'Ollie, why are you shouting?'
We’ve just finished art, and it hasn’t gone well. The quality of the work produced aside, several people have, obviously, knocked over their brush pots and their tables are now covered with a thin layer of water, spreading languidly from the coloured mouths of cups and falling in little dribbly cascades onto the chairs and floor, where it picks up pencil shavings, rubber crumbs, bits of crisp, little oblongs of mud from shoe-tread, specks of seemingly ubiquitous glitter and other detritus of varying vintage, and carries these deposits in little meandering rivers around the classroom, eventually settling in miniature effluent lakes dotted with islands of useless crap. The artworks on the wet tables have largely disintegrated, in no small part due to their being held aloft in salvation and indignation only for their own saturated weight to pull them apart in slow, soft rips. I am not a good art teacher.
We’re now engaged in the part of the lesson called 'tidying up'. What this means is that a handful of people help to tidy up the classroom while everyone else pisses about. A number of the boys, invariably those who ‘finished’ ten minutes in - seeing the hilarity that ensues from a wet table, have ‘accidentally’ knocked over their water pots as well, and are now watching with dead-eyed glee as all they survey turns into a soggy mulch of wasted time. Ollie, to be fair to him, is helping by putting scrunched up paper in the bin. The fact that the paper is perfectly serviceable and is only scrunched up because he made it so doesn’t seem to matter. Much more important is how far away from the bin he can get the paper in from. When he misses, he does a kind of run-up rebound shot, finished with a twisting jump for finesse. He provides a running commentary for all of this, interspersed with victory laps of the room. These are accompanied by a more generalised shouting which, as far as I can tell, is not in any human language.
He hears my question and, without missing a beat, without even looking up, replies, 'BECAUSE I’M A LEGEND!'
Well, he’s got me there. He’s the tallest boy in the class, maybe in all of year 6; he’s the fastest runner; he’s on the school football team and plays in another one on weekends; he’s got a scar on his hand from climbing a massive fence; he’s really good at bottle flips; his YouTube channel has the most subscribers; the boys that bullied him last year have left now, and his dad takes him to see West Ham on school nights - and says that if someone hits you, you hit them back twice as hard. He’s also just managed to outwit his teacher without even stopping for breath. I suppose he is a legend. And legends get to shout.
It was, of course, the wrong question. There are only two things I remember from the parade of poly-pocketed piss artistry that was my training year. One is that the word plenary is either grossly misused or made up entirely. The other is that you should never ask a kid why they're doing something; instead ask them what they’re doing, and then what they should be doing.They will be bound both by honour and sheer weight of reason to do the correct thing, unless they answer 'I don’t know' to the second question in which case you’re really in the shit. It's called the 'What not Why' rule, and it's annoyingly effective given that it’s so fucking trite. Sorry, three things. The third is that Michael Gove is a smarmy cunt.
At some point in their history, the waters of the Rio San Juan in southern Nicaragua must have come up against an area of rock that was harder than anything else around it. Here, about half way along its extent, the river bends sharply to the south east, more or less at a right angle. With the steady work of erosion and time this outcrop gradually became the most elevated point for a great distance around, and the highest point along the river. Where it turns, the river runs in rapids over its rocky floor, making this stretch of the water very difficult to navigate. There is a small town here, El Castillo, which to this day is only accessible by boat from San Carlos, on the south-eastern tip of Lake Nicaragua. If you want to go further up river you have to do it yourself. It’s a good spot for fishing. Back when fishing formed a more important part of the local economy, a man from El Castillo could stand in the rapids with a pole and line and - I’m told - catch a few hundred fish in a matter of hours. Bird and animal life abounds, just as it does in the surrounding forests. Early evening kingfishers dive and zoom, flashing turquoise, white and burnt gold in the lengthening light. Squat green kingfishers, not much bigger than robins, perch on low branches, boardwalk edges and the tops of boats, their bills almost the length of their deep emerald bodies. I have never seen a kingfisher on an English river, but I’ve seen several flashes of blue that could not be anything else. Anhingas - relatives of the cormorant - swim in the rushing water. Their nickname ‘snakebird’ comes from the way their long, thin necks muscle up through the surface like the pipe player’s cobra. The necks and upper chests of the females and juveniles are creamy white; the males are black. When they catch and swallow a fish, you can see its outline sliding down their throat. In the forest there are boa constrictors and coral snakes. There are false corals too, who mimic the pattern of their poisonous cousins, and tiny red and blue poison arrow frogs. If you take a spine from the trunk of a certain palm and coat it in the frog’s poison you can make a poison dart to kill a monkey, an agouti, a peccary or perhaps a tapir. There is a plant that folds up, as if dead, when you knock it, and another whose leaves have a numbing, aniseed taste. Several plants and trees have medicinal uses, though I can’t remember many of them. The tree hombre grande, which is neither particularly big nor particularly manish, is used to treat stomach problems, ranging from indigestion to gastric ulcers. It is also a natural insecticide and can be effective against external and internal parasites. It may even be anti-carcinogenic. Lianas can be used as a water source. If you knock against a ceiba tree it sounds hollow, though it isn’t, whereas the almendro is as hard and dense as rock. Both can grow tall and massive. Back on the river, tiny mangrove swallows dart and loop over the river’s surface catching insects and, higher up, macaws and toucans screech and clatter from tree to tree. At the water’s edge, pure white great egrets stand motionless, watching the ripples down the rapiers of their beaks. Jacanas and compact, creeping, orange-footed herons ply the shoreline, scuttling in and out of the shallows with glinting silver fish in their beaks. In flight, the wings of jacanas are a scoop of bright yellow which matches their crest and bill. Like those of the basilisk, their feet are so wide that they can very nearly walk on water, giving them the name ‘Jesus Christ bird’. The basilisk itself, or Jesus lizard, really can run on water, and can cross the river from one bank to the other at its narrow points. The ones here are luminous green with black stripes on their tails, and sit motionless on overhanging branches. Canoeing at night we came so close to one, a female, that we could have touched it. Later we approached a male, identified by the spiny crest that runs down his head and back. After a few seconds he took fright, and dropped into the water. Occasionally, the beams of our headlamps would fall on the eyes of a caiman, two hollow points of orange light just above the river’s surface. A second glance and they had vanished. During the day, we came across a crocodile as long as our canoe. It allowed us to watch it for a few seconds, snout and spines above the water like an island chain, then it slid under, all but silent, and a moment later it was as if it had never been. Had we been able to canoe along the same river 65 million years ago, we would have encountered more or less the same animal. Branches and tree trunks skinned smooth lay visible on the river bed in the shallow parts like giant bones, felled by a storm. Where the forest met the beach in Costa Rica there was a whale skeleton. It had grown green with mould and lichen and but for the arrangement and shape of the bones it might have been dead wood.
In 1673 the Spanish built a fortress on the bend in the Rio San Juan, La Fortaleza de la Limpia Pura e Inmaculada Concepción, and it is from this that the town of El Castillo takes its name, ‘The Castle’ being a little catchier than ‘The Fortress of the Clean, Pure and Immaculate Conception’. The main reason was to defend against pirate attacks. Pirates, including Francis Drake and the infamous Henry Morgan, would use the Rio San Juan as a way to get from the Caribbean to the wealthy city of Granada on the north-western tip of Lake Nicaragua. The river, like the lake, was deeper then. For the past few years, the water level has been dropping, so that, now, you can’t take a boat from Granada to Isla de Ometepe in the middle of the lake or from Ometepe to San Carlos. Everything has to go via Rivas on the western shore. Had this been the case a few hundred years ago, the history of Nicaragua, and maybe that of the entire region, would probably have been very different.
