It Would Be Night in Caracas

by Karina Sainz Borgo

  “Hmmm . . .”

  I didn’t understand what he meant by that noise. More than speak, he lowed.

  “Come with me,” he ordered.

  I thought I was dead. I followed the man along gray corridors. I had no passport. No phone. No lifeline. I wasn’t Falcón or Peralta. If they raped me or made mincemeat of me, no one would find out. He led me to an office where an obese man was looking over some papers.

  “Sit down. What is your name?”

  “Aurora Peralta.”

  “Why are you going to Spain?”

  “To take care of a sick family member.”

  “Are you carrying euros, citizen?”

  I didn’t know what his rank was, but, given that he seemed to be the one giving orders, I abandoned the idea of calling him “Officer.”

  “No, Commander.”

  “And how will you pay for your time there?”

  “I’m staying with family.”

  The man inspected my passport and let out a sigh that sounded like he was passing wind.

  “Corporal Gutiérrez tells me you’re clean. To verify this, we’d have to put you through the scanner.”

  I must have opened my eyes as wide as plates.

  “But don’t worry, citizen, the state pays. It won’t cost you a cent. In any case, it’s time-consuming and we’ve got a full flight. Please do the favor of accompanying Corporal Gutiérrez; in the meantime, I’ll hold on to your passport and, if you cooperate, we’ll give it back.”

  Gutiérrez took his hands to his waist. I saw myself paying for a quick death with sex. What should I do? Scream? What for? How would that help?

  “Whatever you say, Commander. If I can cooperate, I will,” I responded, already swallowing semen.

  “Go with the corporal . . . and do be sure to cooperate, citizen.”

  Gutiérrez accompanied me to the tarmac.

  “Remove your vest,” he ordered.

  His familiarity frightened me. I took it off and left it on the table, beside my suitcase.

  “Come up with me.”

  The plane was still parked, and I was still on the ground.

  Corporate Gutiérrez walked with me down the corridors and concourse where passengers were wandering, headed for their departure gates. He stopped before one of the duty-free stores, that small empire of perfumes, liquor, and makeup. His tone changed suddenly.

  “Look, mamita: you go in, you choose the Samsung television . . . that one over there, the biggest. You go to the cash register, show your papers, and come out here with it.”

  He spoke while I nodded.

  “But Officer, I have no money to pay for it.”

  “Not to worry, m’hija. You just bring it over and that’s it.”

  I chose the television, handed over my documents and flight details. The store employee printed a receipt and stapled it to the bag.

  “Enjoy your purchase and have a safe journey,” he said.

  I went back to the official. He gestured at the floor with his nose and I placed the television there. An airport employee collected the bag. Only then did we embark on the walk back to the tarmac. We ended it where everything started: standing before my baggage. I opened my suitcase again. He looked over it mechanically.

  “Everything is in order, citizen,” he said.

  Only then did he give me back my passports, the Spanish and the Venezuelan, both in Aurora Peralta’s name. The Spanish document came back to me accompanied by a yellow sticker in a circular shape. I went up the steps to the waiting lounge with difficulty. My legs were trembling.

  In the glassed lounge of the departure gate, I looked out at the landing strip and the airport workers. Men and women who moved their arms as if in a bid to make the planes dance. The asphalt shone like a newly shined fork, while the turbines scraped at the windows with their snores. The clock in the corridor didn’t work. Its dormant punctuality said two in the afternoon. I looked at my passport, flipping through its pages and trying to convince myself that, this time, I really was Aurora Peralta.

  Around me, passengers were mesmerized by their phones. They killed time and quelled their anxiety by pressing their fingertips against the screens. The airport had turned into an air-conditioned crematory oven, in which someone—that woman, that boy, or that man with glasses—was sending out final missives before crossing the ocean, like someone rolling the last dice or—why not?—burning a boat behind them. Never coming back was the best thing that could happen to any of us.

  My phone rang from inside my handbag. It was Ana. She screamed and broke down into crying spasms. I couldn’t understand anything she was saying. Julio took the phone. Santiago was dead. They found him in a vacant lot on the outskirts of the city, three bullets in his head and a bag of cocaine in his backpack.

