The Jaguar Smile

by Salman Rushdie

  With the generosity of the poor, they treated me to a delicacy at lunch. I was given an egg and bean soup, the point being that these eggs were the best-tasting, because they had been fertilized. Such eggs were known as ‘the eggs of love’. When people had so little, a fertilized hen’s egg became a treat.

  As I ate my love-eggs, which really did taste good, there were children playing in the shack next door to the kitchen hut. Their playing-cards were made out of rectangles of paper cut out of an old Uncle Scrooge comic book. Waak! My money! You dratted … Pieces of Huey, Dewey and Louie fled from the rage of the billionaire American duck. While on a radio, I promise, Bruce Springsteen sang ‘Born in the USA’.

  The Germán Pomares field hospital, on the road back to Jinotega, was named after the FSLN leader who had been killed in May 1979, just two months before the ‘triumph’. Pomares had been a great influence on Daniel Ortega, and was one of the most popular Sandinista leaders. ‘He was so loved,’ my interpreter told me, ‘that his death wasn’t even announced on the news for six months.’ I added this to my collection of depressing sentences, alongside the one about the ‘cosmetic’ nature of press freedom.

  At the sentry box at the hospital gate everybody was supposed to hand in their weapons, but our driver, Danilo, hid his pistol under a sweatshirt I’d taken off as the day grew hotter. Stripping in the heat was one thing, but he would have felt underdressed, he agreed when I discovered his deception, without some sort of gun.

  The hospital was just two years old. ‘We have had to develop it quickly,’ said the director, Caldera, an Indian-looking man with a picture of Che, made of tiny shells, hanging on his office wall. ‘Never in the history of our nation have we had so many wounded.’ The specialist staff were all Cubans. Nicaraguan doctors were gradually being trained to take over, but, at present, simply didn’t have the skills required for this kind of surgery.

  The average age of the patients was twenty-one. Ten per cent of them were regular soldiers, thirty per cent came from the peasant militias, and no less than sixty per cent were youngsters doing their military service.

  ‘That’s astonishing,’ I said. ‘Why so many military service casualties?’ The reason, Caldera said, was that these kids were the main components of the BLI forces, the small commando units that would pursue the Contra deep into the jungle, into The Mountain. Military service in Nicaragua was no joyride.

  In recent months, many of the hospital’s patients had been mineblast victims, and almost all of these had died. Otherwise the main injuries were from bullet wounds. ‘Eighty-three per cent heal completely,’ said director Caldera, who knew his statistics. ‘Six to seven per cent survive with disabilities.’ That left ten per cent. I didn’t ask what happened to them.

  By chance, I visited the Pomares hospital when there were quite a few empty beds, and very few amputees. Usually, Caldera said, things were different. ‘If it was always this way I could write poetry.’ Another poet. There was no escape from the fellows.

  I asked if they had to import blood. No, he said, the national blood donation programme provided enough. That struck me as fairly remarkable. It was a small country, and it had been losing a lot of blood.

  The young men in the wards were all gung-ho, all volubly starry-eyed about the revolution — ‘Since my injury,’ one teenager told me, ‘I love this revolutionary process even more’ — and all super-keen to return to the fray. I met a nineteen-year-old youth who had been fighting for six years. I met a shamefaced seventeen-year-old who had shot himself accidentally in the foot. I met an eighteen-year-old with wounds all over his body. ‘First I was hit in the leg,’ he said, ‘but I could keep firing. Then the shrapnel, here,’ he indicated his bandaged forehead, ‘and my vision blurred. I passed out, but only for a moment.’ I asked about the alarming gash above his right knee. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. It looked too large to have arrived without being noticed, but he shook his head. ‘It’s funny, but I just don’t know how I got it.’

  They were all very young, yet already so familiar with death that they had lost respect for it. That worried me. Then, as I was leaving, I met a young woman in a wheelchair. She had been shot in the groin, and her face was glassy, expressionless. Unlike the boy soldiers, this was someone who knew she’d been shot, and was upset about it.