Aside from pirates, a lower water level may well have deterred thieves and bandits of a more official nature. In 1780, Horatio Nelson led a force of some 200 men that attacked and conquered the castle. He was there to claim the land, and the river that ran through it, for Britain. He was 22 at the time. As soon as they realised it existed, Europeans sought a quick route to the Pacific from the Atlantic. No sooner had Balboa laid eyes on the ocean than, it seems, the wealthy and powerful of Europe sought a way to expedite the flow of plunder from the Americas and beyond back to them, so that their wealth and power might increase. In the days before the Panama Canal, the choice was either a long and dangerous rounding of Cape Horn right at the southern tip of the continent, or navigating up the Rio San Juan into Lake Nicaragua. From there, the journey could be continued overland or, as was eventually planned, via a canal to the Pacific. A widening of the river on the Caribbean side was also envisaged, in order to make this stretch of the proposed Nicaragua Canal more navigable. Thus, staking a territorial claim to the land was important. The British already claimed a sliver of land along the coast of Nicaragua. It was known as Mosquito Coast, following in the joint European imperial traditions of mispronouncing foreign words (Miskito is the indigenous group) and naming places after the things they produced - ivory, gold, slaves. The area provided a base from which the British could expand into New Spain, as it was known. Incidentally, the British had already tried and failed to take El Castillo in 1762, during the Seven Years War. Their defeat was due in no small part to the actions of Rafaela Herrera, the 19 year-old daughter of the garrison commander, who himself had died some days earlier. Herrera rejected the British request of surrender and led the defence, killing the leader of the British force with a cannon. Despite this, Nelson was certain of his victory, declaring, 'I will take Lake Nicaragua...the only route between the two oceans, and in so doing, we will cut Spanish America in two.' In the event all but ten of the men died of dysentery and, under a year later, the Spanish reportedly walked back into the castle following its abandonment by the British. Undeterred, Nelson remained proud of his initial conquest of El Castillo, seeing it as confirmation that he would one day be a hero of England. The castle, and the hill from which the assault was mounted, features in a portrait of Nelson that today hangs in the Royal Maritime Museum in Greenwich. How the other survivors felt is less well known, much less the 190 men that died shitting blood on a riverbank thousands of miles from home.
In the mid 19th Century, this part of the continent again drew the attentions of a Great Man. In 1856, William Walker - 'The Grey-eyed Man of Destiny' - became president of Nicaragua, despite not being elected, not speaking Spanish, and not being Nicaraguan. Walker, a man of various occupations, had arrived from the United States the year before at the behest of Francisco Castellón, one of two men who claimed to be president of Nicaragua. Castellón sought Walker’s help in the civil war between his Liberal/Democratic Party based in Léon, and the Conservative/Legitimist Party based in Granada. Walker defeated the Legitimists in Granada and, after having been recognised as such by the US, declared himself president of Nicaragua. Walker, too, was interested in controlling the territory of a potential canal, as were his financial backers, the Vanderbilt Company. Nicaragua was, at that time, a key route for prospectors and gold hunters heading west, just as it had been a key route for American gold being taken to Spain in centuries before. Unsurprisingly, his presidency was met with staunch opposition from other Central American nations. A Costa Rican-led coalition declared war against him, and his regime collapsed within a year. In the meantime though, he had declared English as the official language and revoked Nicaragua’s abolition law, in part to garner support amongst the southern states of the US, who sought the expansion of the peculiar institution in the run-up to their country’s own civil war a few years later. Walker may also have contributed to the cholera epidemic which decimated the Costa Rican army and - subsequently - civilian population in the 1850s, by contaminating the wells of Rivas with corpses after he had lost the battle for that town to Costa Rican troops. Pellets of poison flooding the water. However, it was probably the filibustering which did for him. When he officially surrendered in May 1857, it was to the US Navy. Tempting as it is to think that the US couldn’t stomach the immorality of his actions, I suspect it may have had more to do with the government not being able to stomach the potential strengthening of the South. Walker was returned home safely and faced neither conviction nor retribution. This despite the fact that he had precedent; he had previously attempted to establish a slave state in Mexico, a crime for which he was summarily acquitted. Like Leopold II enslaving, mutilating and murdering the inhabitants of the invented ‘Congo Free State’ in order to extract for himself its material wealth, Walker’s actions in Nicaragua demonstrate the abject violence and depravity that result from the confluence of colonial expansion, the interests of private capital, and runaway machismo. Leopold sought to claim the entire of the Congo basin for his own personal factory and fiefdom. Walker sought to claim Nicaragua, and its lucrative waterways for himself, aided by breakaway railroad magnates and venture capitalists from the Vanderbilt company. Utterly convinced of their right to make history, neither man saw any reason why they, a man of destiny, shouldn’t do what they were doing, whatever the human cost. On leaving Granada, defeated, Walker ordered his remaining men to smash and burn it to the ground. He was executed by firing squad in Honduras a few years later. He was 36.
To an extent, Walker's actions in Nicaragua were predictive of the subsequent attitude and policy of the States towards the rest of the continent. Certainly the North American belief that it should control any waterway through the isthmus persisted. In 1903, the US half supported, half fomented the separation of Panama from Colombia. In return, they were granted rights to build and operate the Canal. Panama remained a US protectorate until 1939, but the canal zone remained under US control until the dawn of the new millennium. In Nicaragua, the canal proposal has never quite gone away, though the actors have changed; the most recent Nicaraguan Canal proposal came from a Hong-Kong based billionaire. Militarily, too, the North Americans sought to extend their reach. Throughout the 20th century the US involved itself in conflicts in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador, as well as installing and propping up 'friendly' leaders in all four states. Such regimes helped to grease the wheels of US wealth and resource extraction in the area, whilst also helping to stem the feared spread of communism to febrile states whose people were beginning to resent being brutalised and neglected by their own governments. The US would not risk the other American nations falling under the thrall of another superpower. So, just as it had done centuries earlier, Central America became a chessboard for the superpowers of the day. El Salvador provides a chilling example of this policy. During the Salvadoran Civil War which lasted from 1980 to 1992, some 75,000 people were killed, the majority of them by military units equipped, trained and sometimes directed by the US, because they feared that the unrest and coup of 1979 would install a soviet-friendly government, as it had done in Nicaragua that same year. (Incidentally, the Nicaraguan Revolution overthrew a US-backed dictator). The Salvadoran government and their US backers favoured a scorched earth approach which saw entire communities destroyed and their inhabitants massacred at the hands of US-trained deathsquads, in order to dry up the resources - both material and human - of the FMLN (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front - the coalition of armed leftist groups who opposed the government). This practice was also known as 'draining the sea'. The most infamous of these deathsquads was the Atlácatl Battalion, trained by the US in Panama, which murdered over a thousand people, mostly civilians, in Calabozo, Mozote and the surrounding areas, and probably hundreds more throughout El Salvador. A museum in Santa Ana recounts the Mozote massacre of 1981 through the testimonies of women who escaped. Their stories recount torture, rape, bombings and helicopter strafings, the indiscriminate murder and rape of children ('future guerrillas'), the gunning down of those trying to flee, decapitation and mutilation of corpses. The inhabitants of one village were told to go to the town square, where they would be safe, as the army were only looking for guerrillas. Once there, the people were gunned down.
