It was the middle of February, or summer vacation, and the dog days were with me in Nicaragua. They were also with the Nicaraguan school children, for whom the new school year started two days after I arrived in Granada. The national flag was flying blue over the Plaza de la Independencia, and the porcelain blue sky covered the city like a wide bowl. In the market, vendors were sweeping up yesterday’s trash, horse-drawn carriages stood in a line waiting for customers, and the young prostitutes, who at midnight had been standing at the corner of the market, were probably sleeping sweetly at this early hour. The dogs of the night nosed around the trashcans. From the terrace of the hotel came the smell of morning coffee; the servers in their white waistcoats waited on the hotel guests seated here and there. The month of February in Nicaragua is warm and dry. Only one day did a rain cloud creep over from the lake, but it was immediately dissipated by the winds and, having sprinkled only a few drops like the milk of a cow, it melted away along the green peak of the Mombacho Volcano. Every morning as I showered, I took in the damp greenness of Mombacho, which hung over the blackened tejas of the neighborhood’s roofs. The window in my shower looked directly out at the volcano, whose peak was often covered by white snow-like clouds that were later blown away by strong winds. After a few days in Granada, I got used to seeing the Mombacho Volcano first thing in the morning and hearing the muffled sounds of human voices that drifted in from the neighboring street. These were the voices of street vendors who were already frying the meat, bananas, potatoes, and corn they wanted to sell. My stomach and my consciousness easily digested my morning coffee on the terrace and the green—after New York—Nicaraguan February, yet, here in the middle of winter, the treacherous leaves on the trees and the illuminated lamps of flowers induced in me that certain misunderstanding one always has the first day after landing in this country.
2
When I arrive in a foreign city, one I don’t know at all, I always catch myself thinking that this encounter, these few days, have been given to me to find the signs of my own temporariness. Today this is Granada, a medieval Nicaraguan city situated between a volcano and a lake. And you are between forty and fifty. You demand Granada be frank with you, almost like a woman you’ve caught by the wrist and into whose ear you want to whisper a few amorous words. Like a mangy dog from La Plaza de la Independencia, you’re sharpening your senses so you make no mistakes, so you choose just the right place to turn up or just the right words to say. Poems could help you here, but they’re yet unwritten. Maybe that’s why you flew to Granada. Maybe it was to feel that Granada was the city of your fatigue, the city of your dog days, the city of green—of swaying trees in February and the Australian woman’s dress. Maybe because this impermanence desperately needs a break, needs a place with colorful buildings and sleepy, dust-streaked children. This is temporariness, but in Latin America temporariness is demonstrative, colorful, sexual, bodily, musical, and therefore permanent.
3
From up on the hotel’s terrace, daily life appears as ceramic bottles and vases, painted bird whistles, and a music that never stops. In the hotel’s inner courtyards, the blue-jean sky hangs above the palms and the fountains burble like pigeons. And when you sit in a rocking chair on the terrace, the world rocks before you with its colors of green, and languid smoke blends smells of fried bananas and beef. I’m not mistaken when I say that the music, together with the horses and dogs, the volcanic dust carried by the wind, the green shadows of trees, and the carnival colors catch the city in their embrace like a temporary lover. At first, after the daily siesta—which every Nicaraguan is entitled to take in a hammock or right on the street, on the sidewalk, or perhaps even leaning up against a tree trunk—the music would come with a drum and big wooden puppet with a bright skirt and painted-on face, red lips, and cheeks. The doll came to life and would twist and turn, the drum trembled mercilessly, and the worker would collect the money. Inside this costumed metal carcass was a small puppeteer, just some old desperado from the outskirts of the city. In her gyrations, this two-meter beauty would stretch out her arms and scoop up the warm air, thick like the syrup they poured over crushed ice and served for dessert.
