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Sick of the Revolution.By Deb Olin Unferth- - - - - - - - Part Two It was night. We were on a bus going into El Salvador. It's too bad that we wanted to take the bus to El Salvador, because we weren't allowed on the roads. No one was. No foreigners were even allowed in the country at that time, except a few special exceptions, and there wasn't anything special about us, but we'd managed to get in. We'd gotten overland visas with a three-day window for entrance—but either by coincidence (unlikely) or by yet another round of diversions, they'd given us the visas on the very day the FMLN had announced a paro. We'd gone anyway (not my idea). - - - - 1. the headlights of our bus 2. the sound of cicadas Other than that it was like driving through outer space. - - - - Paro means stop. A paro was when the FMLN announced that their plan was to stop any vehicle they found on the road and attack it and burn it. All transportation halted during a paro. But we had our special visas and only three days to get into the country. We went to the bus station and hung around until we found out about a secret bus that would try to go through in the middle of the night. My boyfriend had a plan for what we would say if the guerrilleros stopped the bus. I spoke better Spanish. I was supposed to explain that we had been trying to find them. That we meant to put ourselves in their way. That we wanted to interview them with our tape recorder and take their picture. That we wanted to join them. This is never going to work, I said. - - - - In El Salvador during that time people were always talking about bodies. There were lists passed around of the bodies by name and there were counts made—"two found with hands removed," "96 found beneath a church." There were many separate counts for the same set of bodies. The militia counted, the reporters counted, the FMLN, the embassy, the villagers. The counts contradicted, 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. Are the numbers growing or shrinking? Over the last year, have they declined by half or risen by 20? Invisible forces affected it. It was like a flock of birds rising and falling. It was a number that was out of control, a wind coming up in the night, the way those bodies appeared on the streets or in the fields. It was a number attached to phrases like "totally false," "a fabrication of subversives," - - - - The bus stopped that night, all right, at least 15 times, and we all had to get off and back on, all night, on and off, every half hour. Each time the driver downshifted, the people in the seats began murmuring, because we could see there were men with machine guns outside, blocking the road and alongside the bus, but we couldn't see which men with machine guns it was. Then the men got on the bus and we could see: it was not the FMLN. It was the other incredibly young men with enormous machine guns, the ones who today happened not to be assigned to attack the bus: the militia, checking papeles, searching bags, asking questions. We all got off the bus. - - - - It was nearly dawn. We were standing alongside the bus. I was whispering to my boyfriend 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 of them. They took all of our things out of our bags and lined them up on the ground. They took away our map. Forbidden, they said. 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? It was still dark, but you could feel the light on its way. The soldiers poked at the pages of my passport. What's in this bottle? they said. What is this book? What does it say? Read it. Read it aloud. Translate. They took our cassette tapes and put one into our cassette player. We didn't know for a moment if they had picked one with music on it and my boyfriend looked very grave. They turned it on. They had picked one with music on it. Sing, they said. Sing along. We sang. It happened to be a song about a transvestite who loves another transvestite, or maybe only one of them is a transvestite. It was a sad song with deep tones. Behind us the sun was coming up. My boyfriend and I sang about how girls are and how boys are, and how mixed up that is. Translate, the soldiers said, pointing their machine guns at us. What does it say?
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