Who would believe that there could be ballet in Managua? Once, even the walls of the city were literate. They wore pictures of Neruda and Carlos Fonseca and they said: Ni se vende, Ni se rinde.We are not for sale. We will not surrender.On the bus ride from Sandino International Airport to the armory shelter turned hostel where you will sleep, kids come up to the windows with bags of nuts and packs of chewing gum. Everyone is wearing plastic flip-flops. And the storefronts collapse in upon themselves beside the houses made out of cardboard, abandoned cars, windows broken in two and three places, no windows at all. Everything has been whitewashed. On the whitewash is scrawled, again and again, like the mantra of a Bank Buddha, like the name of a dead woman that her son is compelled to repeat, the words of progress, and of fiscal promise: Se Vende.Nicaragua changed the linings of your stomach. It tore the pages of your constitution to bits, and untied you, limb by limb, from yourself, and from the umbilical paradigms of your heritage. This is what it did to you, and this is what it gave you, and it happened so quickly that all you can do now is return to the terrible jumble of embryonic ladders and tell the stories, one by one.Pues. This will be the story about the ballet.

Francesca Martinez is my mother's age, but at fifty-four she carries herself with the fierce endurance of centuries. Her face, which is lined with years of poverty, smiles as she hands me a glass of mango juice, and we stand in front of her cardboard and tin house which is like the thousands of cardboard and tin houses in Acahualinca. Around us, the heat rises in waves from the dirt street and the smell of trash is heavy. I speak to her in my broken Spanish, and she tells me of her life.

Francesca has lived in the province of Acahualinca, Managua, for twenty-three years. During the 1980's, when the Sandinistas were in power, Acahualinca was a town of industrial and sewing cooperatives, and Francesca worked as a seamstress. A decade of civil war, during which the United States under Ronald Reagan economically and militarily funded the right-wing rebel Contras, and imposed a trade embargo in 1985, challenged the town, but with government support for cooperative economic structures it managed to survive. “The revolution," Francesca tells me, “Made us realize that we had rights." In the 1980's, the children of Acahualinca went to school.

In 1990, the conservative party, headed by Violeta Chamorro and heavily funded by the United States, was elected into power. From 1990 to 1996, Chamorro and her administration followed the economic advice of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and cut back on social programs, education, and health care. Formerly government-run programs, such as electricity and water, were privatized. Contraceptives and therapeutic abortions were restricted, and homosexuality was made illegal. Government support for industrial and agricultural cooperatives was eliminated.

In 1992, one of the main dumps of Managua was relocated to Acahualinca, where it remains, and the economy of the province changed from one based in cooperatives to what is literally a trash-picking economy. The people of Acahualinca spend their days searching the dump, which has extended past its borders into the streets of the nine sectors of the town, for materials which they clean and then sell to an intermediary for minimal pay. During the 90's, people gathered tin and steel and glass bottles. Now, the demand is for plastic bags. Everywhere in Acahualinca, barefoot kids in shorts and even toddlers in diapers walk through the trash with bundles of plastic bags under their arms, and thousands of the bags hang like strange fruit from the barbed-wire fences in front of the tin homes.

Francesca lives in one of these homes with four children, a grandson, and a nephew. Because all of the children are needed to help the family survive, none of them go to school. (From 1993 to 2001, the number of child workers in Nicaragua grew by 400%. 43% of these do not go to school and 60% are illiterate. Overall, 900,000 children, which is well over half the population of young people in Nicaragua, do not go to school because they cannot afford transportation and other expenses.) Francesca and her family gather plastic bags from the dump, clean them, and hang them to dry on the barbed-wire fence. They can sell the bags when they have a bundle that weights 100 pounds. This 100-pound package, which has taken between five and six weeks to compile and clean, is sold for 120 cordobas—the equivalent of eight dollars.

