Few objects stood out among the belongings of Aurora’s that I found in her bedroom. She didn’t seem to read much. On the shelf she had few books, at most two or three novels by Isabel Allende and a copy of Doña Bárbara, the national classic. She didn’t seem to listen to music, either. She did like cutting out newspaper clippings. She had mismatched collections. A recipe for tocinillo de cielo, rice pudding, and profiteroles together with the daily recap of the telenovelas showing on TV. I could reconstruct the story arc of an entire decade with her article collection. Aurora must have suffered at each episode’s ending, because she used a pen to underline the summaries. Endings that, though they always seemed the same to me, she highlighted as exceptional.
On reaching the third folder of clippings, I turned to stone. Aurora Peralta had kept a copy of the picture of the soldier dead on the pavement, the same one I discovered the day of my tenth birthday and kept a long time. I unfolded the front page to look at the image of the boy whose eyebrows were sodden with blood. The newspaper layout made me realize soon enough why Aurora had kept the picture: it belonged to the same sheet, the one printed with both the first and last page, as the TV reviews. At the opposite extreme of the newspaper edition that reported on the first bout of social unrest the both of us experienced, was—duly underlined—the obituary of the actress Doris Wells, known for La Fiera. Wells was our dream witch, the elegant villain, the one who brought others to their knees with her harsh eyebrows and head of golden hair. I held on to the death of a country, and Aurora, to the death of a telenovela actress. Both were a fiction.
I felt dazed, leaden, incapable of dragging my baggage to the airport doors. When I looked up, I saw groups of people going through the same motions. Anxious families whose faces changed: smiles at the passenger who might be—this time really might be—the one they were waiting for, suddenly wiped from their faces with the disappointing realization that, ah, no, it wasn’t. But look, look, that’s him! Scattered around the edges of the crowd, the same men wielding tablets, though really they were different men. Women, overly made up as they’d been earlier, but different individuals, greeting a different group of Japanese tourists. Everything was both the same and different, like a lamp turned on and off. And there I was, seated on the same bench, not moving a muscle, and wondering what to do about my masterstroke, as if it were a grenade.
The transfusions from Aurora Peralta that ran through my veins weren’t sufficient. To make them work, I’d have to drain all my blood. I had to get my act together. Aurora Peralta had been unlucky, but that didn’t mean I had to be. I hadn’t come so far only to founder.
I made my way to the taxi rank.
“To Calle Londres, number eight, please,” I said to the driver after pulling the door shut.
The white sedan took off in a hurry and merged onto the M-30 ring road as a male voice told us the time over the radio: “It’s nine a.m., eight a.m. in the Canary Islands.”
We crossed a huge highway that had glass buildings on either side. The sky looked as clean as a window. I went over what I knew about my new family. María José worked as a nurse in a municipal health center. After her divorce, she and her son moved to a rental apartment a few blocks from Francisca’s house. It was a fifth-floor apartment that overlooked the street, well lit. “You’ll like it,” she’d stated in her last email. Francisca, her mother, was living in the old family house, between Calle Cardenal Belluga and Calle Julio Camba, very close to Plaza América Española, a place I learned to love thanks to the three olive trees that never changed, the only constant in a life of four seasons. Francisca lived alone, but a Bolivian woman took care of her. Francisca’s lucidness, I understood, came and went. “You’ll see her,” wrote María José. “Yes, I’ll see her,” I said to myself under my breath as the buildings left me speechless. Each of them taller and more modern than the one before.
The taxi turned right on Ventas bridge and crossed behind the Plaza de Toros, a place where bulls and men met their deaths: the same liturgy as my city, celebrated opera-style. Paying for a seat to watch death play out. Why would I, when in my country I could do so free of charge?
Number eight on Calle Londres seemed a nice building. The door was open. A man with leathery, wrinkled skin was sweeping steps that looked impeccable to me. He was wearing navy-blue overalls and had a smoker’s smile, his teeth marred with dark spots. He set the broom aside and helped me with my baggage.
“I’m going to the fifth floor.”
“Oh, okay . . . to María José’s. She said she was expecting someone. Do you want me to go with you?”
“No, thank you,” I said.
