Revolution

by Deb Olin Unferth

  * * *

  Below us el Inter sat. In a few more years, it wouldn’t be “el Inter” anymore. It’d be sold off, abandoned, reclaimed, renamed: the Crowne Plaza, fixed up, revamped, but by then the second hotel in town. There’d be a new Intercontinental, a nicer Intercontinental, brighter, more elegant, closer to the plaza. Any more revolutions go on, the journalists are going to want to stay at that one instead. Things keep going this way and one day we won’t have el Inter anymore. Its doors will close for good and that, for me, will be the very end of the revolution. But back in 2000 it wasn’t a Crowne Plaza yet. The revolution ten years done, Nicaragua on its second capitalist president, but it was still el Inter and it was open—a little grayer perhaps, a little squatter, still itself but becoming something different every minute, as every minute more history flew by and the world became something different around it, like the river Heraclitus can’t step into twice. The river, all that water passing through, all that earth sliding down the bank into the silt, all the fish and plants and mold growing and dying inside, all the cities going up around it or falling down into it.

  * * *

  There’s a fuzziness to what I know about George. The marks I can make are incomplete. I don’t have the dates, for example, of when he went back to claim the peasant queen, when he built the house. I lost some years somewhere. At one point, before the TV set, someone had told me he was at seminary or divinity school. He’d won a fellowship to Harvard or Yale. Then I heard he’d dropped out, that he’d had a sudden awakening and left, or maybe it was that he’d grown slowly disillusioned and had been kicked out. This must have been the year he was between jobs at the pizza joint, between shifts on the construction line.

  Perhaps that year he’d been trying to forget the peasant queen. Perhaps he’d been trying to live—how do you say it?—“up to his potential”? I’ve always had misgivings about that phrase. Why should studying at Harvard be more thoroughly “living up to his potential” than watching TV in the rain forests of Brazil? I imagine he would agree with me on this point (he’s the one who taught me it in the first place) since he left Harvard or Yale or was told to leave and then went back to claim his queen.

  * * *

  The year 2000 may have been the lowest year of my life. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was trying to be a writer by that time, but it wasn’t working out. I’d come home to my crappy Chicago apartment, feeling sorry for myself, and have to pry open a mailbox stuffed with rejection letters. I was midway through a demented, dismal romance that I couldn’t bring myself to end. My boyfriend hated me and avoided me at all costs. I loved him desperately and wanted only to be near him. I was teaching five or six classes a semester at four different schools. I drove all over the city, my grammar books tossed in the backseat. I was teaching on Saturdays in the suburbs, Monday mornings downtown, writing in the middle of the night for a magazine that pitched new age health products, and hopefully a few lines of my own. I couldn’t make enough to pay rent in a slum. I’d come home and find my electric off one day, my phone off another. I’d have to figure out if I hadn’t paid my bill or if the wiring in the building had gone off (again), or was the whole block down tonight? One cold month I had no hot water. My neighbors fought day and night on what seemed like rotation. I’d go out to the street and find all the windows of my car smashed or the tires slashed or my license plates gone. Once a man grabbed me from behind outside my apartment and I screamed him away. My family, all of them without exception, thought I was a bum and told me so every time they saw me. “It’s sad what’s happened to you,” they said. “Just sad.”

  I’d had it. I mean, I had really had it. But what was I going to do? You can’t just give up. Or sure, you can give up, over and over, you can lie there stopped, but you start back up again, you stubborn winding clock, because the heart keeps beating, madly, wretchedly, gratefully, unless you figure out how to stop it. I could see no way out of this mess. I’d obviously missed out on an essential lesson everyone else had had. I was lacking some basic instinct, some secret understanding, the right way to believe in the American dream. I tried to think of a time when I felt at home in the world, and I came up with nothing. Then I remembered Nicaragua.

  * * *

  There’s the foot too, of course. If you’re looking at the river, knowing it’s different, and looking at the world around the river and knowing that’s different, you may happen to notice the foot that’s stepping in the river as well. Maybe you didn’t even know it was the foot you came to see, not the river, until you see the foot there, wet in the water. Then you say: Damn, what happened to that foot?

