Revolution (15 page)

The day I broke the engagement and was nearly attacked or at least mistaken for a prostitute was a day we were supposed to have no water. But the government hadn't turned it off. They'd gotten the day mixed up or they were trying to be nice or it was another sign that things were getting a little chaotic behind the curtain. We'd prepared for a day without water, but it was all around us and coming out of the faucets. Its seamless presence felt abundant, extreme even. We hadn't realized how much we'd missed it when it wasn't there.

CENSORSHIP

George and I were in Managua the day
La Prensa
reopened. We were there to read the first paper off the presses.

The Sandinistas had shut the paper down years before, saying at
La Prensa
they took money from the CIA and didn't like the revolution. Opponents called it censorship—more proof of Sandinista Communist treachery. Look at the Russians, look at the Cubans. Now the Sandinistas. But the Sandinistas were letting
La Prensa
reopen. What did it mean? The Internacionalistas took it as a sign of triumph (
¡Viva Sandino!
), but maybe it was another sign of ruin.

I remember being on the street when the paper came off the presses—the crowds of people, the newspaper boy turning in circles, his thin papers going from his fingers, passing through the crowd. It was late in our trip. I'm not sure about the timing. We were still planning to get married at that point, but we were uncomfortable and I was about to say I didn't want to. Or maybe we weren't going to get married anymore and that's why we were uncomfortable, not sure what we were to each other now. I'm certain it was our second time in Nicaragua. We were pinging around, an arsenal of interviews in our bags. I know we were together and that we were unhappy. But on that day the talk was all about
La Prensa
. It was afternoon, the day
La Prensa
reopened. The newspaper got a late start or their boy did. I don't recall what was in the paper, what the articles were about, but I know I was surprised. I had thought it was a heroic moment, a historic one. I had thought
La Prensa
might want to be at least a little nice to the Sandinistas for letting them print their paper again, but no, at
La Prensa
they were mad. Somebody had taken away their land, their money, their men, made them drive taxis. They had a lot to say about it.

Or were we someplace else that day, the day
La Prensa
reopened? In Panama? And what I remember is the first time George and I bought the paper, on our way back through, though it had reopened weeks before?

Am I inventing the crowds? No, that part must be right. I can see the people gathering, the Nicaraguan men and women, but I can't see the rest of the day around it.

It could have been the day I vomited on the street. Or it could have been the day I cut the soldiers' hair. Or the day I was robbed on the bus. Or the day we went to the Russian ballet. Or the day we interviewed the bishop. We could have been walking out the church doors. I believe we were leaving some formidable spot—or does the memory of formidability come from the advent of
La Prensa
?

And now, today, I read that
La Prensa
hadn't been shut down for years. In this book it says that the press had opened and shut and opened and shut like a drawer during those years of the revolution. I ask a Nicaraguan journalist I meet and she confirms it. “Did it open and close?” I say.

“Many times,” she says solemnly.

So why that day all the hoopla? Was every time it reopened a special time? And I'm misremembering its uniqueness, not the celebration? Which part of this am I wrong about? I couldn't say. I am sure of this much: I was there in some way. I bought
La Prensa
. “Let me see it,” said George, but I kept it. I held it in my hands and read the insides. Later we used it for toilet paper.

PEANUT BUTTER

George and I got separate rooms. The engagement was off, after all, but we told each other we needed separate beds in order to get some sleep. The beds were singles and we were sick and hot. The rooms cost two dollars apiece. We split up our stuff and George went into one room on one side of the atrium and I went into another on the other and that was it for a while. I lay alone in the concrete room. Days passed. One morning I got up and went to his room. It was empty, cleaned out, and I figured we'd broken up and he'd taken off, left me there. I went back to my room and got onto the bed.

I lay there sweating for days. I didn't eat. A huge spider lived in the room—flat and fast, the size of a small plate. Now and then it came out, sat on the wall, and then scooted away. I watched for it and threw shoes its way but didn't get it and I lived in low-steam fear. The Internacionalistas talked all day and night outside my room. They sat at plastic white tables that they moved around to try to stay in the shade. They'd start out in the morning at one end of the atrium, and as the day went on and the sun moved across the sky, they moved the tables and chairs across the cement to the other end. The next morning they'd carry the tables back and start over. I watched this all day. I had to leave the door to my room open a little because the roof was a strip of corrugated tin and the room worked like a convection oven.

