It Would Be Night in Caracas

by Karina Sainz Borgo

  Santiago’s story petered out.

  “Now can you understand why I was wearing that mask today?”

  He looked at his cigarette stub and then at me.

  “I didn’t leave any for you this time, I’m sorry,” he said with a battered smile. He smoothed his hair again and looked up.

  “Are you sure there’s no more beer?”

  I nodded. My head wound was smarting again.

  “In that case I know what I’m doing now.”

  “What?”

  “Going to sleep.”

  AURORA PERALTA TEIJEIRO. Date of birth: May 15, 1972. Time: 3:30 p.m. Place: La Princesa Hospital, Salamanca District, Madrid Province. Father: Fabián Peralta Veiga, native of Lugo, Galicia. Mother: Julia Peralta Teijeiro, native of Lugo, Galicia. Nationality: Spanish. Reason for requesting certificate: passport application and national ID for the Kingdom of Spain. Alongside the long-form copy of the record was a letter signed by the city’s consular office, a list of required material, a leaflet with the date the issuance was scheduled for, and a phone number for queries or consultations. There were two weeks to go until the appointment. The date coincided with the one-month anniversary of my mother’s death, May 5.

  I grabbed a clean towel and a blanket. I left them on the dining table. I went back to the master bedroom and bolted the door. I found a red binder in the top drawer of the dresser. Inside it was another birth certificate, for Julia, Aurora’s mother. She was born in Viveiro, a town on the Lugo coast, in July 1954. Both the original and a copy were together with her death certificate, issued in Caracas.

  Julia Peralta died just before my first trip to the border with Francisco. I didn’t go on many trips, but the first was on assignment, sent by the newspaper I was working for at the time. I was employed there as a proofreader. In time I did a lot of things besides. I would go down to print layouts to correct a caption or I would redo a news ticker, just as I would make calls to corroborate facts that the news writers had no time to check. No one else could perform such a variety of tasks for so little money. I had copy edited almost all the articles filed by Francisco, the political journalist with the greatest number of scoops about Colombian guerrilla activities. The bosses thought I was the best person to go with him on that trip, and really, who else could do it? I had to stay at the border for as long as the operation he’d been sent to cover lasted. Though I asked, my bosses weren’t forthcoming with details; they only urged me to tell them my answer as soon as possible. I accepted.

  When I arrived home to pack my bags, I found my mother getting ready to go to Julia Peralta’s funeral.

  “What do you mean, you’re going to the border? Have you gone crazy? The whole area is set to go up like a match. You’re not coming to Julia’s wake?”

  “Mamá, I can’t. Please give my condolences.”

  My mother was in mourning. She never usually dressed in black. It made her look like she was from a village. She was, of course, but grief reminded her of that. It stuck to her skin, as if it had been dormant in her genes all the while and had suddenly come to the fore.

  “Take that off as soon as you get home, Mamá,” I said before I left.

  She stopped still in the living room, looking down at her dress as if secretly she agreed. Her drained, expressionless face was an island of sadness. I regretted my words. I gave her a kiss on the cheek and left.

  I was agitated when I arrived. Francisco was waiting in the Portuguese’s café, a place next to the newsroom that all the reporters frequented, which was run by a man born in Funchal, who had a dark mustache. You could find any journalist other than the bosses there.

  Francisco had arrived first. He was sipping unenthusiastically at a black coffee. We spoke little. He didn’t seem to have much of an idea what I was doing on the trip, and his star-reporter airs made me feel apprehensive. He intimidated me. But there the two of us were, killing time and sidestepping that annoying habit strangers have of making conversation when what you really want is to be left in peace.

  The story that took us to the other end of the country was dangerous: the kidnapping of a prominent business owner who belonged to the national elite—when such a thing still existed—at the hands of the guerrillas. His release was to take place in the Meta River area, a hundred kilometers from the border. The family had taken it upon themselves to negotiate, without much intervention from the Commander-President’s regime. Even then, the government was strengthening ties with the Colombian Liberation Forces, having created an impunity corridor in exchange for loyalty and armed cooperation, as well as royalties from the Europe-bound drug shipments that they allowed them to ferry down the Orinoco River.

