The Jaguar Smile

12 THE OTHER SIDE

The music of Rundown, a local group, played at top volume on a ghetto blaster, welcomed me to Bluefields, on Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast. Costeña music, Nicaragua’s answer to calypso, reggae and ska, had been one of the main reasons why I’d become so determined to get over to Nicaragua’s other side. I had also formed an ambition to swim in the Caribbean — because the Atlantic coast was, of course, really the Caribbean coast, as the locals were quick to point out — and the Pacific on the same trip. I’d already had my swim in the Pacific, strolling into the warm, warm water at Pochomil beach near Managua, where once the Somoza gang would take its weekend dips; now for the Mar Caribe.

In Bluefields it was often difficult to remember I was still in Nicaragua. The west coast was, for the most part, racially homogeneous, but here, as well as mestizos, there were Creoles, three different Amerindian tribes, and even a small community of Garifonos who shouldn’t have been there at all, according to the textbooks, but up in Belize. And that wasn’t the only difference. The majority of the inhabitants here were not Catholic, but belonged to the Moravian church. And a large proportion of them were English-speaking, to boot.

The culture of Bluefields felt distinctly West Indian, but it was more or less totally cut off from contact with the rest of the Caribbean — excepting Cuba. It wasn’t very closely in touch with the Pacific coast of Nicaragua itself, come to that. In Bluefields you couldn’t receive Nicaragua’s ‘Sandinista Television’, so you watched the Costa Rican programmes instead. It could take you all day to get a phone connection to Managua, and even then you might not manage it. There was no road link between the coasts. The few air flights filled up weeks in advance, and the only other route involved travelling 100 kilometres on a slow ferry down the Río Escondido (the ‘Hidden River’ that used to shelter pirate ships in the Days of Yore) as far as the township of Rama, where the 300-kilometre road from Managua came to an abrupt halt. The ferries had been frequent targets for the Contra. About a month before my visit they had burned the penultimate boat. The banks of the river were thickly jungled, and the ferries were sitting ducks; but the people, having no option, continued to use the route.

What would happen when the Contra burned the last boat? The only answer I ever got to this question was a fatalistic shrug. To live in Bluefields was to accept remoteness, just as it was also to accept rain. It was one of the wettest places I had ever been in. ‘May is sunny,’ people said, but that was cold comfort in July.

Apart from music and swimming, I was taken to Bluefields by a desire to find out if the revolution still felt, over there, like a new sort of conqueror. The inhabitants of the vast Atlantic coast province of Zelaya (only about 200,000 of them in almost half the country’s land area, almost all of it covered with virgin jungle and criss-crossed by inland waterways) had not had much to do with the making of the revolution. As a matter of fact, throughout the country’s history, the two coasts had not had much to do with one another at all. The Pacific coast had been a Spanish colony, but even though Columbus had landed in 1502 on the spot where Bluefields now stood, it had been the British who established, in 1625, the Protectorate of Mesquitía. Their subjects were mainly Amerindians: the Mosquitos or Miskitos, the Sumos and the Ramas. The British set up a puppet Miskito ‘kingdom’. These Miskito ‘monarchs’, often educated in the British West Indies or even in Britain, were based in the village of Pearl Lagoon to the north of present-day Bluefields. The Miskitos repressed the Sumos and Ramas so thoroughly that, today, barely a thousand Ramas (and not many more Sumos) were still alive. When I heard this, I realized that my mental picture of the Miskitos as a ‘pure’ tribal people whose ancient way of life had been disrupted by the Sandinistas, might need a little revision.

Under the British, the Atlantic coast gradually acquired its sizeable Creole population. This was made up in part of runaway slaves from elsewhere in the Caribbean, and in part of people imported by the British to work for them as overseers and clerical staff. Thus, unusually, the British, who were more accustomed to using blacks as slaves, turned them, in Nicaragua, into a petit-bourgeoisie.

