Revolution

by Deb Olin Unferth

  PART FOUR

  SICK OF THE REVOLUTION

  TIRESOME

  The Internacionalistas were so happy. Nineteen eighty-seven was the year we romped in the sun and played in the streets. The Nicaraguans loved us. We all laughed at each other’s jokes even when we didn’t understand them.

  But sometimes the revolution became tiresome for the Internacionalistas. Managua was tiresome. Every day the restaurants and stores ran out of food. The rice had rocks in it and we all chipped our teeth. No one had air-conditioning and we had to share the fans.

  Of course it wasn’t as tiresome for us as it was for the Nicaraguans. The Internacionalistas were a hell of a lot happier about the revolution than the Nicaraguans. We could go home anytime we liked. The Nicaraguans were stuck. “Nineteen eighty-seven? Ah, yes,” a Nicaraguan will tell you, “that’s the year we had no toothpaste. We brushed our teeth with salt. We had no—what is the word?—jabón, soap. We washed our clothes with the seed of a tree.”

  But the rocks in the rice, the shortage of water, that was nothing compared to the war, the draft, year after year, all their young men dying off or running away, no one getting any richer, promises sinking like stones. The revolution was a pain in the ass, if we wanted to know the truth. And on top of that there were also all these tiresome Internacionalistas around, who expected much and became disappointed.

  The Internacionalistas, well, we knew we could be tiresome. It wasn’t our fault we were tiresome. We were just standing there, not doing anything, not wanting to be tiresome, and there we were, tiresome.

  The Nicaraguans felt the same way. They were just standing around in their own country, in their own town, and here come these Internacionalistas, calling it tiresome. Hey, Sandalista, we didn’t ask you to be here. Whose revolution is this anyway? Freeloaders is what you are. Why don’t you stay in your room if you’re going to go around with a face like that?

  * * *

  So after George and I held signs at the embassy protests, after we spent our Sundays at the church, after the bikeman gave us the boot, after we’d been in Nicaragua a month or more, I got dysentery and did stay in our room. It was around then that things took a turn for the worse.

  I lay on our bed and came out only to use the bathroom. The bed was made of giant rubber bands stretched across a frame. A burlap sack covered the rubber bands and the sheet was pulled over that. The burlap rubbed through to your skin. The pillow was heavy and hard, stuffed with sawdust. The heat was like a fist. I was dizzy, bored, depressed. I lay on the bed, irritated with George, irritated with Nicaragua, irritated with God, who was getting pretty tiresome Himself. I listened to the Internacionalistas talk outside our room all day. They never stopped talking about the revolution. Did they have nothing else to talk about? Was it the only thing that had ever happened on the Earth? You could tell what kind of Internacionalista you were dealing with by their similes. “This sure’s not like Detroit!” they said. I stared at the ceiling, could think of no reason for the comparison. It was a syllogism. A is not not-A: This sure’s not like Iran! Nobody drops and prays to the call of the muezzin. At least it was more logical than the ones who said, “This is exactly like India!”

  Then I got dehydrated and vomited thin strings of bile.

  Then I just stood over the toilet gagging.

  “This revolution is a drag,” I said. I didn’t say, “I want to go home.”

  BLACK MARKET

  Then George started trading dollars on the black market.

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “Fine. Mr. Moral. With his principles.”

  First he’d told me we wouldn’t trade on the black market. If there was one thing tearing apart the revolution, he’d said, it was corruption—bribes, black market, crime. “We’ll play fair,” he’d said, “and in this small way we’ll be revolutionaries, revolutionaries of the economy.”

  Well, there isn’t anything so revolutionary about obeying the law or, for that matter, breaking it, but fine, good, agreed. We will be revolutionaries by obeying the law, George. No black market. So then what was he doing trading dollars on the black market right here in Managua?

  “All right, all right,” he said. “We can’t all be perfect, can we? Have you seen the markup on the córdoba? It’s absurd. If they’re going to make it impossible for us, what else are we supposed to do? Are we supposed to starve while everybody else eats?”