Before the war, Cinquera had around 5000 inhabitants. By 1983 this had been reduced to little more than 600, most if whom were women and children. The village, and the Cabañas region in which it is found, was a stronghold of the FMLN, an allegiance which cost its inhabitants their homes, their lives, or both. In November of that year, the Atlácatl Battalion massacred some 150 people here, including an unknown number of civilians. One man told a foreign newspaper at the time that the body of his son was found in a trench being eaten by pigs. Similar atrocities were carried out in other villages. In one the men were shut in houses and shot, before the houses were knocked down on top of them. I'm another, the women and children were raped and decapitated, and their bodies dumped in ditches. Cinquera itself was heavily bombed. Since the war, it has been rebuilt with money from among others, the UN, the Red Cross, the Bloody EU and, oddly enough, the Basques. There is a small museum, and some buildings have been preserved to show bomb and bullet damage. In the small square, the tail of a wrecked army helicopter is displayed on a plinth. Disused guns are bolted to the fence which surrounds it, and outside the rebuilt church are two rusted, unexploded bombs. On leaving the church, I saw an old man staggering and swaying drunk to music from a small stereo, singing a song about freedom. Round the corner, and on the walls of the church, murals remember the martyrs of the conflict, and pledge continued allegiance the the FLMN. The song the man was singing didn’t match the one coming from the stereo.
More recently, and perhaps more famously, a new threat has come to El Salvador from the north, just as it has to Guatemala and Honduras, although not Nicaragua, carrying with it a familiar stench: the pursuit of wealth at any cost, the man who wants to make a name for himself. The maras (gangs) that in 2016 turned El Salvador into the murder capital of the world, and the most dangerous place that wasn’t a war zone, are a US export. Many Salvadorans fled to the US during the war, and the country is still home to about a fifth of El Salvador’s population. Formed in LA in the 1980s by second generation Salvadoran refugees, the M-18 (also called 18th Street, Barrio 18, Calle 18) and MS-13 (also called Mara Salvatrucha) didn’t begin to spread to Central America until the deportations of the late 90s. Over the past two decades, the violence and brutality of these gangs has become only too well-known, and is probably the main thing that a lot of people know about El Salvador. It was certainly the main thing I knew about it. Of course, the vast majority of Salvadorans are just normal people who aren’t in gangs. That said, it was a common, perhaps unavoidable, topic of conversation. One woman we stayed with, a teacher, told us about a certain market in Santa Ana that is known for gang violence. She will not allow her nephew to go there, lest he be taken for a (rival) gang member. He isn’t in a gang. I’m pretty sure he’s a dentistry student. On the other hand, she goes there to buy her fruit and veg, because it’s cheaper and fresher. We heard another story about two electricians who were on a job in a gang area. Though they were not gang members themselves, they came from a part of town claimed by the rival gang. They were killed. The majority of the actual violence is restricted to young men, but Salvadorans have to live with other threats and realities. The main one we heard about was extortion; every single business, however small, is apparently a target. Our host in Santa Ana did not put any sign on the house to show she was running a bed and breakfast, for fear that gang members would come round demanding money. I didn’t feel that we were under any specific or unusual threat as a result of being foreigners. I have no doubt that most Salvadorans would like to live in a country not subjected to the meaningless and directionless violence of gangs who extort their businesses, steal their teenage sons and ruin the image of their country. I imagine there is also a sense of bitterness about having to deal with a problem which they didn’t create, either in an immediate or a historical sense. It wasn’t them that put guns in the hands of children. It’s worth saying again that the gangs didn’t form in El Salvador, or Honduras, or Guatemala, but in the USA, land of opportunity, warm hearth and open heart to the huddled masses. The Donald’s recent announcement that he will be deporting 200,000 more Salvadorans, as well as his much-trumpeted zero tolerance approach to immigration, is unlikely to help matters.
Bob lived on his own in a small house in Cambridge. He had never married and had no children. His house was dark and untidy, and contained almost nothing apart from stacks of books and old newspapers. I don't think he had a car and he may have have been recovering from a drinking problem. He had spent five years of his life writing a book that nobody wanted to publish. I suppose you could call him a failure. For much of his life Bob worked in an FE college in Essex, where he met my parents, but when I first met him he was retired. We sat in his garden and my younger brother and I ate the Soleros he had bought specially for us. He brought them smiling out of the kitchen, which seemed otherwise to be largely empty. Amongst the colours of the leaves and the flowers they looked ridiculous. I felt an odd sort of embarrassment, not just of being offered a gift, but also of having provoked the intrusion of such an object. I imagined Bob ringing my parents to check if they were still bringing us, going to the shop to get the ice creams, perhaps not quite knowing what section they were in, being unsure which ones to get, paralysed momentarily by the meaningless choice. I said thank you. It was hard to tell how old Bob was. His hair was white and unkempt, but he was in no way infirm. He was wiry and light and springy. Life seemed to have reduced his body to the bare essentials. He ran marathons. He wore a large moustache which covered much of his lower face, and I think his eyes were blue and they crinkled at the edges. At some point he must have been a younger man, but I find it hard to imagine him as such. I suppose he would have been quite handsome. He spoke several languages and understood Greek and Latin. When my mum left the college to start a new job he gave a speech at her leaving party which nobody understood. The first time I met him, once my brother and I had eaten our Soleros, we all went to the Botanical Gardens. The day was warm, and Bob knew the names of the trees and the plants. At various points he went off to a patch of grass to do a handstand. He was about the most interesting man I had ever met. At the time I was still labouring under the misapprehension that I was a skilled linguist, rather than a gobshite with a good memory (for some things), and I had just started learning Russian. He asked me how to say a particular phrase and I either couldn’t remember or didn’t know yet. 'Next time I see you,' he said, 'I want you to tell me that phrase.' I agreed. A year is a long time when you’re trapped in the pointless immediacy of adolescence, and I forgot. The next time I saw him he asked me expectantly, and looked right at me with his blue eyes. I must have known the phrase, because it was как дела (kak dela - how are you/how’s it going), in fact I’m surprised I couldn’t answer the first time, but I’d forgotten that he’d asked me, and my brain couldn’t change tack. The two bits of information weren’t the ones that went with each other. So I said I had forgotten to find out. Bob looked sad, said something like 'Oh, never mind', and walked away. It was as though he had held out his hand and I just looked at it blankly. I doubt he remembers. Anyway, I hope he can still do handstands.
