The Drive

by Teresa Bruce

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  BEWITCHED

  There is a fine line between charmed and spellbound, and we drive along that line to a five-star restaurant tucked into the woods. We have been eating a steady street-food diet of beans and rice topped with pickled onions and hot peppers. But over white linen tablecloths and a view of the San José Valley, we dine on imported olives and rosemary hummus. In the cleanest fleece and cargo pants we own, Gary and I must look like uncouth American guests relaxing after a day on set with Mariamalia. For the first time on the trip, Gary doesn’t have to rely on me to translate, and the meals we share with Arnoldo and Mariamalia over the next few days are food for his soul.

  “So why is this country the only one in Latin America that manages to exist without a standing army?”

  “It isn’t that we’re all super-pacifists in Costa Rica.” Mariamalia is bantering with Gary, clearly proud of her country’s priorities but not wanting to seem immodest. “It’s that we don’t really want anyone to notice how lucky we are.”

  Arnoldo finishes her thought. “We Ticos lead a charmed existence compared to our neighbors. We don’t start revolutions, and the United States pretty much leaves us alone because we don’t make waves.”

  Mariamalia nods between forkfuls of grape leaves. Arnoldo laughs. “I’m telling you, she never eats this much. I think we are going to have baby piglets.”

  She pretends to glare, and Arnoldo kisses a wisp of wavy brown hair from her forehead. Their affection is as touching as Ernesto describing Yolanda, and between the lines of dinner discussion I see the passion of Rodolfo and Yanina. More than anything they exude gratitude, and I realize our paths crossed just in time. I need some of it to rub off on me.

  As soon as the babies are born, Mariamalia’s smile will again light up the television screens of San José, and Arnoldo will start working on his next CD. But tonight, they are ours alone, and she is teaching us her favorite Costa Rican sayings.

  “Okay, this one is what I used to say to my parents whenever I got in trouble for staying out too late,” she says, acting it out with pouting lips and hands on hips. “‘Nadie me quita lo bailado, lo comido, y lo viajado.’ Or ‘Nadie me quita bailado’ for short.”

  I try it out, the round o sounds rolling around in my mouth like marbles. “So are you going to translate or make me figure it out for myself?”

  This beautiful ambassador of a tender country says that it means “No one can ever take away what I have danced, eaten, and traveled.” A blush rises from my throat all the way to my ears, and I hope she never finds out that she is talking to a woman who just a few days earlier filed a police report purely on belligerent principle. I have allowed petty annoyances and disappointments to detract from an incredible privilege. A year from now I won’t even remember what my stolen wallet looked like, but Mariamalia’s motto will stick with me for a lifetime.

  What we thought would be a short stay turns into a weeklong wait for the replacement lock to fix the Ford’s door, and we settle into a routine at the Belén RV Park. Every day in the rainy season starts with bright blue skies. Clouds build by lunch, and from one in the afternoon until one in the morning it pours. Mariamalia and Arnoldo do their best to distract us. He is opening a snack franchise called Get Nuts and a coffee shop, and he takes us to the upscale mall where he’s hoping to beat Starbucks to the punch. Squealing girls carrying Gucci bags pose for selfies with Mariamalia and Arnoldo, and it’s a head-spin to remember that a few days ago we drove through places still unpenetrated by cell phone signals.

  Each time Arnoldo and Mariamalia drop us off at the campground, the ground is so saturated my boots leave heel-shaped puddles in the flattened grass. In five days our truck tires have sunk to their lug nuts in mud and I have returned to a mental state requiring sticky notes. I paper the camper’s curved walls with pale yellow reminders of the kind of person I’m trying to outgrow. Check on the insurance claim just in case. Stock up on antibiotics. Look up the State Department website for travel warnings about Panama, the country we will enter next.

  I stare at the blank strip of wood between the two cabinet doors above the sink, wondering if it’s wide enough for another note. But Gary beats me to it. The note he wedges between the doors is decorated with a colored-pencil sketch of a tree with a little dialogue bubble coming from its branches: “Save me!”

