It Would Be Night in Caracas

by Karina Sainz Borgo

  I got into the passenger seat and looked at the driver out of the corner of my eye. He had gray hair and the pitted skin of an aging black man. “Which cemetery are we going to? La Guarita?” I nodded. We said nothing further. The city’s hot wind embraced me. It had a sweet-and-sour smell of orange peel rotting inside a plastic bag beneath the sweltering sun. Driving along the motorway took twice as long as usual. In the past fifty years, the city had grown to at least three times the population that the main artery had been designed for.

  The Zephyr had no shocks, so the potholed road was an ordeal. With no straps to hold it secure, my mother’s casket bounced around in the back. As I looked in the rear-view mirror at the veneer box—I hadn’t been able to afford a timber one—I thought about how much I would have liked to give my mother a fitting funeral. She must have thought along similar lines all too often. She must have wished to give me better things: a cuter lunch box, like the pink ones with gold trim that my schoolmates bought every October, not the workaday blue plastic one that she washed out thoroughly every September; a bigger house with a garden in the city’s east, not our birdcage apartment in the west. I never questioned anything my mother gave me because I knew how much it cost her. How many tutorials she’d had to teach to pay for my private-school education, or for my birthday parties, which were always overflowing with cakes, jelly, and soda served in plastic cups. She never said. Yet where the money came from needed no explaining because I saw it with my own eyes.

  My mother had taught private tutorials on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays every week. These turned into daily sessions during the holidays for students who had to take exams in September so as not to fail a course. At a quarter to four, she would remove the tablecloth from the dining table. On its surface she would place pencils, a sharpener, several blank sheets of paper, a plate with María cookies, a jug of water, and two glasses. So many children passed through our house. They all had the same anemic look, no life in them. Overweight and indifferent girls and boys, undernourished thanks to all the chocolate and television that filled their afternoons in a city that was doing away with its parks. I grew up in a place full of rusty slides and swing sets, but everyone was too fearful of crime to play on them, and back then the crime rate wasn’t a shadow of what it came to be.

  My mother would outline the basics: subject, verb, and predicate, then direct, indirect, and circumstantial complements. There was no way to get it right except to go over it again and again, and sometimes not even that was enough. So many years of correcting exams written in gray lead, preparing morning lessons, and supervising her students with their homework in the evenings meant my mother’s sight deteriorated. Toward the end, slipping off her pearly acetate glasses was almost impossible. She could do nothing without them. Even though her daily reading of the paper became slower and more difficult, she never stopped doing it. She thought it was civilized.

  Adelaida Falcón was a cultured woman. The library in our house had books from the Circle of Readers monthly subscription service—universal and contemporary classics in electric colors that I consulted thousands of times during my degree and ended up adopting as my own. Those volumes fascinated me even more than the pink lunch boxes that my classmates flaunted every October.

  WHEN WE ARRIVED at the cemetery, the gravesite with its two pits had already been dug. One for her, the other for me. My mother had bought the plot years before. Looking at that clay recess, I thought of a Juan Gabriel Vásquez line that I’d seen on a galley I’d proofread a few weeks before: “Each of us belongs to the place where our dead are buried.” As I observed the shorn grass around her grave, I understood that my mother, my only dead, tied me to this land. And this land exiled its people as forcefully as it devoured them. This was not a nation. It was a meat mincer.

  The cemetery workers removed my mother from the Ford Zephyr and lowered her into the grave with the help of pulleys and old belts full of rivets. At least what had happened to my grandmother Consuelo wouldn’t happen to my mother. I was very young, but I remember it to this day. It was in Ocumare. It was hot, a saltier and more humid heat. My tongue had been seared by the guarapo that my aunts forced me to drink between one Ave Maria and another, and I kept worrying at it as the town gravediggers lowered the casket with two frayed ropes. All of a sudden, the casket slid sideways. On impact, it broke open like a pistachio. My stiff grandmother banged against the glass top, and the gathering of loved ones went from intoning the requiem to shrieking. Two young men tried to right her, close the box, and get on with the proceedings, but things got complicated. My aunts paced around the pit, grasping their heads and praying to the top brass of the Catholic Church. San Pedro, San Pablo, Virgen Santísima, Virgen Purísima, Reina de los Ángeles, Reina de los Patriarcas, Reina de los Profetas, Reina de los Apóstoles, Reina de los Mártires, Reina de los Confesores, Reina de las Vírgenes. Pray for us.