  Francisco had been guaranteed a safe conduct, so he could accompany the military liaisons who would work to free the business owner. My job involved staying on this side of the border, ready to resolve any eventuality: from obtaining cash or fuel vouchers to redeem at the National Guard posts, to using the scanner and laptop to send the photos and story when they were ready.

  “Have you ever been to the border?”

  “No.”

  “Well . . .”

  “Well what?”

  “Try not to stand out. Don’t talk with people too much and, most important, don’t even think about mentioning what you’re doing there, or why.”

  “Thanks for warning me not to speak to strangers. Until now that concept had never occurred to me.”

  “You’ll thank me,” he said, raising an eyebrow.

  “I’m sure.”

  I ordered a black coffee.

  “Get it to go.”

  “No. I want it in a mug.”

  The expression of the Portuguese owner, Antonio, looked unsure.

  “Don’t order for me, or think for me, thank you very much.”

  “Whatever you say, but you’ll need to be quick. We’re leaving before eleven. I’ll wait outside.”

  We traveled overland for eight hours, until we reached the town closest to the Colombian border. Francisco spoke only a few times. The first to ask me which newspapers I’d work for previously. The second to say that he hadn’t studied journalism either. And the third to explain why the best journalists had never set foot in a university. I wasn’t wrong: he was a jerk.

  I spent two weeks away from the city. In that time, I discovered that reality has a habit of ruining convictions. This was confirmed for me in two ways: the government demonstrated a capacity for sabotage far above anything we’d ever expected, and Francisco wasn’t a complete asshole. I could have foreseen the first, but not the second. No doubt there are more serene, cool-headed journalists. Better photographers, perhaps. But until then I’d never come across a creature like Francisco. He did everything: both the photographs and the articles. He was always pushing the limit. He reported things precisely, and before anyone else.

  When we said good-bye in the town where I would be coordinating the rest of our stay, thirty kilometers from Colombia, Francisco asked to borrow the book I’d been reading.

  “Poetry shouldn’t be read in one go, so take it,” I told him.

  He thanked me and left.

  We spoke over the phone every day. He would dictate his article and I would transcribe it. Of the fourteen he dictated I retitled all of them, which meant more calls. Some were to tell me off and others were to organize the next day’s session.

  “I’ll call you around five, and next time, please ask before you change a headline. If it’s too long, check with me.”

  “They all fit perfectly.”

  “So why do you rewrite them?”

  “They’re confusing. If you’d read the Gil de Biedma, the book I lent you, you’d understand the importance of precision.”

  After ten days embedded in a camp in Villavicencio, Francisco still wasn’t completely clear on the Commander-President’s intentions with the rescue operation. We gave the government the benefit of the doubt, but something wasn’t right. The rescue date was pushed back fifteen days. Th
en two more, again and again until a month went by with no news. The country came to a standstill. Everyone was awaiting the return of the business owner, heir to one of the most important Venezuelan fortunes.

  We took for granted that everything would be arranged so that the leaders of the Revolution could puff up their chests about the intermediation, but things didn’t turn out as expected. Francisco had to write the reverse of his great scoop. He did so rigorously and devoid of any emotion.

  His was the only photograph of the kidnapped business owner’s lifeless body, which the guerrillas dumped two kilometers from the border crossing, wrapped in a jute bag stained with dry blood. He’d been dead for days. They’d made the family travel all that way only to collect a corpse, after they’d paid four million dollars that ended up in the Marxist Forces of National Liberation piggy bank.

  The day after we returned to Caracas, I showed up at the newspaper’s photography department with a selection of Gil de Biedma’s diaries.

  “Take it as an apology for changing your headlines,” I said.

  “There’s no need. Yours were better, much better. I couldn’t say it at the time, but I can now.”

