The Jaguar Smile Read Free

gave the city a provisional, film-set unreality. There was still a serious shortage of houses, and Managuans were obliged to improvise with what was left. The Foreign Ministry occupied an abandoned shopping mall. The National Assembly itself sat in a converted bank. The Intercontinental Hotel, a sawn-off concrete pyramid, had unfortunately failed to collapse. It stood amidst the wraiths of old Managua like an omen: an ugly American, but a survivor, nevertheless. (It became impossible, I discovered, not to see such a city in symbolic terms.)
    People, too, were in short supply. Nicaragua’s population was under three million, and the war continued to reduce it. In my first hours in the city streets, I saw a number of sights that were familiar to eyes trained in India and Pakistan: the capital’s few buses, many of them donated quite recently by Alfonsín’s new Argentina, were crammed to bursting-point with people, who hung off them in a very subcontinental way. And the roadside shanties put up by the campesinos (peasants) who had come to Managua with hope and not much else, echoed the bustees of Calcutta and Bombay. Later I realized that these echoes of multitudinous lands were as misleading as the tyrant’s empty plinth. Nicaragua, which was about the size of the state of Oklahoma (if you turned England and Wales upside down, you’d have a rough approximation of its proportions), was also the emptiest of the countries of Central America. There were six times as many people in the New York metropolitan area as there were in the whole of Nicaragua. The void of downtown Managua revealed more than a crowded bus.
    Filling the void, populating the streets, were the ghosts, the martyr dead. The Argentinian novelist Ernesto Sábato described Buenos Aires as a city whose street-names served to entomb the memory of its heroes, and in Nicaragua, too, I often had the feeling that everyone who mattered had already died and been immortalized in the names of hospitals, schools,theatres, highways or even (in the case of the great poet Rubén Darío) an entire town. In classical Greece, heroes could aspire to the status of gods, or at least hope to be turned into constellations, but the dead of an impoverished twentieth-century country had to make do with this more prosaic, public-park or sports-stadium immortality.
    Of the ten earliest leaders of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, nine had been killed before Somoza fell. Their faces, painted in the Sandinista colours of red and black, stared gigantically down on the Plaza de la Revolución. Carlos Fonseca (who had founded the Frente in 1956 and who fell in November, 1976, just two and a half years before the Sandinista victory); Silvio Mayorga; Germán Pomares: their names were like a litany. The survivor, Tomás Borge, now Minister of the Interior, was up there too, one living man among the immortals. Borge was badly tortured and, the story goes, ‘took his revenge’ on his torturer after the revolution, by forgiving him.
    In a country whose history had been a continuous rite of blood for the forty-six years in which the Somozas had headed one of the longest-running and cruellest dictatorships on earth, it wasn’t surprising that a martyr-culture should have developed. Over and over, I heard the legends of the dead. Of the poet Leonel Rugama, who was trapped in a house by Somoza’s National Guard and ordered to surrender, and who yelled back, ‘Que se rinda tu madre!’ (Let your mother surrender!), and fought on until he died. Of Julio Buitrago, surrounded in a ‘safe house’ in Managua along with Gloria Campos and Doris Tijerino. Finally he was the only one left alive, resisting the might of Somoza’s tanks and heavy artillery hour after hour, while the whole country watched him on live television, because Somoza thought he’d captured a whole FSLN cell and wanted their destruction to be a lesson to the people; a terrible miscalculation, because when the people