Revolution

by Deb Olin Unferth

  * * *

  We sat on that landing because our room was depressing—peeling walls, stained sheet—and because it was awkward to be out on the streets. Men with enormous M-16s stopped us every few blocks and wanted to see our papers and ask us just where did we think we were going and what were we doing in El Salvador. George wanted to go out anyway. I didn’t and I wasn’t going to let him go without me. He had to talk me into coming along. From here on out, in fact, George had to cajole me into doing anything. We argued endlessly about this, first in apologetic tones, later in harsher ones. “What is the point in being here,” George would say, “if all we do is sit in our room?”

  “What is it out there you want to see?” I said. “Buildings we could look at in books?”

  “We need to find people to interview.”

  “We don’t have to go out for that,” I said.

  * * *

  People filed in to see us. Somehow they knew we were there. I was mystified by it, but it occurs to me now that obviously George knew we were being watched, but he didn’t want to frighten me. One man turned up and said he wanted to see our room. I have no idea who this guy was. He was nice-looking in his suit. He looked like a movie star. He was shaking our hands and making jokes and walking back and forth across the room, waving. He stood over our backpacks and pulled our clothing out of them. “¿Qué es ésto?”

  “Ha ha!” he screamed. “Can you tell me what this is?”

  “What a weirdo,” I said to George.

  “I think he’s searching us,” George said in English. “I think this is a search.”

  “That,” George told the man, “is shampoo. You put it in your hair. Y éso es un zapato, yes.”

  “What are you doing here?” the man said. He had a fistful of tampons in his hand and behind him the window to our room had bars. I stayed quiet.

  “Visiting,” said George.

  “What for?”

  “Tourism.”

  “Oh yeah? What do you want to see?”

  “Playa, beach.”

  “Playa’s not here. Playa’s over there.” He pointed with his chin.

  “Ruins, then. Las ruinas.”

  “¿Arruinada? Ruined what? There’s nothing ruined here. Only ruined thing is in here.” He thumped his chest, then reached over and, with the back of his hand, thumped George’s chest.

  * * *

  Another day another man showed up. He had one of the ladies with him. They walked up the steps, passed us, and then stopped. The man turned to us with a bow. He was heavyset, unshaven, but light on his feet, a head of curly hair. “Desculpe, do you guys know how badly things are going in this country?”

  We nodded. We’d heard that.

  The lady looked away.

  “The government is bad ¿sabes?” He went on and on. People are poor, dying off, missing. He knew what they were saying in the States, he said, that El Salvador was a democracy, but it wasn’t true. (He was right about that—now everyone knows the truth about the death squads in El Salvador, but at that time in the States there was a lot of talk about El Salvador, the stronghold of democracy in the Communist wasteland of Central America.) He said he didn’t know what we were doing there and he said he wasn’t going to ask. He said he may be in trouble even now for coming to talk to us, but he wanted us to know that the FMLN could make El Salvador better. He was very eloquent. “I don’t know what you’re doing here,” he kept saying. (Salvadorans always want to know what you’re doing in their country, even if you’re Salvadoran. It’s the great national question. I never know what to say. Why wouldn’t I want to see their country? So many people want to see mine.) George and I were too scared to answer. We thought he might be an actual revolutionary and after what we’d seen—the paro, the orphanage, the curfew, clear sincere danger—we weren’t sure we still wanted to sign up. We said nothing.

  Then he said, “Don’t remember me.” He repeated it, sternly. “Remember this country, these people, but not me.” He took the lady’s arm and led her around us, back down the steps, and he never came back. But it’s hard not to remember a man who orders you not to remember him. There is a similar mind exercise involving an elephant.

