She opposed the closure of La Prensa and thought, as I did, that Barricada was the most boring paper she’d ever seen. She felt the FSLN leaders didn’t really understand why the freedom of the press was so important. ‘They are boys, who went from school to the mountains to jail or into exile. Are they really properly prepared for the running of a State?’ And then, in another of her vertiginous non sequiturs: ‘Taxi drivers in Managua these days! They charge the earth. There is supposed to be a rate, but they ignore it, and there is nothing anyone can do. Nothing. It’s wrong.’
As she dozed, wisps of Nicaragua floated through my mind in the eddying, repetitious fashion of airplane thoughts. How isolated from information it was. ‘England?’ a campesino asked me, and then struggled to offer some piece of knowledge about the place. ‘Sí, sí: Reina Isabel, no?’ And India, to most Nicaraguans, always excepting the followers of Rabindranath, seemed an exotic, camelious, elephantine place; they were amazed when I drew parallels between that fantasyland and their own country. And yet those parallels did exist. The three tendencies of the FSLN, for example, echoed the divisions and arguments in the Indian left, and in many other poor countries of the South. There were also differences. India was poorer than Nicaragua, but not nearly so information-poor. Very little foreign news made the pages of Barricada and El Nuevo Diario during my stay. ‘Torrijos was assassinated by the CIA.’ ‘US, UK spy on ANC for South Africa.’ ‘Royal wedding stages a distraction from the quarrel between Reina Isabel and Mrs Thatcher.’ That was about it.
To tell the truth, Nicaraguans didn’t seem perturbed by the absence of the world. Their own circumstances absorbed them so deeply that they had little room left for curiosity. Very few people asked me any questions, though they were all happy to answer mine. History was roaring in their ears, deafening them to more distant noises.
‘History,’ in Veronica Wedgwood’s phrase, ‘is lived forward but it is written in retrospect.’ To live in the real world was to act without knowing the end. The act of living a real life differed, I mused, from the act of making a fictional one, too, because you were stuck with your mistakes. No revisions, no second drafts. To visit Nicaragua was to be shown that the world was not television, or history, or fiction. The world was real, and this was its actual, unmediated reality.
I had left Nicaragua unfinished, so to speak, a country in which the ancient, opposing forces of creation and destruction were in violent collision. The fashionable pessimism of our age suggested that the destroyers would always, in the end, prove stronger than the creators, and, indeed, those who would unmake the Nicaraguan revolution were men of awesome power. The new weapons of the counterrevolution, purchased with the US dollars, were moving into place; soon it would be time for battle. The logic of realpolitik said that there could only be one result: now that the US had opted for a straightforward military solution in Nicaragua, its might would eventually prevail. But that kind of logic had proved fallible in the past. Unhappy endings might seem more realistic than happy ones, but reality often contained a streak of fantasy that realism (pace Tagore) lacked. In the real world, there were monsters and giants; but there was also the immeasurable power of the will. It was entirely possible that Nicaragua’s will to survive might prove stronger than the American weapons. We would just have to see.
‘One worries for the future,’ Silvia said after a time. ‘Because if the Contra come to power the Sandinistas will go into the mountains and become guerrillas again, so it’s endless, no?’ I suggested that if the revolution managed to outlast Reagan, his successor might follow a different line, and without US support the Contra weren’t much to worry about. She looked dubious but was too polite to disagree openly. ‘It’s possible, what you say,’ she said, without conviction.
I asked my well-worn question: ‘What do you think the government should do, then? Should it try and make peace with the Americans?’
‘You said “Americans”,’ she reproached me.
‘I’m sorry. North Americans. Unitedstatesians. Reaganians. Them.’
‘It’s all right,’ she forgave me quickly. ‘When I first came to Europe from Nicaragua, it would shock me to hear the US called “America”. I wanted to protest, But we are America, not just them. But now I say it too: America, Americans. Europe teaches you a different perspective.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘it certainly does.’
She went back to my question. ‘No, they can’t give in. The war must go on. It’s difficult to know what to do. The revolution exists. It has to exist, or there’s no hope. But what problems! What difficulties! What grief!’
She had started crying again, and was fighting against it. I pretended to think it was just her heavy cold.
