“What do I do with these?”
“Give them to me. Now go get the books. Hurry up, we can’t wait all day, this little lady was just leaving. Because after this, you’re out of here, mamita.”
La Mariscala made as if to hand me the stack of plates, holding on to them with both hands. At a glance I could see that wasn’t all of them.
“That’s not all of them. Where are the rest?”
“What’s that, my love? Are you complaining? Here, take your plates.”
She let them fall one by one. Each plate in pieces on the granite floor. Crash. Crash. Crash. Crash. And crash.
“You wanted your plates? There, you have them.”
“There’s tons of books here, I can’t carry them all. Here’s what I could grab,” said Wendy, appearing again in the doorway, this time with five or six volumes.
“Give them here and go to the kitchen, m’hija. See what else is there for us.” La Mariscala paused dramatically before snatching the books from her hands. “Let’s see what we have here. The Autumn of the . . . of the . . . Pa . . . Pa . . . Patri . . .”
“Patriarch.”
“Shush. What do you think, that I don’t know how to read?”
“Frankly? Yes.”
“Well I can, chica. I’m going to do a little demonstration for you. I’ll read you a poem!”
She grabbed the volume by its covers, opened it, and ripped it in half. The binding cracked between her enormous hands. The pages came loose like the leaves of a tree. I watched, weary to my bones. La Mariscala laughed, gloated.
“Look at how I treat your things,” she said, stomping on the La Cartuja plate shards. “This is what hunger makes us do, my love. And we’re hungry.” She separated the word into syllables again, adding emphasis to the phrase the commander used to justify their stealing, his way of winning their votes. “With me in charge, nobody will steal out of hunger ever again,” he’d said. “No doubt you’ve never experienced that. You don’t know, girl, what hun-ger is. That’s right, my love: hun-ger.”
She burst into sarcastic laughter and then started stroking her revolver.
“This apartment is ours now. Like everything else, it was always ours, only you took it from us.”
I looked at the plates, the torn-out pages, the chubby fingers with no polish on the nails, the flip-flops, my mother’s blouse. I lifted my gaze, which she held, enjoying herself. My mouth still tasted of metal.
I spat at her.
She wiped her face, expressionless, and took hold of her pistol. The last thing I remembered was the sound of the butt as it struck my head.
WE WERE EATING blackened chicken with maize hallaquitas. We were using plastic forks and coarse paper napkins, a quick lunch before heading back to Caracas. It was hot, and the cicadas were singing like crazy, rubbing their legs to call down the rain. The air smelled of butane, gasoline, engine oil, and pork rinds.
“You’re not going to let go of that egg, even to eat?” my mother huffed. “Putting it on the table so you can eat like you’ve been taught won’t do it any harm. Use the cutlery and the napkin, please.”
“If I let go, it might roll off. The chicken inside it will die.”
“For that little chicken to hatch it needs the mother hen’s heat. Even if you keep holding it in your hands, it won’t grow.”
“Yes, it will. And I’ll have a little yellow chick. You’ll see.”
I left some of my chicken and nibbled reluctantly at a half-eaten hallaquita. We collected the paper plates and tossed them into a Dumpster overflowing with pork, blood sausage, and fried plantain leftovers that stray dogs were pouncing on, hungry. We walked past stalls selling soft toys covered in grease and dust, as well as lottery tickets and folkloric music tapes. I stopped before a counter piled with local treats. Flies and wasps were wheeling around the homemade candy, coconut bites, guava paste, and sticky scrolls covered in treacle.
“If you eat any of those your teeth will fall out. And who knows what water they use, or the conditions they make them in,” my mother said while I salivated at the sight of a caramel bar wrapped in plastic.
“I didn’t say I was going to eat it. I’m just looking at it.”
“I’ll do you a deal. If you let go of the egg and leave it behind, I’ll buy you one of those treats. Whichever one you want.”
“I’m not leaving it.”
“Not even for a candy? Or a coconut bite? Yummm—how can you resist?”
“I want the chick, Mamá.”
“When the egg breaks on the way home, you’ll be sorry. You’ll have sacrificed the treat for nothing.”
