We're giving away books this holiday season. Click here to learn more about our very special holiday deal. - - - - |
Sick of the Revolution.BY DEB OLIN UNFERTH, - - - - Part One My boyfriend and I went to join the revolution. Nicaragua had the best revolution, he and I agreed. There were several other revolutions in the area—in El Salvador and in Guatemala, in Honduras, in Panama (sort of). My boyfriend said we should get shots and malaria pills and that we would ride the bus there. I knew my mother and father were not going to go for this so I didn't tell them. I wrote them a letter from Mexico. Actually I wrote the letter in Nogales on the American side of the border, then I crossed the border and mailed it from the Nogales post office on the Mexican side. The letter went something like:
- - - - Two things: I was 18, and I had recently become a Christian. I was heavy into John Calvin and Kierkegaard and liberation theology. I may not have understood any of it, but my older boyfriend did (he was 20) and that's all that really mattered—that somebody around there knew what was going on even if it wasn't me. - - - - My father still tells the story of the time I went to join the revolution. That girl told us nothing, he says. I had no idea. I open the mailbox and there's a letter from Mexico saying she's off to foment the revolution. He used to shout it, She told me nothing! and point at me—there she is, the traitor, the tramp. Later he said it sadly, shaking his head: I had no idea. Later he said it with pride. His loony girl, a bit like him. Do you know he once owned a Communist bookstore? Now he tells it like an old joke. So one day I open the mailbox ... - - - - As it happens, it was the very end of the revolution, the year my boyfriend and I went, but the way it looked to us, we were arriving at the very beginning. It was a new world order. Everybody in the world was talking about it. The revolution was coming over the ocean. It was floating up through Texas. It could spread over America. People were writing their ideas in the papers. But a year later the Berlin Wall came down and soon after that the Sandinistas were gone, the Cold War was over, and the FMLN signed a peace accord. By the time we arrived, the decay had set in but we didn't know. There were a lot of us like this on the scene. 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? Part Three My boyfriend had several older brothers, the eldest of which had been a hippie and the rest of the brothers thought that was cool. They were sorry they had missed out. They all still listened to the music and wore the floppy hats and talked about how the eldest had had all the luck. One of my boyfriend's favorite songs was about a man who is arrested for littering. There's a line in the song that goes, "After the ordeal ...," and he enunciates it slowly and with a drawl: "After the orrrr-deal ..." The singer is referring to being arrested for littering, but since the song is really about the Vietnam War, that line seemed to my boyfriend to refer to that, too. My boyfriend liked that line. He thought it was funny and he said it all the time and since he said it, I did, too. The idea was you said it instead of saying: What is going on here? This is unbelievable, how can this even be happening? Instead of saying that, you waved an arm at it, backwards, like the situation was behind you, already over, and you said with a drawl, After the orrrr-deal ... - - - - My boyfriend lined up a revolution job for us in El Salvador. In those days it was called a revolution—the Salvadoran Revolution. Nowadays people call it a civil war—the Salvadoran Civil War. As it happens this was during the part of the Salvadoran Civil War when the villages were being scorched and the villagers were being rounded up and killed by military forces. It was supposed to encourage the villagers to not be angry at the military and not want to overthrow the government in charge. That, or it was supposed to get rid of the problem of the villagers altogether. But sometimes what happened was that a mother and father would be killed and there would be a child left over, hidden, who would come out later and walk to another village, maybe with a little brother or a sister or a friend in hand. So this orphanage had been set up just outside the war zone. I believe it was at the edge of the department Chalatenango. It was somewhere around there. The kids were taken there and then they rode in little buses over the hills each day to local village schools and then they rode back and everybody agreed not to bomb them or shoot them, even though these kids were nascent insurgents, sympathizers by birth, so people said, and in fact the military did bomb them, just the once—killed the kitchen, before we arrived—after all, the place was filled with a bunch of growing FMLN guerrilla fighters, so what did they expect? The problem is then the war moved over a little so then the orphanage was right in the middle of it and then the paro began so the buses stopped running and the kids couldn't go to school or leave the premises at all. This is about the time my boyfriend signed us up for the job. - - - - At the orphanage we held all-night prayer vigils. What is that? I wondered. This was my first night at the place. There was a Salvadoran woman whom I will call Bea who ran the orphanage and was always ready to tell me what was going on as if I were the stupidest person around, which I likely was. An all-night vigil, she said. You know, prayer. What for? Por la guerra. For the war. Have you heard we have a revolution going on? Well, I didn't think that praying all night was going to help, not to mention how smart is it to keep 8-year-olds up past 10, but, OK, let's all pray for the war. What initiative we'd show God, what