The Jaguar Smile (11 page)

The question of adulthood was almost as tricky. ‘You must remember,’ Soria said, ‘that in Nicaragua men have been joining the armed forces, and before that the Frente, and dying in great numbers, at the age of sixteen.’ I didn’t need reminding. The boys at the Pomares hospital clamored in my head: ‘I can’t wait to get back to the front line!’ – ‘I’m going next week!’ … ‘So the argument runs,’ Soria went on, ‘should they not be considered full adults by the constitution?’

Eugarrios, the oldest of the quartet, wasn’t happy about that. ‘My own opinion is that they should get the right to vote,’ he said. ‘But full adulthood at sixteen? With the right to borrow money, and so forth? Many people think it’s too young, and I must say I am one of those.’

‘Many others, however,’ Rocha said, ‘believe that the
muchachos
cannot be treated as half-adults in this way. We are still discussing this.’

And so to God. In several of the public forums, including the one with the writers, there had been demands that the constitution should ‘invoke the name of God as a Supreme Being’. A passionate debate on the subject was in progress all over the country. Where did the committee stand?

The official FSLN position, they told me, was opposed to the idea of mentioning the name, but this wasn’t a ‘final’ position. Some Sandinistas thought that it wasn’t very important either way, so if it made some people happy, why not concede it? On the other hand, a number of Christian participants in the forums had said that merely mentioning the name was neither here nor there; it was more important that the constitution should reflect the Christian love-thy-neighbour spirit.

‘The ones who are really pushing for this are the Conservatives,’
Alejandro Bravo said. So what was the probable outcome? ‘It’s still uncertain. Maybe God will be in, maybe not.’

With or without God, sixteen-year-old adults and abortion, the constitution ought to have been ratified by the end of 1986. (The subsequent politicking made this less certain.) It struck me, and I said so, as a uniquely important document. But as long as the state of emergency lasted, the constitution would be little more than a piece of paper; the President would retain most of the power, and a number of civil rights would remain suspended. Critics of Nicaragua would argue that the emergency might never end; that it might, in fact, be the first step towards the establishment of a dictatorship. (My own relationship with the term
Emergency
, formed during Mrs Indira Gandhi’s dictatorial years of emergency rule in India in the middle 1970s, was an uncomfortable one.)

But the enthusiasm, the vigour with which Nicaragua had entered into the constitution-making process did not smack of window-dressing or tokenism. The emergency in Nicaragua was not the product of a politician’s desire to hang on to power, as it had been in Mrs Gandhi’s India, but the inevitable response to acts of aggression from outside the country. This was what Sergio Ramírez had meant when he said that peace would bring more democracy, not less.

I left the Assembly building feeling genuinely angry. At the Enrique Acuña co-operative, and again today, I had seen a people trying hard to construct for themselves a new identity, a new reality, a reality that the external pressure might crush before construction work had even been completed.

Nicaragua’s constitution amounted to a Bill of Rights that I wouldn’t have minded having on the statute book in Britain. But to hell with all that; to hell with all the dead sixteen-year-olds. Give a dog a bad name and hang him.

9

ON CATHARSIS

I
was sitting on a verandah at the ASTC cafeteria, in the company of two young Nicaraguan writers, Mario Martínez and Donaldo Altamirano, and two visiting writers from Eastern Europe: the Bulgarian poet Kalin Donkovy, a slow, silent, heavy man, and one of the secretaries of the Soviet Writers’ Union, Vladimir Amlissky, a much more urbane fellow altogether. Conversation wasn’t easy. Amlissky and Donkovy had to be translated into Spanish by one interpreter, and that was then rendered into English, for my benefit, by a second intermediary. Nevertheless, I thought, one might as well plunge in. ‘What news,’ I asked, ‘does Comrade Amlissky have about the reported liberalization of censorship in the Soviet Union?’ He nodded a number of times. ‘Things are better,’ he said. ‘Now more writers, and, which is more important, a greater number of publishers have the confidence to speak out on social issues. I myself have written on the subject of delinquency.’ He also told me about all the prizes he had won.

I thought what he said was very likely true. ‘But,’ I pressed
on, ‘what about
Doctor Zhivago
? Can we expect its publication soon?’

‘My personal opinion,’ Amlissky replied, ‘is that this novel of Boris Pasternak,
Doctor Zhivago
, is a poor novel. The Nobel Prize was not given to him for literary reasons.’

‘To tell the truth, I’m not too fond of it myself,’ I said.

‘And it made an absolutely terrible film,’ he added.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but whatever one thinks of
Zhivago
, it has become symbolic of Soviet censorship, and, anyway, you can’t seriously be saying that Pasternak was not a writer of Nobel Prize calibre.’

Amlissky nodded again, many times. ‘Yes, I think this novel will probably be published soon,’ he said, as if it were a trifling thing. ‘And, for his poetry,’ he added, reasonably enough, ‘I would give him all the prizes in the world.’

What about other writers? ‘A number of errors were made,’ he said, ‘in the case of many of our great writers: Akhmatova, Bulgakov, Pasternak. These are now being rectified. For example, the poet Gumilyov, the husband of Akhmatova. A volume of his verse is now being published.’

No mention of Mandelstam, I noticed; and, after all, the ‘error’ made in the case of Gumilyov was that he had been executed. It seemed an inadequate word to use.

‘Yes,’ Amlissky said, ‘certain errors.’ Something of my views had evidently been lost in translation.

‘These days, there’s a strange schizophrenia in Russian literature,’ I suggested. ‘Most of the writers known outside the Soviet Union are unread within it, and vice versa. How does that feel to a writer who is still on the inside?’

