The second part was more complicated: reconstructing Aurora Peralta’s relationship with her Spanish family. All the emails in her inbox were from her cousin María José Rodríguez Peralta.
I had trouble building a picture, maybe because when people know each other everything is taken for granted. María José was the daughter of Paquita, the woman I saw in the photos from the seventies, which I started studying exhaustively from that point forward. Now Francisca Peralta was eighty-one years old and, according to what her daughter wrote to Aurora, she was the one insisting she leave the country. A way of repaying the long history of outstanding accounts with her sister-in-law Julia.
I dipped into the letters that Julia Peralta wrote to Paquita. She was the one who encouraged her to cross the ocean after Fabián’s death. They wrote to each other at least once a week for the first eight years. The correspondence started to space out, though Julia never neglected the monthly five hundred bolívares, or sixty-eight hundred pesetas, that she wired her in-laws. Paquita asked after little Aurora and insisted that they visit for the summer. “I know you’re working hard, but you could send Aurora. We miss you, and it would be wonderful if María José and Aurora could spend some time together. They’re close in age, after all.”
As far as I could tell, the Peraltas traveled to Spain on only one occasion after they left. It was in 1983, when their origins were still fresh in their memory. As Julia Peralta adapted to her new country, a transformation occurred: she went from working as a cook, a job she started as soon as she arrived, to opening her own restaurant, a small tavern. Casa Peralta was a strange place, like all immigrant bars initially. Sometimes it functioned as an eatery, sometimes as a café or bar. I remember that Julia Peralta sent out a small canapé with each glass of wine, and even with sodas. The servings were generous: octopus, scrambled eggs, arroz caldoso, and paellas that sated the appetites and melancholia of those who ate there almost daily. In time, Julia Peralta put Venezuelan dishes on the menu: maize empanadas stuffed with meat and cheese, and arepas, which she offered once she employed a kitchen assistant. These additions attracted public servants from the nearby ministries, who would go there for weekday breakfasts and lunches.
Julia—the Spanish woman, as people called her—became Doña Julia. Business improved at Casa Peralta. Word of her special touch meant soon she was receiving more substantial orders. She started offering set meals for first communions and ended up cooking arroces a la marinera and paellas that the Social Democrats served during their electoral campaigns. It could be said that Julia Peralta fed two generations of political leaders of democracy. They won several consecutive elections, a run of almost twenty years in total, and in that time the Spanish woman found her place in the city.
She made quite a name for herself. In the restaurant dining area she hung a framed newspaper feature that pictured her in the kitchen, smiling. “The Spanish woman who cooks for the adecos,” as they called the center-leftist politicians, the first to legislate universal voting, free basic education, and the nationalization of petroleum. Until social democracy was buried by two coup attempts, which paved the way for the Commander’s political career and his Sons of the Revolution movement, Julia had been the woman who cooked for democracy celebrations, while they lasted.
My mother liked going to Casa Peralta on Sundays. She thought it was a respectable place—something she said when relatively good taste and decorum were guaranteed. We would invite Don Antonio, who always ate alone, to sit with us. He was from the Canary Islands, from Las Palmas, and was the youngest of seven brothers and the founder of the first book distributor in the city. I liked listening to him as he talked to my mother. He had arrived toward the end of the fifties. He told us that he had to pedal up and down Bulevar Sabana Grande, selling baseball cards and science primers to newsstand owners in the area. Then he bought a pickup and took to the road to sell the latest arrivals in other cities throughout La Cordillera Central until he opened his bookshop. He called it Canaima, like the Rómulo Gallegos book.
Aurora Peralta moved about the tables, taking drink orders and leaving baskets of bread for the diners. She also served the starters, while her mother went into and out of the kitchen holding a steaming clam casserole. She was an ugly child who stood on the other side of the bar shining glasses and removing cakes and tarts from their molds with a disgruntled air.
