The Jaguar Smile

by Salman Rushdie

  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.’

  D’Escoto described the visit to Managua of a White House emissary — whom I’ll call ‘Rocky’. During their talks, he told us, he himself had repeatedly emphasized that, given goodwill on both sides, he was convinced that the difficulties between the US and Nicaragua could fairly straightforwardly be resolved. ‘ “We understand,” I said, “that you have certain security requirements in this region. That’s fine. We can discuss all those. We are pragmatic people, and we want a working deal with the United States.” ’

  Eventually (d’Escoto continued), Rocky took up the gauntlet. If they were hypothetically to suppose that this hypothetical goodwill might hypothetically exist, on what basis did the padre think that negotiations might begin?

  ‘Well,’ d’Escoto said (this was before the Hague judgment), ‘suppose we both agreed to abide by international law? That would be a fairly objective basis.’

  ‘That’s your problem, Father,’ Rocky told him. ‘You’re a philosopher. You won’t concentrate on the facts.’

  And what were the facts? D’Escoto, an excellent raconteur, performed Rocky’s reply. ‘These contras on your frontier, Padre. They give you lots of trouble, don’t they?’ Yes, d’Escoto had replied, but they wouldn’t if you stopped funding them. �
��There you go again,’ Rocky said. ‘More philosophy. You’re hopeless, Father. The reality is that these people have been funded, are being funded and will continue to be funded. And they give you trouble. Those are facts.’ He then said he thought Father Miguel looked pretty intelligent. ‘And intelligent men don’t want trouble. And you’ve got trouble.’

  So what did he suggest, d’Escoto asked. ‘It’s easy,’ came the reply. ‘Just do as we say. Just do as we say, and you’ll see how this trouble you’ve got will disappear. Overnight. As if by magic. It just won’t be there any more. You’ll be astonished. Just do as we say.’

  It was a well-told, black-comic tale, and since there was no possibility of getting it corroborated it was clearly one of those stories you could either take or leave. ‘The truly remarkable thing,’ Father Miguel said, ‘was how crude the method was.’ For a mind as highly trained in disputation, both theological and diplomatic, as d’Escoto’s, the American’s crassness, his naked gangsterism, had been almost more offensive than the content of the discussion. ‘You’re hopeless, Padre,’ d’Escoto repeated, laughing a good deal. ‘More philosophy.’

  It occurred to me that if the struggle between the Church hierarchy and the priests could be called a struggle over the Word, then this anecdote represented a parallel, secular struggle between two kinds of discourse, vying for supremacy. Before the evening was out, we would find ourselves involved in a third such combat: press freedom again, the other, inescapable, war of the words.

  The actual US Ambassador to Managua, Harry Berghold, was not too bad at all, d’Escoto was saying. He had been put in because he was supposed to be an expert on Marxism-Leninism. (His previous posting had been in Hungary.) ‘The trouble is that now he says he can’t find any Marxism-Leninism here.’ Poor Berghold, his reports on Nicaragua languishing on the desk of the duty officer in Washington, unread by the makers of policy. He was summoned from time to time to the US capital, to give briefings on Marxism-Leninism. ‘But at these meetings they never ask him about Nicaragua. It is sad, really.’

  At this point, Burt Schneider, who had obviously been bursting with it, unleashed a diatribe against the closure of La Prensa. ‘It’s a stupid mistake,’ he said. ‘It cancels out the Hague judgment, and it takes away my ability to argue. Now, when people in the US say the Sandinistas are undemocratic, I’ve got nothing to tell them.’

  D’Escoto gave us the party line: all countries have the right to censor the press in wartime; La Prensa was being financed by the CIA; it was an important part of the US strategy of opening an internal front, just as they did with the paper El Mercurio during the destabilization campaign against the Allende government in Chile. But he seemed to distance himself from the decision at two moments. The first was when he mentioned, mildly, that he had been out of the country when the decision was made, so he had not been present at the crucial Cabinet meeting. The second was when the argument had been raging (or, rather, Burt had) for some time. ‘This argument,’ Father Miguel said, ‘reminds me of Cabinet meetings. We have exactly the same disputes.’

  But, he said, while the government was anxious to have a good press abroad, and to help its liberal supporters, there were decisions that had to be taken on national security grounds, and that was that. ‘If you want to answer people on the subject of democracy, talk about the Hague ruling. That shows who is acting legally and who is not. By bringing that case we have given you a very powerful argument. Use that.’

  Susan Meiselas and I were broadly in agreement with Burt. We said that it felt as though a downward spiral had begun: first the US approved aid to the Contra, so the FSLN closed La Prensa, so the New York Times called them Stalinists, so they expelled a couple of priests … it was like going into a tailspin, and the inevitable smash — a US invasion — got closer and closer each time round. ‘You shouldn’t get caught in that spiral,’ Susan said. ‘You shouldn’t become so predictable.’

  I voiced a rather different fear. ‘I’ve lived in a country, Pakistan, in which the press is censored from the right, by a military regime. And to tell the truth the papers there are better than they are here. But what worries me is that censorship is very seductive. It’s so much easier than the alternative. So, no matter what reasons you have right now for closing La Prensa, I don’t like it. Not because of what you are, but because of what, if this goes on, you might eventually become.’

  Father Miguel had his wall up again. ‘These are only wartime measures. In peacetime, it would be different.’

