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Trueno y relámpago

(To read El Gringo Feo’s Costa Rica Diary from the beginning, start here.)

Saturday, September 22

Since I injured my ankle, I’ve let my Spanish studies slip. I get the occasional painful nag from Duolingo reminding me my progress is nonexistent. And I haven’t been working through the exercises in my workbook.

I am picking up some new words and phrases here and there, though. Sadly, most of them have to do with ways to describe ankle pain (me duele el tobillo) or to explain that I injured my ankle (me lastimé el tobillo) or the words for sprained ankle (esguince de tobillo).

Damned tobillo.

I’ve been on a pain killer/anti-inflammatory that’s working well but is decimating my stomach, so I reached out via Whats App to the Tico doctor who makes house calls to ask if there’s an alternative. True to form, he pinged me back quickly, within 30 minutes, asking a few questions via text and then he called me. He recommended something that will help my stomach handle the drug and said he’d send a prescription via What’s App. About an hour later, the prescription showed up, along with a profuse apology for taking so long.

I laughed and responded, “no problema.”

So with my prescription on my phone, I called the taxi and set off for la farmacia, figuring I could hit el supermercado at the same time. Never hurts to stock up. The cab let me off at the pharmacy, and from there I hobbled across the street to the grocery store, where I stocked up on fruits and vegetables, including a juice box of red wine and other makings for spaghetti sauce. (I’m hoping Gian will drop off some of Sara’s bread today, and I want to have a sauce on hand that’s worthy of those glorious carbs.)

As I was checking out, I told the clerk in Spanish that I needed to recharge my phone card, which you have to do in person at a store using cash. She plugged in the info, took my money and then told me, also in Spanish, to check my phone for the text from Kolbi confirming the credit had been added.

It was so rapid fire I didn’t catch what she was wanting me to to. Generally, they just hand me the receipt and assume it all worked. Which to date, it has.

Through hand gestures, grunts and broken Spanish I finally got it, checked the phone and sure enough, there was my text.

“Lo siento,” I said sheepishly to the clerk. “Soy solamente un Gringo tonto.” (Sorry, I’m just a dumb gringo.) She started laughing, and one of her cohorts who overheard also started laughing. I’m assuming they encounter more than their share of dumb gringos in this tourist town. I’ve found that’s a great way to defuse situations where my Spanish just isn’t cutting it. I suspect they’re used to getting the opposite response.

Why don’t you speak English?

I always try to be respectful of the fact that I’m in their country. It goes a long way toward generating goodwill. For instance, I never walk in and ask, “Do you speak English.” I back into it, greeting them in Spanish and trying my best to operate in Spanish until the inevitable flood of words swamps me. Then I confess, No hablo español muy bien and we work toward some degree of mutual understanding.

On the way home, I got a quick Spanish lesson from my cab driver, who speaks some English but clearly is more comfortable in Spanish. It had started raining hard, and lightning was erupting all around us.

“Relámpago,” he said after one spectacular flash.

“Ahh,” I replied. “In ingles, es lightning.”

As I repeated “relámpago” over a few times trying to commit it to memory, he did the same with “lightning.” When I got home, I went to Google Translate (amazing resource) to look up thunder: trueno.

So I sat on the deck, reading the final chapter of Under the Volcano while el trueno y relámpago raged all around me. That proved to be a perfect accompaniment to the finale of this beautiful, dismal, tumultuous book. I guess it’s no surprise that Malcolm Lowry died before he turned 50 of alcohol-related misadventure. He definitely knew what he was writing about. But this isn’t just a book about dipsomania. I love the descriptions of Mexico and how layered the novel is. After I finished it, I started Googling around for analysis, realizing there was a lot going on there I was missing, and I found a wonderful resource, The Malcolm Lowry Project, a digital extension of Chris Ackerley’s A Companion to ‘Under the Volcano.’ Sadly, the site uses frames, which I’ve always found to be a horrendously kludgy way to organize digital information. So I extracted the text from each frame and pasted into a doc on my computer so I could read it offline. Turns out, there’s 200,000+ words of analysis there. Damn. It was invaluable, though, especially for the penultimate chapter, where Yvonne is killed. I love Lowry’s final sentence in that chapter.

Yvonne felt herself suddenly gathered upwards and borne towards the stars, through eddies of stars scattering aloft with ever widening circles like rings on water, among which now appeared, like a flock of diamond birds flying softly and steadily toward Orion, the Pleiades …

I have to admit there was a tear in my eye as I just transcribed that. Lowry does such an incredible job showing us the world through this character’s eyes, her desire to flee to British Columbia to live by the sea with the Consul, her sundered dreams of being a movie star, her college obsession with astronomy, the allusion to the “hurricane of immense and gorgeous butterflies” that greeted her ship when she arrived in Acapulco in a final effort to save her marriage and to save the Consul from himself. There’s a sense of transcendence there that I didn’t fully anticipate, even though I’d read the book before many years ago. Of course, the Consul’s experiences in the final chapter are more Dante’s Inferno than return to stardust. Under the Volcano, indeed.