  Two weeks later, Francisco appeared before my desk.

  “I’m traveling to Meta River next week and I want you to come with me.”

  “For as long as last time?”

  “No. Only five days. No need to take so many scanners or file a story every day, but I would feel more comfortable if you came.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “As sure as I am that it would mean I wouldn’t be sending shitty headlines. The national desk editor said it would be no problem, though he added that I’d be taking their best editor.”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, don’t feel obliged. If you don’t want to, no problem. We’ll find someone else.”

  “When are you leaving?”

  “Next Tuesday. We’ll be back Saturday.”

  “All right, then. I’ll be there.”

  “Would it be too much to ask you—”

  “Ask me what?”

  “To bring more books for us to read on the trip?”

  “I always take too many. I’ll find a few books with pictures for you.”

  Francisco smiled. It was the first time I saw him do so. He was forty-six and I was closer to thirty than twenty. We were together for three years, the same amount of time he had left to live.

  I examined Julia Peralta’s death certificate as if it were a group portrait, taken by force, that captured us squashed together and unsmiling before the blinding flash of one truth only: people croak, get sick, or are killed. They place their foot in the wrong spot. They fly through the air or tumble down a staircase. People die, through fault of their own or by someone else’s hand. But they die. And that’s the only thing that counts.

  The year that Julia Peralta left this world, I met the only person who came into my life as if he would stay in it forever.

  I’d been widowed at ten and was widowed again at twenty-nine, a week before I was to marry Francisco Salazar Solano. A group of guerrillas took issue with the photograph that won him the Ibero-American Press Freedom Prize, making him pay for it with his life. It was a portrait of his informant after the guerrillas had their way with him. They’d discovered he’d been the one to leak details about how the order to kill the business owner, whose liberation the Commander-President’s government supposedly had been trying to secure for months, had come from the same government. The guerrillas gave Francisco the Colombian necktie, a technique they reserved for informers: they slashed open his throat and pulled his tongue through the wound.

  When my mother met Francisco, she examined him from head to toe. His height was his saving grace, she said. And it was. He was almost six feet six, distributed in a geometrical, heavy body. The first time we made love, I thought I’d broken a rib. That wasn’t the case, but almost. My mother didn’t like him. She disapproved of everything about him: his stubble, the years that separated us, the two kids he had from a previous marriage.

  “You’re an adult, you must know what you’re doing,” she said when I told her I was moving in with him. “You’re going to live at his house? Because it’s his place, not yours. And the kids are not yours, they’re his. Don’t be one of those birds that raises cuckoos instead of its own offspring.”

  I never told her, and she never asked. She knew it already. I would have gone to the ends of the earth for Francisco. Like soldiers who head to the trenches, stupefied by anisette, which is what love must taste like when there’s too much of it. If I had to pick just one of the borders we crossed, it would be his skin. Francisco photographed me with the palms of his hands and the tips of his fingers. We loved each other best without words. He never showered me with them, not even to say good-bye.

  I got word of his execution two days after it happened, when news tickers about his assassination started coming from news agencies. “Winner of the Ibero-American Press Freedom Prize, Francisco Salazar Solano, found riddled with bullets and with his throat slit on the banks of Meta River, a few miles from Puerto Carreño, very close to Amazonas.”

  A nauseating River Styx.

  One of his sources gave him away. Not the one they’d killed, but someone more innocent. The boy who had taken him to the waste ground where he took his best photo, the one with snitch exactly as his executioners had left him: with his hands holding his severed head and his testicles and penis in his mouth. That was how tattletales were killed on the border. Human beings transformed into meat, which someone else would turn into a news item displayed on the newsstands the next day. The Eleventh Commandment chiseled into the stone tablet, or into the bone of a broken neck: Thou shalt not talk. Francisco arrived at the cemetery in a similar way, his necktie quite unlike the one that he never got the chance to wear to our wedding.

