The Wandering Jew

 Written by Luis José Castro Jeréz

   In the fields of Nicaragua, it was customary on Good Friday to enjoy the typical "spicy sardine of the Indian Moctezuma" with rice, fried beans, and boiled plantains, or the smell of a corn tortilla freshly taken off the griddle. People would savor a rich jícara of tiste, accompanied by the classic Holy Week dessert made with mangoes, jocotes, pieces of papaya, cinnamon, and cloves caramelized with several blocks of cane sugar. Everyone would sit and wait at three in the afternoon for the classic "cordonazo" — the wrath of Heaven with lightning and thunder at the moment Jesus expired on the Cross at Calvary. They would peer down the path to see the figure of the Wandering Jew pass by; that heartless cobbler who one afternoon denied Jesus a chair in his workshop to rest his weary body, and for that, he was condemned to wander the roads of the world until the arrival of the Final Judgment.

    To tell the truth, the few times I spent Holy Week days at the farm near Puerto Somoza, I never saw or heard anything extraordinary with lightning or thunder. However, from three in the afternoon on Good Friday, the wind would blow through the tops of the trees, producing notes from the branches that resembled moans. A whirlwind of wind seemed to shape the dry leaves and road dust into a multicolored human figure. This blended with the oppressive Holy Week steam rising from the earth's depths... Could it be that the legend of the Wandering Jew thus came to life on the lonely paths of the Pinolero mountains?