The Jaguar Smile

14 MISS NICARAGUA AND THE JAGUAR

My last night in Nicaragua was warm and starlit. I spent it at the home of Tulita and Sergio Ramírez, talking mostly about literature. I heard that La Prensa’s ‘pope of letters,’ Pablo Antonio Cuadra, the one major Nicaraguan poet to be against the revolution, was to have a volume of his work published by the State-run New Nicaraguan Editions; books were not subject to censorship of any kind. (They sold in large quantities, too; print runs of 10,000 regularly sold out. In Britain, with a population twenty times the size of Nicaragua’s, most authors would envy such figures.)

In the time of Somoza, there had not been a single publishing house in the whole of Nicaragua. The only way for Nicaraguan writers to get into print was to find a publisher elsewhere in the Spanish-speaking world and then have the books brought in, if possible. It was another reminder of the extent to which things had improved since the time of the Beast, the forty-six years of fear.

The original title of Sergio Ramirez’s marvellous novel, ¿Te dio miedo la sangre?, meant ‘Were you scared of the blood?’ and came from a children’s nursery rhyme (‘Did your mother kill the pig? Were you scared of the blood?’). The English title, To Bury Our Fathers, derived from The Birds by Aristophanes:

The skylark was born before all beings and before the earth itself. Its father died of illness when the earth did not yet exist. He remained unburied for five days, until the skylark, ingenious of necessity, buried its father in its own head.

The novel had been my companion as I travelled around Nicaragua. It was set in the Sandino years, and told a large number of inter-connected stories, which were woven in and out of each other with great skill: the stories of three friends, revolutionaries, Taleno, Jilguero and Indio Larios, who became famous as one of the most wanted men in Nicaragua but actually did very little, spending his days in Guatemala making piñatas for children’s parties, having lost his stomach for the fight; of the National Guard Colonel, Catalino López, and of many ordinary people, barmen, barflies, guitarists, fishermen, traitors, whores. Vile deeds, such as the bringing of the head of Sandino’s general, Pedrón Altamirano, to Managua on the end of a stick, alternated with more comic vilenesses, such as the fixing of the Miss Nicaragua contest of 1953. And behind everything was the malign presence of the tyrant, known only as el hombre, the man. To bury one’s ancestors in one’s own head, in memory, was to confer upon them a kind of immortality, the only kind human beings could offer one another. It was also, of course, to be haunted by their memory for ever.

I was also struck by the reference in the quote from Aristophanes that stood as the novel’s epigraph to a time when the earth did not yet exist. Here, I thought, was another echo of Uriel Molina’s image of Somoza’s Nicaragua as captivity, as exile. The Nicaraguan meaning of the Aristophanes quote could only be that in those days the country wasn’t there. Landless, nationless, the people buried their fathers in themselves, because the self was the only ground they had to stand upon.

As I’d just finished the book, I started asking Sergio Ramírez all the questions that writers get to hate: how real was it? Were the characters drawn from life? ‘It’s all true,’ he told me. ‘Everything in the novel comes from actual events.’ Ramírez had spent years studying the history of the Sandino period before he wrote the book. ‘There really was someone like Indio Larios,’ he said. ‘Always top of the wanted list, but actually he was never in Nicaragua, he had lost his nerve. And the real Catalino López was a sidekick of Somoza García, a certain Manuel Gómez. But the beating he gets from Jilguero and the others –’ (in the novel, the three friends had captured and humiliated the National Guard officer) ‘– that actually happened to a different man. People used to hint that he’d been raped.’

‘In the novel, you never quite say what gets done to Catalino.’

‘There were many possibilities,’ Ramírez said with relish. ‘I didn’t want to choose. And the other thing that’s absolutely true,’ he went on, ‘is the Miss Nicaragua business.’ A certain Miss Bermúdez, daughter of a Guardia officer, had been a candidate for the title, and was opposed by a Miss Rosales or Morales. In order to vote you had to clip a coupon from the paper. Miss Bermúdez’s candidacy became associated, thanks to her parentage, with the regime, so the people began to vote for her opponent. When el hombre heard about this he insisted that Miss Bermúdez must win. His underlings printed quantities of forged entry forms and filled them in with votes for Bermúdez. The whole affair became quite a political hot potato. On the day of the announcement of the result, it was given out that Miss Bermúdez had scraped home. ‘Of course everybody knew it had been fixed,’ Sergio said. ‘Nobody had been voting for her, after all. She would have lost very heavily. So there was uproar. It was too good a story not to use.’

