Oyster_Cocktail_Fina..

Transcription

CHAPTER ONE
“‘She take me money and run Venezuela,’” Marcello
sang to himself as he gazed out the window of the
commercial airliner. “‘Matilda, Matilda, Matilda, she take
me money and run Venezuela,’”
“Scusi Signore,” said the woman next to him in
perfect Italian. “I think you have it wrong. The correct line
is ‘She took my money and ran to Venezuela.’”
The music faded when he pulled out one of his ear
buds and smiled. “Thank you for the advice,” he told her,
“but I know English, too. It’s just that the song was written
that way.”
Marcello chuckled at the befuddled expression on
the woman’s face. She was probably just trying to be
friendly. Friendly but wrong. She blushed to be corrected
on the lyrics of an old Calypso tune—a song that seemed to
have been written, he thought, to show that even language
errors, if they have the right rhythm and feeling, can last for
decades in people’s hearts.
He replaced the speaker buds and sang “‘Run to
Venezuela, run to Venezuela,’” along with the next tune that
the on-board audio system pumped into his earphones. A
few minutes later he pulled out a picture of himself with a
dark-haired beauty, set against the backdrop of an Italian
town. Still nodding to the music, he ran a finger over the
girl’s curvy image. Then he turned the picture this way and
that, as if by doing so he could somehow extract a third
dimension from the flat photograph. He knew that this
picture was probably the way he would always remember
her. The thought didn’t make him the happiest passenger
on that flight to Caracas.
The Oyster Cocktail © 2007 - Tomas Sancio
1
“È la sua Matilda? Is that your Matilda?” his
seatmate asked, raising her voice to get through the
headphones. “Sorry if I’m being nosy.”
“No, not at all. Her name is Alessia. She stayed
behind in Milan.”
He took one last look at the smoldering black eyes of
his fiancée and then slipped the photo between the pages
of an in-flight magazine that he was planning to keep.
Along with Alessia, Marcello Carosio had left a great
part of his life in Italy. He had caught the first RomeCaracas flight following his sudden departure from a
vacation in Mallorca, Spain. That trip to the Spanish isles
was supposed to last for three more days, but an
unfortunate accident on the Palma city bayside road had
interrupted it.
A Japanese couple had begun crossing the street,
looking the wrong way, when Marcello came along in his
rented Renault, thumbing a text message into his cell
phone to tell Alessia what a great deal he had gotten on the
car. Before he realized how dangerous it was to be doing
two things at the same time, the couple was sprawled on the
street. To avoid facing jail time for reckless driving or even
manslaughter, Marcello decided to leave the island without
saying good-bye to the girl in the photo.
“È bella. She’s beautiful,” said the woman next to
him.
He smiled and nodded at her.
“I guess she would have enjoyed traveling with you
to Venezuela,” she added, still trying to be friendly. “You
could take her to Los Roques or to the mountains in the
south. Very pretty sights.”
“You’ve been in Venezuela before?”
“Yes,” she said with a little laugh. “My parents are
Italian, but I was born in Caracas and have lived there
almost all my life.”
“Lucky you.”
“Quite an interesting place, if you ask me, but
completely unrelated to the normal world,” she continued,
2
apparently happy that she had found somebody on the long
flight to talk to. “Things that are supposed to work well
really do work, but not for the reason you would expect.”
“In Venezuela, you mean?”
“Yes. You have to leave your common sense at the
airport, if you know what I mean.”
“Actually, no, I don’t,” said Marcello, wondering
what he was getting himself into.
She glanced at him and said, “Don’t worry, you’ll get
used to it. Everybody does “
That left him even more confused. If he was fleeing
from his past, he wanted to go to a place where he could
survive without too much trouble. He didn’t want to live in
a country that wasn’t “normal,” that works in “its own way.”
His limited understanding of South America had led him to
think that it was much more reliable for a European than a
place like, say, India. The woman’s words disturbed him.
He knew he didn’t have the patience to learn the ropes of a
new culture, especially one that operated without any
common sense.
But every country had its fair share of Italian
immigrants. Marcello figured that enough of them lived in
almost every country to avoid having to adapt very much.
He could remain within a circle of comfort populated by his
own countrymen. If he ever wished to leave this group, he
would have to be just tolerant enough of the local culture.
If they ate rats, for instance, he would just say ““Excuse me,
I prefer pasta,” or if cows were sacred there, he would just
bow to the udder mystery of their beliefs. He grinned at his
own silly pun.
“In Venezuela we eat a lot of pasta,” the woman said,
perhaps trying to reassure him.
“Al dente?” he asked, feeling slightly embarrassed
about his sudden fear of the unknown.
“Whichever way you want it,” she replied with a
laugh. “You’ll be surprised by the quality of the vongole.”
“Is it good?”
“Excellent!”
3
He thought she looked a lot like Lucille Ball. Her
hair was naturally red, her face was pale, and her eyes were
light, with minuscule veins showing how tiring the
transatlantic flights can be. She had said she was
Venezuelan, but her light skin and hair weren’t typical of a
Venezuelan woman.
She must have sensed that she wasn’t getting her
point across, so she told him about the optional stoplights.
According to her, the traffic lights in Caracas indicate what
you should do when your car comes to an intersection, but
the rules aren’t mandatory. So if you see a green light, you
should first look both ways to check for other drivers who
have decided to run the red light. In that case you have to
wait for them, But if you see no other cars, then you can
cross the intersection.
““I don’t think that’s stupid,” she said.
“What’s not stupid? Waiting for others to run the red
light?”
“Yes. If you consider this with an open mind, that is.
Running red lights saves time for everybody if no cars are
coming the other way. The only disadvantage is that you
have to be more alert.”
Marcello nodded. He was happier with the effort she
had put in telling her story than with the veracity of the
story itself, something that foreigners like him couldn’t
prove.
Another one of her tales involved the taxi drivers at
the Maiquetía airport, the port of entry that serves the city
of Caracas.
“We have three types of taxi drivers there,” she
explained. “ One kind rushes up to you and offers you a ride
to Caracas. These drivers rarely have any identification and
usually charge you a high fare, depending on how naive you
look.”
This story made him feel like a death-row prisoner
contemplating his final walk to the electric chair.
“They’re not as dangerous as the second type of taxi
drivers,” she continued—”the ones that want to rob you of
4
Everything. They also approach you quickly and ask, ‘You
going to Caracas, huh?’ You nod yes because that’s where
you’re going, not because you want to go with them. But
they’ll take your luggage anyway.”
“Oh, that’s just great,” Marcello replied, wondering
what other dangers lurked ahead. Was doom imminent?
Adventure, excitement, and fear of taxi drivers that doubled
as muggers were all part of her story, which was becoming
more interesting than the in-flight movie.
“Anyhow, stay away from those two types of taxi
drivers and walk toward the airport exit, where you’ll find
the third type. Those are the ones with nametags and
marked cars. “They aren’t cheap, but at least you can be
sure that they won’t gouge you on the fare or rob you
blind.”
Marcello nodded again. He thought once more about
that fateful moment when he had thoughtlessly paid more
attention to his mobile phone than to the road ahead.
“How’s your Spanish?” she asked.
“I understand some, if people speak slowly but I
don’t speak the language at all.”
“You understood that you have to take the marked
taxis to Caracas, didn’t you?”
“Oh, don’t worry. I won’t be leaving the airport. I’m
taking the next flight to Margarita.”
The woman’s look of deep concern vanished, as if
she was glad that Caracas wouldn’t be his first experience of
Venezuela.
Marcello thought the woman was quite nuts. Those
bags around her eyes told a story of candles burned at both
ends. She was probably not only sleep-deprived but
drinking too much corporate Kool-Aid. Business travelers
lived in a parallel Universe, he thought, a world made of
airports, conference rooms, hotels, and flights like this one.
She probably had visited more countries than she could
count. Maybe if she stayed in one of them longer, she’d be
more relaxed.
5
But she was obviously a seasoned traveler, and that
was important as far as the lessons that he could learn from
her. She told Marcello that she worked in Europe for an
American company. No surprise there, he thought.
Europeans emphasize coffee breaks and long vacations,
while Americans are all about work, work, and more work.
Marcello expected to see many odd things in South
America. In fact, he was already looking at one—a
Venezuelan who looked Scottish and worked the American
lifestyle in Europe.
The United States had been his first choice of a
destination until he found out that he couldn’t run there
with 18,000 Euros in cash. He wouldn’t make it through
Customs with that, and he’d probably be detained and
deported.
That wouldn’t be the case with Venezuela, according
to his friend Filippo, who had been riding with him when
the accident occurred. Filippo told him back in Spain that
his uncle worked in Venezuela and that the security there
was much more lax than in the States. So that would be a
better place for him to hide while the hit-and-run issue
died. Marcello prayed that the accident would do the dying
and not the Japanese tourists.
As he flew across the Atlantic with a group of
complete strangers, he wondered how the Japanese couple
was faring in the hospital. Leaving them there probably
wasn’t the best decision in the world. What would be the
outcome? All he had was enough cash for one year, the
address of Filippo’s uncle, and his girlfriend’s promise to
wait for him no matter what.
“Oh, Alessia,” he whispered as the dimmed lights in
business class shone upon the sleeping executives. “I miss
you already.”
6
CHAPTER TWO
Marcello filed through the Jetway that led to the
arrivals terminal at Maiquetía with the rest of the
chattering passengers. As he traveled through the
rectangular tunnel, pulling his bag behind him, he was
surprised by the hot wind blowing through the open service
doors, which was unlike any mid-February weather he had
ever encountered. His leather jacket and scarf were
suddenly as useless as candy at a diabetic’s convention.
Filippo had been too rushed to remind him that he was
heading for the tropics, where the sultry weather never
changed much. Even if he had done so, few words could
convey the heaviness of the heat and humidity. Fortunately,
he was wearing a T-shirt under his jacket, so he quickly
stripped down just to that.
Marcello thought about how quickly his life had
changed. He and Filippo hadn’t had much time to discuss
anything. After the accident they had to make a hasty
agreement: Filippo would stay and blame his friend for
everything while Marcello fled the continent. While he was
away, Filippo would make sure that the Japanese tourists
received the best care possible and try to persuade them not
to press charges.
Also, Filippo’s father, a well-connected lawyer,
would pull some strings to have the whole matter settled in
a friendly way. If he failed, at least Marcello would be
farther away from the carabinieri and from jail. He and
Filippo didn’t even have enough time to consider the
implications of their hurried plan. Considering how
connected the whole world was, he knew that he could
7
never again travel to a country where he wasn’t blacklisted.
If the tourists died, that list could include all of them.
He and Filippo had no more than ten minutes to
decide where Marcello should go. That was when they were
at the Spanish hospital where they had taken the injured
couple, while they were waiting for the police.
After discarding the possibility of going to the U.S.,
they considered Argentina, a country that quickly came to
mind because of the recent game-saving goal scored by an
Argentinean player for the Milan AC football club. The
problem was that they didn’t know anybody in that country.
They knew all about the soccer players but nothing about
the country itself.
Then they thought about Mexico, mainly because of
Shakira, but then they remembered that the famous
chanteuse was from Colombia. And they didn’t know
anyone in Mexico, either. The Middle East and Africa?
Forget it. Too many security problems, and Marcello would
have an even harder time blending into those cultures.
Finally, Filippo recalled his trip to Margarita Island
the previous year. He thought, incorrectly, that Margarita
was an independent country that you had to reach by
traveling through Venezuela until Marcello called the
airline to make a reservation. The agent assured him that
the only independent country within Venezuela was called
Zulia.
When Filippo visited Margarita, he stayed with his
uncle Angelo, who owned a boat repair shop in the town of
Punta de Piedras in the southeastern part of the island.
Angelo had moved there in the 1950s as part of the
Venezuelan dictator’s plan to lay out the welcome mat for
European immigrants. Angelo soon learned that Margarita
was little more than a fishing village, but the fishermen
used motorboats and Angelo knew that those engines
would break down occasionally, and when they did, he
would be there to help.
He started his repair business there with just a box
of basic tools, visiting fishermen all over the island. Little
8
by little, he created a name for himself as a skillful and
honest Mechanic. The income from his occasional jobs and
the low cost of living allowed him to save enough money to
buy land in Punta de Piedras and build his repair shop. In
the meantime, he met and married a beautiful, darkskinned woman from Carúpano, a town on the
northeastern coast of Venezuela.
From this marriage came two sons, one of whom
grew up to manage the Margarita Hotel while the other left
to take postgraduate courses in Rome. Like many children
of immigrant entrepreneurs, his sons decided that keeping
the old man at a safe distance was the best way to pursue
their own professional and personal objectives. Although
Filippo’s uncle showed some of the quirks typical of a man
his age, he was a welcoming person. This was especially
true with somebody outside of his family to whom he didn’t
have to impose his discipline.
The pleasant time that Filippo had spent with his
uncle Angelo gave them their answer that day in the
hospital: Marcello would go to Margarita Island in
Venezuela.
The sign in the airport kiosk near a very visible blue
wall-mounted public telephone read “Phone Cards.” The
time had come for Marcello to make his first report. If the
authorities were looking for him, he didn’t think that the
Italian police would have had enough time to bug Alessia’s
phone and trace the origin of incoming calls. He
purchased a phone card in the store, placed the call, and
waited, his breath stuck in his throat.
When she answered, he shouted, “Cara, sono Io!”
“Marcello! Dove sei?” Alessia cried. “Sono molto
preoccupata! I quotidiani parlano di te e sei accusato di
guidare pericolosamente. Secondo loro, sei un criminale
Marcello!”
“Alessia, don’t believe what they say in the news.”
“Oh, Marcello, Marcello . . .”
9
“It was all my fault. Sono un stupido! I’ll come back
and turn myself in, but not for a while.”
“ Oh, Marcello, how could you be so careless?”
“I’m sorry, cara mia. I got distracted with the
cellular phone.”
“Marcello, Marcello. Did you have to leave? And now
you are where?”
“Venezuela. I’m so sorry, Alessia. I miss you
already.” He estimated the time left on his calling card.
Maybe dialing directly to her mobile phone wasn’t the most
economical way to use the phone card. “I’ll return as soon
as I can, I promise. I’ll come back to you.”
His own words sound more desperate than what he
had intended. If he wasn’t feeling so jet-lagged, maybe he
could reassure her by sounding more confident.
“You have . . . one minute left,” the automatic female
computer voice warned him. He wondered if that voice
sounded more cheerful if your conversation was a pleasant
one or when the phone company was ripping you off.
“Alessia, please hang on for me. Filippo is taking
care of everything on that end. I’ll be back. I’ll—”
Time’s up! That wasn’t the way he had wanted to end
his conversation. Damned phone companies! He hated how
they had decided to bill him at an outrageous rate for calls
made to mobile phones outside the country—exponentially
higher than calls made to a land line. Marcello slammed
down the receiver and trudged toward the suitcase
conveyer belt. The metal belt clanked and rattled as it
carried the first briefcases. Did the designer make it so
noisy on purpose to wake up travelers before they got to
baggage claim, he wondered, so they wouldn’t pick up the
wrong suitcase? Who knows?
Marcello pulled out Alessia’s photo once more while
he waited for his bulky, black suitcase. He rubbed a thumb
across her lovely image and gazed at it with remorse,
wondering if he would ever see her again.
10
“El guayabo, no?” asked the man standing next to
him, who looked Venezuelan.
“Scusi, non parlo spagnolo,” Marcello replied in
Italian, hoping that the similarity to Spanish of his mother
tongue would be enough to get his point across.
“Ah! Saudade,” the traveler replied in Brazilian
Portuguese, more confidently than accurately.
Marcello still didn’t understand the words.
“He’s asking if you miss her,” said his former
seatmate as she approached the baggage carousel.
“Guayabo is Venezuelan for saudade, which is the feeling
you get when you miss somebody—you know, the chill in
your bones and the emptiness in your stomach. Are you
enguayabao, Marcello?” she asked with a giggle as she
grabbed her bag.
“Io credo,” he said to both of them.
Marcello finally spotted his black suitcase. It wasn’t
all that big, because he had packed for a trip to the Balearic
Islands, not Margarita Island. He turned to face the first
hurdle between himself and freedom—the airport
immigration authorities.
“Marseyo Carosio?” said the uniformed man behind
the immigration counter.
The unfamiliar pronunciation of his name caught
him off guard. He knew he had to act relaxed and friendly
unless he wanted the Venezuelan officials to single him out
for questioning. The last thing he wanted was for them to
find out that he had left Europe with some issues pending
with the Italian police.
“Si, sono io.”, he finally replied, regretting again that
he couldn’t speak a word of Spanish. He decided that
nodding would help him along the best.
Marcello wasn’t offended by the man’s
pronunciation. After all, he was the foreigner now, and he
had to adapt to the way they spoke here. Even so, he still
felt the urge to locate an Italian and tell him “how the
Venezuelans didn’t know that ce is pronounced chay and
11
that llo should be low. Unfortunately, he didn’t see any
Italians around.
The immigration official paged slowly through
Marcello’s passport until he found the right one to stamp.
Marcello wondered how these people selected a specific
page among several blank ones. Why did he pass over three
perfectly spotless pages before stamping the fourth one?
Was four a lucky number? Or did they select different pages
each time out of to boredom? Could be. How much fun
could it be to deal with tourists all day long? But he wasn’t
going to ask the man about this, especially since so many
others were in the line behind him, all of them looking
impatient.
Venezuela’s official blessing bestowed upon him,
Marcello marched through the sliding glass doors that were
his last roadblock to freedom. A kind—and ridiculously
beautiful—young woman at the Alitalia counter told him
how to get to the national flights concourse, where he could
buy a ticket to Margarita.
He arrived just in time to catch the 3:30 p.m., onehour flight to the island. Filippo had already told his uncle
about Marcello’s ETA, and he had given Marcello the
names of Angelo’s hometown and workplace.
Marcello arrived at Angelo’s shop to find the old man
dressed entirely in black and seemingly ready to leave. “Sei
Marcello, certo?” asked Angelo.
Marcello said that he was and shook Angelo’s big,
rough hand.
“Do you have any black clothes?”
Marcello thought that was an odd question until he
identified the reason for the gloomy look on the old man’s
face. That expression, along with his somber attire and his
frantic pawing through the papers on his desk—probably
looking for his car keys—indicated Angelo’s need to get to a
funeral on time.
“I may have something that will do, Marcello replied.
12
“Then what are you waiting for? Leave your bag here
and come with me. But wash your face first so people
can’t tell that you haven’t bathed. And be quick about it!”
He had just set foot on the island, and already he
had to take orders. Marcello sniffed an armpit and said, “As
a matter of fact, I did bathe this morning.”
“What?” said Angelo with a tight laugh. “That was
more than eight hours ago, young man! Haven’t you
noticed the heat here? Welcome to Margarita, the land of
the beautiful beaches, the even more beautiful women, and
the compulsory three baths a day.” Angelo puffed out his
chest as he said this, looking like some kind of Roman
emperor proving a point he had just made in the Senate.
Taking a bath every eight hours seemed rather extreme to
Marcello.
“Twice a day, twice a day”, he muttered to himself.
“What? Never mind. You could wash yourself right
now while I look for my car keys. Have you seen a leather
wallet that—” the old man said without looking up from the
floorboards under his desk. “Well, how could you? Use the
bathroom to the right.”
Marcello did as he was told. He had to admit that
the heat really was suffocating, especially here in Angelo’s
shop. It was past five in the afternoon, but the temperature
still had to be at least thirty-three degrees Celsius outside.
Gladly, the proximity of the sea pushed a mild breeze
through the bathroom window and made the heat more
bearable. Nevertheless, Marcello opened just the cold-water
tap to see if that would help, too.
Once he had splashed himself with the cool water
from head to beltline, Marcello retrieved a black polo shirt
and pulled that one along with the same blue jeans that he
had when he ran over the Japanese tourists. That thought
gave him a superstitious twinge, but it really didn’t matter,
because he wouldn’t be driving the battered old pickup
truck parked out front. Angelo was running late for the
funeral, and he knew the way, so he’d drive them, wouldn’t
13
he? A pair of comfortable yet stylish leather shoes
completed Marcello’s attire. And, yes, he had applied plenty
of deodorant, just as Angelo had so kindly reminded him to
do.
Marcello had done enough traveling to develop his
own list of rules for behavior when you’re in a foreign
country. The first one was: Keep your mouth shut, and let
your host do the thinking. That’s just what Marcello
decided to do as he climbed into Angelo’s old truck. It was
an old F150 pickup, its red paint had faded almost to a
dusky rose, and it was dented and spotted with rust, but the
engine fired up right away and turned over smoothly. No
air conditioner, of course. Marcello was glad when they got
rolling and a cool breeze whipped through the cab.
“You don’t see trucks like this in Milan, I’ll bet,” said
Angelo with a smile, keeping his eyes on the road.
Marcello nodded, wondering why they used gasoline
instead of diesel.
“Here in Venezuela they practically give the gasoline
away,” Angelo told him with a hint of pride. “So you can
have the car you want and not have to mortgage your house
to pay for the gas.”
“No kidding?” Marcello replied, trying to pay
attention. He was more interested in the desert-like
landscape here on the coastal part of the island. The sparse
vegetation made a sharp contrast with the taller, dense
trees that grew thickly on the central, cloud-wrapped
mountains that he could see to the distance. When they
had driven farther north, near what Angelo said was the
geographical center of the island, mountains of another
kind rose to the west. They were nearly devoid of
vegetation, but they had formed into familiar shapes.
“Those are the breasts of Maria Guevara!” the old
man shouted through the engine noise. He glanced at
Marcello and laughed. “Yes, they call them ‘las tetas de
Maria Guevara.’ No, they don’t use the polite name for
female breasts, just the common and vulgar one.”
“Who is Maria Guevara?”
14
Angelo motioned for him to move closer so they
could speak in classic Italian fashion. “Let me tell you a
secret.”
Marcello expected to hear a story of pirates, long-lost
lovers, dictators, or something equally thrilling. Maybe
Maria Guevara was the Venezuelan equivalent of the
Roman wolf-mother. Instead of breast-feeding from a
wolf— who knows how that would taste—maybe the
founders of Venezuela suckled at the teats of a black
woman. Her breasts were probably so big that only a
couple of hills could be used to honor them.
“I have no clue,” Angelo said, smiling at him
roguishly. “I just enjoy saying ‘those are the tits of Maria
Guevara’ without anybody calling me a dirty old man.”
Marcello felt disappointed. He slumped in his seat
and gazed at the scenery, enjoying the temperate sea
breeze. Angelo didn’t know how the hills got that name,
and he had no idea about what to expect in the future—or
why he had to go to a funeral now.
“Who’s being buried today?”
“Rubén Domínguez,” Angelo replied matter-offactly, concentrating on the road ahead.
Marcello wondered why the old man had nothing
else to say about the deceased. Maybe Rubén was an old
friend. Whatever the reason, Marcello decided not to push
Angelo for answers. If he wanted to talk about the man, he
would do it in his own good time. That information
probably wasn’t important, anyway. If not, then he
wouldn’t interrogate him.
Marcello relaxed and let the landscape slide by in
bouncy slow motion, thinking how empty spaces are more
beautiful sometimes than highly developed ones, especially
if those glitzy, beachfront playgrounds involve throngs of
tourists who don’t know how to cross a street properly.
The warmth of the lowering sun made him feel
drowsy, encouraging his thoughts to drift homeward—and,
as always, to Alessia. I wish we could watch this beautiful
15
sunset together, cara mia, he thought. I know you’d love it.
I promise I’ll bring you here someday.
“He was a fisherman.” Angelo said. “From
Manzanillo, a village at the northeast tip of the island. He
was a very nice person and very much liked by almost
everybody,”
The word almost tempted Marcello to ask the old
man to tell him Rubén’s real story, but he kept his eyes
closed and his mouth shut. He knew what old people liked
to do best—tell stories to anyone who was willing to listen.
He’d hear more about the fisherman sooner or later, he was
sure.
“So, how’s Filippo? A fine lad, isn’t he?” Angelo said,
changing the subject. “Yes, he’s a great friend, Marcello
replied, looking at Angelo.
When they reached the northern coast, they drove
more slowly through a town that the old man called Juan
Griego, which was named after a man who had come from
Greece, Angelo said. For someone who had lived here for
the past five decades, he seemed to have only sketchy
knowledge of the local history and geography. Marcello
didn’t know whether he was uneducated or just too lazy to
learn more about the island.
“Filippo said that you were coming here to take a
work vacation. That’s how he put it—a ‘work vacation’ and
not a ‘vacation from work’ Do you really want to get a job
here in the island?”
“Yes, of course,” Marcello replied. “I have a technical
degree in mechanics, and I thought I could help you with
your engine-repair business.”
Angelo nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, I suppose you
could do that. I was just wondering why a young person
like you would want to come here to work and earn a third
of what you could make in Italy. Why didn’t you come on
holiday with some friends and visit the beaches, mountains,
and jungle like everybody else?”
16
Marcello swallowed hard, trying not to show his
surprise. He didn’t know about the “one-third” part. He
knew that salaries here would be lower than in Europe, but
when he saw the prices at the Maiquetía Airport Duty-Free
shop, he expected the average income to be about sixty to
seventy percent of European pay scales.
“Sometimes you need to give up some comforts to
gain a new perspective on your life,” he said. That sounded
philosophical enough, but he knew that some people would
call it what is really was—lying through your teeth. He
hoped that Angelo wasn’t one of them.
“You sure you aren’t in some kind of trouble, son?”
the old man asked in a kindly way but with a hard look.
He’s probably checking for glazed eyes and needle
tracks, Marcello thought. “No, sir, I’m not,” he lied again.
Angelo gave him a doubtful look but didn’t press the
issue.
They rattled on toward Manzanillo in silence,
heading east. Now the mountains were on Marcello’s right,
the ragged cliffs and the setting sun on his left. He couldn’t
relax and enjoy the scenery on this part of the trip. The old
man’s question had alarmed him. How had he managed to
guess the truth so quickly and easily?
Calling Manzanillo a town seemed like calling a
tomato a vegetable, Marcello thought. Neither one had
much in common with the other. He assumed that people
were too busy to invent a new name for such exceptions.
Angelo turned left off the main road that circled the island
and steered the truck down narrow streets crowded with
small, rundown buildings and cradled fishing boats of all
sizes. The most prominent structure was an equally small
brick church. Angelo explained that the larger and fancier
churches were located in La Asunción—the island
capital—and in Pampatar, the latter town’s churches having
the most beautiful ocean views.
17
The old man parked the truck near the little church
and called his greetings to a cluster of fishermen on the
beach, most of them sitting near their boats and chatting
while others worked on their nets. A few of them looked as
if they had changed into better clothes for the funeral.
“Let’s go inside,” Angelo said, guiding Marcello
toward the front door. “The mass will begin soon. By the
way, how much Spanish do you know?”
“Almost nada,” he admitted. “Some words sound
the same in Italian. Certo?” He realized then that his
ignorance of the local language cast more doubt on his story
about wanting to work in South America. Who would go to
work somewhere without being able to communicate with
his colleagues?
“Do not worry,” Angelo said. “I will translate for you
for the next six weeks. After that, you’re on your own.”
Marcello was grateful for that much, at least.
The church was just as bare-bones inside as its
exterior. But he was pleased by its lack of ambition. He
figured that if Jesus Christ were here today He would feel
more at home reciting mass in this little building, with its
plastic ventilators to keep the congregation comfortable,
than in a massive, stone cathedral with enough air
conditioning power to cool all of the parishioners’ homes.
The open casket sat near the altar. Family members
and friends filed past it to pay their respects, taking their
time. As indifferent as Marcello was to the mystery of life
and death, the spiritual feeling in this hushed space
prompted him to take a last—and first—look at the
deceased fisherman. He looked like a typical old man who
had endured more than his fair share of salty air and harsh
sunlight, not that he cared anymore about getting skin
cancer. He was dressed impeccably in a white suit and
artfully made up in every mortician’s impression of
“lifelike,” but the cosmetics didn’t quite conceal what
Marcello thought looked a lot like the entrance wound of a
bullet on his neck.
18
Angelo leaned close and whispered, “His son shot
him. Don’t stare. Just keep moving.”
During the mass the priest recounted the humble
life of Don Rubén Domínguez. As he told the rags-to-rags
story, Marcello sensed Angelo’s increasing agitation. This
seemingly peaceful man radiated anger like a heat lamp.
He clenched his fists with every point the priest recited.
He spoke about a man who had worked hard as an honest
fisherman from his early youth until the day he died.
Marcello appreciated the story for, but he wondered why
the priest never mentioned the shooting. If Rubén’s life
had been so peaceful, full of honest toil and the simple
pleasures of his family, then why did his son shoot him?
The priest was still droning on when Angelo
suddenly jumped to his feet and fled from the church.
Marcello followed him quietly, trying to make himself
invisible.
He caught up with the old man near the beach.
“They don’t respect the dead or the living,” Angelo all but
shouted, flailing his arms. The few fishermen still loitering
near their boats stared at them. “When they omit the
darkest details of a man’s life, they think they’re doing him
and his family a favor. That is simply not true. Can’t you
see?” He was panting with anger now.
“Rubén was murdered by his own son. He worked all
his life to take care of his family. When they kicked his son
out of school, he and his wife begged the teachers and the
principal to allow him to return.”
Marcello didn’t know what to say, but he figured that
the old man just needed someone to listen while he vented
his fury. He shoved his hands into his pockets, looked away,
and watched a seemingly clumsy pelican tightrope the
gunwales of a wooden fishing boat, what Angelo had called
a piragua, with the skill of a gymnast.
“But the boy made no effort to better himself,”
Angelo continued. “I think it was the drugs. Some dealer
19
must have gotten him hooked at an early age and made
sure that he remained in his grasp.”
Angelo explained how drug dealers didn’t consider
their job done until a buyer has burned the bridge that
leads him back to a normal life. He described the look on
his dead friend’s face when he had to deal with his son’s
irrational behavior— desperation, anguish, frustration, all
rolled up into one person.
“ So you knew about all of this?”
“Yes, of course. And I tried to help whenever I could.
The two of us worked on different parts of the island, but
I’d come once in a while to deliver the outboard engines
that I repaired. I’d stay as long as I could, talking with
Rubén and trying to find some answers. Once, I even
gave his son a job at my shop.”
