Nicaragua I: Apuyo > Granada > San Juan del Sur [reading Ramirez & Darío & Cuadra & Diaz] 11.3.10. NYC to Managua [via Miami] on the pLane i read Margarita, How Beautiful the Sea by Sergio Ramirez—appropriate enough as it is a sort of hYstorical REconstruction of Nicaragua centered on it's 2 key figures—the acclaimed poet Ruben Darío & Anastasio Somoza [the original dynasty-founding dictator] | the book illustrates the importance of literature in Nicaragua to the point where its LITerature IS its hiStory [or at least inseparably intertwined][& if to further validate this Ramirez himself was the vice-president of Nicaragua from '85-90] | there are 2 storylines that [despite being 50 years apart in reality] eventually blur & converge with each other—1 path following the life of Darío & the other the plot to kill Somoza | it's spun from the P.O.V. of no one & everyone [Nicaragua is socialist after all] & has a cast of characters so colored it requires an appendix to keep them all straight [also useful to cross-check the validity in comparison to Nicaragua's «real» history | there's: {Jorge Negrete the Mexican cockfighter who wears spurs on a boat | the luchador «Lion of Memea» that sports a rotten lion hide | Rigoberto the poet assassin | the Alligator Woman | a barbarian doctor that removes Darío's brain }—etc.—a veritable circus sideshow complete with albinos [due to a curse from Nicaraguan women sleeping with Yankee marines] | the boat bringing Darío back to Nicaragua morphs into a boat carrying this evolving cast of freaks that conspire to both assassinate Somoza & plan the production of a play [this was my take on it anyway—maybe i was reading into it & yes i was reading the English version so who knows what was lost in translation] | the dialogue was at times hilarious especially when the customs official enters the picture & starts interrogating them & official business digresses into debate over theatrical drama & poetry & the sex of the Alligator Woman | the lines between fiction & history are smeared & often you discover that it's the most absurd things that are actually true | i left the book behind so i don't have any passages to quote in particular but take my word for it—there's botched sex-changed surgeries & colostomy bags & a struggle over Darío's brain that leaves it lying on the cobblestone amidst broken glass | a great primer to Nicaragua i'd say | [in reality] we arrived in Managua & rented a car | we didn't bother with Managua just headed straight out | driving in Nicaragua is interesting to say the least | there are no signs & streets have no names & when you ask for directions you typically get cryptic ones in respect to landmarks that haven't existed for 20 years | we somehow managed to find a volcano [Masaya] & drove to the top though our shitty rental car could barely make it | the volcano was steaming & frothing [with sulfur whose taste we couldn't shake] so you couldn't see much | evidently it is one of the few volcanoes with a perpetual lava pool | after initiating ourselves with a volcano we found our way to Laguna de Apuyo which is a crater lake in an extinct volcano | we got a waterfront room at some eco-lodge & parked ourselves for a day just to chill & swim in the mineral-rich geothermally heated waters of the lake | when we weren't mindlessly swimming way out into the deep blue expanse we were looking for monkeys or reading or playing with the dogs & parrots | i figured i HAD to read some Ruben Darío so i read a book of his collected Stories & Poems | somewhere in the Sergio Ramirez book i think he talks about how Ruben Darío's fame is not so much from his poetry but his personality & how historical records show that only 1000 or so of his books were published & that Darío himself likely owned many of them | so i guess you have to appreciate Darío for who he was [the worldly boozer & womanizer & diplomat] not for what he wrote | or maybe you have to consider Darío in the context of his time as the first «modernist» & that he preceded the likes of Borges or Marquez | the book was dual language so i'd read the Spanish first before finding myself lost then realized i was equally detached reading the English so it didn't matter | interesting nevertheless [from a language perspective] to see how it was translated | being as i'm amidst a self-administered crash course in Italian it's weird to switch back to Spanish but i guess it's good practice regardless | the way they speak here is very sing-songy & less crude than Mexican Spanish | 12.3.10. Laguna de Apuyo heard all sorts of noises in the night—geckos & bats & howler monkeys & bushbabies & who knows what else | a hard adjustment from the overhead trains & bridge traffic & noisy neighbors back «home» | we woke up with the sun & i went to find the source of the howler noise & here's some creatures we saw: i moved on to reading Pablo Antonio Cuadra [his Songs of Cifar & the Sweet Sea]—far more accessible & enjoyable than Darío | Cuadra reads like a cross between Whitman & Neruda | i also read the bilingual version of these not needing to refer to the English much | they are narrative poems that follow the adventures of the sailor Cifar who plies the waters of Lake Nicaragua recounting his adventures & observations which are told with child-like wonder | every time he sees something he sees it for the first time even if he's seen it before | i read most of it on the dock shown in the picture below though Apuyo is not nearly as big as Lake Nicaragua [where we're headed next] | although bodies of water are regarded by most as feminine—Lake Nicaragua to Cifar is an ethereal father-object with his mother ever-beckoning from the shores:
along Cifar's odyssey he encounters—{ other islands | fishermen | farmers | sages | a one-armed sailor | Mirna the prostitute | unpredictable weather formations}—etc.—that all get woven into the BEing that is Cifar [seemingly unaware of himself] | he ventures about leaving no tRaces except words:
very Odysseian—for example the grunting in the following harks of Circe:
& some last words just because:
starting to run low on books & it's only the first day so i read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz that j had brought along & finished & since i guess the D.R. is not such a stretch from Nicaragua | i'm not sure i liked it as much as Drown but i suppose it passed the time & was easy enough to read | his characters don't fall into the typical Dominican stereotypes—nerds & goths—but after a while it seems he is trying so hard to not stereotype that the characters don't feel genuine nor believable | & the voice & language is casual street lingo that also gets a bit trying after a few hundred pages | i mean ¿how many «Negro, Please»s must we endure? | i know he's trying to let us all into his inner posse or whatever but it all gets too cutesy [especially when you look at his smug photo on the back reclining on a couch with orchids & his designer glasses & all that] & i felt like a white college chick at starbucks eating a bran muffin with the book propped up in front of me to make me seem culturally enlightened | you shouldn't need to be his homeboy to read his book | & he keeps talking about this voodoo fukú shit & saying things like «In Santo Domingo a story is not a story unless it casts a supernatural shadow» but Oscar Wao falls flat with any semblance of magical payoff black or otherwise | i have to admit it was compelling enough to finish but i felt dirty about it after | i also started to read The Obstacles by the Eloy Urroz | unlike the critic darling Díaz [whose getting enough attention]—i want to say something nice about Urroz since it was published by Dalkey Archive & all but truth is it bored the hell out of me | it follows 2 characters [one in D.F. & another in Baja, Mexico] that are both so obsessed & troubled over women that they suffer all sorts of gastrointestinal & health ailments | so if you're into reading about love-struck [read: pussy-whipped] guys then you might like it | i personally couldn't stomach more than 50 pages of it | 13.3.10. Granada our bathroom here is basically a roofless garden patio which makes for good star-gazing when you take a leak in the middle of the night | this morning i was showering in this patio when i felt something on my leg | i looked down & figured it was a branch sticking out of a potted plant so continued washing my hair when i felt it higher up on my thigh | without looking i brushed it off then cleared my eyes & looked & it was a wet scorpion scrambling off | scorpions were the the things i feared most living in Mexico [where they can be lethal] so i was pretty much freaking out—especially being as it was inches from my manhood | we split for Granada after that | everything in Nicaragua is close together [at least away from the Caribbean coast or up north]—only like 30 minutes to Granada | it was insanely hot so mostly we hung out on our balcony looking out over the plaza people-watching & drinking beer | i unknowingly left the video camera on at one point so if you want to know the kinds of things j & i mindlessly talk about listen to the background noise of this [mixed in with a few stereos all blaring simultaneously in typical latin American fashion]: & here's some other things we saw around Granada: the food's been pretty much shit here so far but tonight we had possibly the best steak [churrasco style] i've ever had in my life at a place called El Zaguan—so succulent you didn't even need a knife to cut it | 14.3.10. San Juan del Sur pushed off to the beach today | thank god for google maps & j's blackberry as nothing is marked & people's directions were usually more misleading than helpful | we spent an hour or 2 on all these random dirt roads trying to find some schmancy resort called Morgan's Rock | google map had it pinpointed a few miles south from where it should've been so we almost gave up on it after wandering into some abandoned resorts & one beachside palapa with a fat couple wasted out of their minds dry-humping on a card-table littered with empty beer bottles from the night before | it was worth the effort though as this place was unbelievable—though it ended up being twice as much as we thought [which was already a lot] as j didn't realize the price was per person & not per night | oh well j in particular was in need of a well-deserved splurge & this was it |
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