Never to Be Forgotten—On the Passing of Amanda Aguilar

Muchos han oído estos gritos del Cuá
gemidos de la Patria como de parto . . .
Ernesto Cardenal, “Las campesinas del Cuá”

Voy a hablarles, compañeros,
de las mujeres del Cuá,
que bajaron de los cerros,
por orden del general.
De la María Venancia
y de la Amanda Aguilar,
dos hijas de las montañas
que no quisieron hablar.
Carlos Mejía Godoy, “Las mujeres del Cuá”

If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write something worth reading or do things worth writing.
Benjamin Franklin


Her heroism, as well as her sacrifices, inspired “Las campesinas del Cuá,”one of Ernesto Cardenal’s best loved poems. In turn, these verses, by Nicaragua’s most famous living poet, moved Carlos Mejía Godoy—the country’s best known composer—to write “Las mujeres del Cuá,” a heart wrenching song from the era when the Nicaraguan people banded together to overthrow a nearly fifty-year old dynasty.

Petrona Hernández—a campesina from the mountains of Matagalpa who adopted “Amanda Aguilar” as her revolutionary code-name—died this past Valentine’s Day, at the age of 116. Along with her mother, María Venancia Aguilar, Amanda joined Augusto César Sandino’s struggle against the US Marines, back in the 1930s. Both women worked as cooks in the guerrillero’s headquarters, in the mountains of Jinotega.

After Sandino was assassinated, Amanda and her mother left Jinotega and returned to their hometown of El Bijagüe Norte, in the highlands of Matagalpa. And for the next three decades Amanda waited patiently for an opportunity to join the struggle against the Somoza regime—which she considered an extension of the Marine occupation.

In the early 1960s, Amanda didn’t balk when members of a newly formed revolutionary group calling itself the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) asked her to join them in bringing down the Somozas. At a time when Nicaraguans believed that anyone who took a stand against the US-supported dictatorship was either insane or had a death wish, Amanda Aguilar and her mother fed, gave refuge, and acted as messengers for the first Sandinistas, including Carlos Fonseca Amador, founder of the movement. What’s more, Amanda helped organize a campesino network that supported the fledgling guerrilla effort by way of providing reconnaissance and food supplies.

Her commitment to the Sandinista cause, though, came with a heavy price tag. In 1968, the Guardia Nacional—which was essentially Somoza’s personal army—embarked on a military offensive designed to wipe the FSLN off the face of the earth. In the mountains of Matagalpa, the soldiers encircled the revolutionaries and their collaborators. Although Amanda and the other women of the network initially managed to elude the noose, they were soon captured and taken to a Guardia Nacional command center in the village of El Cuá. There, Amanda and her mother, now 90 years old, were beaten and tortured. Amanda’s two daughters, who had also been captured, were repeatedly raped. Two of her brothers were killed, one of them thrown from a helicopter. Yet in spite of torture, the irreparable losses, and the constant death threats, not one of the women uttered a word about the Sandinistas’ support network.

After being held for six months, the women were released and placed under surveillance. But their sacrifices did not end there. In 1975, Amanda lost a son, Jacinto Hernández, who joined the Sandinistas and had risen to the rank of Comandante, the first campesino to do so.

After the Sandinista triumph, in July of 1979, the revolutionary government awarded Amanda with a large plot of farmland, far from El Bijagüe Norte. Friends say that she traveled there, took one look at the place, then turned around and said, “It’s too far away. I’m going back home.” Amanda never second-guessed her decision.

She lived the remainder of her life quietly, in her beloved town of El Bijagüe Norte, never asking anyone for anything.

Amanda Aguilar exemplifies what was—ideologically, at least—most noble and pure about the Sandinista movement. She lived a life of courage and commitment to others. But neither the trappings of power nor the temptation to seek personal gain held sway over her. She simply wanted to make Nicaragua a better, more just nation. Amanda Aguilar's nobility and sacrifice deserves to stand the test of time. She deserves never to be forgotten.

