The Jaguar Smile (18 page)

‘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.

SILVIA: AN EPILOGUE

O
n the plane home I sat beside a Nicaraguan woman with a soft face, thick spectacles and a streaming cold. She was married to a Frenchman and now lived in Paris. We spoke in French, and I soon realized that she was in a distraught state.

I had asked her if she returned to Nicaragua often. (She had left just before the ’72 earthquake, so that ‘her’ Managua had largely vanished. Only the photograph of old Managua at the Los Antojitos café really reminded her of home.)

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘my mother lives there, I just went to visit her, but two days before I arrived she, she, died.’ She began to weep, then controlled herself as if bored by her tears. ‘They kept the body until I came.’ I made inadequate noises, how tragic, how did it happen, you must feel awful.

She felt her mother’s medical treatment had not been up to the mark. The cause of death had been a thrombosis, a huge clot in a major artery, but radiology had failed to detect anything; they hadn’t seen the clot. ‘They said the picture wasn’t
clear. Some equipment, some fluids were lacking, because of the shortages, the economic blockade by the US.’

Silvia blamed the government. ‘I come from a Sandinista family. Both my brothers are active in the Frente, also before the triumph. But now I go back and I see the same old habits of the Somoza time creeping back.’

For instance? ‘For example, there was an arts and crafts exhibit at the ruins of the Grand Hotel. The first day it was not open to the public, but by invitation only. The second day, you found out that all the best pieces had already been reserved. That was how Hope Somoza used to behave.’

‘Yes, I see,’ I said, not having expected so sudden a change of subject.

‘Also the prices of primitive paintings have gone through the roof,’ she said. ‘And the transport system in Managua is appalling.’

I asked if her husband had ever been to Nicaragua. ‘Yes,’ Silvia said, ‘but there is the problem of the expense of the air tickets, and besides it is hard to bring my whole family; one simply cannot find
domestiques
, and there are no automatic washing machines, one must wash everything by hand, and there is the ironing, and the cooking, and everything.’

She was a good-hearted woman, in spite of the sound of the above. She had trained as an architect and had gone to Europe to complete her studies. ‘Everyone told me I’d never come back. I had dreamed for years of being in all that grandeur, all that splendour of buildings. But I never thought I’d stay away. Then things happened very quickly, and I was married, and there it was.’

Did she have a vote in Nicaragua? No, she said, she lived abroad, but her family had all voted for the Frente. ‘And now?’ I asked. ‘Would they vote for the Frente again, or have they changed their minds?’

‘No, no, they haven’t,’ she said. ‘But things are wrong, everybody knows that.’

She opposed the closure of
La Prensa
and thought, as I did, that
Barricada
was the most boring paper she’d ever seen. She felt the FSLN leaders didn’t really understand why the freedom of the press was so important. ‘They are boys, who went from school to the mountains to jail or into exile. Are they really properly prepared for the running of a State?’ And then, in another of her vertiginous non sequiturs: ‘Taxi drivers in Managua these days! They charge the earth. There is supposed to be a rate, but they ignore it, and there is nothing anyone can do. Nothing. It’s wrong.’

As she dozed, wisps of Nicaragua floated through my mind in the eddying, repetitious fashion of airplane thoughts. How isolated from information it was. ‘England?’ a
campesino
asked me, and then struggled to offer some piece of knowledge about the place.
‘Sí, sí: Reina Isabel, no?’
And India, to most Nicaraguans, always excepting the followers of Rabindranath, seemed an exotic, camelious, elephantine place; they were amazed when I drew parallels between that fantasyland and their own country. And yet those parallels did exist. The three tendencies of the FSLN, for example, echoed the divisions and arguments in the Indian left, and in many other poor countries of the South. There were also differences. India was poorer than Nicaragua, but not nearly so information-poor. Very little foreign news made the pages of
Barricada
and
El Nuevo Diario
during my stay. ‘Torrijos was assassinated by the CIA.’ ‘US, UK spy on ANC for South Africa.’ ‘Royal wedding stages a distraction from the quarrel between Reina Isabel and Mrs Thatcher.’ That was about it.

To tell the truth, Nicaraguans didn’t seem perturbed by the absence of the world. Their own circumstances absorbed them
so deeply that they had little room left for curiosity. Very few people asked me any questions, though they were all happy to answer mine. History was roaring in their ears, deafening them to more distant noises.

‘History,’ in Veronica Wedgwood’s phrase, ‘is lived forward but it is written in retrospect.’ To live in the real world was to act without knowing the end. The act of living a real life differed, I mused, from the act of making a fictional one, too, because you were stuck with your mistakes. No revisions, no second drafts. To visit Nicaragua was to be shown that the world was not television, or history, or fiction. The world was real, and this was its actual, unmediated reality.

I had left Nicaragua unfinished, so to speak, a country in which the ancient, opposing forces of creation and destruction were in violent collision. The fashionable pessimism of our age suggested that the destroyers would always, in the end, prove stronger than the creators, and, indeed, those who would unmake the Nicaraguan revolution were men of awesome power. The new weapons of the counterrevolution, purchased with the US dollars, were moving into place; soon it would be time for battle. The logic of
realpolitik
said that there could only be one result: now that the US had opted for a straightforward military solution in Nicaragua, its might would eventually prevail. But that kind of logic had proved fallible in the past. Unhappy endings might seem more realistic than happy ones, but reality often contained a streak of fantasy that realism
(pace
Tagore) lacked. In the real world, there were monsters and giants; but there was also the immeasurable power of the will. It was entirely possible that Nicaragua’s will to survive might prove stronger than the American weapons. We would just have to see.