Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Tomorrow became today, and I was vibrating with excitement.
Today I was going to my first cooperative—or as I preferred to call it, Cooperative Heaven.
Some kids went to bed dreaming of sugar plums or magic lands, but I dreamed about this : a utopia of economic cooperation where everyone enjoyed the fruits of their labor—equitably.
And I was about to experience it in the flesh.
With Adrián. I was surprised that he wanted to participate in my naive, imperialist activities, but he said he wanted to avoid work that day; his dad planned on firing two housekeepers.
I couldn’t deny that I was happy he was coming with me.
But I preferred not to think too deeply about my weakening resolve to resist.
After a drive exceptional only in that we didn’t pass any dead bodies, we saw the sign to Café Alegre rising twenty feet high out of the jungle.
Cooperative Heaven! Adrián parked outside a gate with three horizontal bars.
Then we walked down a dirt road shaded on both sides by large guanacaste trees.
After a few hundred meters, pink and periwinkle plaster houses appeared.
Since this was a cooperative network, the worker-owners lived on or near their plots.
Vibrant red heliconias decorated the path, and prickly green guanabanas littered the ground.
I left the road to try to peer into the closest house, but Adrián pulled me back by the belt loop of my jeans.
“What are you doing?” he asked, a bit severely.
“I just want to look inside.”
“If you want to see the place, just knock and ask for a tour.” I looked at him with surprise. He wasn’t exactly a follow-the-rules type. “I don’t want to see anything happen to you.”
“Nothing’s going to happen. We’re at a co-op. Cooperative .”
Adrián didn’t speak. He just pushed an errant hair away from my forehead. His real motives for coming hit me. “Are you still hung up about the scratch? Did you come here to protect me?”
“You never know what kind of security they have on these farms. Coffee is big business here, Dee. It’s not all roses and kittens just because it’s a co-op.
” He grabbed both of my hands and wrapped them around his waist. “And I wanted to spend time with you.” Then he began to kiss me in a way that made me worry about keeping our appointment.
My sexual experience was limited to my high school boyfriend and Cody, and the heat dial never went past seven.
But the way Adrián kissed me made me think that maybe there was a whole world I was missing out on. Actually, it made me not think at all.
“Um. Okay. Well,” I stammered as I reluctantly pulled away.
“Is there a problem? Do you not like it?”
“No! I like it! I really like it! I super like it!” Oh my god, could I just stop talking? “I just don’t want to be late for our appointment.”
“Okay.”
As I watched Adrián struggle to catch his breath, I realized I’d have to make up my mind about what I wanted this to be soon. The word “slow” didn’t appear to be in his vocabulary. And “fast” wasn’t really in mine, at least not physically. Adrián straightened his shirt and took my hand.
We walked on, smelling the overripe guanabanas and listening to the birds.
At the end of the road, there was a clearing with a soccer field, surrounded by laurel negro trees.
Behind the soccer field stood a community center with a veranda.
It was flanked by a large building to the west, and a drying platform for coffee berries to the east. A layer of bright and puffy clouds hung over everything.
It looked like a cloud factory had just exploded.
Now that we were here, I became a little nervous.
Was Adrián right to be concerned about our safety?
When the Professor said, “take normal precautions,” why hadn’t I asked what those were?
Why had I even come to Costa Rica in the first place?
What had been so terrible about home? How did a pushy, overly invested family compare with the terrors of interviewing people you had never met in a foreign language you had barely mastered?
I stopped on the path and turned to Adrián. “This was a bad idea.”
“Bringing me?”
“Thinking I could do this in the first place. I’m a college dropout with limited qualifications. My resume had a lot of... embellishments.”
“ Tranquila .” Adrián put his arms firmly around my waist. “Everyone exaggerates on their resumes. And nobody ever feels as qualified as they are. Maybe you don’t have a lot of experience, but you’re smart and you’re passionate.”
Huh. Adrián actually made me feel better .
“Remember when I told you you’re an unreliable narrator?” he asked. “Maybe it’s time to change your narrative about yourself.”
I smiled at him. Maybe it was. We crossed the soccer field and went up the steps of the veranda.
Adrián opened the thick wooden doors and we went inside the community center.
The main room was a large, thoughtfully merchandised tasting room with an elegant coffee bar.