Though she became an adolescent in Venezuela, she hadn’t absorbed any of the informality and merriment that surrounded her. She was devoid of all grace and joy, as if she’d stayed impervious, mired in her own grayness. Her life story was full of gaps and unfinished episodes.
Transforming myself into Aurora Peralta was a losing battle before I’d even begun. From now on, I wouldn’t be thirty-eight but forty-seven, and I had to seem like a cook with a certificate in tourism and secretarial studies to her name, judging by the unexceptional qualifications I found, not a language and literature major who specialized in editing. That involved a downgrading in social status.
What expression would I wear when I introduced myself to the women of her family? María José kept insisting that I bring forward my leave date. And she was adamant to the point of nonnegotiability that I stay at her place while I set myself up and learned how things worked in Madrid. Paquita, her mother, was elated. She wanted to see me. “It’s been so many years,” wrote Aurora’s cousin. To pluck up my nerve, I reminded myself that decades had gone by since Aurora Peralta traveled to Spain, which would help justify my appearance. It would even be understandable if I didn’t remember names or places. But I was troubled by the thought that the family could have seen a photo of the real Aurora, and even more worried by the details I’d forced myself to memorize. It would all swirl into one big soup. The risk of failure was enormous.
On top of pretending to be someone else, I had another difficulty: how to explain my disappearance from my own life. Emails from the publishing house I worked for wouldn’t stop peppering my inbox. At first they only wanted to know how I was and if I had recovered enough to take on a new manuscript. The fact that editing and selling books were increasingly extravagant and ruinous activities in Venezuela worked in my favor. But the cease-fire was short-lived. The regional editor wrote to me. She was perturbed by my silence. She asked if she should consider it a rebuff. I decided my demise should be abrupt and shouldn’t include too much explanation. I wrote a succinct response telling her of my decision to leave the country for a time. It seemed that the national circumstances, and even Adelaida Falcón’s personal ones, were enough to convince her.
“I need to get back on my feet after my mother’s death. After all the deaths,” I typed.
Finally, in another dilapidated café, the agent delivered me the false Venezuelan papers I needed to leave the country as Aurora Peralta. That afternoon I bought a plane ticket to Madrid on the internet. I could have left the same week if it hadn’t been for the drastic reduction in the number of international flights due to the protests that were scourging the country. I paid with Aurora Peralta’s credit card. It was a relatively high sum. When I saw the sale go through without incident, I let out a sigh of relief. Money made everything quick and simple. Having it made you a target for those who wanted it, but not having it was worse. And that was how most people lived. In perpetual bankruptcy.
THEY’D STOLEN THE VASE, as well as four letters from the epitaph. They’d wrenched the word Descansa from Adelaida Falcón’s grave. The en paz remained, like a debt that no one would ever pay. Her surname was missing too, as well as the consonants from the town where she was born and where I spent part of my childhood. They had wrenched them off one by one until only extinguished letters remained, stammered like the F in Falcón in the sign at my aunts’ guesthouse. For losing, we even lost our name. The Falcóns, queens of a world that was in its death throes.
I took an empty vase from another tombstone, so that the white carnations wouldn’t wither in the heat of my own shame. It was a month since she’d
died. And even though I was no longer the same person, I wanted to be Adelaida Falcón while I stood before her. I wanted to tell her how much I loved her. Like my mother, I was dead too. She was belowground. I was on the surface. That was why I went that day. To weld our worlds back together, talking to the wind.
I don’t know how long I stayed at her grave, but it was the longest conversation we’d had. Even if there were no words left, even if we only shared this bit of lawn, it was the closest we could get to each other in this part of the world. Death happens quickly when the world insists on turning. And our world, Mamá, didn’t turn until we found each other, like in Eugenio Montejo’s poem. It didn’t, Mamá. It tipped over and fell on everyone else. It crushed the living and the dead, binding them together as one. As for home, our home, nothing is left of it; I couldn’t protect it, Mamá. You must know, too, that other things have changed. That I’m no longer your namesake, that I’m leaving here soon. I don’t expect you to understand, only listen. Can you hear me? Are you there, Mamá? I came to tell you things I thought were obvious but weren’t. But are not. I came to say that I never cared that my father was dead to us. Bearing your name was enough for me. It was the only roof over my head that I needed. Naming me after you, Adelaida Falcón, was a way of sheltering me. From vulgarity, from ignorance, from stupidity.
