“You’re giving me lectures? What about you, Adelaida? Huh? Why don’t you tell me what’s going on? This place isn’t yours, it’s not your family’s. There’s not a single book here and you don’t even know where the glasses are exactly. What were you doing in the middle of that mess? You don’t have the look of someone engaged in urban warfare and the resistance. What happened? Why were you running like crazy? What were you looking for? What were you disposing of? Your expression stood out, even in the midst of all that chaos. Lucky it was me who got to you first, before somebody beat you up for real, or shot you with a pellet.”
“Shhh. Keep your voice down! You did that because you wanted to. At this stage of my life I’ve more than demonstrated that I can take care of myself, much better than you can. I have no intention of explaining anything to you. I’m old enough not to answer to anyone, especially a boy with airs. I know you have nowhere to go, that you’ve been through hell. I know that. But you need to know something too: you say we’re in it up to our heads. All right then, in that case all of us need to start bailing out the shit. Start by going to your sister’s house as soon as possible. You can stay here two days; sleep, because you need it; clear your head. But then you’re out of here. Life didn’t give me children of my own, and you’re not going to be my first, okay?”
In the hours we’d spent together, I hadn’t seen the look of shock and bewilderment that was now on Santiago’s face. He fixed his eyes on the floor and crossed his arms over his chest.
“Okay?” I repeated.
The silence stretched out until it felt stifling.
“Okay, Adelaida. Okay.”
“All right then, I’m going to the kitchen. Now I’m the one who’s hungry.”
I opened Aurora Peralta’s old china cabinet, one with glass doors, shelves, and cutlery drawers. Piled in two towers of soup bowls and dinner plates was an assortment of La Cartuja chinaware that was a little more comprehensive than ours. The look of fine bone china was evident in several dishes that our set lacked, which, arranged as they were on the shelves, had the look of an event: the tureens, the coffee cups, the platters. I took out one of the plates and examined it carefully. It seemed more ornate than what I was used to, making me doubt the authenticity of the chinaware that my mother had stored so carefully with the idea that it was valuable. I never really believed that we Falcóns ate off the same plates that Amadeo de Saboya had requested for the Royal House of Spain, but on seeing these dishes I suspected that the Peraltas were the ones who owned the authentic La Cartuja chinaware.
I wanted to feel like a real person, and eat from a plate like this, and use cutlery. Though circumstances had turned me into a hyena, I still had the right not to behave like one. And one can eat carrion with a knife and fork.
I opened more drawers. I found several cans of fruit, flour, pasta, and bottled water. Coffee too, and sugar, powdered milk, and three bottles of Ribera del Duero. There was enough canned tuna for a week, and the same went for the roasted peppers and olives. The diet of a Spanish household, remarkable in a city where there was not even bread to be had.
In the refrigerator were half a dozen eggs, a half-eaten jar of guava marmalade, and a tub of spreadable cheese. Some tomatoes and onions in a good state too, and, in the freezer, six pieces of meat on Styrofoam trays. I felt an uncontrollable impulse to eat a juicy steak, something bloody to satiate my deferred hunger. I hadn’t eaten for two days. I started to weaken. Then I remembered La Mariscala and her deputies, who would react instantly at the smell. Though I guessed they wouldn’t be hungry, given that they had the bags and boxes of food that the government distributed to its acolytes.
I peered into the living room. Santiago was still there.
“Come on, let’s eat. There’s no beer, but there’s wine.”
He had his back to me. He was silhouetted against the light from the window. He seemed like a ghost. His head was lowered, and his back was hunched.
I went back to the kitchen. I took out the tomatoes, the canned tuna, and two eggs to boil. In a drawer I found a dozen white tablecloths, perhaps from Julia Peralta’s old eatery. I spread one of them on the table, like a declaration of peace. I took two wineglasses from an odd set and uncorked the Ribera. I went over to Santiago, who was still looking at his shoes. He got up and went over to the table. I served the wine and took a seat. After gulping down his glass, he asked after Sagrario, his mother.
