Crazy Good Fortune Out of the Blue - 24*
At this time, we had not yet wearied of the four-hour trek to Quepos, so we loaded up the jeep with our bags and, of course, an ice chest, and headed over to the coast. Along the way, we decided to pick up some fruit at one of the roadside vendors. We were particularly intrigued with the fruit of the cashew tree, called marañon. We’d seen them growing on trees; they resembled small, yellow-orange bell peppers, swelling above the cashew nut on the end of a limb. The nut looked like a stubby, wrinkled, naked tail curling beneath the marañon. Encountering live cashew trees made it clear to me for the first time why cashews are so expensive. There is only one nut per fruit, and there aren’t that many fruits on the tree. Not only that, the shell of the cashew nut is poisonous, and they can blister your hands if you touch them. Consequently, you never find them in the shell.
We’d had some marañon ice cream at a locally famous ice cream parlor in the Central Valley, Pop’s, and it was absolutely delicious—very difficult to describe, though. It tasted like nothing else I’d ever experienced before. It was sweet and tropical with an interesting pungent component, something like a cross between a mango and an ugly fruit.
However, the smell of the actual fruit turned out to be something else again. We stuck the marañones, which were packaged in a cute little mini-crate, in the cooler to keep them fresh, but every time we opened the cooler to get a cold drink, an extra-sweet, curiously cloying aroma would escape. At first, it was interesting. Then, it became mildly distasteful. By the time we got to Quepos and opened the cooler for the last time, the scent made me want to throw up. It had to taste different than it smelled, because the ice cream truly was delicious, one of my favorite flavors, in fact. But we couldn’t even face the prospect of bringing one of these fruits close enough to our noses to take a bite of one, so we threw them away as soon as we could, never tasting them at all.
Tropical produce, I learned, is really a completely different culinary experience than that from temperate climes. For example, I finally got used to the taste of papayas and after a while began to love them, but at first, they tasted like sweaty BO to me. Cilantro reminded me of Clorox, until, once again, I not only acquired a taste for it, I began to crave it. Star fruit remained way too tart for me, though (my entire face literally imploded after I took my first bite; for one scary, heart-stopping minute, I entertained the nightmarish notion that a microscopic black hole had suddenly appeared in my mouth), and a small yellow fruit that had intrigued us for some time remained unsampled when a hitchhiker we picked up one day told us that they tasted like dirty feet.
At any rate, the marañones were quickly forgotten as we settled into our suite at Garth and David’s resort. To save money on Jane and Horace’s bill, since they insisted on paying for our trip to Quepos, Artie and Richard and I shared a villa. It was split level and had two bedrooms, so it worked out very conveniently. However, I didn’t realize how our lodging arrangements might appear to some of the staff until I went down to the bar to get a beer later on in the afternoon. Garth and David had hired a new manager, Waldon, an elegant young man from the East Coast of Costa Rica. His family had lost their cocoa crop to a fungus and had to turn to other ways of making money until they could get their farm producing again. Waldon was tall and slender, with sculpted features and skin the color of rosewood. He always wore a nicely pressed pair of pleated trousers and a white Oxford shirt with the sleeves turned up crisply. When everyone else was wilting, perspiring, wrinkled, and damp, Waldon looked as if he had stepped off a page of GQ. He never looked wrinkled. In fact, he looked as if someone was surreptitiously ironing his clothes in some back room every fifteen minutes. It was a true wonder.
I ordered a Bavaria from Waldon, and after he served it to me, he narrowed his eyes appraisingly and remarked in his lilting Caribbean accent, “You know, if you like two men, I could arrange for something very nice.”
I choked on my beer. “Well, thanks, Waldon,” I stammered, not wanting to appear rude or unappreciative. “I’ll, uh—I’ll let you know.” Blushing like mad, I grabbed up my glass and hurried away, mumbling something about taking my drink to my room. I felt pathetically and transparently unsophisticated, but now I’m wondering if he thought I was flustered because he’d ferreted out my secret and I was in such a rush because I couldn’t wait to get back to my ménage a trois. Hmmm.
I felt a little awkward after that about hanging around the bar and pool area with both Artie and Richard, but I got over it eventually. Garth joined us at one point and when I told him excitedly that I’d just glimpsed a Blue Diadem Mat-Mat, an exquisitely gorgeous bird with cobalt-blue plumage, he frowned and declared, “Oh! That is the meanest old bird!”
“Really?” I replied, surprised.
“Yes! Its favorite thing seems to be pecking guests on the head,” he told me, giggling. This seemed to please him almost as much as pigs chasing the guests. For a five star resort, the danger of getting attacked by the resident fauna here seemed awfully high. All of a sudden the top of my head felt exposed and vulnerable, and I experienced this peculiar paranoid vision that the hair along my part was rearranging itself into bird language for “Peck me!”
Somehow the conversation drifted to high school fashions, and Artie regaled Garth with his account of the shoes he wore in high school. Apparently, Cuban-style boots with a pointed toe were popular in his circles—the pointier the toe, the cooler the boots.
“In fact,” he told us with a completely straight face, “I used to sharpen the toes of my boots.”
This cracked Garth up completely. “Give me the ol’ sharp shoe, eh?” he chortled.
Shortly, we were joined by a middle-aged German tourist who had brought three teen-aged Ticas with him to help him enjoy his vacation. While the teenagers frolicked in the pool, he stood at the bar in a skimpy little Speedo that was pretty much obscured by his rotund belly. He dominated the conversation while he downed a few scotches, going on and on about this fabulous European restaurant and that fabulous European restaurant. Each time he brought up a new one, he would kiss his fingertips three times, pooching out his fleshy lips to emphasize his appreciation, while Garth remained uncharacteristically silent.
