“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