by Wendy Dale
It was a really stupid thing to feel. Any woman in her right mind would have known that prisons were not appropriate places to start engaging in Good Housekeeping fantasies. But some primal genetic urge surged up in me, stronger than logic, stronger than rational thought, stronger even than a lifetime based on uncertainty. And damn it all to hell, I felt safe.
Of course, it was a double-edged sword. Moments like this were part of the punishment too. In prison, you didn’t get a minute of happiness without paying for it doubly, and I knew that the next day, walking back onto the streets of San José would be twice as hard, twice as lonely, the contrast twice as apparent. My hearth-and-home fantasy would be revealed in all its flaws. And I would be back to where I had started from, alone and frustrated, fighting a battle, only half aware of the rules.
“The pen is mightier than the sword.” It was a nice enough quote, but you couldn’t help but notice its inherent bias. After all, people who came up with poignant phrases like that were obviously writers and no self-interested pen wielder was going to come up with a maxim like, “You can hack any writer to bits with a saber”—not to mention a Colt Magnum or a Smith & Wesson. However, none of these arms were (nor ever have been) in my possession. The only weapon available to me was a metal-gray Macintosh laptop with binary capabilities, fully loaded with state-of-the-art software, powered by a rechargeable battery, and connected to a Hewlett-Packard printer.
As far as writers went, I was about as armed and dangerous as they got, ready to type out pithy phrases at an impressive seventy words per minute. All I had to do was ensure that the letter I had carefully loaded into my computer would strike its intended mark. Typed in twelve-point Palatino was a request for bail on behalf of Francisco.
Francisco had been denied bail at least five times, but I wasn’t willing to give up hope. The lawyer’s previous whiny request had basically amounted to “Please let Francisco out. He’s been in jail for a long time.” But this time, I had evidence. In the past two and a half months, I had come up with a declaration of good credit from the bank Francisco had repaid a loan to, his daughter’s Costa Rican birth certificate, a letter from a friend stating that Francisco had a place to stay in the event of his release, the official registration of the travel business Francisco had owned in Costa Rica, and Saúl’s letter from CODEHUCA stating it was a violation of human rights to keep a man imprisoned for eight months without benefit of a trial, a document that bore a great deal of weight. Even the lawyer recognized the logo at the top of the page and asked astonished how I had managed to come up with it.
I wanted to give him a snide answer, something like, “There are people who sit around waiting for things to happen and people who get out and go drinking with human rights representatives,” but I just glared at him and said mysteriously, “I have contacts.”
I handed him the letter that I had typed up in Spanish, commanded him to remove any grammatical errors, sign it, and deliver it to the court.
“What are we going to do if you get out?” I asked Francisco the next Sunday, after explaining the recent turn of events.
“I’d like to eat a steak, drink several beers, and make love to a beautiful woman.”
“And then what?”
“Eat another steak, drink some more, and wake up in the morning with the same woman.”
“Listen, I can probably get a job with AFP here as a journalist. I have a contact here and they look highly upon John Lithgow interviews and—”
“Wendy, I don’t want to stay in Costa Rica.”
“Francisco, I’ve just spent months gathering evidence to prove that you won’t flee the country if they let you out on bail.”
“Wendy, what do I have here? They’ve even taken my daughter away from me. After the articles that came out in the papers, my ex-wife hangs up any time I call.”
I looked around us at the bars, the barbed wire, and the armed guards and asked myself the same question.
Three working days later, I trembled my way up to the fourth floor of the courthouse and requested a copy of the judge’s decision. A very effeminate Costa Rican man sashayed his way to the counter and opened up the file. I picked up the paper and began to read slowly, picking apart the dense and complicated legal language. I went over the paragraph once, getting the gist of its content. Then I read it again, trying not to get too excited until I was certain of its meaning. However, after digesting the document a third time, I was positive of what it had to say: After having been denied bail five times, this time it had been set in the amount of a mere $250.
I stared at the words in front of me, not quite believing them. I had waited for this day for nearly six months—three of them spent helpless and distant in Los Angeles and just as long spent battling a second-rate legal system in Costa Rica—and, finally, it had arrived. We had done it. I had stuck it out. He really was going to come home to me.
I ran to the nearest bank and deposited the money into the prison’s account as I had been instructed, and raced back to the court with my receipt. The same Costa Rican who had attended to me earlier informed me that Francisco should arrive at the house later that afternoon. “Hurry on home so that he’ll have someone to greet him there. And tell him to behave himself,” he added with a flamboyant wave of his hand.
“I will,” I said, and rushed out of the building into a bright beautiful Costa Rican afternoon.
Not long after I arrived home, Doña Cloti came around to knock on my door, informing me that I had a phone call. I thanked her and raced into her living room, eager to give Francisco the good news. Unfortunately, Doña Cloti followed me in, hoping to overhear my end of the conversation, her attempt at vicariously living out the romances of young couples in love.
Since I hadn’t yet found time to unravel the yards of stories that Jessica had spun for me (Doña Cloti still thought that Francisco was in Colombia starting up an import-export business), her presence posed a bit of a problem. I was going to have to relay the news to Francisco with a bit of skill.
