The Jaguar Smile (7 page)

I was taken aback. What was old Rabindranath doing here, with this accent on his final e? ‘Is he translated here?’ I asked.

‘Victoria Ocampo, the great Argentine editor and intellectual, fell in love with the work, and with the man,’ came the reply. ‘I do not know, however, if they had an
affaire
. I suspect not. But Victoria Ocampo was determined that Latin America should discover this great genius, and she published many excellent translations.’

‘Then Tagore is better read in Latin America than in India,’ I said. ‘There, many of the translations are very bad indeed.’

‘Tagoré,’ he corrected me. ‘I admire him for his spiritual qualities, and also his realism.’

‘Many people think of Latin America as the home of anti-realism,’ I said. He looked disgusted. ‘Fantasy?’ he cried. ‘No,
sir. You must not write fantasy. It is the worst thing. Take a tip from your great Tagoré. Realism, realism, that is the only thing.’

I escaped from the admonitory shade of Rabindranath and sat down with Rosario Murillo and Hugo Torres, the Frente’s political education chief (and, what else, a poet). Also at the table were Susan Meiselas, the American photographer whose work in Salvador and Nicaragua I had long admired, and an American film producer, Burt Schneider. I arrived as Rosario was wondering how the people of the USA could tolerate what their government was doing to this tiny country.

‘You’ve got to understand that for Americans, Nicaragua has no reality,’ said Burt, a tall rawboned man with long arms and large gestures. ‘To them it’s just another TV show. That’s all it is.’ He went on to argue that the US would never invade Nicaragua because of the memory of Vietnam. Susan Meiselas said she found it hard to be so optimistic. So did I; in neoconservative America, the lesson of Vietnam seemed to be that the real mistake had been to quit when they did, instead of staying to finish the job.

‘The trouble is, Rosario,’ Schneider cried, ‘nobody knows if you’re communists. Hell, I don’t know myself. What do you reckon, Susan?’ He leaned conspiratorially across the table to Meiselas, ‘Does she look like a Commie to you?’ Schneider had known Rosario a long time, and she and Torres both smiled politely, but the joke fell pretty flat.

In the background, the nine
comandantes de la revolución
were having their picture taken. It was the only time I ever saw them all together, and my only glimpse of Tomás Borge, a tiny gnome with a large cigar.

‘Look at them,’ Burt said lovingly. ‘Looks like a school photo, doesn’t it? Isn’t it a privilege to be here with them, on this day?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it is.’ Happy birthday, Nicaragua. I drank a toast in the best rum in the world, Flor de Caña Extra Seco. Mixed with Coke, it was called a Nica-libre, and after a few glasses I was ready to take on the salsa champions and knock them dead. I went outside to dance.

6

THE WORD

I
n the octagonal church of Santa María de los Ángeles in the Riguero
barrio
of Managua, Father Uriel Molina stood in full regalia in front of a packed congregation with a pop group at his back. The modern church looked like a tepee of metal girders. Its walls were covered in luridly coloured murals. Sandino, wearing his hat even though he was in church, and Carlos Fonseca, his goatee and specs looking iconically, as they always did, up and into the future, were both present on the walls, but on modest side-panels, playing a strictly supporting role, on this occasion, to Christ and his angels.

(The characteristic Fonseca pose was clearly based on the old images of Lenin thrusting his beard forward, ever forward. It struck me that, in this supposed hotbed of Marxism-Leninism, this was as close to a picture of Lenin as I’d come. I did, eventually, get to see both Vladimir Ilyich and the old bastard Marx himself: their portraits flanked a rather bemused-looking Sandino at the headquarters of the biggest trade union, the CST [Central Sandinista de Trabajadores]. Compared to, for
example, Kerala, where graffiti of Lenin speaking Malayalam sprouted on every second wall, and trucks could be named STALIN JOSÉ, the Reds in Nicaragua were keeping a pretty low profile.)

