Crazy Good Fortune Out of the Blue - 13*
One evening Richard and I were quietly reading novels in our little study when a bizarre, deafening sound started up without warning. It’s difficult to describe this sound, but it had a percussive, rocking quality, like two hollow, wooden sticks knocking together in a rapid rhythm, amplified by some heavy metal band’s sound system. We bolted to our feet, and it died down.
“What was that?” I exclaimed.
“Hell if I know!” Richard replied. “Seems to have stopped, though.”
As soon as these words escaped his lips, the sound started up again, even louder and more insistent than before.
“Jesus!” he sputtered. “I’m going to go ask someone.”
He headed out of the room and I went after him, not sure I wanted to be left alone in the company of whatever this was. The first person we bumped into upstairs was Don Marcos as he was gravely making his rounds, his big billy club of a flashlight in his hand.
“Don Marcos, qué es ese sonido?” Richard asked him.
“Ah,” declared Don Marcos, nodding his head sagely. “Son los sapos, señor.” Toads??? “Los sapos llaman la lluvia.”
The toads were calling the rain? Richard asked him to repeat what he just said. We must have misunderstood.
“Sí, señor,” he insisted. “Los sapos llaman la lluvia.” He raised his arms and cast his eyes heavenward, looking slightly spooky and crazed, so we thanked him and crept back to the study where we tried to read over the din.
“Is it getting to be rainy season?” I asked.
Richard shook his head. “Not for another month, at least,” he told me. “It’s been a dry year, too.”
Actually, the superstition that the toads called the rain thrilled me. It was just the kind of poetic, exotic belief that I missed in my own culture where everything has to be so scientific and mundane, readily explained by Laws of Thermodynamics, Newtonian Physics, and gene composition—controlled variables, vectors, neurotransmitters, and nucleotides. As much as I genuinely enjoy science, I yearned for more mythology in my life. I wanted to someone to tell me, “Yes, the earth stays aloft in the heavens because it’s on the back of a giant turtle.” Or, “Thunder is caused by weird little men with long beards playing nine pins.” After a while, I even began to enjoy the toads’ cry. It sounded like some crazy percussion section in the All Star Toad Band.
We finally went to bed with the toads’ lullaby ringing in our ears. It gave me strange dreams about odd-looking people moving about dark, nighttime meadows, with lights that shot out of their fingertips and propelled them up into the sky. When we awoke the next morning, rain was absolutely pouring down.
We felt so cozy in our warm bed, listening to the drumming of the raindrops while the fresh, green scent of the downpour stole into the room from the outside. Birds called, piercing the liquid veil, but everything else remained silent, soaking it up.
I love the rain. Growing up in the Midwest, I was treated to some spectacular storms, and the minute it started raining, I would pull on my black galoshes with the clips (that I could never figure out how to get off again, much to my frustration), wiggle into my yellow rain slicker, and dash outside like a nutty turkey to practically drown while I raised my face to the sky. I would skip up and down the gutters, swollen with rainwater that rushed like mad down our hill, peppered with the biggest, fattest, raindrop bubbles I’ve ever seen. Sometimes it rained so hard I couldn’t lift my arm to wipe my eyes and this just delighted me even more.
But hey—how ‘bout them toads, huh?
Horatio joined us for breakfast that morning, far less impressed with these amphibians than I was.
“Oh, those toads just drive me crazy,” he lamented. “They kept me up all night! I suggested to Don Marcos that he shoot the stupid creatures,” he told us in his soothing, cadenced drawl, “but he wouldn’t have a thing to do with it.”
Well, not if he ever wanted it to rain again, he wouldn’t!
By now, I was no longer taking classes at the language school, so I was writing every morning, working on a novel about a brilliant school nerd picked on by her classmates who grew up to engineer a virus that would kill the entire human race. She justified her activities with the belief that superior, all-knowing aliens were programming her to do this for the good of the planet. Sadly, this little gem never got published, but at least I can rest easy knowing that I didn’t give any wackos any bright ideas.
At any rate, I was writing every morning but then I pretty much had my afternoons to do whatever I wanted. Ana and Lijia cleaned my room and did most of my laundry. They cooked most of my meals. They did the shopping. I had no bills to pay, no cars to wash, no errands to run. It was kind of unsettling, actually. By now, of course, I had come to realize that the servants who worked here were more than neighbors who happened to live here. At first, Richard and I felt awkward about being waited on and I tried to help them by cleaning up our rooms and cooking most of Richard’s and my meals. But I found out later that rather than finding this helpful, they felt rejected and hurt. My efforts implied that they weren’t doing a good job and they took pride in their work. So, little by little I had succumbed to being pampered and I now had so much free time it felt a little scary. So one of the things I did was to indulge in my hobby of making found-object art.
