Avoiding Prison & Other Noble Vacation Goals

by Wendy Dale

  “Mango,” I’d say, looking at the small fruit in front of me.

  “That’s right. It’s a small one. And this one?”

  “Manga. Because it’s big.”

  “Good. Very good.”

  “How about this one?”

  “Manga.”

  “No, no, no! It’s a mango,” he said, amazed how slow his American pupil could be.

  “But it’s big,” I said defending myself.

  “That’s right. It’s a big mango.”

  “Not a small manga?”

  “No, definitely a big mango.”

  For the benefit of anyone who may someday visit Costa Rica, I have included the following cut-out, wallet-sized continuum:

  Instructions for use: 1) Cut along dotted lines. 2) Photocopy at 150 percent. 3) Enjoy!

  Unlike in the United States where only losers and serial murderers lived with their mothers past the age of twenty-four, in Latin America it was the only socially acceptable thing to do. The fact that I was twenty-six years old and already supported myself was seen as a suspicious sign of independence, and it was barely tolerated in my case because I was a foreigner. Costa Rican girls who got their own apartments before marriage were seen as rebellious tramps, whose first night on their own was sure to be filled with drunken revelry and animal sex—in other words, the same reasons we left home in my own country.8

  Since Latinos rarely fled the coop (and if they did, it was usually only for a long weekend that ended with them bringing a wife back), Costa Rican homes were filled with people. What was odd at the Arguedes household was that everyone seemed perfectly content with the situation. This for me was going to require some getting used to. After all, I came from a family where successfully separating yourself from all others was seen as the highest form of bliss. As a kid, doors were shut, solitary walks were taken— anything to accomplish “alone time,” as my mother so adamantly referred to it.

  However, after wandering about Jessica’s house for a few days, I came to the conclusion that Latin American families didn’t have the same need for privacy as those from the States. They shared rooms, they shared beds, they shared clothes. As long as no one was actually standing on your toes, you had no personal space issues to complain about, they figured.

  At first, I had assumed it would be a bit of an adjustment for me to get used to living with a family again—I had been on my own for nearly ten years. So I was amazed at how quickly and contentedly I adapted to life at the Arguedes’. They rapidly incorporated me into their routine and assured me that their house was simply an extension of my own. From Day 1, it was taken for granted that I would help myself to anything out of the fridge, go to bed whenever I was tired, and not stand on ceremony if there was something I felt like doing—just as it was assumed that I would help with the dishes and light household chores.

  At Jessica’s house, I was just one of the kids, which was strangely comforting. I got bossed around by her parents and referred to them as señor and señora. Had I been a decade younger, at that adolescent age when you insist you are a grown-up, I probably would have resented this juvenile treatment, but I had already made something of myself and I was bored with being impressive. In Los Angeles, you always had to be someone or have accomplished something for people to want to hang out with you, but the Arguedes family didn’t expect anything of me. They didn’t know that I was earning five-hundred dollars a day. They didn’t know that I had put myself through college or that I occasionally conducted interviews with Hollywood celebrities. They just liked me, period. Their affection for me was real. And being a kid for a while was actually a nice respite.

  Over the next week, I tagged along with Jessica like a sister, comfortably settling into her routine: days spent between her office and the streets of San José, an early-evening dose of television, and nighttime walks that were completely magical for me. In Los Angeles, I had always shut myself away after sunset. Darkened city streets were no place for a woman walking alone so my friends and I invariably met up at movie theaters, bars, coffeehouses—anyplace indoors. But with Jessica, I embraced the night. Fearlessly, the two of us raced each other through darkened fields, climbed trees, and picked wild fruit, the same way I had spent the best days of my childhood. There was no discussion of California wine, independent film, or nouveau Asian cuisine—just giddy laughter over scraped knees and orange-stained hands sticky with fruit juice.

  On one of these nights, while Jessica and I happily frolicked through a neighbor’s cornfield in an attempt to find anything edible, I suddenly realized that all of my roaming around the world had come down to this—not corn (granted, it was one of my favorite vegetables but it didn’t quite seem worthy of an international quest)—but rather the ability to act like a kid, to stomp through cornfields at eleven o’clock at night and have nothing else matter. It wasn’t pure irresponsibility I had been searching for, the kind that entailed running away from everything I cared about; rather, it was the desire to be taken in and taken care of, to have someone else think about bills and insurance and rent checks while I had time for the small important things, like stealing the neighbor’s produce. Come to think of it, my journey around the world had come down to corn.

  The next day, bursting with good intentions, I slipped out of Jessica’s office and walked to the international phone center, where I invested what was left of my cash on a phone call to my parents in Tegucigalpa. All this time with the Arguedes clan was making me miss my own family.

  “Hi, Mom, it’s Wendy,” I said, happy to hear the sound of a familiar Dale voice.

  “Wendy, you shouldn’t call international long distance. It’s so expensive.”

  “I know. I just missed you.”

  “We miss you too, dear.”

  “I’m in San José and was thinking of popping in for a visit in a few weeks. What do you think?”

  “Oh,Wendy, we’d love to see you, but it’s not a good time. We’re really busy.”

