It is not living in misery that causes a person to be miserable, but the inability to describe it. For Octavio, this meant he carried a rage within him that ran right through his history, a legacy of anger. Like him, his father used to cut his hand. He could not think of ink without associating it with the metallic taste of blood. He had his father’s face, more like marble, wood or stone than a mask, impenetrable as a dense forest. His features were no different from those of any peasant: harsh and rough, with tanned skin and eyebrows as thick as ivy. A hard and shapeless lump of clay, sealed on every side.
Yet in spite of the marks of weariness and age, he did not cut too shabby a figure. He was noticeably taller and broader than the average man. His body might have been hewn from a tree trunk; his heart could beat for a hundred years. He was shaped like a giant with a thick neck, solid thighs, powerful shoulders and a back that was always slightly arched, as if he were carrying an invisible weight. He was strong enough to bring a young ox to its knees simply by holding on to its horns. He did not seem encumbered by his own bulk, but rather seemed to float within it, his movements graceful and fluid, a curious mixture of feather-light and firm. There was an arrogance to his vitality in that it took up every space, leaving no room for anything else. To see him was to be presented with a picture of a whole land of mangoes and battles.
Like a monster or a genie, Octavio was destined to leave the world without descendants. His robustness and passion for life were inherited from a freedom he could pass on to no one else. He was one of those men who, like trees, must die standing up.
IV
The day the young doctor came back to see Don Octavio, a flag was raised in the middle of the slum to show that illiteracy had been eradicated, like a disease. Centres of adult education were set up in disused school wings. Leaflets were distributed outside shops. Posters were put up. A printer opened his factory to teach people how to fold and sew sheets of paper with cotton thread and corrugated cardboard to make their own notebooks. After six thousand years of existence, in some kitchens, writing was being used for the first time to keep a note of spending and recipes.
‘The illiterate are now breaking their silence like plague victims,’ Alberto Perezzo observed, looking out of Octavio’s window at the flag. ‘Everywhere you look, they’re eager to show their wounds. Yesterday, a gardener was saying he once killed a whole flowerbed because he hadn’t been able to tell the difference between weedkiller and fertiliser.’
Don Octavio had already bandaged his hand. He watched the doctor writing the prescription on his pad. The doctor recounted the stories he had been told on his visits, the notes left on his floor, the thank-you letters written in the clumsy and hesitant hand of a first attempt. He held his pen in midair to avoid making a blot.
‘Only a couple of days ago, just a few houses down from here, a woman admitted she’d never been able to read the names of the bus stops. She’d spent thirty years counting the stops by moving dried beans from one pocket to the other. Can you imagine, Octavio? Thirty years counting beans!’
As he handed Octavio the prescription, he noticed the bandaged hand he was holding behind his back.
‘What happened there?’ he asked.
‘Just a scratch,’ replied Octavio.
‘Do you want me to look at it?’
‘No need, Doctor.’
The doctor smiled and did not ask again. The sun was going down. The chemist’s was still open. It had rained and the route down through the narrow streets and steps would be slippery; better to skirt the slum and go through the surrounding fields. Octavio walked with the doctor as far as the church, then he took the old dirt track that ran behind the houses.
The earth was black, heavy, greasy. Whole hectares of dense, fertile fallow land were drying in the breeze. In the soil, Octavio read the traces of a bird from its tracks, a mouse from its trail of debris, and a mule from the impression of its hooves. He could follow the path a horse had taken from meadow to stable. Further on, among the pine trees, the ferns had been flattened by couples lying down to make love. Names had been carved into beech bark and the huge, strange-looking canopies of the rain trees cast shadows over the pastures. Swept away by the wind, drawings in the sand were like a return to the first art, the first engraving or knotted rope. A return to a world in which you showed what you meant by pointing, and counted the hours by the movement of the light.
When Octavio arrived at the chemist’s, he put the prescription down on the counter. The chemist picked it up and eyed it with suspicion.
