THE MIGHTY HOPES THAT MAKE US MEN

I enter the rehearsal room, sensing something meaningful will happen to me today, and immediately spot her vixen face, green eyes, and corn-colored hair. She has a unique look about her. Maybe it's the way she nibbles on her bottom lip when she smiles. She is new to the band and must have joined while I was in Nicaragua last month. For the first time in eighteen years...

When I see her surname on the list, my heart skips a beat. Sophie Candelle… Rioting emotions obstruct the passage of words in my throat. I brace myself and continue reading, trying to control my voice. Hands rise one by one until I reach the last name. They're all here—15 teens eager to get their instruments out and start playing.

I have always believed in the healing power of music and am convinced that, like laughter, tears, rain, and certain childhood aromas, it may bring relief to broken souls. But not today. Not when I'm confronted with a girl named Sophie Candelle. Not in Bismarck, North Dakota, where I thought I could put everything behind me.

A loud giggle jolts me out of my trance as I try to gather my thoughts.

"Silence!" The word cuts like a whip and commands an immediate hush.

They are taken aback. They've never seen Dora, the Conciliator, irritated before and aren't pleased with the change.

"All right, let's start with Here Comes Mardi Gras. It's all about the rhythm, remember? People are marching; they are having fun. One, two, and three!"

The rehearsal stretches like an elastic about to snap. After Mardi Gras, they play the New Orleans Parade and finish on a softer note: Glory of the Nation. All I want is for them to pack up and go. Go right now.

There is laughter and some messing around as, one by one, they leave the hall. Only Sophie remains, taking awfully long to put the saxophone into the case. The steel cube of emotions suffocates me. I bite on it and swallow, but it must irradiate from my skin because she turns around to look at me.

"Is everything all right? Are you feeling unwell?" Her voice is heavy with genuine concern.

I get closer and place my hand on her shoulder slowly, ever so carefully. I can feel the warmth of her flesh and the fragility of her bones through the thin fabric of her blouse. I want to dig my fingernails into her skin, squeeze her till it hurts, and pound her into the floor.

“Don’t do anything stupid, Dora,” I tell myself, finally letting go of her shoulder.

She gets nervous, rushing into a black Buick LaCrosse that had stopped in front of the hall. Andrew Candelle is behind the wheel. The man who has sent her to the Bismarck concert hall to play saxophone in a marching band. My son's killer.

I grab my bag and pull out a packet of Winstons. A picture of my son is in a yellowish envelope in the bag's cavernous bowels. I resist my desire to take it out and look for something I might have missed. And every time I do notice something new—the slight crease of attention for the camera's sake, the rebellious shimmer in his eyes. The crooked smile I will never see again. 

"Come back from the meadows of your thoughts, my pretty maiden." A voice breaks into my retrospective journey. The concert hall manager, Vincent, looms over me like a handsome ebony tower.

"Ay Nicaragua, Nicaraguita, la rosa más linda de mi querer," he sings.

"La FLOR más linda de mi querer," I correct.

"Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell a teacher’s blood!" he mocks.

"Go back to your ledgers, spreadsheets, and numbers, and leave music to me," I admonish jokingly.

"Iron Dora, the epitome of a despotic academic. Was Tchaikovsky a swan fan when he composed Swan Lake? Why must all teachers, even music teachers, dissect beauty? Chop, chop, chop—divide a concerto into quavers and semibreves."

My laughter is strained when I ask, "Hey Vincent, what’s this about a meeting at eight tonight? The one on the poster."

"Oh, that thing... We’ve been asked to host an open discussion about the new refugee policy. With a guest speaker—the guy financing the mega wind farm project just outside town. How many refugees can Bismarck still accept? From where and why? I fear it might turn into a heated debate."

"And you, Vincent? What are your thoughts?"

He knows I’m a Nicaraguan refugee and feels cornered.

"I am just a humble concert hall manager,” he answers noncommittally.

“I’m not allowed to have views. I do as I’m told. The mayor wants the hall for a meeting; the mayor shall have the hall. But I still love you, and if I were a decade older and you were a decade younger, I'd marry you in a heartbeat," he quips and walks away, swaying like a catwalk model and singing at the top of his lungs.

"La rosaaaaaa más linda de mi querer!"

I can't stop myself from diving into the bag when he's gone and taking out the photo. The colors have faded, and some portions have been nearly erased from so much handling, but I can readily recognize all of Manuel's features as I saw them the last time.

