Century of the Wind Page 11

  Santos López

  Whoever joins the liberating army gets no pay, no pay ever, only the right to be called brother. He has to find a rifle on his own, in battle, and maybe a uniform stripped from some dead Marine, to wear once the pants have been properly shortened.

  Santos López has been with Sandino from day one. He had worked for the farmers who owned him since he was eight. He was twelve at the time of the San Albino mine rebellion, and became a water boy and messenger in Sandino’s army, a spy among drunken or distracted enemies, and along with his other buddies, specialized in setting ambushes and creating diversions with cans and whatever noisy odds and ends he could lay his hands on to make a few people seem like a crowd.

  Santos López turns seventeen on the day Sandino promotes him to colonel.

  (236, 267, and 361)

  1931: Bocay

  Tranquilino

  In Sandino’s rickety arsenal the finest weapon is a Browning machine-gun of the latest model, rescued from a North American plane downed by rifle fire.

  In the hands of Tranquilino Jarquín, this Browning shoots and sings.

  Tranquilino is the cook. He shows one tooth when he smiles, sticks an orchid in his hat, and as he stirs the big steaming pot, meat-poor but rich in aroma, he tosses down a good swig of rum.

  In Sandino’s army drinking is forbidden, Tranquilino excepted. It took a lot to win that privilege. But without his little swigs this artist of wooden spoon and trigger doesn’t function. When they put him on a water diet, his dishes are flat, his shots twisted and off-key.

  (236 and 393)

  1931: Bocay

  Little Cabrera

  Tranquilino makes music with the machinegun, Pedro Cabrera with the trumpet. For Tranquilino’s Browning it’s bursts of tangos, marches, and ballads, while Little Cabrera’s trumpet moans protests of love and proclaims brave deeds.

  To kiss his celestial trumpet each morning, Little Cabrera must freeze his body and shut his eyes. Before dawn he wakens the soldiers, and at night lulls them to sleep, blowing low, low, lingering notes.

  Musician and poet, warm heart and itchy feet, Little Cabrera has been Sandino’s assistant since the war began. Nature has given him a yard and a half of stature and seven women.

  (393)

  1931: Hanwell

  The Winner

  Charlie the Tramp visits Hanwell School. He walks on one leg, as if skating. He twists his ear and out spurts a stream of water. Hundreds of children, orphaned, poor, or abandoned, scream with laughter. Thirty-five years ago, Charlie Chaplin was one of these children. Now he recognizes the chair he used to sit on and the corner of the dismal gym where he was birched.

  Later he had escaped to London. In those days, shop windows displayed sizzling pork chops and golden potatoes steeped in gravy; Chaplin’s nose still remembers the smell that filtered through the glass to mock him. And still engraved in his memory are the prices of other unattainable treats: a cup of tea, one halfpenny; a bit of herring, one penny; a tart, twopence.

  Twenty years ago he left England in a cattle boat. Now he returns, the most famous man in the world. A cloud of journalists follows him like his shadow, and wherever he goes crowds jostle to see him, touch him. He can do whatever he wants. At the height of the talkie euphoria, his silent films have a devastating success. And he can spend whatever he wants—although he never wants. On the screen, Charlie the Tramp, poor leaf in the wind, knows nothing of money; in reality, Charles Chaplin, who perspires millions, watches the pennies and is incapable of looking at a painting without calculating its price. He will never share the fate of Buster Keaton, a man with open pockets, from whom everything flies away as soon as he earns it.

  (121 and 383)

  1932: Hollywood

  The Loser

  Buster Keaton arrives at the Metro studios hours late, dragging the hangover of last night’s drinking spree: feverish eyes, coppery tongue, dishrag muscles. Who knows how he manages to execute the clownish pirouettes and recite the idiotic jokes ordered by the script.

  Now his films are talkies and Keaton is not allowed to improvise; nor may he do retakes in search of that elusive instant when poetry discovers imprisoned laughter and unchains it. Keaton, genius of liberty and silence, must follow to the letter the charlatan scenarios written by others. In this way costs are halved and talent eliminated, according to the production norms of the movie factories of the sound-film era. Left behind forever are the days when Hollywood was a mad adventure.

