Aftermath

by Carl Frode Tiller

  But we got there without being robbed. Well, I say “there”: the bus was actually meant to be going to Estelí, but for some reason that no one bothered to explain to us we wound up in Matagalpa, a little farther south. We looked at each other and shook our heads when we realized where we were, but we were too exhausted to ask what had happened, and it didn’t really matter that much. We didn’t know anything about either town anyway.

  I don’t know how many times we had been in this same situation, I don’t know how many times we had found ourselves standing in a strange square, hungry and thirsty and flicking through the Lonely Planet guide, looking for a cheap place to spend the night. And yet this time it was all so different. Now that I know more about Nicaragua, I understand that my first impressions of Matagalpa were colored by the grueling bus journey and the tension that had grown between us since you had become tired of traveling, but still: the first thing I thought of as we stepped off the bus was Apocalypse Now, that and Heart of Darkness. According to the Lonely Planet guide the air in the mountain town of Matagalpa was cool and refreshing, but late in the day though it was we were met by a wall of steamy, blistering heat. We were drenched in sweat, our T-shirts and the straps of our homemade fanny packs plastered to our skin. Neither of us said a word, we simply stood there ankle deep in mud, gazing around about. There was not a backpacker to be seen, only Nicaraguans and almost all of them men. Some wore baseball caps and tattered T-shirts, but most sported cowboy hats and battered boots with spurs. They rode or sauntered past us. Several of them carried guns and a few yards away from us four men were sitting in the back of a red pickup truck passing around a bottle of rum while comparing two pistols and clearly disagreeing on which was better. Behind us we heard sounds of laughter from where two small boys were amusing themselves by throwing stones at a dog with an injured paw that was having difficulty getting away from them and on the other side of what was in fact a road, but looked more like a river of mud, stood a row of rickety market stalls. Most of these were closed or in the process of closing for the day, but a few were still open and hanging from the roofs of these, in the blazing sun, were huge red glistening joints of meat, which had presumably been there all day. The air was black with flies, but apart from waving the remnants of an old T-shirt or some other rag around a bit whenever a customer approached, the stallholders did nothing to prevent the insects from landing on the meat. My stomach turned at the sight and I didn’t feel any better when my nostrils were assaulted by the sickly-sweet smell of tainted meat and rotting fruit and vegetables mingling with the acrid reek of the countless piles of garbage that lay round about, stewing and fermenting in the heat. “I’m not that hungry after all,” I said as we started to make our way toward the guesthouse we had decided on. Some guesthouse. We were the only people staying there and the tiny woman behind the desk didn’t seem unduly interested in having any guests—she did not look at all pleased when we walked in and she was forced to leave the soap opera she had been watching on a portable black-and-white set powered by a car battery. She muttered a price in Spanish and when we didn’t quite catch what she had said, she didn’t deign to repeat it. She heaved a big sigh, snatched the two córdoba notes you had produced, put them into a drawer, and gave you back a few coins. “Number four,” she grunted, slapping the key down on the desk and turning on her heel almost in the same action. Our room was on the second floor, at the very end of a dark corridor with cockroaches scuttling around the floor. From the shared bathroom down the hall emanated the stench of the sewers, the shower was a makeshift DIY job with the wiring totally exposed to the water, and had it not been for the fact that we were the only people staying there and that there was a huge common terrace overlooking the river and the jungle where you could write and drink undisturbed, we would probably have checked out again pretty soon. But it was peaceful and quiet, so we stayed.

  Matagalpa had merited no more than a couple of paragraphs in the Lonely Planet guide and I managed to take in the few sights mentioned on one of the many mornings when you were sleeping off a hangover. From then on my days were mainly spent lying in the hammock on the terrace, writing in my diary, or reading novels (I had brought two of my set texts with me, but as far as I can remember I never got around to reading so much as a page of them), usually with a cold Victoria or Toña within reach. During our first week there I did feel duty bound to take a little walk every day, to get to know the town and the surrounding area. I could read and write at home, after all, and to lie in a hammock reading for hours on end, well, it rather rendered the whole trip pointless, I felt. But eventually I dropped my daily walk. For one thing there was little or nothing to do or see in Matagalpa—for someone like me, who couldn’t speak the language, that is. My Spanish was good enough for ordering food and asking directions, but I couldn’t hold a proper conversation in it, so I was cut off, so to speak, from any social contact. Previously on the trip not a day had gone by without me exchanging at least a few words with other English-speaking backpackers: Germans, Swedes, Argentinians. We met them on buses, in hostels and guesthouses, we went sightseeing with them during the day and drank beer with them in the evening, talking all the time. But there were no other backpackers in Matagalpa, only Nicas, and none of them spoke English. So for the first time on our travels, when I walked around Matagalpa I felt like a stranger. I felt as though I was in a bubble, locked inside myself. Not only that but being outdoors was not at all comfortable. One moment it was baking hot and so humid and oppressive that it was hard to breathe, the next the heavens would open and a torrential downpour would engulf the town, a massive deluge that went on and on, raindrops the size of pennies hammering down, roads dissolving into rivers of ocherous sludge in which it was almost impossible to stay upright, and puddles of mud reaching almost to my knees. I didn’t feel safe, either. Crime figures were lower here than in Guatemala, but they were on the increase, and as a lone, pink-cheeked Western woman, not only did I stand out like a sore thumb, I was also easy prey for anyone whose intentions were less than honorable.

