by Mary Morris
But Arturo blushed and shook his head. "I didn't do anything you didn't do, Tamar."
Tamar shook her head, acknowledging that neither would win this discussion. He took us each by the arm. "Come," he said. "Let's go somewhere where we can talk." And we made our way through the crowd of a quarter of a million people back toward a small stand where you could purchase beer. He bought us each a beer and we sat down.
"So," Tamar said, "where have you been keeping yourself?" She laughed, tossing her blond curls.
"Oh, I am defending borders. I am doing security checks. All day and all night long I am working. It is difficult," he said with a laugh, "this victory."
The next day on our way to a market Tamar told me about Arturo. She said he had been a journalist but had joined the underground. He had been captured and tortured for a long time. His hatred ran deep. Arturo was a victim of history, she said.
We reached the market. It was filled with flowers, coffee beans, cotton, children. We went to meet a group of women who talked about their cooperative and how it worked. On the wall were pictures of children. I asked one of the women who they were. The women grew silent until their spokeswoman said, "These are our children. They died in fighting. They are heroes of the revolution. All mothers," she said, "mourn the loss of all children. Do you have children?" she asked me. I said I did not. "When you have a child, you will know what it is to pin your child's picture to the wall."
The subcomandante came to the hotel that evening and asked if Tamar and I would like to go to a café. He drove us through the streets of Managua to a small park. Inside the park was a place to sit and have a beer. Two other women from our group had come with us and we sat at a table, talking. One of the women asked what Nicaragua would do if the United States decided to invade. Arturo laughed. "We are already preparing ourselves for the worst," he said. His steel-gray eyes sparkled as he spoke. "But try to imagine the occupation of Nicaragua. We are a people with a great capacity for covert war. We have malnutrition, but we also have tremendous experience in clandestine war. We got rid of Somoza with sticks and stones. No one is thinking about big weapons here. My biggest weapon will be I'll cut off my curls and dye my hair." He pointed to his head of curls. "I'll dye it black and shave my mustache. And I will become a citizen. An ordinary citizen, and I will kill whomever I need to kill in order to stay free. What we say here is 'free homeland or death.' Those are not just words. Nicaraguans mean this. We have a very precise, clear meaning of death. We never lose our happiness. Every day people die, but we don't lose our happiness. We are free in our hearts. They can do anything they want to my body. But they'll never touch my soul."
I don't know for how many hours Arturo continued talking in this vein, but it was a long time, and no one interrupted him. Later he drove us home. We drove through a residential neighborhood that soon turned into deserted streets, bombed-out buildings, an area resembling the South Bronx. There were no streetlights and I began to feel nervous. "Are we lost?" I asked. I looked all around me and saw nothing. "No, no," he said. "You are not lost. Don't be afraid," Arturo said. He pulled a revolver out of his hip pocket. "You are with me."
The next day we traveled to Masaya. We walked through this city of political slogans and bullet-ridden walls. It was in Masaya just a few years before that the first spontaneous insurrection against the Guardia occurred. Camillo Ortega, brother of Daniel and Humberto, died here, fighting. As we walked through Masaya, children followed. A boy of about seventeen came up to me. He said, "Are you North Americans?" I said we were. He said, "Why are you fighting with Nicaragua?"
"I don't know," I replied.
"I don't either," he said. "But I don't want to fight." He asked me to write to him. Carefully he wrote down his name and address on a card. I gave him mine. "Please," he said, "write me a letter. I want to hear from you." He looked at me with longing eyes. "I don't want to fight," he told me. He had warm, brown eyes and he seemed very sad. "I don't want to be in a war. I am afraid I'll be killed." Now he whispered, his face pressed close to my face. "I will write to you," he said. "Then you will write back to me." I promised I would. His eyes followed me as I headed down the street.
He would write me one letter, which I answered. Then I never heard from him again.
That afternoon Arturo left a message at the cultural center, saying he would like to take Tamar and me to dinner, but at dinnertime he phoned. He had an emergency to attend to, but he said that the following evening he would pick us up at seven. The next evening, just before his car arrived, Tamar came to my room. "I'm not going with you," she said. "I have to go with a group somewhere."
