The Meaning of the Shovel

—Barrio René Cisneros Managua, Nicaragua, June-July 1982 This was the dictator’s land before the revolution. Now the dictator is exiled to necropolis, his army brooding in camps on the border, and the congregation of the landless stipples the earth with a thousand shacks, every weatherbeaten carpenter planting a fistful of nails. Here I dig latrines. I dig because last week I saw a funeral in the streets of Managua, the coffin swaddled in a red and black flag, hoisted by a procession so silent that even their feet seemed to leave no sound on the gravel. He was eighteen, with the border patrol, when a sharpshooter from the dictator’s army took aim at the back of his head. I dig because yesterday I saw four walls of photographs: the faces of volunteers in high school uniforms who taught campesinos to read, bringing an alphabet sandwiched in notebooks to places where the mist never rises from the trees. All dead, by malaria or the greedy river or the dictator’s army swarming the illiterate villages like a sky full of corn-plundering birds. I dig because today, in this barrio without plumbing, I saw a woman wearing a yellow dress climb into a barrel of water to wash herself and the dress at the same time, her cupped hands spilling. I dig because today I stopped digging to drink an orange soda. In a country with no glass, the boy kept the treasured bottle and poured the liquid into a plastic bag full of ice, then poked a hole with a straw. I dig because today my shovel struck a clay bowl centuries old, the art of ancient fingers moist with this same earth, perfect but for one crack in the lip. I dig because I have hauled garbage and pumped gas and cut paper and sold encyclopedias door to door. I dig, digging until the passport in my back pocket saturates with dirt, because here I work for nothing and for everything.