Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Matías’s pep talk worked subliminally in my sleep.
It was incredible that he could change my outlook with just a few sentences.
By the time I showed up at Professor Ramírez’s outer office early that morning, I was cautiously optimistic.
Fingers crossed, Las Nubes would be suitable for the Truth Trip, and I would make my February deadline.
“ Buenos días, joven ,” said the Professor, from his inner office. “I’ll be right out.”
I sat at his assistant’s desk and wrestled with the screwed-up straps on my wide-brimmed adventurer hat.
As I tried to untangle them, they appeared to recoil from my touch.
I would have to stop taking my allergy medications; they were making me hallucinate.
Goddamn that strap on my cap; it was actually trying to get more twisted. “Cooperate, here!”
“What?” asked the Professor, exiting his office. “Let’s go. We’re late.”
Right , I thought. Late.
We ran down the stairs of the Social Science building and went to his Jeep.
Did everyone have a Jeep in this country?
The Professor’s was a lot older than Adrián’s, which didn’t seem fair.
The cloth interior was separating from the plastic roof, and the whole thing reeked of cigarettes. I unrolled my window.
“Sorry,” he said. “I quit six months ago, but I can’t get the damn stench out.
” He peeled out of the parking lot and onto the road out of San Pedro.
“So,” he said, passing three cars from the right shoulder.
“It’s a bit unusual for a young North American to come to Central America for work. Why Costa Rica?”
“To learn about cooperatives.”
“Please.” The three cars were honking at him, but by the time I looked in the passenger mirror, they were dust. “You have co-ops in North America. What’s the real reason?”
The last thing I wanted to talk about today was my family. I tried thinking of a credible explanation, but one look in those Neptune eyes and I knew half truths weren’t going to cut it. “To escape my family.”
“So you had to go to a different country?”
“You don’t know my family.”
“They’re that bad?”
“Not bad ... Controlling. Suffocating.”
“Is that another way to say loving?” There was an edge to his voice.
“I mean, sure, they love me. Like I’m a possession.”
We hit a speed bump. “It’s hard not to,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
His harsh features softened a little. “When your kid is born, they are yours. You do everything for them; they’re completely dependent on you.
Then one day, they get older, and you realize they’re not yours anymore.
Maybe they don’t want to do the things you want them to do.
Maybe they don’t even want to talk to you.
And, well, as a parent, it’s hard to make that transition. ”
I looked at the Professor. He was a parent ? It was hard to think of him as an actual human being and not a living legend.
“Okay. But it’s kind of the parent’s job to be the adult about it, don’t you think?”
“Yes,” he said, tersely. “But if they’re having a hard time with it, that’s not a reason to abandon them.”
“I didn’t abandon them.”
The Professor was silent. In the quiet, I realized we had both raised our voices. We came up to the Pan-American Highway and he put his coins in the bucket. “My daughter won’t speak to me.”
Oh. I could see he was struggling to control his emotions. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know you had a daughter.”
“I used to.” He stopped looking at the road and looked straight at me. “Don’t let a small crack grow into a gorge.” He shifted into a lower gear. “You’ll regret it.”
I leaned back into my headrest. If only he knew. Regret was my most familiar emotion.
“Look,” he said, relenting just a little.
“I don’t know what happened between you and your parents, but I do know this.
If you were my daughter, I’d do everything I could to fix it.
And I bet your parents would, too. You just have to try and see it.
Have pity on us old folks. We have a hard time expressing ourselves. ”
So do us young people, I thought, looking out the window.
The Professor had just turned off the main highway and we were going up a one-lane road.
He was concentrating on driving, and I was grateful for a few moments of silence.
It was tragic, really. People try so hard to understand each other, but despite their best intentions, they keep failing.
Were my parents trying to communicate something important to me? Was I just missing it?
“By the way,” he said after a while, his voice much lighter. “There’s going to be a community meeting tonight at Las Nubes,” he said. “I have to make a speech. Can you help me with it?”
“ You want me to help you with your speech?”
“I need a closer. Something generic, but also inspiring. Don’t worry about being trite; people love that stuff. Lean in.”
I thought for a few moments. “Tell them they are a shining example of cooperative values.”
