But, after all, what gave me the right to judge him?
Sons of vice, my aunts would say, singing along to the tune dedicated to San Juan.
“Hasta que no suene el plomo, no me voy de aquí. Ay, garabí!”
I HAD NO IDEA where I was until we got to the building entrance. I could barely fit the key into the lock. Santiago was still wearing his Sons of the Revolution mask, so it was hard for anyone to tell whether we were chasing somebody or fleeing. The threat that the mask signaled made us invisible to some, vulnerable to others. A few months before, clothing associated with the government would have given us a free pass, with no one daring to approach. But things had changed. Now many wouldn’t hesitate to ambush a member of the regime and lynch him with anyone else who felt like teaching him a lesson. Santiago, an unarmed executioner, was easy prey for anyone who wanted to expend some of the hate that the commander had bequeathed us. Finally we went inside the apartment. Santiago took off his mask and looked in silence at the furniture and the walls. Seeing him like that, with his face pinched and his eyes wild, stirred in me more pity than fear. He turned on the spot, disoriented. He canvassed the messed-up living room. He stumbled over his words. He hit me to save our hides, he said. He was where he was and doing what he was doing because . . .
Poised before his own ellipses, Santiago started over. He hit me to save our hides. This—he brandished the mask—was a nightmare. In three months. The police. The special forces.
“I told you. Told you to go, to get into the building. Why did you follow me, dammit? Now you’re in it up to here too, up to here! Do you hear me?” he said, waving a hand over his crown.
Santiago was wrong. The sewage had risen far above our heads. It had buried us. Him, me, the rest. This was no longer a country. It was a septic tank.
“Lower your voice, will you? After the beating you gave me, I’m the one who should be shouting hysterically.”
“But you didn’t—”
“Yes, I know, I know, I heard you. If you didn’t do it, they’d have cut off your balls. But now I’m asking you to follow my rules: the apartment next door has been invaded by a group of women who would have no qualms about kicking us out by burying a gun in our sides. While you’re here, speak as little as possible, and when you do speak, make sure it’s on this side of the apartment. Don’t turn on any lights and don’t open the door or peep out if someone knocks.”
“But this . . . ?”
“No, Santiago, this isn’t my place. And yes, I’ve got a lot of explaining to do. But you do too. Your sister thinks you’re dead. She’s heard nothing from you. She keeps paying for them not to kill you, and you haven’t even called her. What are you doing with those criminals? We thought you were locked up. Everyone saw you being taken away from the university.”
He stayed standing in the middle of the living room, the mask in hand. I lowered my voice, hurried over to the wall, and pressed my ear to it. La Mariscala and her troupe hadn’t returned. Not everything was lost; at least they hadn’t heard us. I could hide here for a few more days while I worked out my next move. When I turned around, a wave of exhaustion swept over me, even greater than what I’d felt when I pushed Aurora Peralta off the balcony.
Santiago looked at me, almost as wild as I was, his eyes dull. He looked at me like someone who has been lost a long time in a far-off land. For the first time since I’d known him, I saw what looked like defeat in Santiago. The economist whiz kid who knew everything and could do anything had vanished. He looked like an old man. His face was screwed up, his skin full of scabs from past wounds. He was so skinny I could see his veins running over the small amount of muscle that covered his bones. He was wearing tattered jeans and a red shirt that had the eyes of the commander printed across the chest.
“Santiago, you’re not going to say anything?”
He raised his hands to his forehead and grabbed his dirty hair, full of grease and dust.
“Adelaida, I’m hungry.”
I went to the kitchen and came out with what was left of a loaf of bread, two or three slices in an almost empty bag, as well as some soda crackers I found at the back of the pantry and three cans of tuna that Aurora Peralta had left on the microwave. Santiago chewed hard. He pulverized the crackers between his teeth and slurped the sunflower oil from the can of tuna. I opened a beer I found in the fridge. It tasted glorious.
