Men Without Honor,

Women Without Love

An unfolding, unversed account—

upon occasion purposefully deceptive;
at other times not illusory—questing
ceaselessly, through manipulative
conversation, for the sum of all
that is true, pure, and immutable.

Authored by Anthony St. John

Montecatini Terme, Italy
1983-1986
anthony.st.john1944@gmail.com
 DEDICATION

Men Without Honor, Women Without Love

is dedicated to Tom Goderis,
a ten-year-old Belgian boy,
son of Belgian embassy offcials
in Caracas, Venezuela,
who was brutally raped and murdered,
27 April 1980,
by a security guard working at the
CENTRO COMMERCIAL SANTA SOFIA,
where Tom had been playing with his friends
before his death.

My friend, a Caracas psychiatrist,

who “escaped” to Canada to do research
because he “could not take any more of Caracas,”
he a forensic psychiatrist who investigated
the violent death of Tom, told me
this about Tom's murderer who had left
Tom strangled in a water tank
that serviced the shopping center:
“”The murderer, the very sick individual,
will be dead before long.
In prison, where he has been sentenced for life,
he will be murdered before the year is ended.
Why? Simple.
The “killer” is a mental defcient.
He cannot cope with reality.
He cannot cope, I cannot cope, too, with Caracas.
He will not be able to defend himself
in the ferocious prison community.
All of us know this.
The priests, the doctors, the politicians,
the journalists...
and the people of Venezuela.”
 THE WHITE HOUSE
28 JUNE 1977
TUESDAY EVENING

After the introductory speech—simple and homely in character, but

plentifully supplied with cozy political allusions—the United States
President, Jimmy Carter, raised his crystal champagne glass, toasted the
honor and health of Venezuelan president Carlos Andrés Pérez, his family,
his countrymen and women, then sat down to listen to his Latin guest's
public address directed to him and other distinguished visitors gathered in
the State dinner's audience.

One highly transparent glass tinkled; another clinked. A chair scraped the
foor. Muffed coughs, in fts and starts, echoed in the canyon of the giant
dining room.

President Pérez moseyed slowly but deliberately to his slot on the political
fring line where he, “CAP,” a particular shooter, his feet nervously
touching hard rubber, would stand in for three-hundred-million Hispanic
people and, in thirteen truncated minutes, lay claim to them that they were
poor and underdeveloped but developing.

When he stood before the assemblage, he paused, raised his rife of

rhetoric, switched to “automatic,” and opened up, in “Spaneesh,” with a
curt hip, hip hurrah for the Third World burst—not spun and woven on
the plains of Georgia.

When the president of Venezuela came to the end of his counsel for the
president of the United States of America, he politely having suggested to
Mr Carter that he desist from the specifed undesirable course of action
which the industrial nations, he thought, had fomented against the Third
World, the Venezuelan television crew canned the videocassette speech in
a metal receptacle, stuffed that in an urgent mail pouch, and rushed it to
Dulles International where a Lear jet stood waiting to scoop the bag up and
climb suddenly and sharply away from Washington onwards to Caracas's
downtown Carlotta Aeropuerto. There the cassette would be rushed to my
desk at the Ministerio de Información y Turismo by my chauffer, Carlos
Estrepa, and before sunrise would be telexed, in six different languages, to
3
news agencies throughout the world.

C O L I N A S D E L A S P A L M A S, C A R A C A S
29 JUNE 1977
WEDNESDAY EVENING

I had affectionately nicknamed her “Gonza.” The joy of my life, naked in

bed in the Colinas Hotel—directly in front of the Venevision television
studios—read carefully the photocopy of the English rough draft
translation of Peréz's White House State dinner speech, that I had made
during Wednesday's early morning hours from a transcript of the
videocassette recording fown into Caracas from Washington the night
before.
I interrupted her:
“Pretty good speech, eh?
A little rough on the rhetorical and continuity
edges, but a damn good effort.”
She said nothing, and continued reading. When she fnished, she dropped
the proof-marked pages on her body, between her mammoth breasts and
the tuft of black hair set in the crease where her thighs joined her trunk.

Casually, my divorced, mother of two spoilt darlings, well-to-do,

opthalmologist Venezuelan girlfriend, reached for her supply of Vantage
cigarettes—imported for her by traveling contact lenses' salesmen from
New York and Miami, She had a strong feeling of distaste for Venezuela's
Astor and Belmont brands. She lit up. Then very elegantly, raising her
hands in the manner a Pope might when he greeted visitors from his
balcony on Piazza San Pietro—one hand held a smoldering match; the
other her burning cigarette—she asked me, in perfectly pronounced
English, with a sly grin on her beautiful face:
“Do you believe this bullshit, my dearest gringo?
“I would like to believe it, Gonza.
Shouldn't I?
“No, you should not,
unless you are a fool,”
she retorted emphatically.
I added:
4
 “The speech certainly is democratic in tone.
The passion with which Pérez pleads
his obviously just cause is impressive.”
She shrugged; I defended myself further:
“You know they applauded him last night
there in Washington.”
“How many times?”
“Twice,” I bowed.
“Gringo, Pérez is one of the richest men in the world,
a well-known Venezuelan political opportunist.
He is a gringo political lackey.
The State Department tells him how to dress
so he looks pretty and non-militaristic on television.
In all probability the gringos wrote the speech for him
before he set foot in Washington.
Wake up, my gringo sweetheart!
Don't be so stupid.”
“Gonza, you're depressing me.
Even if he is a corrupt, capitalistic yes-man,
he still talks a mean speech.
And all the more nice it is if the gringos
wrote it for him.
They must be interested in these highfalutin
democratic ideas more than he is
if they shove them down his throat!
Is it so important how the ideas evolve to the top
into the hands of the media?
Isn't it good for Venezuela to be charged up with notions
of freedom and fair play and not with Pinochet
murdering and Videla desaparecidos?
Come on, give credit where credit is due.
Venezuela has a long way to go before it enjoys
its newly-discovered democracy.
You've only had it for nineteen years.
When the democratic ball gets rolling, you'll be the frst
to hop up on the freedom train, my sweet Latin lover!
I still say Pérez is leading up to something good.
Poco a poco.
Give time to time.”
5
 “You're a dreamer, gringo.
Latin America doesn't fantasize as much as you do.
We don't look up for miracles,
and we don't look down in disgust.
We are Indians, and we look straight on.
We look at what is the reality. We look at the present.
And that present isn't very pleasant for those
who aren't sitting pretty at White House dinners,
sipping champagne and kissing political ass.”
“Oh, shit! Gonza, be an optimist!”
“I am. But I am also a realist.
And I know South America is up for grabs
by all the powerful ones—commies and capitalists alike.
We are victims, gringo.
And we ain't ever gonna give in to people like
Pérez, Videla, Castro, or Carter.
Mark my words.
Ni Marx; ni Jesús, you son-of-a-beeetch!”
she exploded.
“You're very hard, darling.
You have a steak of the revolutionary in you.”
“Not really. I am not hard.”
“Are you sure?” I joshed.
“Come to me. Here, gringo,” she pointed to her side,
and I went to lay down next to her.
“Gringo, I am not interested tonight in Pérez or politics.
I am interested in you, my sweet gringo connection.
More than anything.
I want your love and tenderness.
Let's think about us; let's think about our returning
to the States once and for all.
Let's think about our future.”
“I'm for that!”
I cuddled up to her taking hold of her hands; I peered into her big brown
eyes. We felt content in a shared intimacy which offered us a resting place
from the turmoil of Caracas and the notions of political propagandists.
“Te amo, gringo.”
“Te amo, Gonza.”
My mouth reached for the nipples of her breasts, and I caressed the little
6
stiff bulges with my tongue. I felt unclouded and dignifed fondling them.
These breasts which calmed my anxieties. These breasts which would
fnally succumb to cancer—one to be removed by a radical mastectomy; the
other to be cut upon at the areola and lifted up casually by the surgeon's
fngers—as a striptease artist might raise her pasty to scratch an itch—to
remove a clump of bleeding, pre-malignant, papillomas.

Cancer was about to destroy our happiness and lead my love to the edge of
insanity from where she would fing at my gut demented ditties such as
these:
“I'd like to be able to
keep you in this drawer
and take you out when
I need you.”
And...
“I'll be glad to see you
go so I can suffer.
I'll enjoy the suffering
when you are gone.”
And...
You killed my father,
and you are trying
to kill my mother.”
Six years and four months later, I would get free by feeing Caracas also
afficted with a cancer. Not a malignant neoplasm metastasizing in my body
that at the time of my rapid going away was drugged with sex and alcohol
abuse, but with the cancer of a mind long maltreated by the carcinoma of
ideas morally dissolute, ideas not sincere, ideas not fully ripe but childlike,
ideas showing no sense of duty: undependable, unreliable, untrustworthy.
Worse, ideas devoid of love and compassion.

I had also concluded, as Gonza had done long before me, that Pérez was, at
best, a political poet beating about the bush. On my escape route to Rome,
Alitalia vodka and ice cubes depriving me of sensation, I induced the
fanciful vision of spreading the trails of an eight-inch howitzer, and pulled
the lanyard of rhetoric permitting my mind to blow out some of the grief it
had accumulated in Caracas. Imagining myself the composer of CAP's
White House speech, I sang out against the Venezuelan government and
the United States' State Department pronouncing a personal judgement on
7
them, then sentencing them to stew, forever, in their juices of stupidity and
fraud. The Venezuela story, for me, fnally had come to an end. For you, my
dear reader, it is now beginning.

Even though Gonza and I and her two puerile angels, aged twelve and
thirteen, had come only four months before from the United States where
she had been working and studying on a post-doctorate research
assistantship in corneal transplantation and diseases and contact lenses'
ftting, the ever-meddling grandmother and grandfather thought it wise to
send the monsters back to gringolandia, Vermont, in July for a month of
summer camp and Big Whoppers. No one wanted the brats to lose their
English, and because Gonza kept the two darlings in our apartment all the
time—Caracas being such a violent and hostile place not permitting the
children to play in the streets—a change for them was what a psychologist
would have ordered.

All the day long, Fernando and Isabel watched North American cartoons
on television, played disco music in between, ate candy and frozen pizza for
lunch, put holes in the walls of the apartment, and kicked and punched
each other when the notion struck them. In the meantime, I translated
Spanish to English and edited English text at the Ministerio de Información y
Turismo, while Gonza refracted contact lenses' patients in her offce one
block away from the apartment in Edifcio Cavendes, directly in front of the
Embassy of the United States, and while her Colombian maid tried to hold
the fort down often crying to Gonza at the end of the day: she so frustrated
at her lack of success in controlling los dos mimados y malcriados.

I hid my vivid emotion of pleasure when Gonza told me the two nasty ones
were off to green pastures in that New England state. She asked me,
solemnly, if I thought one month was too long a time for the monstrosities
to be separated from their mommy; she thought they might be emotionally
damaged being away too long. Very calmly and very compassionately,
feeling as if I was talking to an idiot and not the astute political and
fnancial whiz-kid that she was, I explained that a month in the woods
would do the rascal wonders. (Maybe the Abominable Snowman would eat
them for lunch one fne day.) Imprisonment in the apartment was making
the children neurotic. Consenting hesitatingly, Gonza gave in. No matter
8
how horrendous life in Caracas was for the children, leaving them for a
month was a tragedy of sorts for her. I footnoted my delicate talk with this
idea:
“Gonza, you realize that it is not good
for the children to sleep in bed with you every night.
Don't you think that if the children go away for a short time,
they might come back broken of the habit?
Then they can sleep in their own rooms!”
Her eyes popped out.
“That's a great idea!
You gringos are so practical!”

We embraced, and caressed, and kissed, and hugged, and patted, and cried
the urchins away onto a Pan Am fight to New York out of Maiquetia's
Simon Bolivar International Airport, a thirty minute drive, depending on
traffc, down from the polluted valley in which Caracas lays, to the hot
muggy seaside where the Mar Caribe nudges very lightly the outer
boundaries of the airport's hard-surfaced landing and take-off strips.

Gonza stifed sniffes on the way up back home, and secretly rubbing my
palms with feelings of ecstasy and relief, I tickled her and squeezed her
hand and gently reassured her that the month would fy by lickety-split.
She fnally responded, and after an hour or so, she began to sense
erotically, as I had already, the coming month of beautiful leisure time
chock full o' sex and sleep and tenderness and restaurant meals and peace
and privacy.

Alone, at last, in our little, modernized, urban castle. A bewitching remnant

of Spanish Colonial terrorism. As much as the Caracas society is
pervertedly directed inwards—with unfinching fear—to family clusters and
homes, casas, with bars and locks to protect their innermost integrity and
existences, there is a splendid, temporary illusionary pause when one fnds
shelter in them from the untamed force and acrimony of the Caracas
streets. In one's apartment, quinta, or hotel room glued to the naked sweaty
body of the lover whose affection will bring sudden forgetfulness to all
feelings of fear and repugnance, there existed a spirit of hope. In our
apartment, doors locked, gates chained, bolts secured tight, we felt calm in
the safety we had created for ourselves knowing that this assurance could
not be provided by the government of Venezuela, its police, its national
9
guard, and above all its very own people.

When we left our little fanciful world each morning to go to our work
places, we took a deep breath, sucked it in with all our might, and scurried
on out into the street for the block-long walk to the snack bar for coffee,
then on to Gonza's professional offce in Edifcio Cavendes and mine at the
ministry in Parque Central. An epic of flthy, soiling substances, malicious,
mean and depraved, was about to punch us in the eyes, and defne for me,
symbolically, the horror of Caracas and the ethical debasement to which its
citizens had been sentenced to for a life term.

We walked out of the apartment hand in hand ready for all and
predisposed for anything. Watch out, there's a pile of poop! Next, a
clustered mass of bloodied, tuberculin, stringy, thick mucous. We sidestep.
Oh, yes. The garbage. For eight days it has been piling up. Big orange
plastic bags with green alligators emblazoned on them. Twenty, thirty,
forty: in huge heaps in front of apartment buildings. The bags on the
bottom of the heaps have popped from the weight on top, and rivulets of
scummy liquid—putrid smelling and toxic and emetic and emerald—are
squiggling down the avenida never to reach a clogged underground
conduit, but to peter out after a ten meter journey—that Dry Cleaner in the
Sky, at 36° Centigrade, putting a damper on any ambitiousness the sleazy,
poisonous slime might care to incubate. Look! There's a man blowing out a
snot! He has, ceremoniously, put the index fnger of his right hand on his
right nostril, has clogged it, has turned left, and has snorted nasal mucous
into the street. Now, he is doing it again—to the other external opening in
his nose. Oh, no! The spray has speckled the lenses of my glasses! Here
comes a beggar. Not a panhandler earning $50,000 a year in Times Square,
but an honest-to-goodness poor person: hungry and desperate. His hands
are deformed; he is caked with crud; he limps. Gonza, my multi-
millionaired lover (stashed away $$$, not worthless bolivares) offciates for
me: “Why don't you look for a job, señor?” We're heading down the dusty,
smoggy trail to Avenida Francisco de Miranda and the Embassy of the
United States of America. Look at the humid, polluted haze jelled by the
hot sun. Always, always, always big, round, beautiful derrieres to see in the
streets, the women fnally coming round to wearing pants—jeans. Pear-
shaped. Like the wooden bodies of mandolins. Bulging out at their seams.
Look at the bloated dog dead over there for four days now. I see a man
smoking cheap Cherry Blend pipe tobacco in his $400 Dunhill pipe. There
10
is a group of kids playing ball with broom sticks and soda and beer caps.
Ah, yes, another assemblage of juvenile delinquents kicking a “ball” made
of newspaper and bound together with shop-lifted strips of black
electrician's tape. Motorcycles, motorcycles, motorcycles. Few use the
wasteful and incompetent Venezuelan mail system, so many companies
have their own postmen to deliver their mail. Motorcycle drivers proceed
by sharp turns in alternating directions seeking out names and addresses,
then a cruise or two running through bus stops to grab at a pocketbook or a
dangling gold chain. They wear the helmets of Nazis, baseball batters,
Moroccan police chiefs, English dukes, North American football players,
and Kamikaze pilots. Here is an interesting sight: a four-door, black, 1963
FORD Maverick, with Mercedes-Benz hubcaps, is zigzagging and jerking its
way on down the street. In the front seat are four teenage boys, and in the
back are four teenage girls. On the hood, there are two teenage boys, sons
of prominent Venezuelan lawyers. The driver, jolting the car by racing it
and stopping it, is trying to knock his two giggling friends to the ground
while they lean back on the windshield grabbing for the radio antenna.
Watch it! Another gob of dog poop. Get in the street fast! Can't walk on the
sidewalk. It is blocked with parked motorcycles, and two of the
motorcyclists are fghting with baseball bats. Bow your head! We are
passing a funeral parlor, La Voluntud de Dios, The Will of God, and the
bereaved are gathered in front laughing, joking, drinking coffee, and
sipping Scotch and water held in white-gold plastic chalices. Three of the
bewailers are frocked in black mourning sweatshirts richly festooned with
the heraldic devices and armorial bearings of the IOWA STATE
UNIVERSITY, PLAYBOY CLUB, and THIS IS THE PROPERTY OF
THE FLORIDA STATE PRISON. To the left, there's a puddle of stagnant
water with mosquito larvae growing on top. Floating on it is this ripped
news clip taken from a copy of Caracas's English-written newspaper, The
Daily Journal: “It was reported yesterday that Caracas, after number one
Yokohama, has the second highest incidence of bronchitis, emphysema,
and respiratory diseases in the entire world.” Careful, here comes a
motorcycle heading directly for us! See the buildings? They are all fenced
in and barbed wire crown the tops of those structures that enclose. If there
are thick brickwork constructions which serve to protect, their uppermost
surfaces are speckled with shards of broken glass bottles cemented into the
shelves of the high walls. Another beggar coming our way. See the slogans
painted on the walls of the apartment buildings? SEXO, DROGA, Y
ROCK, GOLPE AHORA, YANQUI; GO HOME, MILITARES, SI,
11
PINOCHET, EL ASESINO, VENEZUELA FUERA DE NICARAGUA,
MALVINS, SI; GRINGOS NO, QUIEN MATO RENNY?, CAP MATO
RENNY. See the delivery truck with the fve-gallon bottles of “mineral”
water? The water in Caracas is so heavily treated with chemicals, when it
runs, you must drink mineral water. But before you do, you have to boil the
fungi out of it! Here comes two policemen on a 150cc Honda. They are
wearing baseball batters' helmets and loaded burp machine guns are slung
at their sides. Press an intercom button at the front door of an apartment
building. It does not function. What works in Caracas? Little green gardens
with plastic green fowers and green spotlights for night viewing, Á la
Miami. A broken Buchanan scotch bottle. A smashed-to-smithereens
Cointreau bottle. Empty Polar beer cans. Old cars with unfxed dents. No
hubcaps. No stripping. Headlights that do not work. Smashed brake lights
with red cellophane paper scotch-taped to them. Highbeams at night out of
alignment and slashed forty-fve degrees askew. And they are building a
subway beneath it all! See the man unlocking his Mercedes-Benz?
OOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
Off goes his electronically installed and controlled sireeeeen alarm. He
takes his time going to shut it off. There's a bank guard with a loaded
shotgun, and another with an M-16 rife. Big backsides. Big violent
buttocks. A pool of vomit. On top, an editorial from The Daily Journal:
“CARACAS' DEARTH OF PARKS: Landscape architect Eduardo Robles
Piquer gave the sad statistics at the gathering commemorating the 15 th
anniversary of AVEPANE, the Venezuelan organization which so admirably
tackles the problem of the mentally retarded in this country. While Madrid,
London, and New York offer their inhabitants 8, 10, and 12 meters of green
area per person respectively, Caracas has only 1.5 for each of its residents—
and that is counting the patios and gardens of the quintas in the eastern
part of the city. While this lack of parks is detrimental for the entire
population, it is particularly dangerous for the young: they are deprived of
natural recreation areas, and their almost total absence of any contact with
nature can easily produce emotional disturbances. It is estimated that 60%
of Caracas' population is under eighteen years of age. We are waiting with
interest to see if the new planning authorities can do anything to remedy
the situation. Action, withing the limits of feasibility, is called for without
delay.” The President's Task Force Commission on the Logic of Exploding
Atomic Weapons to Alleviate Human Suffering, met today amid a furry of
controversy. Look! The political “graffti” on the United States Embassy's
walls is never whitewashed. See the man picking his nose? See the lady
12
leaning out of her car's front window to pluck her eyebrows in the side-
view mirror? See the man squeezing blackheads in front of the pharmacy?
See the big-breasted woman pulling out, with a tweezer, black hairs
growing between her mammary glands? Holes in the streets flled to the
their brims with oily, drossy, dark water. Horns tooting. Horns blasting.
Horns menacing. Horns sounding signs of portend. See the shoeshine boy?
He is ten years old. No school for him. Sits on an emptied powdered milk
can. He shines away. There's a seventy-fve-year old man sharpening knives
by peddling a make-shift motor attached to his bicycle. He blows on a four-
chord whistle to attract customers. And a shoe repairman from Portugal
who sits in front of Edifcio Cavendes and fxes your Heels and Souls while
you wait. Fresh bread scents foating out of the panaderias to be poisoned
by smog. Fresh fowers for sale in the streets, bunched in twelves, packaged
in newspaper sheets, and bound with rubber bands, and dying in the heat.
The traffc is...well...the traffc is.... Finally, our coffees. The cafeteria's foor
is laden with empty plastic coffee cups and cut-up straws which were used
as stirrers. Little vacant packets of fexible, cellulose paper employed to
hold sugar, sparkle on the dirty, stained linoleum foor. Four men work
behind the frantic counter. One honchoes jugos naturales, the second
attacks the ancient Faema Italian coffee-maker, the third throws taut
strings of beef and putrid chicken and smelly ham and old cheese and
dried-out pork into sliced maiz-fowered biscuit-like paddies, arepas, and
the fourth stows the fast-fowing cash: DINERO ES PRIMERO! The aroma
of the rich red cerezas, powdered to brown fuff in the electric coffee
grinder, leaks through our nostrils. These beans have an interesting
history. Supposedly coffee originated in Ethiopia, but no one knows for
sure. The cafetos, cultivated coffee trees, need to be protected from the sun
and wind. They must fourish in the shade. Every year when they are ready
for plucking, poor men go into the felds of Brazil, Colombia, and
Venezuela to snatch the coffee beans off the branches of the cafetos. Then
the edible seeds are spread out on huge patios to dry in the sun. After the
drying out, the pods are toasted and enlarge themselves to marketable size.
And so, on the corner of Avenida Francisco de Miranda, in front of Edifcio
Cavendes, I hug and kiss Gonza goodbye and we head out for work.
Suddenly I hear a loud CRUNCH! I turn to see an eleven-year-old boy
gulping in shock and pain. He has been hit by a car. The two bones of his
lower leg—between the knee and the ankle—are broken and bent like an
elbow wrench. There is no blood. The kid's friend is holding him close, not
knowing what to do. The driver of the car that struck the boy, has taken
13
off for las colinas, rapidly screeching away. To my utter amazement, a
Venezuelan businessman, in Gucci suitcoat and Pierre Cardin tie, driving a
1977 Caprice Classic, imported, air-conditioned and ftted with a Pioneer
stereo system and a pink plastic gorilla dangling from its rear-view mirror,
signals the boys to get in, and zooms off, presumably, to the nearest public
hospital where the boy's leg will be set. On 15 August 1977 all banks and
savings and loan associations will remain closed for a religious holiday
celebrating the Assumption of the Virgin Mary into Heaven. The Caracas
stock exchange will also be cerrado. Another kiss, darling?

Stirred to activity with the promise of a month's vacation without her

impudently confdent son and daughter, my transformed Gonza—her libido
so energized she pranced about the apartment barefoot in a see-through
baby blue cotton nightgown that revealed dark zones at the breasts and
groin areas—summoned her live-in domestic from Cartagena, Mireya, to
the living room and dismissed the light olive brown mulata, with a
pathetically false calm, from her charge. No notice. No severance pay. No
apologies. Just one-thousand two hundred bolívares ($280.00) in cash for
services rendered the previous month. The female worker, criada,
adjourned to her quarters, a narrow, confning room with a toilet and
washbasin, adjacent to the kitchen, where she, expressionless and
obedient, her big brown eyes glassy as if covered with a thin coating of ice,
began to pack her bags, and from where afterwards, in about twenty
minutes, would leave without saying a single word to me or to Gonza.
Gonza, still rudely brief in her temporary state of mind, exhibited no bitter
regrets, and directed the 50-year-old woman not to call in August because
Gonza's mother's maid would be replacing her at that time.

With the door closed, Gonza breezed to me and broke my quite apparent
silence by snapping the end of a beach towel in my face—to pop me out of
a trance she thought I should not be indulging in. Then she haughtily
quipped this gibe: “You have to be that way with them, gringo. They are
thieves. Do you know what I have to do now? I have to inspect the
apartment, all the closets, all the rooms, all the drawers...for what? To see if
she has stolen anything.”

My eyes were dropped; they rotated, along the foor. I thought about my
14
sexual desire now reduced from the considerable extent it had blown up to
only sixty minutes before. Gonza was angry with me. Incensed with herself;
enraged with my high-volumed, but unspoken, social protest. It was time
for me to saunter slowly out of the room now packed with frustrated
feelings and guilty vibrations. I went to the study and played Chicago's “If
You Leave Me Now” over and over and over again.

After I went to our bedroom. When I reached the portal of the bedroom, I
jumped and dived into bed, tagging the pillow as if I had been playing in a
baseball game, and began to recoup my feelings of calm and solitude. I
heard no “You're out!” scream, and felt safe for the moment. I tuned into
Gonza's presence in the other room. I payed attention to her as she lit up
the ever-present Vantage, drop the packet, then toss the matches on the
oval table top, made of smoked glass, in the dining room where I had left
her sulking.

I unplugged a bottle of Moskovskaya and slugged down a big gulp of the

Osobaya vodka. Immediately afterward, thinking of how I used to put the
top piece of rye bread on my roast beef and coleslaw sandwich, I slapped
the other pillow on my head in order to muffe all sounds: vibratory
disturbances from the Universe, from the maddening Caracas, from Gonza.
My feelings were ferocious. I was rolled up and secure in the fetal position:
sure, but unhappily defant.

The bed shimmied, shook, and wobbled when Gonza's weight pressed her
presence upon the king-size mattress. I readied my mind for an argument,
yet none came. Rather, Gonza moved one of her fngers against my back in
up and down strokes, light and feathery, raising goose bumps all the way
from the back of my head to my coccyx. After a while, she pecked at the
nape of my neck with alternating soft thrusts from her tongue, and then
tender munches from her pointed denticles. I started to feel pampered. My
nerves sprang up out of control, and spasms trickled on down through my
legs to my heels. At one time, my body shivered with a rapid, instantaneous
agitating motion and, remembering what happened when I, as a child,
would put my sweater full of static electricity against a dry radiator, a quick
fx pop of discharge surged through my nervous system. I was sensually
content, but not still up to playing the erotic, competitive activity of love-
making, governed by its specifc rules: Respect for your partner, tenderness
during the match, and trustworthiness before, during, and after all bouts.
15
I was thinking too hard about many things. When Gonza put her hand
under my stomach and slid it down farther to my penis, then to and fnally
around my testicles, her fngers gently tapping on my two gonads, she
keeping time to some musical score I had no idea of, I felt a fow of passion
pour through my body to my brain where the following considerations, at
once, kaleidoscoped across my imaginative mind: licks on her nipples,
tongue lunges into her dribbling mouth, nibbles on her earlobes, the feshy
muscular organ of my mouth entering her soap-smelling anus, then her
vagina; quick soft thrashes smacking against her small, erectile organ at the
upper end of her vulva, homologous with my penis. Maybe a bite or two on
her big toes, a scrumptious suck on the downy fesh of her thighs' insides; a
sudden snatch at her luscious buttocks, a squeeze on a calf, a long lapping
at the hollows under her arms, at the shoulder.

My stiff penis told me I was ready. We proceeded. She screamed frst in

exalted delight. Then I. Was it a big one, my darling? Incredible! How
many times? How big? Big!!! Like this: the Pope's arms spread out again.
Our orgasms encompassed the entire world. I sniffed at my fngers to smell
that fsh-like scent that, once gooey and slippery, had begun to dry yet
would remain with me for the day to savor over and over again. It had
remained, in almost perfect, unadulterated condition, under my fngernails.

Then she asked me something—something very puzzling—I was to hear

over and over and over again from Latin women during my stay in South
America: “Gringo, please take me to gringolandia?” As if she had had that
thought in her mind exclusively. I asked: “Do you think it is because you
want to go to the States that you love me? “Oh, no, gringo. I love you
because you are you. I love you very much! MUCHISSIMO!!!” With that,
our lips pushed against themselves very gently again, and we swooned in
the joyful contentment that alone was ours. I would do anything to make
Gonza happy. Taking her to the United States was the least I could do for
this woman I loved with all my being.

During a late evening banquet, my mouth flled with bites of Argentine

steak, sips of Médoc, greedy gulps from a gigantic, green salad, and small
slices of succulent chocolate, French-styled, cream-flled cake we had
16
bought from the pastelería on Avenida Las Palmas, next door to Teatro Las
Palmas, I made extended penetrating observations into this beautiful
creature, Gonza, trying to fx her, the image, into focus: not a Venezuelan
living in the United States, where I had known her exclusively for one year,
but a Venezuelan placed under particular circumstances in Caracas.
Disappointedly, I could not converge the one upon the other and clear up
my blurry notions as to what was my place and Gonza's in this unhinged
society that comprised so large a force—even greater than the emotional
power which kept me clinging to this woman, six years my elder, so
passionately, so faithfully—a strength which abided steadily in Gonza'a
mental ability to recall past experiences, but which eluded me successfully
again and again and again.

Something had been placed between us since our arrival from the United
States. Whereas before, I had had direct access to Gonza's private world,
whenever I wished it, I now groped around eventually fnding my way to
what I had been looking for in her. But this new stress, strictly catering to
the society to which Gonza had a charter membership, put a horrible strain
on my patience and feelings of belonging. Now there were family members
to visit, friends to lunch with, medical class reunions to attend, an
ophthalmological practice to build up, new clubs and schools for the
children, and a host of other seemingly annoying interferences which
diluted the Gonza character from that as I had known it before. I was on
Gonza's turf; she was no longer on mine.

It should not be thought that I was not invited to these new social
functions. Rather, I was included regularly and, I might add, cordially. It
was interesting to visit Venezuelan homes—mostly of the upper class—as
the novio of Gonza, and be presented to absorbing and, often, important
people who, Gonza indicated, would be especially helpful in securing one
favor or another for me and her in Venezuelan business and political
circles. At these informal gatherings where the guests would invariably
speak Spanish, I would prick my ears and overexert to improve my español
adding those delightful idioms and special sayings, dichos, that pepper the
often tedious Venezuelan mother tongue. Very often, tired and lost in
“English” thoughts, I would lapse into dazing at people scrutinizing not
their words and ideas, but reading their bodies to interpret their
psychologies, or sensing the undercurrents of their personalities grouped
in large meetings where they exclusively drank Scotch and water—
17
occasionally stirring their drinks, held in tall glasses flled to the brim with
ice, with their index fngers—and seemed always to talk of buying trips to
Miami and real estate investments in all parts of the United States,
southern Florida high on their lists.

Still, to all I was a gringo, a yanqui, a norteamericano, a neoyorquino—un

natural de Brooklyn, Nueva York. What do you think of Venezuela, gringo?
What do you think of Caracas, yanqui? What do you think of our food,
norteamericano? What do you think of our women, neoyorquino? What do
you think of us? Always the passion to resolve identities. The wish to secure
a niche in the society of everyone's world. The desire to know who they are
and what their reasons for being are. The craving for integration, the goal
to be one's own creator, his or her object to make a purpose of their being.

These questions puzzled me; then they frightened me. In effect, if these
individuals were seeking an identity, they must have then thought that they
had none. If the passions of these folk were not directed to create and
transform, could it be their emotional powers were directed to deface? If
there was no general satisfaction being gained from the drama of life and
its excitement, could the drama of destruction be in force to foster, at least,
a perverted identity of nothingness? My thoughts turned to Gonza, to her
identity, to my identity, to the identity of the Venezuelan people.

“Gonza, I would like to know more about you,

your family, your country, your customs.”
It was what I thought the obvious direction for me to head in. I had to
know if her South American points of view would mesh with my North
American mental postures.

Sipping from a brandy glass flled half-way with the Spanish Duque d'Alba,
her head propped on her bent arm and elbow, Gonza replied nonchalantly:
“What do you want to know?”
I've told you all that you need to know.”
“Gonza, what I need to know.
Yes, but your nuts and bolts are what interest me, sweetheart.”
“Like what?” she replied incisively.
“Your life in Caracas as a youngster, your adolescent years,
your medical school days, your life with your parents.
I'm really fascinated.
18
 You know, what it is that makes you be who you are.
I love you.
Everything about you interests me.
Please go deeper into your life here in Caracas
than you did with me in the States.
Here in Caracas it's easier to talk to me about your past.”
“OK. I'll tell you, but you must promise me not to laugh.
My life is not really that complicated.
I can even say it has been boring.
Not very eventful, if you get what I mean.”
Gonza was off and running at her mouth to which she pressed, often, her
brandy glass to unclog the stuffed inhibitions of her emotional hinterland. I
longed to hear her reawaken memories from her intellectual back country,
to come closer to the core of her existence. I wanted to understand her and
the people of Venezuela, observing her behavior by way of what happened
before and not by way of what might befall her in the future. Of course, I
would never reach her precise “essence,” but I thought by peeling away the
onion skins of her psyche, each expunged part would help me to
understand her more.

There were so many mysterious elements in her “Venezuelan personality”

and her life; I was piqued to have the secrets all revealed to me. I was
hungry to devise explanations to the “clues” she had given me before,
inscrutably, over and over and over again, ever since I had known her.
Gonza had posed for me with Latin coquetry and womanly ways, an
unfnished jigsaw puzzle, and I was interested to put it, Gonza, together for
an unbiased fxed look. I proceeded at my own peril, for I knew only too
well that the blindness of my love had hidden many realities which I sadly
thought now might surface to sap my intense affection.
“Well, doctor,” she joshed, her pronunciation now slightly indistinct:
the brandy had loosened up her facial muscles
and would now help me to untie twisted mental strings
long lain dormant in her subconsciousness.
“Where do I begin?”
I bantered back:
“Begin at the beginning!
Then go on until you come to the end!
There stop!”
She pretentiously broached a scornful laugh,
19
then turned thoughtfully to her memories. The frown on her forehead told
me she seemed earnestly desirous to blurt out what it was that made her
what she was.
“I'm a tall girl and when I was young,
I stood up over my friends, and stuck out among them,
a sort of freak, very different from the other girls my age.
My ambidexterity is another thing that makes me different.
When I operate on my patients' eyes,
I can sit behind their heads and use both hands.
The other doctors must work at the sides of the heads of their patients.
And, like Leonardo da Vince, I can write backwards.”
I was at once surprised with this opening observation not only because it
hinted at Gonza'a seriousness to offer a profound introspection into her
life, but more because it revealed to me a “hang-up” that I would never
have suspected her to be afficted with. She continued languishingly.
“But my height wasn't all. I am white, and all the other girls
ridiculed me for the reason that my mother was a gringa
and my father a vasco, an español.
When I was a kid, I spent four years in the United States, Philadelphia,
and I learned English there—in an all-girls' nun school.
Later, I lived with my ex-husband in New York and Boston where he
studied cardiology. Then I studied ophthalmology in Florida.
All told, thirteen years of living in North America.
I've always had two cultures, two countries:
Los Estados Unidos y Venezuela.”
“Four years in Philadelphia when you were a kid?”
“My mother was born in Philadelphia.
She met my father when he was studying in a military school in
Pennsylvania. I forget its name.
They fell in love, and when he graduated, he came to marry my mother
and take her back to Caracas where they lived for three years
and gave birth to me and my brother.
My father had another woman who lived in the quinta,
Quinta Santa María, adjacent to our own, Quinta San José,
and my mother just couldn't accept my father's
being in love with that woman.
She fnally left my father and took Jesús and me to Philadelphia.”
“Well, three years is a long time to put up with another woman,” I
prodded.
20
 “Yes, but my father lied to her about that lady.
”Who lived next door!” I replied surprised.
“Yes, you must remember my mother did not speak español.
It took a long while before my mother would catch on.
And then she fnally caught on.”
“You and your mother and brother eventually came back to Caracas?”
“Yes. My father repented. Or, so he said he did.
My mother believed hm, at any rate.
He swore he left the woman and the two children
he had had by her.
At this time, my father had received a large amount of money
from the dictator Gómez, and he started up a pipe manufacturing
company that our country needed very much.
He told my mother he had a lot of money.
He kicked the other woman out of Santa María.
He promised that if my mother would stay with him again,
he would spend the rest of his life making up to my mother.
My mother agreed, but she put a very big price
on her agreement to return.”
“What was that?”
“She told my father he could never sleep with her again as her man.
They slept in separate rooms from then on,
and they still do today.
I don't know if they have sex or not, but I think not.
My mother and father respect each other,
but my mother does not love my father.
They're together for their children, I guess.
My mother cannot forgive my father for his infdelity.
She continues to punish him.
She holds his arm when they walk in the street,
but in the house they just share an existence together.
No love, no affection, no kisses, no hugs.
My father works in his study and rarely comes out.
He is a lonely, sad man.
My mother runs the household and keeps it as it was
when they frst came to Caracas from gringolandia newly married
and on their honeymoon.”
“How can the quinta look as it did forty-fve years ago?”
“They keep the same furniture, the same fxtures,
21
 all is just about the same.
My father is a multi-millionaire, but he lives in his home
as if he were a poor man.
He hates to spend money-
My mother, too. Once my father bought a Cadillac,
and after driving it for three days, he returned it
and asked for his money back.
He felt abnormally guilty about being so showy.
My mother saves everything. Old newspapers, magazines,
empty wine bottle, plastic bags.
Worn-out and discarded things. Just any old thing.
It's piled up all over the quinta.
Obsolete, stupid things.
When we were kids, my brother and I were ashamed to invite
our friends into our home because it looks like a junkyard.
Our home was different from the homes of the other children.
My mother and father live in the past.”
“Your mother sounds like a very bitter woman.
How has she, do you think, affected your life?
Do you think your mother has had
a good or bad infuence on you?”
“You know, I love my mother very much,” she slurred.
Then she hesitated.
“This is a very good question because I haven't thought very much about it
before. I love my mother. I love my father.
But, my mother hurts my father, and this I don't like at all.
My mother is an expert at creating guilt.
In all of us.
My brother, myself, and my father.
In herself, too. My mother is always reminding everyone whenever
they have done something wrong—according to her.
And she doesn't even have to speak when she admonishes.
If my father makes an incorrect judgment about even something simple,
say, an opinion about a neighbor or friend, if it turns out
mother was right, she becomes nasty, and the expression on her face
is one that says: 'See, I told you so.'
She is negative. Pessimistic all the time.
Oh, how down she is on everything.
A regular weeping willow.
22
 She sulks all the time.
She will sit alone away from everyone on the porch of our quinta,
and wait for all to gather around her.
If we don't go to her, she says no one loves her!
She's quite a character.
She knows very well how to manipulate. She is clever.
She'll stop taking her blood pressure pills just to get us to fuss over her.
She puts her nose into everyone's business.
She is always suffering, always complaining
about how hard and expensive life is.
I really believe she is still in shock over the idea that my father
was in love with another woman when she was just a newlywed.”
“Your father...does he seem gloomy, too?
Does he believe that things are generally for the worse?”
“Yes. Perhaps more than my mother. My father is a recluse.
He has a heart condition, and is very anxious about it.
He sits alone in his room reading magazines
from the United States and England, and he counts his money.
Watches over his investments and properties.
He watches over his money with great attention.
Scrutinizes his stocks every day.
His life is plata, and he has a lot of it. Millions.
A man works for him as a business consultant,
but my father is on top of him constantly.
My father is stingy. Tight-fsted.
He will not spend a centavo if it isn't necessary.
His only diversion is a ham radio, and even this is centered
around conversations that concern the economies of other nations.
Every penny in the house is accounted for.
I have to give him credit, nevertheless.
He knows how to handle money, and he makes a lot of it doing so.
He taught me a lot about investments.”
“Your father isn't chintzy with you. In the States you lived
very comfortably, din't you?”
“My father would do anything for me.
Because of him, I have never had to worry about money.
When I went to the States to study medicine,
he bought a car for me, rented two apartments—one for me;
one for him and my mother—paid for one year, and put $50,000
23
 in a savings account for me and the children.
My ex-husband couldn't do that for me,
although he said he would.
My father has been my fnancial kingpin.
He takes care of me, and he has seen to it
that I will never have to worry about money in my whole life.
That's something to be said for him. I'm proud of him.
I'm secure in my life because my father has made my life secure for me.
He will always protect me.
He will always count in my life.”
“How about talking more about your father?”
“My father is the most important man in my life...I mean....”
She corrected herself brusquely realizing that she had suddenly mouthed a
self-incriminating Freudian slip,
“...you are the most important to me, but not...”
then she tailed off with a weakened reaffrmation of her belief trying to give
the impression that what she had said was not qualitatively true, but had
gray areas open for discussion,
“...in the same way.”
I ignored the possible truth that gushed from her ambiguity, but stacked it
on a shelf in the supply room of my future defensive repartees. A gust of
sadness blew through my heart into my blood vessels, and I reached for my
brandy glass.
“You are my lover, my future husband. But my father...
you will never understand...my father has been with me all my life,
for good for bad. It is a different kind of love.
Look, when I was a teenager, probably the most diffcult time in my life,
my father played a very important part in my development,
and he helped me through some rough spots
which I don't think I would have survived without him.
For example, because I was taller than the other girls,
I looked older. So my father talked his military friends into getting me a
license to drive a car when I was ffteen.
All the other girls had to wait until they were eighteen.
This made me feel really good at frst because it boosted my confdence.
But, later I felt guilty because the other girls avoided me on account of it.
Yet, papi was always there to protect me and make me feel good when
I felt guilty. I could lean on him to take away my negative feelings.
He was always there.
24
 When my brother went out with other girls,
I went for a drive with my father to feel good.
My brother, Jesús, is tall and handsome.
He had many girlfriends and went to many parties.
No one asked me out because I was so tall. I went out with my father.
My mother mostly hated him, so it was good for us to leave the house
and drive around Caracas.”
“Your adolescence was crucial in your life?”
“Yes, very much so.”
“How did you feel about your brother during this diffcult time?”
“I hated him. I really couldn't stand him. He was always going to parties.
He pushed me to go with him, but I rarely went.
Even my mother and father tried to get me to go to parties with Jesús.
When I did go, I was jealous of Jesús. He was the center of attraction,
and I was the wallfower.
He was for ever trying to get me to dance, or talk to the other boys.
I hated him for being so manipulative with me.
My ex-husband tried to do the same with me.
Tried to push me into social experiences when we were at parties.
Even my going to medical school was because of a “push” from my brother
and my parents. I really didn't want to go,
but I went for the hell of it. I was shoved into it.
My father made sure I got a place in the university.”
“I noticed in Gainesville (Florida) you avoided parties,
never had them in your apartment.”
“Yes, I don't like parties. It is torture for me to go into a party,
a classroom, a medical meeting, and an operating room...whatever.”
“Please, more about your father. Cars, parties, medical school...”
“My father, papi, always took care of me. He always made sure I had a car.
When I was a kid...and when I married...my husband...he...he couldn't.
If I didn't want to go to a party, I could take my papi for a ride in my car.
We would drive down the mountain to the beach and have an ice-cream.
When there was a curfew, my father could get passed the check-points
because he had a government carnet from the dictator's palace,
and that gave him total freedom at night.
We would sometimes walk in the sand barefoot watching the sun go down
on hot summer nights.
I didn't miss the parties and I didn't miss for one minute Jesús harassing
me to talk and dance with boys.
25
 He acted like a jerk at parties.
Drunk, self-centered. My ex-husband, too. Another clown.
Not a considerate man.
My father would never have tried to embarrass me. Never.
It was also good for my father because he was lonely
and suffered with my mother.
She is cruel to him...so cruel...”
“Medical school?”
“My papi knows many important men in Venezuela,
and they helped me get into the university, then medical school.
He even helped me when I took
my residency examination in ophthalmology.
Our professor was his friend, and before the examination he gave me
the exam questions, and that helped me a great deal.”
“The questions to the examination?”
“Yes. My father's friend gave them to me.
I still had to be able to answer them correctly, naturally.
Even now my father is helping me.
He is negotiating with ophthalmologists and optical companies in Caracas
to get me the best deal when I open my practice. He would like to have my
offce set up in Quinta Santa María, but I told him I wanted a modern offce
in a huge offce building near the United States embassy.
I guess it comes from my living in the United States for long a time.
You know me, modern things and furniture and sleek buildings.
I want a small offce that doesn't ft too many people.
Not a crowded place like in the free University Hospital where
the dirty, smelly people go.”
“Why do you think 'modern things'?”
“I'm an ophthalmologist. One of the most precise medical specialties is
ophthalmology, and sophisticated equipment is second-nature to me.
Laser surgery, corneal replacements, plastic contact lenses, etcetera.
The eye is enormously delicate.
I like instrumentation. All kinds of it.
If I could I would buy a Mercedes-Benz sports car because it is so
mechanically exact. I like perfection. Science. Tools. Instruments.
I very much like your “instrument,” too, gringo!”
“Does your father like 'modern things'?”
“Yes, but my mother doesn't want him to spend the money on them.
Sometimes he likes photography and always enjoys his ham radio.
26
 But he never buys expensive equipment.
I told you my mother and father live in the past.
The present and future don't appeal to them.
Well, to my father, yes. He wants. But my mother won't let him.
She hoards.”
“Your brother?”
“Yes, he thoroughly modern. Really modern. And he is not hesitant about
spending the money he earns as a pediatrician.
He bought a brand new, made in USA, Oldsmobile sedan, a big one,
and my mother and father were angry with him for two months.
He's not afraid to splurge on what he wants. He is different from me.
We don't think the same. He lives his life, and I live my own life.”
“Are you afraid to 'splurge'?”
“Yes, very much so. I don't want to displease my mother, and especially my
father, even though I know they are wrong about how they think.
And I depend on them for fnancial sustenance,
so I don't have money to spend on myself.”
“But your father gave you $50,000 when you were in Gainesville.”
“Yes, but not to spend. To save and gain interest.
Anyway, I don't want to spend my father's money.
He works hard for it, and it is his. Not mine. I feel guilty
when I have to use his money.
Of course, I would if the children got very sick,
but that would be different.”
“Your husband. What happened?”
“I met my ex-husband in medical school.
Ours was an ideal romance all the more because my ex-husband's father
was the rector of the Venezuelan university system and a well-known
Venezuelan educator. A respected, humble man. My friend.
My ex-husband studied cardiology, and did a post-doctorate in New York.
Now he lives in the United States, Chicago, and practices there.
His brother is a prominent psychiatrist in Caracas.
I was a virgin when we married, and I remember it took two days for him
to break my hymen in the Macuto-Sheratan in Maiquetía!
We laughed about it for years.
A little later, we went to Nueva York to study.
I started up a residency in dermatology,
he continued his cardiology studies.
He is a very good heart man.
27
 He fooled around a lot in the hospital,
and would come home at night bragging to me that he had “f****d”
this nurse or that technician.”
“In the frst year of your marriage?”
“Yes. I guess I wouldn't do those things other girls would do for him.
I never had had oral sex with a man until you.
And I never had swallowed a man's semen until you.
My husband was sexually frustrated with me.
So he went with other women. He hated having my father around.”
“Did your father live with you all the time in New York?”
“Not all the time. But he had an apartment in the same building we did.
He and my mother would visit from Caracas every two or three months and
stay for a month or two.
My ex-husband hated my mother and father because they are wealthy,
and his parents are not.
One day my ex-husband beat me so much that I got a black eye.
My father made me take pictures of my face,
and he still shows me these pictures all the time to remind me
how bad my husband was to me. He threatened to show the photos
to my ex-husband's father when we were fghting over the divorce.”
“How long were you married?”
“Only six years, but I got something out of it.”
“Something out of it?”
“Yes. I got two children!”
“Oh, s**t!”
“Yes. I remember after we had sex I used to put my feet up against the wall
so the sperm would trickle into me. I wanted to get pregnant by him.
I wanted his children.”
“But why if you weren't happy in your marriage?”
“You will never understand us, gringo.
Our families. Our culture. Our ways.
Children are important to us.
To our men, especially. I thought I could save my marriage
by having children.
I thought if my husband had had children by me,
he would think he was a big, macho man and would respect and love me.
That was stupid thinking. I learned the hard way.
But I am not alone now because of my ex-husband.
I have two human beings who I know will be loyal to me
28
 for the rest of my life.
I can't expect that from any other person except my father,
but he will be dead before I am.
Do you understand?
I got something out of all the s**t he gave me. I got my children.
They are mine forever. They are something I own.
Nobody can take them away from me.
My husband tried and my father took care of him for good.”
“Took care of him?”
“My husband tried to kidnap my children.
He was furious about the divorce.
He said my father was the cause of the trouble.
He used to call and insult us almost every day.
My father tape-recorded his telephone conversations to give to our lawyers.
He called and he called and he called.
I thought he was going crazy.
I was so upset and nervous for many months.
My father helped me, thank goodness.
He helped me get through that crisis.
He got the best lawyers in Caracas to handle the divorce proceedings.
My husband didn't stand a chance.
He couldn't afford adequate legal defense.
My father had friends who were judges.
It was very embarrassing for my husband's family, too.
We showed them up good. Except for my father-in-law, the rector
of the Venezuelan university system.
He was kind and understanding with me, but not with my father.”
“Please, more about your brother Jesús.”
“I have hated him for most of my life. He has always been able to get along
with people better than me, and his out-going personality has gotten him
many girlfriends and patients.
I think my brother is an arrogant, conceited individual.
I am introverted and because of this he has always been able to manipulate
and push me around as much as he wished.
Jesús is a good pediatrician. In fact, he did very well at Harvard when he
took a post-doctorate in the Boston Children's Hospital.
Jesús is clever and well-known in Caracas.
His medical practice is one of the best, and even the children of United
States citizens are referred to him by the embassy—and not just because
29
 he speaks English; but because he is a good doctor which I am not.”
“Why Not?”
“I don't really know. It was never in my heart to become a doctor.
I went because Jesús went and my father ordered me to go
after getting me a place in medical school.
You must understand one thing.
Our requirements for medicine are not as strict as yours are
in the United States. It is easier here.
We do not pursue excellence as the gringos do.
It was more or less easy for me to get through,
and I didn't have to study so hard because I am quick to learn.
I'm intelligent, but I am also lazy.”
“When you and Jesús were teenagers, how did you feel about each other?”
“I said I hated him! He always had girlfriends calling on him.
And he always went out with different girls. Pretty girls.
He was, and is today, what you might call a “playboy.”
I resented this. He went out on his own, but I was afraid to.
But even if I had not been afraid, it would have been diffcult for a
girlfriend to function freely as a boy does in our conservative,
macho society.
Jesús wanted me home, actually. He would only want me to go to parties
where he would be, so he could watch
how the other boys behaved with me.
He protected me from the machos because he, a macho,
knew what the machos were after.
It was hard for me to feel independent. On one hand,
my father was with me; on the other, Jesús was with me.
My two chaperons! Always, always, always.
I was with Jesús or my father until I married.
I felt so strange when I began to live with my husband.
It was as if I was suddenly shoved into the cold weather.
I was very happy when papi came to visit me after my marriage,
even though he was annoyed with my husband very much and my husband
was annoyed with him.”
“What about?”
“Oh, one more thing I can remember now. When I was of age,
I was not allowed to wear make-up or jewelry.
No rings, no lipstick, no bracelets, not even my hair
in a ponytail like the other girls.
30
 My father and my brother would not allow it.
I tried sometimes, but their reactions were brutal.
Even now, I rarely put make-up on, except for you!
And I would never wear jeans in my home in Caracas
as I did in Gainesville. That would have been horrible! I love jeans.
They are so comfortable. My friends in Caracas are always insisting
that I use perfume and dress in elegant clothes imported from Europe
to “go along” with society. But I don't want to displease my father.
The only “elegances” that are have are my French sunglasses and my
expensive bras and panties.
No one can see my underwear—except for you!—so
I don't have to feel ashamed.
“Girl friends? Did you have many girlfriends when you were a kid?”
“I always got along well with my girlfriends. I remember playing
with little girls when we were youngsters.
And there was no trouble from my father or my brother.
Although Jesús always teased and interrupted us to show himself off,
if he was around the house.
I don't like formal, dressed-up women.
In the United States, I liked it very much when I saw ladies in jeans
and shirt tops and not French dresses and Italian shoes
as many of my friends in Caracas wear.
My mother dresses formerly, but never expensively.
I had more friends in Gainesville—more girlfriends, actually—than
I had in Caracas. Mostly in the university hospital.
Now, in Caracas, my friends are acquaintances.
I am usually embarrassed to be with them because they dress so elegantly
and have their hair done in expensive beauty parlors.
I don't like to spend money on those things.
I went to a beauty parlor once in my life and that was
the morning of my marriage.
I was so self-conscious, the girls who were attending me laughed
and tried to put me at my ease. But, they couldn't.
I was so glad to get out of there, I practically ran out the door
when they were fnished with me.
And when I went into the street,
all the neighbors kept staring at me and they told me how pretty I looked.
I was so embarrassed, I couldn't talk. I was in shock.
My father wasn't happy with the way I looked,
31
 but Jesús said he liked my hairdo and painted nails.
I didn't believe him. I wasn't what he expected. I'm sure of that.
He wanted to see me kept as I was when I was a little girl.”
“Do you think...”
“Let's stop, gringo. I'm tired. I don't want to remember anymore.
It's hard for me...hard for me.”
“OK. As you like.”
“What is your diagnosis, doctor? Am I crazy?”
“Oh, no, Gonza. You are not crazy. You are wonderful.
You are good and generous and dignifed and charming.
I love you very much.”
“But, my life...my life has been sad, hasn't it?
I have not lead a normal life, have I?”
“Look, Gonza, what is normal? So many people live pessimistic, unhappy ,
self-depreciative, weary lives. Feeling inadequate, discouraged, hopeless.
You have these feelings now about something that occurred in the past.
The fact that you can face up to what happened to you in your early years,
means that you have dislodged those intuitive feelings from your self,
and you are ready to live your life at a different slant.
Some people never can do that, and they stay in a rut all their lives.
Gonza, I love you. We get along together fabulously.
I really love you, darling.
I myself was not always happy in my life.
Now I want to be contented with myself and with you.
I'll bet you are more normal than me.
Let's both be strong for each other.
Kiss me? Hold me? Love me?
I need you, Gonza.
I hesitated to include the turmoil which might arise from the side of the
father, the brother, or the mother, then I fell pray to tempting her with this
observation:
“Gonza, your relation with your father and brother
has victimized you quite a bit.
It has not been what should have been called normal.”
“You mean incestuous, don't you?”
With that, I looked up at her, I could feel and see the swish of a fast-
moving hand coming to the right side of my face, and then could observe
my glasses fying to the foor.
“Don't you ever say that again!” she screamed for all Caracas.
32
 “I had that coming, Gonza. Take it easy!” I urgently begged.
“This is better than electric shock, don't you agree?”
I scoffed acrimoniously trying to recoup my presence of poise and self-
respect in my deportment—to the degree that it might inspire respect.
“Don't ever say it again,”
she warned still another time—her words distant and threatening; dry
saliva was at the corners of her mouth. Suddenly, she turned over, her back
to me, and slumbered off to sleep seemingly partially relieved—at my
expense—of her controlled and manipulated youthful emotional life. Chalk
one up for Freud. Chalk one up for Crisis Intervention. I sipped away the
last drops of my cognac, and thought for a long while before dozing off to
sleep next to the sound asleep Gonza.

