Held Hostage by History

"Nicaragua," answered my Dad jauntily.

"Wow," she said slowly. "I don't even know where that is."

I got used to giving a description--it's in Central America, a few countries below Mexico. But as the 80s went on, and Ronald Reagan made Central America his last stand against Communism, I started dreading being asked where I was from . Suddenly, the follow-up questions--When did you leave? Why did you leave? Which side were you on?--always seemed to come with the implication that my family had done something wrong. At the same time, I overheard snatches of dinnertable conversation about people in Nicaragua being jailed or killed. My grandmother was reported to her neighborhood committee for having friends over, her tires punctured; my grandfather risked a beating trying to recoup a few belongings from our abandoned house. Even for our friends who had joined the Sandinistas, like my godfather, things were tough: The country was suffering terrible shortages of food and basic necessities.

For my parents, I realize now, the American perception of what was going on in Nicaragua must have been even worse. My father is an extremely law-abiding, cautious person: If he has 12 items going through a 10-items or less grocery line, he'll make me go through the line and claim two. He only crosses at a crosswalk, ever. Until the revolution, he had led a successful middle-class life--he went to school on scholarship, got a good job at the Central Bank, worked his way up. He was shocked when he first came to Washington and discovered that because he'd worked for the Somoza government, many people -- even those he knew -- wouldn't hire him.

For me, the problem was social, not professional. I felt my family had suffered a tragedy--I resented being fingered as the bad guy on top of it all. So when asked which side we'd been on, I'd stress that my family had been on both sides--my college-aged cousin Mario had died fighting for the Sandinistas in Jinotepe. His body was never found. My godfather, a member of the Sandinista government , would stay with us when he came to Washington.

AndI'd lie. I realized this recently when I dropped an email to my high school boyfriend, Alex, asking him what he remembered me saying about Nicaragua while we were dating.

"I remember you talking a good bit about your family's experience," he wrote back. "You would get mightily upset at anyone who suggested that the U.S. not assist the Contras. You would also get upset if anyone suggested that the Sandinistas were a just and proper regime. I remember you telling me the story of when you escaped from Managua. The Sandinistas were looking specifically for you since you were a U.S. citizen."

I don't recognize the right-wing teenager that Alex describes. Clearly, I was parroting the views I'd heard at home. Now, as my parents have noted, my grown-up politics are far more progressive. My first magazine job, to my parents' quiet chagrin, was at feminist Ms. (At least I'm not my cousin, who works for a Democratic congressman.) I can't imagine, now, denying the legitimacy of the Sandinista government. I can't imagine arguing for the Contras as a moral right.

But I see something deeper in the story he recalls of my "escape" from Managua, which was completely fake. I think I wanted to give Alex, the first boy I ever loved, a reason for all the pain he sensed at my house. To explain why I owned this pain. Lacking any solid facts, I invented some.

The few clues I had about my mother's picture meant I would have to cast a very wide net. It would have been snapped either August 23 or 24 and printed in a foreign newspaper--something major enough to end up in Managua. But I'd looked through reams--The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, The Independent, the Guardian--and found nothing.

One Saturday in late October, I headed to the Periodicals Room at the Library of Congress to search again. In an issue of La Prensa, I had read a story about how the hostage-taking had been a front-page story in Spain, so I wanted to check out their microfilm of El Pais.

And there, in the August 25, 1978 issue, was my mother. The picture wasn't what I'd imagined. In my mind, it had been front page, huge and tightly focused on her. In reality, it was a playing card-sized square on page two. She is in profile, wearing the black-and-white striped maternity dress I remember, and standing in line behind another mother-to-be. The caption reads, "Pregnant women after being freed." Both are drinking glasses of water. Nearby, watching over the line, stands a man with a rifle slung over his shoulder. Is he police? National Guard? On the blurry, scratched-up microfilm, it looked like Mom is holding her cup up to her mouth with both hands, like a child, and something about the loose gather of hair at the nape of her neck and her feet-together, stomach-forward stance made her look so vulnerable to me.

Amid the whir of the machines in the dark back corner of the Library of Congress' periodicals room, I said, "Oh my God," and realized that I had actually stopped expecting to find this picture.

A few days later, I took the Xeroxed copy of the page with me to my parents' house in Potomac. I wanted to see if showing it to my mother would make her more amenable to talking. But once again, my parents' response surprised me "That's not the right picture," my mother said. "It was a " -- she made a tight frame around her face with her fingers -- "a close-up, just of my face, like this, and I was drinking water."

She was describing exactly what I had imagined. Had she put that thought in my head? I did a few more searches afterward, but was never able to find the picture she described. And in the end, I had what I'd wanted -- finding the photo in El Pais already felt like a miracle.

