“It's about living in the future. It's about waiting. It's about time. Time is the enemy. You count every minute, hoping it will go by. And then there are moments like these when time goes by and you don't want it to. But it does anyway.”
I was silenced by what he had just said, trying to take it in.
“I can't really tell you what it's like, but I can make you feel it.”
Francisco slid over closer to me and put his lips close to my ear. And then in a quiet melodic voice, he began to sing:
Libre, como el sol cuando amanece yo soy libre, como el mar.
Libre, como el ave que escapó de su prisión y puede al fin volar.
It was the song of a prisoner, a man sitting in a jail cell calling to mind everything in his former life that reminded him what it was like to be free: the sun rising, the tide coming in, birds flying overhead.
Francisco had been singing only to me, but the others at the table had overheard him and conversation had stopped. Olman's uncle looked to Francisco and complimented him on his voice while I turned to Jessica to whisper, “Who
is
this man?”
“Olman's been telling me about him. It's really sad. Everyone talks about what happened to him. His ex-wife just got him tossed in here in an act of revenge. Olman says his cellblock would be completely quiet if it weren't for Francisco. His singing and his crying are the only two things Olman hears at night.”
At the end of visiting hours, as Jessica hugged everyone good-bye, Francisco pulled me off to the side. “You know, I'm supposed to get out of here any day. Maybe we could go to a movie or something.”
“I'm leaving in a couple of weeks. I can't really stick around.”
“Well, you'll come back to visit, won't you? Say, you know what, why don't you come to the dance they're putting on tomorrow?”
“My Spanish must be really bad,” I answered in my really bad Spanish. “I thought you just said the jail was putting on a dance.”
“That's right. With food and live mariachi music.”
I'd never heard of such a thingâa prison putting on a party?
“You're kidding, right?”
“No, I'm not.”
I looked at him for a minute, trying to gauge his expression. “Funny. Very funny. I believed you for a second.” I turned to Jessica.
“This guy is giving the poor
gringa
a hard time. For a minute I actually believed him when he told me the prison was putting on a dance.”
“You mean the one tomorrow?” she asked. “Why don't you come?”
I wavered for a minute while images of volcanoes and jungles and beaches raced through my brain one last time. A small “no” was all that was required of me at that moment. It was a tiny word really and so easy to say. But even as my lips formed the sound of the “n,” I heard my voice get ahead of me and blurted out, “What the hell?”
“You like him, don't you?” Jessica accused me outside of the prison as we waited on the curb for a taxi.
“Don't be ridiculous.”
“What's not to like? He's gorgeous, he's nice, he's a great singerâ”
“He lives in a prison.”
“You seem to be fixated on that fact.”
“Jessica, in my country, people I hang out with don't go to prisons.”
“So . . .”
“Here, everyone seems to.”
“But you like him. I can tell.”
“Sure, he's cute. But attraction is cheap. You can come across it just about anywhere. And sometimes you just have to walk away from it.”
It was a sound sensible mantraâand what's more, I truly believed it, but I was still worried. I was completely capable of blowing off a handsome man, but a handsome man with entertaining stories, whose words bore the mark of a life well lived, this was the kind of man whose secrets I was dying to tear into. I hated the fact that Francisco was a prisoner, and what I hated even more was that I had more to talk about with him than the men I ran across in Los Angeles, guys who saved their passions for Range Rovers, the film industry, and arugula salads with radicchio.
As Jessica and I jumped into the cab she had flagged down and sped off through the streets of San José, I thought back to the last conversation I'd had back home, days before I had boarded a plane to come to Costa Rica. At a bar, a tall attractive stranger had scooted his stool up closer to mine and had tried to break the ice with mundane questions: “Where are you from?” “What do you do?”A month earlier, I might have been excited by the possibility of where the conversation could lead and would happily have responded to his queries, but my experience with Michel had changed me in a way I had not realized until that moment. As I began to answer, I suddenly felt that writing radio commercials and being born in Arizona were arbitrary details. They had nothing to do with my real life. What mattered to me was that I had just visited a Costa Rican prison. But this wasn't the kind of topic you broached with a stranger; I was having a hard enough time explaining these things to my friends.
