“Oh, you’re working?” said the official at the customs office.
“Sure we’re working.”
“All right. Where do you work?”
George looked at me. “Bicicletas Sí, Bombas No,” he said.
“Bicicletas Sí, Bombas No?” The official was writing on a form.
“Yes, we work there, we worked there.”
“Trabajábamos,” I said. “Worked.”
“Which is it?” He clicked his pen. “You work or worked?”
“Worked,” George admitted.
The official put down the pen. “So where do you work now?”
The short of it was we had to leave if we wanted to stay. We had to cross a border and come back—pay the entry tax. George said we should go to Costa Rica and find out why they didn’t have a revolution. Didn’t the Ticos want a revolution too?
* * *
Raise your hand if you’ve been to Costa Rica. How did you like it?
I, for one, will never forget the first hours I spent in Costa Rica, after being in Nicaragua and El Salvador those months. We rode over the border and from that moment the air was cooler.
“Is the air cooler?” I said.
“Yes, it’s cooler,” said George. And the road was smoother, George looked handsomer. The flowers were fresher, seemed larger out in the fields. The lines for food at rest stops were shorter, more orderly. The road signs made sense suddenly and people spoke clearly. The bus seemed less likely to break down, now that it was riding away from those ravaged countries to the north.
San Jose, the capital: riding into that city was like riding into Bethlehem or Las Vegas. There was that much holy to look at. Grocery stores and pizza shops, tall buildings made of steel and glass. It was like seeing it all for the first time—that’s how foreign it seemed. It was like someone else was seeing it. We felt dirty before it. The city was shining and multiform and complex. We could see out the window of the bus unbroken sidewalks, stores with names, billboards for breath mints, women wearing pantyhose, the faces of TV sets, a line of them on racks, cars on the street less than a decade old. George and I climbed off the bus and walked through the city. We dared to buy things—a can of diet soda, a slice of chocolate cake. We looked in through panes of glass at swimsuits and pie pans and clocks, plastic shaped into toys and containers and telephones (let’s face it: plastic was the real revolution). We saw ourselves on the mirrored sides of buildings. We walked into and out of air-conditioning. We looked at a theater that looked like it had been made to be looked at.
We came to rest on a park bench in the plaza, the city moving in circles around us.
“Capitalism is wonderful,” I said, my mouth full of cake.
PARADISE
Costa Ricans are fond of reminding you how peaceful they are. “We are a paradise,” they say, and all the tourists repeat it: “This is paradise, we’re in paradise, here is paradise.” George and I stayed a week in San Jose, looking for interviews, and people told us we were in paradise so many times and with such vigor and pride that we wished they’d say something else. Their primary claim to the title was the fact that the country had no army, which you had to admit was impressive considering the military buildup all around them.
“No army? Ha.”
This was an American talking to us.
“Go to Costa Rica, people told me,” he said. “It’s a paradise.”
“That’s what they say,” we said.
“Come to find out,” he said, “I’m the fool. There’s police all over the place. Semiautomatic weapons, Mace, clubs. People live behind ten-foot walls here. Every house has guard dogs and barbed wire, electrified fences.”
“Yeah,” we said.
“If that’s not an army, what is? I never saw anything like that in the States.”
“It’s not like that in the States, true.”
I don’t know who this man was or what he was there for, but I know it was something dark. People in the hostel had said he was facing charges of treason. That he’d led attacks in the mountains of Nicaragua. Maybe it wasn’t true, I couldn’t say. He was a thin man. His skin looked sucked in. He wore a light, white Mexican shirt and drank rum from a flask, bared his teeth with each swig.
“I’m getting the hell out of here,” he said.
“Go home,” I told him.
“That’s a laugh,” he said.
“People miss you at home,” I said.
“That’s another laugh.”
“Somebody does.”
(I hoped people missed me at home.)
“What’s home?” he said.
* * *
He didn’t tell us anything, didn’t answer our questions, but I kept watching him, trying to figure it out—what was it about him? And at last I came up with this: he had the scent of defeat on him.
But it was 1987, he should have been in his heyday. And yet you could tell he was already done for. Maybe he knew somehow that these wars were lost and that even the won ones would gain little. Those dusty Nicaraguan shacks would always look the same—through dictatorship, communism, capitalism. Maybe he could see it before the rest of us could.
There were defeated men like this. They started to pop up here and there and then suddenly there were masses of them, not just from the Central American wars, but from Russia, from Germany, women and men, disappointed people, people living a life in the face of failure, not only the failure that we all face—the slow rot of the body—but the failure behind them as well as ahead, the failure of who they’d been and what they’d hoped for. And there was the present failure too, the failure rooted in their being, the failure that entered their dreams.
“We’re revolutionaries,” we told the man.
“You are tourists,” he corrected.
“Revolutionaries,” we said. “People call us revolutionaries.”
“People call you tourists. Everywhere you go, people say, ‘Stop, don’t shoot, it’s just some tourists.’ ”
“We only look like tourists.”
“In fact you’re even dirtier than the tourists,” he said. “You should clean yourselves up. The Ticos are tidy. They can’t stand you filthy tourists. Not to mention tourists pretending to be revolutionaries. That’s the filthiest fucking tourist there is.”