“I won’t have, I want a little chick.”
My mother held out a twenty-bolívar bill, a long rectangle of green paper. Back then they were worth their actual denomination: twenty bolívares. Not twenty million, not twenty bolívares fuertes—the ones they added zeros to, then seized to hide how little they were worth. Of the money that existed before the Sons of the Revolution, this was the bill I most liked. Twenty bolívares back then was enough to buy three or four breakfasts. Several kilos of anything. It was a fortune.
“I’ll take one coconut bite,” my mother said to a toothless woman who was smoking with the flame pa’ dentro—their cigarettes back-to-front—as she cooked arepas on a griddle.
The woman took the bill. She passed her right hand over her forehead, placed the bill to one side, and shaped a coconut bite. Then she transferred it to a brown paper bag. She gave my mother her change and passed her hand over her forehead once more. She took the saliva-soaked cigarette from her mouth, exhaled a mouthful of smoke, and placed the cigarette between her lips again. My mother turned around, looked at the ceiling, and bit the bullet.
“If you put down the egg before you get on the bus, I’ll let you have some of this.”
“I’m not letting it go.”
“Adelaida, I’ll give you this coconut bite in exchange for your egg. You love these!”
“Not happening.”
She put the treat in her bag, grabbed me by the hand, and strode toward the bus that would take us back to Caracas. After waiting our turn to get on, she took out the treat and started making exaggerated, greedy sounds.
“Yum, it looks so good! Smells good too.”
I stayed firm. I didn’t taste the treat, or let go of the egg I’d found on the floor of the Falcón guesthouse chicken coop. I wanted to see the chick emerge from its shell.
We sat in silence for the entire trip. My mother, worn out, slept with her purse on her lap. I, tyrant queen and occupier of the window seat, examined the small street stalls at the edge of the road: dwarf bananas, mandarins, and cassava cake bathed in treacle; the flowers and crucifixes of makeshift shrines, raised in memory of those who had lost their lives in crashes who knows how long ago. All over the country, the dead menaced on all sides.
Every place is sketched and erased by way of its roads, in the routes that stretch from the periphery to the center. Time and again we journeyed from the sea to the mountains. We travelled the miles separating some people from others. We crossed valleys planted with sugarcane, rosy trumpet trees, and araguaney trees in silence.
I was still clutching my small, pale egg. I cupped my hands around it, waiting for the heat of my body and the long trip to deliver a living being.
My mother woke as the bus was pulling into its bay in the metropolitan bus terminal. She seemed to have aged during the trip. She got out of her seat with robotic movements. She asked if I was thirsty, if I needed to go to the bathroom. I said no to everything. She grabbed her bag, checked that we had everything, and gave me a kiss.
We got off the bus dragging our feet, our belongings in tow. We got into an old taxi, a run-down Dodge with broken headlights and dents in the door. Back then we called them libres, not taxis. The driver dropped us at our building entrance. My mother unloaded everything on her own: the small suitcase and the bags full of stone plums. She paid with a crumpled bill.
W
e waited for the elevator. We went up through the rusty throat of our old building in silence. Once inside, my mother called my aunts to let them know we were home safely. I, encumbered as I was with the egg, had forgotten to tie my shoelaces. For a moment—the only time I’d let go of it that day—I placed the egg on the kitchen table. I crouched and started tying my shoes. When I was about to tie the final bow, the egg fell to the granite floor. It smashed next to my left foot. The beige shell shattered into a thousand pieces.
The egg white splattered all over the floor. In the yellow yolk, I saw a little red spot: the small amount of life I’d breathed into the egg with my hands, which had proved themselves incapable of delivering anything. My mother came back into the kitchen and saw the disaster. The egg, my face. She took the coconut bite in its paper bag from her handbag. She looked at it in disgust and threw it into the bin.
“I’m turning on the water heater. When the water warms up, get in the shower. I’ll take care of this.”
She cleaned up the disaster. I got in the shower. I rubbed a jasmine-scented bar of soap all over my body while the water washed the hours spent in the bus from my skin. The useless wait on that trip home.