  * * *

  So that’s where we all were that year, the tenth anniversary of the revolution’s end: the Sandinistas driving taxis around the city, their leaders becoming corrupt, me coming apart and shaking out a trail of debris, George in the jungle watching TV.

  * * *

  “There’s so many of you,” said the soldier in charge of Sandino. “What do you come here for?”

  My sister and I looked at each other.

  “Well, I’ve been here before, you see,” I said.

  “Why do you want to go back to the same place?” he said.

  I didn’t know how to answer that.

  “I think I’d want to see someplace else,” he said.

  WHERE THE DANES STAYED

  “Old Nica, Nica of the revolution, those were the days. It’s sure not like it used to be. The fun we had.”

  “Remember the water?”

  “Oh, the water, the districts, the two days a week.”

  “It smelled like chlorine.”

  “What fun that was.”

  “And Comedor Sarah!”

  “You know, she’s not around anymore, trying to sell the place.”

  We shook our heads.

  It was a year later, 2001. I was back in Nicaragua. Again. I had no reason to be there and I didn’t have the money for it, but I was back. I’d gone looking for Comedor Sarah that day, walking una cuadra arriba, dos cuadras al lago all over the place, until a kid on the street told me, “Ya no está.” Of course it wasn’t. It seemed absurd that I was there, that I was still me, that I hadn’t died by now and been reincarnated and returned to Nicaragua as a turtle. That’s how long ago it all seemed. But no, I was still me. I’d found another former Internacionalista, in fact, a European. We can’t keep away.

  He and I were settled in the hotel atrium with a bottle of rum.

  “Remember the Russians? The AK-40s?”

  “Ah, the Russians, they loved American stuff. Movies and food.”

  “The córdobas!”

  “You had to carry bags of them everywhere you went.”

  We raised our hands to show the bags of córdobas we had to carry.

  “Remember Molinitos?”

  “Molinitos, what is that?”

  “Molinitos.”

  We frowned at each other over the rum.

  “You know, Molinitos. A pension. It was right around the corner.”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “You remember. All the Danes stayed there.”

  “Danes?”

  “Sure.”

  “I don’t remember any Danes anywhere.”

  “Sure.”

  “No.”

  There were some Peace Corps volunteers being silly in the corner, smashing bottles into the trash can, throwing them from a distance.

  “Well, they were here.”

  He and I were sitting in the Hotel Oye, five bucks a night. There were two sets of water pipes, one line beside the other in every bathroom, over every sink. One of the lines didn’t work, but nobody bothered to pull the dead one out, so two pipes ran up the wall and there were two showerheads in every shower. You had to try both faucets. The entire hotel was built with this philosophy. The rafters were a mess of metal and wood. Wooden beams swung loosely. Unfinished paintings sat on the floor. Projects started and were deserted. People stripped off the piece
s they needed and left the rest swinging half-attached, like a rejected thought, no longer in use but still there. The electric wiring hung in a jumble from the ceiling, strung across the wall. It was held together with bits of black electrical tape, here wrapped around a curtain rod, there forming a spiderweb on the ceiling, suspended like a trapeze net.

  What can we say? We tried to join the wrong revolution. For ten different reasons we were wrong: it wasn’t ours, it didn’t work, we didn’t understand it.

  He and I had finished the rum and were lying on our chairs like lizards. All these years and I felt like I hadn’t moved on at all.

  “Remember Nicaragua of the revolution? Everyone was so excited.”

  “I tell the people at home. I tell them Nicaragua is still beautiful! You shouldn’t abandon old friends.”

  “Old friends shouldn’t abandon you either.”

  I wasn’t sure what he was talking about there, but after that rum I was ready to back him up a hundred percent. Damn it, old friends shouldn’t abandon you.

