by Cahill, Tim
Officially, the government said it was "interested in classical tourism, not sociopolitical tourism." The Institute of Tourism, for instance, had turned deposed dictator Anastasio Somoza's seaside estate into the Olaf Palme Convention Center. The government hopes the golf course, casino, and private airstrips will be attractive to conventioning dentists.
The photographer took our picture for the Institute of Tourism newsletter. He took our picture because we were real apolitical visitors and a potential inspiration to dentists worldwide.
Chepy told us that she had thought Garry and I were internationals when she first met us in Managua. She had expected us to express solidarity with the revolution and do nothing whatever to foster the cause of classical tourism or in any way help her attract dentists to Nicaragua.
It had taken her half an hour of my bad Spanish before she realized that we were Institute of Tourism kinda guys.
The road was exceptionally bad and there were huge potholes all over.
It was like the road into Ecuador from Peru and it was a bad road for
all the same reasons. There would be no high-speed invasion over this
crate red pavement.
Chepy, sitting in the back of the cab, said she wanted to interview
us for the Intourismo newsletter. How did I like Nicaraguans and
Nicaragua? We were fifteen miles into the country, driving along the
shore of Lake Nicaragua. On the far shore was a huge volcano looming
over the blue-gray waters of the lake. It was a perfectly shaped cone,
rounded and green and inordinately sensual.
I said that Nicaragua was beautiful, as anyone could see, and all
Nicaraguans were imbued with the spirit of friendship. Nicaragua was
the friendliest, most beautiful . . . Chepy cut me off.
"I would like you to comment on the political situation." "We are apolitical visitors," I said. "That's the point." "But you must say something about the political situation." Garry muttered under his breath and shot me a murderous look. I
was going to have to take this one. Chepy didn't want to hear what
Garry had to say.
I thought about it for a while. Telling the whole truth was out of the question. I thought the Sandinistas were heavy-handed ideologues who had succeeded in squeezing every ounce of joy out of the country.
On the other hand, the contra insurgents were terrorists, funded by my own government. I had seen pictures of women and children who had suffered at the hands of the contras. The pictures were taken by my friend Paul Dix, who lives in my hometown in Montana. He had spent two years in Nicaragua, working for the quasireligious organization Witness for Peace. He was interested in documenting the effects of the conflict on civilians. He would document atrocities on both sides, he said.
Paul tried to get out to the scene of the fighting as soon as it was reported. More often than not he found a house burned to the ground, most of a large family dead, and one or two survivors wandering around in a daze. The contras often targeted health-care workers and teachers.
Paul thought the Sandinista leaders had some poetry in their souls and didn't find life in Managua completely oppressive. He would admit that, under the Sandinistas, Nicaragua wasn't exactly an ideal society. There were some things that irritated him.
"But so what?" he had argued. "What if the whole country is a totalitarian dungeon? Does that give us the right to pay a bunch of terrorists to basically go around and cut the throats of four or five people a night?"
Paul often talked at length with the children who had survived various attacks. He gave them crayons and asked them to draw pictures of what had happened.
One of the pictures I saw showed a bright red house. A stick man standing outside, a contra, was throwing a little round ball through a window into the red house. The little round ball was meant to represent a grenade. Because this was a child's drawing, the contra was smiling. Small children don't know how to draw a face that isn't smiling.
In another drawing, there was a bodyless smiling circle on a stick stuck into the ground. The girl who drew the picture said that contras had decapitated her nineteen-year-old brother and put his head on a fence pole. The head was drawn like a bright, round, happy face.
And now Chepy wanted me to talk about politics, for the record. I had had half an hour of sleep in thirty hours and didn't want to have to think at all. I said that I hoped the Arias peace plan would be fully implemented.
"You are against the interference of foreign governments in Central American affairs?"
"Yes." I sensed that this was what Chepy needed to hear me say, for the sake of her job. It had, for me, the benefit of being my actual opinion.
"Would you write this down so I can translate exactly?" And so I wrote that down and drew a happy face under the place where I signed my name.
Later, Chepy showed us a picture of her daughter, a blond six-year-old cutie dressed in a clown suit for her birthday party. Chepy and her husband were separated, she said, and she had to raise her daughter alone. He didn't support the child at all.
She had thought about going to the U.S.—one of her sisters was attending college in Seattle—but she imagined that she'd end up being a waitress. "And here," she said, "I work in"—Chepy made an expansive gesture that encompassed the filthy cramped cab of the truck— "international relations."
We dropped her at her home in Masaya and exchanged addresses. Chepy said that her home address would be the best place to reach her. "I don't know what will happen," she said. She might have been referring to the political situation or to her personal life. It seemed best not to inquire more closely.
Garry tried to give her $100 but Chepy said she couldn't take it. "Yes you can," Garry said, "you have a daughter."
"Then," Chepy said, "I will spend it all on her."