  “Cocaine?”

  “Yes, Adelaida. Haven’t you seen the papers? The government has packaged the matter as only they know how. ‘Murdered student leader of the resistance who trafficked drugs.’” There was interference on the line. “Can you hear me?”

  “Yes, Julio. Put Ana on.”

  He told Ana to come to the phone.

  “It’s not true, you know that!”

  “I know it’s not. Listen to me. The important thing, Ana . . . the important thing is to calm down.” I raised my voice, as if doing so would drive away my own surprise.

  “No, no . . . !”

  “Ana, listen to me!” It was impossible to talk to her. She wouldn’t stop crying. “Ana, listen to me, Ana. Ana! Ana, can you hear me?”

  The line went dead. I tried to call back several times, but it went straight to voice mail. I left three messages.

  I clamped my eyes on the baggage vehicle parked next to the plane. The voice of an airline employee announced that boarding for flight 072x to Madrid was due to commence. The workers hastened to load the final boxes and pieces of luggage. Phone in hand, I looked at the suitcases, trying to make out mine, but didn’t manage to identify it. All of them looked small, not large enough to hold the life of Aurora Peralta. The suitcases were treated like us: they were piled up and kicked about. We shared the same powerlessness, like we were all in a giant fish market. Someone was quartering us, opening us up, and shamelessly rummaging around to find what we were carrying within.

  That day, I understood what certain good-byes are made of. Mine, from that fist of shit and viscera, that disappearing coastline, the country I couldn’t shed even a single tear over.

  I got on the plane and found my seat. I turned off my phone and, with it, my nerves. I looked out the window. It was night, and electric currents of misery and beauty were shooting through the city. Caracas looked welcoming and at the same time terrible, the hot nest of an animal that still peered at me with fierce snake eyes in the darkness.

  Only a small difference in sound separates “leave” from “live.”

  I WENT TO THE RIVER to wash the sheets. A girl dressed in torn pants was by my side. A gash encrusted with blood showed through a hole in the fabric above her right knee. I looked at the washbowl full of dirty rags. I asked the girl her name, what happened to her, where her mother was. She grabbed my hand and pulled me with the strength of a Cyclops. We went under, down into dirty water that didn’t seem at all like the clean and calm water’s edge where I’d rung out my linens. We floated among snakes of excrement, which moved slowly alongside dead horses and riders. Their eyes were open, the color of cooked yolks: sockets emptied of life. As we swam clumsily in the warm soup of blood and shit, the bodies of beasts and men collided with us. Unable to turn around, we went on beneath the current, which spun us in nightmarish slow motion. The girl pulled my hand and pulled me under, farther still, down among the algae and the tendrils of firm, hardened shit.

  I wanted to swim to the surface, but the girl tugged my hand again, showing me something. Behind a saddled, riderless horse a curled-up body was floating. A fetal man in a septic placenta. The girl swam to him, not letting me go. Holding him by the shoulder,
she turned his body so we could see his face. It was Santiago. The little girl used her free arm to reach around him. The three of us embraced, the shoal of beasts, dung, and dead men surrounding us.

  When I opened my eyes, a flight attendant had a hand on my shoulder.

  “Are you okay?”

  I must have cried out.

  “Yes, I’m fine.”

  My mouth was claggy, thick. I’d been holding my handbag on my lap the whole time.

  “We will be landing at Barajas Airport in an hour. Would you like breakfast?”

  I nodded, dazed. A sweet smell of baked bread impregnated the air. The woman sat a tray of food in front of me: cubes of fruit, cold butter, and a limp omelet for unhungry travelers.

  “Would you like tea? Coffee? Creamer? Sugar or sweetener?”

  Too many questions. Would you like to proceed or return? Is your name Adelaida Falcón or Aurora Peralta? Did you kill her or was she already dead? Are you fleeing or stealing? The plane seemed small, suffocating.

  “I’m thirsty,” I said.

  “Would you like some water? Juice? Pineapple or orange?”

  “Orange, I want orange.”

