“You know,” he says over his shoulder. “You’re different from when you first came.”
I glance down at myself. I know, from looking in the mirror in the apartment bathroom, that my hair is streaked blonder from the sun. My shorts hang on my hips, likely because I’m not eating every day at Sant Ambroeus, the café in the Sotheby’s building, and because I’ve been running and hiking instead of just briskly walking to work. Gabriel has slowed, so that we are shoulder to shoulder, and he sees me doing a self-inventory. “Not like that,” he says. “In here.” He puts his hand over his heart.
He starts walking again, and I fall into pace with him. “You came here like every other tourist. Wound up supertight, with your checklist, to take a picture of a tortoise and a sea lion and a booby and put them on Instagram.”
“I didn’t have a list,” I argue.
He raises a brow. “Didn’t you?”
Maybe not literally, but sure, there were things I had wanted to do on Isabela. Touristy things, because what’s the point of crossing off something on your bucket list if—
Shit. I did have a list.
“Visitors come here saying they want to see Galápagos, but they don’t, not really. They want to see what they can already see in guidebooks or on the internet. The real Isabela is made up of stuff most people don’t care about. Like the feria, and how trading a pair of rubber wading boots can get you a meal of fresh lobster. Or how people who live here mark a path—not with a wooden sign, but with a lava rock set in the notch of a tree. Or what dinner tastes like, when you’ve grown it yourself.” He glances at me. “Tourists come with an itinerary. Locals just … ?live.”
“Gabriel Fernandez,” I say. “Was that a compliment?”
He laughs. “This is your birthday present,” he admits.
“You must have seen a lot of ugly Americans,” I say. “Not physically ugly. I mean the spoiled, entitled kind.”
“Not too many. There were way more turistas who came here and saw what nature looks like when it’s wild, when you haven’t contained it and confined it into twelve square city blocks or an exhibit at a zoo, and they were just … ?humbled. You could see the gears turning: How do we make sure these beautiful things are here for other people to see? How can I keep my corner of the planet alive, to help? The best part of being a tour guide was planting a little seed in someone’s mind, and knowing you wouldn’t be there to see it, but that it would grow and grow.”
Given how prickly he’d been about me being a tourist when we first met and the fact that he isn’t a tour guide any longer, I wonder what changed.
My nose prickles—the first clue that we have reached the fumaroles. The ground bleaches from black to white and yellow. All I can smell is sulfur. Instead of the melted ice cream whirls of cooled lava, there are endless small light rocks that shift under my sneakers with a light, tinkling noise, and steam belching from thermal vents.
“There,” Gabriel says, pointing to a spot where lime-green smoke oozes out of a pore in the earth.
I am six feet away from an active volcano.
“Why did you stop?” I ask.
He turns to me. “Because swimming in magma is overrated.”
“No,” I say. “Why did you stop being a tour guide?”
He doesn’t answer, and I assume that he is going to ignore me, like he has before. But maybe there is something about the primeval landscape and our proximity to the beating heart of the planet, because Gabriel sinks down to the jaundiced ground, and starts from the beginning.
“We were taking out a scuba tour to Gordon Rocks,” Gabriel says, as I settle across from him, our knees nearly touching. “It was a live-aboard boat, with twelve divers. It was a gig we’d done hundreds of times. My father and I went out early to check the conditions, because that’s what you do. I was the one who went into the water, while he stayed in the boat. There was a slight current near the surface, no big deal.”
He looks at me. “Gordon Rocks, it’s a cliff under the water, where just a little triangle of rock peeks out above the surface. We went back to the clients’ boat and we did the safety briefing. Because there were so many divers, we took two pangas. Everyone was given the same instructions for deboarding: get down twenty feet as quickly as possible, and bear to the right. But as soon as we were under the water it was clear that conditions weren’t what I’d thought they were. The current was swift, and it was deep.”