When the two unpleasant ones returned to Caracas, their faces culturally
suntanned, their eyes beaming red, white, and blue impertinences, their
suitcases bulging with Bee Gees' music cassettes, soggy bathing suits,
Betamized cartoons, and emptied quart bottles of Pepsi stuffed with
McDonald's french fries and wrapped in towels in an attempt to keep the
greasy strings fresh (Gonza thought that was really “cute;” her mother's
Colombian maid effaced momentarily her ever-present shit-eating grin),
they acting like rhesus monkeys let out of the laboratory and set free to
roam the sub-continent of India—I was politely told that it would be best if
I returned to boarding-house living: there was no way Gonza and I were
going to enjoy living together in this Caracas society always, always, always
feigning virtues it did not possess; worse, still, with a possessive abuelo and
abuela breathing down the children's necks and standing guard over their
only daughter whose soft curtain of fesh, on the bed of her husband's
wedding night desire, took two days, in the Macuto-Sheritan bridal suite, to
be passionately pierced.

I took my abrupt demotion with a grain of paprika. A constant sufferer.

Always “in love.” Hardly ever “in f**k.” Then I went about—with Gonza's
help!!!—looking a room in Alta Florida: an exclusive section where
Gonza's mother and father's quinta was—not far from her apartment.
We/she settled on a bathless, kitchenless room in one of the many quintas
33
Gonza's father owned and rented in the neighborhood. Afterwards, the
Spanish landlady (Viva Franco!!!) literally litanized a roll of “no's” for me to
abide by: NO telephone calls after ten o'clock at night; NO use of water
when sudsing my body in the shower; NO soiled toilet paper in the toilet
bowl—put dirty toilet paper in the wastepaper basket next to the toilet
bowl; NO food in my room; NO loud music; NO free toilet paper; NO
visitors in my room; NO telephone in my room; NO refrigerator in my
room...NO! NO!! NO!!!

I loaded up the closet with my suits, piled my books on a small wooden

night stand, cleaned the dust out of the draws of the old, used bureau
before storing away my underwear and socks, then sat down depressed, and
mulled over a rock n' roll song I remembered from my teenage days, “It
Hurts To Be In Love!” Night and day. Day and night. Wow! It really hurts
to be in f*****g love!

I perked up...sucked it in. Just as when I was in Vietnam. I hypnotized

myself to keep moving. To keep busy. To keep improving my position. And
for ever, for ever, for ever, lieutenant, harass the troops! My Second World
Wide War was just beginning. Area of Operation: Caracas, Venezuela.
Object: The woman I loved. Enemy: Father, Mother, brother, Caracas
Society. Weapons: Love, Tenderness, Intelligence, Witticism. Defciencies:
No money: Depends too much on luck.

Keeping face, I went off to the Ministerio de Información y Turismo each

morning arriving at 8:30 ante meridiem sharp unlike anyone else in the
entire offce. But before we peek in on that place's daily activities, the por
puesto (translated, por puesto means, “Here's a seat!”) ride to work must frst
be transmitted by mental images, expressed by written sounds.

Converted Dodge, Chevrolet, or Ford vans, por puestos are mini buses, and
perhaps thousands of these motor vehicles, for carrying passengers around
Caracas, exist to complement the awkward bus system and the
uncompleted subway network. Usually the por puesto is part of a unión—a
line—but there are many “bandit! por puestos out there scrounging up
bolívares. Por puestos have an identifying characteristic: a plastic, moulded,
colored sign on their roofs—lighted up at night—specifying the ends of
their runs through the city. Each operator owns his own vehicle, and
because he (rarely, a woman is seen driving a por puesto) “lives” in his micro
34
transport for ten or twelve hours a day, various manners of devising the
comforts of home had being in the por puesto. Not all conductors are so
interested, even extravagant, about the decoration of their por puestos, but
enough variations have existence to give one a sense of anticipation when
entering these public people carriers that charge from one to three
bolívares, depending on the ride's distance. Por puestos run along calles y
avenidas and, except in heavily-traffcked areas where they are assigned
load/unload zones, may stop anywhere along their routes to accept or
discharge passengers.

One morning I hopped up into an imported lavender Chevrolet van for my

early morning trip to Parque Central where my work place at MIT
(Ministerio de Información y Turismo) was located. In contemplating the very
pale-violet paint job on the exterior, the driver had taken pains to jazz the
inside with black and red shag rugs, rose-colored seat covers, and pastel-
purple gloss paint on the walls of the van's cabin area. Indirect lighting
gave the por puesto a subdued look. Electric buzzes had been installed on
the sides, conveniently positioned so passengers could notify the chauffeur
—who really was always within speaking distance; por puestos, on the
average, seat nine to thirteen travelers—of the point of their
disembarkation. A stereo system, with speakers set acoustically in a state of
undiminished excellence, piped pleasing, light Venezuelan waltzes which
eased the way to the pile of papers on my desk. The windows of the van
were tinted smoke gray. A NO FUMAR, POR FAVOR sign in Latinized
Helvetica lettering, gently reminded the commuters in the conveyance not
to pollute the interior with persecuting cigarette, pipe, or cigar fumes. The
dashboard of the public people carrier was covered with a reddish-purple
piece of heavy fabric that in ordinary circumstances would have been used
to cover a portion of a foor. Red puffy pompoms pulsated on the edge of it:
the balls of wool aligned in a specifc arrangement. On the “dash,” three
big, round magnets were affxed, and the operator tossed on them the
metallic monies he received from his metropolitan voyagers who paid up
when leaving the por puesto: PAGA USTED AL BAJAR, POR FAVOR. (in
Gothicized Baroque script). A blue and white statue of the Virgin Mary was
set beneath the rear-view mirror on which dangled a pair of plastic
women's legs with a red and black silk garter attached to the left gam. Even
though it was only eight o'clock in the morning—the sun was not yet set
high up in the sky enough to molest the eyes—the pilot of our por puesto
wore expensive French sunglasses, and he gripped the steering wheel with
35
a pair of black, pitted leather Italian racing gloves. He wore pre-shrunk
Valentino jeans, gold Nike sneakers, and a green tee-shirt which publicly
made plain, in bold yellow English lettering, this message that he probably
did not understand: WHEN GOD CREATED MEN, SHE MADE THEM
SECOND BEST. An Omega diver's watch adorned his left hand, and a
gold chain was hanging around his sweaty neck. Decals were appended to
the interior sidings of the por puesto: SONY COCA-COLA, CLARION,
MOMA, PIONEER, FORD, PEPSI-COLA, PIERRE CARDIN, FRUIT OF
THE LOOM, HOLIDAY INN, I LOST MY VIRGINITY IN THE VIRGIN
ISLANDS. A lilac room deodorizer scented the inside of the transport
vehicle. The por puesto was not air-conditioned, and it was uncomfortable in
its interior. On the sun visor, there was a chrome-plated picture frame
encasing a formal shot of the driver's attractive wife and his six children
aged about nine to eighteen years. The look on the man's face was one of
quiet resignation. He was a hard worker, took obvious pride in his
apparently successful private enterprise, and was getting a slice of the oil
pie. Capitalist democracy was paying him well—at least for the time being.

When a bash to the back of the Chevy jolted all of us in the por puesto, and
shattered break lights fell to the oil-slick pavement making sprinkling
metallic sounds, the composure of the Venezuelan man did not alter one
iota. As if he had been rehearsing such an event for years, he reached
under his seat and pulled out a 9mm PPKS with a pearl handle, stuck it
between his belt and his belly—an enormous thing that reminded one of a
six-ton African elephant in her nineteenth month of gestation—and left his
por puesto gently closing the door behind him.

I looked to the rear and saw two French women, who did not speak
Spanish, surveying the damage to their car and the por puesto. Our driver
approached them with his hands on his hips and a scorn on his face. When
the French woman scrutinized a pro-por puesto-driver crowd congregating
around the scene, an obviously guilty “he was hit in the backside” verdict
uttering on the lips of witnesses, and the milky-white handle of the PPKS
glistening in the now rising morning sun, she let loose a food of tears and
cushioned her head on the shoulder of he daughter who was yelling merde
at the top of her lungs accusing our perplexed, but very angry, driver of
scaring the merde out of her mother.

Perhaps it is pointless to repeat it, but “s**t” is merde in French and mierda
36
in Spanish, so our driver, not a bi-linguist by any means, correctly
associated merde with mierda, took merde, naturally, as an insult, then
bewailed—pointing his left index fnger at them and resting his right hand
on his pistol's handle—a staccatoed bevy of choice Venezuelan slogans
which the ladies could not understand but felt all the more penetratingly.

“Oú est mon ambassadeur???!!!” screamed the daughter in a useless search for
diplomatic assistance. The crash had come about unexpectedly in one of
Caracas' more unsavory sections—not far from Parque Central—and the
women were justifed in being out of control.

The tears of the tender gender brought sudden relief to the mesdames, but
not to two Venezuelan passersby who had come to their rescue trying to
calm down the por puesto driver with “They're foreigners!” screeches. When
our driver realized the ladies were being defended by two of his own, he
pulled his pistol and held them at bay as accomplices.

Traffc had been tied-up already for twenty minutes, and the screaming
sirens of two police cars could be heard off in the distance where they were
stuck in the traffc jam caused by the accident.

Before I slid out of the por puesto, bent like a pretzel, I tossed my bolívar on
the driver's seat, then founced into the street hoping I would not be
shouted after and detained as a witness for a police report. Cars were
passing slowly by, and their occupants were assessing the damage to the
vehicles, and appraising the harm to the spirits of all the verbal combatants.
I was lucky; no one saw me. It was almost 8:30, and I had to trot in my
Hartz Schafter & Marx business suit to make it on time to work in Parque
Central and a pile of translations and re-writes I had to make of badly
transposed into English speeches, news reports, and public relations
releases on my cluttered desk in my MIT work cubicle.

When I rushed up sweating—my tie out of place, my face full of soot, my

hair hanging in loose array—to the up button of the Otis elevator, I eyed
the progress of a modern hoist scanning with my eyes the rhythm of the
digital display of foor positions above the door of the vertical shaft. My
offce was housed in the penthouse, on top of the twenty-two-story
37
building.

PIP...PIP...PIP...14...13...12...11...10...9...8...7...6...5...4...3...2...1...PB (Planta
Baja, the main foor.) SWISH...SHUSH...CLOP: the doors opening the
precise fraction of a second the gravitational force of the enclosure settled
at the point where the door met the frst foor. I sprang to the entrance
when the chime admitted the falling body had indeed fallen, and when I
raised my sights in expectation that some of the big-breasted telex
operators on the night shift might exit and quiver themselves my way, three
of the voluptuous ones plunged out shrieking inarticulately, weeping
copiously. Before I could think what might have happened, before I could
interrupt them to determine what might have occurred, they bolted for the
street and huddled on the median strip that divided Avenida Mexico in two,
and consoled and hugged each other until I reached them.

“Temblor!!! Temblor!!! Temblor!!!” they were shrilling in horror—mascara

dripping down their cheeks, handkerchiefs shoved to their noses. I
immediately offered my affections and mutual understanding quickly
wondering how I would have reacted if a minor Earth tremor had thrilled
me on top of a twenty-two story high concrete mass. I touched shoulders, I
pulled out my own handkerchief, I lovingly blotted tears, I nonchalantly
reassured, and I fnally enjoined that they both relax without delay. It
worked.

“Tranquilla, chicas. Tranqui! Tranqui!! Tranqui!!!” They oozed off to a

cafetería on the other side of the street at last allayed of their intense mental
anguish.

When I returned to the building, h-e-s-i-t-a-t-i-n-g-l-y, I met my boss, a

North American New Yorker from Brooklyn who had lived in Caracas for
more than twenty years, had changed his citizenship to Venezuelan in
order to secure his present post in the Venezuelan government, I—in
ignoble fearful fashion—offcially cautioned him: “There's been a vibrating
movement in the building. Perhaps it is wise for us to wait a while before
going up.”

“Wait? Wait for what?” he grunted at me with a puzzled look. “If you're
gonna work in Caracas, gringo, you better get used to temblores. And

38
pronto! There hasn't been a quake in Caracas for more than ffteen years.
We have temblores all the time. The buildings are constructed to absorb
quakes up to 5.7 on the Richter Scale. I can't be bothered by temblores,” he
fnished tersely; and, he did not say a word more to me all the way up to the
penthouse—he absorbed in what was going to happen in his action-packed
offce during a day that gave the shakes to three communication technicians
and one transplanted Brooklyn guy.

I moseyed to my desk as soon as we got to the crown of the edifce's head,

and put in a call to Gonza's offce excited about not only the temblor, but
still remembering the uncanniness of the por puesto ride that undid so
abruptly the reserve of the two charming French women. Gonza listened to
me as if I was a greenhorn newspaper reporter who had received an
anonymous call specifying the evidence of a presidential sex scandal. I
blurted away at her:
“You can't believe what happened to me on the por puesto!
You should have seen the faces on the French women!
You can't imagine how arrogant that por puesto driver was!
You wouldn't be able to guess what happened when I was about to enter
the elevator at work today!
You have no idea how afraid those telex operators were!
You would be shocked at how calm my boss was when I told him
there had been a temblor in the building.”

“Take it easy, baby,” she admonished as only she could,

kindly but seriously, reprove.

“Oh, Gonza! I was scared s*******s! I thought the guy was going to shoot
somebody! I thought the building might collapse!”

Gonza, who never had ridden in a por puesto in her entire life always served
by papi's chauffeurs—papi would never allow her to sit next to “dirty”
people and catch strange diseases—spoke completely composed.
“Gringo, I told you things would be different here.
You need time to learn...to adjust...to adapt...,”
she evoking the power of persuasion as a psychiatrist would
upon his patient as he offered the three R's: rest, reassurance, and Rx.
“Gonza, I thought I was the shrink in this family?
Who's crazy here, you or me?”
39
 “It's not a question of being crazy, gringo,”
she calmed her hysterical one.
“Then what the f**k is it, Gonza?
Look, the people are loco! Crazy. I mean it.
It's bananas wherever I go and you're telling me I have to learn
to accustom myself to this insanity! Come on, baby, get off it.
This is too much. I mean WOW! Too much.”
“So go home, gringo,” she played one of the aces up her sleeve.
“Go home!” I scowled.
“Yes, if it's too much you can leave,” she putting the psychological
icing on the psychiatrical cake.
“Sweetheart,” I fumed, “after all I gave up for you!
HOLY S**T!!! What else do you want from me?”
“Look gringo, we are here whether we like it or not,” she took me back
into her fold and reminded me subconsciously that it was
her mother and father's millions that would help us out a great bit
if and when we returned to gringolandia together.
Was it not worth the wait?
Was it not so much to put up with for fve or six million bucks?
Was it not wise for me to cool it and relax and adjust and adapt
and acclimatize and accustom myself and...and...and...and...?
“OK, Gonza. I'll behave,” I conceded.

I hissed my onerous vapors out ballasting my momentarily uneven temper.

She had to know what she was doing—she talked so gently, so deliberately.
It had to be me who was exaggerating. I must act more level-headed. I must
calm down. I must adjust. I must adapt.

I smacked a kiss at her through the telephone lines and told her I loved her
very much indeed. I was terribly doleful. I loved Gonza with all my heart,
and the most beautiful memories I held of our private, unperturbed state in
Florida, kept me desirous for more of it—to get back to it, to get out of this
horrible Caracas. She reciprocated my telecom touch. Then I put the
receiver on its hook and muttered “s**t” to myself over and over again.

I went off for another coffee and noticed, at 9:15, the other trabajadores
struggling in after the expected time set to begin work—they conforming to
40
their own established practices. No one made reference to the work hours
(8:30-12:30; 14:30-18:30) offcially posted on the wall between the Xerox
machine and the DAMAS toilet. My boss, who knew better, was not a time
stickler.

Ana María, Clem's plump, chain-smoking secretary—she did know better—

huffed in protesting the “insoportable” traffc on the Caracas streets. A
group of stray workers eyed her with confused expressions: could there be
meaning behind such an unembellished declaration about something
widely known with certainty? One trabajadore directed his right index
fnger to his right temple and, near it, whizzed circles in the air.

Iris, the directress of Xerox machine concerns, foated to her work station
wearing jeans, painted fngernails, painted toenails, painted cheeks, a
painted sweatshirt which cried out: KISS ME, I'M HOT TODAY. In a
manila folder, held in her left hand, there was contained the latest book of
poetry of her brother that she said she had to copy one-hundred times that
day in between our boss's demands to hurry up and get the president's
speech reproduced for Time and Newsweek representatives waiting in the
lobby. She later complained, absorbed with piles of poetry all over the foor
—people were kicking them over as they came out of the bathroom—that
she would do the best she could as soon as she fnished page thirty-nine of
her brother's obra maestra.

Flor de Primavera, daughter of Generalissimo Juan Carlos del Rio

Turbulente, the Vice-Ministro de Defensa, strutted to her desk followed by
her chauffeur from the Ministerio de Defensa, a fatigued-clad sargento capped
with a helmet liner, a machine gun hung around his neck, and who carried
through the main corridor, lined with enormous funghi-laden water jugs,
two suitcases flled with dresses and blouses she had bought in New York's
garment district while her father addressed a United Nations' Military
Affairs Commission delivering, in French, a Venezuelan position paper
entitled “Wake Up Family Loving Christians and Defenders of Capitalist
Democracy! Communist Subversives Are Infltrating through the
Backdoors of Our Cherished Ideals of Freedom,” dresses and blouses
which she wanted to “unload” before tackling the translation, into French
(her father had taught her all she knew about French) of a Carlos Andrés
Pérez International Rotary Club speech that the France Presse Caracas
bureau chief was anxiously waiting for in the foyer—he chain-smoking
41
Gitanes and sweating out the possibility of his imminent removal from
Caracas to Dacca if the political discourse did not reach his Paris
headquarters before deadline.

María Eugenía, sister of construction magnate Guillermo Boticello, bubbled

into the offce, eyed her desk to see if work was there, saw that there was,
and about-faced to the DAMAS room where she spruced up, with Conchita
Alvarez, the assistant telephone switchboard operator, for ffteen minutes
chatting about her recent love affair with a VIASA pilot and the problems
they were having with his wife's mother.

Fanny María, at 9:53, has charged in showing one and all a General Electric
public relations release honoring her uncle for his thirty years of loyal
service to the company. That very afternoon he—and she will take off soon
to get dressed for the ceremony—will receive the Orden Mérito al Trabajo
en su Tercera Classe from Carlos Andrés Pérez himself in the offce of the
Presidente de la Republica at Palacio Mirafores. The president will also give
him a cellophaned-wrapped basket of Grand Old Parr—a fne, neat, real
antique, smooth-fowing deluxe drink from Scotland. Her uncle, Pedro
Martinez, whose four sons also work for General Electric, made this
comment for General Electric public relations director for Venezuela, Kurt
“Speedy Gonzalez” Fleetwood: “General Electric is my family. I am part of
General Electric, and General Electric is part of me. Also, General Electric
means security, stability, and consideration.”

Coco, the private secretary to the assistant director of Televisión, Radio,

and Audio.Visual Affairs, has arrived sullen, dressed in black. Her
grandfather did not survive open-heart surgery in Houston, and she has
had time to come to the offce because the funeral, set for that very
morning, has been put off until tomorrow: VIASA accidently sent the
casket to Maracaibo—the oil city fve-hundred kilometers to the port side of
the country. A group of the girls will represent the ministerio at the funeral:
a group of translations will be further delayed. (Flor de Primavera is now
annoyed with Coco because she had a hot sale of three dresses going before
her customer went off to shed tears for the dead abuelo.)

Coquito, wife of the cousin of the Ministro de Foment, has fnally reached
her work destination with her two children, Pepé y Esmeralda, ages six and
eight, respectively, and has asked me to keep an ojo on the two rascals for
42
her—“play with them, gringo, if you will, anything to keep them busy”—
while she goes off to call home to fnd out if her two Colombian maids have
returned to the quinta from their IUD fttings at the local Ministerio de
Sanidad Y Salud birth control clinic. Meanwhile, Pepé, Esmeralda, y yo, are
rolling circular-shaped wads of compressed typewriting paper into three
empty plastic coffee cups placed in line, on the foor, against the desk of
the assistant director of International News Affairs.

María Carmen Julia, daughter of Spanish immigrant parents, Don Carlos

Oria de Joaquín Ruiz Jiménez y Doña Julia Carmen Sevilla de Oria de
Joaquín Ruiz Jiménez, she, María Carmen Julia, the offce's fnal word on
all Spanish grammatical and stylistic phenomenons—and there are many of
them—has summoned me immediately to speak with the overweight,
bispeckled assistant foreign affairs editor of The New York Times who is
mouthing off in Brooklyn-accented French to the France Presse bureau
chief—about to go to Bangledesh—that he wonders if France Presse is
having the same trouble as the NYT in getting “good copy” out of the
Venezuelan “banana république” all of which he will visit on a whirlwind
tour from Chile to Mexico in fve airport-long days. My immediate concern:
who will play with Pepé y Esmeralda? Here comes the bosomy Haydee! The
director of Caribbean News Affairs. A perfect candidate—motherly type
that she is. But no. Haydee has to study for her exam tonight at the
Universidad Central de Venezuela, she is a law student, and she cannot play
with the two monsters screaming for their mommy, arepas, and pipís in the
DAMAS room just behind the knee-high piles of Iris's brother's books of
poetry. I call my boss and he tells me he will go himself to the corpulent
assistant foreign affairs editor. (Iris, parenthetically, is really p****d because
the copies of her brother's book of poetry are gray-tinted, and she wants to
know why the ministerio is so cheap about buying copy paper.)

María Victoria, sister-in-law of the Vice-Ministro de Justicia, arriving to

work excited, has called for everyone's attention. She is to be engaged to
Francisco Alvarez Aria Salgado, hijo of the owners of the largest Pepsi-Cola
factory in South America, this very day! Everyone is invited to the
engagement party—to begin at 15:00 that afternoon, in the Maiguata Salón
of the Tamanaco Hotel. “Please bring your dates, girls!” she giggles. (We
will tune in later on to explore the goings-on in the Tamanaco's Maiguata
Room. Please don't change the channel.)

43
To cap the morning off, Humberto, a male employee, Director of the
Petroleum Information Task Force Liaison Section, has come up to see me
pounding on the price page of today's newspaper, has pointed to the latest
increase in petrol/gasoline prices, has screamed over and over and over
again in my ear in his delightful, exuberant manner, slapping me on the
back, while uttering uncontrollably, in broken in broken but well-
emphasized English—spoken with a Spanish/Chinese accent—the
following: “We are goeeng to fuckee goodee you gringos! Chico, lookee at
theese pricees!!!” (Umberto did not know, at the time, that in California
one Hollywood actor, soon to play his biggest role, was himself interested
and impressed with “theese priceeeeeeees.”) Valium or Old Parr?

Old Parr. I sat in thought on a bar stool in The English Pub, a snazzy
international restaurant and bar located in the Parque Central building
chain, waiting for my turn to be seated somewhere, I hoped, quiet and
quite remote from the mental whizz-banging of my offce. At least here, in
The English Pub, there were rugs on the foor to cushion noise, a subdued
lighting arrangement that contrasted magnifcently with the offce's
fuorescense, and the feeling that people here were directed, though still
somewhat chaotically (the major domo was arguing full-blast with one
drunken executive not inclined to wait in line), to a consolidated—not
eclectic—goal: the taking into the mouth, chewing, and swallowing of food.

I ordered shrimp bisque, a flet de pargo (red snapper), rice, an

accompanying salad, a small bottle of Pouilly Fuisse, and agua mineral con
gas, and reminded myself I had no sane reason, except to escape from
reality, in living beyond the real means I possessed to function decently in
the expensive city of Caracas. After an espresso and a Havana cigar, la
cuenta, the equivalent of $56.00, was delivered to me on a silver dish, and I
had to bring into memory again the idea that I was only to live once—I
guessed!

It was too hot and muggy and polluted and windy to walk comfortably on
the sidewalk-less streets adjacent to Parque Central, and I did not want to
stroll again along the mall-like corridors under the Parque Central
buildings because all the stores were closed for lunch; so, the only thing I
could do was return to my offce and put in another call to Gonza who
would be eating and waiting, with her new maid, for the horrible ones to
return from school. I hesitated to bother her, but she had told me to call
whenever I wanted—even at meals; she could “chew and chew the fat
simultaneously,” she once popped a pun my way very proud of her English.
I felt relaxed after my exquisite lunch, and the offce had that feeling one
senses when he or she enters an emptied public place—a large stadium or a
gigantic dance hall—and even thought there are no people about, the
function of the place, so imposing on the mind, evokes such strong images
of limited, transparent habits (“ideas as one Scottish philosopher once
described them) that an individual almost perceives the people to be there.

“Hello, darling”
I saluted her jubilantly remembering my panicky communication a few
hours old.
“Hi, honey!”
Are you feeling better?” she pleasantly inquired.
“Yes, I am, Gonza.
I had a fantastic lunch, and now I'm all alone in the offce except
for the security guards. The kids back yet?”
“No, but they should be here any sec.”
“Many patients in the offce this morning?”
“I had only four, but two were for contact lenses and that's good.
That's where the plata is. I must go to the hospital this afternoon
to check on one of my patients.”
“Miss me?” I purred.
“Yes, I miss you, sweetheart. I wish you weren't having such
a tough time of it here,” she made a regretful acknowledgement.
“Oh, don't worry about me. I'm down, then up.”
“Oh, before I forget,” she interrupted suddenly,
“you're going to have to go to Colombia to get your transeunta visa.”
“What? To Colombia? I quizzed with surprise, my voice gulping.
“Yes, all foreigners must go out and come back in
to acquire their work visa. My friend Paúl at the
Ministerio de Relaciónes Exteriores told me there are to be no exceptions.
You get the visa at a Venezuelan consulate or embassy, and the closest one
for you is in Cúcuta, in Colombia. It takes three or four days. No big deal. I
think the trip will do you good anyway.
You can take a break from Caracas.”
I did not appreciate the fact that Gonza thought I needed a small spell away
from Caracas, and a trip into the border town of Cúcuta to wait on a
45
line for three days, did not sound so tempting, although it would be
interesting to check out the sights in bandito-flled Colombia. I resigned
myself. But why could not Big Shot Paúl get my passaporte stamped here in
Caracas?

“OK, I guess it's best; but, I will miss you.”

“It's only four or fve days,” she said adding an extra day or two.
“Gonza, are you sure you don't want to get rid of me for a while?”
I coughed up, paranoicaly, my most hidden fear.
“Don't be silly, baby.”
“Gonza, when are we going to get married?
“Honey, I don't know. But it will be soon, I promise.
I know what you are going through.”
“Gonza, have you talked to your father yet?”
“No. But I will. I promise. Poco a poco, sweetheart,” she reassured.
There was a pause.
“Got to go. The kids are coming. See you tonight. Un beso?”
I clicked my lips softly. Then she.
“Te amo, gringo.”
“Te amo, Gonza.”
“Ciao.”
“Ciao.”
Ciao: from the Italian schiavo, “I am your slave;” from the Latín sclavus,
“slave.”

The seven day jaunt to Cúcuta was a real humdinger. I got the visa; I got
gonorrhea for the frst time in my thirty-two-year-old life.

The Avensa jet took me (I kept my fngers crossed all the way) to San
Antonio, Venezuela, and from there I bussed it into Cúcuta and headed
directly to the Venezuelan consulado to begin processing for the transeunta
visa that would allow me to legally work in Venezuela for one year. Then it
would be up for renewal, but not in Cúcuta. The re-issue would be
effectuated in Caracas. Muchas gracias for little favors.

At the consulate I was instructed to go to three doctors located throughout

the border town. In the neighborhoods there were many small shops
46
selling discounted clothes, shoes, and assorted leather goods. Many
charming streets and passageways in the city. But in general, Cúcuta was
not a pleasant place to visit: Poor people walked around the city
scrounging for food and begging for alms. Old cars populated the sides of
sidewalks, and flthy, sad scenes were common wherever I went. In fact, the
outskirts of Cúcuta reminded me of the Afro-American ghetto in northwest
Fort Lauderdale, Florida where I had worked for two years as a social
worker.

The doctors had something fne going in Cúcuta inspecting the bodies of
foreigners wanting to live in Venezuela. The oil ”boom”—caused by
Venezuela's nationalization of petroleum and the upstart of the
Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries' (OPEC) cartel—had
brought destitute people from Colombia, Perú, Ecuador, and Chile who
had entered with reluctance, but with bolívares in mind, the colonies of
Venezuelan, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese people already living in
Caracas. The South American “melting pot.” The focal point for the insane
South American nationalistic spirits. La Sopa Mezclada of undying pride
and hatred for all that is foreign.

Many long lines to establish my legal existence in Venezuela faced me, and
blood tests, urine samples, chest ex-rays, eye examinations, cardiograms,
blood pressure controls, and dental look-sees, were part of the routine in
attaining legal documents to join in on the oil orgy and help Venezuela,
principally Caracas, expand, build, modernize, and grow, thus entering the
twentieth-century of North American, French, German, English, and
Japanese democratic capitalism that was advertised all over Caracas in
fancy transnational media logos which Venezuelan people eyed with
suspicion.

The medical checks were mere formalities for the most part. No serious
time-outs for consultation if a problem existed. Rush-throughs one offce,
then another, where sometimes hundreds of characters waited to be
stamped physically OK to pass on through to Bolívarlandia. We had to pay
nominal fees (ten dollars) for each of the examinations. On these lines were
handsome Indians, ecuatorianos, who would cook and clean in Venezuelan
homes of wealth. Peruanos, often speaking French or English , who would
serve as bi-lingual secretaries. Chilenos, “left-wingers,” intellectuals, who
would work in engineering companies and advertising agencies--anything
47
being better than General Pinochet. Argentinos, again left-wing in thinking,
who would teach in universities and start up small import businesses. And,
of course, colombianos to lay bricks, drive por puestos, and clean the mierda
out of the culos of little rich Venezuelan boys and girls. A slave market of
sorts. Picking out the best of what was available for the construction of the
South American Melting Pot...the Switzerland of South America...The Big
Apple of the Third World: Caracas, Venezuela.

After days of waiting in enormously extended rows of foreign people, and

hours of tolerating the often nasty Venezuelan processing unit in the
consulado, an old, dilapidated, immense quinta, I thought, along with two
other overly-processed mexicanos and three paper-laden argentinos, who
had escaped their regime's Gestapo-like secret police before they had
become “missing,” a celebration was in order. We all met at a restaurante
where there was a mariachi band: the mexicanos went tacos when they
heard music from mexicolandia. We proceeded to get, all of us, borracho out
of our cabezas: beer, rum, tequila, and Scotch. We were trying them all.
Remembering the Chinese proverb, “Drinkee for drunkee; no drinkee for
drinkee,” I did just that, and at 2:30 in the morning, three of us barged into
the El Ultimo Orgasmo, an old motel which had been converted into a drive-
in house of prostitution and, there, came across almost two-hundred
dressed-to-kill, perfume-wreaking Latín ladies of the night—plopped out in
the lobby on chairs and sofas and even on the foor—in all assortments,
sizes, colors, shapes, ages, and—I was to learn early on in the morning of
the new day—diseases.

My case of gonorrhea had incubated rather rapidly, and at eight o'clock in

the morning, when I got up to go pipí, something white and gooey was
trickling out down there, and I could all but guess it was the “big “G,” but
anxiously hoped it was not the “big SYPH.” I was a bit excited. Even
laughed at myself for being so stupid—so commonly human. “Thought
you'd never get it, heh?” You got it good, and you can't even tell the boys
back home. Until I got to the urologist in Caracas two days later, I had the
sensation of an infected penis ever-present in my mind, and I was ever
hopeful that it was not more serious than the clap. At least I had had the
presence of mind to get The French Distemper after the medical exams for
my transeunta visa, I thought consolingly.

What possessed me to be “unfaithful” to Gonza? You ask. Well, after the

48
brats had returned from gringolandia, and I took up living quarters away
from Gonza, our sex lives were abbreviated to short get-togethers in a hotel
Saturday nights or Sunday afternoons, depending on family commitments.
And then, Gonza, who did not want to make love when she was having her
period, often cancelled out on me every fourth weekend when blood and
dead cell debris discharged from her uterus. I was a good masturbating
sport during my days of partial abstinence, but the thought—that other
people were depriving us of our basic human rights—gnawed heavily upon
my social conscience and sense for what was mine and what was hers and
what was ours. Gonza was generally unconcerned and acted, as I had often
observed women do—and not to say that they do not possess strong sexual
drives—with a sexual nonchalance about her deprivation that she thought
was not so great a sacrifce to make for her geniuses and family. She,
castratedly, made me feel that always wanting to have sex with her was the
behavior of an uncontrolled sex maniac! This was an enormous emotional
strain for me. She could “go without it” if she had to. And she had to, did
she not? She had to maintain her rigid family ties for money and for
security: things I could not offer her; things no one was going to offer me.
My immolation would result in a pay-off if I behaved well enough to earn it
by sticking it out for the duration, for her. But for how long? That was the
big question Gonza could not answer. I had to answer it for her and myself:
Until both parents, each now aged seventy-three—were dead and buried
and probated. I mused disapprovingly.

10

Did you ever see the ground foor of Fifth Avenue's Lord & Taylor decked
out to the hilt one week before Christmas and everywhere there are huge
supplies of goodies overfowing on and behind the counters? Did you ever
imagine you had an extra $10,000 in your pocket to be showy there? I had
only $300 in my pocket and each “throw” was $25 in this low-class, seedy
drive-in sexual retail establishment. I went twice to two different rooms
where the girls made business for themselves and the brothel's owner. But
before we go to these rooms, I must tell you about one of the most
interesting parts of my two transactions: the selection processes.

Drunk and randy as I was, I really did not waste too much time, but I
remember foating through groups of scantily-clad women who, often,
would juggle their breasts or open their legs for a few at their pudgy
49
pudendums sullied with ringlets of silky short black hairs. The indirect
lighting made the ladies look even better, for when I went to the room with
the frst lady, where the lighting was improved, I could distinguish,
suddenly, revealed features such as wrinkles and birthmarks and scrawny
skin and dyed hair and a heavily made-up face—distinctive qualities which
were not immediately recognizable, even to a sober individual, in the
obscure illumination where the selective process had been effectuated.

This frst choice turned out to be a mid-thirtyish bosomy woman, who

really was in her mid-forties, and she possessed huge breasts and an
enormous derriere. She had long black hair, a charming smile, and huge
brown, sad eyes. She was attractive, on the heavy, but pleasantly chunky
side. She was not excessively weighty. She had a sultry look, and she knew
had to arouse me. Yet, she was not exactly what I had expected her to be.
She became business-like, stripped, went to work, and took no pleasure in
it. Afterwards she told me to clean up in a pail of stagnant water in the
bathroom. There was no running water. When I realized I was not in the
most sanitary of business arrangements, I dove for the soap and frothed
rapidly my penis and testicles to a rich lather as fast as I could, entertaining
wishes for the best. My mind and body—now a bit at peace after that quick
ejaculation—decided that the quick relationship, having released some of
my sexual tension, had been a good event. The sudden consonance of my
imaginative forces with my physical drives, bade me return to my hotel and
do some more washing “down there.” (“Enjoyed active sexuality may be as
stressful as enjoyed chastity.” Margaret Mead said that!)

As soon as I went back to the lobby, heading for the door, a beautiful
young Colombian girl, she looked twentyish in the shadows and was
twentyish in the sensation of brightness, grabbed me by the hands and
implored me to go to her room where she said I would be sure to have a
good time and not run out after a “quickie” as I had had with “that old bag
over there sitting with the big grin.” This one was a bit too anxious, but
since she sounded so sincere about it (she probably was in cahoots with the
other woman), I gave her “A” for effort, I decided to try to recoup my loss
shelling out the same $25.00.

It was beyond belief. She wanted to engage in sexual intercourse. And that
was that. She was a wiggling sexologist who not only enjoyed her work, but
put every effort humanly possible into it. But permit me to describe her
50
room frst.

You see, the fop was one of those old motels with 1950 décor: fat, boxed,
and “modern.” Putrid. As they are in Hollywood, Florida. Really pukey. A
cucaracha-infested hole. The grass outside was not manicured, lights were
broken, and beer cans and cigarette butts were all over the place.

When I entered the girl's room, I was struck immediately into visual shock.
She had all four walls—and the ceiling—wall-papered with pictures of
naked North American and French men with stiff or faccid penes. Mostly
magazine pictures, but there were also some genuine porno photographs.
The men all had smiles or passionate grimaces on their faces, and most of
the penese were circumsized—as far as I could see. (Do women prefer men
with or without circumcisions?) The room had two, one red; one white,
spotlight lamps, the type used to set aglow lawns and plastic plants on
Collins Avenue, Miami Beach, and Palm Beach. The effect was sensual. The
muchcha ushered me to the pail of water in the bathroom and washed my
penis as I gazed at cans of hair spray, perfume bottles, hair brushes, a
shower cap, make-up and cosmetic cases. There were lacey bras and
panties hanging on the shower's stainless steel curtain rod. I lifted up and
slid off her HARVARD UNIVERSITY t-shirt as she whipped soap foam
around my miembro viril and parts adjacent to it. Then I unhooked her
Maidenform 38-D-cupped brassiere and latched my mouth onto one of her
dark nipples—tough and chunky.

We tumbled into bed and she began to gyrate to my heart's content,

switching positions during her repertoire of supervised sexual actions—one
of which was the following: she turned on her belly, spit on the index
fnger and middle fnger of her right hand, rubbed her saliva in and around
her anus, and then grabbed my penis and jabbed it into the excretory
opening of her alimentary canal. She knew all the tricks of the sex trade,
and took vigorous delight in her work looking after her own satisfaction.
The Total Prostitute.

After twenty minutes or so of this violent commotion, this jodiendo, my

head spinning with North Americam and French penes, we paused to
examine our sweating bodies and began to talk about cultural sexo. For
example, in Venezuela, “c**t” is cuca; but, in Perú, Chile, and Colombia it is
chucha. In Argentina, Uraguay, Paraguay, and Cuba, it is concha. And in
51
glorious Spain, coño. I was stunned to know that there were different
names for “c**t” in different South American countries. It indicated to me
a basic defciency of oneness in the sense of uniformity of overall structure
and character. The girl told me that many words have different meanings in
distinct South American and Central American countries—they being all
very chauvinistic in their dispositions.