Pounds of coffee were for sale: medium and light roasts, single origins and blends.
There were also Café Alegre mugs and tees.
A genial, moon-faced man in his fifties came toward us with outstretched arms. “ Buenas tardes, amigos ,” he said.
“We’ve been expecting you.” He gave me the Costa Rican air kiss.
“You must be Dee,” he said in Spanish. “I’m Manuel and this is Paula.
” Dona Paula, a serious woman in her late forties, nodded at us from the coffee bar.
She was the only other person in the room.
Manuel turned to Adrián. “And you’re.. .?”
Adrián looked at me with a mischievous smile. “Her driver.”
“Ah. Great. Come with me!” Manuel led us to the coffee bar. “What will you have? Single origin or a blend?”
“I’m supposed to like single origin better, right?” I asked.
“You’re supposed to like whatever you like,” said Adrián. “No one gets to choose your preferences for you, Dee.”
“Agreed, profe ,” said Manuel, using the local slang for driver—professor. He ground some beans from a canister, then poured boiling water from an electric kettle into a Vandola. After a few moments, he handed us two cups.
I sipped the coffee. It was balanced and smooth. Was I getting a hint of plum? Was I fooling myself?
“It’s our house roast,” he said. “From just three micro-lots. A light to medium roast.”
“It’s phenomenal.”
“Glad you agree. We’re closed to the public today, so you’re going to get your very own private tour. But first I’m going to give you the history of the place. Would you like that?”
“Yes, please.”
“Café Alegre was a dream of mine ever since I was a boy.” He leaned against the coffee counter.
“I grew up on a coffee plantation. At the age of six, I was already working in the fields, picking berries. My mother, my father, my seven brothers and sisters, and I lived in a two-room shack. We didn’t have electricity or running water. We bathed in the river.”
Adrián looked disgusted. I elbowed him subtly.
“My youngest sister was a child prodigy, but we had no money to send her to school. She continued picking coffee just like the rest of us. My younger brother lost his senses from meningitis because we couldn’t afford the medicines.
And the imperialists next door lived large while we suffered and starved. It was an outrage.”
Paula nodded. Manuel wiped his face with a red bandana.
“So I took that resentment and I turned it into a dream. And that dream became Café Alegre.”
Paula murmured, “ ?Gracias a Dios! ”
“And now my sister is getting her PhD in engineering at the University of Western Australia.” I was too struck to say anything. What a success story.
“How does Café Alegre work?” asked Adrián, unmoved. Was he made of stone?
“I’ll tell you, profe ,” said Manuel. “Better yet, let me show you. Let’s go to the mill.”
Manuel and Paula led us out of the tasting room, down the steps of the veranda, and into the building next door. The cavernous main room was humming with mechanized activity where coffee cherries were pulped, fermented, and washed. A few workers supervised the process.
“Do you mind if I take photos?” I asked. “I’ve never been in a coffee mill.”
“Be my guest.” Manuel pointed to some tanks. “This is called the wet-processing method. It provides a consistent, clean taste.”
“What do you do with the coffee pulp waste?” I asked.
“We use it as natural compost.”
Adrián raised an eyebrow.
“Where are the cherries roasted?” I asked.
“Most of that happens offsite, by the buyers.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s its own specialty,” said Manuel. “Roasting is part science, part magic. You’re not just heating up a food product. When you alchemize starches into sugars, you unlock the essence of the bean.”
“That sounds very mystical,” I said.
Adrián nodded. “My grandmother used to say, roasting reveals the true nature of the coffee. Transforming it into what it was always meant to be.”
Could that be true? Could things have an innate essence, waiting to be revealed, through trial of fire? Were people like that?
But we were done with philosophy for now. Adrián had turned to Manuel. “How does the co-op work from an economic perspective? Who pays for what? The plants, the machines, the processing labor?”
“Great question. We are all brothers and sisters here, by blood or affinity. Every owner-member has their own small farm that they work with their family. We all pay fees to belong to the cooperative, and those fees pay for the labor of processing, the materials, and the equipment.”
“How are the profits split?” I asked.
“By yield, from each lot,” said Paula.
Adrián raised his eyebrow again. He was going to get wrinkles there. “So not evenly,” he said.