Revolution

by Deb Olin Unferth

  * * *

  On Sunday afternoons we went to la misa campesina, peasant mass, where Uriel Molina, a great priest of the revolution, talked about what God had revealed at Vatican Two, the new directive, “Lucharemos o moriremos!” We will fight or we will die! he told the Internacionalistas, because the place was always full of Internacionalistas, so many that buses had to bring them. They filled the church, sat on the floor, stood in the back, blocked the campesino murals. Some had to wait outside. There was hardly room for the Nicaraguans. A few Nicaraguans, the musicians, fit. They played their instruments on the side. Some Internacionalistas danced, marimba-style, in the aisle. Some took photos of the walls.

  “Where are the Nicaraguans?” George said. “They’re missing all the fun.”

  “Oh, they come in the morning,” the Internacionalistas said.

  “Imagine,” said George, “what it must be like in the morning, when the Nicaraguans are here, if it’s like this now.”

  One week George and I went to the Sunday morning service. We woke very early and rode several linking buses across town. The church had Nicaraguans in it, but it was silent. No music, no shouting, just Molina at the front murmuring mass. “You should come at night,” a man leaned over a pew to tell us. “The Internacionalistas come at night.”

  “Why do you come in the morning?”

  “The Internacionalistas are asleep,” he said. “A church is not a place for dancing and making fun.”

  * * *

  Managua heat was mean and the Internacionalistas had to share the fans. Sometimes it became too much and we would split up and go hunting for air-conditioning. The one place we knew we could always go was the Hotel Intercontinental. This was a strange-looking building, constructed like a concrete staircase to the sky. We called it “el Inter,” and knew it as the hotel where the real journalists stayed—not the screwups with rock music and a tape recorder—all the famous people from New York and Washington who wanted to see the Sandinistas. It was the only place in town that never ran out of food, that hung on through the revolution to its old-style waitstaff (nothing is worse for the service industry than socialism), that was rumored to have a rooftop pool, sparkling sun chairs around it in a star (though none of us had seen it). Yes, el Inter was capitalism incarnate. We used it as shorthand for all that was wrong and greedy in the world. We secretly wanted it and felt guilty for it.

  In ’72 Howard Hughes had been living up on the eighth floor of el Inter in the months before the great earthquake, the one that took down the whole city, but left el Inter standing. All the top military brass used to go there, smirk over drinks at the bar. There’d been machine-gun battles fought in the lobby. There’d been assassinations. The rebel Chamorro had once shot a rocket from one of its windows at the most evil Somoza of them all, the second son. Later Somoza himself moved in, crouched through the barricade days before he fled the country. In 1979 Daniel Ortega stayed in those rooms in the dawn of the new order. Jimmy Carter slept on the eighth floor while taking in the Communist sights—and when George and I arrived a year later, the bellboys were still talking about it.

  The Internacionalistas used to go to el Inter to cool off. It was an easy walk from the cluster of hostels, and any old Internacionalista could go over and sit in the lobby as long as you made a show of looking in the gift shop and being animated and didn’t stay too long or fall asleep. Then the security guards got to know you and shooed you out. George and I were eventually barred.

  * * *

  Every night at six o’clock the Internacionalistas went to Comedor Sarah. All over Nicaragua there were food shortages, water shortages, shortages of all kinds: cars, clothes, paper. If you showed up at Sarah’s at seven the food was gone. If you showed up at eight the beer was gone. Anyone who showed up at eight had to sit in the back and drink a disgusting red cola called Rojita. We sat on benches and talked about the revolution. Ben Linder, Oliver North, city zoning, the bridges blown in Jalapa. We talked about God and the economy. South Africa, the French Revolution, Trotsky and Marx. We sang the Internationale in different languages (Völker, hört die Signale, auf zum letzten Gefecht…). George, who back at school had been incapable of a regular conversation, here could sit and talk all night. The Internacionalistas liked George and me, except for the Christian part. They said that all the time. “Except for that Christianity crap, you’re all right!” I took this as a compliment. George, though, you didn’t want to start on that one with him, boy.

  “Fuck God. Who cares about that stupid myth,” someone would say, and George would be off arguing with him for hours.

  Later back in our room at the hostel I’d say, “People don’t like us if you talk about it all the time. You don’t have to talk about us being Christians all the time.”

  “I don’t,” he said.

  “It comes up somehow.”

  “They bring it up.”

  “You bring it up,” I said.

  “No, you bring it up,” he said.

  I denied it, but he was right. I couldn’t help myself. “I’m Debbie and that’s George,” I’d say. “We’re Christians.” The people around us could say who they were in three words and be fascinating. Christianity was our single distinctive trait.

  * * *

  One week Comedor Sarah was full of jugglers. A group of jugglers had come from Canada. They’d gone to the northern mountains of Nicaragua, to the war zone. “We walked from town to town,” one told me, “juggling.”

