Revolution by Deb Olin Unferth Page A

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.
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    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.
    â€œHow do you know what’s a word?” he’d say.
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    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