Revolution

by Deb Olin Unferth

  One day an Internacionalista put his head into my room.

  “What do you do in here?” he said.

  “Go away. I’m sick.”

  In fact I wasn’t sure if I was still sick. I’d felt the way I felt—sickish—for so long that I didn’t know if it was illness or if this was just what I was, if this was me being normal and normal for me was sickish.

  “What is wrong with you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He was some sort of European. The young blond kind who speaks perfect English. “Come out,” he said. “I’m tired seeing you in here.”

  “How do you think I feel?”

  “I walk by the same room, see the same person. I feel like I repeat myself.”

  “That’s life, buddy.”

  He walked in and looked down at me on my bed. “Did you see a doctor? You can see the doctor here for very cheap.”

  “You better get out of here. My boyfriend’s coming back,” I said.

  “What boyfriend. No one comes in here.”

  Maybe I should have been nervous at this point, but I was used to being approached by men of all ethnicities and ages, inside and outside these hostels. I just tugged my dress over my knees. I was wearing my “fruit basket” dress, so-called because of the pictures of large dark fruits on it. I had begun wearing it every single day. One day I washed it and all the Internacionalistas in the hostel congratulated me and told me how nice I looked and said that I should try a trick like that more often.

  “Let’s go to the movies,” said the guy.

  “There are no movies.”

  “Sure there are movies.”

  “You’re thinking of Mexico. You’re thinking of Spain.”

  “I will take you to eat an ice cream then.” He reached out to touch my leg and I kicked his hand away.

  “I know that place,” I said. “Every day they say they have a different flavor. Some days they say chocolate. Some days they say strawberry. But it’s vanilla. Vanilla every day.” That place drove me crazy. In one place we stayed someone had written on the wall of our room, “La vida es tan corta comer helados vanillos y bailer con hombres aburridos.” Life is too short to eat vanilla ice cream and dance with boring men.

  “Forget this town,” he said. “Let’s go to India. They have beautiful rugs in India. We can lie on them and look at the sky.”

  After all these years, I still remember the thing that impressed him most about India was the rugs. I don’t even know what he was talking about. I’ve never been to India and no one else I’ve met who has gone has mentioned the rugs as the high point of their Indian adventure, though I’m sure there are indeed beautiful rugs to be found in that country.

  “No thanks,” was what I told this guy. I’d say the same thing today.

  “Okay,” he said. “I will bring you to my parents’ house.”

  “Why would I go there?”

  “It’s very nice.” He drew the house in the air. “It’s full of rooms.”

  “What do I want with rooms?” I said. “I’ve got a room.”

  He dropped his hands. “I can’t go back without you.”

  We’d reached an impasse. I wasn’t going with him, but he wouldn’t leave unless I went. He bowed his head like in prayer. He closed his eyes.

  “Tell you what you can do,” I said. “You could go get me some peanut butter.”

  He opened his eyes. “You know where to get peanut butter?”

  “Black market,” I said. “Military packets. There’s a place. I’ll tell you how to get there, but you have to promise to bring me some. Promise?”

  “Tell me where first.”

  “Promise first.”

  “Tell first.”

  “Promise first.”

  He sat down on the floor. He put his head between his knees. “I am sick of this revolution,” he said.

  SMALLER

  It was in that room that I began having a dream I then had for years. I dreamed Central America was shrinking. It happened fast. I was standing on it and then suddenly it got smaller. I teetered for a moment, nearly fell, then planted my feet in Nicaragua, my heel sunk in Lake Nicaragua. I crouched and saw George among the plastic trees, the tiny metal towers. Solid black lines separated the countries. I reached in for George, but the ground beneath me shook—an earthquake?—and Central America shrank again. I couldn’t stand on it anymore. I fell into the ocean and was left tossing around with my pack. I didn’t see George. I grabbed hold of Costa Rica, tried to wrap a leg around it, throw my pack on top, but my pack had opened. My things were falling into the water. I was grabbing my belongings, getting them back into my pack—my guidebook, my bottle of shampoo—but everything was muddy or lost. The water was too deep to splash home on foot. I’d have to swim, but I couldn’t go without George, and how would I carry my pack? It would get soaked, was already soaked. Central America shook again, another earthquake, and I was thrown into the sea, head under, now above, sky overhead. My pack had sunk and George was gone.

  I had the dream on and off for many years. I’d wake and sometimes if a fan was whirling or if the light was coming in on a certain slant, I thought I was back. I’d sit up—where’s George? Instead of a shabby square of bed, our stuff in collapse on the floor, I’d find the room spread cleanly around me, a lamp, a desk, a closet. At some point the dream stopped. I don’t know why.

  In the final scene of the dream I’d try to swim toward Central America but it was far away now, growing smaller and smaller. It squeezed to a dot and disappeared.

  FORGETTABLE MOMENTS

  George came back. One day I returned from the toilets and he was standing over my bed.

  “Our visas are about to expire,” he said. He had some mosquito coils and my flashlight in his hands. “We have to get out of here. It’s time to go.”