  He slaps another note on top of the pleading tree: “Stop writing these stupid lists and take off your clothes.”

  The patter of raindrops on the camper’s metal roof reverberates like incessant knocking, but I’m laughing too hard to answer. Sloppy drips drizzle through the rubber seals around the ceiling fans, splashing off my naked shoulders. We flop onto our backs and take turns catching them with outstretched tongues.

  The next morning Gary paints a gummy coat of aluminum waterproofing over the entire roof to stop the leaks, but he can do nothing to arrest the torment of the rainy season. We both catch colds, and I feel increasingly claustrophobic, confined to a small and stuffy space from which there is no escape. I can’t imagine how my mother survived—cooped up in a camper with two small daughters pulling each other’s hair and arguing about whose turn it was to turn the page in the Little House on the Prairie book. It must have driven her crazy, a condition I can relate to now that I have driven myself to that same place.

  Despite my resolution to be more grateful and accepting, the notes I type into my computer each night begin to mimic the dreariness of my mother’s journal. I should be committing my memories of Costa Rica’s grandeur to the page: magnificent volcanoes, fish-full lakes, and operatic tropical birds. Instead I fixate on banal details—like the fact that there are only eleven inches between my nose and the Avion’s rain-pummeled roof when I’m lying flat on my back in bed. If I roll over on my right side I squash Gary; if I roll over on my left side I have nine inches before my head will smack into an overhead kitchen cabinet. The walking space down the length of the camper is the width of an army cot, and we have to pass belly-to-belly for one person to climb into bed while the other brushes teeth in the kitchen sink. We play a hundred games of gin rummy because the sound of the rain on the roof makes it impossible to read.

  One afternoon we kill time by dragging out the prints Gary made from my father’s slides. The sun is shining in all of them. I am naked, soaping up in a Costa Rican stream. Shading my eyes with my hands on a deserted beach. Under a waterfall in a one-piece bathing suit. There’s even one of my mother smiling into the camera with Jenny on her lap. I don’t know which version to trust: my father’s photographs or my mother’s words.

  There is the same disconnect in every country—exotic adventure on film, miserable pilgrimage on the page. I am beginning to realize they are equally unreliable as narrative. The very act of taking photographs contaminates reality, implying that a fleeting instant is somehow permanent and representative. But distilling an entire day into one or two incomplete sentences leaves out the pauses between exclamation points, the sustaining moments of tranquillity. What’s missing from both my father’s photos and my mother’s words is the filter of time, the perspective of survival. The truth is what lingers, long after, in the chambers of the heart.

  I can visualize the act of documenting the camper, if we ever find it, but not what Gary’s camera or my words will really convey. I am not the first traveler to set out on a quest for place or origin, but finding the camper will be more than planting an I-lived-here flag in my history. It was built as the opposite of a permanent homestead, so can it ever anchor me? I am not sure I’ll be ready to smile for a photo in front of a home I loved but that my brother never saw. I have no idea where finding it will fit along the continuum of grief to relief.

  At last DHL delivers a replacement door lock for the F-350, and we hand a newly reissued credit card to the service desk at the San José Ford dealership. Our sojourn in the capital is over; we can embark again on our adventure. The camper I grew up in might still be out there, and Cost
a Rica has offered me fortitude for the search ahead. Yet somehow even a week in one spot has resurrected a little of the old me: the woman who constructs an order out of everything she can and relishes the little, predictable victories of schedules and checklists.

  A part of me clings to the comfort of Mariamalia and Arnoldo’s friendship. Like Shawn and Susie in Guatemala, they have become my Yanina and Rodolfo, my Yolanda and Ernesto. The difference is that I am no longer a child at the mercy of my parents’ memories. I can create my own.

