For several days Octavio was confused by the u in gu and perplexed by the tilde on ñ, never having noticed the accent before. She made him hiss to make an s and pinch his nostrils for n. She taught him to link his thoughts, to swap words around or join them together. He took sentences apart, weighed every syllable. He confused definite and indefinite articles, saw no difference between synonyms, and never managed to make the verb agree with its subject.
One morning, he was surprised to discover how simply the word mujer was spelt.
‘I expected a more difficult word for such an important person,’ he exclaimed.
For a long time afterwards he continued to roll the syllables of the word in his memory, moulding it to his own shape, his mind at once full and aware of all it was lacking.
When he managed to read a whole sentence straight through and was struck with the sudden realisation he had understood it, he felt a pressing urge to rename the world from its very beginnings. He felt somehow bound to a new land, part of the same fight, the same era. Happiness spun around him, and he spun with it. Each word resonated in his mouth like a promise.
His preference was for the lighter-sounding adjectives. He recognised in them the simplicity and tragedy of his own nature. He understood that grammar had traditions beyond its rules. And if he did not share every doubt with Venezuela, it was in order to avoid unnecessary complication, and not because he was afraid to do so.
He stopped cutting into his palm. He no longer filled the basin before he went out or prepared strips of cloth to tie round his hand. The gap had now been filled by the orchestra he heard every evening, an intoxicating whirl of music which he recreated at home later with the sobriety of a single instrument. For, as with women, all Octavio had known of words till then was their dying wave, the expectation that they would vanish as soon as they emerged from his mouth, like the line a sword draws through water. But now he was discovering he could hold on to the trace they left behind, blending the names of things and the things of love. In a single stroke, he could etch both his desire and the mark of that desire. Thirsty for learning as one thirsts for love, he never tired of mixing the two alphabets. There was something illegible in the time they spent together.
For several months, Octavio’s work within the brotherhood and his afternoons with Venezuela brought him a sense of fulfilment he had rarely known before.
Business was going so well at the church that it was sometimes hard to find space for new arrivals. If a medieval suit of armour was brought in and needed to be sold straight on, Don Octavio would make it gleam by frantically buffing the cuirass and brigandines, the hauberk and the rondels, the whole body from the helmet to the greaves. He would find himself making the same rubbing movements later under Venezuela’s stern gaze, when he got a syllable wrong and had to use the other end of the pencil to erase his crossings-out. If a table with legs representing fantastical creatures was received, he had to clean the glass with vinegar and lemon and remove traces of limescale with coarse salt; those creatures would reappear later in another beautiful setting, on the old illuminated maritime maps that Venezuela showed him and explained at length. Though inside the church he cleaned and polished, it was at Venezuela’s house that, without cloth or feather duster, by way of words alone, he made clear what had been murky, made newly appealing what had once been dull. Everything he achieved through his daily toil seemed to be elevated and sweetened in her company.
One night at the church, while tidying a bookshelf, he sat down in a faux-leather armchair that had been turned towards the wall, and opened one of the books on his lap. He turned to a page where an allegory of Literature, depicted as a tall woman in silk robes, stood pale and silent with a lyre in her hand before a stony-faced assembly.
He thought of Venezuela. It seemed impossible to him that Literature should look so unlike a real woman. Literature should hold its pen like a sword and stand amid the vast, uproarious community of men, staunchly defending the right to put names to objects, for she was shaped from the same clay and muck, the same absurdity, as those who served her. She should have loose hair, torn clothing and a heroic air, wear a machete in her belt or a shotgun over her shoulder. Literature should also represent those who did not read her, she should exist in the same way as air and water, and evolve constantly. As his mind wandered, he was overwhelmed by sleep and dozed off in the stony chill, alone and forgotten, with stuffed lambs gathered about him as if he were an angel.
‘Donkeys, gentlemen!’ cried Guerra. ‘Yes, long may the donkey be the protector of our art!’
