The Vegetable Air

You’re clean shaven in this country where trees grow beards of moss, where even bank tellers look a little like banditos in vests as pungent as sweatsuits. Still, you prefer the vegetable air to almost any other place on the map. After the heart attack, you considered Paris— the flying buttresses, the fractured light of its cathedrals; the entire city refined and otherworldly, ascending on its architectural wings— but decided you had no use for glory, boulevards fur-lined with statues and expensive trees. You admit, on the whole, the towns in this country are ugly. One summer you drove toward Nicoya (a beautiful name that became your destination), expecting a fragrant town of mango trees but found cattle grazing in the plaza, rattling the tin plates in the ubiquitous Chinese restaurant. A Coca-Cola sign hung weathered and askew. That’s perhaps why you like it, it’s a country you can’t count on, a country of misfits. Unable to take root in the mud, the twentieth century has failed miserably, creating neither factory nor industry but a thirst for soda pop; like cosmetic surgery, it is skin deep. The clock is stuck in the rain and the mud of four o’clock. There’s nothing to do but wait as if in a dry cave, a room with a view of the waterfall, pinned as you are beneath the downpour. The waiter bends over your cup without filling it, the storekeeper holds your change until the rain, hypnotic and dramatic, leaves the streets and the gutters, the balcony and the air greener, heavier— mildew blooming in the closet where your shoes, powdered with a sea-green lichen, resembles old bronze, a pair of ancient goblets. While iguanas lounge in the attic (a prehistoric version of the domestic rat), the Office of the Ministry (a pink and crumbling building surrounded by dusty rose trees) prints more money to prop the flimsy flowered currency. You can’t predict what your American dollars will bring by morning. In the hotel restaurant you meet the Undesirable American. He learns just enough of the local lingo to swing by, living on a dwindling account and, here and there, a real estate swindle. Or the pensionado who buys two cigars, offering you one the day his Social Security arrives. Like the cockroach, the displaced have crawled through the cracks and selected for themselves an agreeable niche. A place to start from scratch. They thrive in the vegetable air. You wonder how you’ll survive, unfit, unable to work. Lacking the predatory skills, you’ve stayed in the trees, a dreamer, all your life, even now wanting to believe a change of scenery will get you back on your feet. A brief hiatus in the vegetable air. Tonight, you walk along the damp streets, an average steak, a glass of wine swishing in your belly, to your small room wedged between a jukebox and a dance hall. There are so many things you can’t change— like the dull thrashing music. You draw the blinds, switch on the tiny cassette. Silence. The click of the tape. And then the familiar aria, rising like the moon, lifts you out of yourself, transporting you to another country where, for a moment, you travel light.