It is late March and you and I are on a train going from the middle of Costa Rica to the Caribbean coast. The ceiling is tin and the seats are old-fashioned, high-backed, and we have the special ones that face one another in the middle of each car. I am traveling east with you, whose idea this was, and Beverly, a woman we met in a little line of ocean-front cabinas a few days ago. She does something in national housing based in Washington and was in the Peace Corps in Nepal twenty-five years ago. A friend of hers planned this vacation for her; she learned the destination at the airport. Across from us are two people who speak Spanish. You call the woman the Oral Woman because as each vendor comes past, chanting his wares, she takes. She is not fat at all. Both she and her companion are Banana Republic chic: khaki or some other substantial material, light brown hair. They are reading Voltaire and García Márquez.
The rest of the car is made of people who, we figure, are actually going somewhere they need to go. The train makes more than fifty stops and we have been told by Eugene Fodor, and others, that one can’t know Costa Rica without taking this eight-hour ride. We are obedient, though Fodor has disappointed us: the wildlife areas are not as easy to get to as he said, in our short amount of time; a boat ride he so cavalierly said we could catch from a private carrier is $175, they told us at the tourist bureau.
We are here — ah, it is hard to say why we are here. I am here, I guess, out of romance; you said in January you wanted to go away with me. Two things: you wanted to go away and with me.
Why are we here? I began asking myself the first night, when we took a walk on that main street, mostly looking at shoes in the windows and the jeans and high heels of the women, finding Fodor wrong again — the women here are not exceptionally beautiful, not exceptionally European. Why are we here? I kept wondering. It wasn’t an assignment. I would probably write a travel piece about it, but why? So other people could come and ask themselves, why are we here?
This is hard for you to comprehend, because though my questioning seems intellectual — something imposed on the natural order of things — for me it is purely emotional. You wanted someplace warm and I thought Nicaragua or Jamaica or Haiti, but Jamaica was too touristy for you, Nicaragua too unknown. You wanted to read more first. Costa Rica, we heard, was an ecological paradise, and I was won over by the descriptions of the monkeys and toucans and butterflies. Your idea? Maybe mine, too.
Now you are standing between the cars, feeling the breeze, maybe thinking about the railroad and the blacks who came to work on it from Jamaica, and survived, because they were somehow immune to malaria, and stayed. You and Beverly are into her hyperboles now, she composing tall tales to try on her friends — episodes with giant gorillas, lions, wings falling from planes. I am looking out the window, envious. There are mountains and lush growth and a church I am reading about, where a miracle was wrought, and the train vendors, just like the book says, walking up and down, crying, “Maní Maní” (peanuts peanuts), an endless, tireless search to scrape a living. You loved our last two days at Manuel Antonio Beach, where we went out of instinct, almost, because it was next to a national park, where you hiked, and I thought about the futility of hiking (actually felt before thinking, do you understand?), really just outdoor window-shopping, trees instead of shirts, and though I liked the scuttling of the land crabs, their shells like painted clown faces, and took pictures of iguanas sunning themselves on the almond tree roots, underneath it all I kept hearing, like a chorus: why why why? Why are we here? What is our purpose? What is the thing we do next? And why that? And do I write or should I read (seems I could do both anywhere), can’t work on my tan because fear of skin cancer has made that démodé, and I tried not to let you know these thoughts because they are not vacation thoughts. But the thoughts kept coming, and I wandered mournfully while you hiked (sounds so purposeful, such a short, decisive-sounding word) and limned my mournful thoughts and collected a few shells and sketched the tiny blue lizards in the crotch of a tree.
It wasn’t all desperate, only partly. There was the time when we whirled in the ocean after sunset, singing “Hernando’s Hideaway,” and the dinners we had with the other Americans, talking of rabies and of health care in Haiti, the Bug Lady they knew from last year (the place like a boarding house, quick friendships and assessments), who would shout all day about the species she was missing in her collection, as if she believed that the loudness of her need would bring the insects flying straight to her. Those moments lifted me out but I was aware early on that we were on separate vacations, you in a sun-drenched country on the cusp of the rainy season, and I as lost as a piece of luggage, fallen into some dark, sludgy place, a certain waxy glaze over everything. I had fallen accidentally and was embarrassed, a traveler taking the wrong road, unable to speak the right language to get the proper directions to be lifted out. I did not know the proper tools, the special lift. So I pretended I was in your Costa Rica.
And now we are on the train and I work up courage to ask the little chattering girls in uniform whether they are in public or private school, when the vacations are, and they are not curious or are not interested in talking, and I feel I’m wrenching them from their natural conversations. At one stop I venture to buy a whole fish in a greasy brown paper bag from a very old lady — expensive, compared to the other food, almost a dollar.
I look out the windows, see the houses with their corrugated roofs and wooden porches, even the rudest ones draped with plants and flowers, the blue light of the television, the antenna, signs of electricity. A woman cooking on her front porch stops to wave — impossibly Disney.