Octavio woke with a start. He shuffled, hunched, towards the small group assembled around the altar.
‘To the donkey who has pulled the carts of great men, dragging their petty obsessions from place to place, who over the centuries has served as messenger, artisan, envoy, confidant and counsellor, who has moved whole libraries, who has shown that the mute servant is the one with most to tell. I once knew a man who hid three hundred gold coins in a donkey’s belly. Yes, long may the donkey be the protector of our art!’
Judging this to be sufficient by way of preamble, Guerra opened the tabernacle. He took out a key and passed it round the group.
‘This key opens the door to an apartment whose owners will soon receive an invitation to hear Berlioz’s Requiem at Teatro Teresa-Carreño. The Requiem is three hours long. I don’t wish to take any risks. We’ll stay in the apartment for an hour. We’re looking for a stone.’
‘A stone?’ El Negro objected.
Guerra slowly turned to face him.
‘This is not just any stone,’ he replied. ‘It’s a matter of politics.’
‘You can’t squeeze money out of a stone.’
‘Are you suggesting we take another vote?’
‘Not over something as crazy as this. I’ve got better things to do.’
Guerra stared long and hard at El Negro, then stepped up onto the altar and made an announcement that startled everyone present.
‘If you’ve got better things to do … then Octavio can take your place.’
Octavio looked up at Guerra in horror. A shiver ran through him and his heart felt as tight as a fist. Weakly, he tried to protest, stammering his excuses, but a rebellious scrum was forming in the nave which quickly got out of hand. Guerra faced the mob from the altar, waving his arms in panic as the gang of burglars surged towards him. From a distance, the scene strangely foreshadowed the one that would be seen a few days later under the roof of the Teresa-Carreño, as the conductor moved his arms with similar flourish to give his musicians the beat of the Requiem.
As the meeting descended into total chaos, Guerra declared the session closed. El Negro stormed out of the church crying tyranny.
‘This is no utopia,’ he shouted on his way out. ‘It’s a henhouse!’
Guerra calmly returned the key to the tabernacle. He glared at Octavio.
‘You’ll drive,’ he told him.
Octavio asked for the address.
‘It’s not far,’ replied Guerra, stepping down from the altar. ‘You follow the grassy tracks up the hill, keep to the right when you come to the petrol pump and bear left as soon as you see a broken traffic light. Go past the baseball pitch, keeping the little mango forest on your right. Take the very first diagonal turning onto a road with no name. It’s not the first building, or the second, but the one at the end, hidden behind the four tallest palm trees on the road.’
IX
A few days later Venezuela duly received two invitations for Berlioz’s Requiem. Without hesitation she asked Don Octavio to join her. He refused, offering no explanation.
Teatro Teresa-Carreño had put on a huge production: thirty-eight brass instruments and hundreds of strings, four orchestras with almost three hundred singers and a Russian tenor soloist who, a few days before his departure, gave a bayan performance to the schools of San Agustín. The 2,300 seats of the theatre were filled for a week. The orchestra pit below the stage was littered with scores
and music stands. It was dense with melody.
Whilst programmes were being handed out at the entrance of the theatre, outside the church, Guerra was distributing black canvas balaclavas that covered everything but the eyes. He got into the car singing the Dies Irae and, noticing the empty space where El Negro would have sat, remembered their falling out.
‘Better to lose a limb than to lose your soul,’ he sighed. ‘If it was the other way round, we’d all have turned to banditry, repeat offending or, worse, revolution.’
He threw one last glance at the church.
‘And to think all this began with a stolen apple.’
When they arrived at Venezuela’s apartment, the sky was red.
Octavio was the one who opened the door. He recognised the squeaky hinges and uneven floor tiles. The wall of coloured glass windows, the tapestries, the mahogany furniture: everything was in its place. The scent of honey and beeswax, the table he had bent over to write on, the tree out on the balcony were all familiar to him.
