Tales of a Female Nomad (9 page)

“Where are you from?” asks Carlos, the young man I am dancing with. He looks about eighteen and he’s wearing a Detroit Tigers T-shirt.

“What?” The music is loud.

“Where are you from?” he shouts.

“The United States,” I shout back.

“How long have you been here?”

“I arrived three hours ago.”

“Tomorrow,” he yells at me, “I would like to take you to Xiloa!” A nearby lake with a beach.

Nicaraguans are not shy. Nearly all of the Nicaraguans I meet over the next eight months, especially the young ones, have an air of pride and confidence that comes from having made the revolution (in 1979) that got rid of the dictator, Somoza, and nearly all of the wealthy class, most of whom fled to the United States. Perhaps because I am an American, Nicaraguans are eager to invite me into their homes, to share their food, to show me that the revolution was a good thing. What I see and hear during my visit is very different from what I read in the U.S. newspapers about a people under siege by the Sandinista government. Up close, it is clear that the Sandinistas
are
the people.

“Sure,” I say to Carlos’s invitation. “I’d love to go to the beach.”

The next day, Carlos, his little sister, an American woman from my hotel, and I take off at noon on a crowded bus where people are squashed together like those potato chips that come in a can, every body part fitting snugly into someone else’s body.

We get off at a lake just a few miles outside of Managua. Carlos, his hair below his shoulders and his smiling brown eyes flecked with green, looks handsome in a navy T-shirt with the short sleeves rolled up to his shoulders. As we walk, teenage girls turn their heads. Carlos tells me he is a medical student in his second year.

“In the days of Somoza, I could never have thought about becoming a doctor. The university was for rich people. Now, even the poorest people can become doctors or whatever they want. Education is free.”

As we approach the lake, we walk along a grassy slope that leads down toward the sand. The grass is spotted with picturesque pavilions, thatched roofs on poles with benches underneath—protection from the tropical sun. As we get closer to the water, we pass bars and restaurants with tables outside. It looks like an exclusive club, which it once was.

A pickup drives up and parks next to one of the pavilions. There are eight kids in the back and coolers and blankets and a skinny dog. And a radio playing Madonna. Four adults and two kids climb out of the cabin.

“That family would never have been here if Somoza were still president,” says Carlos, pointing to the new arrivals. “Places like this were for the rich. Now they’re for the people.”

“Come on. Let’s go in the water,” says Carlos’s sister, getting back to more important things. And we race across the burning sand to the cool water of the once off-limits lake.

Carlos does not fit the picture of the oppressed Nicaraguan I have read about in the U.S. papers. Like most of the young people I would meet in the eight months I live here, he is proud of his country and its revolution.

I spend the next days wandering, walking miles in the suffocating heat of the city or standing in line for hours to get onto buses where I can barely breathe. There are heads tucked under strangers’ arms, waists into rear ends, legs and hands and feet intertwined. No one seems to be bothered by all this intimacy. In fact, it opens up communication. If you are holding hands with someone, conversation is almost inevitable.

After four days, I want to get out of Managua; it’s hot, grimy, crowded, smelly, and I’m tired of squeezing onto buses. I want to see the rest of the country; but I don’t want to do it alone. I’m sure there are plenty of visitors who want to escape Managua.

The next day I walk into Mirna’s Pancakes for breakfast and ask a young woman if I can join her. After more than a year of traveling alone in Mexico and Guatemala, it has become easy for me to approach other tourists. Nearly every solitary traveler is happy to have company.

Jennifer is from Baltimore and she’s as eager to get out of the city as I am; there is nothing to do here and the heat is unbearable. The hard part is figuring out how to get out. There are buses . . . but they are unreliable, overcrowded, and you have go where
they
want to go. There are also tours for foreigners; but they are expensive and carefully plotted to show you what the government wants you to see.

What we want is to share a car and driver and maybe find two more people to join us. We put up some signs in the motels and restaurants looking for people. “Leave a message in Hospedaje Santos for Rita or Jennifer.” And we walk the streets, stopping every foreigner we see, asking if they want to join us or if they know any drivers with cars.

After two days, we get a lead on a driver. Marco, a cab driver, has taken this German couple around the country. He doesn’t have a phone, and they don’t know his address, but if we catch the Larreynaga bus and get off where the hospital used to be and then turn toward the water for two blocks (you cannot see the water, it is merely a direction), Marco’s house is the third one on the right.

Sounds crazy, but we actually find the house and end up sitting with Marco’s mother for two hours waiting for Marco, who will be home any minute. Doña Juana, Marco’s mother, is a passionate Sandinista and she talks to us about what it was like during the revolution. There was fighting on her street and her house was used as a hospital. If there was no one else around, she was the doctor, removing shrapnel, cleaning wounds and stitching them up.

“Did you have any medical training?” I ask.

“No,” she says. “Mothers know those things.” She has five children and fifteen grandchildren.

While Jennifer and I wait for Marco, we meet eleven grandchildren, seven of them Marco’s kids. Marco, his mother tells us, is thirty; he and his wife were fifteen and sixteen when their first child was born. Teresa is currently pregnant with number eight. I also discover that Doña Juana has several rooms that she rents out to international volunteers: political exiles, socialists, artists, adventurers, idealists from around the world. And she has a room for me if I want it. I do.

Finally, Marco drives his yellow taxi into the yard. Two of the doors are wired closed, the car has no grill, and he tells us later that only one headlight works. He’d been standing in line all day long to get a used carburetor. When he finally made it to the front of the line, they were out of carburetors. His car is a Chevy. Ever since the U.S. closed all trade to Nicaragua, no one can get parts.

