It Would Be Night in Caracas

by Karina Sainz Borgo

  Almost all the customers were men. They went there to drink bottles of beer, which they sipped unenthusiastically. Even in the hellish heat, they pecked at chickpea-and-spinach stew, lentils with chorizo, or tripe and rice. Casa Peralta was known as the best place in the city to eat mussel-and-white-bean stew. Judging by the number of diners, that was a fair assessment.

  Julia, the owner, had been one of the many Spanish women who made a living from the trades they plied before coming to Venezuela: cooking, dressmaking, farming, waitressing, nursing. Yet, most started out working as housekeepers for the local bourgeoisie in the fifties and sixties; others opened small stores and other businesses. They had only one thing to live by: their hands. Spanish printers, booksellers, and some teachers came to the city too and became part of our lives, bringing with them those resounding, lisped z’s that cut through the air in any conversation until they made our pronunciation their own.

  Aurora Peralta, like her mother, made a living by cooking for others. For quite some time both before and after Julia’s death, she ran the family restaurant. Then she sold it to start up a pastry-making business that she ran from home. Renting premises was expensive, and it was risky: anyone could stage a holdup and take everything she had, not to mention shoot the unfortunate person who at that moment had access to the cash register.

  Only nine years separated us, but she already seemed like an old lady. She came over a few times with a cake just out of the oven. Like her mother when she was alive, she seemed affable and generous. And one thing in her life resembled my own: she had no father. Or at least that was the conclusion I came to when I noticed that the life she and her mother led looked a lot like ours. They started and ended each day together, as mother and daughter. I’d been surprised when she hadn’t come to my mother’s wake. I’d told her in person how poorly my mother was when she’d asked after her health. I assumed the shortages of flour, eggs, and sugar had put a strain on her business, that she was going through a tough time, or had returned to Spain, if she still had family there. Then I forgot about her as easily as I forgot about a faulty lightbulb. I was too busy completing a second gestation, nourished only by my mother, whose presence I could still feel around me. I didn’t need or want anything else. No one would take care of me, and I wouldn’t take care of anyone. If things got worse, I would earn my right to live by walking all over the rights of others. It was them or me. There was no one alive in that country who was generous enough to give me a coup de grâce. No one would blindfold me or put a cigarette in my mouth. No one would pity me when my time came.

  MY MOTHER’S BELONGINGS were, finally, in boxes to one side of the home library. They looked like baggage that time had packed behind our backs. I resisted the urge to give away or donate all of it. I didn’t intend to leave a single page, length of fabric, or splinter of wood to this doomed country going up in flames.

  The days accumulated like the dead in the headlines. The Sons of the Revolution tightened the screws. They gave us reason to go out in the street, and all the while the state-sponsored bodies and armed cells repressed those who did, acting in groups with their faces covered, cleansing the pavements. No one was completely safe in their homes. Outside, in the jungle, methods to neutralize opponents reached an unprecedented degree of finesse. Across the nation the only thing in working order was the killing and stealing machine, the pillaging apparatus. I watched them grow and become part of the cityscape, just another feature of everyday life: a presence camouflaged in the disorder and chaos, protected and nourished by the Revolution.

  Almost all the militias were made up of civilians. They acted under police protection. They started congregating by the trash heap at Plaza del Comandante, which we were still calling by its original name: Plaza Miranda, a tribute to the only truly liberal figure of our War of Independence, who died, like other good and just men, far from the country he’d given his all. That was where the Sons of the Revolution chose to establish their new command. Sons? I thought. And why not bastards? “Bastards of the Revolution,” I murmured on seeing a troupe of obese women, all dressed in red. They looked like a family. A gynoecium of roly-poly nymphs: fathers and brothers who were really mothers and sisters. Vestals armed with buckets of water and sticks, femininity in all its splendor and at its most bizarre.

  The first day, a convoy of ten soldiers—faceless thanks to dark helmets with skull smiles—camped next to them. After a few weeks, more arrived. All the while more members of the Fatherland’s Motorized Fleet turned up. It was impossible to identify them. They wore the masks used by riot police. The lower half of the face was covered with the smiling jawbone of a skeleton and, at the height of the eyes, a piece of rubber was bored with holes. Why did they take such pains to hide their identity when the law was in their hands?

