IT WOULD BE NIGHT IN CARACAS
Karina Sainz Borgo

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.

My mother would outline the basics: subject, verb, and predicate, then direct, indirect, and circumstantial complements. There was no way to get it right except to go over it again and again, and sometimes not even that was enough. So many years of correcting exams written in gray lead, preparing morning lessons, and supervising her students with their homework in the evenings meant my mother’s sight deteriorated. Toward the end, slipping off her pearly acetate glasses was almost impossible. She could do nothing without them. Even though her daily reading of the paper became slower and more difficult, she never stopped doing it. She thought it was civilized.

Adelaida Falcón was a cultured woman. The library in our house had books from the Circle of Readers monthly subscription service—universal and contemporary classics in electric colors that I consulted thousands of times during my degree and ended up adopting as my own. Those volumes fascinated me even more than the pink lunch boxes that my classmates flaunted every October.

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.

I remember he was printed on the first page of El Nacional, the newspaper my mother read every morning at the table from the last page to the first. Not a day of her life went by that she didn’t buy it. At least while there was still reams of paper to print it on. If there was a newspaper, she would go down to the newsstand to buy it. That morning she brought it back, along with a pack of cigarettes, three ripe bananas, and a bottle of water—everything she could find at the grocery store, which shut its doors whenever rumors of a new band of looters started circulating.

She arrived home disheveled, puffing, the newspaper tucked under an arm. She dropped the paper on the table and ran to phone her sisters. While she tried to convince them that everything was fine, which wasn’t the case at all, I grabbed the newspaper and spread it out on the granite floor. The main photograph, which depicted the military repression and national carnage, covered the entire front page. And that was when he appeared before me. A young soldier lying in a pool of blood. I peered closer, examining his face. He seemed perfect, handsome. His head fallen and lolling on the road’s shoulder. Poor, slim, almost adolescent. His helmet was askew, which meant that his head, shattered by a bullet from a FAL rifle, was visible. There he was: split open like a fruit. A prince charming, his eyes flooded with blood. A few days later I got my first period. I was already a woman: beholden to a sleeping beauty who was killing me out of love and grief. My first boyfriend and my last childhood doll, covered in bits of his own brain, which one shot to the forehead had blown apart. Yes, at ten years old, I was a widow. At ten, I was already in love with ghosts.

I TOOK STOCK of our home library. On some of the books’ covers I could see the colored circles that for so many years, bored and with no parks to play in, I made while my mother imparted her lessons on “subjectverbpredicate.” Told not to leave my room, I equipped myself with an armful of books. Sometimes I read from their pages, at other times I only played with them. I unscrewed the lids of the tempera paint pots and pressed them against the bound pages at random: an orange ring for In Cold Blood to match the butane color of its cover; yellow, the color of little chicks, for The Autumn of the Patriarch to bring out the mustard of the design; burgundy in the case of For Whom the Bell Tolls. Almost every book bore a circular mark, as if I’d branded each before returning them to their shelves so they could graze quietly and at ease. Why didn’t those marks fade with the passing of time when all our transgressions remain? I wondered, The Green House in hand.

Next, I opened my mother’s wardrobe. I found her size 36 shoes. Arranged in pairs, now they had the air of a platoon of tired soldiers. I inspected the belts that once showed off her slim waist, and the dresses on their coat hangers. None of her things were garish or over the top. My mother was a fakir. A discrete woman who never cried and who, whenever she gave me a hug, created a paradise around me, a second womb scented with nicotine and moisturizer. Adelaida Falcón smoked and took care of her skin in equal measure. In the university residence hall for young ladies, where she spent five years of her life, she learned both to groom herself and to smoke. From then on, she never stopped reading, gently applying face cream to her cheeks, or quietly drawing on her cigarettes. Those were her happiest days, she often said. Every time she voiced those words, a question burned within me: Had the years she’d lived with me by her side put an end to the good times of her youth?

I rummaged around in the back of the wardrobe until I found the blouse of hers that was covered in monarch butterflies. Black and gold sequins were sewn all over it. I’d always loved it to bits. Whenever I removed it from the hanger and held it in my hands, the few square meters of the world my mother and I inhabited were suffused with wonder. The blouse was a swanky version of the glittery cocoons I dreamed about. Magical clothing, made of otherworldly color and fabric. I spread it out on the bed, asking myself why my mother bought it when she never slipped it on.

“How can I step out in that at eight in the morning?” she would say if I suggested she wear it to a PTA meeting. No matter how much I begged, she never went to a meeting wearing the blouse.