“Perfect.” He smiled and looked into my eyes. I smiled back, touched, but only briefly, because I really wanted him to pay attention to the road. He drove even crazier than Adrián. Was it the testosterone? Was that what made them all insane?
Two hours and several thousand feet in elevation later, we reached the center of town.
There was a plaza with a church on one end and a general store on the other.
It was colder up here than I had expected; I drew my cardigan closer.
We walked to the co-op’s central office, where a compact, muscular woman was painting the eaves from a ladder.
When she heard us approach, she climbed down.
She had little specks of yellow paint in her hair and a Gen X attitude.
“Clara,” said the Professor. “So wonderful to see you again. This is my friend, Dee. She’s organizing eco-tours for Justice Alliance. She isn’t your typical North American dilettante; she’s a true ally.”
Clara looked at me skeptically but didn’t say anything.
“Nice paint color,” I said. She just stared at me. I began sweating despite the chill.
“Would you mind showing Dee around?” he asked.
She nodded. Did the nod mean yes, she’d show me , or yes, she minded ? The Professor was unbothered and headed toward the wet mill down the road. “See you in a few hours!” he shouted over his shoulder.
Clara scrutinized me for a moment. Her body language said: You’re wasting your time, interloper. I sure wasn’t getting any attendance trophies from her. She put her paintbrush on top of her paint bucket and wiped off her hands on a wet rag, which she tucked into the back pocket of her overalls.
“ Venga ,” she said, entering the community center. I scurried after her like a chastened child.
In the main room, there were sofas, a TV, and board games. It sounded like there was a daycare happening in some of the other rooms, because I could hear bright peals of toddler laughter coming from underneath the doors. Clara went into the open kitchen and started making coffee.
“Is the community center open for all members?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, in Spanish. “We have game nights, movie nights... We even do yoga and meditation classes.” I lifted my eyebrows. “The meditation classes haven’t been wildly popular,” she confessed. “Yet.”
This was perfect . The tourists would go apeshit for this place.
We could work in some coffee-themed guided visualizations.
I couldn’t wait to tell Suzanne! But first I needed to convince Clara to let the Truth Trip come here.
“Professor Ramírez mentioned you haven’t allowed tours here, but I think people would love to learn about Las Nubes. What’s stopping you?”
Clara put the drinks on a tray. I followed her to a large veranda that overlooked the rolling fields. Shiny coffee leaves glinted in the midmorning sun, and hummingbirds darted from plant to plant. We sat in rocking chairs. She finally spoke.
“Tourists have expectations. Because they’re paying, we feel obliged to fulfill them. Next thing you know, I’m wearing a ruffled blouse and full skirt while I hand-hull the dried beans.” She made jazz hands. “I’m dancing for the Americans.”
“There must be a way to do the tours that doesn’t commodify your culture.”
She looked me directly in the eyes. “Professor Ramírez didn’t mention you were naive.”
I paused. “Maybe I am. But we would work with you to make sure the tours were on your terms. And they would bring in a lot of revenue. Professor Ramírez said you guys are struggling a bit.”
“A bit?” she scoffed.
“What’s going on?”
Clara blew on her steaming coffee. “For the last decade, we’ve been a major player in the organic and fair trade space. But over the last two years, our market share has been reduced by 50 percent.”
“Wow.”
She nodded, grim. “There’s a new co-op that’s taken over one of our biggest contracts.”
“How?”
“We don’t know. We dropped our prices to the Ethical Coffee International floor, so they can’t be underselling us.” She rocked methodically in her chair. “And it isn’t higher quality.”
“What’s the name of the co-op?”
“Café Alegre.”
My heart began to race. Was Alegre illegally selling their coffee at a price below the Ethical Coffee International minimum to steal clients from the competition?
Clara looked in my face as if searching for a lost item. “You know them?”
“I’ve been there.” I looked at my coffee, wondering how much to share. “I’m not sure they’re playing fair.”
“Neither are we.”
I took a sip of the coffee. An explosion of chocolate and honey, a whole universe in a cup. Café Alegre’s coffee was good, but this was better. There had to be something underhanded going on for Café Alegre to take over their contracts.
“We can’t sustain production without buyers,” she said. “We’ll have to sell land soon. People will have to move out.” Her aloof facade cracked for a moment, and I saw how scared she was. “Our community is going to fall apart.”