The Spanish-speaking mestizo population was growing, too, and in 1838 the Republic of Nicaragua was established. Mestizo numbers continued to increase, and at the last count they made up over half the population of Zelaya. (The blacks or Creoles, at 50,000 plus, accounted for about a quarter.) Old resentments between the Creoles and the ‘pañas’ — from españoles, Spaniards — had diminished, but the divisions were still occasionally noticeable. The army on the Atlantic coast was almost wholly mestizo. This racial division between soldiers and civilians hit me the moment I arrived at the long wooden hut that was Bluefields’ airport terminal. The Creoles didn’t like joining the paña army, though they didn’t mind signing on with the police.

The Somoza dynasty handed the Atlantic coast over to the transnational companies, who dug fortunes out of its gold mines and profited also from the abundance of precious woods. The transnationals created, in Zelaya, a distorted, totally dependent company-store economy, habituated to imported US produce and at the mercy of the foreign employers. They exported the area’s wealth, put back little or nothing, and when the last Somoza fell they decamped. The effect on the locals’ way of life was shattering. And then the Sandinistas arrived, singing heroic songs of revolution and liberty. It wasn’t surprising they got a frosty welcome; the revolution of the Pacific-coast pañas had felt, to many people on the other side, more like annihilation.

Bluefields was poor as mud. (Only dry places could be dirt poor.) It was too poor to build a waterfront. A few jetties, all loose planks and holes, stuck out into the bay. The wooden houses with their verandahs and balconies looked attractive, but when you got close you saw the rot, the poverty. Children played hoop; Creole ladies lounged on barrels, ample-bottomed and well buttoned-up. Vote for Yazmina & Fátima, the walls insisted. I went into a bar in which a mestizo sailor, Pancho, was holding forth. ‘I’ve been everywhere,’ Pancho stated. ‘Miami. Mobile, Alabama. I’ve been all over. Let me tell you something: I liked Mobile, Alabama better than Miami, Florida. People don’t bother you in Mobile. It’s like here, in Bluefields.’ The rain began to belt down and Dylan started to sing ‘Stuck Inside of Mobile’ in my head. ‘Is there any beer?’ I asked, and the small jelly of a woman who ran the bar said, ‘No. Beer finish.’ But when she left the room, Pancho winked and fished out a bottle of cerveza Victoria from the cold box. ‘Be my guest.’

The proprietress returned and blew her stack. ‘Where you find that? Pancho, you no good. These days you got to look after your reg’lar customers, and those beers is reserve. They is reserve. I need meat and ting, I gotta keep the butcher his beer. You got beer at your house, you get me one.’ Pancho made mollifying, insincere noises. I felt bad, and didn’t enjoy the drink.

After dark, in a Creole bar in the Old Bank barrio, I was befriended by Francisco Campbell. He was home on leave from the Nicaraguan embassy in Washington, and he was a man with a problem: the US authorities had just expelled his wife, Miriam, who had also worked at the embassy. He was a likeable, generous man, and put his troubles aside to show me a good time. We ate the bar’s special ‘chop suey’, with which no Chinese person would ever have felt the slightest affinity, but which tasted spicy and delicious, and drank Flor de Caña Extra Seco with tamarind water.

The transnationals, Francisco told me, had been the ones who cut Bluefields’ trade links with the Caribbean. He was keen to restore them. ‘Do you know Trinidad imports all its beef from Argentina?’ he demanded. ‘Do you know how many thousands of miles further that is?’ He was also eloquent on the subject of shrimps. They spawned in the Escondido tideway and then, in the rainy season when the rainwater pushed the salty water back, they headed out to sea. The lagoon at the river’s mouth would fill with shrimps; it would be alive with shrimps. They were the easiest catch in the world. But trawling was banned, because then you’d catch too many, and ruin things for the future. ‘Shrimp fishermen from Jamaica have been raiding our continental shelf for as long as I can remember,’ he expostulated. ‘It’s about time we came to some arrangement about that.’

We emerged from the bar when the Extra Seco was gone, and strolled down the street past the Moravian school. The night sky was full of stars, but if you kept looking up at them you were in serious danger of falling down one of the many holes in the road. Francisco had been thinking about his wife, and as we passed the school he cried: ‘I was expelled myself once, you know. Right here, from this school.’

