Resolved not to let himself be broken by circumstances, Reverón called Llorente’s house at 10:25. He wouldn’t have done so if he had known that no answer had been sent by then from Miami. But the Jackson hospital told Dr. Mangels at 8:30 that they’d found five thousand units, after a lightning-fast operation, in a neighboring town. Dr. Mangels collected the ampoules personally and drove with them, at top speed, to the airport, where a DC-6B was beginning preparations for the nocturnal flight. The next day no plane flew to Caracas. If Dr. Mangels did not arrive on time, he’d have to wait until Monday night. Then it would be too late. Captain Gillis, veteran of the Korean War and father of two boys, received the ampoules and Dr. Mangels’s handwritten instructions personally. They shook hands. The plane took off at 9:30, at the moment when the Reverón boy, in Caracas, had a degree and a half of fever. Dr. Mangels watched the plane’s perfect takeoff from the chilly airport roof. Then he ran up the steps two at a time, to the control tower, and dictated a message to be transmitted to Caracas by the special channel. On Avenida Urdaneta, in a lonely office, submerged in the colored reflections of neon ads, Carrillo looked at his watch: 10:20. He didn’t have time to despair. Almost immediately the teletype began to jump spasmodically, and Carrillo read, letter by letter, mentally deciphering the company’s internal code, Dr. Mangels’s cable: “We are sending with Captain Gillis on flight 339 five ampoules of serum under guide number 26-16-596787 stop obtained Jackson Memorial Hospital stop if more serum needed request urgently Lederle laboratories in Atlanta, Georgia.” Carrillo pulled out the paper, ran to the telephone, and dialed 718750, the number of the Llorente residence, but the telephone was busy. It was Carmelo Reverón, who was talking to Llorente’s mother. Carrillo hung up. A minute later, Reverón was dialing Carrillo’s number, from a shop on La Florida. He answered instantly.
“Hello,” said Carrillo.
With the calm that precedes a nervous breakdown, Reverón asked a question he doesn’t remember precisely. Carrillo read him the cable, word for word. The plane would arrive at 4:50 in the morning. It was perfectly on time. There was no delay. There was a brief silence. “I have no words to thank you,” murmured Reverón, at the other end of the line. Carrillo couldn’t say anything. When he hung up the phone he felt that his knees wouldn’t support the weight of his body. He was shaken by a sweeping emotion, as if the life of his own son had just been saved. By contrast, the boy’s mother was sleeping peacefully: she didn’t know of the drama her family had lived through that day. She still doesn’t.
March 14, 1958, Momento, Caracas
June 6, 1958: Caracas Without Water
If a downpour falls this morning, this feature is telling a lie. But if it does not rain before June, read it…
After listening to the 7:00 a.m. radio news bulletin, Samuel Burkart, a German engineer who lives alone in a penthouse on Avenida Caracas, in San Bernardino, went to the corner store to buy a bottle of mineral water to shave with. It was June 6, 1958. Unlike every other day since Samuel Burkart arrived in Caracas, ten years ago, that morning seemed mortally calm. From the nearby Avenida Urdaneta, the noise of cars or the explosions of scooters could not be heard. Caracas seemed like a ghost town. The sweltering heat of recent days had eased a little, but in the high, dense blue sky, not a single cloud moved. In the gardens of the country houses, in the little island of the Plaza de la Estrella, the shrubs were dead. The trees of the avenues, ordinarily covered in red and yellow flowers at this time of year, stretched long bare branches up to the sky.
Samuel Burkart had to wait in line in the store to be served by the two Portuguese shopkeepers who were talking to their frightened clientele about the same topic, the only topic over the last forty days, which that morning had burst out of the radio and the newspapers like a dramatic explosion: Caracas had run out of water. The previous night they had announced dramatic restrictions imposed by INOS (National Institute of Sanitation Works) on the last 100,000 cubic meters stored in La Mariposa reservoir. As of that morning, as a consequence of the most intense summer Caracas has suffered for seventy-nine years, the water supply had been suspended. The last reserves were destined for strictly essential services. The government had been making arrangements of extreme urgency for the last twenty-four hours to keep the population from dying of thirst. To guarantee public order, they had taken emergency measures, which civic brigades composed of students and professionals would be in charge of fulfilling. Newspapers, reduced to editions of four pages, were allocated the task of disclosing official instructions to the civilian population about the way they should proceed to overcome the crisis and prevent panic.
