On the sandy shores of the Pacific, near the swollen belly of the world, there was a little sleepy surf town that was unusually blessed. During the hot season it was cooled by an ocean breeze from the Gulf of Papagayo, and during the rainy season it never flooded so badly that the bananas or sugar cane crops were ruined. The people were all happy and said good morning and whistled to each other as they passed on bicycles on their way to work. On Sundays they gathered in the little white church on the grassy hill overlooking town, the windows opened to welcome the soft wind, and sat in the freshly painted green pews to pray. This town only had dirt roads, and in the busy season around Christmas, when the town bustled with fat, pale tourists eager to spend their money, they sprayed the roads with honey to keep the dust down. Every day at sunset the whole town and even the tourists gathered at the beach and faced west, where they watched the sky light on fire over the ocean, turning orange then pink then finally purple before the moon appeared. At night it was quiet except the sound of music and people dancing drifting up the hills.
At the center of this town was a beautiful hotel that was filled with smiling young workers in flowered shirts that brought fruity drinks and plates of food to the tourists. But mostly drinks. All of the posts and the furniture in the hotel were hand-carved out of the finest Teak trees from the jungle, and the roof was a fifty-foot high hand-thatched palopa. The fountains and fresh flowers pleased the visitors so much that they didn’t think about the money they were spending. The owner of the hotel was a tall Austrian gentleman with silver hair who moved there a long time ago and fell in love with the place. In fact there weren’t many people in town old enough to remember a time without the Austrian and the hotel. He was blessed and had five sons with a beautiful ink-haired Tica woman, and their sons were also blessed. They were healthy as horses – each one more handsome and fit than the next, and spent the day eating apples and surfing. All the women in town chased them around and wanted to have sons with them.
No one in town knew why they were so blessed, why the Langostas and the wild dogs stayed away, but they just enjoyed it and that’s how things always were. But there was an old man in town, Senor Torres, who had lived enough years to remember a time when the town wasn’t so blessed. When he was younger he was a fisherman, pulling pots off the boat for Pescador Pedro. But now his knees were so rickety that when it rained he could barely get out of bed, so he worked as a maintenance man at the hotel. Mostly he just strolled around, keeping to himself, and in the heat of the day he sat inside the hotel tool shed to play cards or take a siesta on a hammock.
The old man remembered when the Austrian moved there and built the hotel many decades ago. As a final accoutrement he bought twenty-one statues of human figures from a Chorotega man in a black hat, an indigenous tribe who are known as the “fleeing people.” He met the Chorotega one day at the market in Guaitíl, about 12 kilometers east of Santa Cruz, in Nicoya. The Chorotega lived in the interior jungle on the Matambu reservation and mostly worked as a beekeeper, but every once and a while he crafted a statue or ceramic mask and sold it at the market. He took his time making the statues, and traveled to the base of three different far-away mountains to collect the finest sands to fashion into his clay: tan, red ochre, and black. The black sand was the hardest to find, but he knew a good place at the opening of an iguana’s nest where there was plenty. The statues were each about 4 feet tall, rounded likeness of ancient Gods that were crafted of clay mixed and fired just right until they were as solid as rock. Some of the statues in the markets had human bodies with animal heads, but the Austrian thought those looked too scary and might remind the tourists of the darker history when the Chorotegas and other Indigena tribes sacrificed slaves to appease the Gods, and every once and a while tossed a virgin into a volcano just for good luck. So the silver-haired Austrian picked out twenty-one statues which were anatomically correct; they all had large phallus.
He paid a handsome sum, even for those days, and arranged the Chorotega man to transport the heavy statues one by one on a horse cart into the dusty town. He had the statues placed alongside the dirt road in front of his hotel and lining the stone wall between the beach and the hotel bar, all facing towards the Pacific. The statues, which were fertility omens in Chorotega legends, watched over the town and its people. That’s why they were blessed for so many years, until no one even noticed they were there anymore. The cows grew fat on the ranches outside of town, the sons ate apples and surfed, and everyone smiled and whistled at each other.
Time passed like this until one Christmas season about five years ago. The town swelled with more tourists than usual, thousands of gringos drifting in like beached whales, all wanting to stay at the beautiful hotel. There was such a demand that Senor Torres had to pull the fold-up cots from the maintenance shed so they could sleep three or four to a room. The gringos loved Christmas in the tropics and the fruity drinks flowed like fountains. But this particular year they got too drunk. They drank Vodka and lemonade all day by the pool, and then drank Flor de Cane rum by the beach as the sun went down. By nightfall they were sloppy and giggling and falling all over the place. It got so bad that the gringas lost all of their manners and started acting crazy. They said inappropriate things to the five sons that made them blush and drop their apples. They took off some of their clothes and took pictures next to the statues. Their fat gringo husbands were too busy at the bar planning the next day’s fishing trip so they just ignored them. The gringas climbed all over the statues in compromising positions, pretending to kiss them, and grabbed their phallus while snapping pictures. It got very bad and the Austrian saw this and was shocked and embarrassed that these things were going on in his hotel. It deeply troubled him but he couldn’t kick out the tourists with all of their money, and he was up all night agonizing over a solution.