He answered by attacking the dissident writers. They had ceased to write literature and become pamphleteers. They were mediocre. ‘Even if that were true,’ I said, ‘and as a matter of fact I don’t think it is, not when one thinks of Brodsky, Solzhenitsyn, Sinyavsky, Voinovich – but even if it were, mediocrity
is no reason for banning a writer. Third-rate writers get published all over the world, after all.’

‘Let me give you my personal view of Solzhenitsyn,’ he said. ‘I don’t care for his writing nowadays. It has been getting worse and worse, and he has become a very right-wing figure, very Reaganite, very illiberal.’

I, too, was critical of many of Solzhenitsyn’s pronouncements since his arrival in the West, I said; but surely one had to separate that from his stature as the author of, above all,
The Gulag Archipelago
? ‘Let me give you my personal view of this work,
Archipelago Gulag
,’ Amlissky offered. ‘You must understand that in our great classics we have a tradition of high tragedy, in which many awful things are shown and done, but always in the end there is catharsis, the cleansing of the soul. But in Solzhenitsyn we find no catharsis. This is why I do not care for this work.’

I was about to suggest that the lack of catharsis in Solzhenitsyn’s writing might have more to do with Russian history than with his artistic limitations, but at this point I realized that the Nicaraguan writers were puzzled and confused. ‘The Soviet Union is a country with many great problems,’ Mario Martínez said. ‘It is interesting to hear how it is learning from its past errors.’

Later, one of the interpreters asked me a breathtaking question: ‘What’s a labour camp?’

‘What’s a labour camp?’ I echoed, disbelievingly.

‘Oh, I can see what you’re trying to say it is,’ she said. ‘Something like a concentration camp. But are you really saying they have such things in the Soviet Union?’

‘Um,’ I stumbled, ‘well, yes.’

‘But how can it be?’ she asked in obvious distress. ‘The USSR is so helpful to third world countries. How can it be doing things like this?’

There is a kind of innocence abroad in Nicaragua. One of
the problems with the romance of the word ‘revolution’ is that it can carry with it a sort of blanket approval of all self-professed revolutionary movements. Donaldo Altamirano told me how deeply he felt in solidarity with the Provisional IRA.

Now Kalin Donkovy, who had been ponderously quiet all evening, began to speak, as unstoppably as a steamroller, about the poetry of Bulgaria. ‘Our tradition is of martyr poets,’ he declared. ‘Do you know that the symbol of our writers’ union is of the winged horse, Pegasus, with a bullet-hole in his chest? The most successful volume of modern poetry in Bulgaria is an anthology of dead poets. And this is not surprising. When poets suffer with the people, their work improves.’

Martínez and Altamirano responded to this statement with great warmth. The parallels with Nicaragua were obvious. The ghosts of the local martyr-poets walked into the ASTC cafeteria and joined us, the ghost, for example, of Leonel Rugama, who, in the old days at the India Cafe, used to tell stories about his mad uncle who lived in Macondo, with the Momotombo volcano in the background; who died at the age of twenty; and who believed that the revolution was ‘communion with the species’.

That was a fine, romantic sentiment, I said to Rugama’s ghost. But nation-building required something more prosaic: the ability to make distinctions, for example, between the PLO and the IRA.

I wondered if Nicaragua’s ghosts would permit the living to make such distinctions. On the one hand, the romance of the dead; on the other, the great American fist. It could turn into quite a trap.

10

MARKET DAY

T
he Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar loved Nicaragua, and came here often. When he was in Managua his favourite places were the markets. He would wander, with Tomás Borge, through the old ‘Oriental market’ that grew up in the earthquake-ruins of the city centre. They must have made an outlandish couple, Julio the giant and tiny Tomás. Nicaragua returned Cortázar’s compliment and loved him, too. The author of the fiendishly esoteric and complicated
Rayuela
(‘Hopscotch’) had been on first-name terms with many market traders. Now he, too, was dead.

When the big new covered markets like the Mercado Roberto Huembes were constructed, the traders didn’t want to leave their sites at the Oriental market. They were afraid their regular customers wouldn’t be able to find them in the cavernous new location. Daniel Ortega went to a meeting with the traders and old women yelled at him for hours, We won’t move, you can’t make us go. But some did, and then more, and now very few remained at the Oriental site.

At the Roberto Huembes market there were giant pink bunnies dangling over my head. These were
piñatas
, children’s party pieces. You filled them up with sweets and hung them from the ceiling. Then the children beat them with sticks until they burst in a shower of sweets. Young
mestizo
girls eyed the
piñatas
longingly.

There was a distraction. To the music of drums, the
jigantona
, the giant dancing woman, jigged past, about ten feet tall, her head a wide-eyed mask, her hips wobbling. The children rushed along behind her and so did I. She shimmied past a wall on which satirical cartoons had been pinned: Cardinal Obando y Bravo kneeling at Uncle Sam’s feet, begging, Give me your blessing, to which Uncle Sam replied, OK, baby, you are Contra, I am Contra, God is with you. Nobody (except for me) glanced at the cartoons. Everyone followed the dancing giantess, who was a lot more fun.

In different parts of the market you could buy furniture, arts and crafts, shoes, household goods, food, more or less anything that the shortages (and inflation) permitted. Some of the shoes cost more than a month’s salary for an office worker. Meat, corn, oil, potatoes, beans were all hard to come by. As a result, as I wandered around it, it wasn’t hard to hear complaints. Not surprisingly, the government came in for a lot of stick. The shoppers knew that not all the shortages could be blamed on the war. Recently, 20,000 pounds of beef went bad in the government’s meat-packing company because it was stored without refrigeration. Then there had been the 200,000 dead chickens to account for. And of course the prices made people angry. They could hardly afford a bottle of shampoo these days.