Revolution (6 page)

*   *   *

George liked to sing. He used to speak the words more than sing them, shout them. I did whatever he did, so I shouted the words too. We stood on the road and shouted them together.

*   *   *

You can get anything you want at Alice's restaurant.

VISITORS

Once we left the orphanage I more or less had a bad attitude from there on out. I didn't want any more guns in my face. I didn't want any more Marshall Law. There was some confusion on this point. Before we went to Central America, George had told me that San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, was under martial law. He said it several times and it comforted me every time because I thought he was saying Marshall Law and that it referred to a restructuring program that I messily confused in my mind with World War II and the Marshall Plan. Imagine my surprise when we arrived. We got off the bus in San Salvador in the middle of the night and a squad of soldiers came sidling over, clanking with artillery like cowboys.

“Hey,” they wanted to know, “what are you two doing, standing out on the street like this, violating curfew?”

Excuse us?

“Everybody has to be in by dark,” they said, “and here you are, milling around outside with your bags. Let's see your papers.”

The other people from the bus got into taxis and cars. I recall the red taillights going down the street and then George and me there alone with the soldiers.

*   *   *

George spoke mediocre Spanish. Later he spoke it so well that he developed a slight accent in English and couldn't shut the Spanish faucet off even when he wanted to. Spanish just came out with the English. Meanwhile I spoke it beautifully, but later less and less, until today it sounds fake, like seeing glowing stickers instead of stars. But at that point George was having trouble understanding, and I myself couldn't get my head around this curfew business. It felt like a new language, one that I knew but somehow the meanings of the words had been switched on me. The only curfew I knew of was the one my parents had imposed in high school. For an entire city to have to be in by dark was too strange for me. Around us was a city of iron-vault streets, thousands of hearts beating in the walls.

*   *   *

The soldiers searched our bags. They told us not to be out after dark again and they were not nice about it. They put us into a taxi.

“We'd like to go to a hostel, please,” said George.

That sounded good to me. We had been in hostels in Guatemala and Mexico, and that's where I wanted to be just then—among our kind. I wanted a set of good old-fashioned gringo heads lit up in front of me. I wanted to see that tourist smile wiped on a face.

The taximan frowned into the rearview. “Hostel?”

“A cheap hotel. Where the people are like us.”

“What are you like?”

“We're from another country,” George explained. “We carry backpacks.”

The man turned around and took a good look at us. Then he drove us to a brothel and left us there.

*   *   *

We spent a lot of time in that brothel over the next few weeks. We sat on the landing outside our room. The ladies did their washing in the courtyard below. The sky was gray all the time over that building. The place seemed muted of color. We leaned our backs against the wall, stretched our legs out across the walkway. When the ladies came up the steps with their visitors, we got to our feet to let them by. They just stepped over us if we fell asleep. They didn't speak to us or even look at us, or even look at each other. (This was specific to El Salvador. Later we stayed in a brothel in Honduras, where there were only insurrections, not a civil war, and the ladies were so friendly, they came into our room and told us stories all day and even robbed us, twice.)

I don't know where they got these prostitutes, but they didn't look like any I'd ever seen and even at my age I'd seen a few, and anyway I knew what one was supposed to look like. These prostitutes wore blouses and knee-length skirts. They had neatly combed hair. They looked like the kind of ladies who work as clerks in business offices, or like airline ticket agents or case workers at a social service agency. They looked like the kind of women who type your number into a computer and make you wait a long time and then tell you in a voice at the edge of impatience that they're sorry, there's nothing they can do. You'll have to come back tomorrow. Just to look at them made you feel a Kafkaesque hopelessness.

*   *   *

We sat on that landing because our room was depressing—peeling walls, stained sheet—and because it was awkward to be out on the streets. Men with enormous M-16s stopped us every few blocks and wanted to see our papers and ask us just where did we think we were going and what were we doing in El Salvador. George wanted to go out anyway. I didn't and I wasn't going to let him go without me. He had to talk me into coming along. From here on out, in fact, George had to cajole me into doing anything. We argued endlessly about this, first in apologetic tones, later in harsher ones. “What is the point in being here,” George would say, “if all we do is sit in our room?”

“What is it out there you want to see?” I said. “Buildings we could look at in books?”

“We need to find people to interview.”

“We don't have to go out for that,” I said.

*   *   *

People filed in to see us. Somehow they knew we were there. I was mystified by it, but it occurs to me now that obviously George knew we were being watched, but he didn't want to frighten me. One man turned up and said he wanted to see our room. I have no idea who this guy was. He was nice-looking in his suit. He looked like a movie star. He was shaking our hands and making jokes and walking back and forth across the room, waving. He stood over our backpacks and pulled our clothing out of them. “
¿Qué es ésto?
”

“Ha ha!” he screamed. “Can you tell me what this is?”

“What a weirdo,” I said to George.

“I think he's searching us,” George said in English. “I think this is a search.”

“That,” George told the man, “is shampoo. You put it in your hair.
Y éso es un zapato
, yes.”

“What are you doing here?” the man said. He had a fistful of tampons in his hand and behind him the window to our room had bars. I stayed quiet.

“Visiting,” said George.

“What for?”

“Tourism.”

“Oh yeah? What do you want to see?”

“
Playa
, beach.”

“
Playa
's not here.
Playa
's over there.” He pointed with his chin.

“Ruins, then.
Las ruinas
.”

“
¿Arruinada?
Ruined what? There's nothing ruined here. Only ruined thing is in here.” He thumped his chest, then reached over and, with the back of his hand, thumped George's chest.

*   *   *

Another day another man showed up. He had one of the ladies with him. They walked up the steps, passed us, and then stopped. The man turned to us with a bow. He was heavyset, unshaven, but light on his feet, a head of curly hair. “
Desculpe
, do you guys know how badly things are going in this country?”