  BROKEN CITY

  San Salvador was cleared out, hardly anyone on the streets except for all the different kinds of militia. People were staying indoors or had gone away or “disappeared” or were dead. Plus an earthquake had knocked down half the city the year before and the government still hadn’t sent anyone around to pick it all up. Concrete walls lay in apocalyptic pieces on the roads. People were living in the rubble in plywood houses they’d put together, tin tops tied down with strips of plastic. In places it was hard to get through. Cars shifted around the piles. George talked me out of our room each day and we walked all over that broken city, looking for people to interview. We went to the Casa Presidencial over and over and were never let in. We waited at the gate and argued with the guards. Behind them the Casa looked like a compound behind the barbed wire and fences. It seemed far away, a distant white fortress, colonial-style. George and I found only four people in El Salvador willing to talk to us on tape. One was an artist. He wore a fine blue suit and was friendly and calm, having his soda from a straw, but what he said shocked us, and later we said his words again and again to each other, we couldn’t stop saying them, but I don’t remember what they were. (And of course the tapes are gone.)

  We went to churches, to the cathedral. No one would talk to us. The cathedral was ravaged, birds flying in and out the broken windows, bare rebar coming out of the walls. The story went that years earlier, before the civil war, a new cathedral had been going up, a better cathedral, tremendous, full of paintings and glass and statues on platforms, like a birdcage full of color and light, and El Salvador was to have a new archbishop, Oscar Romero, sworn in too. But no sooner had he fit on his robes than he said enough was enough. The government was gunning down all their priests, and he’d had it. If they thought they could stick this robe on him and he’d just sit and smile, well, they had another thing coming. The church officials could not understand why he said that. The government killed one little priest (a friend of Romero’s, yes, but still), and suddenly the guy went berserk. Romero had been a conservative his whole life and now he became a raving radical, ranting about Vatican Two. Who knew he had rebellion sleeping within that aging body? All it took was one priest downed, and the end of the yarn was tugged, his entire soul unraveled.

  Oh come on, said Romero. No one would believe the number of priests killed in El Salvador. It’s like a horror film the way they were being plucked one by one off the countryside, tortured or shot, the bishops writing sadder and sadder letters to the president, “Stop killing us please.” And on top of that, said Romero, here the church was spending God knows how much money on a new cathedral when anyone could see the hungry people sitting outside, sleeping on the steps, which clearly runs against the teachings of Vatican Two. Romero ordered the construction of the cathedral to stop and for the money to be given to the poor. (These liberation theologians and their Vatican Two.)

  The cathedral was three-quarters built when Romero told the workers to stop. The workers just left. The building began to decay. People brought flowers. People brought umbrellas to pray in the rain. Romero talked on the radio and all of El Salvador listened. He talked about government persecution, he demanded an apology, a pasture of apologies, he demanded a new order. In 1980 Romero was gunned down in the middle of mass and the Salvadoran Civil War began.

  * * *

  By 1987 a film of graffiti had settled over the city, over the benches and walls, the statues, the steps, the roads, the trees, cars, and fountains. It all read the same:

  EL PUEBLO EXIGE LA RENUNCIA DEL PRESIDENTE DUARTE

  MUERE REAGAN

  DUARTE ASESINO DE MÁS DE 70 MIL SALVADOREÑOS

  FUERA DUARTE, OLIGARCAS Y YANKEES

  YANKEE GO HOME

  We played hangman in a notebook, George and I, when bored in
our room. He made words up, didn’t play by the rules. “That’s not a word,” I’d say.

  “How do you know what’s a word?” he’d say.

  * * *

  One day we took a bus to the coastal resort town La Libertad. We’d read in our guidebook that the finest beaches were in El Salvador and that all the surfers of New Zealand lived but to get there and ride the Salvadoran waves. We got off the bus and walked down to the ocean. But the water was brown. It was streaked with black lines in both directions as far as we could see. What the hell? My suit itched under my dress. We walked on the beach, poked at black clumps of seaweed with our shoes. We were the only people around. We walked back up the sand. We asked a man in a hotel why it looked like that. He took us upstairs. We looked down at the water. You could see the heavy streaks across the water, running out into the sea. The man told us the water wasn’t really brown. It looked like that because of algae. It would be gone soon, we should wait a few days, he said.

