Journey from Nicaraguan debutante to Sandinista guerrilla

In Gioconda Belli's Nicaraguan memoir, "The Country Under My Skin: A Memoir of Love and War" (Knopf, $25), the subheading for each chapter describes the action within the chapter in the fashion of 18th-century picaresque novels. "Of how I landed in the hospital and was informed that my son had died," reads one such subheading.

It's an indication that what Belli has written is essentially a picaresque: an episodic narrative in which a rogue (Belli herself) travels from place to place, and bed to bed, and winds up wiser for it.

How does one go from Nicaraguan debutante to Sandinista guerrilla? Belli was born into the upper crust of Nicaraguan society — but into a family that didn't support the U.S.-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza, and she was an obstinate child to boot. When the son of a family friend is killed by Somoza's National Guard, little Gioconda insists on information about the coffee-colored stain on the family's front steps. Why is it brown? she asks. Isn't blood red?

She marries young and foolishly — her husband doesn't have her zest for life — and soon she begins an affair with a man she simply calls "The Poet." Through him she becomes acquainted with Sandinista rebels and eventually joins the cause herself.

This is in 1970, and for the next nine years Belli makes contacts, organizes networks, runs guns and finally is forced into exile. Almost everyone she meets along the way seems to be a poet (she becomes one herself, winning the prestigious Casa de las Americas prize in 1978), and she gets involved in a string of heart-rending affairs with men that blur in the reader's mind: the Poet, Marcos, Jimmy, Sergio, Modesto. Each is described in grandiose terms. "Volcanoes, cataclysms had begun inside of me," she writes after the Poet awakens her body to its powers. "He drank my soul through my teeth," she writes after Marcos kisses her.

Her egotism, particularly as it relates to her body, can get out of hand. When pregnant with her second child she writes, "It felt as though the pregnancy belonged only to me — as if I alone was responsible for this creation."

When Marcos is killed close to the spot where the two of them had nearly been captured two years earlier, she philosophizes, "... perhaps that first time she [Death] spared him by chance, just because I was with him and it wasn't yet my turn."

No attempt is made to reconcile her contradictory emotions. Looking after her first child, she feels superior to the absentee mothers in the neighborhood. "The other babies in the park were cared for by nannies," she writes, "but I wanted my daughter all to myself."

In temporary exile in Spain, she feels superior to the mothers of Martorell. "After the life I had led during the past few years, I felt out of place among the docility of the women of Martorell, who spent their days in a bustle of activity, mopping the floors, preparing baby food ... " i.e., the activities she once took so much pride in. Whatever emotion she's currently feeling is apparently the correct one.

The memoir gets better after the revolution, when Belli is named director of Nicaragua's television stations, and the young Sandinistas visit several socialist countries, including Cuba, the former Soviet Union and Libya, where Belli is placed at a separate dining table because "according to the Koran, women don't have souls."

Soon after, the Reagan administration begins its anti-Sandinista policies. Remember the mining of Nicaragua's harbors? Remember Eugene Hosenfus? Because the reader has just witnessed the birth of this revolution, with bickering amateurs in charge of a weak, economically burdened country, U.S. policy here seems monstrously paranoid, if not monstrous.

"The Country Under My Skin" is part history, part feminist bildungsroman and part love letter to Nicaragua; but it could've used a storyteller less in love with flowery, melodramatic prose, and with herself.

Erik Lundegaard: elundegaard@earthlink.net.