It Would Be Night in Caracas

by Karina Sainz Borgo

  We left, not saying anything, keeping it that way until we closed Aurora Peralta’s door.

  Santiago appeared with a toolbox he’d found beneath the sink. With a few screws and a small metal bar he reinforced the latch and added two more locks.

  “This won’t stop anyone, but it can’t hurt. If those women don’t come back, will you move back into your apartment?” he asked, driving a screw into the timber.

  I stayed silent a few seconds.

  “I’m not staying here long, fifteen days tops.”

  “Will you be able to put up with all this for two weeks more?”

  “I’ll have to,” I snapped.

  I didn’t know exactly what was combusting in me: if it was my bad mood, the fear of not knowing what to do, or the suspicion that Santiago was trying to include himself in my plans, whatever they turned out to be. Perhaps the three things together had darkened my state of mind. Meanwhile, he was attaching more locks to the door, screwing and loosening pieces with a screwdriver.

  “This could slow someone down, but it’s not enough to keep you safe. You have to leave this place.”

  Outside, tear gas bombs blasted. Pepper gas impregnated the air again. I was getting used even to that: it no longer made me retch, as it had the past few days. The shouts in the street grew in intensity. I peered between the curtains. A group of young men sheltering behind wooden shields were trying to break through a National Guard barrier. The National Guard had reinforced its ranks. They outnumbered the resistance protesters. They shot their tear gas bombs at young men just a few meters distant.

  Santiago crossed to where I was.

  “I’m leaving tomorrow. I think you should do the same.”

  His determined tone seemed strange, even harsh.

  “Tonight will be worse than yesterday,” I said. “I’m going to the bedroom.”

  I went down the hall, feeling like I was leaving a trail of destruction in my wake. I opened the plastic bag and spread my things across the bed. I picked up the apartment deed, which I strained to read. The daylight was fading, but I didn’t want to turn on any lights, at least until I was sure the women wouldn’t be back. And even after then. Who could guarantee that nothing else would happen, that another group of thugs wouldn’t arrive? Who could assure me that no one would slit my throat on a corner? That I wouldn’t be kidnapped? That they wouldn’t be back? Nothing would ever be the same again. And I couldn’t expect to escape the next bullet that tore out of a gun barrel.

  I had to do something with the wild card that Aurora Peralta’s death had dealt me. I could—why not? —pass as her. I could try.

  In that dark room, I made my decision. There was no going back.

  I SAT ON THE FLOOR, closed my eyes, and started counting the shots. One, two, three, four. Sometimes I heard five or six in quick succession; they sounded like they were coming from an automatic weapon. The bursts of gunfire were increasing. The gas bombs, too. The repression was much worse than the day before. A band of the Fatherland’s Motorized Fleet started an offensive against the buildings. Windows broke in their path. The roar of the convoy’s motors was the sound track to an everlasting war. Then I heard a commotion at the entrance to my building.

  I looked out the balcony window, hiding behind the curtains. A group of six or seven National Guards were beating the door with their shotguns.

  “Open up! Open up the fucking door! We know you’re in there and we’re coming in to get you!”

  I turned around and looked at Santiago, who had come to the bedroom door with the toolbox in hand, his expression unsettled. He motioned to me with his chin. We ran to the kitchen window, which overlooked the building parking lot. Out the window we saw ten masked guards pass by. Neighbors screamed from inside their homes. Something was happening on the ground floor.

  “There’s nobody here!” a man’s voice rang out.

  “No, chico, there’s nobody!” we heard others shouting from the windows of the building’s lower floors.

  “Open the door, cocksucker, open the door right now or we’ll shoot it up!” responded one of the Intelligence Service agents, whom I could identify thanks to his camouflage trousers and black vest. “You’ve got terrorists hiding in there!”

  We watched them drag out a girl by her hair. She fought back with kicks.

  “My name is María Fernanda Pérez and I’m being arrested! I haven’t done anything! My name is María Fernanda Pérez and I’m being arrested! I’m innocent! I haven’t done anything! I’m only protesting! My name is María Fernanda Pérez and I’m being arrested! They’re taking me! They’re taking me!”

