It Would Be Night in Caracas

WHEN WE ARRIVED at the cemetery, the gravesite with its two pits had already been dug. One for her, the other for me. My mother had bought the plot years before. Looking at that clay recess, I thought of a Juan Gabriel Vásquez line that I’d seen on a galley I’d proofread a few weeks before: “Each of us belongs to the place where our dead are buried.” As I observed the shorn grass around her grave, I understood that my mother, my only dead, tied me to this land. And this land exiled its people as forcefully as it devoured them. This was not a nation. It was a meat mincer.

The cemetery workers removed my mother from the Ford Zephyr and lowered her into the grave with the help of pulleys and old belts full of rivets. At least what had happened to my grandmother Consuelo wouldn’t happen to my mother. I was very young, but I remember it to this day. It was in Ocumare. It was hot, a saltier and more humid heat. My tongue had been seared by the guarapo that my aunts forced me to drink between one Ave Maria and another, and I kept worrying at it as the town gravediggers lowered the casket with two frayed ropes. All of a sudden, the casket slid sideways. On impact, it broke open like a pistachio. My stiff grandmother banged against the glass top, and the gathering of loved ones went from intoning the requiem to shrieking. Two young men tried to right her, close the box, and get on with the proceedings, but things got complicated. My aunts paced around the pit, grasping their heads and praying to the top brass of the Catholic Church. San Pedro, San Pablo, Virgen Santísima, Virgen Purísima, Reina de los Ángeles, Reina de los Patriarcas, Reina de los Profetas, Reina de los Apóstoles, Reina de los Mártires, Reina de los Confesores, Reina de las Vírgenes. Pray for us.

My grandmother, an unloving woman at the foot of whose grave some joker planted a hot chili, died in her bed, calling for her eight dead sisters. Eight women dressed in black. She saw them on the other side of the mosquito netting beneath which she was dispensing her final commands. So said my mother, who, by contrast, had no parade of relations to command from her throne with the aid of pillows and spittoons. My mother had only me.

A priest recited from a missal for the soul of Adelaida Falcón, my mother. The workers shoveled the clay and sealed the grave with a cement board, the mezzanine floor that would separate us when we were together again beneath the ground of a city in which even the flowers prey on the weak. I turned around. I nodded good-bye to the priest and workers. One of them, a slim black man with snake-like eyes, told me not to linger. So far that week there had been three armed robberies at burials. And you don’t want a nasty scare, he said, looking at my legs. I didn’t know whether to take that as a warning or a threat.

I got into the Ford Zephyr and turned around in my seat again and again. I couldn’t leave her there. I couldn’t leave when I knew how quickly a thief could dig up her grave to steal her glasses, or her shoes, or even her bones, a common occurrence now that witchcraft was the national religion. A toothless country that slits chicken’s throats. For the first time in months, I cried with my whole body. I shook out of fear and pain. I cried for her. For me. For the single entity we had been. For that lawless place where, when night fell, Adelaida Falcón, my mother, would be at the mercy of the living. I cried thinking about her body, buried in a land that would never be at peace. When I got in next to the driver, I didn’t want to die, but only because I was already dead.

The plot was a long way from the cemetery gates. To get back to the main road, we took a shortcut that was hardly better than a goat track. Curves. Boulders. Overgrown paths. Embankments with no guardrails. The Ford Zephyr went down the same road we’d come up. The driver swerved around every bend. Disconnected, shutdown, I didn’t care what happened. We would either die or we wouldn’t. Finally, the driver slowed and leaned over the greasy, blackened steering wheel. “What the hell is that?” His jaw dropped. The obstacle spread out before us like a landslide: a caravan of motorbikes.

There were twenty or thirty of them parked across the road, cutting off our route. All were wearing the red shirts distributed by the government in the current administration’s first years of office. It was the uniform of the Fatherland’s Motorized Fleet, an infantry the Revolution used to quell protests against the commander-president—the name the leader of the Revolution was known by after his fourth electoral victory—and in time that infantry outgrew its role. Anyone who fell into their hands became a victim. Of what depended on the day and the patrol.

