Forged Testimonies: Fabricating the Nation in Sergio Ramírez's «Sombras nada más»¹

Stephen Henighan

During the 1960s and 1970s novels such as Gabriel García Márquez's Cien años de soledad (1967), Mario Vargas Llosa's La casa verde (1966), or Carlos Fuentes's Terra Nostra (1975) appeared to act as vehicles that forged a certifiable cultural identity for impoverished, marginalized nations². The major novels of the «Boom» period filtered the particularities of Spanish American reality through the prism of avant-garde techniques in a way which, as John King suggests, «attract[ed], for the space of a decade, the support of both politically engaged and culturally modernizing groups»³. Fiction alone seemed to be capable of unifying nations. Carlos Fuentes wrote at the time: «Inventar un lenguaje es decir todo lo que la historia ha callado»⁴. Mario Vargas Llosa stressed the impact of the literary reimagining of national history on the middle classes: «las burguesías descubren que los libros importan, que los escritores son algo más que locos benignos, que ellos tienen una función que cumplir entre los hombres»⁵. Not all were persuaded by these arguments. Critics such as Braulio Muñoz argued that the novel of the Boom induced pessimism and hopelessness in Latin American readers, persuading them that they were trapped in labyrinths of ambiguity that prevented them from improving their societies: «The indecision that pervades the New Novel is the result of [...] its revival of baroque style»⁶. But the dominant mood was that characterized by Gerald Martin: «there was some optimism that the Latin American middle classes, with liberal democratic regimes to represent them, might be on the verge of some new era of political stability and real economic expansion»⁷. The novel was inextricably entwined in this cultural rebirth.

According to most commentators, this illusion, like other illusions of autonomy harboured by the nation-state, has been swept away by globalization. Néstor García Canclini makes this argument when he writes:

The fact that this malaise is widespread does not mean that it is the same everywhere. García Canclini himself points out that both the economic and spiritual deprivations associated with the era of globalization and neoliberalism are felt in Central America «de modo más severo que en otras regiones» (p. 44). The crisis is illustrated particularly graphically by the case of Nicaragua, where the watershed of the 1990 electoral defeat of the Sandinista Revolution underscores in dramatic fashion the transition to the neo-liberal policies associated with the era of globalization. Rescuing Nicaragua's national autonomy and particularity from a history of subjugation by the United States, or by dictators subservient to the United States, energized Sandinismo more than any other single objective⁹. The career of the novelist and politician Sergio Ramírez epitomizes the merging of the «vanguardias artísticas y propuestas nacionalistas» alluded to by García Canclini. As a novelist who developed under the tutelage of the Boom, his narrative technique influenced by Vargas Llosa and his career promoted by García Márquez and Fuentes, and as a leader of a revolutionary regime committed to enlarging national autonomy¹⁰, Ramírez personified the fusing of the literary and the national. In an essay written in the aftermath of the 1990 electoral defeat, he spoke of the centrality to the Sandinista Revolution of

The nation, Ramírez goes on to argue, is still out there: «El país que sigue allí, con su misma gente y sus mismas esperanzas de una vida distinta» (p. 124). Yet it is not the same nation. Ramírez recognizes this change in Adiós muchachos, his memoir of the Sandinista Revolution, published seven years later in 1999, where, benefiting from greater perspective, he writes: «El mundo cambiaba a final de los ochenta, se hundía todo el aparato de los ideales, eran destronadas las quimeras. Pero en Nicaragua saltaba en pedazos el primer modelo real de cambio que el país había vivido nunca [...]»¹². It could be argued that 25 February 1990, the day of the Sandinista electoral defeat, marks the moment of rupture, when the pact that enables the Spanish American intellectual to speak unselfconsciously on behalf of the nation crumbles. This change in the relationship between the intellectual and the nation is made explicit by Gioconda Belli, the poet who was in charge of the Sandinista government's relations with the foreign media, in her description of the morning after the election:

The shattering of the organic idea of nation that was implicit in the words of generations of Spanish American intellectuals when they spoke of «mi patria» and «mi pueblo», the assumptions that served as the underpinning for the alliance of the literary avant-garde and Spanish American nationalism, is a reality throughout contemporary Latin America¹⁴. In Nicaragua, where subsequent governments, particularly the government of President Arnaldo Alemán (1996-2002), have worked to eradicate the memory of Sandinismo, the disappearance of the nation and its history is tangible and deliberate. As Florence Babb recounts:

