by Wendy Dale
It had taken two Costa Rican cabs, six Costa Rican buses, a Panamanian cab, a plane ride, a panga trip, and a long walk to get to Sapzurro, but looking around me, I realized it had been worth it. Palms were swaying in the wind. Papayas as big as footballs were growing on trees. The air was warm and humid and carried the scent of the sea. We had arrived in a tropical paradise.
After an al fresco meal of rice, tomato salad, plantain chips, and fish sprinkled with salt and lemon juice, Francisco and I dragged our bags along a dirt path, brushing aside the birds of paradise and banana leaves that competed for space along the way. We were on our way to the home of the mayor, a man named Sombrero (which means “hat” in Spanish, but saying “We were headed to Hat’s house” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it). Francisco had met him on a previous journey and assured me that it would be fine to drop in on him.
Sombrero received us with a warm smile and invited us into his modest home that was just yards away from the beach. I looked him up and down and came to the conclusion that he was awfully young to be the city’s governing official (then again, I reminded myself that customs must be a bit different in a place where mothers name their children Hat).
He offered us a seat while his wife brought out lemonade for everyone. Francisco gave him the condensed version of what had occurred in Costa Rica and when that topic had been exhausted, Francisco informed me that Mayor Sombrero was one of the best storytellers he had ever met.
“Imagine the people who have passed through this small border town between Colombia and Panama where there isn’t even immigration control. Sombrero has met drug traffickers, bill forgers, hit men, leaders of the Cali cartel. I bet he could give you great stories for your book.”
“You’re writing a book?” the young mayor wanted to know.
“Yeah, but it’s kind of self-centered. I mostly write about myself.”
The mayor graciously invited us to stay with his family for a few days while he told me about some of his experiences. The thought was tempting. After all, I was in a Caribbean Eden surrounded by water and palms and warm, humid air, where people sat on their porches telling stories late into the night, drinking piña coladas, and munching on fried plantains. Besides, I had a free place to stay. How could I possibly refuse?
“I’m sorry,” I said to the mayor, truly meaning it. “I would love to—it’s just time we set up new lives for ourselves in Cali.”
I hated to leave, but the daily practical worries of existence had invaded my thoughts yet again. Our money was slowly trickling away. If we got to civilization soon, there was a chance I’d be able to do some telecommuting work for Hughes Aircraft. But we needed to get there quickly—I hadn’t e-mailed my potential clients since leaving Costa Rica and I worried they’d grow frustrated and hand the job over to someone else.
If we missed the next boat out, it would be days before there was another departure. And although I had fallen in love with Sapzurro and there was a side of me that deeply longed to stay, there was a part of me that wouldn’t be able to enjoy it. It would be like going on vacation, knowing I’d left the iron on. Besides, there were still too many unknowns. We weren’t sure what we were going to do with the rest of our lives, and Sapzurro didn’t provide any answers, just procrastination.
We had to be heading back to civilization—though it would take a while to get there. After a five-hour motorboat ride and a brief stay in the small guerrilla-ridden town of Turbo, a day later we finally made it to Medellín, where I was never so happy to see a bus station in my life. Exhausted, we dragged our bags to the counter and bought one-way tickets to Cali.
We waited at a restaurant inside the terminal until it was time to hop aboard our bus. While trying out my first Colombian buñuelo, a cakelike pastry that was perfectly round and the size of a tennis ball, an older American couple seated at the table next to us tried to strike up a conversation. They were missionaries headed to Bogotá, they informed us. They were going to be in Cali in the next few weeks. It was so rare to run into an American in this part of the world. Wouldn’t it be great if we could meet up in the future?
“How will we find you?” the woman asked.
With a private investigator, I thought. Why, not even the Costa Rican FBI can find us.
I shrugged my shoulders and put my arm around Francisco’s waist. And together we walked out of the restaurant and into the free world.