  I gulped down the concentrate. Life and presence of mind returned to me with the chemical taste of that citrus, irrigating my parched brain. I scanned my surroundings. No one was seated by my side. I played with a bread roll. I glanced at the minuscule tubs. Everything had come to an end in the same way it had begun: with a pile of completely useless plates. I turned to the window, the black sky an idle threat, as if the slow rising of the sun would pull up the day that was ending on the other side of the ocean. To leave everything behind: the marvel that the Atlantic confers on those who cross it.

  I barely ate. The flight attendant took the tray and hurried to collect the crumpled napkins and empty cup. Flight 072x’s captain announced that in twenty minutes we would land at Madrid–Barajas Airport. The temperature was twenty-one degrees Celsius. I turned my face to the frozen window again. Cities have such a surreal look when you gaze on them from the air: as if they were false, like miniatures or models. Highways, houses, plots of land, pools, tiny cars, drivers headed who knows where. Small lives, insignificant, far off. We landed suddenly. The plane careened along the runway. The smell of cold bread followed me to the only door, which birthed us passengers one by one. The seats looked like a battleground: forgotten pillows, crumpled paper, wounded paper cups cradling the remains of juices and sodas, people’s last yawns fogged on the windows.

  I moved along the jet bridge, passport in hand, clutching my ID like a compass. The airport had a rich-country modernity about it. On arriving at immigration, I found two lines. I stood in the line for Europeans, as if I were secreting stolen goods in my carry-on baggage. I awaited my turn. A National Police officer inspected my passport. His face was clean-shaven, and he was fine-looking. He could never be as dangerous as Corporal Gutiérrez in his soldier’s uniform clustered with medals.

  The process of becoming someone else gets complicated when there’s a counter in the way. It’s like selling anguish by the pound. The Spanish passport, my passport, didn’t have a single stamp on its pages. They were completely blank. That must have caught the officer’s attention, because he took his time examining each page. He looked at the date of issue and my photograph as Aurora Peralta, closed it, and handed it back to me. Good-bye; nothing else. In that small room, by the deed and grace of that stamped paper, I was Spanish. Perhaps for the first and only time, I was the person I was supposed to be supplanting.

  I moved forward, my legs weak. I passed through the airport concourse, holding up my name as if it would light my way. When I arrived at the baggage hall, the conveyor belts spat out cases. The fluorescent lights made the room seem like an incubator where the woman housed inside me could grow. I was my own mother and my own child. The deed and grace of a desperate act. That day, I gave birth to myself. I delivered myself, clenching my teeth, not looking back. My suitcase was the final strain. I grabbed it by the handgrip and headed for the exit.

  “Fucking country: you’ll never see me again,” I said under my breath.

  That morning, for once in my life, I won. A harpoon had pierced my side, but I won.

  Every sea is an operating room and a sharp scalpel slices into those who dare cross it.

  A FAMILY WAS WAITING, balloons and banners in hand. At first, they seemed euphoric; a few seconds later disappointment overcame them as they realized the person they were expecting wasn’t among those coming through the glass doors. A few men were holding up electronic tablets that displayed the name of a passenger, and overly made-up women dressed as flight attendants were awaiting groups of tourists. I wanted to hit all of them. I don’t know why, but I wanted to do damage, hurt, destroy. Wanted to be a hurricane. A force of nature. I pulled my suitcase after me until I arrived at a free bench.

  I checked the address: Number 8, Calle Londres, Las Ventas. “You have to tell the driver that the address is inside the M-30 ring road,” María José had written in her last email. Ten lines with instructions, and, after that, she wished me bon voyage. But what did that mean, after everything? Who gets wished such a thing? The one returning, or the one leaving? The person you are when you’re leaving, or the person you are when you arrive as someone else?

  What would happen if I didn’t show up, if I got lost in Madrid and made a life for myself without first checking in with a family I didn’t know? Why did I have to implant myself among people I knew nothing about when I could, with my new surname, disappear without explanation? I felt afraid, much more afraid than when I disposed of the body of the woman who had now gifted me her name.

