Avoiding Prison & Other Noble Vacation Goals (24 page)

Two days later, I learned that conjugal visit protocol for
indiciados
was going to be significantly improved as well. In the past, as much as I had enjoyed the “quality time” these visits afforded (not to mention the sex), I had always hated how unspontaneous they were. The joke about blocking off time on your calendar actually applied to me. Every two weeks, “have sex with Francisco” appeared on my list of things to do.

The planned nature of my love life made these conjugal visits feel just the slightest bit sleazy. Someone else was dictating when and where I was to have sex. Since this translated into four precious hours twice a month, Francisco and I tried to cram in as much as possible during our allotted time, and the unfortunate result was that quality took a backseat to quantity (backseat being a somewhat appropriate metaphor here). The first hour was great, but every subsequent hour was controlled by nervous glances at the clock, constant reminders of how little time remained.

What I hated even more was the dreaded knock on the door signaling the end of my visit and my subsequent exit to face a bunch of horny guards who always smirked, reminding me that they knew what I'd been up to for the past few hours.

However, now that Francisco was living in
mínima,
conjugal visits here were all night long. For the first time, we were actually going to be able to sleep together—and unlike other rendezvous in my past, there was no need to worry about him leaving when the sex was over—having a group of armed guards outside the door just a hundred yards away was enough incentive to cuddle for even the most commitment-wary man.

On the day of my scheduled conjugal visit, I arrived at the prison showered and perfumed, wearing my best lingerie, a bit frazzled as usual. The line was always short for conjugal visits, but if you arrived even five minutes late or forgot your conjugal visit ID card, you wouldn't be allowed in so I always showed up a bit nerve-racked, having checked and rechecked the contents of my bag a half-dozen times on the harried cab ride over.

After the usual inspection (frisking my body, rifling through my bags, inspecting my change of underwear, my bra, my condoms— God, how I resented this invasion of privacy), I waited by the entrance, until my assigned guard showed up to take me to the conjugal visit area in
mínima.
We sauntered across the prison courtyard, my escort moving at an unbearably slow pace, a man obviously getting paid by the hour. I was supposed to stay at his side until we arrived at our destination, but when I spotted Francisco in the distance, I gave the guard my best pathetic pleading look, and apparently an old softie when it came to young couples in love, he shrugged his shoulders and let me race on ahead.

Thirty seconds later, I was in Francisco's arms, hearts pounding, our lips all over each other's faces.

“I'm making you dinner,” Francisco whispered in my ear once our lips had run out of respectable places to wander. He proudly held up a bag of groceries that I hadn't noticed before.

“Where did you get that?”

“There's a store here in
mínima.
I can get a pass to walk across the prison grounds and buy stuff there once a day.”

At the prison minimart (I couldn't help but wonder how many times a day that place got held up), Francisco had picked up potatoes, yucca, plantains, chicken, and rice. It was a nice gesture, but I had no idea what good the raw ingredients would do us.

“There's a stove, too,” Francisco explained, grabbing my hand and leading me in. “Come on, I'll show you our room.”

We wandered into a covered patio area equipped with a small outdoor kitchen. There was a sink, a double-burner stove, and an outdoor picnic bench. Next to the patio was a courtyard that was encircled by numbered rooms, a rudimentary Motel 6 in need of a good coat of paint—or at least a different color choice, something a little more romantic than florescent lime green.

“Isn't it great?” Francisco beamed.

I had to admit that it was. Twelve hours was an incredible length of time for us to get to spend together and we had the freedom to wander back and forth between our private room and the communal open-air area half the size of a basketball court.

We raced to Room 12, set down our bags, and suppressed the urge to fling ourselves on the bed until we had fitted it with the clean sheets that I had brought along for the occasion.

“It's a double,” Francisco announced proudly, distractedly tucking in the sheets. On other visits, we had always shared a twin bed that we had struggled not to roll out of. “And we even get our own bathroom!” he added, pointing to the room off to the left. “Come on, let's take a shower!”