  Okay, so that one thing. Trade dollars, nothing else. So what was he doing buying food on the black market? Stolen military tins and plastic packets of peanut butter?

  “Somebody’s going to buy the stuff,” he said. “It may as well be us because at least at heart we’re trying to help the revolution.”

  But somebody stole that from the soldiers. The Sandinista soldiers, the good guys.

  “Well, it’s stolen already. We’re not going to find them and give it back. Besides, the soldiers probably sold it. What do they want with the stuff? And these plastic packets travel well. Who knows the next time we’ll see peanut butter or the next time we’ll be dropped off on some dusty crossroad with nothing to eat? In fact, it’s probably stolen from the Contras. No way is this Russian-issue peanut butter. Have you ever seen a Soviet eat peanut butter? This has got to be United States Army issue. Reagan peanut butter. We’re taking food from the enemy and putting it in the mouths of the revolutionaries.”

  Fine, buy black-market food, that one other thing, but nothing else. So what is this, was he actually bribing that clerk?

  “Now look, do you know how much it costs to extend our visas? How are we supposed to help this fine revolution if we have to pay all our money just to stay? We were going to spend the extra money inside the country in any case, so what’s the difference?”

  But bribery? What would God have to say about that? That must be the limit, that must be over the limit.

  “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, render unto God what is God’s. It’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the kingdom, Debbie. Remember Jesus at the moneychangers, turning over the tables. Use your head, Deb.”

  So bribery, as it turned out, that wasn’t the limit. Smuggling, that was the limit. Except that wasn’t the limit either. We could do anything. We could steal, we could look into faces and lie, we could forge documents, we could pull tricks and run. It was fine, it was part of the revolution. It was our Christian duty.

  TO BLUEFIELDS

  George and I set out on the road to Rama. I didn’t know why we were going to Rama. I couldn’t see any sense in it except that it was the mouth that led to Bluefields, a place he wanted to go—there was the promise of an interview with the leader of the Miskitos, if we could make it, the promise of an interview with the mayor. I couldn’t see any sense in that either.

  The more resistant I was to whatever he wanted to do, the more determined he became, and, in turn, the more difficult I got. We could be like this about everything.

  I’d gotten over the dysentery, but still had diarrhea, and who wants to go on a bus with diarrhea? He said we would hitchhike—an outrageous suggestion. But he said we had to, because the buses weren’t running or were filled or delayed, and the line to wait for one looked longer than the road to Rama, which was no surprise, I said, since getting anywhere around Nicaragua was always that much of a hassle. So instead of waiting in line or asking around or trying again another day, George had the idea of Rama in his head, that gateway to Bluefields, and the idea of our arriving at its gate, and that was it.

  I was fasting. We had developed a theory that the best cure for diarrhea was to starve it out because a woman we met on the street told us that diarrhea is a hungry bug feeding off your plate. Plus I had a cross around my neck because an Episcopalian gave it to me with some idea that a cross would help. Because God likes crosses. Because God changes fates. Because God loves humans and not the diarrhea. Because God wants people to ask Him for things.

  On our first day of hitchhiking we stood
at the side of the road at five in the morning with all the Nicaraguans who also thought hitchhiking out of Managua a fine idea, with their baskets and bags and boxes and children. We all stared down the road. Finally a man picked us up and dropped us off in a small town where we waited for hours. I didn’t know the name of the town and saw nothing in it I would want, now or ever. Even the ladies in the shop seemed to see their town as what they got in place of what they’d asked for. I sat on my bag and read a book about the plague while George stood in the dust shielding his eyes. He asked everyone who came by for a ride and no one would give us one no matter what. We were that unwanted. The town had no hotels. The trees were leafless and wind-bent. The store sold only Rojita. The sun was like an illness.

  “Would you come over here and help me?” George said. “Stop reading that dumb book?”