This travel thing had started to get to me and I was losing the ability to separate my double existence. A year ago, Lebanon, Honduras, and Cuba had been like distant movie settings that I could walk out of any time and back into my reality. But now Costa Rica followed me around. Even in Los Angeles, I hadn't been able to shake it from my life.
And that was really why I had returned. I had come back to Costa Rica to try to make sense of how a lover of mine could have wound up in prisonâand the irony of it was that the man capable of explaining it to me was a soulful, kind Colombian inmate. I was completely screwed.
“So where do you meet all these men?” my friends in Los Angeles would later ask me. “Coffeehouses? Movie theaters? Singles bars?”
“No, actually singles bars would be a step up.”
Meeting men in prisons had its advantages. So they didn't have a phone number and sex was a bit inconvenient, but you always knew there was someone keeping an eye on them while you were away. Besides, if every man I met in Costa Rica was going to wind up in prison anyway, wouldn't it simplify the process to just start meeting them there? This was what passed through my mind as I walked through the entrance of the prison with Jessica on Friday.
“So, what's the cover?” I jokingly asked the woman at the front counter as I handed her my passport.
“There's a donation of five hundred
colones,”
she said, serious as a prison guard. Figuring I couldn't finagle my way in for free by sneaking in a back entrance, I handed her a bill as she stamped my hand.
I spotted Francisco in the courtyard twenty minutes later and nervously walked over to greet him. The day before, he had just been someone to talk to, but given that only adult women were allowed in the prison during the dance, today it felt suspiciously like a date, and one I wasn't completely prepared for. After all, first dates were awkward enough when you were in a room filled with quiet music and candlelight. They were even more unsettling when you were surrounded by rapists, murderers, and thieves.
“So, would you like to meet some of my friends?” Francisco asked after giving me a kiss on the cheek.
“These friends . . . I don't assume we're talking about doctors and accountants and engineers?”
“No, most of the people in here are politicians. Come on,” he added, grabbing my hand and leading me through the courtyard.
He introduced me to Valencia, a short, thirtyish Colombian who felt the need to lecture me on injustice.
“It's unfair, unfair, unfair! The cops cook up these false drug charges because they don't like that I'm a foreigner and I own beachfront property in Puerto Viejo. So they plant cocaine in my hotel. That's the kind of thing that goes on all the time in this country. Not like in Colombia where the cops are people you can trust. Have you ever been to Colombia?”
“No, but I may get there this Christmas when I visit my parents in Cochabamba, Bolivia.”
“That's a great city,” he said, lost in a moment of reverie. “Some of the best cocaine in the world.”
“Really?” I said, making a mental note to pass this tip on to my parents.
We walked past the mariachi band and over to a group of men who had gathered by the fence. Francisco pointed to a tall, chestnuthaired one and explained that he was an American who had been caught selling drugs. Apparently, this American hadn't made it to a beach or volcano either. (I decided not to ask him if he'd managed to avoid having a boyfriend who was in jail.)
As far as first dates go, I had to admit that it was going rather well. We weren't sitting in a four-star restaurant and there was a decent-sized possibility that someone might try to kill me, but at least I wasn't going to be faced with the tough decision of whether to ask him up to my apartment.
Besides, the man sitting next to me was beginning to get to me. Jessica was rightâhe was awfully good looking and he had the most striking blue eyes I had ever seen. And in spite of what had happened, he seemed to be strangely in control of his life. Granted, he lived in a prison, but this was beginning to seem more like a positive attribute than a flawâwhere else was I supposed to meet a man capable of relating to my bizarre existence? Blockbuster Video? The Dairy Queen?