  I’d never seen the Pacific Ocean look like that.

  It must be a terrible war to make the water look like that, I thought.

  I looked over at George. I wondered if I should be marrying someone who took me to places like this.

  We couldn’t have been very high, looking down on the beach, maybe one or two floors up, but in my memory it seems as if we were very high and I could see a long way.

  WONDERFUL TIME

  In fact I’d been to El Salvador. When I was six years old, my mother and father took the whole family on a vacation car trip to El Salvador. We drove from Chicago to San Salvador in a station wagon, stopping in Mexico to see my grandmother. We slept in a tent. This was in 1975, just before the trouble started.

  I remember driving down the gravel road through the rain forest. I remember the station wagon breaking down over and over (though my mother says it was a Dodge Dart and that it broke down only once), and I remember my brother and me playing in the mud. We took a tiny airplane someplace and then we saw some buildings (my mother says that must have been in Guatemala at Tikal), and then a Native American slept with us in our tent (she says that was a hired guide), and I peed in my sleeping bag. I listened to Sesame Street on my tape recorder and then a bad man cut my chin with a knife (my mother says this last one didn’t happen). Then we got stuck in a traffic jam and I was sick with a stomachache and I had to hold my head out the window so I could vomit onto the road (my mother says that didn’t happen either, or if it did, it was in Mexico City or Texas). I remember the car kept breaking down. Dad was angry all the time and yelling. I wanted to go home.

  My mother says it was an adventure. She says we met so many nice people. She says we all had a wonderful time.

  GOOD IDEAS

  Afternoons on the landing at the brothel I closed my eyes and prayed. What did I pray about? I prayed that everyone on Earth would get what they want. But then I’d think about that and decide that was an awful lot. People want so much. So I prayed for people to get these particular things that I named in my mind, or at least for these particular people that I named to get these particular things—or for them to get them when the time was right or when God wanted them to have them, if He did. If God didn’t want them to have the things they wanted, then I didn’t want them to have them either, and it was probably wrong to want them, so I prayed for their souls instead.

  I prayed for us to not want what we want but to want what He wants, whatever that was. How was I supposed to know what He wanted? I’d never even prayed before that year. I prayed to learn what He wanted somehow—not to have the knowledge of God and the hubris that would come with it, but to see dimly the plan or at least the section of the plan that involved me and the people I knew so that I could pray for the right thing.

  Or at least, I prayed, let me pray for the right thing accidentally, by coincidence or mistake.

  * * *

  I was reading the Bible that year. The Sermon on the Mount with its revolutionary spirit, Ecclesiastes with its gloomy complaints. George and I read together, taking turns reading aloud. We read books about theology. We read the ontological and teleological arguments for the existence of God—Saint Anselm, William Paley. We read Kierkegaard and Lessing on human striving. We argued with Hume. We read books on Christology. We talked to the liberation theologians and copied their expressions: “The preferential option for the poor”—does anyone remember that one? Or “institutionalized violence”? Some people must remember these outdated phrases. I recall them all. It was my first specialized vocabulary. I’ll never forget it. I’ll die dreaming of “applying a Marxist analysis to a God-centered system.”

  * * *

  My faith also had the side benefit of sending my Jewish atheist family into fits of despair. In my house, Judaism referred to an abbreviated Passover and a few jokes about candles around Christmas. Once I announced I was a Christian, my family whipped themselves into shape. They joined a temple and went every week. They enrolled my sister in Hebrew school. They celebrated holidays they didn’t like or exactly understand, found the menorah in the garage. They put up a mezuzah, and my mother joined a Jewish study group for women. They made my sister have a traditional bat mitzvah, complete with a great-grandmother’s locket and chairs in the air. By that time I had backslid into my atheist upbringing, but they weren’t taking any chances.