After graduating from the National Conservatory of Music, I left Managua because I yearned for a simpler and more peaceful life. We relocated to Rosario, a village near the Honduran border, where I taught arts and music to children with indigenous faces and eager eyes.

Rosario was and still is a small, close-knit community where people rely exclusively on what they can wrench from the fields, catch in the lake, or pick from the trees. Local women gather cotton, weave cloth, and carry babies tied to their backs in hemp sacks. Men plant and fish as necessary, giving them plenty of time to tell stories and watch leaf-cutting ants that can strip a shrub naked in minutes.

Life is not perfect in Rosario, but it is pretty good if one ignores the occasional flooding of the Cua River and the indigestion that makes the Cosiguina volcano belch magma and ashes.

Or, at least, it had been pretty good until someone realized that wealthy foreign tourists would pay good money to hike in the jungle, climb the snow-capped volcano, and experience the whole "rustic" adventure before returning to NASDAQ and the flow of cryptocurrencies. The only issue was that the project required a fancy hotel right on the lake's shore, and Rosarians had no intention of moving. That someone was Andrew Candelle, an American investor and property developer.

For me, Rosario was my home, and I never considered returning to Managua for good. I kept in touch with my family, and Manuel and I spent a few weeks there each summer. But we were always glad to return to the village's peace and quiet.

People close to us said that the relationship we enjoyed was not the typical parenting thing because, while other teens preferred comic books and Atari games and gushed over Ricky Martin and Mariah Carey, Manuel and I read Marquez and Neruda and played classical music, me on the flute and Manuel on his violin.

I took the gift of Manuel's presence for granted. It was a constant, like sunlight or rain falling on the jungle, then exhaling as warm mist. I was convinced that things would never change. But they did.

I'm not sure when it all started. Was it the year he shifted from Lorca to Cuban poets? For me, he was passing through a phase; deep within the old Manuel, the essence of generosity and maturity remained.

But over time, black and white Che Guevara posters began to replace Nikki Lauda’s on his bedroom walls. I still ignored what I can now clearly see as signs of rebellion—not against me, his mother, but against the world that took a lot and offered little. Against people like Andrew Candelle, who raced into the village one day in a gigantic jeep, spoke flawless Spanish with a Florida accent, and tried to sweet-talk the residents into selling their land.

"It's just a lot of lianas and spider monkeys," he argued.

"You can buy nice apartments in Managua with flushing toilets and electricity. Here, you barely eke out a living."

But Rosarians were obstinate. It was their jungle and their spider monkeys. They wanted to keep fishing, weaving, and watching leaf-cutting ants and had no desire to relocate and live in cramped apartments overlooking other cramped apartments. Because for them, the capital was terrifying and menacing, and the people who lived there seemed to scurry along set lines as if on rails, passing each other with the civility of strangers, with a distance that was not physical, because there was nothing physically distant in a city but spiritual.

When Candelle realized his sweet-talking had no effect, he launched an intimidation campaign. He hired people to bribe certain town leaders who threatened anyone who wouldn’t sell.

Manuel, who was eighteen years old at the time, became involved. He had spent most of his life in the community and loved it just as much as I did. He participated in the meetings, encouraged people to act wisely but without fear, and gradually became the community’s official spokesman.

I was concerned and remonstrated with him, warning him of the dangers. He got angry.

"So, Mom, was it all just for show? All of Tennyson's quotes? Was it just a parenting experiment to see if you could make me into a dream child? And when you’ve succeeded, you want to destroy it because honesty is scary.”

Naturally, I blamed myself. After all, it was I who raised him to value freedom. And when he did, I didn't want him to get involved. I could quote verses and poems, but my fear of losing him went beyond poetry. It was the raw and unbearable fear of a mother whose child was in danger.

After that came the waiting. Waiting for Manuel to go home. Waiting for news about Manuel when hours turned into days and days into weeks, but my son never told me anything about his activities. Not any longer.

In the meantime, Candelle stopped trying to change people’s minds with bribes and launched a full-fledged war.

The first house to burn was Jose Dominguez’s, the most vocal of Candelle’s opponents. Fortunately, Jose was working in the fields, and his two kids were at school.

Two months later, Gabriel Mairena’s house was set on fire in the early morning hours when he and his family slept. The blaze killed him, his wife, Yeriel, and their daughter, Paula. Everyone knew who was to blame, but no one said anything. Fear rolled over the community, thick and black.

And then came the worst day of my life—a witness, paid by Candelle, testified that my son was behind the arson, allegedly in revenge since Paula had spurned him.

