the bat episode

I'm washing dishes in the evening when I hear a loud shriek. Soon, I hear "Vecina! Vecina!" coming from the apartment across the hall from me, so I go out into the stairwell to see what's wrong. My neighbor, a Teak exporter in her thirties, is yelling to me through her closed door that there is a bat in the stairwell. I don't see anything, so she opens her door a crack and peeks her head through. The bat picks this moment to fly up the stairs, trying to find an exit through the screen windows which line the stairwell, and my neighbor screams and slams her door.

Through the wall I can hear her accented English saying "What are we going to do?! We can't leave the apartments! You work with STRI, GET IT OUT! Oh my God, what are we going to do?!"

So I head down the stairs and open the front gate, and then slowly herd the cute furry bat down the stairs. The creature is smart and has sonar, so it finds the open door right away and escapes from the terrifying world of shrieks and screens.

When I come back upstairs, I find that my neighbor has already called the landlady. And that the landlady wants to speak with me, immediately.

Now this landlady is notoriously crazy. She drastically raises the rent and then pretends it was the same price from the beginning, intimidates even the bravest of people, argues fiercely with tenants, wants to know every action that occurs in the house, and hates people from STRI (supposedly because someone left the air-conditioning on once when they left the apartment for the day). To make matters worse, I just found out the day before that I'm not actually supposed to be living in the apartment; meaning the landlady thinks that for the last two weeks, two French women have been there, and not one American woman. Unfortunately, my neighbor seems to have (accidentally) just informed the landlady of this. I need to call her right away, or she has threatened to drive to Gamboa tonight to see what is going on.

I am in the apartment because originally I was going to be house-sitting for the whole month of July, but then a British family who is here had a bad housing situation where the house was not appropriate for their two small children. So they moved into the house-sitting house for their last two weeks, and I moved into the apartment they had rented for their two assistants who have already left Gamboa. But since the landlady is so difficult, they decided not to tell her about the change and hoped she didn't find out during my two week stay.

It is my second to last day in the apartment, and the landlady has found out. I briefly tell my neighbor the situation, and she says I should pretend that the two French women are in Costa Rica for a couple days while I watch the apartment. But I can see myself getting deeply entrenched in a drama of lies that really has nothing to do with me, so instead I call Sunshine, who tells the two Brits, who call the French assistant who has a reasonable (though fearful) relationship with the owner. Meanwhile, I go to my friends' house for dinner.

By 9:30pm, I'm tired and the problem still isn't resolved. At this point the landlady hasn't been called back for over two hours, and I picture her sitting in my apartment, going through my things to figure out who I am, fuming. Both the British family and my friends who I ate dinner with offer their places for me to sleep, but I decide to brave the potential wrath and go home.

It is dark and no one is inside, so I go in and lock the front door and my bedroom door and fall asleep. In the morning, the landlady is finally reached, and she is upset but calmed when told that I am another assistant and that they know me very well (both not true).

The next day I pack my things, drop the keys off with the neighbor, and gratefully leave the apartment for good.