We got going into her personal life and she astounded me again. A student
of history in the Universidad de Bogotà she was, “working her way through
college during the summer vacation.” Yet she was terribly dissatisfed with
Bogotà U because it was always being closed on account of “communist-
inspired demonstrations and riots” which often turned into bloody
confrontations between the police and many members of the student body
laden with leftist, and even, right-wing sentiments. And so she told me of
her dream: to go to study in the United States of America where she
believed she could pursue her career in calm and dignity. She asked me to
explain to her university life in the USA, and I flled her in on the good
points (huge campus bookstores with enormous selections of colored
sweatshirts and t-shirts sealed with the university's) and the bad ones
(cafetería food)—she thinking satisfyingly about how much better it would
be for her there rather than in Bogotà University.

She asked me about my girlfriend and wanted to know if Gonza was better
in bed than she was. I had to admit that she was not, but I told her I was
very much in love with my girlfriend, and I was hoping to marry her one
day. She dropped gloomy eyes onto the bed. When we dressed she walked
with me to the front door of the the motel, and we chatted further until my
taxi arrived. When I started off, I could see her with tears in her eyes
leaning against the door frame of the main entrance. She waved her hand
tenderly at me, then blew kisses to me. I clutched a piece of paper with her
name and address on it as the gonococcus, that had been transmitted to me
in the hotel, began to infame my urethra and later cause me pain when I
urinated.

11

When I got back to Caracas, I returned to MIT and renewed participation

in the persistent mental disorder of that place—my clap on the cure with
antibiotics. I was lucky that Gonza's menses were fowing again, because
52
the doctor told me not to have sex with anyone for two weeks. Translations
and rewrites were my main task assignments at MIT, and when there were
none, I accompanied other workers in the offce on VIP service calls to
airports, hotels, and government offces situated in the craziest places in
Caracas. During my travels from one place to another, I met kings, queens,
princes, princesses, presidents, foreign ministers, ambassadors, scholars,
editors, and cocaine bagmen. My chauffeur, Carlos Estrepa, hauled me
around one offce to another whenever I went on duty outside MIT. We
had a huge Ford Ltd with airconditioning, two-way radio/telephone,
television, a siren that went WEEEEEEEEEAH WEEEEEHAH, and two
gigantic red lights on the car's front fenders—like those one sees on
fretrucks. These accruements helped a bit in traffc jams, but not really a
great deal.

Carlos and I made many trips together during my months at MIT, before I
was fred, and we developed a fondness for each other that was charming
and respectful. Many mornings he passed by my quinta to pick me up and
take me to work. My neighbors went loco because they thought I was a
personaje importante in the government. I was so embarrassed. I preferred
the por puesto. I always sat in the front seat with Carlos, riding shotgun, and
that impressed the hell out of him. For two months, until he got tired of
telling me, he insisted I occupy the backseat when he chauffeured me. And
then, too, if we were alone and we stopped for lunch, I always invited
Carlos in with me to eat while the other “chauffs” waited in their cars.
Since MIT was paying for my lunches on out-of-offce assignments, Carlos
and I went to the best restaurants in Caracas, some of which included the
following: Tyrol, El Palmar, El Tinajero de los Helechos, El Gran
Charolais, Hereford Grill, La Estancia, El Tejar, Mee Nam, El Palmar,
Aventino, Bagatelle, Antoine, Henry IV, La Bastille, La Belle Epoque,
Lassserre, La Cava, Da Guido, Franco, Il Padrino, L'Inferno, Altamar, and
my favorite, Costa Vasca. I even took Carlos with me to a Yehudi Menahin
concert at Teatro Municipal—my carnet from MIT letting us in free at all
public functions in Venezuela. And Carlos knew, too, that if his wife or kids
had to go to the doctor, he could count on me to rough it in a cab or por
puesto. And every week I lent him my carnet to go buy food in the military
discount store where certain government offcials and workers, including
myself, had access to discounted purchases. I could not cook in my room,
so I had no need of discounted food. Carlos's poor family, and I had met
them, needed these price breaks more than I did. Perhaps Carlos was
53
Tonto to MIT (tonto means stupid in Spanish) but he was not going to be
tonto for me.

So when Mrs Carter, wife of President Jimmy Carter, visited Caracas and I
had a problem with three female journalists, Carlos was ready to put his a*s
on the line for me without hesitation. Carlos was with me when I went
through one of the most disgusting experiences of my stay at MIT.

We were down at the airport waiting on Mrs Carter's jet to roll into the off-
load section of the airport. With the Nixon experience in the back of
everyone's minds—the Venezuelans were the frst to spit on Richard M
Nixon and they did it years before the Americans ever got around to doing
it—you can imagine how tight security was. A battalion of cover and
undercover Secret Service agents, many equipped with attaché cases
containing Israeli machine guns and “high-powered handgrenades, buzzed
in and around and between the airport's huge plant. Even the Kennedy
family would have been impressed. To get into the place and onto the
premises, we had to wear three IDs: one from MIT, one from the Ministerio
de Defensa, and one from the United States embassy. The SS men kept
talking into little radio microphones—the receptive part of the two-way
communication system ear-plugged into their heads. They wore smart suits,
and were bright, athletic-looking men. Little green, yellow, and black pins
in their suits' button holes, identifed the protective agents. Mrs Carter had
a small army to protect her: Secret Service agents, United States military
personnel, and Venezuelan police and army contingents who were as
closely watched as Mrs Carter was.

My job was to lead the cavalcade of North American journalists into

Caracas from the airport. I had been a convoy commander once in
Vietnam, so I had an idea of what had to be done and what hassles could
arise. I had a feet of ffteen Ford LTDs and four Venezuelan Army
motorcycles with heavily-armed non-commissioned offcers to escort us
into town: two of them in the front; two of them in the back. Soldiers had
been placed at most strategic points along the route from the airport to
Mirafores, a thirty minute drive, where Mrs Carter was to hold a news
conference when everyone had been settled into their name-tagged chairs
in the press conference sala of the Venezuelan President't work place.

There were news media characters from Newsweek, Time, St Petersburg

54
Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, The New York Times,
Associated Press, United Press International, Cox newspapers, ABC, CBS,
NBC, and even the Voice o America. We were prepared to do our best for
the journalists, mostly women, and their quarters, at the Circulo Militar, and
food, were of frst-class quality. They could not have asked for more—even
though they did.

All the drivers had washed and waxed their black limousines; the insides
were spic n' span; and, the windows were Glassex squeaky. Each driver
waited at his car and was prepared to load baggage into the trunk, open the
doors for his passengers whom I had assigned to the cars to save time in
loading, and offer all the amenities and courtesies possible to make the stay
for the tired journalists—who were on the last leg of their trip—as
comfortable as possible.

The loadings went smoothly enough. Carlos helped me direct this and that
collector of news items to her car, and I was immediately impressed with
how tired and grouchy everyone was. They looked like a motley crew of
tourists disembarking from a long, third-class train journey, nearly
exhausted and hungry, all fagging along to their cars. Each one had a
White House press pass hanging on a chain around their necks. Almost all
complained when we politely offered them a Venezuelan government
carnet that we knew would help us entertain them more effciently during
their two-day work visit.

It was not long before my three guests, representatives from Time, NBC,
and The Washington Post, if I remember correctly, came to my car after
the loud roll calls of names I had been making in front of the arrival
terminal on one of the airport's peripheral roads. I had a mini loudspeaker.
It was my wish to secure the arrivers safely and comfortably in their seats in
the backs of the ffteen Ford LTD sedans that stood at attention in fle
waiting to zoom to Mirafores.

I graced my group and greeted them with a smile and a friendly “Hi, there!”
“Are things going to be as f****d up
here as they were in the other countries
we visited in f*****g South America?” came their
gloomy rheums.
“Well, ladies, I surely hope not.
55
 Were things a bit trying for you in South America?” I attempted
to take hold of the situation.
“Trying!!!
It's been a f*****g nightmare. Shitty food,
long waits at airports, and all kinds of other s**t you just wouldn't believe!”
one complained vociferously.
“I can only tell you we have prepared a very pleasant stay for you.
Your accommodations are topnotch, and you will have a chauffeured car
at your disposal twenty-four hours a day.
Please inform me of your needs, and I will do the best to help you,”
I talked calmly and convincingly reassuring the girls that things
would be totally different in media-conscious Venezuela
where every effort had been taken to serve and satisfy.

The girls grunted and groaned “We'll see about that,” and when I saw that
all the people informers were situated in their cars, I radioed that I was
ready to proceed to Caracas. One woman squealed to another that all she
needed was a hot meal and a “good lay.” I looked back at her and her
scraggy legs and wondered sorrowfully who was going to have that
opportunity.

We pulled out rapidly and headed for one of the airport's gates that had
been assigned to the journalist caravan. I had it in mind to beat Mrs Carter
and her hostess, Señora Blanca Pérez, wife of President Pérez, to Mirafores
and get the journalists I was charged with comfortably seated before the
arrival of the frst ladies. Mrs Carter was still posing for photographs and
shaking hands with Venezuelan well-wishers.

When we reached our out spot at the airport's passageway out, it was
closed, and a Venezuelan Army major, who was posted there with three
armed lieutenants and twenty machine-gun carrying troopers, stood still
without moving to open up. I sent Carlos to instruct him to permit us to
lapse through, and when Carlos rushed back with a negative frown, I knew
my hopes for things to go like clockwork were sliding into oblivion. I got on
the radio fast. The major would not release the lock without orders from
his superiors. I could not imagine where the foul-up was originating, but I
knew my best bet was to bleed the radio for information—but how long
would it take?
56
A tediously protracted ten minutes! At least the car was airconditioned to
help us tolerate the hot, muggy seaside temperature. The girls were
insulting and inconsiderate throughout.

“Another f**k-up, Marlene.”

“Yeah. These goddam f*****g banana republics.”

While I squirmed in my seat, they began to comment on their last visiting

place.

“Remember the ceiling in the offce of the President?

He thought it was some kind of f*****g Cistine Chapel
with all that gaudy painting up there.”
“Yeah. And the Simón Bolívar Plaza in the downtown area.
Big f****g deal. We've got loads
of that shit in Washington.”
“Marlene, have you heard all the stories about
what a stud Carlos Andrés Pérez is?”
“No, but I don't think he's such a hot number.
He's got the face of a Mafa gangster.”

And so on and so forth, their mouths spewing forth bitter gall and pointless
non sequiturs. I even felt a bit sorry for them. The gate fnally opened. I told
Carlos to buzz off, and like a shot we were fying, fnally, to Caracas. Carlos
honchoed the motorcycle escorts with his siren when they delayed too long
for him at an intersection or busy shopping area. People were lined along
the streets watching the spectacle blur by them.

It was not long before another disaster occurred. Just before we entered
the expressway to Caracas, we got caught at a red light where a farmer in
his pickup truck was stopped before us. The access road to the major
divided highway was single-laned, so we could not pull up around this guy
to pass him. The upfront motorcycle drivers were signaling him with their
sirens and screeching coño de su madre (m**********r) at him to get him to
pass on; but, he refused. Even when the two soldiers dismounted their
bikes and went to speak to him, he directed his hand at the red light and
reaffrmed his obligation to remain for the green.

There was no time to argue with the old man, so the motorcycle drivers
57
eased their Harley-Davidsons up to the back fender of his pickup and
started pushing the vehicle, flled with caged chickens, out of the way. The
weight of the conveyance was so heavy, the back wheels of the motorcycle
began to burn up in a cloud of blurry black tire rubber which accumulated
round the windows of our limousine, and set about seeping through the
airconditioning system.

The ladies kept muttering “another banana republic f**k-up” when the
traffc light eventually changed. Then the farmer took off screaming curses
at the motorcade. With the way clear again, I gave Carlos, who was rather
embarrassed at his point, the high sign and we were off to the races after a
one and one-half minute delay that seemed to have been an eternity.

More nasty remarks from the rear. I had all to do to keep from popping off
to the offensively self-assured female information collectors. We were
running along at a good clip when the girls caught sight of Mrs Carter and
Señora Pérez's motorcade way beyond us, and sighed their disbelief to me
that we would be in Mirafores before Mrs Carter. Another “banana
republic f**k-up.”

I looked at Carlos grimly. Carlos did not speak Engleesh, but caught the
drift of the bitching immediately. He shrugged his shoulders, then
suddenly alighted with an idea that he conveyed to me in silence by
pointing his right index fnger at the accelerator on the foor of the LTD. I
got the message and thought seriously for ten seconds—mostly about the
trouble I was about to get into—and when I nodded my head positively,
Carlos hit it hard and we rocketed off past our motorcycle escort onwards
to Mirafores. I looked back to survey the expressions on the ladies' faces,
and all I could see were legs and red, white, and blue panties—the
gravitational force had plastered the girls to the backseat—with this
inscription stitched on them: “I COVERED MRS CARTER'S 12-DAY
TOUR OF SOUTH AMERICA—June 1977.”

The women kept screaming “Slow down!” but I ignored them. They fnally
shut up when we whizzed by Mrs Carter and Señora Pérez, who looked at
us with the dumbest expressions imaginable, while the Secret Service
entourage and Venezuelan security forces cursed “f**k you's” and “coño de
su madre's” at us. We fnally crashed into Mirafores, red lights and siren
leading us on. The LTD's wheels squealed a piercing cry as we stopped to
58
let the girls out. They were furious. Carlos and I were waiting for then to go
inside so we could laugh our heads off.

One spiteful, lewd woman, the one who needed “a good lay,” shouted over
her shoulder at me: “I'm going to include this in my report to my editor
when I get back to the offce.”

I uprighted the middle fnger of my right hand and pumped my arm at her.
She nearly had a stroke, and Carlos grabbed my hand to stop me.

When we turned around, the two front escort motorcycle Venezuelan Army
non-coms from the Casa Militar, an elite corps that guards the President of
Venezuela and his family that had lead Mrs Carter and Señors Pérez into
Mirafores, a good fve minutes after Carlos's spectacular arrival, came
running towards us with their handcuffs unlatched. (“Handcuffs” is an
interesting Spanish word. “Esposas,” handcuffs, is the plural of the singular
“esposa,” which means wife!!!)

My boss, Clem, made a beeline to us and interceded pronto. He did not

want to scandalize Mrs Carter with an arrest of security-cleared people. He
ordered Carlos and me to report to his offce at nine sharp the next
morning, and when we went to him we were left off the hook with a mild
admonishment; we had become heroes overnight because everyone was
enraged at the White House Secret Service men and the Caracas US
embassy people for acting like such fatuous persons during the visit, and
since Carlos and I had upstaged them so dramatically, we were thrown
accolades wherever we went from then on, and people talked about us for
weeks as if we were fold heroes.

Shortly afterwards, riding high on the crest of our abruptly favorable public
esteem, Carlos and I had our car painted fre-engine red with dayglow
yellow piping, added red, amber, blue, and white revolving lights on the
car's roof, had the car's windows bullet-proofed, sent the bill to MIT, and
“breezed” thereafter through traffc jams as people stared fxedly—very
often opened at their mouths—at our mobile aberration which we
purposely misnamed—“sobriquetted,” if I may—E l Árbol de Navidad, The
Christmas Tree.

12
59
Seeking Gonza's love and affection was becoming more and more and more
beset with diffculty. I did not know it at the time—nor did she—that Gonza
was incubating cancer in the left breast, benign epithelial tumors in the
right, and polyps on her uterus. How would I have reacted if I had known?
Her libido was low-strung and her reactions were more depressive than
usual. I never imagined that her physical health might be in jeopardy.
Doctors don't get sick, do they? My “diagnosis” was based on the possessive
relationship she was embroiled in with her family and her society. Later, in
retrospect, I wondered, “Was it this that caused her cancer?” The stress?
The loss of weight? The poor eating habits? I will never know. But Gonza
was in a bad way suddenly, and my treatment offense was to insist that she
desist from her morbid attachment to her mother, father, and brother. This
turned out to be a useless tactic, of course.

In the La Colina Hotel one Sunday afternoon, the abuela with the beasts on
a tour of the family circuit, Gonza and I refected on our situation that was
beginning to appear more and more impossible to hold onto. (If only we
could admit it; if only we would.) Our love was strong, but it seemed to be
set against insuperable obstacles, and we were bitter with the situation
which dulled our dreams and supplanted our successes. It had been so
different when we lived together in the States.

We thought back upon the good times in Gainesville. The tender moments
clutched in oneness underneath the swishing pine trees outside our
apartment. We had given names to the trees we imagined in love as we
were: José and María, Christopher and Alyson; names we wished to give to
our own children if ever we had them. We remembered the long rides
through northeastern Florida: the huge oak trees...the charming little
southern municipalities...the tobacco leaves blowing in the winds which
augured a powerful electric storm...the lakes with cabins chained around
them along their waters' edges...the rows of pine trees set, in fles running
vertically, by gargantuan paper corporations...the Florida State Highway
Patrol cruisers, black and cream colored, scurrying past us to chase a
speeder...the trips to Atlanta Stadium to check on a patient of Gonza's who
played infeld for the Braves...the car's radio emitting our favorite romantic
tunes...

And there was Gainesville itself: the All-American city, the home of
Florida's largest educational facility, The Flagship Univercity, the
60
University of Florida...the charming and elegant southern-styled homes in
the city's northwest section...the nights of English and ophthalmology
study sessions in the university library...our apartment set in a low-rolling
hill area where there were enormous pine trees...the Gator footbsll games
when we would ascend to the top rows in Florida Field, and from our
benched seats, fing paper airplanes, made from our programs, onto the
playing feld...the swims in the pool outside our apartment...the Saturday
afternoons in the movies holding hands and kissing...the shopping trips to
the Publix supermarket where we walked together imagining we were
married...sipping on beers from the rime-laden Heineken aluminum kegs
that were set alongside the pool on hot Saturday and Sunday
afternoons...steak and wine and salad and chocolate cake late night private
dinner parties...tennis games at the wire-guarded public parks...NO
PARENTS!!! Yet.

We recalled and told over and over and over again of past experiences
together in the United States. The memories themselves, a source of
emotional resuscitation; the wish to repeat them still in the future, a cause
of continual expectation. Now here we were together twisting in our bodies'
smells and fuids, our resistances low to the system of forces that tended to
strain and deform our happiest thoughts. Always it was the considerations
of the past—not the present or future—which acted, partially, to supply us
with the physical and emotional power to go on.

I could not help being worried about Gonza. “My dearest, gringo. Oh, how
much I want your kisses and hugs,” she languishingly exhaled her sorrow
and weariness in long, deep breaths.

“Don't worry, darling, everything will be all right,” I lied with a trite,
overused expression which was the only idea that summoned itself easily to
my consciousness, then found existence upon my lips.

But why not “all right?” I sipped on the eternal springs of hope. There was
no sane reason not to be optimistic. Can we not, in fact, create our own
happiness? I pushed my will to its limits. Be positive. Chin up. Stiff upper
lip. It was an effort in futility.

“Gonza, look...You and I are passing—well, Gonza, our relationship is

passing, really—through a crisis of credibility. But understand one thing,
61
darling, please. It's not with us that the problem exists. We, in our little
world, our own orbit of being, are happy and content. What a beautiful
love we have. We are one; we are joined forever. We must control ourselves
when the connection to each other is threatened. If we realize this, that this
is happening to us, we can cope, we can handle it. Sweetheart, let's do it!
Let's fght for us.! Let's not allow anything to destroy the integrity of our
loving union! Are you with me? We can do it,” I charged her up, and
myself, as some football coach before a big game. Gonza was cleverer.

“Oh, gringo, you are so loyal to me. You are so strong for us. I love you all
the more. I love you so very much. What am I going to do with you...” (My
brain waves suddenly fuctuated on that) … “when you are so faithful to
me.? How can I ever forget you?”

I busted in calmly looking her straight in the eyes: “Gonza, are you trying
to forget me?”

“No, darling, no! How can I forget you, really now?” she bromided almost
belligerently moulding a bi-partite bottom of distrust, then security, as the
basis on which our love should stand, should be founded, should be
supported.

“But, Gonza, you're talking as if you have given up hope already! Didn't
you hear yourself what you just said: 'How can I ever forget you?' Gonza,
what is it that you are thinking? Please level with me; I beg you. Be honest
with me,” I implored with an agonizing demand—my voice almost crying
out.

“Sweetheart,” she went on, “you know I love you. You know the problems I
am set against here. My career, my children, my need to make money so we
can live together, so that we can share the life we have always dreamt
about. But this is impossible now. I cannot think of marriage until these
things are in order. I cannot think of any solutions to my fnancial
diffculties—instantaneously.”

I thought immediately of her parents, and the notion of them helping

Gonza and I to live on our own with the ugly ones; that this was merely a
wish I had to discard with disgust. And if Gonza was not going to ask them
for us, it was not my prerogative to ask her to do so—as much as I thought
62
one and all might enjoy happier lives together if this impediment to
fnancial security had been obliterated. But, surely, even if money was no
diffculty, the problems with the parents, who had refused to see me since
my arrival in Caracas, would persist; perhaps they would even aggravate
themselves more persistently. I knew there was little chance to expect help
from them for us: they ignored my invitation to meet with them to discuss
the pressures which had erupted to disturb so violently the emotional life
of their only daughter.

“Gonza,” I decided to force the issue, but proceeded delicately, “let's talk
about what is really screwing up the works for us. At least, let me offer my
version. Do you understand me? My concern? If you are latched on to
something which is keeping us from being together—even though you want
us to be together for forever—it will only be a matter of time before we
crash to the bottom. We cannot be set against each other. It is counter-
productive to the relationship.”

“I'm not against us or our relationship,” she insisted.

“I think you are, Gonza,” I chimed in ever so softly.

She thought on it a bit, then quizzed me capriciously.

“How am I against us?”

she leaned towards me and ordered me to report to her my fndings.

I was tempted to blurt out “P-A-R-E-N-T-S!!! my dearest, P-A-R-E-N-T-S!

my dearest” but I suffocated the surge which had surfaced suddenly from
my gut to my breast. I had to control myself.

“My dearest, Gonza. Tell me that it is not children, it is not career, it is not
money that keeps us apart! Tell me that there is fear in you to live with me
here! There is something that is holding you back from me! There is a force
denying us our well-deserved happiness! Tell me, tell me, tell me your
parents are pulling on you not to be with me as much as I am pulling on
you to love me and live with me,” I released the foodgates of my pent-up
hostilities.

“It is not my parents, I swear to you.”

63
 “Gonza, what is it?”
“Security. For me, for the children.”
“Gonza, I can't give you the security you need.
That is out of my league. You already knew that.
I can never measure up to your father's fnancial power.
What can I do?
What do you want me to do?
Is this the end for us?”
“There cannot ever be an end for us.
There can only be beginnings,” she made me believe her.
“Darling, I said “we are at a dead-end.
We cannot continue in this manner,” my thinking
caved in under the absurdity of it all; my heart yearned not to lose Gonza.

I had but one chance and one chance alone: to play the “mister” of Gonza
until her parents no longer existed. To hope to be with her someday, to
pine away until the moment of deliverance arrived, to take back seat to her,
her children, her parents, her society; her, her, her! My role had been
defned for me. The beginnings would come when Gonza would allow
them to come. Not before. The parents, at all costs, had to be placated: $$
$.

Gonza sensed my profound grief. Then she felt guilty. She was kind
enough to sympathize with me. Kind enough to root me on in my
depression. Kind enough to offer me hope for the future. I bowed my head
in silence and tears came to my eyes. I told her I would do anything for her.
I would sacrifce for her. She did not want me to be so sad, so frustrated.
She decided to relieve me a bit. She told me she would go away for a week,
to Mérida, in the Andes mountains, with her parents and children, and
there talk about us and confront her mother and father with her feelings
for me. That would be diffcult she said; but, she realized she had to do
something for me. She made no promises. She told me not to get my hopes
up. I felt a grand relief. Gonza was fnally going to them to speak up for us
—for me! Perhaps my dream might come true after all. Perhaps we might
rekindle our receding love. What a fool I was to imagine so optimistically!

13

64
María Victoria's engagement party inspired awe in the thousands of guests
invited to the on-going, three-day pre-nuptial shindig in the Hotel
Tamanaco's Naiguata Sala. Because of previous work commitments, Carlos
and I did not arrive until late the frst night. We swooped on through
wooden Venezuelan Army and police stanchions which had been placed in
the streets near the hotel to keep the hundreds of supplicating mendicants
out of reach of the rich, high society, diplo, and governmental party-goers.

When we reached the parking lot, television crews, which had been
monitoring the comings and going of the diplomatic corps and important
North American and South American, and European industrialists, ran to
t h e E l Árbol de Navidad that was splashing red, amber, blue, and white
circular fooded fashes along the windows of the Hotel Tamanaco's second
and third foors. Four Venezuelan Army lieutenants, toting Israeli sub-
machine guns, escorted Carlos and me to the reserved parking zone of the
director of the hotel, removed two small dayglow red-orange plastic
barriers from the executive's spot, and guided us in with military police-like
hand and arm stringent movements. Two of the offcers remained to guard
the El Árbol de Navidad, and they were still standing at attention when we
found them there two and a half hours later. After we had shut down El
Árbol de Navidad's lighting system, all the telejournalists returned to the
main entrance of the Tamanaco to resume covering the arrivals of more,
important dignitaries, guests, and lardy-das, many of whom were landing
on the two-Chinook helicopter shuttle set up by the Venezuelan Air Force
between Maiquetía and Carlota airports and the Tamanaco. Carlos and I
were dressed in white tuxedos with red ties, red handkerchiefs, and red
piping at the sides of our white pants. As a courtesy to me, Carlos was not
asked—as other invited ones had been—to check his two 9mm PPKSs that
he carried at his sides, under his armpits.

Getting Carlos to come to the party had been a chore—I had to remind him
of his bodyguard duties to me; getting him to put on a tuxedo was like
pulling impacted wisdom teeth from hungry river horses.

When one works with a partner over a protracted period of time, his or her
peculiarities surface as a reminder that each and everyone of us is a
bottomless pit of not only surprises, but of strange features that support
other identifying elements which all possess fnality in making a whole of
many parts. So it was with Carlos. He rigidly played Tonto with me—all
65
the time. His essence. Then, suddenly—but very, very infrequently—he
played Uppity Indian. And Carlos was Indian! His parents came from the
Amazonas, Boca Mavaca, near the Brazilian border. He, too, after all, was
full of his own pride. Putting on a monkey suit was a big insult to him. It
signaled that his being was being altered by others. I tried to explain to him
that playing Tonto for MIT was even a bigger offensive action, but he could
not connect up suffciently with this theorizing. The MIT shelled out
bolívares to him each month—bolívares he needed to feed his family. That
was necessary bootlicking. The monkey suit was above and beyond the call
of duty. I told him, fnally, to stay at home; but, he reverted immediately to
his Tontoismness. He was afraid to loss his job. I insisted it would not
matter, but he was not to be missed at the Tamanaco. He would have
preferred coming in his usual get-up (suitcoat and tie) and wait in the
parking lot with the El Árbol de Navidad and the other chaufs.

Carlos kept making me feel like The Lone Ranger, and I did not appreciate
it. Wherever we went he guarded me carefully. At night, in dangerous
Caracas residential zones, he often stuck his right hand on his left PPKS
when he thought that “prophylactic” was recommended. And he held
doors for me, carried attaché cases, supervised elevator openings to
conserve time, checked my apartado in the Sabana Grande post offce every
morning, and was always loyal to me not of his own volition—and I really
think he respected me very much—but because it was his job to do so.
Carlos did not like the order of things, but he seemed to be implying that
he would wait until a new one would be created. To him the present was
already the past because the now had no value for him. What might beneft
him and his family would come in the future; not from the past; not from
the present. The past of the Venezuelan Indian was horrible enough; his
present perhaps worse. Certainly, not better. He had to look forward. Not
up in hope because there probably would never be any; not down in
despair because there existed the imperative to survive. Survival could not
be based on the sufferings of the past. The future might bring the better,
but the act of outlasting could not be grounded on the dreamworld of the
future. So Carlos had the divine will of the Stoic in him: seemingly
indifferent to joy, grief, pleasure, or pain. The perfect retinue. He could not
accept explicitly his work. He did not think it was constructive. It might
even be destructive. It gave very little to him and his family, but pretended
to dole out a lot. Carlos was not stupid. A dullard? No. He was wary. He
had to pocket, out of sheer desperation, those bits which crumbled his
66
way. They were all he had. He could not chime in with the new social order
that Washington, through Carlos Andrés Pérez, was fomenting. In fact, I
believe Carlos would destroy that political invention if he had the chance to
do so. Carlos was split in two: the monkey suit and the rain dance. To put
on the monkey suit was too live, too close to the present he hated. He
rejected vehemently what was being shoved his way. Yet, he had to
kowtow. I felt sorry for him. He wanted to slush in the mud. I believed he
was forced to do something he had not the slightest desire to accomplish.
And the notion that I, too, was victim to what was trying to destroy him and
his country, erected a makeshift bridge between the two of us. I was in the
system to be with the unfaithful Gonza, not to empower it. I did not care
about the Washington-Caracas connection; therefore, I was in good stead
with Carlos. Still, we could not be close friends. The gulf was too great
between us. The way of the Indian was Carlos's path: patience,
forbearance, suffering,. He looked at me without promise, without disgust.
I could see one thing through his eyes that struck me squarely in the
viscera: the “Indians” of Central and South America, on the political
warpath, were looking more and more upon the conquistadores del presente
with disgust tinged with hatred. They were learning to ride on up and out,
and not on the wings of democratic capitalism or Soviet Marxism-
Leninism. A new seed had been planted in the dried blood of centuries.
Carlos and his people's loathing was beginning to simmer beyond the low
boil. (Excuse me, my dear reader. I have gone a bit stylistically out of whack
here. Let us return to María Victoria's engagement party.)

When we walked on into the tremendous hall, the frst vivid perception
produced for us was His Eminence, Juan Carlos Cardenal Cardona,
sprinkling holy water with a diamond-studded pocket aspergill, a gift from
his mother for being elevated to the bishopric ten years before, on the
seven-karat diamond engagement ring of María Victoria. His Eminence
daubed away with his aspergill, and television cameras and videocassette
recorders picked up on the droplets of sanctifed H²O dripping off María
Victoria's gigantic chunk of “ice” unto the violet-red velvet cushion which
bore the weight of it. In His Eminence's right hand there was a crystal glass
flled with Old Parr on the rocks—between his thumb and index fnger; a
world-famous Rothman's International export with a long ash and a
tradition of over ninety years of fne blending, the favorite of clubs and
embassies throughout the world (between his middle fnger and ring
fnger); and, a gigantic ruby red ring surrounded by diamonds (surely
67
smaller than María Victoria's eye-opener) which he bought in the Vatican's
secret FOR BISHOPS & CARDINALS ONLY Jewelry Bargain Store in the
Catacombs. From His Eminence's Right Reverended Right Hand and its
glistening ring, the imprint of the glistening-on-ice Old Parr, of the
sparkling gold-banded Rothman, and of the resplendent discounted ruby,
so fascinated one periodista from El Momento de Caracas, he ran to his press
car, copped his Nikon 9, and trotted back to shoot a still of the Right Hand
that he thought might be a live presentation of an event that appeared
unexplainable by the laws of Nature and so is held to be supernatural in
origin, or an Act of Dios. (He later entered the “shot” of the thought-to-be
miracle, now a “work of Art,” in the Second Annual International
Venezuelan Photographic Aptitude Regalia.)

After His Eminence fnished scattering globules of Holy H²O all over the
room, he headed for María Victoria and Francisco, and His Eminence's
imminent impulse, was to dash liquid upon the twofold voluptuous,
uplifted mounds of María Victoria's 39 D-cupped curvaceous masses, while
her betrothed bowed his head in prayer. He pitched to and fro. And again.
María Victoria was wet through and through. She fickered her long, water-
beaded lashes for the media, crossed herself from forehead to crack
between her gigantic bosoms, then left shoulder to right shoulder, tilted
her head down, kissed the thumb nail of her right hand three times, and
thanked the Almighty One Above for sending to Brazil, from the Heavens,
the plastic surgeon who grafted the new membranous fold of tissue that
now completely occluded her vagina's external orifce. The so-called, in
Rio, “Immaculate Implantation.”

His Eminence then tipped unsteadily to the boxes of whisky, champagne,

and wines; mounds of smoked salmon, lobster, roast beef, and caviar; crates
of two-hundred sixty-four assorted French cheeses, barrels of fruit,
chocolates, and mints; bundles of Havanas and other imported tobaccos, et
cetera; and, dispersed more sprays of consecrated H²O in every direction he
walked swervingly.

Carlos and I shifted ground in the company of what gave the impression of
being a “see” of low-cut dresses, sheeny jewelry, mauve-colored tuxedos,
gold Rolex watches, and ornamented fngers holding paper cups, signaling
the red, white and blue logo of the Pepsi-Cola company, flled with
expensive French champagne. Generally, the men were off standing in
68
groups of threes and fours, the women sitting in small and large
assemblages. We ventured to the mannish, extreme opposite.

There was Jesúcristo Márquez Pompeyo with the El Ministro del Trabajo y
El Ministro de Educación. Jesuúcristo, son of eminent Venezuelan socialites,
is pushing a nationwide chain of English-teaching institutes. He needs
government permission and backing for his enterprise: work visas for
poverty-stricken Oxford PhDs, and building permits to erect government
subsidized educational facilities.

There was José Vincente Rangoso with El Ministro de Agricultura y Cria and
El Ministro de Desarrollo Urbano. “Joe,” male offspring of wealthy
Venezuelan landowners, is negotiating with North American hydroponics
companies to cultivate vegetables in water containing dissolved inorganic
nutrients. Caracas is short on soil and “Joe” thinks he can make a bundle in
the vegetal business. He needs Agricultura y Cria import rights and
Desarrollo Urbano big business backing to get set up.

Over there is Rómulo Betunería, ex-president of Venezuela, with El

Ministro de Estado Para Asuntos Económicos Internaciónales and El Ministro de
Ambiente y de los Recursos Naturales Renovables. Rómulo, ex-communist
sympathizer and now member of the Democracy Hall of Fame, and a good
friend of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, is wheeling and dealing to sell his
memoirs in ten different languages, and to raise thousands and thousands
of cast-iron forms of sculptured likenesses of himself in pueblos throughout
the Venezuelan republic. He needs Estado Para Asuntos Económicos
Internaciónales tax deductions and Ambiente y Recursos Naturales Renovables
iron ore protection rights.

Forever my Tonto, Carlos stood next to me faithfully. We sashayed away

from the old men to the younglings. Fernando Acostado, twenty-fve years
old, heir to a heavy-duty machine company, was having love problems.
Engaged to Sonia Alvarez for seven years, he was reluctant to cave in under
the “marriage pressure.” He wanted an MBA from Harvard, and more girls
before he took the plunge—that long walk to the altar. In one hour he
would be in a Tamanaco bed with the forty-fve-year-old wife of El Ministro
de Estado Para Asuntos Económicos Internaciónales who kept talking with
Narcissistic Rómulo. Fernando sipped liberally on a gigantic Old Parr.

69
Ignacio Loyola Verga, twenty-six years old, in line to inherit the fortune of
a pharmaceutical company, producing condoms, was having love problems,
too. Married to Conchita Sanchez for three months, he was looking for an
abortionist in Miami to rid his high school sweetheart, Louisa, of an
embarrassing problem. He wanted the best medical attention for Louisa,
and was reluctant to send her to the “Butcher Shop,” “La Carnicería,” in
Caracas's elegant restaurant zone, El Rosal. In forty-fve minutes he would
be in a Tamanaco bed with the seventeen-year-old daughter of El Ministro
de Agricultura y Cria who was planting hydroponical notions into “Joe's”
head. Ignacio sniffed on cocaine and told Carlos and me to go to Francisco
and María Victoria's “tocador,” Powder Room, to secure gratuitous mini-
envelopes of the white surface anesthetic.

Frankie Sosiego, twenty-fve-years old, soon to take possession of a whisky

importation legacy, was having love problems, naturally. Divorced and
engaged to Elvira Zurriago, he was bending over backwards to escape
Elvira's persistent pleas to marry her. He wanted to travel to Scotland and
visit the distilleries for a year or two so he could break loose from Elvira's
matrimonial clutches. In thirty minutes he would be in a Tamanaco king-
size with the thirty-fve-year-old wife of the young El Ministro de Información
y Turismo, my boss, who was discussing his presidential possibilities with El
Presidente himself. Frankie sipped Old Parr, sniffed cocaine, and sucked
marihuana.

The next stop for Carlos and me was the Tamanaco's swimming pool area
where recreational facilities had been set up to entertain the teenage-and-
below crowd while their parents gluttonized themselves in the Naiguata
Sala. Betamaxes with cartoons, video games, a small band of seven hard
rock musicians unskilled in performing music, non-alcoholic refreshments
imported from the United States, Pepsi-Cola, hamburgers and hot dogs,
pulsating lights, dart boards, tennis tables, ping-pong tables, pinball
machines, electronic video games, shuffe boards, chess games, checker
games, and a Walkman 37 gift for each and everyone of the more or less
fve-hundred fabulous young beings, made the evening a “night to
remember.”

There was Chico Choo Choo, the thirteen-year-old son of the owner of
Venezuela's largest beer brewery. Chico was plugged into his Walkman 37
and was listening to the “Best of the Bee Gees” when we saw him sneak
70
behind the swimming pool pump house to steal a snort of cocaine.

Look! There's Roberta San José de Tarbes, ffteen-year-old daughter of

Venezuela's largest chocolate company owner. “Robbie's” bathing suit bra
had been yanked off in the pool by one of her boyfriends, and she was
running—her breasts heaving up and down—to the DAMAS room to avoid
the heckling which she was receiving from poolside.

And there was Chamo Rodriguez, sixteen-year-old son of the Venezuelan

ambassador to England. Chamo was smoking pot and drinking a glass of
Old Parr his father had snuck out to him, and he proceeded to enter the
DAMAS room where he stayed with “Robbie” for two hours listening to the
Bee Gees and enjoying “his” and “hers” bodies in one of the toilet stalls in
the bathroom. Carlos and I could hear Chamo singing to “Robbie,” along
with the Bee Gees, “How Deep Is Your Love?” Roberta panted “Muy
hondo! Muy hondo!! Muy hondo!!! (Very deep! Very deep!! Very Deep!!!)
Roberta pleaded: Más! Más!! Más!!! (Again! Again!! Again!!!)

Enough! Enough!! Enough!!! We returned to the Naiguata Sala and caught

sight of rhythmical bodies which had loosened their limbs to accomplish
sybaritic gyrations on a huge dance foor inlaid with parquetery. It was
mesmerizing to see how much in consonance were the bodily movements
with the powerfully sensuous music in abidance with the many Latin
percussion instruments made of metal, trees, and animal skins. The
melodious throbs undulated synchronously with both downbeat and
upbeat waves. It was integrated music for it satisfed frst the body with
passionate poundings upon the dense, bass parts of all the instruments;
then, it gave pleasure to the mind with light strokes upon the tingly, high-
pitched parts of all the musical devices. The blend, unique and stimulating,
engendered an exuberance that wheedled one and all on the foor, to
swing, then sway in enthusiastic abandonment. A tonic to both young and
old. When the Latin music halted, very often a disco tune from the United
States would send old folks scurrying for their seats while younger people
jerked stereotypically, jolted mechanically. There existed no soul in this
sharp, staccato-like, straight, modern music. With a Latin melody again
sounding loudly throughout the sala, all the way into the hotel's bedrooms,
parking lots, and pool area—where it faded into rugs, cushions,
macadamized slots for cars, and the air of the outdoors—people thronged
once again to feel their bodies in tune with their minds. They crowded the
71
dance foor, and some were forced off the wooden mosaics and found space
to bob up and down between scattered tables and chairs. There was an
energy in the air that obliterated tension and worry for as long as the music
played on.

It was relaxing to gaze upon the oscillating forms. The dancers had an even,
gentle motion in their shuffing gaits. Their arms rocked softly in front of
their bodies as if they were mimicking—in slow motion—the jostling of a
pair of maracas. I remembered being impressed with dancers in Afro-
American bars in Buffalo, Harlem, and Miami. Yes, the dancers there
created harmonious patterns in their relaxed rotations—refecting,
repeatedly, beautiful rebounds and recoils; but, their dancing was less
natural because it had politics in it: Blacks danced to identify themselves;
Blacks danced to be identifed. Theirs was a message. The Latin grouping
seemed to dance because it was the thing to do. Their steps and gestures
leaped from them as unaffectedly as stalks of corn blow in the wind. There
were no basic themes, no signifcances of something. Only the pleasure
produced by the expected order of things. Soothingly gracious. In
agreement. Free from affectation and artifciality. The feet of the frolickers
slid in short, patient glides; the bodies of the merrymakers revolved ever so
gently on an axis that ran into the deep recesses of the Earth. Men felt
proud, honorable; women felt joyous, affectionate. Carlos's eyes beamed
with delight. He jived. He swelled. He smiled. The beat bloated the vanities
of those moving up and down. Yet, it did not intoxicate them with
superiority. It stimulated them to feel part of what was beneath their feet. It
excited them to sense communion with Nature. It exhilarated them with
some moments of hope and promise for their loved ones. When the music
stopped, they returned to the state of actual being and sipped Old Parr,
sniffed white cocaine, and sucked Gold Mary Jane. I saw the ambassador of
the United States staring solemnly at the ice cubes in his almost fnished
glass of Old Parr.

I high-signed to Carlos that it was time to make our exit. Tonto stiffened to
the on-duty position. I led him to the food area, handed him a gigantic
plastic orange bag with a green alligator on it, took one myself, told him to
fll his bag with pounds of lobster and smoked salmon while I stuffed mine
with roast beef and potato salad, nodded to him to follow me to the El
Árbol de Navidad where we stored our “catch” in the trunk, then I told
Carlos to engage the El Árbol de Navidad's lighting system. We moved out
72
rapidly, and when we reached the cordon of Hispanic Panhandlers, we
opened the trunk and dropped the two orange plastic bags to the ground.
We started off again. Hi, ho, Silver! AAAAWWWAAAYYY!!! Through the
back window of the El Árbol de Navidad, I could see large groups of people
foraging in the midst of the bags, stuffng their anxious mouths with food.
Then Carlos turned to me and asked me if I knew when and where María
Victoria's wedding would be held.

* * *

I suppose the many images of drinks at María Victoria's engagement party

have whetted your thirst appetite, my dear reader. They certainly have
stimulated my taste buds,. You know, I am often asked: “What does a
writer want to drink after spending long hours creating truth and fantasy
for his highly-educated, highly-incomed readers still interested in the
ancient entertainment known as reading?” Well, after hours of being the
frst to portray and give character to commonly unknown roles millions of
people are leading, when the need for a bit of relaxation strikes me, I head
for the kitchen, boil a pot of water, then submerge a bag of TWININGS
EARL GREY TEA. Spiked with a slice of lemon—without sugar—this
marvelous brew, BY APPOINTMENT TO HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN,
swills round my mouth offering a unique, neat taste sensation. A super tea.
R Twining & Co, Tea & Coffee Merchants since 1706, has solved my tea
problem. Once swallowed, EARL GREY TEA infltrates my blood and
fows peace and well-being to all parts of my body. Truly, a remarkable
beverage. I highly recommend it to you. Enjoy TWININGS EARL GREY
TEA—especially when you are creating a long-lasting literary classic.

Now let us return to our thrilling romance. Gonza, who has come back to
Caracas after a short intimate vacation in the Andes, near Mérida, will
surprise all of us with a shocking revelation. Our protagonist is immersing
himself further and further and further in an impossible situation.

* * *

14

Gonza telephoned as soon as she got in from the Andes. She would not
discuss anything with me on the phone. Rather, she invited me to dinner
73
at the most expensive restaurant in Caracas, the Gazebo, a French eating
establishment, the following night. I was shocked at this unusual move. It
was not normal for Gonza to shell out two-to-three-hundred dollars for a
ritzy French meal. Either she was going to marry me or dump me in the
Orinoco river.

She jilted me with this grammatically-improper Swan Song that she told
me she composed in complete Andean serenity after hashing over the
situation with her mother and father:

“Ther are those loves like Romeo and Juliet,

all those operas are about that dont last.
They are only romantic stories, just that.
They are not true to life.
They are selfsh loves were there
is room for nothing more, for this reason,
they cant last.
They rise like foam, quick and exaggerated
but like foam, without grounds to hold itself,
it soon fopps.
They are selfsh because the involved persons
dont allow for nothing more
so they are predestined not to work
leaving great pain.
As adults we must realize
that there are certain norms to conform
to to succeed, to be able to live among fellow man.

I have two children.

I cant put them aside and forget
that they need me. I bought them to this world
conciousley, they were not an accident.
They have no father, I'm the only thing they have.
I must raise them to the best of my ability
even though I fail sometimes.
I dont have a steady income.
I am beginning my working career
that will take time to be profttable.
This is a fact.
74
 There is no doubt about it.
My destiny for the following ten years is traced.
I must put effort and dedication to this.
To be able to do this the mind must be quiet
if there is love at the same time it must be curbed,
it cant be wild and unprediktible,
it cant interfer with the basic grounds as as to
not allow these to function.

Your views are different,

love is the core, the ups and downs
and the thrills make you to keep going
no matter what, instability, suffering,
and great emotions.
I can guarantee this will lead to nowhere
not only with me but for yourself.

From my experience with you,

which has been full of emotions
fears and challenges anguished worries
which have not allowed me to function
as I should.
I could say there is no way out.
I can't expect you to wait
until I'm stable and have my duties
taken care for because I am
making you loose your time which is
as valuable as mine.
I cant expect you to wait.
I cant expet you to be alone
in a strange country without a friend
or a reason to be in going through ruff roads
I dont want you to-not only that-no
human being can stand this-why should you.
And even if you tried you would soon
come to realize that it is not at all worth the effort.
But this takes time.
You will see.
Time puts things in their place.
75
 Our relation was doomed.
It started at the wrong time
and it continued in the wrong time and wrong place.
We were children playing with love.
We like children believed it would work out,
we were playing with love. That was all that mattered.
It is a love that to survive it needed
to sacrifce everything else
society children, work family
I dont think you or I are prepared to be outcasts.
Yes you sacrifced everything
and so you want me to do the same.
I cant because two main reasons, the children
and a means to survive.

Up to now it has been almost impossible.

We cant go on.
I am returning to my mother and fathers house to live.
I think you need to think in peace.
So do I.
Dont try to contact me.
I'll be thinking too.
I think we must exchange ideas after. We will.
Dont panic. Dont do crazy things.”

I sank to the bottom. My gut tense. A million things passed in my mind: her
grammatical errors; her confusions; the strange way she crossed her “t's” (if
only I was a handwriting specialist); her psychological state flled with
feelings of unworthiness, pessimism, self-punishment, procrastination, and
pleasure avoidance; her chilling unfaithfulness to me after I had offered up
all to her. Was this then the end? Was she so forcefully under the spell of
mother and father? Was she suffering an emotional crisis that obstructed
her rationality? Was she really wanting to discard her lover or to react to an
unbearable situation? I wanted to hit her. I wanted to shock her out of it. I
wanted to love her. I was torn in two.Whichever way I turned, I lost. All the
pluses, all the minuses equalled zero. She made the move to break up. I
had no choice but to bow out like a gentleman. She was too wea to carry
the load. She had not the character to propel herself, much less the load of
the two of us. I was very sad. I was at sea. Tears came to my eyes. I could
76
not speak.

