It Would Be Night in Caracas

by Karina Sainz Borgo

  I went up to the seventh floor. Same as in the clinic where my mother died, the elevators didn’t work. Up each flight of steps, I came across people who were dying alongside others with minor injuries, children with cuts on their foreheads and elderly people with hypertension. They were piled together, languishing in their own disgrace.

  In the intensive care waiting room were two women. They were my age, but they seemed to have aged prematurely. They were resting on a row of blue plastic chairs. They had blankets, food wrapped in foil, and bags packed with folded sheets. Just as I’d done a few weeks earlier, they had put up their own field hospital in the war without tanks endured by those who had to watch their loved ones die. I walked over to the younger. The other was asleep on her shoulder. I assumed they were sisters.

  “Are you Clara Baltasar’s daughter?”

  “Who are you? What do you want?”

  “My name is Adelaida Falcón.”

  “Mmm . . .”

  “Your mother helped me get money together to pay for my own mother’s treatment. I went to find her at City Hall. They told me she was here.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I just wanted to say thank you.”

  “Get out of here.” She got to her feet, waking the other.

  “What’s going on, Leda? Who is this?” She rubbed the sleep from her eyes.

  “My name is Adelaida Falcón. Your mother, Clara Baltasar, helped me get money together to pay for my mother’s treatment,” I repeated.

  “Leave, please. We don’t know her. We don’t know who you’re talking about.”

  “I just came to tell Clara that my mother died. And I brought her this.” I held out two boxes of antibiotics.

  They looked at each other, not saying a word. I left the antibiotics on the only empty chair, then turned and left.

  Clara Baltasar—the social worker who lined up for people who couldn’t go to the supermarket on the designated days—was dead, or was about to die, thanks to a beating the revolutionary commanders had inflicted to make an example of her. I left her the last boxes of my mother’s medication.

  I went down the seven floors on foot. A woman started weeping loudly upon arriving in the ER. Her father was the man with the gunshot wound that two nurses had pushed past me earlier. He had died before reaching the operating room. They cut us down like trees. They killed us like dogs.

  IT WAS MY FIFTH VISIT in three days, but the baker acted as if he’d never seen me before. The flour hadn’t arrived this week either. Next to me, two women hauled bags that far exceeded the daily ration of bread that we lined up for only to go home with our hands empty. They left with loaves of bread meant for other people, who missed out no matter how long they waited or how early they rose.

  I went up Avenida Baralt, thinking about the white frogs that stuck like stones to the mosquito nets in the Falcón guesthouse. Creatures ensconced in the back of my mind, a bad memory that now bubbled to the fore. We were alike, the frogs and I. Ugly-skinned females that spawn in the middle of tempests.

  I reached my apartment door dragging my feet. I turned the key, but the lock stuck. I pushed and pulled. I rattled the peephole grille, pressed on the handle, persisted. There were scrapes around the lock. Someone had changed it. What next sprang to mind were the sleeping mats, the nights camping out, the motorbikes, the caskets, the bruises, the beatings with buckets of water and sticks. A barb of fear pierced me as it dawned that I was too late. My home! Their whole purpose had been to invade every apartment in our building. The troupe of women who had been camped in Plaza Miranda for days was in fact an invasion command. “Dammit!” I put my hand on my crotch. It was damp. I tried to contain the drops of urine and stay calm.

  I crouched, looking for shadows that might signal steps. Nothing. I was incapable of perceiving anything other than a faint haze of light. With my hands still between my legs, I quickly went down to the building entry and kept watch. Soon some women appeared. There were five of them and they were loaded with bags, mop handles, and packets of food sealed with a logo I recognized as the Food Ministry’s. The ministry was a recent invention; through it, the Sons of the Revolution distributed food in exchange for political support.

  The women got into the building using one of the keys from the bunch they were carrying. They were all wearing the civil militia uniform of red shirts. They seemed to have found a pack with the smallest sizes. The tight jeans emphasized their thick legs, below which elephantine feet were shod in plastic flip-flops. They had dark skin and bristly, stiff hair gathered up in untidy mops.

