Crazy Good Fortune Out of the Blue - 3
(Note: Intro to this series is below this excerpt.)
I confess that I had no idea whatsoever what to expect from Costa Rica. In fact, I’m ashamed to say that before we received Jane’s invitation, I thought that Costa Rica was a Caribbean island. (“Oh yeah,” quipped a friend when he heard this, “somewhere down there in the Rico Islands, right?”) When I found out that it was in Central America , and that it bordered Nicaragua, I felt a little nervous. After all, there was a war going on in Nicaragua between the Sandinistas—the leftist political party that had deposed right wing dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979—and the U.S.–backed Contras, Ollie North’s buddies. El Salvador was in the middle of a bloody civil war in which insurgents and civilians were being murdered on a daily basis by right wing death squads. And death squads were busily engaged in similar activities in Guatemala, wiping out students, professionals, and Mayan peasants suspected of opposing the military government.
It didn’t help when our plane made a stop in Honduras and I saw that tanks lined the runway in Tegucigalpa, every one of them draped in camouflage nets, their extremely large guns pointed up at any and all incoming air traffic. I hadn’t even realized that anything was going on in Honduras, yet here were these tanks, evidently ready to start blasting away at the drop of a hat. These sorts of concerns didn’t perturb Richard at all; but then, his resume included riding and training giant, crazy race horses and tramping about mamba-infested and Tsetse fly-filled jungles in Liberia discovering diamond mines.
Costa Rica, however, was apparently immune to the strife that their neighbors suffered. Their history as a Central American backwater as far back as Mayan times helped. No native gold existed in the area and the indigenous population had always been small, while malaria and other tropical diseases ran rampant; so the Spanish conquistadors wasted little time here and hurried on to climes with more resources to exploit. The farms that sprouted up in Costa Rica were modest and egalitarian— evidently even Coronado had to work his own plot of land when he lived there—and historically, no great gulf separated the rich and the poor.
Anyone I talked to who had actually been to Costa Rica would get a dreamy, far away look in their eyes when I brought it up, and everyone, to a person, would murmur, “It’s paradise.” I viewed this appraisal with skepticism as I figured these people must be beach aficionados who loved the tropics. For some reason, I’d always been more attracted to northern climes, like Scandinavia, Alaska … even the arctic circle. Not that I’d been to any of these places nor that I even particularly liked cold weather. I suppose that the stark, craggy wildness of the north appealed to me, or maybe I have some sort of migrating bird gene buried in one of my chromosomes— perhaps a loon or Canadian goose or grebey/puffiny sort of gene left over from our evolutionary trek from paramecia to the breathtakingly clever primates that we are today. I’d never been all that enamored with the tropics. I became hot, sweaty, and itchy in about two minutes at the beach, and humidity made me feel oily and faint.
So, although I certainly wanted to like Costa Rica, where we hoped to park ourselves for the next year or so (assuming we didn’t get blown into smithereens at the Honduras airport), I was not expecting paradise.
We didn’t get shot out of the sky, however, and we arrived at our destination in the evening. Since Costa Rica is located very close to the equator, the sun had set around 6 p.m. As our flight approached the San José airport, we saw picturesque, twinkly lights strewn over the entire central valley, where the bulk of the population lived, but the volcanic mountains that ringed the valley looked utterly dark and somehow prehistoric, jam-packed full of magical realism.
Going through customs proved extremely casual: a bunch of guys leaning up against the walls smoking cigarettes and waving us through as if customs was a fender bender that they wanted to get traffic flowing around. But when we mounted the stairs to go outside, we were greeted by an enormously huge, noisy crowd of people totally mashed up against a cyclone fence that separated us, the debarking passengers, from them.
At the time, I thought some celebrity was arriving at the airport but I found out later that this many people always showed up to greet arrivals. Air travel was still novel enough in Costa Rica in 1982 that entire extended families piled into cars that they drove in the dark without headlights in the mistaken belief that this would save the battery (and in a decidedly less sinister way than the Phantom of 505) and they swarmed to the airport where they pressed up against this chain link fence like happy, animated hamsters, smiling, waving, and shouting at their returning loved ones. And for all I know, they’re still doing this, even after the novelty has worn off. One thing I learned about Ticos, as the inhabitants of paradise like to be called, is that they will seize upon any excuse to have a party. Hell, a really big pot hole is good enough. I can’t count the number of times we passed a pot hole that had about six or seven guys crowded around it, telling jokes, peering down into the pot hole, smoking cigarettes, and chatting idly with friends who drove by in their cars.
