The Jaguar Smile

7 EATING THE EGGS OF LOVE

I first read Omar Cabezas’ book, Fire from the Mountain, on the plane from London to Managua. (The English title is much less evocative, though shorter, than the Spanish, which translates literally as ‘The mountain is something more than a great expanse of green’. Now, on the road to Matagalpa, travelling towards the mountains about which he’d written, I dipped into it again. Even in English, without any of the ‘Nica’ slang that had helped make it the most successful book in the new Nicaragua (its sales were close to 70,000 copies), it was an enjoyable and evocative memoir of ‘Skinny’ Cabezas’ recruitment by the FSLN, his early work for the Frente in León, and his journey up into the mountains to become one of the early guerrillas. Cabezas managed to communicate the terrible difficulty of life in the mountains, which were a hell of mud, jungle and disease (although one of his fans, a young Nicaraguan soldier, thought he had failed to make it sound bad enough because he had made it too funny). But for Cabezas the mountains were something more than a great expanse of unpleasantness. He turned them into a mythic, archetypal force, The Mountain, because during the Somoza period hope lay there. The Mountain was where the Frente guerrillas were; it was the source from which, one day, the revolution would come. And it did.

Nowadays, when the Contra emerged from The Mountain to terrorize the campesinos, it must have felt like a violation; like, perhaps, the desecration of a shrine.

Forested mesas flanked the road; ahead, the multiform mountains, conical, twisted, sinuous, closed the horizon. Cattle and dogs shared the road with cars, refusing to acknowledge the supremacy of the automobile. When the trucks came, however, everybody got out of the way fast.

Tall cacti by the roadside. Women in fatigues carried rifles over their shoulders, holding them by the barrels. Moss hung in clumps from the trees and even from the telephone wires. Children pushed wooden wheelbarrows full of wood. And then, as we neared Matagalpa, we came upon a sombre procession carrying a distressingly small box: a child’s funeral. I saw three in the next two days.

It had begun to rain.

I was pleased to be getting out of Managua again. Matagalpa felt like a real town, with its church-dominated squares, its town centre. It was like returning to normal, but normality here was of a violent, exceptional type. The buildings were full of bullet-holes left over from the insurrection years, and dominating the town was a high, ugly tower which was all that remained of the National Guard’s hated command post. After the revolution, the people had demolished the Guardia’s fearsome redoubt.

The ice-cream shop had no ice-cream because of the shortages. In the toy shop the evidence of poverty was everywhere; the best toys on display were primitive ‘cars’ made out of a couple of bits of wood nailed together and painted, with Coca-Cola bottle tops for hubcaps. There were, interestingly, a number of mixed-business stores known as ‘Egyptian shops’, boasting such names as ‘Armando Mustafa’ or ‘Manolo Saleh’, selling haberdashery, a few clothes, some toiletries, a variety of basic household items — shampoo, buckets, safety-pins, mirrors, balls. I remembered the Street of Turks in One Hundred Years of Solitude. In Matagalpa, Macondo did not seem so very far away.

The faces in the Egyptian shops didn’t look particularly Egyptian but then neither did the orientally named Moisés Hassan, mayor of Managua. In the cafés, I met some more familiar faces. Posters of the Pope and of Cardinal Obando y Bravo were everywhere, the Cardinal’s scarlet robes rendered pale pink by the passage of time. Sandinistas, unconcerned about the company they were keeping, drank hideously sweetened fruit squashes, including the bright purple pitahaya, and munched on the glutinous kiwi-like mamón, beneath the watching Cardinal. I talked to Carlos Paladino, who worked in the office of the delegado or governor of Matagalpa province, about the regional resettlement policy.