  I retreated to spy on them from behind a brazilwood and a few dry ferns shriveled in a corner of the mezzanine. There wasn’t much point, but I had to hide behind something. My face was hot, and my underwear was cold. Urine was still escaping as my desperation increased. Fear made me ashamed, dismantling me.

  The women had no leader, or at least no obvious one. They took almost an hour to shift their pillows and boxes to the building entrance. Many of them sprawled across the boxes of food, sometimes using them as stools, sometimes as beds. They didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry, and were even giving the impression that they were killing time. Some of them looked at their smartphones, raucous music emanating from them, while others chatted among themselves and aired their complaints.

  “Roiner the Barinas guy went to San Cristóbal, you know.”

  “What’s with that?”

  “What do you think, stupid? Get a higher price for fuel there. You can score a slab of beer with two drums. And the hustle is better, he said. Less competition.”

  “Sonofabitch, what about us?”

  “I’ll smash your face in for cussing if you’re not careful.”

  “And what did they give the stinker in Negro Primero?”

  “That front’s over.”

  “How come?”

  “Oh, world, what am I to know?”

  “Look, Who-endy.”

  “Wendy, it’s Wendy . . . not Who-endy.”

  “That then. . . . You’re not gonna call La Mariscala?”

  “Hold up, chica. She’ll be the one to decide when we move all this.”

  “And what the hell are we to do until then?”

  “What we always do, hang tight.”

  Around them, mountains of boxes, sticks, mattresses, and almost twenty government-logo-stamped boxes of food. The people who were given those packets had certain obligations: to show up without question at any event or demonstration in support of the Revolution; and to deliver simple services that went from denouncing neighbors to forming commands or groups in support of the Revolution. What began as a privilege for civil servants spread as a form of propaganda and then of surveillance. Everyone who collaborated was guaranteed a box of food. It wasn’t much: a liter of palm oil, a packet of pasta, another packet of coffee. Sometimes, if you were lucky, they gave out sardines or Spam. But it was food, and hunger had a tight hold on us.

  The women, who were of cathedral proportions, stayed put until a phone rang, and after answering and letting out a few monosyllables, Wendy took to her heels.

  “Pick up all this shit right now!”

  They picked up the boxes without making too much noise. They made their way two by two, the boxes in hand. There was no electricity in the building, so they had to walk up the stairs instead of taking the elevator. I hid in one of the garbage rooms and waited for them to go up at least one or two floors. From below I couldn’t see much, but after a while I guessed they would have reached the third floor. I went back down to the lower floor to make sure they didn’t leave anything behind that they’d need to come back for. They’d collected everything. I followed them, dazed by the vinegary smell wafting in their wake. Those women sweated like truckers. Their smell was dark and bitter. A mixture of citrus, onion, and ash. When they reached the fifth floor, my own, I prayed they would keep going. I crept as close as I dared to the balustrade and confirmed what I’d dreaded. They w
ere outside my apartment. My hopes melted in a flash when I heard them shouting for someone to open up and let them in.

  They took another ten minutes to move the boxes from the corridor into the apartment. They were tired. They’d carried all that weight up five floors without pause. I’d barely had time to think what I should do. Thirst was burning my tongue, and my bladder was about to burst. When they finished unloading everything and closed the apartment door, I squeezed my eyes shut. I gathered the little courage still coursing through my body and went up the stairs.

  I pressed the doorbell. Once, twice, three times.

  They took their time answering.

  I tried once more, this time rapping my knuckles against the timber.

  Then the door opened. A woman, her tangle of unkempt hair pulled up into a bun. She was wearing flip-flops and had tatty polished nails and thick toes eaten up by chilblains.

  She was wearing my mother’s sequined butterfly blouse.

  “What do you want?” she asked, looking me straight in the eye.

