MISSION OF LOVE : Displays of Respect for Her Husband Ease Pain of Vera Clemente’s Nicaragua Visit

Clemente’s flight hasn’t made it to Managua this time, either. Vera Clemente’s, that is.

But the plane taking her back to Nicaragua for the first time since the death of her husband, Roberto Clemente of the Pittsburgh Pirates, on New Year’s Eve, 1972, has not disappeared into the Caribbean, as his did. It simply has not gotten off the ground in San Juan.

Commandante Emmett Lang, Nicaragua’s minister of sport, huddles with an entourage from the Institute of Sport at Augusto Cesar Sandino International Airport. Magdalena Lacayo, 16, daughter of the chief of protocol, stands quietly nearby, her bouquet of flowers wilting in the late spring afternoon.

Lang and the welcoming party retreat to the shade while aides try to track down Vera Clemente’s flight. Mechanical difficulties have grounded it in Puerto Rico. Perhaps, they hope, she will find other connections.

If not, this Central American nation of 3 million, who have waited for more than 16 years to honor the man who died on a mission to help the victims of the 1972 Managua earthquake, will wait even longer.

But Vera Clemente, 48, unfazed by a roundabout itinerary that takes her in an arc around the Caribbean, does not disappoint. The woman with short black hair swept back over an unlined face arrives after dark.

With a grace that has evolved over a quarter of century as the wife and then widow of the Caribbean basin’s greatest athlete ever, Vera Clemente faces the impending swirl of recognition with composure.

“I came to Nicaragua with Roberto in November, 1972, when he managed the Puerto Rican team in the world amateur baseball championships,” Vera says as she walks through what once was downtown Managua.

Despite four batting crowns and 12 Gold Gloves, the Pirate right fielder had labored in relative obscurity until dazzling the baseball world during the 1971 World Series. The next season, he got his 3,000th hit and became a hero across the Caribbean basin.

“We came to Nicaragua and found the people as we had been in Puerto Rico 30 years ago,” Vera says. “Roberto saw himself in the boys in the streets--without shoes, living in a one-room house--much like it had been when his father worked for the sugar mill in Carolina.

“He changed a twenty-dollar bill into coins each morning and called boys over as we walked to ask them about their families. What work did their father do? What had they eaten for dinner last night? And then he dug into his pockets for them.”

They returned to Puerto Rico on Dec. 8, accompanied by Federico and Marianne Lacayo. Marianne, who was from Puerto Rico, was pregnant with Magdalena.

“We were eating at our house on Dec. 23, when Federico felt a terrible upset in his stomach and had to lie down,” Vera says. “We soon found out that that was when the earthquake hit Managua.”

The upheaval killed 7,000, injured 20,000, and left 200,000 homeless. The Clementes spearheaded relief efforts in Puerto Rico.

Only the Bank of America building, the National Palace, and the Intercontinental Hotel survived the tremors. Sixteen years later, central Managua remains largely unreconstructed. Families squat in the shells of buildings while boys play stickball in the hulking ruins of the national cathedral.

Vera takes it all in as she walks down streets where she once strolled arm in arm with Roberto, in what was to be their last time alone together.

Clemente is quiet as she enters the elevator--one of only five in the country--of the Intercontinental Hotel, where she and Roberto stayed in 1972. Moments later, standing by the window in what was then Howard Hughes’ penthouse, she stares at Lake Managua and the craggy mountains and volcanoes that surround the city.

When the earthquake hit, Hughes and Gen. Anastasio Somoza, Nicaragua’s president-dictator, were in this room negotiating the sale of the Corn Islands off the Atlantic Coast.

Soon after the quake, stories of the National Guard pilfering relief supplies began to surface and crews on the aid flights the Clementes sent had difficulty getting their goods to those in need.

“Our people here kept asking Roberto to come and straighten things out,” Clemente says. “He didn’t want to come. ‘I will work better in Puerto Rico,’ he said. But our people were having to fight to get the supplies to Masaya, where many of the survivors had gone.

