Avoiding Prison & Other Noble Vacation Goals (11 page)

“Sure. Did you have a specific market in mind?”

“Yes. The black one.”

Grocery list in hand, Mercedes and I headed out toward the street. “Just how far do we have to go?” I wanted to know.

“The black market is everywhere and nowhere at the same time,” she confided to me with a wink.

Cubans were issued a
libreta,
which was a card that entitled them to a monthly ration of goods. Being a somewhat progressive country, “essential goods” also included cigarettes, coffee, and rum. However, there were always shortages in the government stores and so a thriving black market had sprung up, providing everything from shrimp to toilet paper.

The vendors hung out on street corners quietly whispering what they had to offer: meats, cheese, rice, exotic fruits. We made our way down the street (that is to say, I walked, she danced salsa in a forward motion), and when something interested Mercedes, we'd walk off with the salesperson, slink around the corner, and make the deal in a quiet corner or in the person's house.

We finally arrived at her house, both of us aglow with the thrill of the black market: She was happy because she had managed to come home with her arms full of groceries, and I was amused at the fact that by simply buying bread, cheese, and mangos I had managed to violate the laws of two nations.

It was the last full day I was going to be able to spend with Mercedes so we celebrated with a large lunch, a bottle of rum, and a leisurely afternoon spent looking at photos of her family. After perusing five albums and several stacks of loose pictures, she asked if I would like to see the video of her son and his family in Miami.

“Of course, I don't have a VCR, but I'll show it to you anyway,” she explained.

I didn't understand the concept of watching a tape without a tape player until she pulled out the cassette and handed it to me.

“See?”

Yes, now I had seen the video.

There are several ways to leave Cuba, none of which is particularly convenient if you happen to be Cuban. There's the popular
“balsero
route,” which is the Caribbean equivalent of rafting down the Mississippi (but which doesn't always end happily with a reunion with Aunt Polly—the most frequent conclusion is an unpleasant confrontation with Uncle Sam). The journey is full of risks and tragically enough most Cubans I met had a tearful story to tell me of some family member who didn't survive the trip. (Mercedes had lost several nephews; Alberto had lost his father.)

My trip home was going to be a bit simpler. All I had to do was get to the airport, hop on a plane, and fly directly to any country that wasn't the United States. (In this case, Mexico was the closest and most convenient.)

I packed up the last of my things, fought with the zipper on my suitcase, and struggled with my thoughts about the island nation I was leaving. I had come here illegally, ironically enough against the law of the United States, a country that didn't want its citizens having anything to do with a place where the people were denied freedom. And Cubans were not free by American standards: They couldn't say what they wanted, they couldn't buy what they wanted, they couldn't even walk down the street without the constant fear of being watched. Yet they were liberated at the same time. They revealed their skin as if it were nothing to be ashamed of and moved their hips to a pounding salsa beat without ever feeling self-conscious.

Havana was full of life and desperation at the same time. Surrounded by tropical heat, the beat of island music, dilapidated architecture, and the constant presence of sex, in Cuba I had had the constant feeling that something was just about to occur—because in a place so full of uncertainty the only thing that was for sure was that something inevitably
would
happen.

It took me a while looking out the window of the plane on the runway of the José Martí International Airport to realize that I had completely failed in acquiring the things I had come to Cuba to get. A last-minute fear of customs officials had made me decide against the box of Cohibas at the airport and I had handed my last bottle of rum to Mercedes as a thank-you gesture.

So that was the situation: I had gone illegally to a communist country and had nothing to show for it. I would be coming home empty-handed: no rum, no cigars, no bringing along my new Cuban friend. But as I thought I distinguished Mercedes waving at me through the glass of the airport, I realized that it was okay. Because now I would have a good reason to come back.

