Book Review: How to Make a Nicaraguan Quilt

Rigoberto Lopez Perez

On September 21, 1956, Anastasio Somoza Garcia visited the city of Leon to accept his party’s nomination to (once again) stand for reelection in the upcoming Presidential contest. The act was merely a formality; Somoza had already been ruling the country for twenty years and through land expropriations and the personal control of several national industries had become one of the richest men in Nicaragua. Dictators, however, like all leaders, require the appearance of legitimacy, even if it’s through rigged procedure. So, Somoza Garcia made the trip north.

Days earlier, Rigoberto Lopez Perez, a young aspiring poet, landed in Nicaragua, after an ambiguous stint in El Salvador. He immediately headed for his hometown of Leon, carrying a cardboard box filled with his belongings, which included a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson. On the evening of the 21st, he sneaked into a town party thrown in honor of the visiting President. It is said, that when he took out the .38 caliber Smith & Wesson and unloaded it into Anastasio Somoza Garcia, the dictator looked straight at him and remarked (like a father reprimanding his child), “You fool! What have you done?”

Margarita, está  linda la mar by Sergio Ramirez tells the story of this extraordinary event, which led to the death of the first Somoza and the consecration of Lopez Perez as a martyr (you can find his bust next to the cathedral in Leon). As Ramirez retraces the assassin and his victim’s steps up to that fateful party, he flashes back a half-century to tell the story of Ruben Dario, by that point an international literary sensation, and his triumphant return to his hometown of Leon after decades of roaming around the metropolises of the world.

The two narrations mirror each other: as Lopez Perez arrives on a boat to the port-city of Corinto, Dario is also arriving on a boat to Corinto; as Leon throws a parade in honor of Somoza, the city is also throwing a parade in honor of Dario; as Somoza lays dying, Dario lays dying. Even some of the characters are present in both narratives. Dario writes what would become one of his most famous poems, “A Margarita Debayle,” on the side of a little girl’s fan; that little girl grows up to marry Lopez Perez’s victim, Anastasio Somoza Garcia.

The characters in Ramirez’s novels are inextricably connected to each other and to the land they share, and the reader is only able to understand the characters through their shared bonds. It is both a universal idea and an peculiarly Nicaraguan concept.

For example, imagine yourself on the porch or front yard of a Nicaraguan friend’s house; you and your friend are both sitting comfortably on rocking chairs watching town people walk by. As they do, your Nicaraguan friend starts telling you about each person. What will your friend say? Usually, one or all of the following things: his or her nickname, occupation, family relation to other community members, romantic relation to other community members, distinguishing behavioral trait (i.e. he is a drunk or she is churchgoing), and/or most embarrassing/scandalous moment. The more people walk by, the more you discern the links between them. He is Fulano’s cousin. She had So and So’s child. They once got into a fist fight. This folksy narration makes the town come alive, and it’s a little what it feels like reading Ramirez’s novels.

The technique has it drawbacks. Reading a Sergio Ramirez book is a commitment to get to know an entire community, from the town drunk up to the alcalde. Not only that, but to keep up with the narrative you have to know each character’s family relations (who is their cousin/brother/husband) and their distinguishing behavioral trait. As I read Baile de Mascaras--an account of the day of the author’s birth set in his birthplace, Masatepe--I had to keep a list of characters, with entries like, Ulises Barquero: shopkeeper; drunk; married to Aurora Cabestran, and even then, I gave up a hundred pages in, after amassing a list of fifty characters.

The point of Baile de Mascaras was to see the town as the townsfolk see it: as a collection of interrelated individuals. With Margarita... Ramirez takes it one step further. He is not describing the essence of a small town, but that of a small country. The connections are not only between the people of the country, but also with the history. Ruben Dario is everywhere in the story of Somoza’s assassination. As Rigoberto is traveling on the boat from El Salvador to Nicaragua, he is accompanied by a life-sized statue of Dario, which a fellow passenger is transporting to Leon.  At a small coffee shop in Leon, Rigoberto gets together with his group of co-conspirators not to discuss the assassination plot, but to exchange stories and legends about Ruben Dario. As they do, they’ll point to a spot they all frequent and mention something Dario did there, or mention a person they all know that as a child met the great poet; Ramirez then transport us to that time and place.

There is a beautiful philosophy hidden under this approach: rather than seeing history as a series of events, it is a long string of encounters, of handshakes and gunshots. In this philosophy, life is the sum of all the people we have met, and every person we meet is also the sum of all the people they have met. The result being that we are all connected to each other, and it is this universal connection that defines both us as individuals and the universe itself.

In order to know the Masatepe of Baile de Mascaras, I had to meet every individual Masatepino and appreciate the relationship each individual had to each other. I could not claim to understand the Masatepino without understanding Masatepe, and I could not claim to understand Masatepe without understanding the Masatepino. Ramirez, therefore, transcends the divide between macro and micro. His novels are full of small intimate encounters that are crude, funny, honest and incredibly authentic. But these tiny moments are also huge, intricate, monumental events when put into their proper historical context.

The final implication of this philosophy, and one that is present in most historical novels, is the idea of destiny. Looking back at events, they always seem inevitable and almost mystically preordained. Ramirez, alluding to Greek tragedies (his prose is sometimes interrupted by bouts of dialogue written in the form of a play), introduces a chorus of seamstresses who hover over the story of the assassination and literally stitch together the event, mourning their own tragic creation. Ramirez's work masterfully creates a truly Nicaraguan quilt.