  “Shut up, puta! Terrorist! Slug!” The soldier delivered a kick to her stomach.

  They shoved four guys ahead of them too. They were the demonstrators to whom the ground-floor neighbors had given refuge during the bombings. They were being taken away handcuffed. Every time they resisted, they fell to the ground and got a new round of kicks.

  “Leave them alone!” shouted the neighbors from the upper floors.

  “They’re protesting peacefully!”

  “They’re just kids! Let them go!”

  “Killers! Sonsofbitches!”

  “Film it, film it, film it!”

  The last to leave was Julián, our ground-floor neighbor, who walked handcuffed, dragging his bare feet. They made him move forward by whacking him with a long machete. He was wearing shorts and a sleeveless shirt.

  “You’re a terrorist too, you too. We’re putting you in jail, and you won’t be coming out for years, you hear?”

  They shoved them all into a National Guard truck cage. Santiago and I didn’t say anything. We didn’t shout anything. We were like gargoyles.

  “Tomorrow I’m leaving, Adelaida. Tomorrow,” Santiago repeated.

  The truck disappeared downhill. I watched until they vanished in a cloud of smoke and lead. I wanted to tell Santiago there was no rush, he could stay a few more days if he needed. When I turned, he wasn’t there anymore. I went back to the master bedroom, to hide from it all, from what I’d seen that day, and the one before, and the one before that. My head was throbbing, and my body felt punished from being on alert all the time.

  I left the bedroom door open. If Santiago was going to rob me, he could have done so the minute he arrived. The passport and documents arranged in order on the bed struck me as useless objects. The real world happened out on the street, and it imposed itself with absurd force. Our day-to-day had become a matter of watching on quietly as others were carried off to jail or to their deaths. We were still alive. Stiff as statues, but alive.

  Hugging my knees, I sat on the floor. I felt watched. Perhaps I was going crazy. The eyes of the commander, printed on shirts or displayed on city walls, were looking straight at me. I rested my forehead on my knees and begged God to make me invisible, to give me a blanket that would shield me so that no one could know what I was thinking or feeling.

  When I saw Santiago in the doorway, I jumped in terror.

  “Adelaida, it’s okay. It’s me.”

  I knew it was him, sure I did, but my body wouldn’t obey me. My skin was slicked with a cold sweat, and what began as a tremor turned into spasms. My heart started beating out of control, my chest constricted painfully, and my breathing went haywire. I started gasping as if choking. The more I did it, the greater the feeling of dread. “We shouldn’t make any noise,” I said over and over.

  Santiago took me by the shoulders and steered me to the kitchen, the only place in the apartment where the smell of tear gas wasn’t so intense.

  “Breathe into this.”

  He gave me an old paper bag that smelled like bread.

  “Place it around your mouth and nose. Breathe, slower. Breathe.”

  My anxiety started to deflate. As my terror receded, a new feeling overcame me: shame and humiliation. My chest stopped churning and pain transformed into emptiness. Santiago looked at me, not moving a muscle. The glare of the lights from the neighboring buil
ding shone in his eyes, which were a murky color. I saw a river in his pupils. I brought a finger to my lips once more. “Shhh. Shhh. Shhh.” He did the same, as if he were my reflection. We went to the living room: I leaning on his shoulder, he leading me as if I were blind.

  Sitting on the couch, my back straight and flat against the backrest, I felt that my lungs opened suddenly, and the oxygen started running through my veins again, giving me back my presence of mind. Santiago stroked my hair with his free hand. His fingertips worked their way through strands of it to press against the base of my skull. He made circular motions, applying light pressure, and moved to my neck and shoulders. I removed my finger from my lips. We looked at each other a long time. We touched each other’s faces as if confirming we existed. We touched each other to prove that in a country that was in its death throes, no one had killed us yet.

  When I woke, it was daytime. Santiago wasn’t around. He had left, just as he’d promised.

  I never saw him again.

  THE AGENT was a practical man. He was to the point and didn’t seem all that interested in why I wanted the papers. The card and passport issued in Aurora Peralta’s name would cost me six hundred euros, though. The cost wouldn’t be so exorbitant if circumstances were otherwise.