  “I . . . I . . .”

  “I what, girl? What’s wrong?”

  “I . . . am.”

  “Uh-huh. You are . . .”

  “I . . . am.”

  I couldn’t finish my sentence. I fainted.

  WHAT DID YOU DO TODAY?”

  “I helped clean the pileta.”

  “The pool, Adelaida, the pool.”

  A puddle of green water surrounded by cement in a Caracas preschool. That was a pileta, to my mind, an exceptional thing, a made-up noun. I even came to think that it was the only pileta in the world, and that the word was created especially for that pond, the centerpiece of the patio where we preschoolers played. Sometimes it filled with larvae that were minuscule, springy, fluorescent. I would spend my half-hour recess watching them writhe in the still water.

  “Adelaida, come here. Enough with the pileta!”

  Verónica, my teacher, was Chilean, and had come to Caracas from Santiago with her husband and two children. Pinochet’s dictatorship was the reason behind their decision to leave, she explained to us once as she made sure we drank all our morning tea.

  “Who is Pinochet?” I asked, a mayonnaise sandwich in hand.

  “A president.”

  I found that explanation absurd. What did the president of a country have to do with the fact that individuals, out of nowhere, packed their things and left forever?

  Verónica must have been my mother’s age. Her fair, sensitive skin made her face look like paper. Her hair was cut short, and very dark. A sadness was buried deep inside her and sometimes showed on her face, betraying her at the most unexpected moments: while we organized the toothbrushes of the children who would arrive for the afternoon session, while she sang faded songs about women who would drown in the ocean, and especially when a father or mother would ask how “things” were in Chile.

  “You know how it is, back there everything’s going from bad to worse,” she would respond.

  The person who most stopped to talk with her was Alicia’s mother. Alicia looked like the cartoon character Heidi and never said much. Anytime someone mocked her accent, which fell somewhere between Argentine and Venezuelan, she would grab the offender by the arm and sink her teeth in. After each episode, her mother came to see Verónica, who had called her in to discuss Alicia’s behavior.

  They chatted for twenty or thirty minutes and then went out to the recess patio, which Alicia’s mother crossed with an elegant gait enhanced by the wonderful, unique clothing she always wore, tights covered by a long, breezy skirt that she lifted to show us her shoes. Her black hair shone, and she always wore it in a bun.

  She was a classical ballet dancer, but earned her living dancing for Ballet de Marjorie Flores, a folkloric ensemble that enlivened the interludes of Sábado Sensacional, a variety show that played on weekend afternoons. The program featured anyone from children with a talent for singing to international stars on tour that week, and it finished at eight, right before dinner. She always appeared in the dance troupe. She would do a flashy solo, tap dancing a joropo, making her floral dress shiver, or else she danced a tango she’d learned when she was in Argentina. At least, so said Alicia one day. Her father, an Argentine editor and journalist, met her mother on one of the tours she did around the southern cone. They married soon after and settled in Buenos Aires. But I only wanted to hear about her mother’s skirts.

  “Look, Mamá! It’s her, it’s her!”

  “Who, Adelaida?”

  “Alicia’s mother, the one I told you about, the one from Ballet de Marjorie Flores!”

  “What a cheesy name for a dance troupe, my goodness!”

  “Hurry, come see!”

  “Hold on, let me find my glasses.”

  Then the two of us waited, planted before the TV, until she appeared: dark, as Venezuelan as could be, with her big white smile and Llanera del Arauca skirts.

  “Yes, she’s beautiful,” my mother conceded, and one day bought tickets to see her dance at the city theater.

  My mother couldn’t pick out Alicia’s mother among the huge corps de ballet of white swans that glided from one side of the stage to the other, enveloped in fog. She maintained that she wasn’t there. I thought I recognized her among four dancers who did a pas de quatre to the sounds of an oboe.

  The following Monday, after class, my mother overcame her shyness and introduced herself. We went over to her, holding hands, to tell her we’d been to see Swan Lake.

