These were followed by other snapshots, almost all of them accompanied by handwritten captions. “Honeymoon, Portugal, 1971. Fabián’s birthday, Madrid. August 1971.” In a photo of the young couple standing before a dining set, Julia was wearing a dress that enhanced her growing belly. “Christmas 1971.” Another showed a group of people at a table covered in plates of food. “New Year’s Eve dinner with Fabián, Paquita, Julia, and grandparents. 1971.”
Judging by the photographs, the Peraltas didn’t travel to Lugo often. There weren’t many snapshots of Viveiro. In one, dated February 1972, Fabián was smiling before a clam casserole. There were two more photographs from those early years. Fabián and Julia Peralta, dressed more elegantly than usual. He looked very erect, with his arm around his wife’s shoulders. She was holding a baby. A brief explanation stated: “Aurora’s first month. June 1972.” Just below it, on the same date, the three of them outside San Jorge Church. “Aurora’s baptism, Madrid, June 1972.” There was one more in front of the facade of the same church. The little one was in the arms of a blond woman, who stood out because of a certain beauty absent in the rest of the photos. “Aurora and Paquita,” read the meticulous cursive caption.
Three photographs corresponded to the summer of that year in Viveiro: one of Aurora and her father at a beach; another with Fabián holding a platter of sardines in the middle of a festivity; and one featuring the blond woman, Paquita, once more. This time she was wearing a wedding gown and smiling, holding the hand of an unremarkable man. It was the only one of those three images that had a caption: “Union of Paquita and José. Summer of 1972.” There were a couple more of the “Aurora’s first steps” series and another of the father lying on the lawn: “Fabián and Paquita in Guadarrama.”
Something changed suddenly. Pictures taken in the year 1973 showed the same composition, but with no Fabián: Julia Peralta almost always dressed in black with Aurora in her arms. There were several more. One of people congregated around half-eaten dishes, everyone except Julia smiling. “Madrid 1974.” Paquita was present in almost all the group photos of the period. I assumed she was Julia’s or Fabián’s sister. In one she appeared dressed in a regional costume with a small girl in her arms. “Paquita and María José 1978.” There was a photo of Julia Peralta from the same period. It stood out compared to the rest, its tone severe. She was dressed as a cleaner, with a gray skirt and a starched white apron. She was wearing her hair up, in a hairnet-covered bun. Next to her, seven women were dressed the same way. “Welcome to the new employees of the Palace Hotel, Madrid 1974.”
A blank piece of cardboard faintly outlined with a date separated the rest of the photographs, which corresponded to the Venezuelan chapter. In them, Julia Peralta, a little more filled out and no longer in black, appeared in the old wooded area of Acacias Park. There were three more in Los Caobos Park. Another in front of the La India statue, in El Paraíso, and one of the modern metallic structure by Alejandro Otero in Plaza Venezuela; none of its aluminum vanes were left now, all had been stolen. Another photo: Julia Peralta, standing behind an enormous paella. Aurora’s mother was smiling, the first time she looked natural in all the portraits I’d seen. In her right hand she was holding an enormous wooden spoon. Rómulo Betancourt, president of the republic between 1959 and 1964, one of the founding fathers of democracy, was beside her. Beneath the photo, a handwritten line explains: “At Don Rómulo’s birthday. Caracas 1980.” Many other snapshots were included in the album.
In one of them, Julia and her daughter were posing at the doors of La Florida Church in 1980. At the end of the album, slotted into four cardboard photo-corners, were a few postcards signed by Paquita, who didn’t stop sending them until the year of Julia’s death.
I’d gone through drawers looking for money only to discover the overlooked life stories of women I’d lived alongside, wall to wall, for years.
