131

p “Can you walk along without making any noise?" Jose asks.

p “Of course.” (What else can I say?)

p Jose gives a satisfied nod. The Toyota bumps for the last time over the last hole in the road, and stops. Silence drops down at once. So does darkness. Jose switches off the shaded headlights, and the dashboard. Bright fireflies dart about the clearing, each shedding a 40-watt glow. When a firefly makes a beeline it seems to be a man coming along, flashing a torchlight at chest level. Were I a sentinel, I would certainly shoot.

p A starling twitters softly right at hand. Jose responds. A greyish-white hardly discernible splotch emerges from the thick dark grass. As it draws nearer it assumes the shape of a grey head of a man in uniform holding a submachine gun.

p “It’s you?" he asks.

p “It’s me,” Jose nods. Then with a wave at me, "The journalist I told you about.” Placing an arm on the greyhead’s shoulder, he adds, "Our priest. One of the several with us.”

p The padre slings the submashine gun behind his back and we exchange a firm handclasp. They whisper, after which the padre enquires with a businesslike air, "Does he know how to walk?”

p “He says he does,” Jose replies.

p Off we go. I glimpse a barely discernible trail in the grass, which disappears the moment we enter the jungle. Jose confidently plods on, now bending, now brushing a branch aside. I try to imitate him, to put down a foot not 132 on its heel but on its tip, and follow in his footprints. But the jungle grows thicker, and all that I see are Jose’s lighttoned palms and face on those few tare occasions when he turns around to look at me. At tunes he disappears completely, and I feel the flesh crawl. We must have been going on for an hour and a half, when Jose suggests we take a breather. I at once plump down on a fallen tiee tiunk.

p “I must be making quite a noise,” I say.

p “It’s all right,” he chuckles, swinging his submachine gun from shoulder to shoulder. "Two in the jungle is nothing. When you have two hundred, doing it at night, and with a full pack, that’s something. But we’re getting used to it,” he assures me.

p “Show me how you do it,” I ask.

p Jose smiles, raises, takes a few paces, and . . . vanishes. I cock an ear, but don’t hear a thing. A couple of minutes pass and I feel a bit worried, when suddenly I hear a soft voice behind me say, "That’s nothing. What’s really hard is to come up close.”

p Standing behind me at arm’s length, Jose continues under his breath, as if nothing has happened: "We have three kinds of training camps, the first for the novice, the third for the experienced. In the first we teach the rudiments, which very often includes reading and writing. Back in Nica three-quarters of the population are illiterate, just as a hundred years ago. The second is an intermediate camp, while those who complete training at the third are ready to go into battle.”

p “Where do you get people from?”

p “From all over. Mostly youngsters running away from Somoza. He’s staging a real hunt for them. Jails them, and kills them. He knows the young are with us, and that’s why he’s wiping them out.”

p Jose breaks off to cock an ear for a few instants, and then calmly continues, "In Esteli in September we attacked National Guard barracks, and would have captured them. But when they heard that our attack was coming, you know what they did? They herded into the barracks 14- and 15- year-olds and also smaller children, and poking machine 133 guns into their backs told them to stay where they were. Anyone who tried to run was mowed down. The moment we saw them in front of us, we stopped. We couldn’t fire at kids, and so had to desist. But an hour later they shot all of them, down to the last kid, with machine guns! I must say the young are joining us not just because they are afraid of Somoza. They’re doing it consciously, as things just have to change. It can’t go on any longer like this.” "How do they find you?”

p “We’ve got our own people all around the country. Anyone who wants to, can always find a way to contact us.”

p We resume our trek. Three or four times somebody calls out in a whisper, and each time my companion says, " Gomandante Jose here.” After exchanging a few indistinct words with the sentinel, we go on. From time to time he calls a halt, apparently believing I needed a rest. In these intermissions he always tells me something.

p “You’re in luck,” he says, "the rainy season’s over. Three weeks earlier you’d be up to your ears in water and up to your knees in mud.”

p Despite the manifest caution displayed, I have the feeling that the Sandinistas were in full control of a vast tract of jungle land. That may not be really so, but the entire warning network operates without a hitch, and everyone we see is in uniform and carries a submachine gun. It’s more like the outposts of a regular army than of guerillas. When I mention that to Jose, he nods. "That’s the whole thing,” he says. "We’ve got to make an army out of the guerillas. That’s vital to come to grips with Somoza.”

