His Azure World

The family is asleep and I am sitting out in a courtyard at sun down in the city of Leon, Nicaragua.  This is a former convent and there is a perimeter of palm trees that ring this courtyard.  A fountain is bubbling in the middle, which I can hear over the wind and the dull drum beat of some song I don’t want to know anything more about.  A couple that must be only ten years older than I are walking toward me.   The man is lumbering.  How long before I lumber?  This is the sort of wind one might imagine before a tremendous deluge. 

I got a glimpse of the city for a few hours yesterday while my family slept.  Today we largely retraced my steps.  But before we did, we were able to take in a wonderful museum of Central American modern art and then the home of the poet Ruben Dario.  I am mid way through the history of the Sandinista revolution by Stephen Kinzer.  He writes well.  I am enjoying his company here in town.  He was conveniently winding through a sub current of his tale, wherein he described his own fascination for Dario. 

In 1888 he burst onto and unsuspecting Europe with Azul a short but dazzling collection of stories and poems written in fresh, melodic rhythms.  His later works were of surpassing beauty, confirming all of his early promise.  Praise followed him during his years in South America and Europe and at the time of his death in 1916, shortly after his final return to Leon, he was the leading literary figure in the Spanish-speaking world.  From wretched and faraway Nicaragua had sprung this brilliant vagabond spirit, a poet deeply versed in the classics, enamored of French and Italian culture and master of a musical sense that allowed him to fashion some of he loveliest verses written in any language.

In preparation for this trip I had read a large collection of his work and, although hobbled to have to read all in English, I was immediately drawn in to his azure world of evocative verse, grotesque short stories and unfiltered glimpses of my own homeland, for better and for worse.  As is the case in most parts of the world, he is both fascinated and repulsed by the United States. 

It’s gotten dark now.  There are still lights at the base of each palm and before the fountain but the courtyard is big enough for darkness to dwarf these gestures.   Where does the courtyard come from?  Clearly this courtyard in a Franciscan convent, built in a Spanish colony comes from Iberia.  And we know that courtyard’s of Spain and Portugal were the legacy of Moorish occupation.  Is it safe to follow the thread further back?  Were the Arabs influenced earlier by the older font of regional civilization, the Persians?  And if we make it that far, it’s only a leap over the Himalayas to suggest that the same time that silk and porcelain were making their way from the Han capital near Xian all the way to Rome, that the simple notion of walling a dwelling off from the world around an enclosed courtyard center, that this idea also made its way from a civilized China out on to the world?   My wife certainly liked this thread.  When will I have the time to dig into Persia?  Surely that is the missing link. 

The wind has stopped.