By replacing history with consumption as the source of national identity, the city as redesigned by Alemán (who was mayor of Managua prior to becoming president) dethrones the intellectual from a position of authority. A writer such as Ramírez finds that his expertise in Nicaraguan history and culture is now marginal to national debate. Furthermore, since one of the consequences of globalization has been the collapse of the Spanish American publishing industry and its removal to Spain -to the point where, by 2002, 70 per cent of the books produced in Spain were exported to Latin America (LBL, p. 50)- Ramírez depends on the Mexican branch plant of the Madrid-based Alfaguara group to «export» his novels to Nicaragua. Most larger Spanish publishers will export books only to countries where they predict a market for at least 3000 copies to exist. In this way, particularly in smaller and poorer countries, «national literature», like national history, exists under constant threat of being erased from the social landscape.

Ramírez's novels have catalogued Nicaraguan history: the nineteenth century in Tiempo de fulgor (1970) and Mil y una muertes (2004); the entire period from the 1930s to the 1960s in ¿Te dio miedo la sangre? (1977); the 1930s in Castigo divino (1988); the 1940s in Un baile de máscaras (1995); the 1950s and the early twentieth century in Margarita, está linda la mar (1998). The post-1990 novels, such as Un baile de máscaras and Margarita, está linda la mar, betray the besieged, provisional nature of the nationhood that the novels attempt to enshrine. As Neil Larsen argues, in a refutation of the postcolonial theories of Homi Bhabha, which Larsen sees as anti-historical and part of the globalization problem rather than part of the solution: «"Nation" is not ultimately reducible to "narration". But narration, arguably, simulates nation in our globalized, interchangeable "locations", now off just about everyone's "cognitive map", and about which stories cannot really be told»¹⁶. The fragmented sense of location evoked by Larsen corresponds to García Canclini's account of the «lugar» of Latin American culture as pulverized and externalized by mass emigration and globalized industry, which has centralized Latin American publishing in Madrid and Barcelona and Latin American television and music production in Miami. He writes of Latin America: «Su imagen le llega de espejos diseminados en el archipiélago de las migraciones» (LBL, p. 12). One of the paradoxes of globalization is that this is true even when the author lives in Managua.

Ramírez had stated that he would not write a novel about the Sandinista Revolution. Yet the Alemán government's suppression of the memory of the Revolution, compounded by the erosion of the fusion between the literary avant-garde and popular nationalism that at one stage rendered literary and political activity almost indistinguishable from one another, appears to have forced a reconsideration of this decision. Strictly speaking, Ramírez has kept his promise, since the temporal span of Sombras nada más does not include the years of Sandinista government. The novel's action takes place between 21 and 23 June 1979, less than a month before the Sandinista overthrow of Anastasio Somoza Debayle, the last Somoza dictator, on 19 July 1979. Ramírez has described the events that inspired the novel:

At first glance, Hüeck, the dictator's crony, might appear to be an unexpected figure for Ramírez, the former revolutionary leader, to place at the core of his novel. Yet like Ramírez, who resigned from the Sandinista Front in 1995 after nineteen years of revolutionary activity and a dramatic rupture with his long-time collaborator, former president Daniel Ortega, Hüeck, who was expelled from Anastasio Somoza's inner circle after an almost equally enduring tenure, was a leader in a government to whose initial ideals he remained loyal but which had lost the support of the majority of the Nicaraguan population. In the novel, Alirio Martinica, the character based on Hüeck, is depicted as having been for a while the number two man in Somoza's regime. Ernesto Cardenal maintains that Hüeck remained in his hacienda «en espera de la caída de Somoza y en espera que los yankis lo escogieran a él»¹⁸ as Somoza's successor. The novel's title comes from a song of the same name by Javier Solis. The song's refrain is «Sombras nada más entre tu vida y mi vida | Sombras nada más entre tu amor y mi amor»¹⁹. One interpretation of Ramírez's invocation of this lyric is that only happenstance separates Ramírez's fate from that of Hüeck. Such a suggestion would have been heresy in the environment of dialectical struggle that prevailed in Central America prior to 1990; in the less ideologically divided post-1990 atmosphere, it becomes plausible. In Sombras nada más the deputy leader of Nicaragua's 1979-90 government examines the life of a somewhat fictionalized deputy leader of the country's pre-1979 government and discovers in it shadows of his own fate. In another parallel, Ramírez has stressed the efforts to modernize Nicaraguan society of the Hüeck/Martinica generation, describing their ambitions as

Each man, in this vision, participated in a flawed project aimed at modernizing Nicaraguan society.

