Revolution

by Deb Olin Unferth

It was too bad that we wanted to take the bus to El Salvador. We weren’t allowed on the roads. No one was. No foreigners were even allowed in the country at that time, unofficially—save a few special exceptions, and there certainly wasn’t anything special about George and me, but we’d managed to get in. We’d lined up a job, although that hadn’t gotten us in. Then we’d been persistent. Long after the other gringos had given up, had gone staggering off to Honduras (visit the islands! see the ruinas, cheap!), we were still there at the consulate, every day, with our passports, but that hadn’t done it either. Finally we figured out a trick they were playing on us involving the papers we needed to get into the country. And even then we hadn’t gotten normal visas. El Salvador wasn’t giving out plain come-as-you-are visas—what do you think this is, a party? We had overland visas with a three-day window for entrance, which meant you had to come through the land, not drop in from the sky or swim the sea, and you had three days to make it. But either by coincidence (unlikely) or in yet another round of diversions, they’d given us the visas on the very day the rebels of El Salvador—the FMLN, the leftist guerrillas of the mountains—had announced on the radio that their plan was to halt any vehicle they found on the road and blow it up. This was called a “paro,” a “stop,” because things that move stop moving in the face of threatened destruction. Buses, cars, trucks, everyone stopped and stayed home, the roads were tenantless as housetops. We’d gone anyway. (Not my idea.)

  * * *

  The FMLN, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front. Named for Farabundo Martí, that Marxist, radical, peasant leader of the thirties, whose greatest achievement was the botched revolt of 1932—half aborted at the last moment, half carried out in confusion, entirely crushed by the National Guard and resulting in thirty thousand deaths. He rose again in the form of these rebels who took his name, a clear vote for human striving over (or in the absence of?) strength, proof of the poetic (quixotic?) mind of the Salvadoran campesino.

  * * *

  George had a plan as to what we would say if the FMLN stopped the bus. I spoke better Spanish. I’d spent time in Mexico as a child. I would do the talking. The theory was that the guerrillas would shoot Americans or take them hostage. I was supposed to explain to the guerrillas that George and I were on their side and that we’d been trying to find them. That we had meant to put ourselves in their way. We wanted to interview them with our tape recorder and take their pictures. We wanted to join them. But I didn’t want to do the talking. I’d mess it up and get us killed and then get blamed for it.

  “This is never going to work,” I said.

  * * *

  The men on the ground strayed around the sides, stringing the bus, moving like night creatures. We couldn’t see their garb, only their figures and the silhouette of their weapons pointed up. Then the front door sighed open and the people around us quieted. The men got on. At last we could see: they had on military uniforms. It was not the FMLN. It was the other teenagers with enormous machine guns, the ones who happened not to be assigned to attack civilians today, the militia, checking papeles, searching bags, asking questions. We all got off the bus.

  * * *

  We found machine guns disturbing in El Salvador, more so than in Guatemala, where we heard only twigs of rumors of killings. But in El Salvador people were always talking about bodies—the bodies found nearby, the lists passing around of the bodies by name, the lists hidden in a film canister and run over the mountains to Honduras, the lists read aloud in the U.S. Congress, and the counts made, the separate counts for the same set of bodies: the militia’s count, the embassy’s count, the FMLN’s, the villagers’, the counts reported in the papers—“two found with hands removed,” “ninety-six found beneath a church.” The counts made no sense, they were off by a hundred, two hundred. 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. Is the number of bodies growing or shrinking? Over the last year, has it declined by half or risen a third? The count was affected by invisible forces. A flock of birds rising and falling. The number was out of control, a wind coming up in the night, the way those bodies appeared on the streets or in the fields—not that we saw the bodies themselves, we only heard about them, the numbers of them, attached to phrases like “totally false,” “a fabrication of subversives,” “a massacre.”

  * * *

  We were standing alongside the bus. It was maybe the tenth or eleventh time we’d had to get off the bus and now it was nearly dawn. Every half hour, all night, the bus had stopped and we’d had to get off, over and over. I was saying to George 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 soldiers. They took all of our things out of our bags and lined them up on the ground. They took away our map. “Forbidden.” 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?”

  “Turismo,” I said. (I’d been told that if a soldier points a gun at you, you should always say “turismo.”)

  It was still dark, but you could feel the light on its way. “What’s in this bottle?” they said. “What is this book? What does it say? Read it. Read it aloud. Translate.” They were passing around our passports. They spilled the plastic bag of cassette tapes on the ground. “What’s this?” They took one of the cassette tapes and put it into our cassette player. We didn’t know for a moment if they had picked one with music or interviews on it, and George looked very grave. They turned on the cassette player. They had picked one with music on it.

  “Sing,” they said. “Sing along.”

  We sang. It was a song about a transvestite who loves another transvestite, or maybe only one of them is a transvestite. George and I sang about how girls can be boys and boys can be girls and how mixed up that is. A sad song with deep tones. Behind us the sun was coming up.

