14 The New York ReviewTongolele no sabía bailar
[Tongolele Had No Rhythm]
by Sergio Ramírez.
Madrid: Alfaguara,
344 pp., $19.95 (paper)Sergio Ramírez, the illustrious his-
torian, novelist, and former vice-
president of Nicaragua, could well
have been among his unfortunate
friends and many other members of
the opposition arrested by the regime
of President Daniel Ortega and his
weird wife and vice- president, Rosa-
rio Murillo, beginning in June. But in
view of the fate of their friends and
colleagues, Ramírez and his wife, Tu-
lita, decided to leave Nicaragua. It was
a wise move: in September Ramírez
learned that he stands accused of
money laundering and something
called “provocation, proposition, and
conspiracy.”
Ramírez is seventy- nine, and it is a
cruel fate for someone who loves and
has served his country as consistently as
he has to know that he may never see it
again, or his imprisoned friends, or his
beloved writing desk and its surround-
ing walls of books. On the other hand,
all experience is fodder to a writer, and
Ramírez’s rich array of novels and his-
torical essays—sixty years of ceaseless
production—is a tribute to the tragic
and absurd history of his beautiful
homeland. Nicaraguans survive their
lot with a trickster’s sense of humor,
and Ramírez’s latest novel, To ngol e l e
no sabía bailar (“Tongolele Had No
Rhythm” might be the best translation
of a title as clumsy as its protagonist),
is a grim, wildly funny, surrealistic
account of the grievous events of the
spring of 2018, when student protests
broke out in Managua and other cities
around the country, and the repression
served up by Ortega and Murillo left
three hundred dead.Ramírez tells the story through the
character of Detective Dolores Mo-
rales, who was severely wounded in
the fight to overthrow the dictator An-
astasio Somoza back in the 1970s and
wears a leg prosthesis as a result. The
book’s other characters, however—all
portrayed with swift dialogue and the
author’s unerring ear for the sweet and
extravagant Spanish of Nicaragua, with
its sixteenth- century thees and thous
and wild similes, and its joyful use of
vulgarity whenever the occasion de-
mands—are the most fascinating. They
include Tongolele, a top intelligence
officer working in the darkest corners
of the government; a mild- mannered
and heroic country priest; a startling
woman who runs all the itinerant sales-
men and -women in the country, with a
sideline gathering intelligence for Ton-
golele; and a mystical spiritual adviser
to someone referred to only as la com-
pañera. That someone would be Vice-
President Murillo, and though she is
never seen or even named in the novel,
Ramírez avails himself of the oppor-
tunity to trample merrily all over her
shadow.
The novel’s account of the events of
May 2018 is accurate, but it is when
Ramírez’s narrative invention runs
wildest that his portrayal of Nicara-
gua under the thumb of the improba-
ble Ortega- Murillo duumvirate is most
truthful. Because he was vice- president
or the equivalent for the first ten years
of the Sandinista regime, Ramírez has
intimate knowledge of Ortega and his
associates in the underworld of power,
as well as of everyday Nica life. Non-
Nicaraguans, though, might benefit
from a decoder.
Ortega, seventy- six, loves to use
the insult vendepatria—fatherland-
seller—but he once agreed to sell the
rights to a 278- kilometer- long strip of
Nicaragua running from the Atlanticto the Pacific to a shadowy Chinese
businessman who intended to build a
canal parallel to and competitive with
the one in Panama. Murillo, seventy,
keeps meticulous track of every offense
or snub she has ever suffered and com-
munes with spirits who let her know
who her hidden enemies are. Police
and army battalions being insufficient
to hold all the couple’s adversaries at
bay, paramilitary groups are now de-
ployed against peaceful demonstra-
tors. Murillo had colorful curlicue
metal silhouettes of trees installed all
over Managua to channel positive en-
ergy from the skies. Strong evidence
would indicate that Ortega is a pe-
dophile and a rapist. Together, the
doddering couple have created what
Monsignor Silvio Báez, the auxiliary
bishop of Managua (currently in exile)
has called “a situation of... irrational-
ity, violence and evil that surpasses the
imagination.”