  Yes, those days of faith were fun for the whole family but, bit by bit after the trip, I walked across the dance floor and sat back down with my family, where I remain, like a wallflower, patting my hair, watching the waltzers, admiring the grace of some, the awkwardness of others, but no, I will sit this one out.

  Long after I stopped being a Christian and it was clear my brother and sister weren’t going to become Christians either, my mother and father went to temple less and less, and finally they left off altogether, and everybody forgot about it. Except my sister. She is the last to forget. She still can’t forgive me for Hebrew school. “Three days a week I had to go. While everyone else was having fun. One day you and your God will pay.”

  ENGAGED

  I found it odd that George wanted to get married.

  * * *

  He’d asked me to marry him on the road to the capital and I’d said yes, so that meant we were engaged now. In the brothel we talked about it, about how our marriage was going to be based on God. We prayed to God and asked if our marriage was okay with Him. And since we didn’t hear back exactly, we decided it was okay. We told Him that He shouldn’t worry because He was the base of our marriage.

  “We’re sure not the base,” we said. “You’re the base, God.”

  * * *

  One reason to get married was so that we could have sex. We (he) didn’t believe in sex before marriage. This, although we had a very sexual relationship. We simulated sex until climax every day, often more than once, in our underwear. This did not seem strange to me. I’d had plenty of sex in high school. Too much. Anyone who has had an eighteen-year-old boyfriend knows what it is to be sick of sex. I was happy to “wait” with George, as long as it meant we could still take off (almost) all our clothes and have lots of (almost) sex. Except at some point you do want the real thing.

  “Now that we’re engaged,” I told George, as he got on top of me and scooted up my dress, “we can have sex. Being engaged is the same as being married.”

  “It’s not the same,” said George. He left my undies on.

  * * *

  Still, he had surprised me by bringing up marriage. I was crazy in love with the guy, but eighteen seemed a little young to be getting married, didn’t it? He said that depended. We knew we would always love each other—that’s what I had said, right? So what was the difference if I was eighteen or thirty-eight? I wanted to trust him. He certainly knew better around any subject than I did. “Relax,” he said. It made me nervous that I was nervous.

  * * *

  He wanted to buy a ring. You would think the ring would be my idea, but it was his. His zeal was of that order. We foun
d the jewelry district in the guidebook, a small block off the plaza, downtown San Salvador, a few dented shops shut up like they were closed except for the signs outside that said OPEN. We walked from shop to shop. The National Guard on the sidewalk kept asking to see our papers. We’d shown them our papers, but they wanted to see them again. The shop owners waited in the doorways and watched, did not call to us, did not smile or prop open their doors and wave us inside. We were the only customers. It must have made those shop owners awfully shaky to have two gringos in there. They must have thought we were spies and wondered for which side. They pulled out boxes of rings and let us fool around with them. I made a big show of being choosy. George made a big show of being patient. I made a big show of being happy. The owners and the soldiers watched. We came away with a little ring for a hundred dollars. It had a tiny diamond and two specks of ruby.

  Under an awning, out of the way of witnesses, George put it on my finger. “For you to wear every day for the rest of your life,” he said.

  * * *

  He said we should tell our families.

  * * *

  Another reason to get married was so that his family would be my family—every day for the rest of my life. His mother would be my mother. I wished his mother were my mother and I already pretended like she was. She was George’s mother after all and I wanted to be close to anything that had George on it. I suppose she was fairly normal for someone who sounded a bit like a crazy person when she spoke, but I’d never known anyone like her before—calm, undemanding, weirdly religious. She listened to what her sons said and approved. She was a Southern belle, faded, blond, washed out but still beautiful, like a doll left out all fall. I daydreamed about saving her from catastrophes, carrying her up from the depths to the surface, traveling to China and bringing her gifts in small ornamented boxes. I wanted her to know we would be married, that I would be her daughter. “I always wanted a daughter,” she told me once. I was ready to be the one.