by Teresa Bruce
“Tome mi fotografía, sólo diez cordobas,” he bargains as he sits down on the empty chair at our table. It’ll cost us ten cordobas, or about a dollar, to take his picture. I have never formed a mental image of what my little brother would have looked like if he had posed beside my sister and me in my father’s slides of Central America. To me he is arrested in time, a tormented toddler forever on Santa’s lap. But this boy’s audacity is straight out of my father’s playbook, and for the first time I have a sense of the savvy hustler my little brother might have become.
“Oh yeah, tough guy, how about one cordoba?” Gary counters, laughing as he holds up one finger.
“Okay,” Tough Guy answers without hesitation, holding up ten fingers. “Pero, diez fotos.” Either way, he’s getting his dollar’s worth.
We spend an hour watching vestiges of lightning and pressing our faces against the cool condensation of bottles of Victoria beer. I can’t stop smiling at Tough Guy, but he prefers to assume serious poses for Gary’s ten digital portraits, one elbow propped on the table and the other on his hip, eyes drilling directly into the lens.
He clearly isn’t impressed by the results on Gary’s viewfinder and motions for us to follow him to a small plaza behind the cathedral. Which is where an itinerant photographer named Jesús works. He uses a homemade camera that looks like a cardboard shoebox covered with leopard skin. For another ten cordobas we pose for him as Tough Guy supervises.
It’s a primitive two-step process: a negative of a negative to make a positive, chemicals right there in a plastic bucket. The result resembles a daguerreotype—our gestures blurred and eyes glazed like travelers from another century. Gary snaps a digital photo of our oddly intimate portrait and offers to e-mail it to the photographer, but Jesús has never heard of the Internet.
Tough Guy spies another sucker sitting down for a beer and darts away before I can get close enough to pat his head, or, worse yet, hug him. I watch him leave, knowing something has changed. Time has relinquished a tiny piece of power over me. All the frustration and brutality of the border are behind us now, the dividing line a meaningless artifice. I have collected another entrada, but it is Nicaragua that has entered me.
Chapter Nineteen
THE PUBLISHER’S WIFE
Nicaragua did not agree with me as much the first time. We stopped in León only long enough for another wheel repair and then headed for the closest beach, Poneloya, this time not for my little sister to recuperate but for me.
FEBRUARY 5–11, 1974
Met local news publisher and enjoyed house facilities while there. 1st Teri sick, then I. Doctor said malaria?
My head begins to throb as I read those words. Why is there a question mark after the diagnosis? Was the doctor not certain or my mother not concerned? I flip through the pages, looking for another hospital admission card like the one she saved after my sister’s fall in El Salvador. Simple blood tests would have settled it; even in 1974 there were medicines we could have taken. All I find is one line she wrote a few days earlier, in Honduras.
Spent night on roadside. Got bug bites.
After twenty-one separate truck breakdowns and hemorrhaging savings, contracting malaria warranted only a shoulder-shrugging question mark from my mother. So much had already been taken from her: her three-year-old son, her home in the Oregon woods, and all contact with her own mother and sister. She had no power other than denial, and like the shoot-out in Mexico, malaria became just another visitor in the night. She never referred to it—or to the woman who nursed me back to health—again.
It is this woman’s husband who has always played the starring role in the slide-show version of our time in Nicaragua. He’s the one my father remembers. Rodolfo was a prominent newspaper publisher who owned the land behind the slice of Poneloya beach that my father picked as a camp spot. I’ve often wondered what would have happened if Rodolfo had called the cops on what were essentially foreign squatters. I have a feeling it was his wife who took the phone from his hand and said, “Let’s hear their story first.”
Yanina is a memory only I can recover, and I’ve returned to León to find her. Her cool hands and gentle words soothed me when my mother couldn’t. She made salty soups and soft breads, and she squeezed guava juice from the fruit of trees in her garden for me to drink. I can’t remember how tall she was or the color of her hair, only that she smelled of lavender and talcum powder. Her lap was never too tired for my sweaty, clingy body, and when she had to move from room to room she carried me on her sturdy hips.