With other men, I had always blindsided them with any discussion of my past. I couldn't help it, but my experiences were always disastrous conversation stoppers. “So, there was this time that I lived out of a station wagon with my parents and two sisters.” What could any normal person say in response to that? And the only thing lonelier than not ever sharing any personal details about myself was making a difficult disclosure only to receive a blank stare.
But somehow I sensed that I could trust Francisco with this information. Without making any effort, the stories of my life came pouring out. He didn't flinch when I talked about my recent visit to a prison in Limón or when I spoke of my trip to Beirut.
Over the next hour, the topics of conversation kept spilling out. Every story he recounted inspired two anecdotes of my own, which reminded him of four more incidents. It was a conversation of geometric proportions. I had topics lined up like ducks at a shooting galleryâI'd have to let some of them slide pastâthere wasn't time to get to them all.
Finally, knowing our time was growing distressingly short, I wanted him to explain again how he had wound up in prisonâI hadn't really given him my full attention the first time and suddenly the topic seemed terribly important to me.
“Nice to know my stories really matter to you,” he said with a wink.
“Well, back then, for some strange reason, I had somehow assumed you were, you know, a
criminal.
”
He smiled and indulgently launched into the story one more time. He had visited Costa Rica on vacation, fallen in love with a woman, and stayed in San José to live with her for four years. The marriage had fallen apart and he had finally returned to Colombia, but he couldn't stop thinking about the daughter he'd left behind. He made plans to go back to Costa Rica, but there was a problem: His relationship had ended badly, in bitterness and disputes, and in a final act of vengeance, Laura, his ex, had filed charges against him, claiming that he was a mere acquaintance of hers, that they had never had a relationship, and that he had stolen her car. After all, Francisco had gone to Colombia and wasn't around to tell his side of the story, which was that he had bought her the car in the first place and had sold it when she had run off to Holland and had been incommunicado for over a year.
By calling a friend in San José, Francisco had found out about the false charges, and knowing that officials weren't too understanding about listening to both sides of the story at the border, in a rather foolish but very typical Colombian move he decided the only way to enter the country would be under an assumed name with a fake passport. He crossed the Costa Rican border successfully but ten days later he'd been unlucky enough to be asked by several police officers to show some identification and he had pulled out the false document.
So here he was. His lawyer said the case was cut-and-dried, that the car charges were a hoax, and that walking around with a fake passport wasn't such a big deal in this part of the world.
Francisco gave me his lawyer's phone number to verify his story. I took it, thinking that I would call just in case, but I really did believe what Francisco had told me. What was worse, I found myself sadly wishing that the two of us would be able to walk out of the gate together once visiting hours were over. But, of course, I knew this was impossible.
All too soon the prison bell rang. Over the loudspeaker boomed an authoritative voice. “The visit has come to an end. Please make your way to the front entrance.”
“They want us to leave,” Francisco said. “Guess we'd better go.”
He walked me to the gate. “So, what should we do now?” I asked. “Shopping, the beach, maybe catch a movie?”
“Why don't we grab a bite to eat?”
“I'm starved.”
“Me too. Wait a minute,” he said, slapping himself on the head. “I just remembered, I have somewhere I have to be.”
“What a shame,” I said.
“What a pity,” he echoed.
“Actually, I'm going to be pretty busy for the next few days. But I think I'm free on Sunday from 8 A.M. to noon.”
“Where should we meet?”
“Why don't I see you here again? You seem to like this place.”
“All right,” I said, quickly pecking him on the lips. “Don't be late.”
“Isn't it great?” Jessica said to me the next day, while milking Lorenzo, her family's cow. “Who ever thought we'd have boyfriends who were roommates!”
Apparently Cellblock A-2 was a prestigious place to be. The day before, we'd read in the paper about a high-ranking government official who had been caught trying to sell cocaine. “He's in A-2,” she said excitedly. “We'll have to ask Olman and Francisco if they know him.”