  In contrast, the women showed their faces, baring their teeth like menacing dogs. They fought more fiercely. They landed punches. Once they’d managed to bring down an opponent, they dragged him along the ground and stripped him of everything. Everyone carried out their labors with immense gusto, though I never managed to understand what salary could be so high that their fury never abated. What did they get in exchange for the full-time job of smashing heads in as if they were melons? Our days were numbered.

  THE LAST BOX fell from the highest shelf of the wardrobe, plowing into my forehead. I picked the box off the floor. “Teseo Shoes,” I read. My mother liked these boxes. They were stiff boxes, good-quality, like almost everything in the store. It was called Teseo after the owner, an Italian whose face looked like it had been chiseled from an enormous piece of marble. “Ah, carissima bambina,” he said after pinching my cheeks so much that they flushed like ripe mangoes. His manner of speaking was always the same, a mixture of Italian and Spanish that he never corrected, despite living in Venezuela for more than twenty years.

  People called him “Señor Teseo,” as if something in his appearance exonerated him from being called by his first name alone. He was tall, with light eyes and a perfect smile, his teeth large and square. At almost fifty years of age he still had a gallant appearance: a strong jaw, a nose that could belong to a statue, and hair slicked back with gel. He always smelled like eau de cologne and wore a wristwatch almost as big as his large hands. I would be lying if I said that I once saw a single crease in his shirt or trousers. His clothing suited the store he owned, which was on the lower floor of a building built in the fifties, one of the granite-and-mosaic marvels that imposed order in a nation eager to shake off its horse-riding montoneras past. Development as an attempt to saddle a lawless nation with progress.

  His store was directly across from the apartment block where my mother and I lived. It was a simple, elegant store. The floor was covered in beige carpet. Loafers and high heels lined the showcases, glassed-in stands in which socks and metal shoehorns were neatly arranged. The cash register with its paper rolls spitting out receipts stirred a thorough fascination in me. But that wasn’t what I most liked about the store. Another object monopolized my attention: a photograph of Pope John Paul II, which presided over the door to the storeroom. The image seemed to have traveled through time, as if it had frozen the moment when the pope clasped the hand of a young man dressed in a dark cassock.

  While my mother took her time requesting shoe sizes that were never quite right, and while Teseo went from one side of the store to the other in search of the perfect fit, I studied the portrait. A pope—no, the pope. Holy moly, I thought. What relationship could exist, beyond one of faith, between Señor Teseo, the young priest in the black cassock, and the Great Chancellor of the Holy Glory of God on Earth, in my aunts’ words—the very man who presided over Sunday Mass on the official channel on TV? (At that stage the state hadn’t yet declared war on the Church, and the Sons of the Revolution weren’t a concern.) The Vatican, I thought. So far away.

  “Are you related to the pope?” I asked.

  After letting out a hearty laugh, Teseo told me the story. The young priest Jo
hn Paul II was greeting was Paolo, his younger brother. The snapshot, blown up and exhibited in a golden frame, was of Paolo’s ordination.

  The Italian told me this with special solemnity, as if his brother’s cassock and the position he held in the Vatican elevated him on the social ladder, an invisible one that stretched between this shoe store, in the middle of a Third World city, and the world that his brother inhabited. That was the reason behind his perfect manners and the anticipation of progress that his store represented, which set him apart from other immigrants.

  Like Teseo, men and women had arrived in the city from Santiago, Madrid, the Canary Islands, Barcelona, Seville, Naples, Berlin—people who in their countries had been forgotten and who now lived among us. Muisiúes, every one. Teseo had nothing in common with the Funchal bakers, the Madeira gardeners, or the builders from Naples, people whose hands, though they were thick like Teseo’s, were cracked and flaking from working directly with the earth, cement, or flour. People who broke rocks, baked loaves of bread, and built a place already partly their own.