“Mi mono mono,” she called me—her cute little monkey. And when my mother and I recovered, she, like Yolanda in El Salvador, wrote her name in the front of my mother’s journal. I am still clinging to the hope that I am not too late to thank her.
“What do you think are the chances she’d remember me?” I ask Gary.
“A camper with US license plates staggering up to her doorstep and depositing a mother and daughter with malaria in her lap?” Gary is sure that we made a lasting impression. “The question is whether she’ll answer her doorbell if she sees you coming.”
On our second day in León, Gary and I begin the search for Yanina and Rodolfo. The temperature is in the upper nineties, and I carry two bottles of water in my bag. It isn’t enough to prevent the headache from returning.
“I think I’m having a malaria flashback,” I tell Gary.
“It’s a little early for gin and tonics” is his way of telling me to buck up.
Finding Ernesto in El Salvador has transformed my mother’s journal into a treasure map. Connecting with actual human beings who crossed paths with my childhood feels like a resurrection—or at least confirmation that the slide show has roots in reality. I know time has replaced agony with adventure, that our collective, celebrated exploration of a continent is the unconscious camouflage of my family’s grief. But however faded the truth has become, its faint outlines are still there. Names inscribed in handwriting other than my mother’s offer more than third-party validation. They give me hope that the camper is also out there waiting for me.
But with the dentist, at least I had an address to go on. This time the journal simply lists the names Rodolfo and Yanina, plus all their kids and the underlined words León, Nicaragua. The owner of a local bookstore tells us that Rodolfo’s paper, El CentroAmericano, has been out of print for years. Then, as if that isn’t disheartening enough, “Pienso que él es muerto.”
My head throbs with his casual surmise that Rodolfo is dead. If there is one person as invincible as my father, I have always assumed it is Rodolfo. The slide-show version of this man is a character I treasure. In Rodolfo my father found a fellow rebel, and he filled my head with man-crush tales of how tough Rodolfo was, how he could twist ordinary words into weapons. I studied journalism in college not to be like Bob Woodward but to be like Rodolfo. In the heirloom that is our family history he is heroic, a Sandinista rebel with a determined woman at his side. He can’t be dead.
Almost as an afterthought, the bookstore owner tells me to check a sewing machine store a few blocks away. One of the women there might know where Yanina lives, assuming she is still alive. We duck back out into the searing, merciless sun. My hat feels like it is trying to choke my head as we make our way to the sewing machine shop. Life-sized, faded murals and protest graffiti dot our path like accusatory mile markers—the CIA as a giant, slithering snake; Ronald Reagan sitting on the head of a peasant woman in a field; Henry Kissinger wearing a clown’s hat. Yanina’s gracious sympathy for Americans might very well have been replaced with hostility and resentment.
We smell the rainstorm before we feel it, negative ions lifting and swirling the dust from the street under our feet. Just like yesterday’s storm, it advances through León’s streets in a frontal assault, and buildings only two blocks away are erased as we watch, edges and rooflines turned into a smear of chalky white. It keeps coming, and soon we can barely see each other through the downpour.
Someo
ne shouts from a doorway, and I can make out only a Yankees cap and a waving arm. A sixteen-year-old boy named Pedro is apparently skipping school and invites us to take shelter in his living room. We step over a shinbone-high threshold obviously designed with the exact height of León’s frequently flooded streets in mind. It is cool and dark inside, the walls above a high-water line painted bright turquoise and covered with baseball pennants.
Pedro’s mother ducks into the house, sheltering a new haircut under a hasty hat of drenched newspaper, and instead of being annoyed to find two strangers dripping all over her living room floor, she invites us to stay for lunch. But when the rain stops, as suddenly as it began, we thank them both and head out for the sewing machine repair shop instead.
