El Silencio is an entity unto itself. A town in the lowlands on Costa Rica’s Pacific coast, it has an other-ess, a removed-from-the-world-ness, a something-is-under-the-rug-ness that lingers in its shaded palm groves. Turn off the main highway and follow the dirt road around the bend where the towering wide-rooted ceiba tree stands sentry and cross the river on the narrow, guardrail-less bridge with the sign that warns you not to fall off. Pass the palm-ringed soccer field and the carpenter’s shop with the piles of teak out front and you will find yourself passing tiny cement houses painted in bright pinks and blues and greens and apricots and tangerines. Stop there. Pull in at the mini-super—the tiny grocery store on the right, the one with the peeling blue benches out front—and you will find yourself at the spot where the smiling boy rode madly by on his bicycle.
I don’t know if he was deaf, but I wondered. He never spoke. But he did smile a lot. The other boys gave him some respect, as if he were the younger brother who needed to be carefully watched and yet allowed to live freely. We bought him an ice cream sandwich which he devoured promptly.
We watched for him every time we drove into town, which was often. It was a safe haven for us. A place removed from the craziness of running a hotel and restaurant in a foreign country. We escaped there, in the quietness. Having made our purchase at the small store, we chose a rutted path off the dirt road and drove our van down into the vast sea of towering red-berry oil-palms.
El Silencio is a town set aside as a co-op owned by the people who lived there. It is nearly completely self-sustaining with a chicken farm, an organic community garden, a furniture-building shop where local teak is turned into beds and chairs and tables, and a thousand acres of very profitable oil-palms. Wagons drawn by brown and white oxen with huge humped backs haul bright red oil berries from the depths of the groves to the buttered-popcorn smelling oil plant out on the main road. Wiry men in high-water pants and thick snake boots use sickle-topped poles to cut the berries from the high branches of the trees. Women and children brave the snake infested, palm-branch-littered ground to gather the berries that fall from the piled-high wagons.
When we needed to escape, we drove so far into the groves that all noise but the squawk of the crows was eaten by the trees. We turned off the engine and rolled down the windows. The earthy scent of rotting greenery drifted in. We sat in silence. Sometimes we fell asleep. Sometimes we braved the snakes and got out of the van to pick through the strewn branches for a few stray berries to bring home.
The day the boy rode madly by, we'd been in the grove for an hour or so and were heading back to the business of our business. We pulled out of the rutted path and back onto the dirt road and stopped across from the mini-super. Lee got out of the van with the intention of buying us each an ice cream sandwich. He stopped for a moment to stoop and pick up something in the road, something that caught his eye, maybe a bright green El Silencio dollar bill. (The community even had its own currency.) I don’t remember. In fact, I may never have known what it was he stooped to retrieve. I watched for traffic from the safety of my seat. I don’t know how I missed the boy. I don’t know how he rode so fast. Suddenly he was there, peddling like the Wicked Witch from Dorothy’s Oz and smiling like Alice’s Wonderland Cheshire cat. Like a whirlwind, he peddled madly past, leaving Lee and me reeling. We were left there in his dust, feeling the brunt of his frozen smile. For a moment we both remained in shocked silence.
Perhaps that is why they call it, El Silencio.