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Sick of the Revolution.By Deb Olin Unferth- - - - - - - - Part Five We conducted interviews. That's something we really did. We recorded them with a hand-held tape recorder. We brought a bagful of tapes with music on them and recorded over them one by one. We interviewed dozens of people—politicians, priests, organizers. We walked in off the street and interviewed the goddamn Guatemalan press secretary to the president. In Nicaragua everyone wanted to be interviewed—top people in the government and church. In Bluefields 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. The cabmen wanted to be interviewed. The little kids wanted to be interviewed. Their fathers wanted to be interviewed. In El Salvador no one wanted to be interviewed. We went to the National Palace 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. Can you believe it? No, I cannot believe that, said my boyfriend. But we did get some interviews with artists and priests and a few others there. - - - - We went to interview two nuns in Managua who we'd heard had just come back from the northern front lines. We had our tape recorder, we were all set. We asked the first question. Oh, we can't answer that, they said. Do you know what happens to people who answer that? No, we didn't know. We were just here with our tape recorder. Well, the nuns weren't going to answer any questions like that. And here were some other questions they weren't going to answer. And they began to recount all the questions they wouldn't answer. And while they were at it, they might just tell us their life story—one of them might. The other might tell us what she thought about using medicinal herbs. The one nun had grown up in a village with five brothers and a horse, and the other used medicinal herbs every night and taught others how to use them too. And while they were telling us all this, a violent thunderstorm broke and rain pounded on the tin roof, and my boyfriend and I couldn't hear anything the nuns were saying, only a few words here and there, and we knew the tape recorder wasn't going to pick any of it up. And they weren't going to answer any of our questions. And they were going to keep on talking for as long as they liked. And the questions were probably not very good ones in any case—too general or too pointed. And besides, what did it matter? What were we going to do with the tapes anyway? Toss them in a bag, carry them around till we lost them. We sat back and listened to the rain. - - - - We were bickering on the bus. We were on our way to Estelí to hear the president speak. We went to speeches to record them. We'd woken up later than we'd wanted and then we'd not been able to find the right bus station. Then the bus had taken hours longer than we'd expected—it always did. No matter how long we thought it could possibly take, it always took hours longer. And now it was so late, we would miss the speech for sure and it was certainly somebody's fault, his or mine, and we were not going to stop trying to figure out whose. We got off the bus. Is Ortega speaking here today? we said. Yes, yes, but you don't have to shout about it. Is it over? we said, desperately pointing at the bus-station clock. No, he's still talking. Well, where is he, then? Allá, allá. They waved. We ran off into the burning sun. We ran and ran. We were sweating and choking. We'd missed him for sure. We slowed to a walk. We were already an hour, no, two hours late. Our one chance to see him speak and one of us had screwed it up. We passed people on stoops. Is this the right way? Is he still talking? Sí, habla, they said. We hurried on. After a while we just couldn't go on anymore. We were so tired and hot. Surely the man had stopped talking by now. A taxi pulled up. Is he still talking? said my boyfriend. Sí, sí, said the taximan. The taximan drove us there and we hopped out and ran into the field full of people, holding our tape recorder high. And, yes, he was still talking. He talked for hours after that. We were so bored, we were lying on the ground. Won't he ever shut up, I said. - - - - A Jesuit priest was talking about bodies—the bodies again. We were at the University of Central America in San Salvador. I recall small spiders crawling on me. More people killed here than in Vietnam, he was saying. And this is a tiny country. There were some drawings beside his desk. He saw me staring. Oh, a local artist, he said. He lifted them, showed us. Pictures of people lying naked, side by side, whip and burn marks on their backs, legs, necks. The next year, a few meters from where my boyfriend and I sat, this priest was shot in the head along with five others and the caretaker and her daughter. Somebody snapped Polaroids of the bodies and the brains and put them into photo albums on display. That same month the FMLN pushed into San Salvador and took control of large parts of the city and the army bombed them out. The Berlin Wall had fallen by this time. It was the end, though the war would still sputter on. Years after that I was back in El Salvador. I was in Suchitoto, just across the lake from Chalatenango. I met a young man there who told me about that crazy month in San Salvador. The FMLN had taken over his neighborhood and come into his house. They wanted food, he said. My mother cooked them a big meal, meal after meal. You can't imagine how well they ate. They slept lined up on the floor. One morning I looked out the window and there was a huge tank in front of our house. It took up the whole street. So the FMLN ran away and the army moved in. They put a rocket launcher in the window and my mother dusted it every day. Mom, I said, stop dusting that thing. It doesn't matter if it's dusty. Still she dusted. And she tidied. All day she went around the living room putting the grenades into little rows and folding the soldiers' clothing. They never lived anywhere so clean.
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