started seeing Cesar the last week I was in Vilcabamba. It was sort of a secret.
It was a secret because Cesar worked at the lodge, and things seemed simpler that way. Cesar was everyone's friend, the kind of guy you trust with your spare keys. The kind of guy you trust with your kids. He's so cool that I never noticed he wasn't handsome, and never bothered to ask about the cloudy red speck in his left eye or the stunning amounts of pot he smoked. In January, Cesar is moving to Brazil to work with street children. He's just like that.
Around this time, a group of English guys came to stay at the lodge. Boff, Truff, and Richard. I adored them. The first day there, they wrote a song in the style of a boy band, introducing themselves. This part I remember:
"I'm Truff. I'm fat. I've got a hairy back."
It was the best week I spent in Ecuador -- afternoons with the English blokes, making each other squeal with pop cultural minutiae, and my evenings wrapped around Cesar. I started writing about it, after the boys had gone off drinking and before Cesar finished his work for the day. Just an hour or so, enough to eke out some vignette. At night, Cesar would sit on my bed, reading what I had written that day. His English is like my Spanish -- limited vocabulary, present-tense verbs -- so I spent a lot of time translating.
Like Cesar says, "Never in my life have I seen this word."
(The word is "wee." As in, "wee hours.")
"It's like small," I say.
He gives me a look. The look says, "Why don't you just say 'small'?"
When he asks about anything I want to keep secret, I just lie.
Like Cesar says, "What does that mean?"
(The sentence is "I had bad gas." As in, why I left my room at 4am the night before.)
"It's hard to translate," I say. "It's just a joke."
He shrugs and continues.
Like most stories I start, I never finished it. I don't know if I will or if I even want to. But this morning was sunny and too quiet, and I missed Cesar and the English boys and the fact that I had never mentioned them on the site seemed totally unacceptable.
So here is the first thing I wrote about any of them. It goes like this:

*********************

At 5pm every day, Cesar waters the snails. Hundreds of snails, thousands of snails -- fat black snails with undersides like a big wad of snot, baby snails the size of a dime. None of us knows exactly why the snails are there, or how Cesar came to water them. All we know is that everyday, Cesar almost forgets. He'll be spraying the herb garden, or planting trees in the nursery, or cleaning the stove of the kitchen and then he'll just stop, as if he has just heard a rustle in the woods, and ask, "What time is it?"
An example: "5:05."
"Hijo de puta!" Whatever he is holding clatters to the floor. "Los caracoles!"
And he is off. If you look toward town, you can see the white of his T-shirt bobbing as he runs over the bridge, like a bouncing ball.
"Cesar is a better man than me," Boff says, lighting another cigarette.
"Cesar is a better man than all of us," Truff says, pouring himself another coffee.
"If you took me," says Boff, "and combined me with, say, Leroy from Fame, do you think I might be as good a man as Cesar?"
"No," we all say at once.
"If you took Leroy from Fame, and combined him with Luke Skywalker ..."
Truff looks at Boff. Wonder sparkles in their eyes.
"... my head would explode," says Truff.
These are the conversations I have with Boff and Truff. They are the English guys staying at the lodge, and while Cesar sweeps the porch, Boff and Truff and I argue over which type of movie monster we'd most like to be. While Cesar cooks lunch, Boff and Truff and I argue about whether fried potatoes with salt should be called "French fries" or "chips." While Cesar washes clothes in the concrete basin, Boff and Truff and I argue over how to rid the bathroom of a hornet's nest.
"We can organize a militia of flies to fight them," says Boff.
"We can light the entire bathroom on fire and hope it burns the hornets away," says Truff.
"We can redirect the hornets' bad behavior with the help of strong father figures," I say.
Boff and Truff consider this for a moment. "Brilliant," they say at the same time. They say this a lot.
Boff and Truff and I are first-world travelers. We have bank accounts and occasional therapists and absolutely no desire to spend our afternoons watering snails. We lie in the hammock. We smoke. We drink coffee. When we run out conversation, Boff says things like this:
"If I were a woman, I'd love to be shagging Cesar." He turns to me, his eyes lit up behind thick square glasses. "You're a woman. You should be shagging Cesar."
"I am shagging Cesar," I say.
Boff looks at Truff. Wonder sparkles in their eyes.
"Brilliant."