Then it hits me that what we are seeing is not just another way of life, not just countryside, but this is poverty, the real thing, as real as the decrepit people near the cathedral, hands spread for coins, as real as the homeless people on downtown sidewalks and park benches in any city in the United States. This is how they live. We see inside their living rooms. It is poverty with mosquito netting, maybe, and television and bougainvillea, but it is poverty all the same and it begins to seem invasive that we are taking this train not because we have somewhere to go but because this is our all-day amusement-park ride. (And tomorrow we will take the plane back to San José.) We follow a path because we are looking to test the texture of the packed dirt, the slant of light in the sky, the fauna, and not what’s at the end.
And that is a metaphor for our lives — the struggle has gone out of it, for the most part, the basic struggle of gathering our food and building our houses. Travel is a poor imitation of that struggle: we are homeless, searching for food and warmth. But we are also looking for amusement and comfort and our money frees us. And that thought stabs me and flows through me. It breaks that wall of ennui. (Or maybe it was the protein of the fish that transformed me, and everything is so much simpler, more basic than I thought, all a chemical reaction.)
I am filled with remorse that is somehow sharp and clean because it is the first realization to pierce through my melancholia. It is the first thing I don’t feel indifferent or confused about. It is the first thing that matters. That they are in pain, in straits, in this Switzerland of Central America, is somehow important, just as whether we get up at 9 or noon, or eat shrimp or trout, or go to the east coast or the west, is not. The journey no longer seems pointless. Maybe my purpose was to learn that piece of information, to really feel it. We have already learned that even though this is a democracy, there are gold miners out of work for a year, and though there is widespread education, it comes at great price. So that man told you at the park the first day, $50 a semester, if we understood him correctly, a lot for him. That man kept repeating, “Sticka, Sticka,” to you, and finally you communicated by pointing to lines in your traveler’s book. We never figured out what he meant.
I realize now the “Sticka, Sticka” is partly why we travel, too, for the mystery, for the simple joy of the mystery, the way we conjure up an identity for the Oral Woman. You haven’t told me this, but even if you had, or if I’d read it in Fodor’s, it wouldn’t have meant a thing. I think I learn only with my heart, the dumbest organ but also the most sensitive. I realize I don’t go on vacation so much to see a country as to feel it.
When we arrive at the end, Limón, for the first time we have trouble finding a hotel, and you are brazenly propositioned, both of which bring a certain charge to the air, some adversity, and finally we find a place, our first with air conditioning. We listen to a fundamentalist preaching to a large crowd. (Later we learn that fundamentalism in Central America is a bona fide force.)
I hate to believe that in the struggle is meaning, in the pain, in the guilt. It is easy, too easy, to blame all this on being Jewish, to say that we come from a mournful, beset people, holidays commemorating disasters, an occasional harvest, even the New Year a somber occasion for assessment. In March we celebrated Purim for maybe a minute in your apartment, with that apple I cut into a triangle to approximate three-cornered hamentaschen. On Purim we celebrate not that we were saved, because we really weren’t, but that we averted total annihilation — the Persian ruler couldn’t rescind his order that all the Jews in the land be killed, so he made another, allowing Jews to defend themselves. We did fight back, and there were dead on both sides. But we celebrate because nothing’s perfect, not even a victory. I believe it happened, even though I don’t believe in God, because somewhere in me I feel the holiday, reinforced by centuries of belief and observance; at least I believe in the belief that was handed down to me, the belief of my ancestors.
Did you write about Bev? you ask me now, and the sunburned guy we nicknamed the Alaskan King Crab, and the doctor on his way to Haiti and monkeys and the gold miners? A little, but not the way you would write it. You think my unease was caused by my writing, that I should have put down my pen, and just enjoyed — the mountains, the vineyards, the oceans, kids skating in the park. But the writing is part of the equation; as much as it catalogs the vicissitudes of my distress, it pulls my feelings from me, or pulls me toward them, illuminates my internal train ride through unknown landscapes.
In Costa Rica I thought we were so distant, our countries’ separateness irreconcilable, but then in Limón I found that you too had had the same revelation about poverty, that in Spanish dress it was still poverty, and we were like voyeurs in a moving fair. The only difference was it sobered you, but me, it raised me up and kept me going on.
For months more, that was enough, this memory of our shared revelation.
Almost a year later, we finally admitted we were living in different countries, speaking not only different languages, but words that scraped because of their foreignness. Now, that too was months ago. Regrets fade eventually, I guess. I still wonder whether Costa Rica was what “did it.” It wasn’t. A friend says, well why don’t you get back together. I say, I still want him to be different. He still wants me to be different. I wanted Costa Rica to be different. But it was the way it was and all a person can do is change her attitude toward it. On my last vacation, alone, sitting in a youth hostel in Istanbul and listening to some drunken Australians, I thought about this: that travelers, true travelers, not tourists, have to be open. They have to adjust their semi-permeable membranes so that they are just absorbing, just accepting. Taking it in. If not, then why bother moving from one place to another? I wished for that openness, in which I observe and feel but don’t think. For a part of each day of my trip I felt that, straight down and deep. And I didn’t write you a postcard.
A slightly different version of this essay was published in the Chicago Reader as “Voyeurs in a Strange Land.” The copyright is retained by the Chicago Reader.
— Ed.