“There are a few bananas, if you want.”
The only reply was the sound of a clump of bread being swallowed forcefully.
After peeling them, he gulped down the dwarf bananas, drank what was left of the beer, and took a crumpled cigarette pack out of his pocket.
“Can I?” he asked, almost timidly.
“What difference does it make? The smell of trash indoors and out makes it all the same to me.”
“You don’t smoke?”
“Not anymore but leave me the last two puffs.”
Santiago smoked pinching the filter between thumb and forefinger. Only after a while did he offer me what was left. He passed it to me as he exhaled two columns of smoke through his nose.
“When they took me to La Tumba, they dumped me inside a windowless cell with no ventilation for a whole month. At first I was alone. Then they brought two more from the university. Every two hours someone from SEBIN would appear, the military intelligence guys they let loose in the marches to carry people off. He would choose one of us and shove whoever down the corridor. He’d then bring us back after an hour, beaten up and with our balls turned to jelly.”
I started inspecting my hands. I felt incapable of looking him in the face.
“They didn’t want to know if we knew each other or were organized. They just hit us. Time and again. We’re gonna kill you, cocksucker, we’re gonna rape you, we’re gonna finish off your family, you fucker. Who forced you into this? They shoved a tube up the youngest prisoner’s ass. The barrel of a gun up mine. They wrenched it around, enjoying themselves. Sorry for not sparing you the details.”
I didn’t answer or move. I tried not to look up. Was I the first person he’d told?
“In two days, they gave us four rounds each. Then they straightened us up a bit and took photos of us with a phone and shut the door again. They always made sure to hit us on the body, leaving our faces unbruised, mostly, so they could pretend we weren’t being mistreated. I imagine those are the photos they sent to Ana.”
I nodded.
“And they charged my sister for them?”
I nodded again.
“What did they promise her?”
“That you’d eat.”
“Only that?”
“And it was a proof of life.” I went quiet for a moment. “They say terrible things about La Tumba.”
“All true. They stripped us naked and put us in white rooms, the only ones that had vents. It was their best torture: the air-conditioning. They turned the thermostat as low as it would go. We got fevers. We lost all sense of time, hunger, temperature. At first we shouted a lot. We started out asking for a lawyer and ended up begging for water. They brought us glasses with a broth that tasted like toilet water to me. The blows wear you down, dehydrate you, dry out your mouth and make it pasty. They hit you to exhaust you, break you. Fear makes you lucid and the blows make you stupid. That first week they always hit us separately. The next, they put us all in the same room. They pulled down our pants and made us dance. Then touch each other’s balls. By this stage, we weren’t completely aware of what we were doing. The worst was when they’d speak about my sister.”
“What would they say?”
“That they knew where she lived. That they were going to rape her. Kill her. Both her and Julio. They knew their names. They made me beg forgiveness, but it made no difference because they’d hit me again. There were women with us. Some of my economics classmates were arrested the same day I was. Some had never protested before. We told them that marching at the front of the demonstration wasn’t the same as marching in the ba
ck. But they didn’t care.”
“Were they hit too?”
“All of them were raped. When they took us to ‘the refrigerator,’ we’d hear their screams. In the other cells, the white ones, it was impossible to see or hear anything. We were isolated and had no light. We started to lose our minds. That’s what it was about, making us forget the days when we were human. After a month they took us out of La Tumba to an office. We arrived wearing blindfolds. They put a document before us that accused us of half a dozen crimes: rebellion, conspiracy, instigation to commit an offense, arson, damages, terrorism. Most of us arrested that day hadn’t resorted to violence. Many of the ones still locked up hadn’t even been in the main body of the protest. They arrested them after they’d left the march, when they were on the way home. They waited until they were alone to make it easier to carry them off.”
“Santiago, who was laying the charges against you?”