El Lago de Suchitlán is the biggest lake in El Salvador. It lies to the north and east of Suchitoto, some 50km north of San Salvador. The lake is artificial; it was created by the flooding of the Rio Lempa valley between 1973 and 1976, as part of the construction of the Cerrón Grande hydroelectric plant. Fifteen thousand families were moved, but the family of Carlos Manuel Lemus Martinez was not amongst them. He came from Metapán, up near the Guatemalan border. It was in the final years of the Civil War, however, that he decided to come and live on an island in the middle of the lake. You can take a boat to visit the island from San Juan, a short walk from Suchitoto. It is named Isla el Ermitaño (Hermit Island) in his honour. On the wall of the cave where Carlos slept there is a faded, laminated picture of him, an old man white haired and a little glassy-eyed. On his shoulder rests the cropped arm of someone else, perhaps a family member or friend. It might be his son, with whom he visited the area and found the deserted island that would become his home. Before he retired and became the Hermit, Carlos Lemus had worked as a prison guard in Santa Ana. It may have been the people and stories he encountered in this work that drove him to seek solitude; one man who killed his wife, another who killed the teenager who had trespassed on his property to steal an orange. People wounded in love, people wounded in hatred. Perhaps, like so many others in El Salvador, Carlos was trying to escape the violence and brutality of the war that was tearing his country apart. Maybe it was the simple fact that living in a cave on an island meant no rent or mortgage, allowing his Ministry of Justice pension to stretch further. The truth is no-one really knows why he did it, including him. At any rate, his life was not exactly Franciscan. He had a boat which he used to get to the mainland to make phone calls and get supplies, though he also ate fish from the lake. There are not so many now. Articles in local papers and a handful of TV appearances made Carlos into something of a minor celebrity, and brought no shortage of national and international visitors. His granddaughter would also come and visit him. By 2012 he was elderly and he grew sick. His family came to collect him. He died a little while later.
On the island the rising and falling of the lake waters can be read in the plastic and other debris that lies on the ground in tiered rows: bottles, broken crates, netting, water bags, food packets, lengths of blue rope. The sediment of our age like layers in rock or rings in a tree trunk. An island of useless crap. You can read the same lines on the shores of lake Nicaragua, and in rivers and on river banks all over Central America. Waste and slime bobbing on the water surface, marshmallow clods of foam building up in the crook of a branch. Eddies of effluent. That Costa Rica is cleaner is partly due to mentality but mainly due to money, and the monetising of mentality. People in wealthier nations don’t produce less waste, we can just afford to pay someone to come and clean it up. Infrastructure, tax, effective government: these are the systems that keep us from seeing the detritus of our daily lives, the nappy strapped over humanity’s ragged sphincter. In amongst the rubbish there are cows and a family. They arrived on the island in the final year of the Hermit’s life. They sell souvenirs and rear the cattle. On top of the rock with the Hermit’s cave there is the wreckage of a small plane, one wing torn off with impact. It went down on 1st October 2014 with four crew members. The pilot, Lieutenant José Corleto Andrade, was a veteran of the Civil War and the 100 Hours War with Honduras. With him were Sergeant José Armando Roque Mulato, and two engineers, Sergio Luis Funes and Josué Armando Velásquez Argueta. Of the four, only Velásquez survived, saved by a local fisherman. After the crash he got religion and he now gives talks about his experience, and being born again. I suppose he thinks he survived for a reason. I wonder if the same reason killed his three comrades. Central America is currently experiencing a flood of evangelical christianity. Pentecostalists, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists and other, more specific, denominations are a constantly visible presence. From Guatemala to Costa Rica you can see groups of elders, young, neat and name-tagged, roaming the streets. Every village seems to have its complement of churches spreading the word, or the good news, or proclaiming the end, or the beginning, pumping out repetitive, droning Christian soft rock with a fuzzy bass. In Cinquerra, while the Catholic church (with the bombs outside) was empty, the evangelical Protestant church was full, its doors wide open to better hear the roaring preacher raining fire and fury on the inhabitants inside, as if they haven’t had enough of that. On Ometepe, in Nicaragua, we heard that there were seven different churches servicing the community of Mérida alone. While I’m not sure what the population of Mérida is, given that the whole island is home to around 35,000 people and that around 27,000 of these live in Moyogalpa, it’s safe to say it’s not that big. The figure of seven may be exaggerated, but it seems an odd thing to make up. In Guatemala, on a three day trek from Xela (Quetzaltenango) to Lake Atitlán we slept in Maya villages. In the first, there was a service at the local evangelical church which went on long into the night, with songs and music and preaching. Most of the village seemed to be there. We were woken in the morning by a small tremor, a rumbling in the guts of the earth. At the entrance to the village there was a tall goal post-like structure hung with bananas, pineapples, corn and other goods - offerings for Semana Santa (Holy Week). There were similar structures all along the route, at village entrances or in main squares. In the main square of Santa Clara, near Lake Atitlán, there were men in traditional dress and masks dancing, either seemingly or actually drunk, to some clonking marimba music, while a crowd of largely disinterested people watched from the edges. This may have been something to do with Easter as well, but the link was not clear. Like the stone circles newly built at Maya temples and the lavishly decorated shrines to particular saints, such practices are traces of indigenous belief, fused inextricably with Catholicism.
The Baile de Judas (Dance of Judas) on the other hand, is a more recent invention. On either Spy Wednesday or Maundy Thursday, depending on the location, people in grotesque masks go around communities collecting charitable donations. Groups of them stand by the roadside at the entrance to towns and villages, holding traffic up. Sometimes they have a long plank of wood with nails hammered through it which they sling across the road and don’t move until the driver has either given them money or persuaded them to move it. The dance culminates in the burning of an effigy of Judas, a tradition which bears striking similarities to the Protestant ritual burning of a Catholic effigy on 5th November.
Back in Mexico, there is a church in San Juan de Chamula, Chiapas, where the people practice a unique mixture of Catholic and indigenous religion. The floor is strewn with long, green pine needles and your steps rise up the acrid-sweet scent of crushed resin. The trees that the needles come from grow in high places like the slopes of mountains and volcanoes. Their sap is thick, and burns well. In the green sea floor there are islands of light. Hundreds of candles stuck with their own wax to the cold stone throw flickers into the air where they mingle with the smoke from those sputtered and gone out. People kneel, sway, chant. Some of them have live chickens, which they grip in both hands and wave in small circles. Some drink fizzy sodas to encourage burping, thought to release evil spirits. The chicken is there to absorb malign forces, and may later be killed. The church and its congregation were excommunicated years ago. A man moves around, scraping the cooling pools and spent candle wicks into a dustpan, at times alight still with a small flame.
The Iglesia de San Francisco in Antigua, Guatemala, is the site of an old convent. Part of it is still a working church. Another part contains a shrine to Saint Peter of Saint Joseph de Betancour, or Hermano Pedro as he is more commonly known. A Catholic missionary from Tenerife, he came to Guatemala in the 17th Century to spread the word and do good works. This he did, founding a hospital and devoting his time to caring for the poor and sick. He is credited with performing numerous miracles and people still come to his shrine in Antigua to pray for them, or they do so remotely I suppose. These miracles are recorded in the Paseo de Miraglos (Corridor of Miracles) in the church, where the walls are hung with notes, pictures, plaques and other offerings from those whose prayers have been answered. Some people pray for recovery from illness. Some ask for support in times of grief or trauma. Some want help with their exams. One wall is covered with crutches no longer needed by their miraculously healed owners. There is a pair of hinged steel leg braces for a child, from the bottom of which dangle small lace up shoes, faded blue leather, the eyelets rusting. Entwined in the lace of the left shoe is a human hair. In the room next door there is a small exhibition about the life of the saint, who was canonized in 2002, and some of his personal effects. They’ve got his prayer beads, his walking stick, his hair shirt. One plaque in the Paseo is from a person who recovered from cancer. It is varnished wood with gold writing. The writer credits their recovery to 'Faith in the Virgin Mary and in Hermano Pedro, and six hard months of chemotherapy.'