He left the bed half tended and nearly shoved me into the tiny room. Within seconds, we were both naked and standing in the cement-walled cubicle under the showerhead.

“Water!” Francisco announced, turning the knob. And it sure was—a gushing stream of cold water. I screamed in agony.

“Make it warm!” I insisted. But I noticed that there was only one knob.

“There is no warm. You'll get used to it.”

Francisco joyously splashed me with handfuls of freezing water until I pleaded with him to stop. Suddenly serious, he began running his hand over the goose bumps on my arms, my waist, my hips, and then he embraced me, distracting my mind from the cold.

So making love in a prison shower wasn't the warmest or most romantic of places, but when it came to playing the game, “Where is the strangest place you've ever done it?” I was now guaranteed to win every time, hands down.

After we had dried off and gotten dressed (the bed still remained unmade), Francisco and I headed out to the patio area where we succumbed to the fantasy that we were just a normal couple out on a regular date. It was a childish thing to do—I felt too old to be playing make-believe—but it was a pattern we inevitably slipped into. We were just two people sitting outside on a patio watching the rain. The illusion worked for a while. As long as I focused on Francisco's face or the courtyard, I could successfully avert my gaze from the bars that encircled our fantasy motel.

How simple my needs had become. Once I had dreamed of strolling along the Champs-Elysées, traveling by Italian gondola, munching on creamy Swiss pastries. I had even gone to Honduras thinking of heading to the Estée Lauder counter. How foolish these desires seemed to me now. They were the wishes of some other person, a woman who had little to do with my life.

Now I was content with the diluted fantasy that the man in front of me was my boyfriend (sometimes he became my husband) cooking me dinner in our home.

“It smells wonderful, honey. Are you sure you don't need any help?”

“No, dear. Just keep reading your
Harper's.
I'll call you in when it's ready.”

Later we'd go for a walk, perhaps run into our friends on the street, watch a movie on cable before curling up together to sleep.

My fantasy was made all the more realistic by the very real dinner preparations going on in front of me. Francisco had refused my offer to help, and now that I saw the way he prepared the meal, I realized I probably wouldn't have been of much assistance to him anyway. Granted, I knew how to chop up vegetables, but I came from a wimpy country where we generally accomplished this activity with the aid of a knife.

“They don't allow knives at the prison,” Francisco explained, noticing my astonished stare as I watched him dissect tomatoes, yucca, and parsley, using nothing more than the sharpened end of an aluminum can.

The stove was also a mystery to me. It looked like a hot plate, but instead of plugging the two burners in, Francisco expertly hooked the entire apparatus up to a hose connected to a metal canister filled with natural gas. And with one swift stroke of a match, the flame sprang to life. I tried not to look amazed, the way I was always impressed by men capable of shaking a few wires under the hood of my car and making a previously useless vehicle sputter and hum again, but I felt very much like Jane dropped suddenly into the unfamiliar jungle, forced to rely on Tarzan for the simple necessities of life.

I pretended to read my magazine but watched Francisco every time he wasn't looking as he added ingredients to the pan, lovingly stirred the soup, tested the broth for salt. I was thinking about him, but it was different than what I usually felt in the presence of men involved in my life. It wasn't desire or the wish to enflame his desire. In fact, it had nothing to do with sex. What I felt was safe.

It was a really stupid thing to feel. Any woman in her right mind would have known that prisons were not appropriate places to start engaging in
Good Housekeeping
fantasies. But some primal genetic urge surged up in me, stronger than logic, stronger than rational thought, stronger even than a lifetime based on uncertainty. And damn it all to hell, I felt safe.

Of course, it was a double-edged sword. Moments like this were part of the punishment too. In prison, you didn't get a minute of happiness without paying for it doubly, and I knew that the next day, walking back onto the streets of San José would be twice as hard, twice as lonely, the contrast twice as apparent. My hearth-and-home fantasy would be revealed in all its flaws. And I would be back to where I had started from, alone and frustrated, fighting a battle, only half aware of the rules.

