A Bus Stop Bear Hug

Night falls early near the equator, and by 6:30 p.m. it’s dusky here in suburban Santa Ana, Costa Rica. By 10:00 p.m. it is pitch black on the main thoroughfare through the village, a road with no name and no street lamps, like every other street here. Tonight it is raining-raining black oil, slicking roads, roofs, every breathable molecule of air-and I am standing outside in the pitch darkness on the no-name main street, waiting to catch a bus to Piedades, another suburb of San Jose: I’m going night swimming.

The woman going with me-she’s a volunteer here with a humanitarian NGO as well-has been here a few weeks longer, so she is the one squinting into the dark looking for the right set of headlights. Suddenly, something on one of the side roads emits a flash and a roar-I look up to see not the bus but someone in a reflector-taped crossing-guard vest waving wildly at us, shouting in our direction. “I think someone’s calling you, Elisa,” I say. I’ve been in town for three days-I don’t know anyone in Santa Ana. Elisa looks up and sees the reflector tapes and smiles.

“Oh, it’s just Guillermo. He wanders the streets at night giving people hugs.”

“What?”

“He’s, ah…very, very mentally handicapped.”

I watch, riveted, as Guillermo charges down the street with his walking stick, still hollering, until he reaches the sidewalk next to Elisa. Carefully, he leans his walking stick against a fence and then gestures for Elisa to shake hands. They shake hands for 30 solid seconds, and Elisa says, “Hola, Guillermo. Cómo está?” At this, he flings out his arms wildly and grins at her, waiting, expectant, almost cartoonish in his eagerness. She acquiesces, and he rockets his arms around her neck and clings to her for two minutes. She patiently pats him on the back as they hug and rock back and forth, back and forth, surreal in the rain and in the flashing headlights of passing cars. After she’s had enough, Elisa firmly says, “Adios-adios, Guillermo, adios” and extracts herself from his grip. He happily snatches up his walking stick and heads down the road in the other direction.

A minute later he’s back for more-he doesn’t remember that he’s just been here, and he and Elisa repeat the routine. When they’re done, it’s my turn. There’s nothing to be done: I stand in a puddle and let him hug me. He bounces a bit, like he has the hiccups, and in the rain, I can’t tell if he’s laughing or crying.

Later I ask Elisa where he goes home. Who does he live with? “I don’t know,” she says. No one ever talks about him-it’s like he doesn’t exist, even though he wears that name tag-and even though people know to avoid him.

No one here ever talks about physically or mentally handicapped Costa Ricans. They are pariahs, like the poor Nicaraguan refugees who fill up the slums and ghettos outside the city limits. Only the “Nicas” have this one advantage: they are feared, and their poverty, their presence, is a constant, weighty shadow that creeps along the edges of cosmopolitan San Jose. They will not be forgotten as long as even taxi drivers, that typically fearless breed of city dweller, refuse to set foot in their ramshackle villages in broad daylight. Their festering humanity, heartrending as it is to the eye, has its virtue in visibility.

Tucked away behind walls, doors, shades, locks, closed mouths, and closed minds, the disabled and the mentally handicapped have no such foothold on the attention and the anxious imagination of San Jose and Costa Rica. They are too expediently forgotten; too easily neglected and ignored.

Costa Rica, this is your compassion, your solution to the inconvenience of human frailty: hide them, stuff them under beds, lock them in closets, stow them away in the attic, like household mess that has been hastily shoved out of sight right before the company arrives. Let them wander the streets in the darkness, in the rain, alone.