Crazy Good Fortune Out of the Blue - 33*
Once everyone knew we were leaving, we received an influx of visitors. Family and friends who had procrastinated coming to see us realized that they had better come now or miss visiting us here at all. Two of our next visitors were old friends, Candia and Lawrence. Richard had met Candia in Little Rock when he went back to college at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock for a year before he and I got married, and Candia had moved to Syracuse around the same time that Richard and I moved to Amherst, Massachusetts. She met Lawrence while he attended the Maxwell School of Public Administration in Syracuse, and when he graduated and took a job in Africa, she continued her eastward trek and decided to accompany him. There, they eventually married.
In Africa, they lived in several countries. Their favorite was Kenya, where they spent their free time at the game parks, observing all the wonderful, exotic animals there: lions, hippos, rhinos, giraffes, wart hogs and wildebeests. However, Lawrence’s administrative specialty was food aid, as in famine, so he also worked in some of the poorest parts of Africa. They lived in Ethiopia for a spell, where Lawrence’s employees disappeared with a disturbing regularity, victims of the brutal regime that had taken power in 1974. Someone just wouldn’t show up one morning and when Lawrence asked other employees if they knew why the person hadn’t come in for work, they simply looked away, their faces stricken and blank. In Ethiopia, Lawrence had come down with hepatitis and barely survived. The only thing that saved him, he told us, was watermelon. It was the only thing he could bear to eat.
They also stayed in Tanzania, where there was virtually nothing to eat, no matter how much money you had. Lawrence and Candia told the story of going to a restaurant one evening shortly after arriving in the country, being seated, receiving their menus, and placing their orders only to have the waiter tell them, “Oh, I am sorry. We do not have that.” So they selected again. The waiter shook his head regretfully. “I am sorry, we do not have that, either.” When they made a third choice and received the same answer, Lawrence finally asked, “What do you have?” But the waiter wouldn’t tell them. He insisted on encouraging them to attempt to order everything on the menu until they had gone through every item except one.
The entire process seemed so bizarre that Lawrence and Candia were perfectly prepared for the waiter to politely inform them that, alas, this item was not available, either. But they had the feeling that they wouldn’t be allowed to leave the restaurant until they’d completed whatever strange, foreign ritual this comprised. So, Lawrence asked hesitantly, “Do you have carrots?”
The waiter smiled broadly. “Oh, yes, sir!” he replied happily. “We do have carrots. Would you like some carrots this evening?”
Candia told us they learned every single way in the world to prepare carrots. And to this day, she can’t even look at a carrot.
They were an interesting match, Candia and Lawrence. Candia had grown up on a farm in a teeny little town in central Arkansas, just down the road from the Wolverton Mountain of country music fame, where her citified parents from Oklahoma made an idealistic but ineffectual stab at farming. They both ended up taking outside jobs. Al worked for many years at the nearby federal penitentiary, and Isa taught in local schools, working on her Ph.D. in education and taking her Christian faith very seriously.
Lawrence had grown up in New York City, first in Manhattan, and then in Westchester when his parents decided that the suburbs would be a better environment in which to raise a family. Lawrence is Italian on one side of the family, and Sicilian on the other; his father was a photographer while his mother worked in publishing. Candia was raised in the conventions of classic Southern hospitality whereas Lawrence is a master at New York-type skills, such as squeezing his large frame into a half a seat on a crowded subway and then little by little expanding so that he occupied a seat-and-a-half. Candia, from growing up in the woods, has certain forest animal type preferences, such as quiet and space and cozy, private shelter, whereas the only American city that Lawrence truly enjoys is Manhattan, with all the attendant diversity, choices, concrete, and buzz.
A job of Lawrence’s in Kenya with Catholic Relief Services had recently ended, and they were taking some time off to recuperate from several intense years. They didn’t have a household set up in the States yet and so they decided it would be fun to come spend several weeks in Costa Rica before getting settled for a while. But they weren’t the only visitors. Two good friends of ours from Redding, Jack and Joy, a family practice physician and nurse-practitioner, made the trip down, too, another couple from disparate backgrounds. Jack is a solid, easy-going, unexpectedly playful man who grew up in upper state New York and attended Cornell while Joy, a vivacious, impish, former hippie-style Valley Girl, had joined a New Age Indian tribe when she left home after high school, earning the name “Rainbow” from the chief. She also holds the honor of executing one of the best language faux pas that we witnessed during our sojourn here.
Joy’s experience with Spanish came primarily from Mexico. As she was a native Californian, Mexico had been within easy reach and she traveled there fairly frequently. However, every single country in Latin America has its own peculiar slang, particularly when referring to genitals, sex acts, and pregnancy. Often the naughty words involve food items, such as empanada, which in one country means a tortilla turnover but in another country refers to a woman’s private parts. So, when Joy accompanied us to the supermarket one afternoon looking for some spiced peanuts, she went up to a young male clerk crouched on the floor stocking shelves and asked, “Donde están los cacahuates?” He froze for a moment, then stood up. He wore a very, very strange, sort of spasming look on his face. Without replying to Joy’s request, he bolted then and disappeared.
Puzzled, we walked to the next aisle where Joy found another young clerk sweeping up a spill and asked him the same thing, “Tiene usted los cacahuates?” Again, she received a similarly bizarre response. The guy froze, wearing a strangled expression, then hurried off.
“This is so weird!” she exclaimed. “All I want is some peanuts! Surely they’ve heard of peanuts, right?”
Another young man passed by, wearing a manager’s badge and Joy addressed him, too. Excuse me, sir, she said to him in Spanish, but I’m trying to find peanuts. “Cacahuates,” she repeated. His face stiffened. “Cacahuates con condimientos,” she elaborated.
