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1. Partial Confession
- Duke University Press
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1 | Partial Confession Sergio, my eldest, and his sisters, María and Dorel, were born in San José, Costa Rica, Central America’s peaceful oasis from the clandestine cemeteries of the sixties. My wife, Tulita, and I had lived there during our virtual exile since we were newlyweds. Afterward , we all went to Berlin in the German Democratic Republic for two splendid years. This was thanks to a writer’s grant that also allowed me to see all the German expressionist films at the Arsenal cinema. I saw all of Brecht in the Berliner Ensemble on the other side of the Wall, and I spent long afternoons contemplating Lucas Cranach’s paintings in the picture gallery at the Dahlem Museum and enjoying matinees with complimentary tickets to the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Von Karajan. Those were also years of marches in the snow through all of Kurfürstendamm to Nollendorfplatz to protest Augusto Pinochet’s military junta in Chile or the Greek colonels, or to celebrate Portugal’s Carnation Revolution . Then we finally returned to Costa Rica, with no plans other than to overthrow Anastasio Somoza Debayle’s dictatorship. Sergio is finally writing his thesis, which is about the market for low-fat dairy products. By the time this book is published, he will have already graduated in business management. Today, for example , he left very early this morning for Camoapa, one of the country’s cattle regions, busy working on his research. He is still single, although I know his private feelings because, in the end, after so many twists and turns, we are good friends and trust each 6 | CHAPTER 1 other. His plan now is to specialize in systems analysis, perhaps at the Comillas Pontifical University in Madrid, or at the University of Maryland . While I am not very familiar with that science, he has explained it to me. It is of vital importance to the modern world and works to organize personnel and supplies according to advanced mathematical calculations, similar to armies, but applied to businesses. Born in 1965, he lived the disruptions of a life of moving from place to place, the same as his two sisters. They had their own country, Nicaragua, which they did not even know since they were children of exile. When we went to Berlin, they missed San José, and then in Berlin, by the time they spoke only German with each other, they did not want to leave their friends in the Wilmersdorf neighborhood. It was worse for them back in San José when I was completely devoted to the struggle against Somoza, and even more when I returned to Managua in 1978. This was despite an order for my arrest from the dictatorship—something they never knew about—and with a death threat from ‘‘El Chigüín,’’ (the kid), Somoza’s son. My departure left them and my wife deep in despair, in the worst kind of waiting, because everything in Nicaragua was already marked by death. It was the color of the landscape in which the people moved about. Since I have been digging up memories lately, I found a folder with all the letters my children sent to me in Managua telling me about their childhood routines. Sergio’s are written on squared pages torn from his school notebooks, and María and Dorel’s are on pastel-colored stationery with printed designs that they must have brought from Berlin, with ladybugs , daisies, and wild mushrooms in between the words glück viel glück (luck, good luck). Read in a far-off place, in hiding, those letters seemed full of extraordinary events. It feels that way again now since they do not show any wear, nothing that time would have erased, and they always tremble in my hands like live fish out of the fishbowl that had been our life until then. I later returned to San José. During the final insurrection, our house in Los Yoses became a center for conspiracy, a storehouse for supplies, a treasurer’s office, a barracks, a public relations office, and a safe house. For them, those months involved arriving home from school to find people coming and going as if it were a big market. The living room and hallways were packed full of boxes with medical supplies, bundles of uniforms, and rows of boots. That was until the revolution was finally victorious, and once more they watched me leave one night without knowing if...