Rat Witch Hunt

Here in Costa Rica, I have a pretty nice room -- lace curtains, antique wood furniture, plenty of room. And best of all, it faces east, which means I get incredible, warm sun every morning as my alarm clock.

But as of late, my lovely little haven has adopted a not-so-lovely odor. It started out subtly -- I´d catch a whiff when I opened my closet or put my shampoo bottles back there. It´s a sour, stale smell, like some dairy-based food product had spilled and a mold colony moved in. I thought maybe it was the shoes in the closet, but even when I put the shoes out on the patio, the rogue scent persisted.

I opened the glass panels of my window, hoping the chilly night air of San Jose might carry the scent off with it. But such was not my luck. The smell was just as onerous, even when the closet door was sealed shut. I silently endured the olfactory offense, worried that if I was too curious, I might just find something I really didn´t want to find.

Yesterday, my host aunt stopped by the smelly closet to stow away some blankets. Apparently the stench took her aback, however, because within minutes my mom showed up with an oversized broom and a look suited to the grave duty ahead of her.

A ratón had died here, she pronounced grimly, and thus commenced the rat witch hunt.

All my stuff came out of the closet -- shoes and cosmetics and medicines -- and she put her nose to the wood like a detective. Yep, she said, something definitely died here.

But few were brave enough to do the dirty search and recovery work of extracting said corpse. I refused, so my mom arrived with a long-tailed comb and began digging in the crevices of the closet. We discovered stuff in those crevices that hadn´t seen the light of day in years. There was a baby pillow, my mom´s ancient driver´s license, a tube of cream for who-knows-what. And there was lint -- globs and globs of it -- so that every time she pulled a gray clump out with the comb, we jumped, certain this was the blasted ratón.

Alas, 20 minutes of scraping, scratching, sniffing and scavenging turned out to be pretty much fruitless. The closet still stunk like something was decomposing, and all we had to show for it was a bunch of lint and a pile of expired knick-knacks. The ratón had eluded us once again.

So my mom reluctantly resigned her valiant pursuit and swept the room. Then, she filled up a giant old water bottle with some purple liquid she simply called ´Clorox,´lifted the bottle over her head and splashed the contents of the bottle throughout the room in broad arcs. She doused the carpet, soaked every wood object in sight, got all electric appliances dangerously wet, and finally gave up when all two liters of it were gone.

She marched out, not quite victorious, but close. And so I slept another night with my window open, the same pungent odor diffusing through the room just beneath the sickening fumes of Clorox. And I knew the real winner that night was the ratón.