So as not to forget those impossible trees that sprouted in my dreams, I drew them in my Caribe sketch pad with wax crayons, choosing the pink and violet colors I found in my box of twenty-four. I used the sharpener to make resin shavings and rubbed those shavings against the paper with my fingertips, giving my grubs a halo effect. I could spend hours on each drawing. I created them with almost as much devotion as when I nibbled and sucked at the sour and veiny plums that to this day are fixed in my memory.
That tree at the Falcón guesthouse was my territory. I felt free on its lonely branch, after climbing it like a monkey. That part of my childhood had nothing in common with the fearful city where I grew up and that, as the years went on, became a jumble of fences and locks. I liked Caracas, but I preferred the sugarcane-and-mosquito days of Ocumare to the city’s dirty pavement, which was always strewn with rotten oranges and stained with engine oil. In Ocumare, everything was different.
The sea redeemed and remedied, swallowed bodies and spat them out. It intermingled with everything that crossed its path, like the Ocumare River, which to this day flows into the ocean, pushing at the salt with its fresh water. On the shore grew the sea grape trees with their scant berries that my mother would use to make beauty-queen tiaras for me, while I daydreamed, hidden, my earrings made of pearly caterpillars, of the metamorphosis the plums underwent when they crossed the membrane of reality.
I HEARD GUNSHOTS. Like I had the day before, and the one before that, and the one before that. A gush of dirty water and lead that separated my mother’s burial from the days that followed. At my desk by the window in my bedroom, I noticed that the apartments in the neighboring buildings were dark. It wasn’t unusual for the electricity to go out across the city, but there was electricity at my place yet not elsewhere, and that was strange. Something’s happening, I thought. I switched off the lamp. Sharp blows started up at Ramona and Carmelo’s place, one floor above. Furniture colliding. Chairs and tables being dragged from one spot to another. I picked up the phone and dialed. Nobody answered. Outside, the night and the confusion worked their own curfew. Venezuela was living through dark days, probably the worst since the Federal War.
A robbery, I thought, but how could that be when nobody had raised their voice? I peered out of the living-room window. A Dumpster was ablaze in the middle of the avenue. The wind was carrying off the cash that neighbors had resorted to burning, huddled in groups. Lean, sooty people who came together to illuminate the city with their poverty. I was about to phone Ramona again when down below I saw men in military intelligence uniforms exiting my building. There were five of them, and long guns were slung across their shoulders. One had a microwave in his hands, and another had a desktop computer case. Others were dragging a couple of suitcases. I didn’t know if I was witnessing a raid, a robbery, or both things at once. The men got into a black van and drove off in the direction of Esquina La Pelota. When they had disappeared into the intersection that led to the highway, a light came on in the neighboring building. Another followed. And another. Then one more. The colossal wall of blindness and silence began to awaken, while a whirlwind of flaming cash spiraled in gusts, propelled by the military truck as it sped off.
Before cash disappeared altogether, the revolutionary cabinet announced, on the commander-president’s orders, that paper money would be progressively eliminated. The decree’s purpose was to fight the financing of terrorism, or what the leaders deemed as such, but printing more money to replace the old was impossible. The money that circulated forcibly wasn’t worth anything, even before it was burned. A napkin was more valuable than a hundred-bolívar bill, which now went up in flames on the pavement like some kind of premonition.
At home there was enough food to last me two months, thanks to a stockpile that my mother and I had made a habit of adding to ever since the first lootings blighted the country years before. No longer out of the ordinary, lootings had become routine events. I was ready to resist thanks to the life lessons they’d given us, which I learned to administer instinctively. Nobody needed to show me how; instead, time was my teacher. War was our destiny, and it had been a long time before we knew it was coming. My mother was the first to intuit it. She made provisions and obtained supplies for years. If we could buy one can of tuna, then we would take two home. Just in case. We stocked the pantry as if fattening an animal that we would feed on forever.
The first looting I remember happened the day I turned ten. We were already living in the city’s west. We were isolated from the more violent part. Anything could happen. Filled with uncertainty, my mother and I watched as military platoons passed by on their way to Miraflores Palace, the seat of government, a few blocks from our building. A few hours later, on TV we saw swarms of men and women raiding stores. They looked like ants. Furious insects. Some were heaving legs of beef onto their shoulders. They ran with no thought for the splotches of still-fresh blood on their clothes. Others carried off televisions and appliances they’d pulled through windows smashed with stones. I even saw a man dragging a piano down Avenida Sucre.
That day, during a televised live broadcast, the minister of internal affairs called for calm and civility. Everything was under control, he assured us. A few seconds later, there was an awkward silence. An expression of terror crossed his face. He glanced to one side then the other and left the podium he’d been addressing the nation from. His plea for calm remained just that: a medium-long shot of an empty podium.