At the same time I did not want to play a self-immolating role. I did not
want to accept defeat. She was playing lousy. Her family was playing dirty. I
looked forlornly at her. She was willing to end it all because it did not suit
her family's fancy. I was willing to fght it out to the end. But what now was
I going to battle for? A traitress? She had decided to eliminate her problem
and take any number or kinds of consequence. She was pulling out. My
respect for her dropped two-hundred points on the Moral Stock Exchange.
The message, which was so clearly delineated for me, was not acceptable.
She was not adhering to Hoyle's Love Rules. She was not conducting
herself in a sportswomanly, honorable correct way of acting. I sighed.

“Do you want a drink,” she asked.

“Yes, please. A cognac.”

I sat stunned. My distress was tinged with bitterness. What had I done to
deserve this turn of the screw? NO MONEY zipped automatically across my
mind. She was amoral, I thought. A no good son-of-a-bitch. Really. No!
She needed to placate mommy and daddy. She needed to rub her nasty
embarrassment out. She needed her fnancial status more than she needed
my love. She was just plain stupidly corrupt like so many others I had met
in Caracas. I felt so shamefaced for her. Nothing came to my mind to utter
aloud to her. I could not react. I could not even banter back and forth with
her over it all. While her emotions were devastatingly weak, her wits were
made strong; I knew this much about her. Her ethical strengths were nil.
There was one distinguishing attribute which impressed her and her
family: $$$. I had none of them—or at least enough to support her. I was a
worthless precursory entity in the fnancial scheme of things.

I called Carlos on my electronic page, and he arrived in ten minutes to take

us home. I slid into the backseat of the El Árbol de Navidad after Gonza was
set in place. I must have looked very depressed to Carlos because he did
not switch on the television, Betamax, or stereo-radio as was our custom to
do during slack hours. No one uttered a word. All I could hear was the
squishing rummages through the frequencies of the radio-telephone that
broke squelch occasionally to emit a message from MIT, the Metropolitan
Police, the Policia Technical Judicial, the DISIP (Venezuelan secret
77
police), the Army, the Navy, the Marines, the Air Force, or the President's
offce in Palacio Mirafores.

Gonza puffed on a Vantage and sat with one leg transversed over the other.
She had an air of elegance about her that one thought should accompany
modish clothes and expensive jewelry, but did not. On this occasion she
had worn one of her three or four cocktail dresses which she had kept
draped in dubious trust for years over the metal bar in her closet. No
makeup. She looked beautiful. She beautifed her dress; it did not beautify
her. Gonza could be alluring, and when she did put on makeup, heads
turned to her. She made me feel so proud at times. A lady of dignity and
charm. I could understand why I had fallen in love with her. Her
stretchable stockings and underpants in one piece summoned back to
awareness the hours of nakedness we had shared together. Her breasts
caused me to remember the tremendous psychic reliefs I had taken from
them as my head, cushioned on their softness, swirled with joy and
contentment. Now I must think about losing this possibility for happiness.

I kissed her goodnight on the cheek but said nothing. I walked her to her
door and turned to go immediately when she clicked the lock open. As I
walked away, my torso tensed in hopes of receiving the “blows” of a
“comeback” signal from her. But none came. I went to the car and asked
Carlos to take me to my room.

In my small abode measured three meters square, I removed my clothes,

then laid down naked on the bed and cooled myself as the balmy night's air
fapped over my body. Tiny frogs gurgled short, high-pitched peeps and
tweets and low-pitched groans and moans in the still darkness. I was alone;
a lover cast aside. For about three hours I scanned through theories of love,
theorists of love, and experiences of love. Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, D
H Lawrence, Jean-Paul Sartre, Stendahl, Simone de Beauvoir, Gore Vidal,
Marcel Proust, and even the folksy sayings of Barbra Streisand, Barry
Manilow, and Gary Pluckett and the Union Gape. Then some feminists:
Kate Millet, Germaine Greer, T-Grace Atkinson, Lucinda Cisler, Dana
Densmore, No one could help me. What mattered an interpretation? What
mattered the thinking postures of Miller, Mailer, Lawrence, Sartre,
Stendahl, Vidal, and Proust—individuals whose writings I knew well
enough to “speak” to them about Gonza. Their ideas were not of
importance now to me. And what would the feminists say to Gonza? I could
78
not even guess. I felt I had done nothing to degrade or insult Gonza's sex
or femininity. I had always felt—as she had, once, with me—that we were a
team that transcended, with our love, all the external considerations of a
politics of sex. We just damn well liked being together, liked loving each
other, liked being kind to each other. Gonza had to have some screws loose
to want to drop me. She had to be under a great strain. Too enormous for
her to handle. The big problem for me was to decide that if Gonza was too
depressed to function happily in the relationship, should I back out or fght
to melt away that which was making her despondent?: Her mother and
father's unnatural hold over her, her society's ways, corrupt and
immoderately fond of accumulating wealth because they had had so little of
it before the surge of oil prices.

I thought of my frst love. Another lost love. I remembered it took a

gargantuan will to leave her because she had had another boyfriend. I had
never let myself come to love her physically because of her lover; and, I
always sensed I had to extricate myself from the relationship: the cause of
an unhappiness I could not tolerate. On that occasion, too, I thought I had
all the reasons to walk out; all the rationalizations to divorce myself. Yet the
break had been one of the most diffcult things I ever had to do. So it must
be now, I assumed, with Gonza. Not faithful to another man, but faithful to
the idea of another man, her father. I concluded: They should be lovers!
Tsk! Tsk!! Tsk!!! (A father's love for a grown-up daughter is the most
dangerous of all infatuations,” said George Bernard Shaw.) I entranced
myself: so fearful I am of being supplanted, apprehensive of the loss of
affection, not because my feelings have no basis in reality, but because
Gonza has created an unjust situation that is intolerable for me. To exit
abruptly is the sane recourse for me.

Why this diffculty in breaking up with a woman when one's mind is set,
obsessed, with her? I was puzzled. I had always prided myself on my ability
to adapt to different predicaments. I had held numerous different job
positions which educated myself to the fuidity, non-quiescence of life. I
had been a social worker, insurance salesman, journalist, photographer,
whisky and wine salesman, taxi driver, paper products salesman, teacher,
day camp counsellor, English teacher to foreign students, copyeditor of a
newspaper, small businessman, horrible actor, translator, shoe salesman,
security guard, bartender, combat soldier...there were others. I could foat
from one job to another. I could accept one situation after being tossed
79
from another. I rolled with the punches. I always felt I was learning
something worthwhile.

Even in the U S Army, that I despised for its stupidity and fraud, I was one
day a forward observer, then a pay offcer, then an ammunition offcer, a
battalion liaison offcer, a brigade liaison offcer, a battery commander, a
base camp defense battery commander, a convoy commander, an assistant
adjutant, a property book offcer, an assistant battery executive offcer, an
executive offcer, a training offcer, a mess hall offcer, an aerial forward
observer, a chemical offcer...still more. I was ready for anything. No
qualms, no reservations on my part. What could I contribute to the totality
of things in this universe?

The love drama killed me. If I could have switched from one woman to
another as I shifted from forward observer to mess hall offcer, perhaps I
would have been a record-holding Don Juan. In love, I become stuck to the
woman I love. I give my all and I dote, as did Richard Burton, to get back
excessive love and intense fondness. For sure, I do not expect to fy high on
love full blast, full time. No. But I do want to feel respected by a woman (I
know when she is not respectful to me), to be treated faithfully by her, and
to be considered valuable to her. I had been emotionally perceptive of
these “love” characteristics with two other women before Gonza, and now I
was coming, maybe, to the conclusion that such qualities were not lasting
in Nature; and, to expect them to be enduring might be naive thinking. To
lose Gonza was more to me than the loss of a great lady; it was another
proof of the unworkableness of lasting love in a feeting world. I had to get
used to that.

What should be my next step? Accept being a casualty to love? Realize that
love will not endure anyway? Bail out now on the apostate tune Gonza was
whistling? Take it as true that Gonza's “love” Freudian slips were prophetic
signs on the road which laid before us and passed years on down to
infnity? Or should I assume that Gonza's “unfaithfulness” is a psychiatric
collapse and perhaps, subconsciously, a scream for my love and attention
for her? Was I to think as a male chauvinistic pig and accept her sluggish
droning on as female scatterbrainness? It all depended on me now, did it
not? Cop out or continue a diffcult march. A failure to commit myself
would leave me ashamed. A fght for Gonza will leave me winner or loser.
Probably loser. I want to win for myself and win for Gonza. I must
80
counterattack if I am to stay in the fray of this love battle. I need to push
back at Gonza for kicking me in the b***s with her kiss-off letter.

I think of Humphrey Bogart at the airport in Casablanca. He should have

shot Laslow and gotten on the plane with Ingrid! No wonder he was always
sipping whisky and taking antacid pills! He was too uptight. Humphrey
Bogart derived pleasure from being offended, by being mistreated in some
way. He turned destructive tendencies upon himself. I was not going to be
so stupid. No one was going to push me around as they jostled and bent the
Humph. I am psyched for the fght for love's might. I am preparing to go
into battle. I must plot my strategies. Construct tactics designed to destroy
the potential of my enemy. Gonza, I am The Love General! Fair Maiden! So
ragged with impure love thoughts about us, I will rescue you from the
dragons of Caracas! Your soul is in the Lost & Found department, and I
will come to claim it, my darling! Hold on! The Love General is coming!!!
(“Hey, kid, it's still the same old story—a fght for love and glory!”)

15

The next morning I went to the forist near my home, purchased a long-
stem red rose, and chucked it maneuveringly, with a National Basketball
Association hook shot, over the ten-foot wall that surrounds San José and
Santa María, onto the pavement that leads from the upright structure to the
entrance to her parents' quintas. No note. Nothing attached. I went to MIT
and waited.

She called shortly.

“I told you it was over, gringo. O-V-E-R!

Do you understand?” she spelling it out loud and clear.
“Go f**k yourself, Gonza,” I uttered impulsively
slamming down the receiver upon its plastically pronged hook.

Two female co-workers came scurrying to my desk guffawing over my anger

with Gonza, and they prodded me for details as if I were a soap opera actor
they had seen watching on TV, but whose last episode they had failed to
take in.

“I don't want to talk about it,” I seethed. They were compassionate,

81
nevertheless. Halted their spasmodic laughs abruptly; wished me their best
wishes and walked away.

“Muchas gracias, chicas,” I retorted sprightly but sardonically. The phone re-
rang.

“Please, I beg you. DO NOT THROW ROSES TO ME.

My father will get upset.”

Slam! Her f*****g father “WILL GET UPSET!!!” Again the phone.

“You will get a f*****g rose every f*****g day for the rest of your life!
You Venezuelan f*****r!
Do you understand E_N_G_L_E_E_S_H!!!”
“This is crazy! You are crazy, gringo!”
“GONZA, I love you! Darling, I love you!” I screamed.
Her voice was restrained:
“Gringo, please understand.
Try to understand. I can't go on. I can't continue this way.
It's too much for me. Be nice to me. Please don't hurt me.”
“A rose is a rose is a rose and a day without a rose is a day without
your hugs and kisses,” I taunted tautologically.
Slam went the phone in turn.
Ring in response.
“I want to meet with you,” she soothed softly vibrant sounds
as any cat might expressing pleasure and contentment.
“When?”
“I get off from work at...”
“NOW!” I commanded. It was 10:15 in the morning.
“The Tamanaco then,” she acknowledged as just.
Slam went the phone.
“Where the f**k is Carlos?” I shrieked producing a blatantly
arresting effect within the confnes of the offce.
“Carlos!” went one. “Carlos!” went another.
“Carlos went still someone else. No Carlos.
Where are you when I need you? I called my answering service.
“Por favor. Clave 29777. Mensaje: Carlos telefona El Gringo prontissimo.”

Carlos reported in six long minutes, and I told him to rush the El Árbol de
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Navidad to the offce, sparkling the red, amber, white, and blue, and
stimulating the electronic wailing unit if necessary. He rogered me over and
out and arrived in short order.
“Tamanaco. But no SIRRRREEEEEEEEEEEEEENNNNN.”
I did not want to impress Gonza with my personal involvement in the
source of my mental unrest. Apparently, neither did she, for when I met
her she was perched on a chair reading a woman's fashion magazine!

“How can you read that garbage at a time like this?” I moiled.
“It's important for a woman to be abreast of...”
“I'll keep abreast of you! You!! You!!!
You traitress!”
“Traitress?”
“Traitress!!! Yes, a f*****g traitress!!!”
“Do you want a drink?”
“A drink? A drink? No. I need a Valium!”
“I'll send you some from the offce.”
“Vodka, con hielo, por favor.”
“This can't go on, gringo,” she deferred.
“You are right, Gonza, we can't continue this way.”
I surrendered.
“It's over, gringo. O-V-E-R.”
“OOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHHH, Gonza,” I sobbed.
The tears poured forth more than suffciently.
“What do I do? What do I do?” I appealed earnestly.
“You go home.”
“Home?”
“Yes, to gringolandia. To your family. To your country,
the great United States of America.”
The female Humphrey Bogart summoned the Wisdom of the Ages
with placating incantations.
I saw frecrackers going off and jets making fy-bys.
Old Glory fapped in the blasts of strong airs.
“Home?” I pondered momentarily.
“Yes, home, gringo. Home, where you belong. Home to gringolandia.
Away from this insanity which is driving you crazy.”
“Yes, home,” I simulated her pitch.
“Go home, gringo. Go home, gringo. Go home, gringo,” she cast me under
her spell as if she had taken a Psychiatry 101 course.
83
 “Yes, go home, gringo. Go. Go. Go. Home. Home. Home.
I reacted cooperatively to her suggestions.
I thought in a state of mind that recalled the past.
“Gonza, remember “Bridge Over Troubled Waters?”
A Simon & Garfunkel hit we driveled over again and again and again.
“Yes, gringo,” she cooed.
I ordered my memory to return to the words that were fxed
in our minds forever...

“When you're weary

Feeling small
When tears are in your eyes
I will dry them all
I'm on your side
Oh when times get rough
And friends just can't be found
Like a bridge over troubled waters
I will lay me down
Like a bridge over troubled waters
I will lay me down
When you're down and out
When you're on the street
When evening falls so hard
I will comfort you
I'll take your part
Oh when darkness comes
And pain is all around
Like a bridge over troubled waters
I will lay me down
Like a bridge over troubled waters
I will lay me down
Sail on Silver Girl
Sail on high
Your time has come to shine
All your dreams are on their way
See how they shine
Oh if you need a friend
I'm sailing right behind
Like a bridge over troubled waters
84
 I will ease your mind
Like a bridge over troubled waters
I will ease your mind.”

Her eyes fell to the foor and she began to cry, too.
“Gringo, I can't lay me down for you.
I can't, my darling.”
Her feebleness shocked me out of my self-pity.
“I know, sweetheart.”
“Gringo, I love you, I love you, I love you.
But I can't,” she cried uncontrollably.
“OK, Gonza I'll bug out. I'm a hero. Was a boy scout, too.
I'll Humphrey Bogart it for you.”
“Gringo, you are special. I never in my whole life
met a man so faithful, so gutsy, as you.”
I sang from Simon & Garfunkel again:
“I am a rock; I am an island.”
She spasmed a jerk of gaiety.
Then I sang to her from Gary Pluckett and the Union Gap...

“We choose it
Win or lose it
Love is never quite the same
I love you
Now I've lost you
Don't feel bad
You're not to blame
So kiss me goodbye
And I'll try not to cry
All the tears in the world
Won't change your mind
There's someone new
And he's waiting for you
Soon your heart will be leaving me behind
Linger a while
And I'll go with a smile
Like a friend who just happened to part
For the last time
Pretend you are mine
85
 My darling, kiss me goodbye
I know now I must go now
Though my heart wants me to stay
That guy is your tomorrow
I belong to yesterday
So kiss me goodbye
And I'll try not to cry
All the tears in the world
Won't change your mind
There's someone new
And he's waiting for you
Soon your heart will be leaving me behind
Linger a while
And I'll go with a smile
Like a friend who just happened to part
For the last time
Pretend you are mine
My darling, kiss me goodbye
My darling, kiss me goodbye

I could not fnd a plane out of Casablanca to put Gonza on, so I downed my
vodka, took a Maalox tablet that tainted white the corners of my mouth, and
kissed her goodbye on her left cheek. She kissed me back on the feshy part
of my face below the left eye.

I walked out of the Tamanaco and fipped my cigarette, a Vantage I had

borrowed from her for effect, to the ground as Sam Spade did in “The
Maltese Falcon.” I directed Carlos to crank up the El Árbol de Navidad, and
informed him to engage the lighting system, blast the William Tell
Overture through our eight-speaker stereo system, turn on the siren
network, and in between its screeches, and over the DA DA DUM DA DA
DUM DA DA DUM DUM DUM of Gioachino Rossini's masterpiece, I cried
into the Caracas air, at the top of my lungs: “Hi! Ho! Silver!!!
AAAAAAAAAWWWWWWWWWAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!”

16

86
Gonza, too, was a frm believer in this—it is: Time separates everything
into components after which one may think more intelligently. Give Time
to Time. I was not going to jump back into the United States at this precise
moment in my life. I had still been roiling at having been a veteran of the
Vietnam “War,” and I just wanted to be away from Americans and their
feelings about Vietnam veterans. I would continue the march for a while,
without, sadly, Gonza, but I would not return to my country exclusively for
Gonza and her family. I needed to extricate myself from the Gonza
“entanglement,” but ever so gently so. When that mission had been
accomplished, I would decide what was best for me. I could not do it
before I had some peace of mind. If I was going to be left alone, alone then
would I determine the conclusion of my Caracas sojourn. I had to support
the poverty of my spirit with a very high degree of self-respect.

There was such an enormous degree of mental malfunctioning at MIT, I

thought that, by itself, was suffcient motive for me to allow the
“entanglement” to slip into forgetfulness. Yet even with this governmental
chaos, my memories of her chewed on me with intense melancholy. When
I strolled by the places we passed together, my spirits sank. When I was
burdened with remembrances of our past, my heart became weaker. When
I was tempted to call and ask to see her, my gut strained with anxiety.
When would this persistent yearning diminish? I was in mourning. I was
suffering through the psychologically connected phases of one who has
been afficted with a bereavement: that is, the whole process of responding
to the loss of a signifcant, key person: anticipatory grief, grief/mourning,
depression, loneliness and estrangement. My relief and resolution were yet
to come.

So what was I to do to “forget” uncomplicatedly? WALK!!! Yes, I decided

to walk! Walking is fantastic, a great way to “forget.” Perhaps I had read
that in an issue of Reader's Digest sometime before, but it seemed to me the
proper thing to revert to in my acute sorrow. Good for the circulation
system, too. I remembered that old Latin adage: Post prandium stabis; post
caenam lento pede deambulis. (After lunch rest a while; after dinner take a
leisurely walk.) So after my noon lunch (not after caenam, because you have
to be crazy to walk in Caracas at night) if there was no action in the offce,
Carlos took me home where I changed into my walking uniform: jeans,
Chinese t-shirt, and Alpine hiking boots—which had cost me a whopping
one-hundred eighty-six dollars in a gringolandia commercial
87
establishment in downtown Caracas. Carlos objected vehemently when I
told him to go home. I informed him I wanted to mix with the people to
fnd out why Gonza was such a s******d. He notifed me that I was a little
crazy over the loss of Gonza, and that suicide was my real ambition. I
indicated to him that I was no chicken foreign affairs offcer working in a
plush embassy. I instructed him to leave me alone, and off I went.

I have a great idea! My dear reader, how would you like to come with me
for a walk in downtown Caracas? I'll take you through the city and you'll be
able to see for yourself! OK?

Take your camera if you like. But don't look like a dumb tourist or you
might get your a*s busted. Keep close to me and do as I say. There will be
no problems. If I tell you to duck, DUCK, damn it! Don't look at me as if
I'm stupid. Let's move out. Ready on the left? Ready on the right?

We can start here at Chinquinquira, a big church in La Florida a few

blocks from my quinta and the two quintas where that mush head Gonza
and her family live. We will walk about ten to twelve kilometers, back and
forth. So I hope you are in reasonably good shape. At the halfway mark, we
will break for a bite to eat and some cold Polar beer—if that suits you.
Look, but don't act surprised at anything. Keep your mouth shut all the
time we are engaged with other people. You don't speak Spanish, and they
will think you are saying something about them. If you talk in a foreign
tongue, or even ask questions in a different language, these people pop
paranoid. Wait until the coast is clear to talk to me. Let's gooooooooo.

This is Avenida Andrés Bello. He was a famous man of Venezuelan letters,

and his Spanish grammar book is used in schools throughout Venezuela.
Even, I believe, in many other countries in South America, but I am not
sure in which ones. Andrés Bello leads into Avenida Urdaneta which leads
into Avenida Sucre. Urdaneta y Sucre are revered historical personages,
too. The Andrés Bello-Urdaneta-Sucre thoroughfare is perhaps the most
important traffc artery in the city, and it is famous in the world for its
mighty congestion and hefty pollution which kills people regularly. From
Chacaito in the north-central part of the city, it leads thousands and
thousands of people to work spots and important governmental locations
and buildings including the President's offce in Palacio Mirafores—at the
end of Avenida Urdaneta, just before the beginning of Avenida Sucre.
88
The noise of honking horns and racing car and bus engines may seem
unbearable at times, but don't let it get you down. It might be a good idea
to keep your nose and mouth covered with a handkerchief especially when
the unmaintained buses spew out their clouds of noxious smoke. Keep
checking the ground for dog and cat and human fecal matter. When we
pass through the elegant zones of La Florida, watch out for the red hibiscus
leaves which dot the streets in lots and look like huge droplets of blood;
they are slipperier than banana peels. And always, always, always check at
corners, even the underground passageways leading out from basement
garages, to avoid being hit by reckless drivers.

The next street we are coming to is Avenida Samanes—there to the left.

That is one of the most luxurious streets in Caracas, and the cost of
apartments in those buildings is four and fve times more than the same
structures in the United States. This zone, La Florida, is famous for its
power blackouts and water stoppages. In fact, one smoldering, fne summer
day in La Florida we went without water for two weeks. Water trucks came
to the streets, and lines of public utility consumers went to them with
plastic and glass receptacles to get fll-ups for cleaning and cooking. Rich
people have water tanks in their houses and apartments. Gonza, that creep,
has a 100,000-liter tank under her front lawn in front of Quinta San José.

As you can see, the trees and plants along Avenida Andrés Bello are all
dead or dying. They aren't pruned, but even if they were, the carbon
monoxide would still do them in. Sometimes water trucks pass to wash the
streets off, but that is not often and usually comes before a general election.
There is always piles of garbage wherever you go—in all sections of the city.
That's normal. You'll be full of soot and grit when you get home. The
incidence of acne is high among the kids in the city. Venezuelan business
executives who use, rarely, public transportation always have rings around
their collars, but the best imported detergents wash them away with the
greatest of ease, and leave their shirts sparkling white and fuffously soft.
Obviously, you should not drink from public water fountains. And if a
beggar asks you for money, please pass him a bit. You'll help him a little,
and you'll feel good for having done so. Unemployment is very high. The
Bible says: “To give is to receive.”

Another important warning: DO NOT SPEAK IF WE ARE STOPPED in

the downtown area by the police or Army personnel checking identity
89
cards and passports. Just hand over your passport if they stick their hands
out to you. Don't be scared. If they nudge you with the muzzles of their
Israeli machine guns, don't panic. The guns won't go off by accident. I
swear to you. These brutes know how to shoot—they don't have accidents.
They are not going to fre on a foreigner, anyway, and if they thought to,
they wouldn't do it in broad daylight. They would take you to the Petare jail
and do it there. Let me do all the talking. I have government credentials,
and my electronic warning system if things go awry. Be polite, self-
possessed, and be cooperative even if you don't want to be. As they say on
Madison Avenue, “it pays to be nice.”

The next street is Avenida Las Palmas. On the corner over there—in that
drive-in restaurant—one fnds a meeting place for students and offce
workers in the area. The prices are exorbitant even for Caracas, but the
food is well-prepared and the waiters, mainly Portuguese and Spanish men,
are prompt and courteous. Teatro Las Palmas—I saw a nude review of
Brazilian girls there thinking that the show would have been a folkloric
presentation—and a famous pastelería are down the avenida, two blocks,
very close to Avenida Libertador, another important heavily-traveled broad
street. Avenida Las Palmas, at night, is persistently troubled with
aggravated assaults, soliciting putas (prostitutes), and transvestites
scampering away from the police who are always chasing after them to keep
them out of their lairs in the tourist-rich Avenida Libertador area.

As we walk along, you can see a variety of apartment buildings, medical

offces, coffee shops, small businesses, and drugstores (farmacias). A
hodgepodge of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Venezuelan family affairs.
No large-scale emporia. Notice the kiosks that populate practically every
corner we pass. Newspapers, magazines, betting forms, chewing gums,
candies, pencils, pens, razors, and sometimes liquid refreshments, are
hawked from these large metal cubicles. The men pushing refrigerated
carts sell ice cream, ices, and chicha, a milk-rice mixture. The ice cream is
factory produced, but the ices and chicha very often are home brews, so
they can't be trusted to be hygienic. People will accost us to buy fowers,
boxes of tissues, shoe laces, pictures of the Virgin Mary, fshing poles,
stolen watches, clothes, newspapers, stolen prophylactics, and many other
items which very often are hot stuff from the United States. These
characters walk stealthily wary of the police who seldom harass them
because their sheer number boggles the peace offcers' minds. They, along
90
with the beggars, might seem to be a source of inconvenience, but if you
ignore them, they won't “jew” after you or impede your progress.

The next street, Avenida La Salle, to the right, leads up to Venevisión, the
gigantic private Venezuelan television station that is in possession of a
family consortium—one of the twelve most powerful and wealthy of the
Venezuelan “Twelve Disciples.” This particular conglomeration owns about
twenty large companies, and it is an enormous economic factor in all of
South America with ties to large banks and corporations in the United
States. As a matter of fact, this association of fnancial institutions has a
“think tank/foundation” mentality, and often offers exclusive seminars
touting “freedom of the press” and “big business is fne” bills of fare
frequented by North American and European political science and
economic notables. The scheduled meetings are very expensive to attend,
and the high entrance costs serve as a public obstruction, in turn a security
measure, to keep out the masses of Venezuelan who are not
“capitalistically” enervated and who might endanger the functioning of the
elite meetings with embarrassing questions—if not attempted
assassinations. (It would be impossible for David Rockefeller or Arthur
Schlesinger, Jr, frequent visitors to Venezuela, to appear at a Venezuelan
public university gathering to speak about the progress of democracy and
capitalism without being shot out. Their visits are hush-hush. And if they
tell you otherwise, don't believe them.)

To the right, you can also see one of the few parks which are in the city of
Caracas. Remember that there is very little greenery in Caracas, and youth
under eighteen years of age constitute a formidable sixty percent of the
Venezuelan population. This park is typical. For example, you can see that
it is not supervised by anyone; and, it is not bounded by any protection to
cause it to be perceived distinctively. So then, it offers a short cut to
another street, it serves sloppy citizens with a place to dump their garbage
at night, and it makes itself available to a fraternity of drunks who sleep
there after dark. There is very little grass, and where there was any, now
you might see large patches of powdered dirt which blow all over the park
in the twirling city winds.

Notice everything is broken. There are no swings left, the narrow tubes of
metal in the monkey bars are missing, the long planks of the seesaws are
gone, there are no hoops on the elevated, vertical boards used for playing
91
basketball, and the slots in all the park benches have been removed. The
trees are so battered from kids' climbings and initial carvings in them, they
appear to be ready to die.

What should strike you as even more sinister than the physical abuse the
park's property is subjected to, is the mental maltreatment which the gangs
of unoccupied teenagers, you can see them frisking and ripping there in
large groups, are caused to carry on through with. They belong in school at
this hour, but they have no compunction to be there. Every year there are
less and less and less openings in the drastically crowded university
“system,” and unemployment is skyrocketing with Venezuela's debt
diffculties. You can observe the kids in the park dancing, smoking,
smoking pot, perhaps some cocaine, but certainly very little of the
expensive heroin. These kids are poor. They are cultivating notions to
escape from a very portentous future. If you talk to them, and I have many
times, they strike you as being very nervous, immature characters; and, they
strongly trust in DROGA, SEXO, Y ROCK and the value of money and
clothes and television and cars and cheap jewelry. When they are pushed
into the corner by their parents, they react, in groups, dangerously.

You will note, as you get to know Caracas, that it is a city of potent
contrasts: very rich, very poor; very fast, very slow; very happy; very sad. It
is not an equilibrated city. (Two negatives do not make a positive.) The
carequenia society is on edge all the time. An on-going joke among
foreigners here is this pathetic observation: If fouridation can be put in
Caracas drinking water to prevent tooth decay, why can't Valium be put in
it to prevent mental instability? Things fow crudely in this large company
of individuals, because with all the clashes colliding between the extremes,
a discorded midst is ever-perpetuated. Problems resolve themselves
successfully usually with a great deal of luck and patience. Never without
infuence, palanca. One cannot rely on things to function normally because
they usually will perform, from habit, out of the ordinary. Waste and
ineffciency are norms. The childish notion is that oil can pay for
Venezuela's problems.

One of these striking dissimilarities between things compared, of which I

have just spoken to you about, is the walled complex opposite the park on
Avenida Principal de Maripérez. That is the Hermandad Gallega, a club—
an alliance is perhaps a better word because the organization is strongly
92
nationalistic—to which Spanish people and their families, from Galicia, a
zone in northern Spain notable for its seafaring inhabitants who for
centuries propped up an unstable fshing industry—to this lodge go to
enjoy themselves and escape from the realities of Caracas, which, in this
case, strike them very violently at times when their sons and daughters lock
horns with the poverty-stricken ruffans in the park across the street when
they leave the Hermandad Gallega to return home.

It is important to understand a little about the gallego y gallega. The man

and woman from the cold, bitter place at the top of the northwest corner of
Spain, directly to the north of Portugal: not far from Bordeaux, Nantes,
Brest, Plymouth, London, Cork, then Dublin; to the south, not far from
Porto, Lisbon, Tangier, then Casablanca.

The winds from the North Atlantic Ocean have always blown hard upon
Galicia, and the physical qualities of the gallegos are strong and sinewy. The
gallego/gallega is a hard worker but he or she is an uneducated one.
Forever threatened in their history, they—their faces chaffed by the cold
winds—had to suffer barbarous cultural, social, economic, and linguistic
perplexities. The centralist state of España, headquartered in Madrid, far
away from Galicia's capital, La Coruña, always insisted on making the
people of Galicia, travel-minded beings, conform in ways which did not
abide well with the restless temperaments of the gallegos/gallegas. Poverty
and almost exclusive dependence on fshing for making their livings, added
to the suffering of the people set upon the mercy of a government they
scorned for its brutal insensitiveness and corruptness. No conformity; no
state aid; no Roman Catholic schools; no social services; No! No!! No!!!

Galicia, perhaps the largest fshing area in Europe, has always been isolated
because of the thick-headedness of its people reacting against the
unrelenting intransigence of its government. Los gallegos/Las gallegas:
bullnecked to the physical strength test; scornful of education, technology,
and modernism. Its own enemy. Xenophobic, obsessively family-
orientated, avaricious about money to secure economic vitality that more
often than not kept the gallegos/gallegas a bit above the poverty line.

When the Monster Franco took the Spanish helm in 1936, and began
leading Spain through the turbulent waters of spiritual and moral
destructiveness, Galicia, the Balcony of the North Atlantic Ocean, smarted
93
bitterly. The economic and political persecutions—often made in the name
of the Roman Catholic Jesus—dealt consistent blows to Galicia, and hordes
o f gallegos/gallegas, used to upping their collars to the freezing cold and
putting their hands in their pockets to keep them warm, scattered to South
America to seek their fortunes in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The
oppression had become too great for many. In Caracas, these people,
former slaves to Francistic Fascism, peasants to a rural area bordering the
mighty sea, found jobs in grocery stores, in taxis, in laundries, in bakeries,
in fruit stores. Intractable characters: quick to work, earnest to save and
improve their economic status. They clanned together and isolated
themselves—their natural posture—from the Venezuelans upon whom they
looked with horror and disgust. Over the years their fnancial acuity and
monetary accumulations lead them to own successful, but small,
businesses, and with their newly-acquired economic clout, they contrived
ways to protect themselves and insure the prosperity of their children.
Aware of their own lack of previous education, they insisted that their
children study. Alert to their own former lack of medical care, they insisted
that their children particpate in health insurance programs. Cognizant of
their own previous lack of social and sport facilities, they insisted that their
children have a meeting place as did the Italians, the Portuguese, the
Hungarians, the Lebanese, the English, and the Venezuelans. So up went
the Hermandad Gallega, a huge complex and, perhaps, the best in Caracas;
not the most elegant, not the one with the most yachts, not the one with
the most wealthy people, but the one which offers—club pound for club
pound—the most activities, the most sporting events, the most organized
programs. It caters to the gallegos/gallegas and their families who frequently
enough have inter-married with the Venezuelans and other nationalities.
Other social clubs usually pride themselves on their gaudy facilities and
Who's Rich in Venezuela membership lists, exorbitant entrance fees,
manicured lawns (a novelty in Caracas), bar service to the pool area, and
not-so-bad restaurants. These meeting places are not so ingenious and
social-conscious as the less conspicuous and operable Hermandad Gallega:
a monument to the dogged will of thousands of individuals who have
escaped economical and political and religious maltreatment from España
to fnd a better life for themselves and their families.

But where is the “better life?” the gallego y gallega demand now in
bitterness. Certainly not outside their homes, beyond their walled club.
The terrorism in Caracas has embittered the weather-beaten peasants from
94
Galicia as it has many others including the Venezuelans who often are
perplexed by the ruinous turn their country has experienced. As a rule, the
same individuals, ironically, who sped away from Franco's stormtroopers
beating heads in the name of Jesucristo, now clamor for military control and
golpes de estado to rid Venezuela of its corrupt democracy and unsafe
streets. The gallegos y gallegas, victims of the sword, now wish to wield it
wildly against those now burdened with the repulsions the gallegos y
gallegas themselves once were strapped with. The circle closes more and
more and more in Venezuela. The gallegos y gallegas: newly “rich,”
interesting, stroppy, handsome individuals making their impressions, for
better, for worse, on the Venezuelan society that distrusts and often hates
them. A society that, in all, is a composite of many persons from many
different countries racing away from itself and the realities with which it
dawdles.

The next sight, Parque Andrés Bello, is not really a landscaped tract of
land, but a gigantic concrete slab with a monument to Andrés Bello and
ramshackled toilets for men and women. Again, a hangout for juvenile
delinquents and drug pushers. Outdoor political meetings are held
sometimes at this location, and there are always perro caliente (hot dog)
vendors and ice cream cart-pushers congregating near the steps which lead
up to the sculpture erected as a memorial. There are oodles of statues in
Caracas with pigeon excrement covering them, and I wonder if Narcissistic
Romúlo had it in his mind that his iron mug would forever be the landing
zone for pigeon droppings!

That spot is the Hospital Ortopédico where people with bone diseases and
deformities go for “assistance.” I believe that the hospital is non-proft,
sponsored with government funds. One is certain, then, to fnd inadequate
care, a poorly trained medical staff, and long waiting lines to attain care and
attention.

Over there, across the street, to the left, is the Guaicaipuro Mercato where
fresh vegetables and fruits are dropped off farm trucks every morning
between three and fve o'clock. It is a great place to shop for produce if one
has the willpower to rise early enough to beat the crowds which come later
to scrounge up what has not been distributed out to the abastos (grocery
stores) in the city. Very often tents are thrown up, and good clothes buys
and excellent household appliance purchases are available. It is nice
95
to walk through the mercato to smell the rich odors of fruits and vegetables.
The Guaicaipuro Mercato is a hotbed for off-loading stolen goods and farm
products, especially those confscated illegally in Colombialandia. A must
on one's Caracas sightseeing list, but it's too late now for us to see anything
of interest. Early, very early, morning is best.

The building with the large white fags with huge red crosses on them is
the Cruz Roja, the Venezuelan Red Cross headquarters. Not a very dynamic
organization. Like so many things incorporated by imitating other countries
(Boy Scouts, Lions' Club, Rotary Club, Chamber of Commerce, and others
like them), there is a sense of insecurity, secrecy, and xenophobia affliated
with this group when it tries to advance some common purpose or
charitable work effort. Less than enthusiastic, the functionings of these
associations often serve corrupt leaders who bilk away at membership dues
and public contributions.

As we cross over Avenida La Estrella, that passes under that overpass above
us, we enter a twenty-square block zone which will prove more fascinating
and lively than the other views we have already seen during our travels.
Before this, we walked along Avenida Andrés Bello adjacent to some very
fancy well-to-do residential areas: Las Lomas, San Rafael, La Florida, Las
Palmas North, Las Colinas de Las Palmas, and San Bernardino. Now we are
on the downtown (“El Centro”) city district, and this zone, more poverty-
ridden and crowded with slums, more populated with stores and
government offces, and more heavily-traffcked with por puestos, buses, and
taxis, will give you a better sense of Caracas not only as it churns on today,
but how it partially looked in years gone by when Caracas was a more
sedate, healthy, and interesting place to live in even with Spanish soldiers
combing the area and murdering the innocent. Many old colonial houses
and narrow streets of the past, which slowed marauding armies, still exist.

Are you ready? Let's enter “El Centro.” The frst riveting sight is
Candelaría, a Spanish section occupied by members of the gallego
community who live there under economic and social pressure, where, also
vascos a n d catalanes relive, even today, a repressive Spain they once
suffered with and left nurturing sentiments of abhorrence and desperation.
This is a peculiar expanse, very “Spaneesh.” It is set apart from the Caracas
mainstream even in its slum-like character that reminds one of New York
City's Lower East Side. It is unlike the mud-sliding, shack-like barrios
96
which typify Caracas's shantytown sections that compromise ffty or so
percent of the living space in Caracas. In Candelaría everyone speaks of the
glory and splendor of Spain and disparages his Venezuelan neighbors with
whom he is encumbered to live with. If you speak with vascos, they will tell
you they are superior to catalanes who are superior to gallegos who are
superior to vascos who are superior to....All are superior to all, especially to
native Venezuelans: “The Indians,” “Los Indios.”

Candelaría boasts the Spanish soberbia: arrogance, haughtiness, conceit,

vanity, presumptuousness. Perhaps rage and fury are better words. The
place wreaks with all talk, no action. Here, in this neighborhood, frustrated,
middle-class people belch their melancholy for España Gloriosa. They eke
out bourgeoisie livings in small shops selling discounted electronic
equipment, radios and stereos, dental equipment, hardware products, and
crystal and silver ornaments. All are usually imported from Miami and are
often stolen goods. The streets are teeming with people and carts scurrying
to buy and sell, oblivious to the other “worlds” which populate the Caracas
urban soup.

Spanish people are great talkers. In Candelaría there are no decent

hospitals, schools, or civic associations as one might fnd in New York or
London or Paris. There is no attempt to incorporate Candelaría into the
Latin Melting Pot. Candelaría is strictly a “get it all for me and my family”
proposition., and the narrowmindedness of the inhabitants of Candelaría is
refected in their community spirit and civic responsibility, very little of
which exists beyond their own reclusive family leagues. The Sacred Family.
Blessed by the Pope and Prayed for by the Saints. Streets are dirty,
apartment buildings are unkempt, and the surface of Candelaría is, to the
casual glancer, distorted and sloppy in appearance.

Now if one has the patience and interest and ability to remain calm under
adverse cultural barrages, a dive into the murky waters of Candelaría is
worth the education. Intelligence agencies should include Candelaría in
their reports to presidents and kings and dictators and Popes. This Spanish
holdout is the fnding of the political Rosetta Stone of the South American
immigrant middle-class society. Once one shoves aside the pomposity of
the frightened Spanish migrators, and enters their private worlds of family
and business establishments, the realities of their lives evinces a sympathy.
They are scared stiff. Nervous. On edge. Brutally arrogant. You want to ask
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of them: “Why, if you hate Caracas so, do you live here?” The inevitable
answer: “For the money.” Their fght for the bolivar impels their
impetuosity and that bursts all over the neighborhood.

There is”culture” here. Now, dear reader, don't reach for your pistol when I
talk to you about culture in Caracas! I don't mean “culture,” I mean
“culture” culture! I mean nut-cracking, anti-social behavior, neuroticism,
psychoticism, and pushing to out of the way “culture.” Pounding against
the wall “culture.” Kicking ass “culture.” Stabbing in the back “culture.”
Take a swig of Vodka before you go into Candelaría, and keep your hands
over your testicles when you walk around that hole. In these houses in
Candelaría exist young people isolated by their parents' not poor-poor, not
rich, money. Youth, frustrated, denied, abused, negative, oppressed,
abandoned emotionally. But their bellies are full and their mommies have
enough money to buy opera records, videocassette recorders, and
encyclopedias! The monsters beat upon themselves with an intensity that
would make Christian martyrs envious. Misdirected punks. Masturbating,
smoking pot, sniffng cocaine, slugging whiskey and wine, fornicating like
rabbits, and aborting like plumbers.

Within the confnes of these modern social prisons, there exists a handful
of “distorted beings” practicing the piano, practicing the violin, practicing
playwriting, practicing novel writing, practicing nuclear physics, practicing
computer science, practicing flm making, practicing airplane design,
practicing Molotov cocktail making...practicing, practicing, practicing to
keep from going completely out of their skulls. These “horrors”—if the oil
money holds out (and who is crazy enough to think that it will?) might come
to create a symphony or two, but will probably design new weapons to hurl
against the United States embassy on Avenida Francisco de Miranda and
the Soviet Union embassy located in Las Lomas de Las Mercedes: the
chance to destroy will be more apt than the chance to create sparkling
newness.

The persistent screech of South America, to spring up from its bottom

position, cannot beat on in a spirit of understanding and good will. It must
rise as a festering infection frst bursting out of its rind, then spreading
itself upon the skin of all that surrounds it. Middle-class South America
signifcant in number, caught between the familiar oligarchies and the
gargantuan masses and masses and masses of poor people looking for
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the way to murder and rob out of their banal existences, is the backbone of
the coming Latin Revolution that will stun foreign affairs offcers all over
the world. (Is my irritation again over-evident, my dear reader?)

A good example of middle-classism is the restaurants in Candelaría. There

are a slew of Spanish-styled eating roosts, and I will single out one, the Bar
Catalan, which is likely the best of them all, surely typical and surely
Spanish.

A view of this venue will help you put Candelaría in better perspective.

In this eating establishment catalanos congregate to sing folksy songs at the

bar, to scream and shout during Spanish football matches, and to cultivate
their bravados assenting to their personal higher kind of nature which, they
say, is wider and more comprehensive than that of the Venezuelan people
in whose country they live as guests and succor themselves usually more
comfortably that their “Vennie” counterparts.

Whenever you are in a Spanish-imitated restaurant, you can be sure of two

things: A high decibel level and unctuous food. I've never been
disappointed in this regard. Bottles banging, trays clanking, feet stomping,
televisions blasting, telephones clanging, air-conditioners buzzing, waiters
shouting orders into the kitchens. People scream, shout, pound on tables,
and slam doors to their hearts' content. One lets it all out in these Spanish
restaurants in Candelaría, and if your nerves are up to the challenge, it is an
interesting experience. But one with which you could do without. The
español must shriek in Caracas in order to keep his emotional balance. Not
the places to take a date with whom you wish to talk about serious, intimate
matters. These are places where one careens one's conversation through
and around his companion unto the walls laid with relics from glorious
Spain. And Bar Catalan is considered a chic locale. You have to be
admitted by the owner, Juancito, who inspects you through a one-way
mirrored door at the entrance. While the ambience is not elegant, it
compensates itself, in turn, with its rusticity. The food is excellent, when
you avoid the oily dishes. Clean, well-prepared, home-styled cooking.
Bullfghters from Spain visit there, Venezuelan political luminaries
congregate there, and theatrical and “artistic” aspirants deem it necessary
to make the Bar Catalan scene.

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I'll tell you one thing about the Bar Catalan that will keep you from going
there: THE TOILET. To go to any public toilet in Caracas is a depressing
experience, unfortunately. To go to the lavatory one is called upon to
sustain a great inconvenience, that is typical in most public places where
there are rest facilities. Firstly, there is no toilet paper. No napkins. Maybe
an old newspaper. If you need to defecate, you must go to Juancito and ask
for a roll of toilet paper he will present to you with ceremony as if he were
handing over to you the keys to his new car. All Venezuelan paper rolls of
towels and tissues don't break off—the perforation machines in the paper
companies are not regularly maintained. The paper rolls on and on and on,
and you must grab hold of it and rip it apart. As a rule, the foor is soaked
with sticky, caking male and female urine, and the toilet bowl might very
well be clogged with turds which will not fush away because the tank is
forever out of order. Cigarette butts are squashed all over the foor. If you
have a coat or a bag, you can't hang it because the hooks on the back of the
door have been removed. The top of the toilet tank is so dirty and scummy
and slimy, one cannot think to lay a bag there without a paper towel or
large section of ripped-off toilet paper, when available, emplaced as a
protective mat. When the toilet paper has been acquired from behind the
bar, one must dry off the urine on the toilet seat before sitting down in the
squashy pool of urine on the foor. There is a universal habit in Caracas to
put used toilet paper in plastic baskets next to the toilets. The plumbing
systems are so ineffcient and old—paper clogs so easily in them—it's
become a common practice to put fecal-stained toilet paper in wastepaper
baskets. (This drives women from St. Paul, Minnesota crazy!) Soap? Forget
it. The mirror is broken and what sections of it remain are covered usually
with vulgar magic-marked special sayings. There is no graffti on the
intellectual level but demands for golpes and the phone numbers of
prostitutes who have visited the bar. You have to keep your foot at the door
to keep people from storming in, because the latch to Juancito's lock is
missing. The smell of urine and feces mixed with cigarette tobacco can
make a strong stomach nauseous. The Colombian cleaning lady might get
to the toilet next week. One can't be sure, though. When you open the
door to leave, a smog of cigarette smoke and the thunder of screaming
people pelt you in the puss as the blast waves from an exploding 8-inch
artillery round would. After leaving the restaurant, the noisome, rackety
city street seems relatively calming to the nerves.

Let's get back onto Avenida Urdaneta. If you look up and down the
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thoroughfare at this point, you will see one of the world's ugliest city streets
—perhaps worse than Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn, New York. There are
many store fronts to be sure, and some of them attractively designed—flled
with shiny electric toasters and electric juice squeezers to buy. But outside,
there is the hustle and bustle of traffc and the rushing to and fro of
agitated, nerve-wracked people. The puffs of pollution defy the health of
the city's citizens. When the signal light changes to green in the street,
horn and siren devices from the drivers of stopped vehicles, blast their
impatience before one can take his or her foot off the brake pedal and pass
it to the accelerator. Everyone is on the run. Not to their work places to be
effcient and proud in their endeavors, but to escape the noise and tension
and heat of the street. One crosses over to the other side in fear. People
push and shove and spit on the ground and throw paper to the pavement
and jump in front of others to enter taxis, buses, or por puestos. The huge
transnational logos, colorful and trendy, impose themselves against a
backdrop of old, ugly buildings flled with offces with Swedish telex
machines and new Italian typewriters and German telephones and
Japanese calculators and North American air-conditioners and Japanese
color televisions and North American water coolers and French mineral
water bottles and English tea bags,

Look at the crudy Chinese restaurant roasting chickens and see the
common domestic fowls' fat dropping on sizzling coals and smoking their
ways to the street to mix themselves with the pollution and smells of caked
vomit. See the cervercería , beer joint, rocking with hoards of drunk men
shouting and gambling and cursing and smoking and burping and wishing
their wives were dead? See the lotería, La Virgin de Coromoto, dishing out
useless lottery tickets under the auspices of the Virgin Mary, tickets blessed
by the Pope in Rome and promising rewards of heaven after a dismal life in
Caracas? See the 5y6 outlet doling out receipts for bets on drugged horses
mopping around the Caracas racetrack beaten by Latin jockeys with
hemorrhoids itching them on? See the forería sighing itself with droop-
headed red and white carnations in its misty, steamy window? See the
farmacia offering, without prescription, the magical Valium crystals to those
with sweaty palms, taut stomachs, palpitating heart muscles, headaches,
constipation, pounding veins and arteries, receding hairlines, and ringing
ears? See the iglesia, church, where the priest is hallelujahing nine people
with hope of an eternal happiness in a world of infnite reward?

