Written by Pimsiri Petchnamrob
Translated by Tyrell Haberkorn
Illustrated by Summer Panadd

[คลิกที่นี่เพื่ออ่านต้นฉบับเรื่องสั้น “สัจนิยมมหัศจรรย์”]

In “Magical Realism,” cultural critic and human rights activist Pimsiri Petchnamrob writes in the voice of a Thai who spends the night before the 22 May 2014 coup walking through the city of León, Nicaragua. The narrator who inhabits and speaks in the second-person “you,” is lost in time and the memories of others. 

But you are not a passive observer to the revolutionary plans and actions of sixty years ago that Pimsiri narrates. Instead, you are a chronicler with the responsibility to warn those around you of the impending disaster and repression. You know at once what is going to happen but are powerless to intervene. Witnessing Rigoberto López Pérez’s 1956 assassination of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza García, and then the immediate assassination of López by the military, you query how the meaning of these actions may have shifted first with the victory and then the defeat of the Sandinistas in the 1980s. With the responsibility that comes with being a witness, a solidarity across time and space emerges between the lines and, for the reader, and perhaps the author, the Nicaraguan past is refracted once again with the news of the Thai coup. As the ten-year anniversary of the 22 May 2014 coup approaches, both solidarity and the responsibility to avoid its repetition loom large. This time, you are powerless no longer.

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Night is falling in a city in which it is believed that stories fill every square inch. A city built by oppressors from another hemisphere in the fifteenth century. A city once abandoned after a series of earthquakes in the sixteenth century. A city where liberalism had a stronghold in the eighteenth century. A city that was an eyewitness to a civil war between the Somoza dictatorship and the Sandinista People’s Army during the Cold War.

Night is falling. You sit sipping a can of Toña beer in a plaza with a fountain in front of a church bearing the city’s name. The last rays of sunlight make the neoclassical buildings, a legacy of this region’s colonizers, appear golden before the sky turns a deep dark blue. If the church could speak, you know it would have a great deal to say. It has seen earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and civil war over the 200 years of its existence. In this moment, you wish that your Spanish went beyond inquiring about prices, asking for directions and ordering food. Then you could hear what the church is trying to say. 

Night is falling. You walk to a street-side restaurant and are determined to quell your belly’s protest with a cheap dish of what is called gallo pinto, or rice and boiled red beans, and a piece of fried chicken. A woman with dark brown hair, eyes a mix of green and brown, and a silver ring through her nose walks past. You know immediately that she is not a local. Something about her indicates that she comes from a country ruled by the Communists in Eastern Europe before that world disintegrated in the 1990s. You know this, even though you do not know how you know. 

Night is falling. You follow her for a reason opaque to you. She walks past the old and run-down Museo de la Revolución. A message sprayed across its wall curses George W. Bush, the former president of the United States, as a genocidal murderer. You do not understand Spanish but you can guess because some words are similar to English. She walks past a shop selling handmade souvenirs at the corner. She passes a bar in an old building where young backpackers are sitting and sipping the same brand of beer that you hold in your hand. You secretly hope that she will duck into the bar and order a beer. This unreasoned following would cease. You would eat dinner, drink two more cans of beer, chat with other tourists, and go back to sleep on your $10/night bed. But she keeps walking and turns left at the corner. You recall that the street has a stall selling bootleg DVDs of Pedro Almodovar films. The DVDs are scattered on a table, prices left unmarked. She walks far away from the tourist neighborhood. You follow her even though your Spanish is terrible and you are uncertain if you can remember the way back.

Night is falling. You walk past a house influenced by colonial architecture. You follow her, neither sticking close nor becoming separated. You begin to remember that this is the way to the beach. You walked to the beach during the day. Tall waves and gray sand. When you walked back from the beach, you passed the house of an old woman who asked where you were from. You were not at all certain whether she would know the location of the country whose name you uttered. You lose yourself in thought for not even thirty seconds and then catch yourself. The woman you are following has slipped out of your sight. You are unsure of the direction in which she has gone. You look down the lane on the right. You should see her, but you do not see her.

Night is falling. You find yourself standing in front of a house. One-story, colonial-era. You know that houses of this design are narrow in front but deep inside with a central atrium, like your budget hostel. You look through a door left ajar into the house. You are astonished by the group of young men and women you see sitting engaged in discussion. It is the same group whose pictures you saw on the pink walls of the old, falling-down Museo de la Revolución. The group includes a Chinese woman, whom the guide at the Museo, a former comrade, said died during the revolutionary war. You stand and listen to them speak in Spanish, which you now understand well. They talk about the guerrilla war of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional. They discuss the plan to take over the country by surrounding the capital of Managua from the countryside and cutting off the dictatorship of the Somoza family, which has ruled the country since 1936. You only now realize that they are referring to the pre-1979 situation. They appear taut with worry and exhaustion. But hope remains in their voices. Abruptly, you wonder if these young men and women imagine that they will one day be in black and white photographs in a museum. You wonder if they realize that they will not see the Sandinistas’ day of triumph. 

