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