  Every day Keaton feels more at home with dogs and cows. Every night he opens a bottle of bourbon and implores his own memory to drink and be still.

  (128 and 382)

  1932: Mexico City

  Eisenstein

  While in Mexico they accuse him of being a bolshevik, homosexual, and libertine; in Hollywood they call him a red dog and friend of murderers.

  Sergei Eisenstein has come to Mexico to film an indigenous epic. Before it is half-produced, the guts are ripped out. The Mexican censor bans some scenes because the truth is all very well, but not so much of it, thank you. The North American producer leaves the filmed footage in the hands of whoever may want to cut it to pieces.

  Eisenstein’s film Que Viva México ends up as nothing but a pile of grandiose scraps, images lacking articulation put together incoherently or with deceit, dazzling letters torn loose from a word that was never before spoken about this country, this delirium sprung from the place where the bottom of the sea meets the center of the earth: pyramids that are volcanoes about to erupt, creepers interwoven like hungry bodies, stones that breathe …

  (151 and 305)

  1932: The Roads of Santa Fe

  The Puppeteer

  didn’t know he was one until the evening when, high on a balcony in Buenos Aires with a friend, he noticed a haycart passing down the street. On the hay lay a young boy smoking, face to the sky, hands behind his neck, legs crossed. Both he and his friend felt an irrepressible urge to get away. The friend took off with a woman toward the mysterious frozen lands to the South of the South; and the puppeteer discovered puppeteering, craft of the free, and hit the road on a cart pulled by two horses.

  From town to town along the banks of the River Paraná, the cart’s wooden wheels leave long scars. The name of the puppeteer, conjurer of happiness, is Javier Villafañe. Javier travels with his children whose flesh is paper and paste. The best beloved of them is Master Globetrotter: long sad nose, black cape, flying necktie. During the show he is an extension of Javier’s hand, and afterward, he sleeps and dreams at his feet, in a shoebox.

  1932: Izalco

  The Right to Vote and Its Painful Consequences

  General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, president by coup d’état, convokes the people of El Salvador to elect deputies and mayors. Despite a thousand traps, the tiny Communist Party wins the elections. The general takes umbrage. Scrutiny of ballots is suspended sine die.

  Swindled, the Communists rebel. Salvadorans erupt on the same day that the Izalco volcano erupts. As boiling lava runs down the slopes and clouds of ashes blot out the sky, red campesinos attack the barracks with machetes in Izalco, Nahuizalco, Tacuba, Juayúa, and other towns. For three days America’s first Soviets come to power.

  Three days. Three months of slaughter follow. Farabundo Martí and other Communist leaders face firing squads. Soldiers beat to death the Indian chief José Feliciano Ama, leader of the revolution in Izalco. They hang Ama’s corpse in the main plaza and force schoolchildren to watch the show. Thirty thousand campesinos, denounced by their employers, or condemned on mere suspicion or old wives’ tales, dig their own graves with their hands. Children die too, for Communists, like snakes, need to be killed young. Wherever a dog or pig scratches up the earth, remains of people appear. One of the firing-squad victims is the shoemaker Miguel Mármol.

  (9, 21, and 404)

  1932: Soyapango

  Miguel at Twenty-Six

  As they take them away bound in a truck, Mig
uel recognizes his childhood haunts.

  “What luck,” he thinks, “I’m going to die where my umbilical cord was buried.”

  They beat them to the ground with rifle butts, then shoot them in pairs. The truck’s headlights and the moon give more than enough light.

  After a few volleys, it’s the turn of Miguel and a man who sells engravings, condemned for being Russian. The Russian and Miguel, standing before the firing squad, grip each other’s hands, which are bound behind their backs. Miguel itches all over and desperately needs to scratch; this fills his mind as he hears: “Ready! Aim! Fire!”

  Miguel regains consciousness under a pile of bodies dripping blood. He feels his head throbbing and bleeding, and the pain of the bullets in his body, soul, and clothes. He hears the click of a rifle reloading. A coup de grâce.