Who are these people? How did they
get where they are? And why, after
forty- two years of Sandinismo, are they
still around?You could say that Ortega’s real life
began in prison. He was the son of
an itinerant father, a barrio kid who
together with his buddies joined the
Sandinista National Liberation Front
(FSLN)—a tiny organization back
then—as a fund- raising unit: the group
held up stores and banks. He was first
briefly jailed and tortured at the age of
fifteen, then jailed in Guatemala and
subjected to even greater abuse a year
later, jailed again in Nicaragua and
then freed under a general amnesty.
In 1967, at the age of twenty- two, he
was given a fourteen- year sentence for
bank robbery that ended seven years
early, when his guerrilla comrades
rounded up a few hostages at a dinnerparty and exchanged them for him and
thirteen other prisoners. The handful
of poems Ortega published long ago
mostly center on his prison life, and
they are stark. “If you feed me you can
fuck me/Three cigarettes gets you a
blow job,” one begins. In another, he
depicts the episodes of torture that
prison authorities practiced on him
almost recreationally: “Kick him / like
that, like that, in the balls, the face/the
ribs. / Get the cattleprod, the bullwhip /
talk / son of a whore /talk.”
In a perceptive and thorough biog-
raphy, El Preso 198 (Prisoner 198),
the journalist Fabián Medina Sánchez
makes the case that Ortega has never
really moved out of a prison cell.* He
quotes a Playboy interview from 1987,
in which Ortega describes how un-
comfortable he was when he was re-
leased in 1974 and sent to Cuba, free
to go wherever he pleased, and how,
during a brief time back in Nicaragua
in 1976, he discovered that he was ac-
tually much more relaxed in clandes-
tinity, locked up in one room in a safe
house, working in his underwear in the
steaming Managua heat, meeting with
the members of the Sandinista urban
network and coordinating communica-
tion with guerrillas in the mountains.
Medina tells us that after the San-
dinista triumph in 1979 Ortega had a
small room built in his new, expansive
house, with a small window covered by
a curtain and a hammock suspended in
it, prison style, where he would spend
much of his time. He ordered a similar,
though windowless, room constructed
for him in the bank building that ini-
tially served as the new government’s
headquarters.
Ramírez, who as Ortega’s vice-
president from 1985 to 1990 essentially
administered the country, confirmed
this in a conversation and added that
whenever he stopped to pick Ortega
up on the way to some early event,
he was struck by the fact that Ortega
would never sit down for breakfast
but ate hurriedly while standing, and
was never partial to anything other
than the typical Nicaraguan rice and
beans, tortillas, cheese, and black cof-
fee. Better- quality ingredients than the
gunk ladled out in prison, but a meal
not unlike the one that would be on the
prison menu.
Ortega has a younger brother, Hum-
berto, who is articulate, ambitious, and
very smart. Long ago, he mentioned
to me in passing—I am paraphrasing,
but not by a lot—that every family has
a son who is audacious and destacado
(stands out more), and another who
is... not so much. Humberto has buck-
ets more personality than his brother,
which isn’t hard, considering that Dan-
iel is as memorable as your average
mop, and there is consensus among
knowledgeable former Sandinistas I
recently interviewed in Costa Rica that
in 1978 the idea of bringing their scant
guerrilla forces down from the moun-
tains, where they had been circling
for years, and into the cities, whereNicaragua’s Dreadful Duumvirate
Alma Guillermoprieto
Nicaraguan vice-president Rosario Murillo and president Daniel Ortega, Managua, July 2015Oswaldo Rivas /Reuters*Madrid: Alfaguara, 2018; reviewed
by Stephen Kinzer in these pages, Sep-
tember 23, 2021.Guillermoprieto 14 19 .indd 14 11 / 18 / 21 4 : 42 PM