Revolution

by Deb Olin Unferth

  We also met doctors in hostels or at Comedor Sarah or on tops of ruins—Cuban doctors, German doctors, doctors from anywhere you could think of. We heard advice from them all. You could buy medication over the counter anywhere in Central America. We started getting whatever pills people recommended as long as they were cheap. We tried many different medications. We took antibiotics for months, switching kinds each week, sick through it all. Sometimes the diarrhea turned into straining diarrhea, where you shit water but had to work at it as if you were constipated; sometimes it became bloody diarrhea, which we hid from each other because we thought there had to be something really wrong with that and we were afraid; or we had diarrhea plus fever, which may have been the worst because “fever” didn’t mean a temperature of a hundred and one. It meant skyrocket fever, a hundred and six, and it came out of nowhere, had an onset time of minutes, and could knock you to the floor anywhere you were, leave you unable to move, unable to form thoughts, unable to fear death. The first time it happened was to George on a bus, a seven-hour ride. I was hysterical, weeping and begging people to help. I was certain he would die and leave me there with his stiffening body. I was furious at him for doing this to me—and how on earth was I going to tell his mother?

  * * *

  One time I had an incredible number of bites. You could barely see them, but they itched like mad. George kept saying, “Wow, you are a mess. Look at you,” because I couldn’t stop scratching. George said he didn’t want to sleep next to me because the bites might spread over to him.

  “Bites don’t spread,” I said.

  “They do on you,” he said, and he was right. They’d spread to my fingers and between my fingers and then to my arms, my stomach, my legs, my ankles. I had to keep stopping on the street, so I could sit and scratch.

  Then a Nicaraguan lady told us, “Those aren’t bites. Those are bugs living under your skin and when you scratch, you spread them.”

  We thought this was helpful. This was progress and it made sense (though it was gross). We tried to get rid of them. We tried to freeze them to death by holding ice to the bites. It didn’t work. An Internacionalista suggested we suffocate them with chewing gum, that we put the chewed gum on my body, covering up the bugs, so the area would be sealed off and they would die. We discussed it. Would gum work? Or would the sugar in the gum feed the bugs? Did the bugs even need air? Was there air in the gum that would seep through and onto my skin? We bought gum, an enormous quantity of gum, and we tried it.

  There is something wrong with this picture: Where did we get all the gum from? There were rations and shortages. Often we did not have enough to eat. How did we find gum? Well, we did. I can’t explain it. Somehow the gum was there and we sat around and chewed it and stuck pieces of it to my body. We had to chew it well, and I had many spots that needed it. We asked some Internacionalistas sitting in the atrium to help. We sat around chewing and sticking pieces of gum to me, between my fingers, on my stomach. “How long should I wait?” I said. We didn’t know. First we thought twenty minutes, but then we thought maybe thirty. Then George said wouldn’t it be a shame if we took it off and they were almost dead but not quite dead. All in all I think we waited about an hour and twenty minutes and then took it off and it didn’t work. For weeks it went on and we didn’t know what to do. I was desperate, I was in despair. It was a crisis.

  Then suddenly I got sick of the bugs or forgot about them, or the bugs forgot about me and left or died, and we all went on to something else. They went away. I don’t know how.

  Many things are like that.

  * * *

  Another time a doctor from Canada was alarmed by what we ate. We ate whatever we could find, we ate from venders on the street when they were there.

  “From the venders?” he said. “You cannot eat the food from the venders.”

  “Well, people eat it,” we said. “Someone eats it, we eat it.”

  “You shouldn’t eat it!” he said. “And what are you doing about the mosquitoes?”

  We weren’t doing anything about the mosquitoes. What were we supposed to do?

  He went on like that about all we did wrong. At last he sighed and said, “Can you do the waltz at least?”

  Alas, not even that.

  “Now, that I can teach you,” he said, and he did.

  “One two three, one two three, one two three,” he said. “Here, put your hand on my shoulder. Good. Now you two try it together.”