Chapter Four

Sex, Lies, and Tapeworms

Costa Rica was not a fitting place for a traveler intent on adventure. It was nicknamed the Switzerland of Central America. It was full of rosy-cheeked tourists and shops with signs in English that proclaimed, “Come inside. We love Americans.” It was
so
legal to go there, I didn't even need a visa. And it was the only country in the Western Hemisphere without a national army. Eliminate the possibility of war and what lure could a nation possibly hold for me?

However, the place had one important thing going for it— namely, it was not Honduras. Freshly back from my Cuba trip, I was visiting Tegucigalpa for the second Christmas in a row, and since my sisters hadn't yet arrived, being trapped at my parents' house with no transportation and nothing to do was beginning to wear on me. What I needed was a little rest from my vacation and there seemed to be a simple solution: a couple of weeks in Costa Rica would cost me next to nothing, it was just two days away by bus, and I'd be back at my folks' in time to open presents.

My mother, who was always supportive of her children's international attempts to ditch their problems, filled my backpack with homemade brownies and sensing my misgivings about the boring country I was about to visit consoled me, “I'm sure you'll make your own fun.” As it turned out, she was right. Within three week's time, I was going to have made headlines in the papers, visited a prison, and been interrogated by Costa Rican federal agents.

Seated on a surprisingly plush air-conditioned bus nearing the Costa Rican capital, I decided to peruse my guidebook, which offered this disconcerting piece of information: “Whenever traveling in Costa Rica, always always plan ahead and always always make reservations in advance.” Of course, they always hid these types of warnings in the body of the book, kind of pointless for me now that I'd gotten in the habit of not even opening my guidebook until I had nearly arrived at my destination.

I would just have to make do. Arriving at sundown in the dirty congested chaos of San José, I had no idea where I would be spending the night, but I quickly deduced that the bus terminal was not my first choice. The taxi driver who picked me up spoke of a vacancy at Hotel Venecia, which sounded like an elegant and continental place, but the only thing it turned out to have in common with Venice was that turning on the shower converted the entire bedroom into one giant canal. Water gushed from the showerhead, water flowed from the knobs on the wall, and a noisy drip even came out of the handle on the toilet.

The sign outside had advertised hot showers, which was completely true. What was lacking were warm showers. After having discarded my clothes into a pile on the bed, I stepped under the water for all of two seconds, as long as I could endure the scalding water and then jumped out while I soaped up my body and shampooed my hair. But too tired and hungry to complain, I kept the room. I washed my face (and the entire bathroom floor in the process), changed into fresh clothes, and headed for the hotel restaurant.

Dinner turned out to be a bland meal of chicken, rice, black beans, and plantains. But it was food, and I was sitting down so I was content. Besides, I was in a foreign country yet again and had no plans—anything could happen. I was starting to get the hang of this whole spontaneity thing.

One of the nicest things about travel in Central America is that it gives you an excuse to strike up conversations with strangers, something that's nearly impossible to do in Los Angeles. Try leaning over your grilled eggplant at any trendy West Hollywood lunch spot to ask the guy at the table next to yours, “Where are you from?” or “Where are you headed?” and he will likely mistake your banter for the existential prying of a Jehovah's Witness, the only people who talk to strangers in Los Angeles.

However, in Costa Rica wherever you went—on the streets, in restaurants, on the bus—everyone went around gabbing with each other. “Be sure to be friendly to strangers,” Central American mothers taught their children from birth. The effect of this was that any time you leaned over your beans and rice in a Costa Rican eatery and asked a guy seated nearby for the time, he would gladly tell you “Seven-fifteen,” which segued nicely into a rundown of his whole life history, beginning with conception.

When you were in a hurry, dealing with this cultural tendency could be a bit inconvenient, but sitting in the hotel restaurant my first night in San José, I actually had a couple of hours to kill, the time it would take waiting for my floor to dry. So bravely, I gathered up my collection of Spanish verbs and nouns in my head, ordered them into a sentence, and addressed the nearest man with a watch, hoping he was the kind of guy to give me the time of day.