‘How did it happen?’

‘It was the long hair of Mary Hebbert,’ he said. ‘That did it.’ Mary Hebbert had the most beautiful long fair hair, and the young Francisco wanted desperately to attract her attention. One day as he was coming to class — he was not yet ten years old — he saw the hair of Mary Hebbert dangling out of the classroom window. He had an impulse he could not resist: he pulled it. Unfortunately, he pulled too hard, and she banged her head against the window frame. She decided to make a big song and dance about Francisco’s bid to be noticed, and the headmaster asked his parents to remove their boy from the school.

‘That’s terrible,’ I said.

‘It was OK,’ Francisco grinned. ‘You survive expulsions.’

‘What happened to Mary Hebbert?’ I wanted to know.

‘I found out,’ he said contentedly. ‘She married a klutz and lives in the Caymans. So she got hers in the end.’

Cathy Gee, a US citizen working with a local development agency, was telling me about the death of the Rama language when I noticed the smashed computer VDU in her office. The screen had gone, and the insides were in a terrible mess. ‘Oh, yeah,’ she said. ‘Yeah, it was on the boat the Contra attacked. It got shot.’ She pointed to something taped to the top of the unit. ‘We found the bullet, too. Yeah.’ The computer had been a keenly anticipated gift. ‘Too bad.’

‘So the Contra are assassinating machines now,’ I said.

We got back to the Rama language. There were only twenty-three people alive who could still speak it: the other Ramas had already lost their tongue. A French linguist had spent months with the ageing twenty-three, to record the structure and phonetics of the language before it disappeared. ‘She came up against quite a problem,’ Cathy told me. ‘Most of the old Ramas had lost their teeth, so they couldn’t pronounce some of the words properly. Yeah.’ False teeth were much too expensive to be an option. Dental costs could therefore deliver the final blow to a tiny, dying language. Nicaragua is a land of small tragedies as well as large ones.

Thomas Gordon, the Creole delegado of Zelaya’s Special Zone II, which included Bluefields, was in his thirties, bespectacled, goateed, and owned a pet macaw. (An English-speaker, he had had to take Spanish lessons, but was by now thoroughly bilingual.) His deputy, Felix, was a mestizo, and had the happiest smile I saw in Nicaragua. Originally Felix had been the boss, and Gordon his assistant, but now that the roles were reversed, Felix showed no trace of resentment. The two men bubbled with plans for the improvement of Bluefields. ‘This town doesn’t even have a decent cinema,’ Thomas Gordon exclaimed. ‘There are places, but the picture is so dim you can hardly see it. We’ll change that. And we’re rebuilding the roads. You may have noticed there are a lot of holes.’ I said I had. ‘I’m afraid your hotel is not so good. I want some decent hotels here. You’ll have to come back one May for the Mayo Ya, and see all the changes.’ The Mayo Ya was the music festival that filled the town for one month, with the spirit of carnival. I discovered, to my disappointment, that for the rest of the year the best costeña musicians were to be found living in Managua, and the only way of hearing the music in Bluefields was on records and tapes.

‘You’re lucky tonight,’ Gordon said. ‘We’re having a party for the Cuban doctors. It’s gonna be something, man. We’re gonna dance. I mean, we’re gonna have a time.’

‘I’d love to come,’ I said. He offered to drive me around town, and as we drove he soliloquized about the latest employment projects. ‘At Kukra Hill, on Pearl Lagoon, we’ve got what could be the oldest working sugar mill anywhere. We had no funds to modernize it, but recently we found in the jungle a plantation of precious woods.’ A government order permitted the revenues from non-traditional exports to be retained in the exporting region (all other funds had to be centrally collected), so Gordon hoped this one-off sale of rare woods would finance the renewing of the sugar mill. ‘We’re gonna get that mill. We’re starting on the operation now, even before Autonomy comes.’