“How are you?” Francisco asked me, in a low depressed voice.
“I’m fine and you’re feeling better than you’ve felt in eight and a half months,” I gushed, unable to contain my enthusiasm.
“What?” he asked, not picking up on my code.
“So where do you want to have dinner tonight?”
“In Paris, under the Eiffel Tower, with a bottle of red wine.”
“I don’t mean in your fantasies. I’m going to have dinner with you tonight and I want to know where you want to go.”
“Wendy, what are you talking about—you don’t mean . . .” Finally he was catching on. “They granted me bail?”
“Yes.”
“When do I get out?”
“Sometime this afternoon.”
After our phone call, I figured it was probably a good time to begin deceiving Francisco that I was actually a neat, organized person. The childhood industriousness induced upon me by my mother had been replaced with an adult laissez-faire attitude toward cleanliness and my room had been left basically unattended to for the past three months. Now seemed as good a time as any to begin the arduous task of trying to straighten it up.
The first problem I encountered was that I had nothing to clean it with. Doña Cloti, never one to let me go anywhere alone, suggested that her daughter accompany me to the store. Yuliana, a shy lovely eleven year old, ended up not only helping me haul the stuff home, but she also explained what all the cleaning paraphernalia was used for.
It wasn’t that I was a completely novice housekeeper; it was that the brands that were familiar to me were nowhere to be found. Comet had yet to fly into Costa Rica and Joy in this country was nonexistent. Dishwashing liquid wasn’t even used by housewives here; instead, there was what I called “freeze-dried Comet”: a green, gritty hockey-puck-sized mound of green stuff that came in a plastic container that had to be mixed with water to wash the dishes.
After overcoming this small hurdle, I was fa
ced with another challenge: I needed something for the floor. Luckily, mops were plentiful in Costa Rica—it was the detergent that had me stumped. Noting the puzzled expression on my face,Yuliana came to my rescue again: “You have to choose the same color as your floor.” Realizing I was still at a loss,Yuliana added, “It’s red.” Bypassing the blue, yellow, and green plastic bags filled with liquid the consistency of runny glycerin soap, I added a container of red floor cleaner to my shopping basket.
An hour later,Yuliana and I hauled our bags into the house where Doña Cloti was there to greet us. “You’re going to clean your room!” she exclaimed, happier than I had seen her in months. It was a nice contrast to her failed bonding attempt upon my arrival when she had tried to exchange housekeeping tips with me which had been met by my blank stare.
Not knowing when Francisco was due to arrive, my game plan was to do the chores in order of importance. The first hour passed. I straightened up my bed and the bathroom. Then another hour went by. I cleaned the tub and toilet and mopped the floor. Another hour passed. I started cleaning the corners of the room with a toothbrush.
It grew dark. Francisco still had not arrived. I decided not to worry and lay down in bed trying to comfort myself with a book. Nine o’clock came and went, then ten o’clock. At midnight I turned off the lights, wondering what could have gone wrong, finally giving in to the subtle premonition that had warned me all along that it was simply too good to be true.
At eight o’clock the next morning, I left my newly cleaned room (the odor of fungus having been replaced by a refreshing lemon scent) and arrived at the lawyer’s office. Jorge was not in, but the receptionist who apparently had been well trained in her employer’s favorite phrase told me that I was welcome to wait.
Two and a half hours later, Jorge strolled into the office and languidly put his briefcase down on the table. “What’s new?” he asked.
“They let Francisco out on bail.”
“That’s great.”
“But he didn’t arrive at my house last night.”
He seemed to realize that he was supposed to react to this as if it were bad news. “Hmmm, well, I’ll have to check into it.”
That was it. No explanation, no apology, just a wimpy excuse to get me out of the office and deal with the other frustrations of his day. I gave Jorge my worst glare and silently stormed out his door without as much as a good-bye.
Outside the building, I took a few deep breaths in an attempt to calm down, convincing myself that anger wouldn’t do me any good. What I really needed was information and the best person to provide it would be Francisco.
In theory, Francisco had a phone number, but actually getting in touch with him was nearly impossible. In the past, I had tried calling him from a pay phone half a dozen times, which had only resulted in a busy signal. On several different occasions, I had even invested an especially frustrating hour repeatedly dialing the number, hanging up and dialing over and over again in the hopes that eventually the call would go through. But it hadn’t worked yet. So why hold out any extra hope today?
If this had been a movie and not real life, my attempt to use the phone definitely would have proven successful. After all, I had logged a total of four hours of failed attempts. Any scriptwriter would have realized that the heroine had suffered enough. Time to give her a break. But this wasn’t the way things worked in real life. I knew. I’d been playing the “having been through enough card” for several months now.
“Okay, whoever’s in charge up there, I think this has been just about the right amount of suffering,” I had silently repeated so many times during the past six months. “Time to make things go right for me for a change.”
