Revolution (4 page)

This is about the time George signed us up for the job.

*   *   *

“Who keeps kids up all night?” I whispered to George while we put down our stuff, the orphans waiting behind us. “An all-night vigil. Is this insane?”

“Could you just go along with it?” he whispered back. He turned and smiled at the group.

We all crowded into a classroom-like room, rectangles covering the ceiling and floor. We took seats on the linoleum. George sat on the other side of the room with a stack of orphans in his lap, and a couple of the littler ones crawled into my lap too. We lit candles and sang songs to God. “Please take care of everybody, God,” we prayed. “You are so wonderful, God.” Outside the shooting started up. That surprised me. I hadn't realized how close we were to the fighting. It sounded like the shots were right outside. Explosions shook the floor and the children began crying. Suddenly I could see the sense in an all-night vigil. These were children whose villages had been burned to the ground, their parents pulled away, shot or tortured, while they hid in a bush and watched. I had no idea what I was supposed to do. I was terrified. This is what George had brought me here for? The first night of my civil war job I vomited four times.

PROJECTS

That week at the orphanage, George instituted early morning exercise, mandatory for all the boys. They loved it. He held sports games after lunch, games that involved throwing balls and catching them. The girls could join in too. Everyone wanted to throw the ball to George and wanted George to throw it back to them. He came up with a system for the boys to bring water from the river that made this chore somehow fun, or so it seemed from the laughter I could hear on the path.

I came up with projects too. I had the idea of planting a garden. I had done something like this in the second grade—not outside, but in little cups at our desks, some indestructible vine. There was plenty of dirt and grass around. “Go ahead,” said Hermana Mana. She didn't point out that these kids had come from agrarian villages and were not going to be impressed by a few plants the way kids from the city were (i.e., me). A man came in a car once a week to bring supplies. He agreed to let me ride with him to town so I could buy seeds. I came back happy with my industriousness. I found a place for a garden and was crouching on the ground, ready to direct the orphans. A few stood around me and looked on. George strolled over. “What are you planting?”

I held up the packages.

“They didn't have any vegetable seeds?” He took the packages and read them slowly, one by one. “You think they have a shortage of flowers?”

I put down my little spade.

“No, no,” he said, handing back the packages. “By all means. Bring on the flowers. I'll sit right here and watch.”

*   *   *

I decided to try to teach the girls how to read. Now, these orphans went to school every day except during a paro, I knew that, and so I should have known that those of reading age knew how to read. I had an idea of orphanages in my mind and of what one does at them and that idea included giving classes in how to read. The children were too polite to tell me that they knew how to read, so they sat there pretending not to.

I was an astonishment of a teacher. They were all reading within days. In fact they could read better than I could. I'd had a few classes of Spanish but I hadn't paid much attention (my brother and I held that Spanish class was not cool). Mostly I'd learned Spanish by speaking. The orphans had to keep correcting me. We'd recite the alphabet together and each time we all faltered on the fourth letter because in Spanish the alphabet goes, A, B, C, CH, D.… I knew CH counted as a letter, but I kept forgetting. We'd start out together: A, B, C, but on the fourth letter, the orphans would say CH and I would say D and then they would say D and I would say E and we would all be confused for a moment before falling silent. Don't ask me why this happened more than once.

I decided to teach them English. This went extraordinarily badly. They couldn't learn a word of English. I must have been a truly terrible teacher because for several days in a row I grilled them over and over on the simplest things. Hello. How are you. I am seven years old. And they couldn't understand at all. They couldn't pronounce the words. They couldn't remember the phrases. They didn't understand the English-learning games I'd come up with. It was an embarrassment for us all.

THE EVANGELICALS

They were religious at the orphanage.

I'd been an atheist Jew when I met George—have I mentioned that? But all he had to do was say he was a Christian for a while and soon I was saying I was a Christian too. I don't know how to explain that. I suppose it's a good thing George came along and not someone worse because it's possible that I was ready to take on any irregular person or object headed my way.

