Revolution

by Deb Olin Unferth

  * * *

  George called home first. There was no e-mail in 1987, no iPhones or gchat. In those days you could run away and it meant something, by God. You could receive letters from home through the lista de correos—an improbable system that somehow worked, whereby the sender would write your name on the envelope and the name of the country you expected to be in, and two months later you’d get off the bus, walk into the post office in the capital, and ask if you had any mail. Or you could call home by going to a phone office, standing in line, and then waiting while they rang up your mother to see if she would pay for the call. You had to pay a small fee either way but you’d have to have a pretty mean mom to say no to a child calling from the middle of a civil war.

  George let me go with him into the booth and share the phone receiver. I always did that when he called his mother and I would get hysterical if I couldn’t hear her voice.

  She was pleased, naturally, that we were getting married. I say “naturally” because that’s just how she was all the time: pleased. I never met a nicer woman in my life. She thought maybe we would be getting married in El Salvador.

  “No,” I said.

  “Nicaragua then?”

  “Maybe,” said George. He looked at me.

  Then it was my turn. I sat in the booth and didn’t invite George in. I closed the glass door between us.

  I didn’t want to tell my family. I was scared. I was even a little embarrassed. To say I was going to join the revolution, that was one thing. That could mean anything. That showed I’d kept my sense of humor, even if I had gone mad. But to get married, that was really to put a lid on the thing and shovel dirt over it. I didn’t know why I felt that way and I was confused and sad. What was wrong with me?

  * * *

  You ask my mother and father what it was like for them when I ran away to join the revolution and they’ll say they were traumatized. But to hear them tell it they were already traumatized. They have a whole list: there was my Christian conversion and, before that, my high school boyfriend, there was my brother from the time he was born, my father’s not being able to play baseball, the teasing my mother took as a kid. Still, it’s kind of a wonder that they didn’t hire a bounty hunter to come find me and drag me home. In fact they didn’t do much to get me back. They settled on one plan and stuck to it, and it did finally work: if they sent no money, we’d run out and eventually have to come home. A convenient plan for them, thinking about it now. A nonplan, really, a plan of inaction, of least resistance.

  Later, from Nicaragua, I called and invited them to come “visit the revolution,” and they said no. Maybe in those days that’s simply how parenting worked.

  * * *

  This call went like all our calls, like all our interaction for as long as I could remember. It seemed to me that my father was standing behind a door and each time I opened it he was shouting, so I’d slam it shut and open it a few weeks later, and he’d be shouting again. Was he shouting all the time behind the door? Or did he start the shouting just as I opened it? On this call he said I was irresponsible and intellectually lazy. “Your problem is you don’t think,” he said. Fair enough, but no different from anything he’d said before I’d run off to the revolution. Meanwhile, my mother tried to give me a few updates from home: My sister was taking an avalanche of lessons. Something significant was happening to the bathroom. I wasn’t close to my family. I didn’t know them and I did everything I could to keep them from knowing me. But still, oddly, when I heard their voices coming over the line, I felt a sudden tug toward them, a little insurrection inside me. Despite everything, I felt allied with them. A deep sense of belonging. I looked at George outside the booth, sitting on the bench. He seemed like a different creature from us. I wondered if he had been born wanting to get married. If he would have proposed to a plant.

  I didn’t tell them about the engagement. I hung up. We began walking back to the room.

  “So what did they say?”

  “About what?”

  “Our getting married.”

  I hunched my shoulders. “Not much.”

  “Not much?” He stopped.

  “I didn’t tell them,” I admitted.

  “Oh.”

  In that moment I recalled in a slap-to-the-forehead kind of way what, in my amnesia love-fog, I’d forgotten: I was never going to get married. My mother had once told me not to. She’d said: “Never get married,” and it had cemented in my mind. The one piece of advice that made sense.

