The next morning, I again awoke to find Richard gone, no doubt engaged in his morning ritual, which he very much enjoyed in that fabulous living room upstairs with the gorgeous view. This morning I was careful to slip on some jeans and a blouse before doing anything else, but as it was nice and warm, I didn’t put on any shoes. The floors of our apartment were a smooth, polished, cream-colored stone that felt delectable on bare feet. I brushed my teeth and hair in the bathroom, then decided to go upstairs; so I headed over to the door to our bedroom, a beautiful thing made from a rich, henna-colored hardwood.

 

 

“Th-th-there’s a snake in our room!” I sputtered. “A–a–a coral snake!”

 

“Are you serious?” he responded, while Horace declared, “Ohhhhhhhhhhh myyyyyyyyyyyyyy!”

 

“I think it’s dead, though,” I told him, shaking from the aftermath of adrenalin flooding through my body. “It fell onto the stone from the top of the door and now it’s not moving.”

 

 

Richard leaped forward with lightning rapidity and managed to jab the snake with the broom right before it actually disappeared under the bed, stopping it in its tracks. Then he snatched up the large flashlight we had on our bedside table, and clubbed it to death while I hid in the kitchen, unable to stop thinking about the fact that I had gotten up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night without putting any slippers on and without turning on the light. When he came to find me after dispatching the snake, I thanked him profusely for coming to my aid, brave warrior that he was, while he just shook his head, undoubtedly thinking about the fact that he, too, had been going to use the bathroom in the middle of the night without donning any slippers or turning on the light.

 

Our encounter with the snake didn’t stifle our appetites—in fact, the excitement seemed to stimulate them—so we snarfed down a couple of Lijia’s extremely delicious country fried eggs along with some crisp, buttery toast and freshly squeezed orange juice. Then we were off to language school, fearlessly rumbling over quarry-sized potholes, dodging the flying hoards of yellow dogs and chickens, and driving vertically up the side of a sheer cliff face so that we could once again sit around and giggle for six hours with a friendly group of Central Americans.

 

The night before, Richard had filled me in on the backgrounds of most of the staff and students at the language school, which was based on a method for teaching languages to Peace Corps volunteers, founded by a former member. It was designed to get people talking and communicating quickly. The teachers were primarily young women and they came from all parts of Latin America. Nuria was one of three Costa Rican teachers, while Romi hailed from El Salvador, Lili from Columbia, and Otto was a native Guatemalan. Nuria was married to a Nicaraguan man who seemed to have been gone for a couple of years, while her fellow countrywomen, Ana-Lucia and Gabriela, were both engaged to Costa Ricans. Romi was married, too, with children, and she had fled El Salvador when right wing death squads bombed her family’s home, killing her mother, father, grandmother, and three-year-old niece. Otto, who was part Mayan and part Aztec (as well as part Spanish), had fled Guatemala after becoming a student activist and getting blacklisted by the death squads there. Lili, a sexy young woman with doll-like features and extremely tight jeans, also engaged to be married, was in Costa Rica because she wanted to travel and earn a little extra money.

 

 

In fact, one of the more delightful aspects of learning a language is all the opportunities for communication to go hilariously awry. Nuria loved to repeat the story a minister from Canada told on himself in class one day. Shortly before he came to Costa Rica to study Spanish, he had arranged for a meeting with the chief of one of the local Indian tribes in his area, a very important chief whom he had wanted to meet for a long time and for whom he held tremendous respect. He wanted to please and impress the chief, so he found out from a friend what the proper greeting in the chief’s language would be when they were introduced. The phrase was “My heart to your heart.” The big day came, the minister had practiced and practiced, but alas, when he pronounced the words, he didn’t have the right accent. As is so often amazingly the case, what he said meant something. He didn’t just spout gibberish which would have would alerted the listening party to the fact that he didn’t know what he was saying. What he said to the chief was, “My ass to your ass.”

 

Well, one can only hope that this was a common mistake.

 

I myself got into a very embarrassing situation one morning when I was looking for Richard, couldn’t find him, and ran into Lijia, who told me that Richard had gone out in the jeep. Ana’s ride to work had fallen through that morning, she said. “Oh,” I responded, speaking carefully and trying to remember whether the verb I was using was reflexive or not (which meant that you added a little “se” or “me” or “nos” in front of the verb to give it its proper meaning), “so Richard went to pick up Ana?” Unfortunately, however, I had gotten the reflexive part wrong. Instead of asking whether Richard had gone to pick up Ana, what I really said was, “Oh, so Richard went to [very rude word for ‘have sex with’] Ana?” Poor Lijia nearly exploded trying not to laugh. I realized my mistake upon seeing her eyes widen in helpless mirth and her face freeze in a futile attempt not to register what I’d actually said. I’d been warned about this particular lingual pitfall and screwed it up anyway.