‘Autonomy’ was the autonomy project, the biggest political news on the coast, the scheme that had begun to convince some Zelayans that their best hopes did indeed lie with the revolution. I was keen to talk about it, but Thomas Gordon was pointing out the sights of the town. In Old Bank, the Creole barrio, the wooden houses ranged from sprawling bungalows to cramped, spartan shacks. In Central there was a pink obelisk bearing a white silhouette of Sandino. In Cottontree, Gordon took me to see his childhood home. ‘You know, I’ve got a white brother,’ he said. ‘Tall, pale skin, fair hair, blue eyes. But he thinks black. I mean, he identifies himself with the blacks here. That’s what counts.’

He introduced me to the macaw, who accompanied us into the warren of bare-floored wooden rooms, with comfortable old armchairs and a big airy kitchen. I loved it. Out back was a large ‘yard’, a wild garden in which mangoes and breadfruit hung from tall, spreading old trees. ‘How wonderful still to have contact with the house in which you grew up,’ I told him, a little enviously. He smiled happily. ‘I came back to Bluefields after the triumph,’ he said. ‘I wanted to do something for my own place.’

I was going up to Pearl Lagoon the next day. ‘See the sugar mill,’ he insisted. Also at Kukra Hill there was the new African palm project. The palms would provide oil, copra, jobs. ‘But they’re having trouble getting labour. They should have known. Blacks don’t care to work in plantations any more.’ They: another hint of the old Creole-paña friction? He denied it. ‘Before the revolution, it’s true, there was some, but that was in the old society.’ Class, racism, sexism, were all deemed to have been abolished by the revolution. There was something rather endearing about the idea.

The autonomy project was the FSLN’s way of recognizing that they had made a series of disastrous, alienating mistakes on the Atlantic coast. Inexperienced, over-zealous young political cadres had arrived among the Creoles and the Indians and created a good deal of bad feeling, for instance by making all manner of promises, of new hospitals, schools, and so forth, promises that the government quickly discovered it couldn’t deliver, because of the war, the scarcities and the inaccessibility of the region. The arrest of a Miskito leader, Steadman Fagoth, increased resentment. The FSLN insisted that it had cast-iron evidence that Fagoth had been a Somoza agent, but the costeños weren’t interested. Fagoth (who always denied the charges against him) was released, and went instantly into the Contra war. The bridge-building organization known as MISURA-SATA (for Miskitos, Sumos, Ramas and Sandinistas) fell apart after the Fagoth affair and the compulsory resettlement of many Miskitos living along the Río Coco, which formed the frontier with Honduras. Fagoth, dropping the SATA, named his counter-revolutionary force MISURA. In Zelaya, the Sandinistas faced at least four Contra groupings: the main FDN forces; MISURA, still fighting even though the latest word was that Fagoth was no longer its driving force; KISAN, an Amerindian group that had just announced it would use sabotage and speedboat ambushes to try and cut the government’s links with sea and river posts on the Atlantic coast; and the Costa Rica-based ARDE forces in the south.

There was no question that the FSLN had seriously mishandled the Miskitos, and attempts to claim that they had heard there was to be heavy CIA bombing in the Río Coco area, and that the evacuations were for the people’s safety, only increased the feeling of a cover-up. The autonomy project was an attempt to prove that the Frente had learned from its mistakes. The policy of evacuating Miskitos from the Río Coco had been reversed, and many of them were going back to their old territories. (Some, however, chose not to, having grown accustomed to their new lives.) The policy of unconditional amnesty for anyone returning from the Contra was also having an effect. As morale slumped in the Contra armies, Miskitos were returning to the fold.

The autonomy scheme guaranteed the cultural rights of all minority communities in Zelaya. But it was attempting to do more than simply compensate for previous blunders. Under the scheme, Zelaya would be given a large measure of self-government. The structure of the nation would be altered into a form of federation between the two ‘wings’, with Managua retaining responsibility for defence, internal security, foreign policy and overall budgetary and economic strategy. Most other functions would pass to a regional executive and a regional assembly. I asked John, a rangy, electric young Creole working at the project offices in Bluefields, if the local administration could actually cope with the new responsibilities. ‘In many ways we aren’t prepared,’ he admitted. ‘But we are just going to have to get on and begin it, and learn as we go.’

