by Wendy Dale
Wendy was married to a nice Colombian, who unlike most nice Colombians, had nothing to do with cops, prisons, or breakouts.
The nice Colombian to whom Wendy was married was currently in the country of his birth, starting up an import-export company, after which time he would make it to Costa Rica to begin living with his nice American wife who had never visited a prison.
These facts were necessary, according to Jessica, because no one from Costa Rica ever went to jail. (Other than her boyfriend and the fifty-two hundred Costa Ricans who made up the prison population.) Besides, Santa Ana was a small community and everyone there seemed to be far more interested in what was growing in their neighbor’s garden than what they were harvesting in their own backyard.
Adding more sweetened condensed milk to her bread, Doña Cloti continued, “Don’t you think it’s strange to be married to a man who is living in another country?”
After dating a man in jail, being involved with someone living on another continent was starting to sound pretty run of the mill.
“You don’t really know what he’s doing when he’s that far away,” she continued.
“No, I guess not.”
“Does he have another woman there?”
“No,” I laughed, picturing Francisco living with nearly two thousand men.
“How do you know?” she asked bitterly. “My husband has another woman and a family up north that he has been visiting and supporting for over twenty years.”
Infidelity, it seemed, was the national pastime in Costa Rica (probably because they realized their soccer team wasn’t going anywhere). Any time I sat down in San José’s central park for more than two minutes, I was sure to be approached by a married man older than my father who would invite me to have drinks, dinner, or sex with him. Luckily, I’d amassed a lot of experience dealing with unwanted advances (being one of the few women I knew who had been felt up on four continents) and I knew how to deal with these sorts of things. The best tactic was having them arrested by a dozen armed police officers, a helicopter spotlighting them from overhead.
I had learned this little trick when I was nineteen years old, working alone in a retail clothing store in Los Angeles, when a man had entered, taken off his pants, and begun masturbating in front of me. Not sure exactly what to do (the path to the door being blocked by a large penis), I suddenly remembered the panic button. Two minutes later, a very surprised naked man was arrested (literally with his pants down) by an armed group of police officers, a helicopter flying overhead while my distressed manager explained to me, “Wendy, it’s not a panic button. It’s an armed-robbery button.”
However, my last time in Costa Rica I had realized that this tactic was not going to work very well in this part of the world because the cops at the jail were propositioning me as often as the prisoners. Having discovered that being married was often the only way to get rid of a Latin advance, I had told one particularly persistent guard that I was at the jail because I was visiting my husband. Not one to be deterred, he had responded, “Well, if he’s in prison, how’s he going to stop you from going out with me?”
They say that patience is an acquired skill, but I have yet to learn where exactly one goes to acquire it. Personally, I think that the ability to sit calm and contented for long periods of time is located next to the gene that controls the gallbladder, which is very unfortunate for the many members of my family, including myself, who as a result of surgery, happen to be living without that particular organ. Luckily, neither gallbladders nor patience is required to sustain human life as long as one avoids greasy foods and prison visits. However, as fate would have it, my first week in Costa Rica, these two vices formed the basis of my existence.
Since I didn’t have a kitchen, Cloti insisted that I take my meals with her family, which made her suddenly responsible for the bulk of my dietary intake. She’d pile up the outdoor patio table with chunks of fatty meat, oil-drenched rice, and butter-soaked bread as I sat down to an al fresco lunch with the entire clan: her, her husband, Yuliana (her eleven-year-old daughter), her younger brother, and her mother-in-law.
Besides putting up with the heavy food that was wreaking havoc with my fragile digestive system, my bigger worry was Francisco. Upon arriving in the country, I had had to wait three days for my scheduled “special visit” with him, which I had acquired as a result of being a foreigner, under the pretense that my stay in Costa Rica was limited. After what felt like an interminably long period of time, the days had finally gone by and on the scheduled morning, I was able to slip out of the house without Doña Cloti’s knowledge, sparing me the usual barrage of questions that followed any time I left or returned. A bus dropped me off in the center of Santa Ana, where I flagged down a cab to take me to the prison.
“Where to?” the driver asked, reaching over to open the door.
“La Reforma,” I said, suddenly remembering Jessica’s warning to not give out too much information to anyone. In her paranoia, she’d even come up with a list of explanations in case the cabdriver began asking any questions.
“Tell him you’re a foreign exchange student and your project is to study the prisoners in Costa Rica.”
“Jessica, that’s not exactly the type of project the Rotary Club endorses.”
“Oh. Well then, tell him, tell him—”
“What?”
“Tell him that you’re a missionary and you’re bringing food to feed the prisoners.”
“Carrying just one bag of groceries? What do I say—that I’m going to multiply the bread and the fishes?”
“Okay, okay, let me think.”
“Jessica, I don’t see why—”
“I’ve got it! Plants!”
“Plants?”
“Yes, tell him that you like plants. See, there’s a nursery not too far away. Have him drop you off there and then you just have to walk four kilometers to the prison.”
“Four kilometers?”
“Yeah, it’s not far. What is it? Two, three miles?”