  “Translate,” the soldiers said with their machine guns. “What does it say?”

  “Love song,” George told them, and they did something that looked like a laugh.

  TYPICAL MAN

  I met George when I was seventeen and a freshman in college at a large state school in a large state, the entire student body united behind rituals involving their sports activities. I was new to that part of the country, had grown up in Chicago, but George had been raised nearby. He’d grown up in the western middle of America, in the kind of neighborhood where most people don’t have passports and no one speaks any language other than the one they’d been raised to suspect was God’s favorite. George had played tag among these people, had attended their schools, dated their daughters, and so by all counts he should have been like them, but he wasn’t, or he didn’t seem so to me.

  * * *

  I became his girlfriend at a protest. I’d heard the chanters and the bullhorn from my window, and I’d come out of the dorm and over the grass to watch. I’d never seen a protest up close before. It was one of those anti-CIA protests of the Cold War eighties, back when the CIA still made it serious business to come to campus once a year to interview possible recruits, and the hippies left over from the sixties showed up to exercise their right to object.

  I remember seeing George that day. I’d met him once before. He was a friend of a friend from the dorm, and we’d talked one night at a concert. Now he was sifting through the protesters toward me, the hippies swaying. They looked drab and disarranged beside their cop counterparts in fine suits and unhappy helmets, standing in a line. Against this blur, George was young and shining. He shifted through the assortment of people, sliding around them. He came over to the tree I stood under, leaves falling all around. He had blue-green eyes and the sort of blond hair that blonds call not blond. He held up his fist to me like a microphone and asked me what I wanted to say.
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br />   * * *

  George had an odd system of rules. He didn’t believe in paying bills. Phone bills, library fines, gas bills. It was a principle for him: never pay bills. Corporations were evil, rich, foolish to trust him. Around that time credit card companies first began handing out cards to students. He thought this was funny. He called it free money. He signed up for several credit cards, spent up to the limit, and threw the bills away. At first I didn’t know how this was going to work out for him, but it wasn’t as bad as you’d think. Bills piled up and floated away, and more appeared to replace them. Yet he never refused someone money if asked, even if he himself really needed it (which was always), so he was usually broke. It was what made me fall in love with him: his disregard for rules other than his own. He simply didn’t care about money, possessions, sleep, food. I found this daring and visionary. I wanted to be like that too.

  He had a coterie of friends since childhood who were protective, fearful for him. “Oh, give it here,” they’d say, dropping a twenty on the counter, “I’ll pay for his.” Never resentful, they acted as if George had done them some quiet deed long ago and now they were in his debt, or—on his more annoying days—as if he were the kid brother whose father on his deathbed had charged them with his care. Maybe to them he seemed hopeless or muddled. You could not have a regular conversation with the guy. He had no reaction to chitchat about sports, school, snow. He never swore, never took drugs. At a party he was the one in the corner bending the lamp into strange shapes. He wasn’t outgoing and he wasn’t a leader. He was a prankster, but all his pranks were private jokes. I was the only one who laughed. To me, George was spectacular, misunderstood, brilliant. He was a senior and he studied continuously, four hours a night, and he never missed a class. At a school like ours, this was deranged. He went in for physics, philosophy, and math. Amid the psych majors, the communications minors, boys sunk in bean bags watching ball, no one understood what he was talking about. He was just smarter than everyone else.

  “Genius,” was how I put it then. “He’s a genius.” I felt that I’d come from a long line of genius men. The women in my family fell in love with geniuses, was how I understood it.

  “I believe he might be the real thing,” I told my friends from home on the phone. “A true genius.”

  * * *

  He and I both had checked jackets for some reason. The jackets more or less matched, and we rarely took them off. We walked around campus, jabbering to each other in those jackets. Whatever few scraps of friends I’d begun to make in the dorms I immediately forgot. Until I met George I’d found my new college life that had been set up for me boring, excruciatingly so, and the people who were supposed to be my new college friends by far the most boring element in it: smiley, well-built women—skiers, runners, blondes. They were eager to describe their organizational achievements—their schedules, their sports activities, their boyfriends, their matching heart mugs and flower shower buckets. So if I wasn’t with George, I wasn’t with anyone. He and I would meet up at four o’clock each day and, before our long nights of homework, go scrounging for food. I had a meal ticket, but I didn’t want to be away from him for the time it took to eat.

  * * *

  At first we slept in the physics building, a tower that rose high over the campus. He held a key to the top floor. A lounge of couches stood under a line of tall windows. He was living there, had given up his room in an apartment—or he was about to, I don’t recall the exact timing. I only recall his inconvenient, complex housing plan, which involved him moving his belongings every few days. But he was putting one over on the school, he told me. They’d left themselves open. He could have it all for free. Late at night we walked through the physics tower, perfecting the housing plan, how he’d eat, the rooftop barbeques.

  For a while it was just he and I kidding around, laughing at our own jokes, but soon it became a powerful passion. It was us against them, and “they” were anybody, everybody—whoever they were, they were out there, and we were against them, jokingly.

