Straight with Many Limes

Flor de Cana is Nicaraguan rum.

I’m not a connoisseur of rum. I only drink this rum. Because it is Nicaraguan.

I remember being in Managua, sitting in the courtyard of Casa Bolonia, a squat, sprawling hotel where plywood had been used to make two rooms out of one. In the room where I was staying, half the air conditioner was in my room and the other half, with the controls, was in the room next door.

It was 1988.

I had traveled to Managua with my 15-year old daughter to fetch a little boy who would become my son and her brother. We traveled with a small group who had come to Nicaragua for other reasons but we were together like relatives there because it was foreign and risky. At night, the city was dark and walking was dangerous, not because of people but because of massive holes in the pavement. You never knew where they were, the holes.

It was very hot, thick hot, dripping all the time, and it rained hard every afternoon. By the time night came, we only wanted to drink so we would sit in the courtyard with our friends and the new boy on our laps, and we would talk and laugh about the day and gaze at the new bottle of Flor de Cana on the wrought iron table.

We had tried to find Coke all day but there seemed to be none in the city. In days prior, we’d bought Coke from vendors who gave it to us in plastic bags tied at the top with a twist tie. This is how the Coke came, I don’t remember why.

The trick was to bite a small hole in the corner of the bag and drink the Coke that way. It was chancy, the Coke being likely to run down one’s arm, but the heat made trying worth the effort. So we yearned for a bag of Coke to have with our rum since drinking rum straight seemed extreme or at least something one wouldn’t do in front of one’s daughter, especially with a new son. It appeared all was lost for our rum drinking.

While we puzzled over this, the Nicaraguan boyfriend of a woman in our group, a man who had been a soldier in the Sandinista Army, fought in the jungles up in the mountains, and often carried his knife in his teeth to keep his hands free, stood up and announced we would have limes for our rum! And he pointed to the lime tree in the middle of the courtyard, smiling with glee at the dozens of limes hanging ripe. He picked dozens of limes, slashing each one open on the ceramic tile of the table top.

So we squeezed lime after lime in our plastic cups and poured in the Flor de Cana and the drink was tart, so tart it made our eyes water, but better than anything I had ever drunk. So I think of that every time I unscrew the lid of my bottle of Flor de Cana – that night thirty years ago with the heat and the rum and the limes. All the limes.