I studied at a school run by nuns, a stand-in for a more prestigious institution that wouldn’t take me because, at the interview, the principal learned that my mother wasn’t married and wasn’t a widow either. And although she never said anything to me about the incident, I came to understand it as symptomatic of the congenital disease that in those years afflicted the Venezuelan middle class: the defects of nineteenth-century white Venezuelans grafted onto the chaos of a mixed-race society. A country where women birthed and brought up children on their own, thanks to men who didn’t even bother pretending that they were stepping out for cigarettes when they decided to leave for good. Acknowledging this, of course, was part of the penance. The stumbling block on the steep ladder of social ascent.

I grew up surrounded by the daughters of immigrants. Girls with dark skin and light eyes. A summation, centuries in the making, of a strange and mestizo country’s practices in the bedroom. Beautiful in its derangements. Generous in beauty and in violence, two of the qualities that it had in greatest abundance. The result was a nation built on the cleft of its own contradictions, on the tectonic fault of a landscape always on the brink of tumbling down on its inhabitants’ heads.

Though less exclusive, my school likewise levied restraint on a society that was a long way from having it. In time, I understood that place as the breeding ground for a much greater evil, the natural resource of a cosmetic republic. Frivolity was the least egregious of its evils. Nobody wanted to grow old or appear poor. It was important to conceal, to make over. Those were the national pastimes: keeping up appearances. It didn’t matter if there was no money, or if the country was falling to pieces: the important thing was to be beautiful, to aspire to a crown, to be the queen of something … of Carnaval, of the town, of the country. To be the tallest, the prettiest, the most mindless. Even now, amid the misery that reigns in the city, I can still make out traces of that defect. Our monarchy was always like that: it belonged to the most dashing, to the handsome man or the great beauty. That’s what the whole thing that swelled into the cataclysm of vulgarity was about. Back then, we could get away with it. Our oil reserves paid the outstanding accounts. Or so we thought.

I WENT OUT. I needed sanitary napkins. I could live without sugar, coffee, and cooking oil but not without pads. They were even more valuable than toilet paper. I paid a premium to a group of women who controlled the few packets that made it to the supermarket. We called the women bachaqueras, and they acted with as much precision as the leafcutter ants they were named after. They went around in groups, were quick on their feet, and swarmed on everything that crossed their path. They were the first to arrive at the supermarkets and knew how to bypass the caps per person on regulated products. They got hold of what we couldn’t, so they could sell it to us at an inflated price. If I was prepared to pay three times the going rate, I could get whatever I wanted. And that’s what I was doing. I wrapped three wads of hundred-bolívar bills in a plastic bag. In exchange, I received a packet of twenty sanitary napkins. It cost me even to bleed.

I started to ration everything to avoid having to go out and find it. The only thing I needed was silence. I barely opened the windows. The revolutionary forces used tear gas to repress the people who were protesting the rationing decrees, and the fumes impregnated everything, making me vomit until I was pale. I sealed all the windows with duct tape, except the ones in the bathroom and kitchen, which didn’t face the street. I did all I could not to let anything make its way in from outside.

I answered only calls from the publishing house staff, who decided to give me a week’s grace period for my loss. I’d fallen behind with revising a few galley proofs. It was in my interest to invoice for the job, but I felt incapable of doing the work. I needed money but had no way of receiving it. There was no connection for carrying out transfers. The internet worked in fits and bursts. It was slow and patchy. All the bolívares I’d deposited in a savings account had been spent on my mother’s treatment. As for the pay I’d received for my editing work, there wasn’t much left, with an additional problem. By order of the Sons of the Revolution, foreign currency had become illegal. Having any amounted to treason.

When I turned on my phone three messages pinged, all from Ana. One to ask how I was, and two of the kind that get sent by default to a phone’s entire contact list. The message stated that fifteen days had gone by with no news from Santiago and asked us to sign a petition for his freedom. I didn’t respond. I couldn’t do anything for her, and she couldn’t do anything for me. We were condemned, like the rest of the country, to become strangers to ourselves. It was survivor’s guilt, and those who left the country suffered from it too, a mixture of reproach and shame: opting out of suffering was another form of betrayal.

Such was the power of the Sons of the Revolution. They separated us on two sides of a line. Those who have and those who have not. Those who leave and those who stay. Those who can be trusted and those who cannot. Apportioning blame was just one more division that they cleaved through a society already riddled with them. I wasn’t having an easy time of it, but if there was one thing I was sure of, it was that my circumstances could be worse. Being free of death’s stranglehold condemned me to silence out of decency.

IN THE MIDST of that night’s shoot-out, I realized my neighbor’s flush hadn’t sounded. I hadn’t seen Aurora Peralta since my mother went into palliative care. I was surprised to realize I hadn’t heard the irritating pull of the chain, which night after night sounded through my bedroom wall, interrupting my dreams with its gurgle of wastewater.