STITCH YOU ALIVE, I do; stitch you alive, I will.”
On contact with my skin, the needle smarted and burned. I cried tears of pain.
“Stitch you alive, I do; stitch you alive, I will.”
“María, you’re hurting me. It’s hurting! Leave it be, already. Leave it!”
“Shhh, you should have thought of that. Quiet, let me work. Stitch you alive, I do; stitch you alive, I will.”
Before becoming a nurse, María, my sixth-floor neighbor, had dreamed of becoming a seamstress. Her mother had made a living sewing clothes and mending the garments that others brought her. She did wonders with very little, María told me as she passed the surgical thread through the eye of a sterilized needle.
“You know, I always wanted to sew like my mother. She hemmed pants with the same care and attention that she paid wedding dresses. Imagine! Back then, there weren’t nearly as many stores as there are now.”
“María, please, you’re hurting me!”
“Remember the narrow little alleys in La Pastora? Up there . . . do you remember or not?”
“I do, but María, you’re hurting me!”
“Well, my mother opened a store in one of them. She attracted a steady stream of customers, especially brides, who would have a fitting the day before the ceremony.”
“María, please . . . please! Enough already!”
“Shhh. Calm down, honey. Hush, and listen. My mother would do the final stitches in the hem while her client was still wearing the wedding gown, and she would repeat: ‘Stitch you alive, I do; stitch you alive, I will.’ You know why?”
“María, stop it.”
“Shhh, calm down, and listen to the story, it’s a good one. My mother would say that if you sew clothes while someone is wearing them, people die. Small-town superstitions, you know. So whenever I quickly mend something for someone, I always repeat that phrase: ‘Stitch you alive, I do; stitch you alive, I will.’ And yours counts as a quick mend. Because we’re not going to pull off your head to stitch it now, are we?”
“María, you’re hurting—”
“Grit your teeth; this one will show you the meaning of hurt.” And she dug the surgical needle into my skin for the final time. “Stitch you alive, I do; stitch you alive, I will. That’s it, there you have it, all good to go. As good as new!”
If I wanted to live, I had to stay awake, alert. María, who insisted that I stay at her place, telling me that she would call my aunts, that for the love of God would I refrain from going out in the state I was in, passed me a glass of sugar dissolved in water. Despite the shot of glucose to my brain, I had to clutch the door frame as I was leaving.
“Young lady, where are you off to? What are you doing? Stay here.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. Where are you off to?”
“The police.”
“What police? What do you mean, the police, honey? You’ll only make things worse. Stay tonight, and tomorrow you can call your aunts and leave. Don’t even think about putting up a fight with those people. Go to Ocumare. Far away. Tomorrow more of them will arrive. But if you call the police, they’ll come in a flash. Don’t you understand that those people are in charge now? Don’t you understand it, young lady?”
“María, I’m not sure how I can repay you. I’ll find a way.”
“You owe me nothing, there’s nothing to repay. But hear me this: you’re not leaving.”
“I have to make this right.”
“Stay tonight. Tomorrow you can go wherever you want. Your head’s got an almighty split in it. At least wait until the pain’s gone. I’ve got a spare room, go lie down; tomorrow you can do whatever you feel like. Though I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: nobody will stop them, we’ll be the ones who wind up paying the price. Young lady: we’ve already lost this war. There will be more thugs and criminals where they came from. Soon we’ll be living in even more fear than we are now.”
“More?”
“Listen to me, Adelaida, there’s no end to this. We’ll never know the limits of this disaster. Stay.”
“María, thank you for all you’ve done . . . but you can’t talk me out of leaving.”
“Don’t go to the police. Do whatever you want, but don’t report the incident.”
“Good-bye, María.”
I went down the stairs to the fifth floor and planted myself before Aurora Peralta’s apartment. I inspected the line of light below the closed door, trying to make out shadows or steps. Once again, I couldn’t see anything. I stood before the wooden surface covered in white paint. I inspected the lock: no sign of forced entry. I placed my hand on the handle . . . and a miracle happened. Forcing the door wasn’t necessary, it was enough just to apply pressure and push. I went in quickly and closed the door in silence. The living-room window was open. Through it blew a foul wind that tasted of lead and brawls. I glanced around the living room, which was very similar to our own. Then I saw her.
