Avoiding Prison & Other Noble Vacation Goals (21 page)

I knew Francisco was a smart guy and could probably plan a breakout in his sleep, but to actually carry out the escape while he was sleeping, now that was a different matter entirely.

“What kind of proof do they have?”

“One member of the escapees says I did it—he has always hated me and has found a way to get back at me. But there are thirty prisoners in my section who've signed a document testifying that I never left my bed.”

Before we knew it, a guard came to give us a warning that time was nearly up. It seemed unfair to me. I had paid for this hour with three months of waiting and now it had been eaten away, minute by minute, just like that.

“I can't believe I already have to go.”

“Wendy, I can't believe you actually came.”

He was right. At least we were in the same country now. At least he wasn't going through this alone.

“I'm going to do everything I can to get you out of here.” I meant it, even though I had no idea what I could possibly do. “In the meantime, do you need anything else?”

“Do you think I could borrow your lipstick?” he said with a grin.

“When a man loves a woman very very much—and they're married—well, the man puts his penis in the woman's vagina and that's where babies come from.” That was the extent of my mother's advice on relationships and that useful bit of information I received (and subsequently imparted to the rest of the neighborhood children) when I was just four years old. I searched my brain for anything more recent. Of course, there was my mother's description of what sex was like (“it's like a tickle that you don't want to stop”), but other than that Mom had been pretty brief on the topic of relationships and had neglected to mention any helpful tidbits on getting my boyfriend out of a Costa Rican prison.

I was clueless how to begin, but at least I knew who would sympathize with my situation. Jessica could certainly relate and maybe she'd even offer some helpful advice—“Ten tips for freeing the man you love” or something like that.

“What about bail?” she suggested as we strolled from the ice-cream shop to her office, raisin-rum purchases in hand. “That's what my lawyer's trying to do. I want to get Olman out, see what his chances are and if it looks like they're going to convict him at his trial, we'll leave the country before the court date ever comes up.”

“That's your plan?”

She nodded.

“You'd leave the country just like that?”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“What about clearing Olman's name? What about your family?”

“Wendy, where do you think you are? If you think you're going to find justice here, forget it. If I have to choose between having Olman in a foreign country and not having him at all, I'll leave here in a second.”

Was my chance of seeing justice in this country as slim as all that? What about due process, what about a fair trial, what about all those rights with Latin names that we had in my country—habeas corpus, e pluribus unum, carpe diem. Maybe Jessica was just uninformed. Surely, Francisco's attorney would take a more proactive view.

The next day, seated in a café in downtown San José, I expressed my concerns to the slightly chubby, mustached man across the table from me. “What about habeas corpus? What about gluteus maximus? Isn't there anything we can do?”

“There is nothing you can do but wait,” Francisco's attorney casually informed me, apparently unaware that he was speaking to a woman without a gallbladder.

“Easy for you to say,” I said, watching him digest his greasy food with ease. “Exactly how long am I going to have to wait?”

“Trials around here take a while. It shouldn't be more than, say, three or four more months.”

“They're going to keep an innocent man in prison for a total of ten months?”

“Probably longer. There are three charges and we're going to have to wait for three different trials.”

“Well, what about bail? How come bail hasn't been set in his case?”

“He's already had three different lawyers. Among them, they've requested bail a total of five times. It's always been denied.”

“Why?”

“It's tough to get bail on behalf of a foreigner. As a Colombian, there is nothing tying Francisco to Costa Rica. The court assumes that the minute he's set free, he'll flee the country.”

“So there's nothing we can do?”

He shook his head. “Just be patient and wait.”