Early in the novel, Martinica overhears the young guerrilla Manco-Cápac announcing his capture over the radio with the words «Caifás en mi poder, todo bajo control, cambio» (Sombras, p. 34)²¹. Martinica's identification with Caiaphas, head of the supreme tribunal of the Jews, who is powerless to sentence or save Jesus of Nazareth and can only pass him on to Pontius Pilate for judgement, stresses both his ultimate impotence and his culpability in the dictatorship's crimes. The contradictory role of Caifás raises the question of Ramírez's own association with Sandinista abuses such as the execution of Martinica. The issue is framed in historical and ideological terms that dramatize the tension between the humanist and radical strains in Sandinista ideology that is played out through the actions of the guerrillas by whom Martinica is captured. As the Sandinistas close in on his mansion, the reader learns:

The irony of this statement is evident in the fact that the novel closes with Martinica's execution at the paredón. Martinica himself, questioning Manco-Cápac about his possible fate, associates the image of the paredón with revolutionary radicalism: «Sí, dijo él, paredón, como en Cuba» (SNM, p. 111). The novel also presents the justification for allowing the crowd, or la turba, to decide a prisoner's fate as a gesture in the direction of conferring power on the masses. This empowerment is not couched in the language of liberal democracy that corresponds to a humanist agenda, but in more radical terms of citizenship conceived as an interplay between rights and responsibilities. Martinica asks his fellow prisoner El Niño Lobo, the former president of the Asociación de Estudiantes Somocistas, how his fate will be decided: «¿Una votación en urnas? Nada de urnas, el voto va a ser un aplauso» (SNM, p. 373). El Niño Lobo counsels Martinica to forget the guerrillas who have been interrogating him: «no fueron más que personajes secundarios en toda esta mojiganga, la verdadera función empieza ahora, en cuanto nos suban al tablado de los actos escolares» (SNM, p. 373).

The image of leaders of the regime standing before the people to be judged by them resonates through the novel, evoking questions not only of revolutionary justice but also of the people as supreme yet unreliable arbiters of the nation's political destiny. As Manco-Cápac states: «era de necesidad que el pueblo mismo asumiera desde ahora misma sus responsabilidades [...] sangre era sangre, y al ser derramada no podía caer solamente sobre la cabeza de los jefes de la revolución» (SNM, pp. 386-87). If the people wish to complete their revolution they must get their hands bloody, earning their new citizenship rather than expecting the comandantes to take all responsibility. The contradictions inherent in this outlook are incarnated in Manco-Cápac's name. He is both manco, as symbolized by his ruined hand, and capac, which recalls capaz, a key word in the Sandinista lexicon of capacitación: training people to exceed their former capabilities, a crucial step in engendering the revolutionary Hombre Nuevo. Manco-Cápac's narrowness of vision and his politico-military adroitness contribute equally to his character. In a similar vein, his guerrilla training in Cuba and his Catholic education have become so entangled that both bear equal responsibility for his strengths and his limitations. He states: «No veo en qué puede oponerse la religión cristiana a la causa proletaria» (SNM, p. 114). Taking his name from an Inca king, Manco-Cápac is rooted in the soil of the Americas; he represents a tradition that can boast of being indigenous, unlike Martinica, who is a lackey of a dictatorship so subservient to the United States that the dictator prefers to conduct business in English (as a Jew, Martinica's prototype, Cornelio Hüeck, was also distant from the Nahuatl-Chorotega ethnic origins of the vast majority of Nicaraguans)²². As Somoza says to Martinica: «Being fluent in english [sic] like hell es lo único que le falta para ser mi secretario perfecto» (SNM, p. 292). Yet the novel depicts Manco-Cápac's fate and that of Martinica as being intimately intertwined within the fabric of the nation, not only by Martinica's trial, but by the fact that as a young man Martinica seduced Manco-Cápac's much older sister, Erlinda Campuzano, an impoverished «empleada doméstica» (SNM, p. 62). The people, as embodied in Manco-Cápac, are aggrieved, temporarily empowered by the revolution and limited in their understanding of their own circumstances. Yet, in spite of the disdain for liberal democracy evinced, for different reasons, by both guerrillas and the dictator, the Sandinista Revolution culminated in the institutionalization of liberal democratic forms in Nicaragua, a paradox signalled by Ramírez in his memoirs:

The form to be taken by relations between government leaders, whether revolutionary or reactionary, and the population is the tension that propels the story and generates the novel's structures, particularly its narrative structure. Like Margarita, está linda la mar, Sombras nada más employs a contrapuntal narrative structure where alternating chapters present different threads of the narration. Both novels are shaped by the interaction between Modernist and postmodern modes of narration, which is emblematic of Ramírez's need to participate in the fluid, playful, popular culture-drenched post-1990 world while at the same time enshrining national history through resonant images, as was done by the novelists of the Boom²³. While writers such as Vargas Llosa and Fuentes have abandoned the extremely challenging narrative techniques whose decipherment required the engagement of an «active reader», Ramírez's novels continue to exert these sorts of demand upon the reader. As in late Boom novels such as Vargas Llosa's Conversación en La Catedral (1969) or José Donoso's El obsceno pájaro de la noche (1970), Margarita, está linda la mar and Sombras nada más employ labyrinthine temporal structures, passages where important speakers are not identified, sudden shifts of time or setting, the intercalation of past and present dialogue, characters with multiple names whose common identity becomes clear only after hundreds of pages, and the running-together of dialogue and narration in the absence of dashes. More revealing, however, is the point at which these two novels' techniques diverge. In Margarita, está linda la mar both sides of the contrapuntal narrative equation display burly complexity; but in Sombras nada más the avant-garde techniques of the odd-numbered chapters alternate with even-numbered chapters consisting of testimony presented as having been culled by Ramírez concerning events surrounding the fate of Alirio Martinica. The literary suavity of the narrative voice alternates with many other voices; half of the novel appears not to have been written by the author. Some of the odd-numbered chapters are raw and colloquial, while others, consisting of transcripts of interviews and interrogations, are formal and stilted. The novel concludes with an eleven-page section entitled «Sobre los documentos que auxilian a este libro» (SNM, pp. 409-19), where Ramírez describes how he located these testimonies. The anecdotes are presented in an affable manner and include, for example, a three-page description of Ramírez's promotional tour for Margarita, está linda la mar through the Spanish-language media in Miami, replete with accounts of bilingual conversations and lunch dates with prominent personalities such as Álvaro Vargas Llosa. Ramírez identifies personal friends and members of his own family as the sources for other documents, explaining how they helped him to locate transcripts or interview subjects capable of elucidating particular periods of Alirio Martinica's life. The even-numbered chapters have an unedited feel, with the interviewees giving Ramírez their opinions of his earlier novels or, in one case, berating him for not ending his feud with Daniel Ortega: «arréglese con Daniel, ¿cuándo van a arreglarse?» (SNM, p. 379). In a lengthy e-mail Alirio Martinica's widow, Lorena López, now living in a luxury apartment in Miami, complains about the unflattering portrait of her that appeared in ¿Te dio miedo la sangre?, where Ramírez refers to López as «la huérfana», a reference to her having been adopted into a prominent Somocista family. In apparent mockery of her wishes, the next chapter opens, «La huérfana no lloraba su partida [...]» (SNM, p. 225).