I knew very little about Aurora. Only that she was timid and dowdy, and that everyone called her “the Spanish woman’s daughter.” Her mother, Julia, was a Galician who ran a small eatery in La Candelaria, the area in Caracas with the largest concentration of bars run by Spanish immigrants. They were frequented by immigrants from Galicia and the Canary Islands, and by the odd Italian.

Almost all the customers were men. They went there to drink bottles of beer, which they sipped unenthusiastically. Even in the hellish heat, they pecked at chickpea-and-spinach stew, lentils with chorizo, or tripe and rice. Casa Peralta was known as the best place in the city to eat mussel-and-white-bean stew. Judging by the number of diners, that was a fair assessment.

Julia, the owner, had been one of the many Spanish women who made a living from the trades they plied before coming to Venezuela: cooking, dressmaking, farming, waitressing, nursing. Yet, most started out working as housekeepers for the local bourgeoisie in the fifties and sixties; others opened small stores and other businesses. They had only one thing to live by: their hands. Spanish printers, booksellers, and some teachers came to the city too and became part of our lives, bringing with them those resounding, lisped z’s that cut through the air in any conversation until they made our pronunciation their own.

Aurora Peralta, like her mother, made a living by cooking for others. For quite some time both before and after Julia’s death, she ran the family restaurant. Then she sold it to start up a pastry-making business that she ran from home. Renting premises was expensive, and it was risky: anyone could stage a holdup and take everything she had, not to mention shoot the unfortunate person who at that moment had access to the cash register.

Only nine years separated us, but she already seemed like an old lady. She came over a few times with a cake just out of the oven. Like her mother when she was alive, she seemed affable and generous. And one thing in her life resembled my own: she had no father. Or at least that was the conclusion I came to when I noticed that the life she and her mother led looked a lot like ours. They started and ended each day together, as mother and daughter. I’d been surprised when she hadn’t come to my mother’s wake. I’d told her in person how poorly my mother was when she’d asked after her health. I assumed the shortages of flour, eggs, and sugar had put a strain on her business, that she was going through a tough time, or had returned to Spain, if she still had family there. Then I forgot about her as easily as I forgot about a faulty lightbulb. I was too busy completing a second gestation, nourished only by my mother, whose presence I could still feel around me. I didn’t need or want anything else. No one would take care of me, and I wouldn’t take care of anyone. If things got worse, I would earn my right to live by walking all over the rights of others. It was them or me. There was no one alive in that country who was generous enough to give me a coup de grâce. No one would blindfold me or put a cigarette in my mouth. No one would pity me when my time came.

MY MOTHER’S BELONGINGS were, finally, in boxes to one side of the home library. They looked like baggage that time had packed behind our backs. I resisted the urge to give away or donate all of it. I didn’t intend to leave a single page, length of fabric, or splinter of wood to this doomed country going up in flames.

The days accumulated like the dead in the headlines. The Sons of the Revolution tightened the screws. They gave us reason to go out in the street, and all the while the state-sponsored bodies and armed cells repressed those who did, acting in groups with their faces covered, cleansing the pavements. No one was completely safe in their homes. Outside, in the jungle, methods to neutralize opponents reached an unprecedented degree of finesse. Across the nation the only thing in working order was the killing and stealing machine, the pillaging apparatus. I watched them grow and become part of the cityscape, just another feature of everyday life: a presence camouflaged in the disorder and chaos, protected and nourished by the Revolution.

Almost all the militias were made up of civilians. They acted under police protection. They started congregating by the trash heap at Plaza del Comandante, which we were still calling by its original name: Plaza Miranda, a tribute to the only truly liberal figure of our War of Independence, who died, like other good and just men, far from the country he’d given his all. That was where the Sons of the Revolution chose to establish their new command. Sons? I thought. And why not bastards? “Bastards of the Revolution,” I murmured on seeing a troupe of obese women, all dressed in red. They looked like a family. A gynoecium of roly-poly nymphs: fathers and brothers who were really mothers and sisters. Vestals armed with buckets of water and sticks, femininity in all its splendor and at its most bizarre.

The first day, a convoy of ten soldiers—faceless thanks to dark helmets with skull smiles—camped next to them. After a few weeks, more arrived. All the while more members of the Fatherland’s Motorized Fleet turned up. It was impossible to identify them. They wore the masks used by riot police. The lower half of the face was covered with the smiling jawbone of a skeleton and, at the height of the eyes, a piece of rubber was bored with holes. Why did they take such pains to hide their identity when the law was in their hands?

In contrast, the women showed their faces, baring their teeth like menacing dogs. They fought more fiercely. They landed punches. Once they’d managed to bring down an opponent, they dragged him along the ground and stripped him of everything. Everyone carried out their labors with immense gusto, though I never managed to understand what salary could be so high that their fury never abated. What did they get in exchange for the full-time job of smashing heads in as if they were melons? Our days were numbered.

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