  Another. Another. His eyes misted with blood, Miguel awaits the final shot, but feels a machete chopping at him instead.

  The soldiers kick the bodies into a ditch and throw dirt over them. Hearing the trucks drive off, Miguel, wounded and cut, tries to move. It takes him centuries to crawl out from under so much death and earth. Finally, managing to walk at a ferociously slow pace, more falling than standing, he very gradually gets out, wearing the sombrero of a comrade whose name was Serafín.

  And so occurs the fifth birth of Miguel Mármol, at twenty-six years of age.

  (126)

  1932: Managua

  Sandino Is Advancing

  in a great sweep that reaches the banks of Lake Managua. The occupation troops fall back in disarray. Meanwhile, two photographs appear in the world’s newspapers. One shows Lieutenant Pensington of the United States Navy holding up a trophy, a head chopped from a Nicaraguan campesino. From the other smiles the entire general staff of the Nicaraguan National Guard, officers wearing high boots and safari headgear. At their center is seated the director of the Guard, Colonel Calvin B. Matthews. Behind them is the jungle. At the feet of the group, sprawled on the ground, is a dog. The jungle and the dog are the only Nicaraguans.

  (118 and 361)

  1932: San Salvador

  Miguel at Twenty-Seven

  Of those who saved Miguel, no one is left. Soldiers have riddled with bullets the comrades who found him in a ditch, those who carried him across the river on a chair of hands, those who hid him in a cave, and those who managed to bring him to his sister’s home in San Salvador. When his sister saw the specter of Miguel stitched with bullets and crisscrossed with machete cuts, she had to be revived with a fan. Praying, she began a novena for his eternal rest.

  The funeral service proceeds. Miguel begins to recover as best he can, hidden behind the altar set up in his memory, with nothing but the chichipince-juice ointment his sister applies with saintly patience to his purulent wounds. Lying behind the curtain, burning with fever, Miguel spends his birthday listening to disconsolate relatives and neighbors awash in oceans of tears, extolling his memory with nonstop prayers.

  On one of these nights a military patrol stops at the door.

  “Who are you praying for?”

  “For the soul of my brother, the departed.”

  The soldiers enter, approach the altar, wrinkle their noses.

  Miguel’s sister clutches her rosary. The candles flicker before the image of our Lord Jesus Christ. Miguel has the sudden urge to cough. The soldiers cross themselves. “May he rest in peace,” they say, and continue on their way.

  And so occurs the sixth birth of Miguel Mármol, at twenty-seven years of age.

  (126)

  1933: Managua

  The First U.S. Military Defeat in Latin America

  On the first day of the year the Marines leave Nicaragua with all their ships and planes. The scraggy general, the little man who looks like a capital T with his wide-brimmed sombrero, has humbled an empire.

  The U.S. press deplores the many dead in so many years of occupation, but stresses the value of the training of their aviators. Thanks to the war against Sandino, the United States has for the first time been able to experiment with aerial bombing from Fokker and Curtiss planes specially designed to fight in Nicaragua.

  The departing Colonel Matthews is replaced by a sympathetic and faithful native officer, Anastasio Tacho Somoza, as head of the National Guard, now called the Guardia Nacional.

  As soon as he reaches Managua, the triumphant Sandino says: “Now we’re free. I won’t fire another shot.”

  The president of Nicaragua, Juan Bautista Sacasa, greets him with an embrace. General Somoza embraces him too.

  (118 and 361)

  1933: Camp Jordán

  The Chaco War

  Bolivia and Paraguay are at war. The two poorest countries in South America, the two with no ocean, the two most thoroughly conquered and looted, annihilate each other for a bit of map. Concealed in the folds of both flags, Standard Oil and Royal Dutch Shell are disputing the oil of the Chaco.

  In this war, Paraguayans and Bolivians are compelled to hate each other in the name of a land they do not love, that nobody loves. The Chaco is a gray desert inhabited by thorns and snakes; not a songbird or a person in sight. Everything is thirsty in this world of horror. Butterflies form desperate clots on the few drops of water. For Bolivians, it is going from freezer to oven: They are hauled down from the heights of the Andes and dumped into these roasting scrublands. Here some die of bullets, but more die of thirst.