This hobby had started after Richard and I moved to northern California. I come from an arty-type family (one of my sisters is a professional artist, a painter, and my other sister is a classical musician), and I’d taken art classes my whole life. Richard and I loved to take long hikes into the hills and mountains surrounding our land in California, and the area we lived in was riddled with old mining camps from the early part of the century. Many of these homesteads were abandoned and had been for decades. We found old cars from the forties and fifties sliding down bluffs inch by inch and lying at the bottom of ravines, and we marveled at the fact that they had ever managed to get to where they got to in the first place. We found old rusted car seat springs, and metal Coca-cola signs, falling apart stoves, and wonderfully oxidized pieces of tin roofing.
We hauled everything we could carry back to our land. This, unfortunately, pretty much precluded the cool old cars, although we did manage to bring back a car hood that might have worn a permanent dent in the top of Richard’s head. Then I assembled these pieces into wall hangings. Along with the found metal, I included pieces of stained glass (another hobby), rocks, bones, construction hardware, found wood, etc.
At first, I expected nothing but ridicule. After all, this type of thing was certainly not everyone’s cup of tea. In fact, the first time I showed a piece at a county art fair (a set of car seat springs that I had hung on a stand: in the center of each spring I had wired chunks of white quartz and then I tied a fringe of yarn and stained glass pieces along the bottom), I decided to station myself a short distance from my booth so that I could get people’s honest reactions. I achieved my goal when a nicely dressed middle-aged woman walked up to it, her thirteen-year-old son in tow. She came to an abrupt halt. Her eyes widened. Her lips parted an astonished “O.”
“Why, that’s nothing but a set of old car seat springs!” she blurted indignantly.
Her son rolled his eyes, clearly mortified to be in the company of such a clueless Philistine. “It’s art, Mother,” he snapped.
I kept making these things, though, for reasons unknown even to me. They just seem to make me feel at peace when I do them. This feeling might actually be closely related to some form of obsessive-compulsive disorder, as it comes from putting items in just the right place according to some arbitrary inner criteria that I can’t begin to define. But the weird thing is, I started running into other people who liked these odd little chimeras. In fact, just last summer, Richard and I remodeled our bathroom and we hired a plumber to come install the new plumbing. The guy came out, a lean, blond-haired guy about my age, and took care of the job. As I was writing him a check, he cleared his throat, hesitated, then said, “You know, this might sound weird, but was there ever a set of car seat springs hanging on the side of this house?”
“Why yes,” I told him. “In fact, it’s still here.” Good memory, I thought. The last time he was out here must have been seventeen years ago. I ushered him out to the back of the house, where I had hung my oeuvre, and he drank it in with a happy expression.
“Did you do this?” he asked.
I laughed. “I’m afraid so.”
“I love this piece!” he exclaimed. “In fact, it inspired me!” He went on to describe a wagon wheel he had at home that he’d gone back and attached all sorts of things to, then hung in his house. It sounded quite cool, actually.
As it turned out, Costa Rica didn’t have abandoned mining claims and homesteads, but they didn’t have formal dumps, either. Everyone just took their old unwanted stuff and discarded it in a pile on the side of the road. By some sort of informal cooperative understanding, the piles existed only in certain designated places. And much to my satisfaction, I found a lot of pieces of rusted metal in these heaps of debris.
Of course, the dubious sanitary wisdom in acquiring pieces of rusted metal in the tropics that had been in contact with organic matter for who-knew-how-long did cross my mind. But I took them home anyway and hosed them off outside before handling them much, to the confounded bemusement of the Costa Rican staff. Lijia, an extremely droll person, warned Richard that he needed to be careful when he got old. In Spanish, the word for “old man” and “old thing” are the same: “viejo.” “You get too old,” she told him, her face creased in mock concern, “Celeste might just put you up on the wall.” She nodded for emphasis, wouldn’t crack a smile. Richard assured her he would remain vigilant.
I pursued two other activities as well. I had weekly tutoring sessions with my ex-professor Otto so that I could continue to improve my Spanish, and Jane made arrangements for me to get massages from a British massage therapist who practiced in San José. The physical therapy I’d received for my back pain (getting strapped into a device that I assume was based on the old torture chamber mainstay, the rack, and pulled and stretched by a sweet-voiced, gentle young woman with hands like butterflies) didn’t seem to help all that much, and the Keltons were nothing if not generous, caring people.
“They call him the Beast from Britain,” she told me a tad ominously, “and not everyone likes his approach. But it might be worth a try. A lot of people swear by him.”
She wouldn’t really elaborate on why he was known as the Beast from Britain, but I was willing to try just about anything to make my back feel better. So she set up an appointment for me to have a massage from him. At least this time I had the sense not to tell the receptionist that I had a high-ranking political appointment.
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Above: A recent found object creation, Portrait of a Friend; the car seat springs don’t photograph so well. You’d kind of have to be there. Here. Wherever.
*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 13 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.
Thursday, May 28, 2009