Inside the wooden box that I still hadn’t looked through, I found an envelope full of letters. Almost all of them were written on onionskin paper between the years 1974 and 1976. Julia had signed them; they were meant for Paquita. In the first, she told her about the trip to Caracas from Madrid, in the autumn of 1974, and her arrival in a country that in her eyes was implausible. “The cockroaches weigh a pound. We live in an area that has a lot of trees. There are macaws and parrots, and every morning they come to eat on our balcony. We’ve found a place to live for a reasonable price.” As well as her domestic notes, almost all of them related to everyday happenings, Julia dedicated some more substantial observations to the country she was making a home in, where the sun shone year-round and people could find jobs. In the Venezuela of that time, all European immigrants found jobs.
Julia’s descriptions were brimming with details, such as the color and smell of the fruit, the width of the streets and the highways. “The houses here are bigger than in Spain and everyone has household appliances. I’ve bought a blender. I’ve made liters of gazpacho with it, and we store it in the fridge to drink at lunchtime.” That was one of the things that Julia Peralta mentioned most: how many different things there were to buy, the same things that my mother gazed at in an appliance catalog from Sears, the enormous department store where we spent Saturday afternoons after eating an ice cream at the Crema Paraíso ice creamery in Bello Monte.
In the next letter, a month after her arrival in the city, in December 1974, Julia told Paquita that she got in touch with the nuns of a university residence “for young ladies” in the El Paraiso neighborhood, and that they had accepted her letter of recommendation from the head chef at the Palace Hotel. “Mother Justa is just as you said she would be. Very kind and devout. She hasn’t lost her Galician accent after ten years here, and she tells me that, if I like, I can be in charge of the residents’ kitchen.”
When I was poised to read the next letter, I heard La Mariscala and her crew coming back. They slammed the door shut and turned up the speakers with the never-ending reggaeton of the previous days. “Tu-tu-tu-tumba-la casa mami, pero que tu-tumba-la casa mami.” How could anyone have set the word for grave to a catchy harmony? “Tu-tumba.” I pressed my ear against the wall; it sounded like there were more people than previously. The women’s voices multiplied and echoed above the sounds of the music. I returned the box and albums to their place, trying to leave them in the same order, a gesture that now strikes me as absurd. Who was going to check and confirm and verify that everything was intact? I was acting as if Adelaida and Julia would return at any moment to demand what was theirs.
I looked for a good hiding place for the red binder. Just the boisterousness of La Mariscala and her troupe granted them a power they didn’t really have. My fear made me think they could travel through walls and see whatever I was or wasn’t doing. I was terrified. A young man I knew nothing about was sleeping beneath the same roof I was. Santiago could be anything: a martyr, a killer, an informant. In that bedroom, which was not my own, I realized I was utterly alone. I had to do something, and quickly. I looked around at the bone-colored walls and saw a reproduction of Murillo’s La Inmaculada, the same one my aunts had in the Falcón guesthouse master bedroom. I went over to it and took it down. When I turned it around, an envelope sealed with sticky tape fell to my feet. It was full of twenty- and fifty-euro bills.
IN LA ENCRUCIJADA, between Turmero and Palo Negro, rose a rusty metal silo stamped with the acronym P.A.N., which stood for National Food Products, which everyone identified with processed maize flour, a product that for decades fed the country thanks to all our arepas, hallacas, cachapas, hallaquitas, and bollos. Grain for the flour was stored in the Remavenca plant, visible from the bus when there was still about 125 miles left until Ocumare de la Costa. It had been the granary of Aragua State, where my mother was born; besides rum and sugarcane, Aragua’s most important product was that flour, commercialized in yellow packets illustrated with the face of a woman with red lips, giant earrings, and a polka-dotted headscarf. A local, rural version of Carmen Miranda, the act
ress whose song “South American Way” ushered her to 20th Century-Fox studios and into the kitchens of all Venezuelan homes.
P.A.N. flour nourished thousands of men and women, until the second wave of hunger and shortages saw it disappear from the shelves and become a luxury item. True democracy dwelled in that industrialized flour. Whether rich or poor, everyone ate that starch, which was baked into so many of our memories.
