Nicaragua At the Foot of the Volcano
by
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From a distance doctor Ramírez is walking towards me, staggering, shirt tails hanging out of his trousers and his hair disheveled.
“Had a little look around town?” he asks with a defiant look in his eyes.
Sluggishly, he brushes a lock of hair from his forehead.
“Well,” he continues, “I myself have enjoyed quite an ethylic midday meal.”
The meaning of his poetic turn of phrase is made abundantly clear by a strong reek of alcohol. Ramírez stares dreamily into space. We are standing on a busy street corner, where the wind and the sound of traffic make it difficult to understand one another.
“You are in another world around here. This is the city center, there’s nothing wrong, but there are neighborhoods where you shouldn’t go, especially after dark. You’d get stabbed for couple of pennies.”
Ramírez waves his arm in a wide arc.
“This is Nicaragua, a country, how do they put it again, on its way to development. We are not in Europe here, there is no schooling, no development, no culture.”
He barely manages to keep from belching.
“My ancestors came from Spain and Italy. But I’m Nicaraguan. And a criollo, at that.
Ramírez’ laugh is hollow.
“My father lost quite a lot. Criollo in name, but without any capital. Hit the skids, you see."
He shrugs his shoulders. “I have been to Miami for four years.”
Ramírez bemoans how superficial Americans are.
“To the Yankees, we are all Latinos, just a bunch of scum, all of us crooks.”
His fingers grope through an empty pack of cigarettes. I offer him a cigarette, which he accepts and lights.
“It’s all about having principles,” he resumes after a deep drag. “Which is something the people don’t have.”
He turns his pants pockets inside out.
“You see. I’m flat broke. I walked ten kilometers to get here, don’t even have cab fare.”
He gives me a bleary eyed look. There is something beseeching about the grin on his face.
"But I speak English too, you know."
Ramírez pauses and then resumes.
“The past few days I have been helping you with things that have taken me months to dig out of the archive. Other people might ask you for money. Not me, don’t worry, my motives have been totally unselfish.”
“How about a beer maybe?”
“You do understand what I mean, don’t you. It’s about principles.”
“Of course. My motive for offering you a beer is also fully unselfish.”
We enter the first bar we come to. Ramírez tries arrange his hair, but the locks are stubborn and fall back over his forehead.
“Have you already visited the Club Social?”
“Yesterday.”
“Did you know that in his day, Somoza was never allowed in? An ordinary military man like him, not on your life.”
Ramírez was a young man at the time. The sixties had not passed by Granada unnoticed. The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, Janis Joplin, the Stones. Lots of marihuana. There was always a party going on somewhere. However, back then, he had other things on his mind. The family maid fell pregnant when he was twenty-two. He was the father. He wanted to keep the baby, so they had a son. He must be in his twenties now.
“They weren’t allowed to stay on,” he says. “My family, what do you think?”
He slurps on his bottle, his eyes glisten.
“One of those foxy black girls from the coast, you understand. Not throwing her out on the street right then and there was something they could not accept.”
Ramírez, bent forward in a pensive mood, arches his back and tries to focus. After a stiff swig he scoffs: “Somoza figured he could find good marriage partners for his children at the Club Social. Outrageous. Our aristocracy is arrogant and closed. In Granada they only marry each other. The bloodlines and capital have to be kept together. I lost all my friends.”
He finishes off his bottle, nods to the bartender for another one and sits there for quite a while, lost in thought.
“I never finished university. It wasn’t important back then.”
He steals a glance at me.
“Doctor Ramírez does not exist. I am just Carlos Alberto Ramírez and everything I know is my own doing.”
“The business card?”
Ramírez nods.
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About the Book
Since the end of the Sandinista revolution, Nicaragua has ceased to make the headlines of world news. But with the construction of a shipping route connecting the Caribbean Sea to the Pacific Ocean underway, its chances may be turning.
At the Foot of the Volcano is a rare portrait of Nicaragua today. During the two years he spent living there, Maarten Roest travelled throughout ‘the country of lakes and volcanoes’, even experiencing the temptations of the ‘other’, Caribbean Nicaragua and literally putting on gloves in the shadowy world of Nicaraguan boxing. Uncompromisingly yet full of empathy, he describes a society still grappling with the harsh realities of life after civil war. “Our country has all too often been used like a whore,” says a one-time Sandinista.
A must read for anyone visiting Nicaragua for the first time and for revolutionary nostalgics alike.
About the Author
Born in the Netherlands, Maarten Roest has covered Latin America for leading Dutch newspapers and magazines, before becoming involved in international operations in Iraq and Afghanistan on which he recently published the non-fiction novel Woordvoerder (not yet available in English). “The future of travel literature is in good hands with the likes of such authors,” wrote Belgian daily De Standaard de Letteren on his first book At the Foot of the Volcano.