 

“Sí, Celeste,” she managed to reply in a strangled voice, quivery with repressed giggles. Then she hurried off, no doubt to shriek with laughter for at least two hours.

 

The endless possibilities for screwing up in amusing ways when learning and speaking new languages add a great deal of spice to life and this is one good reason, in my opinion, that we should place more emphasis on languages in this country. We’re missing out on a lot of fun.

 

In fact, just that afternoon I received another opportunity to experience this firsthand. Jane had noticed that I was reaching around to massage the muscles in my back on the trip down, and I told her about my marathon building project that I’d completed right before joining her. She had a friend in Costa Rica who was an orthopedist, and she set up an appointment for me to see if there was anything he could do for my back pain. So after classes that day, Luís took me to the hospital where the doctor had his office.

 

He waited for me in the car and I entered the building where I found a central receptionist for the entire facility sitting in a little booth. I went up to her and announced that I had an appointment. Except that when I had looked up the word “appointment” in my Spanish-English dictionary, my eye missed the first translation, the tiny little word “sita,” which meant appointment in the sense of a doctor’s or dentist’s appointment, and came to rest upon the much larger and more visible translation, “nombramiento,” which meant political appointment to a high-ranking office. So I announced to the receptionist that I had a high-ranking political appointment with Dr. Sanchez. She gave me a dubious look then told me to wait, gesturing over towards a long wooden bench, where I took a seat.

 

Nothing happened for a half-hour. Then a Costa Rican family composed of a young mother and several small children showed up for an appointment and came to join me on the bench. The odd thing was, I had seated myself so that I was up against one end, and the entire rest of the bench was empty. But the mother managed to wedge one of her children into the space between me and the armrest and then once she got that foothold, she and her brood started piling into that spot, pushing me all the way down to the opposite end of the bench. When the family got called before I did, I became fidgety and wondered if perhaps the receptionist hadn’t understood me the first time. So I went back up to her kiosk and boomed, “I have a high-ranking political appointment!” She nodded and gave me a pained smile, waving me back to the bench. When another half-hour passed and still I hadn’t been called, I went back up, a little angry now, and shouted, “I have a high-ranking political appointment! I have a high-ranking political appointment! At 4 o’clock with Dr. Sanchez!”

 

Costa Ricans never, ever become ruffled in any situation, so this woman was not about to get in a lather over me. She merely gazed at me, blank-faced, and when I got through ranting about my appointment, she told me I would be called soon. Eventually, I did get called. I underwent a few x-rays and had a pleasant interaction with Jane’s friend, who told me that the kink in my back was not a problem with the vertebrae, but “an offense of the muscles.” He then gave me a prescription for several weeks of physical therapy.

 

When I got back home from my doctor’s appointment, I overheard Jane telling Lijia about my “sita” with Dr. Sanchez. This gave me a tremendous sinking feeling, and I rushed to my Spanish-English dictionary where I again looked up the word “appointment.” I then experienced one of those moments when I’m so embarrassed I get all hot and sweaty and maybe even a little lightheaded while the blood rushes from my brain into my face as I realized what a total idiot I’d just made of myself.

 

Two weeks after I started taking classes, Richard and Paul had finished their instruction, so they quit to embark upon their import-export business, while I stayed for another month at the school, which I thoroughly enjoyed. The only problem ended up being the fact that I have a ear for languages and I’m a good mimic, so I got the accent right away, which fooled Spanish speakers who didn’t know me into thinking I was fluent. In fact, however, it took me much longer to be able to understand the language when it was spoken to me. So until I’d lived in Costa Rica for a while and gained more facility with understanding spoken Spanish, a lot of people I interacted with outside the school thought that I had an IQ of about 45 or that I was being deliberately obtuse. I felt all kinds of new sympathy for non-native-English speakers who live in the U.S.; until I had experienced it firsthand, I really didn’t understand just how scary, frustrating, and difficult it is to navigate through life in a foreign tongue.

 

 

 

Above:  Escasú, where Richard and I resided with the Keltons.

 

 

*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 9 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.

 

 

**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.