“Do you know if she’s any worse?”
“Up until a few weeks ago she was the same, in a world that’s no longer her own or ours,” I said, and he sighed. “Look on the bright side: at least she’s not aware of this mess. She doesn’t fully comprehend that you’re not around.”
“She doesn’t remember me?”
“Santiago: your mother doesn’t even recognize Ana anymore. And Alzheimer’s with no medication makes for complications.”
“How’s my sister taking care of her?”
“I ask myself the same thing. If Ana hasn’t gone crazy in the past few months, it’s because of the steamroller effect of everything. Here, you can’t go backward. You have to keep moving forward, and quickly, or you fall apart.”
He gazed at his glass. He asked me how my mother had died. When I told him cancer, he knit his brow.
“And how did they give her chemo? There are no reagents. There’s nothing.”
“I bought the chemotherapy treatment on the black market, never really sure that I was being given the right medications.”
“That sucks,” he said, not lifting a finger from the tablecloth.
“What out of everything, Santiago? Cancer, the government, the shortages, the country?”
“That nobody was here to help you.”
“My mother and I were used to getting by without worrying about it too much.”
I went to the kitchen and painstakingly dished up the tomatoes and tuna on two plates. I wondered how we would stock up on food and water if we were locked in here. Santiago couldn’t be seen, and though I could be, I had no intention of leaving him alone in the apartment. I had to search it top to bottom first. And I still had a lot to go through. La Mariscala and her invaders were also a problem. My strategy of silence was worse than an invitation to storm the apartment.
Santiago pulled me out of my thoughts.
“You know something, Adelaida? I don’t remember you when you were young.”
The comment threw me. I grabbed one of the boiled eggs and started shelling it.
“Are you calling me old?”
“No, it’s just . . .” he labored over his words, as if to gain momentum. “I don’t have any memories of you when you were at university with Ana. I remember you after her wedding. I’m not sure why, Ana spoke about you all the time.”
“About you too, Santiago. For her, you were a little genius and she had to give you everything. I hope you know how to thank her someday.”
“The photographer you were with the day of Ana’s wedding . . . why did they kill him in the way they did?”
The expression sounded clumsy to me, though it was accurate. “In the way they did”: slitting his throat open and pulling his tongue through the wound. I had trouble responding.
“He reported things that were damning for the government, and they couldn’t forgive that.”
“I’m not sure why I asked. I’m sorry.”
The buzzer sounded. Santiago looked in the direction of the wooden door. I brought my finger to my lips.
“Don’t say a word. Don’t do anything. Don’t move.”
I started playing with the broken eggshell, crushing it against the tablecloth. It sounded once more. A ring that went on for years in our heads. In that city, the sound of the buzzer meant nothing good, especially in the situation we were in.
Ten minutes went by without us saying anything. We heard footsteps in the corridor. I peered through the peephole in the door. I saw three men dressed in regular clothing: they weren’t wearing any kind of uniform, no red shirts of the Sons
of the Fatherland or dark vests of SEBIN, no olive-green uniform of the National Guard. They did look like criminals, though. One of them, who seemed to be the leader of the expedition, stopped before the apartment door. “Not that one, Jairo. This one,” said one of the others. “Shut the fuck up,” he spat, and turned to the door of my old home.
He pressed the doorbell, which we heard through the wall of the dining room. I was scared. Santiago was a problem. And he knew it.
When I heard the scuffing of flip-flops made by whichever woman was heading for the door, I was even more afraid. What was this visit? And what did it mean? Were they coming to invade the apartment they thought was empty? Were they coming for Santiago? The dark corridor meant I couldn’t make out much. With both hands resting on the door, I was filled with the sensation that I was stopping a train. I was placing my body in the path of the locomotive of the Revolution. The enemies of progress had derailed, and they were headed straight for us.