“I don’t know. We asked for an officer, a lawyer, a judge, anyone to be present when they took our statements. There was no response, and no one appeared. It was a summary proceeding of the Military Tribunal, they explained. ‘This is what you get when you go looking for trouble,’ a man wearing a green uniform said to us. The next day, they separated us and took each of us to a different place. They took me to El Dorado prison, in the south. I was there for a month. I never thought I’d miss the SEBIN. Nobody took photos of us with their phones any longer. I imagine they had more prisoners and it was enough to extort their families. We weren’t even good for that anymore. Do you know if Ana kept making the payments?”
“I’m not sure, Santiago. When my mother was dying, I lost contact with everyone. Between the clinic and taking care of her . . .” He opened his eyes suddenly. “Yes, my mother died.”
“I didn’t know. Well, how could I know . . .” He took the last cigarette from the tattered pack and left it on the table.
“She died a couple of weeks ago.”
“Who’s alive today, Adelaida? Since everything went to hell, who’s not dead?”
Santiago got out of the chair.
“Where are you going?”
“To the bathroom. I haven’t taken a piss in ages.”
I LOOKED AT THE CEILING, wanting answers. I had to call Ana to tell her I’d found her brother. Shouldn’t I? Could I? I passed my hands over the table. I’d never sat down to eat at it, but now my life was elapsing over it like an unedited film. It would be better if Ana didn’t hear anything about what had happened. It would do no good. The despair would drive her crazy. Not knowing is a way of staying safe, I told myself, trying to pluck up the courage and keep a cool head. She was my only friend. I couldn’t hide what I knew, but I couldn’t tell her I’d found Santiago, either.
I got out of the chair, ready to pick up the phone. When I heard Santiago flush, I sat down again.
Ana and I had become friends in our first year of studies at the Department of Humanities. We stepped into the same elevator after seeing each other in classes for several general subjects that we both happened to take. She introduced herself and then let me know, as only she could, how much my contributions in class irritated her. I used too many adverbs and spoke like a public servant, she chided. She, like her brother, obeyed the patron saint of the uncompromising, those people who, for being pains in the neck, somehow end up becoming endearing. Thanks to her influence, I corrected my habit of adding adverbs to everything I said, though this doesn’t excuse her for being so high-handed.
Happy accidents brought us together: the university time-table, the subjects we enrolled in . . . But if anyone asked me why we’d stayed friends so many years, I couldn’t really give a good reason. The same thing happens with couples and marriages. Not much room for choice and if, by chance, the company is pleasant, it’s welcomed. We were both reserved and a little standoffish. Unlike most literature students, we didn’t feel it was our calling to overhaul national literature. We devoted ourselves to professional editing. To making the writing we worked on clean and precise, nothing more.
“And what about you?” she asked me one day in the university cafeteria.
“Me what?”
“Do you send novel manuscripts to contests and that kind of thing?”
“I’m not interested.”
“Me neither,” she answered and let out a raspberry sound, and we burst out laughing.
We got our first jobs as proofreaders in newspapers that eventually folded. We saw how things changed, how the devaluations, protests, and dissent were drowned out, first in the revolutionary ballyhoo, then in systematic violence. We witnessed the best years of the Commander and then the slow ascent of his successors; we got to know the first iterations of the Sons of the Revolution and the Fatherland’s Motorized Fleet. We saw how the country contorted into a grotesque version of itself. Then our personal problems cemented our friendship. Life brought us together through similar circumstances, until we’d been friends ten or twelve years. I know Ana well enough to be able to say a few things. Only two matters kept her awake at night: her mother, who once she was widowed started showing signs of Alzheimer’s; and Santiago, her only brother, ten years younger than she.
The clearest memory I have of Santiago is from Ana and Julio’s wedding. He was fifteen. He walked through the church with a combination of self-sufficiency and reluctance. He was among the best students in his school, the city’s most expensive. Ana paid the outrageous fees; she did so possessed by the strange sense that she was making a gamble, as if the money she spent on his education were coins bestowed to an invisible piggy bank. “He’s extremely intelligent,” she often said. He was, and he was also arrogant. She had contributed substantially to his turning out that way. He placed among the top ten in the admissions exam to the university. He studied both economics and accounting. If the country hadn’t committed suicide, he would probably have ended up heading the Central Bank, his sister would say. He didn’t get the chance. They arrested him before he could.