One day an Internacionalista put his head into my room.

“What do you do in here?” he said.

“Go away. I'm sick.”

In fact I wasn't sure if I was still sick. I'd felt the way I felt—sickish—for so long that I didn't know if it was illness or if this was just what I was, if this was me being normal and normal for me was sickish.

“What is wrong with you?”

“I don't know.”

He was some sort of European. The young blond kind who speaks perfect English. “Come out,” he said. “I'm tired seeing you in here.”

“How do you think I feel?”

“I walk by the same room, see the same person. I feel like I repeat myself.”

“That's life, buddy.”

He walked in and looked down at me on my bed. “Did you see a doctor? You can see the doctor here for very cheap.”

“You better get out of here. My boyfriend's coming back,” I said.

“What boyfriend. No one comes in here.”

Maybe I should have been nervous at this point, but I was used to being approached by men of all ethnicities and ages, inside and outside these hostels. I just tugged my dress over my knees. I was wearing my “fruit basket” dress, so-called because of the pictures of large dark fruits on it. I had begun wearing it every single day. One day I washed it and all the Internacionalistas in the hostel congratulated me and told me how nice I looked and said that I should try a trick like that more often.

“Let's go to the movies,” said the guy.

“There are no movies.”

“Sure there are movies.”

“You're thinking of Mexico. You're thinking of Spain.”

“I will take you to eat an ice cream then.” He reached out to touch my leg and I kicked his hand away.

“I know that place,” I said. “Every day they say they have a different flavor. Some days they say chocolate. Some days they say strawberry. But it's vanilla. Vanilla every day.” That place drove me crazy. In one place we stayed someone had written on the wall of our room,
“La vida es tan corta comer helados vanillos y bailer con hombres aburridos.”
Life is too short to eat vanilla ice cream and dance with boring men.

“Forget this town,” he said. “Let's go to India. They have beautiful rugs in India. We can lie on them and look at the sky.”

After all these years, I still remember the thing that impressed him most about India was the rugs. I don't even know what he was talking about. I've never been to India and no one else I've met who has gone has mentioned the rugs as the high point of their Indian adventure, though I'm sure there are indeed beautiful rugs to be found in that country.

“No thanks,” was what I told this guy. I'd say the same thing today.

“Okay,” he said. “I will bring you to my parents' house.”

“Why would I go there?”

“It's very nice.” He drew the house in the air. “It's full of rooms.”

“What do I want with rooms?” I said. “I've got a room.”

He dropped his hands. “I can't go back without you.”

We'd reached an impasse. I wasn't going with him, but he wouldn't leave unless I went. He bowed his head like in prayer. He closed his eyes.

“Tell you what you can do,” I said. “You could go get me some peanut butter.”

He opened his eyes. “You know where to get peanut butter?”

“Black market,” I said. “Military packets. There's a place. I'll tell you how to get there, but you have to promise to bring me some. Promise?”

“Tell me where first.”

“Promise first.”

“Tell first.”

“Promise first.”

He sat down on the floor. He put his head between his knees. “I am sick of this revolution,” he said.

SMALLER

It was in that room that I began having a dream I then had for years. I dreamed Central America was shrinking. It happened fast. I was standing on it and then suddenly it got smaller. I teetered for a moment, nearly fell, then planted my feet in Nicaragua, my heel sunk in Lake Nicaragua. I crouched and saw George among the plastic trees, the tiny metal towers. Solid black lines separated the countries. I reached in for George, but the ground beneath me shook—an earthquake?—and Central America shrank again. I couldn't stand on it anymore. I fell into the ocean and was left tossing around with my pack. I didn't see George. I grabbed hold of Costa Rica, tried to wrap a leg around it, throw my pack on top, but my pack had opened. My things were falling into the water. I was grabbing my belongings, getting them back into my pack—my guidebook, my bottle of shampoo—but everything was muddy or lost. The water was too deep to splash home on foot. I'd have to swim, but I couldn't go without George, and how would I carry my pack? It would get soaked, was already soaked. Central America shook again, another earthquake, and I was thrown into the sea, head under, now above, sky overhead. My pack had sunk and George was gone.

