Scenes from San Jose, Costa Rica

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The man towers over the people encircling him in the street, his frame angular and athletic, skin white, with the austere shaven head of a Buddhist monk in front and a torrent of wild hair sprouting from the back.  His feet are bare.  The circle of people around him begin to chant.  They take out gourds and notched sticks and beat rhythms of the tribes Angola.  The giant's eyes begin to blaze like a warrior in the moment before battle and his body begins to sway with the rhythms.  The circle begins to chant faster and a little dark man leaps nimbly into the circle and touches the hand of the giant.  They sway for a moment, gaze locked, muscles tensing, and then burst into a frenzy of whorls and flips, the giant's limbs arcing in huge swaths and the small man a blur of spins and dodges.  Their fluid passes are the same movements danced by Brazilian slaves under cruel masters on sugar plantations, the same ancient tumult orchestrated into beauty.  It appears that the white giant and dark dancer are locked in an vicious fight.  But, as witnessed by the eyes of all in the circle, neither has touched the body of the other. 

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He has no ears and his nose is just a knot of flesh and his whole face is like a raised map of a country scored by unnatural lines.  It is a yellow plateau of petrified pus, and all the little boys scream at him "feo! feo!feo!"   "I don't think he likes that," I tell them and they say, "Sure he does.  Everyone calls him that. Watch. HEY FEO.  YOU DON'T CARE IF WE CALL YOU THAT DO YOU?" He gives a shrug as to say he doesn't give a damn what little boys think; his skin is thick.  But later as I am sitting in the plaza waiting for a bus to leave this hard part of town he comes up and sits beside me and tells me, "I'm not going back there, I don't like it when they call me feo."  And then my bus comes and I get up in it and never learn his real name.

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In the Plaza de Cultura the pigeons bob and babble around edges of the polished granite benches and flock on the clean swept flagstones.   A tourist family appears in the plaza and begins scattering bread crumbs and the birds descend in an asphyxiating mass, landing two or three deep on their outstretched arms.   The tourists laugh in delight at their mastery.  The breadcrumbs are gobbled and the pigeons begin again to carefully place one foot in front of the other on the flagstones. Business people pass on the streets with a deliberate walk, well dressed university students stroll through with confidence, and a toddler breaks away from his parents, chasing after one of the birds, the whole world forgotten for this one befuddled creature who hops, skitters, and finally bursts into frightened flight.

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The Nicaraguan leads the way into the Los Pinos slum, not wearing a bra, thrusting her huge teets forward like the prow of an icebreaker; large and in charge, always moving, bellowing her approach like a foghorn.  Her countrymen emerge from a tangle of sheet metal.  In a clearing at the center of the the tangle the exposed roots of the pines are treaded raw and we set up a table with soup. Kids flock en mass from dark doorways and fight to be first in line for the handouts. Later they play soccer and the ball thunders off the a sheet metal wall and spins into a sewage pipe.  The littlest kid is pushed forward, crawls into the sludge, and pops out with the tattered ball.  The game goes on.

 *

The grand piano slumbers on the dark stage in the National Theater,
silent strings straining with several tons of pressure,
ready to drench the hall in a torrent of song.