Portrait of a revolution.

PORTRAIT OF A REVOLUTION

WAITING TO pass muster in Managua's immigration room is lot like being in Purgatory--patience or prayer seems the only way out. The air stinks of old coughs and cheap smoke. A teller riffles off the mandatory exchange of U.S. $60 to 1,200,000 cordobas. Bill Haley and the Comets blast from an unseen speaker; a militiaman stands at tin-soldier attention, one stray toe tapping to "Rock around the Clock." I win release into an odd, ripe-lime twilight. Next to a wall, a mother in combat boots and camouflage fatigues ties a rumpled red ribbon in her baby girl's hair. On the road, faces line the cracked windows of old buses that lurch and exhale the black exhaust of bad petrol. A small car screeches to a stop. On its dented side, scrawled in purple, are three words: "COLT LANCER CAB." The driver, a yellowish fellow with flyaway hair and faraway eyes, emerges. Around his cigarette he grins, showing bad teeth and blue gums. He pries open the door with a screwdriver and says, "Bienvenido a Nicaragua!"

He takes me to Hotel Bolonia, a hostelry orphan, shabby but, for only $20 a night, close to clean. Because the exterior door remains locked, there is a bell to ring, and a peephole to pass. The lobby is small and seedy, with a firefly ceiling bulb and a little metal desk that holds a temperamental telephone. Along the back wall is a grand but vacant counter of carved wood. Once a private home, Hotel Bolonia has a past more genteel than its present, and more promising than its future.

In my room, there is an iron bedstead weeping rust, thin sheets, a private bar of soap, a precious roll of toilet paper, and a spurt-of-cold-water shower, except on Tuesdays and Fridays when there is no water at all. But compared to the press-happy, over-priced Hotel Intercontinental, the Bolonia looks good. And the Bolonia has Linda.

Linda is the desk girl, who warms to customers and smiles through blackouts. She negotiates with passing street vendors, so hungry guests can eat. On nights out, Linda is the money manager, flirt-thwarter, cab-hailer, and direction-giver. She knows permissible streets and black-market narrows, and addresses men with a natural sass.

Linda is a Bluefields girl, who was bright enough to earn a scholarship to Colegio Moravo, the only private high school in Managua. Bright, yes, but not lucky enough to leave Nicaragua when she wanted. As the receptionist at Hotel Bolonia, she earns 600,000 cordobas (about U.S. $8) a month, plus employee meals (of beans, rice, an occasional egg, and fruit), and an elemental upstairs cubicle with an open-air wall, a narrow cot, and a free-standing commode.

Linda is twenty years old and wants to go shopping: "I would like sometime to buy a blouse. This shirt I am wearing--it is not my style or size, but I am grateful to the nice lady guest who gave it to me. And a girl from Panama sent me these golden shoes." But shoes are $20 a pair and generic jeans as much, and utility underwear goes for $4. It takes a long time, no emergencies, constant good health, and a magician to build a wardrob in Nicaragua.

"You have more curl?" she asks.

Mascara.

She vanishes for a moment and re-emerges with eyelashes swabbed thick and black. She is lovely, and delighted with the Wonder Girl Wand that is now hers. In exchange, there's a night in a local reggae disco where cheap beer and deep-beat music drown the sirens' whine. On the wall are murals of musicians and posters of American rock stars, while on the dance floor, bodies writhe in the hot red glow of overhead spots. If the bladder can't wait, there's a urine corner in the back hall, and intentional splatters find the pressed cuffs of police who cruise the room from time to time, twitching to fight and listening, listening.

"Everyone here is anti-revolution," Linda whispers; then, "Watch." There is a general exhibition of a hand-jive routine. "It's a code," she says. "They are all Contra kids."

For the moment, all the flash and rhythm seem to help. But days later, as I leave, Linda dreams aloud of Florida schools, a husband, even a baby. But not here. Not now.

THE WALLS inside the Church of the Revolution boast another kind of mural: of martyrs of the revolution. In a version of the Ressurrection, a black man lifts a scarlet cross, not with the bent shoulders of hard labor, but with a defiant burst of a militant spirit. At the altar, Father Molina, Priest of the Revolution, begins the Mass for peace. Behind him, local guitarists hammer out a hymn--"Though the days pass, though the years pass, we must keep the fire, keep the flame, keep the fight--in El Salvador! Yes! Yes! In Guatemala! Yes! Yes! In Nicaragua! Yes! Yes!"

