The Cleaning Crew

by Daniel Arnold

The early austral summer of 1998 found me back in Mendoza, near the crest of the Argentine Andes. In Mendoza the front doors are always immaculate. Dry December dust, made sticky with soot from old cars burning low-octane gas, adheres to the flat-faced buildings, the trees, and even to strollers on the broad sidewalks. But not to the brightly colored doors, which are polished and swing open on oiled hinges.

The door of Pedro’s hostel was no exception. I had just returned from another epic—the mountain, Aconcagua, had not treated me well. As I raised my fist to knock, I wondered how Pedro managed to keep his door so clean with so many people like me coming to pound on it.

After a moment, Pedro appeared and told me that his rooms were full. He looked the same, filling the vertical reach of his doorway, but not the horizontal. He and his brother could have stood there comfortably side by side.

“What about the roof?” I said. “I’ll put my tent up there.”

He raised one thick eyebrow and held it there for a moment, as if the matter required careful thought. “Why not?” he said. “It’s summertime. Anything goes. You know? Five dollars a night. Don’t use too much water. There’s a queue for the baño every damn morning.”

As I piloted the 70 pounds on my back through Pedro’s narrow hallways, doing my best not to scrape the walls with the sharp edges of my load, I could hear words filtering down through the plaster above my head. The words came out fast—too fast for the voice, which was naturally low. The result was a tight, nasal drone. The rooms I passed on either side were filled with possessions, but no people, and in several it looked as if the inhabitants had left mid-inventory—rucksacks open, jackets, sleeping bags, crampons, ice screws, and other bits of nylon, wool, aluminum, and steel scattered over the beds and floor.

Everyone in the house was up on the second floor, in the room stocked with couches and chairs that merged into the public kitchen and overlooked Calle14 de Junio through two large windows. They were all listening to one battered climber who had obviously just come. The conversation had clearly not originated as a public speech, but apparently there had been no attempt to keep it private; the speaker neither acknowledged his growing audience nor lowered his voice.

He was seated in a metal folding chair across from Pedro’s brother, with a vinyl-covered card table between them.

I was relieved to take the pack off my back, to be in Pedro’s dark, cool house out of the city heat, and to have the mountain far away, already dwindling to mental snapshots that could be riffled through from a casual distance....

Daniel Arnold directs the rock climbing program at Stanford and edits the Stanford Alpine Journal. This is his first fiction in print. E-mail: rockrat@stanfordalumni.org