Revolution (2 page)

*   *   *

Our main ambition was to help the revolution. George and I wanted jobs, what we called “revolution jobs,” but it turned out that few people wanted to hire us and if they did, they almost immediately fired us.

But he and I also conducted interviews. This was his idea, and he was in charge. We started in Mexico and interviewed people clear down to the Panama Canal, dozens of people—politicians, priests, organizers. We brought a bagful of tapes with rock music on them and recorded over the tapes one by one with a handheld cassette tape recorder. Some people gave us only twenty minutes—the press secretary of Guatemala (with his fake, thin clown smile), the minister of culture of Nicaragua (who wore a beret indoors). The strays—the artist, the small-town priest, the local Native American—would talk for hours if we let them (if George let them). In Nicaragua everyone wanted to be interviewed, top people in the government and church. The taxi drivers wanted to be interviewed. The kids wanted to be interviewed. Their fathers wanted to be interviewed. In Bluefields, Nicaragua, we interviewed the mayor of the city, the leader of the Miskito tribe, the soldiers who had provided military escort to that part of the country. In El Salvador no one wanted to be interviewed. We got only four interviews—one with a painter, a few with some priests—but no one in the government would talk to us or even look at us. We went to the Casa Presidencial in San Salvador every day for weeks and couldn't get near the place. The guards told us that the entire government was on vacation. Every day they told us this. “Still on vacation,” they said, spreading their hands. “
¿Lo crees?
Can you believe it?”

“No, I cannot believe that,” said George.

*   *   *

I don't know what happened to all those tapes. When we came back to the States, we had them first in plastic bags on the floor by the door of our apartment. Later I recall them sitting in a couple of broken boxes. After that, I'm not sure. Neither of us ever listened to them again, as far as I know.

SEND-OFF

I knew my mother and father were not going to let me join the revolution, so I didn't tell them. I sent them a letter from Mexico. I wrote the letter in Nogales on the American side of the border, then I crossed the border so I could mail it from the Nogales post office on the Mexican side. The letter was short and went something like:

Dear Mom and Dad,

I am writing you from Mexico. I'm sorry to tell you in this way, but I've left school and am going to help foment the revolution. I am a Christian now and I have been called by God. Due to the layout of the land, we are taking the bus.

My father still talks about it. “She told us nothing,” he says. “We had no idea. I open the mailbox and there's a letter from Mexico saying she's off to foment the revolution.”

He's been telling it the same way all these years. He used to shout it, “My own daughter told me nothing!” and point at me—there she is, the traitor, the nutcase, the smartass.

Later he said it sadly, shaking his head: “I had no idea.”

Even later he said it with pride. His loony girl, a bit like him. Do you know he once owned a Communist bookstore?

Now he tells it like an old joke. “So one day I open the mailbox…”

*   *   *

Before we left, George brought the stuff we would need up out of his parents' basement—backpacks, insect repellent, flashlights, soap, some philosophical books about the Bible. I threw my other belongings away and I did it happily because at the revolution I would need only what I could carry. We put our money together (we each had a thousand dollars). We got shots and a bottle of malaria pills.

George told his mother our plan. We sat at her kitchen table while he explained. She listened and then took out some pot holders for us to take along and bookmarks with pictures of God on them. She had the face of captive royalty, the voice of something gentle in a cage. She told me to memorize the Bible bit by bit and then to write it down at the revolution and send it to her in the mail. We left the pot holders behind, but she also gave us a very large, very heavy canister of vitamin powder that we never used but carried for months and months over borders, on boats, through storms.

George's father was there too that day but he didn't speak. I never saw him speak, in fact, and it seemed to me that no one had. The man sat looking angry, alone on the sofa in the living room. He rose only to come through the kitchen on his way to the door.