4
I thought the heat was making the music come alive and the blood course through my veins with renewed strength. The heat wasn’t only ripening the green coffee beans, it wasn’t only bracing the stalks of rice or licking the golden ingots of corn. It was balancing and evening out life and death, the green of the hills and the scorched bronze fields, the scrawny cattle and horses. It was lulling the tired natives to sleep and then breaking loose in a carnival march. It was looking for a way out, and this way out—this permanent exit in one direction only—was love and poverty. Poverty might change history, but it cannot change the ways of existing and surviving. I passed by the north side of the quiet market and saw four young girls standing on the corner under a tree. They greeted me first, it was something like “Hola,” and I said something in return. They stood there cracking up and not paying all that much attention to the other pedestrians. A white dog was lying under their tree and next to it, a dirty, slobbering drunk. It was unclear whether he had nodded off because he was tired, or if he had had more than his share at some cheap hole in the wall, or for that matter, if he even had a home. My hotel was nearby, about a two-minutes’ walk from these girls, from the tree with the dog and the sleeping man. The lights in the hotel were already off. Only over the terrace was a faint light, yellow like dog piss, seeping into the surrounding darkness which shrouded stoic rocking chairs. I sat down in one. Life and music grew quiet, blocked out by sleep. The plump fruits of stars shined overhead and a wind whipped up over the lake and blew sand along the empty streets. I closed my eyes. “Señor,” I heard nearby. When I opened my eyes, I saw one of the four girls sitting in a rocking chair across from me. She was no more than fifteen, maybe sixteen on a good day. “Señor,” she repeated, her white teeth seeming to shatter this salutation. “Three dollars and full service,” the adolescent prostitute continued. Business was obviously slow, I thought to myself, and I asked her for the sake of the conversation, “How old are you?” “Twenty-one,” she lied. “What is your name?” “Gabriela.” Tonight she could have given any name, any age, and any reason for standing out there on the street corner. There was nothing unwonted or shamefaced in her gaze. She had come to sell her body in the night, just as people sold ceramic trinkets and cheap jewelry here in the day. “Señor,” she repeated, studying me, “three dollars plus Coca-Cola.” “Coca-Cola is your favorite drink?” I asked Gabriela. “You know, man, after sex I likes Coca- Cola.” I dug into my pocket and found a hundred córdobas: “Gabriela, please buy yourself a couple bottles.”
5
I was climbing the Mombacho Volcano. Eagles circled the top, stretching their wide wings into the wind like they were crossing the green slopes, like they were training their death drive, showing me the beauty of their flight. Clouds drew near the volcano and got lost in the crater overgrown with trees. They left behind a feathery trail that was swept away by the porous winds with their holes and whistle of a birdcall. The wet, moss-covered trees accompanied me on my journey along the north face of the volcano. Wildflowers spread out on the south face exposing their stubbly cheeks to me. Granada, in its blues and greens, was visible in the valley. So were Lake Nicaragua, a smattering of boats, and a few islets. I was now as tall as the volcano; here the strong winds took my breath away. The clouds floated by at eye level, and the city could have easily fit into my palm. I could cover it up, rake it into my hand. If I stretched my arm, I could even reach the few boats and fishermen, and ladle all the water out of the lake along with the algae and fish. Blue-gray steam rose up from under the earth, the wet heart of the volcano contracted. Mombacho breathed through the nostrils of its vents; it lived alongside this city and lake. I saw it every morning from the window in my shower, its conical shoulders and greenness smeared by the wind; but now I was a part of this green grandeur, while the city in its remoteness was the narrow, elongated palm of a hand, was warm dust, was burnt-sienna oranges.
6
In Nicaragua, everything, it seems, is stripped of permanence. I return from the city of Distinguido, which is no more than forty minutes from Granada—forty minutes in which you manage to make out only some completely minor details from the continuous ribbon of landscape: laundry on the line in front of a wooden shack, a skinny cow, palms, villagers lying in hammocks, passengers in the bed of a truck, brown farm fields, the ordinario buses that take kids to school in New York, but here carry passengers who exit out the rear emergency door when the bus is full to bursting. Nicaraguan life suddenly comes to a halt: ahead is a funeral procession, the coffin is under glass on the back of a black carved carriage; the coachman dressed in a black waistcoat, a top hat, and white gloves looks like a magician in the circus. The deceased is pulled by a pair of horses, hitched in a strong harness embellished with metal baubles. It’s hot. The friends and family of the deceased follow behind the carriage carrying parasols. The procession moves slowly, holding up all the traffic. This temporariness peeking out from the funeral procession looks like a carnival, and these people, the coachman, and the carriage have perhaps even been borrowed from some carnival reality. Life intersects with death and death moves among the living. If a primitive form of life, some amoeba, is moving toward death, for it the very movement is important. But when a carnival is moving and flowing amid shapes, sounds, and colors on the streets of Granada, for its participants it is important to feel like they’re a part of this great activity, this invisible thread that ties all of us to the time of this street. Time we share, divided like an orange cut up by street vendors, suckles us with the sensation of life. Under the February sun of Granada, I first tasted the music of the carnival when the whole carnival procession stopped near La Iglesia de la Merced, when the orchestra stopped and leaned against the blackened wall of this medieval church, groups of girls variously adjusting the stockings on their calves, the combs in their hair, the flowers on their dresses, while the carnival itself was still preparing to wash off the dust carried overnight from the lake. It seemed like it could have been the unrestrained flow of a river, the turbulent cleansing, the victorious advance of an army that captures an entire city. The carnival procession started in on poetry, reading it aloud at every street corner, sharing it like mineral water in a heat wave. The city, which was spilling out onto the streets, met these poems halfway with resignation and obedience.