We nodded. We'd heard that.

The lady looked away.

“The government is bad
¿sabes?
” He went on and on. People are poor, dying off, missing. He knew what they were saying in the States, he said, that El Salvador was a democracy, but it wasn't true. (He was right about that—now everyone knows the truth about the death squads in El Salvador, but at that time in the States there was a lot of talk about El Salvador, the stronghold of democracy in the Communist wasteland of Central America.) He said he didn't know what we were doing there and he said he wasn't going to ask. He said he may be in trouble even now for coming to talk to us, but he wanted us to know that the FMLN could make El Salvador better. He was very eloquent. “I don't know what you're doing here,” he kept saying. (Salvadorans always want to know what you're doing in their country, even if you're Salvadoran. It's the great national question. I never know what to say. Why wouldn't I want to see their country? So many people want to see
mine
.) George and I were too scared to answer. We thought he might be an actual revolutionary and after what we'd seen—the paro, the orphanage, the curfew, clear sincere danger—we weren't sure we still wanted to sign up. We said nothing.

Then he said, “Don't remember me.” He repeated it, sternly. “Remember this country, these people, but not me.” He took the lady's arm and led her around us, back down the steps, and he never came back. But it's hard not to remember a man who orders you not to remember him. There is a similar mind exercise involving an elephant.

BROKEN CITY

San Salvador was cleared out, hardly anyone on the streets except for all the different kinds of militia. People were staying indoors or had gone away or “disappeared” or were dead. Plus an earthquake had knocked down half the city the year before and the government still hadn't sent anyone around to pick it all up. Concrete walls lay in apocalyptic pieces on the roads. People were living in the rubble in plywood houses they'd put together, tin tops tied down with strips of plastic. In places it was hard to get through. Cars shifted around the piles. George talked me out of our room each day and we walked all over that broken city, looking for people to interview. We went to the Casa Presidencial over and over and were never let in. We waited at the gate and argued with the guards. Behind them the Casa looked like a compound behind the barbed wire and fences. It seemed far away, a distant white fortress, colonial-style. George and I found only four people in El Salvador willing to talk to us on tape. One was an artist. He wore a fine blue suit and was friendly and calm, having his soda from a straw, but what he said shocked us, and later we said his words again and again to each other, we couldn't stop saying them, but I don't remember what they were. (And of course the tapes are gone.)

We went to churches, to the cathedral. No one would talk to us. The cathedral was ravaged, birds flying in and out the broken windows, bare rebar coming out of the walls. The story went that years earlier, before the civil war, a new cathedral had been going up, a better cathedral, tremendous, full of paintings and glass and statues on platforms, like a birdcage full of color and light, and El Salvador was to have a new archbishop, Oscar Romero, sworn in too. But no sooner had he fit on his robes than he said enough was enough. The government was gunning down all their priests, and he'd had it. If they thought they could stick this robe on him and he'd just sit and smile, well, they had another thing coming. The church officials could not understand why he said that. The government killed one little priest (a friend of Romero's, yes, but still), and suddenly the guy went berserk. Romero had been a conservative his whole life and now he became a raving radical, ranting about Vatican Two. Who knew he had rebellion sleeping within that aging body? All it took was one priest downed, and the end of the yarn was tugged, his entire soul unraveled.

Oh come on, said Romero. No one would believe the number of priests killed in El Salvador. It's like a horror film the way they were being plucked one by one off the countryside, tortured or shot, the bishops writing sadder and sadder letters to the president, “Stop killing us please.” And on top of that, said Romero, here the church was spending God knows how much money on a new cathedral when anyone could see the hungry people sitting outside, sleeping on the steps, which clearly runs against the teachings of Vatican Two. Romero ordered the construction of the cathedral to stop and for the money to be given to the poor. (These liberation theologians and their Vatican Two.)

The cathedral was three-quarters built when Romero told the workers to stop. The workers just left. The building began to decay. People brought flowers. People brought umbrellas to pray in the rain. Romero talked on the radio and all of El Salvador listened. He talked about government persecution, he demanded an apology, a pasture of apologies, he demanded a new order. In 1980 Romero was gunned down in the middle of mass and the Salvadoran Civil War began.

*   *   *

By 1987 a film of graffiti had settled over the city, over the benches and walls, the statues, the steps, the roads, the trees, cars, and fountains. It all read the same:

EL PUEBLO EXIGE LA RENUNCIA DEL PRESIDENTE DUARTE

MUERE REAGAN

DUARTE ASESINO DE MÁS DE 70 MIL SALVADOREÑOS

FUERA DUARTE, OLIGARCAS Y YANKEES

YANKEE GO HOME

We played hangman in a notebook, George and I, when bored in our room. He made words up, didn't play by the rules. “That's not a word,” I'd say.

“How do you know what's a word?” he'd say.

*   *   *

One day we took a bus to the coastal resort town La Libertad. We'd read in our guidebook that the finest beaches were in El Salvador and that all the surfers of New Zealand lived but to get there and ride the Salvadoran waves. We got off the bus and walked down to the ocean. But the water was brown. It was streaked with black lines in both directions as far as we could see. What the hell? My suit itched under my dress. We walked on the beach, poked at black clumps of seaweed with our shoes. We were the only people around. We walked back up the sand. We asked a man in a hotel why it looked like that. He took us upstairs. We looked down at the water. You could see the heavy streaks across the water, running out into the sea. The man told us the water wasn't really brown. It looked like that because of algae. It would be gone soon, we should wait a few days, he said.

I'd never seen the Pacific Ocean look like that.

It must be a terrible war to make the water look like that, I thought.

I looked over at George. I wondered if I should be marrying someone who took me to places like this.