  He clapped and called out the numbers while we danced up and down the landing.

  BICICLETAS SÍ, BOMBAS NO

  The Internacionalistas signed George and me up to build bikes.

  Because of the trade embargo, Nicaragua had fewer and fewer cars and trucks. Buses looked like cartoons of buses with too many people on them. Cars were dropping parts along the road, were held together with paper clips and pins. The Nicaraguans would ride bikes, the Internacionalistas decided. A company in China donated five thousand unassembled bicycles and sent them over on a boat. George and I were going to assemble them.

  We reported to the mechanic the first morning, a bikeman from some rainy state in the U.S. North. He said he would teach us what to do. He was very good at teaching and serious about it. He used many words and hand gestures. I was so busy watching him teach me how to put on an electrical unit that I forgot to listen to what he said. Finally he stopped and handed me one of the electrical units.

  “Give it a try,” he said.

  I gave it a try.

  Later we didn’t know what to do about how angry at us he was getting. He kept looking at what we were doing and then saying, “Honest to God!” and grabbing the electrical unit and putting it on like he told us to before. George knew a little about bicycles, had ridden one as a kid, could change a quick-release tire, blow it up with air, but he seemed only able to hold the tools or walk across the room holding them, which infuriated the mechanic. The mechanic had three Nicaraguans working there, real pros who could wrap a chain in ninety seconds, and another Internacionalista, a pretty blonde, Sammy from South Africa, who was funny and wise. I began following her around the shop, imitating her accent and the way she walked. She was thirty-seven years old and as soon as I met her, I hoped to be thirty-seven one day.

  “George,” the mechanic kept saying, “hold this.”

  “Why should George hold that?” Sammy said. She had a habit of raking her fingers through her hair. “Can’t I perfectly well hold that?”

  “Yeah,” I said, pulling at my hair. “I can perfectly well hold that.”

  * * *

  I remember the day the mechanic asked Sammy to sweep the shop. She was on about that all afternoon. “The woman sweeps the shop, yeah? Of course! You ask me to sweep!”

  “I cannot believe this,” I said.

  * * *

  The day the mechanic fired us—all the Internacionalistas—waved his arm at us and told us to leave, we slumped out, never to return. The three of us, George and Sammy and I, walked over to Comedor Sarah. We got beers all around and sat outside under the wet trees. We were men out of work, George and Sammy and me. Fired by the revolution. We sat around telling stories of other revolutions we’d known. In El Salvador. In South Africa. We made fun of the mechanic—the guy was asking for it.

  “Honest to God!” we said.

  “The bikeman looks out on civilization,” we said, and made solemn faces.

  It was one of the best nights of the trip, the night the mechanic fired us. We got a coveted table—half outside and half inside—and it wasn’t even raining. The night air buzzed with cicadas and the moisture sat low in the sky. Normally it was just George and some random Internacionalistas I worried were going to take George away from me. But that night I felt like one of the gang.

  Suddenly dinner was ready and it was coming out on plastic plates, fish raised high and passed down rows over the tables (no menu at Sarah’s, just one dish for everyone—“This is socialism, after all,” we said), a single eye fried
and up on the plate, fins and skin caked with some rusty substance, cartilage protruding. The Internacionalistas began singing, everyone taking turns with their home country’s national anthem, Sammy waving her fork.

  We stayed late that night, me sitting beside Sammy. The cicadas were so loud I couldn’t hear my own “s” sound when I spoke. My “s” ’s were the same pitch as the sound of the insects, so my “s” sound was drowned out. Sammy talked about apartheid and Nelson Mandela: “The desire to stop apartheid is really a desire for socialism,” she said. “It has nothing to do with racism.” She told me about her job as a schoolteacher, about her walk to school. She talked about lost love, all the men she’d left, and how the love she’d had for these men didn’t seem lost anymore, it seemed cast off, discarded and forgotten, which I thought was tragic—to have loved and then to have no longer loved. She shrugged. “I have other things in my life.”