When the money to fund the fleet dried up, the state decided to compensate members with a little bonus. While they would receive a full revolutionary salary no longer, they would have a license to sack and raze with abandon. Nobody could touch them. Nobody could control them. Anyone with a death wish and an urge to kill could join their ranks, though in truth many acted in their name without any connection to the original organization. They ended up forming small cooperatives, collecting tolls in different parts of the city. They erected tents and spent the day nearby, lounging on their bikes, from that vantage spying their prey before kicking the bikes into life and hunting them down at gunpoint.

The driver and I didn’t look at each other. The band hadn’t detected our presence. They were congregated around an improvised altar made from two bikes, on which they’d placed a closed casket. They’d formed a circle around the casket and were laying bunches of flowers and spitting mouthfuls of alcohol on it. They raised their bottles, drank, and spat. “It’s a thug’s burial,” said the driver. “If you’re one for praying, then pray, my girl,” and he jerked the gear lever beside the steering wheel into reverse.

The time it took him to back up was enough to catch sight of what appeared to be the funeral’s liveliest moment. A ratty-haired woman dressed in sandals, shorts, and a red T-shirt had lifted a girl onto the casket, which she was now straddling. It must have been the woman’s daughter, judging by the proud gesture the woman made as she raised the girl’s skirt and spanked her backside while the little thing moved in time to the music. With each slap, the girl—twelve years of age at most—shook harder, always to the rhythm of the raucous music that was pumping through the speakers of three cars and the minibus parked on the other side of the curve. “Tumba-la-casa-mami, pero que-tumba-la-casa-mami, tumba-la-casa-mami, you-need-to-bring-down-the-house-mami,” the reggaeton number boomed, charging the air. A grave never had such a steamy lure.

The girl gyrated her pelvis, no expression on her face, indifferent to the teasing and obscenities, indifferent even to the slaps of a mother who looked to be auctioning her young virgin off to the highest bidder. Each time the girl thrust, the men and women salivated and spat aguardiente and applauded. The Ford Zephyr was now far from the scene, but I could still make out a second girl, a little chubby, getting onto the casket and straddling it too, rubbing her sex against the brass plate that was burning with the heat of the sun, beneath which some man was lying stiffly, awaiting putrefaction.

In the heat and steam of that city, separated from the sea by a mountain, every cell of the dead body would start to swell. The flesh and organs would ferment. Gases and acids would bubble. Pustules would attract flesh feeders of the kind that grow in lifeless bodies and scurry around in shit. I looked at the girl rubbing herself against something dead, something about to become a breeding ground for worms. Offering sex as the final tribute to a life ripped apart by bullets. An invitation to reproduce, to give birth and bring more of his offspring into the world: swarms of people who just like flies and larvae would have brief lifetimes. Beings that would survive and proliferate thanks to the death of others. I would feed those same flies. Each of us belongs to the place where our dead are buried.

The midafternoon radiant heat meant that the mirage that obliterates landscapes had risen over the asphalt, making the concentration of men and women shimmer like a life-and-death grill. We drew farther away and started down a shortcut that was even worse. I could only think about the moment when the sun would drop below the horizon and light would be gone from the hill where I’d left my mother all alone. Then I died once more. I was never able to rise again from all the deaths that accumulated in my life story that afternoon. That day I became my only family. The final part of a life that nobody in that place would hesitate to cut short, machete blow by machete blow. By blood and fire, like everything that happens in this city.

I THOUGHT THREE BOXES would be enough to pack away my mother’s things. I was wrong. I needed more. At the dresser, I inspected what was left of the La Cartuja plates. A collection of loose pieces, enough to dish up soup, mains, and dessert for three in a modest household. It was chinaware trimmed with burgundy edging that had a rural scene in the middle. Not much, sincere and modest. I never knew where it had come from or why it was in our home.