The World’s Best Liar: On Reading The Princess Bride

A liar will not be believed, even when he speaks the truth.
Aesop

If one is to be called a liar, one may as well make an effort to deserve the name.
A. A. Milne

I first saw the film The Princess Bride eighteen-years ago. The way the story unfolded so captivated me that I rushed to buy William Goldman’s novel. I wanted to see for myself how this tale of “true love” had originally been told.

And then I fell in love with the book. In fact, Goldman’s best-known work inspired me to try to write a novel in the same vein. Halfway through, however, I abandoned the effort after the characters held a meeting—in my head, of course—and informed me that although they were interesting, the things I had them doing were boring.

This year, I included The Princess Bride on the reading list of several of the classes I teach. And the students, virtually every one of them, have loved Goldman’s masterpiece.

“Why can’t all the books we read be this much fun?” a few of them have asked.

In The Princess Bride, William Goldman proves himself an astonishing storyteller. Throughout, he keeps the story engaging and the pace brisk. Most readers, though, will overlook Goldman’s remarkable writing skills because the novel is superbly humorous and lighthearted. But I refuse to allow this to happen in my classroom as I often shout out my admiration—and not without a certain degree of envy—during the novel’s most noteworthy passages.

What I find particularly ingenious about Goldman’s work is the way he inserts himself—or, better yet, his fictional personae—into The Princess Bride. He starts to employ this successful stratagem in the very first sentence of the book. Moreover, his splendid use of the artifice of being just the abridger—as opposed to the author of The Princess Bride—allows him to ridicule his own creation while leaping over incidents and time, as well as “cutting out” long segments of S. Morgenstern’s version without making the reader blink.

I’ve held back from telling the students that S. Morgenstern is Goldman’s invention; that the Florinese “author” of The Princess Bride never existed.

“You mean, the entire book is a lie?” a student asked when I finally pointed out that S. Morgenstern is also a fictional character.

“Yes,” I answered. “That’s the nature of fiction: to make things up.”

“You mean, all the stuff about Goldman’s own life, his father first reading him the story, his wife, his son, all those are lies?” the student asked, his eyes reflecting feelings of betrayal.

“Some of the facts of his life are real, others are not.”

“What are we to believe, then?” another student asked, the hurt over Goldman’s deception evident in her voice.

“Why do you have to believe this story?” I answered. “Why can you just enjoy it?”

“I hate that!” another student added as, in frustration, he tossed the book on his desk. “Goldman’s full of it!”

“We can stop reading The Princess Bride if you like. We can move on to another book.”

The class was silent for a moment. At last, a student mumbled, reminding me of the grandson’s character in the movie, “No. Let’s go on. I want to see how the story ends.”

How can a teacher not love The Princess Bride and its creator, William Goldman: The World’s Best Liar?

The Panamanian in Me

He who has gone, so we but cherish his memory, abides with us, more potent, nay, more present than the living man.
Antoine de Saint Exupery

The real meditation is . . . the meditation on one’s identity. Ah, voila une chose! You try it. You try finding out why you’re you and not somebody else. And who the blazes are you anyhow? Ah, voila une chose!
Ezra Pound


Every Sunday, while growing up, my father, his three brothers, and their families congregated at my grandmother’s house in South Central Los Angeles, filling it with laughter and the whirlwind of cousins as we ran around, playing. Coming together for Sunday brunch was a Sirias family tradition. And during these gatherings, although the older generations of Sirias’ hailed from Nicaragua, I’d notice that their gazes would cloud over in nostalgic fondness whenever their conversation turned to the years they spent in Panamá.

At mealtime, I’d listen to my father and his brothers argue over who’d get the “concolón”—the crispy, burned rice at the bottom of the pot. And they referred to beans as porotos, when every other Spanish-speaking family I knew in Los Angeles called them frijoles. What’s more, for the first eleven years of my life I thought that lentils were a Nicaraguan staple; and it wasn’t until I moved to Nicaragua, at age eleven, that I discovered that no one there had a clue what lentils were.