Chapter Nine
Lessons in Laundering
There was something special about coming home. This was what I thought as Francisco and I sped through the streets of Cali, Colombia. Just as I always experienced a tinge of emotion at the sight of the Welcome to Los Angeles sign at the Bradley terminal of the airport, I wondered if Francisco was getting nostalgic at the thought of returning to guerrilla war and drug traffickers. He was home. They would take him in here—and if we were lucky, they wouldn’t do it in the hopes of receiving a ransom.
“Is this your first time in Cali?” the cabdriver asked, glancing at us in his rearview mirror.
“Francisco is from Cali,” I said with a tinge of vicarious pride.
“We’re both from Cali,” Francisco added. “I’m from Cali, she’s from Cali-fornia.”
The cabdriver looked at Francisco’s blue eyes and light complexion suspiciously. “You’re from Cali?” he asked, incredulous.
Francisco nodded.
“But where were you born?” the driver persisted.
“Cali.”
“But your parents . . .”
“From Cali.”
Francisco had come home, yet no one believed he was from the place. In fact, his biggest problem was struggling to answer all the people who kept addressing him in English. The day before at the bus terminal in Medellín, the man behind the counter had taken one look at Francisco’s light skin and blue eyes and immediately addressed him in my native language: “Can I help you?”
Francisco had stuttered a little bit, tried to find any words resembling “purchase” or “ticket” and realizing that he was incapable of carrying on the conversation in English, he went over and grabbed me.
“Come with me. I need some help talking.”
I figured that he had run into some tourists and wanted to offer them directions and hotel advice, but when we arrived at the counter, I was shocked to realize the source of Francisco’s communication problem.
“Francisco, darling . . .”
“Yes?”
“Why do you need my help?”
“Because he’s speaking to me in English.”
“Yes and what country are we in?”
“Colombia.”
“And what country are you from?”
“Colombia.”
“Francisco, dear . . .”
“Yes?”
“Speak to him in Spanish, for God’s sake!”
Francisco gave me a timid smile and reverted to his mother tongue.
Though as it turned out, it didn’t matter what language Francisco spoke—there was just no way of convincing people that he wasn’t an American. I would get complimented on my good Spanish and then they would turn to Francisco and add, “And you— why, you hardly have any accent at all.”
As the cabdriver let us out and wished us a pleasant stay in the city, I looked at Francisco and laughed. “So this is home, huh?”
Francisco nodded. “Yep. The place where I belong.”
Francisco and I had decided on Cali because it seemed like the most logical place to set up new lives for ourselves. Francisco couldn’t enter the United States legally (getting a tourist visa as a Colombian was nearly impossible) and I had no qualms about living in South America—I spoke the language and was familiar with the culture. We didn’t have a specific plan, but we had time and a little bit of money. We’d exist on what was left of my savings until the details worked themselves out.
Francisco’s sister Melba had offered to let us stay with her for a while until we got on our feet. At first, I had worried that we’d be impo
sing, but as we shared Cokes in her small, stark living room and I watched a never-ending stream of people pour into the house, I relaxed and realized we wouldn’t be a burden: There were so many people living here already, they wouldn’t even notice us. We’d blend into the crowd, as inconspicuous as bare breasts at Mardi Gras.
After nearly an hour of animated chatter, Melba apologetically left the house to run some errands with her nieces, which gave me the chance to ask Francisco about our sleeping arrangements.
“We’re sharing a room, right?” I asked him as we marched up the stairs to look at the rest of the place.
“Yeah, if that’s okay with you.”
“Silly, of course I want to sleep with you!” I said slapping him playfully on the butt.
He gave me a look that I wasn’t quite sure how to interpret. As we walked into what was obviously a child’s bedroom, Francisco set me down on the bottom bunk and placed my hand in his lap. “Wendy, you don’t understand,” he said with a sigh, giving me that look of incredible patience possessed only by ex-convicts. “When I said that we’d be sharing a room, I didn’t mean with each other.”