The clash here is not merely of tones, but of literary modes: the inheritance of an avant-garde tradition (if that paradox may be allowed) dominates the odd-numbered chapters and the Testimonio tradition that became the most influential literary form in Central America during the 1980s occupies the even-numbered chapters. There is only one problem with this neat formulation, and that is that Ramírez's testimonies are forgeries. The documents and testimonies are all invented. The eleven-page section at the end of the novel, with its seductive tone and apparent autobiographical intimacies, is designed to mislead the reader into believing that fiction is fact. Ramírez makes this explicit in an interview:

The most striking question raised by this admission is why going to such lengths to induce the reader to believe that invented documents and monologues are in fact «literatura documental» should be the «recurso técnico más adecuado» in Sombras nada más. The novel's roots in the rupture of the fusion of Spanish American high literary art and nationalistic impulses, in the Assuring of the left-wing literary intellectual's ability to speak for the people, help to illuminate this decision. By asserting the literary author's ability to fabricate oral testimonies, Ramírez is neutralizing, by subsuming into fiction, the Testimonio genre whose prominence during the 1980s coincided with both the decline in technical ambition of the literary novel and the shredding of the alliance between the literary intellectual and national-popular political projects. At this point it is worth recalling John Beverley's definition of Testimonio as

The popularity of Testimonio during the 1970s and 1980s was a response to the urgency of Latin American politics, particularly the armed conflicts in Central America and the dictatorships in the Southern Cone, which made some writers impatient with the ambiguities of magic realism. Elzbieta Sklodowska proposes that «muchos testimonialistas perciben su proyecto en términos de un contra-discurso con respecto a la escritura mágicorrealista y metaficticia del boom»²⁶. In response to the popular success of the best-known Testimonios, such as Hasta verte, Jesús mío (1973) by Elena Poniatowska, Los días de la selva (1980) by Mario Payeras, La montaña es algo más que una inmensa estepa verde (1982) by Omar Cabezas, and Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (1983), edited by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, major Boom authors attempted to integrate subaltern voices or documentary material into their fiction, in works such as García Márquez's Crónica de una muerte anunciada (1981) and Vargas Llosa's Historia de Mayta (1984). In Central America, where Testimonio's influence was strongest, Ramírez's friend, the Salvadoran novelist Manlío Argueta, absorbed Testimonio-style voices into the novel in Un día en la vida (1982). During the 1980s Ramírez contributed to both branches of the perceived tension between literary fiction and Testimonio. His playful, post-modern novel Castigo divino was published in 1988. Later that year Ramírez was awarded the Orden Carlos Fonseca by the Directorate of the Frente Sandinista for his role in producing the Testimonio La marca del zorro: hazañas del comandante Francisco Rivera Quintero contadas a Sergio Ramírez (1989). In his prologue to this book, based on seventeen hours of interviews with a prominent Sandinista comandante of peasant extraction, Ramírez wrote: «La veracidad de los hechos permanece intocada a lo largo de la narración, porque se trata de un testimonio vivo, sin mácula de adornos o acomodos»²⁷. In his prologue to an earlier Testimonio under his editorial direction, that of Abelardo Cuadra, one of Augusto César Sandino's soldiers, Ramírez described in this way his influence on the final form of the text:

After 1990 the cognitive dissonance required to promote simultaneously the artifice of literary fiction and writing based on «la veracidad de los hechos» lapses, calling into question the relationship between the authorities and the masses and drawing into confrontation with one another the modes of literary expression associated with each. Writing at the beginning of the new millennium, after a decade's reflection on the electoral defeat of Sandinismo, Ramírez can no longer co-opt Testimonio into a dominant avant-garde novelistic tradition. As García Canclini points out, in the new context both «las vanguardias y las alternativas populares» have exhausted their authority. The crisis faced by writers is particularly evident because of the loss of their intellectual and political centrality. Jean Franco, looking back on «the military regimes in the southern Cone, the civil wars and repression in Central America, the economic crisis of the 1980s in Venezuela, the election of Fujimori in Peru», argues that «the changes destabilized the literary intelligentsia, altering cultural institutions and the book industry and forcing a reassessment of the intellectual's relationship to the new order»²⁹. From the perspective of life under President Alemán's society of historical amnesia and mass consumption, Testimonio's clamour of subaltern voices, albeit still corralled within narrative structures manicured by their intellectual editors, appears, in retrospect, as one of the early-warning signs of the disintegration of the Latin American literary intellectual's authority. Seen through this lens, the differences between Testimonio and la turba may seem minimal. La turba, expressing itself in raw colloquial language, disdains democracy, ultimately rejects the Sandinistas, who fight to improve the lives of the poor, and ends up succumbing to the tawdry populism of the neo-liberal (and ultimately criminal)³⁰ Alemán, who wrenches the gulf between rich and poor wider than ever before. This optic makes Testimonio the accomplice of reactionary forces as, in the post-1990 environment, subaltern populism slides indistinguishably into the reactionary populist gospel of mass consumption. In a book inspired by the search for new paradigms in the aftermath of the defeat of Sandinismo, John Beverley makes this case in a more positive light, arguing that