  “You pay for speed,” he said.

  I asked if he wanted a coffee. He shook his head. He kept his gaze on the material I’d handed him, glancing at the passport photos and, on a blank page, Aurora Peralta’s signature, which I had traced directly from her documents.

  “Sure you want nothing to drink?”

  The man shook his head again. Not that there was anything special in the display counter of the café where we’d met, a chocolatería with no chocolate, milk, bread, or cake. Only empty refrigerators, flies, and sodas piled in a refrigerator that had a Coppelia ice creams logo, a Communist brand the Sons of the Revolution had imported from Cuba. Their products hadn’t circulated long. As a smoke screen, I ordered a bottle of mineral water. The agent took out a small notebook and jotted something down. Then he closed it and left it in full view.

  “Go to the restroom and put two hundred euros in here,” he said softly, motioning at the notebook with his lips. “Give it back to me when we say good-bye on the street.”

  I went upstairs to the restroom. I chose the cubicle closest to the door. As I urinated, I folded four fifty-euro bills in half and placed them between the pages of the notebook with its graph-sheet paper. I tucked it inside my handbag, washed my hands, and strolled out confidently. The agent was waiting on the street. I gave him the notebook. We went our separate ways in the middle of Plaza Revolución, which at that time of day was full of passersby.

  I stopped still in the middle of the plaza where my mother used to take me on Sundays. I looked at the plain cathedral without a portico, which disguised its insignificance with a false stucco wall topped with a bell tower. Everything around that place had been renamed or had vanished. The few centuries-old trees still standing seemed more long-lived and resilient than the country. A group of soldiers dressed in the same way as the patriotic army during the Carabobo battle were paying their respects to the Simón Bolívar statue. Their outfits were cut with coarse fabric; more than uniforms, they resembled costumes. I weaved through the preachers and evangelists. I went up Esquina Caliente, where a group of men and women dressed in red shirts often congregated, spouting the achievements of the Eternal Commander over a megaphone. They were all bearing the new version of the national flag, its eighth star the regime’s addition. A recouped province of their own invention. Next to the crowd of acolytes, two enormous portraits of Bolívar, the Liberator—as we called him, perhaps due to the spate of caudillo-style leadership—depicted a military and funerary scene. They were new posters, hot off the press. They contributed to a new vision of Bolívar that the Revolution hung at all public institutions, substituting the image of the luminary of independence we grew up with.

  The new physiognomy included a few changes to the until-then-documented facial features of Bolívar. Bolívar looked browner, and he had acquired a few traits that no one would think to attribute to a white nineteenth-century Venezuelan. The exhumation and genetic analysis of the remains of our national hero, which the Revolution ordered removed from the National Pantheon in a ceremony more necrophiliac than political, seemed to have added a mixed-race strain to the Father of the Nation’s DNA. Now he more closely resembled Negro Primero than the son of Spaniards who rose up in arms against Fernando VII. The plastic surgery that the Sons of the Nation had performed on the past had the whiff of a sham. I walked to Avenida Urdaneta with the certainty that I was poised to leave it all behind. A mixture of disdain and fear set me apart from my country. Like Thomas Bernhard in the pages of Gathering Evidence and Woodcutters, I started loathing the place where I was born. I didn’t live in Vienna, but in the middle of a big mess.

  Ay, garabí!

  THE PROCESS of becoming Aurora Peralta had begun; it could even be said that I’d successfully crossed my first line of impersonation. I went to the Spanish consulate dressed in her clothes, three sizes too large for me. My clothing had disappeared from the wardrobe of my old apartment. I had nothing to wear, except her size 42 dresses and trousers. It took me days to grow used to my ashen look of a woman turned matron before her time. I spent hours in front of the mirror studying the small calamity of my appearance, a routine of self-affirmation where, while I didn’t notice any concrete progress, I did notice utter destruction.

  When I planted myself in front of the small digital camera of the consulate for the biometrics passport photo wearing Aurora Peralta’s large black dress, I didn’t know if I should smile or simulate the constipated look of faces on IDs. In the end I wore an unhappy, deceptive expression, going by what was printed on the document that I held between my hands.