For many years, he said, he had felt a bit of a fraud when people called him a novelist. ‘I wrote that book so long ago, and since then it has been mostly political work. I felt as if I were living on my old capital.’ But now he was writing a new novel, working every day, for two hours, early in the morning. ‘It’s the kind of book nobody ever thought I’d write,’ he said, happily. ‘It’s a murder story, based on a famous case of a few years back. Very hot stuff.’

He sounded pleased with his steamy story. ‘I’ve finished a draft,’ he said. ‘So have I,’ I replied gloomily. ‘It’s taken me three years and I haven’t been a vice-president, either.’

Gioconda Belli, the unfairly beautiful poet I’d heard reading at the ruins of the Grand Hotel, arrived with her German publisher and his photographer in tow. I told her I’d read her interview with Margaret Randall. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I’ve changed my mind completely since then.’ Then, she had been all for sacrificing her writing to the work of national reconstruction. ‘Now I’ve given up my job to write a novel,’ she said. ‘My first. It’s terrifying.’

I said I had been curious about the relative absence of novelists in this poet-stuffed country. ‘There was never time for novels,’ she said. ‘You could squeeze in poetry between other things. Not a novel.’

So, in spite of all the shortages, there was one commodity that had become a little more plentiful of late: time. Or, perhaps, people had a sense that it might be running out, and were grabbing what remained before it was too late? The photographer was swarming all over Gioconda, photographing her from every conceivable angle. ‘So, how has it been?’ she asked me.

‘I’ve been taking snapshots, too,’ I said. ‘There’s not much more one can do in a few weeks.’

Snapshot of Gioconda: under Somoza, after she had been recruited by the Frente, she went on working in an advertising agency in Managua, writing copy. I’d done that, too, in my time, and said, ‘Oh, good. Somebody else with a shameful past.’ The ad-men had never suspected her of a thing. Then the day came when she heard that the authorities were getting on to her, and she left the country at once by a secret safe route to Costa Rica. Two days later, the Guardia arrived at the advertising agency to arrest her. Her former colleagues went into deep shock: Gioconda? Impossible, but she was such a nice, pretty girl. The innocence of the salesmen, she said. It had kept her safe for years.

As I was about to leave, I discovered by chance that the English novelist most admired by both Gioconda Belli and Sergio Ramírez was Lawrence Durrell. ‘I’d never have guessed that,’ I said.

‘They don’t speak about him in England, I know,’ said Gioconda, who had spent time in Suffolk. ‘Maybe he’s too un-English for the English.’ Sergio said he had admired, and been influenced by, Durrell years ago. ‘Now I don’t dare to re-read him,’ he said, ‘in case it’s not the same.’

On that note, I said goodnight.

‘Come back,’ Sergio Ramírez said. ‘Will you ever come back, do you think?’

‘I’ll be back.’

Throughout my visit to Nicaragua, amidst all the songs and poetry and prose, I had been plagued by the limerick about the young girl from Nic’ragua, her jaguar ride, and the transferred smile. It had been infuriating, at times, like a jingle that refused to be forgotten. That last night, the thing invaded my dreams; or, rather, the smile did, the smile on the face of the jaguar, except that there wasn’t any face. I was pursued across an amorphous, shifting landscape by that lethal rictus which one might have likened to the grin of the Cheshire Cat had it not been for the teeth, which were long, curved and melodramatically dripping with blood. I ran for my life across my dream, chased by the jaguar smile.