As I wandered around the cafeterias of Bluefields, I tried to bring up the subject of autonomy as much as possible. The responses I got ranged from suspicion — believe it when you see it — via indifference, to enthusiasm.

The point about the enthusiasm is that there was quite a bit of it, and that it represented the first enthusiasm the revolution had ever managed to generate on the Atlantic coast. ‘We never did have a say in our own lives,’ one Creole told me. ‘First the British ran us, then Somoza and the transnationals. Now, for the first time, we going to get that say.’

When the project was first mooted, many Managuan politicians had opposed it, thinking it smacked of Balkanisation, of the beginning of the break-up of the country. The counterargument, which had carried the day, was that the project was not dividing the country but recognizing the division that actually existed. By giving the Atlantic coast this degree of independence, the chances were that the bonds between the coasts would actually be strengthened. That paradoxical assessment was borne out by what I saw.

‘Autonomy’ had even become a hit song for one of the coast’s leading bands.

The party for the Cubans in the Bluefields hotel that evening was ostensibly an ‘Acta’ in commemoration of the storming of the Moncada barracks by Fidel’s boys long ago. A young Creole disc-jockey sat with fierce pride by his sound system, polishing each LP before putting it on, caressing his graphic equalizer like a lover. Bluefields in its party best sat around the walls, reminding me of nothing so much as the school ‘socials’ I used to go to as a boy in Bombay, all wallflowers and nothing in the middle. The Cubans and Nicaraguans mixed without any sign of difficulty. Six years ago, in September 1980, there had been a Creole demonstration against the Cubans, and relations had been strained. Now, as the DJ put on ‘Guantanamera’ and the people began to get off their seats and get to work on the dance floor, all that strain had vanished. The Cuban doctors, who had gone without complaint into the most remote regions of Zelaya, regions into which few Nicaraguan doctors had proved willing to venture, had won the locals over. There were still jokes about Cuban accents, but they were friendly jokes.

‘Guantanamera, guajira guantanamera …’ A powerfully built old black woman in thick dark-lensed spectacles, her hair up in a fat netted bun, and wearing a shapeless, white-collared black dress, came on to the floor. Her dancing was so magical, so loose-limbed, so original, that within minutes all the coolest young men in the room were queueing up to partner her. I remembered that one of the traditional Mayo Ya dances was called, and danced by, The Three Old Ladies. The grannies of Bluefields could certainly get down and boogie.

At the party I met a young American health worker, known in Bluefields as ‘Mary Carol’ because people couldn’t get their mouths round her last name, which was Ellsberg. She was married to Julio Martínez, who was in charge of agricultural development in the region; her father was Daniel Ellsberg, of the Pentagon Papers. She had spent a long time working in the villages around Pearl Lagoon — Haulover, Raitipura, Orinoco. When I said I planned to go out there the next day she offered to come and show me round. She had even read, and enjoyed, my novels. It was turning out to be a great party.

The African palm project at Kukra Hill turned out to be Julio’s brainchild. He spoke about it with a parent’s pride, describing how the rows of saplings had been coming along year after year. I mentioned Thomas Gordon’s reservations about the project, and he pooh-poohed the idea that there was a labour shortage. ‘The project is going very well,’ he said. ‘Very well.’ He was a softly spoken, scrupulous man, patently dedicated to his work. At his office, early the next morning, he introduced me to Juan Mercado, a Miskito Indian and the first Miskito to become the manager of the Kukra Hill sugar mill. The two of them were off to Managua on business, and apologized for not being able to come along on my trip. ‘But Mary will show you everything,’ Julio said. As I left, I noticed a poem chalked up on a blackboard at the back of the room:

Death was here, too. Death, the close friend. It was your child, your mother, your self. It was the invisible object that blotted out the world.

‘You haven’t been to Bluefields if you haven’t had a proper drenching,’ Mary said to me as the rain came down in sheets.

‘Can we still go to the lagoon?’ I asked. She nodded. ‘We’ll go. Round here it rains so much that, once you’ve made your plans, you just go ahead with them, otherwise you’d never do anything.’

