My visit to Miss Pancha reminded me, finally, that all was not well in Pearl Lagoon, no matter how drowsily jolly the place might seem. The old midwife, laid up these days with back trouble, became melancholy all of a sudden.
‘Brought most of this village into the world,’ she said. ‘Buried plenty, too.’
Round the corner from Miss Pancha’s was the house of a young couple who were selling up and moving to Bluefields because the Contra had killed the man’s father. In almost every house you could hear a tale of death. Even one of the local Moravian priests had been killed. In a nearby village, the Contra had recently kidnapped more than two dozen children, many of them girls aged between ten and fourteen, ‘for the use of the Contra fighters,’ Mary told me. One girl had escaped and got home. The villagers had heard that five other children had escaped, but had been lost in the jungle. That was five weeks ago, and they had to be presumed dead. ‘It’s so sad going there now,’ Mary said. ‘The whole village just cries all the time.’
On the day of the seventh anniversary, when I was in Estelí, a helicopter crashed in the north of special zone II, killing everyone on board. Mary’s husband Julio had intended to be on the flight; it was only at the last moment that other business prevented him from going. The Contra had claimed to have shot the helicopter down, but they hadn’t; it was an accident. ‘All that fuss about the Challenger space shuttle,’ Mary said. ‘And how many people died? Seven?’ Many of the helicopter dead were from a remote community, Tortuguera. ‘The teacher, the army commander, the doctor. Just about all the professionals in the community,’ Mary said. ‘That place is getting a reputation for being jinxed. That’s the third doctor they’ve lost in a year.’ It was Contra policy to kill the professionals when they attacked such communities, but on this occasion fate had lent them a hand. ‘In a small society like ours,’ Mary said, ‘each death is really noticed. You can imagine what a hole twenty-four deaths make. They had the last funeral yesterday. It was a week before they could cut the body out of the wreck and give it to the family. Special divers had to come from Managua to do it. He was a young man, on his way to Bluefields to be married.’
We left Pearl Lagoon and started back to Bluefields. The rain, right on cue, bucketed down again. I decided I no longer needed to swim in the Caribbean. Enough of it had fallen on me from the skies.
Mary Ellsberg came to Bluefields as a brigadista, a volunteer worker, thinking she would stay for a year. Instead, she fell in love with the country, and with Julio, and now she was a Nica mother with a one-year-old child, Julito. She was afraid her son might one day have to fight in the war. She had already become enough of a Nicaraguan to think of the war as a long-term, near-permanent reality.
I was surprised to discover an Indian connection. Her father had known and admired the great Gandhian leader, Jayaprakash Narayan, who had led the opposition to Mrs Gandhi during the Emergency, in spite of needing regular kidney dialysis; also Vinoba Bhave, the ascetic philosopher whose life had been spent persuading Indians to give land to the poor. ‘My father has been down here three times,’ she said. ‘The first time, he saw only Comandantes. The second time was really just a vacation. But the third time he was in Bluefields just four days after the Contra attacked. That changed his perceptions pretty radically.’ She was still astonished by the naivety of US reactions to Nicaragua. ‘When I go back, I show people my slides, and they just say, we had no idea, we had no idea.’
In the speedboat, she and Yolanda talked about childbirth. The real nightmare was having a child in Managua, Mary said. Expectant mothers often had to double up on beds. It was not uncommon for women in labour, and already five centimetres dilated, to be roaming around town trying to get a hospital to admit them. Things were a little better in Bluefields, Yolanda said, and Mary agreed. But when she went into labour her doctor had been at a party. She rang him, but he didn’t take the call seriously enough to leave. He rolled up at the hospital the next morning, nursing a hangover when she was already nursing Julito.
‘The attitude to pain here is to take absolutely no notice of it,’ she said. ’I felt there was a lot of pressure on me not to cry out or moan. I lay there silently, being a sport. Just once, when the contractions were really bad, I let out a noise, and at once one of the women in the other beds said, ‘Oh, come on, Mary, it’s not as bad as all that.’
