ritánico Colborth Salajar, a roundish Miskito man in his mid-40s, remembers when he first went diving. "I was just a young boy, maybe 10. We were free divers, just held our breath. All the boys went for turtles. This is our national dish, the turtle. When I got older, I learned how to really catch a turtle, how get him around the back, pull his head up, drive your knife into his neck. But we were just boys then, and a turtle weighs a hundred kilos. We'd get on his back, hold on, and it would be like flying.
"There were so many lobsters then, they were everywhere," Británico recalls of the days before scuba tanks came to the coast and the export industry started up in earnest. "You could walk in from the beach and pick them out of the surf. At night their antennas cut through the water in the moonlight. We caught lobsters the way they do now, with a barilla. It has two sides, one with a hook, the other pointed. You use the hook to get the lobster from his hole in the reef, turn him over with your hand, and stab him through the chest with the pointed side so he stops struggling.
"I did this for 17 years altogether. I worked for Jorge Morgan, others too, until 1992, when I died."
It was the golpe, Británico says. "I was in a coma when I came out of the water. Everyone thought I was dead. But I could see and hear. I heard my mother crying, ordering my coffin to the house. Then I felt myself hovering above my own body. Someone was with me. I thought it must be the Liwa, the Mermaid. But I saw that it was Jesus and I said, 'Father, I will serve you.' Then I returned to my body and I woke up."
From that point on, Británico has been an itinerant preacher, traveling the countryside telling other divers of his revelation. "I went around Corn Island, to Bluefields, to say it was not the Mermaid who would protect them. Jesus was the Savior. To know him they would have to be born again, like me." Eventually, however, Británico's diving injuries made it impossible for him to travel. He went back to Corn Island and started his church.
"It is right out there," he says, pointing to the sheer pink curtains fluttering over the window frame of his shantytown home. The first thing he did when he built his church was take one of his old dive tanks and suspend it from a tree branch. This became the church bell, a typical practice throughout the coast. Británico preached his own mystic gospel in his cinderblock church for several years until his sickness rendered him immobile.
"For three years now I have been in this bed," he says, removing the blanket wrapped around his waist to reveal that his left leg has been amputated above the knee. Paralyzed limbs are easily injured, with even small cuts sometimes leading to virulent infections and gangrene, so surgeries like Británico's are not uncommon on the coast. "This buzoman sickness is eating me, every day another bite," he says.
"But I am not unhappy," Británico continues, unfurling a dreamy, unexpected smile, as someone up the hill starts hitting his old tank with a hammer, the clang resounding through the preacher's house. "Because every moment I am so much closer to heaven."
Not all the buzomen, however, are so uncomplaining. As Iz points out, the Miskitos have always been hunters and warriors. Often thought of as ornery xenophobes by the would-be cosmopolitans of the Pacific Coast, the Miskitos hated Somoza. Ditto the Sandinistas. When the revolutionaries arrived from Managua with notions of a centrally planned utopia, many Miskitos signed up with the Ronald Reagan-backed contra forces. If their enemy's enemy was not quite their friend, at least he was handing out plenty of M-16s. Even today, tell a local you are American and he will snicker and say, with no small irony, "Ollie North, mi campeón."
Miskitos cherish their reputation for macho stubbornness, and buzos often carry bravado to the extreme. Some young divers consider coming up from 150 feet with a punctured, bleeding eardrum a rite of passage. For every bent buzo, crippled on the beach, there is another guy banging on his chest as if invincible, claiming he went through 22 tanks just that day.
"When I was young, I had no fear," says John Wayne Taylor. He stands slumped over a dented metal walker in front of his small wooden house on one of the back alleyways of Puerto Cabezas. He is 27 years old. Throughout the town, in tough, hardscrabble bars like the Midnight and the Atlantic, there were buzos calling themselves Elvis Presley, George Bush, Bing Crosby, Plastic Man, Michael Jordan, M.C. Hammer, and, in one rumored case, Adolf Hitler. People change their names all the time, says John Wayne Taylor. Sometimes it depends on which comic books you've read and which pirated videotape you've seen most recently.
Life on the boats was difficult, John Wayne says, with a mixture of loathing and nostalgia. An 80-foot-long boat usually carries at least 75 people. This includes perhaps 30 divers and a like number of cayuqueros who paddle the canoes that leave the mother ship to hunt the lobsters. Divers and cayuqueros sleep in large communal hammocks. During storms everyone throws up on each other.
But there are rewards. A smart, skilled buzo can make a decent living, at least for a while. Pay is variable, depending on the catch. A box of lobster tails weighing 100 pounds usually sells for $10 to $12 a pound wholesale. The sacabuzo, captain, and fish processors take their cut off the top. The buzo gets what's left over, maybe $2 a pound. Working 10 hours a day in the water, the seal of his Lloyd Bridges Sea Hunt mask leaking, breathing stale air from outmoded tanks, a buzo can clear $300 for his 12-day shift. Once back on land, the diver spends most of his money in stores often run by the same people who own the boats. After a week or so, it's time to find another boat.
Still, John Wayne says he was not unhappy as a diver. For years he was a top hand, a stud, el gran buzo. No one got more bottom time out of a tank. True, horrible things happened. Sometimes divers would get bent in the first few days of the journey and be left to suffer on deck rather than taken ashore for treatment. There was a case of a hurt buzo who suddenly disappeared one night. Everyone assumed he had been thrown overboard by the captain so he wouldn't distract the others with his groans. These were all sad things, John Wayne says, but he accepted them as "the buzo life."
Then, in late 2000, John Wayne got sick. Afflicted by a gas embolism, there is little chance he will ever walk again. As a rule, the lobster industry offers no insurance, often making divers sign contracts freeing their employer from liability in case of accident. However, as befitting his top buzo status, John Wayne was deemed entitled to two years of compensation at 2,400 córdobas -- about $150 -- a month. The next payment would be his last, which made him feel "desperate."
John Wayne would eventually suffer even greater humiliation, said several men standing around the small compound in front of his house. The problem was, he was married to one of the most beautiful women in a town of often startlingly beautiful women. John Wayne's wife, fetchingly outfitted in a frilly turquoise top and tight gray miniskirt, was selling batteries and soft drinks behind the counter of a small makeshift store set up in their front yard. This income would sustain the family for a while. But sooner or later, people said, John Wayne's wife would leave him.
Eyes flashing, still very handsome, John Wayne watched his wife's every move. When two younger men approached and began laughing with her, John Wayne gripped his walker tightly and maneuvered himself between them, shooting hard looks their way. The men departed. But, as one of John Wayne's friends noted, they'd be back.
