The Jaguar Smile Read Online Free PDF Page B

critic Ileana Rodríguez, and as each poet finished her reading and returned to the far end of the ruins, the others would group around her, to embrace and to reassure.
    Two of the seven poets particularly caught my attention: Vidaluz Meneses, a slight, grave woman with a quietness of delivery that was gently impressive, and Gioconda Belli, winner of the prestigious Casa de las Américas prize. Her poetry was at once extremely sensual and politically direct.
    Vidaluz Meneses’ father had been a General in Somoza’s National Guard and had eventually been assassinated by the Guerrilla Army of the Poor, in Guatemala in 1978. (He was there as Somoza’s ambassador.) Her moving poem, Last postcard for my father, General Meneses , showed her to be a writer whose work had been enriched, though also made much more painful, by the ambiguity of her family circumstances. (At the time of her father’s death, and for some years previously, she had been working secretly with the Frente. When her father found out, relations between the two became, not unnaturally, rather difficult.) In an interview with Margaret Randall, Meneses talked about that ambiguity: ‘I have never been ableto hate the enemy, but I feel a tremendous sorrow. Because someone I loved so much didn’t share my ideals. And that, I guess, is the central thread of my work … And yet I know that with that poem I disappoint many friends … Maybe the poem seems weak to them. I believe that poetry has to be authentic, though.’
    She spoke of belonging to a ‘sacrificed generation’, for whom the work of rebuilding the nation had to take priority over their private needs as poets. It was the kind of statement one might perhaps have expected from a woman whose revolutionary motivation was essentially religious in origin, as Meneses’ certainly was. But Gioconda Belli, a far more secular poet, made very similar remarks to Margaret Randall. She had just decided, she said, to make her work (for the revolution) ‘the best poem I can write.’
    Belli’s poems closed the evening. She had created a kind of public love-poetry that came closer, I thought, to expressing the passion of Nicaragua than anything I had yet heard:
Rivers run through me
mountains bore into my body
and the geography of this country
begins forming in me
turning me into lakes, chasms, ravines ,
earth for sowing love
opening like a furrow
filling me with a longing to live
to see it free, beautiful ,
full of smiles .

I want to explode with love …

4

    MADAME SOMOZA’S BATHROOM
    I t had become the custom, when young writers gathered in the cafés of Managua, to rubbish Ernesto Cardenal. As Father Cardenal was not only the country’s most internationally renowned poet, but also the Minister of Culture, I took these attacks to be indications that the country’s literature was in reasonably healthy and irreverent shape. The coffee-shop sniping didn’t seem to bother Cardenal much. He just went on beaming away, looking, with his little beret and his silver locks and beard, and his cotona , the loose peasant’s smock he wore over his blue jeans, like a Garry Trudeau cartoon of himself: the radical Latino priest according to ‘Doonesbury.’
    The attack that did upset Cardenal, and many Nicaraguans along with him, was the Pope’s. The story of Wojtyla’s arrival in Managua had passed into legend: Cardenal knelt to kiss the Pontiff’s ring, but John Paul II shook angry fists at him and commanded him to regularize his relationship with the Church. The poet burst into tears.
    At the time of my visit, neither Ernesto Cardenal nor theother priest high in the government, the Foreign Minister, Miguel d’Escoto, were permitted to officiate at the Mass. They were, in effect, suspended. As I read Cardenal’s poem The Meaning of Solentiname , some of the reasons for this rift in the Church became clear:
Twelve years ago I went to Solentiname with two
brothers
    in Christ
to found a small