Sure enough, he informed me that it was quarter past seven, though I hadn't expected him to respond to my request in perfect English. He gave me a warm smile and added, “If you don't mind a piece of advice—be careful who you talk to around here. When a man sees a woman traveling alone in this part of the world, sometimes he gets the wrong idea.”

“Not you?” I teased.

“Well, if anyone's going to get the wrong idea, I want it to be me.”

He was about my age, with dark skin and big brown eyes, and he invited me to join him at his table. It was sure to be another one of those travelers' conversations, full of trivial stories of going and coming that would end with an exchange of addresses and a false promise to write, but this was more interesting than watching the only event going on in my room: evaporation.

“Let me guess where you're from,” he said, taking a sip of his orange soda. “Well, I know it's not the United States . . .”

“Why do you say that?”

“We've been talking for nearly a minute now and not once have you used the word ‘fuck.' ”

Cute
and
funny, I thought. This conversation was beginning to look up.

“You know, the first time an American told me to take a flying fuck, I had no idea what he was talking about. I mean I can do it a lot of ways, but how do you do it flying? Later, I asked my friend Jeremy what that guy meant. Jeremy said, ‘Don't worry about it. He was just giving you shit.' So I said to Jeremy, ‘Well, what did he expect me to do with his bowel movement?' ”

I had been prepared for a discussion of woven handicrafts, the wonders of coastal algae, or the burgeoning mold population, but here he was pleasantly surprising me with scatology. My first impression had been completely wrong. And not only that—I had mistakenly pegged him as a Costa Rican.

You don't expect to be running into Arabs in this part of the world. After all, they're supposed to be hanging around the Middle East, drinking thick coffee, smoking strawberry-flavored tobacco, and picking fights with non-Arab nations. But to my surprise, the man sitting across from me shook my hand, introduced himself as Michel, and informed me that he was from Kuwait.

“The Middle East is one of the oldest parts of the world. I know who my father's father was twelve times back. The biggest religions in the world, Christianity and Islam, where did they start? Americans like to think they invented everything, but you don't hear many stories about Jesus crossing the Delaware or the Hudson.”

I giggled and took a sip of lukewarm coffee, thinking that Costa Rica might turn out to be a lot more interesting than I had anticipated.

Lying in bed that night, glowing from the evening's conversation and Michel's ability to make light of serious topics, my head was still spinning with his stories, making it impossible for me to sleep. Luckily, this was the only type of insomnia that bothered me these days: I was never awakened by stress or anxiety; it was only excitement or giddy anticipation that kept me up at night. I was simply too happy to sleep.

Tossing, turning, and grinning, I realized that my irresponsibility plan was working out brilliantly. I was twenty-six years old and for the first time since leaving Peru so long ago I actually felt like a kid. Before I was even an adolescent, my mother had already been relying on me to clean the house, pick out her clothes, and discipline my younger sisters. My childhood had alternated between running the house and the terror-filled days at school, and by age sixteen, I had possessed the mature gaze of a woman of thirty. Now that I was actually just a few years away from that age, most people took me to be about nineteen.

Even my life in Los Angeles, the few months in between traveling when I did the overpaid writing jobs required to finance my next trip, had taken on a surreal quality. During the day, I would work in my robe and slippers in front of my computer, sipping steaming cups of coffee. At night, I'd finally get dressed and head out to my favorite dark bar where I'd stay up late, a glass of bourbon never far from reach. And in an ultimate act of rebellion, I had even taken up smoking.

I happily stretched out in my double bed, realizing that there was finally no one to take care of but myself. There were no commitments, not even to the clock. Bedtime was whenever I was tired. Waking up happened when I was no longer tired. And if laughter or good conversation kept me awake at night, no problem: I could sleep the next day.

Here I was in a foreign country with no plans (unless you counted the date I'd made with Michel who'd offered to show me around San José the next day). I rolled over in my bed, giggling like a six-year-old, realizing I had become the person I had always wanted to be.