“Here, it is unfortunate,” said the tourist. “You do not have any fine cuisine to speak of.”
“Well, no,” Garth responded testily. “You don’t exactly ever hear of anyone going on a restaurant tour of Costa Rica.”
I was starting to understand why Garth enjoyed having Mat-Mats peck the guests on the head.
After a while the guy drifted away to romp in the pool with his companions, and Garth muttered under his breath, “Just goes to show that any European, no matter how fat or misshapen, will don a bikini!” Then a fit, forty-something woman in a gold lamé swim suit stopped by the bar and addressed Garth with a request.
“I was wondering if you would be so kind as to change the music at dinner,” she said, in a hard-edged tone that suggested she was used to everyone doing what she told them to. Garth and David were fond of opera, so that’s what they played over the sound system at dinner.
“Not at all,” he told her, and a satisfied smile tugged at the flat line of her humorless lips. “Would you mind changing your perfume?”
The satisfied smile froze and she stalked off without further comment, while I marveled at how Garth could get away with such rude behavior. “God, if we could only sell this place,” he moaned. “Then we could move back to civilization.”
“So, how did you decide to build a resort here?” asked Artie. “What attracted you to this particular spot?”
Garth rolled his eyes and slumped onto the counter. “Oh, it was cheap,” he said. “And we could buy practically the entire ridge. Originally, we had hoped to build a hotel in Managua.”
“Really, Managua?”
He nodded. “In fact, we went there one time to scout out locations. We were staying in the nicest hotel in the country, in downtown Managua—an absolutely beautiful building, all made from stone, with a positively elegant courtyard.” He sighed at the memory. Somoza was still in power when they visited, he said, and their trip coincided with the national elections. Both political parties staged parades one day, and it turned out that the route for the parade went right past their hotel, so they decided to stay in that afternoon and watch the parades from their balcony. Somoza’s procession went off without a hitch, but when it came time for the opposition party to march along the streets, Somoza produced a very unsporting and undemocratic surprise.
“Somoza’s troops just—opened fire on the parade!” Garth exclaimed, clearly still shocked. “It was unbelievable! And since the opposition party happened to be closest to our hotel, they all ran inside for cover. So the troops opened fire on the hotel!” Garth and David had to dive under their mattresses for cover, and part of David’s ear got blown off with machine gun fire. The troops drove their tanks right through the sides of the hotel. “They absolutely destroyed that building,” he commented ruefully, shaking his head at the terrible waste of such a fine example of architecture. “As soon as we could, we fled, of course. We didn’t stop to take anything with us. And when we returned days later to see what we could salvage, all of our belongings were gone. But strewn over the entire room were hundreds of swimming suits.”
“Swimming suits?” I echoed, perplexed.
He nodded, grinning. “The funny thing was, when we flew out again, it turned out that I sat across the aisle from a salesman who’d been making a sales call in Nicaragua. He sold swimming suits! And he was lamenting the fact that he’d lost all his samples. So I leaned over and tapped him on the arm and said, ‘Excuse me—I think I know where they are.’” This started Garth giggling again; it didn’t take much, although I must admit, the swimming suit addendum was a bizarre one to such an awful story.
We spent the weekend pretty much as we always did in this particular spot in the Land of the Lotus Eaters: eating, swimming, body-surfing, reading, and napping. It’s amazing how quickly the hours and days can pass like this, and how easily a person can get used to it. You think you’ll get bored but instead, you slip into some sort of state of quasi-suspended animation, and you feel pretty sure that you could happily do this forever. But soon our time was up and we were driving back to San José.
At one point, we drove through a place in the road where cattle had crossed recently and a downpour had created slushy little puddles of oozy cow poop. Unbeknownst to us, some of the liquefied cow patties splashed onto the side-view mirror on the passenger’s side, so when Artie decided to hold onto the mirror’s brace as we drove over a particularly bouncy part of the road, he grabbed a handful of meadow muffin soup. Even after we stopped so that he could wash his hands, he held the contaminated hand in the funniest, contorted way, making it look like a set of stiffened tentacles or alien prosthesis. Maybe a dead tarantula.
When we returned, it was time for Artie to go back to the States, so we bid him a sad farewell. However, we ourselves had a little trip to the U.S. coming up. My sister, a harpist who lived in Manhattan, was getting married, and Jane and Horace generously offered to fly us to the wedding.
Jane and Horace’s travel agent, Don Orlando, made all the arrangements, bought our tickets and procured our exit visas. Travel agents, or at least Don Orlando, seemed to have quite a bit more power in Costa Rica than they did in the United States. In fact, somehow I got the feeling that this guy’s status and power resided on the same level as, say, a district representative to state government or possibly even a city boss. Don Orlando was one of those people who got things done; he had connections everywhere, it seemed. And he was extremely suave and debonair, despite the fact that he looked like a stereotype of a Latin sharpie. He wore Italian-style suits that had wide, padded shoulders and tapered waists—Don Orlando was quite fit—slicked his dark hair back from his finely sculpted forehead, and cultivated a pencil-thin moustache. He exuded sex appeal and had the manners of a courtier. Picking up our tickets was always a little bit of a thrill for me.
At any rate, we were both psyched—we enjoyed New York tremendously and we were ready for some big city excitement. What I didn’t realize was that culture shock works both ways. Once you’ve spent a fair amount of time in another culture, it starts to acquire the patina of normalcy and your brain readjusts to thinking that this new way is the way things should be. But there’s practically no way to prepare yourself for this ahead of time, and my thoughts focused entirely on how comfortable it was going to feel to find myself back on familiar ground.
Above: Breakfast at La Mariposa. 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 24 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, August 20, 2009