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Let's stop and watch the faces of the people. Let's feel these people. Let's
forget about ourselves. See how intense they are? Worried. Caught up in a
struggle to survive. Not interested in anyone but themselves. No enjoyment
in their faces. Men crying in their beer. Admitting how worthless they are.
Crying for their mommy's attention. Sucking on the tits of cigarettes to
calm their nerves. Blake:

“A mark in every face I meet,

Marks of weakness, marks of woe...”

Woe! Woe! Woe! WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.

See the beggar sitting there with his cancerous legs exposed to the sun?
See the boy in an epileptic ft? See that paranoid-schizophrenic who has
just busted the window of the Rex shoe shop with his right fst, and is now
rubbing his bleeding artery on the window of the Banco Provincial? See the
kids tossing rotten eggs, from a bus, at the policeman? See the boy bent
over in the back of that taxi rushing him, with a .38 slug in his stomach, to
Hospital Vargas? See the transit policeman throwing his whistle at the car
that has just passed a red light at one-hundred twenty kilometers? See the
President of Venezuela rushing by in his armored Cadillac with bullet-
proof windows—the window shades down, and a force of one-hundred
Israeli machine-gunned Venezuelan troopers in twenty station wagons,
imported from Detroit, Michigan, protecting him? See the YANQUI, GO
HOME sign spray-canned to the marble front of the Banco Mercantil y
Agricola, the Chase Manhattan affliate in Venezuela? See the motorcycle
driver grabbing at that girl's gold chain, over there? See the two M-16ed
soldiers in front of the Banco Latino branch offce? See all the big
buttocks? See the dark, but not black skin, of the people? See the crippled
boy peddling copies of this afternoon's El Mundo screaming “Mundo!”
under the roar of cars and buses and por puestos? See the girl with the
sweatshirt: TOO MANY MEN, TOO LITTLE TIME? See the poor man
selling vials of human placenta to stop falling hair? See the advertisement
plastered to the wall billing a performance of the ORQUESTA DE
CAMERA DE MOSCU, directed by Mikhail Teryan, that ten people will
attend? See the man on the corner eating greasy Chinese egg rolls and
drinking sweet sherry from a plastic cup? See the holes in the street? See
the jet helicopter zipping up there with Tango Tango Fox—he has more
than eight thousand hours logged in air reporting to his radio listeners on
102
Caracas's sluggish, turgid traffc? See the man pouring reddish-brown
Pepsi into his gold beer? See the girl greedily smiling and kissing her bus
driver boyfriend while she sits on the over-heated motor of the Yugoslavia
autobus which is stimulating her clitoris? See the three ten-year-olds,
truants with syringes, sucking out the milk from the veins of the dying
plants in front of the old FONDO COMUN building? See the pounds of
pregnant women swelling out in their bellies with mounds of babies?

If you take that street, Norte 9, and go four blocks down, you will come to
two interesting places: the Terminal Pasajeros (the New York Port
Authority bus station of Venezuela) and Nuevo Circo (a bull ring used for
political meetings and bullfghting). DO NOT take a bus from the Terminal
Pasajeros. Newspapers are flled every week with bus accidents, charred
bodies and squashed, metal, bus frames. Once the bus drivers exit Caracas
and are on the open roads to all points in the country and out of it, they let
loose the pent-up aggression that has accumulated in them while they
wasted time leaving traffc-plagued Caracas. Please. I must repeat: DO
NOT take a bus out of Terminal Pasajeros.

But visit it. Let's go down there now. You can see crowds and crowds and
crowds of travelers waiting to embark. They are sweating patiently on lines
to enter the dangerous people carriers. Dressed in jeans, with GET ON
DOWN; I ONLY SLEEP WITH THE BEST, GUCCI, PUCCI, COKE,
PEPSI; SONY, or YALE UNIVERSITY sweatshirts and tee-shirts.
Sneakers for sure. Elegant Italian leather bags to carry clothes in.
Sunglasses from France. Gold chains from African mines. Baby strollers,
closed like umbrellas, from the United States. Smoking DUNHILL
International cigarettes, eating soggy potato chips, chomping on strange-
colored hot dogs, licking melting ice creams, guzzling sweet, fresh orange
juice, munching stale popcorn, chewing gooey chocolate, sipping out of
warm COKE cans: all for sale from vendors walking through the long lines
of waiting travelers. Kids playing catch between buses their balls greased
with gasoline: women sitting on suitcases shaded by empty buses and
playing cards; men standing and playing chess on magnetic checkered
boards; people slipping and falling on oil-slick patches left by buses; a line
of twenty men waiting in the torrid sun to go to the only functioning toilet
in the terminal.

We can't call on Nuevo Circo because it is closed today, but I can give you
103
one impression of it I had when I saw a bullfght here a month ago at four
o'clock in the afternoon's scorching setting summer Sunday sun. Gonza,
that stupid numbskulled idiot, had asked Big Shot Paúl to land me (she
does not sit with people hot, sweaty, and drunk on Spanish wine which is
drunk from animal skins sewn to form a soft fask) a choice seat in the
arena on the shaded side she begged, but that turned out not to be the
case. When we entered the small stadium we were met by a ten-piece brass
band playing, in the lobby, Spanish bullfght songs on the order of Herb
Alpert and the Tijuana Brass's “The Lonely Bullfghter.” Wow! What a
charge to the spirit listening to those roistering notes in the air. (I later
bought a cassette of Raymond Nuñez, Oreja de Oro, y la Gran Banda de
Toreo, with such bullfghting oldies but goodies such as Toque de Cuadillas,
España Cañi, ElToreo, La Virgen de la Macarena, Machaquito, Sangre
Española, Pepe Ortiz, Granada, and Toque de Muerte.) I was little on the high
side after a fantastic Spanish paella and white wine lunch at La Cita in
Candelaría where some of Big Shot Paúl's military friends took me before
the breaking of my bullfghting virginity that they had joshed me about all
during our delicious almuerzo. (They didn't know that I had seen the meat
slaughterhouses in Chicago, the feld hospital in Vietnam during the battle
of Dak To, and the carnage on the United States' super highways.)

It turned out that the people sitting directly to my side were a North
American couple attached to the United States embassy from Oakbrook,
Illinois, a real ritzy section near the very same Chicago I just spoke about.
All during the “fght,” the woman kept sticking her head into her husband's
chest to avoid what she thought was a primitive, horrendous, vulgar
debasement of human dignity. She almost bolted for the exit a few times,
and kept murmuring what animales were the people in the stands who kept
cheering on the gore—she a virgin to the maze of cattle waiting in Chicago
to have their heads bludgeoned and sawn off with electrically-powered,
steel-toothed discs.

Many people were drunk out of their cabezas, and within the, accumulated
into a whole, psyches of the human beings in this audience of perhaps two
thousand people, there existed a strange demeanor, a resoluteness, that is
diffcult to describe, but which is something important to perceive about
the citizens of Caracas passing so rapidly from a society once rural and
predominantly Indian, to one now “urban” and “civilized.”
104
I cannot say that the crowd's attitude was brutally sadistic, nor can I argue
that their conduct was genuinely exemplary. But the reaction to the
supposed “ferociousness” was itself very ambiguous. As when I witnessed
these special people dancing, there existed here, too, surrounding the bull
ring, a unique, unusual, “supernatural,” actually “undernatural” is a better
word, stated quality which is not easy to defne pinpointedly as one might
when assenting, for instance, that the Zuñi Pueblo Indians, the Todas, and
the Polar Eskimos represent, more or less, life-affrmative societies; while
the Dobus, Haidas, and Aztecs signify destructive societies. And even a
“cop out” into describing the people encompassing me in the stadium as
non-destructive-aggressive people, i.e., people not basically destructive, but
who do participate in aggressiveness and war with a strong bent on
acquiring things and performing certain functions to validate their
existence—is also not right. Perhaps the best way for me to depict the way
these individuals witnessed the brutal acts in the bull ring is this way: The
people looked on at the “horror” as a statement of fact—one with which
they have been living for centuries; and, they cheered their ability to
sustain their sufferings and survive enormous terror that is well-nigh
profound within the spirit of the Venezuelan Indian (in modern times, the
victims of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese racism of the sort which would
put Ku Klux Klan members to shame; but, and more importantly, in their
faces was the will to resign themselves to further abuse (viz a viz the gross
interference on the part of the six industrial nations that have reconquered
them, and Spaniards, Italians, and Portuguese, with Betamaxes, computers,
disco music, the Beatles, Perrier, and Grundig televisions, who have
coupled their vilifcations to strong elements of racial prejudice) that is very
much more dangerously agitating them than the maltreatments they
tolerated before, and which are so vehemently pushing them into that
corner where they fnally will be forced to burst out in vengeance and
vindictiveness and violence.

Sitting in front of this “bull murdering,” the Venezuelan people were

expressing their patience for more, were recharging their batteries in
anticipation. Not everyone, especially the drunks and the band players,
were so serene in hatred, for sure. But there was a collective consciousness,
among these items of humanity, which spoke of a strength hankering to
explode out into the air with cleverness but would probably reach into the
sewers of destructiveness. The Spanish killed millions of Venezuelans.

105
Let's go back to Avenida Urdaneta. The elevated avenida is Avenida
Fuerzas Armadas and that is the main thoroughfare running north-south
through this downtown center hectoring of confusion. On it is located The
Daily Journal, the “DJ,” known to a few thousand, and that was bombed in
December, 1961 when President Kennedy visited Venezuela. In a January,
1977 issue—I forget the date—of The New York Times it was exposed, with
no press reaction in Caracas, as a Central Intelligence Agency front which
everyone in Caracas had known for years. The senile directors of the “DJ”
were palsy-walsy with Narcissistic Romúlo, and they wrote many favorable
things in the “DJ” about “the founder of modern South American
democracy,” including these bits of journalistic brilliance:

“And he took us all around

his house, commenting on
everything—the swimming
pool, the kitchen, the
revolver and machine-gun on his night table
(he used to go three times a week to
the Poligono to practice
marksmanship) the papers and
books in his study, the armed
guard in his study, the
fruit-juice mixed with champagne
that he served us, his pipes...”

“One time (sic) was badly hurt

by a bomb that exploded in his car...”

“When we were planning (sic) publish

a special supplement about
him (in May, 1977) he insisted
on coming to the “DJ” to
see the editions coming off
106
 the press.
So, that night in May,
he came to visit us. He
left his two bodyguards in
the car, but asked one of
them to carry in a case of
champagne which he had
brought along.”

“...At 11 he took his leave and

we walked with him to his
waiting car. (A small detail;
he had a revolver in his
belt all the time.)”

“After he fnished his term

(in 1965) he went off to live
in Switzerland, but he was never
out of touch with events in Venezuela,
and he continued even in Switzerland,
to be a force in Venezuelan affairs.”

“One of the things Renee,

(Narcissistic Romúlo's wife)
would have liked to talk over
with Romúlo (now dead)
is the frustration she feels
at the delay with which the
commission appointed to review
his papers for publication is
going about its job. It is made
up to (sic) eminent public men
who are all very busy;
107
 Renee says they are not meeting and
nothing is getting done. She is
also afraid that the Bs. 1,000,000
($250,000) the government
has earmarked for the publishing will
never be collected since no action
is under way. There is so much
Romúlo said and wrote which she
feels is highly pertinent for
Venezuela's present situation.”

You can be sure Narcissistic Romúlo is doing somersaults in his ornate

crypt and not just over the “typographical errors” in the “DJ!”

Up farther there are more businesses, banks, the old offce of MIT, and one
or two good restaurants, not spectacular by any means, but decent. The
really fantastic restaurants are located in Las Mercedes, El Rosal, Altamira,
La Castellana, Los Palos Grandes, and La Florida, where that dimwit
Gonza lives. There are other restaurants of quality in different areas, but
this northeastern section of the city is where the best are. Call 92.55.68,
reserve a table, and you will be shocked! The prices will traumatize you,
too!

As we pass along the contaminated, ever-traf...HIT IT! GET DOWN! ON

THE GROUND! GUN SHOTS! DOWN! Up there to the right! Police! Holy
Mierda! They are spraying that bank with their guns, rifes, and machine
guns! Roll over to that shoe store! NOW! Stay down! Move it! Move it!
Move it! Roll! Roll! Roll! We can take better cover here. It will be all over in
a minute. You've got to be careful of ricocheting, high-impact bullets from
Israeli machineguns. They fy in millions of directions, and you can't trust
how far they will defect. Look at all the police cars! An army of them! And
lights fashing like the E l Árbol de Navidad. Incredible! Oh, nooooooooo!
The bastard police eliminated some of the bank's customers!
NNNNNNOOOOOO! A mother and her baby! No! No! No! Riddled with
police bullets. No! No! No! They just shoot and shoot and shoot! Shoot to
kill! To total everyone. Robbers and patrons. Everyone near the robbers is
fair game. Murderers! Look more bodies. Blood all over the sidewalk and
the stairs leading up to the bank's entrance.

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I'm sorry. Really sorry. I think I'm in Vietnam here sometimes. There are
war zones in this city, I swear to you. I know them. You must get used to
the violence to survive here in Caracas. Look. Here come the ambulances
and the coroner's wagons. No prisoners. Dead robbers, dead check cashers.
See the murder in the eyes of the police? See their mean faces? See them
sneaking sips of whiskey in their patrol cars? Old Parr. See the public
offcers, whose primary function it is to investigate by inquest any death
thought to be other than natural causes, circling the bullet holes in the
victims' bodies with black felt-tipped pens and assigning double-digit
numbers to the numerous perforations in the bodies of the victims? See the
police bored with the medical forensic proceedings? See the roped-off
area? See CRIME DOES NOT PAY looks on the faces of the passers-by?
See...well, I'll be!!! There's Tonto! Over there, squatting down behind that
parked car with his two fancy PPKSs poised for action! That crazy little...

Let's pass by, too. What can we do? You can tell this story to your friends
when you return home; they will think Caracas is some sort of cowboy town
with high-priced oil gushing out of the streets.

Three blocks up, and three blocks down to the left, is the Casa Natal del
Libertador, the birthplace of Simón Bolívar. A Colombian psychiatrist from
Bogatá, Dr Mauro Torres Sopsti, says that Bolívar was a hypomaniac and
acted with dementia—irreversible deterioration of intellectual faculties with
concomitant emotional disturbance resulting from organic brain disorder—
throughout his life. From his infancy, Bolívar was “uncontrolable,” says the
doctor in his book, Bolívar. He lost equilibrium constantly. Because of his
illness, he lost many battles during the war to free South Americans from
the oppressive Spanish marauders. He lost, says Dr Sopsti, numerous
soldiers in unnecessary battles. The doctor attributes his fndings to a host
of documents in his attempt to prove that Bolívar was born mentally ill and
so died mentally ill. El Libertador lost his reason very frequently in his
endeavors to create a free and United States of South America. (Why
United States of America and not United States of North America?)

It is interesting to note that Bolívar, in Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Perú,

and Venezuela, is regarded with an awe akin to the devotion which esteems
the Pope or the Virgin Mary in Italy. He is a sun god. He personifes that
which includes all. To speak against him is to stir up a fanaticism that
might lead to one's expulsion from Bolívarlandia.
109
Two blocks to the west of Bolívar's provenance, is Plaza Bolívar, a tourist
site for those who occasionally venture away in airconditioned buses from
the beaten path of restaurants, elegant shops, and hotel lobbies. This is
really an attractive public square with manicured grass, people doting on
pigeons, and lovers whispering sweet somethings to each other. The broad
paved area is well-protected by patrolling police. A huge monument with
Bolívar on a horse is in the center, and pigeons are always defecating on his
head. His hair is always pated with a crust of white, caked pigeon
droppings.

Still another block away is the Capitolio, the building where the
Venezuelan legislature assembles. This is a charming and distinctive place:
ornate, historical setting, immaculately well-kept, and, of course, well-
guarded. To its south is the Centro Simón Bolívar, an immense 1950-styled
government offce building, hideous in appearance; and, Teatro Municipal
y Teatro Naciónal to where come many international artistic bills that are
sparsely attended.

One block over and six blocks up, we come to Palacio Mirafores—the
workplace of the Presidente de Venezuela. A beautiful Spanish Colonial-
styled construction. Under Avenida Urdaneta there is a tunnel that leads to
the Palacio Blanco, the White House, where there are other very important
government offces. If the Presidente de Venezuela must exit the country
post haste to Switzerland or West Point, New York, or Miami, suitcases
stashed with millions of dollars, he runs through this tunnel from Palacio
Mirafores to Palacio Blanco to the Cuartel Mirafores, the military
attachment to the Presidente, to a helicopter which will scoop him up to
one of three or four possible Lear jet take-off points located minutes from
Palacio Mirafores. Then on to his in-exile freedom home...depending on
how much the now “exiled freedom fghter” has “borrowed” from the
Venezuelan people.

I'm tired. I'm disgusted, I'm angry. That shoot-out at the bank has rattled
me. Let's have a couple of beers, and then head home in a taxi. No more for
me today. My spirits are down. You know now a bit more about Caracas,
the city of Eternal Spring.

* * *

110
I'll bet you anything that you are curious to know what kind of boots I wore
while I was trekking through the dirty, violent Caracas city streets!
TIMBERLAND! Of course. TIMBERLAND insulated, waterproof boots are
the best, and they made me feel very comfortable in those situations where
I needed a boot made of rainproof leathers flled on both sides with an
innersole with layers of insularity and warmth. You can't beat
TIMBERLAND boots. The best. The most comfortable. The most durable
of all boots. Get them, and walk in them today!

* * *

17

Now let's return to the plight of our protagonist in Venezuela. There is a

surprise in store for all of us when he, favored with a supreme capacity for
taking on diffculties, walking to his sparsely furnished room, passes the
home of the deceiving (Hiss! Hiss!! Hiss!!! Boo! Boo!! Boo!!!) Gonza, and
overhears some very interesting lines spoken by the special character in his
play of life which is breaking his sensitive heart and straining his
supernatural patience.

At six-forty-fve, post meridien, on a sunsetting Caracas, a summer Saturday,

I was leaping and springing home from El Centro, my blue Chinese tee-
shirt soaked with sweat, my sore feet glued to the innersoles of my elegant,
expensive boots, I passed over into La Floridalandia on Avenida Andrés
Bello at Avenida Las Palmas: the border which separates Las Palmas from
La Florida. My unusually pleasant excursion—for one, the banks were
closed—had been taken on a clear but singeing afternoon, and had been
highlighted by the following event: In a bar near Palacio Mirafores, where
I tarried to have a couple of Solera (a fantastic beer spikes with an alcoholic
content of seven percent), I met an absolutely darling Parisian who taught
French in the Alliance Francaise in Los Caobas, who spoke English better
than I verbalized French, and who, to my utter astonishment, was
detoxifying, as I was, the effects of a poisonous Venezuelan love affair with
her rich, “third-secretary” diplomatic, ex-boyfriend whom she had met in
the Venezuelan embassy in gay Paree. She, hanging downward in body and
spirit, was on the verge of tears. Her amorous fasco was two months in its
composing, and the “living,” but very sad, “doll,” had tired of her French
friends' fretful frankness that the end had, quite frankly, freaked
111
her out.

In mildly gallant fashion—what right had I, in my post-loving depressive

state, to posture the qualities of a hero?—I confessed to her my very own
on-going unravelling of that which is regarded as a symbol of the constancy
of two lovers: The Love Knot! She gasped. How could it be that there
existed in this universe another human being who shared the strictly and
completely in accord with the fact that she herself was encumbered with at
this time and place in space? She raised smartly and quickly, and in abrupt,
distinct, and emphatic fashion, quizzed me—as I interrogated her—for
three hours about the details of our missing intense affectionate and sexual
concern for those two other individuals who had played such important
roles during our short times holding The Loving Cup. We talked about
possessed fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters and and and. We
talked about a crazy society, demented customs, abnormal manners. We
talked, we talked, we talked. Out fowed the putrid emotions. Long live
Aristotle! Long live psychoanalysis! The repressed material had been
brought to consciousness, and with our sips on beer and cognac, the
tensions and anxieties were sucked from the bar room in a splurge of joyful
revelry.

You might think, my dear reader, that there existed here an opportunity to
create an intimate sexual relationship, an enthusiastic liking and desire, or
to foment a romance, between two lost love doves. Don't, please, make that
mistake. Love and spontaneous sexcapades do not work that way. They are
collisions between two upbeat, positive forces; they are not based on the
compatible suffering caused by losing and being lost. Two losses do not
make a win. Our love/sex batteries were low, in the red area, on the
negative way down. We were not ready, as Barry Manilow has sung many
times, to fall in love again.

So we exchanged telephone numbers, and she wailed away never to be

seen again by me. I threw her card into the frst sewer I came to, and I
assume she did the same with mine. I wonder who she is loving tonight?

Walking back to my room, I mused over our three hours of bean spilling,
and I had to admit to myself that the meeting had done wonders for me, as
I had hoped it had relieved that sweet, delicate, intelligent, honest, and
kind French woman, too.
112
My juices had been revitalized enough to get me kicking and grunting and
foating again for, at least, a while. And as I headed in the direction of La
Floridalandia, the sights took on different meanings, the people assumed
different expressions, and my future appeared promisingly better. My mind
was drunk. I had tripped accidentally over a reasonable reason to be
content. I knew it would not persist very long, but I also knew the
temporary charge it was giving me was both life-giving and redemptive in
character. I was confdent, happy, and in feel of myself.

Some people write poetry or compose quartets or sell politicians or sing

high masses in this state. I'm lazy. I like to watch and absorb and feel and
sense and memorize and relax. So my trip home was of this nature: I
smelled, looked, tasted, inhaled, observed, recorded, contemplated,
listened to, and touched all that I could, all that my being was up to
assimilating. And this is what I experienced: The big, milky whitish moon,
with a blue tint to it, starting to distinguish itself, hanging over the Avila
mountain in the northern part of Caracas, seemed to be walking with me
through buildings and decaying trees. A tree trunk there, a bank building
there momentarily occluding this natural sight which many say is the cause
of changing tides, increasing criminal activity, and surging birth rates. Even
the city's torrid temperature was unsizzling itself under the bewitched
bidding of this gigantic steely Icecube in the Sky.

Thousands of little frogs were chirping throughout the city in a continuous,

non-measured beat that hinted at the slowly, but surely passing of time and
the dwindling of the once aglow Sun. These creatures were undaunted by
the buses, taxis, por puestos, and imported automobiles. Over the darkish
green Avila and down its one kilometer rear end, there was the Caribbean
Sea whose waves were churning faster and more forcefully upon the
beaches of El Litoral where lovers were now strolling, hand in hand, upon
the soft sands of the salty beaches.

There was the hope that I would shower, change clothes, and walk to a nice
restaurant and submerge myself in a beautiful meal with a small bottle of
wine. There also was the anticipation that I could fnd romance and love
once again in this crazy place now settling down after the day's hectic
happenings, now loosening itself off of the tensions and stresses which
attack its inner core so oftentimes.

113
With this sensation of joyous well-being and inspiring expectancy, my
spirit, a plastic sailboat moving easily and lightly, as if suspended in some
bathtub of my youth—all was cushy for me—when I arrived at the
bifurcation near Chinquinquera church pointing me to elect to take the
direct route to my tiny abode, or to circumvent this path and pass along the
other fork which pronged directly towards the front of Gonza's villa,
Quinta Santa María, I decided to veer along past the huge stooge's
residence to test my belief that my tender emotions for her, whom I had
lost and grieved for so strongly, were no longer so tenacious as to cause me
boredom, disgust, remorse, and paralysis over her squandered existence.

I steered my body to the place outside where she lived, where I had once
visited, but not entered—informally, unoffcially, irregularly—and now
noticed things I had never perceived in the excited expectation of our lip-
smacking meetings: the Nina y Amalia gift shop across the street; the faded
yellow chalked “Roberta Ama Fernando” on the thick, gray, stone
doorframe of Santa María; a rectangular patch of blackened asphalt that
sealed a hole once hollowed out by telephone construction workers; the
thick rich green lustrous blade-like expansions succored to the trunks and
branches of the mango trees in front of Gonza's quinta; the 1953 red
Chevrolet abandoned and rusty and stripped and missing its hood, its tires,
its front and back windshields, its motor, its radio antenna, its seats, its
steering wheel, its door handles; the zipping of por puestos and taxis and
autobuses around the corner of real estate Gonza's father once lorded and
mastered over—two women at his beck and call to fertilize, with four
children, his notions of power and possessiveness in another world—and
now entrenched with high walls and protected with electronic burglar
alarms to diminish the violent attacks of others whom now were arrogant
enough and suffciently intelligent to demand, not to work for, the
privileges Gonza's father had toiled for, but did not clamor for, in a time
when drudgery was back-and-heart-breaking yet simple and proftable:
1930: 2,000,000,000 of us; 1985: 5,000,000,000 of us.

(Gonza's fether, two weeks after her radical mastectomy, would die this
way: One late afternoon he and his North American-born wife, were
walking arm and arm up Calle Negrin to pay a visit to Banco Republica
where Gonza's father transacted “household expense” business. At the
corner where Calle Negrin joined Avenida Avila there was a kiosk, and in
front of this huge metal box, on the sidewalk, an illegally parked
114
motorcycle. Somehow Gonza's mother managed to cause the bike to fall on
her left side, and when she lost her balance, she tilted onto her husband
and they both pommeled down on the ground, in a pile. As they were
collecting themselves, the two seventy-three-year-old exasperated ones
were to become further disgusted with the “new” Caracas when the owner
of the motorcycle, who had rushed out from a building where he was
making a delivery, to determine the cause of the commotion in the street,
began cursing the two superannuated beings for causing his wing mirror to
be bent out of its usual shape. Gonza's father began to lock horns with the
youngling who fnally jumped up on his red 350cc Honda laughing at
Gonza's papi's pathetic plea for his identifcation. To add insult to injury,
when a passing police patrol car stopped to investigate the diffculty, the
policeman told the now gasping, blanched old man—he who had once
prided himself on his more-than-one family social system—that the
infraction was not his problem but that of the traffc division. Gonza's
mother, sensing that the violent agitation was affecting her husband's ailing
heart, rushed two digitalis tablets to his mouth. It was too late. He careened
to the pavement again and to his death, and was covered from view at a
funeral which was fraught with unusual occurances.

For example, the spanking new Cadillac Fleetwood limousine that

transported Gonza, her mother, her brother, her children, and me to the
cemetery, for some strange reason way beyond my comprehension, had to
have radiator reflls of water at every red light we stopped at, and the driver
paused at two gas stations along the way to fll again the tin can that was the
same kind that my grandmother watered her roses with. And then when we
got to the graveyard, two robust-less cemetery burial place excavators were
just then beginning to stomp their shovels into the earth under which
Gonza's father was to be laid to rest. Gonza's brother and I picked up
scoops with long wooden stems and we began to cull out a hole while the
almost two-hundred mourners sweated in the hot midday sun. In a half-
hour the cavity—fresh and deep but not planed smoothly at its sides as
professional gravediggers would have fashioned it—was ready, and the box,
with a glass porthole that revealed the wrinkled, blue puss of the man who,
essentially, was responsible for keeping Gonza at so far a distence from me!
the man who was an honorary member of the board of directors of perhaps
the largest corporation in South America! the man who I had just buried!
was placed on two huge ropes and four of us gently slid the casket into the
fnal disposition of Gonza's father after upon which roses and carnations
115
were tossed by the sweltering members of the entirely black-clothed crowd.
So unlike a Palm Beach, Florida burial I once witnessed where the priest,
after chanting the Dies Irae in Latin, went to an electric switch, ficked it
up, and proceeded to watch, with all of us, a sheeny cherry wooden box
drift down into the deep recess of a uniformly-carved hole on two
enormous, thickset canvas fabric belts. Gonza, who had not slept for almost
two days, kept checking the inside of her dress to see if the tube, attached
to a round plastic suction container placed over he removed breast to
accept drainage from her operated area, had fallen out of its place at one
end of a long, lateral, slowly-healing scar.)

When I arrived in front of Santa María, this is what I learned by the speech
of a sobbing, pleading Gonza whose voice reverberated out of her father's
home, San José, unto the street, Avenida Los Jardines: “I love him! Why
do you keep me from him, papi? The gringo makes me happy! Let us alone,
please, I beg you!”

There are those who, possessing higher intellectual faculties than most of
us, such mental giants as Kant, Russell, Einstein, Hegel, Wittgenstein,
Leibniz, Schelling, Sartre, who are able, in moments of crisis, to assimilate
trying situations, place them conveniently and quickly in the oder of the
Past, Present, and Future, and then immediately react with a course of
action which is rational and salutary for them.

Even a skeptical David Hume would have held out that my best alternative
—at this crucial moment of my life—when I clenched my fsts in despair
over Gonza's continuing love for me, then not for me, then for me, then not
for me, then for me, was a serious consideration which portended a bleak
future; Strike Two, the intense emotional strain she was suffering over me,
and I over her, and over her father would abate partially if I was wholly out
of her dispirited life; and, Strike Three, (She's Out!), what promise would I
have of a life of happiness with an individual whom I was now for weeks
considering a lovable creature but really not one made of enough stern
stuff—for me, for her, for us? All these facets were very clear to me,
instantaneously. Too limpid. I could not order, of what I perceived and
understood immediately, this data into the Unalloyed Gonza History that I
knew of from the past, suffered with in the present, and would more than
likely anguish with in the future. My impulse, my illogicalness, was to dwell
propitiously with Gonza in the instant of her distress, in the imperative of
116
her dread, then, in the midst of my own self-induced suffering. If I was not
a madman, I certainly was an inquisitive, devoted individual.

I darted to two public phones on the corner hoping that one of them would
function. In fact, one did, and I dialed to speak with Gonza for the frst
time in three months.

“What do you want?” she grunted, her voice discourteous, her essential
activating principle saddened.

“I want to talk to you.”

“No,” she frmly demonstrated.

I hung up the phone realizing automatically that Gonza was in need of

shock therapy and not understanding, and with the surety of my opinion
derived from the quick telephone examination of Gonza's psychical forces,
went directly, went boldly, went recklessly to the side door of San José to
speak with whomever would come to answer: the fault-fnding father, the
martyred mother, or the tormented woman/child.

I pressed the botón and heard the buzzer summon those within. Gonza
responded, and when she saw, through the small crack in the door she had
surreptitiously opened to determine who was the visitor, that it was me, she
slammed the moveable structure immediately and shouted “Go away,
gringo, I don't want to ever see you again!”

That was not enough for me, and I tried a second time.
“Please, go away!”

Yes, of course, I must go away. There is no point to this.

As I turned to go home, I was met with an angry command from on high

above the doorway, off the roof/terrace of San José: “Go home, gringo, you
are no good! You have no money!” Then Gonza's mother spat at me.

I could not believe what I had visualized. I could not give assentiveness to
what she had screamed at me. A sudden inclination to throw something at
the witch sped to my head, but when I saw her distorted, mean face, her
embittered, helpless look, her strings of gray and white hairs hanging
117
straight on down as though they had been cut along the rim of a bowl that
had been placed over her head, I knew that this frst face-to-face
communication with Gonza's mother, who I had seen only three times
before—and then at long distances—was not with a normal individual, but
with perhaps a mentally deranged one.

“I wish to speak with your daughter, Señora.”

“No! Go away! Leave or I will call the police!”

I abruptly contemplated: What to do? I pounded on the door without

stopping, demanding to see Gonza, ready to keep up my commotion until
she exited San José.

The police arrived, their revolving red and white lights dashing fying
masses on Gonza's father's fortress. I was frisked frst, then placed in the
wire-caged back seat. No handcuffs. I could see Gonza staring on down at
me with a shocked, humiliated look, her left arm around the waist of her
father.

Instead of leading me into the hoosegow, the police politely asked me

where I lived, and when we arrive in front of my quinta, they sought from
me a promise to behave myself (P-L-E-A-S-E, gringo!) and desist from
bothering my ex-girlfriend and her family.

Unlike what David Hume, and certainly not Immanuel Kant, would have
done in a similar situation, I gently but frmly informed them that I would
return to the quinta of my novia, not ex-novia's!!! father's home, and there
thump again on the door until I had an opportunity to speak with her.

The two policemen laughed and told me that if I did I would probably
spend the night in the Sabana Grande Jefatura for obstructing a public
sidewalk in a public street, in front of Gonza's father's not-so-public
habitation. I smiled back cynically at them, signing and delivering my end
of the gentlemen's agreement.

18

118
At the Sabana Grande calabozo, I deposited my belt, shoelaces, electronic
page, and personal belongings into a manila envelope, signed for them, and
taking advantage of my prerogative to make one telephone call, I phoned
my answering service and asked them to tell Carlos to hotfoot it pronto to
my aid. Then, I was ushered to a large cell in the back of the dismal-looking
carcel.

In my confnement area I was greeted by an assortment of twenty-odd odd-

looking drunks, street brawlers, and psychotics. The worst was when one
tipsy Latin peed on my taut stomach while I tried to sleep—and make
myself incognito—on the cold foor covered with a sheet of Caracas's
conservative daily, El Naciónal. No privacy was available and there were no
bathroom privileges. Some of the naughty ones were so drunk or demented
they occasionally exhibited violence which, in most instances, was directed
against themselves or the walls or the bars or others of their own
inclinations who immediately bashed them with their fsts to calm them
down, to persuade them to rest and sleep their morbid bitternesses off. The
prison guard kept telling us not to number one through the bars onto the
foor outside our narrow quarters, but he would not open the gate to let
anyone of us out. As soon as he went away, a group of seven or eight
trustees, in turn, after the others, all that could ft along the bars, would
hang their penises out through the parallel metal poles, and streams of
yellow and light olive-brown and bronze urine would cascade, in varying
distances, from the long, straight rigid round pieces of iron—in falling
currents, non-frictional, of high volume, in consonance, containing alcohol,
melodious—the jets from the feshy nozzles of the men striking the ground
then splashing back onto the metal webs of the cage for humans and the
pants' legs of the imprisoned pee-peers.

If the unpleasant custodial offcer signaled to them his menacing return,

which hovered portentously over their ability to maintain urinary authority
—he jangling his enormous keys that would release the locks of the huge
outside doors, then to be heard bang-slaming everywhere in the building—
the men would rapidly insert their dripping organs, with military precision,
into their trousers' zippers, close in unison, and dive to the foor to feign
the natural recurring responsiveness to external stimuli. Although almost
delirious with Old Parr, the defender of the law, upon seeing the steady
torrent of rich golden liquid springing its way down the corridor, would
rant and rave with threats of prolonged detentions for all of us.
119
So when, after three hours or so of trial-waiting, I was called to appear
before the sargento, I was not immediately pleased to expect my release, but
was suddenly made comfortable enough to know that I was about to enjoy a
respite from the smells of caking vomit, the three or four turds that had
been tossed against the opposing wall, and urine freeing itself from
moisture.

When I entered the bright offce of the detention personnel, I saw Carlos
in heated rage arguing with the lower-echelon non-commissioned police
offcials, promising their reassignment to the Brazilian border if ever again I
was incarcerated for such a stupid, trumped-up offense such as
“obstructing a public way in a public street!” I calmed him, thanked the
sargento for looking after my belongings, and led the boiling Carlos out of
t h e jefatura to the El Árbol de Navidad. He kept apologizing for the
inconveniences I had experienced. When I told him what had happened to
me would never occur in the grand gringolandia, and that if he ever got
arrested and imprisoned in the United States of America he should make
certain of committing a federal crime—federal penetentiary are better
places than the medieval systems of, say, the states of Florida or Louisiana
—I immediately understood what a double fool I really was. Carlos sensed
my preconceived preferences right away, and when I went to apologize to
him, he stretched to the Tonto position. We went to down a couple of
beers before he took me home, and both of us pondered silently over the
gloom which had taken hold of us in the early morning hours of a
blossoming, not-yet-old, burning day.

19

Things began to happen in the weeks after my short-lived hold-over. The

frst was this: Gonza's brother came to visit me, insisted I stop distressing
his family, and told me there were “Venezuelan ways” to take care of a moot
point such as me if I wished to continue my “annoying” tactics to win the
love of his sister, who, he repeated again and again and again, did not love
me and wanted that I return pronto to gringolandia. I had heard, a few
times before this, of Venezuelan police offcials escorting recalcitrant
fances of wealthy Venezuelan ladies—smitten with, as what Freud said
was, the psychosis of normal individuals—to the airport where they
informed their captives not to return to Venezuelalandia ever again.
Narcissistic Romúlo, it was alleged, matter of factly, prided himself in
120
offering this service to his patrons who wished to control the passing of
Venezuelan wealth through greedy family fngers. Since Gonza's mother
and father were personal friends of the Ministro de Justicia and the
Ministro de Ambiente y de los Recursos Naturales, I took Jesús's warning
earnestly.

Another was the following: Within three weeks after my stay in the clink, I
was robbed at gunpoint, returning from outings in El Centro, two times, in
front of an abandoned house next door to my own. In the frst robbery I
had taken from me my glasses, keys, wallet, watch, pipe, tie, and belt. The
next time the selfsame gun-totting thugs overcame me, they merely took my
money.

Then the most peculiar of all came about: One day at MIT I was asked to
translate a heap of curricula vitarum of prominent Venezuelan government
offcials and ministers who were slated to visit the United States with
Carlos Andrés Pérez to celebrate the two-hundreth anniversary of the
wealthiest country in the world. One of these CVs was that of the new
Ministro de Relaciónes Exteriores, and when I handed in my work to my
section chief, I cautioned him to check over the minister's CV very
carefully because there appeared to be irregularities in it. I was not
particularly nonplused over the inconsistencies because errors were
rampant in our offce and we always were producing ineffcient, sloppy
fnished products. For example, in this CV after Lugar y Fecha de
Nacimiento, (Place and date of birth), Estado Civil (Civil status), Profesión
(Occupation), Idioms que Habla (Languages spoken), Cargaos en el Servicio
(Government positions held), Cargos Públicas (Government Elected
Positions Held), there loomed, under the Otras Cargos (Other positions
held) section, a list of incongruent employment experiences, which,
because they were not true, were actually demeaning to the minister, and
might prove embarrassing for him when his CV was doled out (hundreds of
copies had been photocopied for government and press people in a
position of social and intellectual advantage and privilege in Washington) at
crystal-clinking cocktail parties and swanky breakfasts and luncheons and
dinners. I guessed that some of the tasks listed on the CV, for example,
copy boy at a newspaper, assistant bank manager, and printing press
supervisor, should be verifed before the CVs were boxed and rushed to the
presidential plane at Carlota to meet the Friday night take-off to the United
States of America's capital.
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Over the weekend the ministro, actually the Chancellor of Venezuela, soon
became cognizant of the errors when North American journalists spoke
with him in face-to-face press conferences. The minister, who hated the
Ministro de Información y Turismo (MIT), my boss-boss, the person
especially loved and indulged by El Presidente de la República himself,
screamed the rigging of facts to embarrass him, said the Ministro de
Información y Turismo had off setted lies about him to further the MIT's
chief's own career, then hopped the next plane to Caracas refusing to
present Venezuela's bicentennial gift to gringolandia.

When I heard about the contemptibly narrow-minded views of the Ministro

de Relaciónes Exteriores, my section chief had relayed to me that our boss,
Clem, had called from Washington, was returning home immediately to
plan a defense for the MIT minister-in-charge, and had told him that my
job and his were on the fring line, I laughed so hard I had to go pee pee.
At the offce, everyone was screaming “Where is the CV the gringo
translated?” It could not be found. I said I handed it in with my translation,
and did not know where it went after that. More screeching. Desk draws
were overturned, fle cabinets were rifed, and boxes were ransacked to fnd
the original CV that had to be somewhere in the offce—but was not.

On Monday: Still no CV. I snuck out of the offce in the chaos, and went to
the offce of the Chancellor's secretary, lied I was a New York Times
foreign affairs correspondent working on a story about the new Venezuelan
Ministro de Relaciónes Exteriores for millions of avid North American
readers of Venezuelan governmental procedure, and returned to the offce
with a photocopy of the miscombobulated CV which appeared to have been
copied—probably amidst others—by the canciller's secretary in between
coffee breaks and visits to the beauty parlor and telephone calls from her
boyfriend. The MIT minister, my section chief, our boss, and I were left off
the political hook.

Two weeks later, when contracts, for non-nationals such as I was, were
being examined for renewal, I was called to my Brooklyn, New York-born
boss's offce, between his meetings with Central Intelligence (Stupidity?)
Agency early morning churchgoers posing as magazine representatives,
public relations, television, radio, and newspaper experts based in fctitious
Miami and Washington companies, and I was told by Clem that “it is time
to get rid of you.” I handed in my IDs, keys, and kissed the girls in the
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offce goodbye and thought to myself how nice it would be from now on
not to wear a suit coat and tie in the fervent Caracas sun. Then I began to
adjust to my new role: defrocked Venezuelan government worker. (I'm so
lonesome I could cry.)

20

No Gonza. No job. No money. No sense of my own proper dignity...

Ever since I was sixteen years of age, I had thought to be a writer, and
when I was in the mountains bordering Cambodia and Laos, where I read
proliferously many of the books recommended to me in the university but
which I had not had chance to scrutinize then, I made this decision after
being born again intellectually: When I returned to the United States—if I
returned!—I would go again to the university not to earn a degree, but to
read and to know what was highly regarded. In Vietnam I decided to do
something about being a writer; in Vietnam I realized I had to gain mastery
of writing through experience and study; to learn many things about
writing: how to write, what to write, when to write, why to write, where to
write... During my writing internship I needed to do one most important
activity, above all others, uniquely suitable and satisfying to me and my
passion for writing: READ THE MASTERS. I read and I read and I read
them.

Walking along Avenida Libertador, at dawn, after almost ten years of

intense reading, penniless, lone, motiveless—my head bowed to the sooty
pavement, my eyes drifting along the narrow clefts in the concrete which
passed under my feet—I willed to stop thinking about writing and vowed to
begin to WRITE!!!

There was one thing I felt I could write about and that was my one-year
stint in Vietnam. A daily record, a journal of events, opinions, places, and
objects, which I had carried with me in the jungles, helped my mind to
return to the past, and summoned up for me—up to the top of my
consciousness—other memories which had become buried, I thought
before, forever.

Now I had the passion to write. In no small way could I thank Gonza and
her family for “forcing” me into the writing of my frst book. They had
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helped me to arrive to the bottom where I found only one way to go: Up!
They had stripped me bare of all the security I possessed in Venezuela and
the world. They had assisted me, indirectly, to realize I must create my own
happiness and not seek for it in other individuals. In a sense, I came to be a
man through the many unpleasant experiences I had suffered with for
Gonza and what I had thought was my own prosperity. (Gonza,
interestingly enough, after many years of separation from her, still holds a
part of my heart, and I often call to mind her existence in the memories—
so lucid and convincing as to sometimes evoke a real sadness—of our past
together. A lady of dignity and charm.)

In order to write, I had to support myself in some manner, and I was lucky
to secure a teaching position in the British Institute (“The Tute”) in La
Florida where I worked fve evenings during the week then Saturdays in
the mornings. This schedule left time loose for me to write, and the social
contact with other teachers, mostly English and commonwealth citizens,
and students at the institute, helped me maintain a balance between the
desolate life of writing and the incidental need to communicate with others.

I bought a small, manual Olympia typewriter, a ream of paper, a Japanese

mechanical lead pencil, and off I went to write: Unfortunately, the
typewriter's “a” key kept sticking in the punch guide (the man from whom I
had bought it would not take it back and reissue me a new one—so my
writing career was launched on ominous strokes. Nevertheless, in a sense, I
really “felt” like a writer, was determined to fnish my Vietnam manuscript
come what may, and took enormous pride in telling everyone at the “The
Tute” that I was occupied fve or six hours a day “WRITING MY BOOK!!!”
I had exchanged my petitioning the hand of Gonza for the writing role. My
new Identity had been forged, and has remained with me since.

In my room, apart from other people, pencil scratching sentences into

stenographer's books, transposing to the typewriter these pages of script
patched with proofreader's marks for letting it stand, making capital,
deleting, closing up space, and inserting, my head capped with a white
tennis tam-o'-shanter to reduce the glare from my lamp, my Japanese fan
breezing balmy blasts around my head, my dictionaries set on music stands,
my pipe's light dimmed out—one day so happy I fick the keys of my
typewriter keeping time to Beethoven's Klavierkonzert Nr 1; another day so
depressed I will mope through my work sensing I will never fnish it—I
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write. Why? ? ? ? I am psychically destroyed of tranquility and
composure, but not all the time. I am forever refecting on the fact that my
two true loves—the violin and philosophy—are lost for always—as Gonza is
now. But, when I am writing about what I am cajoled emotionally to call
into existence, I feel a sense of well-being for both confronting what I
could not have faced before, and for explicating something which others
might enjoy braving with me and which they may fnd relief in as much as I
do. My subjective responses spring out of the murky imprints of my life that
lie fxed below my consciousness and, they do not disappear as quickly as I
would like. They are down there, and every so often signal to me—through
bodily tremors and nervous agitation—their desire to fnd release in a
defnition of their reality. The screams for escape tell me I must begin to
sort my notions, because if I do not attend to these hidden predilections
which may not pass away with time, I will suffer painful consequences for
my neglect. These psychic reactions demand immediate attention. I must
write them out.

And so when the written-over pages reach the fnal draft stage where they
have assumed a neat, elegant visual aspect with measured borders to
impress the publishing companies, with a consistency I have tried to
achieve also in ideas and manners of expression, the work now fnished, I
stand back and admire the original and its photocopied copies; I dream of
the effort appearing in bookstores and library shelves; and, I rejoice in the
completion of my human try to have a similarity to Nature, to add to it, and
to mark approval and disapproval of it.

21

Imagine, for a moment, it is Saturday morning, a bright, beautiful,

blossoming tropical day is before you, and you are a successful Venezuelan
businessman, owner of the company that has exclusive rights to import and
sell one of the United States' most famous lines of automobiles. You are
tired after a busy week of business meetings, late evening work dinners,
and two unplanned rushes—in your Lear jet—to Detroit to haggle over a
price increase and fnancial assistance for the opening of your new sales
outlet in Maracaibo. Your wife, who has not seen you for fve days, is
prancing about the bedroom in red-laced bikini panties, and her two
fantastic heaps of fesh, without an undergarment to give them contour, are
fopping up and down and exciting you as they did when you grabbed for
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them (when you could, you remember with a sly smile) during the period
you wooed the queen with whom you have been with now for ffteen years.
You know what you want, what she wants, but yet you are not yet up to it.
You are dead tired because during the week you made love three times to
an automative executress with whom you have been attached intermittingly
for over eight years (What's good for General Motors, is good for you) since
you started to itch in the seventh year of your marriage. You talk your wife
into letting you sleep until midday promising her a hot time in the old town
tonight as soon as the kids are deposited at the abuelo and abuela's home,
when your libido will have been, hopefully, reactivated more intensely. She
assents to your plan reluctantly—her juices had already been fowing in
expectation of rapturous, riotous, pleasure-giving, moments.