At that, he made a strange, gurgling noise and hustled down the aisle away from us. Richard, who had been strolling around a different part of the store came up to us then. “What are you trying to find?” he asked.
“Peanuts!” Joy declared in exasperation as we continued on to the next aisle. She raised her voice to a frustrated wail. “Cacahuates con condimientos! That’s all I want, cacahuates con condimientos!”
Richard grabbed her arm, making a funny conflated sound between a shush and a suppressed giggle. “Uh, Joy,” he said, “in Costa Rica, the word for peanut is ‘maní.’ You just asked for testicles. Spicy testicles.”
Just then, we rounded the end of the third aisle and there, shaking with silent guffaws, leaning helplessly against the shelves and gripping their stomachs in pain, stood every single clerk in the store. “¡Yo quiero cacahuates!” one of them gasped. “¡Con condimientos!” exploded another, and they all collapsed, weeping and convulsing and writhing with laughter.
Unfortunately, I had not been privy to all the slang that Richard had, hanging out, as he did, with the guys in his work with Paul.
My brother came to visit, too (but neither of my sisters, unfortunately), as well as a close friend of Richard’s and mine from Amherst whom we had met through our attendance at U. Mass. Nathan was a serious and talented young man who had chosen to pursue alternative energy engineering. He lived in large, vegetarian, politically correct group households who shivered through the winters because they didn’t want to turn on the heat and gave the most austere pot luck dinners I’ve ever attended. He and I shared differing opinions about all sorts of topics, but he is the kind of person who can comfortably accommodate differences of opinion. Rather than try to convert others to his political views, he prefers simply to set an example of the way he believes a responsible life should be led. He is also the kind of person who decided to take up the fiddle at one point, and within a couple of years, with no previous instruction at all, could play like Vassar Clements. Well, close, anyway.
It was a passle of people, but the timing worked out pretty well, actually. The Keltons were gone most of the time, not much work remained in shutting down the business, and Richard and I were familiar enough with the country by this time that we could show everyone a good time. We went to El Trapiche, where we had become regulars and everyone got snockered on beer and danced their hearts out. Even the band knew us and liked us, and after a salsa dance that turned into a lambada with my scamp of a tutor Otto, the lead singer stepped out from his microphone and shook my hand as I left the dance floor. Then he gave a signal to his fellow musicians and the spritely strains of “New York, New York,” swelled from the twelve-piece band. Grabbing the mike Bing Crosby style, he glanced over at our table and adopted the suavest look I have ever seen on a man’s face. “I wan’ to be a part of you, New Jork, New Jork,” he crooned, clearly delighted when we all broke out into titters.
We also visited the cathedral in Cartago, where we accidentally got trapped in the sanctuary. Tourists come to admire the classic Latin Catholic artwork, but devout adherents and penitents make pilgrimages to the cathedral every day, often hauling themselves on their knees for miles. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to walk very far on your knees, but just try it some time and you’ll see how painful it becomes in an extremely brief period. When we came in, there were no pilgrims in sight, and we made our way quietly to a front pew where we sat in silence and I contemplated the glass cases full of “gratitudes,” which are little gold and silver charms that people donate to the church when they are praying to heal a diseased or injured part of their body. You could buy little hearts and lungs and stomachs and eyes, but my favorite were the diminutive nalgas, or buttocks. I always wondered what those were for, exactly. Hemorrhoids? A cracked tail bone? Perhaps the person wished for more beautiful nalgas?
At any rate, after we had sat and soaked in the peaceful atmosphere for a while, we decided it was time to leave, so we stood up and turned to exit out the center aisle. But a pilgrim was coming, on his knees, his eyes wide in religious piety and physical pain. He was shaking and wobbling, looking like he was going to fall over at any moment. We certainly didn’t want to impede his progress, so we sank back into our seats, and when he reached the altar, we stood up once more and turned to head up the aisle. But there was another penitent! —this one looking a bit more like a zombie than the last man, his arms outstretched, his eyes unfocused, his face frozen in a trance. He, too, wavered and listed as he made his way down the aisle on bleeding, bony knees that had worn through his trousers. Swallowing, we seated ourselves once again, waited for him to complete his trek, and when we tried to bolt the third time, here came a woman, a tiny little wizened soul, dragging her bruised, scraped legs with a disconcerting shuffling sound that made me want to rush over and apply salve and bandages to them.
We started to get the feeling that we might not ever leave if we didn’t just go, so we spied a narrow space bordering the outer edge of the pew and we squeezed our way along it until we exited the sanctuary and burst out into the bright sunshine.
Of course, we also wanted to take everyone to the beach, so we made two different forays, one to Quepos and one to a province north of there called Guanacaste. Richard had been to Guanacaste earlier with Artie and Jonathan and Sue, but I had stayed home then to work on my novel. This was going to be my first trip. We had meant to travel there again so that I could see it, but we found Quepos and Monte Verde so fascinating and rich that we kept wanting to go back there again and again instead of branching out and going to new places.
Guanacaste was more remote and unsettled than the Quepos area so it boasted some of the wildest, most unspoiled beaches in Costa Rica. It had once belonged to Nicaragua but had been annexed to Costa Rica during a border dispute in the early 1800’s, so perhaps this is why it didn’t seem to be completely integrated into the rest of the country. In addition, it lay in the extreme northwest corner and the easiest way to reach many parts of it was by ferry or boat. From the idyllic, rhapsodic descriptions Richard gave us in preparation for the trip, it sounded like we were headed toward Bali Hai or Shangri La. I was feeling utterly bewitched before we even climbed into the jeep and drove our first mile.
Above: A typical Costa Rica thatched roof hut of the period. 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 33 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. Check out my blog entry, “The Amazing Tale of Caelum Moor,” for more information.
Thursday, October 22, 2009