I had been offered the use of the ‘fastest speedboat in Bluefields’. I climbed aboard with Mary and two Creole friends: Francisco Campbell’s sister Yolanda, who ran women’s groups, and Edwin, who had brought along an AK-47 that Yolanda was sure he didn’t know how to use. As the boat gathered speed the downpour became a pin-cushion stabbing into my face. We zoomed down the forested Escondido and into the swamp-channels between the river and Pearl Lagoon. ‘If your boat breaks down on the Escondido, or up in the interior, you’re in real trouble,’ Mary yelled. ‘It can take days, even weeks, before help comes. If it comes.’ She had been stranded for three days once.

The thick green walls closed around us. The rain, smashing into our faces, couldn’t stop this being a beautiful place; but it did its best.

The township at Kukra Hill wasn’t beautiful, though it could boast a new hospital. I waded briefly through thick red mud to have a look at the famous sugar mill. This mill had originally been on the Pacific coast. When its owners considered it obsolete, they dismantled it and packed it off to the other side, where it had gone on running for years, without hope of spare parts, thanks to the improvisatory genius of the local mechanics. As I inspected this museum piece, which looked like something out of the first Industrial Revolution, I found myself fervently hoping that Thomas Gordon’s scheme for selling the plantation of precious woods worked out, and soon.

The village of Pearl Lagoon, where once the Miskito kings held sway, and which sits on the shore of the eponymous laguna (which never did contain any perlas), looked like an idyllic, sleepy sort of place. The well spaced houses were set around three grassy causeways, known as Front Street, Middle Street and Back Street. The two ends of the town had names, too: Uptown, Downtown. Since the revolution they had been renamed according to the calendar-obsessed fashion of revolutions, but if you asked anybody the way to ‘19 July Barrio’ they would look blank, and then, after some moments, exclaim: ‘Oh, you mean Downtown?’

Three Sandinista soldiers, looking out of place in this Creole settlement, lounged around a little old cannon outside the FSLN offices, whose walls proclaimed, in two-foot red-and-black lettering: Autonomy now! Round the corner, on the wall of the school playground, there was an attractively painted mural showing the whole lagoon, with all the villages marked. Hands extended from each village and clasped each other in the centre of the lagoon. ‘Bushman,’ the legend read, ‘surrender is your only salvation.’ The bushman being addressed was, of course, the Contra fighter.

The rain had stopped. A thin, jaunty old lady sauntered toothlessly by with her parasol. Yolanda led us to the home of Miss Maggie, the village’s great cook. We passed the village meeting-place, which was closed for want of beer. ‘Never mind,’ Yolanda said. ‘Miss Maggie’s always got stuff hidden away some place.’

At Miss Maggie’s I ate the tastiest meal I had in Nicaragua, once Yolanda had coaxed her into making us something. It was snoek in a hot chilli sauce, and there was even some beer. Miss Maggie, a small, plump, giggling lady with grey hair, also baked sensational coconut bread.

After eating we went to visit Mary Ellsberg’s friend, the local midwife, Miss Pancha. She was rocking on her porch in the village’s downtown section, and when she saw us approach she let out a whoop. ‘Oh, Miss Mary,’ she said. ‘I was worry when I see you comin’ ’cause I did not have my brassiere on. These days I only puts it on when I has company and you done take me by surprise.’ Miss Pancha had the largest breasts I had seen in my life, and, Mary told me later, you couldn’t actually tell the difference when the bra was on. I was saying hello to Miss Pancha when her pet cow strolled out of the living room and joined us on the porch. ‘Say “hi” to my darling, too,’ Miss Pancha said.

My visit to Miss Pancha reminded me, finally, that all was not well in Pearl Lagoon, no matter how drowsily jolly the place might seem. The old midwife, laid up these days with back trouble, became melancholy all of a sudden.

‘Brought most of this village into the world,’ she said. ‘Buried plenty, too.’