  I looked at my shoes, the only things of my own that I was wearing. Anyone would have thought I was from the provinces and had never been on a plane or used an ATM. The patterned, voluminous clothing was a dead giveaway for my impersonation. Since I had started being Aurora Peralta—dressing and acting like her, remembering and even sometimes thinking like her—I perceived myself as an undesirable woman, bewildered and unremarkable.

  Where does a lie start? In a name? A gesture? A memory? Maybe a word?

  Giving voice to Aurora Peralta called for dissolving her inside me, assimilating her until I resembled the remote idea of her that I had in my head. Being Aurora Peralta initiated a battle with myself. Ceasing to be. Forfeiting existence, surrendering to her version, which in the next few days would have to take shape in my voice, my memories, in the way I reacted and desired, in my appearance. How would I fill up the first meeting, the first days, the chitchat that follows the basic instructions of here is the bathroom, the coffee machine works like this, here’s how you turn on the TV? What fuel would burn in the moments that followed the truce of courtesy, the welcome to the stranger? I could lament the death of a mother who wasn’t mine, but what could I tell them about her sickness and demise? Sooner or later the topic would come up. What expression should I wear when one of them referred to the house, the one they went on about, Julia Peralta as much as Paquita, in the letters sent in the last years?

  Two days before my trip I opened the letter from Spanish Social Security addressed to Julia Peralta. It was dated recently, and in it was a request to send proof that she was still living, to guarantee her widow’s payment. Six letters of the same type had been filed, one per year since the death of Julia Peralta. They were together with an apostilled document in which Aurora Peralta testified before the Spanish consulate that her mother was still living, but that her health problems prevented her from coming in person. A medical certificate, signed by the same official, served as evidence. There had been no time for Aurora Peralta to answer the last letter; and though I’d taken the precaution of obtaining a similar document for an absurd sum, I didn’t dare send it.

  “Mamá always says I’m gaining weight,” Aurora Peralta had noted in the earliest entry of a diary I found in the nightstand drawer. It was hidden away, as if she were keeping it from prying eyes. It wa
s a blue notebook, its pages yellowing like a sheet stained with urine. It was full of straightforward musings: sketches of an adolescent who burned with resentment as youth neared its end, and then who ended up shutting down in resignation in adulthood. With one line for every day lived, Aurora Peralta could have reached eighty years and the notebook would still have blank pages.

  “Today I’m sad.” “Yesterday I didn’t eat dinner.” “I don’t want to go to the restaurant.” Mamá is ranting.” “I’m getting fat again.” “Mamá’s mood is intolerable.” “Today I went to bingo.” “I don’t want to speak to anyone.” “I hate it when Mamá berates me.” “Mamá wanted to go out today, I didn’t. We fought.”

  More than feelings, Aurora Peralta overturned the inventory of someone who seemed to plod along regardless. On a few occasions she alluded to something that extended beyond the universe of her own health; the fights with her mother; or the restaurant, where she was needed more and more.

  “I don’t like that place.” “I don’t want to be there.” “Cooking is boring.”

  The jottings of the last years drew an even blurrier picture of who Aurora Peralta was or what she wanted. The only clear thing was that she didn’t like the eatery, much less working with her mother. “Today I had to fry eighty empanadas.” “Mamá will go to cook at the party headquarters. I don’t want to go. I’m no servant.” Descriptions of barely two or three lines, endowed with an ancillary contempt for how her mother earned a living. Her boredom was much greater than the feelings of rejection the business evoked in her.

  Julia Peralta’s sickness, which Aurora described only as cancer, took on in her diary the form of a person. An individual with a will. Something like a new family member who moved in and to whom she attributed moods. Everything was written in a brittle way, almost theatrical, like a child playing with two cans of soda, mimicking the voices of inanimate objects.

  “Today cancer treated my mother badly, it’s left her lying in bed. I opened and closed the restaurant; no good.” “Cancer behaved better, Mamá got out of bed today.” “Cancer was brutal today, we couldn’t open. At the clinic all day, I feel sorry for Mamá. But she brought this on herself, bent over the stove all day. The one good thing was not having to fry.”