And almost every Sunday my grandmother—a true artist in the kitchen—prepared tangy ground beef turnovers that my cousins and I greedily devoured. Not once did I ask about the place of origin of these, but I somehow knew they were not from Nicaragua, and I assumed that my grandmother had gotten the recipe from her Mexican neighbors. But in the ensuing decades after her death, the turnovers became a distant, seemingly irretrievable memory. However, when I moved to Panamá—in July of 2002—after buying my first empanada de carne from a street vendor, I was thrilled when my taste buds told me that these were the turnovers my grandmother had been making those Sundays, many years ago, in Los Angeles. It was merely one of a countless number of things that my father’s family picked up during the eight years they lived here.

My paternal grandparents separated shortly after my father, the youngest of four boys, was born. At the time, the United States Marines occupied Nicaragua, and María Brunilda Burgos de Sirias (being a devout Catholic my grandmother never divorced), earned a decent living, cooking for the American soldiers stationed in Granada, her hometown. But in 1933, after the Marines withdrew, she was left without the means to support her four sons. An iron-willed person, my grandmother went to El Salvador to try her luck, starting a clothing business. But after six months without much success, a friend told her that Panamá was a land of opportunities, and that someone with her drive would do well there. And she came to this country, in 1939, leaving her boys in Nicaragua, in the care of relatives.

Within six months, my grandmother had saved up enough money—preparing meals for Nicaraguan students that attended the Universidad de Panamá and yearned for the flavor, el sabor, of their homeland—to send for her sons.

Although my father was only twelve at the time, in his later years he could still recall, and vividly, the day when the boat bringing him and his brothers docked at the pier in San Felipe. At once he fell in love with the city, and he would remain here until the age of twenty, living in a third story apartment near the church of La Merced. While growing up in Panamá, my father swam competitively, practicing every afternoon at the pool that today is named after Adán Gordon, his coach. He also graduated from the Escuela de Artes y Oficios.

Throughout the eight years the Sirias’ lived here, they applied for Panamanian citizenship, several times. Their requests, however, were never granted. During Arnulfo Arias’s presidency, Panamá adopted xenophobic and racist immigration policies—to the extreme that people born in this country were threatened with having their citizenship revoked, simply because they were of African or Asian heritage.

Ironically, when my grandmother applied for residency in the United States, her request was granted. No longer a cook, she had been working for a U.S. Army Colonel stationed in Clayton. He and his wife liked my grandmother so much—she was the nanny of their autistic son—that when the officer was transferred to Virginia, the couple sponsored her so she could continue working for them. She went along, her sons now able to fend for themselves, and nearly two years later, now a legal resident of the United States and living in Los Angeles, she sponsored her boys in a deal that included my father having to join the Army and serve in the Korean War.

In July of 2003, my father, José Joaquín Sirias, came to visit me. He had been away from his beloved Panamá for more than fifty-five years. We toured his old haunts, in San Felipe. In pursuit of his long-cherished memories we climbed up several flights of rickety wood stairs to the third floor apartment just off Avenida B where he and his family had lived. The deplorable state of the building, which through the distorted lenses of nostalgia had been a palace, brought tears to his eyes. Along with Sandy, the youngest of my sisters, we stood for a long time in what used to be my grandmother’s kitchen, where my father and I spent time reminiscing about her remarkable culinary talents.

We also visited other places that had meant a lot to him, especially the pool where he swam every afternoon. But the entire time my father was here, he kept asking me about the Casa Miller. He wanted to see what in his memory had become the city’s most important landmark. Being fairly new to Panamá at the time, I had no idea what he was talking about. But during one of our outings we asked a veteran taxi driver who then drove us to the plaza Cinco de Mayo and pointed to the spot where the Casa Miller used to stand.

My father returned to Nicaragua, his country of residence, happy to have set foot again in the land of his youth, and we talked about another visit for the following year in which he’d bring his surviving brother, Guillermo.

Shortly after my father left, I came across a postcard of the Miller House that I intended to give to him in person. Sadly, within six months of his visit to Panamá he fell gravely ill. I went to Nicaragua—as did my two sisters—to be alongside him, and I took the postcard along.