Apparently, this argument had not been terribly convincing. But what the hell—one more time wouldn’t hurt. As I walked up to the pay phone, I decided to put in one final silent request. “Pleeeeaaase. Not for me. Do it for Francisco.”
Stupefyingly enough, my phone call went through on the first ring.
“Hello?” I said in response to the guard’s mumbled greeting, not believing my luck.
“Can I help you?” he repeated.
“Um, yes, Francisco Sánchez, please—could I speak to him?”
There was a wait of several minutes while the guard went to get Francisco. Finally, I heard his voice at the other end of the line. “I haven’t been granted bail,” he informed me.
“What do you mean? I paid it myself.”
“In the passport case. But there are the other charges. The lawyer lied to us—I was never granted bail in the car case.”
“What are we going to do?” I asked, for once completely at a loss.
“We’re going to court. They’ve finally set the trial date. Twelve days from today.”
The concept of privacy in Latin America is very different from the idea we have of it in the States. According to Costa Ricans, your right to it has generally been fulfilled if you manage to find a bathroom that has a door on it. Luckily, this cultural anomaly made it very easy for me to get the names and addresses of potential witnesses, those who had the unlucky fate to either sell or purchase the car that Francisco’s ex-wife, Laura, accused him of stealing. I simply walked up to the fourth floor of the courthouse and asked the clerk for Francisco’s file.
“What is your relationship to the inmate?” the clerk asked me suspiciously.
“I’m his girlfriend.”
“Oh, okay then.”
And simple as that, he turned over the three-inch-high file to me, explaining that I had to return it in an hour but that I could make a copy across the street.
That afternoon, I tracked down the first witness. Forty-year-old Clara had initially sold the car to Francisco and Laura. Standing outside her door, I asked her the all-important question: “Do you remember who paid for the car? At least, would you recognize the man?”
“Yeah. He didn’t look like a Latino. Tall with blue eyes.”
Another important aspect of the case was that Francisco hadn’t wanted to make a profit; he had been forced into relinquishing the car.
Francisco had driven Laura’s vehicle after she had abandoned him and their daughter. His huge van used to transport tourists to the beach wasn’t very practical for short trips within the city. But Francisco got into a wreck. He had no idea where Laura was or when she was coming back and he didn’t have the money to repair the vehicle. He could either store the useless car or sell it for a fraction of what he had paid for it. Eventually, the car was purchased by a sixty-year-old man named José.
“It was in terrible shape,” José informed me, after he had invited me into his home and his wife had brought me a warm cup of hot chocolate. “That’s why I got it so cheap.”
“Great. That’s all I need you to say on the stand.”
Finally, based on an intuitive hunch, I went to the Costa Rican equivalent of the Department of Motor Vehicles, where I made quite an impression on the employees. Never before had they imagined that a microfiche copy of a car registration could make a girl cry. But the strongest evidence of the case was right in front of me, lit by the blue screen: Laura had done exactly what she was accusing Francisco of—she had sold their other car, the one that had been registered in Francisco’s name. Once Laura finally returned to Costa Rica, Francisco had already fled. And when Laura discovered that Francisco had left his van with a mutual friend, she picked it up and sold it, pocketing a nice twelve-thousand-dollar profit.
Of course, none of this proof impressed Jorge: “That doesn’t change the fact that he sold a car that wasn’t registered in his name,” the man who was supposed to be defending him smugly informed me.
I couldn’t believe it. I had thought Jorge’s character defect was limited to laziness and that I would get around this by doing all the work for him. I had spent months getting to know all of the aspects of Francisco’s case. I had outlined the salient points complete with supporting evidence. All Jorge had to do was stick with the script I had provided f
or him. But now I realized that he wasn’t just incompetent—he actually didn’t care.
This was Francisco’s last chance. We had five days to go and we could lose everything on account of a terrible lawyer.
At my disposal, I had a large network of people in regular contact with criminal attorneys (it was one of the advantages of going to a prison twice a week). However, for months I had been asking every inmate I came into contact with for a referral and not one of them had had anything positive to say about his lawyer. Now it was down to the wire, and the probability of locating a competent attorney before the trial was like finding a needle in a haystack, an aphid on an apple tree, a tiny sliver of glass on a sparkling white floor.
That was a good simile. Hell, I had spent months trying to do this very thing, trying to pick up the final shards of the glass that had smashed to my floor in a clumsy episode of toothbrushing. It was nearly impossible to find them all, but four days before Francisco’s trial, as if to remind me that nothing was completely hopeless, I actually did find the last remaining sliver. Walking barefoot across the floor, I suddenly felt a tremendous surge of pain and lifted up my bleeding foot to realize happily that it was a sign—yes, all things were truly possible.
That very day something amazing happened.
Francisco was walking through the prison courtyard when his friend and cell mate Carlos spotted an attractive, well-dressed woman.
“Get a look at that ass!”
“Wait a minute—I know that ass,” Francisco responded in amazement.
The hindquarters belonged to Fabiola Valerio, a woman who had been Francisco’s neighbor, car-pool partner, and confidante several years earlier.
“Fabiola!” Francisco shouted, racing toward her. “What are you doing here?”