‘I can’t make out the last word,’ she said eventually.
Don Octavio apologised for not having brought his glasses; he could not read such tiny handwriting without them. She replied that she could not sell him a medicine without being able to read what it was called.
‘I’m not trying to trick you,’ Octavio said softly. ‘I just want to buy what’s on this bit of paper.’
They looked at one another, and each discovered in the other’s eyes the same dark passageways, the same hovels, the temperamental stove in the corner, the filthy beds pushed close together, the tussles and curses.
‘I can’t make out the last word,’ she concluded curtly in an effort to deny their common roots.
Don Octavio squirmed. He was about to respond when a woman sitting nearby got to her feet. She took the prescription out of the chemist’s hands and, in a clear voice that was made for the theatre, read right down to the doctor’s signature. The chemist scowled and disappeared into the back room.
The woman might have been older than him, but her elegance and class made her seem more youthful.
‘People can no longer read,’ she said. ‘The times we’re living in!’
Don Octavio said nothing. Where he lived, men were not talkative by nature. Discussions were brief and to the point – characterised, in fact, by a lack of discussion.
‘Do you sleep on your front?’ she asked abruptly, turning to face him.
Before he had a chance to respond, she carried on.
‘You shouldn’t. Sleeping on your front puts unnecessary pressure on the vital organs – the stomach, liver and intestines. How are your intestines, by the way?’
‘Fine, I think.’
‘Señor,’ she said with great solemnity, ‘sleeping on your front can cause diabetes.’
Then, moving on seamlessly, she began telling him how important it was to drink plenty of water during the day to avoid cramp in the legs, but to stop in the evening in order to avoid accumulating excess fluids. She personally relied on pain-relief gels, incense and an array of eye masks to help her sleep. She avoided reading stories with thrilling plots or heated dialogue before bed. Instead, she sought out descriptions of the countryside, and always aimed to drift off on a metaphor.
Octavio watched this woman who was opening her heart to the cold clarity of his own. He studied her fine nose and thin lips. There was as much spirit as there was solitude about her.
He timidly asked her name.
She replied in a powerful voice, as if addressing an entire people.
‘Yo me llamo Venezuela.’
V
Venezuela suffered from acute insomnia, which meant that for the past twenty years she had had to nap at odd times of the day. She had grown used to irregular bedtimes, sometimes eating in bed and getting up in the middle of the night to roam her apartment. The doctor advised her to stop taking her sleeping pills. Out of embarrassment, she began avoiding pharmacies where she might be recognised and ventured out to the little chemists’ shops in the suburbs where she could buy what she needed unnoticed amid the anonymity of the crowd.
Octavio offered to buy the pills for her, to save her the trip out to the barrio. They agreed to meet at Bellas Artes, near the Teatro Teresa-Carreño on Plaza de los Museos, in a little café tucked away beneath an arbour. He waited for her for half an hour, clutching the chemist’s bag and watching students kissing among the bamboos in Parque Los Caobos. It was a clear da
y without a trace of cloud.
As soon as she appeared, red-faced from having scurried along to meet him, he forgot she had kept him waiting. They both smiled at the thought of a coffee. They chose a table in the shade, far from the other customers. She was wearing a pale flowery scarf and earrings shaped like cocoa beans. She kept some amber beads tucked inside a silk pouch around her neck, claiming they had antibacterial properties. She gave off a vegetal aroma, as if she had emerged from loose, damp earth. Don Octavio smelt of talc and bath soap. He carried the scent of a half-century of silence.
A notice on a slate read: ‘No coffee or lemonade today.’
Octavio called the waiter over and asked for two coffees. The waiter said nothing but pointed wearily at the sign.
‘In that case,’ he said, ‘we’ll have two lemonades.’
The waiter raised his eyebrows. Octavio recognised the look: in the eyes of men, all illiterate people are alike. Venezuela stepped in.