In the story of us there was no wedding with a registry, no grandmothers with Canarian accents and Andalusian looks who plied us with fried torrijas that they dished up on those plates during Semana Santa. On that chinaware we placed our steamed vegetables and the sad pieces of chicken that my mother skinned in silence. Eating off them, we honored no one. We came from nobody and belonged to nothing. My mother told me, in her final days, that my grandmother Consuelo had gifted her the eighteen-piece set the day she finally saved enough money to buy the small apartment we’d been renting. A dowry fit for the gardenless kingdom that we founded together.

The chinaware had been left to my grandmother Consuelo by her sister Berta, a woman with Amerindian eyes and black skin who had been married to Francisco Rodríguez. He had asked for her hand in marriage six months after arriving in Venezuela from Extremadura and had built the Falcón guesthouse brick by brick in the heat of the Aragua coast. When he died, everyone started calling Great-Aunt Berta the musiú’s widow, a moniker for all Europeans who arrived in the forties, a translation, if it can be called that, of monsieur. My mother told me there was only one photograph of the man from Extremadura. It was from the day of his wedding to Berta Falcón, who from that moment forward went by the name of Berta Rodríguez. He, a great hulk of a man, appeared dressed in his Sunday best alongside the striking mixed-race woman, or at least that’s what my mother told me about the photo she saw but I never did.

My mother and I ate off the plates of dead people. How many meals must Great-Aunt Berta have cooked and served up on them, day after day? Would she have cooked the repertoire of a woman who moved her large berth around a kitchen smelling of cloves and cinnamon? Whatever the case, those plates emanated just one truth: my mother and I resembled one another only. Through my veins ran blood that would never help me escape. In a country where everyone was made from someone else, we had no one. The land we came from was our only life story.

Before wrapping it in newspaper, I looked at the sugar bowl, never used, that had been forgotten at the back of the dresser. We never sweetened anything we lifted to our mouths. We were skinny like the tree that presided over the dirt patio of the Falcón guesthouse and dropped a dark and sour fruit. We called them “stone plums” because of the tiny amount of flesh and the huge pit. Their centers distinguished them from other fruit. It was almost a pebble, a rough pit rounded off by the sour flesh that gave the small, withered trees, which once a year brought forth the miracle of their fruit, their name.

The stone plums grew in poor soil all along the coast. Children climbed in their branches and stayed up there like crows. Creatures that sipped up the little that the earth gave them. If our trips to Ocumare coincided with the season, we brought back two or three bags chock-full. It was up to me to collect the best ones. My aunts prepared a viscous sweet with them. They let them soak all night and then boiled them with grated sugarcane blocks. After letting the mixture simmer over low heat for several hours, a dark treacle formed. Not just any plum would do, only those that were about to fall from the tree. If they were green, it was better not to touch them; the ones that were still ripening were no good either because they made the treacle bitter. They had to be fully ripe, almost purple, and round and soft.

Collecting them was a painstaking process, accompanied by more than a few instructions.

“Squeeze them like this. Look.”

“If it’s soft like this, put it in the bag; as for the others, put them aside and wrap them in newspaper later.”

“That’s so they ripen. If you’re not going to explain properly, Amelia, how do you expect her to understand? Don’t eat too many. They’ll upset your stomach.”

“Take this bag.”

“Not that bag, Amelia. This one!”

Clara and Amelia kept interrupting each other. I nodded, then they let me go in peace. I wandered down the corridor and out to the patio. I climbed the tree and started pulling the fruit from the branches. Some came away easily while others resisted, coming free only when I yanked them. When I was done, I gave my aunts the ripest fruit, perfect for the sweet that they prepared in their huge stockpots laden with fruit and syrup. I still remember their silhouettes through the steam, a cloud that always gave me enormous cravings as it enveloped those robust women who tipped kilos of sugar into boiling water and stirred it hard with their wooden spoons.

“Get out of here, girlie. If one of these stockpots falls on your head—” said one.

“You’ll be crying all the way from here to kingdom come,” finished the other.