The country changed in less than a month. We started seeing trucks stacked with caskets, all of them tied down with ropes, and sometimes not even that. Soon, unidentified bodies were being wrapped in plastic bags and tossed into La Peste, the mass grave where the bodies of gunned-down men and women started fetching up by the hundreds. It was the first attempt by the Fathers of the Revolution to take power, and the first instances of “social unrest” that I remember. To celebrate my birthday, my mother heated a little sunflower oil and fried a maize bollo she’d shaped into a heart. It was a show of love in the shape of a kidney, golden at the edges and soft in the middle. My mother stuck a tiny pink candle in it. She sang “Ay qué noche tan preciosa,” a long and catchy national version of “Happy Birthday,” which unlike the original lasts a full ten minutes. Afterward she cut the heart into four and spread butter on each piece. We chewed in silence with the lights out, sitting on the living-room floor. Before we went to bed, a burst of gunfire added an ellipsis to that piñataless party that we celebrated in the dark.
“Happy birthday, Adelaida.”
The next morning, on the first outing of my tenth year, I met my first love. Or whom back then I understood as such. At school, girls fell in love with all kinds of fantasies: rodents turned into knights errant, princes with delicate features who followed the sweet sounds of a mermaid song along the shore, woodcutters who with a single kiss woke blond-haired, full-lipped sleeping beauties. I didn’t fall in love with any of those fictions of masculinity. I fell in love with him. With a dead soldier.
I remember he was printed on the first page of El Nacional, the newspaper my mother read every morning at the table from the last page to the first. Not a day of her life went by that she didn’t buy it. At least while there was still reams of paper to print it on. If there was a newspaper, she would go down to the newsstand to buy it. That morning she brought it back, along with a pack of cigarettes, three ripe bananas, and a bottle of water—everything she could find at the grocery store, which shut its doors whenever rumors of a new band of looters started circulating.
She arrived home disheveled, puffing, the newspaper tucked under an arm. She dropped the paper on the table and ran to phone her sisters. While she tried to convince them that everything was fine, which wasn’t the case at all, I grabbed the newspaper and spread it out on the granite floor. The main photograph, which depicted the military repression and national carnage, covered the entire front page. And that was when he appeared before me. A young soldier lying in a pool of blood. I peered
closer, examining his face. He seemed perfect, handsome. His head fallen and lolling on the road’s shoulder. Poor, slim, almost adolescent. His helmet was askew, which meant that his head, shattered by a bullet from a FAL rifle, was visible. There he was: split open like a fruit. A prince charming, his eyes flooded with blood. A few days later I got my first period. I was already a woman: beholden to a sleeping beauty who was killing me out of love and grief. My first boyfriend and my last childhood doll, covered in bits of his own brain, which one shot to the forehead had blown apart. Yes, at ten years old, I was a widow. At ten, I was already in love with ghosts.
I TOOK STOCK of our home library. On some of the books’ covers I could see the colored circles that for so many years, bored and with no parks to play in, I made while my mother imparted her lessons on “subjectverbpredicate.” Told not to leave my room, I equipped myself with an armful of books. Sometimes I read from their pages, at other times I only played with them. I unscrewed the lids of the tempera paint pots and pressed them against the bound pages at random: an orange ring for In Cold Blood to match the butane color of its cover; yellow, the color of little chicks, for The Autumn of the Patriarch to bring out the mustard of the design; burgundy in the case of For Whom the Bell Tolls. Almost every book bore a circular mark, as if I’d branded each before returning them to their shelves so they could graze quietly and at ease. Why didn’t those marks fade with the passing of time when all our transgressions remain? I wondered, The Green House in hand.
Next, I opened my mother’s wardrobe. I found her size 36 shoes. Arranged in pairs, now they had the air of a platoon of tired soldiers. I inspected the belts that once showed off her slim waist, and the dresses on their coat hangers. None of her things were garish or over the top. My mother was a fakir. A discrete woman who never cried and who, whenever she gave me a hug, created a paradise around me, a second womb scented with nicotine and moisturizer. Adelaida Falcón smoked and took care of her skin in equal measure. In the university residence hall for young ladies, where she spent five years of her life, she learned both to groom herself and to smoke. From then on, she never stopped reading, gently applying face cream to her cheeks, or quietly drawing on her cigarettes. Those were her happiest days, she often said. Every time she voiced those words, a question burned within me: Had the years she’d lived with me by her side put an end to the good times of her youth?
I rummaged around in the back of the wardrobe until I found the blouse of hers that was covered in monarch butterflies. Black and gold sequins were sewn all over it. I’d always loved it to bits. Whenever I removed it from the hanger and held it in my hands, the few square meters of the world my mother and I inhabited were suffused with wonder. The blouse was a swanky version of the glittery cocoons I dreamed about. Magical clothing, made of otherworldly color and fabric. I spread it out on the bed, asking myself why my mother bought it when she never slipped it on.
“How can I step out in that at eight in the morning?” she would say if I suggested she wear it to a PTA meeting. No matter how much I begged, she never went to a meeting wearing the blouse.