  It was the first time I could imagine myself without George. I could see a new me looking out through the glass back at myself sitting at Sarah’s, a woman watching a girl who was looking back at the woman—no man, no boyfriend—each just absorbed in her own contemplation of the other. I felt nostalgic for what I’d lost (cast off, discarded), though nothing yet was gone. And when the rain finally came that night, even it seemed miraculous, that where I’d just sat was now wet. We waited under the awning at the edge of the rain and darkness.

  “I was a mess at your age,” Sammy said, reflectively. “I never could have come here the way you have.”

  Wait, I wasn’t a mess?

  NERVOUS

  It’s hard to explain how nervous I was. Later George always talked about how we’d been “running around those countries,” as though it’d been fun. Mostly I did not have fun. I was nervous all the time, not so much of the danger, although there was that, but more, I was nervous that either we were going to have to get married or that George was going to leave me. I could hold both of those in my mind at once. I could be beside myself. Marrying was bad enough, but what would I have done if he had disappeared or fallen in love with someone else? I depended on him for everything. I didn’t know how to take care of myself—changing money, finding bus stations, I was right beside him all the time. I adopted every belief he had. I repeated it, garbling it somewhat, like a parrot. I reproduced a higher-pitched version of it. I looked at everything through his eyes. I wanted to see what he saw. I didn’t want to see whatever I saw. I didn’t know what to see when I looked. I worried all the time that someone would take George away from me—maybe even Sammy, who cares if George was only twenty-one? They were both wonderful, it made sense they’d want to be together and leave me behind. I had to become friends with her and stay near her as much as I could so she wouldn’t run away with George and so that she would feel guilty if she even thought about it. And I had to stay near George too, of course, which meant I had to have both of them near me at once. The three of us wound up spending huge amounts of time together, which only made me more nervous. I pined for San Salvador, where I’d had George to myself. In Nicaragua everyone was a threat—citizen, soldier, Internacionalista. I kept a careful eye on him.

  It occurs to me now: How did I not drive him away?

  It was exhausting being nervous. I looked forward to the day I wouldn’t have to be afraid.

  * * *

  As for him, it wasn’t his fault that he had to do everything for me or I would fall apart. He didn’t seem to mind my dragging around after him. He kept his independent spirit. He helped me, hurried me, included me in his tedious, endless political and theological debates. “She makes a point,” he’d say, then resay whatever I’d said so it made sense. He’d sit squinting at an Internacionalista interlocutor—the squint that let me know they didn’t have a chance. George would nod, listen, squint madly, until the Internacionalista wound down and quieted. Then with a few easy steps he’d take their argument to pieces. Sometimes people would never speak to us again after George was through with them. A Mormon once packed his things and left town in the middle of the night. An atheist once became violent, kicked George, who yelped in surprise like a puppy.

  George grew sullen sometimes, and this could last for days. He’d barely speak, sit alone, sink deep into himself. He’d ignore me. He may have been reacting to me: I was beginning to have small fits of rebellion. Or maybe he just needed a break from my neediness.

  “What’s wrong?” I’d say, following him down the street. Maybe he was sick of me following him everywhere?

  “Are you mad at me?” I’d whisper to him at a protest.

  “I’m trying to listen here,” he’d say, lifting his chin.

  Maybe he didn’t like me anymore?

  Or worse, maybe it had nothing to do with me at all.

  * * *

  Once we showed up in a town with no hotels, George and I and some Internacionalistas—a scientist lady, a man from Canada, a woman from Austria. We were standing in the street, holding our belongings in our arms, not sure where to put them down. At last a Nicaraguan family left their window and came out of their house.

  “All right, all right, you guys can stay with us,” they said. “But get out of the street, for Christ’s sake. Do you want to get run over by a burro? Ha ha.”

