She hadn’t always been this snide. Once, she too had believed in beauty, revered it even. As a child, she had chosen her career because of it. This was back in the days of Batista, when she had noticed that all the beautiful people in La Poma, that bottleneck of chaos and corruption and color that has forever been Havana, were all professionals—doctors, architects, lawyers, engineers. When the Revolution triumphed, on the eve of her tenth birthday, she had been immediately caught up in its spell of social justice, its promise of education (the path to professionalism) for everyone…

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On my first trip to Cuba, I fit everything I needed into my trusty old camping backpack. But on my second visit, to accommodate all the presents I had for my new friends, I bought a fancy, fashionable wheeled suitcase. Despite its supposedly comfort-enhancing pullout handle, I had calluses on both hands after wheeling it from the airport entrance to the check in terminal where the agent promptly informed me that, at 95 pounds, my suitcase was a whopping 50 pounds over the limit.

For the past several months, I had been stocking up on the things I wished I’d brought before, for others and for myself. My suitcase now contained multi-vitamins and ibuprofen, toilet paper, an assortment of power bars and dehydrated bean soups, twine for impromptu laundry lines, automatic laundry detergent for my friend Dinora, bed sheets for my friend Liudmila, and running shoes for my boyfriend Alfredo, who I had met on my first trip.

Once I’d run out of money to purchase more gifts, I’d begun scavenging through the lost and found at the bookstore where I worked. With its multitude of misplaced and never retrieved cell phones and watches and palm pilots, the bookstore drawer contained more electronic gadgets than Alfredo had seen in his lifetime.

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Alfredo and I are standing at the iron rod entrance gate to Cabaret El Patio and the bouncer, a tall man, thick like a wall, is asking for our marriage papers.

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It is about mango trees depositing their overripe fruit in pockets of mud on the jungle floor, filling the air with the perfume of fermentation. It is about the steady downpour of a summer rainstorm mixing with and becoming indecipherable from the sound of the ocean. It is about the world at 5 a.m. when the sun first appears and the polished black surfaces that give night its sense of mystery are replaced with color and familiar textures, with edges. Cabañas Tranquilas is all this and the negation of it all. It is
the absence of scent and sound and sight that occurs during meditation, the way, when you focus on yourself so intently, location ceases to exist.

Cabañas Tranquilas is where I went searching for myself when I thought, by definition, being a wanderer meant you were lost.

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But in the southeastern corner of the country, at the border with Panama, there is a crescent beach whose name is a Spanish word for mosquito. Here, the rocky black sand will cut your feet and the heat will bake your wounds. And if you continue on into the jungle and hike five miles uphill through mud that pulls at your ankles like quicksand, you will come to a land inhabited only by indigenous people. For a few days in November 1995, they came out to greet a group of visitors, but after our stay I imagine they’ve become more guarded with their hospitality.

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Mount Chirripo splits the country in two. If you reach the top before the afternoon fog rolls in, you can see the Pacific on one side and the Caribbean on the other. In the evening, the temperature drops below freezing and icicles decorate the roof of the plywood hikers cabin. But in the afternoon the sun is so intense that half an hour without protection can leave your skin bubbling.

The ranger station requires cabin reservations a month in advance, and although the national park surrounding the mountain is only sixty miles for the San Jose bus terminal, it takes a full day of travel on potholed dirt roads to get there.

It makes no sense to head off to Mount Chirripo unprepared. But there are times when life makes little sense, when a relationship ends, when your return flight home is fast approaching and you realize you haven’t had that life-altering revelation you left the States in search of. Like the view from Mount Chirripo, your life splits in two directions: here and there. And you understand with sudden clarity that you must leave, prepared or not.

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They are Mexicans, Guatemalans,
anyone I’ve managed to pull away
from the free clothing room,
saying “Come learn English.
Puede aprender ingles. Today.”
They are mainly men in their twenties,
men my age who have
left their families
to search for jobs and the good life
some muchacho passing through
their town had told them about.

They know little more than
“What’s up?” and “My name is Daniel.”
The first day they laugh
at their own mispronunciations
and my being a woman, muttering
jokes in Spanish, not understanding
the meaning behind my language.
They hear only guttural sounds and
“h”s that, in their country,
would have remained silent.

Each day they come, at first just
a group of noses peeking over the wall
to see if this classroom still exists.
They always seem surprised that I
am still here, have not been deported
like their friends. Each day
there are more questions.
What is the difference
between “know” and “no?”
How do you spell “learn?” and
What does my name mean
in Spanish?

They cultivate calm English words
in their mouths, still longing for
the rolling “r”s and salsa “ch”
of Spanish, still waiting for the day
they’ll know how to ask a stranger
directions on the street
rather than wandering the dry
sun crackled sidewalks of San Rafael,
hoping to come across a landmark,
something familiar that will
tell them they’re home.

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