As aggressive and worrying as the current evangelical wave is, what makes it worse than the wave of evangelical Catholicism before that? For every person being helped or healed, there was another being racked or burned. Is a lie any less of a lie simply because is it older, or more well rehearsed? And while it’s easy to get watery-eyed about pre-Columbian faith, were the religious elites of those civilisations any less regressive? Does organised pantheistic religion better provide for ordinary people than organised monotheistic religion? Animist or nature-based faiths are appealing, but remain only in isolated pockets, and do not seem to survive outside societies of a few hundred individuals - the point at which human stories and the societies that tell them become necessarily destructive. What’s better: believing the world to have been created by a single, all-powerful deity 6000 years ago, or believing it to be a tree on the back of a giant turtle? How do you choose between fictions?
Yellow-white scum washes up on the Ometepe sand and black-headed vultures hop and squabble like old men over the carcasses of the fish. The eyes are eaten first. They are used to humans and are easily approached, waiting until the last moment to take flight. Dagger-billed egrets and squat herons, yellow-chested kiskadees and glossy grackles stand amongst them. Once, an osprey passed high overhead. One vulture’s left eye was thick with milky blindness.
The story goes that, long ago, howler monkeys used to be white. One night there was a terrible storm in the forest and the monkeys got struck by lightning, and burnt. Instinctively, the male howler put his hands down to protect himself. That is why today, howler monkeys are mostly or entirely black or brown apart from the male’s balls, which remain pure, milky white; and have a habit - as Rachael discovered - of spoiling photographs. The colour contrast with the surrounding body draws the eye irresistibly. As their name suggests, howler monkeys are incredibly loud. They are in fact, often reckoned to be the loudest land animal. If you’ve never heard it before - as I hadn’t - it’s hard to believe the sound is coming from a monkey, or even from an animal. To my ear, it’s less a howl than a roar, but a roar that sounds oddly inverted, like a record played backwards. It is at once full, guttural, and hollow. It seems to defy distance, and you struggle to trace it back to a specific point. It’s as if someone has opened up a crack in the earth, and blistering hot volcanic wind is rushing in and out of it as it would from the devil’s throat. In Central America, we met two of the fifteen extant species: the Guatemalan black howler, which lives in the forests of the Yucatán Peninsula and is entirely black; and the mantled howler, which we encountered in Nicaragua, and is black, with rusty orange along its flanks. The males of all species are able to make this noise thanks to an enlarged hyoid bone. This bone, at the top of the throat, anchors the tongue and connects to the thyroid, as well as the breast and collar bones. In humans it is shaped like a horseshoe but, in howlers, it is more cup shaped, creating a chamber which amplifies the monkey’s vocalisations like the body of a drum. Howlers call mostly at dawn and dusk, and when it rains. In fact, they often seem to call before rain, perhaps suggesting a root for the thunderstorm story, as if they carry a collective memory of their burning. The man who told us the story said he could tell whether it was going to rain or not by the time and nature of the howler calls in the morning. If thunder is coming, they roar out a warning. In truth, the purpose of the calls is not exactly known, but they probably play a role in mating, establishing and defending territory, and avoiding physical confrontation; the howls are so loud and carry such long distances that there is little need for potential rival males to approach each other. This may also explain why the monkeys call during times of poor visibility, like rain. On the other hand, given that howler monkeys are fairly slow moving, and not particularly aggressive, I suppose they might just call because they’re lazy. After all, shouting is easier than moving. Part of me can’t help but think they shout because they like it, or just because they can. They are the only New World monkey to see in full colour, like us; they are about the largest of the American monkeys, despite not being any bigger than a medium spaniel; they are, probably, the loudest animal on the surface of the Earth, and they have bright, shiny testicles which everyone can see. They are fascinating and impressive creatures, and both their calls and their balls are the stuff of legend. And legends get to shout.
While the lightning story is probably not true, what is true is that you can tell how loud a howler monkey’s voice is by looking at his testicles. In male howlers, the size of the hyoid bone and the size of the testicles are inversely proportional. In other words, males with louder, deeper calls have smaller balls, and vice versa. Not only that, but the bollock:shouting ratio is also related to the social structure that howlers live in. Loud-voiced, small-bollocked males live in a harem structure, whereas quieter monkeys with bigger balls live in groups where multiple males mate with multiple females. The theory goes that, in societies with fewer males and less competition for females, there is no need to have particularly large testicles. On the other hand, in societies with lots of males, where competition for females is likely to be fiercer, testicle size becomes more important. Given that both deep vocalisations and big balls are evolutionarily costly, howler species tend to have one or the other. Thus, the importance of voice and testicle size to howler monkey society may help to explain why they are remarkably loud and remarkably visible respectively.
Of course, neither displays of masculinity nor loud or complex calls are restricted to primates. The most prolific and varied singers in the natural world are, or course, birds, and it is the males who sing. Just as with the monkeys and their testicles, there often seems to be an evolutionary trade-off between appearance and song. The resplendent quetzal, the national bird of Guatemala, is iridescent green, red-chested, and has a tail like a banner fluttering in the breeze. Its call is a simple hoot. The same is true of other types of trogon, despite their bold paintbox chests of berry red and corn yellow, the flashes of sea colour on their wings and their stripy tails. Neither do the calls of motmots match up to their impressive appearance, all turquoise, bronze and electric blue, with decorative tail parts known as ‘rackets’. Parakeets, the green of summer grass, ornamented with splodges like flower petals, give off an incessant and unimaginative chatter. The call of a macaw, the parakeet’s larger and more handsome cousin, is a loud, unmistakable, and unchanging screech. The tiny, tweeting, pipping calls of hummingbirds may be the most boring of all. On the other hand, the call of the melodious blackbird is exactly that, and the black-faced solitaire (black and grey apart from an orange beak and legs) is beautiful and lilting, a little metallic. Nightingales are dull in appearance, but are exceptional singers. I always thought they were a kind of thrush, but it turns out they are classified as Old World Flycatchers. They sound the same either way. Dust- and dead leaf-coloured wrens produce a variety of songs that weave and bob around morning air, carrying further and more clearly than you would think possible of something so small. The black-bellied wren can sing in duet, though I have never heard it. The male great-tailed grackle, which is entirely black, makes a dizzying variety of noises, ranging from clicking, creaking, rattling sounds, to harsh shrieks and high, looping whistles. I don’t know if the grackle was named for the sounds it makes - as birds sometimes are -, but 'grackle' seems a good word to describe many of them. They are intelligent, social and extremely common, and I thought they were a kind of crow. They are in fact classified in the family icterid, whose members are often yellow in part, though the grackle is not. Also classified under icteridae are the oropendolas, whose calls and songs are truly bizarre. The call of the Montezuma oropendola, which is dark with a long yellow tail, is a sort of burbling, gurgling sound, combined with a mechanical, almost electronic, clicking, rattling, whirring sound, like someone playing a SNES under water. In England, our best singer is the blackbird, which actually is a kind of thrush, belonging as it does to the unfortunately named turdus genus. During a period of unemployment I passed the time watching a family of blackbirds. I watched the adults build the nest and incubate the eggs. Once the chicks hatched I watched the mother dig for worms and heard the father sing in the tree at dusk. One day a magpie came and attacked the nest. The blackbirds flapped uselessly around the magpie, pecking it and trying to make it leave. It snapped and jabbed at the chicks and clicked the head off one. It picked up the body and flew off. The mother chased it and pestered it until it dropped the dead headless lump, a few scraggy feathers on its lumpy pink skin. A year or so later I spent a night in a small French town telling two friends how there was no need to believe in God (neither is especially religious) because all the wonder you could ever want could be found in the blackbird; the sheer and complete blackness of its body, the beauty and invention of its song, the yellow of its beak and eye. I was drunk on beer and whiskey, and the next morning I was sick into my mouth on a bus and had to swallow it.