Luckily, the cabdriver was not that curious about what I was doing visiting La Reforma; he was far more interested in what I was doing visiting Costa Rica.
“Have you seen a lot of beaches and volcanoes?” he asked enthusiastically.
Fortunately, I had finally learned the appropriate response to this question. “The Caribbean—it’s always been one of my favorite seas.”
La Reforma was located outside of San José, in a valley surrounded by lush green mountains, with air so fresh it hurt my smog-accustomed LA lungs. Not even the prison officials had the power to remove the hills and trees, and I imagined that being an inmate there couldn’t possibly be so bad.
Of course, Francisco didn’t have access to this view. Being the supposed leader of the now famous breakout, he had been transferred to top security, where he was kept locked indoors all day in a cell the size of my dining room, which he shared with seventeen other inmates.
To visit him, I had to go through a body search and two inspections of the bag of groceries I was carrying. The prison guard smashed my bread, ripped open my carton of orange juice, and confiscated my keys (rather, the one key I now owned). Then I was invited to take a seat and wait.
This seemed to be the ritual at La Reforma, what I would come to refer to as “invisible lines.” It didn’t make a difference what time I arrived, if there were people ahead of me or not, no matter what, I was going to have to wait. My visit had been scheduled for nine o’clock that morning but at ten-fifteen, I was still there, sitting on a bench, waiting.
“I realize Francisco’s very busy and has a ton of things to do,” I said to the bored guard sitting in front of me, “but do you think he’ll have time to see me today?”
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said, picking up the phone. “Hey Ramírez, about Sánchez—is he coming up or not?”
Ten minutes later, I heard footsteps making their way up the ramp. And finally, three months, ninety days, 2,160 hours, thirteen bottles o
f rum spent waiting for him, there he was, walking toward me.
It is a strange sight seeing the man you are in love with wearing handcuffs. It’s even stranger when you were not the one who put them on him. Accompanied by a guard, he made his way up the path to where I was standing. Thin when I had left him three months ago, he was gaunt and pale now, walking too slowly, his head down, steps that were far too small for his six-foot-two-inch frame.
Later I would learn what he had been through: a day in solitary confinement in a cell four feet wide, the stench of urine making sleep impossible, where the only attention he received was to have half of the cell doused in a continual stream of water. Then the transfer to a new prison, where the “hole” had been even worse, even smaller, this time full of cockroaches and mosquitoes that had slept on the concrete with him. Finally, the move to top security, where he had been robbed of everything except the clothes he was wearing and where he was still sleeping on the concrete floor (not having the twenty dollars necessary to buy himself one of the prison mattresses).
I embraced him silently, not encountering the words to tell him how sorry I was. Instead, I was reminded of someone else’s words, a line from a Billy Bragg song I had heard long ago: “This isn’t a court of justice, son, this is a court of law.” This is what the legal system is doing to an innocent man, I thought. This is what the justice system is doing to my life.
This was a special foreigner’s visit, but because it was in addition to the regular Thursday and Sunday visits that went on all morning, it was just an hour long. I was being eased in slowly. The next visit would be in mediana cerrada, top security at the prison, where we’d sit on the cold, damp concrete floor of a windowless room inhaling the stench of raw sewage, surrounded by the menacing looks of murderers and rapists.
We were ushered into a small room filled with rows of desks that reminded me of my junior high school classrooms. God only knew what went on here. Reeducation, I imagined. We both squeezed into desks made for people half our size, and Francisco reached for my hand silently. There was so much to say that neither one of us knew where to begin.
We had a full hour, the first time in three months that we had been allowed to speak for so long, but the additional time made finding the right thing to say all the more difficult. We hadn’t expected anything of an eight-minute phone call, but sixty minutes was enough time to share something meaningful. There were so many things to reveal, so much that had happened to us both during our months apart, but there was a guard outside counting off every second, ensuring that we didn’t get away with even a minute more than we had been rationed. With so much pressure to cram everything in, my mind raced to sort out the most important facts.
At a loss and in an attempt to inject a little levity into a moment that was in desperate need of some cheer, I finally asked, half joking, “So, what have you been up to while I was gone?”
Francisco laughed. “Well, for one thing, I moved, as you can see. What do you think of the place?”
“Well, it seems pretty safe. Bars on all the windows.”
“Not a single thief could get in here.”
“I bet. Say, Francisco . . .”
“What?”
“How the hell am I going to get you out of here?”
The situation did not look good. Francisco had made front-page news in two of San José’s papers: “Leader of Prison Breakout Faints During Escape.” “Colombian Leads Escape of Seven Prisoners from San Sebastian.” They’d even publicized his name on the television news. But what had been lacking was Francisco’s version of the story.
He explained it this way: Seven inmates had attempted an escape and were all caught outside of the prison, half of them while making their way down the wall, the others after they had successfully cleared the building and were fleeing down the street.
“And you?” I asked Francisco. “Where did they catch you?”