  “You’re from Ocumare—I’m from Maracay, so close!” said the ballerina.

  “They’re right next door.”

  “Right by each other! I haven’t been to Maracay since I got back from Argentina.”

  “Oh, my, Argentina?”

  “My husband is from Buenos Aires, you see, but we had to leave—”

  Verónica had come over to join us. Beneath the midday sun, Alicia with her mother and I with mine, we witnessed how Verónica’s face dropped.

  “You had to leave Chile too, didn’t you?” said Alicia’s mother.

  “That’s right, I had to get away from there.”

  In that preschool we called pools piletas, and Verónica said “there” instead of Chile or Santiago, as if choosing that word emphasized how far away it was. “There” was the past. A place they’d departed with the condition that they never mention it again. A word that smarted like the stump of an amputated arm.

  I WOKE OUTSIDE the apartment door. My head was hurting. I couldn’t hear a thing. No footsteps or voices. It was as if the twenty families who lived in the building had vanished. My handbag was lying open at my feet. Someone had stolen the little I had in it, my keys and phone. My IDs were still in my purse. My money, not a chance. I realized there was a metallic taste in my mouth. A familiar, raucous tune was coming from the apartment. “Tumba-la-casa-mami, tumba-la-casa-mami, you-need-to-bring-down-the-house-mami.” It was the reggaeton number from the cemetery, now booming from inside my apartment as if this were a block party.

  I struggled to my feet and staggered around the dim corridor. The smell of sweat and garbage hovered in the air. I rapped at the door. The music was so loud that even I couldn’t perceive the thudding of my knuckles against the wood. I banged on it again; nothing. Laughter reached me from the other side, as well as the clinking and clanging of glasses and cutlery. I banged even harder. The same woman as before opened up. She was still wearing the monarch butterfly blouse, which strained at her belly. Everything about her was over the top: her physique, her stink of sweat and cheap perfume. Every muscle and gesture gave off head-honcho vibes that were almost obscene. This was La Mariscala, then. The pinnacle of the miserable, violent army currently laying the city to waste.

  “You again, chica? So you’re over your fainting spell?”

  She looked me up and down. She was clutching a mop handle.

  “I . . .”

  “Yes, right. . . . You, what?”

  “I’m the owner of this ap
artment. This is my home. Get out of here or I’ll call the police.”

  “Let’s see, my love, did hitting your head make you stupid or were you born that way? We’re the authority around here. The au-tho-ri-ty.”

  All I could see was the gap where one of her canines should have been.

  “Get out of here,” I repeated.

  “The only one leaving here’s you.”

  I ignored her and tried to peer inside. La Mariscala grabbed me by the arm.

  “Hey hey hey! You be careful now, you know what could happen to you if you get worked up.”

  “I want my books, I want my plates, I want my things.”

  She looked at me with calf-like eyes devoid of all intelligence. Without easing the pressure she was exerting on my arm, she lifted her blouse, a few sequins falling from it. A revolver was pressed against her gut, tucked into leggings that were smothering her circumference, making her resemble raw sausage filling overflowing its casing.

  “Do you see this pistol, my love?” she said, motioning with her lips. “If I wanted, I could shove it up your ass and blow you apart with a single shot. Couldn’t I now? But today, just for today, I’m not going to. If you leave quietly and don’t come back, we won’t bother you.”

  “I want my books, my chinaware, my home. Give them back!”

  “You want all this? Then you’re about to get them, my queen. Wendy, get over here.”

  The woman approached, scuffing her flip-flops. Her shorts exposed legs covered in scabs.

  “What’s up?”

  “This little lady says she wants some plates and some books, says they’re hers. Go fetch them!”

  La Mariscala looked at me, defiant. She placed the mop handle to one side and crossed her arms while she waited for her subordinate to bring me my things. She’d left the pistol in full view, pressed against her stomach. The Wendy character came back with a stack of six plates.