I studied at a school run by nuns, a stand-in for a more prestigious institution that wouldn’t take me because, at the interview, the principal learned that my mother wasn’t married and wasn’t a widow either. And although she never said anything to me about the incident, I came to understand it as symptomatic of the congenital disease that in those years afflicted the Venezuelan middle class: the defects of nineteenth-century white Venezuelans grafted onto the chaos of a mixed-race society. A country where women birthed and brought up children on their own, thanks to men who didn’t even bother pretending that they were stepping out for cigarettes when they decided to leave for good. Acknowledging this, of course, was part of the penance. The stumbling block on the steep ladder of social ascent.
I grew up surrounded by the daughters of immigrants. Girls with dark skin and light eyes. A summation, centuries in the making, of a strange and mestizo country’s practices in the bedroom. Beautiful in its derangements. Generous in beauty and in violence, two of the qualities that it had in greatest abundance. The result was a nation built on the cleft of its own contradictions, on the tectonic fault of a landscape always on the brink of tumbling down on its inhabitants’ heads.
Though less exclusive, my school likewise levied restraint on a society that was a long way from having it. In time, I understood that place as the breeding ground for a much greater evil, the natural resource of a cosmetic republic. Frivolity was the least egregious of its evils. Nobody wanted to grow old or appear poor. It was important to conceal, to make over. Those were the national pastimes: keeping up appearances. It didn’t matter if there was no money, or if the country was falling to pieces: the important thing was to be beautiful, to aspire to a crown, to be the queen of something . . . of Carnaval, of the town, of the country. To be the tallest, the prettiest, the most mindless. Even now, amid the misery that reigns in the city, I can still make out traces of that defect. Our monarchy was always like that: it belonged to the most dashing, to the handsome man or the great beauty. That’s what the whole thing that swelled into the cataclysm of vulgarity was about. Back then, we could get away with it. Our oil reserves paid the outstanding accounts. Or so we thought.
I WENT OUT. I needed sanitary napkins. I could live without sugar, coffee, and cooking oil but not without pads. They were even more valuable than toilet paper. I paid a premium to a group of women who controlled the few packets that made it to the supermarket. We called the women bachaqueras, and they acted with as much precision as the leafcutter ants they were named after. They went around in groups, were quick on their feet, and swarmed on everything that crossed their path. They were the first to arrive at the supermarkets and knew how to bypass the caps per person on regulated products. They got hold of what we couldn’t, so they could sell it to us at an inflated price. If I was prepared to pay three times the going rate, I could get whatever I wanted. And that’s what I was doing. I wrapped three wads of hundred-bolívar bills in a plastic bag. In exchange, I received a packet of twenty sanitary napkins. It cost me even to bleed.
I started to ration everything to avoid having to go out and find it. The only thing I needed was silence. I barely opened the windows. The revolutionary forces used tear gas to repress the people who were protesting the rationing decrees, and the fumes impregnated everything, making me vomit until I was pale. I sealed all the windows with duct tape, except the ones in the bathroom and kitchen, which didn’t face the street. I did all I could not to let anything make its way in from outside.
I answered only calls from the publishing house staff, who decided to give me a week’s grace period for my loss. I’d fallen behind with revising a few galley proofs. It was in my interest to invoice for the job, but I felt incapable of doing the work. I needed money but had no way of receiving it. There was no connection for carrying out transfers. The internet worked in fits and bursts. It was slow and patchy. All the bolívares I’d deposited in a savings account had been spent on my mother’s treatment. As for the pay I’d received for my editing work, there wasn’t much left, with an additional problem. By order of the Sons of the Revolution, foreign currency had become illegal. Having any amounted to treason.
When I turned on my phone three messages pinged, all from Ana. One to ask how I was, and two of the kind that get sent by default to a phone’s entire contact list. The message stated that fifteen days had gone by with no news from Santiago and asked us to sign a petition for his freedom. I didn’t respond. I couldn’t do anything for her, and she couldn’t do anything for me. We were condemned, like the rest of the country, to become strangers to ourselves. It was survivor’s guilt, and those who left the country suffered from it too, a mixture of reproach and shame: opting out of suffering was another form of betrayal.
Such was the power of the Sons of the Revolution. They separated us on two sides of a line. Those who have and those who have not. Those who leav
e and those who stay. Those who can be trusted and those who cannot. Apportioning blame was just one more division that they cleaved through a society already riddled with them. I wasn’t having an easy time of it, but if there was one thing I was sure of, it was that my circumstances could be worse. Being free of death’s stranglehold condemned me to silence out of decency.
IN THE MIDST of that night’s shoot-out, I realized my neighbor’s flush hadn’t sounded. I hadn’t seen Aurora Peralta since my mother went into palliative care. I was surprised to realize I hadn’t heard the irritating pull of the chain, which night after night sounded through my bedroom wall, interrupting my dreams with its gurgle of wastewater.
I knew very little about Aurora. Only that she was timid and dowdy, and that everyone called her “the Spanish woman’s daughter.” Her mother, Julia, was a Galician who ran a small eatery in La Candelaria, the area in Caracas with the largest concentration of bars run by Spanish immigrants. They were frequented by immigrants from Galicia and the Canary Islands, and by the odd Italian.
It Would Be Night in Caracas Page 3