We Are Not in Pakistan (16 page)

What did Jesús know? He was just one of my many creditors, that's why he wished me a long life and prosperity enough to pay his bills. And he didn't charge interest like the others. Eyes closed behind my wet bandage, I took mental inventory of my creditors. All would agree with Jesús. It took all day, but the thought finally pushed me from my wicker chair so I could drag my alcohol-soaked body up the hill.

As I made my way into the hotel, I ignored what Jesús said. It should matter that someone dies, even a stranger. Death should matter so Madelina and Carmen's would matter.

I can never tell an American's age, because so many tourists have had plastic surgery, even men. Ted's face seemed older than mine, and his hair was sparse and turning grey, but his spine was more erect. The new hotel was spacious and airy. A “bow-teek” hotel, Ted called it, as he showed me around. Each of its twenty rooms had a balcony with a view of the valley. Each would be uniquely decorated, each would have a name — “the Bird Room … the Conquistador Room … the Monsoon Suite.”

Ted said Costa Rica attracted his investment with a large middle class, democracy, no military, no oligarchy.

“I do not know what it is like to live in an oligarchy,” I said, “but we now have a military. It lives in los Estados — the USA, yes? When the president of Nicaragua said he wanted to drop a bomb on our president, what did our president do? He picked up the phone and called Mr. Reagan. And Mr. Reagan sent troops to Nicaragua.”

I was only joking, but Ted didn't laugh.

“Out of friendship, because we are just like los Estados,” I added hastily. “A democracy.”

“Don't count on that, Wilson,” said Ted. “It's all about interests. There's no friendship, only interests.”

I thought of my friends, even Jesús. I could not have survived the years since the fire without them. They had no reason to help me. I said — not to Ted, because I didn't wish to offend him, but to myself — that I hoped I never thought like him.

Ted had built himself a white stucco villa beside the hotel. Modern, with a few Spanish arches and flourishes. He took me to see it the next morning. I felt comfortable inside, though it was not quite finished and had little furniture.

“I hired a Costa Rican architect,” said Ted, when I mentioned it. I warmed to him immediately — which gringo would hire a Costa Rican architect? We went out to look at the coffee trees and I assured him I would look after them. He said I could keep the coffee. I protested we would share it. We shook hands when I left.

“Wilson,” he said, quoting some great American poet, “I think this is the start of a beautiful friendship.”

Jesús was pleased that I'd followed his advice but warned, “Señor Grand is here for la pura vida, but give him a little more of the pure life and maybe he'll go home. He could sell the hotel as soon as it's finished the way he wants it, you know.”

In the next few days, I drove Ted to the SuperMaas so he could buy peanut butter; he didn't blink at paying 1150 colons.
He bought coffee for 2530, an avocado, an onion and a tomato for 1500. He didn't ask how I could afford to eat. Perhaps he knew what we all knew: to buy anything at the SuperMaas, anything packaged, you must work for gringos or be in the tourist business.

Driving home, I translated a street sign for him: “Despacio — eslowly.”

He corrected me: “Slowly.”

When we stopped, he bought a
USA Today
from an expat-run van service, and from then on he read a few stories aloud to me every day. That's how my English got better.

And for once Jesús' fortunetelling was wrong. First, Ted didn't sell the hotel. And second, we opened.

Ted put me in charge of the ground staff, then the inside staff. I hired willing women — not too pretty, but happy at heart — and put attractive, sensible Consuela in charge, though she was the youngest. I forgot all about the dead man, just like everyone else, being too busy even to take one drink or lie around like a sloth anymore. I paid Jesús back, with a substantial tip for passing on information, and even more important, I began paying my other creditors back as well.

In October I harvested the coffee cherries from the trees. I brought the sacks of cherries to my own veranda, and Jesús helped me pack them carefully into his Isuzu. I sent him to a factory in Heredia for the best wet processing and roasting. The coffee returned, now dressed in silver bags, each with a generously flourished “Arias” label — Oscar Arias Sánchez had just won the Nobel Peace Prize. Its aroma turned heads in the hotel. And in April, I hired younger men than Jesús and supervised the planting of more trees down the side of Ted's hill.

