WHO TIED THIS KNOT?

Sophie

I met Sophie my first night at Despedida Lodge in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina. We sat on the back porch outside the lodge’s cozy common area, the landscape’s largesse encouraging deep breaths, not a tree in sight, the austral summer evening stretching past 9 p.m., 10 p.m. Sophie, a former lawyer from Morocco, had a fire in her eyes that softened with each pull on her cigarette and sip of Malbec. She nodded at the bottle of sparkling water from which I’d just twisted the cap.

“It’s not good for your stomach,” she said, her English heavily accented but perfect. She spoke French fluently, as well as Arabic, and who knew what else, and I felt the shame I always feel in the presence of polyglots. I laughed, but she persisted. “It’s not a joke. It’s bad for your stomach, you’ll see.”

It became a daily ritual, sitting on the lodge’s patio under the enveloping sky with Sophie, the Rio Grande tucked somewhere off in the folds of the plain, and large, sea-run brown trout that lay somewhere on a spectrum between freight trains and rocket ships tucked into the folds of the river itself. Sophie talked a bit about fishing, but more often she talked about other things she cared about, and a few things that annoyed the hell out of her. We agreed on many of those annoying things. She reminded me of my mom, though Sophie is only 10 years or so my senior—the quick, sharp wit, iron-clad principles, easily piqued.

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