  As a matter of fact, I don’t think my mother ever said that. I don’t recall her saying it and I can’t imagine her saying it. It may have been my mother’s sister who said it—my aunt, who’d had a divorce that had seemed to go on for years, so long that I’d believed she’d had many divorces, a new one each year around Christmas. Or it’s possible that no one said it. I just heard it without anyone having said it and then it became part of my lore. Who knows how I heard it or why I believed it? All my life, it turns out, the girls I knew dreamed of wedding dresses, cakes, honeymoons, and babies, and I didn’t know they did, because I didn’t. I assumed they agreed with me, and it was only later that I realized my mistake, when one by one my girlfriends began marrying off, pulling out children, pushing their stuff into houses, while I looked on, askance.

  But I loved George and he certainly wasn’t offering me anything like the usual girl’s gray dream, Simon Says, and so on. But what was he offering?

  In that moment, standing on the street—and I can still see myself there, in a loose pink Flashdance shirt and some kind of worn skirt, almost curfew time and the day dimming along the edges—I saw suddenly that this was all a game for me. The Christianity, the running away, the marrying. I was going along with it, but I didn’t mean it, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the orphanage, the soldiers, the brothel. In fact I hated it. It hit me like a chair over the head. I hated not eating enough, hated my dirty clothes, hated San Salvador, hated George in some way because he’d brought me here and because I knew he meant all of it.

  But I loved him too, for the very reason that he did mean it, all of it, he was someone who could mean it. I’d never known anyone like that. I wanted to be with him. I wanted to be him. I couldn’t be away from him.

  Still, the thought that I’d have to live this way, the way we were living, always, that I’d be married to him and my world would forever be that small, as small as the biggest the two of us could make it, and that there would be nothing else that couldn’t come from the two of us, that was hard to swallow. Suddenly how big we could make it looked pretty small and that was too big to get down my throat, that smallness. That wasn’t going to fit.

  Not everything is explainable by something else. You can love something and be afraid of it. You can want someone and want to run away from wanting them.

  A big contradiction was standing in my face and I knew it, and now, waiting beside me, he knew it, and he was going to let it stand there and so was I.

  “Let’s go back. I’ll call them again,” I said.

  “It’s too late. Forget it.”

  “No, I’ll call them.”

  “No.”

  I pulled his arm. “Come on, we’re going back.”

  * * *

  I didn’t know then that there is a different smallness. Your world is small in a different way if you don’t share it, if you don’t wrestle with that struggle of you and him, and how to make it big enough for both of you to fit.

  * * *

  This time he squeezed into the booth with me. My mother accepted the charges.

  “Great news, Mom,” I told her. “I forgot to tell you. I’m getting married.”

  My mother said, “Now how is that great news?”

  PARADE

  There was the day in San Salvador that we went to the plaza. It was more or less deserted except for the police forces, the military, and the guardia nacional. We spotted a few citizens moving through. I hadn’t wanted to come and now that there was so
little to see, I hoped that meant we could leave. “You see?” I said to George. “Nothing here.” Suddenly we heard drums, the regular beat of western drumming, and a parade came marching along. No one saw it, except us and the soldiers and a thin line of locals who obligatorily assembled. In my memory it seems as if the parade was going by a few inches from my nose, so large I could see only hands, faces, drums, the white and red uniforms, the sway of the legs of the stilt walkers and the purple material of their costumes, their eyes through the masks. They stopped in the middle of the plaza. The drummers played a marching tune. The clowns and stilt walkers waved and teetered around. Then they all went on.

  HEAVEN

  The man was very sure that we could build heaven on Earth, that that was part of the plan. Do houses pop up ready-made? No, free houses do not fall out of the sky like Dorothy and the dog. You construct the thing yourself if you want to live in it.

  George and I were at “la UCA.” It has a nice sound. La-ooka. The University of Central America in San Salvador. I believe we were interviewing the Jesuit priest and liberation theologian Padre Ignacio Ellacuría. A poster of peasants hung on the wall.

  “You make the world that will be eternal,” he said.