I was surprised and touched by the force of what she’d said, this sweet middle-class woman with her affluent complaints, whose mother might have lived if it hadn’t been for the shortages. ‘It has to exist, or there’s no hope.’
We parted in Madrid, and returned to our separate lives, two migrants making our way in this West stuffed with money, power and things, this North that taught us how to see from its privileged point of view. But maybe we were the lucky ones; we knew that other perspectives existed. We had seen the view from elsewhere.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The translations on this page–this page, this page–this page, this page, this page–this page, and this page are taken from Nicaragua in Revolution: The Poets Speak, ed. Aldaraca, Baker, Rodríguez and Zimmerman, MEP Publications, Minneapolis (with, in some cases, some small changes made by myself); that on this page from Nicaragua in Reconstruction and at War, ed. Marc Zimmerman, MEP Publications. I have also quoted from Risking a Somersault in the Air: Conversations with Nicaraguan Writers, by Margaret Randall, Solidarity Publications.
I should like to thank all those, in London and in Nicaragua, who gave me invaluable assistance and advice, most particularly Nicaragua’s Ambassador to the UK, H.E. Francisco d’Escoto; Biddy Richards; my interpreter, Margarita Clark; and, of course, Sra. Rosario Murillo and the ASTC.
I can find no adequate words of thanks for the hospitality I was shown by the people of Nicaragua.
—S.R.
About the Author
SALMAN RUSHDIE is the author of nine novels—Grimus, Midnight’s Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the “Booker of Bookers”), Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, and Shalimar the Clown—and one collection of short stories, East, West. He has also published four other works of nonfiction: Imaginary Homelands, The Wizard of Oz, Mirrorwork, and Step Across This Line.
Praise for The Jaguar Smile
“Written with a novelist’s eye for irony and metaphor… [Rushdie] is able to make us see that the factual reality of this country already verges on the surreal.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“To say of The Jaguar Smile that it is a work of art is to take full note of its literary allusions, its uncompromising sensitivity to death and destruction, its ready political eye for the funny and grotesque, and above all its understated and gripping eloquence.”
—EDWARD W. SAID
“A look at intelligence struggling, with limited success, not to be entirely extinguished in the service of faith … an account of the confusion any one of us might feel if we visited Nicaragua and gave it a chance to affect us, because it is an inescapably affecting land, crashing through abrupt change that escapes the easy categories of ideologues … good reading.”
—The New York Times
“The account that emerges… is, as one would expect, quickened by a novelist’s eye.… Compelling.”
—Time
ALSO BY SALMAN RUSHDIE
FICTION
Grimus
Midnight’s Children
Shame
The Satanic Verses
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
East, West
The Moor’s Last Sig
h
The Ground Beneath Her Feet
Fury
Shalimar the Clown
NONFICTION
Imaginary Homelands
The Wizard of Oz
Step Across This Line
SCREENPLAY
Midnight’s Children
ANTHOLOGY
Mirrorwork (co-editor)
Copyright
2008 Random House Trade Paperback Edition
Copyright © 1987, 1997 by Salman Rushdie
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Viking, a division of Penguin Group (USA), Inc., and in London by Pan Books in 1987.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Marxist Educational Press for permission to reprint the English translations of the poems that appear on this page–this page, this page–this page, this page, this page–this page, and this page. All translations were originally published in Nicaragua in Revolution: The Poets Speak, edited by Brigit Aldaracia, Edward Baker, Ileana Rodriguez, and Marc Zimmerman (Minneapolis, MN: Marxist Educational Press, 1980). Reprinted by permission of Marxist Educational Press.
eISBN: 978-0-307-78666-1
www.atrandom.com
v3.1
Footnotes
1
Mario, who has been a stalwart friend and ally to me, has this at least in common with Daniel Ortega: that they both vociferously opposed the death threat of the 1989 Khomeini fatwa against my novel, The Satanic Verses. I should say, for the sake of objectivity, that it is Mario’s view, expressed on a French TV programme in which we both participated, that as I have grown older I have grown more politically sensible and therefore more conservative. I fear he may be right. I fear he may be wrong.
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The Jaguar Smile Page 13