THE LAST WORD
Wisenberg, S.L.
THE LAST WORD S.L. Wisenberg Vacation at Club Dead My friend Angie and I had come to Central America to look for truth, the way others (we thought) went there to tramp through Mayan ruins and...
...Sympathizers from all over the world come to watch—this was November 1984—the first election since the 1979 revolution...
...How can we judge, we who have always had hot showers...
...I wanted to cry for her splendor and sincerity...
...It was vacation...
...The maid told us she had a six-year-old son who lived with her parents in her village...
...They'd been apart since her husband had been killed—by the rebels...
...Old women bathed in the open, breasts hanging...
...But I have to protect the revolution...
...And, Angie added, who have a lifetime of hot showers ahead of us...
...I could not tell them that they deserved what they got, that revolutions are not fought for the benefit of landowners...
...They were landowners...
...It was a bright, airy place, stark as a Shaker house, barely occupied...
...Afew days later, Angie and I were in El Salvador at the home of a newspaper correspondent...
...They thought their maid was spying on them...
...I knew there was a toilet-paper shortage...
...The water was cold...
...That day the highway filled with soldiers in trucks leaving the city...
...she wanted peace and prosperity, a life that was whole...
...What I knew about Central America had come from the media and from leftish conferences...
...It mattered, in a way I strain now to recall, that there had been a place governed by a dictator, that the people had arisen and overthrown him, and that they were making a better life...
...Back at the correspondent's home, we took showers...
...I could not argue with their son, who had rushed home from college in the United States to work in the postrevolutionary literacy campaign...
...We walked through the stalls, buying wrapping paper, a plastic mesh bag, figurines, feeling guilty for bargaining...
...The maid took the bus with us to the central marketplace...
...The next day we found out: If you leave the water running long enough, it gets hot...
...I believed in the Sandinistas...
...Members of our tour group met with government leaders and some of the nonmil-itary opposition...
...What if my daily life were so brutal that mere survival compelled me to take up arms...
...We saw old men, women, children...
...She would have to tell about the massacre in her village in which government soldiers killed her husband and son...
...They fed me lunch and gave me candy and coffee to deliver to their son...
...They were waiting for it to seem like theirs again...
...We sat down in a bakery...
...They believed what they S.L...
...They apologized for not being able to take me back to Managua...
...I felt sympathy for the armed Salva-doran rebels though I had long pronounced myself a pacifist...
...I'd met people a few days earlier who said they had been sleeping flat on the floor, anticipating an attack...
...She wrote part of this article while in residence at the Millay Colony for the Arts in Austerlitz, New York...
...American helicopters had been threatening the capital...
...Tellez was realistic, eloquent, reassuring: The aims of the revolution were equality and an end to tyranny...
...The good guys...
...Wisenberg Vacation at Club Dead My friend Angie and I had come to Central America to look for truth, the way others (we thought) went there to tramp through Mayan ruins and bargain their way to cheap bright textiles...
...Our beds were made and our laundry was washed by maids who called us companera and wanted to come to the United States...
...One day I took a cab to visit a friend's parents, south of Managua...
...Three young women in their twenties, Angie commented later, shopping and getting coffee and dessert...
...And if violence were justified in those circumstances, wasn't it just one more step to accept self-defense in all its forms, and then revenge, and ultimately capital punishment and nuclear war...
...I am twenty-eight years old," she said...
...There was an everything shortage, and I felt ashamed that I hadn't brought them Band-Aids and over-the-counter drugs...
...We felt sympathy...
...In the embattled northern city of Esteli, we visited tiny schoolroom polling places...
...I would love to be wearing other clothes and be out with my friends...
...This was their home...
...They had pastel toilet paper in the bathroom, and I wondered whether it had been put out especially for me...
...We thought of the maid...
...Club Dead, I called it...
...Managua was full of people like us...
...I returned to my group in Managua, which was listening to Dora Maria Tellez, "Commander Two" when the National Palace was seized...
...Water was rationed...
...But I could not refute the truth of their lives...
...The next day, Angie and I went to a refugee camp...
...And an aspirin shortage...
...Wisenberg, formerly a reporter for the Miami Herald, teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Northwestern University...
...She was still dressed as a soldier...
...But companera Dora, I asked silently, why do your words remind me of the soldier I met once at the Pentagon who answered my objection to killing by saying, as if explaining to a slow child, "You can't have a war without killing people...
...I can't leave, she said, because people would ask where I'm from...
...The Nicaraguan revolution, it seemed to me, was one of the few events of the late Twentieth Century that showed improvement was possible and the world didn't have to remain miserable and poor...
...The guerrillas...
...heard on the contra radio and what they read in La Prensa, the anti-Sandinista newspaper they kept stacked on the living-room floor...
...I wanted to tell them the Sandinistas were bringing democracy...
...I said, How can we judge...
...I wanted to speak of land reform and health care, of cooperation and redistribution of wealth...
...I wondered whether I would still espouse nonviolence if I lived in Central America...
...They looked very young...
...We expressed sympathy...
...It is Saturday night...
...Poor children, naked children, standing patiently in line, kids out of Dickens...
...We were taken around in buses and stayed in the ranch-style homes of former Somoza functionaries...
...A young woman told us we must let everyone know what we saw...
...Propaganda, he said later, bitterly, and flew back to Missouri...
...On the streets, we talked to women who used to be maids, who used to be scared, whose pictures I took pointing to an outdoor mural depicting the people's insurrection...
...It's not our life...
...Gasoline rationing, they sighed...
...Only the birds are free, said my friend's aunt...
...There is no way of responding to someone who feels betrayed...
...We wondered if her husband had been a government soldier...
Vol. 51 • July 1987 • No. 7
