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Sick of the Revolution.By Deb Olin Unferth- - - - - - - - Part Eight He went back. He went through the Darién Gap and on to Brazil. He fell in love. Not with me. I was back in school by this time and you cannot imagine how weird and lonely it was to be among all those healthy, rosy-cheeked kids. He fell in love with the queen of the peasants. His words. To this day I have no idea what that means. He proposed. To her, of course. Apparently, the queen of the peasants needed to have permission from her father, because apparently the father wouldn't give it. Not unless you have a house to put her in, was what the father said. My (former) boyfriend didn't have any money, of course. Never had. So he went back to the States and got a job doing construction and at night he delivered pizzas to the homes of our citizens and he saved up and went back to Brazil and bought a piece of land. There, he said, now may I marry your daughter? And the father said, I don't see a house to put her in. So he went back to the U.S. and got his old job back at the pizza joint and again broke his back on construction and again he saved up money and he went back and he built a house and then he went to the father and said, There, you see? A house. Now may I marry your daughter? And the father couldn't speak, so awed was he by their love. So he married that peasant queen and he 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. I don't recall how we wound up on the phone. I tracked him down, I suppose, when he was back in the States at some point. So what do you do in Brazil? I asked him on the phone. Nothing, he said. You do nothing all day? Well, he said, we owned a bar for a while, but we traded it for a TV set. - - - - So there it is: He married a queen. They have a TV set. - - - - In Cuba, I tell this story to a woman and she frowns. This is no happy ending. She could just as easily marry her neighbor. - - - - All those revolutionary priests and their followers and the other leaders of the revolution—what happened to those guys? The one I wanted to see the most was the one who seemed hardest to find. I spent a month in Managua tracking him down. I used all my contacts. I finally got his phone number and managed to get an appointment to see him. He'd been very important back in the day. I'd liked him. I'd followed him in the papers all these years, his excommunication, his trips to Columbia. But he had to be very old now and he didn't seem to want to be found. In my notebook, I wrote down directions to his place out in the countryside beside the phone number that had been so hard to get. The night before my appointment, I was robbed on the street and they took my bag with the phone number and directions. I was so pissed off. They'd taken all my books, too. And I had no idea how to get his number again. I got into a taxi early in the morning. I didn't know what I was doing. I was furious, half-crying. Take me to the bus station, I said. What's the matter? said the taximan. I need to see a priest, I said. We'll go to the church. No, I said. I told him the story. I just wanted to talk to him one more time, I said. This is a very moving story, he said. Yeah, I said. You know, I was a Sandinista, he said. Oh yeah? I said, already bored. I'll find him. For $20. I thought about it. Ten, I said. Fifteen. What he did was drive all over and call out the window to people on the street asking if they knew him or had heard of him. He's over there, people said, waving their hands around. We found him with an hour to spare and what could we do with our hour other than sit in a pasture and interview the cab driver. He talked through the whole tape, 60 minutes, so now I'd either have to record over him or not record the priest. Then he let me out at the bottom of a hill. I could see the priest's house at the top. I was trembling. I started to climb.
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