  On the consular office doorstep, I opened the booklet with the words UNIÓN EUROPEA—ESPAÑA in embossed golden letters. On it, my face was linked to an age and a territory not my own; to a story of misfortunes and joys that were foreign to me and for that reason unimaginable. Aurora Peralta’s life was one I knew little about, and yet I had to submerge myself in it immediately. Faced with the long line of children and grandchildren of Spaniards all waiting their turn to collect a document that would be their ticket out of the country, I felt the good fortune of the desperate. I was not that woman; I never would be, not fully. Between the sword and the wall, one can always choose the sword. That passport was my steel, an ill-gotten Tizona.

  Now isn’t the time for regrets, I told myself. Things were the way they were.

  It was my duty to survive.

  AFTER SANTIAGO LEFT, everything took a turn for the worst. La Mariscala and her followers returned, this time with reinforcements: a troupe of another dozen women crammed into colorful leggings. They embodied an absurd fleshiness in a place where everyone was dying of hunger. Five of them occupied the empty stores on the ground floor, part of their colonization strategy. One of the stores housed the headquarters of the Mujeres Libertadoras Frontline, or so said a makeshift sign they taped to the wall. The other half of the group continued taking orders from La Mariscala. They bustled about all day in my old place, now converted into a warehouse for food boxes.

  La Mariscala must have won the battle against the thug who tried to ruin her now-thriving business selling regulated food on the black market. Things were going well for her. People went into and out of the apartment at all hours. They dragged bags and packets of food, as well as enormous boxes of toilet paper. If a product was in short supply, these women had it. They no doubt charged double or triple what it sold for at the people’s markets, which the Revolution set up in an effort to mask the shortages with half-empty shelves. They occupied the midpoint of the chain, were stakeholders in the black market.

  La Mariscala chose our building because it was close to the revolutionary market and, at the same time, it could compete with other businesses in the area, which recei
ved almost no goods. The Sons of the Revolution accused the owners of those businesses of being hoarders. This was where La Mariscala had a captive audience: in the desert of the hungry middle class that didn’t receive the Revolution’s handouts. She did so through speculation. It was a practice the leaders attributed to capitalism, yet it was how she and others filled their pockets.

  They rarely slept in my old apartment. They only used it to sort out their stock. Their nightly absences gave me a small window of peace. I did everything from ten in the evening: I showered, rustled up something in the kitchen, moved things, walked around more naturally; but I never turned on the light. The neighbors tried to fight them. Gloria from the penthouse was the first to organize more urgent actions. She went from door to door, rallying the neighbors to decide on a common defense strategy. On two occasions she rang Aurora Peralta’s doorbell. In the dark, as if I were in a grave, I stayed mute and immobile. One day I heard her ask a few neighbors for Aurora’s whereabouts, even for mine. No one could give her an answer. They didn’t have one, or want to know it.

  Enclosed between those walls, I devoted myself to studying and untangling the life story of the woman I had to become. The first thing I did, after going through her mother’s letters and photograph albums, was charge her phone, which had three voice mails. All of them were from María José, who had written urgent emails too. I hurried to answer, explaining the motives for the silence: the riots, the blackouts, the internet service being sabotaged.

  I wrote as Aurora Peralta, imitating her style. The response was immediate. “When are you coming?” “As soon as my passport’s ready,” I typed. That was answer enough, at least judging by the secretarial and succinct prose of Aurora Peralta herself.

  Her computer was old, and it autocompleted navigation details, including passwords. I accessed all her information without a hitch. I focused on the bank accounts and emails. First, I confirmed that the electronic signature of the account in euros was correct. There were four numbers that the bank had sent to Aurora in an envelope, which she stored with the rest of the information: email passwords, email addresses, telephone numbers, and physical addresses. The four digits still worked. Once her phone was charged, and with the security key that the bank sent via text message, I managed to transfer small amounts to the credit card issued in her name but linked to an account that still identified her mother, Julia Peralta, as coholder. I didn’t want to leave any loose ends. I tried to make sure that everything was in order.