In eleventh grade, while my classmates were off doing typical Montana things like preparing for snow, preparing for the rodeo, or preparing to overthrow the U.S. government, I would shut myself away in the library, away from big trucks, big cows, and big guns and lose myself in a world of literature. It was on one of these cold winter days that I was first introduced to Latin American culture viewed through the lens of linguistic determinism. According to the author (whose name I never did pay any attention to—who spent time remembering things like writers' names?), Latin Americans'
Weltanschauung
was reflected in the way their language was constructed, and a simple analysis of the sentence “
El plato se me cayó de
las manos
” (“The plate fell from my hands”) was enough to illustrate the Latin American view of life, the universe, and gravity. Unlike most Americans who lived in a world of cause and effect and believed themselves to be primarily in control of the events that happened to them (reflected in the American way of expressing this same sentiment: “I dropped the plate”), the author claimed that Latin Americans viewed life as something that just happened. “I didn't drop the plate. The plate simply fell from my hands.” For Latinos, life was lived in the passive tense.

Ten years had passed since I first encountered this text (what I had come to refer to as the “nonflying saucer theory”), and now the evidence supporting this idea was all around me. In Costa Rica, disaster was seen as something that simply occurred. Who were you to try and avoid it?

“Sorry, I'm late for work. I got drunk last night.”

“Oh, I was almost angry—but if you got drunk—well, what are you supposed to do?”

Of the Costa Ricans I had met, none of them wore seat belts, and given the number of cabs that had left me stranded halfway to my destination, few taxi drivers could even be bothered to remember to put gas in their tanks. The electricity went out constantly, but no one complained. Buses broke down all the time, but passengers were rarely refunded the cost of their tickets. And open manholes were to be found along nearly every city sidewalk, but no one sued. After all, nothing could be done to avoid such calamities—if it was God's will that you should fall through an opening in the street, land in a pile of hepatitis-infected crap, and break a leg, so be it. The Lord worked in mysterious ways.

This Costa Rican laissez-faire may have worked well for Jessica and Francisco's attorney, Jorge, but I was a woman of action and I needed a more American way of dealing with my problems. I needed to
do
something, not lounge around slurping papaya juice while things just happened. I needed the advice of people who saw the world as I did—so I figured I would try and plead my case at the U.S. embassy.

Walking up the steps of the imposing grandiose building, I knew I had come to the right place. The American flag waved proudly in the wind, marines guarded the entrance, and you could practically smell the apple pie wafting through the air. They would help me out here, I figured. I was one of them. I was a citizen of the most powerful country in the world.

At the entrance, I smiled patriotically at the guard, envisioning myself as a brunette Elisabeth Shue seeking solace at the embassy in the movie
The Saint
:

Chased by a Russian mafioso, Elisabeth Shue's life in peril, it's only fifty steps to the U.S. embassy. Then thirty, twenty, ten. She's finally three slow-motion steps away. The Mafia guy reaches out to grab her shirt and at the embassy gate she screams, “I'm an American!”These are the magic words. The gates are flung open as Ms. Shue runs through them in slow motion and embraces the marine who so kindly opened the gate.

Granted, my entrance wouldn't be quite as dramatic.

“I'm an American,” I said, smiling patriotically at the guard and walking past him.

“Whoa! Hang on a sec,” the guard said, blocking my path. “You think you can just stroll on in?”

Gee, they hadn't asked Elisabeth Shue for ID. I pulled my passport out and handed it to the guard.

“Now I need to check your backpack.”

After performing a thorough search, I figured I was free to go.

“Where you going there, sweetheart?” the guard asked me.

Damn, how many Russian mafiosos did a girl have to be chased by to be let onto American soil? “What now?” I inquired, hoping this marine knew he had ruined all chances of getting a hug from me. He pointed to the metal detector and I walked through.

Inside the embassy, after deciding that American Citizens' Services was the office that would probably deal with my particular problem, I entered a room that looked more like a DMV than my romantic notions of a U.S. embassy. A group of bored-looking people filled the waiting room, whiling away the time until it was their turn to plead with a U.S. official.

“Number 56,” a woman's voice called out in a dull monotone over a speaker. “Number 56,” she repeated.

A tall, blond man stood up and walked up to the counter as I took a number and sat down to wait.