“We almost went together, but we had friends coming and one of us had to stay. Then, I almost went instead of him, but he decided to go,” Vera says with a shake of her head. “Someone asked him to wait until after New Year’s Eve so that we could be together, but Roberto said, ‘Don’t worry. For me, every day is the same.’ ”

Roberto Clemente’s flight took off the evening of Dec. 31 but plunged into the waters off Playa Isla Verde minutes later. Four others died with Clemente, whose body was never recovered.

An earthquake ultimately caused Roberto Clemente’s death, and a hurricane brought Vera back to Nicaragua.

“It was hard to come back,” she said on the road to Masaya the next day. “We were so happy here together. That is why I waited so long. And I was a little scared by the revolution and fighting that has gone on here.”

But last October, Hurricane Joan smashed into Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast, pulverizing Bluefields and leveling the Corn Islands. There were 115 deaths, and the storm left hundreds of thousands homeless and caused millions of dollars in damage on an already devastated economy.

Just as Puerto Ricans could not deny Roberto Clemente’s plea to aid Nicaragua in 1972, they could not refuse Nicaragua help after the hurricane. Vera soon joined the Committee to Aid the Victims of the Hurricane. A flotilla of container vessels filled with seeds and medicine and paid for by the committee arrived in Nicaragua in April. “I had been asked to return many times, but I wasn’t ready,” she said. “Then Trish Beatty from Pittsburgh called and asked me to go as the guest of the Roberto Clemente Sports Project in San Isidro. I was going to say no, but finally I thought, ‘Let me go and take the chance.’ ”

It was time to complete Roberto’s mission.

They remember Roberto Clemente better on the streets of Masaya than they do in Pittsburgh these days. Every boy playing ball on its cobblestone streets can recite at least some of his statistics. But they recall Clemente in Masaya, and throughout Nicaragua, not so much for the verve with which he played, but because, as the grizzled groundskeeper at the ballpark there explains, “He died for us.”

“Roberto adopted Masaya,” Vera Clemente says. “And Masaya adopted Roberto right back.”

There weren’t bullet holes pocking the walls the last time Clemente was here and the market where they bargained with Indian artisans had not been destroyed by the air strikes Somoza ordered in a last-ditch effort to stop the Sandinista-led insurrection. But the ballpark, since renamed Estadio Roberto Clemente, still is perched above the lagoon.

Vera Clemente heads first to the pediatric clinic that she and the Clemente Foundation helped build in 1976. Clemente lost touch with its staff during the insurrection.

“I don’t even know if it is still functioning,” she had whispered on the drive from Managua.

Her fears multiply when she finds the clinic padlocked, and the marker missing from an engraving of her husband.

Federico Lacayo scrapes corrosion off the plaque at the front gate with his pocket knife. Vera excuses herself and walks to the edge of the lagoon. Across the water, Volcan Masaya smolders.

But when Clemente returns to the clinic, it has opened for the day and her unhappiness with the shabbiness of its exterior is replaced by relief at the cleanliness of its interior and attentiveness of the staff.

Clemente’s caravan proceeds to the stadium. The party enters under a painting of Roberto and walks up a ramp to a statue of him at bat.

The directorate of the San Fernando club, Masaya’s entry in the Nicaraguan league, assembles on the infield grass and presents Vera a club uniform. On its sleeves, and those of every other jersey, is stitched the number 21, Clemente’s number with the Pirates.

The directors escort Vera to the San Fernando clubhouse, where the fourth game of the Nicaraguan championship series is about to begin on television. They stand when a minute of silence is observed for Roberto after the national anthem.

If Vera Clemente’s return to Nicaragua is an encounter with a bittersweet past, for Nicaragua, it was a moment a long time in the coming.