  THREE BOATS

  One of my final adventures with George was on a boat. He said we’d take a vacation—a boat, like a cruise. This was right after the broken engagement, right after he left or didn’t leave and I lay on the bed looking at the walls, right after we managed to make it out of Managua. We still needed to figure out a different way back to the States. We didn’t have enough money to return the way we’d come. We sat in a room in a hot border town, George calculating shortcuts and not explaining them to me, and me being mad about it and about anything else I could think of. I pointed out that we could go this way (I drew a line on the map with my thumb) and get back to the States through Texas and then hitchhike the rest of the way.

  “We’re not going to Texas,” George said.

  George wouldn’t go to Texas. He’d once sworn he never would. He had a couple of cousins from Texas whom he teased every time they came to town. Texas was so dumb, George had told his cousins, that anyone who went to Texas would be suddenly struck with stupidity, which explained why the cousins were so dumb. He’d made a pledge never to go to Texas. It was all part of a childhood joke from long ago. He still thought it was funny and wouldn’t go.

  He’d always been like that. Anyone who knows him who hears this story will say, “That’s George for you,” and shrug. But in fact, that one time he and I spoke on the phone, he told me he’d been to Texas. “Can you believe it?” he said. “I had no choice. I had to cut through Texas.”

  “Really,” I said.

  I’d thought at the time that we had no choice.

  I bet those cousins weren’t even that dumb.

  * * *

  George said the shortest way back was by water. We could cross to some islands off the coast of Honduras and get back to the mainland by way of Belize and cut off one large leg of the trip. Then he said the bit about it being a vacation, an island holiday—boat ride, Caribbean sun, umbrellas in the sand. So we went to the coast and found a cheap boat, a discount boat, so small that George and I were the only passengers, and it sank low in the water when he and I got on.

  At first the ride wasn’t bad. The water was calm and dolphins jumped alongside the boat as it pulled into the sea. The fisherman held out his hand for them to leap at. But then the sky clouded over and the wind came up and waves began to hit the little boat. We tilted, smacked the waves, and jumped, slammed back into the water over and over. I huddled down on the floor of the boat and held on to my seat with both hands to keep from flying off. I bit my lip so as not to throw up. Water spilled over the side in bucketfuls. George bailed with a tin bowl like a machine and the fisherman was shouting. Then the rain came, drowning the boat. I couldn’t tell the difference between the sea and the air. I was soaked, had seaweed in my fingers, my hair. The fisherman began shoving barrels over the side. George was trying to bail but fell over. I rose to help, but the fisherman pushed me down with a hard shove. This is it, I thought. I’m going to die and it’s all George’s fault.

  But then the rain died down. Far off, lights blinked like fireflies in the fog. Somehow the shore appeared, a gray mass between the sea and sky. I felt the fisherman lifting me under the arms and setting me on the wet dock.

  * * *

  “That’s not the worst,” a man said.

  “What?” I said.

  His face emerged from behind a T-shirt—the room doubled as a laundry and dine-in. Clothes hung on lines down the room. I was in a hostel in Costa Rica in 2002, still hanging around Central America. The man said again, “That’s not the worst.” He looked Indian and spoke like the queen, and I didn’t think he was very friendly. I hadn’t said my story was the worst and I wouldn’t have told it at all except someone asked if I’d been to the islands off Honduras and I didn’t know how to answer except to describe one location after another, draw the line that led to the point.

  Once I started going back to Nicaragua, I couldn’t stop. I was like a train heading off the side of a mountain into the sea. I broke off relationships, quit jobs. I could live for ten dollars a day. I went back to El Salvador, back to Panama. I stayed away longer and longer. It was turning into years of this nonsense now. I couldn’t figure out what I was doing there and it became more and more uncomfortable as I tried to explain.

  “Not the worst?” said another tourist. “I suppose it could have been worse if she drowned.”

  So at least someone was on my side.

  “If you want to hear the worst, I could tell you,” said the man.

  “And how are you supposed to know the worst?” I said.

  “I went through it myself,” he said.

  The tourists at the table turned to listen.

