The summer lasts in Nicaragua half of the year, because summer we call the time it does not rain, but becomes more intense in its inclement between the months of March and April, which coincides with the Lent season. It is when the rivers are agreed until they show their bed of stones, the grass dries in the pastures and the cattle recoves emigrate to the mountain areas in search of greenery; And in the midst of the embarrassment that lights the skies of the earth and cracks the earth, the chicharras choir is listened to. Red Soles – “Los Soles del Red Summer,” says Darío in the Triumphal march– Vented by the smoke of the burns because from millennia behind the aboriginal peoples set fire to the stubble, and on the nights without wind it is possible to see the flows of fire that wind in the plains and rises through the hills.
The opposite station, the other half of the year, is that of the rains that are never meek, but that they fall in torrents and the rivers out of mother, they neglect tree trunks and drag dead cattle in their current, rains without truce that fall for days and even weeks stirring the landscape. An always exaggerated and harmful nature both in its deficiencies and in its abundance.
In my childhood of the White Peoples of the coffee plateau, the sea was the distance and the excursions to the beaches were like a trip abroad, or a temporary migration in which it was loaded with beds and kitchen junk. The summer world of school holidays, Holy Week always in between, an old volcanic crater to which it had rained from prehistoric times to fill the bowl, next to the Santiago volcano, that active yes, and from whose crater it is possible to see the Luciferina forge in the background. An ambitious Dominican friar, Fray Blas del Castillo, believed it was gold in combustion and in 1538 it was lowered by pulleys in a basket to remove a sample ladle. It turned out to be what it was, scum.
The Laguna de Masaya is surrounded by Chorotegas and Nahuas of musical names, Nindirí, Nandasmo, Monimbó, Masaya, Jalata, Masatepe, where I was born. To make possible access to La Laguna, General José María Moncada, mine country, in the years in which he exercised the presidency of Nicaragua, made the rocks of a slope of the crater clear, opened a few road that bordered the abyss, and in memory of the feat, he placed at the top of the gorge a bronze plaque with the legend good. Then he built a chalet on the coast he called Venice, that when Managua was destroyed by an earthquake in 1931, he served as a presidential house.
In that villa he offered agapes and receptions to the prominent people of Masatepe, and after one of those parties, Dr. Octaviano Sánchez, a pharmacist of the town, cleared himself in his Ford Model T while ascending the hillside, and although he survived the accident along with his wife, two daughters his twin daughters died.
Moncada had had to be president under the military occupation of the United States, while the troops of the Marine Infantry fought the defender of national sovereignty headed by Sandino. The Marines sent in the cities of the Pacific and Sandino in the Mountains of the North. Upon assuming the presidency, Moncada had wanted to have his own militia, organized under the command of General Manuel Escamilla, a lieutenant Mexican, but the head of the Marines ordered him to disarm it. Escamilla and his veterans then dedicated themselves to public works, such as that of opening with dynamite the dweller to the Laguna de Masaya.
The strictest prohibition of escaping to the lagoon had been decreed by my parents because of the danger of its waters, since the beach was very brief, already scarce meters rushed towards the abyss forming a funnel, so that the drowned were frequent; But not only violated my brothers and I warning the clandestine excursions, but we went down to the crater grabbed to the drinking water tube that descended almost perpendicular between the rocks. General Moncada, entrepreneur as he was, had also founded a company Aguadora, his property, which supplied the people.
And also, in a clandestine way, we were going through the neighborhood roads and crossed farms of farms until we reached the slope of the Santiago volcano, sinking our feet into the black sand waterfall until reaching the crater, while the intense smoke that smelled like sulfur was wrapped. And when at night I heard from my bed the rumbled rumbles of the volcano, like a distant gunpone, until then I overwhelmed the fear that I had not felt as I climbed the slope and the sulfur vahada burned me in my throat.