I liked being a Christian, seeing the beautiful in the ugly and attributing it to a Thing higher than myself. I was no longer looking at the world alone. I could turn my head and wink at Someone, the One who put it there, like a couple so long together that they each know what the other is thinking. I liked how confusing Christianity was, how it required so much explaining: why we'd sip blood, why we'd pretend to sip blood, why God would punish us, why He'd punish someone else and pretend it was us, and so on. The enormous mystery of God was much more congruous with my disorienting experience of the world than the arrogant certainty of atheism.

George and I were not the kind of Christians you see asking for money on TV, the ones handing out pamphlets at airports, not the born-again, sky-bound kind. We were Calvinist-Marxist-Kierkegaardian Christians. To explain this in a way that reflects how I understood it: Calvinists are predeterminists. They hold that God has already decided our fate. You can pray or strive or whatever you like, but in the end there isn't much you can do about a thing. The Marxist liberation theologians, on the other hand, believe that humans determine their own fate. We must take (armed) action on Earth, seize the promised land, crush heaven onto the planet. I found these two combined incoherent, but luckily they were balanced by a dose of Kierkegaard: Yes, you're right, the thing is absurd. Who could believe such nonsense. But if it made sense, what would be so special about faith?

At the orphanage they weren't any of those. They were evangelicals: Let's just sit down and pray, by God. Maybe we'll get what we want by pleading and flattery.

*   *   *

The evangelical takeover was just beginning in Central America. You'd run into them in groups—evangelicals huddled under a bridge, evangelicals singing through a rainstorm. You'd hear them in the night far off, their tambourines ringing from their church-shacks.

*   *   *

George's mother's church, back in the U.S. West, was evangelical, and that church sponsored our orphanage. One of her pastors had lined up our job for us. In the States, the mid-eighties were the sunny celebrity days of the megachurches: Jim Bakker and his Christian amusement park, Tammy Faye and her eye makeup, the sour Falwell, the limousines they all rode around in, the public scandals in the papers. George's mother's church was an offshoot of those. Her church was a monstrosity, so ugly you couldn't help but wonder how this had happened, whether the architect had dismantled a shopping mall and reassembled it as a giant bin for storing humans for suspicious purposes. The lobby was building-sized. The parking lot was town-sized. The gift shop was a warehouse of crap. Inside the church thousands of cheap plush seats multiplied up into the balconies. The pastors were rich. They wore rich people's clothes and rich people's watches, and you could see them on movie screens overhead, telling about sin and repentance, hours of how to love your neighbor, the intricate details of passing the collection plate, of songs. Once George and I arrived at the orphanage, he couldn't stop talking about it: What were they messing around with all that junk for when here in El Salvador these children barely ate? The orphans ate tortillas and beans for every meal. They grew their own corn. He couldn't get over it. The wastefulness of the church, the very paint they used, twenty dollars a can to put down white lines on a lot to show the idiot Americans how to arrange their cars, twenty dollars that could do so much here.

*   *   *

George and I didn't like the North American evangelicals. Each time we saw them, we made sly jokes and slow getaways. (I singled George's mother out as the sole acceptable American evangelical, but George seemed unsettled on the subject. Around her he displayed a face of determined patience.)

One time, in Guatemala, George and I ran into some of these fellows on the plaza. They're nothing like us, we told each other, because, look, they're all wearing the same outfit—white shirts and white pants. They looked more like each other than like us. And also not like us because they were from Alabama and spoke Spanish with a Southern accent. But we kept a straight face. And there were more of them than us, an entire bus full. They had ridden to Guatemala from Alabama, or maybe they flew and got the bus when they arrived. And they weren't like us because (surprise!) they were actors and dancers. They cleared a little space on the street. They asked the Guatemalan people there if they wouldn't mind moving over just a little. Then they put on a play about Jesus. You weren't supposed to know it was Jesus at first. It was about a king who wore a crown (Styrofoam) and a cape (kings wear capes), and a servant with bare feet who stole or wanted to steal (this part was a little muddy). The punishment for stealing was death (now we figured out where this was going) and the king said he'd rather not have even the poorest of his servants die and that he would take the servant's place (inconvenient domestic policy).