I had come out to this poor
barrio
, whose people had been prominent in the insurrection, to hear the ‘Misa Campesina’, the peasants’ mass created by Ernesto Cardenal and Carlos Mejía Godoy, whose gift for the hummable tune might be envied by Paul McCartney. The Misa Campesina was one of the most striking manifestations of liberation theology, which, in Nicaragua, had introduced into church services such versicles-and-responses as: ‘Between the Church and the Revolution/There is no contradiction.’ I had also wanted to get a look at Father Molina, one of the most visible of the liberation-theology priests, an early influence on Luis Carrión, and the founder of the Valdivieso Centre, at which the ideas of the Popular Church were hammered out. The expelled Bishop Vega had attacked the Valdivieso Centre people as a bunch of liars. ‘The problem is that they use the Marxist method. For a Marxist … to tell a lie is valid because with it you can better implant the ideology.’ And the American journalist Shirley Christian, in her book
Nicaragua: Revolution in the Family
, a book that was waspishly hostile to most aspects of post-Somoza Nicaragua (and, among other things, presented a sympathetic portrait of an escaped Somocista officer of the National Guard, Leo Salazar, who called Somoza ‘a wonderful man’), described Father Molina as ‘a television talk-show host.’

He was certainly flamboyant, something of a showman, a priest familiar with the hand-held microphone. He led the service with a theatrical jauntiness that had clearly offended Ms Christian. I, however, infidel that I was, quite enjoyed it.

The guitars and drums struck up a tune, and the lead singer sang:

Vos sos el Dios de los pobres
,
el Dios humano y sencillo …
‘You are the God of the poor,
the human and simple God,
the God with the work-hardened face,
that’s why I talk to you …
just as my people do,
because you are the worker God,
you are the labourer-Christ.’

The tunes of the Misa Campesina were real foot-tappers; the lyrics continued in this quotidian vein. ‘Identify yourself with us, O Lord,’ they asked at one point, in a revealing reversal – after all, it was more traditionally the role of the faithful to identify themselves with the deity – ‘Show us your solidarity.’ The God of the Poor had to earn the people’s belief, by being one of them.

The texts for the day came from the book of Exodus, and, in his sermon, Father Molina wove them into an extended metaphor, in which the people of Nicaragua were equated with the Israelites in their Egyptian captivity. Somoza was cast as the Pharaoh, and the FSLN was likened to Moses, leading the people across the parted waters of the Red Sea into the Promised Land, while behind them, the God of the Poor closed the waters over the head of Rameses–Tacho and his National Guard.

The idea that a people could be exiled inside their own country, that Nicaragua could be Egypt as well as the land of milk and honey, was a striking and fertile one. But Molina made no mention, I noticed, of the years wandering in the wilderness; no reference to the Golden Calf.

In the congregation was a delegation of farmers from the
American Midwest. No lovers of Reagan themselves, they had come down to learn about Nicaraguan farming methods and give what help and advice they could. There was no shortage of US citizens in Nicaragua; the previous year, for example, a group of Californian old-age pensioners had come down to help bring in the coffee harvest, having heard that the manpower requirements of the army – 50,000 troops stationed along the Honduran border – were making it very difficult for the farmers to get in the crop. (The Nicaraguans had nicknamed them the ‘grey panthers’.)

For the benefit of the US farmers and the other
brigadistas
(foreign volunteer workers) in the church, Molina led us in a chorus, in English, of
‘We shall overcome’
. Like many people who absolutely can’t sing, I get sentimental about old tunes; the lump in the throat provides an excuse for the painful fractured noises emerging from the mouth. ‘Deep in my heart,’ I yelled, threatening the glass in the windows, ‘I do believe, we shall overcome some day.’

Whether or not we would, I thought as I left the congregation, being unwilling to participate in the taking of body and blood, one certainly had to believe in the power of this new version of Christianity, and in its popularity. It confirmed what I’d been told by Swedish missionaries, foreign journalists and Nicaraguan friends, and what Dr Conor Cruise O’Brien suggested in an essay in the London
Times
: that the divisions in the Church in Latin America had now gone so deep that the Vatican must be getting nervous. There was a very real possibility of a second Reformation, a second breach with Rome.

