Interamericana

We’re frozen in time on the highway when my driver starts pummelling his horn, unleashing a river of obscenities.

“Hijo de puta! Move it, move it, move it!”

Beside us, an almost imperceptible procession of red ants scrambles in the gutter, clambering bodies illuminated by muggy yellow street lamps. They hold their spoils aloft – crumbs, grains, seeds, shards, fragments – whatever they can find and carry.

“Hijo de puta!”

He grips the wheel defiantly and performs a deft, if highly illegal U-turn, swerving into noise and engines and swirling headlights.

“Easy!” He laughs, setting us in the opposite direction.

Released from the temporal freeze, we continue our journey down the dark, directionless and endlessly unfathomable arteries of Nicaragua’s capital city: Managua. A city without laws, order, sense or centre.

My driver, Juan Fransisco, is a Managuan born-and-bred, an ex-guerilla fighter and unceremonious master of philosophy. He is proving an apt companion in my search for the city’s heart.

“You see,” he begins. “The centre is everywhere. You know who said that? Nietzche. The mad German.”

Nietzche also said that if you gaze long enough into the Abyss, the Abyss starts to gaze into you. The more we explore this city’s illogical, dislocated streets, the more I suspect that Managua, Nietzche and the Abyss are all borne out of the same incendiary madness, poetry and violence, endless shifting truths… and no truth at all…

“The earthquake came on Christmas eve, 1972.” Juan tells me, as we survey the shattered facades of the city’s ruined cathedral. Here and there, piles of rubble litter the fractured steps, hungry weeds burst forth and the saints stand half-crippled in porticoes, limbs and faces missing. The cracked bell-tower looks ready to shiver into pieces.

“That night, the roof fells on our heads and the city was completely destroyed yet again. For this reason, Managua has no downtown, no central axis, no core. When we build a road, we don’t bother to name it. Sooner or later, everything falls.”

Continually plunged into transformational fires, Managua defies easy definition. Here, in the heart of Central America, death and rebirth, order and chaos, darkness and light are in a constant, dizzying dance.

On Tiscapa hill, a giant, black, cut-out silhouette of Augusto Sandino – the nation’s most revered revolutionary hero – rises from the spot where the Somoza family once tortured their political opponents.

At an eerily empty concrete expanse called ‘Peace Park’, the barrels of retired AK47s peek out from under a blanket of thick cement, a grotesque shanty town groaning on the periphery.

At Metrocentro, an American-style shopping mall near the entrance to the city, giant posters of socialist president Daniel Ortega loom without a hint of irony:

“Arise the poor of the world!”

Indeed, the centre is everywhere, but Managua’s heart is still eluding me.

“Juan,” I say, after careful consideration. “Take me to the Oriental market.”
“I’ll take you, my friend.” He says seriously. “But I warn you, it’s no place for a white boy.”

Managua’s Oriental market is the blackest of Central America’s black markets. Populated by thieves, murderers and every shade of low-life criminal, they might as well have hung a sign at its gates:

‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.’

But as the great curtain lifts, the walls of smoke and swirling black flies part, I find myself drawn inside, hypnotized, and the jaws close in.

Inside, everywhere is movement and fever. Torrents of people pour in and out with parcels held aloft – baskets, buckets, crates, sacks, boxes – whatever they can find and sell within the pungent, never-ending hive of streets. How to find the centre of this crawling, convoluted labyrinth?

Easy. Just follow your nose. The ripe aroma of half-rotten tropical fruit, congealed chicken blood, grease, smoke, stagnant water and horse dung. I descend alone, turning here and there through mud and puddles and litter-strewn alleys. From street to street, stall to stall, something’s following me.

Further and faster I move, colliding with leers and faces and an endless array of drunken, whirlpool eyes. My ears ring with voices and laughter and screaming cockerels. Eyes everywhere, like a vicious swarm.

“Hey white boy! Where are you going? Come back white boy!”

Left and right, around and around, spiraling past butchered livestock. A sickly white horse shivers under its load, wooden cart tied to its sad, starved haunches. I’m stuck in a maze with no centre – no entrance, no exit – and no thread to find my way back. I accost an old man in my horror.

“Excuse me señor, I’m lost. Do you know where I am?”
“Of course,” he laughs and laughs. “You’re in Managua. Where else?”

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