p Suddenly we are in the middle of the camp. At any rate that is my impression. One more sentinel calls out and after about a hundred paces, Jose leads me into a wooden barn, rather, into a small partitioned-off side room in which a storm lantern swings from the ceiling, there are shelves of medicine in jars, tubes of ointment, ampules of penicillin, neat stacks of packages of aspirin, absorbent cotton, and bandages, while on the floor are boxes of cartridges, cartridge belts for machine guns, and in one corner a pile of 134 blue-striped grey army blankets. I glance at my wristwatch—it is two o’clock at night.

p “Feeling hungry?" Jose asks turning up the lamp. "We’ve got boiled rice with beans. Cold, true. Better hit the hay. Put a blanket on the floor and take another one to cover yourself with. Better fall in while no one’s around. We’re having a night-time jungle forced-march drill. Reveille is at a quarter to five. You’re lucky, a wind’s come up and there won’t be any mosquitoes, they’re a pretty hard lot to cope with,” Jose chuckles and leaves, but not before turning the lamp down low.

p The wind blows harder, causing a loose sheet of corrugated iron to rattle on the roof. This affair, apparently a barn once upon a time, had been built a long time ago, and had fallen into disuse also a long time ago.

p ,1 go outside. The sky suddenly plunges down upon me with a low-hung array of bright, twinkling stars which here seem in utter confusion, as compared to the well-ordered arrangement over Moscow. It seems as if somebody has negligently cast over the entire camp one enormous camouflage net for some reason bespangled underneath with brightly fluorescing tinsel. . . .

p “Martinez, Jorge, Antonio,—to me!”

p I open my eyes. Right in front of my face I see the muzzle of a submachine gun, hanging from a nail on the wall. Another ten or so also hang on the wall. They are oddly assorted makes—Spanish Cessnas, Venezuelan Fals, American M-16s, and several old Garands, American semiautomatic rifles of World War II vintage.

p Stretch out on the floor by my side and fast asleep are the owners of these weapons, a dozen husky young lads. Bewhiskered, bearded, and clear-shaven, not older than 22- 23, I’d say, some even less. One smiles in his dreams, another puckers his lips like a little baby, a third knits his brows, moving his lips meanwhile, a fourth shoots out a hand— perhaps to grasp his gun. It’s half past four. Trying not to tread on an outflung arm or a leg, I step out of doors.

135

p Day is breaking. Martinez, Jorge, and Antonio stand in a huddle around their commander. He barks a brief order, and the four slip into the jungle.

p The barn stands at the very fringe of a large clearing in the jungle, sloping down at one end and up at the other. A field kitchen is to be seen beneath a spreading tree some twenty paces away. A guerilla wearing khakhi breeches is chopping up a dried tree for firewood, using an axe on a very long handle, that must be some one and a half metres long.

p Other guerillas brew coffee, stir the rice, and boil water in a black cauldron. A tiny transistor radio, swinging from a branch emits a haunting tune. Hanging from the same branch are several Garands that belong to the cooks. The guerillas emerge from the jungle at a quarter to five. They came calling out to one another, slapping one another on the back, and rubbing eyes and faces to shake off the last vestiges of sleep. Nearly all are grinning. There’s nothing to laugh at though, no wise-cracks, in fact, nothing even said as yet, except a few interjections, but they all grin. Why? No doubt because a new day had dawned.

p All the men coming up, those still half-awake and halfdressed carry machine guns. A girl trips out, holding a submachine gun in one hand, as with the other she takes hairpins out of her mouth and adroitly puts up her jet-black mass of hair. All the guerillas are bound by orders not to let their guns out of their hands, to keep their guns by their sides, day and night.

p A sprawling cloud drapes the mountain tops. Grey, amorphous and damp, like a huge jelly-fish smothering the crater of a volcano. As it rises out of the Atlantic from somewhere beyond the mountains, the sun tinges its upper edge with gold.

p “Fall in!" comes the command through the morning air. Setting-up exercises start exactly at six under the eyes of the youthful sturdy PT instructor. Everything is according to timetable, with the same smooth precision as in a regular army.

p Left turn! comes the order. A couple turned right. Right 136 turn, comes the order. Again, a couple turn left the wrong way. I can’t help recollecting the Spanish Republican fighters seen in the sequences that Roman Carmen shot forty years ago.

p One reedy fellow can’t seem to cope with his stalky arms. They dangle haphazardly as if buffeted by the wind, out of rhythm, arousing a mournful look in the eyes of the energetic PT instructor. On the other hand, Reedy is quite fluent in English. He is assigned to me interpret for the Sandinistas, who treat him with a fun-poking affection and call him not by his right name, Pedro, but by the nickname either of Senor Italiano (with reference to his mother’s nationality), or Senor Spaghetti (with reference both to nationality and his reedy form). He responds to both with a huge grin and a ravenous willingness to run any errand and volunteer any help. Not to waste time with me, a foreign newsman, he carries with him a cartridge belt of some white stuff into whose tight pockets he rams cartidges, while interpreting for me whenever necessary and generally escorting me around the camp.

