The Jaguar Smile (8 page)

D’Escoto described the visit to Managua of a White House emissary – whom I’ll call ‘Rocky’. During their talks, he told us, he himself had repeatedly emphasized that, given goodwill on both sides, he was convinced that the difficulties between the US and Nicaragua could fairly straightforwardly be resolved. ‘ “We understand,” I said, “that you have certain security requirements in this region. That’s fine. We can discuss all those. We are pragmatic people, and we want a working deal with the United States.” ’

Eventually (d’Escoto continued), Rocky took up the gauntlet. If they were hypothetically to suppose that this hypothetical goodwill might hypothetically exist, on what basis did the padre think that negotiations might begin?

‘Well,’ d’Escoto said (this was before the Hague judgment), ‘suppose we both agreed to abide by international law? That would be a fairly objective basis.’

‘That’s your problem, Father,’ Rocky told him. ‘You’re a philosopher. You won’t concentrate on the facts.’

And what were the facts? D’Escoto, an excellent raconteur, performed Rocky’s reply. ‘These contras on your frontier,
Padre. They give you lots of trouble, don’t they?’ Yes, d’Escoto had replied, but they wouldn’t if you stopped funding them. ‘There you go again,’ Rocky said. ‘More philosophy. You’re hopeless, Father. The reality is that these people have been funded, are being funded and will continue to be funded. And they give you trouble.
Those
are facts.’ He then said he thought Father Miguel looked pretty intelligent. ‘And intelligent men don’t want trouble. And you’ve got trouble.’

So what did he suggest, d’Escoto asked. ‘It’s easy,’ came the reply. ‘Just do as we say. Just do as we say, and you’ll see how this trouble you’ve got will disappear. Overnight. As if by magic. It just won’t be there any more. You’ll be astonished.
Just do as we say.’

It was a well-told, black-comic tale, and since there was no possibility of getting it corroborated it was clearly one of those stories you could either take or leave. ‘The truly remarkable thing,’ Father Miguel said, ‘was how crude the method was.’ For a mind as highly trained in disputation, both theological and diplomatic, as d’Escoto’s, the American’s crassness, his naked gangsterism, had been almost more offensive than the content of the discussion.
‘You’re hopeless, Padre
,’ d’Escoto repeated, laughing a good deal.
‘More philosophy.’

It occurred to me that if the struggle between the Church hierarchy and the priests could be called a struggle over the Word, then this anecdote represented a parallel, secular struggle between two kinds of discourse, vying for supremacy. Before the evening was out, we would find ourselves involved in a third such combat: press freedom again, the other, inescapable, war of the words.

The actual US Ambassador to Managua, Harry Berghold, was not too bad at all, d’Escoto was saying. He had been put
in because he was supposed to be an expert on Marxism-Leninism. (His previous posting had been in Hungary.) ‘The trouble is that now he says he can’t find any Marxism-Leninism here.’ Poor Berghold, his reports on Nicaragua languishing on the desk of the duty officer in Washington, unread by the makers of policy. He was summoned from time to time to the US capital, to give briefings on Marxism-Leninism. ‘But at these meetings they never ask him about Nicaragua. It is sad, really.’

At this point, Burt Schneider, who had obviously been bursting with it, unleashed a diatribe against the closure of
La Prensa
. ‘It’s a stupid mistake,’ he said. ‘It cancels out the Hague judgment, and it takes away my ability to argue. Now, when people in the US say the Sandinistas are undemocratic, I’ve got nothing to tell them.’

D’Escoto gave us the party line: all countries have the right to censor the press in wartime;
La Prensa
was being financed by the CIA; it was an important part of the US strategy of opening an internal front, just as they did with the paper
El Mercurio
during the destabilization campaign against the Allende government in Chile. But he seemed to distance himself from the decision at two moments. The first was when he mentioned, mildly, that he had been out of the country when the decision was made, so he had not been present at the crucial Cabinet meeting. The second was when the argument had been raging (or, rather, Burt had) for some time. ‘This argument,’ Father Miguel said, ‘reminds me of Cabinet meetings. We have exactly the same disputes.’

