ZEN WARRIOR BASS PLAYER/SANDINISTAS

Spider and Fly

     I came home one afternoon in late 1976 to my house on Chestnut Street in Santa Cruz. I'd been working in the building trades since leaving the boats, and was trading work for rent, building my first complete house behind the one I lived in. I had recently gotten my general contractor's license.

     I walked across the living room, past the fireplace, and into the kitchen where sun was streaming in through the windows. I started putting groceries away in the fridge. The windows faced south, so that the afternoon sun warmed the red quarry tile floor and threw shadows of the windows' wooden bars and muntins into parallelogrammed patterns across the sink, stove, and countertop.     

     I lived alone; the kitchen was quiet. But I had just closed the refrigerator door when a loud buzz caught my attention from a lower corner of one of the windows. It was a big bluebottle fly, buzzing with such intensity that the sound filled the room. The fly was having trouble with a spider's web that was spun across the corner of the window. A small spider came scooting across the glass, waved its legs near the fly, backed away. I got a kitchen chair and moved it up to just beyond arm's length and sat down.

     Obviously, it would be no contest. The web was no more than a few frail strands, not yet ready for a quarry several times larger than the spider, whose legs were nearly as delicate as the strands of its web. The fly still had both wings free, and was buzzing loudly, trying to get enough lift to pull its legs free of the web.

     The spider darted out again, near the fly but just out of reach of its great thrashing wings. The spider waved its forward legs again, as if giving some arachnidic benediction, but from this close I could see the spider stretching a strand of web between its two forward legs, and offering that strand to the sacrificial buzz saw of the fly's wings.

     The fly instantly snapped that strand, seeming not to notice it. It continued to struggle to free its legs, but could only free one leg by pushing at the web with another, which trapped the liberating leg. The spider pulled back, seeming to rest or to give up. But then it scooted forward again, and again offered its nettlesome benediction. As before, the fly snapped it immediately; as before, the spider backed just out of danger to rest, and to spin another strand.

     The world's time ‑ that is, time outside of what was happening in one corner of one pane of that old twelve‑light double‑hung window ‑ began to dissolve for me. Minutes, or hours, might have passed. The battle became a ballet, a pas de deux between the raging fly and the tiny, impudent, darting spider, coming in with its frail monofilament offerings. The force‑field generated by their antagonistic movements drew me closer to the battle, seeming to magnify the two creatures. I began to see the motion of the spider's legs, as it attempted to lasso the fly with puny strands, as similar to the parenthetic arcs of a ballerina's arms in opposing crescents above her head during a pirouette. The fly became a furious neomechanical monster with blue and green and black metallic glints flashing off its segmented head and thorax, the translucent but formidable wings the instruments of its rage.     

     I leaned in closer. Now, among the flinty pulses of light being emitted by the writhing of the fly's body, a new source of color appeared. As the fly revved its wings, trying to get enough lift to pull itself free of the web that still held its legs, a quick tiny flash of rainbow would appear along the top edge of the fly's left wing, the one nearest the spider. The spider kept moving back, spinning, darting in with a new strand that the thrashing wing would instantly break. But the rainbow glints of light, refracted by the strands' residue on the fly's wing, came more often, lasted longer, and grew in size until a strand of web became visible between the wing and the body of the fly, darting violently with the wing's motion, snapping but then reconstituting itself as the spider added more material, until the strand became a cable, then a net, and that wing suddenly stilled, lashed now to the fly's body. The roar of the fly's wings was cut in half. The spider moved cautiously up on the disarmed side, threw a few more strands in place to make sure the wing was secure, then circled around to the fly's opposite side, patiently repeating the process until the great blue fly was trussed, immobile, silent.

     "There it is," I said. "Vietnam."

Posted by Dean Metcalf at 6:08 PM  

Fear

     Annie and I had just started living together. This was before we built the big house, when we still lived in the 560 square foot cottage that was on the place when she bought it. Our bedroom was tucked up under the gambrel roof, with windows we could open at either end. Remodeling the place, she'd had me put seven skylights in that tiny structure. On warm clear nights, the moon would do its slow east to west waltz from skylight to skylight, and the breeze from Monterey Bay would play like dolphins among our quilts and pillows. It was the most magical place I'd ever slept; the more so because it wasn't someplace I visited on vacation or in dreams. I lived there.

     I'd had relationships; I'd spent nights at women's places, and they at mine. Sometimes it had lasted for a while. But this was different. This was my home; Annie was the woman I was with. We got up and made our breakfast and fed the animals and saw each other off to work and came home and told each other about our days.