  Men like Teseo had disembarked in Venezuela at a time when everything was yet to be done, while the birthplace they’d left behind was in ruins. The streets of Caracas echoed with the voices and accents of people who had crossed the Atlantic, the ocean where someone was always waving good-bye. Their words and names merged with the hubbub of myloveary—my queen, my love, my life—that we used and they ended up adopting. People who improvised quick fixes for the nation: the one that theirs and ours formed. We were, together, all that we understood as “ours.” The sum total of the shores separated by a sea.

  “Adelaida, mi amore,” Teseo asked me once, in a Spanish of his own invention, “why do you like that photo?”

  “Because I like Rome.”

  “E perché?”

  “Because it’s on the other side of the ocean and I’ve never crossed the ocean.”

  Teseo was holding a metal shoehorn, which fell suddenly to the ground.

  “On the other side of the ocean . . .” he echoed.

  “Señor Teseo, excuse me,” said my mother, who had been walking back and forth for a while now, trying out a pair of navy-blue loafers. “I think I need another size. These are tight on my right foot.”

  “The next size then, Doña Adelaida. Coming right up . . . On the other side of the ocean. ¡Dall’altro lato del mare!” We heard him repeating the phrase as he disappeared into the storeroom.

  He came back five minutes later, a shoe of the same style in hand, but in a larger size. My mother tried the left one first, then the right. She walked back and forth, regarding herself in the mirror. She took off the shoes. She set them aside and turned to me.

  “What do you think?” she said, looking me in the eye. I let out a silly wolf whistle and gave her a thumbs up.

  “I’ll take them.”

  The Italian clicked his fingers, let out a “Bravo!,” and crossed to the cash register. He punched in the price and pressed a button that popped open the tray of coins and bills, sorted according to color and denomination. My mother extracted two bills from her purse and handed them over. He passed her the change, in green twenty-bolívar bills printed with the face of José Antonio Páez, the unruly Federal War general who taught himself to appreciate Wagner.

  “If you find them uncomfortable, you can exchange them whenever you wish, Adelaida.”

  “Thank you, Teseo. Adelaida, hija, say good-bye.”

  “Adios, Señor Teseo.”

  “Adios, little one, and don’t you forget . . . Dall’altro lato del mare,” he said with a smile. “Repeat after me: Dall’altro lato del mare.”

  “Dall’altro lato del mare,” I said, and he smiled again, flashing those large, square teeth.

  My mother and I stepped onto the street holding hands. She with her bag of shoes and I with the feeling that I’d made a misstep somehow.

  “Adelaida, hija, what did you say to Teseo?”

  “Dall’altro lato del mare.”

  “But why did he say that to you?”

  “Because he lives in two places at once, Mamá. His family lives there and he lives here. Didn’t you see the priest in the photo?”

  “What about him?”

  “It’s his brother, he works with the pope.” She looked at me, not seeing the logic in my argument. “That’s the thing, Mamá: Señor Teseo has two homes. One here and another on the other side of the ocean. Do you see?”

  “Yes, hija, I do.”

  I was born and raised in a country that took in men and women from other lands. Tailors, bakers, builders, plumbers, shopkeepers, traders. Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians, and a few Germans who traveled to the ends of the earth to invent ice all over again. But the city started to empty. The children of those immigrants, people who bore little resemblance to their surnames, started heading back across the ocean to countries that were home to other people, searching for the stock with which their own country was built. Unlike them, I had none of that.

  I opened the box printed with the Teseo business logo. Inside shone a pair of heels yet to be worn.

  A MAN WITH GUNSHOT wounds on a sheetless bed whooshed in front of me, the bed pushed by two nurses at top speed.

  “Come on, come on, come on, he won’t make it!” they shouted. A ferrous smell invaded my nostrils. It wasn’t an odor, it was a warning.

