There is a word from Central American Spanish that has been echoing in Sergio Ramírez’s mind these days. Cabanga — a warm, aching sorrow tied to the geography of the isthmus where he was born. Cabanga arrives when the afternoon suddenly drops over the clay rooftops and the crowns of wild trees, when the golden light catches the enormous tropical flowers and sways in step with the breezes off the Great Lake. And with it comes absence — forced, in his case: the absence of Nicaragua, a country that will not let him return. A country — with its melodic accent that drops its S’s, collapses its words, sounds like a drumbeat or a heavy raindrop, addresses others as vos, stresses its verbs, and has an audible tilde — that seems to whisper to him: “Come back, come home.”

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