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Translated from the Spanish by Elizabeth Bryer
Copyright
HarperVia
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
This eBook first published in Great Britain by HarperVia in 2019
Copyright © Karina Sainz Borgo 2019
English translation copyright © Elizabeth Bryer 2019
Cover design by Stephen Brayda
Cover images © Carnation and Gentian Ehret, Georg Dionysius [1710-70], Victoria & Albert Museum /Bridgman Images/Meredith Adelaide/Stocksy Unites
Karina Sainz Borgo asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, 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 hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780008359911
Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008359935
Version: 2019-09-26
Dedication
To the women and men who came before me.
And to those who will come after.
Because all stories about the ocean are
political, and each of us
is searching for a land to call home.
Epigraph
Ay, nothing can intimidate you, poet,
Not even the wind in the wires …
Lift your head
But may the words you write
Make sense.
—YOLANDA PANTIN,
“The Pelvic Bone”
They willed me bravery. I wasn’t brave.
—JORGE LUIS BORGES,
“Remorse”
translated by Willis Barnstone
I too was reared, like thee, in exile.
—SOPHOCLES
translated by F. Storr
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
We Buried My Mother …
Utter Destruction …
When we Arrived …
I Thought Three Boxes …
I Heard Gunshots …
I Took Stock …
I Went Out …
In The Midst …
My Mother’s Belongings …
The Last Box …
A Man With Gunshot …
It Was My Fifth Visit …
What did You do Today …
I Woke Outside …
We Were Eating …
Stitch You Alive …
I’d Never Witnessed a Birth …
I Studied the Exits …
I Had no Idea …
I Looked at the Ceiling …
Aurora Peralta Teijeiro …
Also in the Red Binder …
In La Encrucijada …
Do You Mistrust Me …
I Woke to Gunfire …
I Sat on the Floor …
The Agent …
The Process …
After Santiago Left …
They’d Stolen the Vase …
Calling Passenger …
I Went to the River …
A Family was Waiting …
A Note From the Translator
Acknowledgments
About the Author
About the Publisher
WE BURIED MY MOTHER with her things: her blue dress, her black flats, and her multifocals. We couldn’t say good-bye in any other way, couldn’t take those things from her. It would have been like returning her to the earth incomplete. We buried it all, because after her death we were left with nothing. Not even each other. That day we were struck down with exhaustion. She in her wooden box; I on a chair in the dilapidated chapel, the only one available of the five or six I tried for the wake. I could hire it for only three hours. Instead of funeral parlors, the city now had furnaces. People went in and out like loaves of bread, which were in short supply on the shelves but rained down in our memory whenever hunger overcame us.
If I still say “we” when I talk about that day it’s out of habit, for the years welded us together like two parts of a sword we could use to defend each other. Writing out the inscription for her headstone, I understood that death takes place in language first, in that act of wrenching subjects from the present and planting them in the past. Completed actions. Things that had a beginning and an end, in a time that’s gone forever. What was but would never be again. That was the way things were now: from then on, my mother would exist only if worded differently. Burying her meant my life as a childless daughter came to an end. In a city in its death throes, we had lost everything, even words conjugated in the present.
Six people attended my mother’s wake. Ana was the first. She arrived dragging her feet. Julio, her husband, was supporting her by the arm. Ana seemed to be moving through a dark tunnel that disgorged her into the world where the rest of us lived. For months, she had been undergoing treatment with benzodiazepine. Its effects were starting to evaporate. Barely enough pills were left to complete her daily dose. As had happened with the bread, there were Alprazolam shortages, which meant despair prevailed, as potent as our desperation. We could only watch as everything we needed vanished: people, places, friends, recollections, food, serenity, peace, sanity. “Lose” became a leveling verb, and the Sons of the Revolution wielded it against us.
Ana and I met in the Department of Humanities. Since then, Ana’s life and my own were in sync when it came to going through private hells. This time was no exception. When my mother went into the palliative care facility, the Sons of the Revolution arrested Santiago, Ana’s brother. Dozens of students were apprehended that day. They ended up with their backs red raw from the pellets, bludgeoned in a corner, or raped with the barrel of a gun. Santiago got the La Tumba treatment—a combination of all three.
He spent more than a month inside the prison, which extended five floors belowground. Sounds were muffled and there were no windows, no natural light, and no ventilation. The only noises were the screech and clatter of the metro rails above. Santiago was locked inside one of the seven cells. They were aligned one behind the other, so he couldn’t see who else was detained. Each cell measured two by three meters. The floor and walls were white. So were the beds and the bars through which his jailers pushed trays of food. It never came with cutlery; if he wanted to eat, he had to do so with his hands.
