The Real Betrayal
The cruelest and most low thing that Lolita did was to befriend and then betray my then (now ex) girlfriend. As a gringo I'm culturally fair game. By way of explanation (for those inured to the facts on the ground) I remind you that we are seen as cultural imperialists running roughshod over the rest of the world.
In other words, as a white, male-American (my use here of the self-descriptor 'American' is considered by many to be culturally insensitive) I'm party by default to many persistent ills that seem to plague Latin America, and reparations may be extracted by any means available. To put that in plaintext English: I'm a gringo so it's locally seen as OK if Lolita steals from me. Not so with Claudete, and here is where she made her mistake.
A well-off Latina, adopted as a child along with her sister out of poverty and cared for like blood family, stole from a hard-working Latina of more humble means and background. I'm not sure that Lolita's 'father,' a former mayor of Boquete, is aware of or would be surprised at what she did, but I'm sure her estranged sister (by all accounts a respected professional living in Panama City) would find it par for the course.
Over the year that I physically built up the bar and improved the apartment upstairs to make it fit for living, finances for me and Clau were, to put it mildly, up and down. Everything we had was invested. We didn't even have a car during this time as we sold the one we had for capital (as well as a few thousand dollars worth of professional camera equipment and other items). The final bill for simply rewiring the building to make it safe and usable ran close to three thousand dollars.
['Funny' aside: Our original "electrician," Georgie or Jorge, was a long-time employee of Lolita's who touched me for an advance one day and never came back to finish the job. He was later found copulating with a dog on Lolita's finca, which is apparently what you need to do to get fired. As long as he was her dog he was fine, but as she's proudly known as an animal lover herself- don't cut in on her turf.]
May of last year found Clau back in Costa Rica to try and sell the above-mentioned car and she wound up finding decent work at a call center in San Jose. It was finally sold after an excruciating three months, and as our finances had by that point dwindled to nothing we decided it would be best for her to stay there and work while I went on putting things together in Panama. Things stayed like that, with her occasionally coming down for the occasional weekend, until the week the bar opened.
When we first moved in Lolita spent many a supper hour at our table. Clau had me research the Atkins/ South Beach diet and its variations and then proceeded to cook for and feed Lolita. I would of course occasionally find her stuffing her face afterwards in her cantina, so it's no surprise that the diet didn't do all that much for her. After, whenever Clau would come down to visit she would cook for her then as well. I also would occasionally whip up some chow, a cake or something special like Chicken Parmesan and bring some over for Lolita and her girls.
Clau would also do little favors like send medicine from Costa Rica that wasn't available in Panama and bring little gifts when she visited. They chatted frequently on MSN about the usual, female problems, men, family, whatever. Lolita told Clau a number of times that I was the only gringo she liked and trusted. You get the idea. As a matter of fact, as Lolita was setting us up on that final day, she was chatting with Clau on the internet telling her that everything was fine.
Clau was scheduled to go for an operation to cut out a fatty growth the doctors had found and she was terrified of going under the knife. Lolita knew it. She also knew that I didn't want to upset Clau by telling her of Lolita's increasingly bizarre behavior- including Lolita chasing behind me and a dinner companion in her car and forcing us off the road. I still had hope that our lawyer could talk to her lawyer and sort things out by injecting some calm into the situation.
(BTW: She drives a maroon Prado with blacked-out windows and bad tires.)
That was not to be, and, after sleeping that night with a large kitchen knife beside the bed, in the morning I had to tell Clau what had happened. Gratefully, she immediately got that Lolita had been playing her and responded calmly. She contacted Lolita to try to see what could be salvaged, which turned out to be nothing. Lolita continued to play a double game, and kept adding to the 'bill' that she said we/Claudete owed.
As Clau had just taken time off from her job to come down and open the bar she would have had to come down just for a weekend to try and settle the 'bill.' But as Lolita had been offered that money already by my partners- and refused, and as the lease was set to expire on April first, and as Lolita had denied that she had any business with me or the partners, and as I wasn't allowed within 500 yards of the place because of false assault charges, this was just a ruse to take another chunk of money. Disgusting.
So Claudete has lost her clothes, her furniture, music and scads of personal stuff that couldn't be of interest to the fat one, not to mention her money, time and effort (Clau was shoveling gravel with me on the evening before we opened to add more parking) because of some stupid, envious bitch that thought I was paying my bartenders too much money. If for no other reason I will hound this pig to her dying day.
Next week I'll post links to the photos that I took and the directions to her property that she wanted me to sell for her. Thank God I was too busy with the bar to have done more than I did, but I was working on it and was in contact with a local agency in Boquete.