Revolution (16 page)

*   *   *

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 didn'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.”

*   *   *

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.”