It was the end of summer and time to return to graduate school. I had spent the previous months in a bit of a daze, hopping from plane to plane, from bus to bus, with a backpack full of clothes and a handful of books. I had become obsessed with 19th century Brazilian writer Machado de Assis’ unassumingly brilliant storytelling, which I gobbled down as I made my way awkwardly from Peru down to Chile then to Brazil and back to…