Large areas of the mountainous and densely jungled war zone in the north-eastern part of Jinotega province had been evacuated, and the population relocated in southern Jinotega, and Matagalpa province, too. It had been a ‘military decision’, that is, compulsory. The army had been having trouble fighting the Contra because the scattered civilian population kept getting in the way. The people were also in danger from the Contra, who regularly kidnapped campesinos, or forced them to grow food for the counter-revolutionary soldiers, or killed them. But wasn’t it also true, I asked, that many people in those areas sympathized with the Contra? Yes, Paladino replied, some men had gone to join them, leaving many women with children behind. The large number of one-parent families of this type had become quite a problem. But in many cases the men would return, disillusioned after a time. The government offered a complete amnesty for any campesino who returned in this way. ‘We don’t hold them responsible,’ Paladino said. ‘We know how much pressure the Contra can exert.’

Resettlement brought problems. Apart from the single-parent issue — how were these women to be involved in production when they had to look after their children? — the resettled northerners were people who were utterly unfamiliar with living in communities. They had led isolated lives in jungle clearings. Now they were being put into clusters of houses built close together. Their animals strayed into their neighbours’ yards. Their children fought. They hated it. Many of them were racially different from the local mestizos: they were Amerindians, Miskito or Sumo, with their own languages, their own culture, and they felt colonized. ‘We made many mistakes,’ Carlos Paladino admitted.

The plan was to have child-care centres at each co-operative settlement, but so far they had only been able to put in eleven such centres in over fifty communities. They had also managed to build some schools, some health-care facilities; but there was still a lot of resentment in the air.

The lack of resources (and, no doubt, the haste with which the operation had been carried out) had meant that in some places the authorities had been unable to provide the resettled families with completed houses. The ‘roof only policy’, as it was called, offered the uprooted families exactly what its name suggested: a roof. They had to build the walls out of whatever materials they could find. It was not a policy calculated to win hearts and minds. But, Paladino insisted, the state was doing its best, and international volunteer brigades and relief agencies were helping, too. There were even some unexpected individual initiatives. ‘A few days after the mine blew up and killed the thirty-two bus passengers,’ he told me, ‘a tall, fair-haired man appeared in the area, a foreigner, with fifteen hundred dollars to give away. He was just carrying it in his pockets, and looking for the families of the thirty-two, to hand over the money. It was his savings.’

Progress remained slow. ‘It isn’t easy,’ Carlos said. ‘Eight new communities have been destroyed by the Contra in the last six months. Hundreds of campesinos die in the attacks every year.’

Our best defence is the people in arms. ‘The people are more and more able to undertake their own defence. In November 1985 at Santa Rosa hundreds of Contra were killed. Since then, in the attacks on the new co-operatives, hundreds more.’

But the Contra were doing damage, all right. For a country in Nicaragua’s position, the loss of an estimated forty per cent of the harvest was a crippling blow.

When Carlos Paladino came to work in Matagalpa, he was highly critical of the way the revolution had handled the resettlements, and won the approval of the regional delegado, Carlos Zamora, for his new approach. He went into the jungle, with his staff, and lived with the peasants for months, to learn about their way of life and their needs, before attempting any resettlement. This altered the layout of the new settlements, and greatly increased the officials’ sensitivity to the people’s wishes. Paladino became an expert on Miskito Indian culture, and had started writing about it. In his spare time (!) he was doing a history degree. Not for the first time, I felt awed by the amount people were willing to take on in Nicaragua.

After I’d been talking to him for more than an hour, I discovered that Paladino had been in hospital twenty-four hours earlier, having a .22 bullet removed from his lung. It had been there since before the ‘triumph’, the result of an accident: he had been shot in training by a careless cadet. He opened his shirt, after I had bullied him to do so, and showed me the scar. It was an inch away from his heart.

I stayed in a wooden chalet in the mountains high above Matagalpa, and that night the delegado, Carlos Zamora, and his deputy, Manuel Salvatierra, dropped by to inspect the escritor hindú. Zamora was small, slight, moustachioed; Salvatierra of much bigger build. They were old college friends. We sat down to a dinner of beef in hot pepper sauce, squash with melted cheese, and banana chips.

On the 19th, Zamora volunteered, the Contra had moved a thousand men into Jinotega province. Their plan had been to attack one of the two hydro-electric stations and cut the power cable. They had also intended to ambush campesinos on their way to Estelí. ‘They failed completely,’ he said with satisfaction. ‘Our intelligence was good enough. But 700 of them are still in the region, still in Nicaragua. The rest have returned to Honduras.’