One day, just after I set up a huge satellite dish for his TV, he said, “Wilson, let's take a drive.” So I took him in his new SUV and we drove through the mountains. I pointed out teak, mahogany,
Brazilian cherry, bocote and purple heart where I could. At Rio Tarcoles we stopped in the middle of the bridge to gaze at the crocodiles. Ted didn't admire the scaly brown shapes nosing the shore — fifteen on one side of the bridge, ten on the other. He said they were animals that ate other animals.

“You like vegetarian animals only, my friend? Horses, cows?”

“Yeah, I was in the service. I had enough of killing,” he said.

Does killing or dying in war matter more or less than a death from accident? Again I was thinking of the fire. The fire killed, but I blamed myself. I should have come home earlier, should have had some sixth sense as a husband and a father. We strolled over to the other end of the bridge, where palms rustled like a whisper of Madelina's best dress. I became Ted's tour guide as we entered a store, identifying packets of rellenos, dried bananas, cashews and coconut cookies. Behind pyramids of watermelons and mangoes, a little girl laughed — I heard my Carmen.

When you have lost the little girl you created with the only woman you have ever loved, when you have failed your family and disappointed yourself, it takes someone like Ted to make you believe it is possible to create again.

And create we did. A hotel with a bar, a restaurant, an organization. In 1993, we opened a tiny grocery store in the hotel and Ted taught me to stock Skippy low-fat peanut butter, Entenmann's doughnuts, and SP-45 with Aloe sunscreen. The Buena Vista offered internet service with a cup of Arias in 1996, before anyone else in Costa Rica had an internet café. And Ted taught me to hang paintings by local artists above the computers and call them primitive art.

He took a buying trip to Florida and returned with more chandeliers. While I stood on a stepladder, installing them in the lobby,
he handed up tools and the delicate globes, telling me how he visited his ex-wife and forgave her. I went home and told Jesús the next day how much I admired that when I can't even forgive myself.

Hurricane Mitch did a little damage in 1998, and I would have just renovated the hotel to look the way it used to, but Ted said destruction is an opportunity for change. He moved things around in the dining areas, redesigned the kitchen, redecorated the bar. Change, he said, sends a signal to customers that we are growing, not standing still.

“It tells people you're with it.”

I wasn't easy to convince. Most of our customers came once in their lives and then went somewhere else. But Ted said, “Change is like music, felt but not seen.”

Even so, I saw no reason to tear out a perfectly good swimming pool and talked him into simply repaving ours with blue floral ceramic tile. And after my days of hard work installing the tiles, Consuela told me the bright tiles uplifted the whole garden.

Some changes I liked immediately: he decreed the Buena Vista would play no more Kenny G. That music had been playing in every bar, restaurant and hotel non-stop since 1993. He said people might like to listen to Costa Rican salsa and mambo, and I told him he was becoming one of us after all.

I didn't tell Ted the salsa and mambo reminded me of Madelina — we used to dance. He had never asked me anything about my past or told me anything about his. Whenever I asked, he said the past wasn't important. Yet he called me brother.

“Individuality, that's what we need, Wilson,” he said. “Distinction. We don't want to be like the cookie-cutter resorts, bringing in hundreds of people on charters and storing them in high-rise hotels, turning them over like meat on a grill and sending them back tanned on both sides.”

Individuality, I learned, was available to those who could
afford it. I was shocked and apologetic each time Ted printed out a new season rate card. Ted had to spend a lot of time teaching me not to stutter when I said
only
$175 per night,
only
$185 per night,
only
$200 per night.

Every time something broke down, Ted asked, “Don't you have anyone who can fix that?”

“Nobody,” I would say. “Okay, maybe my cousin …” and I'd call. Soon I had every Gonzales working for Ted at Buena Vista. Slowly and “eslowly,” relatives I had pushed away in my grief came back into my life.

The clock over my stove moved forward, circled three hundred and sixty degrees three hundred and sixty-five times in a flash, then another and another. Ted and I moved in lockstep into the new century. I couldn't remember what forty and fifty felt like. I only realized Ted was on the other side of sixty when he told me he needed a hearing aid.