Suddenly, “The Greatest Hits of the Bee Gees” cassette starts blasting out
of the children's wing of the quinta, and you, thinking that all through the
house not a creature had been stirring, not even one of your own rats, tense
up in anger realizing now that the happily anticipated sleep-in to twelve
will not become an event that is actual.

You relax yourself, coil under the covers of your bed draped with egg-white
silk sheets, and understand beforehand, very soon, there will arrive three
pre-teens, your children, who will jump and jostle all over you in delight at
your coming home. They will immediately ask what you bought for them in
Detroit, Michigan.

Before they get to you, you think back to the early morning hours when you
came at length to home, dropped your bags and attaché cases in the living
room, poured some Old Parr into a Bohemia crystal glass, and sat down
before the onyx coffee table in the living room upon which is set three
gold-framed color photos of each of your darlings' First Holy Communions.
You remember looking at them frozen in saint-like poses—the two boys
dressed in blue suits with white ties and shirts, gold cords around their
necks, grasping cooly huge wooden crucifxes burrowed in their bosoms,
and white and gold and crimson silk sashes attached to their left arms; the
girl, in a white dress, wearing a snowy veil, her two hands folded, in prayer,
around a black missal from which dangles a pair of silver rosary beads—
and you had to admit that certainly they are not people offcially recognized
by the Roman Catholic church as being entitled to public veneration; nor,
are they especially charitable, unselfsh, and patient individuals.
126
You refect on this incongruence. Then you think of your studies in the
university: social psychology, mass psychology, some business
administration. You ponder over your jet-lagged traveling, computerized
offce, and illicit, but satisfying, sexual life. You contemplate: Why is it that
we freeze an affectedness on our faces, to be exhibited in a public place, a
posture that is totally affected, wholly chimerical, naturally unreal? Are we
crazy? The religious motif in the pictures has no connection whatsoever
with the lives of the children, and certainly your human activities,
relationships, and collective interests. But that recurrent thematic element
has been monumentalized in your very home for all to see, for all to know
that you are conforming to an ideal that you know you do not believe in nor
sustain with overt practice and regular attention. You think: Maybe you
believe in God, but He certainly does not believe in you! You swig at your
whisky. Why? Why? Why?

Even the focused faces of the infants fascinate you. They are not now the
same children that they were when those pictures were taken. They will
never be that again. Why have you and your wife given those photos, those
instants in time, a status that signifes an outstanding and enduring
achievement viewed as a model for later generations? You immediately call
to mind that flms and videocassettes are more searching; or, you imagine,
suppose it were possible to take a head shot of your children the frst day of
every month for all their lives—to their deaths—and splice the sequences
together to form a flm? That might be more cunning than the few casual
shots you have caught or have had taken to date. How can these idiotic
visual representations of you children, in quasi-medieval garb, serve to be
representations of their likenesses, much less their lives? Something is out
of whack here, you admit nearly hopelessly. Then they get to you. Mobbing
your bed, hugging your neck, kissing your face, stomping your stomach.

One! Two!! Three!!!

“What did you get me, papi? What did you get me, papi?? What did you get
me, papi???”

This and this and this. That and that and that. And they run off to their
rooms. Your wife smiles at you. You remember how tired you are, and you
roll over and try to send yourself back to sleep. The children know no quiet
moments. You think how to cope with the predicament. How to manage it.
127
How to administer it. You think how to keep the fort under control on
Saturday mornings. You think how you must get them to peel potatoes and
drill in the quadrangle for three or four hours. Eureka!!! You think how
you will enroll them in Saturday morning English classes at La Florida's
Instituto Cultural Venezolano-Britanico—known to under-paid English
teachers as “The Tute.”

As you are rubbing your palms in delightful expectation of the frst

Saturday your chauffeur and maid will take the monsters out to breakfast,
before class, to return home later for lunch with you and your wife, a mere
ten minutes' walking distance from The Tute, there exists an individual
writing a book about the Vietnam “War”—a person you will never meet,
but who will be the English teacher of two of your wonderful ones; a
person you will never hear mentioned by your wife, but who will be her
ardent, sexual companion for the next fve years until the agitated author
decides to leave Venezuela and fnd peace and quiet in the beautiful,
indolent Montecatini, Italia.

This aspiring writer is settled snugly in a quinta ruled over by a Spanish

tyrantess from Galicia. He works hard on his manuscript every day, is an
exercise fanatic, is trying to forget a lost love, is taking writing lessons from
Beethoven, is North American, is poor, is rich with spirit, is attempting to
understand the Venezuelan way of life and its beautiful, suffering people.

It is his custom to rise early Saturday morning, before going to The Tute, to
do some calisthenics, shit, shave, shower, and then have a leisurely
breakfast consisting of a big glass of orange juice, a cheese and tomato
toasted sandwich, and a café con leche. He likes to watch the Italian coffee-
maker as it spews out vapory streamlets of the rich, thick, mildly
stimulating beverage into a plastic cup to which, then, is added hot milk
steamed by a vapor nozzle at the side of the coffee-making machine. He
adds half a cellophane mini envelope of sugar, and off he goes, with his
coffee in hand, to climb up Avenida Los Mangos on his way to The Tute.

He guesses that perhaps the most gorgeous days in Caracas come in the
months of December and January. It is then that the temperature is driest,
the sky the brightest. The top of Caracas is fuffy blue and wide-open
during these precious days. Little humidity. Mild breezes. Dazzleless sun. A
perfect picture-taking atmosphere: shadows are distinct.
128
On his journey up Avenida Los Mangos, the writer/teacher draws into
himself, and records forever sights that delight, smells that compel. Within
this location, Caracas, in the inventory of the Universe, there is a large
collection of trees, plants, fowers, and bushes, richly vegetated, very often
enormous works of Nature, doting the streets, the lawns, the driveways, and
the roof terraces of the elegant La Florida residential zone. Plump purses of
shrubs abound so thickly in some areas, one imagines that an idyllic forest
scene—Avenida Los Mangos slopes up into the Avila Montaña—is awaiting
all at the end of the thoroughfare. It is not.

On any day in December and January, Avenida Los Mango is splendid and
resplendent in green growth and foliage which, when mixed with the sun,
refects a greenish-yellowish glowering hue off itself up into the air. The
fne favors from the leaves, branches, and fowers are so pungent at times,
one thinks he or she is in a fower shop or next to some man or woman
wearing a strange, but pleasantly pleasant strong scent. The air is heady
with these blossoming agents which entice with their intoxicating aromas.

The writer of the Vietnam “War” manuscript is reminded of the

magnifcent vistas he saw in the Ia Drang Valley in Vietnam and the
mountains of Cambodia and Laos. In those places, too, rich thick plant life
populated the landscapes. Luscious vines and leaves, gigantic bushes and
trees. The insects also were of inordinate sizes just as they are in
Venezuela: cockroaches, Palmetto bugs, the sizes of one's fst; pythons
stretching forever; wild water buffaloes reaching to the sky; tigers, lanky
and thunderous; cobras, malicious and wiry. Even the monsoon rains in
Asia are impressionable: long, hard, and persistent. Nourishing a tough
territory, a land of strange diseases, a portion of the earth that defes
modernity.

Caracas does not challenge things belonging to recent times, to the present.
But it does nothing to accelerate a change to what is considered
contemporary. Generally, wild fowers, plants, and trees, where they exist,
stand not isolated in a park or botanical garden, but in the very homes,
gardens, and backyards of the people: usually, the wealthy ones who can
afford large enough spaces to cultivate rather complicated, exotic,
vegetation.

129
So as the writer walked along Avenida Los Mangos, he observed not
through wires and cages nor did he witness in sections of public areas
exceptional examples of peperomia sandersil, palmaee chamaedorea
elegans, polypodiaceae adiantum, flices, crasulaceas, and crotons, but he
discovered them through an open door with a view leading to the large
lawn of a quinta, through a porthole in a wall enclosing the terraced patio of
the ex-president of Banco Central, or though the driveway that leads up to
the Spanish castle of one of Venezuela's most successful novelists.

In Vietnam it was the contrary. Nature hemmed him in. The writer had
been “free” to roam in a Gigantic Garden where, occasionally, were found
people living in “primitive” conditions, without running water, without
electricity, without, without, without what he the writer had been with
with, with. Montagnard villagers naked to the waist, cooking on burning
coals in front of their huts, their bodies caked with dirt, their teeth
crooked, stained and rotten, and their eyes burnished with sadness and fear
of the North Vietnamese soldiers, communists at night, and the North
American soldiers, capitalists during the day. Their Gigantic Garden
inhabited now by forces they did not understand or respect. Their Gigantic
Garden no longer open for them to glide through in the hunt for food and
the chase for women. Their Gigantic Garden populated by unknown
representatives of strange political, economic, and social propensities.

Whichever way the writer turned, he felt trapped. In Caracas, it cost to see
Nature. In Vietnam, Nature was gratuitous. Exempt also to exact its own
price: as each and every capitalist and communist general knew there,
Nature was a strict creature. For all the punishment it had inficted on It, It
parceled out its own. Nature knew it would survive, yet it yielded high
malarious temperatures. It slapped down villagers and soldiers with
tuberculosis, cholera, and typhus. Its billowy, dark clouds, bulging their
way through the skies, dropped oceans of rain on roads, muddying them,
on fghter bombers, grounding them, on bodies, diseasing them. When the
fossy vapors full of downpour scattered at the end of their season, the hot
sun came to parch throats and cake high and low roads to a powdery dust
that blew in the faces of uniformed men and clogged the oil-smooth-
running machinery of the capitalist and communist armies.

The writer did not think it was important that there was little Nature in
Caracas and, perhaps, too much Nature in Vietnam. Nature is Nature! And
130
it exists all over the world. All over: wherever the writer wished to fnd it.
Delicious heaps of it! It could be looked down upon. It could be looked up
upon. Nature is ubiquitous.

What impressed him in the highest degree was the power of Nature: Its
Constancy, Its Force, Its Beauty, and above all, Its Avoidance of Speech, Its
Secrecy. Nature is Wise. Nature is Deliberate. Nature is Awesome. Nature is
action without articulate language. A fne place to fasten one's attention, as
John Keats says, in his frst published poem, when one is lonely or alone
with someone:

“O Solitude! If I must with thee dwell,

Let it not be among the jumbled heap
Of murky buildings; climb with me the steep--
Nature's observatory—whence the dell,
Its fowery slopes, its river's crystal swell,
May seem a span; let me thy vigils keep
'Mongst boughs pavilioned, where the deer's swift leap
Startles the wild bee from the foxglove bell.
But though I'll gladly trace these scenes with thee,
Yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind,
Whose words are images of thoughts refned,
Is my soul's pleasure; and it sure must be
Almost the highest bliss of human-kind,
When to thy haunts two kindred spirits fee.”

And therefore, every Saturday morning, at the time when the writer moved
along felicitously, to the front of the farmacia, then round the corner,
where Avenida Los Mangos intersected with Avenida Principal Avila, on a
bit to Avenida San Gabriel, climbing up to The Tute, he took from Nature
and felt content in its innermost recesses.

All through his life he had taken high happiness from Nature: In Vietnam,
where he walked through the jungle with his thumb on the safety and his
right index fnger on the trigger of his M-16, with his pack yoked to his
back, with sweat accumulating at his armpits and lower chine, with his steel
helmet shoving his neck muscles into the middle of his shoulder blades,
with boots wet and scrapped by twigs and rocks...always the Beauty of
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Nature allured him; and, in Caracas, where he could fnd Nature if he had
the patience to do so, when he breezed through the streets with his
electronic page at the ready, with his underarms soggy, with his faded jeans
tepid in the hot sun, with his Timberland boots skimming over the
pavement, with the perspiration from his head dripping on down onto the
lenses of his plastic sunglasses...all the time the Beauty of Nature enticed
him. And just as when, in Vietnam, the Shelleyan slumber he was
indulging in in the infrastructure of a unique wooded area, was violently
interrupted by the smacking of AK-47 bullets and the exploding of 122mm
communist Chinese rockets, resounding through bushes and trees, the
rounds pounding themselves to the ground in thunderous ovations,
scttering his infantry company in panic and confusion, and forcing him to
Hit the dirt!” and come up with his grid-coordinated location to call his
battery for artillery support, so too, the same PercySpectre he was enjoying
as he walked now to The Tute, was suddenly tresspassed upon by the
screams of two-hundred little hostile forces, jumping out of trees and off
cars, blasting into the air Bee Gees' songs which annoyed The Tute's
neighbors (The Tute would be closed by the next government for the
children's obnoxious infringements), and waiting anxiously to storm the
opened doors of The Tute to buy candies ans sodas before the beginning of
classes.

There were twenty-fve small demons rostered on the writer/teacher's

attendance sheet, but no more than ffteen ips ever assembled for the
three-hour (with a half-hour break at midpoint) Saturday morning
instructive marathon. Many of the cursed ones made weekend visits to their
parents' beach homes, or few with papi y mami to apartments in
Miamilandia for Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday “weekends;” or,
they just refused to attend class because they deemed some familiar social
gathering more important than presence at class.

It is more correctible to state that the writer was not, in fact, a teacher at
The Tute. He was a sitter of big babies. His class, programmed for boys and
girls between eight and nine years of age, actually accommodated a group
of students whose existence in Time ranged from six to twelve years. There
were two principal reasons for this. The frst: Some of the unnatural
productions had been left back either because they assisted at class
sporadically, or because they were hated so by their previous teachers. The
second: Two mothers had insisted that their darlings remain clustered
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together at all times—in the same class at The Tute. And so the writer's
class was populated with two family organizations of varying ages. The
Tute, a “non-proft” business, was always at the ready to bend one way,
then another, to keep classes full to the brim. This uppermost edge of The
Tute, without exaggeration—there were tens of thousands of these fabulous
beings in Caracas—often overfowed with tension and hostility with four
independent human aggregations vying for their chances to establish their
modes of existing: the administrators of The Tute; the teachers in The
Tute; the parents of the special ones; and, the very ones who inspired
horror and disgust.

From the writer/babysitter's perspective, a typical Saturday morning at The

Tute, then, was not a learning experience for the children, but an obstacle
course for him who, to survive, needed to have at least tried to remove,
circumvent, surmount, and manipulate them for three hours into a social
stratum of ordered members who ought to have shared similar things in
common: quietness, attentiveness, and courteousness. This never was the
case.

The writer knew that the frst law of the classroom jungle was to eyeball, on
the frst day, mischievous children into a semi-obligingness. Not to torment
them (unfortunately), but to set a tone all at once dependable, serious, and
respectful. The writer believed, as David Hume, that frst impressions are
lasting. Why not lay the law down plain to the mind? Children actually love
discipline because with the limits and bounds set for them, they can go
certain distances in confdence, they can feel themselves secure in one
determined, delineated manner of behavior, and they can, when they are
confdent and strong enough in the company of their own passions, then
seek to charge out to explore always knowing they might return to a
position where they are at their level, conscientious, best. As much as he
often wanted to do, the writer knew that he could never smack them into
such a consciousness-raising state: Violence is not the road whereby one
learns to analyze one's own life situation and then transform it so as to
achieve liberation from oppression within.

Within the totality of social relationships among the human beings in his
eclectic collection of young brilliant Venezuelan students, there were six
individuals who demonstrated to the writer, an intellectually acute, single
person on every occasion on the human behavior outlook, excessive
133
sensitiveness which troubled the writer and impelled him to think twice,
thrice, often fve times, before he proceeded to impose his character upon
them.

One offspring of a prominent Venezuelan family, an asthmatic child, Juan

Carlos, eight years of age, evidenced these uncomfortable qualities: He sat
simmering all the time in anger and antagonism, but rarely expressed
himself to others; he made reference to his mother asking very often when
it would be when she was to come for him—she being one who, before the
course began, expressed her intense concern for her child overprotecting
him with her guilt-ridden, controlling mannerisms and hinting to the
writer her own doubts about her maternal role. Medication, frst-aid
procedures, and telephone numbers were all clearly handed over to the
writer to be used in the event of the dreaded, inevitable asthma attack.

Another youngster, Safa, age six, was afraid to be in The Tute. She was the
younger of three family members who peopled the class. Her older
brothers were out-going, good students, but she seemed to dwell anxiously
and miserably in the shadows of them. Safa had a very low self-esteem, and
she appeared to be intensely vulnerable to everything. Her mother was an
excessive nosey body and told the writer not to pay attention to Safa if she
complained about headaches. Safa kept asking to go to the bathroom.

Miguel Angel, nine, was considered “strange, crazy” by the other students.
He was overactive and restless always. He exhibited aimless motor activities
and occasionally had temper outbursts which disturbed the class and
frightened Safa very much. Generally, it was impossible to expect Miguel
Angel to concentrate on anything with such strong sentiments of
impulsivity. But, there were times when he managed to participate with the
class.

María del Pilar, eleven, worried the writer the most. She kept trying to
leave the classroom. She continued saying things were totally different
from what they had been last term, and that “new rules” existed to keep her
from going to the bathroom when she wished. She communicated with no
one in the class, was defensive, depressed, and anergic. She wanted to
change institutes and study another language.

A different diffculty was Marciano, seven,. He often exhibited explosive,

134
involuntary utterances, and his neck muscles jerked regularly to shake a bit
his head and thoracic region. Sometimes he coughed or grunted. Marciano
was inhibited and overly anxious.

Carmen Julia, aged nine, tore at the writer's heart strings. She was a
“differentiated” person. She was born deformed—one leg longer than the
other with a protruding hump at her left hip—and her attitude was at once
courageous and beautiful for she always made claim to receive
consideration as any other human being, her deformity notwithstanding.
She attributed to her disability a behavior that an ordinary unburdened
individual would have merely regarded as human. Everyone in the class
viewed her as a subject for interpretation: Why was she the way she was
when everyone else seemed not to be as she? Carmen Julia was uneasy and
uncertain in her mind, and she was forever assessing how great a part her
dissimilarity would affect the actions of the others around her. She could
not, in our class, seek comfort from others of her own kind. She was not
living in an institution or a hospital. She glued herself to those who could
be relied upon to show tact and understanding. Hers was a protective
withdrawal. Whenever she came forward to express herself with others—
she was ever so careful, ever so situation conscious. She sought approval
from her viewers. She took pains to show that her condition was a state to
which she had adjusted successfully—a place where she felt she had
control. In fact, the writer felt that she was tolerating her own society, not
the reverse. She often had to put people disturbed at her condition at their
own comfort! She was fantastic at this, actually. She was brave. She was
always attempting, in a forced sense, to underscore her adjustment. (Is not
good fortune, traditionally, a most unpardonable faw among those who
have not thrived?)

It was because of these six special children—overly susceptible to the

attitudes, feelings, and circumstances of the others in the class—that the
writer was to come to adopt an attitude of deriving pleasure from being
offended, dominated, and mistreated by the members of his petite, but
unique, student body. The other ten students in the class were a huge
discipline problem not because they suffered from physical or mental
disorders, but for the reason that they, in their peer group, went bananas
with excitement and playfulness. They all seemed to be in need of
expending a vast amount of physical energy that obviously had no outlet in
their usual social and cultural surroundings.
135
To juggle these beings of perpetual motion—to keep these callow powers in
a common rhythm at one time for three hours, was not the work of a
writer/teacher/babysitter, but the labor of a magician, clown, showman.
Whenever the writer had successes in his manipulations to befool, they
seemed not to last for any great length of time. So jokes, story-telling, and
games came to be the way the writer held attention. When he commanded
interest, he went about, with subterfuge, to sneak in the work of an English
teacher. He taught very little of this language spoken by some 700,000,000
people (1980) throughout the world.

Perhaps the dreary room where the writer conducted English studies had
something to do with the actions and reactions of the children. It was not
an especially attractive place. It was illuminated with light emitting from
electromagnetic radiation., and one of the long, white tubes in the
overhead fxture kept blinking on and off. The desks were old, wooden
ones with scads of initials and scratches furrowed into them. The walls
were scuffed with heel marks, with dried food, and with pockmarked
depressions made by the pressure of banging pieces of fat-topped
furniture. The dilapidated blackboard was not a green board, and its tray
was flled with an accumulation of chalk dust that had snowed on it over
the months. The writer had to clap the powdery erasers (rubbers) on the
outside wall, through the window, of The Tute. The foor: cigarette burns,
patches of gum dried and soiled black, scrapes, scuffs, holes in its worn
linoleum. A wooden crucifx, with Jesus Christ's left leg and right arm
broken off, was centered above the old blackboard.

When the monsters scampered into class they began immediately arranging
the desks in their preferred order, not mine, seeking companionship with
their friends or family members. They carried their ripped books, with
pages missing, to their places. Pencils dropping to the foor...candy
wrappers fying to the foor or bouncing off the rim of the bent-out-of-
shape wastepaper basket...hands gesticulating for bathroom
privileges...fibbertigibbets screaming to know what games were to be
played that morning. Games? Games: “Guess the Word,” the English
word, that flls the gaps on the blackboard; who can write a sentence, a
little English sentence, the fastest?; who can play English teacher the
longest time?; who can tell a story in English?; who can write on the
blackboard the most correct English words?; and, on and on and on...

136
Julio is punching Pedro. Julio is sent to the director's offce. Miguel Angel
keeps jumping out of his seat to pull María's hair. Miguel Angel is told he
will not play “Guess the Word” if he acts badly again. Safa looks so sad she
is on the verge of tears. Safa is made the permanent “Assistant to the
Teacher,” sits next to him, and turns the pages of his book when he is able
to teach. María del Pilar has snuck out of the classroom while the writer has
had his back to the class, writing a game on the rickety blackboard. María
del Pilar's absence is reported to the administration offce. Ramón,
Marciano, and Juan Carlos's hands are up for permissions to go “pee pee.”
Ramón, Marciano, and Juan Carlos are told to wait, in turn, for their trips
to the boys' rest room.

Sitting alone at break time, the writer wished whimsically that he was an
anthropologist, an ethnologist, a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a
psychoanalyst, a historian, a sociologist, a philosopher, then, a politician!
Yes, he saw it as a political activity. It was not to be analyzed, dissected,
written about, studied, put into conference, hashed over, and then stacked
away in the shit can or on library shelves. This was communist/capitalist
free-for-allism, and the writers' pupils were on the shit end of the political
stick. The lines had been drawn: benevolent oligarchy and masses of poor
people against the masses of poor people with a not-so-benevolent, ass-
kicking dictatorship of the right, of the left, of the communists, of the
capitalists...it did not matter one iota. There were no social services in
Venezuela, even for the well-to-do. And there would never be. The median
age of the Venezuelan is getting younger every year—it is not maturing.
Who in his or her right mind was going to make well hundreds of
thousands who were stressing to death the natural order of things? Who
could consent to assist the social nurturing of hundreds of thousands who
spawned forth from the bellies of humans as guppies do from the uteroses
of their mothers. There was a hold on social and medical services in
Venezuela, and no one gave a damn about Safa or Marciano, or María del
Pilar. They were to cook in their own juices, and if they bubbled up in
revolution, if they survived, they would be shot on the spot.

The writer pondered over these hard realities. He knew some rich parents
had the money to go to the United States or Europe or the Soviet Union to
have their children's problems cared for intelligently and professionally. He
knew, too, that ninety percent of the people would never get proper
medical attention. He knew there were six swift elevators in the IBM
137
building in Caracas, but lines to get on the solitary elevator in the
university hospital. He knew the oligarchy was so far removed from the
common people, their stupidity seemed inexhaustible. He also knew this
neglect was festering to the violent breaking point.

When the children returned after their break, the writer braced for the
next, the last, period of aggravation and frustration. María del Pilar still has
not returned to class. The writer runs to the director's offce to fnd out
where she is, but no one knows, still, her whereabouts. A search is made
throughout The Tute, and the writer fnally fnds María del Pilar in the
boys' rest room with the middle fnger of her right hand in the anus of a
four-year-old boy, the brother of a Tute student. María del Pilar explains to
the writer that the little boy wanted to go “pooh-pooh,” but couldn't, and
had asked her to “aguantame” to stimulate his excretory canal so that he
could have a successful bowl movement.

22

Among the memories which used most commonly to drone around an axis
in my inner senses pending the completion of my literary struggle covering
the whole extent of my Vietnam observations, there remained, in the
swirling of my brain, the spent stages I had carried out, in lightheartedness,
with Gonza. I brooded that I must wash my hands of her as best I could
and knew that Time, on my side, was the most excellent restorative for my
hurt self and my vigorous appreciation of her being, taken away from me in
a mode prone to harm and satisfaction in and indifference to suffering.

It took me nine months to bring my manuscript to fruition, and almost to

the day, when I entered upon typing up the third rough draft—the fnal
copy!—to send to the publishers in the United States, England, and
Canada, then, later on, in frustration, to Paris, Peking, Moscow, Tehran,
Madrid, Barcelona, Milano, and Sidney, Gonza again entered my life in this
manner: A knock at my door signaled me to respond to the public
telephone, in the main passageway of my home, where I heard for the frst
time in months, the chilled, mirthless voice of my well-known ex-lover.

Her polished tidings—swimming from her end of the cable—jolted me.

Was the mother and father dead? Hope surged through me forthwith, from
habit, from bygone time.
138
 “How are you?” she set herself on foot.
“I'm fne. But very lonely.”
“I'm sorry.” she sadly conceded, unfeignedly.
“You?”
“Not so good.”
“Can I help you?” I muttered thinking that if I had a gun and she was next
to me, I would shoot her between her eyes.
“I'm not sure.”
“Then why did you call me?”
“I'm scared.”
“About what?”
“I have cancer.”
“Cancer?” I broke sort.
“In my left breast.”
“Are you sure it's not a lab foulup?
Did you check it out with another doctor?”
“I have 'The Big C,' gringo,” she rejoined—her mind
mesmerizing her thought to me skipping its passage
through her seat of affection.
“SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHHEEEETTT,”
I neighed in disgust.
She laughed.
I laughed.
She cried.
I cried.
“When can I see you?” I pleaded in a friendly way.
“Do you really want to?”
“Yes, stupid! I really want to. I will be with you, Gonza, I promise.”
“It's impossible tonight. Tomorrow? Lunch?”
“OK. Where?”
“Your favorite, Costa Vasca. I'm inviting you.”
“Fantastic. Thank you.”
“Gringo?”
“Yes?”
“Te amo.”
“No, you don't.”
“Yes, I...”
I cut the conversation short...and bullied low-mindedly without casting
reproach...”but I can't love you. See you tomorrow at noon—in front
139
 of the Costa Vasca at 12:30”...then hung up the phone.

The Costa Vasca holds a warm spot in my heart for a number of reasons.
One is that the owners, Asunción, the manageress, a dominant personality,
and her husband (I forget his name; he is a quiet, blushing sort—he better
be with Asunción!), the cook, maintain an almost abnormal standard of
excellence in whatever they set up. Whether attending to the cleaning of
their small restaurant, or selecting the day's vegetables, or preparing the
main attraction itself, fne food, these vascos from España go at it above and
beyond the normally accepted Caracas restaurant norms which, far more
often than not, stoop to the raunchy side. In fact, Narcissistic Romúlo often
eats there, and when he is not feeling well, he calls in his order and sends
his bodyguards with pots to pick up his selections of scrumptious
nourishment. To tell the truth, we have eaten together many times at the
same pre-rush time, at different tables, with our dates, his bodyguards
stationed at the entrance and exits, the only four people in the restaurant,
never speaking at one another, but eyeing each other for long times, our
mouths on the chew, content that we beat the crowds that would come to
enjoy an evening's meal or a Sunday lunch with the family all dressed to
kill in Gucci scarves and Marlboro sweatshirts.

The Coasta Vasca is semi-formal at night. It is not a large place, and holds
perhaps forty places at different sized tables. The two waiters, Antonio and
Manola, españoles, wear tuxedos to give the house a formal tint, and the bill
is delivered in a beautifully carved wooden Spanish box. Bathrooms are
cleanissimo! Candles light the tables. The place is comparatively quiet even
when it is flled to excess. The tablecloth is immaculate, lustrous: it has the
touch that it has been scalded to the point of sterilization, and dried and
bleached by the hot, blazing sun. It smells antiseptically.

No one is in a hurry here. Cocktails may be sipped before sitting down.

There are high engraved wooden dividers between the tables. Antonio and
Manolo seat you and they gently guide the chair to the back of your knees
as they do so. This is an enchanting place to eat.

Things being so, it is almost beyond belief to incur, in Caracas, a

simultaneous combination of cleanliness, order, and serenity braced with
superior menus of food and wine. Special sauces and fresh meats and just
received fsh and precious breads and savory salads and ample fruits and
140
soft desserts and abundant garnish and sweet liquors and silver-toned
wines and freshly brewed coffee...these constitute a joyous event. Perhaps a
cognac? A Montecristo? One chafes his fngertips on the luster of the
tablecloth. One watches the glow of the candle refect off the features of the
beloved one sitting across the way. One enters a dreamland of pleasure—
not excessively indulgent and expensive—to enjoy, to relax, to escape,
momentarily, from the actual existence of Caracas.

Gonza was overnicely dressed when I set eyes on her standing on watch
near the restaurant's entrance. She did not see me at frst, so I had some
seconds, before her, to encompass her, to size up her being while it was
still remote from my own. I stole this instant in Time to zero in on her
pallid face, her unusually thinned constitution, her lackluster hair, her
hallowed eyes, her seemingly frail and vulnerable carriage. I knew now, at
last, how to encounter my ex-novia after so long a time in absence from her.
I zoomed on up to the front of her. Our eyes came face to face. Both our
hands reached out. Our cheeks bumped. Our lips puffed. Our smiles
exploded with merry remembrances of happier days together. We walked
into the Costa Vasca set to be seen maybe by important Venezuelan social
and political personages including El Presidente himself.

“You look good!” she revved her engines.

“How are you feeling?” I thought it best to be clinical:
rigorously scientifc; highly objective.
No lies.
“How are you?”
“How's everything?”
“It's been so long.”
“Yes, almost an eternity.”
“How are the kids?”
“How's work?”
“Weather's hot as hell.”
“Many patients?”

“You're fnally writing a book!”

“What's it about?”
“Do you have a girlfriend?”
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
“Who wants a girl with cancer?”
141
 (I suppose I do. Or do I?)
“Let's talk about your cancer, Gonza?” I inquired delicately.
“My cancer. Yes, my cancer. My 'Big C' as you Americans would say.”

The tears rolled out and on down her cheeks onto the sheeny tablecloth
which regenerated the beads of clear saline liquid into gray-white dapples.

I reached rapidly for my clear saline liquid wiper and passed it to her,
providently, for her to do her own blotching in the public place. I stared at
her coldly and businesslike; the memories of our turbulent past were still
crisp in my mind, goading me with courage...for the moment. I knew
before the night was out my frost-bitten heart would melt, dissolve with
oodles of fellow-feelings, sparkled by Spanish brandy (Duca d'Alba), and I
judged at random that I might even be in love with her again. I could see it
all unfolding. More suffering, more excitement, more passion. Just what,
point of fact, I was wishing for again after so long a time from the intimacy
of a woman I loved: the smells, the touchings of soft skin, the
togethernesses, the dovetailings, the walks hand in hand; I, it seemed an
eternity, cooped up with my pad, paper, Japanese lead pencil, and my
broken Wordmaker.

But suddenly I was not so sure that I might drop back again into being in
love with her. She was so weak, so pathetic in appearance. She looked
wilted. The zest for her body, which for years had provoked me
lasciviously, was not again driving me on. It was not entirely the idea of
cancer—although I was to have reservations before making love to her with
the scabbed left side of her chest slit from the sternum to the armpit and
the gooey yellowish, putrid-smelling drainage passing through a pliant tube
into a round plastic container—that caused this lack of lust. Cancer would
exact a small part of her (the moiety of two majestic thirty-eight-D-cups), I
assumed. Her carcinoma, for me, was a reminder of her general illness;
weak willingness about everything: her father, her mother, her
mmmmmmeeeeeeeee! Cancer was just another diagnostic of that principal
disease that I redetermined, instantaneously—while she dried her droplets
of clear saline liquid—would never be antidoted. My unmanly libido
recessed itself. I felt distant from her again. She knew it too, because the
way, the pitiable way that was to win again a part of my love back to her,
she began her Cancer Speech, was the start of a desperate effort to retain
some semblance of affection and security in the “phiz” of surgery and, then,
142
possible Death!!! She was going to have to perform a miracle to get me
back. She was going to have to be lion-hearted perhaps for the frst time in
her life. She was going to have to swallow it, her pride, without losing her
sense of being a woman. She was going to have to be charming, brave, and
dignifed. A diffcult trick to pull off even for a pathological liar. I was not
going to make it easy for her.

She handed back my handkerchief, and I folded my arms like a Supreme

Court Justice attentively sitting on the bench, listening to the details of a
monumental legal case. She cupped her Bloody Mary encircling both hands
around her short, frosty glass, glared into her drink as if she was
contemplating a crystal ball which was about to fx upon her future life,
then reached into her purse and handed me her Cancer Speech that,
choked up at the front as it eventuated, would have grounded her a Best
Actress Oscar from tear-jerking Hollywood had it been placed “live” on
celluloid for the masses of moviegoers:

“My dearest Gringo,

my life has been so different, so diffcult.
Its been controlled by others. You know,
you know very well,
I was thinking the other day,
that it would probably be
better for me to dedicate
my life to medicine and not
to love and my children. For
them I carry so much sufering
and pain and hurt. My kids
are good and bad and a great
amount of sufering and torture
for my mind. Now...now...
I must think that I may never
fnd them a good family life
which we can call our and
which can give a little happiness.
I need to be realstic. I need
to think about the future of
my dear children. For me the
family is important and my
143
 future for the children is
something I need to face now
in my life knowing maybe death
is just around the corner waiting
for me. I told you again and
again much times that
my money has to be one of the
most important things for me
to worry about in my mind. I
think all this time that with
money all my problems will go
away. My children will be
happy I will be happy and able
to live with you and them in a
little apartment where we
could have a good time and
be happy like a family. My
father always was good to me
with money. You know this
now. You know that he is
good and bad for me. This
is so. I cant change this
reality. My mother tooo. She
doesnt like you tooo. This
is not my fault. It is not
your problem. It is our
problem. I repeat our problem
for we alone. My mother and
father will not live long for
many more years. We will live.
My children tooo. We have been
seprated now for about one year.
Is this a long time in a life
of 70 to 80 years? Is this such
sacrifse to make for the love of
two people who have such a
beautiful time together.
WHEN THEY ARE TOGETHER!
Is not this possibility of
144
 of our good time together
something which you feel
good about? Dont you? Dont
you ever think about us too
together? In each others
arm and kissing and holding
and happy? What is money?
You think I think all the
time about money. How wrong
you are gringo. How wrong you
are!!! Money is important gringo
but it isnt everything. LOVE is
everything, gringo. Love gringo.
Love gringo. Love gringo.
You need love. You need me. Me. Me. Me.
What is money. Money helps. Yes,
it helps a lot of times. It
gives to you things to help you to
live and to SURVIVE gringo.
You know me. You know I
dont want fancy clothes that
cost lots of money and
diamonds and cars. Big expensively
things are not for me. I
am not one of your Doris Day
gringas. I am a Latin girl.
I want love. I want family.
I want kisses and hugs. I
want you. I am not cold like
you American girls. I dont
think about $$$ all day long.
I have dollars gringo. My
father gave me lots of them.
Millions and millions of them.
I dont hit my kids.
I kiss them and hug them.
My kids wont go to war.
You told me your mother
kept taking your picture when you
145
 were at Kennedy airport before
you went to Vietnam. Gringo what
kind of people is you gringos?
We dont do these things in
S. Amer. We are not organized
to kill people. We dont send
our children round the world to
kill women and children in Asia.
We need money to eat here and
to survive. Not to make bombs
to kill people gringo. What did
your father tell you at Kennedy
before you few to Vietnam? What
did you tell me? Remember? He said
to you to watch out for those
“sneaky with slant eyes Asiatic bastards.”
You gringo you told me
that yourself. Who do you gringos
think you are anyways. You are not
special like you think so gringo.
And me tooo. I am not tooo good
thing for you tooo. I know it. Your
mind is diferent. You are not like
all the gringos. But you are a
gringo the same. A special gringo.
Why do you love me?
I ask myself thousands of
times. I am bad to you. But
gringo you are still here in
Caracas! Why? ME! Yes you
are here for me. Admit it.
Why didn't you go home? If
you are not here for me? Please
gringo understand this to me.
One thing understand and one only.
If we are going to be
together in our heart and mind
for a long time why can't we be
together in each others arms for
146
 this time? What are you doing to
help us get this. What do you do
gringo. Can I be such a big help
to my children and you if I be
dying of cancer? And if I live,
How many years do I have? Five?
Ten? Fifteen? Twenty? Twenty-fve?
If you love me and my children
what do you do for us. What do
you do for me now. You can
only love me gringo. You have
no choice. You will sufer
all in life id you dont love
me now when I and the children
need you the most and you know
I need you now the most.
If you are a man gringo you
will come back to me. You
will open your heart and forget
my stupids to you. Gringo I
am weak. I am down now. I am
low. I need you. You cant
leave me now in this time of
my biggest rouble in my whole
life. If you do you are not a
man. You are a chicken. You
know it tooo gringo. A mierda.
A shit in English. Go. I want
you to go. Me? A woman
without love without hope.
If you go you are a mierda.
A shithead. Gringo a real
shit. I can only say this
to you. If you stay with me
and are loyel to me I will
promise to be with you all
my life when we live in the
United States where you want.
In New York, Coral Gables,
147
 Palm Beach, Delray Beach
any of our favorite places.
You can write like you said
you wanted always to do and I
will help you even if we
must pay to publish the books
together. Gringo please
love me please be with me now
when I need you much. I need
you. I need your love darling.
I love you.
Your very own, Gonza.”

My frst thought: New York is a nice place to visit, but I would never live
again in The Big Apple. It is too fast for my body, but too slow for my
mind. My gut reaction: To laugh in her face, and not out of scorn. I was
charmed up by her avoidance of the ethical implications which had surged
to the surface, between her thinkings in desperation. Her cocker spaniel
eyes had so large globules of tears in them—ready to burst out onto the
cloth that covered the Costa Vasca's sterilized sheets—I suppressed my
sudden feeling in consideration of her damaged senses, senses I was
convinced now had been impaired by her own will to live beyond the rules
of life's diffcult game. I hardly knew her in this new posture which was
shouting out from the bottom of all the little strength that was left in her. I
could not mock her even when she had it coming.

I also deadened a second whim: To gently tap my hands in cheers for her
brilliant performance. It was useless for me to pretend that I should try to
bear insight upon some of the unfortunate contents of her supplication.
Gonza had a mission: To extort me back at all costs. Logic and truth had no
issue here.

I called for a second Bloody Mary and asked her to let me think a bit over
this letter and ideas of hers expressed therein. I needed to stall some to try
to come up with my own thoughts, which had sunk into the deep waters of
my intellect, which had been bobbing all over the place with the excitement
of seeing Gonza for the frst time in a long time, and the unscrupulousness
of her imprecation that I naturally assumed forebode awful times for me
once Gonza's quick romantic trip was ended. In my pensive mood I
148
realized Gonza knew, too—like so many militarists before her—that a good
defence was an offence. On the attack she was awkwardly refulgent,
innocently stupid. She turned the whole kit and caboodle around to my
end, and, there, jabbed away at me and my gonads without regard for
probity or tenderness of conscience. With these her fast fourishes, which
reminded me of an old lady hitting a heavyweight boxer with an umbrella
and kicking him in the shins while he, like a goof, smiled, she hit once or
twice with very hard punches at my own incompletenesses when she
oppugned my parents and country. So what?

She had played frst her fimsiest, but in the end most convincing cards: the
mother-victim struck down by cancer and alone against the surgeon's knife
and prospect of death. This hit me the hardest. For no matter what a cute
scoundrel she turned out to be, she still needed the comfort of an intimate
friend during this horrid affair. She had a right to sound desperate, to play
dirty, to plead her case as an F Lee Bailey might, to hit below the belt, if
necessary. At the same time, while her despondency was her best way to
suck me back to her, I was sharp-sighted enough to detect its double-edged
facade: Heads, her right to try to win me back; tails, the putrifed fruits I
would be left with again after her successful convalescence.

The broadside at my mother and father and country seemed strange, but it
did hit home. Gonza had never spoken to me ever before of her feelings for
North Americans, for their particular political and social characteristics.
Obviously, these observations had roasted a long time in her mental baking
chamber before she had decided to pull them out to use in her calculating,
favorite time. Why had she not spoken to me about these predispositions
beforehand? Had I thought to ask her about them on a previous occasion,
she probably would have shrugged them off or told me she was not
interested in being disagreeable with me. In the euphoric state of love, we
are ofttimes inclined to proceed on the powerful waves of joy and hope
letting petty annoyances slip through the slats. To attack me on these issues
then, in her wretched Cancer Speech, was a stouthearted penetration into
enemy territory where she had everything to lose and everything to gain.

The bribe? What else could I expect from her unprincipled self? Money is
everything to her. Her Sovereign of the Universe. The Supreme Goodness
that cancels all debts and cures all illnesses. Even her cancerous breast was
going to be operated on by one of the most famous and expensive surgeon's
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in South America, in one of the costliest clinics in Caracas. Why should
not wealth buy back love? I thought, in a moment of disgust, that my lot
was to never be free of decadent people with money, and people without
money, seeking inspiration in the morbidness of life. I felt sprayed by a
wash of greed and stupidity. Like billions of others caught up on one side
of a huge political and economic tug of ideologies. I had no plata. No tengo
dinero. (Gonza was to explain to me one day that she thought “fve or six
million dollars aren't really a hell of a lot when you really think about it.
Some of my friends have ffteen and twenty million.”) I thought a little
about capitalist mental illnesses and money.

Latin women want hugs and kisses and do not smack at their kids! I
thought how Gonza might be now if her father had fanned her butt some
when, as a niña, she was full of pestering frolic. Perhaps a little antagonism
towards her father might have helped her along the road to emotional
independence, and might not have left her in an interminable separation-
loss crisis. Would have that incompatibility abetted her in her attempts to
project her sexuality upon another male, and not her father? Who knows. It
does not matter now, anyway.

Spanking? The new cure for possessive father-daughter relationships? No!

She's daddy's little baby! Slapping people in the face is a crisis intervention
bubblegum fxing of psyches gone berserk at war's critical juncture or
hysterical personalities in the throes of a panic that might endanger their
lives or others'. But even in these cases a Valium is thought of frst—before
the “snap out of it! Get hold of yourself ot I'll shoot your brains out!”
technique is employed. These shock treatments do work at times. They
hurt, but they are calming in effect, on occasion. Are not millions of
individuals transformed, by cathartics, into overjoy when their favorite
boxer slams his opponent unconscious to the bloodstained canvass? And
has not the loser, in a stupor which might be a sign that his brain has been
damaged, been jerked into the reality of his obvious incompetence? Is not a
sporting match with spilt blood more attractive to audiences flled with
frustrations and pent-up emotions? What serves this “joke?:” “What did
the man do after he raped Helen Keller? He cut off her hands so she
couldn't yell for help.” Even some psychiatrists are going to chuckle at that
one if they are honest with themselves. (Interestingly, that “joke” comes
from the book, Gross Jokes, Julius Alvin: Zebra Books; Kensington
Publishing Corporation, 1983, a book Alvin dedicated with this blurb:
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“In fond memory of Helen Keller.” !!!) Freaky is the human being. There
must be some post-Freudian psychiatric literature written on this subject,
but I do not know of it. Also I do not know of anything, beyond the
utilization of drugs, available to parents and teachers to meet the emotional
and physical untamed energies of their monsters who have lapsed into the
zone of excessive unreasonableness.

Perhaps tickling the brats would be intelligent. An approach to discipline

without drawing upon violence or blood—without damaging the little
creeps' psyches. Instead of spanking them or stuffng a pill down their
throats, tickle the misbehaving urchins. Now I mean tickling up to a
clinically correct and supportive point. I suspect one could actually tickle a
child to death. I am concerned here with healthy, constructive tickling: To
delicately tickle a lusus naturae into submission, without a grand amount of
commotion.

Imagine one of your precious ones, a creature of, say, nine years of age,
with the unacceptable habit of not wanting to do her homework. In lieu of
buying her a new SONY color television, tickle her into it! Dumbfound her
with tickling. She will laugh and laugh and laugh until the tears roll down.
She will beg for “uncle.” She will beg to do her homework.

Or, another cherished one will not lower the “Best of the Bee Gees”
cassette. He will if you tickle him enough! Or your wife wants to write a
novel and will not clean the bathroom. Tickle her, too! Tickling: A
Humorous Approach to Behavior Modifcation.

But tickling must be used discriminately. It cannot be vindictive. Imagine

this scenario: The wife is dragging on a cigarrillo butt in bed after you and
she copulated out of lust and boredom, not love, on a dull, “tomorrow is
work,” Sunday afternoon. You have been married eight years. She is
depressed; you are depressed. But what is worse you and working she do
not have enough money to buy that second car and third television to keep
up with the Jones's who are, regretfully, your wife's sister and her
dimwitted husband who is a rich bank vice-president. All money concerns
seem to hover over your wife's sister's lifestyle. Your wife's jealousy is
killing her and your marriage. Rather than wishing about tickling her, slit
your brother-in-law's throat from ear to ear with one of the expensive,
balanced carving knives her sister gave you as a momentum from one of the
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European trips she and her husband took (which you cannot afford to take)
and that is driving your wife crazy with enviousness. Or divorce your wife,
if you are not of the violent sort.

Tickling, then, must be used judiciously and is best advised in intimate

family situations.

Back to the Costa Vasca...

The curtain had to fall upon my stall. The decision reached by the jury
after the legal proceedings? Guilty. Leniency recommended in the form of a
suspended sentence. I looked at her very earnestly. I let her know that it
was not easy for me to acquiesce. Then I broke out with a huge smile that
sent her collapsing rearward to the back of her chair where she puffed out
a Cyclopean sough of relief, then sent foating after it a huge cloud of
Vantage cigarette smoke that she had expelled after taking an incredible
drag. I felt delighted that I had held a part in helping her achieve some
sense of satisfaction. Nonetheless, the eventual wearing off of this love drug
haunted me intensely, and the withdrawal symptoms she and I would have
to sustain when the father-daughter embarrassment was again resuscitated,
sent squeamishnesses of loathing to my tight stomach.

That very weekend, Gonza romanced a fction for her mother and father
and children that she had to jet off suddenly for Miami for an important
ophthalmologic convention weekend that she “only had learned about”
Friday morning: the Venezuelan mail system a perennial fountainhead of
hope and patience emblematizing the coming of some miraculous event:
The timely delivery of mail.