“How did that work out?”
“The first days were good. He showed some interest,
and he quickly learned how to use the power brushes to
clean rust from the engine cases. But then, after a week, tools and spare parts started to disappear. I didn’t think
any of my full-time workers were stealing screwdrivers,
wrenches, drill bits, and such. I never had that problem
before. So all the evidence pointed to the boy. I talked to
Rubén, and we agreed that he should leave the shop. But
after that, instead of going back to work with his father in
Manzanillo, he decided to try his luck in Caracas.”
Now that Angelo had calmed down, his voice
sounded more sad than angry.
Standing there in the gathering dusk, the old man
told Marcello about the many country people who moved
to Caracas in search of a better life. Most of them ended up
living in the squalid barrios that ringed the city. Men who
found construction jobs and women who worked as maids
earned only enough to continue living in the slums. Those
who couldn’t find a job who had even the slightest criminal
tendencies soon became thieves, small-time drug pushers
or murderers. Rubén’s son took the latter path, Angelo said,
20
and in desperate need of cash took the life of the only
person who still had faith in him.
Marcello found that he had new feelings for the old
man on display in the plain wooden box in the little
church.
“Have you ever read a biography?” Angelo inquired
for no apparent reason.
“Of course. Why?”
“Have you noticed that the sad parts can be
summarized in just a few words? For example, ‘Marcello
Carosio—and please forgive me for saying this—lost his
mother at age five.’ That’s only six words plus your name.
But, tell me, if your mother dies when you’re five years old,
can six words summarize your pain?”
Marcello had never lost anyone close to him, but he
said he didn’t think they could do so.
“Sei bravo! You have understood my point. I can’t
imagine anyone telling a person who has suffered a great
loss, ‘Guess what? This is just a footnote in your
biography, especially if you end up being an important
person. So don’t pay too much attention to your irrelevant
emotions, because in the end nobody will care.’”
“That’s a bit harsh, don’t you think?”
“Nobody learns from a kind teacher,” Angelo replied.
“But if they say that Rubén’s son killed him, people
will think he failed.”
“Bah! They know that already. They should stop
being such hypocrites.”
Angelo said that he wanted to return for the
remainder of the mass, if Marcello would join him.
They entered the church and took seats near the
back. A man wearing a straw hat perched on a wooden
chair next to the altar, holding a guitar that was as deep as
the traditional Spanish type but much smaller. His
unbuttoned black shirt revealed a necklace made of coral.
Marcello leaned close to Angelo and said, “What’s
that instrument?”
21
“That’s a cuatro,” the old man replied, showing him
four fingers. “Meaning four, just like in Italian.”
“Because it has only four strings?” “Ecco. That is
correct.”
“Don’t they play regular guitars or pianos in
churches here?”
“Yes, of course. But this is an exception. Rubén’s last
wish was to hear the song ‘El Carite’ at his funeral. People
here don’t usually make such wishes. They think anything
that is called last or final is bad luck. Requesting this
particular folk song is even more unusual, because the
villagers often dance to its graceful melody.” They play the
roles of boats and fish. It’s a fine thing to see. Today they
won’t dance. The man will just play the song on the cuatro.
“And what does the song say?”
“‘Yesterday departed the boat Nueva Esparta,’”
Angelo crooned softly into Marcello’s ear. “‘She left
confident to go rule the seas, she found a fish with force, yet
so light, that grabs the hooks and lines, and breaks them
with all its might.’”
Marcello hoped that the Spanish version sounded
better than the rough Italian translation. The old man was
probably a good mechanic, but he was a terrible singer.
Marcello knew he wouldn’t want to be a showerhead at
Angelo’s house, forced to listen to aquatic operas every day.
As poor as Angelo’s rendition of the Mackerel song
was, Marcello thought he understood its message of
purpose and determination in the face of life’s most
difficult challenges.
“Rubén wanted to present his son to the people of
the village,” Angelo whispered, “not just as his own seed but
as the fruit of everybody’s effort. His desperate struggle to
rescue a family member from an addiction was no easy
task. But the people really did their best to help.
Unfortunately, the ‘fish’ got Rubén first.”
Angelo took him by the arm and said, “Come on,
let’s go to a higher place to see the burial from a distance.”
22
“In the cemetery?”
“No. Rubén had another unusual request. He wanted
to be dropped off a cliff.” Angelo eased the front door of the
church shut behind them.
Marcello said, “You mean they’ll cremate him and
spread his ashes in the sea.”
“No, he wanted to be dropped into the sea, just like
that. From a boat navigating the calm bay waters.”
Very unusual, Marcello thought. “Maybe he wanted
to feed the fish at the end.”
Angelo chuckled as he pinched the sagging flesh on
his forearm, then said, “You think the fish would want to
eat this?”
“Sharks aren’t very picky. They eat car tires, don’t
they?” Marcello grinned at the old man, thinking that
Rubén had probably laughed at the same thought.
Angelo drove them to a high bluff where he said they
could watch the ceremony. As the last of the daylight faded,
a freshening wind whipped Marcello’s hair. The cool breeze
smelled good to him.
A small group of men, led by the priest, appeared
near the edge of a higher prominence just north of them.
The growing darkness obscured the details, but Marcello
knew what they were about to do, and they fulfilled the old
fisherman’s last wish quickly. Marcello thought he heard an
anguished sound escape Angelo’s throat when the body hit
the dark water silently. That silent splash cut off Marcello’s
breath, too. Even if this closing act was full of respect, he
felt certain that the old man would have preferred to be
carried to his final resting place in a different way, by his
son.
On the journey back to Punta de Piedras, Marcello
could think about nothing but the dead fisherman,
marveling at how simple yet how impossible was his
dream of returning his son to the normality of the everyday
world of work and family. Millions of people are born clean
and stay that way, he thought, while this man lived and
23
died pursuing a life that most of us take for granted. If I
wrote his biography, I’d have to mention that happy song
played in a slower tempo on the echoing cuatro in the
church, next to his coffin. And I would have to describe
that beautiful scene in the dying light on the top of the cliff
where his friends and family carried him to eternity. I
wouldn’t write very much about the prison-bound son and
his father’s failed effort to save him. No, people wouldn’t
like to read about that. After all, isn’t this a land where
everybody likes to sing and dance and laugh, despite their
poverty? They have too many worries every day to add a
dead man’s problems to their list.
24
CHAPTER THREE
“Managgia! L’acqua!” shouted Marcello. “È chiusa!”
he said as the stream from his shower diminished to a
trickle. It didn’t help trying to increase the flow using his
soapy hands. “Angelo! Please, did anybody shut off the
water?” He looked helplessly at his half-cleansed body
standing in the middle of the shower at six on a Sunday
morning.
“Oh, Marcello. Scusi,” the old man said. “I think they
cut it.”
“What do you mean they ‘cut’ it?”
“That’s what I said. They cut the water,” Angelo
explained calmly near the bathroom door. “Who’s ‘they’?”
Marcello pictured some mysterious “water
snatchers—unknown men with water knifes who secretly
visit people’s houses and wait until they are covered with
soap to jump in and zap their water away.
“Who do you expect? The waterworks. They usually
tell you when they will provide water and when they won’t.
In that way, people can plan accordingly. If for example,
you need to wash some clothes, you accumulate them until
you’re sure you’ll have enough water. Then you wash all
your clothes at one time.”
“What about taking a bath?” Marcello asked.
“You take a bath either early in the morning or when
they tell you there will be water,” Angelo said nonchalantly.
“Luckily for you, we have our own water tank. Give me a
second while I start the pump.”
The wet and foamy Marcello stood in the shower still
trying to digest the old man’s water logic. It reminded him
of movies about Africa, where the elephants are quite
25
helpless when there are droughts and suffer until the first
rains start to fall. But the elephants were helpless because
of their animal condition. Although they were very large,
their brain wasn’t smart enough to figure out a way to
handle seasons and to store water for later use. Humans
build wells, dams, and reservoirs. But somehow he still felt
like an elephant.
After less than a minute, he heard the sudden start
of the electric motor and the house pump propelling the
water through the pipes and finally out of the shower
nozzle, where it would rinse the soap off his body. Marcello
figured that Venezuelans would be more upset if besides
having to wait for the water to flow again through the
shower, this wait would occur under the blistering cold of a
nontropical location. In his quick search for the brighter
side of this situation, he found the warm weather.
“Bon giorno, straniero!” greeted Angelo as he pulled
a couple of small arepas1 from the frying pan. “Today you’ll
have a Margarita breakfast,” he added with a smile. As he
served Marcello his plate, he explained: “This is what they
call the ‘pabellón margariteño’. I think if we translate, it
would be something like the ‘pabellón from Margarita.’”
Marcello said nothing. He looked at Angelo and
started to question if the old man was pulling his leg.
Maybe all these years trying to find the lighter side of the
poor water supply had given him a license to make fun of
people he had just met. After all, what kind of translation
was that? What in the heck was a ‘pabellón’?
“What’s ‘pabellón’?” Marcello asked, expecting
Angelo to pronounce the punch line of the joke.
“To tell you the truth, I don’t know.”
Angelo was as useful as the maps that some dutyfree shops include on their handouts, Marcello
thought—those that have a big map of Margarita and then
nothing else but a big circle that marks the location of their
store. Of the few questions that Marcello had asked on his
nascent trip, none had received an objective or accurate
answer.
26
“I think it’s because people have been calling the
traditional local pabellón criollo that way for so long,
Angelo added. Probably nobody has cared to break the
phrase into parts. They just order the dish.”
“And what’s the difference between the traditional
pabellón criollo and the one from Margarita?” Marcello
asked as he started to chew on what seemed to be fish meat
accompanied by white rice, black beans, and fried plantain.
“Instead of using shredded beef, they use ‘cazón’ or
baby shark?”
“Baby shark?”
“Yes,”
Marcello took some time to answer, because his first
thought was, What kind of backward third-world caveman
fisherman goes after infant sharks? But this would most
definitely offend a host who, even though he had been born
in Italy, had spent the last fifty years among third-world
fishermen.
“Isn’t it a crime to hunt baby sharks and not wait
until they’re adults?” Marcello finally asked.
Angelo kept on smiling until he started coughing.
Only old men can laugh and make it seem as if they are
coughing, Marcello thought, without offending the person
in front of them. Instead of feeling teased, the person
speaking with him may actually worry about his health.
“No, no. Don’t worry, they’re not really infant sharks.
They’re just smaller than your average lemon shark or tiger
shark or the ones you see underwater and make you wet
your pants, even if they’re already wet.”
“Oh, I see.” As Marcello said this, he thanked himself
for not having replied in a rude way.
“There’s guava juice, too,” Angelo added as he served
the visitor the thick, red fruit extract.
As Marcello looked at the recycled marmalade glass
that Angelo had used for the juice and the plate of rice,
beans, cazón, and plantain, he forgot completely that his
morning had started out with a water shortage issue. His
breakfast was not only good but also completely different
27
from what he had expected to eat on any given Sunday
morning. He was not only surprised with the taste of foods
that were unknown to him until today, especially shark
meat, but he was actually pleasantly surprised with his
tolerance to the unknown. No, Marcello, he thought, you
are not tolerating this, you’re actually enjoying it. Maybe he
would make a good fugitive, as long as wherever he went he
would be attended to in such a nice manner.
“And now, the final test.” As Angelo said these
words, a coffee kettle whistled in the distance.
“Uh-oh,” Marcello said in a low voice as the old man
approached him with a tray. On the tray were two small
cups, with a sugar pot next to them. He was being offered
coffee.
The problem wasn’t that Marcello disliked coffee.
The issue was that he adored coffee. His trips to the local
coffee shop were the sacred moments of the day. Whatever
version he asked for had to be prepared perfectly.
Sometimes Marcello would even ask for special patterns on
his cappuccino, drawn with crafty hands on the cinnamon
or even on the milk. Sometimes he would order it black just
to make sure that the beans they selected were of the best
quality. Alessia wasn’t originally much of a coffee drinker.
She preferred tea. But then your drink of choice can’t be
much of a conversation starter when all you have to do is
order a cloth bag and hot water to place it in. Just seeing
Marcello’s enthusiasm for toasted and ground beans,
stripped of flavor by high-pressure water, turned her into a
believer. Besides, the coffee shops where they hung out
were the right place to discuss anything from lifestyles of
their friends to plans of their own. Neither Marcello nor
Alessia wanted anything to spoil that moment. Alessia used
to add one teaspoon of sugar to her coffee and, as a
newcomer, ordered only one or two types. Since the
caffeine would make her stay awake at night, she usually
asked for the lighter types. Marcello, an avid drinker, went
for the stronger varieties.
28
As Angelo approached the table with the two cups,
he knew that he had no way out of this. He would have to
oblige. Although he had heard of Colombian coffee, his
experience with those beans was based on a pack that was
brought to him by a friend who was just back from the
United States. He prepared a serving with the vacuum pack,
tasted it, and threw it away. In the end he didn’t know if the
Colombians or the Americans were the ones to blame for
this sacrilege. Sitting at the table this Sunday morning, he
was just praying that the flavor of the tiny cup that Angelo
brought would not make him hate coffee forever.
As a slightly distorted image of himself looked back
at him from the black cup, he smelled the aroma of beans
that had been baked but not burned—the smell of
something made with care. The taste was satisfying at its
worst and uplifting when he decided to appreciate it
without prejudice.
“I knew you’d like it,” said Angelo with a smile.
Marcello leaned back and put the empty cup on the
table next to the equally empty dish. He looked at Angelo
and thanked him for the meal. He checked his watch and
remembered that he still hadn’t set it to local time. Even if
he had done so, he still would not know what to do
independently of the hour. Marcello figured that getting up
to help the old man wash the dishes would buy him some
time until he thought of a plan for his last free day before
starting his work schedule.
“There’s a nice beach that you may want to visit,”
Angelo said. “Of course this island has many beautiful
beaches. It’s called ‘Playa El Agua’ or ‘The Water Beach.’ No
hidden meaning there, I suppose,” he continued with a
smile.
“Oh, thanks,” Marcello said as he grabbed a hand
towel, after the last clean dish had been placed on a plastic
holder for drying.
“Today I have to go pick up my wife at the airport,”
Angelo said with satisfaction. “She left last Thursday to visit
her family in Puerto La Cruz, and she’s flying back at two
29
o’clock. I’m not really sure why she didn’t take the ferry.
After all, it’s cheaper and only takes a couple of hours. On
the other hand, she’s older now, and we can afford the
ticket,” he concluded with a smile and a gaze beyond the
wall that Marcello blocked.
So a Mrs. Angelo Clementi did exist, Marcello
thought. Angelo said that her full name was Julia Cabrera
de Clementi and that he had met her on one boat trip he
made to the mainland. He was traveling as the onboard
mechanic during a test run of one of the original ferries that
they had brought to service the route from Margarita to
Puerto La Cruz, a city on the Venezuelan eastern coast
who’s name means just that: “Port of the Cross.” These
ferries were not completely new, he said, hence the need for
extra mechanics.
While listening for any unusual noise in the diesel
engine, Angelo couldn’t help noticing the beautiful, darkskinned lady sitting with her curly hair tied in a knot and a
green dress wrapping her delicately curved body. Angelo
would get up frequently from his post next to the engine to
inhale some fresh yet salty air, while avoiding motion
sickness that could be accelerated by breathing the engine
fumes. This walk around the boat in his greasy blue
coveralls allowed Angelo to take a three-dimensional look
at the object of his attention and make sure that no male
obstacle stood in the way of a greasy mechanic and a lovely
yet silent female passenger.
“The captain of the ship would like to offer our most
special passengers the drink of their choice,” Angelo said to
her as he placed a greasy rag on one arm and pretended to
be a waiter. “What would the fine, young lady want on this
occasion?”
Julia looked up and chuckled. Then she looked at her
sister, laughed, and looked back. “What do you have? Rum,
whiskey, or only gasoline?”
As Marcello heard the story, he was surprised that
this simple pickup line had sparked a relationship that
lasted for more than thirty-five years. Before long, Angelo
30
persuaded Julia, who worked odd jobs in Puerto La Cruz, to
move to Margarita and live with him while she worked in
the shop he was setting up. A man more interested in
sticking his head into an engine than in counting bills and
receipts, Angelo ended up handing the shop management
job to Julia. She was a tough cookie from the get-go when it
came to billing customers and pinching pennies. They
eventually married in a fairly simple ceremony and never
looked back. When their two sons, Armando and Juan,
were born, Julia took some time off to provide sufficient
care. When they were older, she went back to working with
her husband.
“And where are Armando and Giovanni now?” asked
Marcello.
“It’s Juan, not Giovanni,” replied the old man.
“Oh, I see,” he answered with an ounce of
embarrassment. “Why did you use the Spanish version of
the name instead of the Italian?”
“They were born here. Why should I have called
Juan ‘Giovanni’ if he was going to hang around boys with
names like Alfredo and Rafael and girls with names like
Josefina and Belen?”
“Hmm, yes. I think you have a point,” Marcello
replied, wondering if his Spanish name was ‘Marcel,’
‘Marcelo,’ or simply “Musiú,” the latter a nickname for
foreigners that he had heard the day before.
“I really can’t imagine anybody calling their
Venezuelan son ‘Matteo,’ for example. To me it doesn’t
make sense.”
Marcello wasn’t in complete agreement with the old
man’s words. He found it nice that some people never cut
their ties to their homeland, and when some called
themselves “third-generation Americans” or “ItalianAmericans” in the United States, he felt that they were
tipping their hats to the country that had given birth to
their ancestors, even if they had never set foot in that
country. But in Marcello’s eyes Angelo wasn’t fully Italian
or Venezuelan. This was most obvious when he spoke. He
31
started out his sentences in perfect Italian but quickly
diverged into a mix of phrases and Venezuelanisms that
Marcello could follow only if he paid full attention and
connected the dots.
Marcello assumed that other Italians would notice
this trait whenever he spent some days in Italy on vacation.
Or maybe they wouldn’t notice. Perhaps the Italians
wouldn’t have time to pay attention to Angelo’s decaying
lexicon, he thought, as he looked at the portraits of the still
beautiful Julia. Maybe Angelo’s male cousins and friends
back in Italy would just nudge one another and simply
admire the black pearl that their adventurous friend had
caught in the waters between Margarita and the Venezuelan
mainland coast.
* * *
To reach Playa El Agua, Marcello would have to
catch a couple of buses. The first would take him east to the
city of Porlamar, which means “By-the-sea.” Although
foreign visitors may feel relief at having the names of the
cities translated for them, Marcello thought, something is
always lost. In this case, it was that the sea is usually
referred to as “el mar”—in essence using the male gender.
But they had named the city using the female gender to
make it sound more poetic, Angelo told him.
Marcello needed to buy some sandals and new
shorts, so Angelo recommended that he buy them at the
“Conejero market.” He didn’t ask him to translate. He
should be able to find good prices as long as the vendors
didn’t look at his face and assume that as a foreigner he
didn’t know how much things cost. But Marcello wasn’t
fooled, so he was able to buy his clothing for that day and
then some. As he walked from the market to the next bus
stop, he entered a computer cafe, where he was able to use
sign language to communicate with the person in charge,
indicating that he wanted to use one for fifteen minutes.
“Half an hour,” the youngster behind the counter
replied. “That’s the minimum.”
32
“Eh, grazie,” Marcello replied, thinking how cheap
that half hour could be.
He sat down at personal computer number five to
see if Filippo was on-line. Since it was the weekend, he
doubted that he would find him there. So he wrote him an
e-mail message:
Caro Filippo, sono in Margarita. Spero che tutto
sia bene con il tuo padre. Ti ringrazio di
avvisarmi appena hai notizie.2
More urgent than writing Filippo a note was to find
out if Milan AC had won yesterday or not. As soon as
Marcello learned from La Gazzetta dello Sport that they
had won, he knew that the rest of the day would be just
fine, whatever happened at the beach.
From Porlamar, Marcello caught another bus that
passed through the city of El Valle and the cooler areas next
to the central island mountains before heading down the
north road, which led to the eastern coast, where El Agua
beach was located. On the way, Marcello gave his seat to a
lady carrying some plastic bags who said she was going to
Manzanillo. Marcello found out that riding a half hour
while standing up in a small bus that stops every five
minutes is not such a comfortable proposition. Having his
own car would probably make life easier if he had to stay
some months on the island.
Halfway there, three young black men boarded the
bus, wearing tank tops, sunglasses, and long surf shorts.
Two of them carried a cooler. The way they shouted spicy
one-liners at the women wearing bikinis and waistcloths
amused him. They called to the girls who stood at gas
stations, fruit stores, and bakeries along the road. One of
the fellows pulled cans of beer from the cooler and handed
them to the other two. They minded their own business as
long as the bus didn’t pass any scantily clad women.
After a while, one of them noticed Marcello and the
way he chuckled with the things they said or simply stared
at how they were making the most out of their ride on a
33
rocking bus while standing up. The fellow offered Marcello
a beer.
“Grazie,” Marcello said, aware that “thank you”
sounds pretty much the same way in Italian and Spanish.
He grabbed the small can, wiped the icy water from the top,
and took a sip.
“Cer-ve-za,” said the fellow as he pointed to the beer
in his own hand.
Marcello thought it must be obvious to them that he
was from out of town by the way he had spoken his thanks.
With his black hair, they probably wouldn’t take him for a
German.
“Bi-rra,” replied Marcello, pointing to his own beer.
He wondered if this was similar to the first conversation
ever between the Neanderthals or whichever ancient people
had made the first beer. Unga-bunga, he thought, I trade
you beer for woman. And the other caveman replies, No
fair. I drink tree beers, and then any woman you give me is
good woman.
Marcello laughed at his own thoughts and then held
up the can while clinging to the pole. In this way he made
sure first that the other fellow would understand the toast,
second that he wouldn’t fall down, and third that the
deodorant that he had applied that morning was good
enough for the rest of the passengers.
“Si, si, birra,” the fellow said with a smile. “We call
it that way, too.” He toasted Marcello and then went back to
talk with his friends. The bus stopped about half a mile
from the beach. As Marcello walked along the paved road
that led to the sand, passing a host of towel and bathing suit
vendors and liquor stores, he spotted the aquamarine sea.
He felt odd entering a crowded beach all by himself.
Families, couples, and groups of friends were everywhere.
The three young fellows who had ridden the bus with him
joined forces with another group. But he was completely
alone. Alessia, Filippo, Cristiano, Enrico, Paula, and his
other friends and acquaintances were on another continent,
mostly oblivious to him and his circumstances. But
34
something about the beach and all the people there made
him feel less lonely. He thought that something was waiting
for him here.
After he had removed his sandals and walked north
from the southern end of the beach, he felt that he blended
in with the mass of beachgoers. Nobody asked his name or
questioned his solitude. Whether it was young men holding
a drink or groups of girls showing off their tan or their
jewelry, nobody seemed to care about Marcello’s presence.
He didn’t mind that, either. If the women were attractive
enough, he would slow his pace, take a good look, and move
on. The wind, the sun, and the water were all to the east,
providing Marcello with a light, cooling spray of water
blown from the crests of the rolling waves.
After walking about three-fourths of the beach,
Marcello found some abundant shade under arching palm
trees. He walked from the hard and wet sand of the
shoreline across a stretch of warm and soft beach to the
cooler sand beneath the trees, which was littered with bits
of palm tree and the occasional bottle cap. He sat under
one of the trees, about twenty feet away from a lady who
was cooking something behind a big, square, wooden table.
She took some kind of fried food from the pan, which was
obscured by the table. He placed his backpack to one side
on top of his sandals and folded his arms across his knees
to appreciate the view.
Before long a beach vendor approached him. The
man was selling beach toys for kids—plastic buckets and
plastic molds used to shape wet sand into frogs. Marcello
wondered why he thought a grown man with no children in
sight would be interested in such junk. He didn’t have to
say a word for the vendor to realize his mistake. Marcello
knew that the vendors had to be an aggressive, but why
didn’t they use common sense. The next vendors were
selling temporary tattoos—a couple of bohemian-looking
people with a big banner that pictured all the different
monochromatic designs that they sold. Marcello found the
designs interesting but not enough so to allow somebody to
35
paint one on his skin so he could show it off to, well,
nobody. Marcello kindly waved them on their way and kept
on looking at the people walking by. The third vendor
lugged what had to be about sixty pounds of T-shirts.
Marcello had bought a couple of shirts in the market earlier
that day, so he waved off this vendor, too.
Hearing a foreign language spoken all around him
seemed strange. On his right a group of three girlfriends
had spread their towels in a sunny sport and chattered
away about things that probably wouldn’t be any of his
business even if he understood the language. A group of
young guys with a large cooler gathered on his left. They
took turns walking the beach while the others relaxed in
folding chairs and served drinks and chips. Marcello
guessed that they were serving one another fond memories
of previous trips to the island or elsewhere. The gist of their
conversation—if he understood correctly—amused Marcello
because he figured that on their first trip these friends
would have remained very quiet, since they didn’t have any
previous trips to comment on.
Between himself and the surf was a row of chairs
with umbrellas that looked like rentals from nearby
restaurants. Servers ferried drinks to their customers from
the eateries that occupied the commercial frontier between
the beach and the road. Many of the people in the shaded
chairs seemed to be tourists. But what caught Marcello’s
attention the most was the interaction between one couple
and their son. He couldn’t hear what they were saying, but
clearly their body language told a story as if he were
watching TV with the sound off. The young boy had kicked
his soccer ball accidentally toward a baby in an inflatable
saltwater bathtub and made him cry. As the parents scolded
the erstwhile soccer player, he kept his head down and
listened. The interesting part was that as the father spoke in
a serious tone, the mother smiled at the boy’s responsible
reaction, and when the mother spoke, the father also
noticed the boy’s serious—but cute—attitude, and he
smiled, too.
36
All the spoken words around him blurred into a
steady hum, a type of leisurely communication drowned by
the wind and the waves.
About half an hour later, a woman in her late
thirties or early forties walked up to Marcello and said,
“Tengo los collares.”
I have the necklaces. She showed him some with
green stones and others with turquoise and red stones.
When he didn’t say anything, the woman quickly added,
“Ho le collane,” repeating the same sales pitch but this time
in Italian.
Marcello looked up at her and smiled. He hadn’t
spoken to anybody or heard any sentence that he could
understand completely since Angelo had wished him good
luck. And that was roughly three hours ago, before he
walked to the bus stop. In the meantime he had sat down by
himself to hear the sounds of a crowded beach in Spanish.
“Good morning,” he replied. “Let me take a look at what
you have.”
He sifted through a wide array of different necklace
types. The woman had a few of them in her hand and held
the rest wrapped around a section of a bamboo trunk that
someone had cut to make her display much more practical.
These necklaces were made mostly of coral, seashells, and
beads, whereas the ones in her hand used leather straps to
hold different shapes of ebony. Marcello was just about to
ask her if she kept the ivory necklaces together with the
black ones, but he didn’t see any ivory necklaces. If she had
some, he thought they would coexist in perfect harmony.
“It’s called ‘azabache’” she said of the ebony
necklaces. “They say it’s good luck.”
She pointed to a small, black stone—on a closer look
it seemed to be volcanic to Marcello—carved into the shape
of a fist and secured onto the thin, leather band with a
copper wire tightly wrapped around the wrist of the fist.
Marcello kept on looking at the different necklaces.
During the first search he had set aside one that he thought
would make an excellent gift for Alessia. It was made of
37
green Colombian stones held together by a nylon line that
passed through a hole drilled into each stone. After asking
the woman to show him the extra necklaces that she offered
him and that she carried in her backpack, he found three
more for himself. The one he liked the most and that he
thought would match his white shirts the best was made
from white coral. They were thick enough to be seen from a
distance but not too big to make him uncomfortable. The
second necklace he picked had a shark’s tooth secured to
the leather strap with wire. Finally, although he wasn’t
much of a believer in good or bad luck, Marcello chose to
please the lady by purchasing the necklace with the black
fist.
While he looked at the necklaces, the lady did her
best to keep the conversation going. Marcello understood
only about half of what she was saying, but he always
replied kindly, even if he wasn’t necessarily in the mood to
hear about the ins and outs of the necklace-vending
business. After a while he sensed that the woman was more
interested in his life than in explaining hers.
“What part of Italy are you from?” she asked.
“Milan,” he replied, keeping his gaze on the
necklaces.
“Oh, I knew a couple from Milan,” she answered
quickly. “They were fans of the Inter Football Club.”
This time Marcello looked her straight in the eye and
said, “Bah! I’m a Milan fan.” He pointed to a tattoo on his
forearm that declared his loyalty to the Milan AC football
club, the archrival of the Internazionale Club mentioned by
the lady.
She laughed and said, “I’m Luisa. I’m originally from
Caracas, but I’ve been living here for the last three years.”
“Oh, I’m Marcello Carosio, and I arrived yesterday.”
Their conversation continued, carried on by the little
Italian she knew and filled in with the common ground
that both of them were able to find between their mother
tongues.
38
Luisa handed Marcello his change for the necklaces
and said, “Whenever you need some help or somebody to
guide you around, just let us know.” She pointed to the
small restaurant behind them, and the man behind the
counter waved to her. “That’s my boyfriend, Juan. He’s the
owner of the restaurant. If you need something, just ask.
He understands English and a bit of Italian.” Then she
headed down the beach in the search of new customers.
Marcello put two of his new necklaces in his
backpack, using a paper bag that Luisa had given him. He
hooked the one with the shark’s tooth around his neck and
continued his people-watching. Before long he took a quick
dip, and then he headed toward the restaurant owned by
Juan, Luisa’s boyfriend. Referring to locals by their names
seemed odd to Marcello, but perhaps that was a sign of the
first ice being broken. Until now, he thought, the only link
between himself and the beach ecosystem was a lady that
sold necklaces and her boyfriend, the owner of a restaurant.
Marcello sat at one of the wooden tables and said,
“The carta, please” to the waiter. One thing that a waiter
could understand in almost all languages, he had learned,
was the word carta, or “menu.” The man who had the not
too difficult job of tending a grand total of two tables looked
at Marcello and pointed to a blackboard chalked with a list
of the day’s dishes, which obviously made his job less
demanding. As Marcello walked toward the chalkboard,
somebody called to the waiter from one of the chairs with
umbrellas that sat close to the shoreline. No wonder they
had a waiter, he thought. The total number of customers to
attend increased with the people who had rented the
chairs. He scolded himself for considering the waiter lazy,
thinking that prejudice was always something improper,
even if nobody found out.