I made the most of the scolding to slip away and rescue the small pile of plums hidden in the garden, all for me.

Sitting on the highest branch, I sucked the flesh from them. I sucked and nibbled them right down to the pit, where there was always a little flesh still attached. Eating a stone plum was an act of perseverance. You had to remove the hard skin, then tear and wrench at the flesh with your teeth until you were scraping at the stony heart. Once it was smooth, I swished the pit from one side of my mouth to the other, as if it were a hard-boiled candy. And even though my mother threatened me by saying that if I swallowed the pit a plum tree would grow in my stomach, I enjoyed the smooth feel of it in my mouth. Only when the pits were completely fleshless did I spit them out, letting fly a slobbery stone that fell to the ground short of my aim, not even grazing the skinny dogs that watched my every move, expecting me to share my afternoon snack. I tried to shoo them away, waving my hands in the air. But they, with their mangy poodle eyes, stayed put, still as statues, watching me eat.

The stone plum tree appeared in my dreams too. At times it sprouted from the city gutters; at others, from our apartment sink, or from the Falcón guesthouse laundry. I never wanted to wake from those dreams. Far more beautiful than their real-life counterparts, my dream trees were always full of pearly plums that transformed into glittery cocoons, sleeping caterpillars, which I thought were beautiful in a strange and slightly repugnant way. They moved imperceptibly, like the muscles on the horses that sometimes made their way down the road, beasts whose hooves must have been sore from hauling the sugarcane and cacao to the Ocumare market for the men to unload. That was how everything in the town happened: as if the nineteenth century had never given way to progress. If it weren’t for the public lighting and the Polar beer trucks that climbed the road, nobody would have believed that this was the eighties.

So as not to forget those impossible trees that sprouted in my dreams, I drew them in my Caribe sketch pad with wax crayons, choosing the pink and violet colors I found in my box of twenty-four. I used the sharpener to make resin shavings and rubbed those shavings against the paper with my fingertips, giving my grubs a halo effect. I could spend hours on each drawing. I created them with almost as much devotion as when I nibbled and sucked at the sour and veiny plums that to this day are fixed in my memory.

That tree at the Falcón guesthouse was my territory. I felt free on its lonely branch, after climbing it like a monkey. That part of my childhood had nothing in common with the fearful city where I grew up and that, as the years went on, became a jumble of fences and locks. I liked Caracas, but I preferred the sugarcane-and-mosquito days of Ocumare to the city’s dirty pavement, which was always strewn with rotten oranges and stained with engine oil. In Ocumare, everything was different.

The sea redeemed and remedied, swallowed bodies and spat them out. It intermingled with everything that crossed its path, like the Ocumare River, which to this day flows into the ocean, pushing at the salt with its fresh water. On the shore grew the sea grape trees with their scant berries that my mother would use to make beauty-queen tiaras for me, while I daydreamed, hidden, my earrings made of pearly caterpillars, of the metamorphosis the plums underwent when they crossed the membrane of reality.

I HEARD GUNSHOTS. Like I had the day before, and the one before that, and the one before that. A gush of dirty water and lead that separated my mother’s burial from the days that followed. At my desk by the window in my bedroom, I noticed that the apartments in the neighboring buildings were dark. It wasn’t unusual for the electricity to go out across the city, but there was electricity at my place yet not elsewhere, and that was strange. Something’s happening, I thought. I switched off the lamp. Sharp blows started up at Ramona and Carmelo’s place, one floor above. Furniture colliding. Chairs and tables being dragged from one spot to another. I picked up the phone and dialed. Nobody answered. Outside, the night and the confusion worked their own curfew. Venezuela was living through dark days, probably the worst since the Federal War.

