The Jaguar Smile Read Free Page B

February 1934, after he had signed a peace treaty and when he was on his way home from the celebratory banquet. I was struck by the fact that it was Sandino’s hat, and not his face, that had become the most potent icon in Nicaragua. A hatless Sandino would not be instantly recognizable; but that hat no longer needed his presence beneath it to be evocative. In many instances, FSLN graffiti were followed by a schematic drawing of the celebrated headgear, a drawing that looked exactly like an infinity-sign with a conical volcano rising out of it. Infinity and eruptions: the illegitimate boy from Niquinohomo was now a cluster of metaphors. Or, to put it another way: Sandino had become his hat.
    In the west of the city was a low hill on which the initials FSLN reclined, each whitish figure about a hundred feet long, like a recumbent Hollywood sign. At first I thought the letters had been cut out of the hillside in the fashion of an English white horse, or maybe they were made of concrete, or even marble? But the sign was only wooden, made up of boards lying on the hillside, propped up, where necessary, by simple gantries. When I got closer to it, I saw that it had already started to look somewhat the worse for wear. Before the revolutionthere was a different sign on this hill. ROLTER, it read, advertising a local manufacturer of boots and shoes. That discovery intensified my sense of the provisional quality of life in post-revolutionary Managua. One wooden advertisement could easily be replaced by another. Nor could I resist the implications of putting the Frente Sandinista’s sign on what used to be Boot Hill.
    It was the rainy season in Managua; the skies were overcast. A cold wind blew from the north.

2

    THE ROAD TO CAMOAPA
    T he walls of the home of Nicaragua’s Vice-President, the novelist Sergio Ramírez, were hung with masks. ‘Ah,’ said the security guard, admitting me to a courtyard of old trees surrounded by spacious verandahs, ‘el escritor hindú.’ Spanish uses hindú to mean ‘Indian’; the construction de la India , which seemed OK to me, sounded stilted to Nicaraguan ears. So during my stay I became the hindú writer, or even, quite often, poeta . Which was quite a flattering disguise.
    In Nicaragua, the mask was an indispensable feature of many popular festivals and folk-dances. There were animal-masks, devil-masks, even, as I was to discover, masks of men with bleeding bullet-holes in the centres of their foreheads. During the insurrection, Sandinista guerrillas often went into action wearing masks of pink mesh with simple faces painted on them. These masks, too, originated in folk-dance. One night I went to see a ballet based on the country’s popular dances, and saw that one of the ballerinas was wearing a pink mask. The mask’s associations with the revolution had grown so strong that ittransformed her, in my eyes at least, into something wondrously strange: not a masked dancer, but a guerrilla in a tutu.
    The true purpose of masks, as any actor will tell you, is not concealment, but transformation. A culture of masks is one that understands a good deal about the processes of metamorphosis.
    I set off in the company of Sergio Ramírez and one of the nine-man National Directorate of the FSLN, Luis Carrión, to the town of Camoapa in Boaco province, to witness a part of one of the most important transformations taking place in the new Nicaragua. It was National Agrarian Reform Day, and in Camoapa land titles for no less than 70,000 acres were to be handed out to the campesinos .
    Sergio Ramírez was unusually big (well over six feet) and heavily built for a Nicaraguan, and could look, at times, positively Chinese in a Mikadoish sort of way; Luis Carrión was of a much more characteristically Nicaraguan light, slight build, with a moustache that was – as they used to say in the Paris of the 1968 événements – ‘Marxiste, tendance Groucho’ . They were both remarkably free of the pomposity and