The sermon is short, some accounts of Biblical struggle against oppression and some promises of earthly reward for communal struggle against the demon. Then there is the stammering testimonial of a campesino from a remote district, giving thanks for deliverance from pogroms, then an offertory that brings the poorest to the basket with pittances, and finally a careful Communion where trembling tongues receive wafers of the Flesh, but no Blood of the Lamb is poured. Neighbor turns and holds neighbor. Little children are suffered to hug strangers. The congregation sings, "We Shall Overcome." Finally, even pacifist visitors, teary, are ready to take up arms.

The Mass is ended. Go in peace.

IN MANAGUA it is not easy to go anywhere: a mile-long line of vehicles wraps three times around the block that holds the gas station. The drivers have waited the day; now, provisioned with cold tortillas and warm beer, they prepare to wait the night for their five-gallon ration of petrol.

Suddenly an entourage of sleek cars zips past at full speed, fender flags snapping smartly in the breeze, leaving a thin powder of dust on citizen cars. There is a palpable fury. The first stone pings the old gas pump, perhaps accidentally. It silences talk. The second stone, not accidentally, thuds on the gas attendant's back. The crowd holds, then it thrills. A cabbie pins the attendant against the wall. Drivers swarm--damn the torpedoes, fill the tanks! Car after truck after taxi, again, again, until the well dries. Startled police do not act. It is not a propitious time for bad press. And so the people's sweet, brief rebellion against their dry existence passes, unremarkable beyond that street.

IN THE midnight street, a hennaed whore stands on the curb, one hip cocked, black skirt hiked. She sports a yellow Dallas Cowboys sweatshirt, and her red heels hold their ground when the law drives by. She sucks her teeth, flashes dull gold dentures, and shows some leg. The cops show their appreciation; she slips them U.S. dollars. "It is the way here," she tells me and shrugs.

It is the way everywhere.

"More here. Them policia, big black-market bankers, payola American dollars only. Makes a hard night for me--Nicaraguenos got no dollars, cordobas neither--sometimes a German does me nice."

In the morning street the hannaed whore stands on the sidewalk. She calls the song of the food vendor over cut cabbage, yams, chicken, mango. Glistening iridescent flies, fat with eggs, settle happily on her blood sausage and drop their burden onto a grease slick. Remembering the camaraderie of last night, she offers the gift of a sausage, served on a folded palm frond. "See how it is? All night I work. All day I work."

Next to her table, three small boys panhandle for pencils. She sits on an old crate, props her elbow on her knee, her chin in her hand, and looks at her brood. "No money for their school."

But the government says education is free, no tuition.

"Books got to be bought, though, and uniforms. The boy will not stay much in school. He tells me all he hears is lessons of the Revolution. He will take to the streets and then to the army. The army says it likes the young ones because they have energy. But when they fight, they will lie where they die; they are not brought home to their mothers. My Ramon was in his 14th year..."

OF NICARAGUA'S population of three million, nearly 75 per cent are children between the ages of ten and 16. Boys ten years or older are forbidden to leave the country. Eighteen is the age for mandatory military service, but parents say the army claims much younger boys.

Masaya, a small city 26 miles southeast of Managua, is the country's souvenir capital. Artisans grind away at stone objets d'art, wood carvings, pottery--they work for pennies to support their children. Tonight they fight to save them.

"You cannot have my boy!" A mother screams and pelts the Sandinista Youth office with rocks from both hands. A crowd behind her blocks army trucks that wend their way through the streets picking up young men.

Fathers and brothers push to police headquarters, smash windows, burn cars, and yell, "No more! No more!"

A man stands in the midst of violent litter and weeps. "Everyone has betrayed us. Masaya decided the war for the Sandinistas. And now this. They cannot have any more of my sons! They promised us a democracy, everybody always promises democracy."

Tonight, thirty men are successfully conscripted. The Sandinistas blame the protest on sentimental parents and old-guard Somozans. Two hundred troopers guard the city and a passing police car blares with Radio Sandino--"Warning! Do not let the right-wing radicals take the street!"

Later, the Minister of the Interior, Tomas Borge, said to the party newspaper Barricada, "It was nothing. Don't print it."

IN MATAGALPA the early-morning fog lifts; tired children shuffle through the streets calling wares. From the thin stagnant stream that bisects the village, pampered pigs--future wealth--demand breakfast. Men queue outside the split-board door of Carlos the cobbler. They wait a turn to have him trace their feet on old newspaper.

"When will they be ready?" one wants to know.

"Two months," Carlos tells him.

"Two months?" the man yells. "Two months for two shoes?"

"The quota," Carlos tells him, while turning to the next customer. "I have first to finish the quota."