enterprise. - - - - I was a Calvinist-Marxist-Kierkegaardian Christian. To put it in a way that accurately reflects my inaccurate understanding: Calvinists believe that God has already decided your fate. You can pray or strive or whatnot and you should, for some reason, but there isn't much you can do about a thing. The liberation theologians, on the other hand, believe that fate has not yet been determined. We must take (armed) action on earth, seize the promised land, force the future. I often found these two combined to be confusing, but luckily they were balanced by a dose of Kierkegaard: Yes, you're right, the thing is absurd. Who could believe such nonsense. But if it made sense, what would be so special about faith? At the orphanage they weren't any of those. They were evangelical: Let's just sit here and pray, by God. Maybe we'll get what we want by pleading. - - - - So my first night we all sat down together on the floor. We lit candles and we sang songs to God. Please take care of everybody, we prayed. You are so wonderful, God, we said. Outside, the shooting started up, which surprised me. I hadn't realized how close we were to the fighting. It sounded like it was right outside. Now I could see the sense in an all-night vigil. Explosions shook the floor and the children began crying. These were the children whose villages had been burned to the ground, their parents pulled away, shot or tortured, while they hid in a bush and watched. I had no idea what I was supposed to do. - - - - I tried to come up with projects. It was at the orphanage that I had the idea of planting a garden. I had done something like this in the second grade—not outside, but in little cups at our desks, some indestructible vine. There was plenty of dirt and grass around El Salvador. Go ahead, said Bea. I guess she decided not to point out that these kids had come from agrarian villages. A man came once a week to bring supplies and when he did he took me to a town where I could buy seeds. I was happy with my industriousness. I was ready to direct the orphans. They surrounded me. They looked on curiously. I was crouching on the ground. My boyfriend came over. What are you planting? he said. I held up the packages. Flowers? he said. They didn't have any vegetable seeds? He took the packages. He read them slowly, one by one. You think they have a shortage of flowers? I put down my little spade. No, no, he said. By all means. Bring on the flowers. I'll sit right here and watch. - - - - My boyfriend was a real hit. You should have seen him out there running around in circles with the boys. Making them do push-ups. They loved him. It was awful. They were scared of me. A girl who couldn't pat a tortilla. Who could barely carry water. Who couldn't sew. I was a disaster. I was scared of them, too. - - - - The truth is it didn't work out. I won't say what I did to result in my dismissal. I was 18, OK? Let's just say that my ideas about Christianity were more liberal than Bea's (they weren't allowed to dance or wear makeup, to give you an idea) and I knew a few things that teenage girls like to do for fun. They kicked us (me) out after a couple of weeks. The paro was over by this time. It had been over and started and over and started and over by this time. The man came and drove us away from the orphanage. He dropped us off on an empty road and left. - - - - Well, I said to my boyfriend. We stood on the road with our backpacks. We better figure out how to get out of here. How can you be fired from a job that doesn't pay? My boyfriend was marveling at this. I looked up and down the road. I squinted. Which way do you think we should go? Didn't you do any baby-sitting in high school? It wasn't my fault, I said. OK. Whose fault was it, then? I never said I wanted to come here. Oh, I see. He was really working himself up. He was throwing his arms out and shouting. I see. It's my fault. That's it, I said. I'm leaving. We can't stay here, now can we. He gestured to here—a bowl of blue, a stack of clouds, a road running over a summit. Nothing. Not even a pig scratching around. Not even a rooster. I turned and started walking. Where are you going? he called. Hey, he said. Where do you think you're going? I yelled across the flat of field. Away from you! Fine! I hate you! I screamed. I hate you, too! he screamed back. He walked off in the other direction. I kept walking. I was so upset I could barely see. I wiped away my tears with violent swipes across my face. Not even a telephone pole on the horizon. Just a white sky. I walked on, crying and hiccupping, down one hill and up another. I was angry and ashamed and I hated him with the freshness of wet cement, a new imprint, a hand coming down on my mind and marking it. I shifted my stupid backpack and walked on. Who did he think he was, bringing me to a place like this, the bully? Oh, I'd show him. I imagined myself telling the story to a blurry assemblage of strangers, defending myself, explaining. I stopped. I was at the bottom of a hill. I turned around, but my view was blocked. I couldn't see him. The tears started coming again. Far off was a line of mountains. Not a town in sight. I had no idea how to get home. I went on. I came to the top of a hill and looked back. He had stopped and was standing, a lone figure on a hill, the one vertical object. The hum of mosquitoes, the sweep of valley air. He was looking toward me. I kept going, but more slowly. I increased the distance between us by smaller increments. I looked back again. He was walking in my direction. I went even slower. I strolled past thin white birds standing in the fields. He followed, and in this way we went over the hills. Finally I stopped. I brushed the dust from my dress and turned to face him. He came closer and closer. He was right