  “What are you doing? I thought you guys didn’t do anything.”

  “Normally we don’t. But this week, we’re moving to Bolivia. Didn’t you get the e-mail?”

  In typical Dale-family fashion, they had made a spontaneous decision to leave the country. Bored with their lives in Tegucigalpa, they’d begun a massive relocation campaign, which began with reading travel guidebooks for a week and ended with plans to move to a city they had never even visited.

  “Cochabamba sounds like a great city,” my mother gushed. “It’s called the city of the eternal spring. And the best thing is, it’s really poor. So our money will stretch a long way.”

  As my mother droned on about the other merits of Cochabamba (though being poor was the one that seemed to get her most enthusiastic), I decided that this was really one of my parents’ major character flaws—not the fact that they were making a habit of spontaneously moving to foreign countries (I was actually sort of proud of this egregious disregard for societal convention) but rather that they often failed to inform their children of their plans beforehand.

  The previous time this had happened, I had been a sophomore at UCLA. One day I called them at their house in Montana and got the out-of-breath voice of my fifteen-year-old sister Heather on the other end of the line explaining that at the moment our mother was currently too busy to come to the phone, given that the family was in the middle of packing to move to Arizona. This was news to me—I had never heard of any family plans to relocate and it was the first time it ever occurred to me how easy it would be to completely lose contact with my parents.

  “How are your folks?” I imagined my friends asking.

  “Well, they moved and I don’t have their new address. You know how it is with people you haven’t talked to for years. We just fell out of touch.”

  That was the difference between my folks and families like Jessica’s: The Arguedes family viewed maps as innocuous wall hangings, pretty pictures that coordinated nicely with the colors in the couch. My parents saw m
aps as suggestions. To a Dale, Rand McNally was an international relocation guide.

  I finished up my phone call with my mother and in a glum mood, I left the international phone center and headed toward Jessica’s office. It was a five-block walk I was beginning to know well. There was the ice-cream parlor, the record store, the souvenir shop, the man selling coconuts. There was a money exchange place that I had entered a few times, the T-shirt shop I recognized, and the woman I had bought papaya from. And there was an ATM machine that I had never seen before in my life.

  On an impulse, I decided to try the ATM. After a wait in line, I entered the gated cubicle and crossed my fingers in the hopes of good news. I pressed what I hoped were all the right keys, stood back, and gave the machine time to process my simple but international request. After what seemed an exceptionally long wait, the machine cheerfully spit out three hundred dollars.

  I was so relieved at having discovered an ATM machine that could be troubled to give me access to my funds and I had been having so much fun with Jessica that I hadn’t realized how fast time was going by. I had already been in Costa Rica for several days—or had it already been a week?

  “What day is it?” I asked Jessica one evening at her house, realizing I had lost count.

  “It’s one day away.”

  “One day from what?”

  “One day from Thursday.”

  “You mean it’s Wednesday.”

  “Yeah. Isn’t that what I just said?”

  Unlike most people, who had a way of defining days by using names such as “Sunday,” “Monday,” and “Tuesday,” Jessica’s life revolved around prison visiting days and the amount of time it would take to get to the next one.

  “Visiting day is tomorrow. And we’d better think about starting to get ready,” she informed me in an uncharacteristically serious tone of voice.

  “What do you plan to do? Sleep with your makeup on? How can we get ready now for tomorrow morning?”

  “Silly, we have to cook what we’re going to bring.”

  It had never occurred to me that a prison was the kind of place you didn’t want to show up at empty-handed. “You mean like a cake with a file in it?” I inferred.

  Jessica rolled her eyes. “Wendy, we’re going to a prison. A prison.”

  “What? You’d bring a cake with a file to a dinner party? ”

  Jessica cracked a smile. “Seriously, all that Olman has there are the things we bring him.”

  “I’m sure they give him food and clothes.”

  Jessica looked down to the floor. “Wendy, they didn’t even give him a mattress. I had to give him the money to buy one. I have to bring him clothes, food, soap—even toilet paper.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  But from the way Jessica looked at me, I knew she wasn’t. It was slowly beginning to dawn on me that the situation was a little more serious than I had first imagined. Up until now, it had kind of just been a joke for me because people I knew didn’t go to jail. The most embarrassing thing they ever did was occasionally show up at really lame parties—though there was the one time that my artist/ interior-decoration-obsessed friend, Lisa, smoked way too much pot and woke up in the morning to realize that she had tried to fit her apartment with a new floor. In her drug-induced state, wood hadn’t seemed natural enough; she was going for something a little more rustic so she decided to cover her oak floor with something earthier—like earth. (What I wanted to know was how the hell she expected to clean a dirt floor. And how would she know when she was done mopping?)9

  But having a boyfriend in prison was a reality for Jessica; it wasn’t just the source of embarrassing jokes. She was in a really tough situation and I had no idea whatsoever how to help her.

  “Jessica, you know I’m just kidding,” I said, giving her a big hug. “I’m there for you, you know.”

  “Thanks,” she said, recovering her usual good cheer. “Come on, I’ll teach you how to make arroz con pollo.”