But, he said, while the government was anxious to have a good press abroad, and to help its liberal supporters, there were decisions that had to be taken on national security grounds, and that was that. ‘If you want to answer people on the subject of democracy, talk about the Hague ruling. That shows who is
acting legally and who is not. By bringing that case we have given you a very powerful argument. Use that.’

Susan Meiselas and I were broadly in agreement with Burt. We said that it felt as though a downward spiral had begun: first the US approved aid to the Contra, so the FSLN closed
La Prensa
, so the
New York Times
called them Stalinists, so they expelled a couple of priests … it was like going into a tailspin, and the inevitable smash – a US invasion – got closer and closer each time round. ‘You shouldn’t get caught in that spiral,’ Susan said. ‘You shouldn’t become so predictable.’

I voiced a rather different fear. ‘I’ve lived in a country, Pakistan, in which the press is censored from the right, by a military regime. And to tell the truth the papers there are better than they are here. But what worries me is that censorship is very seductive. It’s so much easier than the alternative. So, no matter what reasons you have right now for closing
La Prensa
, I don’t like it. Not because of what you are, but because of what, if this goes on, you might eventually become.’

Father Miguel had his wall up again. ‘These are only wartime measures. In peacetime, it would be different.’

Maybe, in the end, it came down to this, I thought as I left Miguel d’Escoto’s home: who did I think these people really were, beneath the public positions and military fatigues? Father Miguel, Sergio Ramírez, Daniel Ortega; were these dictators in the making?

I answered myself: no. Emphatically, no. They struck me as men of integrity and great pragmatism, with an astonishing lack of bitterness towards their opponents, past or present. They were revolutionary nationalists, a breed not always despised in the United States, which was also born of a revolution, and not so very long ago, at that.

For the first time in my life, I realized with surprise, I had
come across a government I could support, not
faute de mieux
, but because I wanted its efforts (at survival, at building the nation, and at transforming it) to succeed. It was a disorienting realization. I had spent my entire life as a writer in opposition, and had indeed conceived the writer’s role as including the function of antagonist to the state. I felt distinctly peculiar about being on the same side as the people in charge, but I couldn’t avoid the truth: if I had been a Nicaraguan writer, I would have felt obliged to get behind the Frente Sandinista, and push.

I remained convinced that the FSLN’s policy of censorship was misconceived and dangerous. When Omar Cabezas, Nicaragua’s chief of political direction at the Ministry of the Interior, and a roguish, piratical figure, gave the New York PEN Congress the party line – censorship would stop when US aggression stopped – I heard a journalist murmur: ‘Don’t hold your breath.’ And at the end of his speech, one of the writers in the hall, an East European writer, not an American, called out: ‘That was a policeman’s speech.’ The FSLN would do well to take notice of such opposition.

But to oppose a government’s policy was not to oppose the government. Not for me, anyway; not this government, not yet.

7

EATING THE EGGS OF LOVE

I
first read Omar Cabezas’ book,
Fire from the Mountain
, on the plane from London to Managua. (The English title is much less evocative, though shorter, than the Spanish, which translates literally as ‘The mountain is something more than a great expanse of green’. Now, on the road to Matagalpa, travelling towards the mountains about which he’d written, I dipped into it again. Even in English, without any of the ‘Nica’ slang that had helped make it the most successful book in the new Nicaragua (its sales were close to 70,000 copies), it was an enjoyable and evocative memoir of ‘Skinny’ Cabezas’ recruitment by the FSLN, his early work for the Frente in León, and his journey up into the mountains to become one of the early guerrillas. Cabezas managed to communicate the terrible difficulty of life in the mountains, which were a hell of mud, jungle and disease (although one of his fans, a young Nicaraguan soldier, thought he had failed to make it sound bad enough because he had made it too funny). But for Cabezas the mountains were something more than a great expanse of unpleasantness.
He turned them into a mythic, archetypal force, The Mountain, because during the Somoza period hope lay there. The Mountain was where the Frente guerrillas were; it was the source from which, one day, the revolution would come. And it did.