When the elevator doors met, I looked at myself in the mirror. I looked terrible. I was worn out, aged, bitter. Between the woman I was and the one returning my gaze was a long line of specters, washed-out versions of an original document. I’d lost a lot of weight. I looked older, old-fashioned, as if instead of coming from another country I was arriving from another time. That was how Aurora Peralta’s mother must have looked when she arrived in my city. But I was alive. She no longer was.
Living: a miracle that I still don’t understand fully, one that grabs hold with the teeth of guilt. Surviving is part of the horror that travels with anyone who escapes. A plague that strives to bring us down when we’re healthy, to remind us that someone else was more deserving of staying alive.
I halted before a wooden door identified with the letter D. I straightened and pressed the buzzer. I heard a few steps and the creaking of the lock.
“You are . . .”
“It’s me, Aurora.”
It was ten thirty in the morning. Nine thirty in the Canary Islands.
In Caracas, it would always be night.
This is a work of fiction. Some episodes and characters in this novel are inspired by real events, but are included here for literary purposes, not as testimony.
Acknowledgments
To my sister Cristina, the poet who taught me to read inside myself and lived each of these pages as if they were her own.
To my mother, for her truth.
To my father, the Gran Gran Capitán.
To my brother Juan Carlos, for showing me that an ocean existed, and that I could cross it whenever I wanted.
To my brother Carlos José, for his disconcerting smile in the middle of the storm.
To María Aponte Borgo, the one and only writer.
To José and Eulalia Sainz. Now I understand you.
To my women: those who write and those who don’t.
To Óscar: without you, no novel would exist. Not this one, not all those in the bottom drawer.
To Emilio, for the push toward La Carretera.
To Marina Penalva, for knowing how to read this story deeply. And, above all, for believing in it.
To Haydn, Mahler, Verdi, and Callas.
To the cantos del pilón I heard from Soledad Bravo, the drums from San Juan, and the polo margariteño, “La embarazada del viento.”
To my land, always broken. Scattered across both sides of the ocean.
A Note From the Translator
In recreating this work in English, I've paid close attention to the rhythm and shades of Adelaida’s voice, which vary greatly depending on her state of mind. In the beginning, her voice has a staccato quality, her utterances truncated by grief; later, that voice is all energetic resilience, fueled by her determination to survive. Perhaps the sentence I spent the most time reworking was “Tan solo una letra separa «partir» de «parir».” (Just a single letter separates “to leave” from “to give birth.”) In the novel, Adelaida describes the act of adopting a new identity as giving birth to a new self. Birth is given special metaphorical weight, recurring as it does in key scenes that include her recollections of her mother, her realization that she herself will never be one, and her removing Aurora’s body from the building. Yet meaning resides as much in the linguistic structure as it does in the message content, and to translate “partir” as “to le
ave” and “parir” as “to give birth” would mean to lose the linguistic similarity. How, then, to get the meaning—all of it—across? After much wrestling with myself, I finally decided on “Only a small difference in sound separates ‘leave’ from ‘live.’” If she wants to live, Adelaida must leave Venezuela, and her old self, behind.
—Elizabeth Bryer
Here ends Karina Sainz Borgo’s
It Would Be Night in Caracas.
The first edition of this book was printed and bound at LSC Communications in Harrisonburg, Virginia, September 2019.
An imprint dedicated to publishing international voices, offering readers a chance to encounter other lives and other points of view via the language of the imagination.
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
IT WOULD BE NIGHT IN CARACAS. Original Spanish language publication: Copyright © 2019 by Karina Sainz Borgo. English translation: Copyright © 2019 by Elizabeth Bryer. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Originally published as La hija de la española in Spain in 2019 by Lumen.
FIRST EDITION
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sainz Borgo, Karina, 1982-
Title: It would be night in Caracas / Karina Sainz Borgo ; [translated by Elizabeth Bryer]
Other titles: Hija de la espanola
Description: First edition. | New York, NY : HarperCollins Publishers, [2019]
Identifiers: LCCN 2019013246 (print) | LCCN 2019016767 (ebook) | ISBN 9780062936899 (ebook) | ISBN 9780062936868 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780062936851 (trade pbk.)
Classification: LCC pq8550.429.a35 (ebook) | LCC pq8550.429.A35 H5513 2019 (print) | DDC 863/.7—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019013246
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Digital Edition AUGUST 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-293689-9
Version 08212019
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-293686-8
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It Would Be Night in Caracas Page 16