The first dish on the menu was the most expensive
one, of course. Juan served fried shrimp, red snapper, and
the mackerel that Marcello had learned about in
Manzanillo the day before. Just as he was reading that the
39
fish could be served with French fries, rice, and Margarita
tomato salad, the sound of music drifted from the kitchen.
“Chè è?” Marcello asked Juan. “La musica.” The
short phrase was phonetically very similar in Italian and in
Spanish, so he thought Juan would understand him.
“Ti piace? You like it?” asked Juan as he approached
Marcello, wiping his hands with a bar towel. “Eehee.”
“They’re called ‘Masseratti Two liters,’” Juan said as
he picked up the disc case from a pile of CDs. “They’re from
here. I actually bought their record.”
“Here, as in Margarita?” Marcello replied.
“No, they’re from Venezuela.”
Marcello picked up the band’s CD case and read the
cover. “Eh! They got it all wrong. Maserati is spelled with
only one s and one t. And, as I recall, no Maserati has a
two-liter engine.”
“I guess that’s the whole point,” Juan replied with a
smile. “If they spelled their name the same as the Italian car
company, then they would probably be sued or something. I
think they added the ‘two liters’ just for the fun of it.”
Marcello nodded and kept looking at the CD cover.
He didn’t read much Spanish, but he thought that two
brothers were in the group. He asked Juan about that.
“Yes, one lives in Caracas and the other one in
Paris.”
“If they work together, then why don’t they live in
the same city?”
“Who knows? That’s the problem with the exodus.
People flee the country sometimes and remain halfway.
Sometimes they leave and return, and sometimes they
leave, but their job doesn’t. Some people simply find out
that their ties to the country are too strong, while others
manage to leave for good. The beauty of their music is that
it contains local rhythms mixed electronically with French
and Spanish words, but it’s never marked enough to make
you think they’re from one place or the other.”
Juan picked up his towel and left to serve some
tonic water to a fat man at the bar. Yes, Marcello thought,
40
maybe that was what Angelo had become in his fifty years
as an immigrant: a mixture. How long had it taken for him
to stop being Italian and start becoming a blend of two
cultures that weren’t so different in the first place?
Identifying the old man’s origin was as hard as assigning a
label to the type of music that he was listening to now.
Some called it “world music,” and some people called
themselves “citizens of the world.” Silly, Marcello thought.
Everybody has to be from somewhere.
Marcello finally ordered a “Carite” lunch with salad
and French fries. The food was fresh and well prepared.
Just sitting at a wooden table in a shack on a boardwalk,
feeling the sea breeze and watching all the girls walk by
dressed in their summer clothes, really made Marcello
wonder if he was in fact running away from something.
Whatever his situation was, he still had somebody that he
never wanted to run away from.
“Do you know where they sell postcards?” Marcello
asked Juan when he paid the tab.
Juan pointed south and said, “If you walk down the
paved road that way, you will find some shops for tourists.
They have all kinds of postcards, mostly with beach
pictures.”
Marcello thanked him and walked away, leaving the
beach in the early afternoon before most people did. This
way he should be able to catch a bus with few
inconveniences. He soon learned that he was right. He
boarded the bus to Porlamar and found an empty seat—one
that he wouldn’t have to give to any old or young lady.
When the half-empty bus got under way, he pulled out a
postcard with a picture of a fishing boat. He wrote Alessia’s
address on the front and then continued with Cara Alessia:
Don’t believe everything that appears in the news. . . .
41
CHAPTER FOUR
The following Monday was Marcello’s first official
workday at the boat repair shop. His expertise was in
automobile mechanics, but he thought that the work Angelo
offered him didn’t require a long learning curve. In
addition to that, he was still a fugitive. The Manual of the
Perfect Fugitive, if such a book existed, would surely
recommend grabbing the first job offer available. For
Marcello, this was his only job offer, a fact that he could
not take lightly.
It was seven in the morning when the first
mechanics started to arrive. Most of them were introduced
to Marcello by their family names, but quickly
somebody—be it the owner or another worker—managed to
point out each man's nickname. Since that was the last
identifier to be mentioned when meeting them, Marcello
tended to remember more how they were called in the shop
than how their parents meant for them to be called in the
first place.
Some nicknames were really interesting, some were
obvious, and some were oddly hilarious. One mechanic was
called “fresco’e uva.” Angelo said that this meant “grape
soft drink.” Why someone on this planet would be named
after a soda flavor was anybody’s guess. He probably loved
to drink grape soda or, who knows, maybe he wore purple
underwear.
“This is Arnaldo,” Angelo said as a dark, bald man
with a seemingly permanent scowl entered the shop. “He
works the lathe.”
When Marcello shook his hand, he couldn’t help but
feel intimidated. The Italian was obviously proud of the size
42
of his hands and of the fact that although not huge, they
were clearly the hands of a grown man. But when Marcello
shook Arnaldo’s hand, he felt embarrassed. It was like the
handshake of a pampered brat with somebody who knew
the ins and outs of a life made of structures he built himself.
Each one of Arnaldo’s fingers was as thick as two of his, and
the surface of his palm was rougher than raw leather. If that
wasn’t humiliating enough, the man just leered at him, as if
Marcello was the kind of guy who would be there for only a
couple of weeks, getting his coveralls stained with grease,
and then move on to greener pastures and less physically
demanding work. At least that’s the idea that Marcello took
from the encounter. Most likely, the quick handshake was
just because Arnaldo was almost late to work and didn’t
have time to talk about the weather—that never
changed—or about Italian football. That was an odd feeling
for Marcello—trying to get respect from people from day
one. As soon as he realized that the workers he met had
been courteous enough the first time they saw him, he was
able to get over the issue and go back to Angelo to request
instructions.
Marcello’s first job was to accompany Angelo on
visits to boats around the island. The old man said that
this would be a good crash course on the Spanish language.
At the same time, Marcello could learn about the different
engine types being used on the various fishing and
pleasure boats. Many times Marcello would just sit in the
pickup truck and remain silent while Angelo spoke to him
in Spanish. Other times he would try to reply using the few
words he had learned. He just hoped that his uncertainty
would be of some use. Like the puppy that barks in an
empty barrel and later discovers that his voice had grown
as deep as the acoustic effects of the barrel, he hoped to
find himself suddenly speaking Spanish one day.
The most interesting part of his trips to the fishing
boats was seeing the type of contraptions and quick repairs
that the sailors invented when they had to fix their engines
at sea.
43
“What’s this?” Marcello asked one boat owner when
he opened the wooden hatch that hid the diesel engine. His
esto qué es? was a simple jump from the Italian c o s è
questo?
“That’s fish skin,” the man replied.
“You used fish skin to wrap the exhaust manifold?”
Marcello asked, trying not to imagine how the heat from
the pipes would make the fish smell.
“Uh-huh,” the man answered. “It made too much
smoke blowing into the cabin.”
When Marcello pulled the lever that increased the
fuel intake, he found that the bolt that fastened it to the
cable coming from the bridge had been replaced by
something transparent.
“Oh, that’s nylon from the fishing line,” the captain
added. “It works just fine, and we couldn’t find a bolt on
one trip we took to Cubagua.”
“When was that?” Marcello asked.
“I think it was in June.”
“That was nine months ago.” “See?” the man said
with a smile. “It was a good idea. The nylon holds on very
well.”
“Porco Dio . . .” Marcello whispered to himself, as he
looked the other way.
It was quite useless to try to explain to these people
the importance of using the original spare parts for their
engines or at least spare parts that had been designed to
work under those conditions. As far as Marcello knew, fish
skin was designed for protecting fish from the elements of
the sea or for reflecting the sun to attract predators and
keep the population in check or just for bugging the hell out
of people who had to remove the scales before eating them.
But fish skin on an exhaust pipe? Gross.
Before he attempted to explain his reasoning to the
fisherman and owner of the boat, Angelo joined them and
said, “Very clever of him, no?”
44
“What do mean clever?” Marcello replied, switching
to Italian so it wasn't obvious that he didn’t agree with the
fisherman.
“They had no choice,” Angelo explained. “The
corrosion finally ate a hole in the pipe, and the smoke
started to blow out. So they skinned the catch of that day—I
think it was a swordfish—and made the repair.”
Angelo pointed to the exhaust pipe and said, “You
see here. When the fish is fresh, the skin is soft. But when
they wrapped it around the pipe, the skin tightened with
the heat and sealed the opening. It not only blocked the
smoke but also the noise. It doesn’t even smell bad
anymore.”
He turned to the fisherman, patted his back heartily,
and declared, “Sei bravo!” After years of dealing with
Angelo, the Venezuelan appeared to understand that being
“bravo” was a good thing in Italian and that it didn’t mean
the same thing in Spanish, which was “being upset.”
Marcello still didn't think that the makeshift repair
was a good idea. But he couldn’t convince anybody that the
best alternative for keeping the engine running smoothly
and the pipe undamaged was preventive maintenance,
besides a good, old-fashioned welding machine. If the
owner of the boat had kept a log of the hours that each part
of the engine had worked, he would have known when it
was time to replace them.
But that wasn't the case. Angelo, whom he had really
looked up to until that moment, had conspired with the
owner of the boat to make him look like a fool just because
he had tacitly criticized the fisherman’s approach to engine
repairs. Marcello wouldn’t be surprised if the fisherman
went back to the other sailors to make fun of him and his
“formal” methods. Angelo sold the man a new exhaust
manifold and loaded the old one into his pickup truck. He'd
probably keep it around, Marcello thought, to showcase the
genius of the emergency repair.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Angelo told Marcello
as they drove away from the port where they had visited his
45
clients. “But preventive maintenance is something that you
can’t force people to understand.”
“It just makes sense,” Marcello replied.
“It does to you because you went to school. But how
do you tell somebody to replace something that hasn’t
broken yet?”
“You . . . you tell them that it will break.”
“When?”
“When what?”
“When will it break?”
“Soon.”
“When is soon?”
“I don’t know. Soon.”
“That’s not good enough. Tell me on which fishing
trip will it break—today’s, tomorrow’s? Will it break on next
week’s or next month’s?”
“Well, it will break for sure, but I don’t know when.”
“See. That’s what you new grads need to understand.
If he buys the manifold today and the old one didn't break
for a month, then he spent money that he could have used
for other stuff. Even if he understood the need to have his
engine full of brand-new parts, he wouldn’t be able to
explain why others make more money by spending less on
maintenance.”
“But that’s being irresponsible,” Marcello replied,
feeling frustrated.
“No, it’s not. It’s being cheap. If he’s stranded way
out at sea because of some faulty part, then other fishermen
will find him sooner or later. If he carries a radio, even
more so.”
Marcello didn’t reply. Instead, he just looked out the
window of the pickup truck and gazed at the coastline. He
couldn't tell if his watery eyes were a product of his
frustration or of the sandy wind hitting his face. He still
thought the fishermen were wrong to live on the edge with
their engines in the worst state possible. For him,
economizing on maintenance didn’t justify the risk.
46
When Marcello entered the shop that afternoon, he
found Arnaldo at the lathe finishing the repair of a
propeller axle.
“Hey! Italiano!” Arnaldo called. “Vieni qua. Come
here. Let me show you something.”
Marcello walked through the machining area and
greeted him politely, making a special effort to be friendly.
He was still feeling like a fool, but he didn't want Arnaldo to
know that. Why was he trying so hard to make a good
impression on the lathe operator? He didn't think it was
anything related to his manhood or something similar. Or
maybe it was. He did want to impress him, but not in a
homosexual way. Maybe he saw Arnaldo as the type of
rugged man that he wanted to be when he grew up,
although he was more than grown up already, even by
Venezuelan standards.
“Here, take a look at these pictures,” Arnaldo said.
He produced a fat wallet, that must have contained three
kilograms of paper and perhaps two grams of paper
money. Marcello expected to see an erotic collection of
naked women, all posed in ways that were usually reserved
for female farm animals. To Marcello’s surprise, the first
photo he saw was of a little girl with braided, curly hair
riding a tricycle.
“This is my daughter Keyla,” Arnaldo proclaimed
with a toothy grin. “She just turned five. The lady with her
in this other photo is my wife. And this one here is her
sister. She’s single, you know? Here is all three of us at the
beach. This one is the time we went to the Gran Sabana.
Keyla was bitten by mosquitoes, and she became all
swollen.”
“Really nice family you have,” said Marcello. “And a
good-looking sister-in-law to boot.”
Marcello really meant that, too. All of his thoughts
and desires remained focused on Alessia and what could be
salvaged from their relationship, but he had not dated any
woman for over a month, much less had sex. So now he was
more than ready to meet somebody of the female gender,
47
and he had to admit that he was attracted to what Arnaldo's
sister-in-law projected in her picture. After courteously
examining the rest of the photos, Marcello asked Arnaldo
for another look at the dark-haired woman standing next to
his wife and child. Yes, very nice-looking.
As the unofficial guest, Marcello got to pick which
beach to visit. Neither he nor Arnaldo owned a car, so the
group—Marcello, Arnaldo, his wife, Keyla, and Arnaldo’s
sister-in-law—all boarded a bus and headed to Playa El
Agua on a sunny Saturday morning. Marcello was glad to
take a break after a long week of machine-related work.
“Why did you choose Playa El Agua?” Arnaldo asked
him. “We have many other beaches that you probably
haven't visited yet. What about Guacuco?”
Marcello remembered that he was referring to one
named after a small mollusk that could be picked up from
the sand every season. “I know some people there,”
Marcello replied, thinking of Luisa and her boyfriend, Juan.
Referring to acquaintances he had made on a beach
as “people he knew” was a useful device for Marcello,
because he hated to admit that he really didn’t know
anybody on the island yet. Maybe that was a defense
mechanism, he thought, an urge to blend in and drop some
of the emotional dead weight of leaving Alessia behind.
Blending in, he had decided, involved getting to know
people quickly without asking too many questions and then
bragging about it. That's what had happened with the
apparently standoffish Arnaldo, who had suddenly spoken
to Marcello for the first time and showed him pictures of
his family, then invited him on an outing to the beach, with
a female companion included. Marcello knew right away
that his looks hadn't made any great impression on
Arnaldo's sister-in-law. He knew that he wasn't an ugly
person, although he didn’t conform to the standards of
beauty represented by the statues in Florence. But neither
did he make women look away in the streets, either in
48
Venezuela or in Italy. Alessia said he was ‘bello,’ but that
could mean anything, from having a decent physical
appearance to being nice. “Una bella persona” is certainly
not the same as “una persona bella” in Italy. So his new
companion's lack of reaction had to be something else.
Marcello decided that he would have to be witty if he
wanted to impress her. Then he remembered one small
detail: his Spanish was very poor.
That wasn’t much of an issue for the rest of the day,
because Arnaldo and his wife did most of the talking, or, to
be more accurate, Arnaldo did most of the listening while
his wife did most of the scolding. How odd it was to watch
such a menacing man furrowing his brow and hanging his
head because she didn't like something he had said or
done. The name in Venezuela for such overly zealous
women was “cuaima”—the name of an indigenous snake
that was known to attack people without notice—making
the metaphor very fitting for Arnaldo’s wife and her sudden
vituperations.
Marcello had heard about cuaimas before, but had
never seen one in the wild, so to speak. He was having a lot
of fun watching the show of a full-grown bull being tamed
by a snake half his size. Marcello’s obvious enjoyment of the
little drama no doubt prompted Arnaldo’s wife to change
the conversation—if you can call one side saying “Yes,
honey” every five minutes a conversation—and move on to
preparing her little girl for a swim in the ocean.
When they had settled in at the beach, Marcello
enjoyed helping the happy couple by entertaining their little
girl with activities like sandcastle building and wave-riding
assistance. He was very low on verbal ammunition, and he
found that Arnaldo’s sister-in-law wasn't enough of an
inspiration to inspire him to transcend the language and
shyness barriers all at once. Before long, though, she joined
him and Keyla in their construction of the perfect
sandcastle. “Your hands are too beautiful to be used as
shovels,” Marcello told her as she poked her glossy
fingernails into the wet sand.
49
“Do you mean they’re too beautiful in absolute terms
or just because I’m a woman?” she asked, completely
oblivious to the compliment.
“Both,” Marcello replied, not sure about what she
was implying.
“Don’t worry about my hands. They'll be fine.”
“They're still very beautiful, he added, not ready to
give up yet. But maybe he should save his energy, Marcello
thought. He sensed no chemistry between him and his first
unofficial Venezuelan date. Even so, he didn't want that
little detail to spoil his day at the beach.
During the rest of the morning and the early
afternoon he kept slipping in small compliments or words
of praise despite the lack of an encouraging reply. At least
that made him feel good about himself and his courteous
attitude. Marcello also had a good time baby-sitting Keyla,
a rare opportunity for him to interact with a child and also
a way to allow Arnaldo some free time with his wife. Then
maybe she'd stop scolding him long enough to embrace the
joy of a beautiful day at the beach with the man she had
married. After the couple returned from a stroll, Marcello
and Arnaldo took a walk together.
“So what do you think?” Arnaldo asked.
“About what?” Marcello replied.
“Mi cuñada. My sister-in-law.”
“Oh. She’s fine.”
“Fine?”
“Yes, she’s okay.”
“Aren't you going for her? You should.”
Marcello didn't want to ask him why he should go for
his sister-in-law, as if he hadn’t tried. Why did he have to
overcome the pleasant inertia of enjoying a day at the beach
with the obligation to court somebody he didn’t fancy very
much in the first place? What for? Was he just supposed to
shoot first and ask questions later? Or was this simply
about marking his territory? Both ideas repelled him. He
was still too much into Alessia and also very selective when
50
picking his targets. His sniper approach stood in stark
contrast with the shotgun attitude of men like Arnaldo.
To avoid the worst-case scenario, he needed to make
sure that Arnaldo had no doubts about his manhood or his
initiative. The last thing he wanted was to create the
reputation of someone who was slow to act. Hence, he had
to go for Arnaldo’s sister-in-law, even if the path from point
A to point B was obstructed with the type of vines that have
thorns that don’t hurt but are a mess to clean up.
“Vuelve a la vida! Vuelve a la vida!” shouted a boy
holding a tray full of plastic cups with food inside.
“'Come back to life'? What kind of food is that?”
asked Marcello. “Oh, that’s an oyster cocktail,” Arnaldo
said, then called to the boy for a closer look.
“Cocktail? As in a martini or a strawberry daiquiri?”
“No, cocktail as in Molotov,” said Arnaldo with a
laugh. “It’ll keep you burning bright throughout the night, if
you know what I mean.”
“Yes, I know.”
Marcello stared at the cup with the tropical
aphrodisiac and thought that today probably wasn’t the
right day to give it a try. The boy listed the ingredients one
at a time, making that part of his sales pitch. Oysters of
different types, spices, and lemon juice were all part of the
secret concoction, which promised to make men sturdier
and women happier.
Marcello wanted to know about the other
combinations that had different names. One of them was
called “siete potencias” or “seven powers,” supposedly
because it would multiply your sex drive by a factor of
seven. God knows what it contained. Probably better not to
know. Considering the religious aversion to sex in all its
various forms, these secrets would probably be better kept
far from God’s view, if such a thing were possible.
The last variation on the same oyster aphrodisiac
theme was the “rompe colchón” or “mattress breaker.”
Marcello thought it must be the last step of a three-part
treatment. First you bring it back to life, then you boost its
51
power sevenfold, and finally you go for the kill, breaking
mattresses and box springs on the way.
“Wow!” Marcello exclaimed, smiling at the boy. “I
don’t think I’ll need your kind of products today, young lad.
But I'm sure a time will come when your secret potions
could serve the most noble of missions.”
Marcello's mild-mannered alter-ego voice and
matching diction were no product of chance. He had often
imagined himself as a superhero during off hours, spending
nights with many a supergirl. Sensing that his powers were
diminishing, super-Marcello headed for his utility belt and
took the first of his potions. The effect would be immediate,
and would save the city—or at least that particular hotel
room in the city—from the evil forces of boredom. If he
needed more backup, the second and third potions in his
belt would provide the boost required to overcome any
hurdle.
Although he had consumed no oyster cocktail, the
thought of the aphrodisiac lingered, and Arnaldo’s sisterin-law became the obvious target of his new drive. After
spending the afternoon nonchalantly handing her alcoholic
beverages, Marcello was able to make his move in the
backseat of the bus they rode home. Arnaldo’s sister-in-law,
however, kindly but firmly rebuffed his advances. She
wanted nothing more to do with him than sharing a polite
conversation. Marcello managed to stomp on the brakes on
time to save face and continue their talk on another subject.
More important, he could honestly say to any man who
asked him about this day that he had tried, but it didn’t
work out. In the worst case, he would probably receive
another invitation but next time with a woman who was,
well, “easier.”
But that invitation never came. Arnaldo was too into
his job to think about asking his wife if she knew somebody
else to invite to the beach. And with a little girl to take care
of and the scarce extra cash from his salary as a machinist,
Arnaldo wasn't likely to take his wife to a discotheque. The
52
other men at the shop were quite friendly and were always
open to spending a Friday afternoon at the nearest liquor
store. But Marcello didn't find any interesting women there
except the daughter of the owner, and she wasn’t very
attractive. When the conversations with the rest of the men
slowed down or became redundant—something that
occurred frequently—Marcello would opt to write postcards
to his distant girlfriend in Italy. His words were different
each time, but they basically said the same thing: Cara
Alessia: The people here are very nice . . . I miss you . . . I
want to see again . . . Yours, Marcello.
Alcohol helped to lighten the burden of not seeing
his Alessia, but it didn't bring him any female company.
Hence, he decided to hit the nightclubs by himself.
The “Mosquito Coast” was one of the most popular
nightclubs in the city of Porlamar. Its back patio extended
to a beachfront boulevard that was usually busy during the
day because it connected a group of five hotels. Visiting the
“Mosquito” became a no-brainer for Marcello once he saw
the long lines of partiers in front, few of them accompanied
by somebody of the opposite sex. Both young men and
women arrived there in groups. Marcello spent a couple of
months as a Mosquito regular, being seen at the bar or on
the dance floor on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights.
To compensate for the frequent excesses of his
partying, he exercised in the mornings before punching his
time card at the shop or in the afternoons, after work. His
workouts consisted basically of biking to the city of
Porlamar and then taking the narrow, intercity routes to
other places like La Asunción and Pampatar. Some
mornings he took a break from biking and swam laps in the
warm, calm water of Pampatar Bay. He met other
swimmers who used the bay instead of paying for access to
a private pool or matching their exercise hours to the strict
schedules of the public pools. They were a pleasant bunch
of people who varied in age and background. Some were
old retirees and European visitors, and others were local
53
kids and people who were training for triathlons. Marcello
was glad that he wasn’t the only dish on the potential shark
buffet. The amount of alcohol in his body when he swam on
Sunday mornings could tempt the sharks, he thought, and
make them think that they were lucky to have an entrée
prepared that way. At least that would keep him out of
reach of the cazones, who would certainly be under the
drinking age.
Talking about that one day with a kid named Kevin,
a very fast but unschooled swimmer, Marcello said, “I think
they’ll eat you first.
“There aren’t any sharks here”, Kevin would reply
every time Marcello had second thoughts about plunging
into the water.
“That’s because the ones who have seen the sharks
haven’t lived to tell the secret,” Marcello would insist,
which was a joke, he hoped.
By the beginning of his third month in Margarita,
Marcello had moved to a small house located in Las
Marites, a place between the town of Punta de Piedras and
the city of Porlamar. The rent was reasonable, and the
house was well constructed. But neither the builder nor the
landlord could do anything about the heat in the house,
which was almost intolerable just about any time the sun
was shining. Marcello made the best of it by finding more
things to do away from home and by returning no earlier
than 6 p.m., when the heat wasn't so bad.
One of his new outdoor pursuits was learning how
to windsurf at a nearby beach called “El Yaque”, a name
that must have meant something to those who had
invented it but was completely irrelevant to all the young
men and women who went there to learn or practice
windsurfing or kite-surfing.
Marcello smiled at the uncannily beautiful woman,
but she didn't return the smile. He had seen her at El
Yaque on some mornings when he was learning how to sail,
54
and sometimes she would give him a courteous smile. But
today she didn’t.
He thought she was probably
concentrating on rigging her windsurfer. This time,
Marcello moved closer to her and smiled again, even if she
wouldn’t.
“Do we know each other?” she asked, struggling with
a part of the mast that she couldn't hook properly.
“Actually, no, but I’ve seen you around, Marcello
said, feeling pleased by how much his Spanish had
improved, even if his accent was clearly Italian.
“Oh, you’re the one who asked me for a cigarette
once when it was obvious that you didn’t smoke.” She
favored him with a teasing smile.
“Ah, but I do smoke,” Marcello lied.
“No, you don’t. You barely knew how to hold the
cigarette, and later I saw you coughing when you tried to
take a puff. I'll bet you spent the rest of the night feeling
dizzy.”
“Oh, so you did pay attention to me.”
“Well, of course. That's my job. I have to look for the
real smokers in the discotheque and offer them our
products.” She gave him an appraising look. “But I suppose
we could deal with people like you who pretend they smoke
so they can start a conversation with us,” she said with a
wink.
Seeing an opening, Marcello ceremoniously spread
his arms and looked at the sky. “Finally!” he said. “I got a
smile from you. I can now go back to Italy with my mission
accomplished. Vini, vidi, vici.”
When he looked at her again, she was not only
smiling but blushing, as well—a real bonus.
“I'm just a cigarette ‘promotora'’ or promoter,” she
said. “We don’t really sell them. We just let the people know
that they exist.”
She told him more about her job, and then she tried
again to fit whatever part was loose from the sail, but to no
avail. “Jurgen!” she shouted.
55
A tanned German with an extremely low body fat
index walked out of one of the shacks where the windsurf
sails and booms were kept.
“Leonora, mi amor,”3 he replied in bizarrely perfect
Spanish as he jogged toward her.
“Jurgen, I think you gave me the oldest sail you've
got. “
He stopped and said, “I’ll bring you a newer one if
you want.”
She told him that would be a good idea.
Marcello knew that she'd be gone, sailing off
somewhere on the shallow waters of El Yaque beach.
Figuring that he didn't have anything to lose, he spouted,
“I’m Marcello. Pleased to meet you. Do you have any nights
off work?”
She took another good look at him. “I’m off on
Tuesdays,” she finally replied. “If you want, we can meet at
the Mosquito Coast. The bartender, Ricardo, is a friend of
mine. He gives me some drinks for free.”
Obviously, any woman with a bit of savoir-faire
knows that a first date with a complete unknown requires a
bit of support from people of trust, even if its a barman. He
assumed that she would feel more comfortable on their first
date if she had someone looking out for her.
“Mosquito Coast is fine with me,” he said, grinning
in spite of himself.
“I’m Leonora, by the way. Let's make it ten o’clock,
okay? I'll meet you there.” Another sweet smile.
Then she grabbed her board and sail and headed
toward the water.
Marcello didn't come to his senses until a minute or
two later. He didn't know what type of body was required
for a cigarette promoter in Venezuela. But if the national
average for the feminine hot factor was already high, young
women like Leonora were the ones who upped the ante. She
had the kind of confident beauty that a man has to ignore
so he can approach her and to keep her at his side, if the
first part went well. When he realized how smooth it had
56
gone, he decided not to rent a board that day and just leave.
Tuesday was just two days off, so he could disappear from
the beach until then.
*
*
*
Leonora turned out to be more than Marcello
expected of a short-term relationship. The next two months
went by quickly as they discovered all the different angles of
light at sunset, depending on the beach they visited, and
learned all the different types of shots that they served at
the Mosquito Coast. She was as easy on his body as she was
on his eyes. Something seemed to be missing, though, but
Marcello didn’t lose sleep over it. Whatever it was, he didn’t
think too much about it because he considered this
relationship to have a self-imposed time limit. He didn’t
want to bear the stress associated with being the permanent
partner of a woman so wildly beautiful as Leonora.
He knew that Leonora wouldn’t be the one who
would stand with him at the altar or even a woman who
would commit to a long-term relationship. That was okay
with him. As long as he kept his mind focused on the easy
benefits of having such an attractive companion, he would
be able to keep his mind off the mid to long term. And that
was more than he could have hoped for.
57
CHAPTER FIVE
Reply-To: “Filippo Clementi” <[email protected]>
From: “Filippo Clementi” <[email protected]>
To: “Marcello Carosio” <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Come vai Filippo
Date: Fri, May 19 2006 10:04:45 +2:00GMT
Ciao Marcello,
Excuse me for not replying earlier. I hadn’t done this because I
didn’t have any news for you. But now I have excellent news! My
dad talked to the Japanese man and to his assigned lawyer and it
seems like there will be an agreement. He has apologized for what
we did and offered them a monetary compensation. The best part is
that the Japanese people are just happy that they are alive and
that the accident didn’t cause them any permanent damages. The
man is wearing a cast on his leg and his wife suffered a
concussion that is slowly improving.
The bad news is that you’re still not clear. There’s a demand
from the Spanish that has been transferred to the Italian
government that my dad is negotiating. He told me it would take a
couple of months more before the jail time was eliminated and the
punishment for you could be turned into a fine and some community
work.
Well, enough of bad things. Come sono le donne in Venezuela?4
They tell me that the women there are beautiful. Tell me the
truth. :-D
Un’abbraccio, Filippo
At 7:18 PM –4:00GMT 5/2/06, Marcello wrote:
>Caro Filippo,
>
>How is everything? Sorry that I bother you again with
58
>this, but I wanted to know the status of your dad’s work.
>I’ve been having a good time in Venezuela but I want to
>go back home.
>
>Thanks again and especially to your dad. I’ll owe him
>forever.
>
>Marcello
Filippo’s reply was not the breakthrough that
Marcello was expecting. He had been in Margarita for four
months, and although he was learning plenty, he felt that
he was losing contact with his friends and family back in
Milan. He hadn’t heard any news from Alessia, so he
figured she might already be seeing somebody. Although
she had replied kindly to his first two postcards, she didn't
respond to the next three. Even if he didn't count the one
that he had sent only a week ago, that was still two
unanswered postcards.
