Free The Jaguar Smile by Salman Rushdie Page B

occupants through the walls while they lay sleeping. The houses were arranged around wide avenues, with plenty of space between them. Pigs were snoozing in the shade. There was a tap with running water, and even a shower. In a ramshackle shed, a playschool was in progress: clapping games and songs. In the next room, there was a baby care centre with instructions for the care and diagnosis of diarrhoea pinned up on the wall, written out and illustrated by the children themselves. The disease was the main child-killer in the rural areas.
    All around the co-operative’s residential area was a system of trenches. The campesinos did guard duty on a rota basis, andmany of the men were familiar with the workings of the AK-47 automatic rifle. They were also geniuses with the machete. The campesino who had hacked to pieces the tree that had held us up could have shaved you without breaking your skin. Alternatively, he could have sliced you like a loaf.
    Last November, the Contra had attacked the Acuña co-operative, by daylight and in force: around 400 of them against thirty-two armed defenders. Arturo, the burly young man who was in charge of the defence committee, told me proudly that they had held out for three hours until help arrived from a neighbouring co-operative. In the end the Contra were beaten off, with thirteen dead and around forty wounded. ‘We lost nobody,’ Arturo boasted. Since then, the Contra had been seen in the neighbourhood twice, but had not attacked.
    A thought occurred to me: if the opposition were correct, and the Sandinistas were so unpopular, how was it that the government could hand out all these guns to the people, and be confident that the weapons would not be turned against them? There wasn’t another regime in Central America that would dare to do the same: not Salvador, nor Guatemala, not Honduras, not Costa Rica. While in tyrannical, ‘Stalinist’ Nicaragua, the government armed the peasantry, and they, in turn, pointed the guns, every one of them, against the counter-revolutionary forces.
    Could this mean something?
    I got talking to a group of five campesinos during their lunch break. They parked their machetes by hacking them into a tree-stump, but brought their AKs along. Did they know anyone who had joined the Contra? They knew of kidnaps, they said. But how about someone who had joined voluntarily? No, they didn’t. The people were afraid of the Contra.
    One of the campesinos , Humberto, a small man with a big-toothed smile, was an indigène , but he wasn’t sure what sort. He wasn’t Miskito or Sumo, he knew that. ‘I’m trying to find out what I am.’ He had lived in the north, in the area now evacuated. The Contra, he said, had kidnapped him, threatened to kill him, but he had escaped. A while later he heard that they were still after him, and intended to recapture him. ‘This time they’d have killed me for sure.’ So he was delighted to be resettled. ‘It was hard at first, but, for me, it was a blessing.’ He sat close to a matchstick-thin man with wiry black hair sticking out sideways from beneath his peaked cap. ‘The same happened to me,’ this man, Rigoberto, said. ‘Just the same story. Me, too.’
    Another of the quintet came from a coastal fishing community, where there had been no possibility of getting any land. The other two were locals. ‘So do you think of this as your home now?’ I asked. ‘Or does it seem like just some temporary place?’
    Arturo, the defence organiser, answered. ‘What do you mean? We’ve put our sweat into this earth, we’ve risked our lives for it. We’re making our lives here. What do you mean? Of course it’s home.’
    ‘It’s our first home,’ the fisherman, the oldest of the five, at around fifty, said. He was called Horacio, and as I listened to him the penny dropped. What he had said, and what the indigène Humberto had told me – ‘I’m trying to find out what I am’ – were both connected to Father Molina’s