The next day the Austrian called Senor Torres into his office. He told him in perfect Spanish that they had a delicate sort of problem. He didn’t want anything like the previous day’s incident to happen again, but he couldn’t turn tourists away or stop serving them drinks. So he instructed the old fisherman with bad knees to cut off their pingas. The old man thought he heard wrong so he asked the Austrian to repeat himself. The Austrian told him to take a sharp machete and hack the pingas off all of the statues. The old man still thought he heard wrong so he turned his good ear towards him and asked again. The Austrian told him that it was the only solution to the “drunk gringa problem” and to immediately cut off all of their pingas. The old man scratched his head and then went out to the shed and grabbed the sharpest machete they had. He went around and one by one castrated the statues. For some reason it pained him to do so, even though they were just stone. He found that if he took a big wind-up and put his weight behind it he could lop off each one in one felled swoop. Then he collected the severed pingas and put them in a cardboard box. The tourists in town looked at him funny behind their big sunglasses.
When Senor Torres finished cutting the pingas off of all twenty-one statues he threw the box on a shelf in the maintenance shed and laid down on the hammock. It was the most work he’d done in years, since his days on the fishing boat, and his knees hurt. The Austrian walked around and surveyed his work. He was content that the problem was solved and never again would drunk gringas act crazy and hang all over the phallus of the town’s guardians.
Some time passed and things were more or less normal, but by Christmas time the next year things started going badly. The truck that poured honey on the roads broke down so the whole town coughed and squinted as they walked the dusty roads. They didn’t say hi to each other or whistle anymore. The breeze out of the North no longer blew, so it grew sweltering during the hot season. It flooded during the rainy season, washing the roads into mud and killing the sugar cane crops. It rained so hard that the church flooded and all of the freshly painted green pews cracked and warped. On Sundays the town’s people prayed for an answer to their ills but none came.
The town was cursed. Langostas swarmed the air and wild dogs roamed the streets, spilling trash everywhere from the garbage boxes and howling at night. The tourists stopped coming as much so everyone had less Colones in their pockets. The cows grew lean until you could see their ribs poking out. Even the five sons suffered from this curse. One by one they started breaking out with horrible boils and pocks on their faces. They couldn’t sleep at night because they were haunted by bad dreams of volcanoes and sinking in black sand. They looked terrible and started drinking bottles of wine at night to try to fall asleep. The women in town no longer wanted to have sons with them and they felt lonely and sad. They didn’t even want to surf and grew fat.
The Austrian felt terrible as he saw his beautiful town decompose in front of his very eyes. He too prayed on Sundays in the little church with the windows open, but nothing helped. One moonless night he was up late antagonizing over how to solve the problem of the town’s curse as he took a walk. He stopped and sat on the stone wall by the ocean, next to a Chorotega statue without a pinga. It was a new sliver moon so the stars looked brighter against the velvet black sky. He put his head in his hands and cried. He was so distraught that he talked to the statue, asking him what he could do to change the town’s fortunes, but of course the statue didn’t answer. He remembered how nice it was when the hotel and the roads were filled with tourists like beached whales who wanted to spend their money. He even remembered a time, five Christmas’s ago, when it was so crowded that they had to sleep on cots four to a room and the gringas were so drunk that they were fornicating with the pingas of the statues. He contemplated something for a moment and a smile of realization came over his face. The silver-haired Austrian stood up, brushed the sand off the seat of his pants, and walked home, whistling to himself.
In the morning he called Senor Torres into his office. He was a little older and his knees hurt a little more, but he was still working ably at his maintenance job of playing cards and taking siestas. The Austrian asked him if he remembered the day when they cut the pingas off all statues? He did. What did he do with the remnants that day? Senor Torres thought about it and then told him that he put them in a cardboard box and put them on the shelf in a corner of the maintenance shed. The Austrian instructed him to get that box and glue the pingas back onto the statues. The old man asked him what he just said and turned his good ear towards him. The Austrian told him to get the pingas and glue them back on the statues immediately because that would lift the curse.
The old man walked to the shed shaking his head. Now he’d heard it all. The box was still there, dusty and covered with spider webs. He took them out and carefully removed the clay pieces, watching out for black widows in the box. One by one he visited twenty-one statues and measured them for the right pinga and glued them back on. At first it took a lot of trying on before he found the right one, but by the last ones it was going faster. The people passing on the road looked at him funny but by the end of the day, when the sky was turning orange, he was finished, and the old statues were all reunited with their pingas once again. The old man looked at each one when he was done, checking to see if the expression on its face changed, but of course it didn’t. He walked back to the maintenance shed with an empty cardboard box and glue dried all over his hands. He was tired and his knees hurt. The sky was now purple and for the first time in years a slight breeze stirred from the Gulf of Papagayo. But the old man was lost in thought and didn’t notice. Maybe he would retire soon and live out the rest of his years sitting in the shade of his front porch, drinking the cocoa tea that his wife brewed. He could watch his grandchildren play in the yard and when they went to bed tell them stories about the sea. The thought of that made him happy.
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