Reventazón (Pt. 2)
An Encounter With La Llorona
Two
It was unbearably hot that day. Humidity stuck to the skin, wetting hair and encouraging sweat, thickening any air that was sucked up by nostrils. Jota had parked his truck, a large black metal 4x4 box, under a tree whose shadow had dodged the vehicle completely in the few hours it had been left sitting there. Caro and Diego reeled back immediately when they opened the doors making puffing noises as the extra temperature rushed over them, a preheated oven opened by a too eager face. Jota had made the right call running off to the bathroom and giving Diego the keys. At least the car would be a little more tolerable by the time he got back.
Diego rushed to get the keys in the ignition, turned them and sighed in relief as the AC began blasting him in the face. Caro sat in the front, taking an opportunity alone with Diego to speak.
“Are you and Jota good?” She asked.
“Keep the windows down, it cools down faster than you think,” said Diego.
“I know,” she said.
“Just making sure.”
Diego leaned back but moved away from the seat immediately, burned by the back rest. Caro kept her eyes on him, raising her eyebrows as he tried his best to take out his phone without scalding himself further on the leather, waiting for him to speak.
“What do you mean?” Diego asked finally.
“You both seemed tense.”
Diego shrugged, checked the time on his phone, and got out of the car, walking around to sit behind Caro.
“Nah, just regular friendly conversation.”
“Right.”
“What?”
“Have you guys talked about the van?”
“Not really.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah.”
Caro nodded and looked out the window towards the restaurant’s entrance. Jota was nowhere to be seen. She turned to look at Diego.
“Has he said anything about me?”
“What about you?” Asked Diego.
“Nothing, just like in general.”
“Like about you going together?”
“No I mean in general,” she said again.
“He doesn’t really talk to me about much.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, you know, guys. I think we need to go check out this spot here,” said Diego. He leaned forward to show a pin he had marked on his phone. Caro took a look and nodded.
“Jota asked the guy where the pool was,” said Diego. “He said it was there.”
Caro shook her head and smirked, not necessarily surprised that her attempts at getting a conversation started with Diego had been completely ignored. So singularly obsessive, his attention was sharp as a needle and spanned an area equally microscopic. The second the old man had mentioned a pool surrounded by large rocks, Diego had been lost, captivated in his entirety by the only ting that man had said that had peaked his interest. There were large rocks somewhere on the riverbanks, they were close to each other, meaning a small area could be built that might attract more climbers, and it was in a spot they had yet to explore. Everything else the man had said had been ignored, everything Caro had just asked had made mosquito bite welts in his mind, the kind that maybe would itch days later, that might get scratched, if at all, once all the rock that needed to be found had been found and all its moss properly scrubbed. Then again, it might just go completely unnoticed, a bubble on the surface that does nothing but turn red before it fades out and is lost.
It was exactly the thing that had made Diego so well known in this small climbing world, but also the thing that made him somewhat difficult to keep around for long enough periods of time. All he seemingly really knew to talk about anymore was climbing. But Caro had long ago resolved to break through that singularity, especially now that Jota’s decision to leave had clearly formed a severe schism in their relationship.
Caro looked out across the street at the bar as its door flew open and Jota walked out with a confident sort of strut and a dumb tipsy smile on his face. That grin was to most an outward expression of pure contentment, a triumph of soul, absolute bliss in perpetuity. He was pantomiming intentionally cringey finger guns at her and Diego as he walked. Caro looked away, fixing her eyes on the space in front of her, on anything other than Jota or his smile. That smile, those apathetic flaps of puffy skin that laughed at her, that bragged about their ability to not give a shit, was all she could think about. How long had she spent explaining self-consciously, misplaced guilt at her own perceived nagging, the seriousness of their situation, the importance and implications of her decision. Would he ever really understand what had been lost, what had been sacrificed? Here he was, the optimistic jester on the streets of Turrialba ignoring Diego’s suppressed abandonment angst, poking fun at a spirit, a woman who had lost a child, completely oblivious or uncaring to the pain being suffered. He’d said nothing to Diego about them. Diego who only knew how to talk about one thing, who had done nothing to reciprocate her attempts at a serious conversation. She’d only hinted she wanted to talk about something, scared to cross some sort of boundary between two best friends. It was a lack of engagement that had left her feeling deeply alone, suddenly gripped with a desire to not be where she was, to be home in her room under a blanket binge-watching some crappy comedy show. Caro breathed in deep and forced a smile as Jota rounded the car. She was not here for them, she told herself, but because of her own thirst for development.