"Tamar," I said, "please, I don't want to go alone."
"You'll be fine," she said. "He is a great man."
A military car came for me at seven and the driver sent Arturo's apologies. He had had to work late and would meet me at his house. I sat in the back of the limousine, equipped with walkie-talkie and, lying beside the driver's seat, an automatic rifle. I watched the landscape pass as we drove to the outskirts of Managua.
The suburbs were bucolic. Lawns, tree-lined streets, crickets chirping. It was a night that reminded me of home, of my childhood in the Midwest. I could have been driving through northern Illinois just then. I could have been anywhere. Kansas. I enjoyed the feeling of the evening. The breeze, the cooler air. At that moment, it seemed difficult to believe all that had happened here.
As we drove, the neighborhood changed. The houses grew larger, more luxurious. Later I learned that these houses had been owned by the staunch supporters of Somoza and were now lived in by high government officials. At last we pulled up in front of a house. It had a low cement wall around it and the top of the wall was covered with barbed wire. At the only entrance sat a man with a machine gun.
The driver honked and out of the dark entrance the subcomandante emerged, backlit in a halo of mist and smoke. He kissed me hello on both cheeks and led me into his house. It was a big house with a patio entrance and another patio off to the side. We entered a large living room, devoid of furnishings except for a small cot with a blanket and throw pillows, a quadraphonic sound system that blasted "Bridge Over Troubled Water," and an II" x 14" photo of the subcomandante with Fidel Castro.
I wandered through the bleak setting. There were three bedrooms, with their doors open, and in each was only an unmade army cot for furniture. In the dining room the table was not set, and the chairs were missing. There was no sense of dinner, of cooking. No sense of a woman's presence. No sense of any personal life at all.
The music switched from Simon and Garfunkel to a tape of light rock, Muzak style, of the Beatles, then the Bee Gees and Saturday Night Fever, and on to the Best of Motown. Arturo led me to the side patio, where he had set up a bar and a few small dishes of nuts and cheese. I looked around, feeling awkward and surprised and not knowing what to say. So I said that his house didn't seem all that protected. "It looks as if anyone could get in," I said.
"Oh, yes, you are right. Anyone could. They just couldn't get out." He offered me a drink. I said I'd have vodka. He showed me a bottle of the best Russian vodka and poured me a drink. He talked as he poured, but the music was so loud, with four speakers blasting into the patio, that I could not hear him at all. After a while, I said, "Excuse me, Arturo, do you think we could turn the music down? I'd like to talk, but I can't hear you."
But he was obsessed with the loud music that roared through his house as if it were a disco. He changed the tape to salsa, soft jazz, and then classical—Aranjuez and the Albinoni concerto for strings—and finally Burt Bacharach, "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head." He waltzed with me into a corner, away from his guards. I waltzed him back onto the patio. He kept trying to get out of the sight of his guards and I kept trying to waltz back into their view. Finally I grew tired of this dance. "Let's sit down," I said. "I want to rest."
He began to talk of his travels. He had been to India and China, to Russia and Madagascar. He had been to Tahiti an
d several times to New York. "Here," he said. "Here is a wonderful liquor from China." He reached across to his bar and held up a bottle. Inside the bottle was a small, coiled, dead snake. He opened up the bottle. "You must smell it," he said.
"No, thank you." I turned away.
"But you must." He held the bottle to my nose. "They drop the snake in alive," he went on, still putting the bottle to my nose. "It is an odor emitted by the dying snake," he said, "that gives the liquor its perfume."
He put the bottle away and, pouring me another drink, continued. "But the best food I have ever eaten is in North Vietnam. You know, once I ate a meal that represented the four seasons. It was a beautiful plate with white food for winter and greens for springtime and orange for autumn and yellow for summer. Another time I ate a meal that was the great rivers of the world. Each meal is symbolic. Each food, specially prepared, has some greater meaning." He handed me perhaps my fourth vodka tonic of the evening. I wasn't really counting any longer.