  So after a while I only really went out to eat and this made for long, uneventful, and pretty boring days. Then one evening: we had eaten a dinner of beans, rice, tortillas, and bone-dry steak, drunk two or three beers, and ordered a half bottle of rum and two bottles of cola in what we had taken to be an ordinary comedor, only to discover that it was in fact a brothel. Suddenly a brawny, bare-chested guy appeared and started moving the furniture about. He pushed all of the unoccupied tables together to form a sort of catwalk running from the bar to the middle of the room, then placed a chair at the end nearest the bar. Whatever was about to happen was clearly a regular event, one held more or less at a set time, because within minutes the premises, which had been almost empty, were jam-packed. Every seat was taken. By men: young men, middle-aged men, old men, some of them so drunk they could barely stand, others looking perfectly sober and all of them trying to secure a place with as good a view as possible of the catwalk. And then the whores emerged from the back room. One by one they stepped up onto the chair next to the bar and from there onto the first table. And while the men whooped and cheered and shouted out comments, either at the whores or to one another, the girls proceeded to walk toward the middle of the room. I had seen similar scenes in western movies or in films depicting the life of Paris’s Montmartre and Pigalle districts in the early 1900s, and no doubt in other films too. But the prostitutes in those had looked very different, they had been bawdy and sexy in a charming, femme-fatale way, lusty and generally buxom women who winked confidently and ran their tongues over scarlet lips as they bared a little bit more flesh, and if some horny old goat who couldn’t keep his hands to himself tried to grope any of them, she wouldn’t hesitate to give the person concerned a well-aimed kick in the face, safe in the knowledge that her minders would protect her if the culprit made any move to retaliate.

  But these whores were different. They had obviously been instructed to look and act like the prostit
utes in the movies, they wiggled and tried to look sexy, but they weren’t convincing. Their movements were awkward, their eyes flicked uncertainly from side to side, and they looked scared, they looked as though they had been driven out of the back room, and unlike the women I had seen on the silver screen, they could never have made anyone believe they were doing this of their own free will. These were ordinary Nicaraguan girls. I had heard of the land wars in this region. I knew that farmers in these parts were being coerced into selling their land to wealthy landowners who had returned to the country from Miami, where they had been living since the revolution. I knew that the farmers were faced with the choice of living as farm laborers (which effectively meant working as slaves on the estates) or of moving into the cities, where unemployment could be as high as an incredible 90 percent and crime and prostitution were almost the only options open to them if they were to feed themselves and their families. All this I knew and I wasn’t stupid, I knew that these girls, these terrified, half-grown teenagers parading only a few yards away from me, doing their utmost to look sexy, were the young women I had read about, but here they were in the flesh, every one of them looking like the girl next door. In fact the only difference between them and me or the girls I knew back home in Norway was that these girls were poor and slightly darker skinned and as soon as this thought struck me I became another person, I would put it as strongly as that: I became the person I am today. It happened when my eyes met those of a pretty girl with skinny wrists wearing a white T-shirt with the phrase “I ♥ New York” on the front. Apart from her and the other prostitutes I was the only woman in the place and when she looked my way I could almost see the shame in her eyes. It hit me like a physical blow, I longed to tell her that she had nothing to be ashamed of, but I also understood her reaction. In her place I would have reacted in exactly the same way and for some reason I think it was this, together with the perfectly ordinary appearance of these girls, that led me to identify with them as I had not done with other unfortunates I had come across on our travels. We had seen a lot of misery and wretchedness along the way: grubby street children sitting or lying on the pavements, having sniffed themselves into apathy; families of ten or twelve living in tumbledown shacks that the sand and dust blew straight through; crippled beggars gazing at us with mournful dog eyes and pleading for a few coins for food. The scale of the poverty was massive and manifested itself in the most grotesque ways, but this was the first time I had felt that it had anything to do with me. The young woman whose eyes I had met was a sister. She and the other uncomfortable and terrified girls wiggling along that improvised catwalk were my sisters and it’s hard for me to describe the compassion and love I felt for them at that moment. As hard to describe as the fury, nay hatred, I felt for all the men who sat there gawping, eyes brimming with liquor and lust, ready to buy a village girl with money they ought to have been spending on food and clothing for their families. I had been describing myself as a feminist since I was a teenager and an active member of the Norwegian Union of Students, and over the previous year alone I had read masses of feminist literature as part of my course. Nonetheless, I would say that not until that moment, in a dirty little brothel in Nicaragua, was the feminist in me born. It was as if the sight of those poor girls surrounded by hordes of men brought to life all the works of feminist literature I had absorbed. I don’t really know how to explain it, but it reminded me of something my dad had said when he was told that he had cancer and no more than a month to live: he had known from the age of five that he was going to die one day, he said, but only now did he realize what it meant. In much the same way only then did I realize what all the feminist literature and all the knowledge I possessed on women’s liberation and equal rights meant, only then did I understand that all the theory and all the information I had gleaned from books was actually based on real life.