I had the dream on and off for many years. I'd wake and sometimes if a fan was whirling or if the light was coming in on a certain slant, I thought I was back. I'd sit up—where's George? Instead of a shabby square of bed, our stuff in collapse on the floor, I'd find the room spread cleanly around me, a lamp, a desk, a closet. At some point the dream stopped. I don't know why.

In the final scene of the dream I'd try to swim toward Central America but it was far away now, growing smaller and smaller. It squeezed to a dot and disappeared.

FORGETTABLE MOMENTS

George came back. One day I returned from the toilets and he was standing over my bed.

“Our visas are about to expire,” he said. He had some mosquito coils and my flashlight in his hands. “We have to get out of here. It's time to go.”

Then I saw. He had my backpack out.

“You came back,” I said.

“What?” he said tiredly. “What are you talking about?”

I looked at him for a while. Hadn't we broken up and he'd left? Hadn't I been abandoned? Or was it possible, I wondered, that he'd been in the hostel all this time? Had I looked for him in the wrong room? Had he not abandoned me at all?

Had we not even broken up?

Or had we broken up, separated, ended things once and for all, but neither of us even managed to make it off the premises? It could be that's what happened.

It's impossible to know what another person's important moments are, the few moments they'll always remember in the deep ocean of all the ones they'll forget. Was that an important moment for him—showing up after leaving me or not leaving me there in that hostel?

If I could talk to George again, just once, I would say, “Okay, here's a pen. First question. Write down the ten most important moments in your life.”

“Trick question,” he would say. “You just want to know if you would be on the list—which how could you be? You can't imagine all the things I've done. It's been more than twenty years.”

“Okay,” I would say. “Fair enough. New question. Write down the ten most important moments from that trip.”

There's no way that moment wouldn't be on the list, the moment he returned after leaving me or not leaving me, when he knew where I was and I didn't know where he was and still he chose not to come. It wasn't punishment on his part, leaving me like that, if he even did. That kind of behavior wasn't in him. He wasn't mean or manipulative or vengeful. He was a man who acted not by volition, but drive. If he left, he did it because he had to, and if he came back, it was because of the same. I never asked him where he was those days we were apart. No matter if he was in the next room in bed or walking down a road two days away—maybe he doesn't even remember today—still, I know how it was for him. I know what it is to not know what to do, to choose when you don't want any of the options left open to you, to be on a path when it feels like any path is a mistake.

*   *   *

What I didn't realize at that moment, with my belongings tossed out on the bed, is that I had turned a little strange on this trip. The next year I'd go back to school and feel a little strange around all my healthy, rosy-cheeked classmates. It was strange to be strange and I'd do what I had to to stop, not because I wanted what was on the other side of strange, but because both sides, all sides, looked like mistakes. The next year I felt a little less strange and what was around me was less strange, the year after that still less, and finally one day there I was—nothing around me was strange and I wasn't strange. I was normal.

But George stayed strange. He'd wait around for a couple of years, maybe trying not to be strange, maybe not trying. I moved out of our apartment, saying I had to “find myself,” which at first made George laugh but later did not. It would turn out to be harder to find myself than I expected because so little of me existed to begin with. George tried to stick it out until I found myself, but finally he just couldn't. It was taking too long. One day he came over to my place and said he wanted to say good-bye. He was leaving, had to. He hadn't been over in a while, and in that moment he looked much like he did that day in Managua—determined, ill-at-ease in the middle of a room that was clearly mine, not ours. Only this time he wasn't coming back to fetch me. Instead he was leaving for good. He glanced around the room. “Wow,” he said. “Look at all this stuff you've got. You've got a lot of stuff now.” A few minutes later he was gone.