Reading Hemingway in Nicaragua

Before I left for Nicaragua I spent a fair amount of time thinking about what author I was going to read during my two years in the Peace Corps. In Honduras from 2005 to 2007 I read everything Phillip Roth had written except Portnoy’s Complaint and Goodbye, Columbus. I thought about reading William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Saul Bellows, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and several others, but I never made up my mind and left without either buying or downloading many books.

A week or so ago, about halfway through my three months of training, I was in Managua at the Peace Corps office. There is a volunteer’s lounge with a large library of books to pass around. I found Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. Within a few pages I was hooked and decided I’d be reading Hemingway in Nicaragua. A Moveable Feast  is his memoir of being young and broke in Paris in the Twenties. However, he wrote it in the late Fifties, thirty years after the events took place and just a couple of years before he killed himself. Hemingway never got to be really old. He ended his life when he was sixty-two, but he is remembering his life of poverty when he was much older, rich and famous. He wrote this about his younger, poorer self:

It was all part of the fight against poverty that you never win except by not spending. Especially if you buy pictures instead of clothes. But then we did not think of ourselves as poor. We thought we were superior people and other people that we looked down on and rightly mistrusted were rich. We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other.

I read these words on a five-hour bus ride from Managua to Nueva Guinea where I was going as part of my training to observe and work with volunteers who had already been in the country for a year or more. I was traveling with Deb and five other aspirantes, which is what Peace Corps calls volunteers in training. When we left Managua every seat on the bus was taken and three young men were standing in the aisles. Although the bus was billed as an “express” it took on more passengers in every town of any size. When it seemed impossible for any more people to get on, five more would be packed in. I was experiencing this typical Central American bus trip with my head full of thoughts of poverty and wealth, age and youth. I think it is a safe bet that I was the wealthiest person on the bus. Although some of the other volunteers come from families as solidly middle class as I am, they are young and in debt from having barrowed to pay for college. I may also, very well, have been the oldest person on the bus. So, I’m a rich old guy, relatively speaking, living like I’m poor, reading about a rich old guy writing about himself when he was young and poor. It is not exactly symmetrical, but it resonates. I certainly have some of the young Hemingway’s attitudes: it is better to buy pictures than clothes, the rich aren’t to be trusted, and there is a certain superiority to living cheaply and well.

This next part is me, having finished A Moveable Feast in three evenings, trying to write like Hemingway.

I wake up early in Hotel Nueva Guinea. It is five thirty in the morning and I’m sitting outside on the balcony. The sun is just rising. The air is full of moister and dust and seems luminescent. Deb is still sleeping. The town won’t be sweltering for another two hours. Below me in the streets people are passing by on bikes and motorcycles. The taxis are running. Some people are walking by purposefully, on their way to work or to catch a bus. Many dogs wander the streets. All of them are skinny and beat up. There are cows, horses too, but I haven’t seen any pigs or oxen so far today. The chickens and roosters are so common I don’t pay them much attention. On the opposite corner a young man in a red tee shirt is sitting on the curb. He is very engaged with his cell phone. I think he is waiting for a friend or a ride to work.

Nueva Guinea is pretty torn up. It seems that a major project is underway to pave the streets. Many intersections are blocked with piles of dirt. We have been driving around in a big, white, Peace Corps Toyota and it is hard to navigate around all the construction. On a physical level Nueva Guinea is rundown even by Nicaraguan standards. The Moon Guide says there is really no reason to visit here unless you want to see what the end of the road looks like, or words to that effect. Nonetheless, it is busy with people doing what people do everywhere.

The young man in the red tee shirt wanders off around the corner for a minute or two then returns. I think perhaps he went to pee. Maybe he works in the store on that corner and he is waiting for his boss to arrive and open up for the day.

An old man with a cane passes by. One side of his body is stiff in the manner of someone who has had a stroke. Earlier, I saw him out the bathroom window, going in the opposite direction leading a boney white horse. Where did he leave the horse?

Briefly, a guy wearing a lime green tee shirt and riding a red bike stops and talks with the young man waiting on the corner. He rides off, but returns right away on foot. Now two of them are waiting together. Where did he leave the bike? They are good looking boys. One is thin and the other one is sturdy. Although it is not yet sweltering they pull their tee shirts up and expose their bellies. Before long a big, open sided soda delivery truck stops on the corner in front of the store. Nothing gets said, but immediately the two young men start carrying cases of bright orange, vivid red, and dark brown sodas into the store. The Fanta orange in particular catches the light and glows. They work for twenty minutes. The truck leaves. The bike reappears. The young men ride off together, one on the seat and one standing. That may have been a day’s work. They might have earned a dollar apiece.

Now I’m reading Hemingway’s Boat, a biography by Paul Henderson that takes as its focal point the fishing boat the Hemingway owned and loved for thirty years. It is a great read.