Salvatierra stressed the Contra’s morale problem. ‘They’re scared of us,’ he said. ‘Dollars won’t help that.’

I changed the subject. Was it true that it cost six head of cattle to get a car serviced? They laughed. ‘Or ten hectares of maize,’ said Carlos Zamora. So, then, I said, if prices are that high, tell me about corruption. They looked embarrassed, not unexpectedly, but they didn’t refuse to answer. Yes, Zamora said, there was, er, some. ‘About the car service,’ he said. ‘You see, a mechanic will tell you that a certain part is unavailable, or can be ordered for crazy money, but he just happens to have one at home, for a price.’

The black market accounted for maybe forty per cent of the country’s liquid assets. ‘Anything that can be bought can be sold down the road for more,’ Salvatierra said. ‘There is an old woman who hitchhikes from Matagalpa to León every day, with a suitcase full of beans, mangoes and rice. She earns 5,000 córdobas a day. I earn about 3,000.’

Zamora and Salvatierra had been ‘bad students’ in Managua when the FSLN recruited them. Zamora’s father was a garage mechanic. (I had accidentally hit on the right subject when I talked about servicing motor cars.) ‘He wasn’t against the revolution but he wasn’t for it, either.’ I said that it seemed at times that the revolution had been a struggle between the generations — the Frente’s ‘muchachos’, kids, against the older generation of Somocistas and cautious, conservative campesinos. No, no, they both hastened to correct me. But the impression stuck.

‘How old are you?’ I asked them. They giggled prettily.

‘Thirty,’ Carlos Zamora said. He had fought a revolution and was the governor of a province, and he was nine years younger than me.

Later, when a little Flor de Caña Extra Seco had loosened things up, the old stories came out again: of the battle of Pancasán in 1974, at which the Sandinistas suffered a bloody defeat, but after which, for the first time, the campesinos came to the Frente and asked for arms, so that the defeat was a victory, after all, the moment at which the muchachos and the peasants united; of Julio Buitrago; of the local boy, Carlos Fonseca, who was born in Matagalpa. Sandino and Fonseca were both illegitimate, they told me. ‘So what’s the connection between bastards and revolutions?’ I asked, but they only laughed nervously. It wasn’t done to joke about the saints.

I tried to get them to open up about the period in the ’70s during which the Frente had split into three ‘tendencies’, after a bitter dispute about the correct path for the revolution. (The ‘proletarian faction’, led by Jaime Wheelock, believed that a long period of work with the campesinos, to politicize and mobilize them, was the way forward, even if it took years. The faction that favoured a prolonged guerrilla war, and based itself in the mountains, included Carlos Fonseca himself; and the third faction, the terceristas, which believed in winning the support of the middle classes and proceeding by a strategy of large-scale urban insurrection, was led by Daniel Ortega and his brother. The factions united, in December 1978, for the final push to victory, and it was the tercerista plan that carried the day.)

Zamora and Salvatierra denied that there had been any internal power struggles; the division had been tactical and not a real split. ‘I’ve never heard of a revolution without a power struggle in the leadership,’ I said. ‘Wasn’t it true that Jaime Wheelock was accused of being responsible for the split? Wasn’t it true that Daniel Ortega became President because the tercerista faction won the internal fight?’ No, they said, anxiously. Not at all. ‘The directorate has always been very united.’

That simply wasn’t true. Where had they spent the insurrection years, I asked; ‘In the cities,’ Zamora replied; Salvatierra nodded. Now I understood: they belonged to the urban-insurrectionist, tercerista faction, the winning team. They didn’t want to seem to be gloating over the victory.