Round the corner from Miss Pancha’s was the house of a young couple who were selling up and moving to Bluefields because the Contra had killed the man’s father. In almost every house you could hear a tale of death. Even one of the local Moravian priests had been killed. In a nearby village, the Contra had recently kidnapped more than two dozen children, many of them girls aged between ten and fourteen, ‘for the use of the Contra fighters,’ Mary told me. One girl had escaped and got home. The villagers had heard that five other children had escaped, but had been lost in the jungle. That was five weeks ago, and they had to be presumed dead. ‘It’s so sad going there now,’ Mary said. ‘The whole village just cries all the time.’

On the day of the seventh anniversary, when I was in Estelí, a helicopter crashed in the north of special zone II, killing everyone on board. Mary’s husband Julio had intended to be on the flight; it was only at the last moment that other business prevented him from going. The Contra had claimed to have shot the helicopter down, but they hadn’t; it was an accident. ‘All that fuss about the Challenger space shuttle,’ Mary said. ‘And how many people died? Seven?’ Many of the helicopter dead were from a remote community, Tortuguera. ‘The teacher, the army commander, the doctor. Just about all the professionals in the community,’ Mary said. ‘That place is getting a reputation for being jinxed. That’s the third doctor they’ve lost in a year.’ It was Contra policy to kill the professionals when they attacked such communities, but on this occasion fate had lent them a hand. ‘In a small society like ours,’ Mary said, ‘each death is really noticed. You can imagine what a hole twenty-four deaths make. They had the last funeral yesterday. It was a week before they could cut the body out of the wreck and give it to the family. Special divers had to come from Managua to do it. He was a young man, on his way to Bluefields to be married.’

We left Pearl Lagoon and started back to Bluefields. The rain, right on cue, bucketed down again. I decided I no longer needed to swim in the Caribbean. Enough of it had fallen on me from the skies.

Mary Ellsberg came to Bluefields as a brigadista, a volunteer worker, thinking she would stay for a year. Instead, she fell in love with the country, and with Julio, and now she was a Nica mother with a one-year-old child, Julito. She was afraid her son might one day have to fight in the war. She had already become enough of a Nicaraguan to think of the war as a long-term, near-permanent reality.

I was surprised to discover an Indian connection. Her father had known and admired the great Gandhian leader, Jayaprakash Narayan, who had led the opposition to Mrs Gandhi during the Emergency, in spite of needing regular kidney dialysis; also Vinoba Bhave, the ascetic philosopher whose life had been spent persuading Indians to give land to the poor. ‘My father has been down here three times,’ she said. ‘The first time, he saw only Comandantes. The second time was really just a vacation. But the third time he was in Bluefields just four days after the Contra attacked. That changed his perceptions pretty radically.’ She was still astonished by the naivety of US reactions to Nicaragua. ‘When I go back, I show people my slides, and they just say, we had no idea, we had no idea.’

In the speedboat, she and Yolanda talked about childbirth. The real nightmare was having a child in Managua, Mary said. Expectant mothers often had to double up on beds. It was not uncommon for women in labour, and already five centimetres dilated, to be roaming around town trying to get a hospital to admit them. Things were a little better in Bluefields, Yolanda said, and Mary agreed. But when she went into labour her doctor had been at a party. She rang him, but he didn’t take the call seriously enough to leave. He rolled up at the hospital the next morning, nursing a hangover when she was already nursing Julito.

‘The attitude to pain here is to take absolutely no notice of it,’ she said. ’I felt there was a lot of pressure on me not to cry out or moan. I lay there silently, being a sport. Just once, when the contractions were really bad, I let out a noise, and at once one of the women in the other beds said, ‘Oh, come on, Mary, it’s not as bad as all that.’

Childbirth in Nicaragua was all ‘natural’ — there simply weren’t any drugs to be had — but the women were given no training in breathing or pushing, they did no exercises. Those were things Mary was trying to change with her health care programmes.

Yolanda wanted Mary to come and address a women’s group. OK, Mary said, she was just coming to the end of working with a group of Miskito women.

‘These women want first-aid know-how,’ Yolanda said. ‘Very basic things. How to survive and feed children during and after a Contra attack.’

I asked, tamely, how it felt to live with the constant possibility of dying. Some of the remote regions people like Mary, Julio and Yolanda visited could take sixteen or seventeen hours to reach in a small boat on narrow waterways through dense jungle. How did it feel?