  My grandmother, an unloving woman at the foot of whose grave some joker planted a hot chili, died in her bed, calling for her eight dead sisters. Eight women dressed in black. She saw them on the other side of the mosquito netting beneath which she was dispensing her final commands. So said my mother, who, by contrast, had no parade of relations to command from her throne with the aid of pillows and spittoons. My mother had only me.

  A priest recited from a missal for the soul of Adelaida Falcón, my mother. The workers shoveled the clay and sealed the grave with a cement board, the mezzanine floor that would separate us when we were together again beneath the ground of a city in which even the flowers prey on the weak. I turned around. I nodded good-bye to the priest and workers. One of them, a slim black man with snake-like eyes, told me not to linger. So far that week there had been three armed robberies at burials. And you don’t want a nasty scare, he said, looking at my legs. I didn’t know whether to take that as a warning or a threat.

  I got into the Ford Zephyr and turned around in my seat again and again. I couldn’t leave her there. I couldn’t leave when I knew how quickly a thief could dig up her grave to steal her glasses, or her shoes, or even her bones, a common occurrence now that witchcraft was the national religion. A toothless country that slits chicken’s throats. For the first time in months, I cried with my whole body. I shook out of fear and pain. I cried for her. For me. For the single entity we had been. For that lawless place where, when night fell, Adelaida Falcón, my mother, would be at the mercy of the living. I cried thinking about her body, buried in a land that would never be at peace. When I got in next to the driver, I didn’t want to die, but only because I was already dead.

  The plot was a long way from the cemetery gates. To get back to the main road, we took a shortcut that was hardly better than a goat track. Curves. Boulders. Overgrown paths. Embankments with no guardrails. The Ford Zephyr went down the same road we’d come up. The driver swerved around every bend. Disconnected, shutdown, I didn’t care what happened. We would either die or we wouldn’t. Finally, the driver slowed and leaned over the greasy, blackened steering wheel. “What the hell is that?” His jaw dropped. The obstacle spread out before us like a landslide: a caravan of motorbikes.

  There were twenty or thirty of them parked across the road, cutting off our route. All were wearing the red shirts distributed by the government in the current administration’s first years of office. It was the uniform of the Fatherland’s Motorized Fleet, an infantry the Revolution used to quell protests against the commander-president—the name the leader of the Revolution was known by after his fourth electoral victory—and in time that infantry outgrew its role. Anyone who fell into their hands became a victim. Of what depended on the day and the patrol.

  When the money to fund the fleet dried up, the state decided to compensate members with a little bonus. While they would receive a full revolutionary salary no longer, they would have a license to sack and raze with abandon. Nobody could touch them. Nobody could control them. Anyone with a death wish and an urge to kill could join their ranks, though in truth many
acted in their name without any connection to the original organization. They ended up forming small cooperatives, collecting tolls in different parts of the city. They erected tents and spent the day nearby, lounging on their bikes, from that vantage spying their prey before kicking the bikes into life and hunting them down at gunpoint.

  The driver and I didn’t look at each other. The band hadn’t detected our presence. They were congregated around an improvised altar made from two bikes, on which they’d placed a closed casket. They’d formed a circle around the casket and were laying bunches of flowers and spitting mouthfuls of alcohol on it. They raised their bottles, drank, and spat. “It’s a thug’s burial,” said the driver. “If you’re one for praying, then pray, my girl,” and he jerked the gear lever beside the steering wheel into reverse.