“The night it happened, everyone knew about the breakout, but I never even left my cell. The next morning while I was on the phone with my daughter, an announcement came telling me to present myself at the director’s office. I showed up and that’s where they told me. They informed me that I had been the one to mastermind the escape.”
I knew Francisco was a smart guy and could probably plan a breakout in his sleep, but to actually carry out the escape while he was sleeping, now that was a different matter entirely.
“What kind of proof do they have?”
“One member of the escapees says I did it—he has always hated me and has found a way to get back at me. But there are thirty prisoners in my section who’ve signed a document testifying that I never left my bed.”
Before we knew it, a guard came to give us a warning that time was nearly up. It seemed unfair to me. I had paid for this hour with three months of waiting and now it had been eaten away, minute by minute, just like that.
“I can’t believe I already have to go.”
“Wendy, I can’t believe you actually came.”
He was right. At least we were in the same country now. At least he wasn’t going through this alone.
“I’m going to do everything I can to get you out of here.” I meant it, even though I had no idea what I could possibly do. “In the meantime, do you need anything else?”
“Do you think I could borrow your lipstick?” he said with a grin.
“When a man loves a woman very very much—and they’re married—well, the man puts his penis in the woman’s vagina and that’s where babies come from.” That was the extent of my mother’s advice on relationships and that useful bit of information I received (and subsequently imparted to the rest of the neighborhood children) when I was just four years old. I searched my brain for anything more recent. Of course, there was my mother’s description of what sex was like (“it’s like a tickle that you don’t want to stop”), but other than that Mom had been pretty brief on the topic of relationships and had neglected to mention any helpful tidbits on getting my boyfriend out of a Costa Rican prison.
I was clueless how to begin, but at least I knew who would sympathize with my situation. Jessica could certainly relate and maybe she’d even offer some helpful advice—“Ten tips for freeing the man you love” or something like that.
“What about bail?” she suggested as we strolled from the ice-cream shop to her office, raisin-rum purchases in hand. “That’s what my lawyer’s trying to do. I want to get Olman out, see what his chances are and if it looks like they’re going to convict him at his trial, we’ll leave the country before the court date ever comes up.”
“That’s your plan?”
She nodded.
“You’d leave the country just like that?”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“What about clearing Olman’s name? What about your family?”
“Wendy, where do you think you are? If you think you’re going to find justice here, forget it. If I have to choose between having Olman in a foreign country and not having him at all, I’ll leave here in a second.”
Was my chance of seeing justice in this country as slim as all that? What about due process, what about a fair trial, what about all those rights with Latin names that we had in my country—habeas corpus, e pluribus unum, carpe diem. Maybe Jessica was just uninformed. Surely, Francisco’s attorney would take a more proactive view.
The next day, seated in a café in downtown San José, I expressed my concerns to the slightly chubby, mustached man across the table from me. “What about habeas corpus? What about gluteus maximus? Isn’t there anything we can do?”
“There is nothing you can do but wait,” Francisco’s attorney casually informed me, apparently unaware that he was speaking to a woman without a gallbladder.
“Easy for you to say,” I said, watching him digest his greasy food with ease. “Exactly how long am I going to have to wait?”
“Trials around here take a while. It shouldn’t be more than, say, three or four more months.”
&
nbsp; “They’re going to keep an innocent man in prison for a total of ten months?”
“Probably longer. There are three charges and we’re going to have to wait for three different trials.”
“Well, what about bail? How come bail hasn’t been set in his case?”
“He’s already had three different lawyers. Among them, they’ve requested bail a total of five times. It’s always been denied.”
“Why?”
“It’s tough to get bail on behalf of a foreigner. As a Colombian, there is nothing tying Francisco to Costa Rica. The court assumes that the minute he’s set free, he’ll flee the country.”
“So there’s nothing we can do?”
He shook his head. “Just be patient and wait.”
In eleventh grade, while my classmates were off doing typical Montana things like preparing for snow, preparing for the rodeo, or preparing to overthrow the U.S. government, I would shut myself away in the library, away from big trucks, big cows, and big guns and lose myself in a world of literature. It was on one of these cold winter days that I was first introduced to Latin American culture viewed through the lens of linguistic determinism. According to the author (whose name I never did pay any attention to—who spent time remembering things like writers’ names?), Latin Americans’ Weltanschauung was reflected in the way their language was constructed, and a simple analysis of the sentence “El plato se me cayó de las manos” (“The plate fell from my hands”) was enough to illustrate the Latin American view of life, the universe, and gravity. Unlike most Americans who lived in a world of cause and effect and believed themselves to be primarily in control of the events that happened to them (reflected in the American way of expressing this same sentiment: “I dropped the plate”), the author claimed that Latin Americans viewed life as something that just happened. “I didn’t drop the plate. The plate simply fell from my hands.” For Latinos, life was lived in the passive tense.
Ten years had passed since I first encountered this text (what I had come to refer to as the “nonflying saucer theory”), and now the evidence supporting this idea was all around me. In Costa Rica, disaster was seen as something that simply occurred. Who were you to try and avoid it?