He took another swig. Those teeth.
“No offense or anything.”
FEVER
Christ, then I got sick again. We were still in Costa Rica. George wanted to head the hell out, get to Panama, see the Noriega dictatorship, and I, of course, did not. We’d made it only as far as the beach, filthy fucking tourists all over, talking about what everyplace else was like except where they happened to be.
“You get flowers like this in Spain,” the least amusing Englishman I’d ever met told us. “In India the Coke is much cheaper, five rubles, that’s maybe three or four cents, but I bring my own teapot.” He had a guy with him, an American, who wore a backpack with a machete strapped to the side. I could hear them and see them in my head long after George and I had gone up to the room to bed.
Our room was at the top of a staircase. At one time the place had been nice, you could tell, but it was decaying in the sea air. The rafters falling down, holes in the floor. The windows had no screens, no panes, just blocks of wood you could fit in or take out for air. An occasional bat flapped in a loop overhead. I had diarrhea and it was getting worse. I woke up in the middle of the night with a cramp in my gut and a pain in my head and the pang of loneliness in a strange land. George was sleeping so hard he looked dead. I crept down the staircase to the toilet and then all the way back up to the room and flopped into the bed with George, who slept on, dreamlessly I assumed, and when I felt the cramp again, I went all the way down the stairs again and all the way up, over and over. Salsa played from two directions and a rooster crowed wrong all night. The diarrhea went on and on.
It could be much worse, I thought, lowering myself dizzily to the cruddy floor in the bathroom stall with coc
kroaches crawling down the walls. I could be like those awful tourists without an original thought in my head. I could be holding in my head all those sights and words and prices—a meal in Bombay, the taxi to the airport, the cost of a room in some corner far away where people stop, look, start again. The tedium of it. I curled on my side on the floor. I began to fall asleep, but in the end the size decided it: I couldn’t curl properly on the small shit floor in the stall, so I got myself up and began climbing the stairs just as it started to rain.
Oh, of course, I thought, it makes perfect sense that it would be raining right through the rafters and I’d be sitting here (I paused on the stairs, got on my knees), having to go back down to the toilet before I’ve even gone back up. I kneeled there, gripping the handrail, drops of rain falling on me through the rafters, the mosquitoes buzzing. I couldn’t recall if I’d been down yet or up yet and I couldn’t remember what the word “yet” meant, something about time sequence, the future or the past? I couldn’t get a grasp on it, grasping the handrail, kneeling, the staircase unsteady, as though it might collapse, as though it were collapsing already (is “already” a “yet”?), a slow-motion fall, and it was at that moment, with the stairs and the rain and the rafters, that the fever hit, the kind that blinds, the hurricane kind, the ten-trumpet, twelve-finger kind that whips you off your feet and makes you babble. It was like losing what makes you a human, like becoming a small, furry creature with a fast-beating heart. George must have come wandering out because I remember him carrying me to the room. Then for twenty-four hours I had no thoughts, could not speak, I was a body, nothing more. George took the towels and soaked them and threw them over my body again and again while I let out gasps of suffering and relief. He tipped my head to drink, pushed pills between my lips, wrung the towels out over my arms and face. The wet, wet towel. I will never forget you, wet towel.
* * *
How do I remember all these times and places? It’s easy. These were the days I would remember again and again, tell everyone I met, and when I began to write, they were the first stories I wrote down, the first book I wanted to write, the first manuscript I abandoned, and the second, and the third. I have sixteen-year-old drafts of these scenes. Why? What could it matter? A young person goes away and comes home. Everyone has that story to tell. Young people go away for years. A postcard arrives, a picture of water, then nothing. They come back with a small child by the hand, they come back to find no one remembers them, they come back to find everyone dead. They are driven out, they never return. The great works of literature are built on goings and triumphant returns. The Bible is full of them—Jesus Himself, we’re still waiting, ready to hear what He’s got to say for Himself, what elaborate excuse for staying away this long. George and I were nothing. What could possibly be significant about those particular blocks of wood that fit in that window, those particular towels George wet and laid on my head? Why would this trip mean so much that I’d have to keep going back to find it?
* * *
It was dawn, the day after the fever, and the light hit my eyes. A pattern of blues and blacks, a slosh of blood or water inside me, a roughness somewhere. My mind began to tick without my permission or knowledge, began to form letters, then words, pressed them to the white towel of my brain and left them there to hang—machete, sun, man, hill—while I knew nothing about myself, did not know whether I was awake or asleep or dead or dying, had arrived at the unconsciousness that all humans fear and long for, but still, despite my virtual absence, the words began to line up, one after the other, and grow into phrases and sentences, all of it directed at the man who seemed to be in there with me, George, who was in there or out there, nearby, and my mind wanted to talk to him.