We were met by Horace, Jane’s elegant, trim, sandy-haired husband, and Luís, the major domo of the Kelton household staff, a compact, good-looking, dark-haired man with skin the color of a mocha latte. They were standing well back from the crowd, and as we walked toward them, I noticed that I was breathing the most exquisitely soft, caressing air I had ever encountered in my life. It felt like a thousand butterflies were beating their wings against my skin, but just barely.
When they spotted us, Horace and Luís strode forward, and Luís grabbed up both of our bags. It turned out that he didn’t speak English, so Horace made introductions in Spanish, while I frantically tried to remember all the Spanish that I had learned in seventh grade, augmented by a hasty crash course from a Berlitz conversation guide on the plane ride down here. Horace kindly welcomed us in his soft Texan drawl, one of the nicest, most beautifully inflected, soothing voices I have ever heard. In fact, Horace speaks so slowly that he could probably get listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for Most Leisurely Speech, and I imagine that New Yorkers would have to slap eighteen pieces of duct tape over their mouths to keep from finishing his sentences for him.
Luís loaded up our luggage in the trunk of a black Mercedes sedan and we all climbed in. Then we took off down a jouncy road that had been patched and re-patched so many times it seemed as if it might have actually been the result of some bizarre Fortean event, like globs of asphalt falling from the sky, rather than a planned road-building effort. Since it was dark, we couldn’t really see all that much of the scenery, but one thing that surprised and disturbed me was the fact that most of the houses we passed had bars or grates installed over the windows and doors. Some dwellings were surrounded by tall concrete fences topped with jagged, mean-looking pieces of broken glass bottles. This didn’t quite fit the paradise theme. And I noticed also that most of the homes were built out of cinder block and that they sported corrugated metal roofs. They looked poor to me, which didn’t jive with the information I’d read that Costa Rica possessed a large middle class.
Jane and Horace lived in a small town that now served as a suburb of San José, Escazú, which meant “home of the witches” since a colony of brujos had taken up residence along the sides of a canyon in this area. They still lived there, too. When we reached Escazú, we again encountered large crowds of people, this time streaming along the sides of the streets. I figured that there must be a soccer match in the town square (every town center in Costa Rica has a church and a soccer field) or a festival of some sort or maybe a religious holiday that they were all attending. But again, I was mistaken. It turned out that this was simply traffic: You take all the people who are going somewhere, subtract the cars, and you get a lot of people on the streets.
I received another jolt when we turned into the entrance to Horace and Jane’s house and I saw a young man standing guard at the adjoining driveway, dressed in fatigues and holding a semi-automatic weapon across his chest.
“Don’t worry about the neighbors,” Horace told us mildly. “Eden Pastora lives next door, but he keeps to himself.”
Eden Pastora? Commander Zero?! The leader of the Contras, the main man who was waging war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua lived next door?!! I had thought that he resided in Nicaragua. Christ, what if the conflict spilled over into his place in Costa Rica? What if some kamikaze Sandinistas decided to blow up Commander Zero while he was plotting and planning here in Jane and Horace’s neighborhood? Suddenly the trailer in the lunar basin didn’t look quite so bad. It was certainly looking safer. But no one else seemed concerned, so I swallowed my apprehension and focused on developing a blasé attitude. Third world military headquarters next door? No biggie. Men brandishing machine guns three feet from the driveway to the place where I was going to live? How eighties!
It was dawning on me just how naive and unprepared I actually was. And I’d been here less than an hour.
Pulling up to the house, we were greeted in the driveway by the friendly household staff, Luís’s extended family: his wife Lijia, the cook, his father-in-law Don Marcos, the security guard and gardener, his two young daughters, Catia and Rosa, one of Lijia’s cousins, Sofía, who helped whomever needed helping, and one employee unrelated to any of them, Ana, who did most of the cleaning. Not ever having lived with servants, I had no idea what, exactly, this relationship would be so I simply thought of them as neighbors who lived with the Keltons. Of course, it turned out to be far more complex than that.
