NONFICTION - April 26, 1992

THE PATIENT IMPATIENCE; From Boyhood to Guerrilla: A Personal Narrative of Nicaragua’s Struggle for Liberation by Tomas Borge, translated by Russell Bartley, Darwin J. Flakoll and Sylvia Yoneda (Curbstone Press/InBook, Box 120470, East Haven, CT 06512: $24.95; 468 pp.). The title notwithstanding, patient states of mind never really coexist with impatient ones in this touching memoir by Nicaragua’s former minister of the interior and the sole surviving founder of the group that gave rise to the Sandinistas. Instead, Tomas Borge shifts abruptly in these pages between states of fiery impatience--as in the urgent manifestoes, reprinted here, about overthrowing Nicaraguan dictator Anastazio Somoza--and what seems to be his more natural state of limitless patience, a reflection of his most apolitical philosophy that life is, essentially, a search for love.

Borges’ states of impatience will leave most American readers feeling likewise. Slogans about “the robbery of the people” and “Yankee imperialism,” which may have soared in the ‘60s and ‘70s, resonate here with no more than a thud. Borge remains fascinating, though, because his almost fatalistic acceptance of life’s capriciousness makes him the most unlikely of revolutionaries. It seems to stem from a rain-swollen day in 1940, when he gazed out of his parents’ window at the Matagalpa River: a yellowish torrent “carrying away tranquil cows and smiling pigs with broken necks. A cadaver entangled in roots passed by with complete indifference . . . a chest of drawers resembling Noah’s ark regurgitated a doll and some green rags.”

Borge seems so comfortable with his fatalism that we initially are mystified at what brings on his occasional outbursts of political fire. Only a couple of sentences after a poetic reverie about how he lost his virginity while a student, for example, Borge describes how he pointed his “index finger at the school’s principal, a physician with the rank of colonel in the National Guard, and insolently told him that at the slightest ruffling of feathers the Liberator would arise from his tomb and cut off his head with a flaming sword.”

But while Borge’s shifts between sex and politics seem abrupt, the link between them becomes clear when he confesses that he would mouth revolutionary rhetoric simply because he was good at it. All the while he secretly hungered to be more like his more “ordinary” friends, who were absorbed in a search for love and passion. “Not until now,” Borge admits, “have I given vent to the envy I felt toward (those friends).”

Although Borge’s dreams of becoming one with a woman are never consummated in these pages, he does come poignantly close on one school-bus trip where he finds himself seated next to Consuela, his Dulcinea. “Her right knee pressed against my left knee for several hours without the slightest wish to stop, without tiring, without speaking a word. . . . Her body pressed against the very center of my pain; of my desperate urgency. . . . (Consuela), it’s no longer possible to distinguish my skin from yours.”