  This was doctrine liberation theology. I, for one, felt God could have been more clear on this point from the start. Heaven was like taking the airplane to Spain, was how I’d learned it. You land and come out into a world of moorish buildings and sunshine, familiarish language. Someone came along and made the place, thought it up. All I had to do was appear and it was mine.

  The priest began talking about the United States, and I stopped listening. I knew what he was going to say, and what was I going to do about it? I accept the blame. On behalf of my country I apologize. Some drawings sat beside the desk. The priest saw me looking at them. “Oh, a local artist.” He lifted the drawings. People lying naked, side by side, handcuffed, whip and burn marks on their backs, legs, necks. He held one up to the wall. “What do you think? We thought we might hang them.”

  I honestly don’t know why these people agreed to talk to us.

  George had the questions. Is capitalism evil. Does God condone violence. What is the role of the church.

  A couple of years later, a few meters from where we sat, Father Ellacuría was shot in the head.

  * * *

  A couple of years later, in November 1989, the leftist FMLN guerrillas, in an attempt to usher in the kingdom a little faster, came into San Salvador and took over large parts of the city. It was the biggest and greatest thing they’d ever done. Unfortunately no one in the whole world cared because with typical, incredible, Salvadoran bad luck they’d launched their attack the very same week that the Berlin Wall came down. The guerrillas entered San Salvador only hours after the first sledgehammer hit the Wall. Across the ocean the East Germans were stepping over the rubble, walking into the West. Of course the Wall falling was only the latest, most dramatic sign that the world was about to change, that the Cold War was ending, and for Central America, it would mean the rapid crush of the revolution, but for that one week the army couldn’t bomb the guerrillas out, and the FMLN was the image of itself it had always meant to be, even if no one was watching.

  On November 16 at one in the morning a group of Salvadoran soldiers of an elite U.S. Army–trained battalion marched into la UCA, pulled six Jesuit priests (liberation theologians to a man, insurgent sympathizers, Ellacuría among them) from their beds, arranged them in the grass, and one by one shot them in the head.

  * * *

  Back in 1987, Ellacuría pushed back from his desk and said our time was up.

  CLEAN

  Years later I returned to El Salvador alone and I went around the country. It was 2001, and they were finally painting Romero’s cathedral. Scaffolds were set up and men were walking all over them, putting angels and sky on the walls, filling in the empty white spaces. I met a man who told me about that crazy November in 1989, the month the FMLN captured the city and the priests at la UCA were shot. He’d been a high school student in San Salvador at the time. The FMLN had come into his neighborhood and entered his house.

  “They wanted food,” he told me. “My mother cooked them a big meal, meal after meal. You can’t imagine how well they ate. They slept lined up on the floor. One morning I looked out the window and a huge tank stood in front of our house. It took up the whole street. So the FMLN ran away and the army moved in. They put a missile launcher in the window and my mother dusted it every day. ‘Mom,’ I said, ‘stop dusting that thing. It doesn’t matter if it’s dusty.’ Still, she dusted. And she tidied. All day she went around the living room, putting the grenades into little rows and folding the soldiers’ clothing. They never lived anywhere so clean.”

  PART THREE

  INTERNACIONALISTA

  SARAH’S

  George and I had gotten nowhere with joining any revolution. It was August. We’d been fired from one job and hadn’t found another. We’d managed to throw up a wall between us or at least some small obfuscating stones (a dot of diamond, two glints of red). And now we had to get out of El Salvador. Our visas were running out. We couldn’t wait around for people to figure out what they were going to do about the bridges that had been exploded on the road to the border—put them back up, explode somebody back, chart a little path through the river—no time for any of that, George said, because to be stuck in El Salvador with an expired visa was no joke. So we set out. We rode under a tarp in the back of a truck with some guys bringing black-market gym shoes to Nicaragua. The truck drove in loops, searching for bridges still standing. A few kilometers from the border, the guys threw their duffel bags off the truck and jumped out, ran into the trees.

