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| Essay Archive | July 1, 2004 |
A THUNDEROUS CLAP
The Dry Season Ends in Managua
The city felt a slow boil. April turning to May, the hottest time of the year in a city hotter than Hell. A lifetime of heat experience made no difference to the Managuans, they could not help themselves. They complained.
Like zombies glaring straight ahead they dredged through the infernal heat, cursing under their breaths. I could not complain, for the thickness of the air suffocated my words.
The heat found no resistance. Through sweat-soaked nights and wind driven days of dust, we all cooked. A hot bath of irrepressible heat. The endless stream of body fluids saturated our clothes, our bed sheets and the armpits of our lovers and enemies. The streets blurred into a single stream of fever cursed blood, dying to boil and blow out a horrifying collective scream.
Yet Managua remained silent, feverish, with its oppressed humanity flowing through the veins of the heat stricken city. The clear yellow sky, thick with wind strewn dirt and smoke, was another enemy. The sky had grown too close, unwanted intimacy, its breath on our necks.
I walked through Managua tall, above the crowd, like a giant cracked thermometer whose mercury had blown out the top. The people of the city murmured about the coming rains. Yet the brown wind defied its promise, negated the slightest possibility.
Contact with any surface, of any material plastic or leather or metal, was an invitation to slide in pungent body liquid. Managuans turned to laughter. Humor, a sharply sardonic well placed insult could blow off the heat for a moment and lighten all our souls.
Days past and in the midst of the insufferable heat, dust, smoke and sweat - a small cloud appeared hovering in the sky, smiling down on the city. A lone shadow passed humbly over the parched earth. The cloud quickly dissolved into the oven overhead.
Each successive day another cloud would join the little smiling one and then they would all vanish, until, without warning, for a glorious fleeting moment the clouds unified heroically to block out the infernal sun. It was a profound and symbolic moment of hope, lost on no one. A collective sigh permeated Managua, until darkness fell and we all returned to our roasting beds.
The next morning the humidity rose to new heights to dance with the heat. Not amused, the heat became vengeful. Managua's boiling blood was screaming against summer's anger, aggressively trying to rupture the walls of its atmospheric repression.
Heat dug in his heals and tightened its grip as the sky filled with clouds and Managua unified in a steamy haze. Every breath of every human was felt at once in every part of the city.
The sky growled, then roared with a mixture of pleasure and pain. It climaxed in one earthshaking, thunderous clap. A screaming atmospheric orgasm that all of Managua experienced at once.
Impotent clouds finally bore fruit and rain came rushing down from the heavens, pounding the earth. A slow smile grew on my face.
I watched a girl from my office rush outside our building into the torrential downpour. Her head was thrown back and her arms spread wide, as if embracing the sky as she spun circles in the mud laughing.
Author's note: This hot little narrative was written in April of 1996, when I was working in Managua as a photojournalist for two Nicaraguan magazines. Having recently moved to Managua from dry climate southern California, I found the mixture of rising humidity and persistent heat a considerable challenge while beating the pavement daily with a full load of camera gear. Though Nicaragua is my favorite country in the world, at the end of the dry season(March-May), the rising heat caused by a titanic atmospheric battle for climatic change, the swirling dust thanks to 5 months of no rain and the smoky air from farmers burning refuse in anticipation of planting are enough to recommend that visitors do not plan trips to Nicaragua from mid-March to mid-May, or at least if they do, that they sleep and drive only with air-conditioning, neither of which I was privilege to when I wrote this steamy story (or today for that matter). Most travelers will find Managua afternoons hot at any time of year, but it is actually quite pleasant in the rainy season from June-November, once the weather changes and the daily afternoon and nighttime showers take hold. Though the Nicaraguan mountain and rain forest regions enjoy a pleasant climate year-round, for visits to the Pacific slope of the volcanoes and great lakes area, it is wise to favor June through January.
Nicaragua News is a copyrighted newsletter written monthly by Richard Leonardi.
Copyright © Richard Leonardi