  “No,” I said. “I will not.”

  * * *

  Finally George gave in and we got a bus that came by. It was going as far as Santo Tomas. We rode like pebbles in a can on those roads. In Santo Tomas we waited again for hours to get a ride. How many hours are there in a day even? But George was determined to get to Rama. We sat outside and waited. The road stood before us and ran behind us like a thing denied and another discarded. The sun was like another language. The sun was like a shout in the sky. The sun was like the landscape. The sun was alive, like an animal. It was a dull knife. It was a clock, a tunnel, an eye. The sun was a year long. It was like breathing. It was official. It rocked back and forth like a lamp.

  * * *

  Then the people of the town said, “You can’t go on, the soldiers are putting up a barricade.” And indeed they did. Big blocks of cement and wood dragged into the road and spikes set up all over it in case someone thought to drive in a truck and push the blocks away. And they posted soldiers on the road and around it out in the fields, watching in both directions in case some poor sap came by on one of those Chinese bicycles. Everyone gathered around and watched the proceedings and said over and over, shaking their heads, “You’ll never get to Rama tonight. Never, never, never.”

  But George held out hope a little longer. “Maybe a tank will come by and take us.”

  “A tank, ha, that’s a laugh,” they said. “What do you think this is—El Salvador?”

  “A tank,” they said to each other. “He thinks a tank is going to drive in from Honduras and pick him up.”

  At last he understood that we were not going to make it to Rama that night.

  * * *

  There was only one hotel in the town and it turned out to be the most unbearable hotel of the trip. This hotel room had no fan and it was too hot to close the door and there was no fan and there were spiders outside the room. Who crawled in if they could. And there was no fan.

  I have always been afraid of spiders.

  The worst of it was this question: door open or shut? I would no sooner decide the door must remain shut when the heat would grow intolerable, like something intending to kill, and then spider infiltration seemed the better option. But the spiders were not mere daddy-weaklings or jumping spots. They were large and hairy. They had balloonish bulges on their backsides. They looked alien and territorial and evil. And there weren’t only a few crawling around. There were hundreds, there were thousands. They hung in a system of webs like maps, like constellations. Webs ran up and down the walkway, hung in a heavy net overhead and extended down to the handrail and spread across the walkway over by the toilets. The webs shone silver in the moonlight and turned and shifted as the enemy spiders made their way through the maze. And they had to be poisonous. They couldn’t help but be poisonous. They demanded it, foretold it. I had never seen a spider like that and I never have again. Maybe that was all of those spiders in existence, they were gathered in that one spot. The entire species evolved on that hotel walkway, undisturbed by owner or citizen or nature or God as the rest of creation is, as they would have been anywhere else—because who else would put up with such a thing? Who else? I never saw them again and I never looked for them either, and they never looked for me. We’ve left each other alone ever since and may each species—they and I—live forever apart. May we each always be a fading image in the other’s eye, amen.

  Don’t forget I had diarrhea. I refused to cross the webs and use the toilet. I would not crawl into the bushes in that untamed spot. I couldn’t hold it. God help me, I shit in the street.

  * * *

  Nineteen eighty-seven is the year I did nothing. The year I fought in no war, contributed to no cause, didn’t get shot, jailed, or injured. George and I lost the tapes with the interviews on them—or at least I don’t know what became of them. We didn’t starve, didn’t die, didn’t save anyone either. Didn’t change anyone’s mind for the better, or the worse. Didn’t make any civil pronouncements or public promises that we kept (or private ones either). We had absolutely no effect on anything that happened. The only thing that changed as a result of our presence was us.

  * * *

  As for the Sandinistas, they had nothing but trouble ahead. The church had come out against them. They were losing the war against the Contras. The age of the draft was hovering around fourteen. The U.S.S.R. was coming apart. Two years more and the Nicaraguan people would vote the Sandinistas out. The health clinics would shut, the schools close down, the tracks of land handed back (and then caught in ownership confusion for decades). Nicaragua would drain of Internacionalistas, molt its socialist shell and shuttle back in line with all the other small countries with absurd problems that obviously couldn’t be solved (but some of us remember).