A ONETIME beef and coffee baron stands before a little blue pipe cross, hammered into the ground beneath the bleached corpse of a huge roadside tree. A crude sign bears the epitaph: 5 MARTIRES, CAIDOS POR LA GENOSIDA GUARDIA SOMOCISTA, 18-6-79. He crosses himself and mutters a prayer for the dead.

"One of those martyrs was my nephew, only a boy, really. Somoza's gang cut their throats and shoved them into this hole here. It was a long time I was against Somoza. In those years we thought, 'Nothing could be so bad as this.' Well, now we know. Now we have something worse. There are many case histories that document Sandinistan human-rights violations as horrible as any. Those of us who worked to get rid of Somoza thought if we could attain democracy we could expand the middle class, the trickle effect, do you call it? I can only say, we bought the rhetoric."

In the evening he stands on a hilltop near his house. He takes a swallow of old Nicaraguan rum doused with lime, and reflects on the sweet days past and his dear, sweet wife in a distant land. Below, the village is utterly quiet and dark, except for a meekly lit hovel where some people clap a rhythm and sing Spanish gospel songs.

"Kismet," he sighs.

The pension is typical in that it houses a portion of Nicaragua's three thousand Soviet advisors. Those living here are agriculturists. There are 14 of them, no-nonsense types, quick with industry, and flush with the high color of country work. There are six married couples among them, and a sharp-eyed supervisor. The unmarried couple is from Georgia. Lovers, they keep separate quarters and touch with music and considerable discretion. Only she speaks English.

The power is out. The early-evening kitchen is lit by a low lamp burning a skimpy wick and portioned kerosene. Four Soviet women, in flower-garden dresses and babushkas, move about the room with squarish grace. The youngest of them, arms dusty with flour, pats achma into a baking dish.

She speaks of country recipes, of customs, of mountains and myths, and of the vigorous. elders in her homeland who enjoy 120 years of life "because they matter, and and respected." Later, on a candle-lit porch, there are sweets and songs and toasts to the American people and world peace.

In after-midnight privacy, behind her locked door, the couple sings for the stranger sad folk lyrics to the music of a cheap guitar. No one speaks of politics. With endless hospitality, the woman keeps glasses full of cold ginger water, sets out nuggets of bread and cheese and butter-scotch.

But she does inquire about American music, and asks if there are myths of heroes, and wants to know about schools, work, men, women, animals, plants, oceans--there is one wistful question about freedom of movement. And she talks and she sings until exhaustion forces her eyes into sudden sleep.

SANDINISTAN infantry troops are nearly 100,000 strong, with 250,000 in active reserve, and sport Soviet-made weapons and rocket-launchers. Trained by Cubans, East Germans, and North Koreans, the soldiers prowl on search-and-destroy missions, hunting for anti-government militia. They board Soviet-supplied helicopter gunships, the tough MI-17 assault craft. Nicaragua's air force enjoyed a 70 per cent growth rate last year; most of its airplanes are twin-propeller AN-26s, converted, by use of a simple bracket system, into bombers.

Contra commander-in-chief Enrique Bermudez jockeys the jeep up a cratered road, into a moonscape. On the seat beside him is a stack of photographs, Contra soldiers fresh from the field, with bright stubs of their thighs dangling, arms blasted, exploded genitalia nicely swaddled in cotton and gauze. The Sandinistas claim to have killed four thousand Contras in 1986, 4,813 in 1987, and to have only six thousand to go. But--"There are 16,000 of us," Bermudez says. "We have no conscription. And it is logistically difficult for sympathizers to reach us. But we have strong support in the villages, good intelligences from civilians."

And a high mortality rate among them.

"This has been a fact of this war, but we are also the target of much propaganda. For example, if we have a campesino family giving assistance and the Sandinistas suspect this, when a Contra approaches, the enemy will hide in the house, fire, then use the civilian as a shield. It is death by crossfire, not by Contra cut-throats."

And what of the allegation that commandantes have made this war a mission of the man-child?

"The Contras cannot afford the morale of forced ranks. In other words, we do not snatch children and put a gun to their backs and one in their hands. That is not to say that we do not have young teen volunteers. But the Sandinistas use young ones in the front lines for several reasons. They draw the first fire and reveal our position for the more skilled soldiers behind them. And, of course, then there is created the propaganda that we are children-killers. It is very difficult to determine, under battle conditions, whether the person shooting at you is 14 or forty."

Destination now is Mrs. William Casey's rehabilitation camp for maimed Contra soldiers. Bermudez takes a tight turn and passes through an iron gate and into a walled courtyard of a rundown villa. Dressed in donated clothing, stiff, and limping with prostheses, the men cluster around their chief and salute him, shake his hands. It is obvious that Enrique Bermudez is father, brother, confidant, as well as comandante.