This statement exemplifies the kind of academic cultural-studies argument that Ramírez pits himself against in Sombras nada más. By passing off fiction as Testimonio and incorporating his inventions into a work of high art, Ramírez is staging an intellectual counter-attack designed to subvert the forces that have subverted his cultural authority. It is worth noting that Beverley never explains how his «subaltern social subjects» gain their «increased access to the means of cultural production» under the market economy. His casual conflation of «populist nationalism in Latin America» with «the Soviet model of state socialism» is exaggerated and unsupported. Beverley's assertion that «bourgeois humanism» is the hegemonic ideology of «neo-colonial cultural castes» is at odds with the anti-humanist positivism animating contemporary Latin American neo-liberalism. In spite of these inconsistencies, Beverley's praise of commodification is useful because it exemplifies the continuity between the putatively subaltern concerns of Testimonio and the pretensions of neo-liberal ideology to promote individual autonomy.

The patterning of Ramírez's counterpointing of the literary and the pseudo-testimonial chapters is mimetic of the novel's anxieties about the erosion of the male leader's authority over the people. The first informant in the pseudo-testimonial chapters is a male professional, the medical doctor Edgard Morin. As the novel progresses, the informants become increasingly marginal to the power structures of traditional patriarchal Spanish American society. Martinica's widow, the socially privileged Lorena López, is the first female informant; the second woman speaker, Compañera Cristina, is a rural schoolteacher who became a Sandinista guerrilla; the third, María del Socorro Bellorín, is a peasant woman from one of Nicaragua's most underdeveloped regions. The only male informant in the second half of the novel is a sixteen-year-old office boy who portrays himself as having been subjugated by the patriarchy in the most brutally literal fashion by alleging that he was sodomized by Alirio Martinica in the presidential palace. The contrast between literary and testimonial aspects progressively destabilizes patriarchal rhetoric as the novel advances. False accusations of sexual impropriety serve as one means of realizing this destabilization; as, for example, when the accusation of sodomy against Martinica turns out to have been fabricated by President Somoza's mistress to avenge Martinica's spurning of her sexual advances (SNM, p. 367).

Critics such as Beverley need to find a solution to the dilemma posed by the defeat of the Sandinistas -«we needed a new paradigm», he writes (p. 5)- even if this means making an alliance with the market forces they used to oppose by trying to locate a subversive or liberating potential in mass consumerism. On the evidence of Sombras nada más, Ramírez can attempt only to reinvent the Nicaraguan nation that Sandinismo never quite succeeded in consolidating, in full awareness of the artificial nature of his invention, while mordantly charting the erosion of his own capacity to bring his ideals to fruition. The shifts in Ramírez's writing about the Sandinista Revolution between the 1980s and the new millennium register his own increasingly troubled scepticism. In El alba de oro: la historia viva de Nicaragua, a book published in 1983 and, significantly, bearing the dedication «A Daniel», Ramírez relates the conditions of daily life in revolutionary Nicaragua. In retrospect, this book may be seen as a kind of Testimonio-from-above, recounting Nicaraguan reality as experienced by a leader of the Revolution. Many of the short articles conclude with the Sandinista sign-off slogan «¡Patria Libre o Morir!». In one article Ramírez, having posed the question of whether leading a revolution is detracting from the time he would customarily devote to writing novels, responds with an equivocal negation:

The phrase «mi pueblo intransigente y humilde, en armas y en sueños» evokes nearly every imaginable cliché of the revolutionary leader dispatching heroic yet humble peasant guerrillas dreaming of a better world into battle against the surrogate armies of the Goliath of the United States. Yet, turning to Confesión de amor, the essays Ramírez wrote in response to the electoral defeat of 1990, the reader discovers that the phrase «mi pueblo» no longer forms part of Ramírez's vocabulary. In Confesión de amor Ramírez recounts an anecdote about a public event in October 1984 in which a peasant who had been fighting for the US-funded contras was scheduled to climb on stage and hand Ramírez his rifle to signal his reintegration into revolutionary Nicaragua:

The image of the leader on stage, conscious of his inability to communicate with the peasant masses, is reinforced by the change in the connotation of the word humilde. In the 1983 selection this word comes across as a patronizing romanticization of the poor, while in this 1992 extract humilde expresses suffering, the pain of underdevelopment, and, ultimately, the peasant's inability to imagine the left-wing intellectual's dreams of social transformation. More ominously, this use of humilde adumbrates a social distance from the poor which would become a hallmark of Nicaragua under Arnaldo Alemán, whose policies included moving the poor to peripheral areas where they lived out of sight of well-off Nicaraguans³³. Ileana Rodríguez, a former participant in the Frente Sandinista, situates Ramírez's insights in the passage above as the concluding stage of the inexorable erosion of the male Spanish American revolutionary tradition:

Yet it is precisely this understanding that remains elusive. Confesión de amor's image of the leader standing on stage, unable to communicate his vision to the peasant masses before him, is also the image that closes Sombras nada más. In the novel, however, it is Martinica and not Ramírez who is standing on stage, and the stakes of his judgement are higher. Convinced that the people will sympathize with him because he was ejected from the dictator's inner circle, and because his father, also named Alirio Martinica, was executed by Somoza for his role in the 1954 Báez Bone uprising -an attempt to assassinate Anastasio Somoza García, the first Somoza dictator, that became the subject of Ernesto Cardenal's poem «Hora cero» (1960)- he is duped by El Niño Lobo, who precedes him on stage. Having coaxed Martinica to tell him a story of how he was one of a group of Somocista officials who were standing in the presidential swimming pool when General Somoza, who weighed three hundred pounds, defecated in the pool, El Niño Lobo relates this story to la turba³⁵. He uses the anecdote to deflect the crowd's anger towards Martinica. Earlier in the novel, el Niño Lobo speaks in a cultivated Spanish, heightened with citations from the modernista poet Rubén Darío (SNM, p. 65); here he switches to a populist Central American register:

In his use of colloquial language and his insistence that he is telling what really happened, El Niño Lobo reproduces the populist techniques of Testimonio. As in the discourse of contemporary Latin American neo-liberalism, this populism benefits an agile reactionary. In a foreshadowing of later events, the first Assuring of organic society spares a cynical opportunist rather than liberating the poor who are oppressed by the traditional power structures. Martinica, trapped in the older patriarchal tradition of the leader as authority figure, is unable to match the tone or outlook of El Niño Lobo's assumed voice. Martinica tries in vain to win over the crowd with jocular remarks about the supposedly ample sexual endowment of the town's men, only to be repudiated by shouts that he is showing disrespect for the Virgin Mary. By catering to patriarchal values, he has overlooked the important constituency of women, who used the opening of the Sandinista Revolution to demand a greater voice in society. In a clear prefiguring of events subsequent to 1990, the nascent splintering of organic society into factions, each demanding its own voice, thwarts Martinica's ability to rule the crowd. Accustomed to giving orders, Martinica can try to win their applause only by ordering them to applaud him: «¡Vengan esos aplausos! ¡Arriba esas palmas!» (SNM, p. 397). El Niño Lobo, who is astute enough to adapt to the peasants' language, is spared in spite of his unrepentant Somocista past; the dissident Martinica is not.

The novel concludes with a little boy gazing up at the sky from near the spot where Martinica, seated in front of an adobe wall, awaits execution. As the boy stares at the sky, the narrative perspective inverts: the final sentence is narrated from the point of view of the heavens:

The torbellino, possibly a literary allusion to «el viento, tibio, incipiente, lleno de voces del pasado, de murmullos de geranios antiguos, de suspiros de desengaños anteriores a las nostalgias más tenaces»³⁶, that closes Cien años de soledad (1967), evokes the literature of the Boom, whose techniques Ramírez reinscribes without wielding their original transformative assumptions. The wind sweeps away the patriarchal tradition that gave birth to both Somocismo and Sandinismo. Seen from this perspective, Sandinismo is not an ideology that succeeded in bringing to fruition its own ideals but rather, as Ramírez suggests in his memoirs, a force that ushered democratic procedures and assumptions into Nicaraguan society in spite of itself; with the convergence of postmodernity and democracy came social fragmentation and the populist peril. The final words make it clear that Sandinismo is the origin of these changes, by describing the red-and-black Frente Sandinista flags as «las chispas rojas y negras de una fogata». In Nicaraguan discourse, the word «fogata» is an established metonymic reference to Augusto César Sandino, the guerrilla who fought the US Marines from 1927 to 1933, and who served as the inspiration for the modern Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, founded in 1961. As the Sandinista comandante Omar Cabezas wrote in his own best-selling Testimonio: «Entonces la fogata era síntonita de subversión, era símbolo de agitación política, de ideas revolucionarias llevadas por los estudiantes a los barrios. La Guardia odiaba las fogatas porque la fogata concentraba a la gente»³⁷.