Alessia was on his mind again now. His eight-week
affair with the cigarette girl had been a good way to block
Alessia from his memory, but unfortunately that effect was
wearing off. Thoughts of his still-official girlfriend began to
take central stage in the hours he spent awake. He
definitely did not have enough information to draw any
conclusions about what she thought or what she was going
to do. When he gazed at that old picture of her standing
next to him, he felt as if he had built a different story from
the one in the photograph. Oh, he would think, so that’s
what she looked like.
He often felt tempted to grab the phone and call her.
To tell her that she was continuously in his thoughts and let
Alessia know that his heart never left her. But Marcello felt
scared of reducing his relationship to phone calls. There
was so much that he could transmit by grabbing her hand
in a Café, so many words that could be summarized by a
gaze at her eyes, so much that could be shared with a hug.
Marcello longed for that hug, the one he would give the day
he stepped off the plane in Milan.
59
But postcards were minimalist expressions of desire
and despair, a Gordon Summers message of loneliness.
Stripped of the immediateness of modern technology,
Marcello’s cardboard missives would allow her imagination
to fly back to the times of corsairs and maidens. At least
that was Marcello had in his mind when he asked the kiosk
owner to give him another postcard featuring the sands of
the Macanao beach or the JuanGriego sunset.
Then he would remember their best times together.
The other times with her, the forgettable moments, had
become just that—forgotten. That left only the pleasant
images of his lover back in Milan, stripped of all the usual
misunderstandings and disagreements that torpedo many
relationships. Those images became a drug entirely pure,
one that could not remain in his veins for too long without
posing a grave risk to his sanity.
Now he had to find another woman, a lady who
would make him put all thoughts of Alessia on standby
until he could return to his country. If the new girlfriend
wasn't fulfilling enough, she wouldn’t do the trick. But if
she was too good a woman, that could make him set his
roots in South America.
The sky above Playa El Agua was clear on this
particular morning. Marcello hadn’t visited the Mosquito
the night before, so he was able to make it to the beach
around eight, before most of the visitors arrived. The
eastern wind blowing from the sea was still chilly, although
the sun had already warmed the sands that the tide couldn't
reach. Many of the restaurant owners were setting up their
eateries. One of them was Juan, the boyfriend of the lady
who had sold him some necklaces a few months before,
sweeping the sand from the floorboards of his two-table
diner. Marcello decided to walk down the beach to say
hello.
When Marcello was almost there, Juan looked up
and shouted, “Hey, Italiano! What are you doing so early at
the beach? Did you party all night?”
60
“Hey, there. You’re Juan, no?”
“Yes, that’s me. Sorry, but I forgot your name. You’re
Miguel . . . or something like that?”
“Marcello. Marcello Carosio.”
“Oh, yes, of course. How’s everything? You’ve been
in Margarita for quite a while, no?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“You're speaking very good Spanish now. Long
vacation, huh?”
“No, no. I’m not on vacation. Actually, I’m working
in Punta de Piedras. You know, the town.”
“Yes, I know where Punta de Piedras is.”
“I’m working there as a mechanic for motorboats.
We fix the engines at the owners’ place or take them to the
shop if they’re small enough. The job is all right, and the
owner of the place is a pretty good boss. He doesn’t shout
much, and he tries to help.”
“Excellent,” said Juan as his girlfriend appeared
from the small kitchen. “I'm glad to hear that you’re doing
fine.”
“Quick, quick,” Marcello said in a hushed voice.
“What is your woman’s name?” “Luisa.” Marcello wasn’t
used to seeing an unmarried couple with a woman in her
forties and a man in his late thirties. Nevertheless, he was
able to recover from his prejudice quickly enough to greet
her by name as she approached.
“Hi, Marcello. How have you been?”
Hearing her use his name surprised Marcello. Luisa
must be one of those rare people who actually paid
attention to people’s names, he thought, and she also knew
how to greet others respectfully. But maybe her job of
selling necklaces forced her to be polite with the people she
dealt with.
Marcello told her that he was just fine.
“You've had quite a vacation, haven't you?”
“Not really. I was just telling Juan that I’ve been
working all these months as a mechanic in—”
61
“If you’ll excuse me,” Juan said as he went back to
sweeping the floor near the restaurant.
Luisa invited him to sit down and tell her all about it.
The beach was still empty, so Marcello thought it must be
too early for her to start hawking her wares.
“Do you make a good salary?” she asked.
“‘Good’ compared to what—to Europe? No.
Compared with the United States?” He shook his head. “But
if you’re asking whether the money is good enough for me
to live here as a . . . single person, then yes.” Marcello was
tempted to tell this genial but somehow distant woman
about his fugitive status, but he stopped short of that.
“I guess you don’t have to pay taxes, so it’s fine. Isn’t
it?”
“Yes, that’s correct. I can pay my rent and some
expenses. Too bad I can’t buy myself a car. But that’s all
right. I have a bike, and I take the bus sometimes.”
“That’s not so bad, is it?” she said with a smile.
“I can’t complain.” He wanted to tell her that it was
a whole lot better than facing the justice system in Italy or
Spain or wherever they would arrest him.
“Where are you living?”
“In a little house near the highway that connects
Pampatar with Punta de Piedras. Not far from the airport,
near El Yaque.”
She laughed. “That’s where all the Scandinavians
and other northern Europeans hang out.”
“Yeah, that’s right. But you see more Italians here in
Playa El Agua and in the 4D ice cream parlor in Porlamar.”
“Have you learned kite-surfing yet?”
“No, windsurfing.”
“Are you any good?”
“Pretty good.”
“Have you met many Italians here?” she asked.
“Of course. Angelo, the owner of the shop where I
work, was born in Italy. Actually, he’s not that Italian
anymore.” He edited his explanation by leaving out the part
about Angelo's being more Venezuelan because he cursed
62
with “el coño de la madre” or “hijo de la grandísima puta”
instead of saying something like “stronzo” or “porco dio.”
After all, this was a lady Marcello was talking to.
“Huh?”
“I mean, he sounds like somebody from here, at least
to me, maybe because I just came back from Italy.”
Luisa smiled and heard the rest of Marcello’s theory
on how to differentiate an Italian in Italy from an Italian
that has lived abroad for a long period of time. Minutes
later, she glanced at her watch and excused herself. “I’ll be
here making my rounds at the beach, if you need
something,” she said.
“Thanks,” he replied as he got up and headed toward
an empanada vendor.
Marcello thought that the empanadas were
extremely cheap, probably because—among other
reasons—the cooks had mastered the science of structural
stability in half-moon-shaped food. They had created a
culinary treat with a low mass that was filled with meat and
shaped in a way that would prevent collapse. Empanadas
were the gastronomic equivalent of that cone-shaped
building in Barcelona, Spain, or, even more so, the
empanada-shaped hotel in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
But who learned from whom? he wondered. We may never
know.
He ordered three empanadas—one with cheese and
two with meat—and a bottle of soda pop and retreated to
the shade of some palm trees to watch the girls walk by
while he ate. But that day most of the pedestrians were
couples and single mothers with their children. Chubby
little babies with green, plastic watering cans and blue pails
scampered across the beach, gathering raw material for
sand castles that looked like lumpy fortresses for ant kings.
They kept piling wet sand higher and higher until the whole
thing collapses. Gravity always wins.
He wished he could have some of the melanin that
was in such plentiful supply among the dark-skinned
Venezuelans—at least enough so he didn't have to worry
63
about suspicious-looking moles on his back. He had heard
stories about white sailboat owners who had spent years
venturing around the Caribbean, only to learn eventually
that their days were numbered, not because of modern-day
pirates or the like but because of El Sol and its harmful
effects on pale European skin. Cancer is scary enough for
those who smoke, he thought, but even worse for people
who like to visit the beach. Light skin was meant for the
temperate parts of the world. To truly enjoy a beach, dark
was in. Those guys who started World War Two could not
have been more wrong about which skin color was superior.
Some of the people pursued a typical beach
ritual—buying a cold drink at one of the food joints that
crowded the strip between the sand and the street and then
taking a long walk up and down the shoreline to peoplewatch as hundreds of half-naked beachgoers splashed in
the surf, played with balls and rackets, ate, danced, sang, or
strolled the sand, just like you. Others played games of
pickup soccer or volleyball. Marcello was glad that he was
good at both, even if playing in loose sand took some
getting used to. A soccer ball didn't travel as fast across the
sand as it did on a grass field or a hard floor, so he had to
learn how to scoop it up a little every time he passed or shot
to goal. Spiking in beach volleyball had its tricks, too. He
had to step earlier to the net and make a more vertical
jump, because his leap was shorter. Nevertheless, it was a
lot of fun. He befriended German tourists who loved to
replay any of the football games that had ever been played
between Germans and Italians. Marcello was always quick
to point out that in World Cups, Italy had never lost to the
tedeschi.
As he boarded the bus that would take him back
through Porlamar and eventually to his house, Marcello
thought that perhaps Sundays are for shopping.
He decided to stop by a large bakery on Cuatro de
Mayo Avenue and relax for a while. As the heat of the day
began to wane, its rooftop eatery provided just the right
ambience for enjoying a warm ham cachito and a steaming
64
cup of brown coffee. He bought an Italian weekly magazine
from the kiosk next to the bakery to entertain himself while
he ate.
The magazine contained news about the current
state of the political crisis in Italy. But then again, Italy was
always in some kind of political crisis. Mentioning turmoil
like that in a book or novel is always a good idea, he
thought, because then the writing would never feel dated.
No other news in the magazine surprised him, either, until
he spotted a headline on a back page that read “Hit-AndRun Driver Still At Large.” The brief article under it said:
Italian police have contacted the
embassy in Caracas, Venezuela, to locate
Marcello Carosio, who was involved in a
hit-and-run accident on the Spanish
island of Mallorca last January. The
case, now in a Roman court, will
probably be dismissed, police said, but
Carosio is as an integral part of the
investigation.
Marcello groaned. He wished that this had never
happened, that he hadn't bought the magazine, and that he
hadn't seen that story. He thought Filippo was taking care
of everything and that this case was too minor to be
considered news. Now he knew that he was wrong about
that. Maybe it had been a slow news day.
Marcello slept poorly that night. He pictured the
Italian ambassador in Caracas receiving a phone call
demanding the location of Marcello Carosio, the dangerous
fugitive.
“Pronto?”
“Pronto. Chi é?”
“Bon giorno Gennaro. Io sono Carlo, della Polizia di
Roma”
“Ah, Carlo! Como andato? Com’è il clima a Roma?
Tutto bene?”
“Bene, bene. Grazie. E la famiglia?”
65
“Mia moglie non smetterà di fare le spese con le sue
amiche. Quella di quattordici adesso pensa che è Miss
Venezuela. Tutto il giorno alla parrucchiera.”
“Ho capito.”
“Come posso aiutarlo?”
“Voglio domandare per il delinquente di Marcello
Carosio.”
“Marcello Carosio?”
“Si, lui.”
“Non l’ho conosciuto. É pericoloso?”
“Più o meno. Se conoscete il suo dove, prego me lo
faccia sapere.”
“Volentieri.”
The same little Italian giallo5 movie played over and
over again in his mind all night long.
Marcello felt drained when he arrived at the shop
early the next morning. He pulled on his coveralls with an
effort and washed his face with cold water in the bathroom,
trying to be alert enough to sandblast the rust from a large
turnbuckle. He inserted the metal piece into the
sandblasting machine, which resembled a large box with a
small window for watching the results of your work and two
large holes with oversized gloves for handling the parts.
Marcello shut the door to the right and started the air
compressor. Then he thrust his hands into the gloves and
started the sprayer.
“Marcello! Vieni qua”6, Angelo shouted from his
cramped office.
Marcello knew where the conversation would be
heading as soon as he saw a copy of the infamous magazine
on Angelo’s desk. Even after living in Venezuela for
decades, Angelo still wanted to know what was going on in
his homeland. Marcello knew that the old man liked to read
about politics, about the jet set, and about sports in Italy.
And like many older Italian men, one of life's most
compelling mysteries was how Sophia Loren and Raffaella
Carrà kept looking so beautiful in spite of their advanced
66
age. Angelo had told Marcello that he thought it must be
because of the olive oil. If the olive tree can live for
centuries, he reasoned, then people who ate olives should
reap many of its benefits.
But today Angelo didn't look as if he was in the mood
to discuss celebrities or sports. In fact, he looked quite
upset. “I spoke with Filippo when I read about you two,”
Angelo began, drumming the newspaper with a thick
forefinger. “You should’ve told me about it.”
“I’m really sorry,” Marcello replied. “Filippo’s dad—”
“Filippo shouldn’t have talked with his father. You
two are grown men. You should be responsible for your
actions and not leave it up to a couple of old men to do it for
you.”
“I’m sorry . . .”
“Marcello, I don’t want you working here anymore.”
“But it’s just—”
“You almost killed some tourists, and you ran away.
How could you do that? You put the responsibility on my
brother, a respected lawyer, and on me. We're too busy to
take care of foolish children.”
Marcello hung his head. “I’m really, really sorry.”
Angelo snatched up a sheet of paper and thrust it at him.
The old man had scribbled some phone numbers and
addresses on it. “You’ll thank me for this,” he said coldly.
“Get out of here and take a week off, then give me a call. I
have another job for you.”
“A job? Thank you,” Marcello said with a sigh of
relief. “You are very kind.”
Angelo laughed. “You won’t thank me for this, at
least not now. Go home and get all your stuff together.
Rocco will be waiting for you here the day after tomorrow.”
“Rocco?”
“All the information is on the paper.”
“Thanks, Angelo. But let me finish sanding the—”
“No, no. Arnaldo will do that.”
“I can finish it, no problem.”
“I said leave. Please. Right now.”
67
68
CHAPTER SIX
The following Monday, on his first day of forced
vacation, Marcello borrowed an old unmarked CJ10 pickup
truck from Angelo’s shop. The old man told him that it
would be a better idea than traveling in a bus all the way to
the Gran Sabana plains. Besides, he could stop along the
way and visit places such as El Callao and other mining
towns. He could also stop to buy the famous Guyanese
cheese. Marcello wondered if Angelo had spent too many
years away from his country for him to be speaking
wonders about a non-Italian cheese. Then again, when
Marcello heard the old guy talk, he wasn’t sure which was
the old man’s country, the one where he was born or his
adopted land.
Angelo laid out the route that Marcello should
follow. First he would take the ferry to a city called Puerto
La Cruz, or “The Cross Port.” After Puerto La Cruz, he
would head to its sister city, Barcelona. From Barcelona,
Marcello would drive south to the Orinoco River. The trip,
Angelo told him, basically consists of crossing Venezuela
halfway from north to south. Before reaching the Orinoco
River, Marcello would have to drive through the famous
recta de El Tigre, which means something like the “straight
of the Tiger.” The straight is an extremely dangerous
section of freeway, Angelo explained, where careless drivers
can fall asleep and cause an accident.
Rocco, the man he was supposed to meet there, had
sounded friendly enough on the phone when Marcello
called to ask him about what to pack for his expedition to
the Roraima summit.
69
“Most important,” Rocco told him, “is a good
backpack, something that will hold all your gear.” He also
recommended a good pair of hiking boots that could stand
getting wet and a light raincoat. “Did I mention that you’d
get wet? Also, pack a sweater, because—”
“A sweater?” asked Marcello.
“Ha! Another tourist who thinks it's hot everywhere
in Venezuela. Believe me, you’ll be surprised at how cold it
can get.”
“Okay,” Marcello replied.
“You'll need to bring a good sleeping bag, too, and
enough cash. But don't worry about food. We'll buy it in
Puerto Ordaz. “
“All right,” Marcello said. “I'll see you in Puerto
Ordaz next Tuesday.”
After that phone conversation Marcello started to
imagine all the dangers that could await him in the
jungle—ferocious lions, gorillas, baboons, pythons, and all
sorts of exotic animals that you would never find in the
Gran Sabana.
Later that morning, Marcello purchased a backpack
in a Margarita mall, along with some rubber-soled hiking
shoes, a rain jacket, and some power bars that looked
healthy, but he had no idea how they would taste. Probably
like tree bark, he thought or Norwegian wood. He also
inspected the truck to make sure that it had enough oil and
water. He had to replace the fan belt, but everything else
looked good to go.
While he waited impatiently for the ferry to arrive
the next morning, Marcello met an old man who sold all
sorts of imported goods from an overloaded shopping cart
that he pushed all around the parking lot. He had a lot of
interesting products like Swiss chocolates and cheese, along
with the usual American processed potato chips and some
British toffee. Marcello was surprised that anybody would
buy goods from this man. Out of piety, Marcello said he'd
like to buy some of his cheese, only to realize moments later
70
that he had been ripped off. The price was much higher
than those he had seen in the Margarita malls and
wholesale stores. The old man might look stupid, Marcello
thought, but who was the stupid one now?
Angelo had recommended that he take the “fast”
ferry, as opposed to the “slow” ferry, which took two hours
longer to go from Margarita to Puerto La Cruz. But
according to Luisa, the faster ferry was clearly more
comfortable and about thirty years newer. Marcello didn’t
think twice before choosing the fast ferry. Marcello drove
the truck aboard, locked it, and climbed to the passenger
lounge on the second deck. There he found a plush seat
behind a red-faced man and his wife and little boy. As he
spoke to them asking for a clearing to place his backpack,
he man turned around and smiled at him. “You’re from
Italy?” he said in Italian. “How did you enjoy the island?”
“It was very pretty,” replied Marcello in the best
Spanish he could muster. The man’s Italian sounded like
his second or perhaps even his third language. Hearing his
mother tongue spoken that poorly annoyed him.
“Did you visit the Playa El Yaque?”
“Oh, yes. It was pretty, too.”
Marcello was glad when the man turned away to
attend to his little boy and stopped asking questions. The
kid was whining because he was trying to assemble a
“Moon Fight” toy but not having much luck with it.
Marcello had seen little boys and girls with those fad toys
everywhere—those “Sighters” and “Choo-choos” action
figures that came from an animated TV show. He recalled
that this kids’ show was popular in Italy, too, although it
had a different title. The names were so silly that he figured
they must have been created by a seven-year-old who
happened to attend a toy company board meeting.
The little boy looked over the seat, pointed his
Sighter gun at Marcello, and yelled, “Bang! You’re dead!” .
“Am I the good guy or the bad guy?” Marcello asked
as he simulated a quick death from the rays, bullets, magic
71
powder, or whatever was supposed to be coming from the
kid’s pistol.
“What do you care? You’re dead,” the little brat
replied.
Yes, what did he care?
Marcello took the thoughtless words from the pintsized assassin in stride. What difference does it make if I'm
a good person or a bad one if I’m dead? Those Japanese
tourists wouldn’t mind if their deeds in life had been
beneficial or harmful to others. They wouldn’t have to care
about anybody or anything. If an event like the Final
Judgment or the End of Days ever happened then they
would be declared innocent, and the judge or judges would
move on to punish the person who caused their unexpected
exit from the land of the living.
Marcello could feel his guilt bouncing off all the
words spoken by every South American he met, whether it
was an older person or a young boy like the one in front of
him. No, he thought. They’ll survive. The Japanese couple
will make it through alive, and they’ll be so happy about it
that they’ll forgive me. I'll be acquitted, and I'll make it back
to * in time to propose. Yes, we can come back to marry in a
beautiful castle in Pampatar and invite our closest friends,
Italians and Venezuelans alike. It will be the most beautiful
ceremony for the most beautiful person I’ve ever met and
loved.
“Please excuse my son,” the woman said. “He gets
overexcited sometimes and bothers perfect strangers.”
“No problem,” replied Marcello, noting that she had
described her son as “overexcited” instead of a “pain in the
neck,” a “nuisance,” or an even less favorable term. A
mother will always see her children in the best light
possible, he thought. At least the little monster had added a
bit of philosophy to his slow ferry ride.
“Do you have any children of your own?” the lady
asked. ,
72
Now all three of them had intruded on his thoughts.
“No, I’m sorry,” Marcello replied with a smile. “We aren't
married yet.”
He could exaggerate his closeness to Alessia to a
stranger like this woman, and nothing would be lost. How
could she know that he had lost contact with his girlfriend
and that the last time they had spoken the link between
them was all but lost? Marcello could say that they would
marry as soon as he returned. He could refer to Alessia as
“his” and with his detailed descriptions of an ongoing
romance, turn this woman into a believer.
“Here’s her picture,” he said as he handed her the
same photo that he had shown every time a Venezuelan was
curious or kind enough to ask him about his family, past or
present.
“A very pretty woman,” she said. “Congratulations.”
Marcello was pleased with her reaction. Indeed,
Alessia was beautiful, especially in that picture. Other
photos had been taken just for him, like this one. Those
images were the proof that she would still be waiting for
him when he went home. With this peaceful thought in his
mind, Marcello closed his eyes and started to drift into
sleep.
“One last thing,” the woman said. “Don't let your
kids watch too much television, or else they’ll want all those
toys they see there. “These ‘Moon Fight’ toys are driving me
nuts,”
“I’ll take that into account,” he replied.
Then he scrunched the comfortable seat, closed his
eyes again, and tried to picture what a child with Alessia
would look like. Of course the bambino would have to go to
Margarita on vacations and play with his plastic buckets on
the beach. Marcello was thinking about all the things he
could teach his future son when he fell asleep..
The two and a half hours that the ferry took to cross
the expanse of the Caribbean Sea that separated Margarita
and the Venezuelan mainland went by quickly. When the
73
loudspeaker announcement of their arrival work Marcello,
he found a restroom and washed his face. Then he returned
to the truck and waited for the ship’s nose to open and free
all the motor vehicles, big and small. This was a curious
new experience for Marcello—board a ferry on one coast
and drive onto another. Car ferries were common in
Europe, but Marcello had never had an opportunity to ride
one of them. The many trucks on the ferry represented the
most convenient way to deliver goods to the island from the
mainland. The cars that disembarked roared off quickly,
most of them probably making a beeline to Caracas, the
capital, located in the north central region. Marcello bought
some food and refueled at a gas station before beginning his
journey to Puerto Ordaz. The five-hour drive was going to
be a long one.
A weary Marcello wheeled the old pickup into the
parking lot of the bakery where he was supposed to meet
Rocco. He locked the truck and stretched, then strolled into
the shop, where the customers, most of them men, sat
around a scatter of tables sipping coffee with milk and
eating ham pastries, or cachitos.
If one thing was constant in Venezuela, Marcello
thought, it was the bakeries. It looked as if the Portuguese
embassy in Caracas had given every wannabe bakery owner
the same manual, which covered every detail of the
business, from setting up the ovens to preparing the
cachitos. He imagined that all the manuals said the same
things, such as, “If you want to prepare a ham cachito, or
ham-filled bread, you must slice cheap, processed ham into
cubes that are exactly one-quarterinch square.” Other
instructions would tell you where to locate the Italian coffee
maker (a source of pride for Marcello), the juicer, the
cigarette and candy racks, and the refrigerator, with the
milk and juice cartons stacked next to the door that leads to
the flour-fogged kitchen and the grumpy owner (or his
equally grumpy son or daughter). Marcello insisted on
seeing the manual every time he visited a Venezuelan
74
bakery, but they always treated him like a prankster or a
madman.. Still he suspected that all the bakeries were part
of some kind of secret agreement.
He walked by a pair of tables crowded with seven
men—four at one table and three at the other. Sitting at the
table closest to him was a man with especially dark
skin—black by any normal standard—but without curly or
“afro” hair. He was an uncommon mix. The man smiled at
him as he passed. Perhaps it was one of the tourists that
would climb with him but definitely not Rocco, who he
expected to be Mediterranean-looking. Marcello looked
around some more, but didn't see Rocco. Maybe he had
written down the name of the bakery incorrectly. He turned
back to the first two tables. “Sei Marcello Carosio?” asked
the black man.
“Si,” he replied, surprised at the Roman language
coming from the mouth of this person.
“Piacere, sono Rocco,” he said with a grin. “You’re
not the first Italian to look surprised when they see me.”
“I’m really sorry, but I imagined you differently.”
“Everybody does,” he continued in perfect Italian.
“My father was from Naples, my mother from Barlovento.
An unusual combination.”
“Barlovento?”
“On the central coast here. It has many beaches,
jungle, drums, and a lot of really black people. My father
came to plant bananas and met my mother. Dopo, sono
nato io: Rocco Cavalli Gonzalez, jungle guide to the rich
and famous,” at your service.”
“Naples, you said?” Marcello asked.
Rocco chuckled. “I’m Venezuelan, so I don't give a
cucumber whether you’re from the north or the south of
Italy.”
“I meant the football team,” Marcello replied, trying
to save face. “They suck.”
“I’m more into baseball than fútbol, so I don't care
about that, either.”
75
Marcello pulled up a chair and said, “So what do you
care about?” He was becoming more comfortable talking
with this odd-looking and seemingly immune ItalianVenezuelan. “This?” he said, touching his forearm.
“My color? Are you serious? With the sun here? We
are all coffee-colored, you know. But some of us have less
milk than others.” He beamed at Marcello.
“How did you know who I was?”
“The price and brand tags are still on your
backpack.”
“Oops. Excuse me.”
“I hope you're ready to do some climbing, because
we’ll be doing a lot of that.”
“I can handle that,” replied Marcello, wondering
what they would be climbing in the flat lands of southern
Venezuela.
Rocco gestured at the man and woman sitting with
him and said, “This is Cecilia and her husband, Hans.
They're from Sweden.” Then he pointed at the other group.
“The fellow in the light-blue shirt is Ronny. He's from
Maracaibo, in the far west of Venezuela. Hey, Ronny, I
forgot to ask, why didn’t you come with— Well, never
mind.”
“Pleased to meet all of you,” Marcello said, nodding
to everyone.
“This other fine couple,” Rocco said,” are Magaly and
Luis Andrés. They’re from Caracas, but they live in
Toronto.”
Luis gestured at Marcello and said, “You’re from
Italy? Which part?”
“Milan,” replied Marcello. “You know, the Piedmont
and—”
“Yes, I know, I know. My great-grandfather was
Italian. I tried to get my European passport, but it didn’t
work out because there were three generations between us.”
“Ah. Too bad.”
76
“But Magaly and I are glad that we were able to find
jobs in Toronto. Did you know that Toronto has the greatest
number of Italians?”
“Yes, now we have a work visa”, Magaly added. “Oh,
you’re so lucky to have been born in Europe. They don’t
have limitations there in Canada…”
Marcello snatched glances at the one called Ronny,
who stared at his coffee as Luis and Magaly ran on about
the joys of living in Canada. He had acknowledged Marcello
with a nod, but didn’t say anything. He looked normal
enough—probably late thirties, average build, black hair,
tanned skin—although Marcello thought he looked like a
man who had many stories to tell but wasn’t in the mood to
share them. Something seemed to be eating him, but what?
And why was he making this trip to the rugged Roraima
Mountains? Maybe Rocco’s aborted reference to someone
in Ronny's life hinted at a failed relationship, so maybe he
was adventuring in southern Venezuela just to breathe
some fresh air and collect his thoughts. That made Marcello
think about his affair with Leonora, the cigarette promoter.
She was a lovely distraction, but she didn’t erase the
elephant in the room that was his relationship with Alessia,
although she seemed less and less real to him all the time.
He still hadn’t heard from her, and he certainly wouldn't
while he was away from civilization during the next week.
Rocco got to his feet in the bakery and said, “We
need to get going, or else we won't reach El Callao tonight.”
“Guasipati tomorrow night?” said Hans.
“No, we won’t be going to Guasipati—nor to
Tumeremo”. He hoisted his bag and headed for the door.
Marcello and the others straggled after him.
After checking their vehicles at a gas station in
Puerto Ordaz, the party headed south to the Gran Sabana7
National Park.
The next few hours were all paved two-lane roads
meandering through dense jungle. Ronny, who rode with
77
Marcello in his pickup truck, eventually said something. He
talked about the “Kilometer 77,” the most famous mining
town in the area, where they stopped to gas up. Rocco said
that this was the last place to buy fuel for many kilometers.
Marcello was so tired and sleepy by then that he decided to
let Ronny take over at the wheel. Better that than having a
tow truck haul them from a ravine after he drove off a cliff.
Marcello was too tired to work on any more
conversation with Ronny when they got back on the road.
The guy still seemed to be upset about something, but
Marcello knew he couldn't be much help, because he didn’t
know what Ronny’s problem was. What could he say?
“Don’t worry, every little thing is gonna be all right,” like
that reggae song? Nope. What would be the point? He
hoped that Ronny would open up eventually. Then he'd feel
better, and he'd be better company, too. Ronny remained
silent, intent on the serpentine road, for most of the long
ride to the Gran Sabana. Once, he mentioned that he was
from the state of Zulia, where they held a joyous statewide
festival every year called the Feria de la Chinita to celebrate
“Zulianity,” whatever that meant. He said he wished that
every day could be November 18.
Later, while Marcello was dozing, Ronny shook his
shoulder and said, “Hey! Wake up. Rocco wants us to stop
here.”
“Where are we?”
“This is the ‘Virgin of the Rock.’”
“The what?”
“It’s a big rock. People think you can see a virgin on
it.”
Marcello groaned. “I’m really tired. Can I stay in the
car?”
“No problem,” Ronny said, and slammed the door.
Marcello closed his eyes once again.
78
He stared for what seemed like hours at the
millenary rock formation nestled in dense jungle but still
couldn't see the virgin’s face.
He was about to give up with frustration when an
ethereal female voice crooned, “Marcello . . . Marcello. . . .”
It seemed to come from the jungle, as if spoken by a
ventriloquist bird. “Marcello . . .” it whispered. “Can you see
me?”
He replied in spite of himself. “No,” he said. “Who
are you?”
“I’m the one you’re looking for.”
“Alessia?”
“No!” she snapped.
Apparently, even heavenly female voices take offense
when you mistake them for another woman, he thought.
“It’s me.”
Just then a large rock boulder began to slide across
what seemed to be marks of erosion, the same kind of
marks that he had seen in caves that are carved out by
flowing water. They seemed to resemble . . . something, but
he couldn't make anything of it. Until the lines on the rock
moved with the voice. Then came the “Aha!” It was like
staring at a picture that contains a hidden image. Suddenly
it pops out, just like that. “Oh!” Marcello cried.