7
On one of the following days, green and scorching, having walked around the tourist market after it had been swept and the skin-and-bones dogs had awoken to go in search of some sustenance, I headed toward the lake without any particular aim. I was simply walking along the streets. As I got farther away from La Plaza de la Independencia, the buildings became less attractive and the dogs on the side streets more plentiful. The early-morning chill that came nightly from the lake had not yet warmed up, and only the smell of coffee was out roaming with the dogs. The streets in Granada form a simple labyrinth of painted or sometimes whitewashed walls, which is why the smell of coffee and morning slop meanders from wall to wall, bouncing off them and then drifting upward where it turns into clouds for the volcano and a light shroud for the sky. It seems as though this continuity of walls—which run from street to street, from intersection to intersection—closes off all life from outside eyes. The carnival is life on display—Granada accepts no other form of public life. Everything else is concealed, covered, locked up behind the narrow rectangles of windows and the heavy exterior doors. The walls are almost all identical, the doors too. The lives beyond these walls and doors are also identical, but even so the similarities are only superficial. Any given course in this city leads out of it; returns are always to La Plaza de la Independencia. The straight streets end in intersections. There are churches on the plazas; these churches are from the Middle Ages and they’re blackened by time and rain.
8
I had a few phone numbers I’d jotted down in New York just in case I got the chance to meet up with a few ex-Europeans who were now living in Nicaragua. I’d left one message, covered with the dust of Granada, at a house in Managua. No one picked up the phone—clearly they weren’t home. I promised to write them as soon as I found Internet access. Another number was that of a young professor from Rutgers who moved to Granada after living in Honduras; a third and final was that of a French artist. The Frenchman answered and, as it turned out, lived only a few blocks from my hotel. We agreed to meet after the siesta at three-thirty, when his wife returned from the gym. Jean-Marc was waiting for me at the agreed time, standing in his half-open door in a T-shirt and shorts splattered with paint. We went inside a large foyer that was painted blue, the same blue as the exterior walls of Jean-Marc’s building. “I have a small private gallery here where I exhibit and sell my paintings,” he explained. All of this made it look like the building—whose first-floor rooms flowed seamlessly one into the next—was a sort of time ligature, and when you went deeper into this series of spaces, they opened up their nooks to you, giving the feeling of being immersed in the act of genuine living. Living that life, which is hidden behind the continuous walls of these endlessly similar calles and avenidas. Jean-Marc disappeared for a bit, leaving me to study his ancient sideboards and china cabinets. As it turned out, right next to the living room, whose plank roof was held up by posts, there was an inner courtyard with a small fountain, local plants, and a large parrot in a cage that Jean-Marc had locked up in advance of my arrival: “It’s aggressive and attacks guests—well, somewhat like a loyal dog.” The roof ended abruptly at the courtyard and the plants, fountain, and parrot were sunning themselves in the open air, looking for the shadows that by now already covered half the yard. Jean-Marc returned with a bottle of wine and some snacks. We each had a glass, but the heat that hung above the beams of this home quickly did us in, and by the second glass the wine was exiting my body through my sweat glands. Jean-Marc disappeared again and returned with coffee. Some twenty years ago, Jean-Marc left his Paris and ended up in Latin America, where he’d gone through a few countries. In Granada he first worked as a chef in a French restaurant, then he got married, then he took up painting exclusively. Sharing my first impressions of Nicaragua with Jean-Marc sent his memory back to the beginning. I said that the green roadside from Managua to Granada is covered with plastic bottles, probably tossed out by everyone who’s not otherwise too lazy. Jean-Marc said that, yes, there’s no shortage of this import, but it’s better now—even just a few years ago, there were entire plastic snow banks along both sides of the road. They even joked then that Nicaragua’s national emblem was an empty Coca-Cola bottle. I said that President Ortega’s peeling posters preached slogans of socialism, democracy, and Christianity. Jean-Marc fell back into his wicker chair