p The Sandinistas have pitched their camp in thick suffocating—despite the wind—jungle, but in several sections, each two or three kilometres apart. These are green pup tents—rather for concealment from Somoza’s aircraft than for protection from rain or wind. Makeshift tables with transparent plastic tops, used mostly to clean weapons. Food stores, mostly rice, beans, and platans. That’s all. A camp that can be quickly packed, and moved. Either if orders are issued for an offensive, which can be expected any moment, or in case of a bombing or a National Guard assault. The only solid structure, the only dry one at that, is the old barn, where medicines and sacks of sugar are kept.

p Though seemingly preoccupied with numerous cares, Spaghetti tells me that his brother is also fighting with the Sandinistas, only on the Northern Front, that he himself had already been in the September fighting, that then he had hoped each battle would be the last, thinking that Somoza would be smashed and that by nightfall he would be able to sip beer in a free democratic land, but that since he had 137 matured, had gained plenty of experience, that now the Sandinistas are far more experienced than in September, are far stronger, as there are far more of them, are far better armed than before, which is why he is far more certain that eventually they will win, though he realises that this can’t be done in one battle, overnight.

p “Now we attack and retreat,” he tells me, ramming a cartridge into a pocket of the belt, his long slim fingers white with the tension. "But one day we’ll strike out so heavily,” he says, his myopic eyes gleaming behind his large college glasses, "that National Guardsmen will start deserting, and then we shall win.” He triumphantly rams the cartridge home.

p Spaghetti joined the Sandinistas straight from the university, where he had been majoring in medicine and had participated in a pro-Sandinista student movement. In the camp, besides everything else, he assists the doctor.

p . . . Mario is a sturdy working-class lad, who can at once force Senor Spaghetti’s two stalky arms back in a trial- ofstrength game. He has been with the Sandinistas for several years now. In September he had commanded a guerilla force in Chinandega whose first operation was to attack a National Guard patrol and capture eighteen submachine guns with ammunition. Why did he join the Sandinistas? He had been by turns a house painter and tyre vulcanizer at an auto-repair shop. He had had a wife and two children. But he had always been very poor, so poor that it would sometimes make him cry. After all, he had a strong pair of hands, wanted to work, and knew how, so why was he so poor! Why wasn’t he treated like a human being! In 1970 his friend, a working-class chap like himself, was arrested. Several days later a police car drove up and his friend’s wife was told she could go to the mortuary to collect the body. Mario went with her. His friend’s body was sadly battered. The man had obviously been clubbed and tortured. They were handed over the body with no explanations offered (“Say thanks for getting it!”). Mario decided he must get at the truth, but he was only jailed for his efforts. While in prison 138 he had first heard of the Sandinistas. Now he is with them. There is no alternative but to fight.

p . . . Edgar Moncada Colindrez is a sturdy smallish chap with soft ginger whiskers and beard, and on his head a soft plush cap of the same colour. Despite his most civilian, plushy appearance, he is your true military man. In the camp he trains the guerillas in tactics. He is grandson of General Juan Gregorio Colindrez, a comrade of General Sandino who resisted US occupation of Nicaragua and was killed in 1934 by the father of the present Somoza, the dictator on the American payroll. There are but few descendants of General Sandino’s comrades alive. All three Somozas did all to root them out, lock, stock and barrel murdering off wives, children, and grandchildren, so that not even the trace of a memory be left. In the village of Uivili, where the wives and children of General Sandino’s comrades lived in one commune, Somoza’s soldiers herded them together, shot them dead and burned down every single house, to the last one. Comandante Altamirano’s wife, who did not live with the commune, was absent when Somoza’s soldiers came. They seized her two daughters, gang-raped them, chopped off their arms, and finally killed them.

p However, the memory of Sandino lived on. Today Edgar, one of the few surviving grandchildren of Sandino’s comrades, personifies the continuity.

p “We are fighting the same imperialists our fathers and grandfathers fought,” he says. "The same economic system, the same dictatorship, the same dependence upon the Yankees, who treat our country today no whit different than they did in 1912 and again in 1928.”

p . . . The peasant girl Rosario is 17.

p “Did your parents object?”

p “They cried, and I felt very sorry for them, but they agreed with us that no time be lost and that we fight.”

p “With us?”

p “I left with my brother you see. He’s now on the Northern Front.”

p She is holding a brand new submachine gun without a single scratch, with an unstained barrel of blue steel, and a 139 shiny well-varnished butt. I’d never seen such a firearm before.