  Then I saw. He had my backpack out.

  “You came back,” I said.

  “What?” he said tiredly. “What are you talking about?”

  I looked at him for a while. Hadn’t we broken up and he’d left? Hadn’t I been abandoned? Or was it possible, I wondered, that he’d been in the hostel all this time? Had I looked for him in the wrong room? Had he not abandoned me at all?

  Had we not even broken up?

  Or had we broken up, separated, ended things once and for all, but neither of us even managed to make it off the premises? It could be that’s what happened.

  It’s impossible to know what another person’s important moments are, the few moments they’ll always remember in the deep ocean of all the ones they’ll forget. Was that an important moment for him—showing up after leaving me or not leaving me there in that hostel?

  If I could talk to George again, just once, I would say, “Okay, here’s a pen. First question. Write down the ten most important moments in your life.”

  “Trick question,” he would say. “You just want to know if you would be on the list—which how could you be? You can’t imagine all the things I’ve done. It’s been more than twenty years.”

  “Okay,” I would say. “Fair enough. New question. Write down the ten most important moments from that trip.”

  There’s no way that moment wouldn’t be on the list, the moment he returned after leaving me or not leaving me, when he knew where I was and I didn’t know where he was and still he chose not to come. It wasn’t punishment on his part, leaving me like that, if he even did. That kind of behavior wasn’t in him. He wasn’t mean or manipulative or vengeful. He was a man who acted not by volition, but drive. If he left, he did it because he had to, and if he came back, it was because of the same. I never asked him where he was those days we were apart. No matter if he was in the next room in bed or walking down a road two days away—maybe he doesn’t even remember today—still, I know how it was for him. I know what it is to not know what to do, to choose when you don’t want any of the options left open to you, to be on a path when it feels like any path is a mistake.

  * * *

/>   What I didn’t realize at that moment, with my belongings tossed out on the bed, is that I had turned a little strange on this trip. The next year I’d go back to school and feel a little strange around all my healthy, rosy-cheeked classmates. It was strange to be strange and I’d do what I had to to stop, not because I wanted what was on the other side of strange, but because both sides, all sides, looked like mistakes. The next year I felt a little less strange and what was around me was less strange, the year after that still less, and finally one day there I was—nothing around me was strange and I wasn’t strange. I was normal.

  But George stayed strange. He’d wait around for a couple of years, maybe trying not to be strange, maybe not trying. I moved out of our apartment, saying I had to “find myself,” which at first made George laugh but later did not. It would turn out to be harder to find myself than I expected because so little of me existed to begin with. George tried to stick it out until I found myself, but finally he just couldn’t. It was taking too long. One day he came over to my place and said he wanted to say good-bye. He was leaving, had to. He hadn’t been over in a while, and in that moment he looked much like he did that day in Managua—determined, ill-at-ease in the middle of a room that was clearly mine, not ours. Only this time he wasn’t coming back to fetch me. Instead he was leaving for good. He glanced around the room. “Wow,” he said. “Look at all this stuff you’ve got. You’ve got a lot of stuff now.” A few minutes later he was gone.

  * * *

  So that’s how it would end. But on that day in November 1987, he came back for me, or hadn’t left without me in the first place. He gathered me up, found or not, and scooped up my stuff, which was still only a pack’s worth, and we left Managua together again—out of duty, perhaps, or habit, or fear, or sheer stubbornness, or because we’d have to both go back the same way in any case. Many people travel together on thinner threads than that: because they happened to get on the same bus a town or two back, or because they have complementary guidebooks, or they both speak French.

  We put our things away and rode out of Managua that night. We still had a few more adventures to go, though we didn’t know that yet. We headed for the border, our backpacks slung up on top of the bus, side by side, a sky full of water. Just like that, we were going home.

  WHAT HAPPENED TO GEORGE

  As a matter of fact I didn’t have much stuff the day George came to say good-bye. I still feel a little particular on this point. Sure, I had the normal apartment appliances that come with an apartment, oven and cabinets and doors, but I didn’t own those. I had some boxes of kitchenware, a few stools and chairs strewn around, clothes.

  No proper revolutionary would cart around a lot of stuff even if she had quit and gone home.

  * * *

  As for George, he noted my excess of belongings, then he left the States, went back through Central America, where all the revolutions were ending one by one, falling over like buildings, and where the U.S. Army was lifting Noriega out of Panama with a crane. George continued on through the Darien Gap, where the road narrows like a funnel and disappears into rain forest and mud, and the earth becomes water as you walk. He came out on the other side in the vast land of South America. He traveled around, much as he and I had together. I stayed behind.

  In Brazil he fell in love. He didn’t use the words “fell in love” when he told me about it years later on the phone. He said he met “the queen of the peasants.” To this day I have no idea what that means—crown, rags, a path winding through a shantytown, who knows what he was talking about.

  He proposed—to her, of course.