She had joined Jota and Diego on one of their many first ascent quests some months before and had very quickly fallen in love with the idea of discovering, climbing, and especially naming, virgin rock on a trip they’d all done together to El Cerro de la Muerte.
On a mountainside, three thousand meters above sea level, Caro had rounded a corner between two thorny bushes and had discovered a perfect overhung slab of granite, the kind of rock Diego and Jota could only dream of finding. She’d spent an entire day learning from her two mentors, being taught how to brush moss, how to find and remove loose rock, how to properly clean and prepare her first boulder. It took her another two days, days she spent camping in the bitter cold of high elevation, pelted by a persistent gale strong enough to break the mast of a ship, to figure out how to climb the tilted monolith. She would never forget that feeling, that final breath she contributed to the wind around her right as she pulled on the starting holds of her boulder problem. That sense of quiet execution, mind blank with exertion, total physical meditation moving her upwards. She couldn’t hear Diego and Jota cheering her on, couldn’t remember them doing so. But suddenly, and with another breath, she was on top of this rock she had found and prepared, on top of this thing that had challenged her so bitterly with edges so small and sharp they’d made her fingers bleed. And now to name the conquered, The Mark, her first contribution, now forever, to the Costa Rican climbing scene.
She was taken by it, ridden the current of potential permanence, the adventure of discovery. Immediately following that firs trip, Caro had taken to spending countless hours searching the Costa Rican countryside on Google Maps, hunting for boulders and sending every bit of potential she found to Diego and Jota for vetoing. Their lack of sensitivity was not about to take any of that away from her, the feeling she felt, that gut wrenching sense of anxiety that permeated the air around her, a reminder of Llorona, an entity that kept barging into her thoughts, was not about to scare her away. The driver’s door opened and Jota hopped in, making some joke about how disgustingly hot it was that day. The other two agreed as he pulled out of the parking space.
They’d been driving in silence for a few minutes when Jota finally spoke.
“You guys know if McDonald’s is making vegan chicken nuggets yet?” He asked.
Diego looked up at the rearview mirror, making eye contact with his friend.
“What the fuck?” He asked, laughing.
“You know, like tofu McNuggets or whatever.”
“Not as far as I’m aware,” said Caro.
“Cool, yeah, I didn’t think so.”
There was a pause. Then, Caro, unable to contain her curiosity.
“Why?”
“I was just wondering.”
“You’re not vegan, though.”
“Yeah but Marta is.”
“Tofu McNuggets would be disgusting,” said Caro.
“Agreed,” said Diego.
“She hasn’t asked you guys to go vegan? I sure as shit don’t want to be,” said Jota.
“Right.”
“So I said to her, you know, like, I’ll go vegan the day McDonald’s makes vegan nuggets.”
Diego and Caro laughed.
“Mart wants everyone to go vegan,” said Caro.
“Wait who the hell is Marta?” Asked Diego.
“She’s one of Caro’s friends, goes to the gym a bunch, ripped out of her mind, has one of those bull piercings.”
“Bull piercing?” Asked Caro.
“You know what I mean,” said Jota. “Brown hair, lots of freckles.”
“Oh shit yeah, I’ve seen her around.”
“So I realized just now I didn’t actually know if McDonald’s made them.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“So for a second I was like oh shit, what if, you know?”
“Yeah, no, dude. You’re good.”
“You guys are sure, right?”
Caro nodded, looked back at Diego, laughing quietly.
“Is it cool if I roll down the window?” She asked.
Jota nodded as he turned off the AC and lowered his too.
“Yeah, I’m pretty positive that shit doesn’t exist,” she said louder, leaning her head back and letting the warm wind hit her face. Behind her, Diego nodded and looked down at his phone, typed something and leaned against the car door.
“Speaking of things that don’t exist,” Jota said. “What was up with that Llorona story?”
“I don’t know, but thanks to it we’ve got a lead,” said Diego.
“You think it was all bullshit?” Asked Jota, giving Caro’s shoulder a playful little nudge.