in front of me. Marry me, he said. Part Four I more or less had a bad attitude from here on out. I didn't want any more guns in my face. I didn't want any more Marshall Law. There had been some confusion on this point. Before we went to Central America, my boyfriend had told me that San Salvador was under martial law. He said it several times and it comforted me every time because I thought he was saying Marshall Law and that it referred to a restructuring program that I messily confused in my mind with World War II and the Marshall Plan. Imagine my surprise when we arrived. I don't want to tell about our time in San Salvador in the first weeks of our engagement or about getting out of El Salvador, the hiding under tarps in the back of trucks. Our visas expired before we could make it to the border and we had to sort of smuggle ourselves across with some guys taking black-market gym shoes to Nicaragua. Finally, we made it to Managua on a chicken bus. We pulled into the station amid the usual bus-station chaos. I stepped into the doorway of the bus and saw a North American a few yards away. He was waiting to get on. He had two cameras around his neck and was a foot higher than the Nicaraguan people around him. I hadn't seen any other North Americans since Guatemala. He seemed so tall and white and bald and fat, I was shocked for a moment. It was my first internacionalista. Hey, you! he yelled over the crowd. You can't be older than 14. What are you doing here? I'm 18, you old dog, I said, and I walked into the revolution. - - - - The revolutionary internacionalistas knew where to go every evening at 6 o'clock: Comedor Sarah. They came in by plane, by bus, car, boat, van, bike. They came on foot. Thousands of lines on earth and in sky diving into Nicaragua, landing in Granada, Leon, Estelí, Managua. The internacionalistas: struggling with their luggage, their backpacks and suitcases, their hoes, books, cash, cisterns. If you showed up at Sarah's at 7 the food was gone. If you showed up at 8 the beer was gone. Anyone who showed up at 8 had to drink Rojita and sit in the back. El Salvador made Nicaragua look like ping-pong. And helping the Sandinistas was like joining the Peace Corps. The Peace Corps with guns. We were called internacionalistas and we were from all over the world. We had poetry readings and story time. We did tricks for the kids. We looked for air-conditioning. We would make this revolution, we swore. We would help our team win. There were theater groups, Mennonites, herds of journalists, all of them trooping around. At night they drank rum and got into arguments, called each other capitalists or fascists. Then they all became friends again and sang revolution songs until 2 or 3 in the morning. - - - - We talked about city zoning, South Africa, the bridges blown in Jalapa. We talked about God and the economy. Ben Linder, Oliver North. We sang the "Internationale" in many different languages (Völker, hört die Signale, auf zum letzten Gefecht ...). At one point, I recall, the place was full of jugglers. Yes, a group of jugglers had come—from Canada, I think. The idea was they would go to the north and walk across the war zones, performing. Imagine: We were walking across their war, juggling. We were bringing guitars, plays adapted from Gogol, actual elephants wearing tasseled hats. I saw it myself. They wanted land, literacy, a decent doctor. We wanted a nice sing-along and a ballet. We weren't a revolution. We were an armed circus. - - - - Since I was the youngest and spoke Spanish, they could tell me to do anything and I would. Nearly every day there was something for us to do. On the weekend, we went to the U.S. embassy to protest. My boyfriend and I were very good at chanting. We did our share everywhere we went. In Guatemala we had gone to many protests and we had chanted along heartily. The ones in Spanish were easy and rhymed: Pueblo, escucha! Tu hijo esta en la lucha! The Mayan chants were much harder. Even the ones that had been translated into Spanish were a paragraph long and included images of flying people and growing plants. Each Mayan chant ended with a cry against the landino, a thank-you to friends, a prayer to the corn and the sun and a long list of saints. My boyfriend and I started out bravely along with them but were mumbling and shuffling by the end. - - - - At one point we were given a job building bikes. Bikes for the revolution. Because of the trade embargo, there were fewer and fewer cars and trucks. The soldiers would ride bikes, the internacionalistas decided. China donated some 6,000 unassembled bicycles. My boyfriend and I were going to assemble them. We reported to the mechanic the first morning. He taught us long and hard. He really taught us. He went on and on and he used many words and gestures. He was very good at teaching and serious about it. I was so busy watching him teach me how to put on the 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 thought it was funny how angry he was getting. He kept looking at what we were doing and then saying, Honest to God! and grabbing it and doing it like he told us to before. - - - - I had jobs finding food, cutting soldiers' hair, showing around the new arrivals, what else? There were so many jobs I could do badly ... - - - - Now it is years and years later, so many years later it seems crazy that I'm still here, that I'm still me, that I haven't died and been reincarnated and returned to Nicaragua as a turtle. But, no, I'm still me. I've found another former internacionalista—in fact, a European. We just can't keep away. We come back and come back and come back. He and I sit around Managua shaking our heads. Old Nica, Nica of the revolution, those were the days, we say. It's sure not like it used to be. Remember Comedor