“You are a man of little faith,” the silhouette on the
rock said—”or of poor eyesight.”
“A bit of both,” he admitted. “I'm sorry that I
couldn't see you before.”
“Do not be concerned,” she replied. “Not everybody
sees me. Only half of the tourists do.”
“Is that an accurate statistic? Fifty percent of them
don’t see you?”
“No. Divinity has nothing to do with statistics. Please
do not repeat that awful word in front of me.”
He apologized again. “Aren’t you . . . uh, kind of dark
to be the Virgin Mother?”
“I am from the Venezuelan Guyana,” she said with
pride.
79
“Oh. Woman del Callao?”
“Hmmm. More or less.”
“Wouldn’t more distinct markings help people see
you better?”
“Then where would that leave faith?”
“I guess you're right.”
“Marcello, I must say that I am very upset with you.”
The lines of her face slowly contracted into a scowl.
“Does that have anything to do with the Balearic
Islands?”
“Yes.”
“It wasn’t my fault. I was only typing a text message
to my girlfriend on my cell phone when all of a sudden
those people just—”
“I'm not talking about the accident itself. I know you
didn't intend to hit those tourists. It’s what you did after
that. Not facing your responsibilities is a sin. Leaving others
to fix everything for you, especially when corruption is
involved, just makes it worse.”
Marcello stared silently at the Virgin of the Rock
while a lump of ice formed in his throat, wondering which
was freakier, hearing a burning bush give you
commandments or having the image of the Virgin Mary on
a South American rock scold you for something you did in
Europe. Moses didn’t seem to mind, so he assumed that a
lesser person had no reason to worry.
“I . . . I’m sorry,” Marcello finally answered in a raspy
voice. “But Angelo already chewed me out about that.”
“Angelo è una bella persona. È un uomo molto
lavoratore e onesto. Dovresti essere stato onesto con lui
dall’inizio. Lui è rimasto molto confuso con nel lasciarti
andare, ma pensava tu impareresti una lezione.”8
“Ah! Lei parla italiano?” Marcello said, trying a
smile.
“Possiamo dire che ho amici nella città di Roma9.”
“Mira mijita,” said another female voice from
nowhere. “Speak Spanish.”
80
Another virgin appeared from the dense jungle to
the right of the rock formation. Marcello couldn’t believe
his eyes. She wore a long, white robe and a golden crown.
Marcello had seen her before, but couldn't recall where. She
floated closer to the Virgin of the Rock and settled on a
rocky ledge. Then she turned to Marcello and smiled.
“Del Valle!” the Virgin of the Rock cried. “How
wonderful to see you.”
Then Marcello remembered. She was the “Virgen del
Valle,” the patron of Margarita Island. A whole town was
named after her, and Marcello couldn't even recognize her
at first. Then again, that much clothing wasn't normal in
Margarita, so Marcello guessed that she dressed like that
only at night or in air-conditioned cathedrals.
She nodded at him and said, “Who’s he?”
“He’s Marcello,” the Virgin of the Rock replied. “He
was just apologizing for hitting some people with his car
and then running away.”
“Marcello Carosio? You live on Margarita, but you
have never paid me a visit. Shame on you!” She said this
with a wink.
“I’m sorry,” he said once again. “I stayed away from
church in general because of the heat.
“It’s hotter in Maracaibo,” the Virgin of El Valle said.
Suddenly, drums thundered in the jungle, a
resounding t a w c a w t a w - t a w c a w t a w - t a w c a w t a w tawcawtaw that grew louder and louder. Adding to that
came the choocoochoo-choocoochoo-choocoochoo that
Marcello recognized as the distinctive sound of a furruco, a
large drum with a stick attached that makes that peculiar
noise when the stick is pulled and pushed. The combination
of the two sounds was a clear opening for a gaita, the type
of music they play in the Zulia state in December or on car
stereos to the Gran Sabana when your copilot is from
Maracaibo.
“Who said Maracaibo?” shouted a voice that seemed
to come from the same place as the drums. Then the dense
foliage shook, and yet another beautiful, young woman
81
appeared. This one had long, black, sleek hair and tilted
eyes that spoke of her Asian ancestry. This one had to be—
“Chiqui!” Del Valle cried. All smiles, she turned to
Marcello and said, “She is ‘La Virgen de la Chiquinquirá,’
patron of the Zulia state and host of one of the best fairs in
the country.”
“Oh, yes, Ronny talked about you,” he said.
“Who’s Ronny? Oh, that Ronny” the Virgin of
Chiquinquirá said. “Poor fellow, he has so many problems.”
“What problems?” Marcello said.
“None of your business,” Del Valle said with
authority. “We don’t talk about people’s prayers.”
Wow, Marcello thought. This was a moment when
you could really count your blessings. Being in the presence
of not one but three virgin appearances was something
people rarely experienced. He would be the envy of any
pious churchgoer.
“I'm the luckiest man in the country,” he told them.
“We’re still missing Coromoto,” the Virgin of the
Rock declared. “And Betania . . . She's probably at her spa.”
“You called?” a new voice said as yet another holy
sight appeared from the jungle.
“Salve Virgen de los Llanos,” Chiqui sang, changing
the music from a gaita to a more formal church chant.
“She’s the one and only Virgen de la Coromoto, patron of
Venezuela,” the Virgin of La Chiquinquirá explained with a
hint of admiration in her tone.
“I’m impressed,” Marcello said. “I haven't seen so
many virgins in one place since I attended a computerprogrammer convention.”
“Please stop the blasphemy,” Coromoto snapped.
“Or you will have to face me!” boomed a contralto
female voice behind the rock formation. Then an immense
concrete face appeared there as part of a walking
monument that must have stood seventy-five feet high, the
tallest that Marcello had seen and perhaps one of the tallest
in the world. In one hand she held a concrete pigeon, which
stared at Marcello as if he were a six-foot worm.
82
“That’s the Virgin of Trujillo,” Chiqui said. “Lovely
dress!” she called to her.
“Thanks,” the virgin of Trujillo replied. “You really
like it?”
“Yes. Gray is definitely your color.”
The concrete virgin blushed, turning the cement a
reddish hue. Another miracle, Marcello thought as he swore
he saw her eyes water.
“Now that you’re all here,” Marcello said, “I have a
question to ask.” All the virgins turned to look at him. “How
come there are so many different virgins? You know, the
Virgin of Here and the Virgin of There?”
“Because we tend to show up a lot,” Coromoto
replied. “Sometimes unintentionally.”
“Then why are the appearances always different?”
They looked at one another, and Chiqui let out a big
laugh. Del Valle giggled, and even Coromoto smiled. “That
is a mystery, indeed,” the Virgin of Trujillo said from her
concrete heights. The pigeon in her hand winked at
Marcello, who was grateful that huge, concrete pigeons
don’t have a taste for human flesh.
Chiqui said, “ Do you think this Holy Trinity mystery
is the only one around, just because it’s always 'the father
and the son'? That's chauvinistic.”
“Men shouldn’t have all the fun,” the Virgin of the
Rock added.
“That's right,” Chiqui said. “Now leave. Oh, and don’t
forget”—turning to count her colleagues—be sure to pray
five Holy Marys.”
“Ave, o Maria, piena di grazia, il Signore è con te.
Tu sei benedetta tra le donne e benedetto è il frutto del tuo
seno. . .”
Marcello jerked awake to see Ronny's face close to
his. “Were you having a bad dream?” he said. “You were
praying.”
Marcello rubbed his eyes and said, “What? Where
are we?” He looked past Ronny at the sign that welcomed
83
visitors to the Gran Sabana, the land of tepuy mountains,
rushing rivers, and majestic waterfalls. And, according to
previous tourists like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, it was also
the land of dinosaurs. But wouldn't a Tyrannosaurus Rex
devour anyone who had photographic proof of their
existence, camera and all? he wondered, his head still
spinning.
84
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Gran Sabana was also the land of the indigenous
union. Not union as in togetherness or as in jolly people
with feathers on their head sitting around a campfire,
smoking a peace pipe, and telling stories about how Sitting
Frog killed that aggressive buffalo. No, this wasn’t that type
of union. The union of the Pemón Indians was more Jimmy
Hoffa than pan-Indian friendship, because they have a
monopoly on the tour guide business in the Roraima
mountain area. If you want to hire a guide, you have to go
through them. If you want to hire a luggage handler, you
have to ask the Pemón Indians. If you want your guide to
carry your things, he won’t do it. You have to hire a guide
and a carrier. If you know the route by heart, you will still
have to hire a guide. That’s the power of the syndicate.
But you don’t complain. The prices are low, and the
service is excellent. The Pemón are like ants. They carry
many times their weight, or so it seems. They don’t talk
much unless you want them to, and you can ask them all
the questions you wish. If you do ask, then they’ll prove to
you that the old adage is completely and truly Venezuelan:
If they don’t know something, they’ll invent it.
“Do you know how long we will have to walk to the
next river?” you ask.
“About three hours,” the Pemón tells you.
Or you might say, “My truck broke down. Do you
know where I can get it fixed?”
“Yes, there’s a town two hours from here,” the Indian
will reply.
85
And if you ask something like, “Do you have a space
shuttle somewhere around here?”
“Yes, we had one last week, but not now.”
Stronger, wittier, and better organized than you, the
Pemón own the region because of these traits. So you’d be
well advised to follow their rules. Besides, if you happen to
get lost in the Grand Savanna, maybe some twenty-secondcentury explorers will recover your bones, have them dated,
and decide that they belonged to a not-so-clever form of
Homo sapiens.
Parai-Tepui is the name of the location where
Marcello’s party left their vehicles to begin the climb to the
table-shaped Roraima Mountain. As any capable guide
would do, Rocco explained that Roraima was the mountain
that contained the geographical point where the borders of
Venezuela, Brazil, and Guiana converged. He also said that
the indigenous Venezuelans believed that the Roraima
originated from the fracture of a humongous mythical tree
and that the mountain was only one of its remaining
stumps. If that were true then nobody in the group wanted
to meet the lumberjack. The term Indian, he added, came
from Christopher Columbus, who believed that he could
sail all the way to the East Indies. Even in the fifteenth
century, people apparently did anything to skirt the Middle
East. As someone with an Italian ancestry, he made sure to
point out that Cristóforo Colombo the navigator was
Genovese, even if people weren’t paying attention to the
lecture anymore.
A scale hung from a ceiling beam in one of the
shacks. They all hung their backpacks from its hook to see
how much they had to carry on their climb. Marcello’s
tipped the scales at twenty-one kilograms, or about fortysix pounds. Hans, the Swede, carried less weight than
Marcello, even though he was taller and more sturdily built.
Maybe because his sleeping bag was lighter or because all
the food he carried was diet tuna. Whatever the reason,
Marcello hoped this difference wouldn’t cause him to fall
behind. He wanted to learn more foreign languages, but he
86
preferred not learning the Swedish translation of “Damn it,
this candy-ass is slowing us down.”
One male guide and one female bearer joined their
party once they got moving. When Marcello asked Rocco
about the woman, he said, “You’ll see why. She can carry
twice as much weight as you.”
The huts in Parai-Tepui all looked the same except
for one that had a satellite dish. It looked as if the primary
purpose of the local power plant was lighting the bulbs in
the huts and providing juice for television sets. Marcello
peeked into one of them and found a group of kids
watching an episode of Moon Fight: The Animated Series.
When he saw that, he knew that commercialization had
reached its final frontier. Even in a place that had no toy
stores and malls, they had commercials for toys. He rolled
his eyes at the thought.
As they began their walk Marcello learned about why
this part of Venezuela was called the Gran Sabana, or
“Great Savanna”. All they did the first day was walk up and
down small hills, all of them covered with tall grass and
bearing the occasional tree.
They crossed two rivers on the way to their first
overnight stop. The first one, not too wide or deep, was
called the “Tek.” The second one, the Kukenán River, which
marked the end of their journey for that day, was much
wider and harder to cross. It flowed from the top of a
mountain with the same name in a high waterfall. They
could see the mountain in the distance when they crossed
the river.
“That mountain is off limits,” Rocco told them.
“Why’s that?” Hans said.
“Too hard to climb. Many people have done it, but
nobody wants to take responsibility if somebody has an
accident.”
“Have you climbed it?” Marcello asked.
“Of course,” he replied.
Marcello gazed at the distant mountain. It stood
silently, like the second stump of that mythical tree,
87
sometimes looking like just another part of the scenery,
sometimes like a silent witness, but always monumental.
Overwhelming was the word that came to his mind with
the sight of the Roraima and the Kukenán together.
They caught this view again on their second day to
the base of the Roraima. They had to climb steadily from
the Kukenán River to reach the vertical rock escarpment.
This place marked the real start of their Roraima climb. In
one direction was the impressive wall created by the two
tepuis, and in the other direction stretched miles of the
great southern Venezuelan savanna.
To the left of the Roraima the water cascaded from
the towering heights of Kukenán Falls. The waterfall started
as a thin, white line and then became a dazzling spray
halfway down the tepuy. Anyone standing near the bottom
of the waterfall would become soaking wet in no time.
According to Rocco, the Kukenán Falls were taller than
Angel Falls west of Roraima but weren’t given that
distinction because the water fell in two steps, making the
free-fall a shorter distance.
Even the bathroom facilities at the base were
spectacular, Marcello thought, not because they had real
restrooms there—construction was forbidden in the
area—but because of the view. While you did your business
you could enjoy a vista of thousands of acres of empty and
tranquil land.
When Marcello walked to that place to relieve
himself, he found a lone man sitting on another rock among
the short bushes, admiring the panorama.
“What’s up Ronny?” Marcello said.
“Nothing. Just thinking,” he said without turning
around. “This is a good place to meditate.”
“You’re right about that,” Marcello said as he
approached the man. “Nobody around for miles. Just the
plains. Incredible.”
“Yeah,” Ronny agreed. “Nobody shouting or
complaining or demanding anything from you”
“Problems at home, eh?”
88
“More than that,” Ronny replied. He seemed to be
staring at a Parai-Tepui house in the distance. “I won’t be
going back to my house and wife when I return to
Maracaibo.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“Nothing to be sorry about. I think it’s all for the
best. It’s just that . . .”
“What?”
“It’s kind of unfair for her not to come here and
appreciate all of this herself. But when I think about it, I
feel like I shouldn’t feel guilty about coming alone. Hell, I
deserve this vacation, too.”
“I’m sure you do,” Marcello said. “You shouldn’t feel
guilty. So what’s the problem?”
Ronny didn’t reply. He squinted at the cylindrical
shack on the distant hill for a while, and then he turned to
Marcello with a sad smile.
Marcello smiled back and said, “Are you sure the
problem isn’t just between your two ears? If you wanted her
to come, but she decided not to, then why beat yourself up
over it? That was her choice. Now you’re feeling so shitty
that you can’t even enjoy this fantastic view. Keep going like
this, and you could have a wonderful trip but not even
know it.”
“Huh?”
“Do you enjoy being with your wife?”
“I’m committed to her. I made this promise when we
married, and—”
“No, no, that’s not the point. I asked you if you
enjoyed her company.”
“Enjoyed?”
Ronny wasn’t making this easy. “Okay, listen. Tell
me the name of a typical dish served in Maracaibo.”
“Huevos chimbos.”
Marcello laughed at the name “fake eggs,” thinking
that he didn’t want to know what this food was made of.
“It’s a sweet.”
89
“All right, fine. So do you, Ronny, enjoy huevos
chimbos?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Now, thinking about it the same way, do you enjoy
your wife?” Marcello stood up and walked away to make
sure that the question remained unanswered, at least for a
while. He had run out of philosophy. He couldn’t be much
help to Ronny unless he came up with some answers for
himself. The conversation made him think about Leonora,
the cigarette girl, and how much he had enjoyed his time
with her. Being a nonsmoker, he likened her not to fine
tobacco but to a dessert, maybe a Tiramisu, prepared with
Venezuelan cocoa, of course. And Venezuelan coffee. And
rum. He wondered what Ronny would compare his wife to.
The group climbed the Roraima the following day
and set up their tents in a rock cave. The caves here weren’t
full enclosures but more like deep overhangs, with one
gigantic rock slab on top of a smaller one. They provided
enough cover to block the wind and the constant but light
rainfall. The landscape at the top of the Roraima contrasted
sharply with the surrounding plains and jungle. The
vegetation was sparse among the rocks, consisting mostly
of small plants, ferns, and moss, and scant streams flowed
between the rocks. This place represented the intermediate
step between the rain-laden clouds and the legendary
waterfalls that drop from the Venezuelan tepuis.
Rocco planned an expedition to the triple frontier
point for the next day. They had to make the trek only with
a light backpack and some sandwiches. The top of the
Roraima and other tepuis is strewn with large boulders that
resemble one another and cleft with valleys shrouded in
fog. The best way to move across the mountaintop without
getting lost, Rocco explained, was to stay close to the guide
and never, ever leave the main path. He asked everybody to
keep him in sight at all times, even with the distractions of
natural rock sculptures that resembled a monkey eating an
ice cream cone or a Cadillac.
90
But Mother Nature’s wondrous rock carvings got the
better of Marcello, and he lost sight of Rocco and the rest.
He jogged to the spot where he thought they had
gone, but then he looked at the ground and didn’t see the
trail. He backtracked farther, looking for the trail, but
couldn’t find it. The rock formation he thought he had seen
before looked different now. He looked at the glare of the
sun through the thick clouds—no good to determine his
position on the tepuy. He couldn’t even remember if they
had started from the east, west, north, or south. Words of
the philosopher Cartesio came to mind: I think, therefore I
am. Marcello thought as hard as he could, but couldn’t do
more than just exist there on the top of a mountain in the
middle of nowhere.
He kept moving, but soon realized that he was just
walking in circles. It was useless. He had passed the same
rock cave twice. At least he hadn’t fallen off the mountain.
He just couldn’t see the faint markings that passed for a
trail on the rocky Roraima. Why didn’t he have a compass?
Why didn’t mobile phones work there? How about a radio
or a GPS? It was the twenty-first century, but he was just as
lost as the first conquistadores who had searched fruitlessly
for El Dorado, the city of gold that some natives had
fabricated to make the Spaniards go away.
Marcello decided to rest in a rocky cave. At least here
he had some shelter from the wind and rain while he
waited, hoping that one of the others would come walking
by, looking for him. He almost sat on a frog that made no
effort to get out of the way. “Io sono Marcello Carosio. E
lui? Come si chiama?” Marcello said to him, introducing
himself and politely asking the frog’s name. The frog gave
him a goggle-eyed stare, but didn’t reply. Instead, it walked
to the other side of the rock shelter and back again.
“Oh, I see, Mr. Frog. You don’t talk, and you don’t
hop, either. But you can walk. Where I come from, frogs
jump. Let me show you how it’s done.”
Marcello got to his feet and pulled up his stretch
pants a bit to give his knees more room to bend quickly
91
while he lectured the Roraima frog on the art of amphibian
locomotion. He, jumped and croaked, jumped and croaked,
and jumped and croaked again. On one hop his feet slid on
the slippery rocks, and he almost twisted his ankle, but he
continued the frog’s education. Hop, hop, hop, and hop.
Now his face was wet with his own perspiration instead of
the rain, which hadn’t stopped since his party had arrived
at the top of Roraima Mountain.
“You see, Señor Frog?” Marcello said, knowing that
he was so far out in the middle of nowhere that no
copyright nazis could find him. “That’s how you jump,
okay? No, no, no! You’re still crawling. No, no, no, no! Stop
it!”
Panting, Marcello finally gave up. How could you
teach common sense to a frog, anyway? It was hard enough
to teach a human who spoke the same language. But a
Venezuelan frog? If the language barrier didn’t stop you,
the species barrier would. After all, they weren’t even
mammals. Marcello gave him one last instructional jump,
but this time he really did twist an ankle. It was painful
enough, but he didn’t think he had to wrap it.
He clasped his ankle and cursed the mountain, the
clouds, the indigenous inhabitants, their ancestors, the
conquistadors, and everyone else he could think of.
Then his brain connected the dots. He turned and
looked at the frog, then looked at his ankle. Looked at the
frog again and felt embarrassed about making fun of the
little guy.
“Please accept my apologies, Monsieur Frog,” he
said, hoping that speaking in French would show the frog
that he was a respectable person. But the frog just bellycrawled away. Sideways, of course.
“I am so sorry,” Marcello said. “I didn’t see that
everything here has a purpose.” The frog didn’t bother to
look at him. Yes, Marcello thought, Darwin was a genius for
pointing out the obvious. What he had finally realized was
that many generations of frogs must have been as stupid as
he was, jumping around on slippery rocks and hurting
92
themselves, until some mutant frog decided that crawling
sideways was the best way to go. Darwin saw what other
people of his time didn’t see, because he thought in terms of
thousands of years instead of one short lifespan.
How long did it take for the “ideal” frog locomotion
to develop? How many generations of frogs suffered broken
bones and sacrificed their life? Did wise, old frogs say that
only fools jump in? Who cares? Marcello had grasped the
basic concept of evolution in five minutes. If a new
generation of frogs decided that they needed to crawl
sideways to survive even if it contradicted the common
sense of their predecessors, so be it. Whether froggy logic
also applied to his adventure in Venezuela remained to be
seen. How much would he have to evolve? He didn’t know.
After sitting in the cave for a couple of hours,
Marcello decided to stay put. Instead of doing the searching
himself, let the others find him. He grabbed an orange
plastic bag that he kept to protect his camera and wrapped
it around his head. Then he left the cave and stood on the
highest point he could find, trying to ignore the chill of the
misty wind. His boldness paid off.
Half an hour later came a shout from his rescue
party, and he shouted back. Soon their murky silhouettes
appeared in the mist. He was saved!
Rocco trudged up to him, grabbed a handful of his
jacket, and said, “Please don’t do that again.”
93
CHAPTER EIGHT
“His name is Antonio,” Angelo said over the phone,
“and he owns a construction company in Caracas and a
farm near Tinaco.”
“Tinaco?” asked Marcello.
“Yes, Tinaco. That’s west of Caracas, about a threehour drive.” Angelo explained as he waited for the young
man on the other end of the line to take notes.
Marcello wrote down the information quickly.
“Okay, so how do I get to Caracas?”
“Don’t worry about that, because you won’t be
driving. I’ve asked Tonino, a friend from Puerto La Cruz
who owns a restaurant there, to wait for you so you can
drop off the truck. I’ll give you the address as soon as I can
find it in my book.”
The address was for a restaurant in Puerto La Cruz
named Tavola Calda. That’s where Marcello would leave
what had been his mode of transport the previous week.
Angelo also told him how to get to his next job after
dismissing him from the shop on Margarita Island.
Marcello assumed that Angelo had fired him because of the
accident in Spain, when Marcello ran over a couple of
Japanese tourists. But Marcello had thought a lot about
that. Now he believed that Angelo fired him because he had
lied to him. To make matters worse, when the old man
found out, Marcello brushed off the implications of his
carelessness by mentioning the legal help that Filippo’s
father would provide for him. Marcello hadn’t connected
the dots then, however, and realized that through Filippo
he was risking the reputation of Angelo’s younger brother, a
man Angelo held in the highest regard.
94
Marcello had heard Angelo talk about his brother
many times. He became the professional, or “il dottor,” that
Angelo never was. While Angelo toiled on broken engines in
the Venezuelan heat, he lived with the constant frustration
of never having enough time to study anything other than
mechanics. Marcello thought the old man took solace in the
thought of his brother dressed in a fine suit, wielding a
briefcase and deciding people’s fate with his deep
knowledge of the Italian legal code. His admiration seemed
only to increase when he heard about his brother’s
involvement in the mani puliti10 operation, which would
help rid Italy of corruption and graft. Of course Angelo
knew that his brother would stick out his neck for his
family, because his dear son, Filippo, had asked for help.
Marcello realized how disappointed Angelo must be in him,
and yet he had remained kind to him. Finding Marcello
another job, even one on a farm in the middle of nowhere,
was a big favor, since he wasn’t officially part of the
Venezuelan workforce. Without Angelo’s help, he knew he
would have faced a terrible time trying to find a job on his
own.
Marcello looked again at the directions he had
scribbled on a scrap of paper, surprised at how simple they
were: Go to Puerto La Cruz bus terminal. Take bus to
Caracas. Caracas terminal —> Valencia terminal —>
Tinaco (no terminal). In Tinaco, ask for the house of the
Caballero family. Remember that Caballero also means
“gentleman” in Spanish, so emphasize that it’s the last
name.
At least he could ride a bus now. He had done
enough walking for a while. After he had gotten lost on the
top of the Roraima, the rest of the trip to the Gran Sabana
had evolved normally, except for his exhaustion from the
long trek back to Parai-Tepui and the drive to Puerto La
Cruz. It’s always more tiring, he thought, when you travel
familiar roads and aren’t amused with every new town you
see.
95
Airplane fares were too expensive for Marcello, but
he figured that a bus ride to Tinaco couldn’t do him much
harm, even if he had become used to driving from one place
to the other. Unlike the urban buses that he had ridden on
Margarita Island, the interstate transports provided the
minimum creature comforts for spending the next eight
hours on the road, divided into three different bus trips.
During that time Marcello was entertained with a selection
of B movies that he wished he could have ignored.
When he hopped off the last bus in the town of
Tinaco, he felt the same heat of Margarita and Puerto La
Cruz but without the sea breeze to compensate for it. Even
at 8p.m. it was still uncomfortably hot. Marcello retrieved
his mountaineering backpack and walked toward what he
figured would be a good place for asking directions to the
Caballero home.
The town entrance did not look too friendly to
pedestrians because of its lack of street cleaning. The
corner where Marcello got off the bus was the intersection
of one of the main streets and a narrower street that carried
twice as much traffic. So much for planning, he thought. All
types of trucks jockeyed for position in the narrow lanes,
barely escaping collisions with other trucks and cars.
Marcello was most impressed by the number of cattle
trucks. Some were loaded with livestock, and some were
empty, but all of them reeked of cow dung. Although the
streets looked as if they had been repaved recently, the
sidewalks appeared to have been neglected for decades. If
Margarita had many tropical paradise coastal cities with
little development, Tinaco was a tropical town sans the
paradise coastal part. He figured that Angelo wanted to
send him off to a place in the middle of nowhere as
punishment. If the rest of his stay here were similar to the
first five minutes, then Tinaco would work perfectly.
Marcello entered a convenience store at a gas station
to ask for directions. “I suppose you’re talking about Luis
Caballero,” said the desiccated woman behind the counter. .
She told him to walk down the road for three blocks, cross
96
the street with all the trucks, and then turn right. Go two
more blocks to a blue-and-white house. “Just knock on the
door and ask for Evelia Medina.”
“Medina?” Marcello asked. “Isn’t that the Caballero
house?”
“Luis Caballero died some time ago. Evelia and her
husband, Eugenio, live there now, along with their two kids
and another two from Eugenio’s previous marriage.”
Marcello thanked the woman and excused himself,
fearing that she would reveal all the secrets of the town if he
asked her any more questions. Marcello quickly forgot
about how many sons the Medina people had. He could
manage only so much information, and his memory buffer
already held the directions and the name of the person in
the house. Perhaps as a part of his purgatory, his first
mission was to walk down the street that he had disliked
the most when he arrived.
He found the house the store clerk had
described—an old colonial with a high roof and walls made
of clay and woven tree branches—and knocked on the door.
The woman who answered took one look at him and
said, “You’re here for a job with Antonio, eh? I expected you
earlier.”
“I’m sorry. The layover at the Valencia terminal was
longer than I thought it would be.”
She glanced at her watch and said, “It’s eight now.
The woman that cooks for us left a couple of hours ago.”
“No problem,” said Marcello, summoning a smile
despite his fatigue. “Will she be here for breakfast?”
“Don’t worry about that. I’ll cook your breakfast.”
“Thanks. That would be fine. I’ll sleep till then.”
The woman didn’t bother to introduce herself, but
she must be Evelia Medina, he thought. She showed him to
his room. The old house had wide corridors that probably
helped to keep it cool and two gardens in the courtyard
crowded with plants. “Do you believe in ghosts?” asked
Evelia with the same unexpressive face that had greeted
Marcello at the front door.
97
“No, not really.”
“Good. Then you won’t mind sleeping here. The roof
makes a lot of noise at night. Sometimes it’s the bats, and
sometimes it’s just the wood popping as it cools.”
“And that’s all?” Marcello asked, ready to listen to
the full ghost story.
“Other times,” she replied dryly, it’s just your
imagination.”
The room looked as if it hadn’t been used in ages. It
was dusty, and it smelled damp. The walls were painted
white, with a horizontal gray band running across them.
The wooden ceiling seemed to have been repaired not long
before, since the paint on the tree-branch beams looked as
new as the paint on the walls. The single light bulb in the
room hung from a white, double cord that ran across the
old ceiling and down to the external switch that Evelia had
just tripped. Obviously, the house had been built long
before electricity was used here. Marcello was happy to
have a place to sleep after his long trip. But one thing was
missing—the bed. The woman said, “Give me a minute, and
I’ll find a hammock for you,” and left Marcello alone in the
musty room.
The two rings for hanging the hammock—hard to
spot if you weren’t looking for them—were fixed on
opposing walls. A small, kneehole desk held a framed
portrait. He stepped closer to examine it. The faded
photograph showed a swarthy, old man wearing a pelo e’
guama felt hat, standing next to the front door of this
house. He held a rifle in one hand, as if using it as a cane.
Marcello was impressed by his quiet expression. He seemed
to be looking at some point beyond the photographer,
which Marcello thought was unusual for such an old photo
portrait. His collarless suit was white and buttoned up
completely. “Here’s the hammock,” said Evelia as she
entered the room.
“Thanks.”
“Do you know how to tie it up?”
“Uh . . . I think so.”
98
“I guess that means you don’t. Let me show you so
when you sleep at the farm you don’t make a fool out of
yourself trying to tie it.” The she smiled for the first time.
Marcello appreciated her showing him the not-so-obvious
technique of hammock-rigging. The ropes that hung from
the rings on the wall had to be tied to the two threaded
lasso hooks attached to the thick, cotton hamaca. Mrs.
Medina performed the task quickly enough to make it look
easy but slowly enough for Marcello to think that he would
be able to do it himself eventually.