  ‘And what do you think about the revolution?’ I asked her.

  ‘I’ve got no time for that junk,’ she replied.

  ‘Are you against it?’

  ‘Who cares?’ she shrugged. ‘Maybe. Yes.’

  So there were people for whom the violence was too much, and not worth it. But it also mattered that she had been entirely unafraid. She had been in the presence of several officers of the state, and it hadn’t bothered her a bit.

  When I was back in my chalet, the mountains looked so peaceful in the evening light that it was hard to believe in the danger they contained. Beauty, in Nicaragua, often contained the beast.

  8

  ABORTION, ADULTHOOD AND GOD

  The most important task facing the National Assembly was the drafting of the new Nicaraguan constitution. I went along to the Assembly building, which still looked like a bank, to meet four members of the constitutional committee, two of whom, inevitably, turned out to be poets: Luis Rocha and Alejandro Bravo. A third, Manuel Eugarrios, was a journalist, and the fourth, Serafín Soria, was the FSLN’s chief whip.

  In the general election, the FSLN won sixty-one of the ninety-six seats in the Assembly. The others were divided between six opposition parties, four to the right of the Frente and two tiny ones, the PS and the Marxist-Leninist MAP, to its left. (The left parties regularly attacked the Sandinistas for being fakes, not revolutionaries at all; the Frente leadership seemed to enjoy these attacks.) Initially all the opposition parties co-operated with the constitution committee, but then Dr Virgilio Godoy of the Liberal Party, which was actually to the right of the Conservatives, and held nine seats to the Conservatives’ fourteen, refused to participate. ‘He wants to keep apart,’ Rocha said, ‘to make himself an option for the United States.’

  (This tendency to dismiss their opponents out of hand could land the Sandinistas in some trouble. After my return, I heard that Godoy had persuaded the other opposition parties to join him in refusing to take part in the constitutional process until the FSLN agreed to discuss the ‘great problems’ facing the country. Even though, on this occasion, the opposition did not insist that the Contra leaders be party to such talks, it seemed likely that the constitution could become a political football.)

  At the time of my visit, the first draft had been completed and then discussed, up and down the country, in seventy-three public forums. Alejandro Bravo said: ‘This is the first time in the history of Latin America that the people have been consulted on their constitution.’ The draft constitution spoke of ‘the construction of a society with broad based participation of the people, the right to vote and to be elected, freedom of speech, organization and assembly, and the rights to housing, education and health care.’ It defined political pluralism as ‘the participation of all political organizations without ideological restrictions, except to those who advocate a return to a Somoza style of government.’ It stipulated ‘a mixed economy … where diverse forms of property exist — state, private, mixed and co-operative — and where the principal objective is the well-being of the people, without impairing the ability to maintain reasonable profits.’

  ‘Every person,’ one clause read, ‘has the right to freedom of conscience, of thought, of religion … No one can be subject to coercive measures which violate this right.’ The State was obligated to provide social security, welfare, and ‘protection against hunger’. It was even responsible for ‘conserving the environment.’

  There had been no shortage of criticism from the public forums. At the forum of journalists, writers and cultural workers, one speaker demanded that the constitution should ‘amplify the concept of public liberties, freedom of expression and i
nformation’. Another insisted that it must ‘define the State’s policy regarding communication’; a third, more ambiguously, that ‘there should be no restriction on freedom of expression, especially for parties representing the working class’.

  The committee was re-drafting the constitution in the light of all the comments. A two-thirds majority was technically required for each clause, but, Eugarrios said, ‘We are trying to work by consensus. We want a pragmatic constitution that will last.’

  Wasn’t it true, though, that there were a number of issues on which such a consensus would be impossible to form? ‘I want,’ I said, ‘to ask you about abortion, adulthood and God.’

  Of all the issues raised in the people’s forums, the right to abortion on demand had come up most often. Women all over Nicaragua had demanded that this right be included in what many of them considered a very male constitution. But in a country as deeply rooted in Catholicism as Nicaragua, abortion was always going to be an explosive topic.