“No, it’s all right, we can share a room. Really, I don’t mind,” I said in a magnanimous gesture of goodwill.
“You don’t understand, Wendy. We are going to share a room. You, me, Stephanie, and Jenny.”
“You mean—”
“Yes. All of us.”
This was terrifying news. It was going to be enough of an adjustment to get used to the cold and barren two-story townhouse whose sole adornments were a few pieces of plastic furniture and some tasteless knickknacks, not to mention the fact that we were going to be living with six other people: Melba, her son, her two nieces, her nephew, and her brother-in-law. Now we were going to have to share a room with two noisy little girls who played dolls, left candy strewn about the floor, and considered Styrofoam cutouts of Disney characters to be legitimate tools of interior design.
“Do you like Princess Ariel?” Stephanie asked me later that afternoon, pointing to a bigger-than-life-sized head painted on her, um, our bedroom wall.
Under normal circumstances, her pageboy haircut and squeaky child’s voice would have struck me as endearingly cute, but this wasn’t some adorable eleven-year-old girl to me anymore. I realized that I was looking at my new roommate.
“You mean that fish woman?” I growled.
“She’s a mermaid!” Stephanie said, correcting me.
“Oh yeah, right.” And then straining to reach the diplomatic bone in my body, I added, “She’s very pretty.” And she was for a woman who was halfway covered with scales.
This forced effort apparently paid off because Stephanie beamed at me and then generously allowed me my choice in sleeping accommodations: Did Francisco and I want the upper or lower bunk?
I chose the bottom one, thinking it was an appropriate metaphor for how far down I’d sunk.
“You’ve made your bed. Now you have to sleep in it.”
It was a nice enough saying; it had just never applied to my adult life—not because I didn’t believe in taking the consequences of my actions, but because I never had acquired the habit of making my bed—or dusting my shelves or mopping my floors or putting away my clothes for that matter, at least not on a regular basis. In my own country, it had never been much of a problem. After all, America was the Land of People Phoning Before Stopping By and the hour in between hanging up the phone and answering the door was plenty of time to deceive my guests that I lived at a perfectly acceptable level of cleanliness.
This cultural norm probably would have been the same in Colombia if we had been talking about a place where everyone had a phone. But getting connected to Madre Bell was a long, complicated, expensive process, and even if you managed to get a line (an investment of more than five hundred dollars just for the hookup), you were charged for every single call, even local ones. So in Cali, people often stopped by without calling first, which I didn’t really mind—I just hated the side effect: The house had to be clean at all times, which meant it had to be performed on a daily basis.
I figured it would be a good idea to follow the traditions of my host country and pretend that I was a neat and organized person, but I was sorely out of practice, having abandoned domestic industriousness when I left my parents’ at age seventeen. What was worse, I knew I was being closely scrutinized by Melba. In spite of the fact that she was a year younger than I was and didn’t look or dress much like a wife and mother (her hair was long and fashionable; her clothes were hip), like most Latin American women, she had taken to housecleaning like a religion. In Colombia, a dirty floor meant you didn’t care about your children. Not cooking dinner meant the love had gone out of a marriage. In her eyes, my entire worth as a woman was defined by the skill with which I took over the neatness of the place. Never mind that I’d just gotten her brother out of prison; never mind that I spoke three languages and had seen four continents; never mind that I had achieved the all-time high score on Centipede in my neighborhood. Melba wanted an impressive display of my housecleaning skills. And since I wanted to fit in with the family (and, after all, she was letting us stay at her house for free), I figured, what the hell? I would start with a low-key but skillful performance of my clothes-washing ability.
I had done laundry for years in the States and I pretty much had the process down: It involved sticking five coins and a cup of detergent into a Whirlpool. But in Cali, quarters didn’t exist—worse yet, the country had yet to see very many washing machines. So when I walked up to Melba and announced in a conspicuously loud voice that I intended to “Wash Some Things,” she led me to the tiny courtyard patio that served as the laundry room and handed me a brush and a bar of soap.