Bird and animal sounds can be confusing. A toucan sounds like a frog. A cane toad sounds like an outboard motor. A nightjar is somewhere between the two. I first heard a nightjar in Galicia, and knew what it was because my uncle had spent a holiday some years previously (mis)identifying a whole manner of nocturnal croaking, engine-type sounds as such, before disappearing briefly into the darkness to discover their provenance. Similarly, Dad once took off over the fields trying to find whatever was making a laughing sound like a monkey. It turned out to be a woodpecker. As a boy, I was sometimes troubled at night by what sounded like a baby crying. The noise was somehow disembodied, and seemed to come from nowhere in particular. It could have been in the garden, it could have been in the borage, it could have been under my bed. I learned, eventually, it was foxes mating.
The summer I heard the nightjar was a summer of particularly bad forest fires in northern Spain. Smoke rose from the hills in plumes and columns like dust clouds in deep space. The land lay black and bare where the fire had been, the scorched earth like mange. The path of the flames was told by scorched corridors as from a meteor skidding and skittering its heat through the trees. Ash coloured the sky and filtered the sunlight. Apparently the fires were started by people.
In birds, as in monkeys and whales, it is the males that sing. Humans have other forms of displaying masculinity. In Central America, you get your belly out. One thing that is common to all the countries we’ve been in is the male habit of rolling up your t-shirt to just below your chest to expose the stomach. The stomach is very often large and soft, because the Central American diet is flooded with cheap sugar in the form of fizzy drinks. If as much money and effort were putting into making the majority of tap water reliably safe to drink, this may not be the case. Rolling up the shirt has the curious effect of framing the belly, and of making the man who owns it look like a giant baby. This impression is strengthened by the fact that he is usually lounging around doing little. Of course, partly he is just trying to cool down, but what the t-shirt roll offers as a solution over just taking your shirt off I'm not sure. Also, the habit seems to intensify both in relation the size of the gut and the age of its owner, peaking at about 45 years and 110kg. In a group, you can't help but feel that the hierarchy of males relates to the size and visibility of their bellies.
Back home, we favour more mannered and manicured expressions of manliness - firm handshakes, big watches, cars, tattoos, ostentatious beards - because you can’t actually show everyone how big and white your bollocks are. Crises of masculinity and crises of national identity tend to go hand in hand - patriarchy and patriotism are intertwined. Since the economic crash a decade ago we have been in the midst of an anxiety crisis, with everyone wondering and worrying about what being British (read English) really means, especially in the face of resurgent Celtic nationalism. It was around this time that schools became obliged to imbue children with 'British Values', while the culture of the grade factory and its accompanying accountability meant that we were not able to imbue them with anything like creativity or an enjoyment of learning for its own sake, let alone enough of a work ethic to compete with the mainland Europeans who didn’t so much take the jobs as do them because we didn't want to, because we all thought we were going to win X Factor, get rich off YouTube or marry a prince. Latterly, our identity crisis has morphed into a full-blown nervous breakdown. Meanwhile, a self-consciously old fashioned aesthetic has taken hold. Haircuts are sensible and facial hair prominent. Kids have got names like First World War Tommies. Men don the attire of the landed gentry - flat caps and quilted jackets - as if they have just returned from the shoot, or from tramping around the estate. As if the British soul could be saved by sheer force of will and subscription to a particular aesthetic. Baking, bunting and bigotry. A nation of cap-waving, smiling peasants. Simultaneously, political attitudes which had all but died off as the generation that held them did the same have resurfaced because they are comforting and old fashioned, like your racist piss-smelling dribble-chinned grandparent who never meant any harm really. And anyway, everything was simpler in the good old days. Embodying this is the alt-right, with their short back and sides, neat shirts, pocket handkerchiefs and little round spectacles, railing courageously against a liberal consensus which never existed, upset because women in real life aren't like the ones they've seen on the internet. Meanwhile, the great men of the actual landed gentry, and the papers they own, have somehow managed to convince everyone that they are anti-establishment underdogs. Perhaps some fictions are more destructive than others.
We visited Nicaragua during a lull in the unrest and violence that has been afflicting the country since mid-April. What started as protests in response to proposed pension reforms has morphed into a political crisis which is destabilising one of the more stable nations in Central America. Universities have been occupied, roadblocks have been set up all over the country, security forces have been attacked and buildings have been burned, as well as the 'Tree of LIfe' sculptures erected in various cities by Ortega and his wife (whom he appointed vice-president after he extended his term without consultation). In response, the military have been deployed, security forces and government party activists have been weaponized, hundreds of people have been killed, 'cleansing' (limpieza) operations have been launched in areas of Managua and Granada, and a hard-won and economically vital tourist industry has been massively damaged amid accusations of police brutality, human rights abuses, and a widespread loss of faith in the ability of the man in charge to do anything about it. The actions of Ortega’s regime - a word which seems increasingly appropriate - have been condemned by other American nations through the OAS (Organisation of American States) and the IACHR (Inter-American Commission on Human Rights) as well as by the UN and the EU. It’s hard to get a solid fix on how many lives have been lost, but after 100 days of violence, 448 was the number quoted in various places. The example of Ortega is a depressingly familiar one. A veteran of the country’s leftist revolution, it seems he has ultimately failed to successfully make the transition to peacetime politics, becoming concerned instead with the accumulation and consolidation of personal power. FSLN (Sandinista National Liberation Front) members are alleged to have committed some of the acts of violence in question, including disrupting peaceful protests and attacking protestors. The line between party activists, police officers and paramilitaries has become blurred. During the first weekend of violence, several buildings in León were attacked and burned. One of these was the Museo de la Revolución on the city’s central square. The old men who run it managed to talk down the students of the 19th April Movement and, beyond a few broken windows, the building was largely unharmed. The museum traces the history of the Sandinistas and the revolution that ousted the US-backed dictator Somoza - a man with whom Ortega is now drawing comparison. The museum is run by former revolutionaries and, as such, we were shown round by a man with first hand experience of the struggle. He knew Ortega personally, and calls him Daniel. Despite his revolutionary past, or maybe because of it, he expressed little sympathy with the 19th April Movement, or any of the other people protesting. 'When we had our revolution we didn't have access to health, to education, to anything. We were fighting for freedom,' he said. 'The people protesting now have all of that.' There was more than a hint of young-people-today-don't-know-they’re-born to his argument, but I suppose he was factually correct. Not that he blamed the protesters necessarily; rather, he thought they had been infiltrated and were being used by agents in the pay of the right wing, possibly from abroad, with the aim of destabilising Ortega and, more broadly, Nicaraguan democracy. This is pretty much the government's line on what is happening. In an age of troll farms, Cambridge Analytica and the blossoming Trump-Putin bromance, his suggestion is certainly not outside the bounds of possibility, and it wouldn't be the first time foreign forces have meddled in Nicaraguan politics. Nonetheless, I don't understand why that makes it okay to kill the people who are protesting. Admittedly, this was when the death toll was relatively low and the prospect of a 'National Dialogue' was on the horizon, so maybe his position has softened since then - but given that Ortega has dug in his heels and deployed and/or lost control of yet more of his security forces, I suspect this might not be the case. Great Men stick to their guns, I suppose.
