And the Mountains Echoed

pizza with great flourish, making a sweeping motion with his hand like a magician to his audience after the rabbit has materialized from the top hat.
    Scattered around us, among the mussed sheets, are the pictures I have shown Gianna, photos of my trips over the past year and a half. Belfast, Montevideo, Tangier, Marseille, Lima, Tehran. I show her photos of the commune I had joined briefly in Copenhagen, living alongside ripped-T-shirt-and-beanie-hat-wearing Danish beatniks who had built a self-governing community on a former military base.
    Where are you?
Gianna asks.
You are not in the photographs
.
    I like being behind the lens better
, I say. It’s true. I have taken hundreds of pictures, and you won’t find me in any. I always order two sets of prints when I drop off the film. I keep one set, mail the other to Thalia back home.
    Gianna asks how I finance my trips and I explain I pay for them with inheritance money. This is partially true, because the inheritance is Thalia’s, not mine. Unlike Madaline, who for obvious reasons was never mentioned in Andreas’s will, Thalia was. She gave me half her money. I am supposed to be putting myself through university with it.
    Eight … nine … ten
…
    Gianna props herself up on her elbows and leans across the bed, over me, her small breasts brushing my skin. She fetches her pack, lights a cigarette. I’d met her the day before at Piazza diSpagna. I was sitting on the stone steps that connect the square below to the church on the hill. She walked up and said something to me in Italian. She looked like so many of the pretty, seemingly aimless girls I’d seen slinking around Rome’s churches and piazzas. They smoked and talked loudly and laughed a lot. I shook my head and said,
Sorry?
She smiled, went
Ah
, and then, in heavily accented English, said,
Lighter? Cigarette
. I shook my head and told her in my own heavily accented English that I didn’t smoke. She grinned. Her eyes were bright and jumping. The late-morning sun made a nimbus around her diamond-shaped face.
    I doze off briefly and wake up to her poking my ribs.
    La tua ragazza?
she says. She has found the picture of Thalia on the beach, the one I had taken years before with our homemade pinhole camera.
Your girlfriend?
    No
, I say.
    Your sister?
    No
.
    La tua cugina? Your cousin, si?
    I shake my head.
    She studies the photo some more, taking quick drags off her cigarette.
No
, she says sharply, to my surprise, even angrily.
Questa è la tua ragazza! Your girlfriend. I think yes, you are liar!
And then, to my disbelief, she flicks her lighter and sets the picture on fire.
    Fourteen … fifteen … sixteen … seventeen
…
    About midway through our trek back to the bus stop, I realize I’ve lost the photo. I tell them I need to go back. There is no choice, I have to go back. Alfonso, a wiry, tight-lipped
huaso
who is tagging along as our informal Chilean guide, looks questioningly at Gary. Gary is an American. He is the alpha male in our trio. He has dirty-blond hair and acne pits on his cheeks. It’s a face that hints at habitual hard living. Gary is in a foul mood, made worse by hunger,the absence of alcohol, and the nasty rash on his right calf, which he contracted brushing up against a
litre
shrub the day before. I’d met them both at a crowded bar in Santiago, where, after half a dozen rounds of
piscolas
, Alfonso had suggested a hike to the waterfall at Salto del Apoquindo, where his father used to take him when he was a boy. We’d made the hike the next day and had camped out at the waterfall for the night. We’d smoked dope, the water roaring in our ears, a wide-open sky crammed with stars above us. We were trudging back now toward San Carlos de Apoquindo to catch the bus.
    Gary pushes back the wide rim of his Cordoban hat and wipes his brow with a handkerchief.
It’s a three-hour walk back, Markos
, he says.
    Â¿Tres horas, hágale comprende?
Alfonso echoes.
    I know
.
    And you’re still going?
    Yes
.
    Â¿Para una foto?
Alfonso says.
    I nod. I keep quiet because they would not understand. I am not sure I understand it myself.
    You know you’re going to get lost
, Gary says.
    Probably
.
    Then good luck, amigo
, Gary says, offering his hand.
    Es un griego loco
, Alfonso says.
    I laugh. It is not the first time I have been called a crazy Greek. We shake hands. Gary adjusts the straps of his knapsack, and the two of