Furniture, No

Furniture, No

Miguel comes over and with his machete begins hacking away at a fair amount of undesired growth on the flowering bushes and tropical trees that have been deliberately planted on the lot where our house sits. His arms move scissors-style in a rapid blur, whooshing in the air. He swings his machete with swift strokes that trim all dead undergrowth and misshapen branches faster than any person with high-speed, electric hedge trimmer in the entire continental U.S. He quickly rounds the house, trimming trees, bushes and giant tropical plants in his path, then works his way down the driveway, hacking furiously away on the sides of the long, steep slope. Huge leaves and branches lie everywhere.

I hurry to fix him a cup of coffee before he finishes. Miguel, I say, it is necessito that we have some furniture. We have the table that Melvin made and two ugly plastic chairs and a bed. I would like something comfortable to sit on. Pecos would like a dresser as for some reason he thinks it would be more secure against insects (not that we’ve seen any in our clothes, thanks to shaking everything before wearing) than a tightly-zipped suitcase. Miguel rapid-fires a few sentences and directs us to San Rafael, two villages over in the direction we haven’t yet been.

After he leaves I scale the hillside to admire his trimming. A tall crimson amaryllis has sprung wildly near many bright peach and purple-flowering shrubs. Grasses sway overhead in the breeze with variegated leaves in cream, green and red. I am wearing a short skirt with my mid-calf soft leather boots.

Suddenly I’m stung or bitten! I’m on fire! Above my ankle, a ferocious chomp from who knows what! I’m hopping and yelling across the yard when Pecos yanks my boot off and shakes it out. Fire ants drop peacefully to the ground and I know that an especially evil one has looked up to give me a malicious smile. No hope for Buddhism here as I stomp them out.

We head out and enjoy incredible mountain-crest vistas along the winding way. When we finally get to the second village, so identified by us as the second collection of houses we’ve come to with a church nearby, we enter the sole business, a pulperia (little grocery). I tell the friendly proprietor that we are looking for mesas and chairs. I do my pantomime routine again. He is perplexed. I finally ask, is this not the place, is this not San Rafael? No, senora, this is Socorro – two churches, yes, but only one village further from Aguas Buenas.

He writes down a name on a scrap of paper, gives us directions to San Rafael, and tells us to go in the pulperia there and they will direct us to the furniture maker. This is good news as we are eager to find an old craftsman of rustica for our rental house and later our cabina. It takes us a good half hour to leave as we chat a while. This proprietor tells us that Socorro is home to many Ticos, but also several U.S. residents and Canadians. We can easily identify the homes of well-to-do gringos – tightly gated, bars on windows, no doors wide open and sometimes the entire yard fenced with tight spears of iron that curl outward.

At San Rafael we show the paper and are directed to the ‘casa alta’ (tall house) of the furniture maker. He has a huge smile and teeth sprouting in all different directions. We follow him up several steps to his home – there is another home underneath it – and walk past his living room and through his open-air kitchen to enter a large showroom on the hillside behind. There is flawless, varnished, masterfully-built furniture in wood of all shades. The prices are about one-third less than in the U.S. We debate buying a chest of drawers for $210 (mahogany?) or a short burnished pew for $100. Neither is a necessity.

We ask for furniture that is more rustica and perhaps less cost, something simplico? He takes us to his workshop next door and shows us bed frames, mirrored dressers and tables in progress. Pecos asks the cost of a wardrobe, unfinished, and the furniture craftsman seems shocked. Why would anyone want such a thing? He emphatically but politely tells us that he will sell a table in rustica condition, but never such a fine piece of furniture as the wardrobe. We tell him that we are grateful for his insight and will come back when we have a house of our own to hold such nice pieces. He reminds us of the festival in San Rafael in a few weeks, complete with bull fight, and we plan on it. 