*   *   *

The year George and I went was nearly the end of the revolution, but the way it looked to us, we were arriving at the very beginning. A new world order. Everybody in the world was talking about the revolution, how it was coming over the ocean, it was floating up through Texas. It would spread over America. People were writing their ideas in the papers. But two years later the Berlin Wall came down and soon after that the Sandinistas were gone, the Cold War was over, and the guerrillas in El Salvador handed in their arms, put down their names on a peace accord. By the time we arrived, the Communist decay had set in, but we didn't know. There were a lot of people like us on the scene.

 

PART TWO

CIVIL WAR

BODIES

George and I were on a bus headed into El Salvador, a secret bus in the middle of the night. Soft bundles of people sat on each seat, but the space was so voiceless and dim, you'd think we were all gone and the bus rode emptily along. And yet the bus was heavy, pulling itself up hills around bends. You could feel the brakes holding back the weight as we coasted down. I was angry with George. “This is not going to work,” I told him. Dark windows, the weird sound of cicadas. An occasional wet branch hit the glass. George said nothing.

The bus shuddered through a downshift and rolled to a stop. We'd run only a few kilometers over the border so far. The people in the seats around us began murmuring and shifting at the windows because out on the road we could see men with machine guns filed out in front of the bus and walking along the sides.

*   *   *

It was too bad that we wanted to take the bus to El Salvador. We weren't allowed on the roads. No one was. No foreigners were even allowed in the country at that time, unofficially—save a few special exceptions, and there certainly wasn't anything special about George and me, but we'd managed to get in. We'd lined up a job, although that hadn't gotten us in. Then we'd been persistent. Long after the other gringos had given up, had gone staggering off to Honduras (visit the islands! see the
ruinas
, cheap!), we were still there at the consulate, every day, with our passports, but that hadn't done it either. Finally we figured out a trick they were playing on us involving the papers we needed to get into the country. And even then we hadn't gotten normal visas. El Salvador wasn't giving out plain come-as-you-are visas—what do you think this is, a party? We had overland visas with a three-day window for entrance, which meant you had to come through the land, not drop in from the sky or swim the sea, and you had three days to make it. But either by coincidence (unlikely) or in yet another round of diversions, they'd given us the visas on the very day the rebels of El Salvador—the FMLN, the leftist guerrillas of the mountains—had announced on the radio that their plan was to halt any vehicle they found on the road and blow it up. This was called a “paro,” a “stop,” because things that move stop moving in the face of threatened destruction. Buses, cars, trucks, everyone stopped and stayed home, the roads were tenantless as housetops. We'd gone anyway. (Not my idea.)

*   *   *

The FMLN, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front. Named for Farabundo Martí, that Marxist, radical, peasant leader of the thirties, whose greatest achievement was the botched revolt of 1932—half aborted at the last moment, half carried out in confusion, entirely crushed by the National Guard and resulting in thirty thousand deaths. He rose again in the form of these rebels who took his name, a clear vote for human striving over (or in the absence of?) strength, proof of the poetic (quixotic?) mind of the Salvadoran campesino.

*   *   *

George had a plan as to what we would say if the FMLN stopped the bus. I spoke better Spanish. I'd spent time in Mexico as a child. I would do the talking. The theory was that the guerrillas would shoot Americans or take them hostage. I was supposed to explain to the guerrillas that George and I were on their side and that we'd been trying to find them. That we had meant to put ourselves in their way. We wanted to interview them with our tape recorder and take their pictures. We wanted to join them. But I didn't want to do the talking. I'd mess it up and get us killed and then get blamed for it.

“This is never going to work,” I said.

*   *   *

The men on the ground strayed around the sides, stringing the bus, moving like night creatures. We couldn't see their garb, only their figures and the silhouette of their weapons pointed up. Then the front door sighed open and the people around us quieted. The men got on. At last we could see: they had on military uniforms. It was not the FMLN. It was the
other
teenagers with enormous machine guns, the ones who happened
not
to be assigned to attack civilians today, the militia, checking
papeles
, searching bags, asking questions. We all got off the bus.