I dispatched him to Managua, where my father would get a lawyer for him. But he never made it to my dad's. He was picked up 50 kilometers from Rosario. I saw him on the five o’clock news—on a stretcher, his shoulder wrapped in bloodied bandages. The police claimed he tried to resist and was shot.

I tried to reach him in prison for weeks, knocking on doors and pleading, but a stern prosecutor told me that Manuel was in solitary confinement.

Three months later, he was sentenced to life in jail while Candelle sat in the courtroom, looking smug. We exchanged long, hard stares, and I told myself he would pay one day for taking my child away.

I visited Manuel in the high-security prison where he served time along with other "hardened criminals.” He was thin and had significantly aged, and although he was now missing two front teeth, I still recognized my child in his smile.

"What have they done to you?"

"Blame the mighty hopes that make us men," he quoted Tennyson with a lisp.

"The cells are cold. I’ll need a sweater like the one you knitted for my birthday. It’ll remind me of you."

His remarks kept coming back to me while I was knitting. Should I hope for his sake or my sanity?

Two weeks later, I finished the sweater, and the next day, the phone rang.

"Deep regrets...unknown circumstances...suicide..."

The world, or at least the world I had known before, ended for me. The new one was as bleak as Edvard Munch's "Scream." I drowned in despair, chaos, and hopelessness. I no longer lived but barely skimmed the surface of life.

A month later, I left Rosario because every tree, stream, and leaf-cutting ant reminded me of Manuel. Before I left, the man who testified against him passed me a message admitting that Candelle had bribed him to frame my son. But it was too late. The farmers still refused to sell the land, and Candelle, tired of waiting, invested his money elsewhere, possibly in Jamaica. Or perhaps in eastern Sumatra. He was gone, and I had no idea where to look for him.

When my father died, I felt it was time to try to live again, so I relocated to Bismark, where they needed a music teacher for their youth band. There was a sizeable Nicaraguan refugee population there, so I felt at home.

And it was there, nearly twenty years later, that I met Sophie Candelle, a girl with a vixen face.

As she packed her saxophone earlier that morning, I wanted to yell at her, "Who do you see in front of you every day? Do you see your father or my son's killer?"

But I couldn't because her green eyes were sweet and innocent.

As a teacher with more than thirty years of experience, I never do anything rash. But today, I got ready for the meeting long before eight o'clock. I carve a path through the crowd congregating outside the hall to the cafeteria, where the aroma of freshly ground coffee and the buzz of human interactions spread out inviting tendrils.

"I told him to leave it alone if he couldn’t take the stress."

"Half a pound of flour, two tablespoons of butter, five ounces of ground almonds, and a little bit of milk…"

Snatches of chatter prod at the wall I'm trying to build around myself. Still, my turmoil is stronger than the desire to participate in life's trivialities.

Everyone rushes inside to take their seats. Vincent, fixing the microphone on the podium, waves his hand cheerfully to greet me. I look away.

The mayor takes the stage and speaks for a few moments.

"And now, please welcome our guest speaker. He is the man whose generosity has brought a lot of jobs to this city. I will ask you to listen respectfully and leave questions until the end," he says, receiving lukewarm applause.

Andrew Candelle enters from the rear of the stage. Physically appealing and older than the last time I saw him, he resembles the men on old recruitment posters from WWII—square-jawed, muscular, and tanned. He has aged nicely, with the hairline still going strong and refusing to recede. This kind of confident and ruthless man always grows old in style—salt and pepper weave into their hair, and exercise sculpts their bodies into firm muscles.

He taps the microphone to see if it works. Everyone in the hall falls silent, waiting for him to speak. But he won't, because I will not let him. At least not before I have my say. I look at the man on the stage and get up. Our eyes meet. He knows who I am, and he is afraid. Afraid of what I might say and what I might have against him that could spoil his plans for Bismarck, North Dakota. Things that might turn neighbors against his massive wind farm, which already has many critics,

People in the hall stare at me, but I don't care. I start talking.

"My name is Dora Gomez. I’m a teacher from Nicaragua. I’m also the mother of Manuel, who would be 39 this year. I raised him to be a good man. He is no longer with us because he thought that no matter what, he should always do the right thing. Always—not just for show, as he once told me. Until the man standing before you decided that honesty had no value. Because the man who apparently has brought so many jobs to this city doesn't believe in honesty. He only believes in the power of money. Because of people like him, people like my son die. So before you pass a verdict today, think about my son before considering whether you should close the doors to those who flee individuals like Mr. Candelle and others like him. And I hope… I do hope that you make the right choice. Because my son believed in the mighty hopes that make us men."