Santiago came over to the door. He asked me, bringing his hands together, to let him see. If anyone knew what the people coming to cut his throat would look like, he did, so I moved aside and waited. La Mariscala came to the doorway and told the visitors to come through. She turned off the reggaeton and sent her animals downstairs, together with the two sidekicks. I went to the master bedroom. Santiago followed me soon after. I made space for him so we could both listen to what they were saying. The conversation was to the point, no mucking about. I could understand, from what the man said, that they knew about the side business the women had going on. And they didn’t like it one bit. La Mariscala’s reign seemed to have its limits, and this man had come to make that crystal clear. The Revolution had strata and castes, as well as lines that she had started to overstep.
“I’ll put it plainly,” the visitor told her. “We know your brother works in the Ministry of the People’s Power for Food and Agricultural Security. We also know you’re skimming some of the bags of food from the Local Supply and Production Committees. You’re getting fat on reselling them and, worse than that, chica: you’re not sharing the profits with anyone. That’s not good.”
La Mariscala didn’t answer and of course we couldn’t see what expression she made, if any.
“Are you listening, mi amor?” The man spoke in a hurry. “Everyone knows you’re selling your compatriots’ food to the oligarchs. We know that this is where you’re hoarding it. This can’t go on. The commander wanted people who would be prepared to defend his legacy, not make themselves rich. Here, what belongs to one belongs to all.”
“This is mine. I grabbed it first,” La Mariscala finally answered.
“It’s not yours, m’hija. Get that into your head. We frown upon those who exploit the commander’s memory. And you’re being extremely selfish. So I’m not saying it again: either give us the committee’s boxes of food and we’ll leave you in peace, or the battle begins.”
Santiago and I stayed pressed against the wall, looking at each other. La Mariscala’s bravado had abandoned her.
“I’m not doing anything wrong, everyone does the same thing.” Her tone was weaker.
“Are you going to give us the boxes or not?” he shouted.
She didn’t answer.
“I’m not saying it again: if I find out you keep making money off this, you’ll have no time to hide. Get it into your head, there will be no second warning!”
The silence stretched out and grew thicker. It was broken only by the sound of the door opening and the slam it made when the visitor pulled it shut. A few minutes later, some women came up. La Mariscala shouted at them.
“Pack up all this shit, we’re leaving here tomorrow! You get all the bags we set aside and sell them! The ones that still haven’t been distributed, deliver them today!”
“But there are so many,” one of the women responded.
“You work it out then. Don’t you have the list I gave you? Find it, see how many there are. Shit’s going down tonight, and before then we have to get all this outside, you hear me? Get moving!”
“But we have to deliver the committee ones, the ones we can’t sell,” she responded again.
“I know that, stupid. Give me that paper.” La Mariscala started reading. “Ramona Pérez: give her the bag of food, she’s a good stick and a good revolutionary; this one, Juan Garrido, give it to him too, he goes to the marches. Domingo Marcano, no. Not even water for that sonofabitch—”
“But we’ve been given orders to deliver all of them.”
“I don’t care, chica. I don’t care. Whatever doesn’t get delivered gets sold, you hear me? And it’s getting late. Get a move on, while I take care of all this!”
“But señora,” said one of her assistants. “That food is the Revolution’s. That’s the commander’s decision to make, not yours.”
“I’m the voice of the commander around here.”
No one else dared speak.
Santiago and I heard the women shuffling around and dragging bulks, a flurry of activity that lasted half an hour. When they left, La Mariscala started breaking things. One by one. What must she be destroying? What else was there left to shatter when she’d already wrecked everything? Each object that smashed against the floor was a blow to my secret hope of stealing into the apartment to rescue my papers and my mother’s things. I put my hands over my mouth to stop myself from crying out. Santiago tried to grab me by the arm and take me to the living room, but I peevishly struggled free. I gave the bed an imaginary kick that I didn’t follow through, out of fear of being heard. They’d taken everything from me, even my right to scream.
That afternoon I wanted to have hooks for hands. To kill everyone by just moving my arms, like a mortal windmill. I grit my teeth so hard I broke a molar, which I spat in pieces against the granite floor. I swore through my broken tooth at the country that was expelling me. I still belonged to it, even if I didn’t form part of it. Hate had grown inside me. It hardened, like a spike in my stomach.