After that light reading, I dialed Kamasi Washington’s Heaven and Earth into my earphones, keeping the volume such that I could hear my howler monkeys arguing with their rivals across the road while birds clucked into their roosts,  insects buzzed awake and the jungle wrapped itself in darkness, a call-and-response to Washington’s transcendent saxophone.

Somehow, it felt like a fitting requiem for Yvonne.

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Books El Gringo Feo Travel Bob

We make house calls

(To read El Gringo Feo’s Costa Rica Diary from the beginning, start here.)

Thursday, September 20

After nine days, my ankle still was swollen, sore, and in some respects, more painful. I started to worry that maybe this was worse than a sprain.

Time to see a doctor.

So at about 6 a.m. yesterday, I sent an email to the folks at Uvita Information Center asking for guidance on my medical options. In less than an hour Sonia León sent a detailed response with a series of options, including Dennis Ulate, who she said speaks English and might even be willing “to see you at your place.”

Wow. A house call? That would be cool …

When I called Dr. Ulate, he answered immediately and said I could meet him at his office or he’d come here to PurUvita to see me. He said he could be here within 30 minutes.

Wow again. I asked him to come here.

He rolled up in a 4×4 with muddy tires. A youngish Tico wearing scrubs, jeans and tennis shoes. He hauled his gear out of the truck and followed me up to the kitchen area for the exam.

He did a thorough examination of the foot, including questions about my medical history, the injury, current meds, etc., all of which he input into his laptop, which was hitting the Internet via a tethered connection to his phone. He was personable, professional and his English was flawless. HIs main concern, as was mine, is that there might be a fracture involved here, too. After the examination, though, he was pretty confident it was a grade 3 sprain, the most severe. But based on my ability to walk on it and my responses to questions about pain when he manipulated various parts of the foot, he was leaning toward it being just a sprain.

“If it gets worse over the next few days or doesn’t improve, I want to get an X-ray,” he said.

No problem. Where can I do that?

Well, that’s where it gets a little complicated. There’s apparently not an X-ray machine here in town, and the nearest one would involve a drive on roads that might or might not be affected by the national strike that has been dragging on for a week or so. But there is an alternative:

There’s a veterinary clinic here in town that can do the X-rays and email the results to him. If the foot gets worse or doesn’t start improving, he suggested I swing by there to get X-rayed. I was taken aback at first, but when I thought about it, there’s no reason not to do that. And maybe I’d get to see some dogs in the process.

Then my mind flashed back 30 years, to a situation that was the complete inverse of this. Before Lara and I married, she had an Amazon parrot named Taco who suddenly came up lame and whose head was drooping to one side. Our vet, an incredible woman named George Ranglack (her father always wanted a boy, she explained) snuck Taco into a human hospital in Vestavia Hills to do a CAT scan. The staff there cooperated, with one of them even bringing in her child to “see the bird get a CAT scan.”

Sadly, Taco died before we got the results, which indicated he’d had a series of strokes. Hopefully, I’ll fare better than my avian friend.

Dr. Ulate prescribed some pain meds that would do better than the Ibuprofen I’ve been gobbling (with less negative impact on my stomach) and a gel that I’m applying to the foot three times a day. If the foot isn’t improving in a few days, I’ll swing by the vet clinic for those X-rays.

The cost of all this? About $70 U.S. What a bargain. I can’t imagine even getting a doctor to make a house call back home, yet alone do it for this price. As of this morning, the foot is feeling better, though the swelling persists and I’m not ruling out the fact that the improvement could be psychosomatic. I breathed a deep sigh of relief after the doc had examined it and didn’t think there was a fracture so I’m obviously hoping hard for that to be the case.

Next up, I had to get the prescriptions filled. As I started to dial the cab I hesitated and wondered if my friend Gian was around and able to take me in to la farmacia. I pinged him on What’s App.

“Can you wait about 20 minutes?”

“No problema.”

Gian swung by in a badass turbo diesel Toyota 4×4 he’s renting to facilitate a parental visit and took me to the pharmacy, where a young woman filled the prescriptions, asking me in English if I had questions and explaining dosages, frequency, etc.

I offered to buy lunch to thank Gian for being a de facto cab service, and we drove out to Ballena Bistro, a great little lunch place right off the Costanera Sur a few kilometers south of PurUvita. It used to be called the Goathouse in a previous incarnation. While their site describes it as a “barnlike” building, I didn’t feel like I was eating in a barn. The woodwork is beautiful and it’s a wonderful space. I had ceviche, a falafel burger and a glass of white wine. Great food. Stellar service. As we ate in a small open area, the afternoon rains started to roll in. John and I talked and argued about politics, music, Costa Rica. The more I hang out with Gian the more I like him. There’s no bullshit or pretense there, and after two years living in the area he is expert on the best places to eat and frequent.

