Crazy Good Fortune Out of the Blue - 21*
Witchcraft, Otto told me, was very common in Guatemala, but particularly in Antigua, the city of roses, whose fragrant, heady scent could be detected three kilometers outside of town. His great aunt Dolores became the manager of the family farm after her father died, and she was a wicked, greedy, and cruel woman. She exploited the Indians who worked for her, lending them twenty pesos and then insisting they owed her eighty in repayment: the twenty they asked for, the twenty she gave them, the twenty they owed her, plus twenty pesos’ interest. She worked them like beasts, exacted terrible prices for any perceived wrongs, and when she finally died, everyone except the immediate family rejoiced (and quite possibly, Otto surmised, most of the family felt more than a little relieved, too). She was widely considered to have made a pact with the Devil.
During the wake, three enormous black dogs no one had ever seen before showed up and stole into the house where the body was laid out. They seized it and tried to drag it away, but the family fought with them and finally managed to chase them out of the house. Once everything settled back down, the body resting again in its proper place, the mourners found that her tongue was now sticking out of her mouth and it was the color of soot.
But that wasn’t the only time witchcraft made an appearance in Otto’s family history. His grandmother, Josefa, experienced strange circumstances surrounding her death, too. Evidently, her husband kept a slew of lovers scattered about who were poisonously jealous of her. They would send her threatening letters, telling her that they wanted to kill her or that they were casting spells against her. Not surprisingly, Josefa found herself alone a lot since her husband pursued so much company elsewhere and her sole friend was a stable hand at her husband’s farm named Favio. Favio would often come by to visit and drink a cup of hot coffee with Josefa while they sat next to the stove. Sadly, Favio was killed when a horse kicked him in the head while he was cleaning out the stall. Otto’s grandfather knew that Favio was a friend of his wife’s, but he never told her that he had died.
One rainy day, Favio showed up, his cape dripping, and Josefa invited him in, delighted to see her friend after a few weeks’ absence. He wouldn’t speak, however. She told him to sit down by the stove in his usual seat, which he did, but again, he wouldn’t say a word, not even when she asked him if he’d like some coffee. So she brought him a cup anyway. He wouldn’t take it. In fact, he stood up then and walked out onto the terrace. When Josefa followed him outside, she was dumbfounded to find that he had simply vanished.
When she came back into the house, she felt ill. That night, she experienced a high fever and other symptoms. Her breasts started producing milk, but it wasn’t exactly milk, according to Otto. It was some peculiar substance that no one could identify. Then her blood began to ooze out through her pores, a malady eerily similar to some of the modern hemorrhagic fevers, yet they weren’t known to exist at this time. Oddly enough, the same substance that leaked from her breasts was also detected in her blood. Josefa died four months later with no medical explanation offered for her death. The locals felt certain that it was witchcraft that led to her demise.
After his wife’s death, Otto’s grandfather became even more degenerate, so one by one, all the children saved up enough money and left home, moving to Guatemala City. Otto’s father was the youngest, and he remained at home the longest. Every single day, he prayed for a way to escape and join his brothers in Guatemala City.
One night, when he was about sixteen, he was returning home late from a card game. He was groping along in a thick, smothering fog, concerned about finding his way, when he bumped smack dab into something in the middle of the road. It turned out to be a stack of several bolts of expensive cloth—in the middle of the street in the middle of the night! He searched for a vendor, called out into the night, but found no one. So he took the cloth home. For the next fifteen days, he inquired everywhere in an effort to find the owner for these goods. In fact, he even obtained a megaphone and went around the entire city, advertising for the person to whom these bolts of cloth belonged. No one ever came forward. When no one claimed it, he sold it, and used the money to join his siblings in Guatemala City.
I have to say, these are the kinds of details that I adore in this type of story. Bolts of cloth! In the middle of the road in the middle of the night! What could possibly be more Arabian Nights? Not gold, not jewels, not money, but bolts of cloth. The mundane practicality of it all, centered so squarely in the middle of sorcery and bewitchment, adds such a homey dimension. It’s like discovering a magic roll of toilet paper or an enchanted electrical socket.
But the good stuff doesn’t stop there. Otto’s father eventually married and started a family, then took a job in a small town on the coast of Guatemala. There they lived in an enormous old house with a belfry that actually had bats living in it. Otto’s father didn’t make all that much money, but they were able to buy the house for a pittance because the former occupant had been murdered by a lover there and it was reputedly haunted. The children grew up listening to ghostly footsteps in the corridor at night, and sometimes the bats would start to shriek in the most hair-raising, bone-tingling way, as if disturbed by an unseen but tangible presence.
One summer, every one of the children became infected with malaria. They all became gravely ill, and Otto’s mother began to fear that they wouldn’t pull through. Her husband had gone away on business and she was at home alone with the children. Every night, she struggled to stay awake in order to keep an eye on them, afraid that they would slip away from her before morning.
Since it was a big house, all of the children had their own room, and Otto’s mother positioned herself in a chair in the hallway so that she could be available for any of them should they need her. One night as she kept her exhausted vigil, she suddenly felt extraordinarily heavy. She felt paralyzed, in fact. Then she watched in amazement as a woman dressed all in white came floating up the stairs. Otto’s mother struggled to speak to her but found she couldn’t manage to speak a word. When the lady in white entered the first child’s room, she fought like mad to regain her strength and follow the woman, but she couldn’t. She could only sit helplessly in her chair while the lady drifted into every child’s room like lazy, snaking fox fire, one after another. When she had visited the last room, she glided back down the stairs and vanished.
