Do It Again but DO It Better

Do It Again but Do It Better

Grandmother could not read and she marked an X for her name when she went to vote. But you could fill a library with her stories. She told us stories that her grandmother told her when she was a child. Back then, we would sit outside her wooden shack, shaded from the scorching sun by an awning of palm branches. Hens pecked in the dry earth, dogs slept under benches of rough wooden planks straddling short stumps of tree trunks.

She would tell us of one of her uncles, the one who belonged to the famous Indios Flecheros who fought at San Jacinto. We loved to hear that story of her uncle, a hero of that great battle. These flecheros – archers - lived in the mountains around Matagalpa. They had lived there long before the people came from Germany and Poland and started planting coffee. They were there even before the Spanish came with their guns and canons, their guitars and language. In time, my grandmother and grandfather learned to dance the polka, like these people from afar, while others in the family played the guitar.

She never told us her uncle was a hero. That was reserved for a very special horse. All my family love horses. Besides singing, dancing, making music and telling stories, my family love horses.

The great battle, she told us, started in the morning, around seven o’clock. I couldn’t understand that; she never owned a watch, no one in her family owned a watch.

Back then, an army of pale skinned foreign freebooters was advancing towards the capital. Our people had only about half their number but they were told to stop the freebooters, delay their advance to the city of Managua. They put up a good fight, so grandmother said. Not only had the other side a bigger army, they and better guns. Her uncle and his mountain Indio friends didn’t have guns but they used bows and arrows to hunt deer in the forest and fight anyone who crossed them, few dared.

Fierce and fearless men were those Indios, she said. She was fearless herself, my grandmother. After a good beginning the fighting started to go badly for our people. Then, by mid-morning it started to change, there was a decisive turn in the fortunes of war. That was when the Indios Flecheros became national heroes at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1856. That victory gave us independence. There was a young man, from the regular army, a sergeant Andres Castro, she recalled. During the fighting his gun jammed so he picked up a stone and thew it at one of the freebooters. It killed him stone dead, on the spot.

But to my grandmother the hero that day was the horse, Cacique. We lived near Haciendo San Jacinto, a ranch house near Tipitapa, close to Lake Xolotlan. No one really knows how, but somehow or other the  horses got out of a shed where they had been put for their safety. Cacique was the leader of our herd of horses. Normally horses would be frightened by the sound of gun fire. But not Cacique; he was a very patriotic horse, said grandmother. He galloped toward the sound of gun fire, the other horses followed.

The freebooters heard the thundering hooves of the charging animals on the hard, dusty ground as they came closer to the battle. That was enough for the freebooters. Thinking they were hearing our side’s reinforcements, they took off. The flecheros and our regular troupes did the rest. The day was ours, before mid-day.

Oh yes, we were definitely an independent republic after that. But, so what! The people who owned the land, who had grand houses in the city and controlled everything, squabbled among themselves. We harvested miserable crops of beans, kept a pig or two, bought and sold horses. Our family was as miserable as before, for another generation. Thirty years that government lasted.

‘Was it worth it,’ asked my little sister? ‘Fighting for independence, I mean.’

‘I’d say it was. People like us didn’t do well out of that business. We did badly. Maybe we’ll have to do it all over again. Maybe next time we’ll not do so badly, we’ll do it better.’ Then my grandmother would doze off to sleep.

My family have been in a lot of wars. One uncle was a great supporter of Jose Santos Zelaya. When he became President of our Republic. He made many changes. He built railways and started shipping lines. We traded with other countries. Great improvements were made in education. Then he got ahead of himself and the people turned against him. He seemed to go around picking fights with everybody, at home and abroad. The pale faced foreigners returned and Zelaya had to flee the country.

The new government was friendly with Mexico and the United States. Again, foreign soldiers were in our country. Marines, they were called. War started all over again. There were three different leaders in this war against the new government and their foreign friends. After a while a couple of the leaders came to an agreement with the government. But there was one leader who did not.

They say he had worked in the oil fields of Mexico, as a mechanic. He didn’t like the Catholic church or alcohol but he hung out with Genova Witnesses, trade unions and he read a lot. That’s what people hold me, anyway.  This man became known as the General of Free Men. It wasn’t long before his fame spread all over the Americas. My father fought alongside this general.

They killed him in the end, the general I mean. Our president Somoza and his friends killed him. My father died soon after. He was a broken man. After a while all the family and some neighbours too, got together. You struggle to get a better life and what happens? Sooner or later, you discover that you’ve failed again. It’s better to just lie low and get by as best you can. We all agreed on that. We moved away from Matagalpa soon after that. But I still go up there to visit my cousins. My daughters come with me. They like it up there.

We aren’t any better off. We’re still poor and struggling to make ends meet. My youngest daughter is a bit unsettled, she’s restless.

‘Why doesn’t somebody do something,’ she asks? ‘We could do better than this. We don’t have to be poor and sick all the time.’

I tell her, ‘We’ve tried to make changes before but our efforts always lead to failure. That’s the way things are. Look at what happened in the time of my own grandmother. Then Zelaya turned bad after my uncle fought so hard. Your own grandfather was injured fighting with that General of Free Men. He never really recovered after that.’

We’ve been doing that for years now. Life hasn’t got any better. In Leon there are students protesting in the streets. The Guardia round them up, shoot them in the streets at times. They would be better off, singing the songs of those English Beatles. All that when the young ones are going on about free love and the chicas are wearing miniskirts.

There’s talk of people up in the mountains. They call themselves Sandinistas, after that General of Free Men. But there’s nothing like that’s happening down here. Lately my daughter has been very quiet, like something is troubling her. It’s because she’s young, I tell myself.

Our little house is modest, it’s mostly adobe, with a tin roof that leaks when there is rain. We don’t have a well, so we have to walk to a spring in the rocks with two buckets every day. Our neighbours are the same. Either I go or one my daughters goes. When I woke up this morning, I noticed my youngest daughter wasn’t in her bed. She’s gone early to fetch water, I told myself. Then I saw that the buckets were in their usual place, empty.

That’s when I went to her bed. There, where her head should have been I found the note.

‘Madre, I’ve gone to the mountains. We’ll do it better this time.’

She’s my new Cacique now.