The roads in the interior were good and fast. There was little traffic because gasoline was rationed, but we did see several large Bulgarian-made trucks full of people being ferried somewhere for some reason. The people wore civilian clothes and were jammed tightly into the back of these trucks. They weren't shouting or singing or laughing. They didn't look like they were on their way to concentration camps, either. They looked like everyone in Managua: people who weren't having a good time at all.
We were never stopped, not once.
The road to the border with Honduras rose into a series of rounded green hills. The trees were more sparse than in the lowland, but the heat was less oppressive. It was not the great weight upon the land that it had been in Managua. We had found, as the tourist brochure promised, "an excellent weather." When I looked down from the summit of one of the higher mountains, I could see groves of trees separated by meadows of thigh-high grasses. The ridges were closely spaced. It was
beautiful country where, I thought, small groups of armed men could maneuver for months and never be detected.
A brisk wind had sprung up and was blowing the petals of some bright red flowers across the road. There were brick houses along the highway, and all of them had flowers growing in the yard. We passed a school. Dozens of children were walking back toward the houses, carrying books and laughing.
We saw several billboards that looked like advertisements for a Rambo movie, but the words below the noble-looking armed men and woman read, defend your land, defend your city, defeat the enemy.
Not far down a slope near the road, there was a pond fringed with green algae that was so bright the color seemed bogus, a kind of artificial Day-Glo green set against the lighter green of the grass and the darker, more brooding cast of the forecast.
The hills were steeper near the border and there were rocky cliffs. A man in patched jeans, a yellow T-shirt, and sandals was pushing a homemade wheelbarrow full of wood. He had an automatic rifle slung over his back.
And then we were at the border, only four hours after we had entered the country. The customs building was located in a small settlemen
t with an indoor market where the produce looked better than anything I had seen in Managua. A group of boys, ranging in age from about ten to eighteen, surrounded the truck and clamored for our attention. They would take us to the right offices, in the right order, and we would clear customs in a flash. We were given to understand that we needed their help, which, they assured us, would be very inexpensive.
Some of the boys looked too young to hire for this purpose, some looked devious. One, an older boy, was a tall gawky fellow with a loony, toothless smile who appeared to be happily insane. We chose the oldest of the border hustlers. This responsible individual promptly turned our papers over to the toothless loon, who gave out with a mighty shout and ran off down the street. He waved our documents over his head and whooped and laughed and staggered as he ran.
All of the other boys were laughing.
"We gave your papers," one of these evil ten-year-olds said, "to the craziest person in all of Nicaragua."
"What did that kid just tell you?" Garry asked.
"He said they gave our papers to a lunatic."
The fever flush bloomed in Garry's face. He took off at a dead run and caught the boy with our documents at the entrance to a building.
Inside, I was amazed to discover that there were, in fact, customs offices. The officers seemed to know the boy with our papers, and when he didn't get things right, they gently corrected him and sometimes actually guided him by the arm to the next stamping station.
Garry worked on the act—smile, laugh, hand out lapel pins—but he was flat and unconvincing. We suffered through a pit search and were cleared for immigration.
The officers instructed us to drive a few miles and check in at the immigration trailer on the left side of the road. We gave our guide a five-dollar bill and he ran back down the road, waving it over his head, whooping and laughing, as was his way.
"Shitheads," Garry said.
"I don't know," I said. "Maybe they were giving the kid a chance. Couple of strange-looking gringos. Let the crazy kid have a little fun. Maybe he wasn't crazy. He could have been retarded."
"Those papers," Garry said, "are the key to this whole thing." He was very angry. "They were playing around with us."
"I don't think so."
"Nicaraguans," Garry said. He made the word sound like a curse.
The border was a war zone and the old immigration building didn't look so good. There were bullet holes in the adobe. The roof, what there was of it, consisted of twisted girders. It had apparently taken a direct mortar hit.
So the government was checking passports out of an old airstream trailer home. Soldiers drove it down to the relative safety of town every night. A wooden set of stairs led up to a window in the trailer. There was a thin cloth over the window and we understood that we were to hand our passports through, one at a time. You couldn't see inside. It was like a confessional in a Catholic church. There was no way to know precisely how much disgust the information presented has generated. There could be a big penance to pay.
I don't know what they did with my documents, but I stood on the top stair, alone in the sun, for a full ten minutes. Then a brown hand reached out. I took my passport and saw that I was stamped for exit. No words were exchanged.
When Garry took his passport back, his hands were shaking in fatigue or fury or some combination of more complex emotions.
While Garry drove to the Honduras border station, which was a mile away, over a rocky summit, I quickly hid the letter from the Nicaraguan Institute of Tourism and put the letter from the Honduras Institute of Tourism in its place.
* * *
In Honduras, there was the usual scatter of boys, twenty or twenty-five of them, offering, at top volume, to guide us through customs. I looked out at the customs hustlers, the bustle, the black marketeers sitting on benches, the soft-drink vendors, and I felt myself slide into a bleak depression. Here it was: the border rat race, again. This was the seventh set of formalities we had gone through since starting from Panama thirty hours ago.
