Back in Nicaragua

Have I mentioned the heat? It is overwhelming, overpowering, it is overcoming my capacity to come up with adjectival hyperbole; it is too hot to even speculate about what degrees F or C it is. It is so hot that all day long we lie in the hammock or rock in the rocking chair – an iteration of the rocking chairs that are found in every house in the village, the same rocking chairs that are lined up and sold by the sides of the dusty road – and move as little as possible, and only move enough to stay out of the direct sun and watch the mangoes fall from the trees. That’s right: mangoes falling from the trees. But don’t let hammocks and mangoes fool you into paradisaical fantasies. It is too hot to even imagine picking up and peeling the fallen mangoes, mangoes that fall with a thud onto the packed earth and send up a small eruption of dust upon impact. More dust to inhabit every pore and orifice you have, and some you don’t have.

In the morning we learn that last night’s clanging of metal and shouting was a certain drunken man smashing his neighbor’s house with his machete. Drunk and angry about an unspecified insult, he banged his machete against the walls and windows and tin roof of his neighbor’s house and bellowed out threats, and banged even harder when the inhabitants and other neighbors shouted for him to stop. This morning, we are told, he on the other side of the sugar cane field, persona non grata, sleeping it off.

Of course while we are weighing heavily upon the hammock and rocking chair and nodding listlessly in the direction of the plummeting mangoes, men are out in the fields cutting sugar cane, and men and women are harvesting a sweet variety of bananas favored by the inhabitants of Granada, and women are washing clothes and baking in earthen ovens and bathing babies, and children are cranking wells to bring up water and gathering firewood and kicking makeshift soccer balls in the packed dirt. And Rojita is snarfling up food and water.

Later when it is marginally cooler but still stratospherically hot we go visiting with Colby to the house of the lovely Paola with the curly eyelashes, she whose smile disperses even the heat. Earlier she brought fresh tortillas and avocados to Colby, whose name she loves to pronounce, like a magical incantation. Paola’s smile is clearly a direct defendant of her mother’s. Her little brother will do anything to elicit that smile.
Because Doña Pastora is away at cult, we go have dinner at Colby’s neighbor. There is something about Doña Indiana’s demeanor that inspires respect, and a little apprehension. Her ducks wander in and out of the house as we eat. One duck waddles coyly up to CSB, stares at him, and then piddles onto the dirt floor. He will not forget the piddling duck inside the house for a long time. The menu remains the same rice and beans.

That night, lying on the Chinandega bedframe, we are almost asleep when the dogs start their barking obbligato. It is a symphony of canine pipes and reeds and strings. Then our corrugated tin roof rattles and then – or more likely at the exact same moment – the earth trembles. We are jostled in our bed. Everything is making noise now: objects in the house, roosters, pigs, hens and especially the skinny dogs.
I say to CSB: It’s an earthquake.
He shouts outside to Colby: It’s an earthquake. Are you alright?
Colby answers that he is fine.
I say: Shouldn’t we go outside? What if the house falls on us?
CSB says: I don’t think so. There’s not much to fall.
I say: In 1972 most of Managua was reduced to rubble.
CSB says: I think this one is over.
But I stay awake for a very long time awaiting the aftershocks and after-trembles and tremors. I could tell you how many I felt, but I could not promise you that I did not imagine them.

Burning sugar cane on Saint Agnes' Eve

Last night , Saint Agnes’ Eve, we saw them burning the Santa Inez cane fields. We watched the cane fields burn. I admit to being mesmerized. CSB and Heidi expressed some dismay at the extent of my fascination with the burning fields and engaged in pointless speculation as to any pyromaniac tendencies I might have. (None.)
These were cane fields named for Saint Agnes (Inez is her Spanish name), the martyred virgin who at the age of thirteen defied Diocletian (AD 304). He was so frustrated by her unwillingness to worship his gods even when threatened with horrible tortures, that he perpetrated the ultimate assault upon her purity: he sent her to a brothel to be there abused and used. Not single lusty male complied, so awed were they all by her aura of sanctity, and in the end Diocletian had her martyred in the one of the more usual ways. (The sources differ between decapitation and burning.) She is the patron saint not only of bodily purity but also of general cleanliness, and hotels.

Santa Inês (Saint Agnes)by Francisco de Zurbarán
Back in the fields, the sugar cane flickers, then flames up; once the whole clump is solidly aflame sparks will shoot up to 30 feet in the air; they glisten like stars in the thick black smoke.
We first saw the flames flickering from a distance, surrounded and surmounted by billowing clouds of smoke moving swiftly with the wind.
Then we got closer. Gabriel (yes, named for a guardian angel) told us that in Costa Rica they are only allowed to burn 35% of the fields in any given season, for environmental reasons, so they must choose wisely. Last night they were burning at Santa Inez.

We stood on the dirt road just beside the burning field. Two men wearing vests with reflecting tape walked the perimeter with their diesel torches, igniting the dry leaves and stalks.
I had heard that when the cane fields burn all the snakes, rats and other creatures slither, run and hightail out of the inferno, but alas we saw none of those. Heidi was especially disappointed, especially as early in the day we had seen a fellow holding up two (dead) tobobo gatos (which a visit to the dictionary tells me is the local name for, yes, Fer-de-lance, that really dangerous snake that can kill a cow).

Since 5 AM the Nicaraguan cane cutters will have already been there, cutting the hot but still sharp, charred cane stalks, as quickly as possible, because once the field has been burned you have about 12 hours to cut the cane and deliver it to the mill before the sucrose content (Which is all that really counts, the POL) starts declining. Cane cutting must rank in the top five worst jobs in the world.