"But the most incredible dish I ever had," he went on, "was this delicacy from Vietnam. It is the cooking they do with monkeys. They have a soup they make with the hands and feet of monkeys—they look like a baby's hands and feet—and it is delicious to suck on these, but the most remarkable dish I ever had was monkey's brains." He leaned close to me as he spoke. "They have a special table with holes in it and in a cage they have live monkeys. They grab a monkey and stick its head through the table so that the top sticks out, and with a special knife for this purpose they slice off the top of the head. You cannot believe the screeching sound the monkey makes when this happens. Then they put a sauce on this slice of monkey head, and you eat it, just like that, raw. I have tasted many things in my life, but nothing has impressed me the way this has."
He asked if I wanted to dance again. I said I didn't. I wanted to go to the bathroom. But he took me by the arms and began waltzing. "Arturo," I said, "you are a handsome man. You are forty-five years old. Don't you have a wife somewhere? Don't you have a family?"
He waved his hand in my face. "Others do, but, well, I do and I don't." He looked away. "I gave up everything for my country." He sighed and looked down. "Everything," he said.
He reached across and tried to kiss me, and I pulled away. "I am not feeling well. I'd like to get back home."
But he didn't seem to hear. Instead, he spun across the patio, around and around, clutching me in his arms. I pew more and more dizzy until I almost collapsed. I pushed him away. "Please," I said, "I am very tired now. I have hardly eaten all day. I need to use the bathroom."
His guard showed me the way to the bathroom, and when I was finished, I looked at my watch. It was way past midnight, and still there was no sign of food. I wandered into the kitchen, thinking I'd see something that resembled dinner.
The kitchen was large and barren. It had once been white but was now a filthy gray. The floor was sticky and it took me a moment to understand that what was running everywhere was roaches. The only food I saw was a piece of bread on a small plate with roaches swarming all around it.
I thought I was going to be sick. I had no idea what to do, so I staggered back onto the patio. "I am hungry," I said, "and there is no food."
"Of course there is food," he said, angrily now. "There is plenty of food. It is all prepared. I will go get you your food." He stomped off and returned with a plate filled with glop that looked like army food—some kind of polenta with fried pork. Then he launched into a harangue against me. He said, "You are an intellectual but you have been alienated from your intellect. You think you understand, but you have no real feeling for what we are all about." He went into a fairly poetic and elevated speech about my lack of revolutionary development. He was so furious that at last he got up and turned off the music, and all I could think was, thank God. Suddenly, for the first time that evening, it was quiet. It was unbelievably quiet. "I have no idea what your problem is," he said. "I am only trying to be hospitable. I am trying to make you understand the revolution in Nicaragua."
"I am trying to understand." I was in tears. "I think I do understand." Now, from hunger and fatigue, from drinking and fear, from anger toward him and frustration with my own limitations, I was sobbing.
He was quiet for a moment. Then he stood up and took me by the hand. "Come," he said, growing gentler. "You must see the orchard. This is where I work. This is where I get my sense of peace." He led me outside into a very pleasant orchard with peach trees and plum and mango. "Every morning at five A.M. I come here."
"It is beautiful," I said. "It is very peaceful." It really was.
"People think it is easy to keep up an orchard like this in the tropics, but it is not easy. It will not grow by itself. The sun burns it. Parasites devour it. It needs care and tending. It is like the revolution. Everything takes work and time."
"Arturo," I said, exhausted, "I must go back now."
"Won't you have a brandy?"
It was now after three in the morning. "It is almost time for you to be in your orchard," I said. "And I'll be sick if I have a brandy."
Annoyed with me once again, he snapped his fingers and summoned his driver. After walking me to the car, he kissed me on both cheeks. As I drove away, I saw him, again backlit in that halo of mist, the armed guard behind him. When the car turned off the street, the subcomandante was still standing there, a lonely hero, his orchard of ripe fruit shimmering behind him.