I didn’t post an entry Wednesday because there wasn’t a lot to say. I finished Middlemarch and, perhaps foolishly, started re-reading Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, a dark, dipsomaniacal modernist tale set in the shadows of Mexico’s twin volcanoes, Popocatépetl and Iztaccihuatl. I remember the first time I saw them, looming over the Valley of Mexico as my friend José and I drove his powder-blue 1971 Dodge Dart to Puebla in the early 1990s. He explained the Aztec legend behind the names. Every time I return to Mexico City I hope for clear days so I can see the Aztec warrior and the princess he loved, capped with snow, stunning in their volcanic repose.

I’ve never been shy about having a few drinks, but I’ve never understood the all-consuming obsession of the raging alcoholic. Lowry did. In a horrifying way. Under the Volcano is set on the Day of the Dead in 1938 Cuernavaca and details the story of a British Consul right after Britain had cut off ties with Mexico and recalled its diplomats because President Cardeñas had seized and nationalized foreign oil concerns on the cusp of World War II. The Consul refuses to return to Britain, remaining in Mexico where he wavers between delirium tremens and mescal-infused lucidity. The story is told from several perspectives, including the Consul’s wife, who recently divorced him, and his half-brother. Lowry’s writing is gorgeous as he dives into the minds of each character during that single day in Mexico. But after a few hundred pages of this brutality, I needed a break. So I started tinkering again with The Book, making decent progress and drafting my way through Chapter 4. I waver between being overwhelmed at how daunting the task is and impressed at how the story is starting to take on a life of its own, writing itself as I go. But I still have a long, long way to go. I’d love to return from Costa Rica with a first draft, regardless of how messy it is, but that might be too ambitious.

Yesterday, I continued reading Under the Volcano but also carved out a few hours to read Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedie, a late 16th century play with revenge as its central theme. That’s a theme I’m toying with in my book, and as I worked on it the other night I inserted one of my favorite lines from Kyd’s play into my book: “Vindicta mihi!” (Latin for “Vengeance is Mine.”) It’s a line uttered by Hieronymo in The Spanish Tragedie, and it always stuck with me. (This is the same Hieronymo who pops up in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land):

These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe

In Kyd, Hieronymo’s searing drive to be avenged and demand that vengeance should be his is an abnegation of the fact that in the Bible, God cautions that only He can mete out vengeance. The Biblical verse (Romans 12:19) is

Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.

When Hieronymo seizes that prerogative as his own, things go horribly wrong and he’s out of sync with God’s law.

After all that acute alcoholism and bloody revenge, I lightened things up last night by listening to a 2014 podcast interview with Karl Ove Knausgaard. It’s the first time I’ve heard him speak in his polite, calculated English inflected with a Norwegian accent. Jeffrey Eugenides had the unenviable task of questioning Knausgaard. What do you ask a guy who has (at that point) written a six-volume autobiographical novel?  It’s pretty much all out there already. It was delightful to hear Knausgaard read the first several sentences from My Struggle: Book 1, though I guess one could arguing I’m returning to the dark place again:

For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops. Sooner or later, one day, this pounding action will cease of its own accord, and the blood will begin to run toward the body’s lowest point, where it will collect in a small pool, visible from outside as a dark, soft patch on ever whitening skin, as the temperature sinks, the limbs stiffen and the intestines drain. These changes in the first hours occur so slowly and take place with such inexorability that there is something almost ritualistic about them, as though life capitulates according to specific rules, a kind of gentleman’s agreement to which the representatives of death also adhere, inasmuch as they always wait until life has retreated before they launch their invasion of the new landscape. By which point, however, the invasion is irrevocable. The enormous hordes of bacteria that begin to infiltrate the body’s innards cannot be halted. Had they but tried a few hours earlier, they would have met with immediate resistance; however everything around them is quite now, as they delve deeper and deeper into the moist darkness. They advance on the Havers Channels, the Crypts of Lieberkühn, the Isles of Langerhans. They proceed to Bowman’s Capsule in the Renes Clark’s Column in the Spinalis, the black substance in the Mesencephalon. And they arrive at the heart. As yet, it is intact, but deprived of the acting to which end its whole construction has been designed, there is something strangely desolate about it, like a production plant that workers have been forced to flee in haste, or so it appears, the stationary vehicles shining yellow against the darkness of the forest, the huts deserted, a line of fully loaded cable-buckets stretching up the hillside.