Since I was a little girl, I’ve felt secretly proud that you decided not to live in your hometown (beautiful and charming, but, at the end of the day, a small place, stifling). That you preferred other things besides playing bingo at the hour of the mosquito plague, besides the rum and the cinnamon guarapos that numbed the souls of everyone who lived in Ocumare de la Costa. I liked that you didn’t resemble your sisters. That you were quiet and reticent. That you despised superstitions and coarseness. That you read, and taught others to do so. You seemed, Mamá, like the country I took as a given. With its museums and theaters. With its people who took care of their appearance and minded their manners. You didn’t like anyone who ate or drank too much. Or those who shouted or wailed. You hated excess. But things have changed. Now everything is spilling over: filth, fear, gunpowder, death, hunger.
As you faded away, the country went crazy. To survive, we had to do things we’d never imagined: prey upon others, or remain silent; leap on someone else’s neck, or look the other way.
It’s a relief you didn’t live to see it. And if I have another name now, it’s not because I wanted to leave the country that we formed with your name and my own. I did it, Mamá, out of fear. I, as you know, was never as courageous as you. Never. That’s why, in this new war, your daughter is on two sides at once: I’m one of the hunters, and I shut my mouth. I’m someone who protects her own, and someone who steals others’ belongings in silence. I inhabit the worst of both camps, for no one claims the casualties of those who live, as I do, on the island of cowards. And I, Mamá, am not brave. At least not in the quiet way you showed me. You willed me bravery. I wasn’t brave. Like Borges in the poem, Mamá.
I knew women who swept patios to give their lonely days a structure. You did too. An extinct race. Aunts Clara and Amelia, and those who went before them and visited us in our dreams. Paper cutout women who hung from metal hangers in the wardrobes of my nightmares. The severe old ladies from the church in Ocumare, all wrapped up in their novena and Nazarene ways. The ones who smoked with the flame pa’ dentro and lost their teeth from giving birth so many times. Or those who appeared to the dying, fending off death saying, pa’ tras, pa’ tras. They populated a planet that’s magnified, now, in my memory. Aunt Clara got up so early to sweep, do you remember? I saw her clean and scrub the cement floor of the patio, around its shrubs and twisted trees: tamarind, passion fruit, mango, mamey, cashew, genipap, the stone plum, martinica, guanabana. What fell from those trees was sweet and tart at once, leaving a trace of something rotten in the mouth, an excess of sugar that drove the heart and tongue crazy. Aunt Clara lived in her garden, was boss of the place where roots are planted and torn up, where life and death are equidistant. I remember her, a soldier in a nightgown who went out to slay her memories with a rake.
Our life, Mamá, was full of women who swept to give their lonely days a structure. Women in black who pressed tobacco leaves, who used a spade to scoop up the fallen fruit that smashed against the patio floor in the early morning. I, in contrast, don’t know how to shake out the dust. I don’t have patios or mangoes. The trees in my street drop only broken bottles. We didn’t have patios, Mamá, and that’s not a criticism. In the early morning, and sometimes in the middle of the night, I sweep my own patch of land until it bleeds. I gather my memories and arrange them in a pile, like we used to do with the leaves in Ocumare de la Costa before we set them alight in the late afternoon. The smell of fire exerted a secret fascination over me, but it was shattered a few days ago. Fire only cleanses those who have nothing else. There is grief and desolation in things that burn.