Santiago came back from the bathroom, wiping his hands on his jeans. He sat down before me, grabbed the cigarette he had taken out of the pack, and started straightening it out.
“One day, a command from the Heirs to the Armed Struggle collective showed up in El Dorado. We imprisoned students were assembled in the patio. When we were dehydrated and sunburned, eight guys arrived, all of them wearing balaclavas and lugging bagful of shirts and masks like this one.” He motioned at the skull mask on the table. “If we wanted to get out of there alive, we had to go with them. Nobody thought to ask where. Anyplace would be preferable to where we were.”
“I didn’t realize you were locked up in a regular jail.”
“They did it to everyone. Sending you to El Dorado was a way of getting rid of people who were no longer bringing in money. They sent us there to die, you understand? If you wanted to live, you could never close your eyes: anyone who didn’t want you dead wanted to rape you. The prisoners had rusty metal spikes that they sold to new arrivals at the price of gold. We had to be willing to attack or defend ourselves.”
I tried to interrupt.
“Adelaida, let me speak.” He grabbed the lighter and lit the cigarette. “Those of us who weren’t born on the inside, who didn’t grow up learning to slit throats to save our own necks, don’t get out in one piece. That was the way it was for all of us standing in that patio,” he said, expelling another thick column of smoke. “I didn’t think twice, I said I’d go with the group that was leaving that day. They never gave us back our IDs. They gave them straight to the command leaders. They called out our names one by one. They cross-checked us against our IDs and assigned us a number. Mine was twenty-five. I liked it; I’m turning twenty-five next year.”
I kept my mouth shut. For some time now, I preferred not to think about the future.
“What’s wrong? You think I won’t make it?”
“Don’t put words in my mouth.”
An uncomfortable silence followed. It lasted a f
ew seconds, until Santiago went on.
“They put us onto a bus from a border municipality. We traveled for a whole night, blindfolded, our wrists tied with wire. We jolted about in our seats. Even so, I slept. The first time in weeks.”
“Where did they take you?”
“When they made us get off the bus and removed our blindfolds, I saw a mountainous rain forest. At first I thought we were in the south, Bolívar or Amazonas. But from the leaders’ conversations, I understood we were in the central mountain range, between Caracas and Guarenas. For fifteen days they kept us there. Everything was makeshift, and we weren’t allowed to talk to anyone. They taught us basic things. To hit. To shoot. They explained to us, in general terms, the collective’s rules, among them the chain of command, so we would know not to obey leaders from other cells when we came into contact. Once we’d learned the basics, the guy who’d ranted at us at the prison, who showed up every now and then, assembled us once more. Anyone who deserted or talked would have his throat slit. To show he was serious, he made an example of a guy who had tried to escape during the most recent armed action. He summoned him by snapping his fingers. The boy stumbled forward. He grabbed him by the hair and made him kneel, in the middle of the patio, before us. The poor thing wept, begged him not to kill him, and writhed on the ground, his hands bound. The guy pulled him up by the hair again. He got out a knife and brandished it slowly, making sure everyone had seen it. Then he slit his throat. ‘This is what will happen to anyone who thinks about escaping or giving away any of our armed actions,’ he said.”
“Is an armed action what they do every night?”
“All kinds of things get given that name: lootings, protest breakups, organized invasions. They need people for those pursuits. That’s why we were recruited. We don’t act on behalf of the government, but under its protection. Whatever we seize fetches up in the hands of our leaders, a mixture of crooks, soldiers, and guerrillas. These people were on a different level compared to the ones at La Tumba.”
It Would Be Night in Caracas Page 8