  The time it took him to back up was enough to catch sight of what appeared to be the funeral’s liveliest moment. A ratty-haired woman dressed in sandals, shorts, and a red T-shirt had lifted a girl onto the casket, which she was now straddling. It must have been the woman’s daughter, judging by the proud gesture the woman made as she raised the girl’s skirt and spanked her backside while the little thing moved in time to the music. With each slap, the girl—twelve years of age at most—shook harder, always to the rhythm of the raucous music that was pumping through the speakers of three cars and the minibus parked on the other side of the curve. “Tumba-la-casa-mami, pero que-tumba-la-casa-mami, tumba-la-casa-mami, you-need-to-bring-down-the-house-mami,” the reggaeton number boomed, charging the air. A grave never had such a steamy lure.

  The girl gyrated her pelvis, no expression on her face, indifferent to the teasing and obscenities, indifferent even to the slaps of a mother who looked to be auctioning her young virgin off to the highest bidder. Each time the girl thrust, the men and women salivated and spat aguardiente and applauded. The Ford Zephyr was now far from the scene, but I could still make out a second girl, a little chubby, getting onto the casket and straddling it too, rubbing her sex against the brass plate that was burning with the heat of the sun, beneath which some man was lying stiffly, awaiting putrefaction.

  In the heat and steam of that city, separated from the sea by a mountain, every cell of the dead body would start to swell. The flesh and organs would ferment. Gases and acids would bubble. Pustules would attract flesh feeders of the kind that grow in lifeless bodies and scurry around in shit. I looked at the girl rubbing herself against something dead, something about to become a breeding ground for worms. Offering sex as the final tribute to a life ripped apart by bullets. An invitation to reproduce, to give birth and bring more of his offspring into the world: swarms of people who just like flies and larvae would have brief lifetimes. Beings that would survive and proliferate thanks to the death of others. I would feed those same flies. Each of us belongs to the place where our dead are buried.

  The midafternoon radiant heat meant that the mirage that obliterates landscapes had risen over the asphalt, making the concentration of men and women shimmer like a lifeand-death grill. We drew farther away and started down a shortcut that was even worse. I could only think about the moment when the sun would drop below the horizon and light would be gone from the hill where I’d left my mother all alone. Then I died once more. I was never able to rise again from all the deaths that accumulated in my life story that afternoon. That day I became my only family. The final part of a life that nobody in that place would hesitate to cut short, machete blow by machete blow. By blood and fire, like everything that happens in this city.

  I THOUGHT THREE BOXES would be enough to pack away my mother’s things. I was wrong. I needed more. At the dresser, I inspected what was left of the La Cartuja plates. A collection of loose pieces, enough to dish up soup, mains, and dessert for three in a modest household. It was chinaware trimmed with burgundy edging that had a rural scene in the middle. Not much, sincere and modest. I never knew where it had come from or why it was in our home.

  In the story of us there was no wedding with a registry, no grandmothers with Canarian accents and Andalusian looks who plied us with fried torrijas that they dished up on those plates during Semana Santa. On that chinaware we placed our steamed vegetables and the sad pieces of chicken that my mother skinned in silence. Eating off them, we honored no one. We came from nobody and belonged to nothing. My mother told me, in her final days, that my grandmother Consuelo had gifted her the eighteen-piece set the day she finally saved enough money to buy the small apartment we’d been renting. A dowry fit for the gardenless kingdom that we founded together.

  The chinaware had been left to my grandmother Consuelo by her sister Berta, a woman with Amerindian eyes and black skin who had been married to Francisco Rodríguez. He had asked for her hand in marriage six months after arriving in Venezuela from Extremadura and had built the Falcón guesthouse brick by brick in the heat of the Aragua coast. When he died, everyone started calling Great-Aunt Berta the musiú’s widow, a moniker for all Europeans who arrived in the forties, a translation, if it can be called that, of monsieur. My mother told me there was only one photograph of the man from Extremadura. It was from the day of his wedding to Berta Falcón, who from that moment forward went by the name of Berta Rodríguez. He, a great hulk of a man, appeared dressed in his Sunday best alongside the striking mixed-race woman, or at least that’s what my mother told me about the photo she saw but I never did.

  My mother and I ate off the plates of dead people. How many meals must Great-Aunt Berta have cooked and served up on them, day after day? Would she have cooked the repertoire of a woman who moved her large berth around a kitchen smelling of cloves and cinnamon? Whatever the case, those plates emanated just one truth: my mother and I resembled one another only. Through my veins ran blood that would never help me escape. In a country where everyone was made from someone else, we had no one. The land we came from was our only life story.