  “I boated those same waters,” said the man, “only one month ago today. I was one of twelve scientists. We hired a boat to take us to Honduras. Just like you, the sky was beautiful and clear.”

  The tourists nodded to each other. “Scientists, well!”

  (What are scientists always doing on boats? And what’s the use of twelve of them? The boat I’d been on could not have held twelve people and, as all sailors know, the smaller the boat, the worse the trip.)

  “Halfway there, the first engine gave out,” he said. “The captain came out to let us know. We weren’t too worried because there was a second engine.”

  (Two engines? Our boat had an engine the size of a stapler.)

  “Just like you, the water turned choppy. The captain came out and said to put on the life jackets. We didn’t know if this was good news because that meant there were life jackets or bad news because we might need them. Then the sea became violent. Water was coming over the sides in tubfuls. We were soaked, all our suitcases like they’d fallen into the ocean. Still, the storm grew worse. We were seasick, throwing up over the side. The captain yelled for us all to run to one side of the boat. Then he’d yell, ‘¡El otro lado!’ and we’d all run back and so on, to keep us from capsizing.”

  (Doesn’t sound so bad, running up and down like a relay.)

  “Then it looked like we might make it. Far away, four kilometers or so, we could see land. Then the second engine gave out.”

  The tourists at the table sucked in their breath.

  (Who was this guy, Candide?)

  The man nodded. “So close to land. The captain took a life jacket and waved it in the air on a stick. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ we said to him. ‘You think someone’s going to see that?’ Some of the scientists had whistles and blew them, six short blasts, the international help signal.”

  (Only a dozen scientists would know the international help signal on a whistle.)

  “No one came. It began to get dark. We took out our torches and flashed our lights at the shore. Still, no one came. Some of us started saying we should swim. The captain said, ‘No, no, you can’t possibly. This sea is full of sharks.’ We waited, each moment drifting farther from land. Finally two of our men said, ‘Well, bugger this,’ and dove into the water. They towed the boat
with ropes, swam four kilometers to shore, in shark-infested water.”

  The tourists let their breath out. “Oh, that’s certainly the worst,” they said.

  The man held up a hand. “Our luck, the compass was broken. We arrived at an abandoned beach far from the docks. We pulled the boat up until it stuck in the sand and then we waded to shore. We hiked through jungle and swamp for two hours in the dark and the rain to reach town. Then we pounded on the immigration officer’s door at midnight and woke him up. ‘You have to stamp these passports,’ we said. ‘We’ve just entered the country.’ ”

  The tourists shook their heads. “Did you get a discount on the boat ride?” one said. “After all, you had to swim to shore.”

  “Not even a discount,” said the man.

  The tourists at the table looked over at me. Not even a discount.

  But hey, I never said mine was the worst.

  * * *

  Two bad boat tales must be balanced by one good boat tale, so say sailors. (Do sailors say that? I don’t know. I’ve never known a sailor.) The third boat tale begins in 2003, ten months after the Indian man told the story of the worst. It was the latest of night, and I was with a friend paddling in quiet water off the coast of Costa Rica, way at the end of it, almost in Panama. Our canoe was barely big enough for the two of us. We drifted down a thin inlet through the rain forest. We became fastened to the foliage now and then, stuck in the mud, and our paddles helped push us over the shrub. There’d been a hurricane a few days before and giant leaves blocked the path in places, like bridges, and we had to knock them aside to get by. For once it wasn’t raining and the night sky shine came through the trees. We reached the end of the inlet and floated out into the sea.

  It was the last night of my sojourns south. I was going home. I’m not sure how I knew that. The feeling had been coming on for months already, a year, years. Maybe I’d known since 1987 that a piece of me had stayed behind, snagged in Central America, fastened to the foliage, and someday I’d have to get it and bring it back or else unhook it and leave it there alone. All I can say for sure is that each day held a new small awakening or disillusionment (sometimes those two are closer than you’d think, sometimes the awakening is the disillusion—Oh, I see, this isn’t going to work at all.).