A dozen women are waiting in line for alterations when we finally find it, and after passing around my mother’s journal there is general consensus that Rodolfo’s wife still lives in León. Little girls adrift in strange countries latch on to comforting, maternal women with something close to desperation, and it may be too much to hope that the object of my adoration felt anything close to reciprocity. But still, a flutter of feeling lucky takes its place beside the squirming in my stomach that tells me I’m nervous, too.
“Ella es mi prima.” A cousin is suspicious; she wants to know why two Americans are asking for Yanina. “¿Qué negocio tiene usted con ella?”
Twenty minutes later, we are standing outside a modest one-story home surrounded by a wrought-iron fence and flaming orange birds-of-paradise. The doorbell seems rudely loud and insistent, yet Yanina welcomes us into her living room as if she has been expecting us.
“Come inside, even hell would melt in León this time of day,” she says. She is speaking deliberate, polite-hostess English, and I realize her cousin must have telephoned to tell her two sweaty Americans were on their way to her house. That is apparently all she knows. My heart sinks. She does not seem to recognize me; I look nothing like the little girl she nursed through the fevers of malaria thirty years ago.
Yanina is small, solid, and much older than the gentle angel I remember. Her dark hair is pulled back over a wide, square face, and a cotton print dress hangs off her broad shoulders at right angles. She is a grandmotherly warrior, kind and vigilant. Her home is fan-cool and shutter-dark, and every end table, countertop, and mantle is crowded with family photographs.
It is time to show her the prints I’ve made of my father’s slides. There’s one of me on a beach that could be anywhere—I am a purple sliver in sunset silhouette. Then there are blurry images of well-dressed children taking turns at a hanging piñata. It was her oldest daughter Monica’s first communion party. Yanina squints and lifts the picture closer to her glasses. Then she pats it to her chest and squeezes her eyes closed.
“Teresita,” she says when she opens them again, and I lean toward her for the kiss I know is coming.
She remembers me. Not the me who is the woman sitting in her living room fighting back unexpected tears of gratitude and barely dared hope, but the child I have always remained in her mind. On the wall hangs a photograph of a silver-haired, handsome man at a Roosevelt White House press conference, and Yanina addresses the image as though it could talk back.
“Rodolfo, look who came back to us.”
We have missed greeting Rodolfo in person by seven years.
“She is strong and healthy now; it’s a miracle.”
Yanina has had no one to practice English with now that her children are grown and scattered across two continents. She is much more tolerant of my grammatical mistakes than her own so she switches to speaking mostly in Spanish. She still owns the Poneloya beach house, with its deep verandas, shady guava trees, sand dunes, and nesting sea turtles. Monica runs a travel agency now; Yanina’s oldest son, Gustavo, lives in the United States. Yanina settles back in her chair as I translate for Gary. I need him to follow everything. These are nuances I will want to replay over and over, to fill the spaces between my father’s slides.
“You wanted another brother so much that you asked me to give you one of my sons,” she says, reaching over to pat my hand. “You didn’t think I’d miss just one when I have so many.”
Yanina excuses herself for a moment and leaves the room.
“She knows about your brother’s death,” Gary says, surprised. “Your mother must have finally talked about it.”
Yanina returns to the living room with a bound set of El CentroAmericano from the early 1970s, and Gary and I flip through delicate, yellowing pages. Rodolfo was the godson of General Anastasio Somoza, but his beliefs were molded by the poets and laborers of León, and he wrote a column called Mas o Menos—more or less. He befriended an American family on the beach in Poneloya just five years before the Sandinista revolution.
My father’s timing couldn’t have been better. He drove our limping camper onto the beach in front of Rodolfo’s home during a brief respite between his host’s stints in jail. He may have been Somoza’s godson, but that didn’t protect him when he began criticizing Somoza’s biological son in the pages of El CentroAmericano.
“Rodolfo did not always think of consequences,” Yanina says. “A little like your father perhaps.”
No wonder she showed such sympathy for my fevered, disconnected mother. She knew how hard it is to keep the horizon level for the sake of children. The Poneloya beach house was as much a safe haven for Yanina as it was for me. Holding a family together must have been second nature to her by the time ours collapsed at her front door.
