The Jaguar Smile (15 page)

The autonomy scheme guaranteed the cultural rights of all minority communities in Zelaya. But it was attempting to do more than simply compensate for previous blunders. Under the scheme, Zelaya would be given a large measure of self-government. The structure of the nation would be altered into
a form of federation between the two ‘wings’, with Managua retaining responsibility for defence, internal security, foreign policy and overall budgetary and economic strategy. Most other functions would pass to a regional executive and a regional assembly. I asked John, a rangy, electric young Creole working at the project offices in Bluefields, if the local administration could actually cope with the new responsibilities. ‘In many ways we aren’t prepared,’ he admitted. ‘But we are just going to have to get on and begin it, and learn as we go.’

As I wandered around the cafeterias of Bluefields, I tried to bring up the subject of autonomy as much as possible. The responses I got ranged from suspicion – believe it when you see it – via indifference, to enthusiasm.

The point about the enthusiasm is that there was quite a bit of it, and that it represented the first enthusiasm the revolution had ever managed to generate on the Atlantic coast. ‘We never did have a say in our own lives,’ one Creole told me. ‘First the British ran us, then Somoza and the transnationals. Now, for the first time, we going to get that say.’

When the project was first mooted, many Managuan politicians had opposed it, thinking it smacked of Balkanisation, of the beginning of the break-up of the country. The counterargument, which had carried the day, was that the project was not dividing the country but recognizing the division that actually existed. By giving the Atlantic coast this degree of independence, the chances were that the bonds between the coasts would actually be strengthened. That paradoxical assessment was borne out by what I saw.

‘Autonomy’ had even become a hit song for one of the coast’s leading bands.

The party for the Cubans in the Bluefields hotel that evening was ostensibly an ‘Acta’ in commemoration of the storming of the Moncada barracks by Fidel’s boys long ago. A young
Creole disc-jockey sat with fierce pride by his sound system, polishing each LP before putting it on, caressing his graphic equalizer like a lover. Bluefields in its party best sat around the walls, reminding me of nothing so much as the school ‘socials’ I used to go to as a boy in Bombay, all wallflowers and nothing in the middle. The Cubans and Nicaraguans mixed without any sign of difficulty. Six years ago, in September 1980, there had been a Creole demonstration against the Cubans, and relations had been strained. Now, as the DJ put on ‘Guantanamera’ and the people began to get off their seats and get to work on the dance floor, all that strain had vanished. The Cuban doctors, who had gone without complaint into the most remote regions of Zelaya, regions into which few Nicaraguan doctors had proved willing to venture, had won the locals over. There were still jokes about Cuban accents, but they were friendly jokes.

‘Guantanamera, guajira guantanamera …’ A powerfully built old black woman in thick dark-lensed spectacles, her hair up in a fat netted bun, and wearing a shapeless, white-collared black dress, came on to the floor. Her dancing was so magical, so loose-limbed, so original, that within minutes all the coolest young men in the room were queueing up to partner her. I remembered that one of the traditional Mayo Ya dances was called, and danced by, The Three Old Ladies. The grannies of Bluefields could certainly get down and boogie.

At the party I met a young American health worker, known in Bluefields as ‘Mary Carol’ because people couldn’t get their mouths round her last name, which was Ellsberg. She was married to Julio Martínez, who was in charge of agricultural development in the region; her father was Daniel Ellsberg, of the Pentagon Papers. She had spent a long time working in the villages around Pearl Lagoon – Haulover, Raitipura, Orinoco. When I said I planned to go out there the next day she offered
to come and show me round. She had even read, and enjoyed, my novels. It was turning out to be a great party.

The African palm project at Kukra Hill turned out to be Julio’s brainchild. He spoke about it with a parent’s pride, describing how the rows of saplings had been coming along year after year. I mentioned Thomas Gordon’s reservations about the project, and he pooh-poohed the idea that there was a labour shortage. ‘The project is going very well,’ he said. ‘Very well.’ He was a softly spoken, scrupulous man, patently dedicated to his work. At his office, early the next morning, he introduced me to Juan Mercado, a Miskito Indian and the first Miskito to become the manager of the Kukra Hill sugar mill. The two of them were off to Managua on business, and apologized for not being able to come along on my trip. ‘But Mary will show you everything,’ Julio said. As I left, I noticed a poem chalked up on a blackboard at the back of the room:

LA REVOLUCIÓN
Se lleva en el corazón
para morir por ella
,
y no en los labios
para vivir de ella …

The revolution/is carried in the heart/that it may be died for,/and not on the lips,/that it may be lived by
.