After the play we stood on the street and talked to these evangelicals about God and Guatemala. “We're just bringing the Good News here,” they said (because the Guatemalans hadn't heard it).

“Will you come with us?” the evangelicals had asked us. They gestured toward the bus. “Come, come.”

In El Salvador it occurred to me that in fact we must have all looked alike to the Guatemalan people watching us. You have to look at a thing carefully to be able to tell it from the others, and you have to know what to look for. Most things are indistinguishable.

*   *   *

A year and a half later, in the final cough of George and me, I had forgotten all about the orphanage, but George was still betrayed by his mother's church. He had the idea that we put a certain bowl by the door of our apartment, a bowl we'd procured from some dying native tribe and carried back over the land to the States somehow without crushing it. The idea was that when a moment arrived that we wanted to go out and spend idle money—a new sweater, dinner out, a show—we would forgo the adventure and instead put the money in the bowl to mail at the end of the month to the orphanage.

I don't know if we ever sent any money. George was in charge of the affair.

HERMANA MANA

She had no patience for me. I was just a bad teenager hanging around the orphanage being bad. “
¿Qué haces?
” she said. She had Salvadoran stubborn eyes and the wind blew her dark curls. When she lifted her arms, the space filled in with children. She disliked me and I was terrified.

“Have you never washed a dish in your life?” she said.

I froze, sponge in hand. (I hadn't or hadn't much. I could put dishes in the dishwasher with the best of them.)

“The girls are going to fetch water. I suppose you've never done that either,” she said, as if no one in the United States had to fetch water from the river. (Of course no one did.)

She knew English and spoke it well, but to us she spoke Spanish. If she switched to English with me it meant she really meant business. It meant she was furious.

She loved George. “At last a man has come,” she said. She lilted a little in Spanish. “We've been here alone so long and now God has sent us a man.” She wore girlish dresses, bare hair knocking around her shoulders. She could pull out a shy grin.

“
Para servirle
, at your service,” George said, straightening his shoulders, ready to give a more dramatic demonstration of his worth beyond mere child care.

Yeah, George. That guy clicked into place like a battery. He was out in the courtyard, tossing a ball around, playing basketball and winning. The orphans wanted him to win, they let him win. You should have seen him, running around in circles with the boys. Making them do push-ups. They loved him. It was awful. The youngest were scared of me. A girl who couldn't pat a tortilla. Who could barely lift a pail of water. Who couldn't sew. I was a disaster. I was scared of them too. The oldest were a year younger than me and ignored me. I was even more afraid of them. I tried to reach them in our own language—teenage talk—but that too was a bad setback. My ideas about Christianity were more liberal than Mana's—I mean, they weren't allowed to dance or wear makeup, for Christ's sake—and I knew a few things that teenage girls like to do for fun.

It wasn't going to work out, okay?

*   *   *

It was the bra that brought it to an end. We'd been there only a couple of weeks. Mana said I had to wear a bra. I said I was flat-chested and saw no point to it and anyway I didn't even own one. She said the man with the car would make a special trip to bring me to a store where I could buy one. I said that was a fine way to spend money. I said that was a fine way to waste everyone's afternoon. “And you know what?” I said to George. “Who cares. It's a bra.”

“Just borrow a bra from Mana,” George said.

(He'd noticed Mana's bra.)

We were in the hallway talking furtively because we were supposed to be demonstrating proper male-around-female behavior, which was no behavior, which was male-stay-away-from-female behavior because we'd been foolish enough to admit we weren't married so we had to stay in separate girls' and boys' houses and call each other “hermano” and “hermana.” Everybody was an hermano or hermana around there. You didn't have to be a nun. They all marched around in lines like a movie musical. I couldn't stand to be away from George. That would change later, but at that point to be kept apart was the height of outrage. I walked from room to room, despairing and fuming.