     Sometimes at night the dogs would awaken and make a racket, or the chickens would be panicked by a prowling coyote or skunk. I would get up and grab a flashlight and my jo, a Japanese fighting staff, if it sounded serious enough, and go outside to investigate. I was the man of the house. That was my job. I was never afraid when I did it. I was both naked and armed, and that was fine with me.

     Annie went away for a weekend. She had a conference, or a Continuing Medical Education (CME) course. It was the first night I'd slept in the cottage without her.

     I could hardly sleep. I kept waking up at the slightest peep of nocturnal bird or cricket or tree frog. I realized that I was afraid because Annie was gone, even though, when she was home, it was she who depended on me for safety. Coyotes, drunken teenagers in the driveway, even the thought of some desperate prison escapee on the prowl: I would face it. Meanwhile, I had slept soundly. But with her gone, some other meanings of danger and safety had come into play. Her absence had made me afraid.

                                                       Guard Dog

     Annie had this spaniel mutt she'd named Dashiell, after Dashiell Hammett. As near as we could tell, he was part Brittany and part Cocker. I loved that dog.

     One morning we were leaving for work. I came out first. I stopped at the bottom of the steps to pet the dog. "You guard the house, Dash," I said. It was just an automatic remark; Dash was the furthest creature you could imagine from a guard dog. He greeted friend and stranger alike with equal opportunity tail‑wagging.

     Annie came out, closed the door, came down the steps, went through her version of the same ritual: "You take care of the house, Dash," she said.

                    Dream: Panther, Wife, Rifle

Most of my dreams are in color. Sometimes they're extravagant with color, especially with the bright crimson of arterial blood. This dream is black and white, but not the black and white and grays of a photograph. The blacks are deep, irridescent, jet black; the whites are brilliant flashes. Annie and I are at our home, which in the dream is where a high plain meets the foothills of mountains. The place is wild. The mountains which loom behind us are no Ozarks or Smokies or Adirondacks; they are Canadian Rockies, only wilder: great, jagged masses of obsidian and ice, with trees as gnarled as they would have to be to live there. The plain sweeps away to infinite distance in a way that is as severe as the mountains: in all that great sweep of land, no sheltering grove of trees, no comforting hollows, no music of flowing water, no human hearth‑fires. But our house: large, airy, open, warm, bright with sunlight pouring in. Outside, a cold wind sweeps across the plain, swirls around the mountains. I am wearing a certain kind of shirt, a work shirt that is very well made, either of leather or some good quality wool. It fits just right. It makes me comfortable against the wind. I have a coat that is good and serviceable and goes well with the shirt and would get me into a decent restaurant without the waiter scraping his eyes down my body. My pants are jet black: an unfaded version of those Frisko jeans I used to wear as a fisherman. Their deep black color is laced with streaks of white, the way my pants get when I've been working with sheetrock. The black throws off glinty blue‑black highlights; the white streaks dazzle like new snow in sunlight. It's day inside the house, night outside - deepest, blackest imaginable night - slashed often, and violently, by white lightning. The lightning seems intent on reminding us that it is great bolts of electricity. There are wild animals and domestic animals. There is an antelope with antlers which give off intense sparks generated by creatures that are like fireflies, but whose light is greater, more electric than fireflies. Our domestic animals are around: chickens, ducks, dogs, cats. None of them is a fighter or protector; they tend to be on the cuddly side. Our domestic animals, and ourselves, are being threatened by the wild animals. The great windy plain, the looming mountains seethe with threatening movements of wild animals. Our spaniel is especially afraid. Now comes a panther, a great black beast whose obsidian coat is part of the night, whose scream is part of the wind, who gives off violent sparks of light from its long white fangs and from its blue‑black fur; these sparks are kin to the lightning that splits the night. Annie is loading the rifle, a Winchester Model 70 bolt action .30‑06 like the one I killed my second buck with. She is ready, she does not shrink back, she is willing to fight the panther. As she loads the rifle, the dream deliberately places the long phallic rifle, held in her left hand with barrel angled down, directly in front of her crotch, like some gun ad from Soldier of Fortune magazine or one of those posters we see in back of plumbing shops with some bikinied babe holding a big pipe wrench or power drill nestled in her crotch. In the dream, it doesn't seem nasty; it seems right. As she loads the rifle, there is the further explicit feeling of her sliding the male cartridge into the rifle's female chamber, where she holds the rifle across her crotch. She gets the rifle loaded, but doesn't know what to do next. The panther charges, all loping obsidian blackness and lightning‑animated power, screaming with the force of the wind across the plain. She hands me the rifle. I aim, fire. The flash of the muzzle blast merges with the lightning. The panther explodes, disintegrating as its scream returns to the wind, its blackness to the night, its power to the lightning.