To stir things up, I said that the case of Edén Pastora suggested that the divisions were deeper than they cared to admit. After all, Pastora had been a tercerista himself, he had been the famous ‘Commander Zero’, glamorous and dashing, who had led the sensational attack on the Palacio Nacional, taken the entire Somocista Chamber of Deputies hostage, and obtained the release of fifty jailed Sandinistas plus a half-million dollar ransom; and there he was today, in exile in Costa Rica, having tried to lead a counter-revolutionary army of his own … He had been defeated by the Sandinistas, but surely his break with the revolution he helped to bring about was significant? There were grins and embarrassed laughs from the delegado and his deputy. ‘Edén Pastora wanted personal glory,’ Salvatierra said. ‘He joined the wrong army in the first place.’

The next day I drove up into the north. I knew that the road I was on, the one that went up past Jinotega and headed for Bocay, was the one on which the Contra mine had exploded, killing ‘the thirty-two’, and even though that had happened a good deal further north than I was going, I felt extremely fearless as we went over the bumps. ‘How do you protect the roads?’ I asked the army officer who was accompanying me. ‘It’s impossible to guarantee total safety,’ he replied.

‘I see,’ I said. ‘Yes. By the way, how do you know when there’s a mine in the road?’

‘There’s a big bang,’ came the straight-faced reply.

My breakfast of rice and beans — ‘gallo pinto’, it was called, ‘painted rooster’ — began to crow noisily in my stomach.

There were vultures sitting by the roadsides. Low clouds sat amongst the mountains. The road-signs were punctured by bullet-holes. In the jeep, the driver, Danilo, had a radio, or rather a ‘REALISTIC sixteen-band scanner’, on which he picked up Contra transmissions. We passed co-operatives with resolutely optimistic names: La Esperanza. La Paz. The mountains thickened and closed: walls of tree and cloud. There was a flash of electric-blue wings; then, suddenly, a peasant shack surrounded by trees and hedges clipped into cones, domes, rectangles, spheres, all manner of geometric shapes. To be a topiarist in a jungle, I reflected, was to be a truly stubborn human being.

Then there was a tree lying across the road, blocking our way. Was this it? Was this where Contra fiends with machetes between their teeth would burst from the foliage, and goodbye escritor hindú?

It was just a tree across the road.

The Enrique Acuña co-operative was named after a local martyr, who had been murdered by a wealthy local landowner after Somoza’s fall. (The killer got away, fleeing the country before he could be arrested.) It was a ‘CAS’, a Cooperativa Agrícola Sandinista, that is, a proper co-op, with all the land held and farmed collectively. Elsewhere, in areas where there had been resistance to the co-operative idea, the government had evolved the ‘CCS’, the Co-operative of Credits and Services. In a CCS the land was owned and farmed by individuals, and the government’s role was limited to supplying them with power, water, health care and distribution facilities. There was no doubt that the campesinos were encouraged to adopt the CAS structure, but the existence of the alternative was an indication of the authorities’ flexibility; this was not, surely, the way a doctrinaire commune-ist regime would go about its business.

The houses were built on the ‘miniskirt’ principle: metal roofs stood over walls that were made of concrete up to a height of three feet, and of wood above that height. This had become the campesinos’ favourite building method. The Contra couldn’t set fire to the roofs, or shoot the occupants through the walls while they lay sleeping. The houses were arranged around wide avenues, with plenty of space between them. Pigs were snoozing in the shade. There was a tap with running water, and even a shower. In a ramshackle shed, a playschool was in progress: clapping games and songs. In the next room, there was a baby care centre with instructions for the care and diagnosis of diarrhoea pinned up on the wall, written out and illustrated by the children themselves. The disease was the main child-killer in the rural areas.

All around the co-operative’s residential area was a system of trenches. The campesinos did guard duty on a rota basis, and many of the men were familiar with the workings of the AK-47 automatic rifle. They were also geniuses with the machete. The campesino who had hacked to pieces the tree that had held us up could have shaved you without breaking your skin. Alternatively, he could have sliced you like a loaf.

Last November, the Contra had attacked the Acuña co-operative, by daylight and in force: around 400 of them against thirty-two armed defenders. Arturo, the burly young man who was in charge of the defence committee, told me proudly that they had held out for three hours until help arrived from a neighbouring co-operative. In the end the Contra were beaten off, with thirteen dead and around forty wounded. ‘We lost nobody,’ Arturo boasted. Since then, the Contra had been seen in the neighbourhood twice, but had not attacked.

