Crazy Good Fortune Out of the Blue - 20*
Note: I’ll be on vacation for a week, so I’m posting this installment today instead of Thursday. My next post will be Tuesday, July 28.
Most of our contact with Central Americans of our own age was at the language school, so this is where we made most of our friends. We stayed in touch with several of the teachers after we stopped attending classes, and while I was taking private lessons with Otto, Richard was studying with Nuria. In addition, we became friends with Romi, the teacher who had fled El Salvador, and a young couple, Ana-Cecilia and her husband Jorje.
Ana-Cecilia taught at the school while Jorje worked in San José. They knew dozens and dozens of jokes that they would take turns telling, acting them out with hilarious facial expressions and gestures, giggling like mad the whole time. Most of the jokes involved off-color stories about newlyweds, the Ticos’ absolute favorite way to indulge in risqué behavior. They also liked to tell campesino jokes, our equivalent of Aggie jokes. One that really tickled us concerned a group of campesinos who stayed out late partying and didn’t get home until the wee hours. Only one of them had a car and he did all the chauffeuring. When the driver dropped off his last friend and he saw that the guy was having a devil of a time getting his key in the lock, the driver yelled, “No! No! Teeth up!” So the guy obligingly drew his lips back and twisted his head around so that his teeth pointed to the sky while he continued to stab ineffectually at the lock. Not to be outdone by any campesino, Ana-Cecilia would occasionally, when we dropped her and Jorje off after a night of dancing, insert her key in the door while we waited in the car, then bare her teeth and jut them upward for our benefit, looking positively demented. Ticos never worried about looking silly. In fact, the sillier the better!
We often went salsa dancing at a place called El Trapiche, which meant “The Mill,” a very popular bar/restaurant that had a terrific salsa band. We would dance until closing time, sucking down beer and bocas, the Costa Rican equivalent of hors d’oeuvres such as chicharrónes (fried pork skins, yum! and not those fakey processed kind, either—these had meat and sometimes even a little hair still on them), fried yucca, and ceviche on crackers.
The owner of the place was also a musician and he performed a campesino act when the salsa band took a break. Trudging up to the stage in a battered straw hat with the brim turned dorkily up and a bandana tied around his neck, he would assume an expression of blank innocence. Then he would play his guitar and serenade the crowd with humorous songs in the campesino dialect, some of which involved, of course, newlyweds. During at least one song every night, he would have his Chihuahua join him on the stage and caterwaul along with him while he sang, a real crowd pleaser.
Unfortunately, we could never decipher the punch lines to the jokes in the songs. We could understand just about everything up until the punch line, but when it came along, everyone in the crowd roared it out with him, obscuring it, while they laughed until they cried. We tried to get our friends to explain them to us, but they were usually chortling so convulsively that they could never manage to gasp them out.
The connection I came to value the most, however, was my friendship with Otto. He was a charming man—funny, playful, kind, and affectionate (like most Central Americans we met)—but he was something of an outcast, which made him a little lonely. He had a wife and child, whom he adored, but he was part Indian, which his wife was not, and apparently his Indian blood gave him a lower status in Costa Rica. Apparently, the lack of indigenous Indians didn’t prevent the otherwise charming Ticos from looking down on native inhabitants from other countries. In addition, he was Guatemalan, which also set him apart. He yearned to go back to his homeland, but because of radical student activities he participated in while he attended college, he told me, he couldn’t return without risking his life.
One day at the university, Otto had been chatting with friends as they all stood around in the doorway of a student publication, smoking cigarettes and enjoying the fine day. When a car came roaring down the street, something about the reckless way in which the car hurtled toward them alerted Otto, and he hit the ground, yanking down one of his friends with him. A gunman in the car opened fire on them as it caromed by, emptying a cartridge from a machine gun and killing everyone who remained standing. Only Otto and his friend escaped unhurt. He realized then that everyone who worked on this publication had been placed on a death list. Curiously, he said, this just set him on an even more fatalistic course. He figured that he would get killed sooner or later, so he didn’t do much to try to save himself. However, someone who cared about him—he never found out who—submitted an application in his name to a Catholic Seminary in Costa Rica. When he received his acceptance, his mother decided that it was a miracle and a sign from God. She begged him to attend the seminary, which she knew was probably the only hope he had of staying alive. To please his mother, whom he adored, he went.
Apparently, he did quite well in Seminary, and then he became a priest. I knew he was married, and quite frankly, he was a flirt as well, so I often wondered if he had remained celibate while in the priesthood. At first, I resolved never to ask him such a nosy question since I had a good friend back in the States who was an Irish ex-priest, and this was a touchy subject that he would never discuss. But one day after we’d had a couple of beers during our tutoring session—which often took place at a downtown bar—I found myself saying, “You know, there’s something I’ve been curious about, but it’s really none of my business and I don’t want you to feel that you have to answer me if you don’t want to, okay?”