and replied that socialism long ago wheezed its last. Relatively low prices attracted Western capital, and society’s divisions are what they are. The national elite has long since been living in the States, and anyone who’s not an elite but still managed to settle in Florida comes to Nicaragua and switches to speaking English—it’s trendy and demonstrates your otherness, superiority, and snobbery. I told Jean-Marc about my chance meeting with the underage prostitutes and asked him what or who drives them to stand around those nighttime intersections. “Well, you see,” Jean-Marc says, “poverty. Truly poor families sometimes don’t even have a bowl of rice at lunch. Here families with lots of children feel differently about sex than those with a traditionally European upbringing. Early sexual relations in poor neighborhoods aren’t at all strange; a mother can even shove her own kids out the door into the industry. But, sex tourism is also booming. Take a look at the restaurants: who are the foreigners spending their time with? They’re decrepit old farts who are perhaps having the last fun of their lives.” “They’re on their own summer vacation,” I say. “What?” Jean-Marc asks, and our conversation stops when his young wife enters and lets loose a stream of Spanish. This stream was mainly directed at him. I’m on vacation.
9
Ernesto Cardenal lived in the Dario Hotel on the other side of La Plaza de la Independencia. I saw him when he stood in the window of this hotel, greeting all of us participants in the poetry carnival. He was wearing a white dress shirt and his invariable black beret. The white shirt reminded me of the white clothes Christ and his students wore, the beret of the revolutionary Che Guevara. I listened as this 87-year-old apostle of the Spanish language read his poems on La Plaza de la Independencia. The poems were political and social, and the hundreds of his listeners—for whom the history of their country existed first and foremost in words: in the green words of landscapes, volcanic mountains, and coffee plantations, in the loud protests of the excited masses and the shooting of an AK-47—reminded me of a house they assiduously concealed from sight. The poems and the Sunday sermons settle in my memory like volcanic ash and cultivate new words and new earth. Cardenal preaches Christianity like Marxism and Marxism like Christianity: wealth is evil, the enemy is American imperialism, the revolution has failed but it isn’t over. Cardenal’s social and political poems, his protests, his articles on societal and worldly topics will no more leave Nicaragua than will the rains. In his work, that which is Caesar’s and that which is God’s are somehow equally rendered unto Caesar and God as is befitting a Catholic priest and social activist, as is befitting a genuine poet. The poetic carnival that ignited the sparks of poetic brotherhood in Cardenal’s eyes marched past the Dario Hotel, leaving the poet in front of the restaurants on the opposite side, the sated Western tourists, and the music that beat its tail like a fish caught in a lake, which only Christ can share among the five thousand, which the poet shares through his words. For they who have ears, should hear them, hear them and understand.
10
The couple I’d been emailing came from Managua. They arrived in an eight-cylinder jeep and picked me up in front of the Hotel Alhambra. I had been sitting on the hotel’s veranda for an hour and a half drinking a beer, shooing away the vendors selling ceramics and nuts and the beggar children. To pass the time, I left the veranda for a while and wandered through the labyrinths of the souvenir market. This market was for tourists and the real, local one where you could buy produce was located a few blocks away. As you approached, any free spot on the street was taken by vendors. There probably wasn’t enough space for everyone at the market itself. I never did make it to the real one. Every morning I was greeted by paintings that reflected life in Nicaragua in bright tempera. The sellers would set them out and wipe off the dust with yesterday’s newspapers. It was its own kind of national kitsch populated with red-tile buildings positioned on the green hillsides of some city, possibly Granada, Managua, or León. Kitschy sexuality oozed from the exaggerated forms of the female body. The air smelled like coffee, fried corn, and beef; beer was the only river anyone wanted to swim in. It was approaching eleven and the heat would soon flood the streets bringing fatigue and thirst. I noticed that Bismark, the seller of heirloom pottery from whom I’d already purchased a few pieces, was smiling at me. Bismark smiles even if he hasn’t sold anything all day; even if he won’t sell anything tomorrow he still smiles.