  Mariamalia and Arnoldo send us back to the Pan-American Highway with a care package of candied nuts, Arnoldo’s latest CD to play in the cab, and their address, printed neatly on a sticky note.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  PANAMA

  If there is a border I’ve been dreading most, it is Panama’s. Not surprising, considering the welcome I got the first time. I was accustomed to my mother asking me to “go talk to the guards” and “help Daddy stay out of trouble.” I just wasn’t prepared to see him barefoot, tied to a chair, with his wrists strapped together by his own belt, refusing to pay another bribe. I started to cry and couldn’t stop. Not when the man behind the desk pushed the hair out of my eyes and gave me candy. Not even when the guards gave back my daddy’s shoes and untied his hands. Not even when he wiped my runny nose with his thumb and told me everything was all right. It wasn’t. I could feel his heart pounding as he carried me back to the camper, and he smelled sour—just like he did when he picked me up from my sleepover on the night my brother died.

  FEBRUARY 21, 1974

  On to Panama, but not without a hassle.

  This skinny, west-to-east-slanted country, split in half by a man-made ditch, will no doubt still be a hassle. The fact that Panama uses the dollar as currency or that its American expat population might someday equal that of Mexico or Costa Rica does not erase its status as the Central American country the United States has invaded most recently. All I want from Panama is a springboard between the first leg of our journey and the vast continent that I hope contains the old camper.

  It turns out to be a relatively painless border crossing, once the requisite twenties are distributed among tramitaros. There isn’t even a suggestion of searching the Avion; maybe my father’s ordeal earned us some kind of karmic hassle pass. Whatever it is, I start to rewrite my mental script for Panama as soon as we peel off the Pan-American Highway onto a meandering road that loops through the Azuero Península.

  To the left a thick cloak of jungle stretches to the ocean’s shore, but if I look to the right we could be somewhere in Texas. Ours is not the only Ford; in fact, the shoulder is jammed with trucks attached to beat-up trailers. The occasion is a twice-weekly cattle auction, and we pick our way through Pepsi and sausage vendors to take seats in a covered metal grandstand.

  All the men under thirty wear blue jeans and baseball caps with John Deere or New York Yankees logos, but everyone older wears straw hats with flipped-up brims and stylishly stitched cowboy boots. All of them juggle clipboards and pens, payroll pouches and handheld calculators. The enormous beasts jostle up a metal ramp into a holding pen, where two men hanging from scaffolding poke and prod them into an adjoining exhibition pen below the auctioneer. After driving through impoverished countries like El Salvador and Nicaragua, I think I’m hearing things when the auction begins. But the average bid seems to be between $350 and $450 a head.

  I watch, horrified and mesmerized, as young boys dodge horns and hooves to attach paper auction numbers to the heaving sides of beef. Meanwhile, a crowd is gathering around our camper. A couple of Panamanian cowboys are pointing at the rows of stickers we’ve attached to the aluminum door: a flag for each country we’ve traveled through. We have just seen horns thrashing millimeters from their faces, but one of these tough guys asks us, “Isn’t it dangerous to drive through Nicaragua?”

  Panama isn’t shaping up to be such a hassle after all. We drive away with the windows rolled down and doors unlocked. Gary leans back against the bench seat with one hand on the steering wheel and the other draped over my shoulders.

  Under the weight of an impending downpour, the sky is glinting silver, pierced with biblical streams of sunlight. The southernmost ridge of mountains is backlit like the silhouette of a skinny horse’s back: peaks and sways, curves and ribs. From a pull off at the top of the ridge, we look out over a herd of grazing cattle and a deserted scallop of pearly sand, palms, and mangroves.

  There’s a freedom and calmness to the quiet; I feel space settling in my soul and my blood flowing slower. The Azuero is so spread apart, so stretched thin, that jagged edges fall out of focus. Even the villages sprinkled throughout the peninsula seem to blend into the natural landscape instead of interrupting it. The houses are covered in crumbling red tiles the same color as the mud that made them, overlapped in graceful cascades. We stop in a tiny town called Parita to gas up, and while we’re munching on stale potato chips the attendant asks if we’re here to buy masks from Darido Lopez.

