Eat, Pray, Love

“I’ve been doing everything but the vitamin E.”
“So now you cured. And now you need a new man. I bring you one, from praying.”
“Well, I’m not praying for a new man, Wayan. The only thing I’m praying for these days is
to have peace with myself.”
Wayan rolled her eyes, like Yeah, right, whatever you claim, you big white weirdo, and
said, “That’s because you have bad memory problem. You don’t remember anymore how
nice is sex. I used to have bad memory problem, too, when I was married. Every time I saw a
handsome man walking down the street, I would forget I had a husband back home.”
She nearly fell over laughing. Then she composed herself and concluded, “Everybody
need sex, Liz.”
At this moment, a great-looking woman came walking into the shop, smiling like a light-
house beam. Tutti leapt up and ran into her arms, shouting, “Armenia! Armenia! Armenia!”
Which, as it turned out, was the woman’s name—not some kind of strange nationalist battle
cry. I introduced myself to Armenia, and she told me she was from Brazil. She was so dynam-
ic, this woman—so Brazilian. She was gorgeous, elegantly dressed, charismatic and enga-
ging and indeterminate in age, just insistently sexy.
Armenia, too, is a friend of Wayan’s, who comes to the shop frequently for lunch and for
various traditional medical and beauty treatments. She sat down and talked with us for about
an hour, joining our gossiping, girlish little circle. She’s in Bali for only another week before
she has to fly off to Africa, or maybe it’s back to Thailand, to take care of her business. This
Armenia woman, it turns out, has had just the teensiest bit of glamorous life. She used to
work for the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees. Back in the 1980s she had
been sent into the El Salvadoran and Nicaraguan jungles during the height of war as a negoti-
ator of peace, using her beauty and charm and wits to get all the generals and rebels to calm
down and listen to reason. (Hello, pretty power!) Now she runs a multinational marketing busi-
ness called Novica, which supports indigenous artists all over the world by selling their
products on the Internet. She speaks about seven or eight languages. She’s got the most fab-
ulous pair of shoes I’ve seen since Rome.
Looking at us both, Wayan said, “Liz—why do you never try to look sexy, like Armenia?
You such a pretty girl, you have good capital of nice face, nice body, nice smile. But always
you wear this same broken T-shirt, same broken jeans. Don’t you want to be sexy, like her?”
“Wayan,” I said, “Armenia is Brazilian. It’s a completely different situation.”
“How is it different?”
“Armenia,” I said, turning to my new friend. “Can you please try to explain to Wayan what
it means to be a Brazilian woman?”