Santiago came back to the bedroom with the wine bottle. He took a long swig. When he passed it to me, I did the same. We drank in silence, united by a new thing in common.
“Do you still think I’m one of them? Tell me, do you think I’m capable of something like that?”
I took the bottle from his hands and drank the last mouthful.
“I’m exhausted, and I’m scared, Santiago.”
He nodded. “Me too, Adelaida.”
We were afraid.
Much more afraid than we could bear.
I WOKE TO GUNFIRE. It sounded the same as the night before, bursts of pellet shots mixed with explosions here and there. It took me a few moments to work out where I was. I had no shoes. I was wrapped up and tucked between pillows. The door of the room was still closed. I got up and ran to the dresser. I opened the bottom drawer. The documents and money were intact, wrapped in bed linen. I looked at myself in the mirror. My face was puffy, I looked bloated. Transformed into a toad, I went to the living room.
Santiago had tidied and cleaned everything.
“They’ve gone.”
“I know,” I responded, rubbing my eyes.
“Let’s go. I can get us in there without busting the door.”
“Do you think . . . ?” A ray of crazy hope lit up my mind.
“No, Adelaida, they’ll be back. Didn’t you hear that guy? If you want to retrieve anything, now’s the time. With the mess they’re likely to have made, I doubt anyone will notice we’ve been inside. And if they notice, believe me, the last person they’ll suspect is you.”
His reasoning was sound. We went out to the corridor looking every which way. Santiago was holding a meat knife and a coat hanger. He used the steel blade to work open the lock and the hook to pick the deadbolt. The door swung open.
There was a strong stench of shit, and half the furniture was gone. The boxes of my mother’s clothes and notebooks were sprawled all over the room. La Mariscala had broken everything: my computer, the dining table, the to
ilet bowl, the basin. She’d wrenched the lightbulbs from every lamp and she left her shit wherever she pleased. The home I’d grown up in had been turned into a filthy pit.
I grabbed a black plastic bag and put the sole surviving plates in it, as well as my mother’s graduation photo and another two of her with my aunts in the Falcón guesthouse. Santiago was standing guard by the door.
I opened my wardrobe. Not even a T-shirt was left. I looked for the small binder hidden below the shoe rack and got out the house deeds and legal documents: my passport and my mother’s death certificate. The desk was full of half-burned candles, and a few decapitated saints had taken the place of my manuscripts, which had vanished. I breathed in the greasy stench of latrine. I noticed a tower of boxes. They were sealed and labeled with the names of the people they were meant for: El Willy (Negro Primero Frontline), Betzaida (Barrio Adentro Frontline), Yusnavy Aguilar (La Piedrita Revolutionary Collective) . . . invented names, gaudy, vulgar relics of English words, their owners’ attempts to concoct a refined version of themselves. The fools weren’t going to get a gram of coffee, not even a bag of rice from their subsidized food boxes. The Revolution that set them free stole from them in every way possible. The first basic thing to be stolen, dignity, was followed by La Mariscala’s handiwork, when she snatched their food baskets and sold them on the black market to earn double or triple, at the expense of this bribery disguised as charity. I was relieved to know I wasn’t the only one they plundered. I was pleased to know that in this empire of trash, everyone stole from everyone else.
The library was deserted. What the hell had they done with my books? So many were gone. Where had they taken Children of the Mire, The Green House, Family Airs, Ask the Dust? I only had to go to the bathroom to realize that entire sections of my Eugenio Montejo and Vicente Gerbasi editions had been used as toilet paper and blocked the pipes. In silence I said to myself, running my tongue over my broken molar: Now’s not the time, Adelaida.
Crying counted for nothing.
I looked at the bag I’d put everything in and glanced around the room one last time. My mother and I were the last inhabitants of the world that fit inside these walls. Now both were dead: my mother, my home. My country, too.
It Would Be Night in Caracas Page 11