I was in the gift shop helping a couple from New York make up their minds — modelling a sombrero one minute and spinning folk tales about hand-carved parrots the next. They had to catch a plane, so I had arranged for my cousin to take them to the airport.

But just as I was packaging the parrots, Ted came in. In a very professional tone, he informed the couple that he had just heard no planes would be flying to New York City that day. He said he just saw New York on CNN and … and … his face caved. Amazement hit me like a thump across my chest: Ted was holding in tears.

I juggled rooms and accommodated the New York couple and a number of others for extra nights while we sorted out rumours from news. The net, the TV,
The Tico Times, La Nación, Al Día, La República
and
USA Today
offered an intermingled dose of
both. Bit by bit we learned a crime had been committed in New York by nineteen men, and the death count was growing. The New York couple kept saying this was just like Pearl Harbor. I think they really believed some other country had attacked los Estados. The death count passed a thousand, then two thousand, then three thousand, and then I watched President Bush II say he was on a crusade; he too thought the country was under attack.

Now I regretted installing the satellite dish. Suddenly Ted was not with us at the Buena Vista anymore, except for collecting his money every evening. He bought a small TV and made me install it behind the reception desk so if he was there he could watch the sad and angry norteamericanos on CNN and FOX News all day long. If I was on duty, I watched it too, and I felt the same sadness of the families. I too wanted all those deaths to matter. There were donations, there was talk of insurance — norteamericanos seemed much more valuable than my Madelina or Carmen ever were. I watched so many wearing or waving flags, but only for los Estados, though CNN said people of many countries died in the towers.

One day, two days … it became five days since Ted made morning rounds with the housekeeping staff. Then I began doing it for him so he would have time to cheer that man Bush. And he was still cheering a month later when that man Bush dropped bombs on people in Afghanistan. So Ted hadn't had enough of killing after all.

Late one evening, I was watching a CNN special report on bioterrorism after an anthrax scare in Washington when I heard shouting and crying. I rushed around the reception desk into the hall to find Ted standing over a cowering maid as if he meant to rip her apart. No, not a maid — Consuela, my most efficient housekeeping supervisor. Consuela, who had been with us since our grand opening. The heat of Ted's anger hit me though I was standing three feet away.

“Ted!”

He turned to me, and I saw the face of a man I did not know. “Wilson, don't you protect her. The clumsy bitch was about to break one of the globes on the chandelier.”

Not a shard of glass on the floor, all the globes intact and in fixed orbit above.

“Which one has she broken?” I said reasonably, hoping to calm him.

Consuela's hands covered her face; she was weeping.

“None yet, but she was going to.”

Dark tear-filled eyes met mine in mute appeal.

“Ted, Consuela has been dusting and cleaning this chandelier for years.”

“You too, Wilson. You and your whole family … I know all of you … going to cheat me.”

Insult churned in my belly. “Yes, you do know us, Ted.” I knew I should be respectful but my voice climbed away.

I heard myself almost shout, “Ted, we are your friends, not your enemies!”

A gleam came to Ted's eye, a gleam I didn't like at all.

But he did turn away from Consuela.

He strode back to the reception desk, but instead of going behind it, he stood arrested before the TV. Retired generals debated pre-emptive strikes. “Motherfucking bastards,” said Ted. I thought he was swearing at CNN. “Bastards! Nuke the lot. I'll sign up again. Do it myself.”

His face — like a cold sun.

I came up behind him. “Do you remember the first time you saw the crocodiles?”

“What crocodiles?”

It was many years ago, but if he chose not to remember the crocodiles, he would not remember what he had said. So what use was discussion? I went back to Consuela.

Her shoulders were fragile under my clasp. She looked up at me, confused. Teardrops on her lashes like dew on petals. I led her to the garden gazebo, and we sat bathed in the sweet scent of flame vines. The evening view from the mountain, the carpet of lights spread below, calmed us both. I wiped her tears and apologized for Ted.