  I moved through the Sagrario Clinic corridors, wanting to fire words at someone. Clara Baltasar hadn’t shown up for work at City Hall for the past three weeks. So said the guards when I asked after her. Three women surprised her a couple of blocks from City Hall, dragged her inside a Jeep with tinted windows, and kicked and struck her. They left her out the front of her house, as if, instead of a blood-soaked mess, she were a message. “Next time, she won’t come back alive.” That was what the message meant. Compassion as another form of cruelty. Stopping short of killing her only to prolong her agony.

  “An ordinary crime. But nobody saw anything, nobody heard anything,” said a City Hall security guard, a man with a small, well-defined mustache and tiny lips that he was pursing like an anus, a show of false discretion that everyone was wearing. The cobbled seam of shame and fear.

  Finding Clara Baltasar’s room wasn’t easy. A nurse who didn’t appear to have slept in weeks, a bundle of blackened pages in hand, greeted me.

  “Who are you looking for?”

  “Clara Baltasar.”

  “Hmm . . .” she shuffled through the papers for a few minutes. “She’s in intensive care. Are you a family member?”

  “No.”

  “Then you can’t go up.”

  “But what about her. How is she?”

  “I can’t give you that information.”

  “Is she . . . in a bad way?”

  “She’s alive,” she said before disappearing down the corridor with its filthy tiles.

  Long lines of people had filled the stairs of the Sagrario Clinic. Broken, listless people. Men, women, and children waiting their turn in the anteroom of the hereafter. They all looked skinny, punished by day-to-day hunger, mired in the fury of those who no longer remember having lived any better.

  There were three groups: those waiting to be put on a waiting list for outpatient operations; those wanting to book in for major surgery; and the third, made up of people silently waiting to see a doctor or to be taken somewhere other than the corridor, already overflowing with people who’d been camped there for weeks.

  The whole place, worse than the clinic where my mother had died, was awash with drool and a sour odor, a flatulent smell of beings in the throes of decay. Every now and then, a nurse with a page-filled folder passed by and read aloud, “Amador Rodríguez; Carmen Pérez; Amor Pernalete . . .” A few people looked up and raised their hands; others got to their feet to demand an explanation as to why those people and not them. The defeated were the worst. Shut down, like broken appliances. One, two, three, four, five days, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. “Take a number.” “Come
back tomorrow.” “Not now, tomorrow.” The nurses, dressed in worn-out blue overalls, told people to go back to their spots and wait. To have come such a long way, only to die waiting.

  “They promised the process would be quicker,” a woman said to her daughter.

  Promised. That there would be no more stealing, that everything would be for the people, that everyone would have the house of their dreams, that nothing bad would happen ever again. They never stopped promising. Under the threat of nonfulfillment, unanswered prayers crumbled beneath the weight of the resentment fueling them. The Sons of the Revolution weren’t responsible for anything that happened. If the bakery was empty, the baker was to blame. If there were shortages at the pharmacy, even of a simple box of contraceptives, the pharmacist was to blame. If we reached home exhausted and hungry and with only two eggs in our shopping bag, the person who’d bought the egg we needed was at fault. Hunger gave rise to a long list of hates and fears. We found ourselves wishing ill on the innocent and the executioner alike. We were incapable of differentiating between them.

  A dangerous energy was going haywire inside us. And with it, the urge to lynch those who repressed us, to spit at the soldier who resold regulated goods on the black market, or the smart-ass who tried to deprive us of a liter of milk in the long lines that snaked outside the doors of every supermarket on Mondays. Terrible misfortunes made us happy: the sudden death of a leader, drowned without explanation in the roughest river of the central plains, or a corrupt district attorney getting blown up when he turned the key in his luxury all-terrain vehicle, setting off a bomb hidden beneath his seat. Our determination to get our share of the spoils was such that we forgot compassion.

  Those men and women wore an expression I’d started to recognize on my own face when I looked in the mirror: a vertical furrow between my eyebrows. Soon our days were littered with the detritus of war, not normal life: cotton buds, gases, medications, dirty beds, blunt scalpels, toilet paper. Eat or heal, nothing else. The next person in line was always a potential adversary, someone who had more. Those who were still alive fought tooth and claw for the leftovers. Fighting for a place to die in a city devoid of resolutions.