  Clouds of flies and mosquitos pursue the soldiers, who charge through thickets, heads lowered, on forced marches against enemy lines. On both sides barefoot people are the down payment on the errors of their officers. The slaves of feudal landlord and rural priest die in different uniforms, at the service of imperial avarice.

  One of the Bolivian soldiers marching to death speaks. He says nothing about glory, nothing about the Fatherland. He says, breathing heavily, “A curse on the hour that I was born a man.”

  (354 and 402)

  Céspedes

  On the Bolivian side, this pitiful epic will be related by Augusto Céspedes:

  A squadron of soldiers in search of water start digging a well with picks and shovels. The little rain that has fallen has already evaporated, and there is no water anywhere. At twelve meters the water hunters come upon liquid mud. But at thirty meters, at forty-five, the pulley brings up bucketfuls of sand, each one drier than the last. The soldiers keep on digging, day after day, into that well of sand, ever deeper, ever more silent. And when the Paraguayans, likewise hounded by thirst, launch an attack, the Bolivians die defending the well as if it contained water.

  (96)

  Roa Bastos

  From the Paraguayan side, Augusto Roa Bastos will tell the story. He too will speak of wells that become graves, and of the multitude of dead, and of the living who are only distinguishable from them by the fact that they move, though like drunkards who have forgotten the way home. He will accompany the lost soldiers, who haven’t a drop of water, not even to shed as tears.

  (380)

  1934: Managua

  Horror Film: Scenario for Two Actors and a Few Extras

  Somoza leaves the house of Arthur Bliss Lane, ambassador of the United States.

  Sandino arrives at the house of Sacasa, president of Nicaragua.

  While Somoza sits down to work with his officers, Sandino sits down to supper with the president.

  Somoza tells his officers that the ambassador has just given his unconditional support to the killing of Sandino.

  Sandino tells the president about the problems of the Wiwilí cooperative, where he and his soldiers have been working the land for over a year.

  Somoza explains to his officers that Sandino is a communistic enemy of order, who has many more weapons concealed than those he has turned in.

  Sandino explains to the president that Somoza won’t let him work in peace.

  Somoza discusses with his officers whether Sandino should die by poison, shooting, airplane accident, or ambush in the mountains.

  Sandino
discusses with the president the growing power of the Guardia Nacional, led by Somoza, and warns that Somoza will soon blow him away to sit in the presidential chair himself.

  Somoza finishes settling some practical details and leaves his officers.

  Sandino finishes his coffee and takes leave of the president.

  Somoza goes off to a poetry reading and Sandino goes off to his death.

  While Somoza listens to the sonnets of Zoila Rosa Cárdenas, young luminary of Peruvian letters who honors this country by her visit, Sandino is shot in a place called The Skull, on Lonesome Road.

  (339 and 405)

  1934: Managua

  The Government Decides That Crime Does Not Exist

  That night, Colonel Santos López escapes the trap in Managua. On a bleeding leg, his seventh bullet wound in these years of war, he climbs over roofs, drops to the ground, jumps walls, and finally begins a nightmare crawl northward along the railroad tracks.

  The next day, while Santos López is still dragging his wounded leg along the lake shore, a wholesale massacre takes place in the mountains. Somoza orders the Wiwilí cooperative destroyed, and the new Guardia Nacional strikes with total surprise, wiping out Sandino’s former soldiers, who were sowing tobacco and bananas and had a hospital half built. The mules are saved, but not the children.

  Soon after, banquets in homage to Somoza are given by the United States embassy in Managua and by the most exclusive clubs of León and Granada.

  The government issues orders to forget. An amnesty wipes out all crimes committed since the eve of Sandino’s death.

  (267 and 405)

  1934: San Salvador

  Miguel at Twenty-Nine

  Hunted as ever by the Salvadoran police, Miguel finds refuge in the house of the Spanish consul’s lover.