  “Es famoso,” he tosses out, as if a nonchalant tone will make up for bragging about the town’s celebrity. He’s even listed in one of the guidebooks. He works out of a lime-green house across the street. At first glance there is nothing to trumpet his fame, but when he comes to the door the bottom third of his white guayabera shirt is splattered with tongue red, fang ocher, cauldron black, and pus green. The inside of his house is as dark as the workshop of a madman ought to be. On a smattering of armless chairs and slipcovered sofas sit nine children—mixing, molding, and breathing life into outrageously freaky papier-mâché masks.

  “I learned from my father and they learn from me.”

  I shudder to think of the bedtime stories told in this household. These quiet little kids are making masks with flaring nostrils, forked tongues, and razor-sharp fangs.

  “In a few weeks there is a parade in a town called Chitré, and boys will terrorize their sisters and the meanest teachers,” Darido laughs. “When they wear my masks their true identity is hidden and they are all dirty devils.”

  Darido’s anticipatory delight reminds me of my grandfather in South Africa. He used to call my little sister and me “the devil’s apprentices.” When I tell Darido the story, the mask maker knows that I will, without a doubt, want a mask for myself. There is no gift shop in Darido’s home; he makes each mask on commission.

  “I always charge the same. It doesn’t matter if you are a dirty devil or an ambassador. To me there is no difference.”

  We pay for two masks and promise to return to watch the Chitré parade and collect whatever monsters he creates. It is a luxury I’m still not accustomed to: the chance to double back and take my time. We have no deadlines or schedule to keep. This is a detour I didn’t plan, a purchase I didn’t budget, and I pinch the inside of my forearm to make sure it’s still me.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  BRIDGING THE GAP

  Maps may show Panama’s easternmost end butting up against South America like a normal border. But the bridge of connective jungle called the Darién Gap is impassable—fought over by competing indigenous groups, drug traffickers, jaguars, and crocodiles. The search for ocean passage around the Darién Gap took my parents about a month, an eternity even my slide-show memories can’t reduce.

  FEB 25TH, 1974

  Found embassy. Closed ’til Wednesday

  “Put that journal away,” Gary teases. “A lot can change in thirty years.”

  He’s grinning because the proof is in our guidebooks. Panama now has a bona fide RV park two hours west of Panama City called XS Memories, which is where we will stay while we search for a modern-day Darién detour. It will be nothing like the first time. After 9/11, no passengers are allowed to travel on container ships, even to accompany their campers to another continent. We will have to send the Avion ahead of us by sea and catch up to it by air. But back in 1974 I didn’t have to leave my home-on-wheels, as long as my father could find a ship big enough and cheap enough. />
  FEB 26TH, 1974

  Drove around. Made some contacts. Found where people were waiting for ships—at Olympic stadium

  I was more concerned with the half-blind kitten my sister and I found, wet and whimpering, behind the Panama City swimming stadium. We never knew exactly who or what poked out one of its yellow eyes, but my mother carefully scooped up the wounded kitten and brought him inside our camper.

  “Girls, cover the table with the sheet from Mommy’s bed,” she told us. “I’m going to turn it into an operating table.” I covered my eyes but I could hear the kitten squealing. I peeked through my fingers as my mother carefully scraped tendrils of pus from the empty eye socket and sewed it shut with her embroidery needle.

  I am reminded of that crude operation when Gary and I pull into XS Memories. The American owners, Dennis and Sheila, have rescued dozens of wounded animals, and we park our camper among them, on a manicured lawn next to a freshly vacuumed outdoor swimming pool. There are sewer and electric hookups, and the sports bar at the heart of the complex is lined with championship pennants, rugby jerseys, and decades-old ticket stubs.

  “We’ll each have a bottle of whatever the local beer is,” Gary says when we sit down at the bar that will become our base as we search for passage.

  “You’ve clearly never had an Atlas before.” Dennis laughs and hands us each two bottles. “Cheap stuff is so diluted you piss stronger than this.”

  Dennis is a muscular, moody man with a thinning ponytail under an endless variety of baseball caps. He met long and lanky Sheila in Las Vegas, where she ran a hotel and had something to do with raising and selling exotic snakes.