Before I could conjugate the seldom used subjunctive future perfect (the
subjunctive mood expresses a hypothetical state) of poner, “to put,” “to
place” (yo hubiere puesto, tú hubieres puesto, él hubiere puesto, nosotros
hubiéremos puesto, vosotros hubiereis puesto, ellos hubieron puesto), I was sipping
a Duca d'Alba and gaping goo-goo-eyedly at Gonza in the rear cabin area
of a Lear jet that was whizzing us on to nine o'clock Friday night
reservations at Les Violins on Miami Beach. I had thoughts that this had
had to have been pre-planned. But why should I ruminate so much? She
extended her hand and took hold of mine. In doing so we acquired co-
extension in high altitude time and airplane space and fantastic place. I
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swooned off and away from her “love peepers,” and looked at, in a happily
comprehensive way, the innards of the aeronautical miracle of Wichita,
Kansas.

I have a passioned affection for fying machines, but I do not like to wing in
them. If I must fy, I have to booze myself up in anticipation. Usually two,
three vodkas on ice or dry martinis before I board. Then two or three more
swills in fight. My fear is catholic. It is not, I am sure, the result of the más o
menos two-hundred hours of fying time—often being shot at in the rump—
in military aircraft in the United States and Vietnam. I was fearful before
that. My quaking is pandemic, because if I wanted to put conviction in the
airline safety statistics, I would bow to fapping. But not before boating,
busing, taxiing, training, and walking. I do not dread automobiles; I dislike
them intensely. Other drivers have made me feel this way. My trepidation
originates in the supreme principle of contemporary pure reason: Man is
lazy; machines are created for him and her to disappoint their indolence. I
fnd capitalists and communists sharing this notion. For me, inertness is a
favorable stance. It is the rapturous position assumed. In it I am alone. I am
a rock. In it I am a modern disgrace. In it I am strong and content. In it I
create. (The Italians once knew this secret better than all others; but, the
economical imperative in Italy is no longer Italian.)

Being solitary is being with the space of time. What a cheerful thought if
one lives in New York or Tokyo! (I think Adolf Hitler had this in mind in
his immediate, convulsed sense. His water colors have intimated this
condition. But he went in reverse. His frustration caused him to prefgure
destruction. And I am certain Adolf, from what I have been able to
determine about this “monster,” shaped in the German social laboratories,
would have force-fed his enemies birth control pills if they had existed
then, in the way United Nations' on-the-spot commissions do today—to
make himself lonelier, instead of yielding his victims up to poisonous
elastic fuids.) Being alone is in feel with oneself. It is time to defate, to
recharge, to forget, to stabilize, to rest. To swim off to a nearby island, to
veer off the beaten track, to hump on a dirt road, to spin off the turnpike
and head for the high hills. Privacy is strength.

Winged vehicles capable of fight are, for me, the antithesis of solitariness.
In an airplane I am dependent on men and women in control of machines
they propel and have maintained. I am often amazed at them: well-
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educated, eagle-eyed, and generally saner individuals than, say, por puesto
drivers or Caracas elevator operators. Pilots are well-paid professionals.
Seemingly happy in their work. Careful, cautious, relaxed individuals who
put the brains in gear before they put the passions in passage. Airline
maintenance employees: what fantastic characters! I have known them
personally: stable fellows, proud of their work, loose, limber, lithe
laborers...three cheers for airline pilots and maintenance mechanics and,
even, their neurotic comrades in the control towers of the world who keep
The Magnifcent Flying Machines—as the Earth spins—from bumping into
each other more than occasionally!

I loathe fying in them not because I distrust individual men and women,
but because I have no confdence in the Human Race. I think this is a very
important distinction—as the world spins. A discernment we are often
wont to bridle. As I scrutinize Gonza's friend's Lear capsule—before
takeoff!—I marveled, unfeignedly, over the movement forward of man.
Witness, arbitrarily, the jump from the Renaissance to jet propulsion.
There existed a time when Leonardo da Vinci was touch-stoning the
structural details of his horses on his fattoria in vine-ripe Vincilandia, just a
few kilometers from where I am now writing this manuscript. There exists
today a time when nations conjoin to call into existence plans for The
Magnifcent Flying Machines which will transport essences so rapidly—
faster than the projectiles that Leonardo and the Chinese imagined
popping out of their pistol and rife fantasies—that they suffer “lags” of
fatigue. We have moved towards the front of something that confuses yet
excites us.

The Lear jet is surely a Work of Pop Art. Drop in and visit in one. Or, at
least, write to your local Lear jet sales offce and ask the Lear jet sales
representative to send you photos and stats and specs and interior color
schemes. Ask him or her for a test drive. Kids are fascinated by airplanes.
They collect books about them. (Do you know why?) What you have here—
in the guise of the Lear jet—is the North American Re-Renaissance Real
Time Redemption Red-Hot Rectrix. Savor the Lear jet smells. Suck on the
Lear jet nozzles for controlling, especially lowering, the temperature and
humidity of the Lear jet enclosure. Be astonished at the Lear jet
asymmetry. (A possible Lear jet advertising slogan: “Eat your heart out,
Leonardo!”) Cuddle yourself in the Lear jet snugness. Refrigerator, toilette.
Closets for your jewelry bags. Compartments for your attaché cases. Mirrors
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for your reminders of where you are, not who you are. Chimes for Times.
Telephones for status calls. Rolls-Royce-thumping doors. Little mineral
water frozen solids. Coverlets of warm, interwoven fabric on the foor.
Paired plexiglass portholes. Cock-a-hoop cockpit! This magnifcent
origination is more than an imitation of life. It is a new way of imitative life.
It is man's attempt to control Nature.

I have often thought that perchance this power of determination to

superintend is a bit insane, especially when one assesses the amount of
research and development, dedicated to endeavoring to master Nature, that
it is actually confused with the dominion of other natural things. Defense
and arms expenditures far outweigh man's efforts to compose an
environment for humanity just and secure. And the Lear jet is far more the
result of military and defense investigating than it is the outcome of the
business of The Seven or Eight Beatitudes.

To enter the Lear jet is an overwhelming happening. I believe that more

has been done, in the fabrication of this imposing jet capsule, to deny
human nature than has been accomplished to celebrate it in kindness and
The Spirit of Truth and Beauty. Technology has become more important
than humanity in the production of Lear jet. (Adolf would be screaming
today, if he were alive, “See, I told you so! You dumbkauf!”) All The Great
Flying Machines are technological means to technological ends. They are
symbolical of The Grand Affront to Humankind. Flying for me is a
surrender to an obsessive technology about which I have no control over
nor power to halt or even abet if I wished to do so. It is a tyranny snuck in
through the back door. I have no chance in this world to order things (I do
not want to), even to join with others to order things, in a manner I
consider saner and more rational than the existent state. Yet, things are
constantly methodized for me. The only alternative left for me is not to fy.
And I avoid it like I stave off the bubonic plague. Not to join in on the
tragic, contemptuous disesteem for the Human Race that is in need of
those basics which the Lear jet sequesters from the realities of the human
condition. The jump from Caracas to Fort Lauderdale International
Airport, as Gonza's caper from deceiving me to taking me back into her
fold, ended as a spiritual invalidism to my way of thinking. It is something
done for the moment, something conceived of in impulsivity, something
inficted with an escape from the self. This is withdrawal from reality. This
is dangerous—for me.
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And, too, fying is too quick for me—for my mind, for my body. From high
above, I cannot see or touch or smell what I may in a train or on a walk. On
high I cannot immerse myself in Humanity and Nature. I cannot interact,
communicate. I am temporarily put on the holding pattern away from the
realities I am demanded to cope with when my feet are planted on the
ground. The jet rushes me to a time and place and space where I must
digest, rapidly, something I know is unfamiliar and perhaps hostile to my
very own being. I prefer to go from one place to another in calm and in a
progression which allows me to adjust and experience in degrees keeping
within the limits of my physical strength and mental acuity. It is cheaper to
do so, and above all, I don't have to think—for most of the fight—that the
damn plane might crash into a mountain or into the sea.

* * *

Before switching to the dramatic bedroom scene in Gonza's friend's elegant

Key Biscayne penthouse apartment, I suppose I should talk a little about
my especially liked WORDMAKER and WORDPROCESSOR—the
Electronic Solution, The Silent Technology: IBM, International Business
Machines and its high degree of quality and service. Is not this the obvious
question to ask a writer? “What, writer, is your favorite electronic machine
for transposing your thought processes, the fngerprints of your mind, into
a medium best suited for editing by elephantine publishing companies that
make oodles of money and give you some?” I go with IBM because IBM
means quality and dependability, and it perpetually reminds me what it
would be like if I had to use a pencil to write out what I needed to say. IBM
is backed by an army of research and development specialists who I know
create excellent products out of nothing. IBM's power rests in years of
experience and good judgement. IBM's purpose is to deliver distinction.
When I sit in front of my beautiful IBM WORDMAKER AND
WORDPROCESSOR, I am confronted immediately with a paradox: The
furiousness of disorder in my brain and the ecstasy of knowing that
harmony will soon be consummated in the gentle, SILENT!!!, order of
words arranged by my IBM system. Written talk: neat, precise, elegant, and
proper. (Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder!) The perfectness I want for
the editors in the publishing companies. If you write—or if you make
money in other ways—you cannot be without the IBM strokes of excellence
and eye-catching shimmers of grace. Visit your local IBM offce. You will
fnd IBM sales offces handsomely listed in your telephone company's
156
yellow pages. IBM: Eminence in Communication.

23

Now let us return to our thrilling romantic story. I do not think the next
chapter should be read by children or sensitive adults. Nor should it be
read by those who are afraid of hospitals or other people's illnesses. It also
should not be read by women who are terrible afraid of having a
mastectomy. For sure, it should not be read by a father who does not want
his daughter to fall in love with another man.

We beelined it to Key Biscayne in a big, forest green, rented Buick, stopped

at the Sands Bar for a cocktail, then elevated up to the penthouse to
freshen up, sex up, and dress up for dinner at Les Violins. Gonza gave me a
gigantic hug and tongue kiss, then wrapped her left, heart arm around my
shoulder and posed with me in the Otis lift's full-length mirror. Mirrors,
mirrors, mirrors, everywhere! What is in a mirror? A refection of a reality
that one is alive? It cannot say much about ourselves except that ourselves
are here and/or there. Maybe—like many Nikon fans before her—Gonza
thought she could photograph forever herself and her man in her memory.
It was almost seven o'clock. I thought about the Twin Towers in New York
and their “mirror effect.”

When we entered the apartment she pulled me by the hand through huge
rooms, then up a stairs to the second level where the guest rooms were.
She knew this place by heart, as if she had spent a lot of time in it before. I
was amazed at the luxuriousness, the European paintings, the dazzling
modern furniture, the mirrors, the vases of long-stem roses, the crystal, the
silver, the gold, the carved wooden statues. I thought I was looking at a
home decorating magazine featuring the residences of a very famous movie
actress and her seventh husband. There were mirrors all over the place.
Telephones with square buttons, a professional stereo system, bookcases
with almost two-thousand copies. The carpets were squashy under my feet.
Gonza found a note from her friend and his wife who were vacationing in
their Montmartre apartment, and she told me how kind the people had
been to her before and it would be fantastic if I had the chance to meet
them. He was a “brain.” A brilliant doctor and a “super” businessman. The
letter told us to make ourselves feel at home, not to worry about cleaning
up because the maid was coming Monday, and to go to the “frig” where we
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would fnd all we needed to eat for a week and a surprise (three bottles of
Dom Pérignon) on ice. Gonza popped one and splashed me in the face with
cold drops of the sutil Brut champaign. She was festive, silly, and running
full-steam ahead on her teeming euphoria. She asked me if she could
shower frst, then rushed with her cosmetic case and one of her Gucci
suitcases to the stupendous toilet fxed with dressing table, make-up stand,
exercise machine, down-reaching circular bathtub, and naturally, full-
length mirrors. The writer laid half-way on the bed, his feet to the foor,
looked at himself in the mirrored ceiling, and tried to catch his mental
breath. To him, Gonza seemed doped. She seemed victorious. He wished
he could be happy for her, but he could not; he knew he had to be happy
for her, or else. He surveyed her situation and her hysterical reaction—a
“normal” recoil—to her up and coming mastectomy. He guessed what was
next: “Will you love me when my left breast is not around to suck on and
caress?” He would cough up a: “If I love you now, how can I not love you
when one of your beautiful, precious breasts are gone? Besides, there will
be one left! That's enough for me, darling! And don't be so stupid. You
know I love your ass and your luscious pussy more than any other parts. If
you had cancer of the ass or pussy, you would have a big problem, goofy!
You don't have cancer of the pussy, do you, sweetheart? Well, now, what
are you worrying about?”

Then the writer felt a surge of eroticism. After all, it had been a long
masturbating stint since he had broken off with Gonza. No sex with a
woman for ten long months. No sexfests with gyrating Colombian History
majors. Writing about Vietnam and masturbating about Love. That's how it
had been.

The writer began to cruise through his passionate remembrances coiled up

and around and inside Gonza. That had been fun. In ffteen minutes or so
he probably would be at it again—the only difference being a carcinogenic
breast and a strong feeling of loving emptiness which he could not hint at
to Gonza. (He hoped that Gonza was not taking time to think about
anything, much less her feelings for him.) There was a strangeness in all of
this, he thought. He did not like being used. He had spent too long trying
to forget, and now she would not let slip him from her mind. He was here
to perform a friendly duty—A Love Duty. Yes, it was love. Love for another
human being; not love for a lover. He was going to service the bodily
fantasies of one he had once begun to hate, but had given up to begin to
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forget. He had formerly convinced himself that he must forget for all time.
He thought he had nothing to lose. That he could gain the touch and juices
of a woman again. That he would, at least, squelch for a while his sexual
ardor which for oh so long had been repressed to write and to obliterate a
shocking happening.

Gonza popped out of the bathroom in a blue see-through baby doll, and I
was turned on immediately especially so when I viewed her public hairs
and the crack in her ass as she turned out the covers and the scarlet silk
bed sheets. I jumped to the bathroom in an ambivalent state. A little
nervous about what was to come, but more agitated sexually, to tell the real
truth. My penis was already a tad stiff, but it quickly shrunk when the water
from the shower ran over it. I cleaned rapidly, slapped some imported
French cologne on my neck, stomach, and thighs, gargled with Dom
Pérignon, and deodorized my hairy armpits with an elegant spray—the only
kind in the bathroom—hoping that my offense would not reach the ozone
layer of the Universe. I was ready. I slugged down another enormous gulp
of Dom Pérignon, and walked into the bedroom now lit with a silver-
pronged candled candelabra. Gonza was laying on the bed like some dumb
Madonna but with her ass to me. Her head on her arm, her body sideways
(she was hiding her cancer, I guessed), her long auburn hair fowing out
and down on her arm and back. My penis thickened but to sub-rigid only. I
swallowed greedily another gold-trimmed glass of Dom Pérignon and
headed for my cancerous sex object. It was too obvious for me to go for a
breast at once—she would say I was trying to make her feel like a woman
and that I did not really love her—so I went straight way to her rear end,
which she already had pointed at me, and lapped my tongue around there
exciting her and myself for more. I worked slowly and delicately. After a
good fve minutes of this, I took her hip and rolled her to her back. I
unfurled her legs, and, without gazing up at her left breast with the cancer
in it, stuck my mug in her vagina, then over, ever so gently, her love button.
By this time she was reeling with passion and ecstasy. She moaned to her
heart's content. She was not ready for an orgasm yet, so I alternated a bit
again to excite her further. Love Button,,,Vagina...Love
Button...Vagina...Love Button...Vagina...Rectum...Love Button...Vagina. No
luck. I sensed she was having trouble coming. She began to peak to it
several times, but just petered out. Remembering the Colombian prostitute
who studied at Bogatà U, I spit on my right middle fnger and glided it into
her anus, very gently. Then I put my right index fnger in her vagina. With
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my two fngers in her two openings (like two fngers in a six-pack of beer), I
vibrated them as best I could and went to work again on the Love Button.
She peaked once...then dropped off...Peaked again...and quit it. The third
peaking carried her all the way to Orgasm Heaven, and she ululated ftfully
as the pleasurable surges vibrated throughout her body. When she
depeaked, she gloated in pleasure and relaxation over her comings and
complimented me on my virtuosity which she described as “Incredible!”
“Heavenly” and “Oh, my God.” (I wondered, modestly, how really good I
was.) When I asked her if she wanted to go it another round, she put her
two hands around my head lovingly, as a mother to her child, and coyly
murmured, blushingly: “If you want...”

And so she came again and again and again. When the shrilled cries faded
away into peace and quiet another time, I braved up to see her lump and
pressed my lips around the place where I thought I would fnd the bulge.
But no luck.

“Where's the lump, Gonza?”

I was expecting to latch onto some yellowish-greenish thing that would not
ft into my mouth.
“Why do you want to see my lump?” she asked.
“I want to see your lump because if I see your lump I can give to you more,
darling.”
“Silly. You can't see my lump. It's inside. It's small.
The size of my thumbnail.
What did you expect, goofy, some gigantic yellowish-greenish thing”
“No. Not me...I didn't. Who me?
Expect some gigantic yellowish-greenish thing?
Are you kidding?
It can't be bigger than a thumbnail, I bet.”
I thought hard.
“Gonza, if it's inside and so small, how do you know it's cancer or not?”
“The doctor said so. He said it's probably cancer.”
“Probably cancer!!!”
“I have it, gringo. I know I have it.”
“Gonza, look, you're not trying to trick me, are you?”
“No, silly goose. I have it. I swear to you.
When they cut me open they will do a biopsy to prove it:”
“When is your operation?”
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 “In two weeks, At Centro Medico in San Bernardino.
Dr Revero will cut me. He's the best in South America.
No need to worry. Will you be with me there, gringo?”
“Gonza,” I eyeballed her, “I wouldn't miss your mastectomy
for all the tea in China. You can count on me. I'm true blue, baby.
I'll be with you all the way to the end.”
TO THE END...
I mused in sudden panic.
“Oh, gringo, I love you ssssooooooooooooo much.”

She rolled me over on top and inserted my penis into her more-than-ever
mushy marshmallow. I started pile-driving for her. Many more comings
came.

As I rubbed my penis into her repeatedly, I was reminded of an amusing

incident which befell me when I frst arrived in Italy.

I was lucky enough to secure a small studio apartment over a bar in

Montecatini Terme where I now live, and across the way from my
apartment, there lived two girls who worked in a beauty parlor up the block
from our building. They did not really live in their little studio. It is diffcult
for young Italian adults to live without their parents and brothers and
sisters, but the two beauticians used the lodging to meet with their lovers
during the week after work.

One of the girls, Sara, was a screecher. When she peaked into Orgasm
Heaven, often at one o'clock in the morning, all the neighbors were abused
with her piercing offcial pronouncements. Especially me because I lived
directly across the way from her. (There were no carpets on our foors, and
our convertible beds were not the most resistant to sudden changes in
position.)

Sara and Giovanni, her pile driver, would begin to bound up and down on
their bed at about eleven or eleven-thirty. By one o'clock, Sara would be
crying out so inordinately, I came to think that she was some kind of
animal. If I was in a sound sleep, Sara would awaken me. And all the while
the thump-thud...thump-thud...thump-thud...of the bed would be marking
the cadence of Sara's pile driver. I was often tempted to go and knock at
their door, but since the other two apartments on our foor were vacant,
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there would be no guessing as to whom interrupted Sara's peakings, and
her reaction—and the reaction of her Giovanni—might prove to be more
scandalous than her peakings. The shrills were incredible! They were a
torturous reminder to me that I was without the love—or piledriving—Sara
was sharing with Giovanni. I felt alone and irritable because I could not
sleep. In the morning my frustrated rage subsided. I thought of tape-
recording Sara's squeals, which she had placed in the public domain, for
all to listen to. Surely, anyone would have been interested, amused, and
satisfed. But I could not think of taking advantage of Sara's abandonment
into pleasure, for the sake of someone else's indirect contentment. I wanted
to kill Sara and Giovanni at times for their intrusion into my private life
which never interested them nor caused them to refect upon—at least out
of good taste.

What impressed me the most, was this: Giovanni piledrived for her for an
hour or an hour and a half with a persistence that bordered on fanaticism.
Boom! Boom!! Boom!!! Sara was dependent on Giovanni. Giovanni was
dependent on Sara but less so. Giovanni was trying to prove something.
Sara was “taking it all in.” Sara exacted more in the coupling action.
Orgasm after orgasm after orgasm. Then some more. When she was
satiated, she coyed with Giovanni: “Caro, did you come?” (She knew damn
well he hadn't, and he better not have had!) “Come, Giovanni, caro, vieni!
vieni!! vieni!!!, amore mio! Your turn, caro mio.”

His turn! His only turn as it turned out! Two or three or four times a week,
Giovanni pumped and pumped and pumped. He pumped his fucking
brains out while she laid there with him stimulating her into ecstasy.
Giovanni! Giovanni!! Giovanni!!! He came alright. Ploop, plup, plop. Finito.
Il fne. The end. Poor Giovanni. A slave to a sexually “liberated” Italian
orgasmist. I trustingly longed that dumb Giovanni be replaced by another
penis. He was in two months. Piledriving Paolo.

After a relaxing post-coital hour of smoking, sips on Dom Pérignon, and

daydreaming mostly about the up-coming mastectomy, Gonza and I
showered, dressed, and ran late to Les Violins. After dinner we cruised a
bit around Miamilandia and Miami Beach listening to Vivaldi, then
returned for more early morning intercourse.

162
 24

Short, pithy statements and well-known exact citations (“The Iron Rations
of Literature in a Knapsack:” Anthony Burgess), because of the strength of
the literary effcacy vested in them, tend to help groping individuals cope
with, unconditionally, the provisional nuances of life. So, for example,
when Herman Goering, in the summer of 1936—before throngs of steel-
helmeted Nazis screaming in unison “Zig Heil!” and “Heil, Hitler,”
pronounced emphatically that “Guns will make us powerful; butter will
only make us fat,” he struck chords in the hearts of millions of Germans
who were facing a diffcult national predicament. He was decidedly
successful in his effort. His citation was meaningfully important in front of
his hoards of retainers because it served the historical moment and
energized masses who were moving stumblingly.

Consider this apothegm from the Song of Solomon: “He that diggeth a pit
shall fall into it.” Or this Dorothy Parkerism: “Men seldom make passes at
girls who wear glasses.” Or Shakespeare's: “Upon the heat and fame of thy
distemper, sprinkle cool patience.” Or Proust's: “Your happiness depends
upon yourself.” Or Kierkegaard's “With the help of the thorn in my foot, I
spring higher than anyone with sound feet.” Or Ennius's: “Delay sets
everything to rights.” Or Tennessee William's: “After all, high station in life
is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived
with grace.” Or a hippie: “Know when to let go; hang loose.” Or Fletcher
Knebel's: “Smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics.” Or my own:
“The Americans are a wonderful people—if they aren't bombing you.” And
Henry Miller's: “A tailor cleans out the farts which his customers have left
behind in their pants.” (“Fart” is “peo” in Spanish.)

These maxims evoke sentiments of certitude because they may be relied on

on too many occasions. Luckily, they are not dogmatical, even though, at
times, their authors intend them to be so. They apply themselves to the
generalities of life and the samenesses of psychic routines. Abbreviated,
meaty statements, therefore, are mental frst aids; they are the horoscope
readings of ethical philosophy. If I am correct in my recollection of a past
event, it was Lyndon Baines Johnson, the thirty-sixth president of the
United States, who said, in the same way Herman Goering had said before
him, with the same emphasis, the following: “Men will always fear heart
attacks; women will always fear mastectomies.” Thanks to LBJ, this verbal
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ditty set me to thinking on an observation about Gonza which had almost
slipped by me in the turmoil of a jet trip to Miami and the confusion levied
on her and me in the diffcult times which beset us in the days before her
up-and-coming mastectomy: Gonza was not acting afraid; I was
demonstrating more fear than she/her.

This preoperative nonchalance was very puzzling to me, but I was

disinclined to breach the subject with her. She was a doctor, after all, and I
thought this mighty status carried weight even in the operating room where
she had spent so many hours as a human medical technician. I did not,
also, want to appear any more foolish than I had to, and I wished to import
as much of my own strength—as I might—onto her. What was the sense of
asking her if she was fearful of having a mastectomy? A premonition that I
should discuss her attitude further with her startled me, but the hunch
foated away rapidly from my mind. Gonza's manner was to put all of us at
our ease. The parents. The monsters. The me.

I did not realize it at the time, but Gonza was involved in an act of nobility
that would later dazzle me to her side again. (I was not accustomed to
thinking of her as one imbued with magnanimity.) The reality of it was this:
At the time Gonza did not know she had cancer. She was preparing all of
us for the worst—the least satisfactory she really expected for herself. It was
indeed a moment of courage; a time that she was to come through in an
eminent thrust.

When Gonza entered Centro Medico in San Bernardino, Caracas's Jewish

section, she had fxed a plan, a diplomatic ploy set to keep The Family
feathers unruffed, soothed—for visiting loved ones.

My shift—the best, I admit—was the late-at-night, sleep-on-the-sofa-till

-early-morning-one. Mami and Papi's schedule was late-morning-to-late-
afternoon. (Two days in before the operation; two days in after it.)

I bought magazines for her to forget, and the night before the operation, we
talked about old times and snuck in some late-evening lovemaking when
the night nurse, a Christian, was gossiping at her station in the middle of
the ward. (Gonza, incidentally, hid my toothbrush in her cosmetic case.)
We were very anxious, but we joked and talked away our morbid notions
rather successfully, I thought.
164
The moment of truth arrived for me in the morning when the morning
nurse came to sedate her for the operation. Gonza cautioned me to leave so
her parents could see her once again, and I was, then, left on my own.

I reconnoitered around the ward and waited for her to pass on the Gurney
cart, and when they slid her semi-conscious onto the PATIENTS ONLY
elevator, I walked in and held her hand all the way up to the sala de
operaciones, quirófano, operating room.

I kissed her there on the cheek; then the two operating room nurses
commanded me to get back on the elevator. My gut was tensed to pop, and
when I saw the equipment in the sala de operaciones—and the doctors with
green masks and aquamarine paper bags tied around their feet—I thought I
would faint. There were those noxious antiseptic smells so devoid of
enlivening and enriching ingredients all through the post-op wards and
inner sanctums of the hospital.

I went downstairs and began to compose myself in a waiting room chair

near the fower-candy shop. I popped a fve-milligram Valium, that I could
buy without a prescription, into my mouth. I did not know what to do,
where to go. I had no idea how long she would be in the OR, and I could
not even guess when her anesthesia would wear off so I could talk to her
again. After a nervous ffteen minutes, I felt the Valium balm a bit my
muscles and stabilize my nervous system. I appeared to myself to be
thinking more rationally, and in my artifcial calm, decided to go to my
quinta, rest, perhaps sleep, and hang by the phone in my home until Gonza
called to tell me how things went.

I laid in my bed for many hours. I could not eat. I dozed some. Each time
the phone rang in the hall, I braced myself for the knock at my door. The
long-awaited hard blow arrived fnally after four or fve false alarms. I
vaulted to my feet, and ran to the hallway where the beige telephone hook
was cradled neatly for me on a Caracas yellow pages telephone book. I
reached for it and pumped a polished “Hola” into the mouthpiece.

“I have cancer, gringo,” Gonza wept back at me.

Then she burst out into convulsive sobs which tormented my attempts to
remain puissant myself. She bellowed over and over and over again: “I have
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cancer! I have cancer!! I have cancer!!!” The foodgates, which had long
held her gushes of mental anguish, fnally were opened: Gonza had let
loose at last. I interjected at the frst opening: “I'll be with you in less than
half an hour. I'm on my way.” I hung up.

The Spanish landlady in my house came to my room and asked how “la
doctora” was. I sat on my bed to talk to her, but I could not. Suddenly, I
began to weep, and for ten minutes the lady sat with me on my bed with
her arm around my shoulder—she, making attempts to console me. I was
impressed with her sympathy. (Three months later, she would go to
Gonza's offce to talk about how sad I was during her operation, and to ask
for a discount for making refracts on her three children.) When I was
composed enough, I showered rapidly, dressed, grabbed hold of Simone de
Beauvoir's The Second Sex to draw Gonza away from her misfortune, and
hailed a cab in the street to rush me to Centro Medico.

The parents had left before I arrived, and Gonza was sitting up in her bed
with the covers draped up and over her chest, up to her neck. She looked
pale. The room was dimly lit. She was staring at the wall and was obviously
so disheartened. I directed my eyes immediately to see the missing hump
that once was her left breast, but both sides of her chest loomed with
identical bulk. I was puzzled. I darted to her, took her hands, then kissed
her gently on her cheeks and forehead over and over and over again.

“Thank you for coming so quickly, gringo,” she demonstrated sobbingly

with a sense of obligation which she knew and I knew was superabundant.
I did not want to talk about what was obviously on my mind, so I
generalized without any intervention:

“How did things go?”

She limpidly contested sticking at nothing:
“The doctor did not want to remove the breast before
he had talked with me; tomorrow I return to surgery for the mastectomy.”
My sympathies poured out to her posthaste.
“Another fucking operation,” I mused to myself.
I asked her, redundantly, if I could stay with her again through the night to
the morning when she would be rolled up again to the OR. She said she
would be very happy if I did. She knew, and I divined, that it would be a
long haul to morning. I told her I would go out in a couple of hours to get a
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bite to eat. I asked her if there was anything I could get for her in the
meantime. Magazines? Newspapers? A scrabble game? A checker game?
Other things I saw in the gift shop? I suggested: “Try reading the book I
brought for you.”
“No thanks,” she sighed.

I sat holding her hand for more than an hour without us saying a word.
The atmosphere was torpid with unspoken intellectual activity that neither
she nor I wished to brood upon.

The furniture in the hospital room was old but well kept, well-polished.
The tiled linoleum foor was drab but clean. The lighting fxtures from
another time, but functional. All so somber; so much like our dispositions.

I felt very imatient with her for not only was there nothing to say, there was
little I could report to shower cheer upon her chilled spirit. After the long
wait, I was happy to interrupt the still and take my leave to go to eat
something. As I walked from the room, I sensed my performance of this
normal function, eating, would perhaps help her to participate indirectly in
what was routine, and that she would revive with a burst of renewed
courage. I had the impression that I was worthless, useless. I could only
help myself; I could not lift Gonza up and out pf the depths of the fear that
faced her as the moments to her bloodletting ticked away.

When I returned to the hospital, I handed over The Second Sex and she
ficked through it fnally getting to the last section, “The Lesbian,” which,
having been of most interest to her, arrested her attention. Then she began
to read.

The chapter went from page four-hundred twenty-four to page four-

hundred forty-four, and after half an hour of immersion in the text, she
lifted her eyes to me and asked me if I thought she had lesbian tendencies.
I said I thought not.

Then she “pumped” me about the four lesbians with whom I had lived in
Gainesville while I waited for my divorce to come through from the hands
of a cutely coiffed upstart circuit court judge. I had been sentenced to a cat
piss smelling room in a boarding house, and the girls lived with me on the
same foor, unfortunately. There was a lot of drinking and drug-taking at all
167
times of the day, and since the girls and their friends were such a nuisance
when they visited together and blasted televisions and stereo sets, I was
always happy to run out after a shit, shave, and shower and go to Gonza's
apartment for the evening.

There had been one distinguishing feature I acknowledged to Gonza about

the four girls: They were always running around the house naked or half-
naked, and they had no qualms about appearing in front of me in that way.
In fact, I became quite accustomed to their naked bodies, and had not I
been the ardent lover of Gonza, and not caring if they possessed some
venereal disease, perhaps I would have been tempted encountering them
coming out of the public shower and walking calmly in the nude to their
rooms, their breasts heaving, their rear-ends swaying to the right, then to
the left, with masses of soft fesh. One or two of them were attractive
enough to excite most men, I reminded myself.

Well, what struck me as odd about them, I told Gonza, was their constant
efforts to jounce me with their hatred for men and men's bodies. I had to
wrap a towel around me the times I left the bathroom. If I did not and one
of them caught me, she would scream to me to cover my “ugly male bod!”
There was an urgency about them to pronounce their lesbianism all over
the place, and because of that, I often wondered if they were really lesbians
or just trying to be lesbians. I came to call them, to myself, “political
lesbians,” eventually.

The lesbian accruements in their rooms, into which I had been often
invited when things were going calmly, would have been another long bit
of time to keep Gonza's mind off her operation had not the night nurse
come in to give her a sedative with which she could sleep soundly until the
next morning. When the person trained to care for the sick left us, I slid my
hand under the covers into Gonza's vagina and ficked her clitoris until she
dozed off in a pre-operative orgasm.

The same tactic was made use of again in the morning: out I went to make
room for the parents. Such is life. Then the rendezvous at the end of the
hall and the trip, again ascending to a higher place, to the OR in the
elevator to be told to go back. This time, however, I stalled at the hospital.
The operation would last about two hours I had been told, and I decided—
against Gonza's wishes for me not to aggravate her parents whom I wished
168
I could kill with aggravation—to wait for Gonza to return to her room from
the OR. Suddenly, this pleasant thought came to me: She would be asleep
when she arrived so she could not be upset with me anyway!

I went to the street thinking I had about two hours to kill, but thought I
had better start my “stakeout” at the OR elevator on the foor way before
that. I put a toast and cheese and tomato sandwich, a glass of orange juice,
and a coffee into my empty stomach. When I started to go back to the
hospital, a man selling roses in the street approached me, and I bought a
bouquet of red ones wrapped in a newspaper, broke the rubber band
around them, took the healthiest one, tossed the others into a garbage heap
dirtying the street, and stuck the stem between my left thumb and index
fnger. I entered the hospital determinedly and went on watch near the
elevator door that would eventually open to eject from its inner recesses the
prostrated body of Gonza bleeding and stitched upon.

Gonza had been in the OR exactly two hours and twenty minutes when the
door moaned open and presented a pooped out, pale-faced Gonza draped
in green and sound asleep. Two nurses pushed and pulled her into her
room, and I crept along behind hoping that I might be granted permission
to wait in her room with her mother and father until her eyes opened again.
I went to the door and when Gonza rolled in, the father, eyeing me,
slammed the door shut in my face.

I took up watch in a chair next to the room's entrance. When a nurse came
to go in, I asked her to take my rose to Gonza. She smiled kindly and
entered. Immediately out came the father, and he began hitting me over the
head with the rose screaming: “She doesn't need roses! She needs care,
norteamericano!!! I paid for this operation not you!!!”

I turned to go as quick as I could. As I did, up came Gonza's brother, Jesús,

in operating room green surgeon's clothes and my eyes popped out. He had
blood on his OR shirt. I asked him if he had been at the operation with
Gonza, and when he said yes, I bolted for the hospital's exit digging into
my left pocket for another Valium. I went home and slept twelve hours
straight.

Gonza's mental breakdown after her operation—a crush which became

perfect when she learned, two weeks following her violent phlebotomy, that
169
her father was dead in the street of a heart attack—reminded me of the
patients in Gowanda State Mental Hospital and South Florida State Mental
Hospital Children's Division where I had spent times as a student of
psychology and community volunteer in the service of the mentally lame.
Gonza was not institutionalized; nor, was she hospitalized. (I thought, at the
time, she should have at least been “put away” for the three Rs (Rest
Reassurance, & Rx, but her family thought otherwise.)

There is a certain effuence surrounding those who have gone off

suffciently out of their minds to be called “mentally ill” or “crazy” or
“psychotic.” All of these labels defned well Gonza's devastating condition.
Like many I knew and worked with in psychiatric wards, Gonza was
detached, forlorn, drab in color, unkempt, and exhausted. As an
involutional melancholic, I guessed, she was intolerant, self-punishing,
overconscientious, languorous, peevish, illogical, confused, cold at the
extremities, had lost twenty pounds in the last six months, and behaved
herself in a manner suggestive of paranoia—something which frightened
me terribly. She had talked about jumping out of her offce window up on
the fourth foor of Edifcio Cavendes. (That I could not really believe, but
was keen to.)

Like many “locos,” at the funeral of her father she was a woman with more
than human powers. Even though her breast was not completely mended—
yellow goo kept draining from her wound through a tube into a plastic
container—she, dressed in black, greeted friends and relatives, without
sleeping, from eight in the evening until three o'clock the next afternoon
when the blue-tinted body of her father, “the man of my life,” was lowered
into its grave. (The body was later relocated to a well-fortifed crypt because
the family was afraid poor people would rob the body's teeth of its gold
fllings which Gonza's mother refused to have extracted in memory of the
Jews killed and robbed and raped by the Nazis during the Second World
War.) She never “coffee-breaked” it during this time. Ate little, but guzzled
impulsively cups and cups and cups of black “java” spiked with three or
four heaping spoonfuls of sugar. She directed notables to the casket, and
stood by visitors proudly and fxedly, nutty as a fruitcake. When her seat
next to the bier was empty, she told me to sit in it so that the children of
her father's ex-lover would not be able to occupy it. I did all I could to help
her, but I was of little aid emotionally to her crazed with the death of her
father. She spoke sparingly, and I kept thinking that she just might fall to
170
the ground, at any moment, in a pile of exhaustion, grief, and utter
frustration.

When the funeral was over and I was put aside at the front door of my
quinta after laboriously stretching out of one of the funeral limousines, she
told me she would never forgive me for having killed her father. She
mentioned, one by one, in the occasionally frenetic state which is peculiar
to her disease, the reasons why she thought I was the cause of her father's
boisterous death.

I waited a few days to see her; then, went to her offce twice to talk to her.
There, she told me if I did not leave she would call her brother and have
him throw me out. She was as adamantine as a John Birch Society
member.

She wished, she said, she could keep me in a little wooden draw in her
desk and take me out when she felt like it to punish me. And sex? She
would never go to bed with me again in her life because that deprivation
was the only weapon she had disposed to her in her “arsenal.” The only
means of offense and defense, she said, she could maneuver with against
me.

I talked with her, between threats, about a visit to a psychiatrist, and she
jumped at the chance telling me that she had to prove to me that I was
crazy and that I needed intensive psychotherapy. When we went to the
doctor, she broke down crying in front of him. She accused me of murder.
She pointed angrily at me, and when we were returning home after the frst
visit and I suggested we go to a hotel to hug and kiss and embrace ONLY,
she jerked the car to a sudden halt and, screeching, ordered me out into
the rainy night. From then on, I stopped going to see Gonza, but called at
times to see if she was still visiting the psychiatrist. She was not. She said I
was the one who needed to see a psychiatrist because I was a murderer.

All alone again. Whenever I had an emotional and intellectual retreat from
her, I seemed always to volley back and forth with fast forehand strokes
eventually landing the ball, in a saintly kill shot, at the corner of her
baseline and the core of her enfeebled equitableness. She was no good for
me and to me. I thought of her North American/Venezuelan cultural
infuences. I began to write drawn-out communications directed to her
171
mind afraid to agitate her with my presence. I was so desperate and saw no
exit from this drama.

I, too, was starting to go looney tunes. I knew it because I was

communicating rationally with Gonza:

“My dearest, darling, Gonza...

Last night, during a sleepless interval,
I was able to make lucid
two of your emotional moods which
cause your mind such havoc. I
almost yelled Archimedes's famous
exclamation upon discovering a
method for determining the purity
of gold: “EUREKA!” I have found it!
I expressed triumph about my
analysis. I wish you would use the
ideas expressed in this epistle
as an entrée into one of your
psychoanalytical sessions which
I hope you are pursuing with fxity
of purpose...”

No! No!! No!!! I would rip up what I had just written and throw it into the
wastepaper basket on the foor next to my desk. There was no sense. There
was no sense. There was no sense. Then I would try again:

“Your father was a good man to you,

a scared man in all of this.
He was alone. He went to you
for a purpose in his life.
He fought for his independence,
but suffered with little of it.
He could not even decorate
his room the way he wanted.
Here was a humble man,
a good man, and, too late,
a faithful man. There was a proud woman,
your mother, and, too late,
172
 an understanding woman
who stopped torturing her husband...”

No! No!! No!!! I chucked it again into the wastepaper basket. Then again
another try at it:

“I am told to leave you.

Being a realist, I suspect
your adherence to the hard
line position that you have
taken in the last month, will
eventually do the trick. The
end seems to be in the making
as I write this letter. This...”

No! No!! No!!! I chucked it again into the wastepaper basket. I had to stop
this self emulation. I fnally got the message to myself: While these
attempts to communicate with Gonza were useless, they did serve to allow
me to vent some my feelings and frustrations, and after seeing on paper the
inutility of them, I eventually caved into conceiving the reality that I wanted
so fervently to ward off.

25

My sole consolation in the self-pitying weeks following my fnal, somber

separation from Gonza was writing and purging myself of my wrenching
psychological and physical struggles that I had experienced in Vietnam.
There is no doubt in my mind that the psychic energy—often angry and
supercritical—that I invested in my Vietnam remembrances came from the
utter thwarting of my efforts to be with Gonza and then being so forcefully
rejected by her and her society. I felt I wanted to destroy something, break
it, and I could not think, at the time, of anything better than the United
States Army that I detested for so long since my grueling year's combat
tour in Southeast Asia.

While I worked on my Vietnam manuscript, I punched and punched and

punched at the Army punching bag. It was sheer bliss! I kicked and kicked
and kicked the United States Army in the balls so many times, I began
laughing and letting out an enormous amount of accumulated stress. Then
173
tears came to my eyes for I knew that my vented anger impelled me to live
in self-imposed political exile from the place of my birth—and forever. I
knew, too, that I could not live in peace and freedom in the DisUnited
States of America for the truths I had exposed in my Vietnam manuscript.

Also during this period, when I was transcribing and compiling notes for
my Caracas manuscript-to-be, I perceived in my emotional reactions a
penetrating sensitivity to injustice, particularly that type needed in
powerful organizations or concomitant with individuals who could bargain
for their infuence by means of their wealth. I was impotent; I was poor. I
instinctively ricocheted away from anything or anyone who pressed in on
me to indoctrinate me. I was like a frightened rat in the corner: mad,
paranoid, with my own burning to escape at all costs. I analyzed my past as
far back as I could retrogress, and witnessed in myself unrelenting reverse
actions to congruity and contumacy in my relationships with authoritative
fgures.

I went back and back and back for all it was worth, yet I did not learn a
damn why I was the way I was, nor why I thought—indeed, deemed it
utterly possible—I should, and could, kick the United States Army in the
testicles one good f*****g one. After that United States Army (I had already
shaped it to a required size in my mind) my next “quarry” would be
Caracas, not Gonza and her family who wanted to be “killed” by something:
the idea that had insisted that they accumulate money until it oozed out of
them (anal hoarders), they were easy game; they were insignifcant fgures
in the scheme of powerfully political transactions akin to the consanguineal
Washington-Caracas connection. I wanted to kill lions and tigers and not
squirrels and woodchucks. I did not want to smite down the regular herd; I
wanted to obliterate imaginary standards and concepts.

What convinced me to hunt big game, was the following: During my stint
at MIT, I had befriended a top governmental offcial in one of Venezuela's
most highly-budgeted ministries: the Ministerio de Ambiente y Recursos
Naturales. As it moved in order to achieve a desired result, this individual
was a personal friend of el ministro himself, and when he, the minister,
sought after a translator to piece together his blurbs and inserts before a
splendorous speech delivery, I was often called upon to do the “dressing
up” trick for the very important government functionary. (I got twenty-fve
oil dollars a page for my efforts.)
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I became interested in this “hot shot” minister and his sphere of
authoritativeness because I accepted his invite into the lair he reigned over
to see for myself what it was like up at the Venezuelan bureaucratic topsy-
turvy top. I had a chauffered Ford LTD to shuttle me to and fro the
ministerio during the three or four days I would work on that which is
spoken politically. (Carlos had been put out of the picture on these special
occasions, but we did often have coffee together and talk about our old
days.) I possessed the private, internal telephone line of the el ministro so I
could call him at his desk whenever I wished to untie a translating knot. I
work-lunched with him three or four times on dainty food prepared by his
private cook—food served on elegant china with silver and linen and crystal
eating accreument. He would order calls and appointments stymied, and
talked to me in broken English which, years before, he said, he knew better
when he had been a student in California. Open-jacketed, pimply-faced
bodyguards were posted at his offce door and their chrome PPKSs bulged
at their sides stuffed in between their stomachs and pants' belts.
Sometimes, El Presidente himself would interrupt the minister's moratoria
for privacy with a call during our work sessions, and the minister would
politely excuse himself to render obsequious allegiances to his political
foreman, and go to a corner in his offce—where I could not hear his
conversation—for secrecy.

While we worked, secretaries buzzed in another offce, and a man, dressed

as a steward, would pass by us whenever we took a sip on our iced teas or
Old Parrs.

The minister sat in his plushness with a sense of satisfaction,

determination, and acknowledgment for favors, for the fortuitous
happenings which he knew had befallen him—for fve presidential years,
barring a military takeover. Sony videocassettes, three Betamaxes, an IBM
Selectric typewriter, gold-framed pictures of the children in First Holy
Communion outfts, Italian attaché cases, bottles of French champagne,
English pipes, Dunhill tobaccos, diplomas, citations, decrees, and huge
Japanese color televisions and other modish things tinseled the offce with
wealth and power.

I felt like a jerky kid waiting on line to see Santa Claus: there was going to
be peanuts for me here and the minister knew damn well that fact. The
place communicated to me the antithesis of myself: power and money, me:
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impotence and poverty. Here is what Gonza wanted of me. Here was what I
could not offer her. I made a mental note to cut this guy's balls off in one of
my writings on Caracas if he gave me reason to do so, and,my dear reader,
because he did, we will now enjoy more distant delightful moments in the
beyond belief prototypes of Venezuelan political hypocrisy.

To understand this unethical schnook is quite simple: He was regenerated

into this world from a lofty other with a silver spoon in his mug, and he
dedicated at once his life force to the embellishing of a haughty view of
himself. But, of course, that was not enough for him to agglomerate oodles
of power points It takes patient diligence to bubble up cunningly to the top
of one of Venezuela's most almighty ministries at the age of simply thirty-
six years. We give credit where credit is due.

But let us take a closer look at the accomplishments which, he, so proud of,
lists for us in his abundant curriculum vitae—a rather plenteous personal
public relations discharge.

We are in the age when the reproduction of the appearance of someone or

something is important, and this minister is well aware of that political
realness. He is “media conscious,” to coin a common phrase in the “biz.”
Image awareness. On the watch, as all politicians are today, for that dagger
stroke in the posterior position. He had good reason to make himself look
good and keep that good look spiffy fresh. How much he lies is not for us
to document because his false statements ring true with half truths to
confuse us. He is the only one who may instruct us in honesty and
falsehood about his very own being, but because his life has been drugged
with power and the need for prestige, it is probable that even he will not be
able to discern between reality and fantasy in any consideration of what he
positively comprises.

So let us begin by giving him the beneft of the doubt, and let us, quoting
directly from his impressively large, monumental curriculum vitae, permit
him to speak for himself as he so often has made it his walk in life to do.
(Then we will come in for the kill, my dear reader!)

Our bureaucratic runt, our yes man who slavishly agrees with all his
superiors, our sycophant, was formed in mind and character and “broken
in” in elite educational institutions in Caracas, California, Colorado, and
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Manchester. His primary indoctrination was administered at the Colegio
San Ignacio de Loyola and the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, both
Jesuit-commanded snob schools in Caracas. In 1961 he received a Master in
Science, Hydraulic Engineering, (Are not all politicians hydraulic engineers
in one way or another!) from Stanford University in California. Then to the
United States Bureau of Reclamation in Denver, Colorado (1961-1962); to
the Universidad Central de Venezuela in Caracas to study economics (1970);
and, to the University of Manchester to familiarize himself with the
Economics of Development (1973). So far so good.

