The Jaguar Smile

4 MADAME SOMOZA’S BATHROOM

It had become the custom, when young writers gathered in the cafés of Managua, to rubbish Ernesto Cardenal. As Father Cardenal was not only the country’s most internationally renowned poet, but also the Minister of Culture, I took these attacks to be indications that the country’s literature was in reasonably healthy and irreverent shape. The coffee-shop sniping didn’t seem to bother Cardenal much. He just went on beaming away, looking, with his little beret and his silver locks and beard, and his cotona, the loose peasant’s smock he wore over his blue jeans, like a Garry Trudeau cartoon of himself: the radical Latino priest according to ‘Doonesbury.’

The attack that did upset Cardenal, and many Nicaraguans along with him, was the Pope’s. The story of Wojtyla’s arrival in Managua had passed into legend: Cardenal knelt to kiss the Pontiff’s ring, but John Paul II shook angry fists at him and commanded him to regularize his relationship with the Church. The poet burst into tears.

At the time of my visit, neither Ernesto Cardenal nor the other priest high in the government, the Foreign Minister, Miguel d’Escoto, were permitted to officiate at the Mass. They were, in effect, suspended. As I read Cardenal’s poem The Meaning of Solentiname, some of the reasons for this rift in the Church became clear:

I met Cardenal in Hope Somoza’s bathroom. The Ministry of Culture occupies what used to be the dictator’s residence, and the Minister’s office, he gleefully informed me, had once witnessed Mme Somoza’s daily toilette. Had he ever been here, I asked, in the bad old days? No, no, he exclaimed, throwing up his hands in a parody of what would once have been perfectly legitimate terror. ‘In those days the place was surrounded by guns, tanks, helicopters. It was frightening just being in the neighbourhood.’ I told him of my own experience of being in the neighbourhood of a Somoza, and he was delighted. ‘Then you know everything.’

He showed me round. ‘This was the bar. That is the Japanese house which Hope Somoza liked to use for her meditating. Here, for the guards, and here, for the horses.’ Concrete tennis courts cracked and decayed in the rain. I felt that the re-allocation of this house of barbarity to the Ministry of Culture was a particularly elegant revenge, and so, clearly, did Cardenal.

Back in Hope’s bathroom we discussed his development as a poet. There was the early influence of Neruda — ‘his lyric mode, not the political stuff’ — and, later, the much more profound impact of North America: Pound, Whitman, Marianne Moore. We also talked about the parallel development of his political radicalism. ‘In the beginning I was a sort of Christian Democrat. I had many arguments with Carlos Fonseca and the others. I was against the revolutionary route at that time. They were always very patient with me, very gentle.’ This, after all, was a man who had entered a Trappist monastery when he was thirty-one. Revolution did not come naturally to such an inward, contemplative spirit.

The turning-point was his visit to Cuba, immediately after the revolution there. ‘It was a conversion,’ he said. ‘When I got back, I announced that I had been converted. It created a great scandal.’ He beamed happily at the memory of it.

I said I could understand his conversion easily enough; the Cuban revolution had clearly been a great event for the whole of Latin America, an affirmation of possibility, a demonstration that oppressors could be overthrown. But now, I added, I had serious reservations about Cuba. Did he share any of these reservations? Did he feel, for example, that the Cuban revolution had taken some wrong turnings, and that it could serve, for Nicaragua, as a warning as well as an inspiration?

‘No,’ he said, with a radiant smile. ‘Why? What wrong turnings?’

All right, I thought, he’s the Minister of Culture, he doesn’t want to find Cardenal Attacks Cuba splashed across the world’s papers the day after tomorrow. But he was a writer, too… I took a deep breath and mentioned, er, for example, human rights abuses? Political prisoners, torture, attacks on homosexuals, on, um, writers?

‘What attacks?’