Childbirth in Nicaragua was all ‘natural’ – there simply weren’t any drugs to be had – but the women were given no training in breathing or pushing, they did no exercises. Those were things Mary was trying to change with her health care programmes.
Yolanda wanted Mary to come and address a women’s group. OK, Mary said, she was just coming to the end of working with a group of Miskito women.
‘These women want first-aid know-how,’ Yolanda said. ‘Very basic things. How to survive and feed children during and after a Contra attack.’
I asked, tamely, how it felt to live with the constant possibility of dying. Some of the remote regions people like Mary, Julio and Yolanda visited could take sixteen or seventeen hours to reach in a small boat on narrow waterways through dense jungle. How did it feel?
‘You learn to live with it. If it happens, it happens,’ Mary said. ‘People here have come to expect death. The country’s youth is just being thrown away.’
Julio was training local people to take over his job, and in a year or so he and Mary might be leaving Bluefields. I thought: I hope you make it. But I didn’t say it, or tell her how much I had found, that day, to admire. Instead, I agreed to go to her place the next day, Sunday, and cook her an Indian meal.
On Sunday morning the sun shone. I sat on the porch of my hotel and watched the people hanging out in the street. Across the way was the Instituto de Belleza Ilse, closed today, and there was Ilse on the balcony above her Instituto, sipping her morning coffee. The sun shone, too, on a hump-shaped wooden library building full of Reader’s Digest condensed books. In this building, until a couple of months ago, June Beer, librarian, primitivist painter and character of Bluefields, had held sway. Sadly, she had just died.
Church music and reggae passed by on shouldered ghetto blasters. A bright yellow bus bore the sign: ‘Passengers not allowed on board with fishes’. The Moravian church rang its bell. Grown-ups and children headed for Sunday school. Second-hand clothes hung, for sale, over wooden verandah railings. Mothers took their children for juice in the town’s cafés. At nine the rain poured down; at nine-twenty the sky was blue again. Creole men slapped palms in the street. ‘Hey man I hear a tale ’bout you.’ It was a moment of peace, and I treasured it. Soon it would be time to go over to Mary’s place and cook.
The meal wasn’t a great success, because I had never in my life laid eyes on half the vegetables I was preparing; but it was an offering, it was something I could do. Afterwards I said goodbye to Mary and little Julito and headed off down the road. I had a plane to catch.
I met Carlos Rigby, another town ‘character’, while waiting for my car to the airport. Rigby was a dreadlocked black poet, bilingual in English and Spanish. Dreadlocked but not, I ought to say, Rastafarian.
We talked about his work. These days, he said, he thought it was more important to write in Spanish than in English, although he still did both. ‘I am trying to improve my Spanish,’ he told me, ‘in the vocabularial aspect.’ What about his English, I was interested to know: did he, like so many Afro-Caribbean British poets, feel that he ought to write in Creole, in what the Barbadian poet Braithwaite had named ‘nation language’?
‘Yes, this is a question,’ he said. ‘But, you know, I come to find writing in Creole a little bit folkloristic.’ I said I knew some writers in South London who could give him an argument.
‘South London?’ he asked, perking up. ‘Lambeth? You know Lambeth?’
‘I know it,’ I said.
‘We are twinned with Lambeth,’ he said, not without pride.
He then soliloquized for some time about his acquaintance
with Ginsberg, who had read and liked a chapter of Rigby’s work-in-progress, a fantasy novel of Nicaragua. (Fantasy? What would Tagoré have thought?) He recited a rude poem he had written in Spanish about Obando and Bishop Vega, and carefully explained all the puns. He digressed to tell me about the local witchdoctors, the sukié, whom most of the villagers around the lagoon trusted. ‘Real witchdoctors,’ he promised. ‘They dance while prescribing their medicines.’
When the first Western-style doctors had gone into the villages, the people had rejected them, saying they already had their medicine men. Now the government worked with and through the sukié. It was another sign of the revolution’s adaptability, of its pragmatism.