Night is falling. There is a young man in the group whom you hear others call “El Poeta.” You put his age at about twenty. He looks more like a person of indigenous Central American descent rather than a ladino with colonial blood. He walks inside the house and comes back with a violin in one hand. He brushes his hair back with the other and begins to play a song both romantic and melancholic. Before he begins, you know immediately that the song is called “Si el uno me hace llorar.” You stand and listen to the young man play the violin until the song ends. The song is a lament for a love left unfulfilled and a man who sheds tears for this love after wine slips down his throat. The song casts a kind of spell and stillness captures the room. A moment passes until you are seized by fear that someone in the group will turn and see you leaning against the door, like a child denied permission to chat with the grown-ups.

Night is falling. Someone walks into the lane. Another young man has come to confer with El Poeta. They speak and then walk out together. You hesitate for a moment and then decide to follow the pair out the same way you entered. A car waits in front. The newcomer opens the driver-side door. El Poeta lifts his hand up to stroke the bristles of his mustache and opens the passenger-side door. Something in you tells you to open the backdoor and insert yourself among the boxes of paper and piles of cloth stacked up. You should be surprised that no one notices your presence. But you are rattled more than surprised. Unease rises up in you like a cloud appearing on a sunny day.

Night is falling. The air in the car becomes stifling and you can barely breathe. The short trip feels interminable. The two young men barely utter a word to one another, other than when El Poeta gives an envelope to the young driver, whom he calls Armando. The car moves past places that you vaguely remember seeing during the day, including another museum. The car stops and the two men embrace. El Poeta opens his door and you decide to follow him into the haze of the city from which the last light has just faded.

Night is falling. El Poeta walks into a building emitting strains of light and lively dance music. You follow him without intention and find yourself in the middle of a celebration filled with people clad in luxurious evening dress. Caribbean dancers are performing an indigenous dance handed down from the seventeenth century. They were brought by colonizers from Africa as slaves several hundreds of years ago and still preserve their cultural roots. You enjoy the performance until three gunshots interrupt the beating of African drums. Everything around you stops, like an old video that freezes because the film is damaged. The old man hit by the three bullets falls close to you. Blood gushes out of the holes in his chest. You stop breathing for a moment. In the fraction of a second in which you try to comprehend what has taken place, a group of men in paratrooper uniforms walk in and fire thirty bullets into El Poeta, their target. It is too sad and you do not look. You know immediately that the violinist who played the melancholic love song is dead. 

Night is falling. There are no words for the ensuing confusion. If you understand correctly, the man who was felled by the first three bullets was the president who ruled the country as a military dictatorship for the past twenty years. You walk out of the chaos and stand still for a moment. A question lingers in your heart about what to do. If you walk back to the church and come across the Museo de la Revolución, with Che Guevara’s picture and the sentence, “hasta la victoria siempre,” whose meaning you do not know, will it still be the museum or will it have transformed back into one of the villas of the Somoza family? You think at once of the woman you followed, the woman from Eastern Europe. If you have a chance to meet her again, you must inform her of a few things. 

Night is falling. You do not feel the sorrow of grief. But a sadness seeps into the furthest depths of your consciousness. It is a sorrow born of your lack of power to change the world or even control your own life. You live in order to hasten life’s passage. And in the end, you forget that your life has no bearing on whatever may arise. You immediately think of the letter that El Poeta handed to his comrade. You saw this letter in the Museo de la Revolución. El Poeta wrote to console his mother that his action was not a sacrifice. His action was the duty of one Nicaraguan acting in the service of the liberation of the country from the oppression of dictatorship. 

Night is falling. You retrace your steps as best you can remember and find yourself at an evening market behind the church. There is a monument to Augusto Sandino, the leader of the group of rebels who fought the American occupation at the beginning of the twentieth century. You do not know if you should feel joy or sorrow for the young revolutionaries. The Sandinistas won the civil war. The Sandinistas won the election. But neither they nor you had a chance to celebrate. You go in search of cheap gallo pinto to fill your belly. Three bottles of Toña beer and you go to sleep. You wake to learn that another coup has been announced in the country of which you are a citizen.

First published in the collection of short stories Destroy, She Said, Porcupine Books, 2017.