One thing hadn’t occurred to Burkart: his neighbors had to make coffee with mineral water and had used up the store’s entire supply in an hour. As a precaution against what might happen over the following days, he decided to stock up on fruit juice. But the Portuguese shopkeeper told him that the sale of fruit juice and soft drinks was rationed by order of the authorities. Each customer had the right to a quota limited to one can of fruit juice and one soda per day, until further orders. Burkart bought a can of orange juice and opted for a bottle of lemonade to shave with. Only when he attempted it did he discover that lemonade curdles the soap and does not produce foam. So he declared a definitive state of emergency and shaved with peach juice.
FIRST SIGN OF THE CATACLYSM: A LADY WATERING HER GARDEN
With his perfectly squared, German brain, and his experiences of war, Samuel Burkart knew how to calculate with due anticipation the reach of a piece of news. That’s what he had done, three months earlier, exactly on March 28, when he read the following information in a newspaper: “There is only forty days’ worth of water left in La Mariposa.”
The normal capacity of La Mariposa reservoir, which supplies Caracas’s water, is 9,500,000 cubic meters. On that date, in spite of the reiterated recommendations from INOS to economize water use, the reserves were down to 5,221,854 cubic meters. A meteorologist declared to the press, in an unofficial interview, that it would not rain before June. A few weeks later the water supply was reduced to an already worrying quota, in spite of the population not giving it due importance: 130,000 cubic meters per day.
On his way to work, Samuel Burkart greeted a neighbor who had been sitting in her garden since eight in the morning, watering the grass. On one occasion he spoke to her of the need to save water. Wrapped in a red, flowered, silk housecoat, she shrugged. “The newspapers are lying to frighten us,” she replied. “As long as there’s water, I’ll water my flowers.” The German thought he should tell the police, as he would have done in his country, but he didn’t dare, because he thought the Venezuelan mentality was completely different from his. He had always been struck by the fact that the coins in Venezuela are the only ones that don’t have their value inscribed on them and thought it might obey a kind of logic that was inaccessible to a German. He convinced himself of that when he noticed that some public fountains, though not the most important, were still functioning when the newspapers announced, in April, that the water reserves were declining at a rate of 150,000 cubic meters every twenty-four hours. A week later it was announced that they were producing artificial downpours at the headwaters of the Tuy—the vital source for Caracas—and that this had given the authorities a certain optimism. But by the end of April it still had not rained. The poor neighborhoods were left without water. In the residential neighborhoods water was restricted to one hour a day. At his office, since he had nothing to do, Samuel Burkart used a slide rule to discover that if things went on as they were there would be water until May 22. He was wrong, maybe due to an error in the data published by the newspapers. At the end of May water use was still restricted, but some housewives were still insisting on watering their potted plants. In one garden, hidden among the shrubberies, he even saw a tiny fountain running during the single hour when water was supplied. In the same building where he lived a lady boasted of not havi
ng gone without her daily bath at any time. Every morning she collected water in every available receptacle. Now, unexpectedly, despite having been announced with appropriate anticipation, the news exploded across all the newspapers. The reserves in La Mariposa would last for mere hours. Burkart, who had a complex about shaving on a daily basis, could not even brush his teeth. He went to his office, thinking that maybe at no point in the war, not even when he was retreating with the Africa Korps, in the middle of the desert, had he felt so threatened by thirst.