Nowadays, when the Contra emerged from The Mountain to terrorize the
campesinos
, it must have felt like a violation; like, perhaps, the desecration of a shrine.

Forested mesas flanked the road; ahead, the multiform mountains, conical, twisted, sinuous, closed the horizon. Cattle and dogs shared the road with cars, refusing to acknowledge the supremacy of the automobile. When the trucks came, however, everybody got out of the way fast.

Tall cacti by the roadside. Women in fatigues carried rifles over their shoulders, holding them by the barrels. Moss hung in clumps from the trees and even from the telephone wires. Children pushed wooden wheelbarrows full of wood. And then, as we neared Matagalpa, we came upon a sombre procession carrying a distressingly small box: a child’s funeral. I saw three in the next two days.

It had begun to rain.

I was pleased to be getting out of Managua again. Matagalpa felt like a real town, with its church-dominated squares, its town centre. It was like returning to normal, but normality here was of a violent, exceptional type. The buildings were full of bullet-holes left over from the insurrection years, and dominating the town was a high, ugly tower which was all that remained of the National Guard’s hated command post. After the revolution, the people had demolished the Guardia’s fearsome redoubt.

The ice-cream shop had no ice-cream because of the shortages. In the toy shop the evidence of poverty was everywhere; the best toys on display were primitive ‘cars’ made out of a
couple of bits of wood nailed together and painted, with Coca-Cola bottle tops for hubcaps. There were, interestingly, a number of mixed-business stores known as ‘Egyptian shops’, boasting such names as ‘Armando Mustafa’ or ‘Manolo Saleh’, selling haberdashery, a few clothes, some toiletries, a variety of basic household items – shampoo, buckets, safety-pins, mirrors, balls. I remembered the Street of Turks in
One Hundred Years of Solitude
. In Matagalpa, Macondo did not seem so very far away.

The faces in the Egyptian shops didn’t look particularly Egyptian but then neither did the orientally named Moisés Hassan, mayor of Managua. In the cafés, I met some more familiar faces. Posters of the Pope and of Cardinal Obando y Bravo were everywhere, the Cardinal’s scarlet robes rendered pale pink by the passage of time. Sandinistas, unconcerned about the company they were keeping, drank hideously sweetened fruit squashes, including the bright purple
pitahaya
, and munched on the glutinous kiwi-like
mamón
, beneath the watching Cardinal. I talked to Carlos Paladino, who worked in the office of the
delegado
or governor of Matagalpa province, about the regional resettlement policy.

Large areas of the mountainous and densely jungled war zone in the north-eastern part of Jinotega province had been evacuated, and the population relocated in southern Jinotega, and Matagalpa province, too. It had been a ‘military decision’, that is, compulsory. The army had been having trouble fighting the Contra because the scattered civilian population kept getting in the way. The people were also in danger from the Contra, who regularly kidnapped
campesinos
, or forced them to grow food for the counter-revolutionary soldiers, or killed them. But wasn’t it also true, I asked, that many people in those areas sympathized with the Contra? Yes, Paladino replied, some men had gone to join them, leaving many women with children behind. The large number of one-parent families of
this type had become quite a problem. But in many cases the men would return, disillusioned after a time. The government offered a complete amnesty for any
campesino
who returned in this way. ‘We don’t hold them responsible,’ Paladino said. ‘We know how much pressure the Contra can exert.’

Resettlement brought problems. Apart from the single-parent issue – how were these women to be involved in production when they had to look after their children? – the resettled northerners were people who were utterly unfamiliar with living in communities. They had led isolated lives in jungle clearings. Now they were being put into clusters of houses built close together. Their animals strayed into their neighbours’ yards. Their children fought. They hated it. Many of them were racially different from the local
mestizos
: they were Amerindians, Miskito or Sumo, with their own languages, their own culture, and they felt colonized. ‘We made many mistakes,’ Carlos Paladino admitted.