  Entering San Sebastian was a lot like getting into those trendy clubs on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. There was a tremendously long wait in line and a tough-looking guy checking IDs at the entrance. Besides, it really helped to know someone if you wanted to be let in. To ensure that wandering tourists didn’t get it into their heads to just pop in for a quick tour, if you wanted into San Sebastian you had to know the name of an inmate. After all, this was a prison and there had to be some attempt to keep out the riffraff.

  “Vázquez, Olman Mora. Cellblock A-2,” Jessica said to the guard. He found Olman’s name on his list and put a check by it.

  “And you?” he said, turning to me. “Who are you here to visit?”

  I was about to say Olman’s name when I suddenly remembered the Colombian who had seemed to be the most harmless form of entertainment at the place.

  “Francisco Sánchez,” I said impulsively.

  “I didn’t expect to see you again,” Francisco said after having spotted me in the courtyard and racing over to greet me.

  “Me neither. Believe me, there are a million other places I would rather be.”

  “I know exactly what you mean,” Francisco said with an ironic smile that made me laugh.

  He looked just like I remembered him. He was wearing the same clothes and had the same sad blue eyes. He had the lanky walk of most tall and slender men—arms and legs flailing all over the place, which made it seem as if he were shuffling from side to side as he moved forward, and he hunched over slightly, what I assumed was an attempt to make closer eye contact with the people he towered over.

  As we sat down at one of the outdoor tables where Jessica was dishing out bowls of steaming arroz con pollo, I hoped that Francisco wouldn’t misinterpret my having given the guard his name. I wasn’t trying to make friends here, but talking to him would protect me from unwanted advances, and he seemed genuinely nonthreatening, unlike some of the less savory characters who had tossed glances my way the last time.

  “Are you hungry?” I asked.

  “With the food they give us here, I’m always hungry. You’d think this was a jail or something.”

  I laughed but still felt a bit nervous, the way I always tended to be when talking to new people at a prison. I was curious about the man sitting next to me, whose life was like the stories I only read about in books, but I didn’t know how to go about asking such personal details of a stranger.

  “Does your family know you’re here?” I finally managed to ask.

  “No. My parents are dead.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah. My mother died of cancer when I was fifteen. My father couldn’t deal with it so he drank himself to death. He died three years later.”

  “Don’t you have anyone else?”

  “I have two sisters, but I haven’t wanted to call. They limit us to eight minutes. Have you ever tried explaining how you wound up in prison in an eight-minute call?”

  I shook my head and smiled, feeling a lot more at ease. Francisco seemed so open about his life that I ventured asking him the question I had wondered about ever since I had set foot in San Sebastian: “What is it really like being here?”

  “It’s about living in the future. It’s about waiting. It’s about time. Time is the enemy. You count every minute, hoping it will go by. And then there are moments like these when time goes by and you don’t want it to. But it does anyway.”

  I was silenced by what he had just said, trying to take it in.

  “I can’t really tell you what it’s like, but I can make you feel it.”

  Francisco slid over closer to me and put his lips close to my ear. And then in a quiet melodic voice, he began to sing:

  Libre, como el sol cuando amanece yo soy libre, como el mar. Libre, como el ave que escapó de su prisión y puede al fin volar.

  It was the song of a prisoner, a man sitting in a jail cell calling to mind everything in his former life that reminded him what it was like to be free: the sun rising, the tide coming in, bir
ds flying overhead.

  Francisco had been singing only to me, but the others at the table had overheard him and conversation had stopped. Olman’s uncle looked to Francisco and complimented him on his voice while I turned to Jessica to whisper, “Who is this man?”

  “Olman’s been telling me about him. It’s really sad. Everyone talks about what happened to him. His ex-wife just got him tossed in here in an act of revenge. Olman says his cellblock would be completely quiet if it weren’t for Francisco. His singing and his crying are the only two things Olman hears at night.”

  At the end of visiting hours, as Jessica hugged everyone good-bye, Francisco pulled me off to the side. “You know, I’m supposed to get out of here any day. Maybe we could go to a movie or something.”

  “I’m leaving in a couple of weeks. I can’t really stick around.”

  “Well, you’ll come back to visit, won’t you? Say, you know what, why don’t you come to the dance they’re putting on tomorrow?”

  “My Spanish must be really bad,” I answered in my really bad Spanish. “I thought you just said the jail was putting on a dance.”

  “That’s right. With food and live mariachi music.”

  I’d never heard of such a thing—a prison putting on a party?

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  I looked at him for a minute, trying to gauge his expression. “Funny. Very funny. I believed you for a second.” I turned to Jessica.

  “This guy is giving the poor gringa a hard time. For a minute I actually believed him when he told me the prison was putting on a dance.”

  “You mean the one tomorrow?” she asked. “Why don’t you come?”

  I wavered for a minute while images of volcanoes and jungles and beaches raced through my brain one last time. A small “no” was all that was required of me at that moment. It was a tiny word really and so easy to say. But even as my lips formed the sound of the “n,” I heard my voice get ahead of me and blurted out, “What the hell?”