After that, Otto’s mother found that she could move again, so she dashed into the nearest room, fearing the worst. To her amazement, she found that this child’s fever had broken. In fact, all of the children’s fevers had disappeared. The next day, it was as if they had never been sick at all.
“My mother felt convinced that it was an angel,” Otto told me, as I sat in such rapt attention that I almost felt silly.
“What do you think?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “Pues, I don’t really know. I don’t remember it. But I do know that none of us have ever experienced a relapse. And for malaria, that is very rare.”
Rare indeed! And of course, perhaps it wasn’t malaria, although I figure the locals would probably know. Whatever they had, they had been gravely ill, only to recover all at the exact same time after a visitation. I must confess, ghosts and spirits fascinate me, as I’ve glimpsed one myself. It was an interesting sighting and not at all what I would have expected, actually.
It happened while I was hanging out with my boyfriend Christopher, whom I had met the summer after my freshman year in college. He was working as a veterinarian’s assistant and living in his parents’ former house in one of the older parts of Kansas City. One evening, we were sitting on the sofa in his living room, talking. The living room opened into a dining room, which at the time, was darkened. As we chatted, I noticed someone standing in the dining room. The weird thing was, I didn’t think “ghost.” She didn’t really look like a ghost. She looked like a very pale young woman with extremely blond hair all dressed in white standing there apparently quite real and solid, opaque and three-dimensional. She was pretty, seemed melancholy, and she looked straight at me. As I caught my breath at her gaze, she began to fade. First her feet disappeared, then her legs, then her torso, and then she was gone. It was as if she had been erased from the bottom up.
Oddly enough, I still wasn’t thinking “ghost.” Now I was thinking: pale young woman with blond hair and old-fashioned white dress who just performed a disappearing act. I stuttered to Chris, “Uh, I think there’s someone in your living room.”
He gave me a quizzical look. “You must have seen one of the dogs.”
I shook my head vehemently. “Definitely not one of the dogs.”
Then he became more interested. “Oh really? What did the person look like?”
When I described her, he surprised me by responding, “Oh, Laura! You just saw Laura!”
“Who’s Laura?”
“The resident ghost.” Then he proceeded to call up his parents and exclaim to them, “Guess what? Celeste just saw Laura!”
According to him, his mother replied, “Well, no kidding! I was wondering when she was going to make an appearance. She usually does this time of year.”
Unfortunately, this was all the information I got about Laura. No one seemed to know anything else. But it did make me nervous about being alone anywhere in the house and I would beg Chris to stand sentry outside the bathroom whenever I used it so that he wouldn’t be too far away just in case. Just in case of what, I didn’t know, but I was only eighteen and a little skittish, with a fertile imagination. I didn’t need to watch Poltergeist in order to envision the heads of horrifically evil, warty, oozing, mucus-blood-and-pus-caked, grotty-toothed demons from hell erupting from the bathroom ceiling in an exploding shower of sheet rock.
So, I wasn’t going to dismiss any of Otto’s stories out of hand. Once you’ve personally seen a ghost (or been chased down an interstate by a bowl-headed monster in a Jeep Cherokee), it makes it a lot easier to believe that all kinds of strange things can happen, any time, any place.
Which brings up my visit to Imigración to get my tourist visa renewed (temporary resident visas were extremely difficult to acquire). This turned out to be an epic Kafkaesque adventure of Byzantine proportions, a down-and-dirty descent into the Costa Rican bureaucracy, where fifty percent of the country worked. Somehow I didn’t think ahead of time about the fact that if you employ that many people, you’ll have to come up with lots of things for them to do.
*Intro:
At the end of 1982, both Richard and I had been out of work for a year, despite constant looking, and the best we had been able to come up with was scrounging for odd jobs. It was an economic climate much like the one we’re in now, and we were feeling both dejected and panicked about what the future might hold for us. We certainly could never have imagined what happened next: a dream job in a dream country for a dream boss.
This is Chapter 21 of the memoir I wrote about the year-and-a-half that Richard and I spent living in Costa Rica. It was quite the adventure, living with a an eccentric and flamboyant heiress** from Dallas, her elegant and erudite husband who wrote Westerns, and their handsome, bad boy son, whom Richard used to babysit. Oh, yeah, and next door resided the safe house for Eden Pastora, aka “Commander Zero,” leader of the Contras who were waging a civil war with the Sandanistas in Nicaragua at that time.
This was a particularly golden era in Costa Rica’s history, before it became “discovered,” even before the introduction of television there, really (it started coming in during the time we lived there). It was wild and exotic and magical and amazing.
So once a week, I’ll be excerpting a chapter from Crazy Good Fortune Out of the Blue until I’ve told the whole tale. I hope you enjoy these stories!
**Jane, sadly, passed away not long ago, but she left a legacy as colorful as she was. In 1984, she commissioned one of the largest environmental sculptures in the Western Hemisphere, a set of standing stones in Arlington, Texas that were designed and built by sculptor Norm Hines. Caelum Moor has been a source of enormous controversy over the years, which I’ll write about one of these days. In the meantime, feel free to Google “Caelum Moor” and see what turns up. It’s fascinating.
Friday, July 31, 2009