  * * *

  He had a huge number of brothers, most of whom lived on the nearby flatland of flags and rectangles of lawn. He brought me to meet them one by one. The oldest of them had been a hippie and the rest thought that was cool. They were sorry they had missed out. They still listened to the music and wore the floppy hats and talked about how the oldest had had all the luck. The first few brothers were religious and smart about it, studying philosophy and theology. George was the last of this group. The very final brother, the youngest, the “baby,” hated all the other brothers. He wanted to be a cop and put the other brothers in jail.

  The two oldest brothers knew how to fix cars, how to read a mountain map, and they taught the other brothers their skills. They wore beards and gave advice. They played father to the younger brothers among them. The father himself didn’t behave like a father. I don’t know why. It was a deep wound in the family, the father. He never spoke and he wore a sarcastic expression on his face, a combination of irritation and mock surprise. The brothers and the mother conferred in low tones about how he might react to things they wanted to do. When he was in the house, everyone felt his presence, although he was never in the same room.

  * * *

  I have photos of George and me hitchhiking through New Mexico over Christmas, the two of us standing on the road. I have photos of the people who picked us up. There’s the prison guard, the truck driver, the lady with the dog. There’s the town Truth or Consequences, where we couldn’t find a ride. We look ludicrously happy, thin and young and grinning. I’m carrying a camera that looks like a gun.

  * * *

  By spring we stopped going to the physics tower. He moved into my room in the dorm, brought his books and a duffel of clothes. We got in big trouble for that. The resident assistants called us into the office. The dorm administrators called us into another office. They said I was on dorm warning. They said we were both kicked out. George said not to worry. He said we would live on the quad in a tent (students were doing that—as a show of solidarity with South Africa). He said not to worry, we would get blankets and camp out in the fields (Fidel Castro, Central Park, 1960, until Malcolm X came and carried him to Harlem). It was a problem, a big problem, and just when I was beginning to wonder (and maybe worry) how this was all going to play out (blankets in the fields? now how would that work?), suddenly it wasn’t a problem anymore because George said we would drop out of school and join the revolution.

  I said okay.

  * * *

  George had been to Mexico and Guatemala—just once, the year before he and I met. At school he’d met a Guatemalan student whom I never knew and who had talked George into coming with him home. I believe he needed an extra driver. As far as I could gather, George had spent the entire three weeks drunk. I am amazed that he had been such a typical gringo on that trip, drunk, waving his pesos at a bartender. But I suppose if you put anyone in a certain context, they could look typical, even if they aren’t. Maybe he’s sitting somewhere looking typical right now. Maybe for years now he’s been looking that way, and no one around him knows who he really is.

  Once, in our first months together, George and I somehow came up with a car and we drove to the border of Utah. At the border sign we pulled over and pushed the car across with our hands so we could say, “Whew, we pushed the car to Utah last night.”

  I don’t know, maybe that’s a typical thing to do. Maybe that’s the point: he was just a typical guy in a typical place, and he made choices, and each choice changed him, and each change began to close off other possibilities, seal shut other rooms, exclude other people he might become, one by one, until he could no longer be anything but what he was.

  * * *

  I’m not sure what it was about that first trip to Guatemala that made him want to go back, but he did. That man, that typical drunk gringo in Guatemala, had emerged from the bar, sobering in the light, brushing off his shirt, waving away his comrades, and had taken a new
walk—not the one he took with me, that was just more of the same, minus the drinking—but the one after ours, a walk he would never return from, not really, not because he didn’t want to and not because he wasn’t allowed to, but because he couldn’t. A typical man is capable of that.

  SPANISH

  It turns out that no one in my family is a genius, male or female. I understood that later, another broken myth tossed in an old box with Santa. But all of us are fairly smart, can do our times tables, can follow installation instructions, and most of us can speak Spanish. Unlike George, I’d spent a good deal of time in Mexico growing up, starting from the age of four. My grandparents had a house in Mexico, and my first words in Spanish were “Leche chocolate, por favor” and “¿Dónde están los gatitos?” so obviously I knew what was important.

  Houses in Mexico were cheap at that time and my grandfather bought one for my grandmother. Each fall he packed her off to Mexico, and she drove from Chicago to Cuernavaca and then waited for the rest of us to show up on airplanes when we could get away. This was before the Free Trade Agreement, and Grandmother told me solemn stories about how the officials would stop her car and take away her place mats. Other people came to the house too, Mexicans and Americans. Grandfather invited them, or someone did. We all hung around the garden and swam in the pool. I have photos from that time of the men and women lying around on towels in the grass. It was the seventies and they looked pretty groovy in their haircuts and clothes. I don’t know who those people were. I used to say they were artists. I used to tell people that painters and writers would come stay with us in Mexico, but I don’t think that’s right. I think they were business associates of my grandfather. They liked to play board games with me and do thousand-piece puzzles, or at least they pretended to. They left behind books that I read and didn’t understand. Call It Sleep. Fear of Flying. Lolita.