  * * *

  On the third day of hitchhiking George and I stood on the road and waited for the soldiers to pull the barricade away. Then we caught a lumber truck east, sat in the bed on the logs. We rode out of town under dense clouds and then rain and then clouds and then rain, then clouds, then rain, four times total, and we balanced on the muddy logs, bumped along with all the others going to Rama or wherever else they were going to wind up. It was crowded and miserable and wet.

  * * *

  At last we arrived in Rama.

  How far is it from Managua to Rama, by the way?

  Two hundred and ninety kilometers, one hundred and eighty miles.

  By that time I’d forgotten: George didn’t want to go to Rama. It was just a tiny town of rain and people up at dawn. He wanted to go to Bluefields, up the thin river from where Rama watched its back. Of course it turned out that no commercial boats went to Bluefields anymore because of the war and the things that happen to boats in war. George said we should sit and wait in any case because, well, what do these people know. How do they move cows and such if not on a boat? So we sat, most of the day, down by the docks, and it looked as though it had never not rained. The trees looked as though they would drop their leaves with wet, as though the sun could never hope to fight through the wet. A squat of outhouses over the river, large birds coming through. We waited for a boat. There was no boat, only waiting and rain, rain lifting, then rain coming down again. It grew dark. The small strip of town had no streetlamps. People walked around, leaned against the posts, us too, leaning against the posts, until at last we got a room to wait for dawn. I searched all over that room while George sat on the floor and watched. I took apart the bed and put it back together. I shook the sheets. I didn’t find any spiders.

  In the bed, in the dark, I said, “Don’t touch me. It’s too hot.”

  * * *

  This is the year I learned how to get a visa. How to pack a backpack, when to catch the night bus. The year I made iodine water for the first time and the year I nearly gave us iodine poisoning. The year I learned where to get a free room, how to save a wet watch. It was the first time I dried clothes on a line, interviewed a politician, the first time I searched for food, the right road, the right bus. First year I cursed at a doctor. This is the year a stranger crawled into our bed in the middle of the night while George was out, the year I hit a stranger over the he
ad with a glass bottle. The first and only year I was an Internacionalista. The first year I was willing to run away with someone, the first year I began to look back, just a bit, became just a teensy bit more disentangled from him each day. The first time I found a revolution, first time I left one, first time I wanted to go home.

  I later became an expert at all of these things. Except I never found another revolution, though I’ve tried.

  * * *

  The next day George and I got a ride out of Rama on a gunboat. It might have been different if it hadn’t been for the fact that it rained for ten hours straight and the soldiers kept shouting at us because I was always in the way or for the fact that the river was not the blue and green that a river to Bluefields should be and the trees did not hold out fruit we could pick as we passed, as I had imagined. No, the water was mud, the sky was gray, the trees a tangle on a far shore. There was nothing to eat. The soldiers patrolled every fishing boat, every broken canoe, every patch of thatch clinging to the side of the river. “Anybody in there?” they said, poking with their rifles.

  We rode up the river, the rain coming down, a sheet of plastic thrown over us like over a roll of hay. We arrived in Bluefields at last. Beating storm and night. The boat pulled up. A lantern lit the wooden plank to the dock. Not one light shone on shore. A blackout.

  “Where can we find a hotel?” George screamed through the storm.

  “Hotel? No hotel. The hotels all closed last year. Por la guerra.”

  We looked down the dark, wet street. We started walking.

  CAPITALISM

  It had to happen someday: our Nicaraguan visas ran out. Then it had to happen again: our second Nicaraguan visas ran out, and this time the Sandinistas didn’t want to give us third visas, since we weren’t helping the revolution.

  “But we are helping the revolution,” said George.