Crazy Good Fortune Out of the Blue - 29*
A few weeks after we had all returned to Escazú from Kackie’s funeral, Jane decided that the perfect Christmas present for Luis, Lijia, Rosa and Catia would be to send them on an all-expense-paid vacation to Disneyworld in Florida. None of them had never been to the United States, and Rosa and Catia who were eight and nine, respectively—sweet girls with lispy whispers and huge, heart-melting brown eyes—found the idea absolutely thrilling. Jane knew that they would need visas in order to enter the country, so she set Richard about the task of procuring them. He and Luis filled out all the copious paperwork, all of which was in English, and submitted the forms, surprised but not daunted when they came back refused.
“Oh, it’s just because they’re from Central America,” Jane opined. “The U.S. Embassy probably turns them all down just as a matter of course. Horace and I’ll write them a letter of recommendation and even put down a bond for their return if they want.” And they did. Still no dice. Oh—unless Luis and Lijia wanted to go to Disneyworld by themselves and leave the children behind. This time, even Jane was nonplused.
“Huh,” she grumbled, brows wrinkled. “They must be afraid that they won’t come back. You and Luis should go down to the Embassy and talk to them, explain their situation.”
Their situation was a very cushy one indeed. As usual, the Keltons were generous. Luis and his family lived in a nice house for free and Luis had the full use of a jeep. Jane and Horace paid for all the gas, which was expensive, lavished the entire family with clothes and other gifts, provided them with a food allowance, and took care of all their medical bills. Luis was highly regarded among the locals of Escazú, considered a mover and shaker, a man of power and influence. Moving to the U.S. would make no socioeconomic sense for them whatsoever. There, Luis would be considered neither important nor powerful, and his cost of living would skyrocket while his earning potential would plummet. Not only that, his parents, who had both died, were buried in his hometown of Cartago. Traditional Costa Ricans felt very strongly that one should remain in the country where one’s parents were buried. In fact, to leave this beautiful, bountiful, peaceful country would have been inconceivable to Luis.
Richard honestly felt that if he could just explain the situation to whomever he and Luis met with at the Embassy, they could straighten everything out. He couldn’t imagine that the United States would want to prevent this nice family from enjoying the vacation of a lifetime. Luis got incredibly dressed up for this meeting, and Richard even put on a suit. They left hopeful.
They came back furious.
Apparently, it was an odious experience. The woman they had their appointment with sat behind a plate-glass partition about two inches thick. She spoke through a microphone. Every single aspect of the room was designed to intimidate, from the huge scale, the raptorially beaked, flinty-eyed, imposing portrayals of eagles plastered everywhere, to the enormous, beefy Marines they had stationed at various places around the room. Richard pushed the amended application through a depression in the counter to the woman. It contained additional letters of recommendation from noteworthy Costa Ricans and expatriate U.S. citizens, attesting to Luis’s honesty and character, and Luis had also written up an explanation of why his best interests lay in remaining in his own country.
“She didn’t even look at it!” Richard fumed. “She flipped through it like it was one of those booklets that have drawings lined up on the different pages, you know? And when you flip through them really fast it makes them look like they’re moving? That’s how she looked it at.” Then she simply reached over, picked up her stamp, and stamped “Denied,” on the application. “Next,” she drawled, in a bored voice.
“Wait a minute!” Richard protested. “You didn’t even look at that application! You have no idea what’s even in there!”
She glared at him, “like I was an insect,” he seethed. “Like I was some sort of bug.” His Southern accent caused the last word to bulge expressively. “And while I’m trying to explain to Luis what’s going on, she’s telling me that I’m not helping the situation. Then Luis interrupts, thinking that there had to be some sort of misunderstanding and he tells her that his parents are both buried here.”
The woman gave Luis a witheringly blank look and said, “What difference does that make?”
“That means,” Richard shouted, “that he’s honor-bound to stay here!”