Paul, the prodigal son, ambled out of the house with a diffident, “bad boy” slouch, looking debonair in a short, stylish haircut, and light blue Polo shirt. The stark outdoor lighting emphasized his deep-set eyes and strong, straight nose that he had inherited from his mother. Richard knew Paul quite well, having practically grown up with him, but I had only met him in passing a couple of times in the context of large social gatherings. Then Jane came sailing out of the house, trumpeting effusive greetings and hellos, dressed in a brightly colored silk mumu that fluttered about her like a pennant flag in a stiff breeze. She was surrounded by so much energy that she really represented a phenomenon more than a person, an extended special event that had lasted a lifetime.
She scooped everyone up and led us inside to the living room, a huge cavern with a vaulted ceiling that was at least two stories high, the front wall made almost entirely of glass. Unfortunately, it was dark, so we couldn’t see the view, for which Jane apologized, being Southern. She settled into what was apparently her throne, a huge overstuffed arm chair with matching ottoman in the corner of the room and said to Paul, “Darlin’, why don’t you take Rick and Celeste on a tour of the house? Show them where they’ll be staying this visit—okay, sweetheart?” Paul stood up and motioned to us to follow him, ignoring the fact that Jane continued to shout instructions to us as we left the room, even when we finally went out of earshot.
“Look out for Don Marcos,” he told us in a low voice. “The man never sleeps. Ever.”
We nodded, trying to assess the gravity of this information.
“He carries a pistol,” Paul added. “And he sits in the dark. It’s spooky.” We arrived at a door in the long hallway that led off the living room. “This is my room.” He opened the door so we could peek in, then he shut it. We walked a few steps down to the next door. “This is where you’ll be staying.” He pushed the door open and politely waited for us to enter first.
I entered it cautiously for some reason, perhaps because the place smelled so different from anything I’d ever encountered before. It had a tangy, spicy scent from the tropical hardwoods that trimmed the windows and made up the furniture. But there was also something incredibly fecund, botanical, and female in the breeze that wafted in through the open windows. Paul switched on a dim overhead light and I spied an interesting shape on the dresser, so I went over to it, trying to figure out what it was. As I touched it, the dark aroma of chocolate poufed into the air, and I realized that it was a cellophane sack full of plump chocolate truffles dusted in cocoa, a thoughtful little gift from Jane. Outside, I could hear stands of bamboo tossing restlessly in the wind, their stems clacking in a sound very foreign to me, their leaves rustling in an oddly urgent way.
Paul walked over to the linen closet that led into the bathroom. “Leave these lights on in the closet,” he told us. “Or everything in there gets really moldy.”
He showed us the rest of the house which was composed of two wings. One wing had an upstairs and a downstairs, and downstairs was the apartment where Richard and I would be staying if we moved here. It consisted of a cute little study that looked out on a garden, a bedroom, full bath, and kitchen. It even had its own porch. The kitchen led into a den where a pool table was set up along with a couple of couches. The wing above us contained the TV room, Jane and Horace’s bedroom, and Horace’s computer room and was lined with a long covered porch. There was a big library at the corner where the two wings joined, and this is apparently where Don Marcos would sit or lie on the love seat in the dark with his eyes wide open. The other wing housed the living room, dining room, kitchen, the bedroom where we were staying, and Paul’s room. Up a spiral staircase in one corner of the enormous living room was a small private study and extra sleeping quarters. The servants lived in a separate house that was connected to the main house by a breezeway.
After our tour, we each drank a gin and tonic, visited some, and then retired to bed. When we closed the door behind us, we stood practically frozen for a moment as we looked around the room. The bamboo clattered exotically while some unknown tropical creature—bird? reptile? amphibian?—called plaintively in the night. Then our eyes met, and we broke into gleeful grins and grabbed each other up in an ecstatic, delighted hug.
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.
This is chapter 3 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 twice 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, March 26, 2009