  Imagine. We were walking across their war, juggling. We were bringing guitars, plays adapted from Gogol, elephants wearing tasseled hats. I saw it myself and even then I found it a bit odd. The Nicaraguans wanted land, literacy, a decent doctor. We wanted a nice sing-a-long and a ballet. We weren’t a revolution. We were an armed circus.

  * * *

  At night the Internacionalistas would go back to the hostels and sit in the atrium and drink Flor de Caña rum (except George and me, who tried not to drink, being Christians). They’d get into arguments, call each other capitalists or fascists, shout, and bang the tables. Then they all became friends again and sang revolution songs until two or three in the morning. They left the atrium like exiting a stage, calling to each other, waving and blowing kisses, holding hands.

  The cast shifted each day. Some left to work in the north or headed off to a different town. New Internacionalistas arrived. Some days Sarah’s was so crowded, you couldn’t find a seat. Other days it was empty and when you came in, looked for faces, you’d find only one table occupied, two compañeros huddled over a map, a lone German in a corner sewing a button, and even if you didn’t particularly like the Internacionalistas—their racket, their mess, the very space they took up with their long limbs—still, the loneliness set in without them.

  SANDALISTA

  Years later I heard that the Sandinistas referred to us as Sandalistas, not Internacionalistas. We wore Birkenstocks, right? A bunch of hippies, ha ha. I don’t recall hearing that during the revolution, only after. I believe the Nicaraguans called us Sandalistas behind our backs.

  That’s okay. I can take (or be) a joke.

  * * *

  In fact I did wear sandals. I brought on the trip my smartest pair, not Birkenstocks, but a strappy affair. It turned out the revolution was going to involve a lot of walking. A week into Mexico my feet were blistered and my sandals were broken. I bought a new pair for five dollars and I wore those until they broke too. I bought another pair and another. Finally George said I couldn’t keep buying new pairs. I had to make the pair I had last. At that point I had a pair that cost about three dollars. The sandals stretched after a few days and fell off my feet as I walked. I took some string and tied them to my feet. When the string broke, I tied knots in it and tied my sandals back on and kept walking until the soles wore through to the ground. Why didn’t I bring a pair of damn Birkenstocks? I thought. But I’d wanted to look nice, you know, cute for the revolution.

  CHART DAY

  One day George a
nd I took a bus out of the capital. We wanted to see a breezy little town. It was north of Managua, somewhere in the mountains, and we’d heard it was the place for fun—tiny sandwiches, music outside. We’d heard about a fruit cup. An Internacionalista had described these fruit cups to us, how a Nicaraguan lady served them in her kitchen. We were holding it between us, the idea of it and its possibility, the soothing cool fruit cup.

  But when we arrived we couldn’t find any fruit cup or any food at all. We hunched around the town. The streets were so cobbled I kept tripping. We walked by clumps of shrubs, boarded-up restaurants, walls painted pastels. It was lonely up there, hardly anyone on the street, no one to interview, the sun taking its long walk down the road.

  It could be like that in Nicaragua, empty where it should have been full. You could find spots without a person to be found in places you’d expected a crowd. Blinding streets, troubled wind, suddenly nobody anywhere.

  “Where are the freaking fruit cups?” I said. There was nothing going on there. I wanted to head the hell back to Managua.

  Then we turned the corner and came on a Nicaraguan fair or a party! A bunch of old friends with giant signs—big charts and graphs on wood panels. We moved in closer and watched the old friends set them up in a line. They called us over and took us on a tour. The charts showed how many Nicaraguan people could read now compared to how many Nicaraguan people used to read. How many doctors they had now compared to how many they had once had. Maps showed where the land was these days and who owned it, compared to who used to own it, and what plants were growing on it, and how these plants were better than what plants used to grow on it. You couldn’t turn around without bumping into one of these things. It was like an outdoor art show.

  * * *

  I can still see George in my mind, thumbing the charts, huffing with the Sandinistas. He was happy. Before I met George I’d been so lonely and I felt like he’d saved me, but the truth is George was lonely too. I believe he always had been, all of them were, his whole family. Those brothers looked lost, and the mother and father too, each seemed bewildered in their own way, a family of uncomfortable people, bored, estranged, uncertain. But on the day we saw the charts George was flourishing. The Nicaraguans too, marching around the panels. (They’d been lost too, if you thought about it, during those long Somoza years, a whole nation done in, adrift.) Now on chart day everyone looked dolled up and giddy, strong with the pleasure of self-determination.

  Say what you like about the Sandinistas, they were a lot more fun than the other Central American governments, who were frankly just a bunch of crabs.

  * * *

  The Nicaraguans took us into the courtyard and showed us whole rooms full of charts too and also photos of people who could read now and photos of children with shoes on, and giant maps showing all the places where children now wore shoes. Out back people had come and put more charts on big boards and stood them in the fields for the Nicaraguans to look at. The boards were large shapes of color—red and black (¡El Frente Sandinista!)—and the people of the town walked among them.

  But where were the freaking fruit cups? There were just a lot of charts and maps and graphs in that town.