Although we had the chance to say our goodbyes, he was so ill and in so much pain—before lapsing into a coma—that the postcard of the Casa Miller became inconsequential. Because of professional obligations I had to return to Panamá, and my father died a week later, blessedly in my sisters’ loving care.

Certain that my father was close to his death, before leaving Nicaragua I handed the postcard of the Casa Miller to Sandy, my sister, and said, “Please place this inside of dad’s coffin. It’s something from Panamá that meant a lot to him.”

A Question of Inspiration

Better beware of notions like genius and inspiration; they are a sort of magic wand and should be used sparingly by anybody who wants to see things clearly.
Jose Ortega y Gasset


A reader recently wrote to ask what inspired me to tell Father Bernardo Martínez’s story in Bernardo and the Virgin. Most of the time, the answer to this seems quite clear to me. But there are moments when the question is shrouded in a cloud of awe and mystery.

I’ll start by describing what I find perfectly clear. For decades I had wanted to write a panoramic novel about Nicaragua and Nicaraguans—a work in which I’d attempt to explore as many facets of life in this wonderful, quirky country as I could. My adolescent years were spent in Nicaragua. (In spite of both of my parents being Nicaraguans, I’m an American, born and raised up to age eleven in Los Angeles, California. And, first and foremost, I consider myself a Los Angeleno.) But during my time in Nicaragua I came to adore the people, their history, and their culture. And their concerns and suffering also became my own.

In the late 1980s I decided to try to write my long-dreamed novel about Nicaragua, telling the story through a passion that the people of this nation share with Americans: baseball. At the time the Contra War was raging, and the plot became mired in politics. Furthermore, it was my first attempt at writing fiction and, to be honest, I had no idea what I was doing. Needless to say, the result was a highly uneven work. (Regardless, although my first attempt at a novel was unsuccessful, I did learn a lot from the experience.)

I then wrote two more failed novels (neither of them about Nicaragua), before throwing in the towel. I chose instead to concentrate on academic writing—books and articles, mostly about Latin American Literature (in Spanish) and US Latino and Latina literature (in English). Although I continued to dream that one day I would publish a novel, it all seemed to be just that: a dream.

But a decade later, during a long overdue visit to Nicaragua—I had been away for nearly twenty years—I met, through my father, a Catholic priest named Bernardo Martínez. The more I learned about Father Bernardo’s experiences—the pivotal event of his life being the apparition of the Virgin Mary, which took place in 1980—the more novelesque his story became. To my benefit, just as I was about to commit to writing the novel, two books about Father Martínez were published, both non-fiction. I was delighted to discover that others had been so touched by Father Bernardo’s relationship with the Virgin Mary that they had also been compelled to write about it. This was, in my eyes, an indication that I had stumbled upon a remarkable story. Moreover, these books were a godsend, saving me from years of research.

As my idea to write Bernardo and the Virgin began to flourish, I came to realize that Father Martínez’s story could also serve as the springboard for the panoramic novel about Nicaragua I had always wanted to write. Needless to say, I was delighted with my choice of Father Bernardo’s life the subject for my novel.

But did I really choose to write this book?

Many writers believe that a topic often chooses them.

When I had enough information to begin writing, I asked Father Martínez for his blessing to tell his story—in the form of a novel. Since Father Bernardo had a somewhat limited education, I wanted to make sure that he understood, and perfectly, that although I intended to remain true to the essence of his experiences with the Virgin Mary, I was going to invent the other stories that would circulate around his character. The irony is that although Father Bernardo was often accused of making up the apparitions, he had considerable trouble understanding the nature of fiction. He listened patiently to my explanations, which I repeated over and over. After a while, I noticed that he had stopped listening; he then smiled, placed a hand on my shoulder, and said, “It doesn’t matter what I think, Silvio. The Virgin told me some time ago that she had chosen you to write this book.”

This incident worked its way into the final chapter of Bernardo and the Virgin. And it still sends chills through me whenever I think—or, in this case, write—about that moment.

So, did I tell the story of Father Bernardo’s life out of inspiration; or was I chosen to do so?

In answering the reader with all honesty, I told her that I believed it was a little of both.