After half an hour of reading pamphlets on topics such as staying healthy overseas and registering at the embassy during travel abroad (I noted with some concern that there was nothing on freeing your loved ones from a Central American prison), my number was finally called.

“Seventy-eight,” the monotone voice announced.

I stepped up to the counter and addressed the woman behind the bulletproof glass, hesitating to announce my problem out loud to the room of waiting people. “It's kind of personal. Isn't there any place I can discuss this matter in private?”

“I'm sorry. It's not allowed for security reasons.”

“Well, I have a legal problem,” I said, hesitating before speaking the words out loud into the microphone in front of me. “My boyfriend is in prison here. They've accused him of several crimes and they are holding him without proof, without bail, and without having set a trial date. He's been there for seven months now. I was hoping you could offer me some help.”

“I have a list of attorneys,” the woman informed me, as formal as if I had just asked her to withdraw three hundred dollars from my account. “However, I'm required to inform you that their appearance on this list does not constitute endorsement by the U.S. embassy. These are simply the names of attorneys compiled by Americans who in the past have claimed to have positive dealings with them.”

“I already have an attorney.”

“I'm sorry. That's all I can do.”

I was completely appalled. I wanted a new U.S. embassy, one that actually helped its citizens, offering safety, comfort, and hugs at the entrance. I needed help, not a scripted answer, carefully worded to avoid any potential legal ramifications.

My look of distressed agony must have been pathetic enough to make its way through even the bulletproof glass, because the expression on her face softened and exactly as I had imagined in my fantasy, she reached out to me with all the comprehension in the world and gently asked, “Listen, are you okay?”

I wanted to tell her that of course I wasn't okay, that I had left everything behind in the United States—my friends, my apartment, my clothes, my furniture, my car—and now I was stuck in a foreign country in love with a man who I couldn't even go to the movies with. I lived in a tiny room without a kitchen or a phone and had to pretend that everything was fine every time I sat down to lunch with the people who were not my family. My boyfriend was in prison for crimes he didn't commit and no one in this country gave a damn, least of all his attorney. And my own country, with all its rhetoric about justice and the pursuit of happiness, didn't intend to lift a finger to help me. How could I possibly be okay?

This is what I wanted to say, but there was a plate of bulletproof glass between us and these weren't the kind of things you said over a microphone. So I shrugged my shoulders and uttered, “Sure,” as I walked out of the embassy and onto the rainy streets of San José.

Ironically enough, I had come to Costa Rica with the fantasy of finding my perfect life. I had imagined an idyllic existence, shaded by palm trees and warmed by ocean breezes—Jessica, Francisco, and I in our reclining beach chairs lined up side by side. In the land between two oceans, I planned to live out my second childhood, away from the meaningless monotony of life controlled by the clock, of always having somewhere important to be. I had never counted on a prison breakout to interfere with my fantasy. It wasn't the kind of thing I generally needed to figure into my plans.

Now I had all the time in the world in a country bordered by two breathtaking coastlines yet my potential beach buddies both had other commitments. These days, when Jessica wasn't visiting Olman, she was preparing to visit Olman, and now that Francisco had been transferred to La Reforma, her path rarely crossed mine. Even more distressing was the situation with Francisco—the possibility that he would one day join me at the beach was beginning to look more and more remote.

On my last visit to Costa Rica our visits at San Sebastian had been casual, friendly, even fun. In fact, it was one of the things that had so impressed me about Francisco—he had remained amazingly upbeat in spite of such trying circumstances. San Sebastian had been filled with lesser offenders (lots of the men were there for simply failing to pay their debts), but La Reforma was a completely different place, a prison that averaged ten murders a year. And Francisco was in top security, living with the country's worst offenders. A week after I arrived in the country, a knife fight had broken out in the next cellblock that had left Francisco nervous and depressed. “The guards just stood back and watched,” he explained to me, trembling. “They bet on who would win.”