Flight
IN DREAMS I AM AN ANIMAL. I HAVE THE FUR OF A white tiger. The flight of an owl. The body of a blue whale. I dwell in jungles; my cubs are hidden in a lair in a mountainside, covered with brush. When I hunt it is from the sky. I am a night stalker—my prey only the smallest things. Lizards, mice, orange salamanders. But water is my element and it is where I love to be. I rise and breach, fall and dive. I dwell in all these places and in all places I am content to be. In dreams I am an animal. In these dreams I am free.
I know the road that lies before me. I know it well. I have traveled it before. Ten, twenty, a hundred times. In this lifetime and in others. Each turn and twist is known to me. Markers are familiar. A cactus, a donkey, a wildflower patch. I have been gone for weeks. For months, for decades, or more, but it is all there as I left it. The house, the children, Lupe. No one here will ever change or grow old. Now I am going back, and as the bus approaches, a weight lifts. My ghosts recede. I know they will all be there waiting, even if I am frail and old.
As I drag my bags up the street, the children converge, shouting, calling my name. They grab at me like hungry dogs, cling to my ankles and arms. My pockets, laden with candy, trinkets, tiny flags, are soon emptied. The children engulf me, pulling me down. I fall to my knees on the dusty road. Polio, Lisa, Agustín, come running. More children fling themselves upon me. I am drowning in a sea of children, tossing in waves of children. Reaching out my arms, I let them take me to the ground, into the dust, and they climb all over me, laughing.
***
I could not remember what my body looked like. It had been months since I had last seen it in a full-length mirror. I tried to catch a glimpse of my shape in windows as I passed, but the glass is old in San Miguel, and what came to me was a distortion.
One day when Lupe and Maria Elena were bathing Polio in my kitchen sink, I asked them, "Have I gotten fat?"
They both looked at me, amazed by the question. Lupe took it very seriously. "No, but you are gordita."
"Gordita?" This means chubby. I was enraged. "How can you say I am gordita?" I ran my hands over my body, which felt firm to me, strong. Suddenly I was an Amazon, ready to do battle. Lupe squeezed my arm to me. She tugged at a ripple of flesh. "Gordita," she confirmed.
Maréa Elena nodded. "It is not unattractive," she said. Maria Elena, though pregnant, remained bone thin. She pinched her own arm. "It is better than this chicken's leg."
I poked at Lupe's belly and she jumped away. "I am having a baby," she said.
"Not here." I laughed, jabbing her in the sides, grabbi
ng handfuls of flesh as she tried to run away.
"You are old and gordita," Lupe taunted me as I chased her through the room.
At night I lay in bed, running my hands across my thighs, my belly, my breasts. I was blind to myself. I could not see what others saw; I had no sense of how others saw me. I was disappearing in space. Time also slipped away. I lost track of the days. Every day was Sunday.
THOUGH IT WAS TOO EARLY FOR THE RAINY SEASON, it rained every day. The electricity failed and I could not work. My typewriter lay idle. I returned to pen and paper, but I needed something to drown out the noise of the construction next door. It began early every morning, and sometimes I would go to my roof and look down. It seemed they were building an enormous enclosed chicken farm next door to me. I did not like the man who owned the house. Often at five in the morning he started his trucks, and the exhaust went right into my bedroom. One morning I woke, almost suffocating with carbon monoxide poisoning. I went to the roof and shouted at him. "Can't you point your truck the other way?"
He shouted back. "I am loading chickens. I cannot load them from the front."
In the afternoon I'd walk the hills, thinking I should really find something productive to do, but I'd pick wildflowers instead, and talk to the sky.
One day I returned from market and found Lupe waiting for me, distraught. "Oh, Maria," she called, "the federales were here, looking for you. Have you done something wrong?"
"What did they say?" I was sure they had made a mistake.
"They said they would be back."
A few days later, a carload of federales pulled up in front of my apartment. They could have been sent by central casting. They were fat and carried enormous guns. The chief had a handlebar mustache, which he twirled ominously as he spoke. "Doctor," he called me for some reason, "your visa has expired. You must leave the country."