At that, the woman signaled two of the Marines, who strode swiftly to his side. They told him his appointment was over and he had to leave the building.
“They didn’t exactly toss me out onto the pavement,” he said bitterly, “but it almost felt that way. I mean, they were huge. Their necks were bigger than my waist.”
Well, obviously, this left a rotten taste in our mouths about our country. Here our government was turning a blind eye to the illegal activities that our so-called “Freedom Fighters” were waging in these countries—bombing, shooting, and killing people we weren’t even at war with—and we wouldn’t let one little harmless family from one of the most peaceful, desirable countries in the world take their kids on a dream vacation to Disneyworld.
I’m afraid that no magic stepped in to rescue the situation this time. An utterly rigid and unresponsive bureaucracy coupled with really stupid, lousy policy has a knack for squelching magic. In the end, Jane and Horace flew the family to a resort in Mexico—first class, in fact. But it wasn’t the same, especially for the kids.
In the meantime, we continued to enjoy the company of our Central American friends. Nuria and Ana-Cecilia and Jorje invited us over to their homes for dinner, which was usually prepared and served by their mothers. Nuria lived with her parents, particularly since her husband was away somewhere. She would never say where, but the rumors were that he, a Nicaraguan man, was trying to keep his countrymen from getting butchered by the Freedom Fighters. Ana-Cecilia and Jorje lived with Ana-Cecilia’s parents, too, though, despite the fact that they were together and both working. Wages were quite low in Costa Rica relative to the cost of living, and so young people often lived with their families until they were older. At the same time, Central Americans retained more of an extended family structure than North Americans. More of them grouped together under one roof.
Jane liked to tell the story of a friend who had hired a young Costa Rican woman to work as a servant, and, thinking she was being generous, gave the girl her own room. A really lovely room, in fact, that was as nice as she could make it, with a comfy bed, love seat, dresser, and walk-in closet. A week later, the young woman came to Jane’s friend in tears, asking if she could please move back to her family’s house, where about twenty people were crammed into four rooms.
“It’s so lonely and scary in my room with no one else in it,” she explained mournfully.
Our friends’ parents proved to be warm, gracious, dignified people who kept in the background so that we young people could visit amongst ourselves. We encountered a gentleness in these people that we found extremely charming. Before we moved here, I probably couldn’t have even imagined what it felt like, our culture is so saturated with violence and cynicism, with everyone from four-year-olds to forty-year-olds trying to act tough and cool. The absence of anyone trying to be anything at all, in fact, I found soothing.
I always had the impression that the inhabitants of Costa Rica got up every day wondering, with an ingenuous delight, what the day might bring them—a particularly fine papaya? A playful romp in the park with their children? A really good joke that could keep them laughing for the next three weeks? One day Richard and I were driving down the road and we spied a couple walking toward us on the opposite side of the street. The woman had her head down and her arms folded grumpily in front of her; the little I could see of her face suggested a deep scowl. Everything about her body language said that she was angry at her companion. She stalked, she didn’t stroll. The man tried talking to her, gesticulating energetically, but nothing seemed to move her. Finally, he started leaping around her in circles in this hilarious, high-stepping way, as if he was ankle-deep in red-hot oatmeal that he was trying to keep from getting into his boots. That did it. She caved in and began to giggle helplessly.
Even if they didn’t have much, the Central Americans we knew seemed proud and grateful for what they did have. One day Otto took me by his house to show me where he lived. I’d gotten over thinking that the little rural, white-washed cinder block houses with the tin roofs looked poor as they were usually surrounded by rampant, flowering plant life, which lent a rich, opulent air to the places. But Otto lived in an urban setting, where skinny, concrete townhouses lay inches from the one next door and there was literally no plant life anywhere. The front of each home was occupied by a gated, locked, paved enclosure in order to park a car (which, because of tariffs, often cost more than the homes), and this was bordered by the sidewalk, which was in turn bordered by the street.