A thin boy in dirty shorts walk by. His eyes are red and his lids heavy, and Francesca tells me that he is high on glue. Drug use, alcoholism, domestic violence, prostitution—all are as much a part of life in Acahualinca as the unremitting stench of garbage. “I used to think," Francesca says, her eyes looking past me, “that the government sincerely wanted to make things better for us. Now, I think that they just want us to disappear."

Later, I go to the Acahualinca health clinic. The nurse, an exhausted-looking woman in a faded blue blouse, tells me that uterine and cervical cancer rates in Acahualinca have skyrocketed as a result of the close proximity to the dump, and of the direct contact that the citizens have with the trash. Parasites and diarrhea, diseases easily preventable and cured with common medications, are deadly here. “Why?" I ask, and immediately regret the question. She leads me through the tiny, three-room clinic, and opens the door to the supply storage closet. It is empty.

The grave of Carlos Fonseca is the grave of my son, said a woman to her son at his funeral.

They have bought tickets to the national ballet. It will be performed at the Teatro Nacional Rubén Darío.

We take a bus to get there and on the way we pass the National Assembly, where hundreds of people sleep outside under cardboard boxes to demand land ownership rights, promised to them during the demilitarization process nearly fifteen years ago.

The smell of the city comes in through the windows of the bus. E pulls a stick of bright red lipstick out of her pocket. I have never seen her wear makeup. She puts it on carefully, thoughtfully, an actress preparing for her entrance. Then she turns my jaw with her hand and paints it onto me, the color saturated and synthetic, strange fruit hung from our faces.

The theater is enormous, an imposition of white marble and colonial architecture in this place where everything, it seems, is corrugated or collapsing. There is a thick dark carpet inside, sweeping staircases, a table offering small glasses of wine near the entrance.

I am wearing an old skirt and sweater and sandals, and the glitter of the people fills the lobby and overwhelms me with the smell of perfume, and of money. My lips taste like clay. It occurs to me, suddenly, that my mouth is the only visible part of my face.

In Acahualinca the poverty was a lord of the flies, gaping with garish grin at the ivory towers who had come, without warning, into his valley of death. Here, the ivory gapes at us, we who will always be intruders.

Your skin is your screen, your ticket inside and outside and up and down, your protection and your curse, your joke, tissue, pigment, grotesque and sustaining as the plastic bags hung from fences, as the children who stumble past for a coin, for another fix.

We go inside, and take our seats. The ceiling is impossibly high, and gilded. Mary Magdalene gazes down at us with white cheeks.

We have entered another nation.

The faith in God. The Coca Cola. The land of teeth, and of toothless gums.

E turns and whispers into my ear: “¿Y qué persiste de su gran lucha?"

The ballet opens with a folkloric dance, Palomita Guasiruca. Men and women leap onto the stage, shrugging their garish costumes into ribbons about the taut curves of their bodies. The place is rich with full bellies, with purple, with red lips.

The wristwatch of this man is the same color as the fillings in her front teeth. She had a son named Gabriel.

It is in the second act that it happens. The piece is Diablitos de Jinotepe, and the dancers are confronting the Devil. Death is there, and he is wearing a mask with a wide, ridiculous smile. There is a woman who dances toward him and then away again, a dance of flirtation, a dance of defiance. It is a dance, at the end of everything, for the sake of dance alone.

You curl your fingers, and climb the wall to see the hurricane.

I realize that there is dust on my hands. When I look up again to the stage I see that it is Francesca there, in devastating skirt, shining hair, dancing with death. Then she is gone. The crowd is cheering, and standing to leave.

Salomé is looking you in the eye. “¿Qué es patria?" her son has asked. “Do you know, my love, what you are asking?"

There is a meteor shower as wristwatches flash with applause. We leave the theater and in the parking lot E pauses to look at Managua, which spreads out below us into the night. I try to find Acahualinca among the lights of the city, but there are no lights there, and all I can smell is perfume.

Page last updated: February 18, 2005