  ‘Now if such a right were to be enshrined in a constitution,’ I suggested, ‘it really would be revolutionary.’ The men facing me all looked a little shifty. ‘We don’t think this is a suitable matter for such a document as a constitution,’ Soria said. ‘What we propose is that immediately after the constitution is ratified we will introduce a bill legalizing abortion.’

  ‘Surely,’ I said, ‘it could be argued that a woman’s right to jurisdiction over her own body is a suitable subject for a constitution? It’s never been put in one before, but so what?’

  ‘As I said,’ Eugarrios answered, owning up to the real reason, ‘consensus is very important.’ It was clear that abortion wasn’t going to make the revised draft.

  The question of adulthood was almost as tricky. ‘You must remember,’ Soria said, ‘that in Nicaragua men have been joining the armed forces, and before that the Frente, and dying in great numbers, at the age of sixteen.’ I didn’t need reminding. The boys at the Pomares hospital clamored in my head: ‘I can’t wait to get back to the front line!’ — ‘I’m going next week!’ … ‘So the argument runs,’ Soria went on, ‘should they not be considered full adults by the constitution?’

  Eugarrios, the oldest of the quartet, wasn’t happy about that. ‘My own opinion is that they should get the right to vote,’ he said. ‘But full adulthood at sixteen? With the right to borrow money, and so forth? Many people think it’s too young, and I must say I am one of those.’

  ‘Many others, however,’ Rocha said, ‘believe that the muchachos cannot be treated as half-adults in this way. We are still discussing this.’

  And so to God. In several of the public forums, including the one with the writers, there had been demands that the constitution should ‘invoke the name of God as a Supreme Being’. A passionate debate on the subject was in progress all over the country. Where did the committee stand?

  The official FSLN position, they told me, was opposed to the idea of mentioning the name, but this wasn’t a ‘final’ position. Some Sandinistas thought that it wasn’t very important either way, so if it made some people happy, why not concede it? On the other hand, a number of Christian participants in the forums had said that merely mentioning the name was neither here nor there; it was more important that the constitution should reflect the Christian love-thy-neighbour spirit.

  ‘The ones who are really pushing for this are the Conservatives,’ Alejandro Bravo said. So what was the probable outcome? ‘It’s still uncertain. Maybe God will be in, maybe not.’

  With or without God, sixteen-year-old adults and abortion, the constitution ought to have been ratified by the end of 1986. (The subsequent politicking made this less certain.) It struck me, and I said so, as a uniquely important document. But as long as the state of emergency lasted, the constitution would be little more than a piece of paper; the President would retain most of the power, and a number of civil rights would remain suspended. Critics of Nicaragua would argue that the emergency might never end; that it might, in fact, be the first step towards the establishment of a dictatorship. (My own relationship with the term Emergency, formed during Mrs Indira Gandhi’s dictatorial years of emergency rule in India in the middle 1970s, was an uncomfortable one.)

  But the enthusiasm, the vigour with which Nicaragua had entered into the constitution-making process did not smack of window-dressing or tokenism. The emergency in Nicaragua was not the product of a politician’s desire to hang on to power, as it had been in Mrs Gandhi’s India, but the inevitable response to acts of aggression from outside the country. This was what Sergio Ramírez had meant when he said that peace would bring more democracy, not less.

  I left the Assembly building feeling genuinely angry. At the Enrique Acuña co-operative, and again today, I had seen a people trying hard to construct for themselves a new identity, a new reality, a reality that the external pressure might crush before construction work had even been completed.

  Nicaragua’s constitution amounted to a Bill of Rights that I wouldn’t have minded having on the statute book in Britain. But to hell with all that; to hell with all the dead sixteen-year-olds. Give a dog a bad name and hang him.