This immediately piqued his interest and he sat up straight in his seat, apparently delighted that I would ask him something personal. “Sí, Celeste?” he inquired brightly.
“Well, uh,” I stammered, aghast at my temerity, “were—were you celibate while you were a priest?”
He gave a light-hearted, ingenuous laugh. “Oh, no, Celeste, no!” he declared vehemently, shaking his head in utter amusement at my naiveté. In fact, he went on to tell me, his priesthood evidently served as quite a siren call to a lot of young ladies. “Perhaps,” he told me impishly, “they wanted to feel closer to God.”
Eventually, he fell in love with one of these damsels, Julietta, and they married. Since then, he worked as a teacher and he was earning the equivalent of a Ph.D. in Spanish at the University of Costa Rica. His situation put my homesickness in an entirely different perspective. I could go home any time I wanted. What would it feel like to know that I might get killed or maimed if I ventured back? I really couldn’t imagine. I found it amazing that he could still enjoy life so much, laugh so wholeheartedly, and treat me with such kindness in our tutoring sessions.
The stories that he told me about his youth and family history enthralled me, sounding, as they did, like something out of an Isabel Allende novel. One of his great grandfathers on his father’s side had been a famous bandito. He was born in Cordova, Spain but eventually moved to Mexico, where he became a police captain in charge of confiscating contraband liquor and illegal drugs. He himself, however, was a drunk, but an impressive one: he could drink an entire pitcher of guaro, the stuff that did in the entire Costa Rican army, and still function more or less normally. He married a beautiful Mexican woman, and when he lost his job because of alcoholism, he moved his family to Antigua, Guatemala. A brother of his lived there, a soldier and jefe who would always get him out of trouble, and get into trouble he did. Otto’s grandfather was not only a superb swordsman and deadly shot with a pistol, he felt pathologically jealous about his lovely wife. When he got drunk, he would challenge men to duels whom he imagined were coveting her. He always won, too.
His poor wife could never win his trust. He would go out for the day but always sneak back by the house to see if she had a lover visiting. If the door was closed, this meant that she enjoyed the sinful embrace of some vile snake, but if the door stood open, this meant that she was waiting for the rogue. Then he would beat her, even when he came rushing in only to find her alone. If she was alone, he reasoned, the wretch had clearly escaped only moments before.
One day he came home to find the door partly ajar, neither open nor closed, and this troubled him the most of all. A man dressed in a long black cape—a common style of dress for Guatemalans, then and now, Otto told me— stood near by, watching him. So of course, Otto’s grandfather assumed that he had evil intentions toward his wife. He barked at the man, “What are you doing here?” But the man made no reply. Enraged, he seized the man and shouted again, “What are you doing here at my house?!” When the man still made no answer, Otto’s grandfather whipped out his dagger and stabbed the man. He assaulted him over and over, but eerily, the man didn’t move, didn’t even flinch. The next day, Otto’s grandmother found her husband lying outside the house, himself covered with stab wounds and smelling of sulfur. His brother felt certain that he had fought with the devil.
Incredibly, however, he survived his duel with the devil. His family took him to the hospital where he recovered, only to kill another man shortly after his release for embezzling money from him. At least, he felt convinced that the man had stolen from him. This time, his brother could no longer protect him, and with a bounty on his head, wanted dead or alive, he fled the authorities and managed to elude them for months. Finally, however, the police closed in on him as he hid out in a cane field, sleeping in a small hut made from canes. They could see him through the cracks in the walls and ten policemen pumped bullets into him. When they felt certain he was nothing but pulp, they rushed into the hut, where he rose up like some terrifying, invincible undead and murdered four of them with his dagger before they finally killed him.
It felt oddly incongruous to listen to Otto telling me this story about his bad-ass grandfather in his soft, gentle, mellifluous voice, nattily attired in a nicely pressed short-sleeved shirt and well-fitted polyester pants that hugged his slender, graceful hips. Otto was very particular about his appearance, even shaving during the day at school, Nuria laughingly told me once, clearly finding this to reflect excessive, prissy grooming. At the same time, I knew that Otto lived in a poor and tough section of town, and that he moved freely in some rather frightening circles.
But this was only one story! Otto proved a magical realist treasure trove and I begged him to tell me as many stories about his life as he could. They seemed like stories from another world. So he told me about his great aunt, the evil daughter of his famous bandito grandfather, who followed in her father’s footsteps … .
Above: An aerial shot of Antigua, where Otto grew up.
*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 20 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.
Monday, July 20, 2009