A thought occurred to me: if the opposition were correct, and the Sandinistas were so unpopular, how was it that the government could hand out all these guns to the people, and be confident that the weapons would not be turned against them? There wasn’t another regime in Central America that would dare to do the same: not Salvador, nor Guatemala, not Honduras, not Costa Rica. While in tyrannical, ‘Stalinist’ Nicaragua, the government armed the peasantry, and they, in turn, pointed the guns, every one of them, against the counter-revolutionary forces.

Could this mean something?

I got talking to a group of five campesinos during their lunch break. They parked their machetes by hacking them into a tree-stump, but brought their AKs along. Did they know anyone who had joined the Contra? They knew of kidnaps, they said. But how about someone who had joined voluntarily? No, they didn’t. The people were afraid of the Contra.

One of the campesinos, Humberto, a small man with a big-toothed smile, was an indigène, but he wasn’t sure what sort. He wasn’t Miskito or Sumo, he knew that. ‘I’m trying to find out what I am.’ He had lived in the north, in the area now evacuated. The Contra, he said, had kidnapped him, threatened to kill him, but he had escaped. A while later he heard that they were still after him, and intended to recapture him. ‘This time they’d have killed me for sure.’ So he was delighted to be resettled. ‘It was hard at first, but, for me, it was a blessing.’ He sat close to a matchstick-thin man with wiry black hair sticking out sideways from beneath his peaked cap. ‘The same happened to me,’ this man, Rigoberto, said. ‘Just the same story. Me, too.’

Another of the quintet came from a coastal fishing community, where there had been no possibility of getting any land. The other two were locals. ‘So do you think of this as your home now?’ I asked. ‘Or does it seem like just some temporary place?’

Arturo, the defence organiser, answered. ‘What do you mean? We’ve put our sweat into this earth, we’ve risked our lives for it. We’re making our lives here. What do you mean? Of course it’s home.’

‘It’s our first home,’ the fisherman, the oldest of the five, at around fifty, said. He was called Horacio, and as I listened to him the penny dropped. What he had said, and what the indigène Humberto had told me — ‘I’m trying to find out what I am’ — were both connected to Father Molina’s sermon in Riguero, to the idea that one’s own country can be a place of exile, can be Egypt, or Babylon. That, in fact, Somocista Nicaragua had literally not been these people’s home, and that the revolution had really been an act of migration, for the locals as well as the resettled men. They were inventing their country, and, more than that, themselves. It was by belonging here that Humberto might actually discover what he was.

I said, ‘You’re lucky.’ The idea of home had never stopped being a problem for me. They didn’t understand that, though, and why should they? Nobody was shooting at me.

The co-operative’s day began at five a.m., when the workers assembled to hear the day’s work rota from the representatives of the various (annually elected) committees. Then they went home, breakfasted on tortillas and beans, and were in the fields (coffee, rice) at six, working for around eight hours. After work there were adult education classes. Three of the five men I spoke to had learned to write since arriving here — Humberto, he confessed, ‘not very well.’ The classes went up to the fourth grade.

What did they do for fun? Cockfighting, cards, guitar music, the occasional social call at the neighbouring co-op, the odd trip into Jinotega or Matagalpa, and of course the various fiestas. But they seemed awkward talking about fun. ‘In spite of the men lost to the war effort,’ Arturo insisted on getting the conversation back to the serious stuff, ‘we have kept up our levels of production.’

With the generosity of the poor, they treated me to a delicacy at lunch. I was given an egg and bean soup, the point being that these eggs were the best-tasting, because they had been fertilized. Such eggs were known as ‘the eggs of love’. When people had so little, a fertilized hen’s egg became a treat.