Some of the exhibition in the museum is made up of old photographs of key figures or events. He stopped by one in particular and pointed to it. A young man, not older than 20, firing an AK-47 from behind a makeshift barricade on the street. 'That’s me,' he said. I was struck both by how interesting it was to be learning history from a person who made it, and also by just how recent and bloody that history is.
Assuming that you don’t remember the first three or four years of your life, any Nicaraguan older that about 43 will have some memory of civil war. In El Salvador that number is more like 31. In Guatemala it is 26. I’m unsure what that does to an individual, or to the country which those individuals make up. It may help to explain why decent refuse collection is not really in place, for example, or why Central American nations are reputed to have a bit of a drink problem. I read that El Salvador has the highest rate of alcohol-related deaths in the world, but I'm not sure that's true. It probably goes some way to explaining why corruption is so entrenched and why, as in El Salvador and Nicaragua, the transition from leftist guerilla group to political party is not necessarily a smooth and successful one. Political cultures change slowly, and the last people you want hanging around after a violent conflict are the people who were involved in it in the first place. Likewise, perhaps it's not surprising that, in countries that have recently been tearing themselves apart, divisions and resentment are not far beneath the surface. More than other conflicts, civil wars seem to drive countries to extremes of brutality and bloodshed. Spain has yet to fully come to terms with the horrors of its civil war, not least because the Great Men that won it were knocking around for a long time afterwards, and the men who worked for them still are. The Algerian Civil War, which lasted throughout the 90s until early 2002, was so brutal that Algerians had no thirst for the Arab Spring. The American Civil War killed more Americans than every other conflict that country has been involved in since. The same holds true even if civilian deaths are discounted. Our own civil wars killed around four percent of the population of England and Wales, even more in Scotland and Ireland. Perhaps, if we had a better collective knowledge and memory of this, we wouldn't be so keen to fictionalise and fetishise our other great military conflicts, recent enough for us to feel that we know them, but long enough ago to ensure that we don't really. Similarly, we might not cast aside so petulantly the structures and systems which keep us from stumbling back into bloodshed. Go to eastern Ukraine and ask them about the realities of Russian designs on Europe.Or, for that matter, just stay in England and ask the Electoral Commission or the DCMS Select Committee.
Whales are the greatest of all living things. In their vast bodies and brains are exemplified the miracles and mysteries of evolution, and the marvel of mammalian adaptation. They also sing. Whalesong can be considered true song because it is inventive, and because it has themes and passages that are revisited and adapted. It is not just repetitive communicative sound. Along with bowhead whales, humpbacks are perhaps the most prolific and accomplished singers. Off Mexico's Pacific we saw one breach right in front of our boat, maybe fifteen metres away, smashing through the water like a fist of living rock and earth. Bone, brain, blubber, a beating heart and warm blood. The birth of an island. They are baleen whales, meaning they lack teeth, possessing instead massive keratin combs that filter food from the water. They have particularly long fins, and the lower parts of their heads are covered with tubercles. On humpbacks these bumps are huge follicles, and a thick hair grows from each. Their purpose is not known. The emotional and social lives of whales are not hugely understood, but in all likelihood they are rich and complex. Whales show empathy and have collective memory. They feel grief and joy, and presumably a whole range of emotions in between. Incidents of whales saving other species from orca attacks may be be evidence of altruism, but this is debated. In groups, both the males who sing and those who escort the females tend to be the largest, perhaps indicating that mental capacity, as well as physical strength, are considered desirable characteristics. The songs they sing change across time and populations, and the whales have to learn them every time they are reinvented. In this sense they have the capacity both to be creative and to share this creativity with others. They have ideas, perhaps even abstract thoughts, and can communicate and explain thoughts so that they become common to a group. In this sense they have culture.
Coming down Volcán de Concepción on Ometepe, we found a dead body curled up on the path. It hadn’t been there on the way up. Concepción sits in the middle of the northern half of Ometepe, scooping great fistfuls of cloud out of the sky. It was the fourth volcano we’d climbed, the smallest, and the hardest. As you get nearer the summit, the path becomes increasingly rocky and unclear, and it doesn’t zig-zag, allowing you to take the slope gradually; it just goes up. At the peak the ground is hot, and the air smells of sulphur. Forces at work that were here before we were, and won’t notice when we’re gone. Descending is even harder, because the cloud makes the rocks slippery, so you find yourself stumbling down the side of the misty mountain. The small intestine had been ripped out and lay next to the corpse. It looked like spaghetti hoops. Juan, our guide, turned it over with a stick to show its little white face. This is the other kind of monkey we have on the island, he said. New World monkeys like this capuchin have flat noses and sideways facing nostrils - unlike the more prominent noses and downward facing nostrils of Old World monkeys and apes like us - but his face was nonetheless disconcertingly human, his eyes half closed, his mouth turned down at the corners. His fingers were curled slightly, as if something he’d been holding had slipped from his hands in sleep, and they still retained the memory of its shape. Capuchins, unlike other New World monkeys, have opposable thumbs. He bore wounds on the arms and groin, and you could see the tiny, bloody stump of his penis. His intestines seemed to have been pulled out through his back. The groin was specifically mutilated; you don’t kill something by tearing its genitals off. He couldn’t have been more than a few days old. In all likelihood, explained Juan, who had said almost nothing for the rest of the hike, he had been killed by his father, or some other senior male, so that he didn’t grow up and challenge for leadership of the group.
Central America has been ripped apart by the Great Man, by the man who sees himself as a statue, a marble mountain carved by conflict and conquest. He sees his face, keen-eyed and steely-jawed, resolute, facing down the centuries from every street corner, impervious to such a thing as time. He sees himself in the names of plazas and stadiums, hospitals, wide tree-lined boulevards. He reads his name in the map and memory of his country. He hears himself in the mouths of future generations, spoken in reverence, chanted in the plazas, in the flutter of the flag in the warm breeze. He feels his hands grip the people, carry them, lead them. He feels his hands grip the ship’s wheel, steering a course, defying the waves and the storms. He knows his place in history, and knows he has earned it.
