El Silencio is an
entity unto itself. A town in the lowlands on Costa Rica’s Pacific coast, it
has an other-ess, a removed-from-the-world-ness, a something-is-under-the-rug-ness
that lingers in its shaded palm groves. Turn off the main highway and follow
the dirt road around the bend where the towering wide-rooted ceiba tree stands
sentry and cross river on the narrow bridge with the sign that warns you not to
fall off. Pass the palm-ringed soccer field and the carpenter’s shop with the
piles of teak out front and you will find yourself passing tiny cement houses painted
in bright pinks and blues and greens and apricots and tangerines. Stop there.
Pull in at the mini-super—the tiny grocery store on the right, the one with the
peeling blue benches out front—and you will find yourself at the spot where the
smiling boy rode madly by on his bicycle.
I don’t know if he
was deaf, but I wondered. He never spoke. But he did smile a lot. The other
boys gave him some respect, as if he were the younger brother who needed to be
carefully watched and yet allowed to live freely. We bought him an ice cream sandwich
which he devoured promptly.
We watched for him every
time we drove into town, which was often. It was a safe haven for us. A place
removed from the craziness of running a hotel and restaurant in a foreign
country. We escaped there, in the quietness. Having made our purchase at the
small store, we chose a rutted path off the dirt road and drove our van down
into the vast sea of towering red-berry oil-palms.
El Silencio is a
town set aside as a co-op owned by the people who lived there. It is nearly
completely self-sustaining with a chicken farm, an organic community garden, a
furniture-building shop where local teak is turned into beds and chairs and
tables, and 1000 acres of very profitable oil-palms. Wagons drawn by brown and
white oxen with huge humped backs haul bright red oil berries from the depths
of the groves to the buttered-popcorn smelling oil plant out on the main road. Wiry
men in high-water pants and thick snake boots use sickle-topped poles to cut
the berries from the high branches of the trees. Women and children brave the
snake infested, palm-branch-littered ground to gather the berries that fall
from the piled-high wagons.
When we needed to
escape, we drove so far into the groves that all noise but the squawk of the
crows was eaten by the trees. We turned off the engine and rolled down the
windows. The earthy scent of rotting greenery drifted in. We sat in silence.
Sometimes we fell asleep. Sometimes we braved the snakes and got out of the van
to pick through the strewn branches for a few stray berries to bring home.
The day the boy
rode madly by, we'd been in the grove for an hour or so and were heading back
to the business of our business. We pulled out of the rutted path and back onto
the dirt road and stopped across from the mini-super. Lee got out of the van
with the intention of buying us each an ice cream sandwich. He stopped for a
moment to stoop and pick up something in the road, something that caught his
eye, maybe a bright green El Silencio dollar bill. (The community even had its
own currency.) I don’t remember. In fact, I may never have known what it was he
stooped to retrieve. I watched for traffic from the safety of my seat. I don’t
know how I missed the boy. I don’t know how he rode so fast. Suddenly he was
there, peddling like the Wicked Witch from Dorothy’s Oz and smiling like Alice’s
Wonderland Cheshire cat. Like a whirlwind, he peddled madly past, leaving Lee
and me reeling. We were left there in his dust, feeling the brunt of his frozen
smile. For a moment we both remained in shocked silence.
Perhaps that is why
they call it, El Silencio.
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