He next lists, before his professional and teaching experiences, his awards
and decorations! (Rather modest of him! They all do it.) But let us see them
for ourselves: “Ernesto León” Prize for the best thesis on hydraulics.
Honorary Mention for Exceptional Merit at the Venezuelan Irrigation
Forum. Grand Cordon of the Order of the Libertador. Order of “Antonio
José de Sucre.” Cross of the Land Forces. Cross of the Air Force of
Venezuela. Order of National Merit. Cross of the Armed Forces for
Cooperation. (The Venezuelan Armed Forces are joint actions of bribery
created to thwart the overthrow of the government.)

The professional and teaching experiences: Calculations Assistant,

Hydraulics Lab Assistant, Engineer in the Dam Section, Engineer in the
Planning Unit, Professor of Hydrology, Instructor of Applied Hydrology,
head of a project investigation section, head of a planning offce,
consultant, president of another counsel, minister ad interim, and, now,
briefy, minister. All in less than forty long years!

T h e ad honorem list: vice-president of the American Society of Civil

Engineers (Venezuelan Chapter), secretary general, alternate member,
executive secretary, special technical consultant, president of a consulting
committee, president of the Venezuelan Society of Hydraulic Engineering,
member of boards, president of councils. WOW!!!

Memberships in Professional Societies: American Water Resources

Association, College of Engineers of Venezuela, American Society of Civil
Engineers, Venezuelan Society of Hydraulic Engineers, Venezuelan Society
of Soil Mechanics and Foundations. So very, very good! Imagine how much
he must pay every year in membership fees!

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International Meetings attended: Pan-American Union of Engineers, Latin
American Hydraulic Congress, Latin American Irrigation Seminar,
Congress of the International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage,
Pan-American Association of Engineers, Conference of the Society of Latin
American Studies of Great Britain, International Congress on Large Dams,
Regional Preparatory Meeting of Latin America and the Caribbean of the
United Nations, the United Nations Water Conference, seminars in
Caracas, Lima, Budapest, Bogatà, Buenas Aires, Leeds, and Mexico City.

In between receiving awards and decorations and teaching and consulting

and attending international meetings, he has had time to write twenty-
seven scientifc papers which constitute three pages of his eight-page
commemorative curriculum vitae. And to top it all off, he has authored
three books: two of them on hydraulics, and one concerning his opinions
for the political development of Venezuela!

Impressive, no? Can you believe he did it all by himself? I can't. But he says
he did, so let us believe he did; or, at least, let us believe he had lots of help
and lots of money to help him get things done his way.

Now, what will immortalize him in his own mind—this Venezuelan offcial
who insists on rigid adherence to rules, forms, and routines—is the
following: Like Goebbels before him, our Venezuelan propagandist has a
Master Plan: “...to develop alert citizens—active militants concerned about
the environment—community-minded individuals with a sense of mission
ready to bear any sacrifce necessary for the defence of their fatherland's
ecology.” The Green-Thumbed Dictator! And his capital performance, to
incarnate into the souls of all dirty Venezuelan people an ethics about the
environment, to shape a series of norms in the individual behavior of these
people giving place to a collective discipline needed to conserve Nature,
that will be clothed in his idea of ethical fesh by means of, using his own
words taken from his seventeen page speech, “A Presentation of
Venezuela's Environmental Policy at the International Environmental
Forum,” the following: “...decrees, resolutions, measure, regulations,
frameworks, policies, practices, environmental education programs, citizen
participation, territorial regulations, strategies, values, requirements,
priorities, schemes, research, infrastructures, resource managements, plans
of action, lists of priorities, formal and informal education, massive
approaches, social communications, environmental wardenship, ecological
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crime prevention, campaigns, surveillance departments, applications of
sanctions, zonal directorates, staffs, strict executions, prohibitions, controls,
laws, norms, and systems” !!! A veritable laundry list of totalitarianism!
What defnition these possess, or how they will be implemented, no one
knows and no one cares to even guess. The minister has not hinted at them
for us or even his colleagues, members of the International Environmental
Forum! Just talk about “structuring” his people.

What is certain is this: The minister's folk are not ethically bent to an
environmental consciousness he and his political cohorts would kike to
frame for them. Venezuelans need to be plied into their environmentally
conspicuous place gently and with patience. The Venezuelan political
“geniuses” say they are in the process of constituting a new economic and
political renaissance for their people who, quoting again the minister from
his speech, are unlike him, underdeveloped, their “flth, application of
inappropriate agricultural techniques, destruction of woodlands by forest
fres, and aberrant occupation of space, are aggressions against the
environment as serious as the pollution of the air and water that takes place
in heavily populated urban areas.” Which is to say, in part, would it not be
fantastic for all Venezuelans to go to Stanford University to study in a post-
graduate course and view the lovely Stanford campus so that the same
returning, underprivileged Venezuelan people could construct their living
spaces in such a way as others have constructed theirs better than the
Venezuelans, dirty and uneducated, have? Which is to say that the minister
is a authoritarian state planner without a plan! Which is to say the minister
thinks he is better than the very people he is paid to represent. Which is to
say the minister has devised a plan (“Our system is fguratively speaking, an
assembly line along which groups representing the Ministry's general
directorates assemble components until the fnished product—an
acceptable environment—comes out at the end of the line.”) An hydraulics
blueprint for the Venezuelan society which the minister draught but does
not know how he might ingraft it into the Venezuelan social reality—a
program he demands discharged with his bureaucratic autograph affxed to
it. Another “tidbit” for The CV?

Our neo-fascist fantasizer, living in an oligarchic dream world, should

know that his sleeping vision of power has but a snowball's chance on the
Equator of being effectuated. Yet he looks and sounds good when he opens
up his political trap before diplomatic and political chums in
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airconditioned hotel auditoriums in London, New York, Paris, Tokyo,
Rome, Ottawa, and Berlin. In doing so he gorges his ego with his delusive
recommendations for a happier and richer Venezuela. Absolutely, he wants
poor Venezuelans to be like him!

There is a hypocritical, promoting kick to this warped mentality which

tickles the fancy of Puritan North American political science professors and
economists from Washington—not to mention Central Intelligence Agency
bagmen and foreign affairs offcers garbed in well-pressed, pin-striped
suits. They are cut from the same cloth as the minister. They are well paid,
well fed, well educated, well...well...well.... Those that they represent in
Caracas do not share, generally, in their mundane interests. The
Venezuelan people do not belong to this cult of privileged Venezuelans.
The minister will not be seen at the Petare prison investigating ecological
violations (nail pullings, castrations, beatings, and murders) submitted to
political prisoners who do not participate in his Clean Air
Authoritativeness, but he will fank the archbishop of Caracas, with a glass
of Old Parr in his hand, when that member of the body of ecclesiastics fans
crosses in the air over the lobby of a newly opened bank branch. (The real
inquisitor will never strike you; he talks, surprises, shocks, and intimidates.
He coordinates the work of his brutal cast, and never appears at the drama
of the infiction of severe physical pain used to coerce or punish.)

The most burlesque aspect about him is the one he has blazed abroad for
all to see in his grandiose curriculum vitae. His experience is, decidedly, in
hydraulics, not politics! For him to admit that he can govern on to a better
Venezuela, is for him to acknowledge that his best mental equipment for
his proposed national metamorphosis is his forte in directing water under
pressure. He believes he can overpower things by infuence or persuasion
under force. He knee-jerks at the idea of pushing things through to their
end. His speeches wreak with his plumber's abilities. He concedes to us
that in placing human beings in a preconceived pattern of direction, they
will naturally fow with constraining sway to generate a new social
electricity which will shock all Venezuelans into happier worlds of order
and fnancial success.

From where does this lunacy—blessed by bishops, diplomats, CIA agents,

and John F Kennedy freaks—spring forth? Could it be from his militant
Jesuiticism telling people what to think? (May I quote another Jesuit-
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educated fanatic, Fidel Castro, on his impression of Roman Catholic
education: “The separation of boys and girls, the lack of contact, made us
look forward eagerly to the lines of girls who came from other schools.
Kept away from girls, we couldn't take our minds off them. That separation
seems utterly wrong to me. It tends to create repressions, and make boys
think of nothing but women. The same goes for religious teaching in which
sexual problems were posed as problems of sin, with women as an
instrument of sin, an instrument of temptation used by the devil.” Poor
Fidel! And, may I quote Stendahl?: “Herein lies the crowning achievement
of a Jesuitical education: the formation of a habit of paying attention to
those things which are clearer than daylight.” That comes from The
Charterhouse of Parma, and I would recommend that Fidel get a copy of it
fast!

Could it be from his ideas, given to revery, of the pretty Stanford University
campus where the minister had studied, and which he has set for himself as
the model upon which the face of Venezuela should be remodeled, be the
inner driving force of his social plumbing? All those pretty, sexy Stanford
University co-eds tempting el ministro on to Jesuitical conficts of sexual
conscience? Or, could it be he still is harboring intense repressed libidinal
feelings for the Jesuit priests who taught him—tender susceptibilities for
his Jesuit professors which he converts into delusions of grandeur and
power in his desperate bid to reorganize his “beloved” Venezuela?

From wherever his erratic civic brainwork stems, it is obvious that the
construction of his “universal environmental machine,” made to perform
the functions of environmentally deprived Venezuelan citizens, is doomed
to short circuit because it is complete, consistent, and decidedly structured
as human creatures are so prone not to be. His notion, to him radically
novel, to frame into existence an audacious train of thought, has carried
him to those edges where he is left not responsible for his civil actions. In
his Ivory Tower at Centro Simón Bolívar, he cogitated the construction of a
model of the Venezuelan world as a self-maintaining system that he used to
explain and justify “the social system” for the impoverished Venezuelan
nation, exploited and destitute. His philosophical dream. His Jesuitical
plumbing system—shared by other mental midgets in the history of politics
—that formal procedures render truly logical political manner of
proceeding, gulled him and his club of state planners from the start. From
their beginnings, they were never interested in offering a fair shake to their
181
fellow men, and, as always, they excluded them from their power circles
with the justifcation that life demands a political philosophy which exalts
the nation and a select group of individuals above all others, and that
severe economic and social regimentation and the forcible suppression of
the opposition are necessary measures to exercise strong control over the
masses who are considered inferior to the nobler and more privileged El
Ministro. And, he had the face of a Mafa gangster!

I cannot think of a better fesh-piercing instrument than the Walther

PPKS, 7.65mm, semi-automatic. Whether I want to singe human skin or
animal skin, no other pistol offers me the advantages of the PPKS. It never
misfres, and has never poofed out on me. Its steeled, light alloyed
components, anodized, and sensual grip, offer me the security of accuracy
and the reward of shooting pleasure. When the last round in the magazine
has been fred, I slink back and say to meself:
“WOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWEEEEEEE!.” The function of the signal
pin above the hammer is clearly visible, too, and when a cartridge is lodged
in the chamber, the pistol is uncocked and ready! Even the disassembly is
easy. The pistol can be dismantled in a matter of seconds without using any
tools on the main parts. How easy it is! How fast and accurate I can shoot
it! A great weapon for puncturing animal and human skin, or just for
shooting away at cardboard bullseyes at your local shooting range. Carl
Walther makes them. You can contact Carl at 7900 Ulm, Sportwaffenfa,
Brix, Germany. Carl will fll you in on all the details. Get out there and start
shooting now!

26

Now let's return to the thrilling end of this Venezuelan narration.

I had gone on walking again. Wherever and whenever I went, my head

sagging, tilted to the bumps in the sullied surfaces of the Caracas streets, I
strutted in a marked, military manner, my march orders commanded to my
mind: Forget her! Forget her!! Forget her!!! Write! Write!! Write!!! I
pushed myself, I cajoled myself, I dragged myself. It was an almost
unbearable task for me. It sucked on my physical and psychical reserves.

My nervous system shivered uncontrollably when I contrasted my failure

with the years of effort and waiting and intense happiness and deep sorrow
182
—that which I had invested in Gonza, thinking, foolishly, that a return on
my emotional dollars would be rept as the Gonza blue chip stock rose to
value and constancy through the years. I mused sarcastically that I had the
worthless certifcates of a Florida land fraud or the deed to an African gold
mine raked over by thousands of gold-diggers for decades. I had failed to
cash in. I had been cast off. My pride, so terribly wounded, was carrying me
to the borders of hate. The more I thought of the past, the bigger the loser
I came to be. The more I thought of the past, the larger loomed Gonza'a
unfaithfulness. The more I thought of the past, the huger blew my self-pity.

To keep myself from going delirious with bitterness and defeat, I had to
concentrate off and out of myself, and I directed my efforts to the forward
progress of my life force. When the going got tough, I had to get going
tougher. I longed to do “normal” things, to perform, to activate, to
function, to construct the mien I was living, that I was executing. I thought
that this shell of habit would turn me into a rooted being, integral and
typical. I was grateful I was not an old man, because I knew that at sixty or
seventy this torment might kill me.

One consolation I possessed was that my present, although dismal, was

intact. It was not gone from me as yet, nor was it already ready and willing
to bear some other psychic disturbance that still had not come nor had I
permitted it to arrive. Entrenched in this present, I thought I could give
suck to the experience of it, and learn how to accumulate strength for the
future and keep together knowledge of how to cope with the coming
realities of my not unfnished life. If I became intelligent enough, avoiding
the pitfalls of ignorance and unruliness relished by people such as Gonza
and her family, I could live to more than one hundred years! Like many
North Americans, I devoured “How to...” books! How to Shake Off the
Gonza Obsession. The fnal chapter told me I had to begin to hate her.
Would I?

In contemplating my present position, I felt caught in between. As if I were

in the middle of a rope bridge hanging high over a gushing current. I was
afraid up there in the middle. I could freeze; I could not go back. I had to
move on. Where I was, was windy, raw, and threatening to my very
existence. I could stop dead in fright out there all alone. I think: If I do not
push on to the end, I will be left solitary to dangle over the abyss until I
fall into confusion and doubt fxed over a very real chasm. My sweaty palms
183
are gripping the ropes. My heart is beating furiously. My brow is beading
itself with moisture. My legs are shaking with fright. I cannot go back. I
cannot remain immobile. I go ahead or die. My future is my all. My past is
my disaster. My present my jumping-off point. I have one way to go: on, up,
and out and onward. Away from my past and the residue of it in my
depressive present. I will write my way out of this! I will write to
understand and to feel. I will write to purge myself—and others if they wish
to read what I have observed and experienced. I will study, I will read, I
will absorb, I will learn from my mistakes. When I am mature, I will teach
and, maybe, delight about life. I have taken much from life not to know
something about it. My turn is coming to tell others what I know, and what
I believe. The Gonza personality, one of the things I know best of, will one
day roll across the pages of my craving to learn from my past and enrich my
time to come with it.

The end of Gonza's life was foreshadowed by the ensuing cluster of

circumstances. At the outset of one sluggish August sundown, a Saturday, I
was moving slothfully through the busy Caracas streets dopey with eight or
so Solera beers. I had been bar-hopping all the afternoon searching for a
chance to fnd a woman who would let me tune into her private world and
allow me to imbibe on her breasts and vagina in an orgy of abandonment
and onanism. Desolateness and dejection had driven me to the brink of
brutishness.

Near Centro Commercial Chacaito, there was an over-priced bordello

whose front was a piano bar/restaurant accessible only after an inspection
at the locked entrance by a burly bouncer. There were apartments above
the restaurant, and to them went elegantly dressed ladies of the night who
frst had cocktailed on the very best French champagnes, served in
sterilized plastic goblets, with their turned-on sexual clients. In the street
outside, lines of por puestos stood at attention waiting to transport, after a
sweaty afternoon of shopping, off-duty maids and gardeners and chauffeurs
to the exclusive residential zones of Cumbres de Curumo, Los Campitos,
Prados del Este, La Trinidad, and Santa Monica. A kiosk across the street
blared bouncy cumbia music from Colombialandia, and a little network of
stores selling cheap summer clothes, Japanese stereo-recorders, and
suggestive women's lingerie, swarmed with lower-incomed South
Americans from Santo Domingo, Perú, Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela.
The faces of these poor Indians were perplexed with the “modernity” of
184
Caracas—they were building a subway under it all—for they had known the
archaic destitution of other political and economic slaveries in their past
lives, bond services they had now exchanged for work for oil dollars.

Everyone was in jeans and they wore bright t-shirts, franellas, often
stenciled with English off-color slogans or the logos of grand transnational
conglomerates. Street hawkers screamed the prices of music cassettes,
balloons, newspapers, prophylactics, rosary beads, cold drinks, and fried,
dried, bananas.

If freedom could be equivocated with rampageous music, greasy fast-food,

and ringing cash registers, surely Caracas would be a member of the Hall of
Utopian Democratic Fame. In fact, some political science professors from
Washington, DC, were insinuating just that. No one would admit, however,
of the fear they had when Polizia Metropolitana police vans with helmeted,
gigantic, vicious-looking storm troopers oozed through the crowds halting
document-less South American Indians with their slick Israeli machine-
guns. The expressions of these immigrants smarted to the capitalistic glitter
of Caracas, yet the surplus of suffering in their tossed souls rendered them
sly as fretful foxes.

The putas were in place in groups of threes and fours at tables in a large
lounging room where they smoked and chatted and hoped that men would
come to them to buy drinks and then, after casual introductions, sexual
favors. They were scantily-clad in low-cut tight-ftting dresses which
revealed the mounds of fesh on their chests and accentuated their massive
buttocks whose sizes one could guess at with a glance at their crossed legs
which led up, through and around their half-covered thighs, to the places
they knew were most sought after by men and women starved with
unsatisfed erotic hankerings. Indirect lighting glowed round their painted
faces, painted lips, and painted fngernails.

I loitered in the sexual roost focusing my attention on the organ player, the
waiter who delivered another Solera to me, and the other men there who
were not engaged in conversation with any fresh-looking putas. Some
women launched smiles my way and I reciprocated. But they, as objects of
merchandise, were not going to accost me frst. It was the client's decision
to draw near to them when and where and how he or she determined. I had
twenty bolívares, Bs, in my pocket, and the only caresses I would be given
185
this night would be to the two bottles of Solera my measly twenty Bs could
purchase for me.

I slid back to the bar and there ordered my second, and last, Solera. Next to
me was a middle-aged man, his hir plastered down in a flm of grease, his
shirt untucked around his belt, his fngers tained with years of cigarette
smoking, and while I was eyeing the different brands of whisky I could not
afford on the shelves behind the bar, I viewed him, through the mirrors
there, glaring fxedly at me. Alone and lonely, I turned to him in hopes of
blotting him out of my existence.

“You don't happen to speak

English, do you?
“As a matter of fact, I do,”
he rejoined in sympathy.”
“I'm Tony,” I said extending my
hand ruefully. “I'm José” he smiled
through his inordinately
stressed facial muscles.

I asked him what he was doing in such a cheerless place, and he told me he
came to bars such as these to escape the tediousness of the one and only
University Hospital where he was a professor of medicine doing research.
He said he liked to admire the girls and have a couple of drinks to relax,
but warned me, qualifyingly, it was best to look at but not to touch them.

And me?

“I was walking in the streets today, sad and depressed over a lost love. I
suppose you know how it is when you have lost someone dear to you. You
need time to shake off the grief. I was hit hard when I lost her.”

“I'm sorry to hear about your troubles. We all go through these crises at
one time then another throughout our lives, Was she a Venezuelan lady?”
he asked with his heart in the right place.

“What happened?”
“Family. Money.”
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 He alighted in agreement with me.
“Our family system is perhaps
a bit diffcult for you North Americans
to digest in one bite.”
“Yes, it is,” I murmured lowly with tears
in my eyes.
“I studied medicine in the United States. Boston. I know a little about our
common differences. You must remember that we South Americans are
socially, politically, and economically insecure. We clan together too much,
too conveniently. We do it because we are afraid. Our governments, our
schools, our banks, our churches, our political parties, our hospitals (he
clenched his fsts) are just institutions of inferiority. We are backward, we
are victims of our poverty and ignorance. Our families refect our
unstableness. They are often despotic. They are usually closed especially
when money is involved.”
“Yes, I know.”
“You must not be so sad about this. All will pass with time. Just as you
yourself said. You must be strong.”
“I am trying,” I coughed up
overcome with a suffocating feeling in my breast.
“You can tell me what makes you
anxious if you wish. I am a good listener,”
he inhaled heavily on his
flter-less North American Camel cigarette.
I let loose a long breath, then summed it up for him: “Rich, divorced,
ophthalmologist with two children and possessive parents. And me? Poor,
divorced, aspiring to be a writer, free as a bird, but sad as can be. I nestled
on her perch, and when my time was up, she shooed me out.”
“Does she love you?”
“Yes.”
“Do you love her?”
“Yes.”
“Then what is the problem?”
“Parents.”
“Why?”
“Money.”
“Time.”
“Time for the parents to die, I said.
Time I cannot and will not give her.
187
 It's just not in my strength to suffer so.”
He dwelt intensely on my case,
then shook me with this:
“Why don't you kidnap her?”
I looked at him with surprise then immediately held him up to ridicule with
a cutting smirk.
“Yes, kidnap her!”
he restated remaining steadfast:
“We do it all the time in Venezuela
as a show of courage and a proof
of love.
It's a game, actually. The parents
hold on to their daughters as long as
they can, and sometimes only an act of violence,
I don't really mean force, can convince the mothers
and fathers of their children's love for another.
Kidnapping imprisoned maidens is still
a custom here in Venezuela.
“How much have you drunk, doctor!” I mocked.
“Oh, I am not so boozed up as you think!”
he jabbed back.
“A little crazy, perhaps!”
I made merry with him.
“Please, let me explain something to you.”
“I'm all ears, doctor.”
“Latin people are Roman Catholisized people. We are designing, double-
faced by nature. It is our way. We are not integral. We are not whole. We
believe that this world is not the best of worlds. If we are good here, we go
to heaven. If we are bad here, we go to hell. If you view the world as such,
you are stuck in this place to suffer, to wait for your eternal reward or
punishment. But there is a Catch-22. If you wrong yourself with the Roman
Catholic church on Earth, you may confess your sins and then go to
heaven. You have that security even when the last minute of your life ticks
away. Extreme Unction. You are part of the grand earthly Roman Catholic
scheme. If you are cunning, you sin, then, you confess. You can have your
cake and eat it, too! In the case of your girlfriend and her family, this
twisting serves them—and you—well. You must be Machiavellic. Toscano!
Tuscan. Their schizophrenia is your ticket to her heart. You can sin with
them then confess to them! You must sin! You must transgress; you must
188
be deceitful with them. When you are, you give them reason to forgive you.
They are yours and you are theirs. They are, in turn, inculcated with the
power to absolve. You must gamble because the odds are very much in
your favor. When they have reason to forgive you, they are yours and you
are theirs. You must gamble. Macchiavelli was a great gambler because he
had everything to win. Gamble for your girlfriend. It is your only chance.
You must make your girlfriend's family realize that you are so desperately
in love, you will go to any extreme to have her. You will sin. You will be
Roman Catholic. You will will be suited for forgiveness. If you do not sin,
you are better than they are. They want you to sin, and not because they
will lose their daughter! They know already that she must fall in love with
someone, someday. They want you to sin so you have no power—no moral
strength—over them. A man without money and one who has sinned is a
man they have control over! You must be clever in this game. Watch them
carefully; play into their hands; but, do not let them dominate you. The
truly astute individual lets others think they are governing them, but in
fact, if he is wise, it is he who bears sway over them. Be sharp to Roman
Catholic schizophrenic morality. You must be so to survive here. It is our
national mental illness. Archaic, superstitious, false, and for you,
potentially proftable. Be shrewd. Sin!!! And sin violently!!!” he came down
from his pulpit as quickly as he had risen up to it.

I thought to myself that this was out-patient paranoia. Or socially accepted

built-in persecution complex. Then this dicho, proverb, fashed through my
mind: “Los locos, los borachos, y los niños hablan la verdad.” Crazies, drunks,
and children speak the truth. I knew in this instant, premeditatively, it
would be diffcult for me to talk myself into kidnapping the object of my
sexual and amorous desire. I had been looking for an excuse to do
something, anything, and not only had this Venezuelan doctor, friend of
Nobel Prize winners, given it to me, the stranger had actually presented,
through the intoxication of his mental faculties, on a silver platter, that
which I had to do to escape from my boring self-pity, that which I needed
to redeem Gonza from the life she was living to no rational fnal cause. To
Jesuitical dead ends. I might dream I would kidnap Gonza, but I would
never be able to get up the courage to do it. I had already concluded Gonza
was just not good enough for me.

I walked out into the night. Midnight beep-beeped its arrival through the
liquid gray digitals of my inexpensive Casio wristwatch. I set going on my
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haunt through the Caracas streets hoping that as the beer oxidized its way
out of my blood stream, my mind would return to a saner state where I
would not be so concerned about Gonza and my troubles. I wished my
sobering-up would then lead me home to a sound sleep after my chaotic
Chacaito drinking bout. But I senses that mental calm would not be
rewarded to me this night.

Rather than becoming reasonable once again, my instincts were energized

suddenly with a sense of mission to perform that duty implanted in my
brain by the medical research professor. I was not wholly conscious, but
only capable of being made conscious. I had to go through the plan to
kidnap Gonza—the dream to do so. Something kept telling me to go on. It
was as if my life depended on it. And it did! I had to act out the enticing
system of actions clamoring within me whether or not iit proved
detrimental to my very own being, or the beings of the other participants in
the dreary drama. I charged around the streets of Caracas waiting for the
moment I would be ready to strike. I was becoming undrunk, and as I did,
the plan to snatch Gonza away became ever clearer and animated in my
mind. The frst part of my plot demanded that I pick out a place to take
Gonza and her lovely ones.

My “dream” was leading me on to an insanity. I thought that at this time

and place in history no better region than southern Colombia existed to
help one work his or her way up to Miami through the hospices of
conniving drug traffckers who controlled a myriad network of illegal
transportation facilities out and away from Sudamericalandia. No
international airports. No police checks. No customs. Just little secret
airplane and yatch bases to hustle marijuana and cocaine to the lungs and
noses of nervous people in gringolandia. (Gonza herself was no stranger to
Mary Jane because at the hospital where she was stationed in Gainesville,
they were researching the use of MJ for eye diseases, principally glaucoma,
and the doctors often snuck out government subsidized “pot” to serve
guests in their Gainesville homes. Snitch! Snitch!! Snitch!!!) I would have
been made very happy to see Gonza once again high on marijuana, relexed
and a little punchy.

Once I had decided on the site to take Gonza and her children, my next
concern was a rapid means of transportive escape, and I could not think of
anything better than the El Árbol de Navidad—that is if Carlos could get it
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out of government mothballs for me for two or three or four days. This
would be tricky for him to pull off, but I had confdence in Carlos.

I got him on the telephone at home. He was asleep and when I told him I
needed “her” at 7:00am for a “day trip” to Colombialandia, he moaned with
disbelief, asked me what I had been drinking, but told me to call him again
at 6:30am. If all could be arranged with his friend at the government motor
pool where “she” was stored, we could be on our ways by 7:30am at the
latest. Carlos went fast to work on my request, and when he asked me for
what reason I had need to go to Colombialandia, I told him “a woman,” and
that I would fll him in on the details in the morning when I expected him
to pull up in front of Gonza's quinta to accompany her and her charming
children to the beautiful southern Colombialandia—one of the most
gracious places in the whole world.

I had devised a circumspect route in my room and set to task to use it not
so much as to arrive quickly to Colombislandia, but more to deliberately set
the Venezuelan police and National Guard—if they ever would get wise to
my stratagem—asquint with embarrassment and delay. To do this I decided
to head out east from Caracas and away from it, then go around and down
to Colombialandia. On past Los Teques, Orituco, Las Mercedes, Calcara,
through the Sierra de la Cerbatana, south to San Fernando de Atabapo,
and then into Colombialandia and its hundreds of small landing strips. On
this route we would pass through local, minimum securitized towns and
have access to hiding places in the mountains and valleys of south-central
Venezuelandia.

Other considerations began to futter in my head: money, ways to keep

Gonza's beautiful offspring occupied during the kidnapping, food,
helicopters, police checks, and even the fact that Gonza would probably be
a nuisance being upset and horrifed at my violence. I thought it best to
cross those bridges as I came to them in the order of my progress from
dejected lover to romanticized kidnapper. A Christianized terrorist whose
dream was to gain forgiveness from Gonza's mother and later be set into
the place, reserved for me in the Lofty Heavens of Eternal Happiness by
The Almighty Christian in the Sky.

Since Gonza's mother was a screwball about money, I was sure that I would
fnds loads of it—probably fresh, vivid, green dollars—stashed away under
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mattresses and in other places in the quinta which she would have thought
safer than the Caracas bank vaults. (In reality, any idiot would have ease in
coming across the places of her demented stealthiness. She was an anal
hoarding character. A Collyers' Mansion personality: lots of money but
living life in a junk yard. Suspicious of all people and especially not easy in
mind if she knew her own dough was cached in the earthquake-proof
compartments built of steel in Caracas with Swiss and North American
design ideas and specifcations.)

Keeping the two dolls “drugged” for two or three or four days posed
another challenge. I would have to buy bags and bags and bags of
chocolates, licorice sticks, potato chips, nuts, cakes, lollipops, gum drops,
cream-flled chocolate pies, bubblegum with baseball cards, cans of Coca-
Cola, taffes, cherries coated with chocolate, corn fakes sprayed with
articial sugar or honey, popcorn, sour balls, corn crisps, caramels, Life
Savers, Chuckles, Mars bars, Milky Ways, and sugarless chewing gum so
they wouldn't get cavities! Maybe diabetes! With their stomachs sated, their
minds would have to be controlled. Videocassettes of cartoons, flms, and
shows for the little special ones. Music cassettes of the Bee Gees, The Best
of the Bee Gees, The Bee Gees Volume One, The BeeGees Yesterday, The
BeeGees Today, The Bee Gees Tomorrow, and The Best Greatest Hits of
the Bee Gees. A television guide for the El Árbol de Navidad's Super
Electronic Stereo Satellite Hooked-up Color Television Set with zoom and
remote control systemization.

We would not risk eating in restaurants, so the trunk of the El Árbol de

Navidad—with its convertible refrigerator system—would be flled with
deep-freezed frozen foods and fresh drinks. Vitamins would also be
available. A microwave oven, attached to the supped-up electrical system of
the El Árbol de Navidad, would provide hot stuff for us.

Helicopter checks and police road blocks would be handles in turn as they
presented themselves—IF they brought their essences to notice. The El
Árbol de Navidad was well armed, and its Electronic Color-Changing
Network would help the car blend in perfectly with the environment thus
obstructing view of it from meddlesome helicopters and police agitators.
Gonza would sit with me and Carlos in the front set, and if she bugged me
too much with her crybabying for her dead father, I would stick one of
Carlos's PPKS, hard into her ribs—or lull her with drugs, slipped into her
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drinks, to keep her from subverting my cabal. Surely, these wickednesses
would sentence me to the Bottomless Pit of Everlasting Hellfre if I did not
obtain the absolutions of Gonza's mother and, from his majestic situation
in the Abodes of Bliss in Our Father's House of Eternal Rest, her father.

Carlos swindled away the El Árbol de Navidad from its lonesome bay in the
Venezuelan governments's compound of obsolete conveyances which, he
told me when we met in an arepa palace in Chacaito, reminded him of the
dreary God's Acre where his sister and mother had been laid to Eternal
Relaxation. We sipped on Solera and munched greasy arepas with meat
and cheese crammed into them. I flled Carlos in on my plan, and he was
raring to go when he knew I intended to screw some of those who had
taken too much from Venezuela but had betokened so little to its own
people. When I informed him I had no money to buy candy, food, music
cassettes and videocassettes for Gonza's two children, he suggested we
invoice what we purchased onto the Ministerio de Información y Turismo's
account at the military discount store next to Mirafores. He said my old
identity card would do the trick, and the fnancial reckoning would come
due with the other “expenses” the MI T employees were charging to the
ministerio's tab. When we got to the discount store, we purchased six pillow
cases, printed with color prints of Donald Duck, Jack the Ripper,
Superman, Mickey Mouse, President Carter, and Billy the Kid, then went to
town stuffng them with the supplies we needed to keep the darlings
anesthetized during the abductions. We were fnally ready to strike at
9:30am—just when the “students” would be dressing for school and when
Gonza would be, I assumed, preparing the handsome ones' lunches.

Carlos handed me an electronic walkie-talkie, a chrome-plated PPKS, and a

blanket, and suggested—with such a serious face I wondered for a few
seconds where I was—that I enter alone while he cruised the streets around
the quinta, cut the telephone wires to it, and waited for my signal for him
to enter for the pick-up-hold-up. The blanket? He said I would need it to
cover the shards of broken beer and wine bottles used to keep burglars out
and which coronated the wall I had to scale to enter the yard in front of
Gonza's quinta where she lived with her mother, her children, and the
memories of her recently dead father.

In order not to be seen from the street clambering up and over the wall, I
entered the adjacent apartment building, went to its back courtyard, and
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there, in seclusion, threw my blanket up on top, then shimmied up, over,
and down onto the turf on the opposite side. I was in Gonza's father's
Special Territory, and I hoped he was not watching me from Hell.

I moseyed on my way to the front screen door, and to my uttermost

amazement, found it unlatched—just waiting for my uncomplicated
entrance which abruptly scared the wits out of Gonza's mother who
happened to be passing in the foyer when the unoiled hinges of the old,
unpainted door creaked my access into her dead husband's fort. She did
not die of fright.

I extended my right arm with the PPKS aimed directly at the top of her
nose between her eyebrows, and with my left index fnger over my upper
and lower lips, particularized my intention that she keep her mouth shut.
She stood paralyzed in disgust, but she did not die of fright.

I froze with her in absolute silence eyeing the interior of the quinta at the
portal where I held the beast in quiet reserve. I could not believe my eyes!
The house was a pigsty. The children's toys were scattered all over the
place. Empty beer and wine bottles were on a coffee table. An ashtray with
a week's supply of Vantage cigarette butts in it was on the arm of an old
sofa. Furniture was frayed, paint was peeling off, garbage was strewn about.
I wanted to blow Gonza's mother's brains out then and there, and I glared
at her with a scorn she got to the bottom of immediately.

I whispered to her “I don't want to hear a peep out of you, you fucking
witch! Do you understand?” She accorded agreement with me with an up
and down nodding of her head. Then Gonza called from within another
room:
“Mami?”
Mami said nothing.
Still silence.
Gonza came out and when she saw me with the gun directed at her
mother's head, she blanched, then calmly begged me not to hurt her
mother or the kids. She demanded that I kill her rather than any members
of her family.

“I am not going to kill anyone, sweetheart, if they do what I tell them. Get
dressed. Dress the children. Then come here to me and your mother,” I
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casually demanded in a Humphrey Bogart drawl. She obeyed making haste
to go where the children were. My curiosity propelled me to advance with
the mother to the tender ones' room where they were quartered with
Gonza. Before I went in I pushed the PPKS to the mother's right temple
and reminded her to comply with all my wishes. She did not die of fright.
She becked terrifyingly. When I saw her eyes flled with such agonizing
fear, I told Gonza to go fetch her bottle of blood pressure pills, and ordered
the witch to take two instead of one. Gonza blurted out that I was not a
doctor, and with that, I told her she could give her mother one if two would
cause her harm.

The children, meanwhile, gazed unimpassionedly at all of us trying to

hyphenate what they were actually observing before their very own eyes,
with that which contrasted with a videocassette or television flm or
program or cinegraphic show they imagined they had once viewed but now
had diffculty in summoning to recollection. Rather than leaving them in a
state of suspense, I changed their channels of cerebration and gave them an
account of what was in the six gayly-decorated pillow cases waiting for
them in the E l Árbol de Navidad. Their eyes illuminated with jollity, and
they screamed to their mother that they would dress very quickly to
accompany us on the trip to Colombialandia and then, Miami, where I
promised them I would buy for them all the hamburgers and french fries
and Coca-Cola they could eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the rest
of their natural lives. They went crazy. Gonza's mother, who had rained on
my parade, croaked her opposition with a harsh clearing of her throat, but
when the impulse of her emotion returned from her brain and began to
mould itself on her lips in the form of words, I thrust my PPKS into her
side, and the attempt to think and then to vocally transmit, discharged itself
into thin air. I suggested, politely, that she control, with more concise
consideration, her craving to speak. She sagged back into check, but did
not die of fright.

Gonza put her hands on her hips and squealed her resistance. The magical
beings had to go to school, she had to go to the offce, and the mother had
to go to visit her husband's grave and his accountant. With the mother's
trap shut, I used the darlings to attack at Gonza's logicalness. Candies,
hamburgers, videocassettes, Miami's Seaworld, hot popcorn with butter,
Cokes, and the Bee Gees...in live concerts!!!

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They roared with pleases, then threats not to go to school, intimidations
not to ever eat again, and a general—“strike” they called it!—against
everything their mother told them to do for ten years. Gonza was being
yelled down. I remained silent throughout the embarrassing scene which
even struck Gonza at her pathetic self's destitution of sway over her two
prodigies. She succumbed so: “OK. Let's get going! What am I going to do
with you two. You are always getting your ways!”

Gonza got Fernando y Isabella ready and yelled to her mother not to worry
—that they would all be back together again in a few days after I calmed
down and she had time to reason with me. I took the mother to the kitchen.

“Witch, do you really think

I am going to let you
stay here to call the police?”
She, without speaking,
shook her head horizontally.
“Good for you, witch!”

I shoved into her hand a white-red plastic bag from the CADA (Venezuela's
supermarket chain founded by the Rockefeller family and then sold to
wealthy Venezuelan lovers of North America) which was lying on the foor.

“Fill it up with all the money

you've got in the house,”
I sadistically ordered her.
Then I added:
“I better see a lot of green dollars
in there, you dumb-looking witch!”

She, ragged in an old, faded pink cotton nightgown that reached her ugly
bare feet, she, with a paleface that had not been washed and with greasy
gray, straight hairs dripping over her ears and forehead, complied without
shilly-shallying. When she returned with the plastic shopping sack, I saw
enough dollars and worthless bolívares, without even counting them, to
keep us solvent for two or three years. After she coughed up the money. I
told her to get dressed, put her blood pressure pills in her pocketbook, and
stick her broom between her legs and get ready to fy with us to
Miamilandia through Colombialandia.
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We were ready to go in ten minutes. I called Carlos on my electronic
communicator, and he pulled up in front of Santa María posthaste. When
Gonza realized that the old hag, her mother, was coming with us, she was at
frst displeased. But I instantly made her cognizant of the fact that her
mother would have constant medical attention if she were with us. I
suggested that Gonza bring along her black bag, and told her to make sure
there were some sleeping tablets and tranquilizers in it in case anyone gave
me any sort of trouble. I told Gonza that the mother, in the back seat of our
vehicle, could play with the children if they tired of candy and movies and
music cassettes. The witch cringed at that.

We were ready to fee. I charged everyone to their places in the El Árbol de

Navidad, and reminded Gonza to occupy the front seat with me and Carlos.
Gonza's mother and I were last to head out of the quinta. When Gonza and
her beautiful children were well ahead of us, beyond the outside terraced
entrance to the abode, I surreptitiously stabbed my PPKS to the mother's
left temple, and with my left thumb, and index fnger, tweaked her right
earlobe hard enough to evince a wince from her, warning her stubbornly:
“Don't cause me one bit of fucking trouble, witch, or I'll blow your fucking
brains out and dump your ass in the jungle for the buzzards to munch on!
Do you understand me, witch?” She bowed chickenheartedly.

The frst day of travel posed no diffculty for us. We accelerated through
carreteras de tierra(dirt roads) with the ease of newness accompanying the
onset of a long journey through never seen zones. The back foor of the El
Árbol de Navidad looked like the bleachers in a baseball stadium after the
big game: candy wrappers and empty Coca-Cola cans dotted the lush
carpet of the elegant, but very practical, El Árbol de Navidad.

The tremendous ones had lined the back window with their videocassettes,
and had placed them in three columns: cartoons, movies, kids' shows.
(How cute!) If in the ffteen or so hours of traveling on the frst day the
wondrous ones had watched fourteen hours of cartoons and action-packed
crime shows, I would not have been surprised. They sat glued to the black
screen which was set behind the front seat. I turned around frequently to
see them starry-eyed with attentiveness.

Oh! I almost forgot. One interesting event highlighted the frst ffteen fast
hours. We had stopped along the roadside to swallow some sandwiches
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and apples, and Fernando y Isabella, before setting out from the car, had
put a Bee Gees' cassette on for us to listen to while we picnicked in the
grass. They kept playing one particular song over and over and over again.
It, gushingly sentimental, went like this:

“I know your eyes in the morning sun.

I feel you touch me in the pouring rain.
And the moment that you wander far from me,
I wanna feel you in my arms again.
And you come to me on a summer breeze;
Keep me warm in your love,
Then you softly leave,
And it's me you need to show;
How deep is your love?
How deep is your love?
How deep is your love?
I really need to learn.
'Cause we're living in a world of fools,
Breaking us down
When they all should let us be.
We belong to you and me.
I believe in you.
You know the door to my very soul.
You're the light in my deepest, darkest hour;
You're my savior when I fall.
And you may not think that I care for you
When you know down inside that I really do
And it's me you need to show:
How deep is your love?
How deep is your love?
How deep is your love?
I really need to learn.
'Cause we're living in a world of fools,
Breaking us down
When they all should let us be
We belong to you and me
And you come to me on a summer breeze;
Keep me warm in your love, then you softly leave.
And it's me you need to show:
How deep is your love?
 How deep is your love?
How deep is your love?
I really need to learn.
'Cause we're living in a world of fools,
Breaking us down
When they all should let us be
We belong to you and me.”

One time when the children were screaming out the lyrics, and had
reached the “How Deep Is Your Love?” refrain—the fundamental romantic,
imperturbable proposition—they, Fernando Y Isabella, referring to me,
“him,” sought teasingly from their mother an answer to this: “How deep is
your love for him, mami?!!!” I blushed.

Gonza almost choked on her roast beef sandwich, She evoked a sour puss
which suggested that she had been eating lemons for the last three hours,
and was just about to snicker a snide remark when I jumped on her and
began tickling her. She perked up quick as a rabbit but sang out to the
children:
“You should be dancing!”

At this, the famous ones danced on the pavement where the car was
parked. I kept tickling; they kept singing out to their mother:

“How deep is your love, mami?”

Mami, almost ready to say “uncle,” sang back another time:

“You should be dancing!”

“How deep is your love, mami?” they insisted.

“How can you mend a broken heart?”

she demurred.

“How deep is your love, mami?”

they broke in unrelentingly.

“Don't want to live inside myself,” she fnally cried.

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 Still again: “How deep is your love, mami?”

Gonza looked at me with tears in her eyes and then sang out for all the
world to hear:

“If I can't have you!”

The kids swooned at each other with goo-goo eyes of delight.

Then Gonza burst out sobbing, ran to me wrapping her arms around me,
and smothered my face with her juicy kisses as the tears of joy from her
eyes trickled onto my cheeks and lips impressing me with her “need” for
me.

“What next?”
I mused beneath my breath.

27

The second day we saw the fnal fall of the curtain in the Gonza drama. We
had been riding, taken at the gallop, through rugged Venezuelan mountain
ranges with irregular, serrated profles, when I comprehended completely
that the El Árbol de Navidad's Electronic Color Changing Network was not
worth one iota because contrails of dust scuds were setting bounds on our
location so accommodatingly, any dumb fatfoot could follow us without
discomfort. I stiffened for the worst. It came.

Near Cerro Guanay, two Huey helicopters—one brandishing the red, blue,
and yellow stripes of the Venezuelan government; the other, the red, white,
and blue of the United States of America—hovered so untroublesomely
above us, I, like Rambo, saw the necessity to head for high peaks for a
Shootout at the OK Corral.

Carlos, his face taut, handed me pounds of ammunition, and when we

skidded the car to a short stop, we broke in two directions trying to confuse
our despoilers: He went south with the Venezuelan police chasing him; I
went north up the other side of the hill with Gonza—the gringo embassy
199
and the Marine contingent on our tails—held as a security for the
fulfllment of certain terms: my salvation.

The authorities, not the fools I had prognosticated them to be, ran to
Carlos frst and exhausted their fre power into his body flling it with more
than twenty unlucky perforations. They, the over-reactors, used kid gloves
on me. Shot over my head to scare me into an ill-considered release of
Gonza. Their expedient succeeded. Gonza went sprinting to mother. When
she saw that she was in territory near the touchdown zone, she suddenly
stopped and turned towards me. Then to mami. Then to me. Then to
mami. Then to me. Then to mami... Her perpetual state of confusiion had
arrested her forward motion. She looked one more time at mami. She
looked one more time at me. Then she sank to the dirt in defeat and
despair. Sobbing. Anguishing. Cradling the tension in her gut. I thought of
Red Buttons and Jane Fonda in the roller-skating rink. They shoot horses,
don' they? I shot her dead in the head. (Actually, I had qualifed in the
army as an expert with the .45 caliber pistol—one of the most diffcult
handguns to master.) And then I ran to her.

As I trotted—in slow motion—to er, I passed Carlos and they were

numbering the holes in his body. With a felt-tipped pen black pen. I saw a
“15.” When I arrived at Silver Girl's lifeless body, someone, from behind,
placed a hood over my head and injected my right upper arm with a needle.
I began to ooze around. They put me on a stretcher. I could hear the clock-
clocking of the Huey blades (sounds that reminded me of Vietnam), and as
I began the ywaning to a restful sleep, I could see Gonza's body foating, in
an immaculately assumptive poise, to the heavens. Her face was smiling.
Her breasts were covered with a radiantly blue cope, and the folds of it,
corrugated around her body, sent her spirit the faster to the high heavens.
Angels were singing “Dies Irae,dies illa; Salvet saeclum in favilla.” Gonza's
mother was blabbering convulsively to the Venezuelan Army and United
States State Department and Marine offcials. The kids had stopped
watching cartoons; they had stopped eating candies.

The last words I remember as they heaved me into the helicopter, were
these shouted at the top of someone's lungs.

Let's get back to the embassy. Fast!

200
I started to sing to myself, in my drugged state:

“If you leave me now

You'll take away the biggest part of me
Ooooooooo Ooooooooo Oooooooooo
No baby please don't go
And if you leave me now
You'll take away the very heart of me
Oooooooooo Ooooooooooo Ooooooooooooo
No baby please don't go
Ooooooooooo Oooooooooo Ooooooooooo
Girl I just want you to stay
A love like ours is love that's hard to fnd
How could we let it slip away
We've come too far to leave it all behind
How could we end it all this way
When tomorrow comes and we both regret
the things we said today
A love like ours is love that's hard to fnd
How could we let it slip away
We've come too far to leave it all behind
How could we end it all this way
When tomorrow comes and we both regret
the things we said today
If you leave me now
You'll take away the biggest part of me
Oooooooooo Ooooooooooo Oooooooooo
No baby please don't go
Oooooooo Oooooooooo
Girl just got to have you by my side
Ooooooooooo Oooooooooooo
No baby please don't go
Ooooooooo Oooooooooo
Gonza, I've just got to have your loving.

Then I fell fast asleep.

The End
201