For several weeks there had been no word from him. Ana wasn’t even getting the calls she paid periodic sums of money for any longer, or the faulty proof of life she received previously in the form of photos sent from a different phone number each time.
We don’t know if he’s alive or dead. “We’ve had no news,” Julio said in a low voice, moving away from the chair where Ana spent thirty minutes staring at her feet. The whole time, she only raised her head to ask three questions.
“What time will Adelaida be buried?”
“At two thirty.”
“Okay,” she murmured. “Where?”
“In La Guarita cemetery, the old part. My mother bought a plot a long time ago. It has a nice view.”
“Okay …” Ana seemed to be making an effort, as if processing my words were a titanic task. “Do you want to stay with us today, until the worst of it is over?”
“I’m leaving for Ocumare early tomorrow to go see my aunts. I’ve got to give them a few things,” I lied. “But thank you. This is a difficult time for you too, I know.”
“Okay.” Ana gave me a kiss on the cheek and left. Who wants to attend a funeral when you can sense your own brother’s fast approaching?
Next to arrive were María Jesús and Florencia, retired teachers my mother had kept in touch with over the years. They expressed their condolences and left quickly, conscious that nothing they could say or do would make up for the death of a woman too young to be taken from us. They left at a clip, as if trying to get a head start on the reaper, before he came for them too. Not a single wreath of flowers arrived at the funeral parlor except my own, an arrangement of white carnations that barely covered the upper half of the casket.
My mother’s two sisters, my twin aunts Amelia and Clara, weren’t present either. One was rotund, and the other was painfully thin. One ate without stopping, while all the other had for breakfast was a small portion of black beans, while she sucked on a roll-your-own cigarette. They lived in Ocumare de la Costa, a town in the state of Aragua, near Bahía de Cata and Choroní. A place where azure waters lapped at white sand, cut off from Caracas by crumbling roads that were becoming impassable.
At eighty years of age, my aunts had made at most a single trip to Caracas. They didn’t leave their sleepy backwater even to attend my mother’s graduation, and she’d been the first university graduate in the Falcón family. She looked stunning in the photos, standing in the Aula Magna of the Central University of Venezuela: heavy makeup around her eyes, her teased hair squashed flat beneath the mortarboard, the certificate in her rigid hands, and a smile that looked lonely, like she was quietly furious. My mother kept that photograph alongside her Bachelor of Education academic transcript and the notice that my aunts had placed in El Aragüeño, the regional newspaper, so that everyone would know that the Falcóns now had a professional in the family.
We didn’t see my aunts often, only once or twice a year. We traveled to the small town where they lived in July and August, sometimes during Carnaval or Semana Santa. We would give them a hand with the guesthouse and help lighten their financial load. My mother always left them a little money, pestering them while she was at it: one to stop eating, the other to eat. They lavished us with breakfasts that turned my stomach: shredded beef, crispy pork rind, tomato, avocado, and guarapo, a beverage made of cinnamon and unrefined sugar strained through a cloth. They often followed me around the house brandishing the brew, which more than a few times made me faint; I would regain consciousness to the sounds of their fussing.
“Adelaida, if our mother saw this girl of yours, puny as she is and with no meat on her bones, she’d dish her up three arepas smothered in lard,” my aunt Amelia, the rotund one, would say. “What do you do to the poor creature? She’s no bigger than a fried herring. Wait here, m’hija. I’ll be right back … Don’t you move a muscle, muchachita!”
“Leave the girl in peace, Amelia. Just because you’re hungry all the time doesn’t mean everyone else is,” my aunt Clara would sing out from the patio, keeping an eye on her mango trees and smoking a cigarette.
“Aunt Clara, what are you doing out there? Come inside, we’re about to eat.”
“Hold on, I want to make sure those scoundrels from next door don’t come knock down any of my mangoes with a rod. The other day they took three bags’ worth.”
“Here you go, eat only one if you want but there are three more,” said my aunt Amelia, back from the kitchen, with a plate of fried bollos stuffed with pork picadillo. “Come on, eat up, m’hija, it’s getting cold!”
After doing the washing up, the three women would sit on the patio to play bingo amid the clouds of mosquitoes that descended at six in the evening, the same time every day. We always scared them off with the smoke that rose from the dry brushwood once it caught alight. We would make a bonfire and would draw together to watch it burn beneath the day’s dying sun. Then one of the twins, sometimes Clara and sometimes Amelia, would turn in her rattan chair and, growling, would say the magic words: the Dead One.
