Transvestites, War Stories and Lovely Rooftop Views

Arriving with a sore post-virus head in Leon, deposited at a petrol station on the outskirts, Lou and I wasted no time in installing ourselves in a central hostel and trundling around the centre of town, eager for new sights and sounds.

We were in luck, beset upon all sides by a long and riotous procession celebrating some saint or another, around which the townspeople flocked in great quantities. Town bells clanged in glorious dissonance and a string of midday drunks and, unexpectedly, transvestites, trailed behind the main procession as it wound its way about town, disappearing from sight and ear-splittingly reappearing again suddenly as soon as Lou and I decided to sit somewhere and engage in conversation.

Seeking quieter experiences, we committed ourselves to the Sandinista Revolution Museum, housed understandably rather proudly in a grand and steadily decaying building that formed the last stronghold of the National Guard in Leon before it was toppled in 1979. Of the grand rooms leading from the sweeping central atrium beyond the front door populated with latent Nicaraguan men, only one was in active use as the museum. The walls of the room were covered with a selection of newspaper cuttings, shoddy photo-copies, pages ripped from books and dog eared maps affixed by sellotape, forming the most haphazard historical display that I can recall within recent memory.

We were led around the selection by an ex-guerrilla, an amiable but serious fellow who gestured at everything with a trusty pointing stick, giving us a high speed tour of the modern history of Nicaragua from the assassination of General Sandino, who had waged relentless guerrilla war against US military forces since their occupation in 1912 and finally driven them out of Nicaragua in 1933, by the US military trained Nicaraguan National Guard to the relentless war waged against the Sandinista government post-revolution by the (yes, you’ve guessed it) US financed contra-revolutionaries in the years of the hard-line Regan administration. The whole bloody and brutal history lasted for about 60 years, and had much credit to give the foreign policy of our favourite international superpower. It was almost as if I was listening to an echo of El Salvadorian fortunes, the fortunes of an entire country retarded by the best part of a century for the gains of …what, exactly?

Our tour progressing beyond the high ceilings of the room containing grainy photo after grainy photo of young, serious faces that never saw an end to their conflict, and we climbed the stairs up to the roof. Clanking gingerly over a worryingly thin layer of corrugated tin riveted to beams beneath by our confidently striding guide, were led around a selection of fine views of Leon. We stared from the rooftop in the warmth of the late afternoon sun over towards the distant volcanoes that spiked out of the horizon like the cardiogram of a heart murmur patient. I asked our guide how he felt about giving the tours. After a brief pause he replied,

“It’s good for me to talk about it. It is hard, but it’s like a kind of therapy.”

The heavy beige sunlight picked the wrinkles and creases out on his face and I reflected, rather sadly from our grand perch overlooking the sprawling town, on how many people this man had lost. I though about how much had been torn away from him without him being able to do anything about it, and why he had been forced to experience such a hard existence. I tried to understand, but I couldn’t.

Leon, Nicaragua
4th October 2009