A robbery, I thought, but how could that be when nobody had raised their voice? I peered out of the living-room window. A Dumpster was ablaze in the middle of the avenue. The wind was carrying off the cash that neighbors had resorted to burning, huddled in groups. Lean, sooty people who came together to illuminate the city with their poverty. I was about to phone Ramona again when down below I saw men in military intelligence uniforms exiting my building. There were five of them, and long guns were slung across their shoulders. One had a microwave in his hands, and another had a desktop computer case. Others were dragging a couple of suitcases. I didn’t know if I was witnessing a raid, a robbery, or both things at once. The men got into a black van and drove off in the direction of Esquina La Pelota. When they had disappeared into the intersection that led to the highway, a light came on in the neighboring building. Another followed. And another. Then one more. The colossal wall of blindness and silence began to awaken, while a whirlwind of flaming cash spiraled in gusts, propelled by the military truck as it sped off.

Before cash disappeared altogether, the revolutionary cabinet announced, on the commander-president’s orders, that paper money would be progressively eliminated. The decree’s purpose was to fight the financing of terrorism, or what the leaders deemed as such, but printing more money to replace the old was impossible. The money that circulated forcibly wasn’t worth anything, even before it was burned. A napkin was more valuable than a hundred-bolívar bill, which now went up in flames on the pavement like some kind of premonition.

At home there was enough food to last me two months, thanks to a stockpile that my mother and I had made a habit of adding to ever since the first lootings blighted the country years before. No longer out of the ordinary, lootings had become routine events. I was ready to resist thanks to the life lessons they’d given us, which I learned to administer instinctively. Nobody needed to show me how; instead, time was my teacher. War was our destiny, and it had been a long time before we knew it was coming. My mother was the first to intuit it. She made provisions and obtained supplies for years. If we could buy one can of tuna, then we would take two home. Just in case. We stocked the pantry as if fattening an animal that we would feed on forever.

The first looting I remember happened the day I turned ten. We were already living in the city’s west. We were isolated from the more violent part. Anything could happen. Filled with uncertainty, my mother and I watched as military platoons passed by on their way to Miraflores Palace, the seat of government, a few blocks from our building. A few hours later, on TV we saw swarms of men and women raiding stores. They looked like ants. Furious insects. Some were heaving legs of beef onto their shoulders. They ran with no thought for the splotches of still-fresh blood on their clothes. Others carried off televisions and appliances they’d pulled through windows smashed with stones. I even saw a man dragging a piano down Avenida Sucre.

That day, during a televised live broadcast, the minister of internal affairs called for calm and civility. Everything was under control, he assured us. A few seconds later, there was an awkward silence. An expression of terror crossed his face. He glanced to one side then the other and left the podium he’d been addressing the nation from. His plea for calm remained just that: a medium-long shot of an empty podium.

The country changed in less than a month. We started seeing trucks stacked with caskets, all of them tied down with ropes, and sometimes not even that. Soon, unidentified bodies were being wrapped in plastic bags and tossed into La Peste, the mass grave where the bodies of gunned-down men and women started fetching up by the hundreds. It was the first attempt by the Fathers of the Revolution to take power, and the first instances of “social unrest” that I remember. To celebrate my birthday, my mother heated a little sunflower oil and fried a maize bollo she’d shaped into a heart. It was a show of love in the shape of a kidney, golden at the edges and soft in the middle. My mother stuck a tiny pink candle in it. She sang “Ay qué noche tan preciosa,” a long and catchy national version of “Happy Birthday,” which unlike the original lasts a full ten minutes. Afterward she cut the heart into four and spread butter on each piece. We chewed in silence with the lights out, sitting on the living-room floor. Before we went to bed, a burst of gunfire added an ellipsis to that piñataless party that we celebrated in the dark.

“Happy birthday, Adelaida.”

The next morning, on the first outing of my tenth year, I met my first love. Or whom back then I understood as such. At school, girls fell in love with all kinds of fantasies: rodents turned into knights errant, princes with delicate features who followed the sweet sounds of a mermaid song along the shore, woodcutters who with a single kiss woke blond-haired, full-lipped sleeping beauties. I didn’t fall in love with any of those fictions of masculinity. I fell in love with him. With a dead soldier.