The next morning, walking through one of the city's dusty, unappealing parks, Michel had the chance to tell me a little bit about his life. He explained about the scar under his chin, the one under his eye, and showed me where a grenade had torn through his leg. This was a man who had seen things I had yet to understand.

“ ‘Desert Storm,' you Americans called it. It was terrible. Everyone was getting killed, but my brother and I didn't have to fight. My family is wealthy and influential—my father was a cabinet minister, and he said, ‘Sons, you don't have to go. The Americans will die for us.' My brother went anyway. When he died, I wanted to die too. So I joined the guerrilla movement.”

“How did you do that?”

“I filled out an application form and they accepted it.” He gave me a mischievous grin and we both laughed. “When I was leaving, my grandmother said, ‘Don't worry. God takes care of fools and children so you should be okay by both counts.' But I was a terrible guerrilla. I am probably the only Arab you will ever meet who is a coward. And I can't shoot anything. I would fire here and here and here and miss. At the training camp, you know those silhouettes that go by? They had forty-eight go past and I had an AK-47. I didn't hit one. Not one. But my instructor was very nice. He said, ‘Don't worry, you're still a very important part of this group. And when you go out on the field, it doesn't matter if you don't hit a thing. You can act as a diversion.' ”

I couldn't help but snicker. He started cracking up too and we found ourselves in a contagious bout of laughter, both of us gasping for breath and hanging on to each other to keep from falling over. I gripped his shoulder for support, and as I raised my head, we found ourselves in one of those well-choreographed movie positions, my lips just inches away from his.

But the moment was quickly destroyed. “There's something I have to tell you,” he said.

I was hoping he'd complete the sentence with something lighthearted, something like, “You have great hair,” but of course, the only time you heard that phrase was when you paid a stylist forty bucks to say it. Besides, “You have great hair” didn't need to be prefaced with the severe “There's something I have to tell you” line. “Hey, girlfriend,” “Miss Thang!” or “Well, sop me up with gravy and call me a biscuit” usually sufficed.

“What's the matter?” I wanted to know.

“Have a seat.” We sat down at a nearby bench. “You know, this really isn't the best time for you to be meeting me.”

Sure it was, I thought. No matter what drama he got me mixed up in, I still had a prepaid ticket out of this potential relationship in a matter of weeks.

“I really wish I could take you out to dinner and the movies, but I'm stuck in a bad situation.” He took a deep sigh. “I originally came to Costa Rica to try and buy a house for my parents. When my brother died, they were devastated and I thought the best thing would be to get them away from the memories. It was also to make things up to them—right after my brother got killed, I disappeared on them. I ran off to Venezuela, to stay with a friend I had known in boarding school. Anyway, I was living in Venezuela and I called my family and mentioned the idea of them coming down. We thought Costa Rica would be the perfect place. It was a great idea. I was going to make amends with my family and we'd all be away from Kuwait for a while.”

“What happened?”

“I found the perfect house. This yellow Spanish-style place with a pool, six bedrooms. It was beautiful. So my mother sent me a check for the down payment. I had to go to the town of Limón to complete the transaction and I got robbed. They took everything. The check, my wallet, my passport. They even took the suit I was wearing.”

“How terrible.”

“It really wasn't that bad. I figured my mother could cancel the check and all she'd have to do would be to transfer more money to me. She wired twenty-five thousand dollars to a bank here, but there was a problem: I had no way to pick it up. The robbers had taken my ID.”

The same thing was always happening to me: I had money, but so many times it seemed as if there was no way to get it. Latin America was filled with fickle ATM machines that spewed out money on a whim. With thousands of dollars in my account, in Mexico I had been denied a twenty-dollar withdrawal. Another time, my balance was down to a matter of pennies when the machine in Honduras cheerily spit out fifteen twenties. “Open the pod bay door, Hal,” I intoned as my mantra every time I walked up to one of these temperamental machines.