He neglected to ask her how he was supposed to
sleep in that thing. He had seen hammocks only in Playa El
Agua, but he didn’t remember whether the people lay in
them lengthwise or crosswise. The former position seemed
like a better technique, since he could use the excess cloth
to cover himself. He certainly wouldn’t be able to fall asleep
with his body jackknifed into a V, with his hipbone only
inches from the floor. Then he decided to rotate his body a
little on the vertical axis. That stiffened the hammock
enough so that he could stretch out without having his toes
exposed. A small opening over his face allowed him to
breathe properly. That also gave him a full view of the
ceiling and of the occasional flitting of flying creatures that
he believed to be bats. But he was too exhausted to care
about them, and soon he fell into a deep sleep.
The thing flying back and forth above him couldn’t
be a bat, Marcello thought, because it was white, not black.
When it had crossed the room a couple of times and
returned, he realized that it was manlike. Maybe it was
Evelia’s husband, Eugenio. The man-thing dropped out of
sight and started to make noises like the sound of opening
and closing a wooden drawer. Marcello peered from his
cocoon and located the apparition standing at the small
desk with the framed photo, rifling through papers.
“Are you Eugenio?” he asked.
99
The man froze, turned, and glared at Marcello. “Yes,
I am,” he said, then returned to his search.
“So you’ll be taking me to Antonio Torelli’s farm
tomorrow.”
The man nodded once, his back still turned to
Marcello. “Where are those damned papers?” he muttered.
“The titles . . .”
“Do you need some help?” Marcello asked. Eugenio
shook his head and yanked open another drawer. He pulled
out another stack of papers. Marcello couldn’t tell what
they were in the darkness. After what seemed like a long
time, Eugenio stuffed the papers into the drawers, banged
them shut, and headed for the door.
“See you tomorrow,” Marcello called to the man as
the mosquito screen slapped shut behind him. He turned
and stared at Marcello through the screen for a few
seconds. Then he nodded again and disappeared.
Morning sunlight streamed through the dirty
window glass woke Marcello. The deep windowsill had been
built to allow two people to sit there and talk with
somebody standing outside. This was a common practice in
this country, Marcello thought, where people thought of
windows as something other than a possible entrance for
burglars. This morning and all the others he had
experienced in Margarita made Marcello wonder why
anybody would try to sell alarm clocks in a country as hot as
Venezuela. According to his watch, it was 6:30 a.m. and
already too bright to sleep. And even if he could block the
sunlight, the thick hammock made him much to hot to
remain there.
Marcello managed to exit the hammock without
hurting himself and prepared to bathe using water from
buckets. “And I complained about the shower in
Margarita,” he grumbled to himself. Although it was hot
outside already, the water was definitely cold. Not as cold
as the fresh water in Europe, but cold nevertheless. The
100
quick bath woke up any part of him that was still
slumbering.
“Marcello, your breakfast is ready,” Evelia called
from the kitchen. “Eugenio will be ready soon.” A truck
engine growled in the distance. “That’s him now,” she said.
“Thanks,” Marcello replied as he entered the kitchen.
“Here, have some arepas. And I have fried eggs,
suero, and grated white, hard cheese.”
“Suero?”
“It’s made from milk. Try it.”
Marcello poured the thick and creamy stuff on one
side of his plate. To that he added a couple of fried arepas
and a couple of fried eggs, their fat, teary, orange eyes
staring back at him. Mrs. Medina gave him a cup of brewed
coffee that didn’t have enough sugar in it, but it was good
enough for him to notice the quality of the roasted beans.
Arepas soaked in suero, with some ground cheese on top of
them, made him understand why in some places they speak
of Venezuelans as “those people that smell like white
cheese.”
The red pickup truck was still waiting for Marcello
and his luggage a half an hour later. Marcello tossed his
backpack into the bed, opened the passenger door, and
hopped in.
The driver eyed him curiously and said, “What’s
wrong? You looked scared.”
Marcello gulped a mouthful of air. “You . . . you’re
not Eugenio.” He grabbed the handle to open the door
again. “I’m sorry. I thought I had to get in this truck.”
As Marcello was about to step out, the man said,
“I’m Eugenio Marcano. You’re Marcello Carosio, aren’t
you?”
“Yes, but I think I made a mistake,” he said as he
stepped out of the truck. He grabbed his backpack and
turned toward the house just as Evelia walked out.
“Eugenio!” she said. “Here, you forgot a couple of
arepas with ham and cheese I made for you.” She handed
him a small, plastic storage container.
101
“What’s wrong, son?” the driver said. “Aren’t you
coming? Antonio Torelli wants me to take you to his finca,
about twenty minutes from here. He said that you come
highly recommended by an old friend.”
Marcello turned back to the truck. “Yes, that’s
correct.”
Evelia took him by the arm and studied him with a
concerned look on her face.
Finally Marcello shook his head. “I’m sorry. You’re
right. He dumped his pack into the back of the truck and
climbed into the front seat as Evelia walked around the
front to the driver’s side. Eugenio said something that
Marcello couldn’t make out to her and slammed the shifter
into first gear.
The paved road ended after about eight blocks. The
farther they drove from the center of the town, the more
modern the houses appeared—not modern like the homes
in Europe but much better than the shacks that the poorest
people lived in. Marcello was amused by the number of
people who placed a chair outside their front door and just
sat there watching the world go by. He wondered what type
of job, if any, these people had.
He found the ride along the dirt road to be
interesting because of the type of vegetation he saw and the
farms they passed. White cranes flapped away from their
fishing holes, and other birds scattered from the road as
they approached. The air was fresh and hot, but the
sensation was quite pleasing. It reminded him of riding
with Angelo when he visited customers in Margarita. But
this time they rattled past fields of tall grass, trees, and
pastureland instead of beaches and rocky cliffs.
“You’re from Italy, aren’t you?” Eugenio said.
“Yes,” Marcello replied as he gazed in appreciation at
the humps on the zebu cattle for the first time in his life.
“How long have you been in Venezuela?”
“A little bit more than five months.”
“You speak good Spanish.”
“Thanks.”
102
“What happened to you back there at the house? Did
you get cold feet?”
“No, not exactly. Well, I did get scared for a moment.
But it was a short moment.”
“Hmmmph. There’s nothing to be scared about
working with cattle.”
“It wasn’t that,” Marcello said. “Last night I saw a
man in your house who said he was you. So I was surprised
when I got in the truck and saw another person sitting
there.”
“Another man in my house?”
Marcello didn’t like the tone of Eugenio’s voice.
Maybe that man was Evelia’s lover or something, and now
he and his big mouth would set off a crime of passion. Then
Marcello thought that the best way to get out of this jam
was to see if telling the whole story would help. “He came
into the room without saying a word. When I asked him if
he was you, he said yes and continued to search for some
papers in the drawer of the desk that’s in the room.”
“You slept in the main room?”
“I don’t know if it’s the main room or not. It’s the
one nearest the front entrance.”
“Yes, that’s the main room. The desk has a portrait of
a man with rifle, no?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“And you say you saw a man looking for documents.”
“That’s what it looked like. I couldn’t see well,
because it was dark, and he was standing between the desk
and me. I was lying in the hammock.”
“What did he look like?”
“He was quite old, perhaps in his seventies. His gray
hair was combed back and covered most of his scalp. He
wore brown pants and an untucked shirt, and he walked
with a slight jerk. His skin color was light and showed the
scars of a lifetime in the sun. He wore glasses with thick
frames, and—”
“Were his glasses taped together?”
103
“I think so. Actually, now that you say it yes. When
he turned around I saw the tape.”
“I know that man,” Eugenio said.
Marcello figured that he had nothing to worry about.
After all, both Eugenio and Evelia were in their mid- to late
forties, so why would she have an affair with someone who
was thirty to forty years older than she was, unless he was a
millionaire. But by the looks of that man he definitely
wasn’t rich. At least he was somebody that Eugenio knew,
for good or bad. After seeing the expression on Eugenio’s
face, Marcello sensed that he should drop the subject.
Eugenio stopped the truck at a metal gate made from
cylindrical pipes that blocked the road. The horizontal
pipes had been welded into a rectangular frame that swung
open on hinges attached to a thicker, vertical pipe that was
filled with concrete. Eugenio honked the horn four times. A
minute or so later, a skinny man appeared riding a bicycle
from the house that sat farther down the road. Some cows
and a few horses grazed on lush, green grass on both sides
of the road, beyond the gate. The scrawny man popped the
padlock and swung the gate open far enough to let them
pass. The gateway to another new job, Marcello thought.
What kind of life was awaiting him here? As they neared
the farmhouse, Marcello noted that it didn’t look very old,
but the style was colonial, especially the thick walls.
“Bahareque,” Eugenio said as he braked to a stop in
front of the house.
“What?”
“The walls,” he said, “they’re made of bahareque.”
“What's that?” Marcello asked.
“Basically mud, with twigs and vines tied together to
make the wall strong. It’s so thick that the house is actually
cool inside.”
“That’s great, because it’s awfully hot here.”
With no engine noise Marcello could appreciate the
sounds of his new environs, the most notable of which came
from some kind of bird whistling the same tune over and
104
over again. As Marcello walked toward the house, dry
leaves crackled under his shoes.
Eugenio said, “They’re called ‘Cristofue,’” as if
reading his mind. They’re yellow-breasted, and they always
repeat the same tune.”
“It’s beautiful.”
“Cristo fue, cristo fue, cristo fue,”11 the bird seemed
to say to the ears of anybody with even minimal Catholic
instruction in Spanish. Christ was what? Marcello
wondered. His limited knowledge of the language told him
that it could mean “Christ was” or “Christ went,” but the
former explanation made more sense. “Christ was, Christ
was,” the bird sang, as if Judas Iscariot had nothing to do
with ratting out the person known to everybody as the
Savior.
If those legendary events had occurred in the
Venezuelan llanos instead of Jerusalem, Marcello thought,
the Roman soldiers with their killing spears and swords
would have come crashing into the rural mud or brick
houses, demanding the name of the man who called himself
the “Son of God.” None of Jesus’ followers would have
spoken a word, risking their own life. For the sake of their
leader they would not have feared the sting of the lash or
the bite of Roman steel. “Christ was, Christ was,” the birds
kept singing as the soldiers overpowered the common
people with muscles they had developed by using training
equipment and diets that wouldn’t be used for another two
thousand years.
The Roman captain would shout, “Who is this man
who calls himself the Son of God? What is his name?”
The answer was always silence, except for the song of
the birds. Frustrated with the mute Christians, the captain
would shake his fists and shout “Make those birds shut up!”
A Roman soldier would hurry back to the captain to
report that they had killed about five birds, but the others
were still singing “Cristo fue, Cristo fue, Cristo fue.” The
infuriated captain would storm outside, glare at the birds,
105
grimace at their monotonous chant, and then turn to his
soldiers.
“We already have what we came for,” he would say
with a malicious grin. Then they would all mount their
horses and clatter away. The captain would be happy with
the information provided by Pitangus sulphuratus, as the
pagan Romans would surely call them. In the soldiers’
dusty wake the poor Christians would sadly witness the end
of the era of seeing and the beginning of the era of
believing.
Well, at least they didn’t face the lions, Marcello
thought.
“Marselo! Marselo!” shouted Eugenio from the
porch. “Stop gawking at the birds and come here.”
Marcello retrieved his backpack and hurried to the
house. He was glad for the cooler shade of the deep porch.
Eugenio invited him to have a seat. “One of the main
things we do on the farm,” he said, is fatten the young bulls
from about two hundred and fifty to five hundred
kilograms. We do this by moving them from one corral to
another so they can feed on the best grass. We also give
them other food and supplements regularly.”
Mr. Marcano, Eugenio explained, would not be
working with Antonio anymore, because he had received a
better offer from a nearby ranch. He also said that his new
job would offer him more freedom. Eugenio’s criteria for
switching jobs surprised Marcello, because he knew that
Antonio’s involvement in his farm was not a hands-on
pursuit. Unlike his construction company, the cattle-raising
business did not provide his main income. So even if the
farm was, technically speaking, a cash cow, he didn’t
micromanage his underlings to exhaustion or death,
whichever came first.
“One more thing,” Eugenio said. “Don’t get upset if
Antonio shouts at you. He does that to everybody, even to
his own family. At least you’ll be able to understand the
cursing in Italian.”
106
Yes, Marcello thought, ‘freedom’ was only an excuse.
He asked Eugenio if he’d mail a postcard for him when he
got back to Tinaco. “I want to send it off to Italy.”
“You know what they say about ‘amor de lejos’?”12
Eugenio said, taking the card but not even looking at it.
“Ah, do not worry. I will take it to the post office right
away.”
Marcello watched him climb into the old truck and
back away from the house. Then he stopped, poked his
head out the window, and called to him.
“What?”
“I suppose one of the cowhands will mention it, but
I'll tell you anyway. A fence is broken near the forages
garden. The cows are getting in and feeding on the new
grass.”
“Okay.”
“Okay what? You mean you're going to fix it? Do you
know how?”
“I guess so. I get some barbed wire, and—”
“How many strands?”
Marcello looked at a fence to his right. “Three, I
guess.”
“Nice try. Use five. They always go for the garden
grass. That fence needs more protection.”
“Can’t you train the cows to stay away?”
Eugenio gaped at him and slowly shook his head.
“No, you can't. They’re just cattle, you know. We can't
expect too much from them.” Then, with a smile and a
quick wave, he roared off toward Tinaco and whatever else
he had to do that day.
107
CHAPTER NINE
Eugenio’s truck had barely passed the last farm gate
when Marcello received a phone call from Antonio, the
owner of the land. He wanted to know if his new managerin-training was feeling fine and not overwhelmed by the
prospect of an unfamiliar job at a cow ranch.
“Avete conosciuto a Gualberto?” Antonio asked in
Marcello’s mother tongue.
“No, I haven’t met Gualberto yet.”
“He’s a tough fellow, but a good worker. Just don’t
cross him.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t,” Marcello replied.
“If you have any problems with him, come to me
first.”
“I will. You can count on that.”
“And make sure that you respect his opinions. You
know how to do that, don’t you?”
“What?”
“Respect a man’s opinions. Just listen to everything
he has to say. Sometimes people are just happy that you
listen to them, even if you end up doing something else. If
you don’t let him finish, it will show a lack of respect, and
he will have less of an incentive to listen to you. These
people know only what they have worked with, but their
experience sometimes is not enough. Your job is to know
when that moment comes.”
Marcello breathed into the mobile phone to let the
boss man know that he was there, even if he didn’t have
anything worthwhile to say.
Antonio said, “But make sure that he knows that
you’re the boss. If you’re going to do exactly what he
108
suggests, then don’t let him think that he was the one who
made the decision. Be very cautious. If you’re respectful but
firm, you’ll get along.”
Marcello’s ear was getting warm from Antonio’s
lecture. But he felt comfort in having an older person
offering him guidance. Like Angelo, before he practically
fired him, Antonio probably needed to give him a glimpse
of what he had learned in his life. But their styles differed,
Marcello thought. Angelo was more of a technician in love
with his machines, while Antonio was known as a man who
enjoyed the art of getting results from people, a master of
the carrot and the stick. But some people would get tired of
that style, he thought, like Eugenio, for example.
When Marcello got off the phone, he wandered into
the kitchen. The man he believed was Gualberto stood there
with a woman wearing an apron. “Good morning. I’m
Marselo,” he said to them.
“Gualberto, mucho gusto,”13 the man replied. “This
is my wife, Glenda.” The cook wiped her hands with a white
cloth and shook Marcello’s.
Gualberto was a relatively short man, with thick
arms and a neck that had seen more than its fair share of
sunlight. His white hair was combed back in waves,
perhaps to hide a balding head. His hands were as rough as
Arnaldo’s, the machinist from Margarita. He wore a shirt
unbuttoned halfway that showed his relatively hairless
chest. The thick fingers and leathery hands seemed
completely normal to Marcello, because manual labor was
this man’s cup of tea—or coffee.
He assumed that this would be the norm for him,
too, while he worked at the farm.
During the following months Marcello was able to
learn the ropes of the job as the farm manager. Besides
Gualberto and his wife the cook, three other cowhands
reported to him. The first weeks were difficult because
Marcello had to ask questions while trying to prove that he
brought something to the mix. He had to show that he
109
wasn’t just somebody who had been recommended by the
owner’s friend.
Marcello was surprised at what he did bring to the
daily job at the Tinaco-area farm: a newfound selfdiscipline. He was up every day at three in the morning,
making sure that the hands moved the cattle from one
corral to the other or to the right corral, in case they would
stay there for the day, that the water pumps were working
properly, and that all the animals were fed on time.
He learned that the two distinct seasons in
Venezuela were more marked and relevant in the llanos, or
plains, than in the cities or the coast. Although the
temperatures in the country didn’t vary as much as in the
regions that were farther from the equator, the amount of
rainfall there affected his work with cattle and pastureland.
He had started his job at the end of the dry season, so he
was able to witness the yellowing of the vegetation. In those
weeks before the rain appeared, he had to make sure that
the irrigation system was working properly and that the
cattle feed was delivered on time.
Not much later, it was monsoon time. Creeks that
barely existed during the drought turned into wide rivers
that made driving around in the trucks difficult. More than
once they had to use the tractor to pull out Marcello’s
pickup truck. Every time that happened he tried to find an
appropriate excuse to hide his inexperience in driving on
muddy roads. “Bald tires” was his usual explanation, even if
they were practically new.
Marcello learned Gualberto’s full story when
Antonio, the owner, eventually came for a visit. The man
had a curious past, although the word curious was
appropriate only if you didn’t mind sharing your days and
nights with a man who had once used a pitchfork to
perforate the bowels of a coworker. This incident occurred
when he worked in the stables of the Caracas horse track.
He claimed self-defense and managed to get his sentence
reduced to six long years in a Venezuelan jail, where most
people exit—if they come out alive—with worse habits than
110
those they had when they entered. As the story went, the
coworker had offended Gualberto first by snitching on him.
That infuriated Gualberto so much that he snatched up the
hay-pitching tool and speared the man in the side. Lucky
for Gualberto, the dead man was an ex-con, so the crime
wasn’t considered all that serious.
Part of the fun of working at the cattle ranch was
listening to all the stories that the men liked to tell. Antonio
had his share, and so did Gualberto. Since the ones from
Antonio involved Gualberto and vice versa, Marcello
expected to learn from Gualberto all the information that
the owner was not willing to share.
One night Marcello asked one of the hands about the
old man with the glasses, the one he had seen in the
Caballero house the first night he stayed in Tinaco. Eugenio
had told him that he was a ghost, but Marcello wondered
why this ghost was looking for some documents and why
this search had not let him rest in peace. The conventional
wisdom regarding ghosts says that if they’re still here on
Earth, that’s because they have some pending issues.
Marcello had seen a movie where a man was murdered and
his ghost hung around to haunt his friends and family until
his murder was solved. As corny as it sounded, Marcello
hoped the same thing would happen with the ghost of the
old man with the glasses.
The cowhand didn’t seem to mind Marcello’s
unusual question. “His name is Rafael Caballero,” he said
as he passed a small can of tobacco paste to the tanner
cowhand on his right.
“Hush, don’t say anything else,” the other cowhand
replied as he opened the cylindrical can of chimo. He put a
tiny dab between his lips and gums. Seconds later, he spit a
disgusting stream of black saliva onto the dirt floor near the
main house door. “Antonio doesn’t want us to talk about it.”
“That’s right,” Gualberto said. He gave him and
Marcello a hard look. In spite of knowing him for the last
two months, Marcello knew that Gualberto still didn’t trust
him. He probably feared that any comment they made
111
would find its way to Antonio’s ears. The talkative cowhand
hung his head and kept his mouth shut.
Marcello asked the other cowhand to hand him the
can of chimó. “Antonio won’t know anything about it,” he
said. He really didn’t enjoy the taste, and he thought that
spitting black saliva all over the place made no sense.
Nevertheless, he considered the act to be one of courtesy to
the workers and a good story to tell back in Italy. Finally,
Gualberto blurted, “This used to be Rafael Caballero’s farm.
It was his and his brother’s. Gomez took it away from him.”
Marcello was about to ask who Gomez was when the
tobacco-spitting cowhand said, “Juan Vicente Gomez, the
dictator.”
Gualberto scowled at the man who had interrupted
him and said, “Rafael Caballero and his brother Cayetano
owned Los Naranjos in the 1920s. It was a big spread with a
lot of livestock, so it caught the eye of that greedy hijo e’
puta, Gomez. He wanted to buy it for himself, but Rafael
didn’t want to sell. His brother did, but he didn’t.”
“Rafael was a heck of a farmer,” the first cowhand
added. “He built everything here, water wells and all.”
Gualberto added, “Gomez told Cayetano that if he
sold, he would be the chief of the town, something like a
mayor now. But Rafael was stubborn.”
“Really stubborn,” the second cowhand said.
“He stayed here at the farm,” Gualberto continued,
“and told Cayetano that Gomez could come with his whole
army, but he wouldn’t let them take his land, even if they
paid for it.”
“What happened?” Marcello asked, baited by
Gualberto’s dramatic pause.
“Gomez’s soldiers finally came. They killed Rafael.”
“What about Cayetano?”
“He was named Civil Chief, just as he wanted.”
“You should’ve seen how the walls here looked
before,” the first cowhand said. “Antonio had them
repaired, but before then they were full of holes. The men of
Gomez came with everything they had. It was really heavy
112
artillery for the time. Big holes. They say that Rafael fired
and fired and probably killed three or four of them before
they shot him.”
“People were surprised,” the second cowhand
explained. “Nobody thought he could shoot that well.
Maybe because he was a good hunter. But nobody thought
he could kill people. He hadn’t killed anybody until that
day.”
The first cowhand moved to one of the windows of
the house and said, “He must have shot them from here.”
He mimed a man pointing a rifle through the window and
shouted, “Bang!”
Marcello motioned to the first cowhand for him to
move over and allow Marcello a peek out of the window.
Indeed, from that point he could see the incoming road. He
couldn’t refrain from attempting an imaginary rifle shot
himself.
“Has tirado? I mean with a gun?” Gualberto asked
as the cowhands looked away to not giggle directly at their
boss’ face.
Marcello was able to catch that one. “Yes, I’ve
tirado14 a lot. You want me to show you my rifle?”
Gualberto smiled and the cowhands had a laugh.
Whether it was at Marcello’s or Gualberto’s expense, it
didn’t really matter.
One morning not long after that, Antonio arrived
and said he wanted to talk with Marcello over a breakfast of
arepas, cheese, and black coffee. Marcello didn’t mention
what he had heard about Rafael Caballero from the
cowhands. Antonio surprised him by reminiscing about the
farm. After recalling some of the history that Marcello had
already heard, Antonio said, “I bought ‘Los Naranjos’ from
the state. When Gomez died, the new government
expropriated everything he owned. That was about half of
the country—a lot of land in Cojedes, Carabobo, and mostly
Aragua. I don’t know what it is with dictators and land.
They want it all, even if it’s worthless.”
113
Marcello said, “I guess they come around later and
find out that it will take a lot of time and money to make it
productive.”
“No, no, no, that’s not their purpose. They just want
to stand on a hill and look at the extent of their domain. It’s
all about power and about saying that they own a hundred
thousand hectares.”
“What happened to Rafael?”
“Rafael wanted to sell, but at a higher price. He
wasn’t stupid. He knew that Gomez liked the farm, and if he
liked it, he would get it. Rafael was still in his prime, and he
knew he could start from scratch again. Besides, his brother
wanted the Civil Chief post. But Gomez offered too little.
Rafael wouldn’t have enough money to buy a similar farm
in any state.”
“So he decided to fight.”
“Yes,” Antonio said, “but he was hopelessly
outnumbered. I heard that you think you saw him.”
“Yes, I believe so.”
“I don’t think you saw Rafael.”
“I did. He was looking for some papers.”
“The papers, the papers, the goddamn papers!”
Antonio said, tossing his hands. He retrieved a binder that
he carried with him everywhere and pulled out some
papers. “Here’s what the documents say: ‘Sold a farm
called Los Naranjos to Antonio Torelli.’” He recited the date
of the sale and the I.D. number, as well. “That’s what the
documents say. I’m sick and tired of people saying that I
don’t own esta mierda15. Esta vaina la pagué y la he
trabajado yo,”16 he said, raising his voice.
“Nobody is saying anything about—”
“Huevones!” Antonio shouted. “They like to gossip.
It’s not just Gualberto and the others that work here. It’s
the whole goddamn town. They’re good people, but they
can’t stand somebody with money. Esa es la vaina de los
Venezolanos. Trabajan mucho, se esfuerzan, pero cuando
a uno le va bien, lo joden.17 They’re envious, and that’s
114
really a shame. All money is supposed to come from luck,
not work. You’re either lucky or a thief. Screw them!”
Marcello took a deep breath and said, “So were you
lucky, or did you steal all your money?”
“Stronzo!” Antonio shouted.
Marcello looked at Antonio’s flushed face, but didn’t
reply to his insult. After all, he had provoked the man on
purpose. Marcello could feel his pain. Besides all of his
money and in spite of achieving success after arriving in
Venezuela penniless, he was still obviously worried about
how people viewed him. He had built his company
practically with his own bare hands and made much more
than a decent living here. But he couldn’t buy respect and
admiration. Antonio wasn’t a squeaky clean businessman,
Marcello heard, because he surely had to grease some
palms on his way up, but he was probably more honest than
most. He had worked very hard during his first twenty
years, resting only on Sunday afternoons, as he had told
Marcello too many times. And yet people preferred to
believe that he somehow robbed his way to riches.
Antonio dabbed his face with his napkin, took a gulp
of coffee, and apologized for his outburst. “Have you been
to Caracas?” he asked.
“Been through it, but haven’t stayed there,” Marcello
replied.
“Next time you go there, take a good look at the
carritos.”
“The what?”
“That’s how they call the small, urban buses. The
drivers own them, and they decorate the rear window with
stickers and a personal message. Sometimes the message is
the names of the driver’s kids, but usually it’s something
like ’Envy is bad’ or ‘Don’t envy me.’ That’s how bad it is
here.”
“I don’t think everyone is envious,” Marcello said.
“Not all of them, no. Just the ones that make the
most noise. Unfortunately.”
115
That night Marcello sat in the hammock in his room,
his boots on the floor and his bare feet hanging inches
above the fine dirt that always managed to remain on the
cement. He thought about the story of the Caballero
brothers and decided that Cayetano was most likely the
person with the rifle in the old photograph—a man; who
had achieved his bureaucratic dream by sacrificing the
blood of his next of kin. Small wonder his expression was so
somber. How could somebody live that way? Maybe it
would have been more appropriate for Cayetano’s ghost to
be the one roaming that house, begging for his brother’s
pardon. It was a good story to take back to Italy. But then
Marcello realized that he wouldn’t be going home for
months. So he wrote a set of postcards to Alessia, hoping
his words would convey the same sense of mystery and
revelation that the llanos plains had conveyed to him. He
wrote and wrote for hours, using an old 1984 agenda book
to support the postcards. He used a whole pack of ten
postcards to tell his story. On each card he added another
chapter of the saga, dramatizing it as much as possible and
peppering it with a bit of fiction.
When he was finished he returned the postcards to
their original box and stretched out in his hammock. He felt
excited about Alessia’s reading them when they arrived in
Italy. He imagined the look of amazement on her face as
she read the marvelous stories. Her face, he thought. Her
face . . . He couldn’t remember it clearly, but he felt her
smile. That made his night more pleasant, even if all the
bats, calves, and cats didn’t give a rat’s ass about disturbing
his rest. Besides counting sheep, making rhymes was a
good way to doze off quickly.
116
CHAPTER TEN
They called May the “Month of the Races.” Give or
take some weeks, it was the official start of the rainy season.
It was also the start of flies and diarrhea. Hence, the name:
racing to the water closet was something fun to watch but
painful to participate in. But this year the rainy season had
started in July, so by late September the rain still poured.
The dry creek that divided the Los Naranjos farm
from the adjacent property turned into a full-fledged river
in a matter of days. The crecida was a sudden rush of water
that you wouldn’t want to face when crossing this river.
Only experience could teach you to fear any llanos river
during a heavy downpour. Most jobs during these months
took twice as long, because both cattle and trucks moved
more slowly, and the mucky roads didn’t help.
Marcello scraped the brown mud from his boots and
headed to the kitchen. Ironically, the light was better there
than in Antonio’s studio, where people were supposed to sit
down and write. Marcello thought that the rain drumming
on the zinc roof would be good background noise for
writing this season’s postcard to Alessia. He fixed himself a
cup of watered-down coffee and sat down at the wooden
table. He placed a blank card with a picture of the
Venezuelan plains in front of him. The picture showed a
capybara minding its own business, completely unaware
that somebody in another part of the world would consider
its snout worthy of a thousand postcards.
Marcello considered the postcards to be a good way
to keep a journal of his stay in Venezuela. He thought
Alessia was the best recipient of his notes because only she
had a pure Italian perspective. Besides, writing postcards to
117
Filippo wouldn’t be as much fun, and that could actually
make his friend’s fiancée doubt the masculinity of her
future husband. Each new postcard he sent to Alessia
contained more reports about his whereabouts and
everyday chores and fewer words of affection. What kind of
affection could he express to a woman he hadn’t seen or
heard from in more than five months? He kept his faith in
her in the same way he kept his faith in the Milan Football
Club during a bad year, but this faith wasn’t enough to
move him when writing to her now compared to the
enthusiasm he had when he sent the first ones. This time it
would be different, he decided, because he would show that
true affection survives time and distance. When Alessia
read his latest postcard, he thought, it would seem to her as
if they had said good-bye the day before. All he had to do
was find the right words. He had written no more than
Cara Alessia when a voice on the radio said, “Patron, would
you please come to the main corral?”
“Not now, Gualberto. I’m preparing a report for
Antonio,” Marcello lied. A minute later, he had written no
more than those two words. He added her address to kill
time while he thought of something interesting to write.
“Patron, you have to come,” insisted Gualberto. “It
has to do with Antonio’s rucio.”
