To paraphrase one of Shakespeare’s classic lines, all the world’s a stage and I was one of its bit players.
In this play and to get the ball rolling with Jenny, the woman I had just met in Costa Rica, I told her in my Spanglish that I loved the country’s warm weather and what the Costa Ricans call Pura Vida (the Good Life) ambience.
From what I could understand of her Spanish since I was still just learning the language, Jenny talked about how she and her family had arrived in Costa Rica as refugees when she was younger to escape Nicaragua’s civil war.
I hadn’t even realized Jenny was Nicaraguan. She said she worked for a Nicaraguan relief agency near the U.S.-Costa Rica binational cultural center to help her numerous fellow displaced countrymen.
The last straw, what convinced her family to leave their home in Nicaragua’s capital of Managua, she revealed, was a gun battle between the warring political sides that exploded on her residential street. I was stunned to hear that. I thought I had problems.
It had all started with Jenny on a sunny day that turned to twilight, around 6. I was walking to the bus stop from the cultural center in Costa Rica’s capital of San Jose where I was taking a two-week Spanish language class. That’s when I saw her, the exotic-looking lady who captured my eye. She looked to be in her mid-30s, a combination of Central American indigenous Indian mixed in with Spanish/European heritage.
I got on the crowded bus right after her. We stood side-by-side in the aisle. I muttered some gibberish in my crude Spanish. Maybe it would impress her that I was trying to speak in Costa Rica’s native language.
Upon my prompting, she said her name was Jenny, which sure didn’t sound Spanish. Turned out her real name was Jenys, pronounced about the same way as Jenny. I asked if maybe sometime we could meet for coffee. She looked uneasy. But she took my pen and wrote her phone number on my wrist.
I wondered where she lived and about the rest of her story. It apparently was up to me to call her. I hated that idea because for me trying to have a phone conversation in Spanish was much harder and crazier than conversing in person.
When I called several days later, I was about to hang up after the 13th ring when somebody picked up.
“Jenny?” I asked, shocked that somebody did answer.
It was her. Now what?
I asked if she’d like to meet for tea or wonton soup or something this Saturday at noon. She didn’t say no. In fact, she said nothing. I said if Saturday wasn’t good, we could do it another time. She said something in Spanish I didn’t understand, which I wanted to interpret as meaning yes to my proposal.
From what I didn’t fully comprehend, we were to meet on Saturday in front of my hotel where I was staying.
When the big day arrived, I tried out several different dress combinations that varied between low key and no key. I finally went with black street shoes, black jeans, black short-sleeve shirt, and black Ray-Ban aviator shades, trying for the casual Saturday afternoon look although I probably looked more like a gloomy dark rainy Monday morning.
I arrived in the hotel lobby at 11:45 just in case she showed up early. It became 12:15 and no Jenny. I should have known this misadventure would flop.
Maybe I misunderstood what we had agreed to as our meeting place. I walked around to the side of the building and there she was, glancing quizzically at her watch. We shook hands. I was startled that she came off so mature and self-confident. A woman who seemed this comfortable in her own skin must have a riveting past.
We took our hamburgers from McDonald’s and sat down at the city’s Cultural Plaza.
Jenny’s life in Nicaragua turned out to be the opposite of Pura Vida.
Jenny was divorced with her ex in Nicaragua. She had a daughter named Bonita who they called Nita who should be in the first grade. But Jenny wasn’t sure she could be enrolled in school because of their precarious exiled state. I gathered Jenny was in the country on questionable legal grounds.
Then Jenny asked the $64 question I commonly got asked in Costa Rica. Why wasn’t I married? Here I was, not getting any younger, middle aged and still single. It was such a foreign concept in these parts. In her macho man culture, if you weren’t married by 25 at the oldest, was there something wrong with you? I assured her there wasn’t, as far as I could tell. I just hadn’t met the right woman probably because I was too particular.
Jenny laughed and said she didn’t totally believe me. In all my years hadn’t I met Ms. Right? I was impressed by Jenny’s down-to-earth nature. She had obviously been around the block a few times.
After several hours, Jenny said she had to go. I suggested maybe she’d like me to accompany her home to the San Jose district of Barrio Lujan, to make sure she got there safely. Perhaps it was prejudiced to think the name Barrio sounded downtrodden and dangerous. She assured me it was safe. I had to let go of my stereotyping misconceptions.
We entered an old row house into a combination dining/living room with plaster crumbling off the walls.
In a rocking chair sat an old woman, Jenny’s mother. On other rotting wooden chairs were Jenny’s niece Nadine and an older sister, Lorna, who looked nothing like Jenny and didn’t exactly exude warmth or welcoming toward me. Lorna was a big, burly big-haired lady about 6 feet tall with her shoes on, 6-7 inches taller than her sister. Lorna was Jenny’s half-sister who said scowling that she had once been involved with a man from Miami, Florida, who turned out to be a low-down skunk.
A little girl ran from the room. That was shy Nita. Jenny’s mother gave me a not exactly friendly look. She gruffly said to “sientese”–sit down. Maybe it sounded gruff to my misunderstanding Spanish.
I was in for a bigger surprise. Jenny’s 17-year-old son, Donny, entered the room. He held a lit cigarette in one hand and a long-neck bottle of beer in the other. His straight long hair was dyed purple, and his neck and sinewy arms also had tattooed symbols on them. Donny didn’t go to school or have a job, hung out until late at night, sometimes didn’t come home at all to disappear for days at a time, and seemed angry about something.
Jenny privately admitted to me that Donny was too much for her to handle. Donny needed therapy, but she was too financially insecure to afford it, Jenny said. I offered to help pay for his therapy but Jenny said no. This was something between Donny and his mother that she had to handle by herself.
Jenny was an optimistic type of person. She made the best of whatever situation confronted her. I could learn a lot from her about that.
What unsettled me was seeing these people with hard lives compared to my relatively easier life growing up middle-class in the U.S. Jenny was an adult who had survived through very dark times.
Finally, I said I better go because I had probably overstayed my welcome, assuming I was welcomed.
I was hopelessly smitten with Jenny. Now I had to stay longer than my planned only two weeks in Costa Rica.
Our long-distance relationship continued for several years, as I continued to go back to Costa Rica to see Jenny as much as possible. I kept our romance secret from my co-workers and friends back in the U.S. because I wanted this part of my life to be confidential, maybe because I didn’t want to jinx it.
I asked Jenny if she wanted to visit me in the U.S. and she said yes. But her shaky immigration status made that impossible for now because once she left Costa Rica the authorities might never let her back into the country.
It’s not easy to maintain a long-distance relationship. Because of inherent problems from our being separated by cultural differences and the 2,050-mile gulf between where we lived, Jenny and I eventually drifted apart. That was a shame. But that’s also what tough love is all about.
What I can say is that I profited and became, I believe, a better, more empathetic person from learning about a different culture and life that I might not have experienced if I hadn’t met and gotten to know this lady from Costa Rica. Yes, this Shakespearian-like play ended in a bittersweet way. But it was wonderful while it lasted with somebody as special as Jenny.
*****
Eric Green’s short stories and news articles have been published widely. One of his latest pieces, “A Marriage Made in Heaven,” was published by the Hudson Valley Writers Guild. He is a former newspaper reporter, and ESL teacher.
