Turn a New Corner

Legs are sore after a good walk around Managua this morning and another few miles of plodding around Leon, this evening.  This second walk was done alone and it is a sharpened exercise.  Every other trip of your life flashes up when you turn a new corner and reminded of this Colombia, or Crete, in a way that never happens when you walk around in a familiar location or when you make your way out in a group.

Leon has a remarkable Cathedral.  It’s large and white occupying rise as one approaches from town.  There was a service on, that involved the clergy but was not a mass as the media were also there.  I tried to be discrete as I took in the construction and avoided the film crew.  I asked the guard where the tomb of the poet Ruben Dario was and she showed me to where the marble lion guarded his resting place.  I like a town that prioritizes a poet. 

Invariably one is drawn up to the next church that rises up a few blocks away.  And then, off to the right, a few blocks down is another.  I sat in front of the gate.  The benches in a small park were painted bright yellow.  A worn man my own age with impossibly dirty feet was asleep, drunk, on the cheerful bench.  I stared up at the pink plaster and considered how it was that this faith commanded so much of the world’s consciousness for so long.  This volcano-strewn causeway that rides up to Antigua and further up the spine to Mexico City, and down to Cuzco, home to millenniums’ old civilizations that were eradicated so swiftly.  An eradication so thorough and, to my thinking, unmatched in the Old World unfolded here in an historical heartbeat, where all that was and all that made sense was definitively wiped away, replacing the horror of human sacrifice with the horror of human sacrifice.  Christianity forced upon the population that remained, with seemingly complete, resignation. 

I am in Latin America.  In Vietnam the struggle against the United States is an ephemeral blink compared to the enduring theme of resisting China.  Here, the anti-Colonial struggle with Spain is distant echo, whereas the anti-imperialist struggle against the Yankee behemoth remains dominant.  My daughters have formed their American identity largely outside of the United States.  How could they know anything of this narrative?  And so we begin the New World version of the story.  I am grateful for the chance to remember why we all hated Ronald Reagan during his reign, before his hagiography. 

In Managua we began the day climbing the Loma de Tiscapa above the city to the former palace, and the former prison, beneath the austere shadow of Sandino the source of inspiration for the FSLN, who was murdered here above this volcanic lake.  We strolled to the vacant Plaza de Revolution through an outdoor avenue commemorating the revolutionary history.  We drove past the huge roundabout cartoon poster for Hugo Chavez, cast beside colorful iron trees the ruling party has planted for beautification.  And I thought of similar civic commemorations in Accra dedicated to the Burkinabe Thomas Sankara.  Revolutionaries venerated in foreign capitals; revolutionaries who are discarded by the dominant narrative that my country has the privilege of authoring. 

Having just read Jared Diamond’s latest book, about traditional societies, I spare a thought for the people of Nicaragua.  This food is fried.  It’s lovely for the first day or two. But, as I can recall from my visits to Guatemala in 1989, refried beans and deep-fried everything gets old, very fast, and even faster in the heat. My wife asked: “Why are the woman all so fat?”  Good question.  Whatever the indigenous diet of five hundred years ago must have been has now been tossed into a deep fat fryer.   Yankee’s are certainly responsible for all the Coke a Cola here, but I suspect the Nica’s must look within to address this salty, starchy, sweet and crispy, compeltely unhealthy comidas tipicas.

Everyone is napping into the evening.  I must go wake them, before it's too late.