The Jaguar Smile (17 page)

‘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.’

I asked: ‘Do you have examples of stories that the other
papers were permitted to publish, while your versions were censored?’

‘No,’ she replied. ‘Not at the moment.’

I asked: ‘How can you say that the paper is the same as it always used to be, when three-quarters of your journalists quit and started up a rival daily?’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘they were all Marxist-Leninists. At
La Prensa
we always follow the line of my late husband, Pedro Joaquín Chamorro.’

‘But if these were the journalists who wrote the paper in the time of Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, and if they resigned when the paper was under a new editorship, doesn’t that mean that the paper can no longer be what it was in your husband’s time?’

‘Journalists,’ she said. ‘They come and go. It is like when somebody dies, there is always someone else to take his place. It changes nothing.’

She had referred a few times to an offer worth ‘many million dollars’ which, she claimed, had been made by Xavier Chamorro of
El Nuevo Diario
to
La Prensa’s
Jaime Chamorro. ‘They wanted to buy the paper. So, you see? Several months ago, they had already had the idea to close us down.’

But surely that was not the only interpretation? Perhaps
La Prensa’s
former employees had wanted to regain control over the country’s most prestigious title? Doña Violeta remained adamant. She insisted that the offer proved that the FSLN (which did not own
El Nuevo Diario
, although it did put money into it) had been plotting for a long time to shut her paper down.

I said: ‘The government claims to have proof that you have taken CIA money, Heritage Foundation money.’ ‘Let them
produce it,’ she challenged. ‘We have not. But the Marxist government takes money from the Soviet Union and Cuba. And the only people who are truly dedicated to real democracy, they close down.’

Doña Violeta had been a member of the junta that had ruled Nicaragua between the fall of Somoza and the general elections. (The other members had been Alfonso Robelo, the big businessman, now in exile and political leader of the Costa Rica-based ARDE counter-revolutionaries; Moisés Hassan, the ‘Egyptian’ mayor of Managua; Daniel Ortega and Sergio Ramírez.) She resigned her seat after just nine months, because ‘they were not interested in my views. When I agreed to be in the junta it was not for personal gain or anything like that. It was out of a true desire to help build a democracy here. But I soon saw that things were already controlled from outside … it was not the authentic thing.’

‘From outside?’ I asked. ‘Could you give some examples?’

‘Easily,’ she said. ‘After nine months I knew we were not fulfilling the oath of office I had taken.’

‘But some examples?’

‘The advisers who came were Cubans,’ she said.

‘What made you resign, though?’ I asked. ‘Was there some issue, some last straw, something you really couldn’t stand for?’

‘It was for my conscience,’ she said. ‘They wanted the memory of my husband, Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, and the prestige of this paper, to legitimize the junta. It was meant to be democratic, pluralist. But I quickly saw that wasn’t true.’

‘But,’ I asked one last time, ‘what was it that proved that to you?’

‘Anyone who comes to Nicaragua can see,’ she said. ‘You must understand that the majority of our people are true Catholics, not like these religious people who try to divide the Church. The people of Nicaragua who are not Marxist-Leninist
are very sad. That is why we have this war of Nicaraguan against Nicaraguan.’

What was her solution, I wondered. ‘The situation in Nicaragua should be resolved without the intervention of Soviets, Cubans or North Americans,’ she answered. ‘But nothing will be resolved in this country, no matter how many hundreds of millions of dollars are spent, until Daniel Ortega learns to talk to the people.’

I agreed with Violeta de Chamorro that the closure of
La Prensa
was wrong. Apart from anything else, it was evident from the banned articles pinned up by the front door that, because it challenged and argued, it had been the best paper in town. (Not much of an accolade, considering the anodyne nature of the competition.) But her treatment of me did not indicate a profound respect for the truth. She seemed to have no objection to a little helpful massaging of the facts. Also, oddly, she had been the hardest person, of all the people I spoke to, to pin down to specifics. It was usually the politicians’ way to make large general allegations unsupported by actual facts and cases. Strange, then, to find a journalist who was so airy about producing hard evidence when requested to do so.

I left with her injunction not to misrepresent her ringing in my ears. I have tried not to do so. But the truth is that I found the idea that this aristocratic lady was closer to the people than the likes of, oh, Carlos Paladino in Matagalpa, or Mary Ellsberg in Bluefields, or even Daniel Ortega, very unconvincing. And I’m practically certain that my scepticism had nothing to do with the jewellery.

14

MISS NICARAGUA AND THE JAGUAR

M
y last night in Nicaragua was warm and starlit. I spent it at the home of Tulita and Sergio Ramírez, talking mostly about literature. I heard that
La Prensa’s
‘pope of letters,’ Pablo Antonio Cuadra, the one major Nicaraguan poet to be against the revolution, was to have a volume of his work published by the State-run New Nicaraguan Editions; books were not subject to censorship of any kind. (They sold in large quantities, too; print runs of 10,000 regularly sold out. In Britain, with a population twenty times the size of Nicaragua’s, most authors would envy such figures.)

In the time of Somoza, there had not been a single publishing house in the whole of Nicaragua. The only way for Nicaraguan writers to get into print was to find a publisher elsewhere in the Spanish-speaking world and then have the books brought in, if possible. It was another reminder of the extent to which things had improved since the time of the Beast, the forty-six years of fear.

The original title of Sergio Ramirez’s marvellous novel,
¿Te
dio miedo la sangre?
, meant ‘Were you scared of the blood?’ and came from a children’s nursery rhyme (‘Did your mother kill the pig? Were you scared of the blood?’). The English title,
To Bury Our Fathers
, derived from
The Birds
by Aristophanes:

The skylark was born before all beings and before the earth itself. Its father died of illness when the earth did not yet exist. He remained unburied for five days, until the skylark, ingenious of necessity, buried its father in its own head.