         

Zen Warrior Bass Player

     Annie and I were out one night in Capitola, a little beach town near where we lived. We were walking past a small Victorian house when we heard music coming from inside. It had been made into a coffeehouse, and a jazz combo was playing. We went in.

     The space was tiny. There were only three or four tables, with a few extra chairs against the walls. A spinnet piano was wedged into one corner. A drummer with a small trap set and an acoustic bass player were crowded close to the piano.

     They were pretty good, and we liked being that close to the musicians. Everyone in the room was listening, keeping voices low, except for one man who obviously had quite a bit of alcohol aboard. He kept talking in a voice loud enough to interfere, in that small space, with hearing the music. Pointed glances bounced right off him. Someone tried to shush him, at which point he made a belligerent retort, and carried on all the louder.

     Finally the bass fiddle player, a stocky, balding, kindly‑looking man in his fifties who reminded me of Claude, the barber who had helped me pull the old woman from the canal in Klamath Falls when I was a kid, stopped playing and just looked at the noisemaker. The other two musicians stopped playing. The bass player, with as much civility as he could muster, posed a general question to everyone in the room: Did we want to hear the music? Everyone nodded, saying Yes (some emphatically), except the noisy one. The bass player looked at him, asking him basically How about it, can you go along with the majority?

     The noisemaker took all this as a challenge. He bawled out that they could go ahead and play their fucking music if they wanted to, and he would go ahead and talk if he wanted to. It was a fucking free country. Unless, of course, the bass player wanted to try and shut him up.

     The bass player shrugged, with a combination of resignation and disgust, and said, Well then, would you like to step outside? We were all startled. The loudmouth was big, obviously a violent type, and a good twenty years younger than the musician.

     He leaped from his chair. You bet, he said. He stepped to the door. The bass player carefully laid aside his instrument, stood up, met him there. The bass player opened the door, bowed in mock chivalry. "After you," he said. We were all agape. He was actually going through with it.

     The loudmouth puffed up even further and stomped out the door. The bass player calmly closed the door behind the other man, locked it, walked back to his chair, and picked up his fiddle. We all cheered and clapped. The man outside banged on the door and rattled the knob. But he could see through the door's glass the reaction of all of us. Realizing he'd been beaten, he cursed his way down the steps.

                                            

                                             Sandinistas

     In October of 1983 I went to Nicaragua as a freelance journalist. I had joined some of the press in falling in love, from afar, with the Sandinista ethos: a new, revolutionary way, an anti-imperialist way, a “third way” that sought - so the Sandinistas claimed and so some of us wanted to believe - to find a middle ground in a Cold War world between the political cruelties of Soviet-style marxism and the economic cruelties of U.S.-style capitalism.

     I was walking in an outdoor market in Managua with my new friend Öle Ostergaard, a Danish professor of Latin American literature whom I’d met in the airport in Mexico City. It was a bright sunny afternoon; a sort of county-fair atmosphere was generated by colorful sashes and banners and signs at food stalls emanating smells of roasted corn, meat, and tropical fruits and flowers. The contra war flaring in the country's northern provinces seemed as distant in space as the violence of the revolution which had thrown out the dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle seemed distant in time. (The Sandinista revolution had taken over the country from Somoza July 19, 1979.)

     Footing was uneven; my eyes kept going to the ground as we walked. My glance stopped at a piece of bone. I stopped; Öle stopped. I picked up the bone, and the blood seemed to drain from my extremities and rush to my stomach. I held it out to Öle in my open palm. His face, oddly pale now in the sunlight, spoke the confirmation before his voice added: "It's a human vertebra." I’m not expert enough to say whether it was left from the latter days of the revolution, or from a more recent incident in the contra war, but: welcome to Nicaragua.

     A few days later I was in Puerto Cabezas, a small town of board buildings along muddy streets on Nicaragua's Atlantic coast. There had been a contra speedboat raid there; heavy weapons had been used and had caused considerable damage and several casualties.

     The people who lived there were mostly Miskito Indians, whom the Sandinistas, like other Managua-bound governments before them, mostly ignored when the Indians needed something, and to whom a lot of unfair attention was paid when it came to something the Indians had (like land or gold) that the government wanted.