That was how they referred to my father, an engineering student whose plans to marry my mother were wiped from his mind when she told him she was expecting. Judging by the anger my aunts radiated, anyone would say they’d been left in the lurch too. They mentioned him much more than my mother did; I never heard her speak his name. No word came from him after he left, or so my mother told me. It seemed a good enough incentive not to be fazed by his absence. If he didn’t want to hear from us, then why should we expect anything from him?
I never understood our family to be a large one. Family meant the two of us, my mother and me. Our family tree started and ended with us. Together we formed a junco, a plant capable of growing anywhere. We were small and veiny, almost ribbed, perhaps so it wouldn’t hurt if a piece of us was wrenched off, or even if we were pulled out by the roots. We were made to endure. Our world was sustained by the two of us keeping it in balance. Everything outside our family of two was the exception: supplementary, and for that reason expendable. We weren’t waiting on anyone; we had each other and that was enough.
UTTER DESTRUCTION. That was the feeling I had as I dialed the Falcón guesthouse the day of my mother’s wake. My aunts took their time answering the phone. Two ailing women in that big old house, they had trouble making it from the patio to the lounge room, where a small coin-operated telephone was still connected even though nobody used it anymore. They’d run the guesthouse for thirty years. That whole time they’d changed not even a painting. They were like that, as improbable as the rosy trumpet trees painted on dusty canvases that decorated the grease- and dirt-covered walls.
After several failed attempts, they finally picked up. They took the news of my mother’s death in a bleak mood, saying little. First, I spoke to Clara, the skinny one, then to Amelia, the rotund one. They ordered me to postpone the burial for at least the time it would take them to catch the next bus to Caracas. Between them and the capital was a three-hour journey on a road riddled with potholes and thugs. Those conditions, on top of their old age and ill health—one had diabetes, the other arthritis—would have broken them down. Those seemed reasons enough to dissuade them from coming. I said good-bye, promising to come see them soon—I was lying—so we could say a novena in the town chapel. They conceded reluctantly. I hung up the phone sure of one thing: the world as I knew it had begun to unravel.
Toward midday, two neighbors from our building appeared, expressing their condolences and letting loose a barrage of consolations, as useless as tossing bread to pigeons. María, a nurse who lived on the sixth floor, went on about eternal life. Gloria from the penthouse seemed more interested in knowing what would become of me now that I was “all alone.” Of course, the apartment was too large for a childless woman. Of course, the way things were, I’d have to consider renting out at least one of the rooms. Today you get paid in US dollars, Gloria said, if you’re lucky enough to find someone you know. Respectable people, good pay. There are so many crooks around. And since solitude does nobody any good, and now you’re all on your own, it would be wise to have others around, wouldn’t it, at least in case of an emergency. You must know someone to rent out a room to, do you? I expect you do, but if not, I have a distant cousin who right this minute is looking for a place to rent in the city. What a fabulous opportunity, don’t you think? She could move in with you, and you could earn a little extra. A great idea, no?
She spilled these words over the closed casket of my still-warm mother.
Because, as you no doubt saw, paying the doctors, and the funeral, and the cemetery plot with the inflation as it is … Because no doubt all this cost you a fortune, didn’t it? I’m sure you still have some money saved up, but with your aunts being so elderly and so far away, you’ll need another source of income. I’ll put you in touch with my cousin, so you can put that room to good use.
Gloria didn’t stop talking about money for an instant. Something in her little rodent eyes told me she would make off with whatever there was to take from my situation or would at least improve her own circumstances by leveraging mine. That’s the way we were all living: peering at what was in each other’s shopping bag. Sniffing out when a neighbor came home with something in short supply, so we could investigate where to get hold of it. We were all becoming suspicious and watchful. We would distort solidarity into predation.
The women left after two hours, one sick of hearing the other’s indelicacies, the other worn out after failing to discover what would become of my dead mother’s estate.
Life had become a matter of venturing out to hunt and returning home alive. That was what our daily activities had turned into, even burying our dead.
“The chapel hire will be five thousand bolívares fuertes.”
“You mean five million old bolívares.”
“Yes, that’s right,” the funeral parlor employee raised his soft voice. “Given that you’ve presented the death certificate, it’s cheaper. Otherwise, it would be seven thousand bolívares fuertes, because issuing the certificate incurs an additional fee.”
“Seven million old bolívares, was it?”
“Yes, exactly.”
“Okay.”
“So would you like to hire our services?” He sounded a little exasperated.
“Does it look like I have a choice?”
“Only you know that.”