I remember watching her strong arms reaching over me to tug on the chain that dangled from the ceiling fan above my hammock. It couldn’t circle fast enough to bring relief. In my fevered state I flopped my head to the side to see the beach where Jenny and Monica were splashing in the waves.
Far behind them, I saw my father walk on water.
FEBRUARY 5TH–11TH, 1974
Lots of children to play. Rich. Were very well treated. Dave rode surfboard.
There is something about Rodolfo’s story that makes as little sense now as watching my father walk on water did to a feverish seven-year-old. Journalists unfriendly to the Somoza regime suffered worse punishments than jail time in the years that followed our departure from Nicaragua; it was the 1978 assassination of the publisher of Nicaragua’s other major newspaper, La Prensa, that became a tipping point in the revolution. How did Rodolfo escape a similar fate?
“The new rulers assumed that any enemy of their enemy was a friend,” Yanina explains. Rodolfo’s history of jailings under Somoza’s regime put him on the good side of the Sandinistas. “When the revolution came, the new government made Rodolfo ambassador to Colombia.”
It is easier to picture Yanina nursing the wounded on the battleground than entertaining politicians in some faraway embassy. The woman sipping guava juice in her quiet living room a quarter of a century later tells us that she and Rodolfo grew disillusioned with the rigid controls of the Sandinistas.
“I had it up to here with politics and war,” she says, drawing a thin finger across her wrinkled neck. “I read only poetry now, like most Nicaraguans.”
The family ended up in exile, living in Miami. Far from her beloved homeland of arched verandas and guava groves, she watched American TV shows to improve her English.
“‘Like sands through the hourglass, so are the Days of Our Lives,’” she says, eyes closed.
It was years before it was safe to return to Nicaragua, and even though El CentroAmericano was the oldest newspaper in the country at the time, it was forced to stop printing in 1979. Yanina’s sister brings us fresh guava juice and marzipan cookies on a silver tray; we are nearing the end of the story.
“Él murió de un corazón quebrado.” She says Rodolfo died of a broken heart, as though El CentroAmericano had been her husband’s true love. I see a little of my mother’s sadness in her eyes, those of a woman who packed up her entire family to follow her husband around the world. For both of them loyalty came with a high price.
The air between us is heavy, and I can’t tell if it is sweat or tears that trickle down Yanina’s glistening face. My parents never looked back when we left her care, never even wrote to her when they heard of the La Prensa publisher’s assassination. Like the dentist’s in El Salvador, hers is a story they have largely forgotten. But back then I was a needy weed clinging to the soil of Yanina’s garden, and I wonder if my mother was as devastated as I was when we drove away.
“I don’t think it really mattered to her,” Yanina answers. The pink, syrupy guava juice in her glass is mingling with melting ice cubes, diluting. She presses the cool condensation to her cheek, and I can see that the effort to find soothing words is draining. “Nothing could bring your brother back.”
We should be going. If we stay any longer this weary woman will feel as though she must take care of me again. Besides, she is leaving on a trip to Managua tomorrow. Gary takes a picture, and Yanina holds my hand long after the shutter clicks. What matters to her is that I found my way back. She is squeezing encouragement straight to my heart.
Another sudden downpour finds us behind the León market at six in the evening, where we take shelter in a bingo-hall-sized restaurant with dirt floors and crowded picnic tables.
“¿Un menú por favor?” Gary asks a woman carrying a plate of food.
She laughs and points to the sidewalk. Under a faded awning stand seventeen steaming cauldrons and a charcoal grill piled high with meat. For a total of three dollars, we fill our plates with avocado-and-egg guacamole, lemon-and-garlic butter beans, raw pumpkin coleslaw, stuffed cabbage rolls, and chicken that slides off the bone. For two dollars more, we buy an entire bottle of seven-year-old Nicaraguan rum called Flor de Caña.