Blanche DuBois,” he said again. I didn’t understand. “I’ve always relied on the kindness of strangers,” he said. I still didn’t get it. “That’s what Blanche DuBois says. Sorry, it’s a Tennessee Williams character. You remind me of her.” “It’s true, you’re being very kind, yes,” I said, and I thought that maybe it had been his kindness and not his cologne that had penetrated the shield I’d put up around myself. “You’re very kind,” I said again. “I’m not talking about me, I’m talking about you,” he said. “Every time I read or see A Streetcar Named Desire in the theater, when Blanche says those lines, I think that a person who has to rely on the kindness of strangers must be all alone in the world. Even if they’re surrounded by people. If someone has to rely on the kindness of strangers, it’s because the people around them aren’t people they can count on.” His words described me so perfectly that I shuddered. I kept the conversation going as I attempted to control my shaking: “Like the woman you gave your seat to on the plane, for example,” I said. But Robert wouldn’t let me change the subject. “You . . . María? Your name’s María?” “María,” I confirmed. “Do you rely on the kindness of strangers because you don’t have anyone you can count on? I don’t know anything about your past, your childhood, your family, anything up to the moment we met on the plane, but when I saw you yesterday, and today, here, I thought, that woman seems utterly alone.” I started to cry. Robert handed me his handkerchief, he held it out and waited for me to decide if I would accept it or not. And then he let me cry. Without asking, without saying any words of consolation. Just cry. The situation was highly unusual: I’d left my country, abandoned my son, gotten on the first available plane, and I now found myself crying beside a man who didn’t know me or understand the reasons for my tears but who was a kind stranger I could rely on. Not only that, I was going to Boston, a city totally foreign to me, with a man I knew nothing about besides his name and his cologne, because he seemed kind and he offered to rent me a room in his house. Robert Lohan, someone who could’ve been a serial killer instead of a kind stranger to my Blanche DuBois.
But what could a serial killer do to me that would be worse than what I’d done to myself by abandoning my son? 
Born in Buenos Aires in 1960, Claudia Piñeiro is a best-selling author, known internationally for her crime novels. She has won numerous national and international prizes, including the Pepe Carvalho Prize, the LiBeraturpreis for Elena Knows, and the prestigious Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize for Las grietas de Jara (A Crack in the Wall). She is the third most translated Argentinian author, after Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar. The English translation of Elena Knows (Charco) was shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize.
Frances Riddle has translated numerous Spanish-language authors including Isabel Allende, Leila Guerriero, and Sara Gallardo. Her translation of Claudia Piñeiro’s Elena Knows was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2022 and her translation of Theatre of War by Andrea Jeftanovic was granted an English PEN Award in 2020. Her work has appeared in journals such as Granta, Electric Literature, and Southwest Review, among others. Originally from Houston, Texas, she lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