“I’m not freaked,” she said. “Marta was.”
“Honestly, though, kind of a pussy move, right?”
Diego raised an eyebrow.
“The fuck you guys talking about?”
“Oh right, we never said shit,” said Jota.
Caro looked back at Diego.
“We invited Marta, but she didn’t want to come,” she said.
“Oh?”
“Yeah she grew up around here,” said Jota. “We thought she could come in handy.”
“That and I took her with me on my last few trips and she’s pretty cool,” said Caro.
“She’s the one that FA’d that new climb in in Provi?” Asked Diego.
Caro nodded.
“She didn’t show because she was scared,” said Jota. “Said there was no way she’d come out here at night, that we were crazy to do that because we’d see La Llorona and she’d drown us.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah man, she got all creepy when we said we’d be looking for shit down the river.”
“You think if you grew up with those stories you wouldn’t be scared?” Caro asked.
“Honestly?”
“Yeah.”
“If I was twelve, maybe. But come on, she’s old enough to know they’re bullshit stories.”
“And the guy at the bar?”
“Small town ignorant guy. Nice enough, but you know how people out here are with their religion and shit.”
Caro rolled her eyes and turned back to watch the road right as Jota slowed the car down and turned left off the pavement and on to a dirt road.
“This it?” She asked.
“Looks like it according to Google,” said Diego.
“And all hail the Google machine and its infinite wisdom,” said Jota. “Plus also, like, it’s not like she’s never been near a river at night, you know?”
“The man has a point,” said Diego. The truck swerved steadily, narrowly avoiding the porous dirt left so by years of neglect and near-constant mid-afternoon rainfall. It was the kind of backwoods road you’d expect from a country with no real transportation infrastructure, a patch of land pressed down by some property owner years ago and surrounded on all sides by trees and vegetation so thick the dirt on the ground was a pale skin sunless white. Jota stopped the car, a massive sloping and horrifically muddy downhill section giving him pause.
“Well, fuck,” said Diego. “This wasn’t on the map.”
“It never is,” said Jota. “Guess we’ve got a long approach on our hands.”
Caro grabbed Jota’s phone from the dash, scrolling around to look for the pin they were being guided to.
It wasn’t that far, just down the hill from where they’d stopped to the river, and from there maybe a couple of kilometers along the river’s edge to what seemed like a large grouping of boulders, right between the water and the blooming green of the jungle.
Jota reversed the car, leaving it leaning sideways off the side of the road half way inside a ditch where it wouldn’t bother any other potential passing cars, and the three climbers got out.
There was no discussion on what gear to unload from the car, that conversation was completely unnecessary, even for Caro’s slightly inexperienced person. They walked away from the car with only a backpack each, loaded with a little bit of food, water, a few wire brushes, climbing shoes, and chalk. Travelling light and fast, at least for now, was the idea. This first pass wasn’t about actually climbing anything. It was just a scouting mission, a preliminary in person search for potential stone to come back to. If they found anything they’d eventually head back to the truck for the heavy stuff, the large flood lights, the big wire brushes, the harnesses, ropes, cams and nuts that might be necessary to build anchors at the top of tall boulders in order to rappel from and give any moss a good cleaning. It would probably be hours, days even, before they’d even consider bringing out the crash pads, large mats to throw on the ground and fall on top of.
Caro lead the way, stopping for a second at the top of the hill to look at a pair of drawn out footprints in the mud, an anonymous slide not unlike the black rubber scars you often see pointing towards the edges of highways and roads, the occasional shining metal debris left over from an accident whose true consequences will likely never be known by any subsequent driver that passes through at speed. In a moment she was hit with a premonitory realization, that these same marks on a road always come with a certainty of direction that could not be replicated here in the mud, that the coming or going of this slide was impossible to really identify as an up or downhill. Had this mystery person been trying to stop themselves from being sucked down toward the river? Had they been trying to get back up to the top only to find their feet giving way beneath them to land right back where they had started? It was clear that there was only one possible conclusion to all of this, a realization that jumped at Caro the way a deer jumps into headlights and causes a swerving surge of adrenaline in any driver unlucky enough to encounter one. Whoever it was that had been here before them, whoever it was that had fallen down this hill, had not wanted to be there.