     We saw the freighter that had been damaged in the attack, and were paraded past the bed in the primitive clinic where an adolescent Miskito girl obligingly showed us the bandage on her thigh. We were introduced to the local Sandinista comandante, and gathered around to ask him questions.

     It wasn't big-time news, and I could overhear what was being said anyway. I wanted to talk to a common soldier, somebody who might not have been told what to say. I noticed a Miskito soldier in Sandinista uniform standing in an open window of the board building we were gathered outside. His AK-47 was slung underarm and stuck out the window in front of him. He was obviously part of our security detail.

     I approached him, slowly and openly. The situation that developed was that the muzzle of his weapon was trapped on his right by the window jamb, and on his left because that was where the group of journalists were interviewing the comandante, and the soldier did not want to point his weapon at them. He couldn't lower the muzzle because of the window sill. We were both uncomfortably aware that my approach, and the way his weapon was locked in place by circumstances, unavoidably left the rifle's muzzle pointing directly at my chest. He then made a gesture that I have never seen before or since, among all my experiences among men with loaded weapons: he reached out and put his hand over the muzzle. It was an AK-47, a shot from which would have shattered his hand and my chest. But I’ve never forgotten that gesture.

    

     A short time later I was in a Sandinista‑run government office in Managua. A pretty young woman dressed in military fatigues was walking across the room, briskly going about her business. A young man, pointedly admiring the movement of her hips, quickly moved into step behind her, made indeterminate but unmistakably lustful sounds, and reached out to fondle her. She stopped, turned. Her face and body language said it all: Back off. The admiration’s okay. The way you express it stinks. I might be interested... but not now. Sometime, maybe. But when I say. And how I say.

     The man stopped as if he'd just been snake-bit. He got the message ‑ all of it, including the part he didn't want to hear ‑ for a simple reason, I thought: the woman was wearing a loaded pistol.

     I walked into the Sandinista press office, in the Hotel Intercontinental, again hoping to speed up processing of my request to travel in the area of the fighting between the contras and the Ejército Popular Sandinista, the Sandinista People's Army. I entered a room where business as usual had given way to faces that reminded me of Öle Ostergaard's when I'd shown him the vertebra, with an added charge. A group of Nicaraguan and other Latin American journalists were huddled around a low circular table, each with one ear leaned, in what had to be spine-wrenching positions, toward the short-wave radio broadcasting news in Spanish from the center of the table. One journalist glanced up at me, at first in the offhand way that anyone glances up when another person enters the room. Then his face changed, a current passed among them, they all looked up at me, and on each face I saw the same pure, concentrated hatred that I had seen only once before in my life: on the face of the old man I was guarding at bayonet-point, along with a group of screaming women and children, at the well in the burning Vietnamese village of Tho An in April, 1966.

     The short-wave radio was broadcasting the first news of the United States invasion of Grenada.

     Jinotega, in a mountain valley between Managua and Nicaragua's northern border with Honduras, was a relief from the chaos and steamy heat of the capital. Contra raids had already penetrated that far south; I stayed there a couple of days talking to local people about the situation and petitioning the regional Sandinista comandante for permission to travel farther north, to the area near the Honduran border.

     Operating within my typically thin freelancer's budget, I found a stall where I could get a cheap plate of what I lived on most of my time in the country: rice, beans, and salty beef. At one of the plank tables, I got to talking with a young man about my age. He said he worked in construction, and when I said I did too, we swapped stories for a while. He bought me a cup of coffee. He said he'd served a hitch as a draftee in the Sandinista army. I told him I'd been in the Marines in Vietnam, quickly adding that I thought that war was a stupid mistake. His eyebrows raised; we swapped more stories.

     When he told me his name was Juan Antonio Altamirano, I asked if he was related to Pedro Altamirano, the guerrilla leader who carried on the fight against the dictator Anastasio Somoza after Somoza had the nationalist hero Augusto César Sandino killed. Juan smiled, pleased that I recognized the name. “Era un tío mío: he was one of my uncles," he replied.

     I asked Juan what he thought of the contra situation. He took a deep breath, let it out in a deeper sigh. He patted the head of his young son and looked off at the surrounding mountains - mountains where Sandino had fought, where his uncle had fought, where Marines like Smedley Butler and Chesty Puller had fought as their names became legends that would be invoked to and by recruits like me, where Juan himself had fought. In those days, I usually had to take notes to remember the wording of something said to me in Spanish. But Juan's words slipped intact into my brain. “Si el ejército norteamericano viene aquí, habrá muchos ríos de sangre.”: "If the North American army comes here, there will be many rivers of blood."