Since the night you talked to me about my grandmother and the eight women, her eight sisters, who appeared at the foot of her bed as she was dying, I think about us. About what we were, together. You know already, family women. Our tree with its spindly branches and fruits that never ripened fully into sweetness. You know something, Mamá? I haven’t done right by our women. I haven’t called Clara and Amelia since I told them you had died. I will call them, Mamá, don’t you doubt that. For the moment I want to save my words. Looking back only sinks me farther into the land I must leave. Trees are sometimes transplanted. Ours can’t stand it here anymore, and I, Mamá, don’t want to burn like diseased tree trunks do when they’re tossed on a pyre. I’m not sure I’ll see Clara and Amelia again. And I’m not worried. They have each other, like we did. But that, as you can see, is of little use now. And I’ve come here to tell you other things.
I never told you exactly what happened. Do you remember that afternoon when I got lost? I didn’t lose my bearings or get distracted, which I’m sure you always knew. I left the Falcón guesthouse to run an errand you’d sent me on: to buy a kilo of tomatoes.
“Do you know how much a kilo is, approximately? Do you know, Adelaida?”
I shrugged.
“This is a kilo.”
You showed me with both hands, holding the imaginary scale that the real-world tomatoes would sit on.
“Do you understand?”
“Yes, Mamá,” I responded, looking at the mango treetops.
“Pay attention, Adelaida. Concentrate: make sure they don’t give you any less. Like this, remember.” You showed me with your hands once more. “They have to give you change. And don’t dawdle. I don’t like you wandering around town by yourself.”
I walked to the market in the plaza. I asked for what you’d sent me for. They gave me a bag of small, ugly tomatoes. I paid and slipped the change into my pocket. I scanned the stalls, not overly interested. The dogfish-stuffed empanadas, right at the end, at a stall attended by a woman who was kneading kilos of flour. Those makeshift stands where huge men from the port bought empanadas by the pair. They took anxious bites and bathed them in a hot green salsa that streamed down their chins. I also went by the stall with glass jars full of baby clams and trays of sardines, snapper, and mackerel. The fish, open-mouthed, with their small teeth and their stomachs slashed, were lying on hanging scales, the needles going haywire. They smelled of innards, salt, and copper.
I also went by the ice-cream stall, where cups of shaved ice dyed with colored syrup, the frosty peak topped with sweetened condensed milk, were for sale. I went from one stall to another, my bag of tomatoes in hand.
It was hot, the heat of seaside towns. I should have gone home. It was an order, and I rarely disobeyed. Your instructions were a transfer of power within our domestic realm. They conferred responsibility upon me. They momentarily released me from the perpetual state of childhood. It was like wearing high heels, but better. That afternoon I chose to renounce the sovereignty of the Falcón republic. My excuse could be that there were a lot o
f customers and I had to wait, or that the trucks that brought goods from the port were held up, hindering the grocer’s attempts to restock the tomatoes.
The point was to stay away. That day we were having tortoise pie, so the Falcón kitchen was bustling with matrons-cum-slaughterers. I preferred not to watch my knife-wielding aunts Clara and Amelia in their cretonne dresses, all ready to shove Pancho—the red-footed tortoise I fed lettuce leaves, now about to be cooked like any old lobster—into a pot of boiling water, after which they would chop him up and stew him with chili, tomatoes, and onions. I licked my lips just thinking about eating tortoise pie, but I preferred not to pay the price of hearing Pancho being boiled alive. All the tortoises I remember emitted a squeal that sounded human to me and reverberated in my stomach later, when I was guilty of having happily scraped my plate clean of the tasty result of their suffering. I adored the soft meat’s sweet and spicy flavor, but I wanted to enjoy it without having to witness the persecution and sacrifice of that critter. Tasting the prey with no reminder of its death. Eating it guilt-free. The same thing is happening now, Mamá. I take my seat at the table, trying to forget who has carved the fillet of my well-being out of the slaughtered beast, and with what knife. That’s why I was telling you about taking sides, about those who steal and those who turn a blind eye. Those who kill without lifting a finger.
It Would Be Night in Caracas Page 13