Читать книгу It Would Be Night in Caracas - Karina Sainz Borgo - Страница 13

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.