     Juan didn't speak like an ideologue. He was a Nicaraguan, a nephew of a revered patriot; he loved his country. But he spoke now as a tired soldier, older than his years, the way my friends and I speak about Vietnam. He was already as weary of Sandinista bombast as others of his countrymen were becoming. But he was Nica, and told me he would fight again if it came to that; told me that there had been just too many yanquis coming here with rifles to have their way and to league up with dictators like the Somoza clan. He said that every Nicaraguan man, woman, and child would fight: with rifles if they had them; with sticks and rocks and Molotov cocktails otherwise. And not only Nicaraguans would fight. People would come from all over Latin America. This would be it, the great, long-awaited NO as people came from Venezuela, Costa Rica, Mexico, Panama, El Salvador... muchos ríos de sangre.

     Ocotal is the capital town of Nicaragua's northern province of Nueva Segovia. I arrived there in late October, having finally prodded the Sandinista bureaucracy (efficiency was apparently not a revolutionary concept) into giving me written permission to travel and work as a journalist in areas near the Honduran border where contra ambushes had recently been taking place.

     Ocotal's central plaza was like many in Latin America. Broad paths connected adjacent and opposite corners to form an X-in-a-box. Blue-painted concrete benches sat, cool and quiet, at intervals along the pathways, in the shade of banana and palm trees. Children too young for school played around the benches on weekdays; adults gathered to sit in the shade and talk during the hot noons. The old Catholic church on one side of the square faced the municipal building on the other. A mural portrait of Che Guevara covered a large wall directly opposite the municipal building.        

     Ocotal was the locus of a history I needed to touch. That history seemed embodied for me in a drinking fountain on one side of the square. It was a cairn of irregular stones and mortar seven or eight feet high, with the ceramic fountain and a bronze plaque set into the side facing the street. The plaque said that the fountain, and the potable water system of which it was the culmination, were a symbol of the cooperation between the peoples of Nicaragua and the United States. The ceramic fountain embedded in the stone cairn was long since broken; the plumbing which had once furnished water to it was also broken.

     The fountain had been erected during the reign of Anastasio Somoza García, the first of the Somoza clan of Nicaraguan dictators. He had risen to power through the Guardia Nacional, the anti-guerrilla army that had been trained and officered by U.S. Marines in the 1920's. The guerrillas, or "bandits," as the Marines called them, were the band of nationalist revolutionaries led by Augusto César Sandino, namesake of those in power when I was in Ocotal. One of the Marine officers who fought with the Guardia against Sandino was Chesty Puller, the greatest Marine hero they'd told us about in boot camp. Another officer, from an earlier intervention just prior to WWI, was Smedley Butler, one of two Marines ever to win two Medals of Honor.

     Somoza García, stepchild of those Marine heroes, had had Sandino assassinated, and once the Marines had left, turned the country into his fiefdom (“Nicaragua es mi finca” was a favorite expression) and the Guardia into his palace guard and counterinsurgency police.

     The old Marine cuartel, or headquarters, was also facing the square, on the street at right angles to the one with the fountain and the mural of Che. The small original USMC plaque was still on the door.

     There was a major battle in Ocotal in 1929 between Sandino's men and the Marines, who were surrounded all night in the cuartel. The siege was broken by Marine aircraft from Managua, in what was apparently history's first use of the technique of dive-bombing.

     I looked up a fifty-seven-year old man named Joaquín Ponce, who had been a boy in the town at the time of the battle. I asked him to tell me what he remembered, and he told what he’d heard as a boy growing up, saying that the Marines were caught by surprise and trapped, and that only the bombing had saved them. He said that the bombing killed many people in the town; he didn't know exactly how many.

     A heavy-set young woman was in the room with us, a militant Sandinista who seemed to be a political watchdog sent to keep tabs on what was asked by, and said to, a foreign journalist. As I told Ponce about my own Marine history, including Vietnam, she became visibly furious. How could I have done that, and what was I doing here?

     I explained to her and to Ponce that I now felt very differently than I had then, that I now thought that the Vietnam war was stupid and unjust, but that at the time I thought I was doing the right thing, and that I had been lied to about the situation there, and that in any case I'd been like so many other young men, thinking more with other parts of my body than with my brain. She bought none of that, and just sat there and glared at the ex-Marine who had dared crash the gate of her hard-won revolutionary world.