‘You learn to live with it. If it happens, it happens,’ Mary said. ‘People here have come to expect death. The country’s youth is just being thrown away.’

Julio was training local people to take over his job, and in a year or so he and Mary might be leaving Bluefields. I thought: I hope you make it. But I didn’t say it, or tell her how much I had found, that day, to admire. Instead, I agreed to go to her place the next day, Sunday, and cook her an Indian meal.

On Sunday morning the sun shone. I sat on the porch of my hotel and watched the people hanging out in the street. Across the way was the Instituto de Belleza Ilse, closed today, and there was Ilse on the balcony above her Instituto, sipping her morning coffee. The sun shone, too, on a hump-shaped wooden library building full of Reader’s Digest condensed books. In this building, until a couple of months ago, June Beer, librarian, primitivist painter and character of Bluefields, had held sway. Sadly, she had just died.

Church music and reggae passed by on shouldered ghetto blasters. A bright yellow bus bore the sign: ‘Passengers not allowed on board with fishes’. The Moravian church rang its bell. Grown-ups and children headed for Sunday school. Second-hand clothes hung, for sale, over wooden verandah railings. Mothers took their children for juice in the town’s cafés. At nine the rain poured down; at nine-twenty the sky was blue again. Creole men slapped palms in the street. ‘Hey man I hear a tale ’bout you.’ It was a moment of peace, and I treasured it. Soon it would be time to go over to Mary’s place and cook.

The meal wasn’t a great success, because I had never in my life laid eyes on half the vegetables I was preparing; but it was an offering, it was something I could do. Afterwards I said goodbye to Mary and little Julito and headed off down the road. I had a plane to catch.

I met Carlos Rigby, another town ‘character’, while waiting for my car to the airport. Rigby was a dreadlocked black poet, bilingual in English and Spanish. Dreadlocked but not, I ought to say, Rastafarian.

We talked about his work. These days, he said, he thought it was more important to write in Spanish than in English, although he still did both. ‘I am trying to improve my Spanish,’ he told me, ‘in the vocabularial aspect.’ What about his English, I was interested to know: did he, like so many Afro-Caribbean British poets, feel that he ought to write in Creole, in what the Barbadian poet Braithwaite had named ‘nation language’?

‘Yes, this is a question,’ he said. ‘But, you know, I come to find writing in Creole a little bit folkloristic.’ I said I knew some writers in South London who could give him an argument.

‘South London?’ he asked, perking up. ‘Lambeth? You know Lambeth?’

‘I know it,’ I said.

‘We are twinned with Lambeth,’ he said, not without pride.

He then soliloquized for some time about his acquaintance with Ginsberg, who had read and liked a chapter of Rigby’s work-in-progress, a fantasy novel of Nicaragua. (Fantasy? What would Tagoré have thought?) He recited a rude poem he had written in Spanish about Obando and Bishop Vega, and carefully explained all the puns. He digressed to tell me about the local witchdoctors, the sukié, whom most of the villagers around the lagoon trusted. ‘Real witchdoctors,’ he promised. ‘They dance while prescribing their medicines.’

When the first Western-style doctors had gone into the villages, the people had rejected them, saying they already had their medicine men. Now the government worked with and through the sukié. It was another sign of the revolution’s adaptability, of its pragmatism.

It started to rain as my car arrived. Rigby said goodbye. ‘Soon it going to rain less,’ he said. ‘In the old days, if Somoza told the rain to stop, it stopped. I don’t know what wrong with these Sandinistas.’

Large numbers of black butterflies, black with white spots on the wingtips, were fluttering at the roadsides. Children were swiping at them with sticks. On the airstrip the wind got up and blew a great cloud of the butterflies directly at me. As I walked to the aeroplane the swarm surrounded me, escorting me out of town. It felt like a small miracle; an epiphany.

I reached Managua an hour after the passing of a hurricane that had uprooted trees. It was a good thing the light aircraft I’d flown in hadn’t been caught in the storm. Maybe the butterflies had brought me luck.