  For a little while I simply sat there very quietly, observing this grotesque scene, then suddenly I was overcome by a fit of uncontrollable weeping. Without a word I jumped up, stormed out, and took to my heels. You followed me out and I heard you calling my name again and again as you ran after me down the bemired streets of Matagalpa, but I didn’t stop, I ran all the way back to the guesthouse and when you walked in I was lying on the bed sobbing with the sleeping bag over my head. You knew how I felt, you said, but you didn’t. I believed then and I still believe today that you have to be a woman to fully understand how I was feeling at that moment and I said as much to you, or no, I didn’t say it, I bawled it at you. I was beside myself with grief and fury, you didn’t understand a thing, I screamed, you just wanted me to calm down, so you could have peace to work on a fucking novel that was never going to come to anything, certainly not as long as you carried on drinking the way you were doing.

  I apologized later for what I had said and we made up over a bottle of rum. But as I say, I had changed and only days later I was seized by another fit of rage. This time it happened after five Norwegians from an LAG solidarity brigade based in a village outside of Matagalpa moved into our guesthouse. The members of these brigades stayed with poor farming families and shared their daily lives, and these volunteers had come to town to write articles and reports on their stay, which they would send home to Norway before returning to their village. It was months since they had seen any other Norwegians, or any other Westerners for that matter, and they were surprised and delighted to meet us. You weren’t as happy to meet them, though, and that’s putting it mildly. You were nice enough to them for the first couple of days, if a little reserved, but then the shit hit the fan. Partly because they completely took over the terrace in the evening, making it impossible for you to write, but mainly because going on a solidarity brigade mission was an indication of a mindset that really rankled with the ironic observer in you. These people didn’t just think they could get under the skin of the Nicaraguan culture and way of life and understand it, you told me. They took the backpacker’s search for the authentic to the extreme by endeavoring to become Latin American themselves. It was too ridiculous for words, you said before going on to remind me of what had happened when we arranged to meet them at the Comedor San Ramón for a beer or two: the first guy turned up an hour later than we had agreed and when we smiled politely and said well, better late than never, he first pretended not to understand what we meant and then, when we explained that we had said we’d meet at seven o’clock, not eight o’clock, he laughed at us for being so Norwegian, implying that after a few months in Nicaragua he had forgotten the Norwegian love of punctuality that had ruled his life for twenty-odd years. He and the other LAG volunteers were, it seemed, on “Latin American time.” God, you hated that, you said, it was so fucking pretentious. And did I hear what that horse-faced girl had said later on that evening, when you asked whether we should order a bottle of Flor de Caña instead of Ron Plata: “Oh, I’ll stick with Ron Plata,” she said, “that’s what the farmers drink.” Had I ever heard the like? Flor de Caña was the only rum to rival the Cuban rums, but she would rather buy Ron Plata, which was absolutely disgusting, simply because that was the only rum the poor farmers could afford. Unbelievable. The one cost about twenty kroner more than the other, a lot for an impoverished Nicaraguan farmer, but nothing to Norwegians like us. It was all well and good to identify with and endeavor to understand what life was like for the poor and the oppressed, you said, but these LAG volunteers were trying to convince themselves and everyone else that they were poor too. “Just look at the way they were dressed,” you went on. “For fuck’s sake, they looked like they were auditioning for Oliver Twist or Les Misérables—with holes in the knees of their jeans and shirts so washed out there was no telling what color they had originally been. “Christ,” you said, “how much does a new T-shirt cost in this country? Two kroner? Five kroner? Ten?” You didn’t know, but you knew it was so little that these guys could have bought every single T-shirt in the whole town if they wanted to and the only reason they didn’t do so was that they wante
d to dress like poverty-stricken peasants!

  All of this came pouring out in an outburst that was, for you, unusually virulent and impassioned. But later that evening, when you were nearing the bottom of the rum bottle and simply couldn’t resist telling the LAG volunteers what you thought of them, you presented this same criticism in a more Wildean manner. Or tried to at any rate: “Ah, now you disappoint me,” you said when the girl with the horsey face removed her fanny pack and proceeded to count out the dollar bills she was going to change at the bank the next day. “And there was me thinking you really were dirt-poor.” And: “Oh, so you can read?” you asked a guy called Edvard, whom you had, of course, dubbed Eduardo. “The Sandinistas must have managed to reduce the illiteracy figures slightly while they were in power then.”