My mind said, Tell me, truthfully, George, did you see that guy, he was a tourist, I tell you—some kind of American, I believe—with a machete on his pack? My brain lit up, turned, ejected its thoughts. I saw it, George, and I know you did too. There he was, his full pack on and a huge machete strapped to the side of it. Be honest with me: Don’t you think it is a bit wacko to go around carrying a machete tied to the side of your pack like a tent? George was a good companion, loyal, patient. My point being not that he is going to hurt anybody necessarily, but that he is mad.
And the strength of the argument, the sheer volume of the voice in my head woke me, degree by degree. Against my will I began to take control of the sentences, direct them, contribute my own ideas, and I wasn’t sure if I was speaking aloud, seated on a bus or at a table or what.
Think, George, would you? Think of all the things you could slide into the side of a pack, tuck there on the outside, strap to it. Think of the long, thin things: fence post, pedestal, blueprints, rake, a rama de fuego in flower, a telescope, a tripod, a giraffe (a little one), a brook of water. Why, you could strap a second pack on there if you liked!
Not a teapot. That goes inside.
Being sick was good times between us. That’s when I knew I loved him most, when I needed him to pour water on my face.
Why the machete? I asked him in my head, not because I wondered really, but because I liked the sound of the words together like that. And I liked the idea of our answering the question, the two of us puzzling it out. Why oh why the cruel, sharp machete?
All the people who have left us, George, I wept in my head, all the ones who are gone. Mana and Sammy. I can see them, going away across the map, lost, turning around and around. ¿A San José? ¿A León? they call. There’s only me and you now. And the music, the sun, the cobblestones, the rum, the night bus, the cockfights, the cicadas, el jabón.
* * *
It never occurred to me to go home. The only time I even considered it, I didn’t consider it. I insert the consideration into my memory because I feel today like it should have been there, but in truth, I remember a time that I didn’t consider it. I was on the phone with my grandmother. She’d always been nice to me—my grandfather too—quiet and calm, giving me a bowl of sliced fruit. “You’re not cut out for this,” she said on the phone. “Let me bring you home,” as if I were a small ball thrown straight up into the sky. The ball goes up, slows, and for a second it comes to a standstill in the air, torn between acceleration and gravity. There’s always the chance that it will keep going up, that the Earth will release its hold at last. Maybe that’s why we throw balls?
All I thought in that pause was, Huh? I could go home?
* * *
The day after the fever, when my eyes flicked open, consciousness conquering at last, the square of blue beating into the little room, a faded poster half torn from the wall, I wanted to ask him if he could see into me, inside me, the way it seemed like he could, see every thought I had (Nica libre, Tica linda, bocadita), and what led to every thought, if he could see each line, each arrow, each staircase and rafter, the small stall of my mind, and even, I wanted to ask him, if he could see how he didn’t answer me when I talked to him in my head, that too was part of it when I woke, the day streaming in like a stream, a turkey outside making a sound like a human, a distraught human, wounded, exiled, that too, I wanted to say and I would say it just like that, “That turkey too,” but he’d gone out.
WHAT I REMEMBER OF PANAMA
They were our freest days. Or maybe our free-fall days. George and I stopped in Panama from Costa Rica and stayed a week. We weren’t trying to join or quit any revolution. We were like true travelers those few days. Just looking, no thanks, don’t want any part of overthrowing your evil dictator. Just passing through!
* * *
One day we were walking around on the streets of Panama City and we started to notice there were more people than there had been earlier. A little while later there were more. And a little later more. Suddenly there were so many people filling the street that George and I were short on space and getting squeezed. We had to hold on to each other in order not to get pulled apart. We yelled, “What is happening? What can it be?” Everybody was walking in the same direction. We were pulled al
ong with them. The entire country, it seemed, was out on the street. People were hanging from the windows, waving signs and pieces of cloth and shouting things we couldn’t understand, and more people were up on the lampposts and more in the trees. “Where are we going?” we shouted to people and they yelled back, but I couldn’t clearly hear them. We were carried along with the people, everyone shaking their fists, soldiers all over, armed trucks. I was frightened. It felt like one of those soccer mobs where a sudden stampede starts taking people down. We didn’t arrive anywhere.
A little later there were fewer people and then fewer and fewer. Soon there were as many as there had been hours before, and people were walking in different directions. No one was making noise anymore, except one lone man on the corner, calling for his lost dog. Then it got dark and we went to find something to eat.
That was one of the great protests against the military dictator Noriega.
Two years later the U.S. Army landed in Panama, overran whatever was in the way, and swatted that guy into jail.
* * *
Later the night of the protest, a Panamanian man began following us. We were in the old part of Panama City, the magnificent run-down buildings left over from when the French tried their hand and failed at the canal. The buildings were breaking into pieces, crumbling onto the streets, and each morning someone came around with a dustpan, swept the buildings up, and threw them away.
“Hey,” the man said. “Hey, hello? Are you a Jew? ¿Eres judía?”
We stopped. I turned around. “What do you want with a Jew, mister?” I said.
“I wish I were a Jew,” the man said.
“Oh yeah? Why is that?”
“Jesus was a Jew.”
I thought about that. “Peter was a Jew,” I said.
“Moses was a Jew,” George said.
Stop it, George, I thought. I’m the Jew expert here.
“Was Noah a Jew?” I wondered.
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