Marco is swarthy, with a belly that hangs out over his pants and a shirt that is buttoned wrong. The seams of his sneakers are split. When he hears that we have been waiting for more than two hours, he bursts into an uproarious, contagious laugh that is hard to listen to without laughing along. Marco agrees to take us around the country for a week.

Jennifer and I go back to our motel, hoping to find two more people to join us. But two days later, on the morning we are due to leave, it’s still just Jennifer and me. We are meeting Marco in front of the motel at 7:00 A.M. By 8:45 we have given up. He arrives at 9:00, with no apology; but we are so happy to see him that we say nothing.

We load our bags into the trunk and are about to get in the car when a tall, lanky guy with a British accent comes running down the street shouting. “Stop, wait, don’t go!”

His name is Graham and he wants to join us.

“Hold on, I’ll get my bags,” he says, and he runs off.

Ten minutes later he’s back with two monstrous duffel bags. Jennifer and I are each carrying a small book bag. We squeeze his bags into the trunk, wire it shut, and take off.

An hour later we arrive at a plaza in a small town. It’s buzzing with people, and American rock music is coming out of loudspeakers. Graham, who hasn’t said much during the hour we’ve been driving, asks Marco to take out one of the duffel bags. Except Marco doesn’t understand; he doesn’t speak English and Graham doesn’t speak Spanish. Jennifer translates. Turns out her Spanish is near-perfect. From that point on, we address her as Translator. “Hey, Translator, come here,” we call when we need her. She is Jennifer no more.

Marco takes the bag out, and Graham carries it to a crowded spot in the market. None of us has any idea why.

Then he unzips the bag, takes out four leather juggling balls filled with coffee beans, and begins to juggle. A crowd gathers, mostly mothers and children. Graham brings his audience into the act, tossing a ball to someone as he juggles and catching it when they throw it back. More and more kids shout to be included. Then, after five minutes of balls, he calls to me. I am standing next to his duffel.

“Rita, catch.” And he throws me the juggling balls. One, two, three, four. “Toss me the bowling pins.” And a juggler’s assistant is born.

“Uno, dos, tres, cuatro,”
he counts, except his pronunciation is so bad that Marco, hysterical off to the side, mimics Juggler’s sound.

Juggler, his name from then on, had been the headmaster of a school in Canada; and after that, he started a successful macadamia nut butter business in Hawaii. He made a lot of money in macadamia nut butter, but his dream was to travel around Central and South America, communicating with the people. He studied Spanish and failed miserably. He couldn’t get the pronunciation. No matter how hard he tried, his Spanish sounded like British English.

So, four years ago, he took up a different form of communication . . . juggling. Unlike languages, juggling turned out to be a natural talent. By the time he caught up with us on the street in Managua, he’d entertained thousands of people throughout Central America, and he’d even done a stint in a circus.

Translator and I (now officially known as Writer) spend the next week as Juggler’s assistants in plazas throughout the country. We fetch, we toss, we count, we carry. We make people happy. What a glorious experience. Juggler even teaches us to juggle three balls.

Over the next years, I will meet many street entertainers (called buskers), in airports, on street corners, in markets. And because of my brief stint as Juggler’s assistant, I have a whole new respect and appreciation of the joy they bring to the world. Where once I hid in the back of the crowd, after Nicaragua, I move in close to the entertainers. I talk to them, buy them a drink, and share stories of buskers I have met (the international ones often know each other). All of the street entertainers love making people happy. So do I. From time to time I find myself wondering what it would take to become a clown. Maybe one day.

The climax of our whirlwind traveling show is Marco’s idea. Late in the afternoon of our final day, our yellow taxi swings down a dirt road, and he stops the car outside a tan-colored stucco building.

“This,” he announces, “is a home for deaf and dumb children.”

Two Franciscan nuns in crisply ironed blue-and-white habits answer the bell and invite us in. Just inside the door, in a large entrance hall, ten girls, ages ten to sixteen, are sitting around a big table with huge piles of rice in front of them. They are picking out the bad grains.

Juggler grins and drops his bag. Translator and I open it up, toss him the balls, and he begins. At first the nuns and the girls are stunned. Then suddenly, the girls jump up and surround him with strange sounds and laughter. Kids of all ages pour out of classrooms to join us. They stand there mimicking Juggler’s movements, like a mime chorus in a silent musical. And then Juggler brings them into his act by tossing the balls to them. There is magic in the room . . . and communication. Juggler can’t speak a word of Spanish, but it doesn’t matter, because his audience can’t hear. Everyone, including the nuns, is glowing.

Juggler calls for the bowling pins, then the rings, then an assortment of objects, big and small, that he juggles together. Translator and I, his loyal assistants, toss him whatever he wants. Marco, meanwhile, pulls up a chair and sits near the door, bursting with pride.

The nuns interrupt the show briefly to give us drinks and Ritz crackers with a squiggle of honey. When we’ve finished the snacks, they won’t let us go. Juggler performs some more and gives some juggling lessons to the kids. Finally, he signals that he is finished, and he hands out balloons to everyone.

Translator and I pack up his bag and carry it out the door, followed by the whole school. It is already dark when Juggler slips behind the yellow cab and siphons some gas from the tank. Then he calls for the bag that has never left the trunk. Marco unwires the trunk and Translator and I take out the bag. Juggler hides behind the car as he prepares for the final act.

“Get in and be ready to take off,” he tells us. Marco jumps in behind the wheel and starts the car. Translator and I climb into the backseat and leave the front door open for Juggler’s getaway. And then, in the dark, Juggler takes out a cigarette lighter and performs his grand finale: flaming torches.

When the flames go out, Juggler gathers the torches in his arms and jumps in next to Marco, who guns the engine. We screech off, shooting dust into the air and waving to our screaming and jumping audience.