  Maybe, in the end, it came down to this, I thought as I left Miguel d’Escoto’s home: who did I think these people really were, beneath the public positions and military fatigues? Father Miguel, Sergio Ramírez, Daniel Ortega; were these dictators in the making?

  I answered myself: no. Emphatically, no. They struck me as men of integrity and great pragmatism, with an astonishing lack of bitterness towards their opponents, past or present. They were revolutionary nationalists, a breed not always despised in the United States, which was also born of a revolution, and not so very long ago, at that.

  For the first time in my life, I realized with surprise, I had come across a government I could support, not faute de mieux, but because I wanted its efforts (at survival, at building the nation, and at transforming it) to succeed. It was a disorienting realization. I had spent my entire life as a writer in opposition, and had indeed conceived the writer’s role as including the function of antagonist to the state. I felt distinctly peculiar about being on the same side as the people in charge, but I couldn’t avoid the truth: if I had been a Nicaraguan writer, I would have felt obliged to get behind the Frente Sandinista, and push.

  I remained convinced that the FSLN’s policy of censorship was misconceived and dangerous. When Omar Cabezas, Nicaragua’s chief of political direction at the Ministry of the Interior, and a roguish, piratical figure, gave the New York PEN Congress the party line — censorship would stop when US aggression stopped — I heard a journalist murmur: ‘Don’t hold your breath.’ And at the end of his speech, one of the writers in the hall, an East European writer, not an American, called out: ‘That was a policeman’s speech.’ The FSLN would do well to take notice of such opposition.

  But to oppose a government’s policy was not to oppose the government. Not for me, anyway; not this government, not yet.

  7

  EATING THE EGGS OF LOVE

  I first read Omar Cabezas’ book, Fire from the Mountain, on the plane from London to Managua. (The English title is much less evocative, though shorter, than the Spanish, which translates literally as ‘The mountain is something more than a great expanse of green’. Now, on the road to Matagalpa, travelling towards the mountains about which he’d written, I dipped into it again. Even in English, without any of the ‘Nica’ slang that had helped make it the most successful book in the new Nicaragua (its sales were close to 70,000 copies), it was an enjoyable and evocative memoir of ‘Skinny’ Cabezas’ recruitment by the FSLN, his early work for the Frente in León, and his journey up into the mountains to become one of the early guerrillas. Cabezas managed to communicate the terrible difficulty of life in the mountains, which were a hell of mud, jungle and disease (although one of his fans, a young Nicaraguan soldier, thought he had failed to make it sound bad enough because he had made it too funny). But for Cabezas the mountains were something more than a great expanse of unpleasantness. He turned them into a mythic, archetypal force, The Mountain, because during the Somoza period hope lay there. The Mountain was where the Frente guerrillas were; it was the source from which, one day, the revolution would come. And it did.

  Nowadays, when the Contra emerged from The Mountain to terrorize the campesinos, it must have felt like a violation; like, perhaps, the desecration of a shrine.

  Forested mesas flanked the road; ahead, the multiform mountains, conical, twisted, sinuous, closed the horizon. Cattle and dogs shared the road with cars, refusing to acknowledge the supremacy of the automobile. When the trucks came
, however, everybody got out of the way fast.

  Tall cacti by the roadside. Women in fatigues carried rifles over their shoulders, holding them by the barrels. Moss hung in clumps from the trees and even from the telephone wires. Children pushed wooden wheelbarrows full of wood. And then, as we neared Matagalpa, we came upon a sombre procession carrying a distressingly small box: a child’s funeral. I saw three in the next two days.

  It had begun to rain.

  I was pleased to be getting out of Managua again. Matagalpa felt like a real town, with its church-dominated squares, its town centre. It was like returning to normal, but normality here was of a violent, exceptional type. The buildings were full of bullet-holes left over from the insurrection years, and dominating the town was a high, ugly tower which was all that remained of the National Guard’s hated command post. After the revolution, the people had demolished the Guardia’s fearsome redoubt.

  The ice-cream shop had no ice-cream because of the shortages. In the toy shop the evidence of poverty was everywhere; the best toys on display were primitive ‘cars’ made out of a couple of bits of wood nailed together and painted, with Coca-Cola bottle tops for hubcaps. There were, interestingly, a number of mixed-business stores known as ‘Egyptian shops’, boasting such names as ‘Armando Mustafa’ or ‘Manolo Saleh’, selling haberdashery, a few clothes, some toiletries, a variety of basic household items — shampoo, buckets, safety-pins, mirrors, balls. I remembered the Street of Turks in One Hundred Years of Solitude. In Matagalpa, Macondo did not seem so very far away.

  The faces in the Egyptian shops didn’t look particularly Egyptian but then neither did the orientally named Moisés Hassan, mayor of Managua. In the cafés, I met some more familiar faces. Posters of the Pope and of Cardinal Obando y Bravo were everywhere, the Cardinal’s scarlet robes rendered pale pink by the passage of time. Sandinistas, unconcerned about the company they were keeping, drank hideously sweetened fruit squashes, including the bright purple pitahaya, and munched on the glutinous kiwi-like mamón, beneath the watching Cardinal. I talked to Carlos Paladino, who worked in the office of the delegado or governor of Matagalpa province, about the regional resettlement policy.