‘Our eyesight’s not what it used to be, hijo,’ she said to the waiter.
She turned to Octavio.
‘I know a place where nobody writes on slates.’
Then, scowling at everyone in sight, she stood up and took him by the arm.
‘They serve coffee in the square.’
They walked together up Avenida México, passing the record market near Brion Bridge. On the other side of Avenida Bolívar, construction had begun on the towers in Parque Central. The dust from the building site made Venezuela sneeze. She began talking about the link between inhaling carbon dioxide and developing lung disease, and was still talking at Plaza La Candelaria.
They sat against the wall of the basilica. On the other side of the square, six old ladies in flowery blue dresses were sitting on plastic stools, waving fringed fans and looking over at Octavio and Venezuela. The hairstyles the old maids wore had once been fashionable. They still observed the customs of an earlier time, speaking in proverbs and singing widows’ waltzes, and had the strange habit of adjusting their hair before picking up the phone. In these white tropical baroque surroundings, they sold figurines of saints and apostles, along with plastic reliquary statues on little reredos.
Venezuela appeared to have mixed feelings about religion. She railed against the commercialisation of faith and the wealth of the Church, and then bought – at a vastly inflated price – two votive candles to light in memory of deceased loved ones.
‘You never know,’ she sighed.
From that point on, she didn’t stop talking.
She liked her job, hated spending money, and had many whims. She was a woman of healthy, sometimes bold opinions, yet believed in fated encounters. Several times she stopped abruptly in the middle of the road to tell the story of a particular building, half of which she knew, the rest she made up.
She explained that her father had named her Venezuela in a burst of patriotism. The area she had grown up in was bordered by oil fields, strung together like a beaded necklace. There in Maracaibo in western Venezuela, it was so hot you could fry eggs on car bonnets. In the town squares, men in ties dozed beneath the mangroves while the women stood, flagging, breathless, seeking shade beneath telegraph poles. At certain times of day, the air was so heavy that flies, lacking the energy to fly away, submitted to swatting instead. Everything – shops, schools, bazaars, lottery stalls – closed a little before midday and did not reopen until around four when the shadows began to lengthen.
‘That’s how Maracaibo came to be known as the coldest city in the world,’ she explained. ‘There wasn’t a single place that wasn’t cooled by fans, air-conditioning or cooling units. That’s why on the day the dictatorship fell, on 23 January 1958, and the country was liberated with weapons that were hot from the afternoon sun, everyone waited until the evening to join the revolution.’
She was told she had the makings of a good actress and went to live in Caracas. She played parts in vaudeville farces, performed in Greek tragedies, and even appeared at the Teatro Nacional singing zarzuelas. To prove it, she asked Octavio to choose one at random. He was flummoxed. All he knew of theatre was the word itself.
Eventually, she felt the need to make her situation clear.
‘I’ve never married. When you spend your life being listened to, you end up judging men by their silence. And since no man can keep his mouth shut for long …’
And so she had gone through life as one crosses a desert: alone, but with great poise, dignity and the composure of a woman used to playing out her existence under the gaze of men.
Octavio listened, staring into space, feeling his heart swell. Every now and then he would ask a brief question before withdrawing into himself again. Everything sounded different in this woman’s voice, had a resonance he had never encountered before. She would answer him playfully, revelling in the madness of walking arm in arm through the centre of town with an illiterate stranger. It was a means of defying – but not denying – the world. And although well past the age of burning desires, each of them sensed a flicker of those early emotions being rekindled in the other. Together they let themselves be drowned in the intoxication of the moment, one filling her imagination, the other dismantling the void inside him.
Octavio let himself be led to Plaza Bolívar, which was full of children and black squirrels. Venezuela said the café she had in mind was close by, but when they arrived outside, the shutters were down. Taking the matter in hand, she exclaimed, ‘Why don’t we have coffee at my place?’