He proceeds with a ritual. Someone fetches a piece of paper, tears it into bits. Bermudez turns his back and scribbles the letter "R" on four paper scraps and puts the whole batch back into his cap, stirs them, passes the hat among his men. They giggle like schoolboys, take turns at the draw. Four lucky ones wave winning pieces for a small transistor radio. They chortle, snap their fingers. There are no batteries, too dear, but no matter; for now they are content to carry the radios, to have a special place of honor for them in the musty lightless quarters.

Bermudez points to a young man, code-name Jehu, in a wheelchair, who is holding the attention of the group. "He is 19 now, but he volunteered for duty when he was just 14, after his family was murdered. He took three shells to his spine that first year and will never walk again. But he stays. He likes to make the men laugh," says Bermudez. "He tells them now of his dream."

Jehu says, "Last night I had a dream that I was whole again, back in the battle." His listeners nod, mutter congratulations as if the story were real. "Except this time I am killed." The listeners shake their heads, look at the ground. "But," Jehu tells them, his eyes sly, "I take four enemy with me!" The listeners brighten, grin.

"Well, when I arrive in Heaven God says to me, 'Jehu, you are welcomed here, but these other four are not allowed in Heaven.' He tells me, as a reward, I get to drive these four to Hell in a very fancy car!" The listeners love it. "But there is a problem. When I arrive at the gates of Hell, the devil meets me and sees who it is I have brought to him. He says to me, 'Jehu, I cannot accept these four men into Hell.'" The listeners are spellbound.

"'Well, Devil, why not?' I say. "Because, Jehu, they are Sandinistas and if I let them into Hell, they will confiscate it!'" The crowd erupts with laughter, much hooting; heads bob in agreement.

Later, in a safe cantina, Bermudez is asked if there is one request he would make of the American people.

He replies: "Humanitarian assistance for the Contra families and supporters who have been forced by the war into refugee camps."

In December of 1982 the United Nations High Commission on Refugees began to provide support to the first group of Nicaraguan refugees entering Honduras. During 1983, by some reports, the number of refugees increased 600 per cent. By the end of 1987, almost 28,000 refugees from Nicaragua had streamed across the border. Their living conditions are sub-spartan--huts not much bigger than out-houses cower on acres of dusty Honduran back-country. The refugees scratch out straggly crops of beans and rice, but harvests are too small for self-sufficiency. There are no statistics on the effects of six years behind barbed wire on the human spirit.

"I just close my eyes and try to remember, then I try to get it on my canvas before I forget." Eighteen-year-old Ronald Bellorini signs his paintings, "Refugiado en Jacaleapa, Refugio #10."

But this pitiful settlement at Jacaleapa is paradise compared to those outside the UN system. Example: Nicaraguan Indians, caught by thousands in the crossfire, flee from their sea-marsh homeland to the alien red mountains. There are women here, seeking water, mired in the shallow mud of drying river-beds like flies in soft butter. They despair of ever quieting thirsty babies, or of feeding them, or of cleaning them, and so offer them as gifts to a stranger.

TO WALK IS to become more of the picture and less of the observer; the passing through is different somehow. The foothills of the Cordillera Entre Rios are gullied and sere and do not look capable of hiding a hare. But, scattered across the plains, soldiers watch from stilted lookouts, like hunters on deer stands, to spot movement in the scrub.

At a bridge, a Sandinista soldier says, "Let me teach you how to make love the Sandinistan way. Then you can take me to Miami and I can meet your friends."

Thank you--flattered, I'm sure; but no.

"Hey, I went to school in the States. I graduated from high school in Fort Lauderdale," he says in suddenly perfect English.

Then why...

He shrugs. "This is easier. I'd have to go back to school there. I could probably get rich, but I'd have to work my buns off....Sure you don't want to...?" He adds a couple of pelvic punctuations. "I'll make it a story for you." He jiggles his eyebrows.

Real sure, thanks.

"You know, you are crazy, mucho demente. What if some baaad hombre, some craaazy Contra--"

Or some macho Sandinista?

He likes this salvo, holds his arms behind his head and does a short grinding dance step. "You mean much-o mach-o Sandinist-o!"

Only in Latin America. How old?

"April Fool's Day I'll be twenty..."

Eighteen.

"Well, nineteen."

In the distance an army truck is rumbling toward us like a charging rhino. Lover settles back at his post. "What about tonight? What are you going to do about tonight? There's nothing out here for thirty miles. Maybe you can get a ride on the troop truck. Let me see what I can do."