IN THE STREETS, RATS DIE OF THIRST. THE GOVERNMENT ASKS FOR CALM
For the first time in ten years, Burkart walked to his office, situated a few steps away from the Ministry of Communications. He didn’t dare use his car out of fear it might overheat. Not all the inhabitants of Caracas were as cautious. At the first gas station he passed there was a line of cars and a group of vociferous drivers, arguing with the owner. They had filled their gas tanks in the hope they’d be provided with water like in normal times. But there was nothing to be done. There was simply no water for the cars. Avenida Urdaneta was unrecognizable: no more than ten vehicles at nine in the morning. In the middle of the street, there were some overheated cars, abandoned by their owners. The bars and restaurants were not opening their doors. Signs were hung on the metal shutters: “Closed due to lack of water.” That morning they’d announced that the buses would provide regular service in the rush hours. At the stops, lines were several blocks long at seven in the morning. The rest of the avenue looked normal, with its sidewalks, but nobody was working in the buildings: everyone was in the windows. Burkart asked a Venezuelan colleague at the office what all the people were doing at the windows, and he answered:
“They’re looking at the lack of water.”
At noon, the heat slumped over Caracas. Only then did the uneasiness begin. All morning, INOS trucks, with capacities of up to twenty thousand liters, delivered water to the residential neighborhoods. With the petroleum companies’ tanker trucks reconditioned as water tankers, they had three hundred vehicles to transport water to the capital. Each of them, according to official calculations, could make up to seven trips a day. But an unexpected problem hampered the project: the access roads were congested from ten in the morning. The thirsty population, especially in the poor neighborhoods, pounced on the tankers, and the intervention of the armed forces was needed to reestablish order. The inhabitants of the hills, desperate, sure that the supply trucks could not reach their houses, came down in search of water. The pickup trucks of the student brigades, with loudspeakers on top, managed to prevent panic. At 12:30, the president of the Government Council, over the airwaves of Radio Nacional, the only broadcaster whose programs had not been limited, asked the population to remain calm, in a four-minute speech. Right afterward, in very brief statements, various political leaders spoke, as well as the leader of the University Front and the head of the Patriotic Council. Burkart, who had witnessed the popular revolution against Pérez Jiménez five months earlier, had experience: the people of Caracas are particularly disciplined. Most of all, they are very sensitive to coordinated campaigns on the radio, in the press, on television, and in flyers. He did not have the slightest doubt that these people would also know how to respond to that emergency. So the only thing that worried him at that moment was his thirst. He went down the stairs of the old building where his office was situated, and on the landing he found a dead rat. He didn’t give it a second thought. But that afternoon, when he went out on his balcony to get some fresh air after drinking a liter of water supplied by the tanker truck that passed by his house at two, he saw a commotion in the Plaza de la Estrella. Bystanders were watching a terrible spectacle: animals driven crazy by thirst were emerging from all the buildings. Cats, dogs, mice, were running out into the street in search of relief for their dry throats. That night, at ten, the government imposed a curfew. In the silence of the sweltering night all that could be heard was the sound of the street sweepers performing an extraordinary service: first in the streets, and then inside the buildings, they collected the corpses of the animals that had died of thirst.
FLEEING TOWARD LOS TEQUES, A CROWD DIES OF SUNSTROKE
Forty-eight hours after the drought reached its climax, the city was completely paralyzed. The government of the United States sent, from Panama, a convoy of airplanes loaded with drums of water. The Venezuelan air force and the commercial companies that service the country substituted their normal activities for an extraordinary service of water transport. The Maiquetía and La Carlota airports were closed to international traffic and devoted exclusively to that emergency operation. But when they managed to organize the urban distribution, 30 percent of the transported water had evaporated because of the intense heat. In Las Mercedes, in Sabana Grande, the police seized, on the night of June 7, several pirate trucks, which were selling water clandestinely for twenty bolívares a liter. In San Agustín del Sur, the people found two more pirate trucks and shared out their contents, with exemplary order, among the children. Thanks to the people’s discipline and feeling of solidarity, by the night of June 8 no one had died of thirst. But since dusk, a pungent smell invaded the city streets. By nighttime, the smell had become unbearable. Samuel Burkart went down to the corner with his empty bottle at eight at night, and stood in an orderly half-hour line to receive his liter of water from a tanker truck driven by boy scouts. He observed a detail: his neighbors, who up till then had taken things a little lightly, who had managed to convert the crisis into a sort of carnival, began to be seriously alarmed. Especially due to the rumors. Starting at noon, at the same time as the bad smell, a wave of alarmist rumors had spread throughout the region. It was said that because of the terrible drought, the neighboring hills, the parks of Caracas, were starting to burn. There would be nothing they could do when the fires broke out. The firefighters had no means to combat them. The next day, as Radio Nacional announced, there would be no newspapers. Since the radio stations had suspended their broadcasts and there were only three daily bulletins on Radio Nacional, the city was, in a way, at the mercy of the rumors. They were transmitted by telephone and in most cases were from anonymous sources.
