The Jaguar Smile (19 page)

‘One worries for the future,’ Silvia said after a time. ‘Because if the Contra come to power the Sandinistas will go into the mountains and become guerrillas again, so it’s endless, no?’ I suggested that if the revolution managed to outlast Reagan, his successor might follow a different line, and without US support the Contra weren’t much to worry about. She looked dubious but was too polite to disagree openly. ‘It’s possible, what you say,’ she said, without conviction.

I asked my well-worn question: ‘What do you think the government should do, then? Should it try and make peace with the Americans?’

‘You said “Americans”,’ she reproached me.

‘I’m sorry. North Americans. Unitedstatesians. Reaganians. Them.’

‘It’s all right,’ she forgave me quickly. ‘When I first came to Europe from Nicaragua, it would shock me to hear the US called “America”. I wanted to protest, But
we
are America, not just them. But now I say it too: America, Americans. Europe teaches you a different perspective.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘it certainly does.’

She went back to my question. ‘No, they can’t give in. The war must go on. It’s difficult to know what to do. The revolution exists. It has to exist, or there’s no hope. But what problems! What difficulties! What grief!’

She had started crying again, and was fighting against it. I pretended to think it was just her heavy cold.

I was surprised and touched by the force of what she’d said, this sweet middle-class woman with her affluent complaints, whose mother might have lived if it hadn’t been for the shortages.
‘It has to exist, or there’s no hope.’

We parted in Madrid, and returned to our separate lives, two migrants making our way in this West stuffed with money, power and things, this North that taught us how to see from its privileged point of view. But maybe we were the lucky ones; we knew that other perspectives existed. We had seen the view from elsewhere.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The translations on
this page
–
this page
,
this page
–
this page
,
this page
,
this page
–
this page
, and
this page
are taken from
Nicaragua in Revolution: The Poets Speak
, ed. Aldaraca, Baker, Rodríguez and Zimmerman, MEP Publications, Minneapolis (with, in some cases, some small changes made by myself); that on
this page
from
Nicaragua in Reconstruction and at War
, ed. Marc Zimmerman, MEP Publications. I have also quoted from
Risking a Somersault in the Air: Conversations with Nicaraguan Writers
, by Margaret Randall, Solidarity Publications.

I should like to thank all those, in London and in Nicaragua, who gave me invaluable assistance and advice, most particularly Nicaragua’s Ambassador to the UK, H.E. Francisco d’Escoto; Biddy Richards; my interpreter, Margarita Clark; and, of course, Sra. Rosario Murillo and the ASTC.

I can find no adequate words of thanks for the hospitality I was shown by the people of Nicaragua.

—S.R.

S
ALMAN
R
USHDIE
is the author of nine novels—
Grimus, Midnight’s Children
(for which he won the Booker Prize and the “Booker of Bookers”),
Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury
, and
Shalimar the Clown
—and one collection of short stories,
East, West
. He has also published four other works of nonfiction:
Imaginary Homelands, The Wizard of Oz, Mirrorwork
, and
Step Across This Line
.