To Guerra’s surprise, Octavio did not feel his way along the walls but strode across the room to the pillar where the rock carving hung. But as he went to touch it, he heard a floorboard creak in the next room. Then nothing. Just a sense of something caught in the shadows like a prisoner. He lifted the stone and made for the front door. He was tiptoeing out when he heard another creak and a voice behind him suddenly said,
‘Put that down or I’ll shoot.’
Guerra just managed to hide behind the door. Don Octavio spun on his heels. Venezuela was standing a few metres behind him holding a beaten-up old gun, wearing an iridescent dress, perfumed and made-up as if about to go out. Finding herself overwhelmed with tiredness as she so often was, she had decided to lie down for a few minutes before leaving for the concert. She had been asleep for an hour.
Don Octavio put the stone down. The balaclava kept his face hidden. He stood up to his full height and the sheer size of him made Venezuela quake. She adjusted her aim.
‘You can’t squeeze money out of a stone. What do you want, Señor?’
Don Octavio said nothing. Before now, he had only known her to speak softly and sensitively, uttering words of affection. Now the look in her eyes alarmed him. She was afraid.
‘What you are doing, Señor, is undermining a country’s foundations,’ she said, her throat tight with both fear and anger. ‘Steal this stone and you steal them all. Then how do you expect roads to be built?’
He said nothing for some time, sensing himself discovered. He knew he would never be able to come back to Venezuela’s home. But he also knew he could never return to the church. Guerra had already left. And there, stripped of all identity, doubly abandoned, Octavio understood that he was signing a pact with exile. Slowly repeating a gesture he had been making all his life, he raised his hand and murmured, ‘That’s how you conjugate the verb to steal.’
The look of horror on Venezuela’s face was as intense as the look of shame on Octavio’s. Her legs wobbled. She gently put the gun down, keeping her eyes on him.
‘Octavio?’ she asked, her voice catching in her throat.
The air encircled them, trapping them as if between the pages of a book. Octavio did not remove his balaclava. They stared at each other, not seeing. Slowly, with no haste or drama, he turned away and left Venezuela behind him, perhaps for the last time. A void had opened up like a landscape before them, between them, a chasm that was already closing over.
Across town, the final notes of a requiem had just been played.
X
Don Octavio left the barrio in the middle of the night. He took the road west in a truck with rosaries hanging from the rear-view mirror and got off at a building site near Maracay.
For a few bolivars, he carried sacks of sand, limewashed walls, ground cement, mixed plaster and repointed brickwork. He spent broken nights inside huts, was often hungry and felt he was going mad. The dust irritated his eyes. He worked hard and kept out of trouble, and soon people were asking him to decorate the front of their houses. He would stand on a stepladder to paint window grilles and external beams with weeds growing out of their cracks. All he was given to eat were cold arepas, buttered with his finger.
He took the path between Henri-Pittier National Park and Lake Valencia. His height got him noticed. Offers were made to him – he refused them all, steering clear of petty criminals and smugglers, and preferring to wander alone.
He passed through the villages of Aragua, which had grown up around the mission stations and the first tobacco plantations. Now indigo, sugar cane and cotton were sown there. In thick forest, he lay down on his stomach and drank from the stream. In glades, he stole malanga and yams. One day he saw a ribbon of smoke in the distance – a cabin for road-menders, perhaps, or an old sugar mill, and he heard Joropo tunes being sung. Men were tending the soil, pressing olives and crushing sugar cane in old wooden casks.
Here Octavio spent months working all hours for two Colombian brothers, oiling machinery and sometimes pulling the levers himself. At the end of each day, the brothers would count the piles of crushed sugar cane and calculate his pay at a piece rate. They let him sleep inside a grain store, but sleep wouldn’t come.