I woke up in a jumble of nightmare, limerick and sweat. As I lay awake and calmed down, it occurred to me that the limerick, when applied to contemporary Nicaragua, was capable of both a conservative and a radical reading, that there were, so to speak, two limericks, two Misses Nicaragua riding two jaguars, and it was necessary to vote for the version one preferred. If the young girl was taken to be the revolution, seven years old, fresh, still full of the idealism of youth, then the jaguar was geopolitics, or the United States; after all, an attempt to create a free country where there had been, for half a century, a colonized ‘back yard’, and to do so when you were weak and the enemy close to omnipotent, was indeed to ride a jaguar. That was the ‘leftist’ interpretation; but what if the young girl were Nicaragua itself, and the jaguar was the revolution? Eh? What about that?

I closed my eyes and looked through my collection of Nicaraguan snapshots. Finally I chose between the two girls on the two jaguars. I tore up the picture that looked, well, wrong, and threw it away. In the one I preserved, the girl on the jaguar looked like the Mona Lisa, smiling her Gioconda smile.

As I drove to the airport the next morning, the posters of Managua said goodbye. ‘Tuberculosis can be cured!’ ‘Conservatism is the Family’. ‘Death to the yankee invader!’ ‘K-Othrine Insecticide’. ‘Conservatism is Respect for the Church’. ‘Discover the Baha’i Faith’.

Daniel Ortega was on the car radio, speaking at the UN Security Council. At translation speed, he was asking for international law to be upheld, insisting upon Nicaragua’s right to self-determination. Nicaragua against the United States, Daniel against Goliath. The International Court’s judgment was the stone in his sling.

The mouse roared.

My internal dispute hadn’t ended. I thought the Sandinistas were, in a way, elitists. They believed they had been tempered by the fires of the revolution, they had become ‘new men’, and at times, no doubt, they felt that only those who had passed through the fire were fitted to rule. But the inescapable fact was that, whatever Violeta de Chamorro claimed, they had come to power through the ballot box, and were the legitimate rulers of the land.

Some of them probably were ‘communists’, even ‘Marxist-Leninists’. (Although the leaders I met seemed far from being ideologues.) But if Nicaragua was a Soviet-style state, I was a monkey’s uncle.

I had also come to respect the government’s political skill, its will, and its integrity. J.K. Galbraith had written, in a recent Herald Tribune essay, about ‘sleaze’ and the Reagan administration. Once, he said, American men who had money had sought public office. Now men who had public office sought money. ‘I prefer the earlier motivation,’ he remarked.

It was hard to believe that such an administration could claim moral superiority over the likes of Miguel d’Escoto.

Ortega was still speaking on the radio. I recalled asking him why he thought the US had such a bee in its bonnet about Nicaragua. He had replied: ‘It isn’t only us. What Reagan wants to do, by defeating us, is to send a message to the region.’ The message of the FSLN’s overthrow would be loud and clear: give up, folks. Accept that you belong to the American empire. Resistance is useless; you only end up worse off than you were to begin with. ‘Just do as we say.’

‘That is why,’ Ortega had said, ‘we believe we are fighting for the whole of Central America. We are fighting to say, this is not somebody else’s back yard. This is our country.’

Perhaps David and Goliath was the wrong metaphor. Perhaps Nicaragua’s struggle was better compared to that of the ancient Gauls in the famous French comic-books by Goscinny and Uderzo: Astérix, Obélix and the rest, holding out in their tiny enclave against the might of Jules César and his Romans. As I listened to Ortega on the radio, I invented a new Gaul: Sandinix.

The morning paper had brought the news of a Contra attack. Five men had been killed in Jinotega province, at a place called Zompopera. Three of them had been Nicaraguans: William Blandón and Mario Acevedo of the FSLN, and a naturalized Frenchman, Joel Flueux. The others were a Swiss citizen, Claude Leyvraz, and Bernd Erich Koversteyn, from West Germany. (As a result of these killings the Nicaraguan government later banned all foreign volunteer workers from the war zone, one of the saddest pieces of news I heard after my return. Later still, the Contra leadership announced, presumably with the blessing of the US, that from now on any foreign aid workers found in the war zone would be treated as enemy agents.)

Daniel Ortega finished pleading for justice at the UN, while, without his knowing it, the dance of death in Nicaragua took another of its slow, grave steps.