Happy Ant-Heap (11 page)

1989

C
ENTRAL AMERICA HAS BEEN
frequently referred to by its great northern neighbour as the States’ backyard, and the undertone of presumed control and dependency suggested by the description has not been lost on the Spanish-speaking peoples of the countries concerned. Porfirio Diaz, a Mexican president at the close of the nineteenth century, famously attributed his country’s deficiencies to being ‘too near to the USA and too far from God’. Mexico was simply too big to have wholly collapsed under outside pressures but its smaller neighbours, squeezed into a territorial neck narrowing all the way down to Panama, never quite freed themselves from the exercise of Yankee power and wealth. Things for them took a turn for the worse after the last war as subservient dictators were warned against the spread of Communist ideas. Most of these came quickly to heel, but in Guatemala a democratically elected government proposing to defend its liberties by the importation of arms from Czechoslovakia provoked a CIA-mounted invasion and was rapidly overthrown.

Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua, whose father had been a lifelong friend of Franklin D. Roosevelt, offered an outstanding example of misrule. In his own country he was generally accepted as an outright psychopath, frequently visiting in person the torture chambers regarded as a normal accessory of such countries; he was even reputed to have installed a dungeon in the basement of his palace, in which opponents were subjected to psychological pressures by the presence of caged jaguars kept short of food. In 1979 there was an uprising against his regime led remarkably enough by Indians, normally accustomed to keep clear of revolutionary action and let the whites settle their disputes in their own way. On this occasion the President’s National Guard made the fatal mistake of throwing tear-gas canisters into a gathering of Monimbo Indians performing a ‘ceremony’, and the Indians, first dressed by their shamans in ritual tunics believed to confer invisibility, went into action, cleared the National Guards out of town, set up barricades to prevent their return, and the war was on. So great a source of inspiration was their action to the rebels’
muchachos
that Monimbo dance masks were thereafter adopted as part of their uniforms.

The Somozas, father and son, had by this time ruled Nicaragua for forty-three years—the longest period of unbroken terror in Latin American history. At his death, Anastasio Somoza was reputed to be the richest Latin American of all time. Among his innumerable assets were the whole seaport of Puerto Somoza, the national airline, the principal shipping line, a chain of luxury brothels in Argentina and one-quarter of Nicaragua’s cultivable land. Both Somozas were seen as good friends of the USA. On the occasion of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s meeting with the father, the American President had rebuked a member of his entourage who referred to Somoza as ‘no better than an assassin’. In a much-quoted reply the President corrected him, ‘Sure he’s a sonofabitch, but he’s our sonofabitch.’

The fighting started by a band of Indians spread to all parts of the country and continued for three years, provoking innumerable massacres, in the course of which an estimated 5 per cent of the civilian population died, approximately half of these being women who had taken up arms in the Sandinista cause. In 1979 Somoza deserted his followers and fled the country to meet his end in Paraguay. Here, while taking part in a parade in his honour, he was blown in half by a bazooka shell fired from a nearby building, being the 105th Latin American president to the by violence in the twentieth century. Left to its own devices, his army disintegrated. The Nicaraguan air force sprayed the coffee and tobacco crops before decamping, while the National Guard took over the nation’s fishing fleet and sailed away, and the Sandinista regime came into being.

Visiting the country on behalf of a Sunday newspaper in 1982, some two years after the debacle, I found that the only car for hire in the capital, Managua, was a glittering American monster, previously the property of a captain in the National Guard. This unique vehicle attracted curious glances everywhere and sometimes a small crowd. It possessed a powerful radio, and whenever held up by collapsed buildings, a bridge under repair or deep holes in the road, I tried to curry favour with the onlookers by blasting out revolutionary songs. The device was successful but not for the reasons intended. In reality most of the audience had had enough of music of this kind, and soon drifted away.

I drove the absurd car out of town and into a beautiful landscape of forests, volcanoes and lakes, and occasional villages painted in all colours tucked into crevices of the red earth. Some of the houses had shell-holes in their walls, and one or two had lost their roofs. A single village sported a cafe. ‘Come in,’ said a woman standing at the door. ‘Stewed beans are available. One bowlful per person.’ This was good news, for so far that day I’d made do with coffee substitutes and a hunk of maize bread.

