A Papagayo break

 

It was on the edge of a swimming pool, in a luxury hotel on the Papagayo peninsula, that I decided to take my life in hand. At the age of fifty, married with three children, I suddenly realized that my life had escaped me twenty years earlier. 

I had, at that time, followed a young woman, who had become my wife. 

The years had passed. I had put on weight, a sagging chin, wrinkles and a lethal dose of routine.

I had thought I could escape the midlife crisis. I had lived before I got married and had children. My wife was the most beautiful woman in the world and I loved her. 

I thought midlife crisis only affected guys who forgot to have fun in their twenties and were screwing around with a cantankerous wife, the kind who had gained fifty pounds in twenty years of marriage and kept her curlers in while smoking cigarettes all day. But, no, my wife was beautiful, nice, intelligent. I had really won the lottery.

So I understood that the midlife crisis was the simple fact that death was approaching with my wrinkles, my little belly and my softened look.

The midlife crisis for me was not the desire to fuck every girl that came along. I had no desire to defile strangers. I really didn't see what I was going to do with anyone but my wife. I wasn't, in all sincerity, not interested at all. 

Yes, I had a wife, an accomplice, a friend, my confidante for twenty years. The "sex and tenderness" boxes were already ticked. My mid-life crisis was the realization that I was going to die, sooner or later, and that, even if I wiggled my ass, nothing could stop the fatal process.

That's how I suddenly decided to leave. I asked my wife: did she want to go with me to get lost on a beach in Costa Rica?

She looked at me with despair and understanding. It was a no.

So one day I landed at the Juan Santamaria International Airport in San José, the capital. 

As soon as I arrived, I looked for the first bus that left for the Gulf of Papagayo, via the city of Cañas, with a stop in Liberia. 

The trip was long and boring. I felt like I was driving through a hot country, a kind of tropical Latin American suburb, punctuated by uninteresting burgs. I looked at the inhabitants through the window, telling myself that I would never be able to get interested in their lives, their culture, their horizons. 

I already regretted being far from home, in a country of poor people who didn't speak my language. I didn't find the enthusiasm of my twenties, when I was traveling the planet with a backpack and my tail wagging at the promises of adventure.

I got off, livid, at a stop, in front of the El Cruce bar, under a tin roof. 

It was dark. A few locals were drinking a beer, all of them slightly fat, uninteresting half-breeds. It was hot, a TV was blaring a shitty program. It smelled of boredom and biting mosquitoes. 

A cab dropped me at the hotel, an hour later. I looked at the open lobby, the wooden ceiling, the smooth floor, it was a luxury hotel without surprises. As soon as I had completed the formalities at the reception, I went straight to my room. White walls, light wood furniture, waxed parquet, smooth and clean sheets, sea view. I was going to be able to empty myself for a long time, in confidence, of an anticipated shit, caused by the stress of this shitty trip. 

Then I ran a bath, one of those baths you get when you pay a lot of money for a night in a hotel to compensate for not sleeping in your bed.

I spent three years in this lost country. I only found people who lived very well without me. There was no culture, no relaxation other than that of the mind. I probed the souls and found only simple hearts, minds fed with music and vulgar pleasures.

So it was there, in this dull paradise, that I found myself stuck, without friends, without noble distraction, completing a life of a ruined survivor. I had no return ticket. My wife hated me for choosing a life of adventure without her, my children despised me.

So I ended my life in a rotten shack, in Cuajiniquil, a little north, in the Gulf of Santa Elena. I never met any of my compatriots there, and I didn't talk much with the local morons.

Towards the end, some bug shit gave me Chagas disease. My eyelids swelled, I had a fever, headaches.

When I had trouble breathing, I got worried. But it was too late, a cardiac edema took me away.

What message can I give you? None. I still don't know why I went to this godforsaken place. I think only people like me understand. I think it comes from the bland and monotonous life that the West offers. Something deep inside us knows that we are not made for this.

Of course, the situation in Europe was desperate, with the war in Ukraine that was spreading across the continent. 

But it was mostly that Western society was annoying me with its intrinsic weaknesses, its hypocrisies and its superficiality. I had accumulated small jobs, unemployment and boredom. I wanted so much more from life.

So I went on an adventure for the sake of adventure to Costa Rica, with no experience, no plan, no limits other than my financial capabilities.

It was, overall, a bad choice, but I had a few years of respite walking on deserted beaches, watching the raindrops pass through the tin roof, living a little more uncomfortably; living a little more. It was, perhaps, all I wanted. I left with a slightly lighter heart for having given the finger of honor in extremis to my fate as a soy man.