Clemente’s return was front page news, vying for coverage with Gorbachev’s visit to Cuba and Nicaragua’s championship series in baseball. For the Sandinista government, it was a chance to enjoy the spotlight.

One evening, Clemente shared a table with Minister of Sport Lang, who regaled her with tales of the underground. A boyish-looking 41 with a Clark Gable mustache, Lang told of guerrilla theater in the barrios.

Earlier in the day, Vera had broken bread, actually vanilla wafers, with a group of women, each of whom had had a child kidnaped by the contras. They petitioned her to help force the contras to allow inspectors into their camps in Honduras to determine if their children are there.

On her fifth day in country, Vera Clemente accepted, for Roberto, the highest honor Nicaragua bestows upon a sporting figure, the Eduardo Green award. Named for the best ballplayer the country produced, the award had never before been given to a foreigner.

Lang paid thoughtful tribute to Clemente at the ceremony, before President Daniel Ortega pinned the award to Vera’s dress and embraced her. At the reception afterward, Ortega invited Clemente to join him the next day at the start-up of a hydro-electric project in Asturias.

On the road before dawn, Clemente’s caravan races northward at twice the posted speed limit into country that only months ago was a hit-and-run battlefield. It is good terrain for growing coffee, and for contra ambushes. One of the drivers points to a spot where he was shot earlier in the conflict.

The attacks have lessened since last year’s truce, and signs of re-building are evident.

Ortega swoops overhead in his camouflage-painted helicopter an hour before the Clemente convoy reaches Asturias. But Ortega, elected president in 1985, delays the ceremony until Clemente arrives.

Seated on the stage, Clemente listens as Ortega describes the Central American peace process and stresses his nation’s need to determine its own destiny.

Alluding to the fierce sense of independence that propelled Roberto Clemente’s evolution on and off the field, Ortega says, “And we will continue in the spirit of Roberto Clemente, a ballplayer and a man who showed his solidarity with the people of Nicaragua.”

Afterward, at lunch in a hilltop pavilion, Ortega sits with Clemente and her party for over an hour. He questions more than answers, listening closely to his guests.

They discuss from Puerto Rico’s political culture to a history of the Sandinista insurrection and the U.S.-backed counter-revolution.

Before she leaves Nicaragua, Clemente returns to a lakeside restaurant near Granada. As she did the last time, Vera takes a ride through the swamp-like archipelago of little islands, egrets, and freshwater sharks. Her launch is named the Carolina. The outboard’s propellers become tangled in the lily pads and Lacayo, chief of protocol for this quasi-state visit, cuts a lily for Vera.

Vera Clemente has been married now to Roberto Clemente’s memory twice as long as she was to the man himself. “For me, he was such a good husband, such a good father, and such a good son,” she says. “It is as if I owe him fidelity. I never thought of marrying again. I feel satisfied to have my children and use my time the way I am using it--to help whomever I can in my own way.”

She acknowledges: “There are moments when I think about how different it would be if he were here, but then I throw myself back into my work. . . . When we walked through Managua and went to the Intercontinental Hotel where we stayed, it brought back a lot of remembrances. They were sad memories because he is not here now, and here I am. At the same time, I feel sad because all these years these people have suffered so much. They are trying to come up again, now, little by little, but it is a hard situation, and it will take time. When I went to the clinic in Masaya and the Roberto Clemente school in Managua and saw their needs, I was wishing that I was a millionaire just to help.”

Clemente said she has a new commitment to the future instead.

“I think now that my feelings for Nicaragua are stronger,” she says. “Somehow, if I can do something to help, I will. I will try to learn more about the situation here. Roberto always said that he was with the government that wants to help the people. I hope that is what will happen here. . . .

“It has been hard coming back, but at the same time, I feel better because I know that the people still love Roberto here. Even the kids that did not know him--who were born just a few years ago--they show their love for him. I did not expect all that. I knew that some people remembered him, but all these people, everywhere you go. It makes me feel he is still alive.”