Ithaca City of Asylum

“Truth, Lies, and Literature: Sergio Ramírez and Pedro X. Molina in Conversation” on October 15, 2023 featured Nicaragua’s best-known author in dialogue with the celebrated Nicaraguan cartoonist and former ICOA artist-in-residence. The video is now available here. A transcript of the excerpt read by Ramírez is below.

The event was made possible by funds from the Statewide Community Regrants program from the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of the office of the Governor and NYS Legislature, and from Tompkins County, administered by the Community Arts Partnership of Tompkins County. It was co-hosted by Story House Ithaca and the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program at the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University.

THE MATTRESS FACTORY

Excerpt from Dead Men Cast No Shadows (2023) by Sergio Ramírez Mercado.
Translated from the Spanish by Daryl R. Hague.

As Tongolele looked through the windows’ ironwork, he saw that the entire first floor was dedicated to the mattress factory: sewing machines, rolls of striped and printed fabrics for upholstery, mounds of foam pads, piles of waste cotton, and stacks of finished products….

Lightbulbs still glowed on porches and under the eaves of houses during this early morning hour, and the silence of the closed doors was broken only for an instant by a child ‘s cry, which was quickly muffled. A great-tailed grackle used its beak to gather scraps from the pavement. Suddenly, it fixed its round eye upon him. Distrustful, the bird flew away to perch upon an eave. Tongolele had no doubt that certain shadows moving behind window curtains and blinds were spying on him. Most likely someone was filming him when he raised his finger toward the doorbell, which resounded throughout the entire block with the arpeggios of a xylophone.

From the second floor he heard faint noises, muted voices, and urgent footsteps, but no one came down to open the door. He had practiced a speech, and the words he would use when he met the pastor kept returning to his head like a walkie-talkie conversation: A thousand pardons for bothering you, reverend, over; we are here to request a bit of cooperation with you, over; the terrorists, as you know, over; a threat to every good Christian, and we all need to do our duty, over; guarantee our citizens’ right to move freely, over; the serenity of your own congregation, over; peace and public order, over; our urgent mission is to clear the streets and put things back to normal, over; I’m grateful for your understanding and support. Over and out.

The murmurs and whispered voices from above came to a stop. The great-tailed grackle flew low by him, the brief shine of its blue-black plumage absorbing the sun’s first rays. The bird left behind only the mocking vestige of its harsh call.

Tongolele called out a second time, and this time he kept his fingertip on the doorbell. The xylophone played again, insistently now, and he recognized that it was playing the chords of “La Cucaracha”.

La cucaracha,
la cucaracha ya no
puede caminar

This song was the catchy tune to which his father had always danced after drinking too much, during his birthday parties in Leon among his drinking buddies, stomping around as he either slapped his palms on his back or raised the backs of his hands toward his eyes as if he wanted to study them, always moving back and forth, back and forth, heavy, clunky…

porque le faltan
porque le faltan
cuatro patas para andar.

Tongolele turned his head for a moment. From behind him, the poet Lira had made his approach—rifle loaded and ready to shoot—and scornfully observed Tongolele’s powerlessness before a closed door. Cara de Culo, crouched behind him, held a bottle filled with gasoline, ready to light the rag with a lighter. Tongolele had not given an order for any such thing. Where had that Molotov cocktail come from? The poet Lira turned his face away when Tongolele tried to look at him. Homemade weapons weren’t included among the task forces’ equipment because the troops already had the best weapons—the most modern and efficient ones.

The snipers’ eyes were fixed upon him, watching through the balaclavas’ round holes just as the grackle had done. He took his finger off the doorbell. The xylophone’s last arpeggios continued echoing on their own until they disappeared. And Tongolele, as if obeying a voice that could not be heard but seemed to be speaking to him from within the Chinese box, took one step aside so that the poet Lira could move forward and loose a short burst against one of the windows, which shattered in a storm of pieces, while Cara de Culo lit the rag and threw the bottle through the hole.

Tongolele watched the cocktail explode over the piles of waste cotton, and the stench of burning gasoline enveloped him as a lazy wisp of blue smoke did not linger much before it violently disintegrated and hungrily climbed the wall, and then the poet Lira shot another short gunburst and Cara de Culo tossed another burning bottle inside. When Tongolele felt the fire’s scorching heat on his face he backed away into the middle of the street, as the thick dark smoke obscured the machines, the tables, and the mattress covers. Meanwhile, smoke poured through the broken windows and wild flames climbed the stairway leading to the second floor, where shouts and the coughs of choking people emanated from the bedrooms, along with the heartbroken cries of a small boy, as the highest windows came alight with the fire ‘s violent glare and then rained ashes onto the pavement, at which point the poet Lira grabbed Tongolele’s shirtsleeve and pulled him along. Let’s go, commissioner; there’s nothing more for us to do here. And after Tongolele ‘s heavy, clunky feet dragged slowly along the uneven pavement, he climbed into the pick-up, which then drove away.

These things happen because they happen, commissioner. This whole unfortunate episode would have happened regardless of whether it was in our hands or not, the poet Lira explained. I had already warned you that the pastor was a stubborn man—and he didn’t even deign to answer us, much less open the door, and the worst part is that a lot of people living in that house are going to get hurt because those insolent flames will burn all that flammable material so fast that the firefighters won’t be able to come anywhere close, a consequence of how foolish the pastor was to store those things there. But truth be told, we never went to that place anyway, a fact I will make perfectly clear in my report. And after all, everybody knows that that area of the city is boiling with terrorists, and they’re the ones most likely at fault for this attack, which is just one more of the vicious things they do. Everywhere they go, the coup leaders leave proof of what they truly are: arsonists and killers. And as for those last two, the father and son, at the end of the day it’s impossible to know which of them was the most obstinate: the son was a mulish fool, his mind fixated—as he said in his video—on the idea that Jehovah fought by his side, a condition known in scientific theory as primary religious extremism. He’s the kind of man who wants to die by being buried standing up. And now, regardless of how the military operation works out, we ‘re leaving without the support of the Dragunovs, but we’ll find a way to get rid of the barricades some way or another. Isn’t that right, commissioner? We’re arriving now, and I’ll walk behind you because you’re in command.