Categories
Books El Gringo Feo Travel Bob

Stoic mill Hunkies, Medieval monsters and the Grapes of Wrath

(To read El Gringo Feo’s Costa Rica Diary from the beginning, start here.)

Tuesday, September 4

Treehouse selfie before setting off to explore Uvita.

I awoke at 2 a.m. to kettledrumming thunder and rain pinging the metal roof. That might explain the odd dreams I had. Nothing frightening. Just a series of non sequiturs related to people and events I was pondering yesterday.

I spent yesterday morning plowing through info on the Homestead strike that I downloaded from Archive.org, an incredible resource for materials in the public domain. The one I spent the most time with was “’Fort Frick,’ or the Siege of Homestead,” published in 1893 by Myron R. Stowell. The strike had occurred a year earlier and Stowell was present for many of the events he describes. Strangely, I couldn’t find much trace of him otherwise when I started Googling around for more info.

There are a lot of fascinating details here. He clearly sympathizes with the strikers, but he calls out their excesses, too, and I wouldn’t say he portrays Frick as a villain. His summary of the congressional investigation into the Pinkertons is great. I downloaded that document from Archive.org too. It’s dense and circuitous. Congress hasn’t changed much.

Stowell does indulge the stereotyping of the day, as in this passage where he describes the funeral of one of the slain strikers:

They were typical Hungarians—stoical, morose and silent, but their countenances reflected their feelings and left an impression upon the keen observer that the bitter experiences of the recent past would never be forgotten. Aye, and the sins of their enemies would never be forgiven! Stoically, morosely and silently they drank in the words of the man in the pulpit, and then, when it was time for them to sing, they chanted a weird dirge, which harmonized with the tragic circumstances. There were but eight women in the audience, and eight women among three hundred brawny men who were burying a comrade thus, could not be expected to exert that gentle influence which softens hearts of steel and causes men to forget they have been injured. When the minister denounced the Pinkertons as a lawless mob, there was no audible expression—the Hungarians’ glares grew fiercer and they set their teeth together more firmly. That was all.

I hiked into town around 11 a.m. By lunchtime, I was looking for a place to eat and spotted the shady seating at House of Ginger. And they have wireless. Overall, I was underwhelmed on all counts. The food was OK but certainly didn’t fulfill the 4.5 star online reviews I’d read. It reminded me of the Chinese food you’d get at the food court at a mall. And the wireless was slow, but that’s pretty much par for the course here in Uvita.

After grabbing a handful of colones at the bank, I made my way to the beach to watch the waves for a while. I easily logged 6 miles on the excursion, raising new blisters as I went.

Back at PurUvita I showered and dug into John Gardner’s “The Art of Fiction,” which is packed with gems reminding me why I love his writing.

Where lumps and infelicities occur in fiction, the sensitive reader shrinks away a little, as we do when an interesting conversationalist picks his nose.

The real reason I’m studying him, though, is for his critical prowess. He ruffled a lot of feathers, calling out writers and writing he found inferior. I am particularly taking the following passage on John Steinbeck, whom I love, to heart:

Witness John Steinbeck’s failure in The Grapes of Wrath. It should have been one of America’s great books. But while Steinbeck knew all there was to know about Okies and the countless sorrows of their move to California to find work, he knew nothing about the California ranchers who employed and exploited them; he had no clue to, or interest in, their reasons for behaving as they did; and the result is that Steinbeck wrote not a great and firm novel but a disappointing melodrama in which complex good is pitted against unmitigated, unbelievable evil.

Sunset from the third floor of the kitchen/bar building at PurUvita.

I almost canceled evening vespers last night. A light rain was falling, so I went up to the third-floor deck of the kitchen/bar area, which has a nice view of the Pacific and the sunset. But when it became clear the rain was not going to become a torrent, I scampered up the hill in time to catch the view from the shack. Two for the price of one.

And sunset from the shack after I raced up there …

In the afterglow, I listened to the latest installment of Mike Duncan’s Revolutions podcast, which was on the Mexican leader Porfirio Díaz. The Porfiriato era sets up the revolutionary tumult to come in 1910. Duncan dropped this quote from Díaz, which seems as relevant today as it did in his time:

Poor Mexico, so far from god, so close to the United States.

I closed the night with another episode of the History of English podcast, where Kevin Stroud discussed “The Birth of English Song.” I’ve enjoyed this podcast so much I purchased his “Beowulf Deconstructed: The Old English of Beowulf.” It’s in the queue, along with Maria Dahvana Headley’s “The Mere Wife,” a contemporary retelling of Beowulf with feminist themes, and Seamus Heaney’s beautiful translation of the epic into modern English. (I listen to or read the Heaney translation at least once a year.) While I’m at it, maybe I’ll download and reread Gardner’s Grendel, which casts the story from the monster’s perspective. I’ve exposed another obsession, I suppose …