Gioconda Belli: “What are the people of Mexico going to gain if the king of Spain says ‘I’m sorry’? If it’s not going to be true, nobody thinks like that”

Gioconda Belli She came to Spain for the first time at the age of 14 to study at a boarding school for nuns, near the Atocha Station in Madrid. She was very cold, felt the sadness of a city governed by a dictatorship, and had a hard time making friends among her classmates. «She was modest, she didn’t break any rules.. And I was a good student, I did everything quickly and I dedicated the extra time to writing letters. “I was being born as a writer without realizing it.”

Many years later, Belli returns to live in Madrid, exiled from the tyranny of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo. “The best decision I could make was choosing Madrid,” says the author. Belli’s new novel, A Silence Full of Murmurs (Seix Barral), has a pair of Madrid settings inhabited by two Nicaraguan women, a mother and a daughter, a heroine of the Sandinista revolution and a victim of the Ortega dictatorship. and Murillo, who try to find and accept each other, even after death.

I would like to ask you about Spain as the setting in this novel. At some point in the narrative it is a sinister place but later it becomes a refuge.

I wanted to tell that value of Spain as a refuge. The mother in the novel has lived a very difficult experience in Spain when she was very young; She returns and understands that Spain saves her first from the revolution and then from the loss of the revolution. It is Spain where she finds herself.

How does it sound to you that there are confrontational policies towards Spain over History in Latin America?

I had my confrontational time with Spain and the conquest. And I still regret many things that happened. But demanding something from Spain at this point does not make sense. It seems to me to be a populist position, aimed at gaining the favor of people who have a gridded idea of ​​the world. It is like talking about imperialism, as Daniel Ortega does: everything is imperialism and imperialism explains everything. What will the people of Mexico gain if the King of Spain says ‘I’m sorry’? Besides, it won’t be true, he doesn’t feel it. People don’t have that relationship with the past, nobody thinks like that.

Did you have Spanish grandparents?

No. My dad’s people were Italian, although there was also someone on that side who came from France. My mother’s last name is Galician but her parents were Nicaraguan.

Did you read Spanish literature during the Revolution?

He read, above all, Spanish literature. Since I was a child, because my mother did theater and performed works by Lorca, Calderón, Jardiel… I discovered Latin American literature later. I remember that my brother became obsessed with Gironella.

So, is it fair to explain underdevelopment and instability in Latin America based on the traumas of the viceregal era?

It is difficult to answer that question because I myself cannot understand where everything went wrong. Why have there been a lack of structures that solidify? Could it be because of the colonial era? It may be an explanation, although perhaps the role of the United States weighs more. And, in any case, we have Costa Rica, with very solid foundations as a society and with the same colonial past. Costa Rica decided not to have an Army and to make a huge effort in education, that is the difference. Education in America doesn’t seem like a problem of historical inheritance, right? I believe that underdevelopment has more to do with the ambition of large landowners and oligarchies, which is the explanation for the enormous class difference.

I think the important thing about your book is the dialogue between mother and daughter, between a guerrilla fighter and her somewhat orphaned girl.

I think it is a more or less frequent experience in my country. There is a film that explained how the author reconciled with her parents and overcame the feeling of abandonment linked to the revolution. And everyone wonders at some point how much they know their mother, how much they understand her. Many women decided not to have children. Other friends sent their children to raise them with their mothers. I had a more constant relationship except for the time I went into exile. They were in Nicaragua and I was in Mexico and I called them by phone.

How old were they?

Seven and two. I called them and the little girl asked me ‘Are you my mother from the plane?’. It was hard.

And the women of your generation and their children, are they at peace?

Yes. That’s important. It takes great sincerity, asking yourself to what extent it was necessary to be in the front row, what part of it was fascination, what meaning the renunciations we made made… If we speak sincerely, children forgive. Or forgive is not the word, rather it is to accept, understand… There is a problem: the revolution for which we fought ended in a dictatorship, it is a fact. But I think our children have come to understand what the world was like in which their parents lived for 20 years.

Did the Sandinista revolution end in tyranny because it fell into the wrong hands of Ortega and Murillo? Or was there something at his core that was already debased?

Both things. Making the revolution was a collective task but at its core there was a messianic idea, an idea of ​​’I’m going to save the country’.

Do your books arrive in Nicaragua?

I know this one isn’t going to come. Sometimes I browse the bookstores in Managua. There are some copies of mine left in storage. Some want to say two or three. One day they will sell them and I will disappear. It’s what they want.

Do you think about the possibility of not being able to return to Nicaragua?

I try not to think about it but I know it exists. What can I say? That one has to learn not to make tragedy out of tragedy, to live with tragedy, to preserve emotional and mental integrity. When I started this novel, I thought it was talking about disillusionment. And I realized when writing it that the revolution not only left me disappointed, it left many more things that I want to convey. That’s why there is the mention of the myth of Sisyphus at the beginning.

One more curiosity: the book names the great earthquake of 1972. Where was it?

In Managua. It was at midnight and I knew he was coming because it was like he had a seismograph in his body. There was a small tremor before and when it ended I knew there was still the worst to come. And it was horrible. He left the house and saw the sky red from the fires. It was a very animal sensation, it was an instinct of wanting to run and not knowing where.

Did you think you were dying?

No, I thought I had to survive.

I ask because a ghost novel has come out here and I suppose that Managua must have been a ghostly city then.

The ghost thing has more to do with the years of war and revolution. You lived with someone, they killed them and you had to live with their absence very intimately. There was a man I loved very much. One day they called me and told me he had died. The next day, Somoza’s newspapers published the photo of his machine-gunned body.