The idea for the industrial production method was born from the hops with which a German brewer quenched the agonies of a country that swung from drunken binges to bouts of war. It revoked the need for piloneras, women who hulled the maize by driving a stick into a thick wooden mortar carved from the same tree that shaded many a hacienda’s patio. From that activity were born the cantos del pilón—pestle songs—prayers of sweat and rhythmic blows, with melodies that accompanied the sweet and powerful grinding. Unhappy women pulverized, beat by beat, the maize hull, making the flour that wood-fire ovens would bake into the daily bread of a country still stricken with malaria. Ever since, their music has been the nation’s heartbeat.
Almost always, two women would pound the mortar, chatting rhythmically. That was how the songs arose, seeming to confirm one truth: tragedy was a given, like the sun, like the trees laden with sweet, heavy fruit. The cantos del pilón preserved the grievances and stories of the uneducated women who pounded their disappointments against a wooden mortar, and some of those lyrics came to me whenever I passed by La Encrucijada.
“Adelaida, hija, wake up. We’re almost at the Remavenca plant.”
My mother didn’t need to tell me; my heart had already detected the powerful smell of barley and nourishment. The aromas of beer and bread made me happy. So I started singing the verses I’d learned from the old ladies of Ocumare.
“Pound that pestle . . . ee-oh, ee-oh.”
“So hard it breaks in two,” my mother answered softly.
“You and your ma are sluts . . .”
“Not that bit, Adelaida, don’t say that!”
“Your aunt and grannie are whores, ee-oh, ee-oh . . .” I said, laughing.
“No, hija. Sing what your aunt Amelia taught you: I’ve got a thumping headache, ee-oh, ee-oh, it’s this pestle pounding I guess, ee-oh, ee-oh, but I want to fatten a pig and buy a dress, ee-oh, ee-oh . . .”
The town’s black women intoned those lyrics as they stood behind the boiling skillets at the market, their hands molding the arepas. Each phrase was accentuated with gasping pants, “ee-oh, ee-oh”: the groans of their exertions.
Up there on that hill,
ee-oh, ee-oh,
go the newlyweds
ee-oh, ee-oh,
Good old long neck went and tied the knot with donkey head
ee-oh, ee-oh.
If all this is because of your husband,
ee-oh, ee-oh,
hold onto him if you know what’s best,
ee-oh, ee-oh,
he’s slipping away from you but he’s yet to give me a wedding dress,
ee-oh, ee-oh.
They sang wearing scarves wrapped around their heads and exhaling cigarette smoke. They expelled, like a lament, a lineage of females whom the world had given only arms to feed the offspring that spilled from their crotch, always torn to pieces from giving birth so often. Rocky women, with stale-bread hearts and skin made leathery from the sun and the heat of the fires and grills. Females who sprinkled their arepas with the sweet anise of their sorrows.
There goes devil face,
ee-oh, ee-oh,
a demon to the core,
ee-oh, ee-oh,
whose tongue’s gone black from the lies he’s told before,
ee-oh, ee-oh.
I don’t want a married man,
ee-oh, ee-oh,
who stinks to high hell,
ee-oh, ee-oh,
I want me a bachelor who smells of ripe pineapple.
There were cantos for every trade, for practices that died out when, beckoned by the call of petroleum, country folk moved to the city, leaving behind the work melodies that had situated them in the world: melodies for milking, irrigating, grinding, grilling. Among the saddest was the canto del trapiche, which described the process for extracting sugarcane, sweet, dry sticks that fell off the trucks that came to Ocumare from the Aragua valleys. I sucked on them, hiding beneath the dining table at the Falcón guesthouse. If my mother found out I’d been sucking on sugarcane, I was done for. The concentrated glucose in the earthy stem that weakened the stomach, just as rum did to rough men’s brains. Bowel movements as a soul binge. The purging of everything we were carrying in our blood and heart.
The cantos de pilón were women’s music. They were composed in the silent moments when mothers and widows whiled away the hours, those women who expected nothing because they had nothing.
Yesterday I saw you go by in a hurry,
ee-oh, ee-oh,
I said to my friend there goes that brazen hussy,
ee-oh, ee-oh.