It started to rain as my car arrived. Rigby said goodbye. ‘Soon it going to rain less,’ he said. ‘In the old days, if Somoza told the rain to stop, it stopped. I don’t know what wrong with these Sandinistas.’
Large numbers of black butterflies, black with white spots on the wingtips, were fluttering at the roadsides. Children were swiping at them with sticks. On the airstrip the wind got up and blew a great cloud of the butterflies directly at me. As I walked to the aeroplane the swarm surrounded me, escorting me out of town. It felt like a small miracle; an epiphany.
I reached Managua an hour after the passing of a hurricane that had uprooted trees. It was a good thing the light aircraft I’d flown in hadn’t been caught in the storm. Maybe the butterflies had brought me luck.
13
DOÑA VIOLETA’S VERSION
Back in Managua, I had one more ghost to meet. In 1978, when Somoza’s growing greed had alienated large sections of the Nicaraguan oligarchy, the editor of La Prensa, Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, had started looking like a possible replacement. Somoza had him assassinated, and by doing so sealed his own fate; after that, everyone, even the US, wanted him removed. Chamorro’s ghost, shaking its gory locks, appeared at the tyrant’s feast and sat down in his chair.
I went to the offices of La Prensa to meet Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, Pedro Joaquin’s formidable widow, matriarch of the deeply divided Chamorro clan. Her elder son, Pedro Joaquín junior, was in exile in Costa Rica; her younger son, Carlos Fernando Chamorro, was the editor of the Sandinista daily Barricada. Of her late husband’s brothers, one, Jaime Chamorro, was director of La Prensa; the other, Xavier Chamorro, was the publisher of El Nuevo Diario, the paper set up by the large group of disaffected journalists who resigned from La Prensa after the revolution, claiming that its editorial line had become too conservative. One of her daughters, Cristiana, worked at La Prensa (she came in to shake hands during my talk with her mother); the other, Claudia, was the Sandinista ambassador to Costa Rica whom I’d met at Daniel Ortega’s house.
Doña Violeta herself was wholly undivided. Her opposition to the FSLN was without shadows or grey areas. ‘This is a communist state,’ she said. ‘The government says we’re Cia, we’re the Reaganite paper. That’s OK. Under Somoza we were told we were yellow journalists, we were communists. But we have always stood for peace and democracy. Our leader on the day we were closed down was headed, We are for peace. These are the beliefs for which my husband Pedro Joaquín Chamorro was assassinated. They will always be our beliefs. We are not the communists here.’
The first thing I noticed about Doña Violeta was that she wore a great deal of jewellery: gold bracelets and earrings, and quantities of black coral. I had grown unaccustomed, in Nicaragua, to such display, so it struck me in a way it wouldn’t have done in London or New York, or even Bombay. There were no concessions being made, the jewellery announced, to the spirit of the ‘new Nicaragua’.
The second thing was the frequency with which she would refer to her late husband. It put me in mind of a much younger woman in very different circumstances: Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto, who, knowing that the source of her mass appeal was a ghost, referred to her dead father in every public speech. (She called him Shaheed sahib, Mr Martyr.) The martyred Pedro Joaquín had been respected right across the political spectrum, and Doña Violeta was making sure that he was not hijacked by her opponents.
She was a poised, slender woman, very elegant, with short grey hair. Her voice was a fighter’s voice: tough, unrelaxed, premeditated. Our interview proceeded down familiar lines. ‘In the last four and a half years,’ she said, ‘we have been more heavily censored than in all the Somoza decades. Thus we see, and the world sees, that the government is taking off its mask, and revealing itself as a Marxist-Leninist, totalitarian state.’ The term Marxist-Leninist, in Doña Violeta’s mouth, was a final condemnation, a judgment from which there was no appeal. ‘The TV and radio are state controlled,’ she said. ‘This paper was the only thing left, and now it has been taken away.’ I queried her assertion about the radio – there were, were there not, numbers of independent local radio stations? And wasn’t I right in thinking that there was no pre-censorship of the air-waves? – but she swept on. I was handed a dossier of documents relating to the closure of the paper. As she took me through them, she did a rather peculiar thing.