“The pen is mightier than the sword.” It was a nice enough quote, but you couldn't help but notice its inherent bias. After all, people who came up with poignant phrases like that were obviously writers and no self-interested pen wielder was going to come up with a maxim like, “You can hack any writer to bits with a saber”—not to mention a Colt Magnum or a Smith & Wesson. However, none of these arms were (nor ever have been) in my possession. The only weapon available to me was a metal-gray Macintosh laptop with binary capabilities, fully loaded with state-of-the-art software, powered by a rechargeable battery, and connected to a Hewlett-Packard printer.

As far as writers went, I was about as armed and dangerous as they got, ready to type out pithy phrases at an impressive seventy words per minute. All I had to do was ensure that the letter I had carefully loaded into my computer would strike its intended mark. Typed in twelve-point Palatino was a request for bail on behalf of Francisco.

Francisco had been denied bail at least five times, but I wasn't willing to give up hope. The lawyer's previous whiny request had basically amounted to “Please let Francisco out. He's been in jail for a long time.” But this time, I had evidence. In the past two and a half months, I had come up with a declaration of good credit from the bank Francisco had repaid a loan to, his daughter's Costa Rican birth certificate, a letter from a friend stating that Francisco had a place to stay in the event of his release, the official registration of the travel business Francisco had owned in Costa Rica, and Saúl's letter from CODEHUCA stating it was a violation of human rights to keep a man imprisoned for eight months without benefit of a trial, a document that bore a great deal of weight. Even the lawyer recognized the logo at the top of the page and asked astonished how I had managed to come up with it.

I wanted to give him a snide answer, something like, “There are people who sit around waiting for things to happen and people who get out and go drinking with human rights representatives,” but I just glared at him and said mysteriously, “I have contacts.”

I handed him the letter that I had typed up in Spanish, commanded him to remove any grammatical errors, sign it, and deliver it to the court.

“What are we going to do if you get out?” I asked Francisco the next Sunday, after explaining the recent turn of events.

“I'd like to eat a steak, drink several beers, and make love to a beautiful woman.”

“And then what?”

“Eat another steak, drink some more, and wake up in the morning with the same woman.”

“Listen, I can probably get a job with AFP here as a journalist. I have a contact here and they look highly upon John Lithgow interviews and—”

“Wendy, I don't want to stay in Costa Rica.”

“Francisco, I've just spent months gathering evidence to prove that you won't flee the country if they let you out on bail.”

“Wendy, what do I have here? They've even taken my daughter away from me. After the articles that came out in the papers, my ex-wife hangs up any time I call.”

I looked around us at the bars, the barbed wire, and the armed guards and asked myself the same question.

Three working days later, I trembled my way up to the fourth floor of the courthouse and requested a copy of the judge's decision. A very effeminate Costa Rican man sashayed his way to the counter and opened up the file. I picked up the paper and began to read slowly, picking apart the dense and complicated legal language. I went over the paragraph once, getting the gist of its content. Then I read it again, trying not to get too excited until I was certain of its meaning. However, after digesting the document a third time, I was positive of what it had to say: After having been denied bail five times, this time it had been set in the amount of a mere $250.

I stared at the words in front of me, not quite believing them. I had waited for this day for nearly six months—three of them spent helpless and distant in Los Angeles and just as long spent battling a second-rate legal system in Costa Rica—and, finally, it had arrived. We had done it. I had stuck it out. He really was going to come home to me.

I ran to the nearest bank and deposited the money into the prison's account as I had been instructed, and raced back to the court with my receipt. The same Costa Rican who had attended to me earlier informed me that Francisco should arrive at the house later that afternoon. “Hurry on home so that he'll have someone to greet him there. And tell him to behave himself,” he added with a flamboyant wave of his hand.

“I will,” I said, and rushed out of the building into a bright beautiful Costa Rican afternoon.