I followed her in and she put a bowlful of stew in front of me and I tried a cautious spoonful. It was the national diet these days and the taste was at first sweet, leaving thereafter a lingering sourness at the base of the tongue. Many people I was told were obliged to eat nothing but this for days on end, but after the second spoonful I pushed the bowl away. The woman was watching me and I shook my head and smiled, ashamed at this wastage of precious food.

There was a row of bullet holes in the counter, and I stuck the tip of my finger in one of these. ‘It’s nothing,’ the woman said. ‘They were fighting round here for three months. A battle a day. For us it made a change. If you live here it’s the boredom that finishes you off. Anything for a little excitement. We got used to the war. I hate to say this, but in a way I suppose we miss it.’ There was a cripple in the street outside dragging himself along on his hands and knees, the result, the woman said, of a newly invented torture causing permanent distortion of the limbs. The new government had supplied the ‘victim placard’ hanging from his neck, appealing to members of the public to come to his aid readily upon request.

After this excursion it was back to Managua—a city that had never been given time to rouse itself from the coma into which it had fallen after the earthquake of 1972 before the coming of the revolution and war. Many who saw it at the time were reminded of pictures of Hiroshima, but now the eerie emptiness of the once bustling city centre was emphasised by the survival of the stark tower of the Bank of America and the disjointed mass of the theoretically earthquake-proof International Hotel. A few pedestrians were picking their way delicately through the rubble as if in fear of its colonisation by snakes. Space had been cleared round four burnt-out tanks, left where they were to encourage children to play in them, but there were no children in sight.

What interested me was a remarkable newly constructed air-raid shelter in the shape of a tall and slender isosceles triangle of steel, and when I stopped in what had once been the main street to photograph it, a policeman extricated himself from its base to prohibit this. ‘Photography forbidden,’ he said, politely enough, with no trace of menace in his manner. He was quite happy to talk about the tower, describing it as an example of the inventive skills of the new Nicaragua. ‘Its shape prevents its demolition by the bombs of the attacker,’ he said. ‘Note that it is sharp at the top and therefore almost impossible to hit. A bomb that only just misses will slide down its steep side and bury itself in soft earth. We Sandinistas shall fight off attack from wherever it comes.’

I praised the inventiveness of its makers and immediately we were good friends. There was a hot wind and the street was full of the scent of dust and ancient fires. Tiny drops of sweat had formed on the sides of the policeman’s nose and we both covered our nostrils against a white air-borne cloud, twisting slowly as it wandered by. The policeman was staring at the Cadillac, clearly fascinated, although under obligation to disapprove.
‘Es obsceno,’
he said, and I was quick to agree.

‘I know it’s obscene,’ I said, ‘but I was sent here by a newspaper, and I have to get around. This isn’t my choice.’

He laughed. ‘My advice is to take it to a gas station and get them to smear sump oil over it.’

‘I’ll do that,’ I said. ‘Anywhere I can find something to eat on the way?’

‘Place just down the road,’ he said. ‘I have to warn you this is Monday, so it’s bean stew.’

‘I was afraid so,’ I told him.

‘Cheer up,’ he said. ‘They promise us meat by the end of the week.’

Two nurses from the hospital came past, swinging their arms like soldiers to let it be known that they, too, had carried guns. Suddenly I noticed how attractive girls had become since the days, as I remembered them, when young females over-ate to become plump in accordance with male taste of those times. Now starvation, suffering—even sorrow—had carved away the flesh, and everywhere one looked a new and refined style of good looks having something about it of the classical Greek ideal had emerged, as Managua had become full of beautiful bean-stew faces.

I watched the nurses disappear among the ruins, then turned round at a cry of exasperation from my policeman friend as, in defiance of many warning arrows, a ragged car with wheels of different sizes roared towards us down the one-way street. The policeman waved a limp protest as it rattled by. ‘It happens all the time,’ he said. “They’ve all gone crazy about freedom, so whenever there’s the chance to drive the wrong way down a street they do. The latest crazy thing is that traffic lights are supposed to interfere with personal choice, so they’re tearing them down all over the town. They’re out to prove we’re really free.’ An idea struck him. ‘By the way, someone’s going to heave a rock through that car’s windshield sooner or later. Instead of having a guy at the gas station go over it with sump oil, you could have them paint
LIBERTAD
in big letters all across the front. Now that really would go down well.’