One of the documents was a photocopy of the announcement, published in Barricada, of the ‘indefinite suspension’ of her newspaper. She had underlined two lines near the bottom for my attention. They read:
‘ … esta Dirección resolvió suspender por tiempo
indefinido las ediciones del diario La Prensa.’
That is: ‘this Directorate has resolved to suspend for an indefinite period the publication of the daily La Prensa’. Doña Violeta drew my attention to the words ‘this Directorate’. As I knew, she said, the nine-man supreme body of the FSLN was known as the ‘National Directorate’. ‘So this proves that the decision to close us down was not taken by the government, but by the party.’ It was one of her themes: in Marxist-Leninist Nicaragua, the party was the only real power.
As the document was in Spanish, I didn’t examine it closely until after the interview. Then I found that it was clearly headed: ‘The Directorate of Communications Media of the Ministry of the Interior’. The same legend was to be found, in display type, at the foot of the announcement. It was obvious that the words Doña Violeta had underlined referred to this directorate, and not to the FSLN nine; that, in fact, the document she had handed me proved the exact opposite of what she said it proved.
Doña Violeta also complained, several times, that the Nicaraguan government was the only body with the resources to ‘travel everywhere, make any propaganda they want, to tell the whole world their version of what is happening here.’ Yet during our interview she mentioned at least two very recent speaking tours of her own, one to Portugal and the other to the United States, ‘where I addressed many US Congressmen of all parties on the subject of La Prensa and the life of my husband, Pedro Joaquín Chamorro.’ And where was the editor of the paper at present? He was abroad. Anyone who read the Western press knew that international journalists beat a daily path to the doors of La Prensa, the conservative businessmen’s association COSEP, and such opposition politicians as the Liberal, Virgilio Godoy, not to mention Cardinal Obando y Bravo. The idea that the Nicaraguan state could control world opinion – Doña Violeta’s poor-little-me ploy – was a second piece of transparent disingenuousness. ‘They can say anything they like about us,’ she protested, ‘and we never have a chance to put our case.’ ‘You’re putting it to me,’ I pointed out, ‘just as you do to everyone else who comes here.’ She gave me her most patrician look. ‘I hope, Mr Rushdie, you will not misrepresent what I am telling you.’
‘I’ll try my hardest not to,’ I promised her.
‘I want to explain,’ Doña Violeta said, ‘that Daniel Ortega is not a true president, a president by popular support. The elections were not fair.’
I said that most foreign observers had agreed that they were the fairest ever seen in Latin America, and that surely the fact of an eighty per cent poll indicated that the people had, in fact, given both the elections and the President their backing?
She replied: ‘That
’s what they say, but it’s not true. The poll was not so high.’
‘How high was it?’
‘I don’t have the figures right now.’
When we returned to the issue of the paper’s closure, Doña Violeta had powerful points to make. I asked: ‘I’ve heard it said, often, that one reason for the closure was that you would publish alarmist stories, about the shortages, for example.’ She replied, ‘They censor everything. I’ve told you, four and a half years of censorship. So we can publish nothing that has not been authorized.’ It was her best argument: when censorship was already so severe, why close the paper?
‘The government says that in time of war your editorial line is unacceptable, that you support the counter-revolution,’ I said. She repeated, unanswerably: ’Everything we printed was passed by the censor’s office. We would send our articles along with “filler” articles as well, which we would have to use if they turned down our copy. No blank spaces were permitted; no photographs of Hollywood screen goddesses.
‘Sometimes,’ Doña Violeta added, ‘there would be things that the people needed to know. We would print them – we published in the afternoons, and Nuevo Diario and Barricada come out in the mornings – and we would be censored. Then, the next morning, the same stories would be in the other papers. They had not been censored. We would protest, and then we might be allowed to publish, but it was too late then, obviously.’