As I ate my love-eggs, which really did taste good, there were children playing in the shack next door to the kitchen hut. Their playing-cards were made out of rectangles of paper cut out of an old Uncle Scrooge comic book. Waak! My money! You dratted … Pieces of Huey, Dewey and Louie fled from the rage of the billionaire American duck. While on a radio, I promise, Bruce Springsteen sang ‘Born in the USA’.

The Germán Pomares field hospital, on the road back to Jinotega, was named after the FSLN leader who had been killed in May 1979, just two months before the ‘triumph’. Pomares had been a great influence on Daniel Ortega, and was one of the most popular Sandinista leaders. ‘He was so loved,’ my interpreter told me, ‘that his death wasn’t even announced on the news for six months.’ I added this to my collection of depressing sentences, alongside the one about the ‘cosmetic’ nature of press freedom.

At the sentry box at the hospital gate everybody was supposed to hand in their weapons, but our driver, Danilo, hid his pistol under a sweatshirt I’d taken off as the day grew hotter. Stripping in the heat was one thing, but he would have felt underdressed, he agreed when I discovered his deception, without some sort of gun.

The hospital was just two years old. ‘We have had to develop it quickly,’ said the director, Caldera, an Indian-looking man with a picture of Che, made of tiny shells, hanging on his office wall. ‘Never in the history of our nation have we had so many wounded.’ The specialist staff were all Cubans. Nicaraguan doctors were gradually being trained to take over, but, at present, simply didn’t have the skills required for this kind of surgery.

The average age of the patients was twenty-one. Ten per cent of them were regular soldiers, thirty per cent came from the peasant militias, and no less than sixty per cent were youngsters doing their military service.

‘That’s astonishing,’ I said. ‘Why so many military service casualties?’ The reason, Caldera said, was that these kids were the main components of the BLI forces, the small commando units that would pursue the Contra deep into the jungle, into The Mountain. Military service in Nicaragua was no joyride.

In recent months, many of the hospital’s patients had been mineblast victims, and almost all of these had died. Otherwise the main injuries were from bullet wounds. ‘Eighty-three per cent heal completely,’ said director Caldera, who knew his statistics. ‘Six to seven per cent survive with disabilities.’ That left ten per cent. I didn’t ask what happened to them.

By chance, I visited the Pomares hospital when there were quite a few empty beds, and very few amputees. Usually, Caldera said, things were different. ‘If it was always this way I could write poetry.’ Another poet. There was no escape from the fellows.

I asked if they had to import blood. No, he said, the national blood donation programme provided enough. That struck me as fairly remarkable. It was a small country, and it had been losing a lot of blood.

The young men in the wards were all gung-ho, all volubly starry-eyed about the revolution — ‘Since my injury,’ one teenager told me, ‘I love this revolutionary process even more’ — and all super-keen to return to the fray. I met a nineteen-year-old youth who had been fighting for six years. I met a shamefaced seventeen-year-old who had shot himself accidentally in the foot. I met an eighteen-year-old with wounds all over his body. ‘First I was hit in the leg,’ he said, ‘but I could keep firing. Then the shrapnel, here,’ he indicated his bandaged forehead, ‘and my vision blurred. I passed out, but only for a moment.’ I asked about the alarming gash above his right knee. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. It looked too large to have arrived without being noticed, but he shook his head. ‘It’s funny, but I just don’t know how I got it.’

They were all very young, yet already so familiar with death that they had lost respect for it. That worried me. Then, as I was leaving, I met a young woman in a wheelchair. She had been shot in the groin, and her face was glassy, expressionless. Unlike the boy soldiers, this was someone who knew she’d been shot, and was upset about it.

‘And what do you think about the revolution?’ I asked her.

‘I’ve got no time for that junk,’ she replied.

‘Are you against it?’

‘Who cares?’ she shrugged. ‘Maybe. Yes.’

So there were people for whom the violence was too much, and not worth it. But it also mattered that she had been entirely unafraid. She had been in the presence of several officers of the state, and it hadn’t bothered her a bit.

When I was back in my chalet, the mountains looked so peaceful in the evening light that it was hard to believe in the danger they contained. Beauty, in Nicaragua, often contained the beast.