Dylan’s Blue-eyed Son is unfazed by what he encounters. Dead oceans, dying forests, violence, conflict, hatred, the vulnerable brutalised, the powerful unmoved, a world on the brink of chaos and collapse. His father asks him what he's going to do and he says he’ll go to the dark places of the world to face the injustices head on. Then he will tell everyone about it. 'I'll stand on the ocean before I start sinking. I'll know my song well before I start singing.' Which is fine, but what if you don't? What if you don’t know what to do, which song to sing? What if you get it wrong? What if you sink?
In one of the interviews he gave to a local paper before he died, the Hermit was asked why he didn’t leave the island. 'There are no people here,' he said.
We try to make sense of what we are confronted with every day, but it doesn't make any sense, so we can't. How do you make sense of a dying world? It doesn't make any sense because we're not part of it anymore. We're too big, too slow, too old, too many, too complex, too stupid, too safe. A life lived at a distance. We remember something, sometimes, but not for long. We act out these memories but the surroundings are wrong and the lines and movements too deliberate, as if our brains and bodies are not our own. How do you fill the hole when the hole is where you came from and what you are? We fight for no good reason. We drink ourselves into idiocy. We climb things. We take our clothes off and shout things. We memorise things. We run marathons. We leave our homes and families to live on an island. We spend weeks, months, years, writing things that nobody will read. We learn how to do handstands. We divide the birds and the animals and the plants into categories. They don't care. They don't even know. We make nations. We make things up. We tell them to others. We learn about the past and then make the same mistakes, because history can only tell you what happened, not what to do about it. We invade other places and divide the people there into categories too. Some fictions are more dangerous than others. Men seem particularly prone to this sort of behaviour, or maybe we're just worse at controlling it; doomed to suffer the violence of yearning and the yearning for violence, never understanding either.
A whale dives and sinks from our view. Much of what it does from that point is unknown to us, but it comes back up and is alive. A whale can learn new songs, even as an adult.
Maybe it's not the great man’s fault. Maybe he's just doing what the guy before him did, and the guy before him. Maybe greatness was thrust upon him, just going through the motions. Maybe it's our fault, the rest of us. After all, the Great Men are the ones we remember. Nobody knows who the other 190 men were, nobody knows if they wept while they died, if they swore, if they cursed the name of the man that brought them here. We remember Walker; we don't remember the names of the people he poisoned the water with, nor the thousands who died of cholera as a result. In the Panama Canal Museum, the men who actually built it are remembered in vague language in one paragraph, entitled 'Heroes of the Canal'. It doesn't matter who they were, nobody remembers them. Nobody remembers the slaves who died in the war of two competing economic systems, nor the names of the people butchered and left in a ditch. Nobody remembers the ones who were scared, who didn’t want to fight, the drunks, the failures, the mad, the confused, the desperate, even though that is what most of us are. We think we remember but we don’t. This year it will be a century since the end of the First World War. People will visit the mass cemeteries in Belgium and Northern France, go to look at the names on the Menin Gate, and they’ll think they remember. But nobody can. After a certain point people just become numbers, stats for military history geeks to argue over, devoid of meaning. There are too many to count, so they become one, 'The Unknown Soldier', and we think that’s enough. We can’t know who these people were, so we make them 'Heroes', because that saves us from thinking about the meaningless slaughter of ordinary human beings in the name of Great Men or other fictions. In so doing we dehumanise them. They are not just men - they are heroes; heroes to people the legends of history. I remember learning what a legend was at school. A legend is something that used to be based on fact.
We stood around the monkey’s corpse. There was nothing much to do about it so after a minute or so we carried on.
Loose ends
I’m aware that I’ve written almost exclusively about men in this piece. This is deliberate; I was interested in the nature of masculinity, and particularly in the way it manifests in behaviours that are destructive of ourselves or others. I’m sure women feel every bit as constrained and confused by modern life as men do - and that this is compounded by the social constraints that make them less able to express and exercise this confusion by doing things like leaving their family to live on an island - but, not being a woman, I’m not sure I have much of value to add to the discussion.
If you’re Bob, you’ll know that that’s not your real name. I hope you don’t mind me writing about you and I hope the details are reasonably accurate. I’m sorry I forgot to find out that Russian expression. I went on to learn Arabic and I forgot that too, so I assure you it’s nothing personal. On the plus side I can now do handstands.
If you’re Ollie, you’ll know that that is your real name, but that it’s also the name of roughly every third boy of your age in Essex.
There’s nothing in this about Honduras because we didn’t go there.
I’m not as scrupulous as a I should be at citing sources, and I don’t always make a note of what I read. Hopefully, as ever, I will be saved from embarrassment/litigation by my limited readership. Nonetheless, the following should cover most of the sources I've used:
- The Nelson quote is my own translation of the Spanish in the Museo de la Fortaleza in El Castillo. This is also where I found out about Rafaela Herrera.
- The death count in Nicaragua kept changing while I was writing this, so it will probably have gone up by the time you read it. This is why I eventually chose the marker of 100 days for a figure. The two main papers in Nicaragua are El Nuevo Diario and La Prensa, which are where I got most of the news and numbers from. El Nuevo Diario was formed by Sandinista sympathisers, so is more pro-government in its position. La Prensa is traditionally more conservative and is a critic of the Ortega government.
- The American Battlefield Trust does not agree that Civil War continues to eclipse all other wars since in turns of numbers killed, stating that Vietnam tipped the balance. I’m not sure why this is their position, nor am I sure why their figure does not seem to include free civilians or slaves. The figure I reference is based on 2011 research from David J Hacker at Binghamton University. There’s some New York Times articles discussing it here and here, and it’s also cited as a convincing figure by the BBC and Encyclopedia Britannica, among others.
- According to Encyclopedia Britannica, the English Civil Wars killed 212,000 people in England and Wales. This is roughly 4% of the population, assuming a population of 5.3 million at the time.
- The correlation between singing and size in humpbacks is mentioned in this paper. This paper discusses the transmission of songs between different whale populations. Whales have also been found to learn and transmit other behaviours, as per this article. You can read about the phenomenon of humpbacks defending other species from orcas here, here and here. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America has several articles about the nature of whale song, but to be honest I didn’t really understand them. Maybe you will.
- I first heard about William Walker from Carlos, the owner of El Arca de Noé hostal in Granada. The specific claim that Walker contaminated the wells of Rivas with corpses seems to come from this article, and I got the moniker 'Grey-eyed man of Destiny’ from here.
- This article contains the interview with the Hermit Carlos Manuel Lemus Martinez that I reference. The plane crash of October 2014 is reported here and here.
- Testimony from the El Mozote massacre is based on the exhibition La memoria de las luciérnagas in the Museo Regional de Occidente, Santa Ana, El Salvador.
- Descriptions and testimonies from the Cinquera and surrounding massacres come from here, here and here.
- I'm fairly sure I stole the line about a lie still being a lie even if it's older from Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. I don't reckon she'll notice.
- The bit about human societies becoming destructive once they're bigger than a couple of hundred people is based on Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari (from memory, the specific figure he gives is 150).
- According to some literal interpretations of the Bible favoured by creationists and their ilk, the world is a little over 6000 years old.
- There are several references in this post to the Bob Dylan song A Hard Rain'd a-Gonna Fall, which is on the album The Freewheelin Bob Dylan.
That should be everything. Thanks for reading. I'm sorry it was so long.
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