Revolution (10 page)

Even I could see the questions were no good, now that we were right in front of him. Ernesto Cardenal had been asked questions like these a thousand times. When is violence justified? Again with this question, we could tell he was thinking.

“Well, is that all the questions?” he said finally, rising. He was polite, but he had better things to do than answer these questions again from these two, what were they, teenagers? Who let them in here, anyway?

“Wait, I have a question,” I said.

“All right,” he said, turning back. “What is it?”

I asked my question and even as it was leaving my mouth (“Tell us the truth, do you or do you not want to go back to that shark lake?”) I knew it was not a good question either. He answered it nicely and he left.

Later we united in our defense: How were we supposed to come up with good questions when everybody else had already asked him all the questions? That guy talked to everybody, which showed a thing or two about him, if you thought about it. And he certainly put on airs in that beret getup. We could have used something big to happen around there just then so we could have asked him about it. An earthquake. Then we would have been the first to ask him: “Padre Cardenal, what do you think about the earthquake?”

So we were together against Cardenal that day, but really it was me against anyone who didn't let me ask questions.

DOCTORS

When the Sandinistas took over the country, they handed out medical degrees and set up clinics in every town. Anyone who needed a doctor could go—free for the Nicaraguan, five dollars for the Internacionalista. George and I went all the time. We started out the trip pretty healthy but we got sicker and sicker. Each time we got sick, we didn't get entirely better so we grew a little more sick and a little more, and finally we just stayed sick. We were sick for months. Diarrhea, nausea, stomach cramps, lethargy. George lost twenty-five pounds, and my stomach slowly expanded, became weirdly bloated, smooth and balloon-like. It was in Nicaragua that being sick became a serious bother. The first time we went to the clinic we saw separate doctors. The doctor I saw took me into his office, had me take off all my clothes. Then he put his hands on my butt and my breasts. “Are you sexually active?” he said. “With how many men have you had sexual relations? Describe your first sexual experience.” I came out of the office and was shaking for hours. After that George and I went to the doctor only as a team. The second doctor treated us together. He saw us together and gave us the same medication and we took the pills together and threw them up at the same time. The third doctor we saw gave us the same medication again and needles to shoot ourselves up with and vials of a liquid that would keep us from throwing up. We couldn't figure out how to use the needles and George tossed it all in the trash.

After that we didn't go back to the doctors for a while.

*   *   *

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.