11
It sometimes happens, especially when you’re between forty and fifty, that you’re in a foreign city, in a foreign country, that every morning the sweet voices of bronzed women and girls float in with the warm air and the green warmth through an open window in the shower. This is the age when you’re not yet getting a pension, but you aren’t getting the girls either. It’s the age when your body, rebuilding itself in preparation for old age and death, wants to remember the warmth of eyes, the curve of lips, and the words that accidentally ran across your tongue when your soul was opened by hundreds of cherub-like eyes and looked upon another, seeking an interlocutor and succor. This is the time when children go back to school and you go back to the words you must say in a language not your own. You’re afraid of making a mistake, but they understand you. And you have only three days, which you spend half-starving. Maybe she had no way to call or email because she was traveling back from León—you wouldn’t have checked it anyway since you spent the whole day scrambling up the sides of the volcano, and then went out to lunch and then furniture shopping since the couple from Managua decided to buy some end tables and you rode around to a few cities and a few roadside furniture stores with them. She was swimming in Lake Nicaragua at that time, but you thought she was still in León. Someone will later put those pictures up on Facebook and you will see her in her green dress and how everyone went sailing on a tour boat. You will see how the dirty waves beat against the sides of the boat, and how the green flowed gradually from the earth to the water, turning the waves green. Essentially, you will see how differently you spent your time. The couple will also suggest going to Masaya—there’s another volcano there with volcanic lakes. You were thinking about León; the two of you had ended up in different reading groups. You came back with yours that very day after lunch, but the group from León didn’t get back until late evening, almost midnight. But you didn’t know this and you didn’t ask. That evening you sat for a long time on the terrace drinking beer and looking at the salamanders that crawled all over the ceiling of the restaurant, clinging tightly with their webbed toes akimbo. You watched them because their eyes were lit up with the green warmth that they—those bastards—accumulated throughout the day. Later you had a short conversation on La Plaza de la Independencia in which you asked if she was married and she said no. And in which she asked if you were married and you said yes. And there was nothing else to say. And the next morning you had breakfast together—an omelet with fresh tomatoes and chopped green spinach and coffee too. People kept coming up to your table to say something, to write something, to give you something. You exchanged time for words, smiles for touches of hands, books for email addresses. The Italian asked you if you knew who the queen of the festival was. You nodded and he smiled and clapped you across the back.
12
So then, Granada, our accounts have been settled. The days have been counted, the suitcases packed, the poems read. You will stay here with your streets and your churches, your vendors, and your poor. New guests will arrive at the Hotel Alhambra. They will leave their tips, the maids will smile at them all the same, and they’ll toss their coins into the fountain. Different couples will sit at our tables. Their tongues, loosened by wine or beer, will weave different conversations. Different hands will touch different hands, and only the lake sand, the dust that is sprinkled with water and swept every morning, the pottery vendors and stray dogs peaceful and scrawny, the music, the carnival, and the poems will go unchanged. And if it’s in February, then no matter who it is, Granada, add to all of this the dog days, which is to say, summer vacation.
Goodbye, girls of the midnight intersection. New clients will visit you and you’ll drink Coca-Cola to your heart’s content;
go in peace, eternally hungry dogs;
sleep, you drunks under the trees in the fresh air, you need your rest;
play on, orchestra;
carnival fish, thrash against the asphalt and the walls of the streets;
read your poems, Minister of Culture Ernesto Cardenal, and pray for us;
fly, Nicasio Urbina, together with your books;
smile your enigmatic smile, Gioconda Belli;
be verdant, volcanoes, and, coffee, bear fruit on the hillsides;
come, days and nights, and I will leave space in my poem “Returning to Granada” for a table on the veranda at the Hotel Alhambra to hold onto it forever!
Bronwyn—the locals know us by face
perhaps there will be a plaque above the table
here they love poets even after death
I’m taking in the astral sky
you are already flying to Australia
it’s good that we’re mortal after all
*
New York’s Verrazano Bridge glows green just like the air in Granada. I breathe in the brisk air deeply, pack it into my lungs so that, for a moment at least, I can hold on to these green words in order to forget them.