p “It comes from Israel,” Rosario explains. "Only recently Somoza got three planefuls of them. So we captured a few and are now learning how to handle them. Everyone must know how to do that. When we start fighting again, we’ll seize several hundred of them at once, and so we’ve got to know how to use them.”

p “Do you know how?”

p “I know how to handle any firearm,” she proudly returns, "even bazooka and 70-mm.”

p In the camp bazookas and 70-mm’s are object of special pride, even affection. (I’m using 70-mm conventionally, as in the camp it’s a different number, according to the machine-gun calibre.) No wonder. During the September uprising the lack of bazookas against tanks and 70-mm’s against aircraft was particularly felt. Somoza pounded urban blocks with rockets and bombs from aircraft, and then crushed them with tanks. The Sandinistas were powerless. Now it’s entirely different!

p The Sandinistas have devised a motto somewhat similar to that of "a united people are invincible”, that was current in Chile in Allende’s time. Only they say, "an armed people are invincible.”

p I ask Rosario how she and the other girls find it in camp.

p “No different from the others,” she returns with a grin. She’s quite sincere, absolutely sure that what she says is right—although it’s much harder here for the girls than for the men. Comandante Jose tells me later that for disrespect to a girl a guerilla is severely punished, up to expulsion from Sandinista ranks.

p “But we are as severe towards the girls too,” he said.

p ’What for?" I wonder.

p “Well, supposing she sets her cap at a boy, and then makes a laughing stock of him in front of all the others. We punish that too.” Jose is quite serious.

p In the afternoon, after dinner—consisting of boiled rice with black beans, griddle cake, and a greenish orange—the 140 camp takes a siesta. The crazy transistor ladio dangling from the branch amidst the submashine guns suddenly, as if by request, fills the clearing with the strains of a Strauss waltz. As if from some distant planet! Incredibly peaceful, cheerful. The guerillas listen to the Blue Danube, chins poised on submachine gun barrels.

p A girl wearing a cross on a chain round her neck lies on a stretcher, humming the tune. Her submachine gun lies by her head.

p I look at the young people seated in the clearing. There aren’t many; the others are in the jungle. I have jotted down today the stories of at least twenty, each a tragedy. Murdered relatives, ruined homes, poverty. So small a land, yet so heart-wrenching this tragedy, decades long, the tragedy of a people living in their own land as if under the heel of occupation.

p After their siesta, the guerillas have classes in political education. A tall bearded comandante, with a submachine gun slung over his shoulder, paces up and down in front of a circle of seated guerillas.

p “We are not at all soldiers,” he says, "and not all of us will make the army a career later. I know Jorge wants to be a schoolteacher after we win. Isn’t that so, Jorge? (The young man nods.) I, too, would like to do all I can to raise the cultural level after we win. Because it’s horrible to think that 75 percent of the Nicas can neither read nor write, and that’s now in 1978, mind you! We have a grand programme to carry out after we win. Most of you know what it’s about, but let me say once again that we must always bear in mind the goals for the sake of which we’re fighting. And so, we’re going to overthrow Somoza, disarm and disband the National Guard. Then we can nationalise all the land, all the factories, building firms, and banks that now belong to Somoza, his family, and their gang. Everything that is confiscated will be placed under public control of the people, and will be run by the employees themselves. All the confiscated land will be parceled out among the land-hungry peasants, all who want to till the land. All speculation in real estate will be banned. Clear? Any questions?”

141

p “Will we have justice at once?" comes a soft voice.

p “What do you actually mean?”

p “Justice,” the same voice echoes, and adds, "they killed my entire family. I want the killers to get their deserts at once, the moment we win "

p “I see,” the comandante says. "Well, that’s just how it’s going to be, we’ll have justice sure, but we can’t simply go and execute all oui enemies. We’ll tiy eveiy case on its merits. We’re not Somoza’s gang, we’re the aimy of the people.”

p “That’s all right, but I want this done as soon as possible,” comes the same quiet, but stubborn voice. "I’ve been waiting so long.”

p “Well, all I can say,” the comandante resumes, "is that there’s not so long to wait now. We’ll win, and justice will be done. We’ve got very much to do after we win, very much indeed. As one of our great revolutionaries said, ours is a small land, but it has great dreams!”

p “Air alarm!" suddenly comes a cry. "A plane from the North!”

p At once, another shout, the order, "Take cover!”

Everyone vanishes. The campfire is out and there’s not a cry, a rustle, a single movement. Only the transistor radio on the branch emits a slow, soothing tune. Not a Strauss waltz now, something else. Gradually it’s drowned out in the roar of the plane overhead.