At the home of another formidable priest, the Maryknoll father who is now Nicaragua’s subtle and erudite Foreign Minister, Miguel d’Escoto, the size of the problem to be overcome was made abundantly clear. D’Escoto reminded me of Friar Tuck, a
jolly fat man of considerable toughness. He was in a lot of pain from a slipped disc, but ignored it all evening, even though it was hurting him just to sit. ‘I can see the break of diplomatic relations with the US coming very soon,’ he said. ‘It’s even possible that the US may persuade Honduras, Costa Rica and Salvador to break with us as well. They can’t get the support of all the states in the region for an invasion, so it seems they want to set up a little mini-group, and then that mini-group can invite them to attack us.’ But the Nicaraguans would never be the ones to make the diplomatic break. ‘It’s our position that a dialogue is essential.’ We sat drinking cold water amongst his collection of Nicaraguan art, for which he hoped to find a private sponsor to build a permanent home, a museum. He had offered it to the state, but Daniel Ortega had said that the state already owned too much, it would be better to keep the exhibit out of the government’s hands.

We looked out on to a wonderfully kept tropical garden, his other great love. ‘I’ve never said it before,’ he said, ‘but now I think the Americans will come. The invasion will happen.’

The Misa Campesina was still fresh in my thoughts, so we talked about the Church and the revolution, about the battle taking place for the Word. ‘With the priests, there’s no problem,’ he said. ‘Most of them are with us. But the Nicaraguan church hierarchy has always, sadly, been very reactionary, very bound up with the old oligarchy. The Jesuits have no problems, either.’ Managua’s Jesuit university was flourishing, with plenty of financial backing from the Government. I asked why it was that liberation theology had made so little impact on the Church hierarchy. ‘There are plenty of fine minds in the Nicaraguan church,’ d’Escoto said. ‘Plenty of original thinkers. But none of them have access to Obando y Bravo. The Cardinal is afraid of people with minds. He surrounds himself with persons who have attained the minimum level required for
ordination.’ And, after a pause: ‘The trouble with Obando is that he hasn’t read a book since the revolution; and he hadn’t read one before it, either.’

Susan Meiselas arrived with Burt Schneider. There had been gunfire in the neighbourhood, probably a few boozy militiamen still celebrating the seventh anniversary. Susan had wanted to investigate, but hadn’t done so. This surprised d’Escoto. ‘What’s this? Is this Susan Meiselas telling me she kept away?’ Meiselas had been in the thick of the fighting during the insurrection, after all.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I had to protect Burt, you see. Who is wearing white, I might add.’ Burt looked a little, but not very, abashed.

Susan had recently returned from the Philippines, and had been delighted to discover that in a local park known for its romantic assignations the new Filipino President’s name had become a saucy joke:
‘Corazón, aquí, no?’
That is: ‘Darling, let’s do it here, eh?’ Or, if the words were stressed differently:
‘Corazón, aquí? – No!’
She obviously loved being in Nicaragua. ‘This place is ruining me financially,’ she said. ‘I’ve got an apartment in New York that I have to pay for, but I spend all my time down here.’ She had recently made a documentary about the wealthy Barrios family, a clan divided, like the journalistic Chamorros, by the revolution: an anti-revolutionary patriarch whose sons were all with the Frente. (The two families were connected by marriage: Violeta Chamorro
of La Prensa
was a Barrios by birth. Nicaragua often felt like a village, because one kept stumbling over such connections. Luis Carrion’s uncle, to give another example, was Arturo Cruz, banker and opposition presidential candidate.) She seemed reluctant to screen the film in Nicaragua. ‘It’s not for here,’ she said. D’Escoto described a documentary he had made, in which
interviews with affluent Nicaraguan women, who spoke of the laziness and colour televisions of the poor, were juxtaposed against footage of the impoverished homes and lifestyles of the actually existing poor. Susan nodded. Her film was a lot less polemic, more ambiguous than that. The patriarch had fascinated her. ‘I wanted to understand how he could think what he thinks, knowing what he knows.’ It was that ambiguity which, she felt, might make some Nicaraguan audiences uneasy about the film. ‘But we aren’t used,’ she said, ‘to hearing people speak without doubt. When you come from here, the situation can seem very clear-cut, very black and white. But we aren’t used to it.’