Revolution by Deb Olin Unferth

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? ”
    â€œHa ha!” he screamed. “Can you tell me what this is?”
    â€œWhat a weirdo,” I said to George.
    â€œI think he’s searching us,” George said in English. “I think this is a search.”
    â€œThat,” George told the man, “is shampoo. You put it in your hair. Y éso es un zapato , yes.”
    â€œWhat 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.
    â€œVisiting,” said George.
    â€œWhat for?”
    â€œTourism.”
    â€œOh yeah? What do you want to see?”
    â€œ Playa , beach.”
    â€œ Playa ’s not here. Playa ’s over there.” He pointed with his chin.
    â€œRuins, then. Las ruinas .”
    â€œ ¿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.
    â€œThe 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