  At Salvadoran customs we had the deepest, longest search of them all. The soldiers spent hours scratching our money with their fingernails and going page by page through our books. We were so bored by searches by now, had had so many, we didn’t care what the soldiers did. We sat on a curb and watched.

  At last we arrived in Managua, the capital of Nicaragua. We pulled into the station. I was aggrieved, begrimed, laden. I’d had exactly no fun in months and I was ready to blame George for it. I filed to the front of the bus and looked out over the heads of the people waiting to get on. And there, amid the chaos of the station, I spotted a North American. He had two cameras around his neck and stood a foot taller than the Nicaraguan people around him. I hadn’t seen any other North Americans since Guatemala. He seemed so tall and white and bald and fat, I was stunned for a moment. My first Internacionalista.

  He raised his finger and pointed at me over the crowd. “Hey, you!” he called. “You can’t be older than fourteen. What are you doing here?”

  “I’m eighteen, you old dog,” I yelled back and stepped off the bus into the revolution.

  * * *

  Compared to El Salvador, Nicaragua was like Ping-Pong. The two countries were nothing alike. El Salvador was your basic mail-order military dictatorship: terror and torture, stuttering civilians. Nicaragua was more like a cheerful Communist kazoo concert. Nicaragua had once been like El Salvador. A line of Nicaraguan dictators, the evil Somozas—a father and two sons—had had their hand on the country since 1937. Then in 1979 the revolutionary Sandinistas had come down from the mountains and into the capital and run the Somozas out. The Somoza family fled on airplanes, lifting whatever they could and throwing it into the cockpit. The Sandinistas marched into the National Palace and installed themselves. Nicaragua became a socialist country, the only one in the hemisphere other than Cuba. It was a big capitalist scandal and the United States was enraged. But the Soviets loved it, sent supplies and weapons and men, and bragged about it on the radio.

  * * *

  In El Salvador there hadn’t been anyone like George and me. We’d been alone, going around on the streets. In Nicaragua there were hundreds of us, thousands, so many we had a special name: we were called Internacionalistas, and we came from all over the world—Europe,
Africa, all the Americas. We had professors and scientists among our ranks, and farmers and newspapermen and a brigade of artists, all trooping around, looking for ways to help the revolution. We converged on the capital and trucked out to the towns, to Granada, León, Estelí, carrying every kind of equipment—hoes and seeds and cisterns and books. We were ready to scrape up whatever was there and pat down a nice new revolutionary one instead. Joining the Sandinistas was like joining the Peace Corps, the Peace Corps with guns. We held poetry readings and story time. We did tricks for the kids. We looked for air-conditioning. We would make this revolution, we swore. Our team would win.

  * * *

  Since I was the youngest and spoke Spanish, the Internacionalistas could tell me to do anything and I would. Every day there was something for George and me to do. On Thursdays we went to the U.S. embassy to protest U.S. support of the Contras, the reactionary group trying to take down the Sandinistas. (Their very name annoyed us: Contra-Revolución—who would want to be against the revolution?) A hundred Internacionalistas or more showed up each week at the embassy gates and waved signs and shouted. Priests gave talks in front of the line of military guards. Buses pulled up and dancers hopped out, and musicians and tightrope walkers and mimes. They clowned, sang ballads of corporate evil, pantomimed Contra destruction. We put down our signs so we could clap. I never saw anyone go in or out of the embassy (there may have been another door?), but we marched in our circles and chanted.

  The fact is George and I were very good at chanting. We did our share everywhere we went. In Guatemala we had gone to protests and chanted along heartily. The chants in Spanish were easy and rhymed: ¡Pueblo, escucha! ¡Tu hijo está en la lucha! The Mayan chants were much harder. Even the ones that had been translated into Spanish were a paragraph long and included images of flying people and growing plants. Each Mayan chant ended with a cry against the landowner, a thank-you to friends, a prayer to the corn and the sun and a long list of saints. George and I started out bravely along with them but couldn’t keep up. We were mumbling and shuffling by the end.