  9

  ON CATHARSIS

  I was sitting on a verandah at the ASTC cafeteria, in the company of two young Nicaraguan writers, Mario Martínez and Donaldo Altamirano, and two visiting writers from Eastern Europe: the Bulgarian poet Kalin Donkovy, a slow, silent, heavy man, and one of the secretaries of the Soviet Writers’ Union, Vladimir Amlissky, a much more urbane fellow altogether. Conversation wasn’t easy. Amlissky and Donkovy had to be translated into Spanish by one interpreter, and that was then rendered into English, for my benefit, by a second intermediary. Nevertheless, I thought, one might as well plunge in. ‘What news,’ I asked, ‘does Comrade Amlissky have about the reported liberalization of censorship in the Soviet Union?’ He nodded a number of times. ‘Things are better,’ he said. ‘Now more writers, and, which is more important, a greater number of publishers have the confidence to speak out on social issues. I myself have written on the subject of delinquency.’ He also told me about all the prizes he had won.

  I thought what he said was very likely true. ‘But,’ I pressed on, ‘what about Doctor Zhivago? Can we expect its publication soon?’

  ‘My personal opinion,’ Amlissky replied, ‘is that this novel of Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, is a poor novel. The Nobel Prize was not given to him for literary reasons.’

  ‘To tell the truth, I’m not too fond of it myself,’ I said.

  ‘And it made an absolutely terrible film,’ he added.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but whatever one thinks of Zhivago, it has become symbolic of Soviet censorship, and, anyway, you can’t seriously be saying that Pasternak was not a writer of Nobel Prize calibre.’

  Amlissky nodded again, many times. ‘Yes, I think this novel will probably be published soon,’ he said, as if it were a trifling thing. ‘And, for his poetry,’ he added, reasonably enough, ‘I would give him all the prizes in the world.’

  What about other writers? ‘A number of errors were made,’ he said, ‘in the case of many of our great writers: Akhmatova, Bulgakov, Pasternak. These are now being rectified. For example, the poet Gumilyov, the husband of Akhmatova. A volume of his verse is now being published.’

  No mention of Mandelstam, I noticed; and, after all, the ‘error’ made in the case of Gumilyov was that he had been executed. It seemed an inadequate word to use.

  ‘Yes,’ Amlissky said, ‘certain errors.’ Something of my views had evidently been lost in translation.

  ‘These days, there’s a strange schizophrenia in Russian literature,’ I suggested. ‘Most of the writers known outside the Soviet Union are unread within it, and vice versa. How does that feel to a writer who is still on the inside?’

  He answered by attacking the dissident writers. They had ceased to write literature and become pamphleteers. They were mediocre. ‘Even if that were true,’ I said, ‘and as a matter of fact
I don’t think it is, not when one thinks of Brodsky, Solzhenitsyn, Sinyavsky, Voinovich — but even if it were, mediocrity is no reason for banning a writer. Third-rate writers get published all over the world, after all.’

  ‘Let me give you my personal view of Solzhenitsyn,’ he said. ‘I don’t care for his writing nowadays. It has been getting worse and worse, and he has become a very right-wing figure, very Reaganite, very illiberal.’

  I, too, was critical of many of Solzhenitsyn’s pronouncements since his arrival in the West, I said; but surely one had to separate that from his stature as the author of, above all, The Gulag Archipelago? ‘Let me give you my personal view of this work, Archipelago Gulag,’ Amlissky offered. ‘You must understand that in our great classics we have a tradition of high tragedy, in which many awful things are shown and done, but always in the end there is catharsis, the cleansing of the soul. But in Solzhenitsyn we find no catharsis. This is why I do not care for this work.’

  I was about to suggest that the lack of catharsis in Solzhenitsyn’s writing might have more to do with Russian history than with his artistic limitations, but at this point I realized that the Nicaraguan writers were puzzled and confused. ‘The Soviet Union is a country with many great problems,’ Mario Martínez said. ‘It is interesting to hear how it is learning from its past errors.’

  Later, one of the interpreters asked me a breathtaking question: ‘What’s a labour camp?’

  ‘What’s a labour camp?’ I echoed, disbelievingly.

  ‘Oh, I can see what you’re trying to say it is,’ she said. ‘Something like a concentration camp. But are you really saying they have such things in the Soviet Union?’