Burkart had heard that whole families were leaving Caracas. Since there were no means of transport, the exodus was attempted on foot, especially toward Maracay. A rumor said that in the afternoon, on the old road to Los Teques, a terrified crowd that was trying to flee from Caracas had succumbed to sunstroke. The exposed corpses, left in the open air, it was said, were the source of the bad smell. Burkart found that explanation exaggerated, but noticed that, at least in his sector, there was the beginning of a panic.
One of the Frente Estudiantil pickup trucks stopped beside the tanker truck. The crowd rushed toward it, anxious to find out if the rumors were true. A student climbed up on the hood and offered to answer, in turn, all the questions. According to him, the news of the dead crowd on the road to Los Teques was absolutely false. Besides, it was absurd to think that could be the source of the bad smell. Bodies cannot decompose to that extent in four or five hours. He assured them that the forests and parks were patrolled to avoid fires, that public order was normal, that the population was collaborating in a heroic way, and that in a few hours a sufficient quantity of water to guarantee standards of hygiene would reach Caracas, coming from all over the country. He asked people to transmit this news by telephone, with the warning that the alarming rumors were sown by supporters of Pérez Jiménez.
IN COMPLETE SILENCE, ONE MINUTE UNTIL ZERO HOUR
Samuel Burkart went home with his liter of water at 6:45, planning to listen to the Radio Nacional bulletin at seven. On his way he found his neighbor who, in April, had still been watering the flowers in her garden. She was indignant with the INOS for not having foreseen that situation. Burkart thought his neighbor’s irresponsibility had no limits.
“People like you are to blame,” he said indignantly. “The INOS asked us to economize our
water use in good time. You paid no heed. Now we are paying the price.”
The Radio Nacional bulletin did nothing but repeat the information supplied by the students. Burkart understood that the situation was reaching a critical point. In spite of the authorities trying to prevent demoralization, it was obvious that the state of things was not as reassuring as the authorities presented it. An important aspect was being ignored: the economy. The city was totally paralyzed. Provisions had been limited, and in the next few hours food would be scarce. Surprised by the crisis, the population did not have money in cash. Stores, businesses, and banks were closed. Neighborhood stores began to close their doors due to lack of supplies: they’d sold out of everything they’d had. When Burkart turned off the radio he understood Caracas was reaching its zero hour.
In the mortal silence of nine at night, the heat went up one unbearable degree. Burkart opened doors and windows, but he felt asphyxiated by the dryness of the atmosphere and the smell, increasingly overpowering. He measured out his liter of water meticulously and kept two cubic inches to shave with the next day. For him, that was the most important problem: his daily shave. The thirst produced by dry food was beginning to wreak havoc within his body. He had given up, as recommended by Radio Nacional, salty foods. But he was sure that the next day his body would begin to show symptoms of his growing weakness. He took off all his clothes, drank a sip of water, and lay facedown on his scorching bed, feeling in his ears the profound palpitation of the silence. At times, very far away, the siren of an ambulance tore into the torpor of the curfew. Burkart closed his eyes and dreamed he was sailing into the port of Hamburg, in a black boat, with a white strip painted on the gunwale, with bright, shiny paint. When the boat berthed, he could hear, in the distance, the uproar of the docks. Then he woke up with a start. He heard, from all the floors of the building, a human mob rushing out to the street. A flash, filled with warm, pure water, came in through his window. He needed several seconds to realize what was happening: it was pouring rain.
The Scandal of the Century Page 17
