Hornsby had been in Nicaragua
and he spoke of its blue lakes amid blue mountains under a blue sky,
and how it was the Transit route and the great passageway,
the pier of America,
and how it would teem with merchant ships and with foreigners
speaking all tongues, waiting for the Canal;
and each ship bringing new adventurers,
and the green plantations with their great white houses with verandas;
and the planter’s wife instructing the children of the blacks;
and the countryside with sawmills and palm-lined avenues humming
with sugar mills
and the roads filled with blue stagecoaches
and the logs floating down the rivers.
I saw Walker for the first time in San Francisco:
I remember him as if I were seeing his blond face like a tiger’s;
his grey eyes, without pupils, fixed like a blind man’s,
but which expanded and flashed like gunpowder in combat,
and his skin faintly freckled, his paleness, his clergyman’s ways,
his voice, colorless like his eyes, cold and sharp,
in a mouth without lips.
And a woman’s voice was hardly softer than his:
that calm voice of his announcing death sentences …
that swept so many into the jaws of death in combat.
He never drank or smoked and he wore no uniform.
Nobody was his friend.
And I don’t remember ever having seen him smile.
We set sail from San Francisco in ’55.
Achilles Kewen and Bill and Crocker, Hornsby and the others:
— on board a filibuster brig!
There were storms in Tehuantepec, and during the nights
volcanos every now and then along the coast like beacons.
In the Gulf of Fonseca, behind blue islands,
crumbling old volcanos like pyramids
seemed to be watching us:
The land where we would go through so many adventures,
where so many of us would die by fever or fighting!
And the jungle with a whistle calling, calling,
with its thick leaves like flesh, rattan palms, rushing water;
and like a constant moan …
No one had done us any harm, and we brought war.
When we saw Lake Nicaragua for the first time,
upon reaching the front at a bend in the road,
we halted, with a single exclamation:
— Ometepe!
The smooth blue lake and the Island
with its two twin volcanos like breasts
joined at water level by their bases,
which looked like they were sinking in the water,
and the humble smoke rising from its villages.
And through the air’s clearness
they seemed close by.
And beneath us that glassy sand, and in the distance
the steeples of the church at Rivas.
So Rivas next and the first shots,
Walker in front on horseback like a flag.
It was noonday, and our sun-drenched clothes felt heavy on us.
Then Kewen and Crocker were wounded.
Fire! shouted Kewen
and we ran through the grey, walled street,
Crocker with his silver-plated revolver shouting.
–E.C., trans. Jonathan Cohen
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 