Book Review : An Eccentric Look at Central America

Agony in the Garden: A Stranger in Central America by Edward R. F. Sheehan (Houghton Mifflin: $19.95; 362 pages)

Edward R. F. Sheehan confesses to “a taste for the intrigues and convulsions of the Third World . . . an addiction for the poor tropics . . . a lust for new experience.” All of these passions are fully indulged in “Agony in the Garden,” a firsthand account of the tribulations of Central America through the eyes of a sympathetic if troubled American observer. “Central America is a garden,” Sheehan writes. “The isthmus is also a Gethsemane, where human agony seems to flourish in biblical counterpoint to the luxuriance of the landscape.”

Perhaps, as Sheehan suggests, Central America is a land of sensualists. Certainly, Sheehan himself is a keen observer of sensuality, and “Agony in the Garden” is lush, sometimes almost lurid in its description of land and people alike. For example, when we meet a pair of young Contras who appear to be lovers as well as comrades-in-arms, Sheehan lingers over their sheer physicality. Leonel is “a slight, copper-skinned youth, perhaps 18, sensuous of face, with long black hair and the movements of a predatory leopard,” and Rocibel is “17, a bit wide at the hips, as Nicaraguan women tend to be, with a lovely, wide-eyed white face.” Their thoughts--and their hands--are “on guerrilla combat of another sort.”

In Camouflage Gear

Later, Sheehan takes us to a Sandinista hangout in Managua, where he finds himself surrounded by men and women wearing camouflage fatigues and side arms: “They were handsome, the men lithe with copper skin and lush mustaches, the women supple, of generous breasts and mouths too sensuous,” he writes. “The air conditioner in the restaurant worked poorly or not at all, and in the wet air the odor of the women’s young bodies added to their allure.”

I do not mean to suggest that “Agony in the Garden” lacks seriousness. Quite the opposite is true--Sheehan has provided a useful, even indispensable introduction to the history and politics of Central America. He allows us to eavesdrop on conversations with generals and bishops, ambassadors and military advisers, itinerant padres and Contra foot soldiers. He wrestles with the most profound questions of morality and theology. And he contemplates, in unflinching detail, the rival ideologies and the rival terror of right and left in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala.

Significantly, Sheehan traces the terrible cruelty of political violence in Central America to 15th-Century Spain, which “sent to the new hemisphere not only the crucified Christ and His love but the terrors of the Holy Inquisition and the rapacity of the conquistadores.”

Sense of Theatricality

But Sheehan, a novelist and playwright as well as a journalist and former diplomat, is perfectly willing to indulge in theatrical contrivance to enliven his book. Early on, he wanders into a brothel in a Honduran town, where he gallantly kisses the hand of a whore freshly risen from a night’s work, and then he pays a call on the Bishop of Comayagya : “I genuflected to kiss his ring,” Sheehan writes. “If I could kiss a whore’s hand, I could kiss a bishop’s.”

And he finds a celebrated Sandinista like Daniel Ortega much less compelling than the dwarfish comandante Tomas Borge, a founder of the Sandinista movement and a poet who heads the secret police: “He’s half-mad but brilliant,” one unnamed ambassador tells Sheehan. “He can be merciful one moment and cruel the next. . . . He can’t keep his hands off pretty blond women.”

Sheehan’s book is also a kind of intimate confession, the tossings and turnings of a man in a nightmare of conscience over the sufferings of Central America. He is especially moved and troubled by the abandoned children who populate the streets, squares and sewers--the infant beggars, the Resistoleros or glue-sniffers, the tender adoloscents who are press-ganged into the army--and he tries again and again to rescue them. But the floodtide of misery overwhelms him each time: “Why am I doing this?” he wonders aloud. “Do I really care about these children, or am I just taking notes?”

Sheehan, Jesuit-trained and the bearer of a classical education and a refined sense of aesthetics, is superbly equipped to describe the curious juxtaposition of religion and revolution in Central America. He is clearly fascinated by iconography, and he provides us with descriptions of the fabulous Roman Catholic cathedrals of Nicaragua (“. . . life-sized recumbent Christs in glass sarcophagi, wrapped in precious lace, weeping tears of painted blood. . . . “) as well as the agitprop imagery of the Sandinistas and their “Popular Church”--”Here, Jesus Christ and Cesar Sandino were intermingled . . ., blend(ing) the deepest symbols of the Christian legend with the beatification of sandinismo. “

“Agony in the Garden” is a brilliant if eccentric book--truly, I will never read another headline about Central America without recalling Sheehan’s dreamlike images of beggar and whore, jungle fighter and privileged revolutionary, torture chamber and cathedral. (If I may be permitted to say so, the dust jacket by designer Michaela Sullivan is equally brilliant in evoking the sense--and the sensuousness--of the book.) And I find myself tempted by Sheehan’s unconventional and otherworldly musings about the destiny of the people whose suffering he describes with tragic grandeur:

“I see the sorrows of Central America as a religious mystery,” he writes, “and I believe that all human problems, in the end, are theological.”