By ALFREDO MEZA
Dad’s car was stolen in the early morning of April 9, 2014. I was traveling and I found out five hours later because my phone was turned off. When I turned it on, the device vibrated so many times that I realized that someone had been trying unsuccessfully to contact me.
I had several messages from mom. She did not seem like the same woman, who stood out for the high pitch of her laugh or for the tessitura of her voice, with its authoritative inflections. She spoke to me with pity, as if she wanted to prevent anyone from listening to her. I was never able to ask dad if he agreed with what she asked of me then. I prefer to think that Mom was aware that he would never have endorsed what she was about to ask me.
Dad was a doctor, he had retired from university and worked four afternoons a week seeing his patients in a rented office in Ciudad Bolívar. In order to maintain his standard of living he had sold the beach house and the office that he had bought when he was young in another clinic in that city. Over the years I understood that Mom’s gesture was the desperation of a couple of old people subjected to the misfortune of growing old in a country colonized by a rogue State.
Days later, when I returned to Venezuela, I talked with dad about what had happened. He told me that he had left my mother at the Ciudad Bolívar airport early in the morning to take the weekly flight, which took off at 6:00 am to Caracas. He had made the reservation in advance to avoid the sentence of traveling to the capital for eight hours on roads in poor condition, full of holes and riddled with faded signage. It was a tragedy for the entire city that the planes arrived once a week. When I was a child, up to three flights landed a day and I kept track of this loss of status with some pain because my early years are linked to the memory of a fun that dad offered me when he noticed that I liked airplanes. Every weekend he took me to see the old DC-9 maneuver in front of the terminal. We almost always went in the afternoon, but sometimes, if it wasn’t so hot, we would go at noon. In one case or another the routine was the same: once I turned off the car, dad told me that he could get out. I opened the door and ran to an aluminized wire fence that divided the parking lot from the cement beach where the plane stopped. There he put his foot between the braided meshes to greet the passengers who arrived or left. In a corner, protected from the sun, Dad was reading a newspaper while he waited for me.
As the years went by, we stopped hearing the powerful airplane engines every day. Few took our city into account in their tourist itineraries. The imprint of a historic center built in colonial times on a rocky hill, where the course of the Orinoco became narrower, no longer attracted attention. The old Angostura, yes, where Simón Bolívar had presided over the historic Congress of Angostura and sanctioned the first Constitution that had given shape to that aberration called Venezuela. The old Angostura, yes, the triple capital – of the province of Guayana, of Venezuela and of Gran Colombia – in the rough years of the war against the Spanish crown. The country was born in Ciudad Bolívar, the first free newspaper had been published, the Correo del Orinoco, and we thought that there was so much to learn about ourselves that it was difficult for us to process that our city was like a fallen aristocrat. Everyone knew of the importance of this place in the founding of the Republic, but in Venezuela the construction of memory is a precious thing that is always postponed by the constraints of the present.
My parents adapted to horrible schedules to lead their normal lives. Dad was a man who repeated his routines and there was no one to convince him to change them. Many times we told him that, to avoid being robbed, he could not put gas at night and that he should not obey the red traffic lights either. But dad told me that I was forcing him to disobey the laws and that he was taking advantage of his old age to impose on me. Following that impulse, dad noticed, after dropping mom off at the terminal, that he was almost out of fuel and stopped at a station to fill the tank. He got out of the car, selected the octane and placed the pick into the tank’s reservoir hole. He had not finished pressing the pump when he felt a push and a voice ordering:
—Get away, you old shit.
Dad taught me not to fight with criminals. He always took value away from everything, even things that cost him a lot to buy. It was not so much for that half-witted consolation that material things are always recovered, but for something even much more practical: it is not possible to fight as equals with someone who is armed and surely immersed in the parallel reality of the drug effect. There were never weapons at home and he always wore that coat of arms with pride.
Dad realized that there were two men because one of them told him not to turn around and another forced him to lie face down. Almost at the same time he felt someone put their hand in his back pocket, where he had his wallet. I want to think that at that moment Dad did what he once asked of us, as a way to feel better during the affront of a robbery: “Obey the violent man and focus on the contempt you feel for him.” Despite his fear, Dad told me that he had the courage to talk to the guys.
—Take the money, but don’t take the papers, please.
With his face pressed to the ground, Dad listened to the men as they drove away. Before getting up he waited for the sound of the engine to dissolve into the soundtrack of dawn. The neon tubes of the little roof that protected the pumps were still lit. Since the gas station was near the airport, Dad walked to the terminal and was able to tell Mom, who had not yet boarded the plane, that it had been stolen. Later, still shocked by what had happened, they called some friends to take them home.
It was then their turn to start thinking about another ordeal: to prove to the police that what had happened was true. Dad and mom felt that this procedure was the second offense of the day. The word had lost its value so much that in the face of authority everyone was a liar unless they proved otherwise. Like a counterfeit bill, everything was subjected to exhaustive verifications, to an endless string of checks that often ended in confusion and the certainty that the important thing in Venezuela is not having the truth but the power to impose it. That’s when mom left me that surprise message in my phone’s inbox.
—Call Wilmito and tell him to help us get the car.
The Wilmito entry was first published in EL NACIONAL.