A couple weeks later, I sat down to interview my parents yet again. It was my brother's birthday; yet he and my mother had somehow miscommunicated and we wouldn't be seeing him that day. My mom was prickly, disturbed.

"What is it I need to say?" she snapped at me, sitting down on the white couch in their living room.

"I want to talk about what happened at the National Palace," I said. And for the first time, we did.

My mother told me she was at her desk when shots and screaming broke out in the hallway around noon. A dozen or so guerillas had entered the building from doors in the East and West wings, disguised in army cadet uniforms. My mother's boss, Antonio Mora, the Minister of the Interior, was at a meeting, so she and the other secretaries scrambled into a small ante-room and barred the door. They stayed there until a hand jangled the knob and a voice ordered them to come out.

"They said if we didn't, they would throw a grenade in," she says. "So we came out, like this, hands up. And to have your hands up like that--that's really a feeling."

The group of hostages was lined up in two rows in Mora's office--the first in front of the windows, to serve as a human shield in case of a counter-attack, and the other further back. My mom was next to one of the young guerillas who was guarding them.

"I was angry," she says. "I kept asking him, What did they want? What were their demands? Because I knew that if they were asking that Somoza step down, we were dead. That wasn't going to happen."

Finally, a co-worker who was holding her hand gave it a gentle squeeze. Please be quiet. And she was.

The real targets of the take-over, the members of the Congress, were being held in their assembly hall. The guerillas were threatening to start executing them unless demands were met. NegotiationPass with Somoza had already begun. My father, who reported in to the president during the takeover, says Somoza's plan was always negotiation--never confrontation.

My mother stood in Mora's office for hours, contemplating what would happen. Managua is on an unstable geological fault line--the same one that had caused the country's disastrous earthquake in 1972, which razed the downtown and killed two of my mother's sisters. By coincidence, at seven o'clock that night, a strong tremor shook building. To my mother, this seemed a sign.

"I was sure I was going to die, but I came to peace with it," she says. "I thought, if I died, well, the baby would die with me. Your father, he would remarry. The only thing that really nagged at me was leaving you--you would have to grow up without me."

Finally, in the middle of the night, the secretaries were moved from their spot to an interior hallway. For my mother, this was the worst moment.

"That day, a young lieutenant had come to see the Minister," she says. "But [he] was running behind," she says. "I kept his schedule, I knew that there was a chance he wouldn't have time to meet. I could have told the lieutenant to leave, to reschedule for another day. But I thought I'd be able to fit him in. I told him to take a seat and wait. So he was there when the Sandinistas came."

When he heard the fighting, the lieutenant ran into the hallway and was shot. His body lay in the hall until shortly before the secretaries were brought to that very spot.

"There was so much blood," my mother says. "So much blood."

And she begins to cry, huge sobs, ripping out of her for a routine decision she'd made 30 years earlier.

My mother's memory was that she was held for two nights, but the record shows it was only one. The next day, the Sandinistas released approximately 300 people, mostly children and those with health issues, including pregnant women. Someone gave my mother a ride to Somoza's bunker, she says, where she found my father. Stoic until then, she finally broke down.

Neither she or my father remembers where I was all this time. For that, I had to ask Puddy Hamlin. They had come to collect me "for a sleep-over", she says, as soon as they heard what had happened at the Palace. They took me home the next day when they heard my mother had been released. Apparently, I never knew what was happening.

After hearing my mother's story, I checked it against the record. What she described was all in La Prensa. The earthquake, the move from the office to the hallway and, most importantly, the young soldier. The newpaper even records the secretaries' keening grief when they saw the blood.

I still had some questions I wanted my parents to answer. At the end of November, I called them again to try to get time for another interview. They were going out of town, and, on the night I'd planned for us to get together, had committed to dinner with some old Nicaraguan friends. Did I want to come along? my mother asked. I agreed.

We went to a French restaurant in Georgetown. When their friends arrived, they exclaimed over me and asked about my recent engagement to Rob.

Seeing my parents with them that night was seeing my parents released. They had a quickness, a lightness, I hadn't seen in months. And I could feel how much this other couple cared for me because I was my parents' daughter. It came to me then that these were four people who had survived things I couldn't even imagine, and had still been able to pick themselves up and rebuild, to the point where 25 years later they could find themselves poking fun at each other in a Georgetown restaurant.

At the end of the night, my mother asked if I wanted to go home with them, so I could ask my questions. I turned her down. I'd lost any further desire to drag her or my father into the past. Cast against what they'd endured, my petty resentments about having them recognize my side of the war, my suffering, seemed self-centered, more suited to the child I'd been than the adult I've become. The biggest gift I could give them was to let it go.

Sandy M. Fernandez is a Magazine editor.