The novel had been my companion as I travelled around Nicaragua. It was set in the Sandino years, and told a large number of inter-connected stories, which were woven in and out of each other with great skill: the stories of three friends, revolutionaries, Taleno, Jilguero and Indio Larios, who became famous as one of the most wanted men in Nicaragua but actually did very little, spending his days in Guatemala making
piñatas
for children’s parties, having lost his stomach for the fight; of the National Guard Colonel, Catalino López, and of many ordinary people, barmen, barflies, guitarists, fishermen, traitors, whores. Vile deeds, such as the bringing of the head of Sandino’s general, Pedrón Altamirano, to Managua on the end of a stick, alternated with more comic vilenesses, such as the fixing of the Miss Nicaragua contest of 1953. And behind everything was the malign presence of the tyrant, known only as
el hombre
, the man. To bury one’s ancestors in one’s own head, in memory, was to confer upon them a kind of immortality, the only kind human beings could offer one another. It was also, of course, to be haunted by their memory for ever.

I was also struck by the reference in the quote from Aristophanes that stood as the novel’s epigraph to a time
when the earth did not yet exist
. Here, I thought, was another echo of Uriel Molina’s image of Somoza’s Nicaragua as captivity, as
exile. The Nicaraguan meaning of the Aristophanes quote could only be that in those days the country
wasn’t there
. Landless, nationless, the people buried their fathers in themselves, because the self was the only ground they had to stand upon.

As I’d just finished the book, I started asking Sergio Ramírez all the questions that writers get to hate: how real was it? Were the characters drawn from life? ‘It’s all true,’ he told me. ‘Everything in the novel comes from actual events.’ Ramírez had spent years studying the history of the Sandino period before he wrote the book. ‘There really was someone like Indio Larios,’ he said. ‘Always top of the wanted list, but actually he was never in Nicaragua, he had lost his nerve. And the real Catalino López was a sidekick of Somoza García, a certain Manuel Gómez. But the beating he gets from Jilguero and the others –’ (in the novel, the three friends had captured and humiliated the National Guard officer) ‘– that actually happened to a different man. People used to hint that he’d been raped.’

‘In the novel, you never quite say what gets done to Catalino.’

‘There were many possibilities,’ Ramírez said with relish. ‘I didn’t want to choose. And the other thing that’s absolutely true,’ he went on, ‘is the Miss Nicaragua business.’ A certain Miss Bermúdez, daughter of a
Guardia
officer, had been a candidate for the title, and was opposed by a Miss Rosales or Morales. In order to vote you had to clip a coupon from the paper. Miss Bermúdez’s candidacy became associated, thanks to her parentage, with the regime, so the people began to vote for her opponent. When
el hombre
heard about this he insisted that Miss Bermúdez must win. His underlings printed quantities of forged entry forms and filled them in with votes for Bermúdez. The whole affair became quite a political hot potato. On the
day of the announcement of the result, it was given out that Miss Bermúdez had scraped home. ‘Of course everybody knew it had been fixed,’ Sergio said. ‘Nobody had been voting for her, after all. She would have lost very heavily. So there was uproar. It was too good a story not to use.’

For many years, he said, he had felt a bit of a fraud when people called him a novelist. ‘I wrote that book so long ago, and since then it has been mostly political work. I felt as if I were living on my old capital.’ But now he was writing a new novel, working every day, for two hours, early in the morning. ‘It’s the kind of book nobody ever thought I’d write,’ he said, happily. ‘It’s a murder story, based on a famous case of a few years back. Very hot stuff.’

He sounded pleased with his steamy story. ‘I’ve finished a draft,’ he said. ‘So have I,’ I replied gloomily. ‘It’s taken me three years and I haven’t been a vice-president, either.’

Gioconda Belli, the unfairly beautiful poet I’d heard reading at the ruins of the Grand Hotel, arrived with her German publisher and his photographer in tow. I told her I’d read her interview with Margaret Randall. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I’ve changed my mind completely since then.’ Then, she had been all for sacrificing her writing to the work of national reconstruction. ‘Now I’ve given up my job to write a novel,’ she said. ‘My first. It’s terrifying.’

I said I had been curious about the relative absence of novelists in this poet-stuffed country. ‘There was never time for novels,’ she said. ‘You could squeeze in poetry between other things. Not a novel.’

So, in spite of all the shortages, there was one commodity that had become a little more plentiful of late: time. Or, perhaps, people had a sense that it might be running out, and were grabbing what remained before it was too late? The photographer
was swarming all over Gioconda, photographing her from every conceivable angle. ‘So, how has it been?’ she asked me.

‘I’ve been taking snapshots, too,’ I said. ‘There’s not much more one can do in a few weeks.’

Snapshot of Gioconda: under Somoza, after she had been recruited by the Frente, she went on working in an advertising agency in Managua, writing copy. I’d done that, too, in my time, and said, ‘Oh, good. Somebody else with a shameful past.’ The ad-men had never suspected her of a thing. Then the day came when she heard that the authorities were getting on to her, and she left the country at once by a secret safe route to Costa Rica. Two days later, the
Guardia
arrived at the advertising agency to arrest her. Her former colleagues went into deep shock: Gioconda? Impossible, but she was such a nice, pretty girl. The innocence of the salesmen, she said. It had kept her safe for years.

As I was about to leave, I discovered by chance that the English novelist most admired by both Gioconda Belli and Sergio Ramírez was Lawrence Durrell. ‘I’d never have guessed that,’ I said.