1997

D
AWN SPREADS A GLACIAL
calm over the waters of Cochin, and slowly a muted profile of temples, godowns and palms emerges from the mist-bound promontories and islands over which the city is spread. Fishing boats styled in remotest antiquity slide with their patched sails past the Malabar Hotel gardens, as if dragged by ropes across a stage. The thick-leaved trees release their morning crows, and at 7 a.m. on the dot each member of the hotel staff is at his post to greet the passing guest with a sonorous ‘Good morning, sir,’ (or ‘madam’), which sounds like a salutation and blessing combined. The greeting is repeated
ad infinitum
as often as you pass, until the stroke of midday, when afternoon comes officially into its own.

At eight o’clock a Mr Williams, a guide supplied by a friend, arrives to show me the sights of this most ancient city on India’s south-west coast: a small, dark-skinned man with a beautifully carved face and spiritual expression who, having introduced himself, advises me that he is a Christian, a history graduate, and that he voted for the Congress Party at the recent election. His wife is a Hindu and a supporter of the Communists, who are at present in power in Kerala. ‘She cherishes the belief,’ he says, ‘that Lenin was an incarnation of Vishnu. If such credence is keeping her happy, why should we worry?’

The seeing of sights is unavoidable—a matter of common courtesy as well as of interest. Our tour was to begin with St Francis’s Church, started in 1502, soon after the Portuguese had established a trading station here—the first church to be built in India by Europeans. We set out for it on foot by the road to the Willingdon Island Bridge (which links the island with Mattancheri), and thence to Fort Cochin. In the event it was the experience of this morning walk that counted: the clamour and the colour of the narrow streets; the sight of the morning train from Alleppey shouldering aside the buffaloes and the egrets on the tracks; the field packed with circus elephants; the auto-rickshaws charging through glinting laterite dust; the limbs thrust through the windows of jam-packed buses, the rampaging juggernauts, the suicidal cyclists; the resigned cows locked into the streams of embattled traffic; the crashing outcry from the cinema loudspeakers on every corner. A bus station released a flock of office-bound girls into the street ahead; as they came towards us swathed in their multicoloured saris, their feet, concealed in stirrings of dust, seemed hardly to move. A man hosed down a truck painted all over with tigers. An old election poster depicted the fathers of Marxist socialism sitting garlanded under ceremonial umbrellas. Surely these were the sights I had come to see?

The Church of St Francis came into view in an oasis of space within what must be one of the densest concentrations of humanity on earth. When they took over from the Dutch (who had in turn replaced the Portuguese) at the end of the eighteenth century, the British tried with some success to create an image of rural England from which crowds were banished. Here was the village green, the peace, the shade, the large houses in their gardens behind high walls. The church is vast and solid, with an empty tomb that once held the bones of Vasco da Gama.

Three church officials are ready to greet occasional visitors, to display the palm-leaf authorisation ill-advisedly given by the Raja of the day, permitting the Portuguese to settle here. Inside a harmonium wheezes softly out of sight. Outside only the crows disturb the silence, and a few mild cows crop the blond stubble where once there was a cricket pitch. Here, one draws in the aroma of the past with every breath.

The Chinese fishing nets, on view all along the shore from where we stood, were another of the sights. Nets like these were brought to Cochin at the time of Kublai Khan, and the ones I saw were identical in their spindly construction and mode of operation to those still found in less advanced parts of the Chinese homeland. Stretched between claws of wood, they seemed suspended like the flowers of a monstrous blue convolvulus over the sea. At short intervals, when the tide was in, each net would be lowered into the water, then hauled back by the team straining at the levers to disclose a pouchful of tiddlers, worth a rupee or so, which would be split six ways. Across the water, on Willingdon Island, a saccharine Portuguese church with three baroque towers sparkled among the palms. ‘The fishermen are all Christians,’ Mr Williams said, ‘and are very poor. They are showing a lesson in devotion in money spent on places of worship.’