Garry did it all, laughing with officials and bargaining with the boys. He had completely shaken off the strange fever that had deviled him for most of the day. It took two hours to clear the vehicle.
Garry had been at the wheel almost continuously since Panama City: twenty-six out of thirty hours. It was Nicaragua that had somehow driven him, kept him awake, and sent the fever flush rushing to his face.
And now that we were out of the country, the tension was gone. Garry sat back in the passenger seat and sang, to the tune of "We're in the Money," a little song of his own. The only lyric was "We're in Honduras, we're in Honduras ..."
I wanted to know what was going on with Garry and Nicaragua. Perhaps he didn't want to talk about it, and I came at him from an angle. I advanced a theory that the Sandinista government, in its attempt to build the New Man, had appropriated some of the least appealing aspects of classical Catholicism, like the squirming agony of confessional. Guilt. Single-minded pursuit of a higher goal. Restricted reading matter . . .
Garry wasn't as willing to generalize about the country on the basis of a curtain over a window in a trailer. He thought there might be a simpler explanation: "Maybe the Elephant Man got a job in Nicaragua."
The comment was encouraging. Eight hours before, my friend's conversation had to do with an imagined case of malaria. .
"Tell me about Nicaragua," I said.
"We made it."
"Something else."
"It was always the biggest obstacle on this ..."
"There's something else."
Garry paused.
"I lost it there once," he said finally. It was a story he didn't like to tell. "The only time in my life I ever just really lost it."
Back in 1977, Garry had been traveling in Latin America with his girlfriend, a French Canadian named Solange. They were hitchhiking back to Canada. At the southern border of Nicaragua they were detained at customs. Garry was put into a small room. A man who seemed to be the commanding officer came in, and, without a word, took offhis cheap digital watch and put it in Garry's shirt pocket. When the man started to walk out of the room, Garry jumped up and gave the watch back.
"The guy was playing around with me," Garry said. "You know. He was showing me he could do anything he wanted to me. A bully kind of deal."
"Yeah, but that was Somoza time."
"You don't understand," Garry said. "It's not politics I'm talking about. I'm talking about losing it."
I thought about the times stress and fatigue gang up on a person; about the swirling mindstorm of dread and anxiety that is panic. It is a kind of insanity, accompanied by profuse sweating, a racing pulse, and the inability to function. And what is more frightening than any outside stimulus is the idea that you are no longer in control of your own life. You think: I can never come back. Not now.
It happens to everyone at some time or another; it happens in business, or in personal relationships. It happens for good reason; or for no reason at all. The context isn't important. When people say they are losing it, they mean they are losing their minds.
Ken Langley, Garry's partner on the around-the-world trip, knew he was "losing it" when he asked to be restrained, tied up, because he couldn't stop seeing himself opening the airplane door and happily stepping to his death.
Garry said: "This customs guy tried to put his watch back in my pocket—I don't know what he was doing or why—and I wouldn't let him. So they wouldn't let us into the country. We had to go back to Costa Rica. The only place to sleep was in that town where we got diesel this morning. What's it, about forty miles from the border?"
A bus came by and Garry flagged it down. The driver would take them to the town for $10. "It was robbery," Garry said, "but we paid it. So we get on the bus and all the women are sitting in front, all the men are in the back. The men started calling out to Solange. She spoke fluent Spanish and didn't like being called what they were calling her. She also had a fiery French-Canadian temper
and she said a few things that made the women laugh. The men just shut up and stared at me.
"This all happened in a few seconds. I still hadn't found a seat. The
only place for me was in the very back. So I squeezed in there. The guy next to me leans over. I can feel his breath on my neck. He says, in English, 'Twenty bucks or you bleed.' "
"So what did you do?"
"I gave him twenty bucks."
I thought about it for a minute.
"So," I said, "when we came up on that southern border . . ."
"Where it all happened ten years ago . . ."
"You started feeling it again."
"Yeah," Garry said. "And that's probably why I thought I had malaria. I mean, that sounds crazy to me now. And then when they gave our papers to that poor crazy kid, I thought it was starting all over. I thought they were going to start that bully stuff, playing around with us."
"You kind of barked at those kids at the Costa Rican border. I thought there was something wrong then."
"It started before that," Garry said. "I felt it in Panama, but it got worse. And then I'm sitting at the gas station, talking about malaria. I figured you knew I was starting to blow up. But you were calm. You reached out and felt my forehead. I thought, there's another person here. It's going to be all right. I'm going to come through it.
"And then the Costa Rican lady tried to give me five bucks. I looked down at this wadded-up bill in her hand and I felt tears come into my eyes. She saw it. I know she did. And she thought I really needed the money. I don't know . . ."
We hadn't been stopped by police once in Nicaragua. There were no guns and no threats of ambush. The war was on hold until the various parties decided what they wanted to do about the Arias peace plan. It had been a fast, easy drive. And, for Garry Sowerby, it had been terrifying.
"It was never about politics," Garry said. "It wasn't about Nicaragua or Nicaraguans. All that back there: it was about me."