That was Antonio’s favorite horse. People call some
horses that when their color is light gray to white. They
didn’t know what Antonio had named his horse. They just
called him el rucio and made sure that his care was one of
the top priorities of the farm. When Antonio paid a visit,
Marcello saddled the horse and made it ready to ride when
the boss man got out of his shiny sport-utility vehicle.
Joking with the cowhands, Marcello would say that
saddling Antonio’s horse was his brown-nosing deed for the
week. Antonio would ride the horse up the mountain at the
northern edge of the farm so he could see the full extent of
his land. He loved that horse, not only because it stood out
from the rest of the (mostly brown) horses, but also because
118
a similar horse appeared at the bottom of the coat of arms
of his adopted country.
“I love this country more than the Venezuelans,” he
often said to his respectful but bored audience of workers.
“I came here with nothing but the clothes I was wearing,”
he would say, switching to lecture mode. “But you know
what? I worked very, very hard. I worked every day and
even on Sundays. I worked harder than the Venezuelans
that were living the good life. Now here I am, with much
more than those people that didn’t put in all the effort that I
did,” insisted Antonio, forgetting that after more than fifty
years in the country, he too was Venezuelan.
“I can’t go back to Italy,” he’d say to Marcello. “It has
changed too much. I can go back to visit my family, but I
can’t live there anymore.” Then he would smile and grab
Marcello by the shoulders and tell him, “What I have lost by
losing a true identity I have gained in riches and in the
satisfaction of seeing my dreams come true. Today I ride
the horse of freedom, the horse of the heroes, the horse of
the coat of arms.
But now the urgent sound of Gualberto’s voice told
Marcello that they must have a serious problem with the
horse. “Antonio is going to kill me if something happens to
his horse,” Marcello told himself. “Or even worse—fire me.
That would be just wonderful: no job, no girlfriend, no
country. Yeah, you bet.”
“El coño de la madre!” Marcello cursed into the
radio in the type of Spanish that foreigners pick up very
quickly, especially when airport taxi drivers rip them off.
“Pardon me, Gualberto. Tell me what’s going on.” He had to
shout over the heavy drone of the rain on metal roof.
“I think he’s dead, patron,” said Gualberto, sounding
more gloomy than excited now.
“Where are you?” asked Marcello. “At the far end of
the potrero,”18
Marcello grabbed a flashlight, his rain poncho, his
rubber boots, and the radio and headed for the front door.
The tropical monsoon that he had heard for most of the
119
afternoon hadn’t let up. The green pastures beyond the
main corral had been mowed recently, so he was able to
walk through it. He was glad for his rubber boots when he
almost stepped on a stranded river stingray. Marcello
already had enough of bites and stings, so he all but slept
with his reinforced rubber boots on. Today, he had decided
to walk the five hundred feet that separated the house from
the dead horse to give himself more time to think. He
wasn’t sure what he should think about, but he hoped that
the distance would give him the formula to resuscitate both
the animal and his romantic letter writing.
When he had squished his way to the far end of the
potrero, the horse was leaning awkwardly against an
electrical pole, as if it were a tree that provided shade.
Marcello didn’t have to be an electrical engineer to figure
out that the thunderstorm that occurred earlier had
dropped lightning onto the pole and fried the horse nearby.
Although he thought that the your-horse-was-struck-bylightning story would get him and the rest of the workers
off the hook, he started to feel sorry for the animal in a very
unselfish way.
A fan of Sergio Leone movies—Marcello often
bragged that Italians had “created” Clint Eastwood—he
always thought that horses died a heroic death. He recalled
that story where bank robbers wound a lawmen, who has to
get back to town and see a doctor. His faithful horse gets
him back in time to save his life. In another scene of that
movie the hero has to confront the thieves. When one of
them sneaks behind him to make the kill, the faithful horse
comes from nowhere and kicks the gun away from the bad
guy, but not before he’s mortally wounded. After killing all
the bank robbers, the hero takes a good look at his brave
horse and decides to shoot him so he won’t suffer a long
and painful death.
But this wasn’t a western. Who would want to make
a movie about cowboys with rubber boots, anyway? As
Marcello sloshes along he imagines a Venezuelan cowboy
crashing through the swinging doors of a bar. The clatter of
120
dominoes stops abruptly. Everybody gapes at the man that
they had long thought to be dead. Nobody moves. Not even
a cockroach skitters away. The cowboy stalks toward the
trembling barman, his spurs jangling with each step across
the wooden floor. Suddenly, a young man in the back of the
room calls out, “Hey, stranger! Nice boots. Are they
polyethylene?”
See? Marcello told himself as he approached
Gualberto and two other workers, who stood staring at the
dead horse. It’s just a new magical reality. El Zorro had a
horse called Thunder, and Antonio has a horse that was
killed by lightning. Go figure.
“I think he’s dead,” said Gualberto.
“You already told me that,” replied Marcello,
wondering how much horsepower is generated when
lightning strikes an equine. He tried to keep a straight face.
“Kick him,” said another man. “He may be asleep.”
Marcello didn’t think so, but he was happy to oblige. After
all, how many times do you get to unload all of your anger
onto an animal and accomplish something productive at
the same time? But in the case of the unfortunate rucio, he
was simply dead—muerto, fried, burned out, or whatever
you wanted to call it. Antonio’s favorite horse had just stood
in the wrong place at the wrong time. Nobody had thought
about keeping the animals away from the electrical poles.
Unluckily for Marcello, it had happened on his watch. He
could imagine Antonio fuming and kicking everything in
sight. He could only hope that his boss would finally realize
that he wasn’t the one to blame and allow him to continue
managing the farm.
Hauling the horse onto the tractor-trailer required
everyone to pitch in. They found that pushing and pulling a
rigid, five hundred-kilogram object is easier than trying to
move a limp, four-legged dead weight. Marcello’s good
humor faded quickly with each failed attempt to get the
horse onto the trailer.
At first he had suggested bringing in some baba
alligators to lighten the load by dividing and conquering.
121
He laughed then, but was not laughing now. Drenched and
frustrated, he thought about Italy and about not doing
much manual labor for most of his former life. He looked at
his bloody hands and the yellow, plastic rope they had tied
around the horse’s neck. Marcello daydreamed about long,
hot showers, the tranquility of the pitter-patter and
remembered how the tiny streams of water made their way
down Alessia’s skin, more slowly if he had already soaped
her.
“Dear Alessia . . .” he said to himself within the
privacy of his rain hood. “Dear Alessia, you wouldn’t believe
what I did today,” he continued, thinking that she probably
wouldn’t believe anything he told her. “Remember that
time we took a shower together in your stepmother’s
house? The rain in Tinaco is as warm as the water in that
shower. I’m probably doing the most unromantic job on
Earth right now, but I see life where there is death.” No, too
corny, he thought.
He erased that mental postcard and started again:
“Dear Alessia, I’d kill to have you here with me,” he
muttered. “I’d die to see you in a Joropo dress with your
hair tied into a knot and a bow of flowers behind your soft
neck, waiting for your turn in a town dance in the main
plaza on any festival day. I would watch you from afar being
courted by all the dancers dressed in traditional liqui-liqui
clothing and sandals. But I would smile, knowing that no
matter how cocky they became, you would always be mine.
Although you’d be polite to your fellow dancers, your shy
smile would be kept for your man, forever.”
Marcello was about to start another mental postcard
that included toros coleados, or the llanos sport of tripping
a young bull by pulling on his tail while riding on
horseback, when his thoughts were interrupted.
“Se cagó, coño!” shouted one of the men, his hands
and forearms covered with horse manure. “How the hell
can a dead animal defecate?” Cursing, he danced around
trying to clean off the mess in the rain while Gualberto and
the others roared with laughter.
122
Marcello silently thanked the white horse’s ghost for
lightening the load even that much and ordered the man to
get back to work. They managed to work the dead horse
onto the trailer eventually and move it near the house,
where Antonio could see it as soon as he arrived. When that
happened the old man wasn’t nearly as upset as everyone
expected. Marcello sighed with relief. Maybe Antonio saw
the death simply as an act of God.
“I can always buy a new one,” Antonio said. “At least
he didn’t die of a long sickness.”
Marcello returned to the wooden table in the kitchen
and tried to write a postcard for Alessia, but he couldn’t do
it. He placed this last postcard in one of the cupboards,
found Antonio, and asked him for some time off. The dead
horse had given him a quick look at the fine line that people
and animals walk between being here and being gone
forever. When he saw that he took the horse’s death more
seriously than the owner, he felt comfort in his approach to
his daily work. Maybe he could visit Angelo and thank him
for his “punishment” or at least have a cup of coffee with
him. He felt a urgent need to be close to the sea.
Antonio recommended Tucacas and Morrocoy, the
former the town next to the beach that connects to the
latter, a national park that contains one of the finest groups
of islands in the country. He told Marcello to the blue 1982
Land Cruiser FJ40 and advanced him enough cash to pay
for a hotel and some extra expenses.
The next day, Marcello drove away from Los
Naranjos, feeling the satisfaction of a job well done.
123
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Marcello sauntered up the breezy Tucacas beach to
one of the food stands and ordered two empanadas with
cheese from an old woman working over a smoky pot. His
appetite increased just looking at the crispy borders of the
smile-shaped treats absorbing the cooking oil. He knew
that pessimists said they were a frown-shaped treat, but
they didn’t know how to hold an empanada correctly.
The correct term for the empanada shape is a half
circle, since the cooks—also known as empanaderas—take
a thin circle of dough, add some filler in the middle, and
fold it in half. Then they seal the borders with a fork.
Marcello watched the old woman sealing the empanada and
decided that they were really just huge ravioli with a
circular shape but made with corn dough. That’s like saying
that a pancake is really a sweet pizza with completely
different dough. Of course the empanada is also shaped like
a small calzone, but calzones are made from wheat and
have a completely different flavor.
Paying no attention to Marcello, the heavyset woman
carefully removed an empanada from the sizzling oil in the
big pot and placed it on a plastic sieve to drain. “Please, can
I have two cheese empanadas?” repeated Marcello.
He was about to vote with his bare feet and walk
another fifty meters19 to the next empanada lady when she
turned and shouted, “Alejandra! Aaaaleeejaaandra!” to a
young woman who sat on a wooden crate under a palm
tree, reading a book. “Sorry, Mama,” she replied.
Marcello studied the girl’s smooth movements as she
put down the book, adjusted the light-colored sheath that
124
covered her bikini bottom, and glided toward the counter.
With barely a glance at him, she placed the two empanadas
in a small, brown paper package without tying it up with
strings. She added a few napkins and handed the package
to him. When she gave Marcello his change, her shortnailed fingertips brushed his palm and hovered there for a
moment.
Halfway back to his beach towel, Marcello stopped
and looked back at the empanada stand, still thinking about
the girl, Alejandra. What was it about her? The quick smile
she had given him? The way she had wrapped a napkin
around the hot, oily, cheese-filled cornbread? Or was it the
brief tickle of her fingertips? She didn’t seem to be the
average empanada vendor. But maybe he, the bravo
Marcello Carosio, was just a sucker for pretty women. He
was about to turn away again when the young woman
shouted to him in Italian, “Ritorno a la dolce vita!” That
surprised him. Then she cried, “Vuelve a la vida!” —the
same thing in Spanish.
“‘Come back to [sweet] life?’” Marcello thought.
“Oh, yes, that’s my cue!” He pasted on his trademark
Milanese grin—the one he had used successfully in many
European coffee shops—and hurried back to the food stand.
The old woman looked at him as if she was waiting for
Marcello to order something else.
He ignored her and beamed at the girl. “Do you
speak Italian?”
She gave him a sheepish smile and said, “The truth
is, no. I just like the way it sounds. It gives an air of
sophistication to the everyday work, don’t you think? A
tourist came one day and told us how it was called.”
“And what precisely are you talking about? To what
sweet life would you like me to come back to? And why
would such a beautiful young woman from the tropics say
that to an errant European like me?” The words tumbled
from Marcello’s lips as if the months of tending cattle on
the Tinaco plains had armed his verbal shotgun with pickup
lines.
125
“No, silly,” she replied with a chuckle. “That’s the
way we call this oyster cocktail we sell here. It’s called
‘bring back to life’ because, well, you know. . .” “Know
what?” replied Marcello, glad that his babbling had made
her laugh.
“You know . . . it,” Alejandra said, with a blush
coloring her café au lait cheeks.
The old woman turned around and scowled at him.
“For your verga. You know, your manhood. To make him
stand up so you can get the job done—and not make a fool
of yourself. Alejandra, relieved from having to do the
explanation herself, covered her flushed face with both
hands and giggled.
Marcello’s face suddenly felt hot, too, but he made
an effort to recover quickly and said, “Oh, I see, signora.”
He turned on his patented grin for her—probably the young
girl’s mother—but she just snorted at him. “As attractive as
that may sound,” he told her, “I am more interested in the
sweet life that this Earth-bound mermaid here just sang
about in an angelical voice that could be heard on the most
distant island of the Caribbean.”
“Dios mío!”20 the old woman cried. “Another
romantic fool.” But then she looked at Alejandra and smiled
with wistful resignation. “I have to go to the convenience
store to look for soft drinks. Try not to burn yourself while
I’m gone.” She tipped Marcello a sly wink and excused
herself.
Marcello and Alejandra spent the rest of the
afternoon sharing their life story. He told her that he had
taken a break from work for a year to have new adventures
in South America, careful not to mention anything about
the accident with the Japanese tourists. He learned that his
feeling about Alejandra had been correct, that she was not
your average empanada lady’s daughter. She had earned an
MBA from the Catholic University in Caracas and lived in
Puerto Cabello, where she was a manager at the city’s
126
largest shipyard. She was in Tucacas for the weekend to
visit her mother—yes, the old an empanada vendor was
indeed her mother—and her father, a businessman who was
running for city mayor.
Both of her parents were well-known in town,
Alejandra told him, and although her father’s businesses
made enough for her mother to discontinue selling
empanadas, the old lady thought that working at the beach
was more interesting than staying home and watching
television. This way she could meet new people, especially
Venezuelan and foreign tourists. She rarely spent a
weekend or a holiday there without hearing a new story
from someone who came from places like Caracas and
Switzerland, all while she dispensed deep-fried, crescentshaped cornbread pockets stuffed with baby shark meat,
ground sirloin, grated white cheese, or her specialty,
shredded black beef, along with oyster cocktails, those
spicy, lemon-soaked treats that were supposed to have
aphrodisiac effects. From what Marcello had heard, no
scientist or medical doctor in Venezuela had ever bothered
to investigate that claim, but that didn’t hinder the business
at all.
At one point, when they had both stopped laughing
at one of Marcello’s piropos, or cheesy one-liners, he said,
“So why the hole?”
“What hole?” Alejandra replied, looking startled.
“The hole in the empanada,” he said, pointing to one that
was cooling among others that had not been punctured on
the cooking table.
“Oh. That’s a cheese empanada.”
“Did somebody just say ‘let’s put a hole in the cheese
empanadas’ but not in the others?”
“I don’t know. I just follow the standard procedure.
I guess it would make more sense if we added tooth marks
to the shark empanada, wouldn’t it?” She plucked one from
the plastic colander, took a big bite, showed it to Marcello,
and smiled.
127
On rare occasions, he thought, a toothy, food-filled
grin can be highly attractive. This was one of them. “I’ll pay
for that one,” he blurted with a smile.
All the time that Marcello had spent in Venezuela,
never knowing if he’d ever return to some semblance of
normality, suddenly seemed to make sense. He really
appreciated this girl although he was still unsure of whom
to give thanks to. He thought her smoky, self-assured voice
was very sexy. And he liked how she’d look exasperated
sometimes with all of his many questions but tried to
answer them anyway, not knowing that he just wanted to
keep her talking. “Just say anything”, Marcello would think
as she spoke. Because every time she directed a comment at
him, he felt that there was more evidence that somebody of
importance acknowledged his existence. When their
conversation began to gain momentum, he not only existed,
but there was another very real person with him, making
his presence in this land all the more worthwhile. made
him stop thinking about mere survival and start imagining
“projects.”
The empanada stand remained in the shadows of the
palm trees for most of the afternoon. Alejandra’s mother
didn’t return. Eventually, he dragged the wooden crate that
Alejandra had used before into the kitchen so he could talk
to her while she worked. He bought soft drinks from her,
and they shared a Cuba Libre made with some “Castro”
rum that he had bought at a gas station on his way to
Tucacas, assuming—correctly—that it would be cheaper
there. For some reason he associated inexpensive gas with
inexpensive alcoholic beverages, even if that idea lacked
logic. He had bought some lemon from an oyster vendor on
the beach to top off the drink.
Marcello knew that oystermen were purposely
ignorant of mathematics and quite tricky, too. When you
ordered a dozen oysters for a certain amount of money,
they would give you two or three dozen and charge you two
or three times the amount you had planned to pay. He had
128
learned, though, that if you pay them in advance, you get
what you asked for.
Marcello ended up drinking rum practically alone.
Alejandra would take the occasional sip, giving her
approval of its taste but stopping short from accepting a full
cup from Marcello, arguing that she distrusted rum’s quick
and unexpected effect.
When the sunlight began to fade, Alejandra asked
him to accompany her to meet her cousins. He helped to
clean up the counter and cooking table, wondering how
they would empty the hot oil from the big frying pot, which
sat on top of the gas stove and was incorporated into the
table.
When he asked her about it, she said, “We just leave
the oil there. My mother will use it again tomorrow. She
makes less money if she throws it away every day.”
Marcello wasn’t surprised. After meeting a frog that
crawled sideways and seeing an electrocuted horse, he
could hardly consider that cost-saving method to be a
novelty. He stared into the deep-frying pot and at the dark,
soft ring of congealed grease inside. If Alejandra’s mother
recycled the oil, he guessed that she had no reason to wash
the pot very often, much less brush it.
He used his car key to scrape off a clot of the gunk
and called, “Hey, Alejandra! Do you want to know what
food your mother served three years ago?” He held up his
car key.
Alejandra stared at his specimen for a moment, then
walked away shaking her head and mumbling to herself.
*
*
*
Late afternoon, Marcello visited Alejandra’s parent’s
house to share a conversation while she fried some fish in
the kitchen. Her parents’ house was a colonial-style
building with a cement deck in the back that doubled as a
parking place when they had a lot of guests.
Marcello was glad to see that Alejandra’s cousins
were a friendly bunch. Luis Eduardo drove a truck that
129
carried plastic pellets from a nearby factory to Puerto
Cabello for export and to other local customers across the
country. He was effusively happy now because he had just
paid the last installment on his gandola, or trailer truck. He
said that by owning the truck he drove he would eventually
make more money on every trip.
Another cousin, Raul, used to live in Colombia when
he was married. He talked about his job doing computer
support for the dairy business operation of a large
consumer goods company. Unlike his marriage, he said, his
job was quite stable. When people asked him for help with
common computer problems, he was more than happy to
show his worth. He quickly solved their problems and left
them in awe, although he knew that it wasn’t really the
most complicated work. He was probably a better problemsolver than a husband because that blue screen was what
brought him back to Valencia alone. Even so, he was not
bitter about it, mainly because he still couldn’t understand
what had happened. He couldn’t create an algorithm to
explain it, so he dropped the whole issue and carried on.
Cousin Felix operated a peñero, or fishing boat.
Unlike most fishermen, he also used it for odd jobs such as
shuttling tourists back and forth to the Morrocoy National
Park and for doing some import/export business to the
nearby island of Curacao. He usually made the Morrocoy
trips on weekends and holidays and the Curacao runs on
weekdays, when few tourists wanted transportation from
the popular beaches of Tucacas to the relatively pristine
archipelago of Morrocoy.
Felix said that the National Parks Institute had done
a decent job in recent decades to keep tourists from
damaging the coral reefs and other natural attractions of
Morrocoy. Just the fact that people had to reach the islands
by boat was a good thing that limited the harm of human
intrusion, as well. Without knowing it, Marcello thought,
Felix was part of the conservation movement, with his
interests served alongside those of the environment.
130
While they drank beer and talked about anything
man-worthy (baseball, politics, any woman except
Alejandra, and so on), they ate from a big plate of fried fish
that she would bring from the kitchen and yellow cheese, a
combination that was found only in places with access to
imported goods and fresh fish like Tucacas and Margarita.
The yellow cheese had come from one of Felix’s trips to
Curacao. They sat on steel- framed chairs laced with
flexible, colored plastic pipes. The chairs were quite ugly,
Marcello thought, being well versed in Italian design, but
inventive, nonetheless.
“They buy our fish in Curacao and pay us with
American dollars,” Felix remarked, returning to the subject
of his main job. He looked straight at Marcello, as if to
emphasize some point. A dark-skinned man in his late
forties, Felix seemed to be a more dangerous type when he
wore a defiant look, as he did now. Yes, it is not correct. So
what are you gonna do about it? he seemed to say.
“And?” Marcello replied.
“U.S. dollars! Don’t you see? Curacao is part of a
foreign country. We can sell American dollars here on the
black market—I mean the parallel market.”
“Fino. That’s cool,” Marcello replied, using local
slang. Move sideways, frog, he thought. In the era of the
Internet and wire transfers, you’re bringing foreign
currency into Venezuela on an old, wooden fishing boat
that can’t go more than thirty kilometers an hour. Instead
of clicking on a button on your computer you import the
cash yourself and trade it for bolivares at the going
exchange rate. Doing this wasn’t that far out in Venezuela,
the land of the spectacularly beautiful and the uncommonly
absurd, and it was much more romantic than walking into a
bank and presenting a form that you had just filled out with
the number of dollars you wanted to buy. The cashier, even
if she was one of those stunning beauties that he had seen
in Valencia and Caracas, would just smile at you as
instructed, print a code on your form, sign it, and hand it
back to you, still smiling. Better to get the salty taste of
131
greenbacks that had made the trip on an open peñero,
Marcello thought. That kind of money wasn’t hot. It was
wet and cold. But don’t add any detergent to the mix, or
you’ll be getting into the money-laundry business. Added to
all the beer he had consumed, that thought made him
smile.
Before Marcello knew that he was going to speak, he
shouted, “I want in!”
The three cousins exchanged a look and burst into
laughter, probably thinking that it was the beer talking
now.
Marcello turned to face Felix and said, “I mean, I
would like to accompany you on a trip to Curacao
sometime.”
“Why not?” Felix said with a smile. “We can always
use the help. You’ll have an interesting story to tell your
friends back in Italy.”
Marcello was surprised by his quick agreement. He
had expected to do some persuading, considering the
semilegal—yes, such a term was applicable in
Venezuela—status of currency trading with the
government-imposed exchange controls. But Felix was still
nodding and smiling, looking much friendlier now, so he
must be serious. He felt excited by the prospect of a new
adventure. Alejandra walked out of the kitchen and onto
the porch and smiled at Marcello and her three cousins. She
had been frying the fish for them in the small kitchen,
which still hadn’t been remodeled to keep up with her
father’s increasing income. Marcello had asked her earlier if
she needed some help, although at first glance it would
have probably been too messy as it was barely big enough
to allow only two people to work there comfortably.
Felix told her about Marcello’s request to accompany
him to Curacao the following day. She smiled at the
thought, looked at Marcello from top to down and then
shook her head slowly.
132
Alejandra shook her head slowly. “Just be sure to
take a life vest,” she told him. “The boat bounces a lot.” In
the same breath, she asked him if he’d like to go to a party
at a social club a little later.
Marcello felt more relieved than surprised by her
invitation, and he accepted gladly. An avid video game
player back in Milan, Marcello thought of each step with a
new woman as a small mission, with its own time limit.
Complete the first step, and you go on to the next, more
difficult level. If you take too long, you lose, and you have to
find somebody else.
But Alejandra seemed like more than a game to him,
and that made him a little nervous. After spending months
in the land of mighty rivers, skyscraping waterfalls, and
thundering waves, he had finally found something he
thought he could hold on to. Even during his conversation
with her cousins he had noticed the louder sizzle of the
frying oil when she placed a piece of fish in the pan. Other
times he became jittery when he didn’t hear any sounds in
the kitchen, thinking that some boyfriend or old
acquaintance had come to pick her up. He was more than
glad to be wrong about that and happy to know that he was
going to spend more time with her that evening.
Marcello remembered a rule he had learned from a
cowhand in Tinaco: it was bad luck to rent a hotel room for
yourself after meeting an attractive woman. Problem was,
he had no place to take a shower, and he definitely needed
one now. After dinner, he excused himself to solve that
problem. Fortunately, he was able to persuade the owner of
a small hotel to rent him a shower instead of having to pay
the full price for the room. The cold shower also helped to
kill the rum and beer buzz and refresh him.
Marcello drove too fast through the clear Tucacas
night to Alejandra’s house. He thought she looked stunning
when he helped her climb into the passenger seat of his old
FJ40 Land Cruiser. He was sure that the truck had not seen
such a delightful sight or smelled such a sweet perfume for
many years, if ever, because it was used mostly to carry
133
sweaty cowhands back and forth between Tinaco and
Antonio’s farm. So guessing which type of passenger the
seat would prefer was a no-brainer. He was
anthropomorphizing the Land Cruiser, of course, but that
was a common practice with this type of sport-utility
vehicle in this country, where men really loved their trucks.
She wore a white dress with little green flowers streaming
down the narrow straps that held the top in place. Her
smooth shoulders reflected the dim lights along the dusty
streets on their way to the club. “It’s not far,” she said. “I’ll
tell you where to turn.”
Marcello wouldn’t have minded if they had to drive
all night to get there, but they reached their destination five
minutes later. The party location was a typical Venezuelan
town club. The cement floor near the bar was crowded with
tables that were made out of square, steel frames with
round, wooden boards laid on top, each one dressed up
with a white tablecloth and some flowers in a vase in the
center. Alejandra led him among the tables to introduce
him to many of her family’s acquaintances as if he was her
fiancée, and that gave him another attack of the jitters.
Marcello finally escaped the tedium of answering the
same questions over and over again in his still clumsy
Spanish by asking Alejandra to dance.
Unfortunately, he then faced the daunting task of
dancing the merengue without stepping on his partner’s
toes. “Don’t look at your feet,” Alejandra suggested. “Look
at my face and hold my waist. Then pretend that I’m a
wooden top that you’ll be spinning on the dance floor. Yes,
that’s right! Coil and spin, coil and spin!”
Marcello had listened to merengue music back in
Italy as part of the imports they received from the
Americas. Although his ears and mind were acquainted
with the lyrics and melody, his legs and hips couldn’t follow
its rhythm. More discouraging was watching a good-looking
young man and his partner putting on a virtual exhibition
of professional ballroom dancing. He must have begun
dancing in his mother’s womb, Marcello thought, perhaps
134
alternating the merengue and salsa with some limbo under
the umbilical cord.
“Good!” Alejandra said with an encouraging smile.
“You’re doing well.” That made him feel a little better as he
ploughed through an obstacle course swarming with flying
elbows, long dresses, hairdos that defied gravity, and far
too many toes.
He kept moving, hardly able to breathe, trying to
pick up cues from the other dancers and the changing
pressure of Alejandra’s supple body under his hands. When
he finally dared to take a good look at the voluptuous yet
light-footed young woman in his arms, he was surprised to
realize that he was having the time of his life.
Alejandra’s body seemed to possess an independent
processor that controlled the dancing while the better parts
of her brain concentrated on more interesting activities
such as lip-syncing the songs that the band played,
although calling a tuxedoed man playing the keyboard and
a pretty singer in a glittery dress a b a n d was an
overstatement. That didn’t affect the enthusiasm of the
dancers, though.
After dancing to three songs, Marcello considered
his duty to be done. He had managed not to make a fool of
himself, and, better yet, Alejandra was still holding his
hand. He maintained his grip until they had found an
empty table and he pulled out a chair for her. Like all the
other tables at the party, this one held a bottle of Scotch, a
metal bucket of ice, some tall glasses, bottles of mineral
water and club soda, and napkins.
“What would you like to drink?” Marcello plunked
an ice cube into a tall glass, using the tongs. “I think I’ll
have a whiskey with soda. Too bad they don’t have any
rum.” “They never serve rum at parties,” Alejandra said.
“Why not?” he said, pouring whiskey.
“People would think the host is a lower-class
person.”
135
“That doesn’t make much sense. The rums here are
very fine. They even export them to Italy. I’d think you’d be
showing your pride by serving it.”
“Maybe that makes sense to you, but it doesn’t to
someone who is trying to impress his friends by inviting
them to his daughter’s graduation party. That’s just a fact of
life here.”
Marcello said that he understood, of course. Then he
reached toward her and said “May I see your hand for a
moment?” He had just spotted a diamond ring on her right
hand and felt certain that it wasn’t there before. The ring
was beautiful. He was no jewelry expert, but he guessed
that it held a genuine 1-karat diamond. He held Alejandra’s
hand captive in both of his, planning not to say a word until
she offered an explanation about why she was wearing what
had to be a very special present. But her silence lasted for a
long and uncomfortable minute, until the music changed to
recorded songs while the band took a break. The tune
blasting from the sound system now was by Franco De Vita,
an excellent Italian-Venezuelan crooner that Marcello liked.
He looked at Alejandra and pointed to his right ear,
indicating that she should pay attention to the lyrics.
Oh, if they would have seen us, Marcello lipsynched. We were there sitting in front of each other . . .
He pointed quickly to Alejandra and to himself.
She grinned at him.
The moon could not miss this date, and we talked a
bit of all, and everything would make us laugh, like a pair
of fools, he continued, miming the lyrics by pointing to the
sky and then to her mouth and his, and then hugging his
stomach like a laughing Felix the Cat.
Alejandra looked as if she was trying to suppress her
amusement, but she couldn’t help herself.
And I couldn’t wait for the moment, to have you in
my arms, and be able to say . . . I Love You, from the first
moment you were seen, and I’ve been searching here
forever, and like this I thought you’d be. . .
136
During his recital, Alejandra would try to look to the
sides to see if anybody was looking. But the more the song
advanced, the less she seemed to care. That only
emboldened Marcello to finish it on a high note.