*   *   *

We found machine guns disturbing in El Salvador, more so than in Guatemala, where we heard only twigs of rumors of killings. But in El Salvador people were always talking about bodies—the bodies found nearby, the lists passing around of the bodies by name, the lists hidden in a film canister and run over the mountains to Honduras, the lists read aloud in the U.S. Congress, and the counts made, the separate counts for the same set of bodies: the militia's count, the embassy's count, the FMLN's, the villagers', the counts reported in the papers—“two found with hands removed,” “ninety-six found beneath a church.” The counts made no sense, they were off by a hundred, two hundred. They always had to be redone, but already the bodies were gone, no one knew where. The number of bodies was tracked like the stock market. Is the number of bodies growing or shrinking? Over the last year, has it declined by half or risen a third? The count was affected by invisible forces. A flock of birds rising and falling. The number was out of control, a wind coming up in the night, the way those bodies appeared on the streets or in the fields—not that we saw the bodies themselves, we only heard about them, the numbers of them, attached to phrases like “totally false,” “a fabrication of subversives,” “a massacre.”

*   *   *

We were standing alongside the bus. It was maybe the tenth or eleventh time we'd had to get off the bus and now it was nearly dawn. Every half hour, all night, the bus had stopped and we'd had to get off, over and over. I was saying to George that I'd
told
him this wasn't going to work. Then the soldiers said, “You two stay here,” and they waved everyone else back on the bus. There were about six or seven soldiers. They took all of our things out of our bags and lined them up on the ground. They took away our map. “Forbidden.” They gestured with their machine guns for us to pick up our belongings and explain what each item was. They asked questions with their machine guns. “You,” they said, pointing at me with a machine gun. “What are you doing in El Salvador?”

“
Turismo
,” I said. (I'd been told that if a soldier points a gun at you, you should always say “
turismo
.”)

It was still dark, but you could feel the light on its way. “What's in this bottle?” they said. “What is this book? What does it say? Read it. Read it aloud. Translate.” They were passing around our passports. They spilled the plastic bag of cassette tapes on the ground. “What's this?” They took one of the cassette tapes and put it into our cassette player. We didn't know for a moment if they had picked one with music or interviews on it, and George looked very grave. They turned on the cassette player. They had picked one with music on it.

“Sing,” they said. “Sing along.”

We sang. It was a song about a transvestite who loves another transvestite, or maybe only one of them is a transvestite. George and I sang about how girls can be boys and boys can be girls and how mixed up that is. A sad song with deep tones. Behind us the sun was coming up.

“Translate,” the soldiers said with their machine guns. “What does it say?”

“Love song,” George told them, and they did something that looked like a laugh.

TYPICAL MAN

I met George when I was seventeen and a freshman in college at a large state school in a large state, the entire student body united behind rituals involving their sports activities. I was new to that part of the country, had grown up in Chicago, but George had been raised nearby. He'd grown up in the western middle of America, in the kind of neighborhood where most people don't have passports and no one speaks any language other than the one they'd been raised to suspect was God's favorite. George had played tag among these people, had attended their schools, dated their daughters, and so by all counts he should have been like them, but he wasn't, or he didn't seem so to me.

*   *   *

I became his girlfriend at a protest. I'd heard the chanters and the bullhorn from my window, and I'd come out of the dorm and over the grass to watch. I'd never seen a protest up close before. It was one of those anti-CIA protests of the Cold War eighties, back when the CIA still made it serious business to come to campus once a year to interview possible recruits, and the hippies left over from the sixties showed up to exercise their right to object.

I remember seeing George that day. I'd met him once before. He was a friend of a friend from the dorm, and we'd talked one night at a concert. Now he was sifting through the protesters toward me, the hippies swaying. They looked drab and disarranged beside their cop counterparts in fine suits and unhappy helmets, standing in a line. Against this blur, George was young and shining. He shifted through the assortment of people, sliding around them. He came over to the tree I stood under, leaves falling all around. He had blue-green eyes and the sort of blond hair that blonds call not blond. He held up his fist to me like a microphone and asked me what I wanted to say.