Death was here, too. Death, the close friend. It was your child, your mother, your self. It was the invisible object that blotted out the world.

‘You haven’t been to Bluefields if you haven’t had a proper drenching,’ Mary said to me as the rain came down in sheets.

‘Can we still go to the lagoon?’ I asked. She nodded. ‘We’ll
go. Round here it rains so much that, once you’ve made your plans, you just go ahead with them, otherwise you’d never do anything.’

I had been offered the use of the ‘fastest speedboat in Bluefields’. I climbed aboard with Mary and two Creole friends: Francisco Campbell’s sister Yolanda, who ran women’s groups, and Edwin, who had brought along an AK-47 that Yolanda was sure he didn’t know how to use. As the boat gathered speed the downpour became a pin-cushion stabbing into my face. We zoomed down the forested Escondido and into the swamp-channels between the river and Pearl Lagoon. ‘If your boat breaks down on the Escondido, or up in the interior, you’re in real trouble,’ Mary yelled. ‘It can take days, even weeks, before help comes. If it comes.’ She had been stranded for three days once.

The thick green walls closed around us. The rain, smashing into our faces, couldn’t stop this being a beautiful place; but it did its best.

The township at Kukra Hill wasn’t beautiful, though it could boast a new hospital. I waded briefly through thick red mud to have a look at the famous sugar mill. This mill had originally been on the Pacific coast. When its owners considered it obsolete, they dismantled it and packed it off to the other side, where it had gone on running for years, without hope of spare parts, thanks to the improvisatory genius of the local mechanics. As I inspected this museum piece, which looked like something out of the first Industrial Revolution, I found myself fervently hoping that Thomas Gordon’s scheme for selling the plantation of precious woods worked out, and soon.

The village of Pearl Lagoon, where once the Miskito kings held sway, and which sits on the shore of the eponymous
laguna
(which never did contain any
perlas)
, looked like an idyllic, sleepy sort of place. The well spaced houses were set around three grassy causeways, known as Front Street, Middle Street and Back Street. The two ends of the town had names, too: Uptown, Downtown. Since the revolution they had been renamed according to the calendar-obsessed fashion of revolutions, but if you asked anybody the way to ‘19 July Barrio’ they would look blank, and then, after some moments, exclaim: ‘Oh, you mean
Downtown
?’

Three Sandinista soldiers, looking out of place in this Creole settlement, lounged around a little old cannon outside the FSLN offices, whose walls proclaimed, in two-foot red-and-black lettering:
Autonomy now!
Round the corner, on the wall of the school playground, there was an attractively painted mural showing the whole lagoon, with all the villages marked. Hands extended from each village and clasped each other in the centre of the lagoon. ‘Bushman,’ the legend read, ‘surrender is your only salvation.’ The bushman being addressed was, of course, the Contra fighter.

The rain had stopped. A thin, jaunty old lady sauntered toothlessly by with her parasol. Yolanda led us to the home of Miss Maggie, the village’s great cook. We passed the village meeting-place, which was closed for want of beer. ‘Never mind,’ Yolanda said. ‘Miss Maggie’s always got stuff hidden away some place.’

At Miss Maggie’s I ate the tastiest meal I had in Nicaragua, once Yolanda had coaxed her into making us something. It was snoek in a hot chilli sauce, and there was even some beer. Miss Maggie, a small, plump, giggling lady with grey hair, also baked sensational coconut bread.

After eating we went to visit Mary Ellsberg’s friend, the local midwife, Miss Pancha. She was rocking on her porch in the village’s downtown section, and when she saw us approach she
let out a whoop. ‘Oh, Miss Mary,’ she said. ‘I was worry when I see you comin’ ’cause I did not have my brassiere on. These days I only puts it on when I has company and you done take me by surprise.’ Miss Pancha had the largest breasts I had seen in my life, and, Mary told me later, you couldn’t actually tell the difference when the bra was on. I was saying hello to Miss Pancha when her pet cow strolled out of the living room and joined us on the porch. ‘Say “hi” to my darling, too,’ Miss Pancha said.

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.’