Sarah? Sarah! You know, she's not around anymore, trying to sell the place. We shake our heads. Remember the water? How they turned it off one day a week? The fun we had. Oh, yes, the water, it smelled like chlorine. Remember the Russians? The uniforms, the tanks? And the cordobas! You had to carry a bucketful everywhere you went. Remember Molinitos? What? It was a pension. No. Sure, you remember, right around the corner. The Danes stayed there. Danes? Sure. I don't remember any Danes anywhere. Well, they were here. He and I sit in the Hotel Santos, where there are two sets of water pipes, one line beside the other in every bathroom, over every sink. One line doesn't work, but nobody bothered to pull the dead one out, so two pipes run up the wall and there are two shower heads in every shower. You have to try both faucets. The entire hotel is built with this philosophy. The rafters are a mess of metal and wood. Wooden beams hang loosely. Half-finished paintings sit on the floor. Projects start and are deserted. People strip off the pieces they need and leave the rest swinging half-attached, like a rejected thought, no longer in use but still there. The electric wiring hangs in a jumble from the ceiling, strings across the wall. It's held together with bits of black electrical tape, here wrapped around a curtain rod, there forming a spider web on the ceiling, suspended like a trapeze net. Remember Nicaragua of the revolution? we say. The shining eyes? Everyone was so excited. The people at home, he says, I tell them: Nicaragua is still beautiful. You shouldn't abandon old friends. 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. Part Six Oh, yes, I said. Sure. Mr. Moral. My boyfriend. With his principles. First he'd told me we wouldn't trade on the black market. If there was one thing tearing apart the revolution, he said, it was corruption—bribes, black market, crime. We would play fair, he said, and in this small way we would be revolutionaries, revolutionaries of the economy. Although there isn't anything so revolutionary about obeying the law. But fine, good, agreed. No black market. So then what was he doing trading dollars on the black market one week into Nicaragua? All right, all right, he said. We can't all be perfect, can we? Had I seen the markup on the cordoba? It's absurd. If they're going to make it impossible for us, what else are we supposed to do? Are we supposed to starve while everybody else eats? So that one thing. Trade dollars, nothing else. So what was he doing buying food on the black market? Stolen military tins and plastic packets of peanut butter? Somebody's going to buy the stuff, it may as well be us because at least at heart we're trying to help the revolution. But somebody stole that from the soldiers. Well, it's stolen already. We're not going to find them and give it back. Besides, the soldiers probably sold it. What did they want with the stuff? And, besides, these plastic packets travel well and who knew the next time we'd see peanut butter or the next time we'd be dropped off on some dusty crossroad with nothing to eat? Fine, buy black-market food, that one other thing, but nothing else. So, what is this, was he actually bribing that clerk? Now look, do you know how much it costs to extend our visas? How are we supposed to help this fine revolution if we have to pay all our money just to stay? We were going to spend the extra money inside the country in any case, so what's the difference? But bribing? What would God have to say about that? That must be the limit, that must be over the limit. But, no, as it turned out, that wasn't the limit. Smuggling, that was the limit. Except that wasn't the limit, either. We could do anything. We could steal, we could look into faces and lie, we could forge documents, we could pull tricks and run. It's fine, it turned out. Part Seven By the time we got to Panama, we weren't engaged anymore. We had run out of money almost completely. We were both sick. We were eating bread for most of our meals. I was pretending to be pregnant for free food. My parents refused to wire us money. We were robbed over and over. We kept our money well distributed among our belongings and on our persons so the thieves made off with only a few dollars at a time, but it added up. Once, we were robbed by some men who never came anywhere near us or our belongings. We were at a border. I don't even remember where anymore. It must have had something to do with Nicaragua, although we weren't at the Nicaraguan border. My boyfriend was really sick. The idea was to get to Nicaragua, where they had socialized medicine and the doctors cost five bucks. My boyfriend couldn't move very much, so I had to kind of prop him up while we waited for the bus to leave. I was terrified, as usual. It was my conviction that as the elder and as the instigator of this whole trip he should be taking care of me and if he was lying there shaking with fever, how could he? He wanted me to buy some black-market cordobas here, where they were cheaper. He usually changed the money. I ran off and bought $60 worth from a man standing on the side of the road. He gave me stacks and stacks of bills. So many I couldn't carry them all. I tried, but they kept falling on the ground and I had to make two trips. I limped back to my boyfriend with the second batch and dropped them at his feet. What the hell is that? he said, raising his head a little. What are we going to do with all that? How much did you change, like 50 bucks? Don't tell me you changed 50 bucks. You should have changed 10. I tried to get the money into our day bags, but it wouldn't fit. I had to get our backpacks down off the top of the bus and try shoving it in those, but it wasn't going in there, either. We'll have to throw it away, said m |