  For the Internacionalista, there were small-sized versions for purchase. Little wooden square pins to bring home to friends. Revolution pens and bookmarks. ¡No pasarán! ¡Aquí no se rinde nadie! George and I bought an army of the stuff. A revolution pull-toy for my little cousin. A revolution book of poetry for my grandmother. A revolution hairpin for my sister.

  FEMINISM

  George and I were having an argument. We were going to interview Ernesto Cardenal, a liberation theologian and the minister of culture, a top man in the government of Nicaragua. We had spent all week preparing. The guy had written several small poetry books and we read them in the original Spanish. We took notes and discussed what we might want to talk to him about. He was a priest and had lived on an island in the middle of a dark, shark-infested lake until the revolution had come along and taken him away. He had written repeatedly and vividly about how his only wish was to end world poverty and greed once and for all so he could go back to the shark-infested lake and stop it with all this government nonsense for which he’d already been scolded once by the pope. George wondered if Ernesto Cardenal wasn’t being a little disingenuous about wanting to quit the revolution—who would want to leave? I, for one, believed Ernesto Cardenal and thought he was brave.

  But that was not the argument.

  When we did interviews, George asked all the questions. He wrote them down in a notebook beforehand and read them off the page. We did it that way because he had a plan to write his senior thesis about liberation theology—that was what the interviews were supposed to be for—but I did all the interviews with him and I helped him think up questions and by the time we got to Nicaragua I was wondering why I didn’t get to ask questions as well.

  It was in Nicaragua that I began to be aware of things like that. I don’t know why—maybe because we were engaged and I was afraid we were going to have to get married, or maybe because Nicaragua itself prompted such awakenings. It’s true that in Nicaragua I saw women soldiers for the first time. I met women traveling alone from all over the world, women who carried knives. I’d been harassed by men clear down the coast, men grabbing my breasts, men touching me on buses. Men asked to buy me from George. Once, I was alone in our room and a man broke in, and I had to scream and cry and punch to get him out. A soldier chased me through a field once with his thing out of his pants in his hand (that’s how I described it to George: his “thing”). I never got used to it or had any sense of humor about it. I was angry all the time, sometimes a low simmer, sometimes enraged. It was unfair that men didn’t have to put up with this treatment but could dish it out whenever they liked.

  I said that this time I would like to ask some questions.

  “You don’t know how to ask questions,” George said. “If you want to ask questions, fine, but you should practice on someone less important.”

  “I would like to ask some,” I said.

  “Why don’t you ask one question,” he said.

  We went to the interview. We waited for Ernesto Cardenal in a small white room. At last he came in. A short man in loose white clothing, a white beard, and a black beret, like a Santa for the liberation. He sat down at the desk and waited for our questions. George began.

  Even I could see the questions were no good, now that we were right in front of him. Ernesto Cardenal had been asked questions like these a thousand times. When is violence justified? Again with this question, we could tell he was thinking.

  “Well, is that all the questions?” he said finally, rising. He was polite, but he had better things to do than answer these questions again from these two, what were they, teenagers? Who let them in here, anyway?

  “Wait, I have a question,” I said.

  “All right,” he said, turning back. “What is it?”

  I asked my question and even as it was leaving my mouth (“Tell us the truth, do you or do you not want to go back to that shark lake?”) I knew it was not a good question either. He answered it nicely and he left.

  Later we united in our defense: How were we supposed to come up with good questions when everybody else had already asked him all the questions? That guy talked to everybody, which showed a thing or two about him, if you thought about it. And he certainly put on airs in that beret getup. We could have used something big to happen around there just then so we could have asked him about it. An earthquake. Then we would have been the first to ask him: “Padre Cardenal, what do you think about the earthquake?”

  So we were together against Cardenal that day, but really it was me against anyone who didn’t let me ask questions.

  DOCTORS

  When the Sandinistas took over the country, they handed out medical degrees and set up clinics in every town. Anyone who needed a doctor could go—free for the Nicaraguan, five dollars for the Internacionalista. Geor
ge and I went all the time. We started out the trip pretty healthy but we got sicker and sicker. Each time we got sick, we didn’t get entirely better so we grew a little more sick and a little more, and finally we just stayed sick. We were sick for months. Diarrhea, nausea, stomach cramps, lethargy. George lost twenty-five pounds, and my stomach slowly expanded, became weirdly bloated, smooth and balloon-like. It was in Nicaragua that being sick became a serious bother. The first time we went to the clinic we saw separate doctors. The doctor I saw took me into his office, had me take off all my clothes. Then he put his hands on my butt and my breasts. “Are you sexually active?” he said. “With how many men have you had sexual relations? Describe your first sexual experience.” I came out of the office and was shaking for hours. After that George and I went to the doctor only as a team. The second doctor treated us together. He saw us together and gave us the same medication and we took the pills together and threw them up at the same time. The third doctor we saw gave us the same medication again and needles to shoot ourselves up with and vials of a liquid that would keep us from throwing up. We couldn’t figure out how to use the needles and George tossed it all in the trash.

  After that we didn’t go back to the doctors for a while.

  * * *