His serenity threw me into a spin. Confused, I stupidly said, ‘Well, for example, on Nicolás Guillén,’ who is the head of the Cuban Writers’ Union, when I had meant to say, ‘Padilla.’ He looked at me scornfully. ‘In the early days there were a few abuses,’ he said. ‘But not now.’ I asked a few more questions — what about Armando Valladares’ book, Against All Hope, which speaks of over two decades in Cuban prisons, two decades of being made to eat shit and drink soup containing bits of glass? But it was like hitting a wall.

When I left the Ministry of Culture I noticed that the Nicaraguan fondness for naming their ministries acronymically had created, in this instance, an unfortunately Orwellian resonance. Cardenal, chief of MINICULT. I went away feeling depressed.

I had lunch with a man from the FSLN’s newspaper, Barricada. He was responsible for the ‘Editorial’ page, and I have forgotten his name, which is perhaps just as well, because he made the most chilling remark I heard in Nicaragua. I was arguing with him about censorship in general and the recent closure of La Prensa in particular. He seemed, at first, genuinely opposed to censorship — ‘of course, as a working journalist, I hate it too’ — but then he said this: ‘A worker I met recently put it very well. If a mother has a sick child, very sick, she takes it to the hospital without first putting on her make-up.’

My depression deepened. ‘So,’ I asked unhappily, ‘are such matters as the freedom of the press just cosmetic?’

His face lit up, and he nodded enthusiastically. ‘Cosmetic, that’s the word. Yes.’

‘Everybody censors the press in wartime.’ That was the official line on the subject, and I heard it from my anonymous Barricada friend, from Daniel Ortega, from all quarters. It wouldn’t do. I remembered being in Pakistan during the 1965 war with India, and how it felt to be fed information about which the only certain thing was that it was hopelessly and deliberately misleading. I remembered learning to divide Pakistani claims to have shot down Indian planes by ten, and to multiply the admitted losses by the same factor. Then the two figures began to balance up, and you had the illusion of truth. I remembered, too, my outrage at the British government’s manipulation of the news media during the Falklands/Malvinas war. What had been unacceptable to me there was also unacceptable here.

The issue of press freedom was the one on which I absolutely parted company with the Sandinistas. It disturbed me that a government of writers had turned into a government of censors. Largely because of this issue, a kind of silent argument raged in my head throughout my stay. I would tell myself that something remarkable was being attempted here, with minimal resources and under great pressure. The land reforms, and the health and literacy campaigns of 1980 and 1981, the years before the start of US aggression, showed what could be achieved. The literacy campaign, for instance, had brought the percentage of illiterate Nicaraguans down from more than fifty per cent to less than twenty per cent in two years. Now, however, the diversion of manpower into the war effort meant that the initial campaign had not been properly followed up, and illiteracy was creeping forward once again, like a jungle reclaiming a neglected clearing … Then I would argue back: those campaigns are all very well; but they think that dissent is cosmetic. And Barricada is the worst paper I’ve seen in a long while.

The argument usually ended in the same place. Nicaragua was an imperfect state. But it was also engaged in a true revolution: in an attempt, that is, to change the structures of society in order to improve the lives of its citizens. And imperfection, even the deep flaw of censorship, did not constitute a justification for being crushed by a super-power’s military and economic force.

Mario Vargas Llosa wasn’t in Nicaragua, but in the quiet of my room I would dispute with him, too. He had written and spoken so frequently, and with such skill, about the importance of supporting the democratic process in Latin America; he insisted that it was the only way to break the cycle of revolution and dictatorship. He justified his support for parties and governments of the right in his native Peru by saying that he preferred ballots to bullets; that a flawed democracy was infinitely preferable to no democracy at all.

Peru was a flawed democracy of the right. Nicaragua was a flawed democracy of the left. If democracy were really Vargas Llosa’s goal, then Nicaragua, according to his own declared principles, was exactly the kind of state he ought to be supporting, and fighting to improve.

I wondered, into the silence, why he did not.