     Ponce smiled a rueful, knowing smile: "Sí, Usted tuvo más corazón que cabeza," literally that I had more heart than head, but a fair translation of the phrase we'd used among ourselves in the Marine Corps, "more balls than brains."

     I was hanging around the corner in Ocotal where the local buses loaded and unloaded, asking if there was a bus to Teotecacinte, which is about a kilometer – a half hour’s walk - from the Honduran border. There were none. Someone said I could get as far as El Jícaro (which the Sandinistas had renamed Ciudad Sandino) or Jalapa. Someone else said I'd have better luck heading for El Espino or Las Manos, which are near a section of the border much closer to Ocotal than is Teotecacinte, but not as far north. I was puzzling over whether to take the path of easier access or to chance striking off in the direction of Teotecacinte, with less hope of getting there but, I thought, more to write about should I succeed.

     An intense Nicaraguan man in his late twenties, who looked like Ricardo Montalban, approached. I'd noticed him scrutinizing me from the crowd. He asked where I wanted to go. I hesitated. Was he a cop? An agent? If so, for which side? And what did he want with me?

     He wanted business. He had a jeep, he said. Doble tiro, four wheel drive. It ran good, he said. For fifty dollars, I could have him and the jeep for the whole day. He'd take me anywhere I wanted to go. Teotecacinte? I asked. His wince was visible. Why there? I'm a journalist, I said. I hear the contras have been crossing the border and raiding in that area. He nodded, winced again. Teotecacinte, okay.

     His name was Alejandro Guillén. We drove around Ocotal while he bought fuel, said goodbye to his wife at their little house on one of Ocotal's dirt back streets, then to his girl friend on another street across town. He looked at me as if to ask if I was sure, gave a tense shrug, and we headed northeast into the bright morning.

     As we drove north from Ocotal, I asked Alejandro if he’d seen any other North American journalists in the area. He reached into a cubbyhole in the dash, pulled out a new business card, and handed it to me, saying this guy had recently been through, and was his last customer. It was the card of Stephen Kinzer, of the New York Times.

     We passed ambush sites marked by white crosses and fresh flowers (it was shortly after November 2, Día de los Muertos, Day of the Dead, when Latinos honor deceased relatives). We drove through the village of San Fernando, where, Alejandro told me, Sandino had led a miners' strike in what turned out to be one of the early armed confrontations between Sandino and the government of Somoza García.

     In San Fernando we had to stop and visit the local comandante, who, when we entered the building where he held sway, had one boot up on a low stool, getting a shoe shine from a young boy. His manner with the boy, and with Alejandro and me, was that of someone who liked the fact that he had been given some authority, and was not averse to letting us know that. After making sure that his boots were shined to his liking and taking his sweet time signing my permission slip to continue up the road, he dismissed us.

     Alejandro didn't seem to have any particular love for either side in the war; he seemed mostly to want to be left alone to do business. He didn't mind telling stories against both sides. He asked the rhetorical question, Who are the new bourgeoisie? and answered it himself by saying that it was the Sandinista comandantes and their hangers‑on, with their nice houses and cars and special privileges.

     And he told a story, which he said was well known among Nicaraguans, about the former dictator's son, who was named after his father and nicknamed "Tachito" by those who liked him, because his father had been known as "Tacho,” but was called "El Chigüín" behind his back. The nickname had some derogatory origin; when I asked about it I never got a better answer than a shrug and a contemptuous leer([1]). "El Chigüín," the story went, returned after his graduation from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and assumed command of EEBI, the Guardia Nacional's Escuela de Entrenamiento Básico de la Infantería, or Basic Infantry Training School. More than a military training institution, EEBI was the Guardia's counterrevolutionary elite. If you called it a Soviet-style NKVD with US military training and weapons, you wouldn’t be far off.

     Guillén said that, while training his recruits in EEBI, Tachito Somoza had a little call-and-response shouting match to raise their fighting spirit:

     Somoza: What are you?

     Recruits: Tiger!

     Somoza: And what does the tiger drink?

     Recruits: Blood!

     Somoza: And where does it get this blood?

     Recruits: From the Nicaraguan people!

---

[1] In October of 2008, I was sitting with my fiancé and her sister in an outdoor café on the edge of Ibagué, Colombia. We were ordering almuerzo, a late lunch which is usually the biggest meal of the day. I asked

what  kind of meat they had, and the waiter pointed to a sign on a chalk board: carne de chigüiro: chigüiro meat. The chigüiro is a small, quite ugly pig native to the area. It was good, though.