  Mamá went with me to the funeral. She did so in silence. And like that, in silence, we returned home. Both of us were in love with dead men. Days later a witness to what had happened on the Meta appeared. Another child. They used them as messengers. The boy showed up at the national command post, looking for the captain in charge. And there, before the military prosecutors, he recounted disjointed scenes from the killing he’d been told to relay. They sent someone incapable of understanding what he’d seen, so the dark stain of death would arrive in his innocent voice.

  ALSO IN THE RED BINDER, separated by a sheaf of cardboard and tucked into several plastic pockets, I found paperwork for three bank accounts, two in Venezuela and one in Spain. The deposits and transactions made it clear where Aurora Peralta’s inheritance, left to her by her mother, had gone. In the Venezuelan accounts there was barely enough to cover one month of living expenses. In the Spanish one, the numbers were far from modest, a total of forty thousand euros.

  I went through everything, following a trail of pin numbers, statements, and bankbooks. I found them in a sealed beige envelope. Aurora Peralta had printed her account transactions, downloaded from the internet, and underlined them with a fluorescent highlighter before filing them in chronological order. I established that every month the Spanish government deposited a pension of eight hundred euros, as well as another four hundred for disability. Both in the name of Julia Peralta. Disability? What? And why? I’d never noticed anything wrong. I inspected each drawer looking for anything else. I was convinced that Aurora Peralta kept euros in cash. Nothing could be paid in bolívares anymore. Even the underworld stipulated that kidnapping ransoms be paid in foreign currency. The stash had to be somewhere in the apartment, but where?

  On the top shelf of the wardrobe, behind a box that contained a nativity and Christmas decorations, I found a wooden box covered by a black-lacquered album and another smaller one full of press cuttings: news of a terrorist attack that happened years before and several obituaries for Fabián Peralta Veiga, Aurora’s father, whose birth certificate was also in her keeping, issued at the civil registry of Viveiro in March 1948. K
ept in another plastic pocket was an official-looking booklet titled “Libro de Familia.” Inside it, Julia and Fabián Peralta were recorded as marrying in June 1971, in the town of Viveiro, Lugo Province, where both had been born. They were married barely two years: the death certificate of Fabián Peralta was dated December 20, 1973.

  All the newspaper clippings included in the album were of the same news item, published December 21, 1973: a Dodge 3700 GT weighing almost four thousand pounds, in which Luis Carrero Blanco, president of the Spanish government, was traveling, had exploded. A bomb had sent him flying in Madrid. The bakery where Fabián Peralta toiled, next to the San Jorge church where the admiral attended Mass, got the full force of the blast. ETA had set off a bomb to assassinate the politician who had been anointed by Franco to occupy the national office, and Fabián Peralta was killed by the shock wave that emanated from it. The reference to his death was published, as an aside, in an article that headed the collection of clippings and was followed by the three obituaries. That was why Julia always had the somber look of a widow, an air that Aurora Peralta effortlessly inherited. The death of Fabián Peralta had made them grow old early and remain that way all their lives.

  Julia always wore dresses down to her knee. Severe clothing that made her seem older and emphasized her thick legs and ankles. Her daughter absorbed that look. As a child she was plain, and she didn’t grow into any remarkable attributes as an adult. She gave the impression of inhabiting a perpetual border that was neither Venezuelan nor Spanish; neither beautiful nor ugly; neither young nor old. Destined for the place where those who don’t belong anywhere end up. Aurora Peralta suffered the curse of someone born too soon in one place who arrived too late at the next.

  In the black-lacquered album were several photographs. The first was of Fabián and Julia’s wedding, an austere celebration. They appeared at the altar of a church with large stained-glass windows and then at a table, where the guests were raising their glasses, smiling. Another gave a full-length view of Julia Peralta’s wedding dress, which was modest—no plunging neckline, three-quarter sleeves, and two long pleats in a heavy skirt that resembled a tablecloth. Fabián was wearing a business suit, with a dark tie knotted tightly around his chicken neck. Neither was laughing, or even looking at the camera.