The Jaguar Smile

10 MARKET DAY

The Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar loved Nicaragua, and came here often. When he was in Managua his favourite places were the markets. He would wander, with Tomás Borge, through the old ‘Oriental market’ that grew up in the earthquake-ruins of the city centre. They must have made an outlandish couple, Julio the giant and tiny Tomás. Nicaragua returned Cortázar’s compliment and loved him, too. The author of the fiendishly esoteric and complicated Rayuela (‘Hopscotch’) had been on first-name terms with many market traders. Now he, too, was dead.

When the big new covered markets like the Mercado Roberto Huembes were constructed, the traders didn’t want to leave their sites at the Oriental market. They were afraid their regular customers wouldn’t be able to find them in the cavernous new location. Daniel Ortega went to a meeting with the traders and old women yelled at him for hours, We won’t move, you can’t make us go. But some did, and then more, and now very few remained at the Oriental site.

At the Roberto Huembes market there were giant pink bunnies dangling over my head. These were piñatas, children’s party pieces. You filled them up with sweets and hung them from the ceiling. Then the children beat them with sticks until they burst in a shower of sweets. Young mestizo girls eyed the piñatas longingly.

There was a distraction. To the music of drums, the jigantona, the giant dancing woman, jigged past, about ten feet tall, her head a wide-eyed mask, her hips wobbling. The children rushed along behind her and so did I. She shimmied past a wall on which satirical cartoons had been pinned: Cardinal Obando y Bravo kneeling at Uncle Sam’s feet, begging, Give me your blessing, to which Uncle Sam replied, OK, baby, you are Contra, I am Contra, God is with you. Nobody (except for me) glanced at the cartoons. Everyone followed the dancing giantess, who was a lot more fun.

In different parts of the market you could buy furniture, arts and crafts, shoes, household goods, food, more or less anything that the shortages (and inflation) permitted. Some of the shoes cost more than a month’s salary for an office worker. Meat, corn, oil, potatoes, beans were all hard to come by. As a result, as I wandered around it, it wasn’t hard to hear complaints. Not surprisingly, the government came in for a lot of stick. The shoppers knew that not all the shortages could be blamed on the war. Recently, 20,000 pounds of beef went bad in the government’s meat-packing company because it was stored without refrigeration. Then there had been the 200,000 dead chickens to account for. And of course the prices made people angry. They could hardly afford a bottle of shampoo these days.

Because Nicaragua was fertile, people weren’t actually starving. There was always the great profusion of fruits to keep the wolf from the door, and, to my India-trained eyes, the scene at the Roberto Huembes was not a portrait of real, grinding poverty. But that argument, the always-someone-worse-off approach, wasn’t a particularly good or useful one. There was real hardship in Managua, and real bitching, too.

Many foreign observers, visiting Roberto Huembes and other markets, had used this moaning as a sign that the people had turned against the Sandinistas. I found things to be rather different. The FSLN was attacked all right, until you asked: What should the government do? Should it talk to the Contra, should it make some accommodation with the US, should it sue for peace? The answers to those questions were in an altogether different tone: no, no, of course they can’t do that. The war must go on.

The jigantona danced away, down the avenue of the cobblers. I went home and read, later that day, about another mythical being. In an interview with Omar Cabezas, he revealed that, instead of the imaginary friends that some children invented, he had owned, until he was about eighteen, an entirely imaginary dog. Gradually, his friends became fond of the dog, too. They would even borrow it for a couple of days at a time. ‘It was a group craziness,’ he said, ‘that I invented.’ Leonel Rugama, the poet, was one of the dog-borrowers. Once Cabezas lent Rugama a book and never got it back. When asked where it was, Rugama replied: ‘That sonofabitch dog destroyed it!’

Another dog-borrower was a young revolutionary named Roberto Huembes. Like Rugama, Huembes died during the insurrection years, and was now a covered market. Even the dog was dead. ‘One day,’ Cabezas explained, ‘it was run over by a car.’