  It was just one big room up there, where the family put us, and this was upsetting because I was certain George was going to run away with one of the Internacionalistas, even though they were all in their thirties and very unimpressed with George and me. And George was upset because who should the scientist turn out to be but another big fat feminist, just what George needed. The feminists seemed to do nothing but order me not to listen to George, order me not to stay with George, not to marry George—I told everyone we met that we were getting married. The scientist Internacionalista thought our engagement was a hoot and said that if George wanted a doll to play with, she’d give him a Barbie.

  “Come sit here,” she said to me and patted the bed, “and let me tell you the story of soccer. I invented it, in fact, when I was eleven. In my school the boys played football and the girls played hopscotch. I wanted a game we could all play together, so I made up soccer.”

  “You did not invent soccer,” called George from the other side of the room.

  “Yes, someone else invented it before I did,” she said. “But I didn’t know it, had never seen it. So technically I invented it too. As a way we could all play together.”

  “That isn’t how we use the word ‘invent,’ ” George called.

  * * *

  That afternoon the feminist scientist kept walking around the room naked. Both of the Internacionalista women did. I was amazed.

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s pretty neat the way you walk around like that.”

  “Who cares how I walk?” said the scientist. “You could walk around like this all day and we’d be bored to tears.”

  I took my dress off and walked around in my underwear. She was right. No one seemed particularly interested, not even George, who was dehydrated and flattened to the bed. He wasn’t feeling well and had diarrhea. My coming-of-age story, if I had one, would be right here. It didn’t involve a loss of innocence or man’s inhumanity to man. It was me taking my clothes off and marching in a circle around the room. Somehow I knew—nothing specific, I just knew—I wasn’t who I would be. More of me was coming. It doesn’t seem like much, but there it is. The slow shift in the tectonic plate of my soul began. I wouldn’t always need him. I put my dress back on before going out.

  MORE OR LESS, 2001

  Many years after I pulled my dress over my head and knew there was more, I didn’t feel like there was more. It was 2001, and maybe there was even less. I had my dress over my head again and my swimsuit on. I was looking down at my body. The same size but older. I was on a tourist beach in Panama, sitting on a hotel patio among the kinged and queened Europeans: the Norwegians, the Belgians, the Brits. They were gathered on the patio, running up from the beach, shaking sand out of their hair,
settling down to drinks and backgammon. They all looked like George. He used to wear a kind of pants that later became popular for tourists. I kept catching glimpses of the pants and I always thought it was George. Everywhere I looked I saw ghosts of him that lasted for half a second and then were gone.

  The Europeans were speaking broken English, as they do when an American arrives, because of course (they assume) no American knows any language but their own. “This holiday,” said one. “I walk in mud to the beach and get sunburn and sand flies and ants to attack to my feet. I in mud walk back. This holiday is harder than work.”

  “This holiday,” said another, “I could have building a ship and sailing away on the money I spend on rum and cigarettes this week.”

  I stirred my drink with Panama’s plain flag on a stick. “I had a holiday once,” I said. “Not far from here, during the revolution in Nicaragua.”

  The Europeans paused, turned to me.

  “The country was full of guns. There were soldiers all over the streets,” I said. “Fourteen-year-old boys with grenades.”

  A standing European took a seat. No one else moved.

  “There were food shortages, war,” I said. “Old-line Soviets walking around.”

  I may have been laying it on a bit thick.

  “I worked for the Sandinistas.” Well, I sort of did.

  “And in Managua,” I told them, “you could drink the water from the faucet.”

  “Aso?” The Europeans’ eyebrows went up. Hey, this was too much. From the faucet?

  I nodded. “They filled the water with chlorine.”

  A European raised his drink. “Now that’s an adventure.”

  “Oh, not so much.” I smiled. “Tell me one of yours,” I said, wickedly—for who in this crowd could beat me?

  The Europeans looked at each other. “Raccoons attacked to our tent one night, but it’s not much to compare.”