Otto clearly felt thrilled to have this place, his own home, and he proudly showed me his bookcase full of books, his most prized possession. Children on the street ran around gleefully pushing one of their favorite toys, a broom handle that had two rubber wheels mounted at the base. I’m not sure what it was supposed to be, but they evidently found it as exciting as any Gameboy or “Happenin’ Hair” Barbie.
It was interesting, though—the longer I remained in Costa Rica, the more I realized how North American I was. I loved this place, and in a lot of ways, preferred it to my own country. For example, I really wish that Central America could export, along with bananas and coffee, their relaxed, leisurely attitude and their silly, infectious playfulness. They never, ever get their panties in a bunch and when I’m driving on a two-lane highway in the States, going five miles per hour or more over the speed limit and some asshole comes along and gloms onto my tail and stays there until I can find a pullover, and when I do pull aside to let them pass and they flip me the bird, well, I really really want to be able to spray that person with a hefty dose of Lotus juice.
But I couldn’t get any apples here. Nowhere could you find a nice, tart, crunchy apple. All the fruit here was soft and sweet, except for the star fruit which was so tart I risked head implosion eating it, as you might recall. And no one made chocolate cake. There were tasty chocolate truffles for sale in San José, made by a French expatriate chocolatier, but I wanted chocolate cake, chocolate cupcakes, German chocolate cake, brownies, and chocolate chip cookies. They were not to be found. Instead, the Ticos preferred very sugary, frothy, meringuey type desserts (that didn’t include chocolate ingredients). As it happens, these are exactly the attributes of a dessert that I don’t particularly care for.
Too, while I longed for my country to lighten up, relax, and enjoy life more, I was realizing at the same time that I did like the feeling that something was “happenin’” there. It’s the same reason John Lennon gave for his decision to live in the U.S.: the feeling that the U.S. occupies the cusp of high-tech human development as it swells into the next millennium, a truly science fiction milieu. Compared to this, Costa Rica represented a sleepy, sunny eddy in the mad river of human experience. And although our Central American friends were kind to us and included us as much as they could, Costa Rican social structure is so oriented toward family that it was hard to feel truly part of the culture if you weren’t related to anyone, at least by marriage.
At any rate, we had another visit scheduled for the States soon, and I hoped that it might assuage my pangs of homesickness. Christmas was coming up, and not only were Jane and Horace going home for the holidays, all the servants took this time off, so we were going home to be with our families as well. In addition, Jane had reserved a booth at an Arlington, Texas boutique show to display the wares that Paul and Richard had been locating throughout the year, to test the waters for the Costa Rican craft market. We would be attending the boutique show and then going on to do some travel around the U.S. Jane bought us a plane ticket that allowed us to fly to Miami, then Dallas, then Little Rock, then Kansas City, then California, then back to San José.
In the meantime, Paul and Richard put on an extra spurt of effort to gather up all the goods that they would be showing. We went to a bamboo furniture warehouse, in addition to Sarchí, the area where most of the noted woodworking took place in Costa Rica, including miniature ox cart bars, and we contacted craftsmen who worked with leather. Best of all, we were scheduled to return to Monteverde where Jane had contracted with several of the local women to provide Paul and Richard with hand-crocheted tablecloths and cocktail napkins embroidered with birds of the cloud forest.
I couldn’t wait to get there! More than anything, I wanted to spot some howler monkeys. At least one howler monkey, anyway. We’d lived in Costa Rica for almost a year, and we had yet to spot one single monkey. They didn’t live in the Central Valley, as they need a certain amount of undisturbed jungle, but I knew that in addition to howlers, there were spider and white-faced monkeys in the country, too. Glimpsing an actual, wild primate in an actual, living tree that wasn’t part of any kind of a zoo seemed to me to be one of the most exciting events that the earth could possibly offer. But so far, this experience had proved frustratingly elusive … .
Above: One of the famous Costa Rican ox carts. Photo courtesy of Ted James.
*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 29 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, September 24, 2009