Aurora Peralta was lying on the floor. Her eyes were open, and her lips were purple. I didn’t know which was worse, the pain in my head, the horror of seeing her like that, or the fear of giving myself away with an hysterical scream.
“Aurora!” I hissed. “Aurora! It’s me, your neighbor!”
I placed a finger on her neck to see if she had a pulse. She was cold and stiff. I felt repulsion and pity at once. A thick snake of vomit rose in my throat. I ran to the kitchen sink, identical to ours, and heaved up a bitter juice. I went back to the living room, my legs weak. I looked at her from a distance. Aurora Peralta had become just another corpse in this city of ghosts.
On the counter I found a bowl of eggs that Aurora Peralta had been beating to white peaks when death took her by surprise. The living room with its bare furniture resembled a still life. The sight made me feel a sympathy for her I’d never felt when she was alive. Standing before Aurora Peralta’s lifeless body, I saw how the threads of fate that had brought us to either side of the same wall wove together. Aurora Peralta was a corpse and I, Adelaida Falcón, a survivor. An invisible thread united us. An unforeseen umbilical cord between the living and the dead.
I hurried off to find something to drape over her. I wanted to cover her eyes, which right now were gazing at me from the afterlife. I opened drawers, looking for a sheet, towel, or blanket large enough not to leave any of her limbs exposed. In the master bedroom wardrobe I found a white sheet. As I covered her, I kept my eyes shut so that my gaze wouldn’t meet hers. I stood and looked over her shape. Then I looked around. If only the walls could talk. Did they kill her? Did she die? Did she suffer a heart attack? Everything was confusing and happening too fast. One thing was certain: she was dead, and I was alive. Who would ask questions about Aurora Peralta’s death? Was anyone waiting for her call? Would a relati
ve miss her, a friend, a lover? Or was she, like me, isolated enough that nobody would notice her absence? On the table were three letters, two open and one sealed, next to an uncharged phone and the bunch of keys she’d failed to lock the door with. She must have pushed the door shut without engaging the deadbolt, the reason I’d been able to enter after only pressing the handle downward. Anyone in their right mind would double-check the deadbolt in a city like this. What impulse had made her drop everything to start beating egg whites?
Had La Mariscala and the others killed her? Did they force their way inside and leave when they saw she was dead? Why did they invade my apartment and not this one? I walked around the apartment once more. But there were no signs of violence, not even the mess that burglars make when searching for money or jewelry. Everything seemed to be in order. Aside from the fact, of course, that a dead woman was lying on the floor. The kitchen light had been on all this time. Horror permeated me, an acute, brackish fear. The prickle when you’re overcome by the contrary urges to stay and go. But where could I go? I had no place to live. I discarded the idea of going to the police and clung to the refuge I’d found. Think, think, think. Adelaida Falcón, think.
In what until recently had been my home, footsteps were still sounding, louder than the ones my mother and I used to hear from Aurora Peralta. I could distinguish Wendy’s flip-flops, La Mariscala’s laughter, the activities of people in the process of conquering a territory. The crushing sound of “Tu-tumba-la-casa-mami, tumba-la-casa-mami; you-need-to-bring-down-the-house-mami.” The soundtrack to a nightmare. My landline joined that sound track at daybreak when it started ringing without pause for at least twenty minutes. Who was looking for me, and why?
I had a better view of Plaza Miranda from this side of the building. A new patrol of women had taken the place of the previous ones. They were even more corpulent than La Mariscala and her clan. María was right. They’d have no trouble taking over the other apartments, occupied or not. Accompanying the nine warrior women in the plaza were a few members of the Fatherland’s Motorized Fleet. For the moment, they were occupied. They were fighting a group of young men who had been burning banners dedicated to the Eternal Commander.
It Would Be Night in Caracas Page 6
