‘Ah,’ said the security guard, admitting me to a courtyard of old trees surrounded by spacious verandahs, ‘el escritor hindú.’ Spanish uses hindú to mean ‘Indian’; the construction de la India, which seemed OK to me, sounded stilted to Nicaraguan ears. So during my stay I became the hindú writer, or even, quite often, poeta. Which was quite a flattering disguise.In Nicaragua, the mask was an indispensable feature of many popular festivals and folk-dances. There were animal-masks, devil-masks, even, as I was to discover, masks of men with bleeding bullet-holes in the centres of their foreheads. During the insurrection, Sandinista guerrillas often went into action wearing masks of pink mesh with simple faces painted on them. These masks, too, originated in folk-dance. One night I went to see a ballet based on the country’s popular dances, and saw that one of the ballerinas was wearing a pink mask. The mask’s associations with the revolution had grown so strong that it transformed her, in my eyes at least, into something wondrously strange: not a masked dancer, but a guerrilla in a tutu.The true purpose of masks, as any actor will tell you, is not concealment, but transformation.
