Free The Jaguar Smile by Salman Rushdie

region, still in Nicaragua. The rest have returned to Honduras.’
    Salvatierra stressed the Contra’s morale problem. ‘They’re scared of us,’ he said. ‘Dollars won’t help that.’
    I changed the subject. Was it true that it cost six head of cattle to get a car serviced? They laughed. ‘Or ten hectares of maize,’ said Carlos Zamora. So, then, I said, if prices are that high, tell me about corruption. They looked embarrassed, not unexpectedly, but they didn’t refuse to answer. Yes, Zamora said, there was, er, some. ‘About the car service,’ he said. ‘You see, a mechanic will tell you that a certain part is unavailable, or can be ordered for crazy money, but he just happens to have one at home, for a price.’
    The black market accounted for maybe forty per cent of the country’s liquid assets. ‘Anything that can be bought can be sold down the road for more,’ Salvatierra said. ‘There is an old woman who hitchhikes from Matagalpa to León every day,with a suitcase full of beans, mangoes and rice. She earns 5,000 córdobas a day. I earn about 3,000.’
    Zamora and Salvatierra had been ‘bad students’ in Managua when the FSLN recruited them. Zamora’s father was a garage mechanic. (I had accidentally hit on the right subject when I talked about servicing motor cars.) ‘He wasn’t against the revolution but he wasn’t for it, either.’ I said that it seemed at times that the revolution had been a struggle between the generations – the Frente’s ‘muchachos’ , kids, against the older generation of Somocistas and cautious, conservative campesinos . No, no, they both hastened to correct me. But the impression stuck.
    ‘How old are you?’ I asked them. They giggled prettily.
    ‘Thirty,’ Carlos Zamora said. He had fought a revolution and was the governor of a province, and he was nine years younger than me.
    Later, when a little Flor de Caña Extra Seco had loosened things up, the old stories came out again: of the battle of Pancasán in 1974, at which the Sandinistas suffered a bloody defeat, but after which, for the first time, the campesinos came to the Frente and asked for arms, so that the defeat was a victory, after all, the moment at which the muchachos and the peasants united; of Julio Buitrago; of the local boy, Carlos Fonseca, who was born in Matagalpa. Sandino and Fonseca were both illegitimate, they told me. ‘So what’s the connection between bastards and revolutions?’ I asked, but they only laughed nervously. It wasn’t done to joke about the saints.
    I tried to get them to open up about the period in the ’70s during which the Frente had split into three ‘tendencies’, after a bitter dispute about the correct path for the revolution. (The ‘proletarian faction’, led by Jaime Wheelock, believed that a long period of work with the campesinos , to politicize and mobilize them, was the way forward, even if it took years. Thefaction that favoured a prolonged guerrilla war, and based itself in the mountains, included Carlos Fonseca himself; and the third faction, the terceristas , which believed in winning the support of the middle classes and proceeding by a strategy of large-scale urban insurrection, was led by Daniel Ortega and his brother. The factions united, in December 1978, for the final push to victory, and it was the tercerista plan that carried the day.)
    Zamora and Salvatierra denied that there had been any internal power struggles; the division had been tactical and not a real split. ‘I’ve never heard of a revolution without a power struggle in the leadership,’ I said. ‘Wasn’t it true that Jaime Wheelock was accused of being responsible for the split? Wasn’t it true that Daniel Ortega became President because the tercerista faction won the internal fight?’ No, they said, anxiously. Not at all. ‘The directorate has always been very united.’
    That simply wasn’t true. Where had they spent the insurrection years, I asked; ‘In the cities,’