coldhearted scientist وداد

I ended up in Granada, Nicaragua in December of 2005, because it was so inexpensive to get there and I wanted to get away from Katrina’s New Orleans. Had I been thinking more clearly I would have remembered what I usually explain: that Louisiana is like Honduras, El Salvador or Nicaragua, so to go to Central America is not to go away. Yet more specifically I would have remembered that Nicaragua has not been able to recover from the wars or the earthquakes.

Nicaragua is one of the most impressive countries I have visited and I would like to visit again but I was too traumatized at the time to deal with what was happening in Granada and points south; I ran north to León and stayed. What was happening in Granada and points south was a massive sell-off of property, by Re/Max, which was exactly the same thing as was happening in New Orleans. Desperate people approached me on the street, please buy my house. Carpetbaggers from Ohio and New York were everywhere, speaking English loudly in the streets and restaurants, directing the deals.

Meanwhile, back in the nineteenth century:

The plague made its entrance with funeral drums that winter.
All was peaceful one day,
when the first volleys began to be heard drawing near
and the loud vivas on the outskirts,
and the noise of weapons and the bullets from rifles
nearer and nearer,
and the enemy moving fast in the direction of the main square.
— They’d left me behind in Granada, so I can tell the story.
Unarmed men in their homes killed in front of their families;
and a little boy murdered while eating his dinner.
Communication with the pier was cut.
— Besieged.
Patrols downstairs banging on the doors.
And from the enemy boomed laughter and guitars with bonfires during the night.
And at daybreak, there were women grief-stricken in the streets.
And then came that Englishman, C. F. Henningsen,
who’d fought against the Czar and in Spain and for the independence of Hungary.
If only we could have sailed off right then
and left that ruined Granada
— the White Castle, as we used to call it —
with its bloodstained streets and its stinking wells full of corpses,
and the dead’s grimaces lit by fires in the streets!
We protected ourselves from bullets behind piles of corpses.
Day was hot, and the air full of smoke from the fires.
And hour after hour without failing to see them,
without failing to see enemy troops,
until night finally came
and the rifles quieted down.
Henningsen dug trenches that night.
And the following day
the sun rose up out of the lake like an island of gold
and the shots and the whistling of bullets and the groans
let us know one more day of horror had arrived.
And we’d come to a foreign land in search of gold
and there black smoke was everywhere
and streets filled with shop goods and corpses.
All that could be heard the rest of the day were shots
and the moans of those hit by cholera,
and the calm voice of Henningsen giving encouragement.
In balconies where before girls might have been sitting
with their governesses,
now riflemen could be seen,
with their long rifles,
and instead of polkas and waltzes, gunfire.
By the next day
the last houses on the square were burned down.
From afar the town with shooting and smoke and fireworks
looked the way it does on a holiday!

The rainy season had ended
and the fever was spreading like a fire.
At night we dumped those dead from cholera into the water
and cries could be heard from the sick who were delirious begging for water
— Water, water!
We threw the corpses into fires
and the acrid smoke they gave off made our eyes red
and that smoke
and the dust
and the sun on the pavement and the flames from the houses and the gunpowder
dried our mouths more
and soldiers stopped fighting to cough
and were wounded while they coughed
and dropped to the ground still coughing.
New plans were made to reach the lake
which shined at the end of the street like glass,
white as ice.
We knew that many bodies were being burned.
And many groans rose from the streets during the night.
And from the outskirts, the sweet odor of the dead.
And Walker meanwhile:
taking dips in the ocean at San Juan del Sur!
Where the blasts from the cannons did not reach
nor perhaps even our messages.

The days went by without receiving any news.
And I still relive those days in my dark nightmares.

Houses that had been familiar were no longer recognizable
and the streets could hardly be distinguished beneath the rubble:
— a statue of the Virgin hanging by itself on a black wall.
And the ash-colored lake behind the rubble.
Water the color of Walker’s eyes
behind the rubble
which formed odd silhouettes during the night.
And I remember a church with nothing left standing but the portico
like a triumphal arch.

And those flames spread like wildfire in the street from the lake.
And Henningsen’s message was:
“Your order has been obeyed, sir:
Granada is no more.”

Help finally arrived,
with Walker himself, who stayed on the boat,
and we could make out the shots in the night from afar.
The water was still and heavy like steel
and the flashes from the rifles reflected like lightning.
And it was then that Colonel Jack, from Kentucky,
broke through the lines,
as Dixie, the newsboy, played his bugle
and in the darkness of midnight from hill to hill
that bugle shined like a glorious light
coming up to us beleaguered souls,
making the 350 who came
act like an immense army in perfect formations advancing
hitting the dirt all as one
and getting up, with their long rifles
firing.
It was nearly two in the morning on the 14th
when all were on board.
Henningsen was the last to leave Granada.
He went into the ruined main square
and there saw around him the work that had been done;
he picked up a dead ember
and wrote on a piece of scorched hide the epitaph:

HERE WAS GRANADA

then stuck it up on a lance in the middle of the square,
and so it was.

–from Ernesto Cardenal, “With Walker in Nicaragua,” trans. Jonathan Cohen

Axé.