Sandino's campfire in the hills, the point of origin of the Sandinista Revolution, becomes the force that swirls all Nicaraguans towards a future they can neither control nor understand. The final sentence promotes this second meaning of the novel's title. Not only is Martinica a shadow of the dictatorship and a man who feels most comfortable in his leader's shadow, but, as the refrain of the Javier Solis song insists, there are «Sombras nada más entre tu vida y mi vida». The image of the torbellino suggests a vision of history as arbitrary, even though other images contradict this notion. In one of Ramírez's provocative echoes of the language of the novel's testimonial passages a section describing how Martinica's father was shot dead by Somoza while he was handcuffed («esposado») in a prison cell where he was being tortured is juxtaposed with a chapter that opens with a description of Martinica himself handcuffed by the Sandinistas in the mirror-lined bedroom of his mansion: «Esposado a uno de los barrotes del espaldar de la cama miraba parpadear su figura multiplicada a la luz del quinqué» (SNM, 109). The multiplication of handcuffed men, the father executed by Somoza and the son executed by the Sandinistas, suggests that although history continues to proceed in a dialectical progression and has not ended, as Francis Fukuyama would maintain -«hablar del fin de la historia», Ramírez writes, «no es sino una excentricidad del pensamiento saciado por el exceso de bienestar» (CdA, p. 158)- individual fates remain arbitrary. Ramírez could have followed in the footsteps of his father, a Somocista mayor, and ended up on the wrong side of the Revolution; Martinica could have carried his expulsion from Somoza's inner circle to its logical conclusion and joined the Sandinistas. Fates are juggled by cyclical patterns, reflecting Ramírez's belief in «La dialéctica, no como una categoría filosófica perecedora, sino como un simple mecanismo capaz de animar la realidad» (CdA, p. 156)³⁸.

García Canclini, Beverley, and Franco, on the evidence of their analyses of post-1990 cultural dynamics, would treat with extreme scepticism any notion that this cyclical history might bestow on the intellectual left new opportunities to strengthen the Nicaraguan nation. In 1997 Salman Rushdie wrote:

In Sombras nada más the disintegration of the revolutionary leader's authority is the first stage in the disappearance of the fledgling nation. In order simultaneously to raise these spectres and hold them in check, the novel must consume the anxieties it evokes. In his interview with Campanella, Ramírez echoed the Boom novelists' quest for the elusive «novela total» by stating: «Siempre me ha fascinado la novela ecuménica, de pretensión total, que quiere ser una copia del universo a la misma escala»⁴⁰. In Sombras nada más the narrative techniques of the Boom's «novela total» swallow and neutralize the Testimonio voices that threaten to fracture the nation's cohesion and impede the realization of the national-popular project. Yet, as Jorge Luis Borges's Pierre Menard knew (and as Ramírez is aware), the same text, written in a different historical context, acquires new meanings. The major novels of the 1960s deployed their technical bravado to mythologize national identities. Ramírez's invented testimonies forge the nation in the sense of creating a simulacrum of national history; his use of avant-garde techniques generates a pastiche of a Boom novel which, even as it plays up the postmodern ironies of its condition through strategies such as measured echoes between the Testimonio and non-Testimonio chapters, insists on its (possibly futile) drive to rehabilitate a discourse of national autonomy and historical distinctness. In Sombras nada más the eternally unfulfilled nationhood of a tiny country that made a brief, dramatic appearance on the world stage offers a talented novelist the material to construct a work of art which, however elegant the copy of the universe it achieves, cannot resonate far beyond the specialized system of literature.