Author: Bob Benz

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Books El Gringo Feo Travel Bob

A taste of Italy in the jungle

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

Sunday, September 23

I love it when a plan comes together.

I went A Team last night here in the jungle, pulling together a Tico-infused version of one of my favorite meals, Seafood fra Diavalo. It took advance planning and a liberal dose of red wine to pull it off.

On Friday as I hobbled up and down the aisles of the supermercado here in Uvita, I stocked up on garlic, onions, basil, oregano and pasta. I also secured the best Chilean boxed wine money can buy, knowing I’d need that to enhance the tomato sauce I’d be using as a base. Finally, I picked up a package of frozen local seafood — white fish, mussels, clams, crab and shrimp.

So far, so good.

When Gian arrived yesterday morning to deliver Sara’s incredible pizza, focaccia and ciabatta, I had the final components of my master plan. While I was cooking the sauce, I added a liberal amount of wine and an almost equal amount of my favorite Tico hot sauce, Spicy Life. I’m having a hard time getting the cook top here to simmer. Even at its lowest setting, the flame is a bit too much so I cooked the sauce for only an hour or so. Normally, I’d do that for several hours on a low simmer.

The picture really doesn’t do the final product justice. While I’d be reluctant to serve it to Italians like Gian and Sara, it was more than adequate for El Gringo Feo. I ate it with a big hunk of ciabatta and a piece of rosemary focaccia. For dessert, a chunk of Costa Rican chocolate and another glass of wine. ¡Que sabrosa! (Y muchas gracias, Sara y Gian, por el pan.)

After dinner, I decided to hang out in the bar area since the evening rain had started, making the prospect of a return to the Treehouse rather wet. My ankle has been improving slowly but I’m still not wanting to make a mad dash through a tropical downpour. I spent an hour or two reading the latest book I’ve embarked on, Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. It’s a fascinating, sobering, concise view of our history on the planet, and at times it’s nothing short of brutal. This should be required reading for anyone who rejects evolution. The science is compelling, and Harari is quick to concede when the scientific record is vague, conflicting or incomplete.

There’s a section where he discusses the Aché, a group of hunter-gatherers who lived in the Paraguayan jungle until the 1960s.

When an old Aché woman became a burden to the rest of the band, one of the younger men would sneak behind her and kill her with an axe-blow to the head.

I recoiled when I read that. It’s so cold and foreign to our world view. But then I started thinking about it. I live in a society that has decided those who can’t afford health care can be left to die slowly and horribly of cancer or other afflictions, many of which could be cured or even prevented with the right medical care. I guess the difference is that rather than having a young man brutally eliminate a member of the herd who is a burden, we have wealthy old men who do essentially the same thing with laws and platitudes about not being able to afford to care for those who are a burden. It’s not blunt as a blow to the head, but the end result is pretty much the same.

I also found fascinating Harari’s argument that the Agricultural Revolution was a step backward for Homo sapiens, not forward. The population explosion it fostered threw things irreparably out of balance. “We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us,” he writes. He doesn’t soft-sell the life of hunter-gathers, as the passage I quoted above makes clear. But the more you read about the history of Homo sapiens, the more you wonder if we’re really moving forward. Early in the book, he ominously notes that Homo erectus was the longest reigning human, living in the eastern regions of Asia for 2 million years. “It is doubtful whether Homo sapiens will still be around a thousand years from now, so 2 million years is really out of our league,” he writes. It’s tough to argue the point.

Maybe DEVO was right. We are de-evolving …

I shifted over to Shakespeare’s poetry after getting thoroughly depressed about our prospects of beating Homo erectus’ 2-million-year record. As I read Venus and Adonis, the storm grew exponentially, with the thunder and lightning (trueno y relámpago) mirroring poor Venus’ fury at being unable to seduce Adonis. It got to the point where the electrical tempest was so vicious I was genuinely afraid, wincing each time there was a flash in anticipation of the roiling explosion of thunder that followed in successively shorter intervals. Surprisingly, we never lost power, though when things subsided and I returned to the Treehouse, I noticed the low-voltage lights outside weren’t on and once I got inside, I discovered that one set of track lights was completely burned out. All three bulbs gone. There’d been some sort of surge up here, even though I didn’t notice it down in the kitchen area.

I emerged from the Treehouse this morning to run down to the kitchen for some bread to eat with the anti-infammatory drug I’m taking for my ankle. As soon as I stepped out, a shimmering blue morpho butterfly floated by, dipping here, zagging there, riding the morning breeze with calculated randomness. I felt a bit like Moses emerging after the flood, but my rainbow was a single hue and had wings. After I got my bread and a banana, I returned to the Treehouse, where the rains have resumed. The deluge wasn’t done, merely paused. It’s rainy season, after all. Here’s hoping there’s no trueno y relámpago this time around …

 

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It’s what’s for breakfast

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

Saturday, September 22

El escorpión was waiting for me when I came down for breakfast this morning. He was delicious with a side of chiles. This is why I never stumble to the bathroom in the dark at night. Always carry a light …

 

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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.