Octavio made an enigmatic gesture suggesting both gratitude and refusal. Not knowing how to respond, he mumbled his agreement.
*
Venezuela’s apartment consisted of one large, lofty room with light pouring through floor-to-ceiling windows onto coloured tiles. There were mahogany armchairs and tapestry wing-back chairs and landscape paintings on the walls. A breeze slipped in through an open window, heavy with noises and smells.
She handed Octavio a coffee sweetened with honey. Given the time of day, she opted for tea instead.
‘Coffee rattles the nerves, and restless nights can cause strokes.’
She had stuck a sheet of paper on the side of a pillar on which she noted down, night after night, the time at which she had begun to feel sleepy, how she had felt upon waking, and the effects of caffeine.
‘See how much I’ve improved. After a bad night, I make myself a plantain tea in the morning, always checking the leaves haven’t turned brown. After lunch, I’ll have agave syrup and, if it’s very hot, half a glass of lemonade. Sometimes, before it gets late, I rinse my eyes with a little rose water or dragon-tree sap and, if I’m in a lot of pain, I rub my temples with grapeseed oil.’
Octavio had stopped listening. His eye had been drawn to a picture, or rather a stone, a long tablet with strange markings which looked like reptiles, crocodiles or other animals, along with a series of perfectly drawn circles, some floating alone, others joined in a neat spiral.
‘What’s this?’ he asked.
‘They’re indigenous hieroglyphics,’ replied Venezuela. ‘You see them in the forests of San Esteban, on the Campanero stone.’
Don Octavio spent a long time looking at these landscapes of chalk and rock, where nothing resembled man, but nonetheless belonged to him.
‘Some say they were discovered by the German painter Antonio Goering,’ Venezuela went on, ‘others that it was Lope de Aguirre’s soldiers, or Villegas, before he founded Borburata.’
‘What do they mean?’
‘I don’t know. There are some amazing interpretations in Aristide Rojas’s books. They may be to do with tribal feuds among the communities of Lake Valencia, between the Tacariguas and the Araguas. Or they could simply be a way of expressing the natural world.’
Octavio traced the lines with his finger, trying to decipher them. He saw in the jumbled marks of the stone the human tissue of the barrio where he lived, a world freshly born out of nothingness. The flavour of language began with guava, maize and araguaney.
Venezuela poured him a little more coffee and picked up the saucer of honey.
‘It only takes a few strokes to write what you mean,’ she said. ‘For example …’
She dipped her lips in the honey before pressing them against a sheet of blank paper. The trace of two amber-coloured arcs was left behind.
‘See … that’s how you write the word “kiss”.’
She pointed to a tree by the entrance of the building.
‘Look,’ she said, no longer using the polite form of address.
On one of its branches, where the wood was bent like an elbow, Octavio saw two birds singing as they built their nest in the nook.
She whispered, ‘And that’s how you conjugate the verb “to love”.’
Without knowing exactly what love was, Octavio turned to her, took her face in his hands and kissed her. All the words on her lips were suddenly reduced to this kiss, this tremor, becoming as mute as flesh. Octavio kept his mouth pressed to hers for a long while, as if to leave his mark.
Venezuela pulled back and shook her head. She was afraid of going too far. The same gulf had always stood between her and men. This was not about Octavio’s kiss. It was a distance prescribed by nature. But he kissed her again, and his passion surprised her. She felt a sudden urge to be marooned with him. They were unlike one another in every respect. And yet perhaps, without knowing it, she was deciphering an unknown alphabet beside him, a primordial promise, like the first writing on stone, where everything seems to begin.
VI
Closed since the plague years, the church of San Pablo del Limón had long stood derelict. Bricks had been thrown through the stained-glass windows and there was graffiti on the walls. All that was left of the tilework was a few loose stones overgrown with brambles. Time had warped the building’s frame and the paving around the entrance had been lifted by tree roots.
Octavio's Journey Page 2