The inescapable poet of Nicaragua

Across the country where he was born more than 150 years ago, Ruben Dario, who breathed new life into the Spanish language, is honoured and remembered, writes

ONCE you know him, you see him everywhere. He’s at the airport and in the park. He’s by the hotel entrance and inside the theatre. I even caught a glimpse of him on the side of an armoured bank truck in Managua. Now this poet, diplomat and hero of Nicaragua lay at my feet, very much alive at 101 years dead.

Almost any Spanish speaker will know the name Ruben Dario. He wasn’t just a writer. He was the father of Spanish modernism, the one who gave them their language back. For that they are grateful.

Madrid has a Ruben Dario metro station. You’ll find Calle Ruben Dario in Mexico City, Panama City, San Salvador and Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Ruben DarÌo Middle School sits next to Ruben Dario Park in Miami. But Dario was born in, raised in and died in Nicaragua, and to them he’s 100 per cent theirs.

“He’s everything to us!” said a night clerk in Granada.

“He’s the identity of our culture!” said the musician in Managua.

I’d come to Nicaragua in January not to surf or hike or do yoga on the beach but to explore the profound love that Nicaraguans hold for a poet on what would have been his 150th birthday.

Politicians would give speeches. There’d be parades and symposiums and recitals. For the moment I was in Leon, the intellectual hub of Nicaragua, where Dario’s ghost looms largest.

It was not yet 9am. when I set out to find his tomb in the Cathedral of the Assumption of Mary on a large, main square.

Even at this hour, shade was precious and the sun punished the pavement so cruelly it seemed to exhale a hopeless vapour under my feet. I slipped through the cathedral doors into the cool and merciful air.

Dario’s tomb lay near the altar under a life-size sculpture of a lion with a face frozen in anguish. Ministers had come to lay wreaths. I sat in a pew, alone, watching how no one seemed to come inside for the saints.

This is how his story ends, and yet something timeless still lives. To understand who people are, you can flip back through their pages to see where they were.

RETRACING STEPS

My Dario journey began in earnest a few years ago when I got in contact with Immanuel Zerger, a German immigrant who moved to Nicaragua in the 1990s. He looks something like a 19th-century writer himself, with greying hair and lugubrious eyes. He had met his wife to be, Nubia, when she was a widow with five children running a small hotel on the Solentiname Islands in Lake Nicaragua.

Zerger started helping her out and things went from there.

Back then, as Zerger tells it, the islands were losing their culture and wildlife as the modern world pressed in. Fishermen were letting their boats fall apart. Handicraft The Cathedral of the Assumption of Mary in León, Nicaragua

Salvador Allende Port in Managua.

A statue of Ruben Dario in León, Nicaragua.

traditions were all but gone. Children shot and killed exotic birds with slingshots “just for something to do”, he said.

In 1999, Zerger started a company called Solentiname Tours that tried to create a market for what the islanders already had — great landscapes, colourful traditions, awesome birds. The company grew beyond the archipelago. Eventually he was retracing the steps of his adopted country’s writers.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens wasn’t Nicaraguan, of course, but in the early days of his career, in 1866, the man we know as Mark Twain spent three days crossing Nicaragua en route from San Francisco to New York, a trip recounted in

Zerger recreated Twain’s journey on the occasion of its 150th anniversary in 2016, a

moment that caught my attention but that I missed.

“There’s another anniversary for another writer you should know,” Zerger told me. “This one is Nicaraguan, a poet, very famous.”

I bought a book of poems and booked a flight.

Heavy clouds hung over Managua when I arrived. At the time, Zerger didn’t offer a “Ruben Dario tour” but I hired him to help me track down experts and get me to the places where Dario would have been and where his spirit lives on. The Ruben DarÌo National Theatre in Managua came first.

The theatre has bold Bauhaus-style lines and sits near the lake across from a plaza where Pope John Paul II delivered a fiery sermon in 1983 when the country was deep in a civil war. The theatre survived the