Free The Jaguar Smile by Salman Rushdie Page A

Zamora replied; Salvatierra nodded. Now I understood: they belonged to the urban-insurrectionist, tercerista faction, the winning team. They didn’t want to seem to be gloating over the victory.
    To stir things up, I said that the case of Edén Pastora suggested that the divisions were deeper than they cared to admit. After all, Pastora had been a tercerista himself, he had been the famous ‘Commander Zero’, glamorous and dashing, who had led the sensational attack on the Palacio Nacional, taken the entire Somocista Chamber of Deputies hostage, and obtained the release of fifty jailed Sandinistas plus a half-million dollar ransom; and there he was today, in exile in Costa Rica, having tried to lead a counter-revolutionary army of his own … He had been defeated by the Sandinistas, but surely his break with the revolution he helped to bring about was significant? Therewere grins and embarrassed laughs from the delegado and his deputy. ‘Edén Pastora wanted personal glory,’ Salvatierra said. ‘He joined the wrong army in the first place.’
    The next day I drove up into the north. I knew that the road I was on, the one that went up past Jinotega and headed for Bocay, was the one on which the Contra mine had exploded, killing ‘the thirty-two’, and even though that had happened a good deal further north than I was going, I felt extremely fearless as we went over the bumps. ‘How do you protect the roads?’ I asked the army officer who was accompanying me. ‘It’s impossible to guarantee total safety,’ he replied.
    ‘I see,’ I said. ‘Yes. By the way, how do you know when there’s a mine in the road?’
    ‘There’s a big bang,’ came the straight-faced reply.
    My breakfast of rice and beans – ‘gallo pinto’, it was called, ‘painted rooster’ – began to crow noisily in my stomach.
    There were vultures sitting by the roadsides. Low clouds sat amongst the mountains. The road-signs were punctured by bullet-holes. In the jeep, the driver, Danilo, had a radio, or rather a ‘REALISTIC sixteen-band scanner’, on which he picked up Contra transmissions. We passed co-operatives with resolutely optimistic names: La Esperanza. La Paz . The mountains thickened and closed: walls of tree and cloud. There was a flash of electric-blue wings; then, suddenly, a peasant shack surrounded by trees and hedges clipped into cones, domes, rectangles, spheres, all manner of geometric shapes. To be a topiarist in a jungle, I reflected, was to be a truly stubborn human being.
    Then there was a tree lying across the road, blocking our way. Was this it? Was this where Contra fiends with machetes between their teeth would burst from the foliage, and goodbye escritor hindú ?
    It was just a tree across the road.

    The Enrique Acuña co-operative was named after a local martyr, who had been murdered by a wealthy local landowner after Somoza’s fall. (The killer got away, fleeing the country before he could be arrested.) It was a ‘CAS’, a Cooperativa Agrícola Sandinista, that is, a proper co-op, with all the land held and farmed collectively. Elsewhere, in areas where there had been resistance to the co-operative idea, the government had evolved the ‘CCS’, the Co-operative of Credits and Services. In a CCS the land was owned and farmed by individuals, and the government’s role was limited to supplying them with power, water, health care and distribution facilities. There was no doubt that the campesinos were encouraged to adopt the CAS structure, but the existence of the alternative was an indication of the authorities’ flexibility; this was not, surely, the way a doctrinaire commune-ist regime would go about its business.
    The houses were built on the ‘miniskirt’ principle: metal roofs stood over walls that were made of concrete up to a height of three feet, and of wood above that height. This had become the campesinos’ favourite building method. The Contra couldn’t set fire to the roofs, or shoot the