  Apparently the queen of the peasants had to have her father’s permission because her father wouldn’t give it. “Not unless you have a house to put her in,” he said. George didn’t have any money, of course. Never had a dime in his life. So he returned to the States and worked all day pouring cement and lifting buckets and setting them down, and at night he delivered pizzas to the homes of our civilians. He went back to Brazil and bought a large piece of land.

  “There,” he said to the father, “now may I marry your daughter?”

  The father said, “I don’t see a house to put her in.”

  So again George returned to the States and again saved up money and went back to Brazil and built a house on his land. Then he said to the father, “Look, you see? A house. Now may I marry your daughter?” And the father couldn’t speak, so awed was he by their love. George married that peasant queen and put her in the house, and when she had his baby, he put the baby in the house too.

  He told me all this on the phone. We were on the phone because I tracked him down and called him once when I heard he was back in the States. I don’t know what year this was—maybe ’96 or ’97? I still hadn’t found myself.

  “What do you do in Brazil?” I asked him.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “But you must do something.”

  “We owned a bar for a while,” he said, “but we traded it for a TV set.”

  So there it is: He married a queen. They have a baby and a TV set. They watch their game shows and look out the window at the rain.

  “But what else are you going to do?” I said.

  “Nothing,” he said. “I’m not going to do anything.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Maybe I’ll write a book,” he said.

  * * *

  For years I looked for that book. I waited and waited.

  * * *

  That’s all I knew of him for a long time—the queen and the baby and the book I was waiting for, that he would write by the blue light of the TV.

  PART FIVE

  COMMON HUMAN FATES

  STUFF

  “So George went off and had a blissful life in the jungle and you wound up with a lot of stuff. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “No, I didn’t have a lot of stuff. He said I did, but I didn’t.”

  “Well, get some stuff then, if that’s what you want,” the guy says. He nods to the bartender for another.

  “No, I mean, I have plenty of stuff now.”

  “So what’s the problem? You have your own house now, a house full of stuff.”

  “Actually, no, I don’t have a house. I live in someone else’s house. Part of someone else’s house, an apartment, really.”

  “All right, name the things you have.”

  “Car. Clothes. Lamp. Plant.”

  “That sounds like plenty of stuff.” He sips at the foam, eyes the shrilly game overhead.

  “It is. I said that already.”

  “Name the things you don’t have.”

  “I don’t know why I’m talking to you,” I say. “There’s a whole world out there I don’t have.”

  “Name them.”

  SANDINO IN THE SKY

  The first time I went back to Nicaragua was the summer of 2000, wet-season Managua, mornings of hot haze, then insane rain, then the heavy evenings of heat and damp leaves. I wasn’t sure why I was back. I’d come up with the idea of interviewing people, the way George and I had. It was a good idea. People I told the idea to said it was interesting and they seemed impressed. I’d look for those revolutionaries, the old priests and their followers—whatever happened to those guys?

  I put on my sun hat one morning and walked over to the Hotel Intercontinental. There’s a hill behind it and I began a plodding ascent in the heat, slowly rising over flat-faced Managua. The president had put up billboards with his name on them, everywhere you looked, all over the city, and if you rode out to the countryside, you’d see them there too, beside the humblest shacks, along the oldest roads, emerging from the dust clouds: Arnoldo Alemán.

  “This is boring,” said my sister.

  Did I mention I’d brought my sister with me? Yes, that was another part of the plan. I was going to teach my little sister about the revolution. She hadn’t known that was the plan—she’d had in mind beach songs and sand—and because I am her big sister I didn’t know she did
n’t know. She and I were just beginning to understand this misunderstanding.

  We kept climbing the hill. It took a long time and it was hot. At last we came to the gigantic statue of Sandino. It shot straight up into the sky. During the revolution the Sandinistas had put up their own statues in the plaza, ones to represent the times: men with machine guns, of course. And they’d put a giant silhouette of Sandino himself in his big hat on top of the hill behind el Inter. It’s still there.

  “Would you look at that,” I said to my sister. “General Sandino. Inspired the revolution.”

  I told her a little anecdote about him, how in a battle against a white man he’d refused to surrender, and somebody had to explain it to the president. I didn’t tell it right. My sister had the look that said she didn’t care who that guy was.

  A soldier with a machine gun was standing under the statue. “See that?” I said. “There’s a real live soldier too.” We went over to him.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “Guarding Sandino,” said the soldier.

  “From what?”

  “Graffiti.”

  “Oh.”

  My sister looked disappointed.

  “Soldiers guard many strange things,” I told her. “Bushes, abandoned houses, empty beaches, blocks of wood, walls of sacks…”

  We turned to go.

  “But it’s lonely,” the soldier called to us. “I stand here by myself all day. Do you see the lizards around? As big as cats.”

  “Yes, we saw them,” said my sister, who also speaks Spanish. “They walk like dogs.”

  “They don’t walk like dogs,” I corrected her. “If anything, they walk like crocodiles. Or maybe insects, not dogs.”