Revolution (12 page)

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 head 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.

“Oh, you're working?” said the official at the customs office.

“Sure we're working.”

“All right. Where do you work?”

George looked at me. “Bicicletas Sí, Bombas No,” he said.

“Bicicletas Sí, Bombas No?” The official was writing on a form.

“Yes, we work there, we worked there.”

“
Trabajábamos
,” I said. “Worked.”

“Which is it?” He clicked his pen. “You work or worked?”

“Worked,” George admitted.

The official put down the pen. “So where do you work now?”

The short of it was we had to leave if we wanted to stay. We had to cross a border and come back—pay the entry tax. George said we should go to Costa Rica and find out why
they
didn't have a revolution. Didn't the Ticos want a revolution too?

*   *   *

Raise your hand if you've been to Costa Rica. How did you like it?

I, for one, will never forget the first hours I spent in Costa Rica, after being in Nicaragua and El Salvador those months. We rode over the border and from that moment the air was cooler.

“Is the air cooler?” I said.

“Yes, it's cooler,” said George. And the road was smoother, George looked handsomer. The flowers were fresher, seemed larger out in the fields. The lines for food at rest stops were shorter, more orderly. The road signs made sense suddenly and people spoke clearly. The bus seemed less likely to break down, now that it was riding away from those ravaged countries to the north.

San Jose, the capital: riding into that city was like riding into Bethlehem or Las Vegas. There was that much holy to look at. Grocery stores and pizza shops, tall buildings made of steel and glass. It was like seeing it all for the first time—that's how foreign it seemed. It was like someone else was seeing it. We felt dirty before it. The city was shining and multiform and complex. We could see out the window of the bus unbroken sidewalks, stores with names, billboards for breath mints, women wearing pantyhose, the faces of TV sets, a line of them on racks, cars on the street less than a decade old. George and I climbed off the bus and walked through the city. We dared to buy things—a can of diet soda, a slice of chocolate cake. We looked in through panes of glass at swimsuits and pie pans and clocks, plastic shaped into toys and containers and telephones (let's face it: plastic was the real revolution). We saw ourselves on the mirrored sides of buildings. We walked into and out of air-conditioning. We looked at a theater that looked like it had been made to be looked at.

We came to rest on a park bench in the plaza, the city moving in circles around us.

“Capitalism is wonderful,” I said, my mouth full of cake.