He took the road towards Valencia and sometimes, for want of work, he was forced to take handouts. The roads were ablaze with colour and voices when the Virgin was carried in a procession around the old coffee fincas. Members of the religious brotherhoods were allowed to ask for alms. They went from door to door with a crucifix and a begging bowl, swapping coins for novenas. Octavio spent two days picking up the money that had fallen from their cassocks and sweeping up the chains and trinkets that lay on the ground. He begged for the cassavas left on altarpieces. He would wait for closing time at eating places, and once, in the backyard of a restaurant, he dined on leftover yucca from customers’ plates, as a girl washed tablecloths next to him.
His skin took on a sandy hue, as if he had been cut from a block of quartz. He never told his story. He avoided those who liked to chat, preferring the company of partridges and wood pigeons in the vast shadow of the rain trees. At dawn, he roamed the streets hoping for a bit of good luck. At dusk, he wearily took any shelter offered to him out of charity. He wandered like an idle dreamer, but his nights were dreamless.
One morning, he showed a child how to write his name in the sand with a nail. They were in a wild garden where little petals filled the air like ocean spray, surrounded by flowering bushes and churned-up earth. The child had been raised on cow’s milk and showed Octavio how he suckled straight from the udder and roamed the pastures without startling the beast.
For a time, the two of them were a team. In the shade of the painted houses, they stole food put out on windowsills in saucers for wild parrots. The child was quick and wily. He had a straight nose and yellow eyes, and there was something untamed about him. He climbed telegraph poles, cut the cables and collected the copper parts. He crushed beer cans under his heels and sold them on to a smelter. In bakeries, while Octavio distracted the shopkeepers’ attention, the boy would stick his finger into the vats of treacle and snaffle marzipan fruits. His pockets always bore the black stain of crushed berries.
Hunger led them into graveyards. They foraged inside tombs, plundering in the darkness of vaults, finding little bronze crosses pinned to rags, mother-of-pearl rosaries and belts embellished with glass beads. Once they found a little Yanomami statue that had been turned into a lectern, holding a Bible whose pages had been devoured by vermin. They became so destitute that the moral high ground sank to their level.
Like two drunken insects, they lived for months deep in the woods of Tacarigua. While Octavio washed his clothes using guanacaste seeds, the child got lost among the bamboo, lay down and wallowed in the muddy grass and stuffed himself with green bananas until he was sick. He was more interested in flowers than people, made bouquets and wreaths, whittled canes. He sometimes disappeared for four days at a time. One night he ventured deep into the
forest and never came back. He made sure to leave no trace behind him.
The separation left Don Octavio with a taste of sap and illusion. He wondered if the child had been a figment of his imagination and deep inside he sensed the bitter beauty of a world he was destined never to understand.
Alone again, he crossed the Carabobo region, travelling in the back of pick-up trucks. He helped himself to the contents of crates, ripping into watermelons with his teeth and stealing purple passion fruit wrapped in hemp. As he moved west, the grass became higher. The mountain that ran between Cabo Codera and Puerto Cabello was like an enormous grey-green muscle separating land from sea, without coves or valleys.
He reached the forests of San Esteban where the swamp led into clusters of mangroves that broke the sea up into little lagoons. Blue cranes gathered here to begin their migration towards other wetlands. Octavio headed deeper into an area of thick tree cover. The darkness beneath the canopy was like a different expression of light. He came across an old derelict building and a small patch of pasture where black donkeys came to graze.
The sandbox trees had been cut in some places: the sap was used to treat snake bites. A row of mangrove and gum trees infested with red spider mite led down to a torrent stretching twenty metres across, a tumult of foam and rocks creating an endless roar. The tropical rains had submerged the banks and made the water deep. A man could not have stood up in it.
Walls of greenery ran down both sides of the river. Don Octavio dipped his foot into the water and it bit into his ankle. He picked up a heavy branch, most likely torn from an acacia in a storm, and threw it into the water, where it spun, rebounded between the rocks, and disappeared under banks of flowering aloe.
Octavio's Journey Page 4