Paying for the wake was even more complicated than paying for my mother’s final days in the clinic. The banking system was a fiction. The funeral parlor had no credit card reader, they didn’t accept bank transfers, and I didn’t have enough cash to cover the quantity requested, which was something like two thousand times my monthly wage. Even if I’d had the cash, they wouldn’t have accepted it. No one wanted cash anymore. Cash was worthless bits of paper. You needed several wads to buy anything—from a bottle of soda, if you could find one, to a small pack of chewing gum, which might cost ten or twelve times what it was originally worth. Money had taken on an urban scale. Two towers of hundred-bolívar bills were needed for a bottle of cooking oil; sometimes it took three to buy a quarter kilo of cheese. Worthless skyscrapers, that’s what our national currency had become: a tall tale. A few months later, the opposite happened: all the money disappeared. This meant we had nothing to exchange for the little we could still find.
I opted for the simplest solution. I took out my last fifty-euro note, which I’d bought months before on the black market, and handed it to the funeral director, who pounced on it, his eyes lit with astonishment. He would probably exchange it for twenty times its official worth, or even thirty times what I’d paid. Fifty euros, a quarter of what remained of the savings I had wrapped in old undergarments to bamboozle any intruder. A stint for a Mexican publishing house based in Spain—they paid me in foreign currency—and overdue payments for edited manuscripts had meant my mother and I could get by, but the past few weeks had been brutal. The clinic charged for everything they didn’t have, and we had to buy it on the black market for three or four times its original worth: from syringes and saline bags to gases and cotton buds. A nurse with the air of a butcher handed over each item after naming an exorbitant price, almost always higher than the one we’d agreed on.
Everything was disappearing as fast as my mother faded. She shared a room with three other patients, lying in a bed made up with the freshly washed sheets I had to bring from home every day, sheets that seemed to soak up the room’s sickly air. There wasn’t a single clinic that didn’t have a waiting list for its beds. People got sick and died as fast as they lost their minds. I never considered subjecting my mother to a public hospital, it would have been like leaving her to die in a cold corridor, stuck between criminals riddled with bullets. Everything was ending: our life, our money, our strength. Even the days were now abbreviated. Being in the street at six in the evening was asking to cut your life short. Anything could kill us: a stray bullet, a kidnapping, a robbery. Blackouts lasted long hours and meant sunsets were followed by everlasting darkness.
At two in the afternoon, funeral parlor employees appeared in the chapel, two strong-looking individuals dressed in dark suits sewn from cheap fabric. They hauled the casket outside and threw it into a Ford Zephyr that had been converted into a hearse. I had to grab the wreath and lay it atop the casket to make it clear that this was my mother, not a platter of mortadella. In a place where death was equated with casualties from a plague, the body of Adelaida Falcón, my mother, was a cold cut, one lifeless body among so many others. The men treated her as they treated everyone else—completely devoid of compassion.
I got into the passenger seat and looked at the driver out of the corner of my eye. He had gray hair and the pitted skin of an aging black man. “Which cemetery are we going to? La Guarita?” I nodded. We said nothing further. The city’s hot wind embraced me. It had a sweet-and-sour smell of orange peel rotting inside a plastic bag beneath the sweltering sun. Driving along the motorway took twice as long as usual. In the past fifty years, the city had grown to at least three times the population that the main artery had been designed for.
The Zephyr had no shocks, so the potholed road was an ordeal. With no straps to hold it secure, my mother’s casket bounced around in the back. As I looked in the rear-view mirror at the veneer box—I hadn’t been able to afford a timber one—I thought about how much I would have liked to give my mother a fitting funeral. She must have thought along similar lines all too often. She must have wished to give me better things: a cuter lunch box, like the pink ones with gold trim that my schoolmates bought every October, not the workaday blue plastic one that she washed out thoroughly every September; a bigger house with a garden in the city’s east, not our birdcage apartment in the west. I never questioned anything my mother gave me because I knew how much it cost her. How many tutorials she’d had to teach to pay for my private-school education, or for my birthday parties, which were always overflowing with cakes, jelly, and soda served in plastic cups. She never said. Yet where the money came from needed no explaining because I saw it with my own eyes.
My mother had taught private tutorials on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays every week. These turned into daily sessions during the holidays for students who had to take exams in September so as not to fail a course. At a quarter to four, she would remove the tablecloth from the dining table. On its surface she would place pencils, a sharpener, several blank sheets of paper, a plate with María cookies, a jug of water, and two glasses. So many children passed through our house. They all had the same anemic look, no life in them. Overweight and indifferent girls and boys, undernourished thanks to all the chocolate and television that filled their afternoons in a city that was doing away with its parks. I grew up in a place full of rusty slides and swing sets, but everyone was too fearful of crime to play on them, and back then the crime rate wasn’t a shadow of what it came to be.