I had figured that washing clothes by hand would mostly be just common sense, a notion that was quickly dispelled when I looked at the bizarre contraption in front of me. It was the strangest sink I had ever seen. The entire device was made of concrete and it was so long, it took up an entire six-foot wall. In the center were two basins that could be filled with water from a faucet. One end consisted of a counterlike space one and one-half feet square that appeared to accommodate some sort of washing activity. At the other end was an area the exact same size, only instead of being flat it consisted of inch-high ridges molded into the cement, which I concluded was either used for washing or the torture of small children. I had no idea how to begin.
The easiest thing would be to ask, but I knew that Melba would see this lack of experience as a character flaw. I needed some privacy to figure out the apparatus on my own. So I gave her a confident smile and remarked, “Melba, didn’t I see a cobweb in the living room?”
A look of dread crossed her face and she raced out quickly to remedy the situation.
Francisco and I had already had an extensive discussion about housework and who was going to do it (him) and who wasn’t (me), so when I yelled out to him to bring me his dirty clothes, he walked into the room empty-handed and looked at me suspiciously.
“What in God’s name are you up to?”
“Remember when we made that deal that if I got you out of prison for a crime you didn’t commit and if we succeeded in crossing the border to Panama and if one day we happened to make it safely to Colombia that you’d do my laundry for me for the rest of my life?”
“Uh-huh . . .”
“Yeah, well, I’m going to hold you to it as soon as we get out of your sister’s house. In the meantime, will you please show me how to use this thing?”
Within five minutes, I had convinced Francisco that I was in fact serious about this project and that I was completely determined to learn how to wash clothes by hand. Francisco picked up a pair of jeans, and animated by the prospect that his girlfriend would know how to do housework in the event of an emergency, he patiently began showing me how to scrape the fabric against the ridged edge of the sink to get the dirt out. I watched attentively, making careful note of his technique.
&
nbsp; “Francisco, I think I hear footsteps.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. Quick, hand me the jeans fast.”
I was up to my arms in soapy water by the time I realized that it was just Jenny and Stephanie entering the room. With a sigh of relief, I handed the pants back to Francisco.
“It’s only the girls. Go ahead, show me how to rinse.”
Francisco dunked the pants into the soapy water, which was enough to create quite a scene. The sight of a man showing a woman how to wash clothes was such an anomaly for these two Colombian girls (I think they would have been less shocked had he shown me the proper way to wear pearls) that they immediately began buckling over in laughter. Even Francisco and I began to crack up. Of course, Melba would have to come in to see what all the commotion was about.
“I have never in my life seen a woman who didn’t know how to wash clothes,” she said, truly shocked.
As much as I wanted to blend in to my new home, it seemed that housework was where I was going to have to draw the line. So I sat down and explained the situation to my new Colombian family: I came from a different world, a land of dirty dishes and crumb-laden floors. Since we were going to be living together for a while, would it be too much for them to try and extend a little tolerance to those from other countries whose cultural values did not include domestic tidiness and order?
Within two weeks at Melba’s house, I had failed as a housewife but I had succeeded in becoming the major source of family entertainment. The morning show began around 8 A.M. at which time the girls would gather outside the bathroom, glue their ears to the door, and wait for the screams to begin.
I had no choice but to accept the fact that most houses in Colombia had no hot water; what seemed unreasonably cruel was the fact that the shower nevertheless had two knobs: the “C”10 knob which stood for cold and the “H” knob that I assumed stood for “ha ha” because it did absolutely nothing.
Bathing in ice-cold water gave whole new meaning to the phrase “refreshing shower”—because if you weren’t awake after a Colombian shower, it was because you had just consumed two codeines and a bottle of rum, in which case you were guaranteed to enjoy the experience immensely.