No. Sleeping out is fine.

"Sleeping out? Sleeping out? Where do you think you are? Yogi Bear Campground?" He is very loud. But he calms and stares.

Then, "Naw, you'll be all right. Latin men won't bother you. On the other hand, if you run into an American advisor..."

The truck bringing his replacement is very close.

"But listen," he says under his breath. "After the next two miles, don't wander off the road. And don't mess around the bridges at all. Comprende?"

Mines.

Then quickly, "What's your name again?"

His is Johnny.

"Hey, when all this has had it," he waves toward the plains, "I'm supposed to get foreign duty--maybe I'll get Miami!"

This is a joke, right?

"I'll look you up," he says in perfect Spanish.

IN THE LAST LIGHT, they are like images on undeveloped film and still, so still, at the approach of a stranger. But, finally, the woman moves, lights a stack of jicaro branches. A boy in middle childhood and a younger girl hang back. Then, as vision adjusts to the dimness--a man, lying on his left side in a ditch.

"Sientense," the woman said, pointing to a log for sitting by the fire. The little girl came with a gourd of cold rice and pieces of palm for plates. It is another expression of the supreme hospitality of the Nicaraguenses that even the eat-dirt poor will give their last to a stranger.

The man looks very sick.

"He is dying." Her Spanish is slow, calm--perhaps tired.

Stupidly, I ask, Has he been to a doctor?

She, kindly, is philosophical: "He is dying. He does not need a doctor."

They have been together four years. They met in the rubble of a firefight that leveled several villages near the Honduran border. He was an old man then, and she was a Contra widow, pregnant by rape. They were kind to each other during those first days, and it was natural that they became nomands together, their direction determined by war and weather.

In some year the man had served in some army and had consequently inherited a small, green, shot-up tent that became their home. When her baby was born, she named her Juanita, to honor the old man, Juan. They have been in this spot for some months. They homesteaded a plot, 12 feet by 12, by picking enough stones to make a clearing and a short wall against the wind.

Wouldn't he be more comfortable in the tent?

"He tells me to leave him where he is. He likes to watch the children play in the daytime. He likes to watch the stars at night. He says he would stink the tent."

The ditch is a washout from when it used to rain or from when it rained hard once. Beneath the man, for insulation against the ground, she has placed an old torn inner-tube she salvaged from a wreck by the side of the road.

The boy's job is to keep the flies off Juan's face and to lie against him during the night to provide a warmer sleep. This is a hard bed, this orange earth. But there is a fire here. And these people are here. And the dependable light of the moon.

Juan's breath sounds like scuttling dry leaves. Inside the tent, the woman hears and moves to him. There are murmurs. She sends the boy to her bed and, herself, lies against the old man's back. He reaches around for her hand.

The vendana is a rusty wind, thick and steady. It comes up now, and stirs the chill as tomorrow it will stir the heat. Beneath its harsh breath, Juan's ceases.

No! Listen, move out of the way! I can do something! I know CPR!

His mouth feels like sandpaper, tastes like spoiled eggs.

"Leave him alone," she says. "He is dead, let him be dead."

I do not know the etiquette for this death.

The woman is removing his clothes. She hands them to me to fold. First thoughts: This is indecent. Then: God! Of course--this woman needs every thread.

"He said I was to leave him in the ditch after he died. It was a thought for me. I could not have moved him. I could not have made a grave."

Daylight is an astonishment. The children gather rocks. We scoop dirt with an old fender, and eventually Juan is buried.

I suggest a cross, just out of branches.

"No. Juan said not to mark him. There are plunderers."

The woman disappears into the tent and emerges with an old cigar box. We sit on the fireside log and she opens the box. There is an old Polaroid print, the color faded to a wash, and the stub of a black cigarette. She lights up and draws deeply and passes it to me. The smoke sears. She takes the cigarette, pinches its fire, and puts it back in the cigar box. Then she holds out the photograph. It is of Juan.

"It is when he was young. He made a holiday. Here is him in the market in Tegucigalpa." And there stands Juan, sorrounded by stalls, peering out from dangling strings of chicken feet and tin cups and stacks of beef tongue, and cheese sacks made of cows' teats. She returns the picture to the box and sits quietly for a long time. Suddenly she looks around for the children and relaxes when she sees them scavenging for wood.

She stands and walks to the tent, bends to enter, but first turns and says, "Gracias."

I never see her again. As my walk begins, the little homestead under the jicaro trees looks the same, except for the dirt, the sticks, and the stones that covers the old campesino.