Don’t call me brazen,
ee-oh, ee-oh,
I’m upstanding as can be,
ee-oh, ee-oh,
and who are you to come round here insulting me,
ee-oh, ee-oh.
You and your ma are sluts,
ee-oh, ee-oh.
Your aunt and grannie are whores,
ee-oh, ee-oh.
What choice did you have when your family’s got them galore,
ee-oh, ee-oh.
The silly tart thinks,
ee-oh, ee-oh,
that her shit doesn’t stink,
ee-oh, ee-oh,
and she lives in a house that’s just a big old pile of sticks,
ee-oh, ee-oh.
My aunt Amelia, the rotund one, sang it to me, letting out bursts of laughter in the kitchen, swearing me to silence in the event that my mother caught us. I repeated after her, like a sad, skinny parrot, my arms and thighs not a pinch on those of the large black woman beside me, that cathedral of firm flesh that sang standing before the skillet. The kind of crying that resembles a burning field.
I opened the window and peeked out at our treeless street, somehow discerning the smell of maize bread amid the deathly clouds of smoke. I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply the remains of a life story turned into a pile of sticks. Life was what had already gone by. What we did and didn’t do. The platter on which we were cut in half like a bread bun about to rise.
DO YOU MISTRUST ME that much? You slept with the bedroom door locked.”
“Good morning, Santiago. I slept well, thanks for asking. And please lower your voice; the longer the invaders next door take to detect my presence, the better. Oh, and the towel I left on the table is for you. Take it.”
I went back to the balcony. The smoking barricade was in the same spot. No one had bothered pushing aside the Dumpsters or cleaning the plaza, which was still full of obstacles—blocks of cement wrenched from the pavement, broken bottles, sticks.
Aurora Peralta was no longer Aurora Peralta. In the place where I’d left her was a charred pile.
Everything is all right, I thought.
I peered out the window longer than usual, as if coming into contact with the outside air had made me shut down. On the asphalt were bloodstains and broken glass. Above, in the direction of La Cal, coming down Avenida Panteón, was a group of the Fatherland’s Motorized Fleet. There were more than thirty of them. They advanced in a zigzag. They had megaphones and shouted the usual:
“They shall not pass! They shall not return! The Revolution lives on!”
Yes, it does live on, over others’ dead bodies.
“What are you thinking about?” Santiago jolted me out of my daydream.
“The quickest way of getting you out of here,” I answered, not looking up.
The direct, aggressive way he had of asking things annoyed me, as did his decisive spirit, which made me think of a leader scoping a situation.
“Look for a place to hide,” I continued.
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“I can’t.”
“Yes, you can. And you will. Not right now, but you have to soon. Call Ana, a friend, I don’t know—”
“I have nowhere to go.”
“I don’t either. That lady crossing the road doesn’t either. The thousands of people driven crazy and trapped in this city don’t either. One of your university friends could take you in for a few days.”
“Ah, of course, you’re right, chica. All of them must be out of El Helicoide. No, no, wait! I’ve got a better idea! I should report to the head thug of Negro Primero. He’d be thrilled to hear how I got disorientated and lost my way, and that was why I didn’t reconvene with them yesterday.”
He searched his pockets for another cigarette. They were empty.
“But, sure, since they know I keep to myself and have my wits about me, they wouldn’t even begin to suspect I said anything to anyone. The command will realize what happened and will intercede for sure, so the commanders don’t put a bullet in my head.”
He ground his teeth. He looked at me with the coffee-colored eyes of a bright boy, a chastened version of the Lasalle-educated adolescent I’d known: tall and thin like a pole for knocking down mangoes; his chin and jaw well defined; his expression lean and arrogant; his physique that of an adult, though this was not entirely complemented by a grown-up air. The fact that he was Ana’s younger brother meant he was mine too. For that reason, I felt I had the moral authority to slap him. If I didn’t, it was only because others had hit him enough.
“Santiago, quit it. Now’s not the time for sarcasm.”
It Would Be Night in Caracas Page 10