Adventure 232

SUFFRAGE AND GROWTH
AN ACCIDENTAL ROMANCE
By Paul Fadden
I learned to ski because I needed the
money.
A weird tour through the warped brothels of
Italian immigration had just stripped me of
a life’s savings, direction, and most worldly
possessions. So when I answered a call
promising winter employment high atop
the Chilean Andes, I asked no questions. I
simply said, “Si.”
Raise the stakes; raise the allure, and so it
goes until somebody’s ‘bust’. In my case,
to ‘bust’ meant a fate worse than drowning
by dirty toilet bowl. And I was tip-toeing
the porcelain edge, I knew it. Lumped atop
a kitchen table was a cluster of rumpled
notes, random coins, a wrinkled bank slip
and pocket lint, enough--to the Peso—for
one last roll of the dice.
What followed was a sixty-hour odyssey
aboard two turbulent airplanes and two
asthmatic buses, ending in regurgitation at
the wheel wells of a rusty flatbed driven
by one, Señor Nelson Rubilar Flores—
‘Nelson’ for short.
My broad-faced Chilean patron smiled
widely beneath dancing eyes. He spoke
not a lick of English save a single,
intensely stressed declaration: ‘Eetz-Eem-
Por-Tant.’ Ah Nelson, how right you are.
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