  Before wrapping it in newspaper, I looked at the sugar bowl, never used, that had been forgotten at the back of the dresser. We never sweetened anything we lifted to our mouths. We were skinny like the tree that presided over the dirt patio of the Falcón guesthouse and dropped a dark and sour fruit. We called them “stone plums” because of the tiny amount of flesh and the huge pit. Their centers distinguished them from other fruit. It was almost a pebble, a rough pit rounded off by the sour flesh that gave the small, withered trees, which once a year brought forth the miracle of their fruit, their name.

  The stone plums grew in poor soil all along the coast. Children climbed in their branches and stayed up there like crows. Creatures that sipped up the little that the earth gave them. If our trips to Ocumare coincided with the season, we brought back two or three bags chock-full. It was up to me to collect the best ones. My aunts prepared a viscous sweet with them. They let them soak all night and then boiled them with grated sugarcane blocks. After letting the mixture simmer over low heat for several hours, a dark treacle formed. Not just any plum would do, only those that were about to fall from the tree. If they were green, it was better not to touch them; the ones that were still ripening were no good either because they made the treacle bitter. They had to be fully ripe, almost purple, and round and soft.

  Collecting them was a painstaking process, accompanied by more than a few instructions.

  “Squeeze them like this. Look.”

  “If it’s soft like this, put it in the bag; as for the others, put them aside and wrap them in newspaper later.”

  “That’s so they ripen. If you’re not going to explain properly, Amelia, how do you expect her to understand? Don’t eat too many. They’ll upset your stomach.”

  “Take this bag.”

  “Not that bag, Amelia. This one!”

  Clara and Amelia kept interrupting each other. I nodded, then they let me go in peace. I wandered down the corridor and out to the patio. I climbed the tree and started pulling the fruit from the branches. Some came away easily while others resisted, coming free only when I yanked them.
When I was done, I gave my aunts the ripest fruit, perfect for the sweet that they prepared in their huge stockpots laden with fruit and syrup. I still remember their silhouettes through the steam, a cloud that always gave me enormous cravings as it enveloped those robust women who tipped kilos of sugar into boiling water and stirred it hard with their wooden spoons.

  “Get out of here, girlie. If one of these stockpots falls on your head—” said one.

  “You’ll be crying all the way from here to kingdom come,” finished the other.

  I made the most of the scolding to slip away and rescue the small pile of plums hidden in the garden, all for me.

  Sitting on the highest branch, I sucked the flesh from them. I sucked and nibbled them right down to the pit, where there was always a little flesh still attached. Eating a stone plum was an act of perseverance. You had to remove the hard skin, then tear and wrench at the flesh with your teeth until you were scraping at the stony heart. Once it was smooth, I swished the pit from one side of my mouth to the other, as if it were a hard-boiled candy. And even though my mother threatened me by saying that if I swallowed the pit a plum tree would grow in my stomach, I enjoyed the smooth feel of it in my mouth. Only when the pits were completely fleshless did I spit them out, letting fly a slobbery stone that fell to the ground short of my aim, not even grazing the skinny dogs that watched my every move, expecting me to share my afternoon snack. I tried to shoo them away, waving my hands in the air. But they, with their mangy poodle eyes, stayed put, still as statues, watching me eat.

  The stone plum tree appeared in my dreams too. At times it sprouted from the city gutters; at others, from our apartment sink, or from the Falcón guesthouse laundry. I never wanted to wake from those dreams. Far more beautiful than their real-life counterparts, my dream trees were always full of pearly plums that transformed into glittery cocoons, sleeping caterpillars, which I thought were beautiful in a strange and slightly repugnant way. They moved imperceptibly, like the muscles on the horses that sometimes made their way down the road, beasts whose hooves must have been sore from hauling the sugarcane and cacao to the Ocumare market for the men to unload. That was how everything in the town happened: as if the nineteenth century had never given way to progress. If it weren’t for the public lighting and the Polar beer trucks that climbed the road, nobody would have believed that this was the eighties.