The Shopkeeper’s Son: From Law School to Writing, a Story of Fulfillment

The classroom became depopulated, because many were forced to return to their villages, their hopes defeated. And, in those times of turmoil, the overthrow of Batista in Cuba encouraged the overthrow of the Somozas, and the focus of resistance and protest was the university. A few weeks after the courses began, I survived a massacre perpetrated by the dictatorship’s army against a student demonstration, in which I participated, on July 23, 1959; And seeing death up close at the age of 17, because they killed four university students, two of them my classmates on the bench, forged my convictions in one fell swoop, and shaped my ideals.

And it also happened that I became a writer. In 1963, a year before graduating, I published my first short stories in a small book, and I went to Masatepe to give it to my father, rather than my law degree, fearful of his reaction, because if I wanted a profitable profession for myself, and of prestige, of which to feel proud, that of a writer was not so in Nicaragua at that time. In today’s world, it is also a dangerous job, which can lead you to jail, or exile, or make you stateless, that’s already been seen.

Now I see him flash in my memory that Saturday afternoon, sitting in his rocking chair in a corner of the store. He takes the glasses out of the case, and goes through the pages of my book. Then he looks up, and he says, “Well, now you have to write a novel.” Far from any reproach, there was pride in his words. It was the endearing complicity of an illiterate shopkeeper with a boy who, rather than a lawyer, wants to be a writer at all costs. For him a story was a first step that should lead to a higher one, that of the novel. I have learned that these are two different genres, each with its own degree of difficulty, but his was only a voice of encouragement.

The following year I took my public exam to obtain a law degree at the university, and my father was present at the graduation ceremony, when I also received the gold medal as the best student of the career, which he kept until his death. And in Masatepe he made Eslava’s Tedeum sing in the parish church, my uncles in front of their music stands with their instruments, and he took shelves and display cases out of the store to turn it into the hall of the party to which he invited half the town.

I had fulfilled my commitment to him, although not completely, because I never set up my law office, nor did I open my notary protocol, nor did I ever litigate in court, nor did I hold any arguments in court. He had not been born for the trade.

My father died in 1981, at an age that I have now surpassed, and I have remembered him when the faithful and helpful Supreme Court of Justice of Nicaragua has stripped me of something that I owe only to him, my title as lawyer and notary. It is as if in that resolution full of gibberish, in which, after ordering the annulment of my degree, they order me to return within the term of the distance under penalty of law, my lawyer stamps, which I never had, and my protocol of notary, which I never got to open, they will try to erase the dreams of the shopkeeper who wanted to see his son a lawyer, the first with a university degree among his 56 cousins.

But between him and me, everything is safe.