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