Marcello caught his breath and said, “Can you
accompany me to the car? I think I may have left it
unlocked.” He doubted that a line like this would work in a
safer country like Sweden and Japan, where a confused
Inga or Mariko would have answered “yeah, so what’s if it’s
unlocked?” forcing another strategy. Nevertheless, he
thought it would work in Venezuela. Alejandra quickly
agreed. Marcello held Alejandra’s hand as they approached
the Land Cruiser FJ40. He keyed the lock on the driver’s
door and found out what he already knew. “My mistake,” he
said. “I did remember to lock it up, even with the
distraction of a such a beautiful girl.” He turned smoothly,
leaned against the door, and pulled her into his arms. She
didn’t look surprised at all, and she continued to smile up
at him. A moment later he was swept into a sensory
adventure of touch, smell, and taste—in that order—and
lost himself in this warm and lovely girl, this daughter of an
empanada vendor, this successful young professional, this
kind and patient dance teacher with the soft and rhythmic
hands. Glued to him full-length, Alejandra’s compliant
body trembled under his touch. Her lips were as luscious as
they looked.
Tiziana from Biella. Tiziana? Why on Earth am I
remembering Tiziana? Marcello thought. As he tried to look
beyond Alejandra's face sucking his, he noted that she had
her eyes fully closed, just like the girl he met as a teenager
on a ski trip to the Piedmont town. He had come a long way
since that girlfriend but always remembered the red-haired
snow princess.
But now there wasn't any snow. He was in a beach
town with one of the most attractive women he had kissed
in ages and with little time to estimate how high she ranked
compared to his past conquests. Marcello was too busy
feeling the absence of orthodontia on his partner and
137
grappling with the imposing presence of a tongue that was
a much better wrestler than his own. When he wanted to
play rough, she played rougher. A hunter versus an
anaconda –he thought— fighting to escape the constrictor’s
mortal coil. With each unsuccessful tug, his heartbeats
came more and more frequently. At least he could breathe.
Just when he thought he could pin it down, Alejandra
pulled out and smiled, her shiny white teeth declaring her
the victor of the first round.
His eyes stopped looking at Alejandra and
concentrated on her thick lips’ next opening. There was no
way he could be beat in a battle he planned so carefully. It
went in once more. This time, Marcello now sought a
distraction against the dormant giant serpent, passing his
tongue through the inside section of her premolars like a
bored kid that clangs on a fence with a metal bar on his way
home. While she concentrated on grabbing another part of
his body, he would surprise her—he thought. But Alejandra
was already into the game and took the initiative. Before he
could react, her wet tongue awoke and began the next
battle, with a fury unlike anything expected from the lady
Marcello had met hours ago. Another round lost.
Alejandra pulled out to catch her breath and grin
once more. The beads of sweat that Marcello felt sliding
slowly down his brow were in the same league as the ones
that were attaching the light cloth of Alejandra’s dress
against her hips. As she raised her right hand to clear her
dark hair off her face and stun Marcello once more with the
reflection of the parking lot lights on her neck, he noticed
that the dress was still affixed. Wetness, he thought, but not
only his own. She moved with her fingers the strands of her
hair that were still stubbornly covering her moist neck,
showed Marcello her own trademark toothy grin and
signaled the start of a new round, one that his now tired
tongue would most likely lose.
But what am I doing with my hand on her right hip?
Marcello thought. As Alejandra pulled closer and began to
close her eyes, not too different from the blindness of a
138
Great White shark attacking a meal, Marcello reacted. He
shifted his left hand from the right side of her waist, moved
it across her thigh, hovering slowly down into the softer
area that separate her two legs and drove it in as much as
the dress would allow. His hand wasn’t there more than a
second when it came.
Marcello predicted the earthquake that came from
the South. Alejandra pulled back her legs in a quick gluteus
tightening movement but was unable to control the
tremolo. Marcello giggled with his tongue still engaged and
his left hand taking its time to leave as it was escorted out
by her right hand. By the time she was able to pull out and
catch her breath, he still had her in his vise and as such, a
tie was declared. Marcello figured that not even Primo
Carnera had ever seen a sucker punch like his. Alejandra
still exhaled by installments. Even so, her grasp remained
as tight as Marcello’s. She looked quite surprised but never
showed any intention of letting go.
Richter was a fool, Marcello thought. Why work with
a seismogram when you can do a mammogram? Everybody
knows where the epicenter of the quake is, although hardly
anybody knows when it will hit and what to do to provoke
it. It’s just a matter of timing. Marcello couldn’t decide
whether it had measured 7.0 or 8.1 on the Carosio scale.
Was it “Major” or was it “Great”? Never mind. He could still
feel the ripples in her breathing as she pressed her chest
against his. A deeper investigation of Alejandra’s geology
was definitely required, even if he had already made a
mental map of her topographic features. Move aside María
Guevara, he thought.
Marcello’s excitement was signaled by the readiness
of his perforation tool, which had a similar agenda. While
in Venezuela, Marcello frequently had to explain which
head was doing the thinking when his mind and tool had
their own ideas about a girl he was contemplating. He was
100% sure now that they both were okay with a “Major” or
“Great” quiver but really wanted “Massive” or even
“Meteoric”.
139
However, his drive was still stuck at finding out the
perfect way to say: “let’s go to a hotel” in Spanish. Now
Marcello was the one who was shaking, his nervousness fed
by the insurmountable desire and by the very short distance
to completing this monumental task.
“Let’s go… back to my hotel room”, Alejandra
interrupted, making it clear that this would only be the
beginning.
The non-groping moments on their ride back would
just play Marcello another Franco de Vita song over and
over: Who put you in my path? Who told you that I was
alive? Who’s brilliant idea was it?
The next morning, Marcello rolled over and squinted
at the alarm clock in Alejandra’s hotel room. Just after six.
He groaned. Sunlight blared through the open balcony
doors along with the gentler strains from what sounded like
a cello. Puccini? He slit his eyes against the glare, and there
she was—Alejandra—wearing nothing but a look of blissful
concentration as she played the cello. It sounded like the
prelude to Giacomo Puccini’s early opera The Fairies, but
he wasn’t sure. He’d have to hear the flutes and the piccolo
first. Although he wasn’t a big fan of Italian opera, the
music pleased him, simply because he was Milanese. He
propped himself on one elbow to enjoy the unusual
performance.
An Italian who didn’t know anything about Puccini,
Marcello thought, was like a Venezuelan who had never
heard of Simon Diaz. Since coming to Venezuela he had
learned that the Italian composer had written a popular
folk song called “Caballo Viejo”21 that contained the lines:
“But they don’t realize that a tied heart / when its reins are
loosened / is a wild horse”. Marcello didn’t know what a
“tied heart” was, but found the words interesting, especially
when he considered the night before the deed of a wild
horse. Whatever Alejandra was playing, it sounded
beautiful.
140
He eventually slipped out of bed and tiptoed to the
balcony, hoping he wouldn’t interrupt Alejandra’s concert.
The tears gleaming on her cheeks told him to retreat. He
padded back to the bed and sat and listened to the music
for another minute or two.
She stopped abruptly and said, “Felix must be
waiting for you” without turning around. “You better hurry,
or he’ll leave without you.”
Her tone of voice chilled him. She sounded like a
secretary reminding her boss about an appointment. No ire,
no affection—just the urgency of now.
While he got dressed, Marcello tried to think of a
way to tell her good-bye, but he couldn’t find the right
words. The night before had been perfect, at least for him,
but the morning had taken a strange turn. A siren call that
sounded like a woman playing the cello had awakened
him— a good start. But then the mermaid didn’t react to his
presence. Yes, she was weeping, but couldn’t she have at
least said good morning or good-bye or given him her
telephone number or some hint about seeing him again?
No, just You better hurry with her back to him.
What was wrong? Was he that lousy in bed? No, he
decided, after recalling their enthusiastic lovemaking. He
simply wrote down his mobile phone number on a piece of
paper next to the bed and left.
Marcello found Felix at the Tucacas beach, still
loading his old fishing boat with essentials: extra cans of
gasoline, lifesavers, a case of beer—of course—bags of ice,
and some arepas that he said his aunt had made for them.
Cousins Raul and Luis Eduardo showed up a few minutes
later. The crossing to Curacao was uneventful and not
nearly as rough as Alejandra had suggested. Fortunately,
none of them asked him anything about last night’s party or
about Alejandra. In fact, they all seemed to make a point of
not mentioning her. When he asked them if she ever came
along on these trips, they managed to change the subject.
Otherwise, they were very polite and friendly, joking with
141
him about drinking beer, about Italians, and even about
women, but not one comment about their cousin Alejandra.
After this morning’s peculiar scene, Marcello wanted
to learn more about the girl, but these guys obviously
wouldn’t be any help, at least not today, so he shrugged it
off. But he figured he’d get another opportunity. Eventually.
142
CHAPTER TWELVE
The following Monday before heading off to Los
Naranjos, Marcello decided to review his e-mail inbox and
catch up with the part of the outside world that was still in
contact with him. He paid the person in charge at the
Tinaco Internet café and sat down at an available machine.
Marcello read his messages quickly until he came to
one that made him shudder. “It can’t be . . . it can’t be,” he
muttered, catching the attention of an old man sitting next
to him.
He stood up slowly, staring at the computer screen
as if he expected it to say something. His movements were
slow and tentative, like someone who is in great pain. “I will
open the glass door and walk outside to the street, he
mumbled to his unresponsive self. Then I will head to the
public phone a couple of blocks away.”
No, this cannot be true, he thought, hurrying down
the street. Have to call Alessia, make her tell me that this is
just an elaborate prank. Venezuelans are not the only ones
with a sense of humor. Italians have tons of humor. Filippo
has to be behind this bad joke. He must’ve created fake
invitations. Ah, there’s the phone. . . . He pulled out his
wallet and extracted a bank note, one with the familiar face
of the Venezuelan hero Simon Bolivar. But of course, he
thought stupidly, all bank notes have his face.
Marcello’s brain continued to whisper orders to the
rest of his body. Now I can pay the lady next to the phone.
Now I am standing in front of the phone. I have Alessia’s
mobile phone number. Okay, let me start dialing it. Now
there’s a ring tone. Good. Marcello, you know what you
have to say. Just excuse yourself for not calling her for so
143
long, even if she hasn’t called you, either. Act courteous
instead of caring. You will have to regain her confidence.
There’s a thin string holding you two together. Don’t let
your despair get in the way of recovery.
The phone connection was successful. Ring number
one. . . two. . .three. . . four . . . and now her voice mail.
“Ciao, hai chiamato a Alessia Bellini. Per favore,
lasci un messaggio é subitamente li risponderemo.”
It was Alessia’s voice. But Alessia’s last name was
Scarlatti. A bit of amnesia would have spared Marcello the
type of pain he never thought a person could feel. But no,
he remembered it well. Bellini came from Francesco Bellini,
who was now Alessia’s husband. Filippo wasn’t lying. The
copy of the wedding invitation card that he had sent by email was as real as the ever-increasing pain in Marcello’s
chest.
Marcello was breathing but he didn’t know it. The
town, which was already quiet that morning, had now
become mute. A couple strolled past him, but they could
have been cows grazing a pasture, for all he cared. Then a
storm of rage and self-contempt broke in his chest. What
the hell am I doing here? Why aren’t I in Milan? How did I
get stuck in South America? Why didn’t Filippo’s dad move
faster with the hit-and-run case?
He slammed the handset into its cradle and shouted,
“El coño de la madre! Coño de la madre!” Then he realized
that only the livestock wandering around town understood
his words. “Now I’m even cursing in Spanish. What’s
happening to me? Alessia, Alessia, ti ho perduto. Sono un
imbecille. What a fool! What an idiot I have been.”
The lady who collected the money for the phone
calls eyed him reproachfully, and several bystanders stared
at him. Now he acknowledged them as human
beings—flesh-and-blood beings who could be surprised to
see someone who was so upset by something he had heard
on the phone. He found himself suddenly concerned about
what they thought. What would they do? But why should he
care? Was worrying about gossip a trait he had adopted
144
from this culture or a consequence of living in a small
town? Did any of these people know somebody who worked
at the farm?
Marcello made an effort to corral his feelings, unsure
about what passion may explode next. He was afraid that
he would burst into tears right there on a street corner in
front of these people. Not the best time or place, he
decided. He had to find a place where he could be alone,
and he needed to talk to somebody about this soon. But his
closest acquaintances were at the hato, the farm, half an
hour away. But if he went there he’d have to mourn his
broken heart with an ex-con who had broken some hearts
himself—literally. He decided that he needed to take a few
days off to rethink his life, or at least to figure out what to
do next. He fled the circle of staring faces.
Marcello used the phone at the Caballero house to
call Antonio half an hour later. He explained his personal
problems and asked him for some extra days off. His
employer said he was sorry, sounding genuinely concerned,
which made Marcello feel a little better. He had decided to
drive to Margarita and visit Juan and Luisa. He really
wanted to fly back to Milan and cry on his mother’s
shoulder or on anyone else’s who cared enough to listen to
his anguish, but that was clearly impossible. He quickly
scribbled a checklist before making the eight-hour trip.
When he drove out of Tinaco an hour later, Marcello
discovered that nothing is worse for a person who wants to
forget his agony than to be locked up alone, even if the
“room” is the cockpit of a Land Cruiser. Soon the road
ahead became a blur because of the tears that flooded his
eyes. He was sure now that he was a failure. Technically, he
was still a fugitive from justice. To be a successful escapee
he had kept a low profile, blending into his refuge and
keeping his contacts with people few. But that strategy
became his undoing. Marcello didn’t see Alessia’s
engagement coming, because he had no one who could
point out the obvious, based on their diminishing
145
communication. Perhaps if he had talked about this with
Juan in Margarita or even with Alejandra’s cousins, they
would have told him that nobody waits for anybody, at least
not in the twenty-first century.
As he drove along the winding, two-lane road,
Marcello thought about all the trucks that he would have to
overtake. Passing a truck on these roads required a special
set of skills. If he didn’t accelerate enough, or if he made a
mistake in his timing, he knew that he could be in the last
accident of his life. He thought about this every time he
passed a long-hauler. Today, with each one he passed he
took greater risks each time.
The first time he passed a low-boy truck, he did so
before knowing what was lurking behind the next curve.
Luckily, the road was empty. Then he tried to pass an
ENCAVA bus on a straight piece of road, but this time he
encountered a F150 pickup truck racing toward him. The
result: another close call. The next time, Marcello overtook
a car that was passing a truck carrying pigs. The next curve
came quickly, and so did an oncoming bus. He had no time
to back off or the space to swerve to the right. A sudden
burst of adrenaline signaled either the end of his life or of
his stupid, reckless driving obsession.
He was in the opposite lane, with the first passing
car in the middle of the road and the truck hugging the
right shoulder. A split second later he tromped the brakes,
wrenched the wheel, and nosed the FJ40 Land Cruiser into
the tight space between the first passing car and the truck
just barely in time to avoid the lumbering bus. But when he
released the brakes, his old SUV veered sharply to the right
and slewed through the gravel at the edge of the road. He
fought the wheel and pumped the brakes to regain control,
but the truck plowed across a stack of plastic beer cases,
scattering a flock of chickens, and slammed into the side of
a brick house.
When the dust cleared, Marcello found himself
gazing dumbly across the hood of his Land Cruiser, hard
146
against a small house that sold “cachapas”22 and fried pork.
Marcello’s seat belt had saved him from everything except a
slight pain in his chest, where his heart thudded furiously.
The steel bars attached to the front bumper of the Land
Cruiser had saved it from serious damage, but the house
wasn’t so lucky. The impact had destroyed almost half of
the wall.
The building was a typical roadhouse with a fully
covered section where the owners lived and an open patio
with a cauldron and grill where they prepared fried pork
and cachapas for the motorists. Marcello had slammed into
one of the walls of the main living room.
When he climbed out of the truck and stood there on
shaky legs, the first person to greet him—the chickens had
already done that, but they didn’t count—was a little boy
without a shirt and shoes.
“Gerardo José!” a woman shouted from the house.
“Come back! Then a pregnant woman wearing a bulging
shift, a pair of plastic sandals, and a look of panic flew from
the house to grab the boy and inspect the damage. Keeping
her distance from Marcello, she shouted “Gustavo!” toward
the river, which ran parallel to the road.
Before long, a man trudged up the river bank
carrying wood that he had cut to feed the flames of the
pork-frying cauldron, along with some cassava roots. He
dropped his burden and approached the ruined wall of the
house. Ignoring Marcello, he counted all the broken and
fallen bricks. .
Then he turned to Marcello and said, “You will have
to pay for this, señor. This is our house, and we don’t have
the money for making this wall again.”
Marcello couldn’t reply.
“You are lucky you didn’t run over somebody, or else
you would go to jail.” Marcello just stared at him and then
at the wall. He still felt too stunned by the accident to
consider himself lucky. What irony, he thought. I’m
probably the worst fugitive ever, escaping a relatively
decent Italian jail to land in one with convicts like
147
Gualberto. Marcello looked at the man again and nodded.
Slowly, all the details around him came into focus—the
anguished look on the pregnant woman’s face, the little boy
crying in her arms, the tire marks on the scraggly yard, and
the growing gaggle of neighbors at the edge of the road.
Finally he said, “Yes, I’ll pay.”
Soon a state patrol car pulled into the yard, and two
policemen jumped out. They greeted Gustavo politely and
eyed the destruction. The larger of the two cops swaggered
up to Marcello and said, “You must be the one. Let me see
your driver’s license, the car circulation ID, and your
medical certificate.”
Neither one of the patrolmen looked amused when
Marcello showed them his passport and his Italian driver’s
license. They stepped away and huddled with Gustavo.
Marcello couldn’t make out what they were saying. After a
couple of minutes the big cop holding Marcello’s papers
returned to him.
“Do you know how to lay bricks?” he asked.
“I guess so. I’ve done it before.”
The policeman glanced at the other two men and
laughed. “Well, Musiú, what’s next for you is a job of laying
bricks. If you work quickly, you might be able to leave this
afternoon. But if you’re slow, you will spend your whole day
here and arrive later to wherever you were going in such a
hurry.”
Every cop in the world seemed to be the same to
Marcello. They all liked to play on people’s desperation. But
Marcello remained calm, because he knew that nobody was
waiting for him, either in Venezuela or, sadly, in Italy. He
relaxed even more when he realized that he could avoid the
El Tocuyito jail.
“Okay,” he replied, reaching for his passport and
driver’s license.
“No, sir,” the patrolman said, leaving Marcello with
his hand in midair. “You can’t have these yet.” He turned
and handed Marcello’s papers to Gustavo. “He’ll keep them
until you finish your job.”
148
The pregnant woman, smiling now, brought small
cups of black coffee to the policemen. They took their time
drinking it while they chatted with her and Gustavo. Then
they said good-bye cheerfully and sped off in their cruiser.
Marcello looked at Gustavo, then at the shattered
wall, and finally at his precious papers clutched in the
man’s hand. In the next half hour he learned that he had to
drive slightly more than five kilometers to reach the
construction warehouse where he could purchase the
bricks, cement, and tools. In spite of the humiliation of
having a civilian kidnapping his passport and driver’s
license, he did not feel that miserable.
When he returned to the house and inspected the
damage closely, he got a good look inside. Calling the place
a house was probably an overstatement, Marcello thought.
It contained only a hammock, a narrow bed, a bedside
table, and a cement floor. Even just three people living in
such a place made him look at his short-term priorities in a
very different way.
The newspaper headlines that Marcello imagined,
like “Man Destroys House And Runs,” sounded much less
grave but just as silly as one that said “Child Run Over By
Tourist With Broken Heart.” Any outcome like these put his
recent actions into perspective. Maybe his next postcard to
the newly christened Mrs. Bellini would read, “Dear Alessia,
You broke my heart, so I crashed my car and destroyed a
poor family’s house.”
Driving back to Tinaco to buy tools at a hardware
store, Marcello thought of himself as an idiot, a freak, an
incredibly irresponsible person, and even worse—all of
those things.
Gustavo was waiting for him, wearing a look of
impatient concern, when Marcello returned. Marcello was
serious about repairing the damage he had caused, but he
knew very little about preparing the mortar. Before he
could make a mess out of the job, Gustavo stepped in and
told him to wait until he got some lime and gravel from a
149
neighbor so they could create the mixture the way it was
meant to be.
Marcello and Gustavo didn’t talk much as they
worked, but the scant verbal communication wasn’t
necessary to perform the job as a well-functioning team.
Marcello was surprised when the pregnant woman brought
him some filtered coffee in a tiny, cracked cup, and even
more so later when she handed him a plastic plate of fried
pork. As the hours passed, an occasional traveler stopped to
buy cachapas, fried pork, soft drinks, and coffee.
Roadside vendors like these people shared a simple
life, Marcello learned. Their daily commerce explained why
neither they nor the policemen were particularly hostile
toward him. They just asked him to clean up his own mess.
He felt more embarrassed now than humiliated. Although
bricklaying wasn’t a skill he needed in Italy, he had felt
quite incompetent not knowing how to mix decent mortar
to put some bricks together.
They finished the repairs at about two o’clock in the
afternoon. Gustavo smiled and thanked him when he
handed Marcello his papers.
Then he looked at Marcello solemnly and said, “Be
careful, my friend. “It is not only your life that you risk. You
almost hit somebody in my family. Whatever bad things
may be on your mind, don’t hurt other people because of
them.”
Gustavo hadn’t spoken much during the hours they
had spent laying bricks, so Marcello figured that he had
composed his little speech during that time.
“I can replace the stove,” Gustavo said, “and I can
replace this house. They’re just things. But I can’t replace
the people who live here. You should know that.”
Marcello nodded in agreement, apologized to the
man, and thanked him again for his help. He climbed into
the FJ40 Land Cruiser, fastened his seatbelt, and backed
away from the house. Then he pointed it eastward, toward
the place where he would board the ferry.
150
Even though he had kept his speed down, he reached
Caracas in less than three hours, feeling only the stiff
fatigue of driving a truck without hydraulic steering
nonstop for that much time. Some people had told him that
riding in a Land Cruiser too long would ruin your kidneys,
but he wasn’t sure if the statistical sample included only
heavy drinkers.
Caracas looked the same as before—noisy, dirty, and
crowded with people. He wasn’t familiar with the
Venezuelan capital, so he decided to drive right through it.
Before long, he realized that this was easier said than done.
The cross-town trip took two hours, including a quick stop
for gasoline, bottled fruit juice, and chocolate—not a
balanced meal but good enough to give him some energy
until he could get something more nutritious, like fast-food
chicken. Marcello imagined that the Manual of the Good
Fugitive, Chapter Three, “Blending In,” requires the
escapee to eat what the locals eat. So if that means dining
on Arturo’s Fast Food Chicken, so be it.
About halfway between Caracas and Puerto La Cruz
he finally started to feel less paranoid about running over a
cyclist or a little kid playing at the edge of the road. But as
the fear of having another accident faded he started to think
about Alessia again. This time, though, the feeling wasn’t
like “I lost Alessia, so I’ll try to kill myself again” but more
like a requiem for a lost passion and the hope of
establishing a life with the person he had learned to love.
The music on the FM radio didn’t help, either, with
its litany of songs for the depressed or soon-to-be
depressed. One of the tunes was by a local crooner called
Yordano, whose name Marcello always criticized. The
correct spelling in Italian would be “Giordano.” This man
sang about helplessness and despair and offered no easy
way out. Spelling issues aside, Marcello enjoyed his music,
but today he wanted something to make him forget and
cheer him up. But he couldn’t find anything like that on the
radio. Later, when he drove past a CO2 plant, he imagined a
burping contest, but the humor in that silly idea escaped
151
him. Farther along, when the sea came into view, he longed
for those trips to Sardinia, even if the beaches on that
Italian island were no match for the ones in Venezuela. The
difference, however, wasn’t so much about the sand or the
sea as it was about the company—visiting that place with a
woman who was no longer available to him.
Marcello hadn’t spoken more than a few words with
anybody since he had left Gustavo’s little house. As he
entered the ferry port he figured that he wouldn’t speak to
anybody for hours more. It was about 11 p.m. now, and the
next boat wouldn’t depart until two in the morning. He
decided to kill time in the favorite place of those who
thought the world had collapsed on them—a bar at the
harbor.
Marcello found one easily enough in the main ferry
terminal building, near the ticket office and the waiting
room. He made sure that the Land Cruiser was locked
before he walked in and took a stool at the bar next to a par
de viejos discussing Venezuelan politics. Sensing that a
political debate was just as boring in this hemisphere as it
was in the other one, Marcello decided to face the barman
and ignore them. Rum was Marcello’s weapon of
choice—rum for chasing away all those pesky memories
that threatened to breach the stone walls of the medieval
fortress that protected his sanity.
In no time at all his Castro rum-induced haze
showed him a distant mountain, from which a flag-bearing
horseman appeared, galloping toward his castle. Somehow
he carried the distinct memory of the promises that
Marcello and his Milanese love had shared in cards and
letters. I’ll never forget you, he would write, and she would
reply, I swear you’ll never be lonely. As the horseman
closed the distance to his fortress, Marcello could make out
the markings on his banner.
“Load it up!” was the battle cry that Marcello
thought up for the barman. “Load the glass now! Hurry up!
He’s coming!”
152
Marcello demanded the lethal shot like an imaginary
soldier awaiting his enemy within the walls of his castle.
The catapult couldn’t have launched the projectile more
accurately. The bolt of brownish liquid from the glass hit
the rider squarely and unseated him. He tumbled into the
dirt along with his banner—the flag of promises.
Then a whole battalion of heavily armed soldiers
appeared like magic and rushed forward with their own
streaming flag. Somehow he knew that this banner
represented all of Alessia’s photographs and their scenic
memories together. One shot wouldn’t be enough to stop
them; their armor was too thick. He needed one, two, three,
and then four shots of liquor to stop them. Marcello
celebrated this victory by pulling out the snapshot of him
with Alessia and burning it in an ashtray. The barman,
looking amused by the fireworks, continued to provide
Marcello with the ammunition he needed to win the war.
The final attack came unexpectedly by sea. The north
face of his castle looked like the one he had seen in the city
of Juan Griego—Margarita minus the fast-talking
storytellers. Vikings in their dragon ship, carrying round
shields and battle axes. They marched toward the fortress
carrying a big, heavy box that seemed to be filled with the
mournful sounds of dead relationships. “Marcello,” crooned
a mermaid near one of the ships. “Marcello . . . Marcello . . .
Mar-ce-llo . . . Mahhhrrrcello!”—each lilting cry in a
different voice that he took to represent a different scene
from the past when he and Alessia were together. Her
panting, begging, and moaning voice floated from
somewhere beyond the sea.
“I know, without a doubt,” he pretended to shout at
the barman, “that I will need a bigger shot to sink this ship
than what I used for the horseman and the infantry.” The
barman looked happy to serve him a “double,” a rare
weapon for Marcello, because he had never heard of a
double rum, that term usually reserved for whiskey. But no
matter. He had work to do. The double-sized bomb
153
destroyed the warriors and their ship, and finally Marcello
had silenced the nagging voices in his head.
But now, all but lost in a fog of alcohol, he knew that
he couldn’t drive his SUV onto the ferry, so he decided to
rest for a couple of hours in the driver’s seat before
boarding the ship. He paid his tab and stumbled out of the
bar. On his way out of the terminal building he bought a big
cup of black coffee. That steadied him enough to unlock the
tricky door of the Land Cruiser. He sat there until all the
coffee was gone, and then he levered the seatback all the
way down and closed his eyes.
No problem, he thought. The ferry was always more
than an hour late, so he should feel fine by then.
154
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Despite his elevated blood-alcohol level, Marcello
managed to drive the SUV onto the ferry without hitting
any of the other cars that were tightly parked on the main
deck. Although he had downed a large cup of black coffee
and rested for a while in the Land Cruiser, he still felt
drunk. His own body odor assured him a place by himself
in the passenger cabin. Luckily, he drifted off to sleep as
soon as they left and stayed that way for the whole two-anda-half-hour trip. He awoke when the ferry reached the
southern coast of Margarita with a hangover headache that
threatened to split his skull in two. He drove to the room
that Angelo owned next to his shop and slept away the rest
of the Sunday morning there.
When he opened his eyes again at about noon, his
head and his stomach felt a little better. But the news from
Italy remained foremost in his mind. He shuffled into the
shop, greeted Angelo, and apologized for arriving without
notice.
“Don’t worry, son, you’re like family,” said the old
man with a surprised but serene look. “You can come and
go as many times you please.”
“Grazie,” Marcello replied with his hand on his
forehead. “I really appreciate that.”
And he knew that was completely true. During these
darkest hours he wanted to feel comforted by friends and
family members, And Angelo was the closest thing to family
he had. Without him, Marcello wouldn’t have landed his
first job and probably would have run out of money and
returned to Italy to face the police.
155
But Angelo’s kindness only went so far. He urgently
needed to discuss Alessia with somebody. He decided then
to visit Luisa and Juan at Playa El Agua beach.
The drive there killed about ninety minutes, mainly
because Punta de Piedras and El Agua are on opposite ends
of the island and because of the traffic jam caused by all the
beachgoers who stopped along the road to buy coconut
smoothies and cachapas. The police also kept the traffic
moving slowly. Marcello put on a straight face and waved
when he passed the sun-baked traffic guards.
The competition among the makers of coconut
smoothies along the road to El Agua struck Marcello as
interesting, especially because he really couldn’t taste the
difference among them. They were all made pretty much
the same way: the vendors used coconut concentrate that
they kept refrigerated in plastic jugs and then added to a
blender cup full of ice. Then they added sugar while they
blended the ice and the coconut syrup. They served the
mixture in plastic cups, either with or without cinnamon or
sweetened condensed milk, whichever the buyer preferred.
Marcello decided to stop for one and see if its taste
lightened up his spirit. While he waited, the owner of the
roadside restaurant told Marcello that he never added
condensed milk to the coconut smoothies. He said that a
well-made smoothie should taste like coconut and that you
shouldn’t use anything to mask its flavor.
Whatever, Marcello thought as he pictured the
shirtless man in front of him as a coconut smoothie
connoisseur who prepared his drinks much like one of
those proud winemakers in Italy. In Europe they all said
basically the same thing: My grapes are the best, so I don’t
need to add anything to the wine.
Different place, same pride, he thought as he paid
for his smoothie and returned to the Land Cruiser. He
decided that the drink was delicious, whether it had
condensed milk or not.
When Marcello got to Playa El Agua, he parked his
vehicle next to Juan’s restaurant, just off the paved road
156
that serviced the beach and slightly into the sand that
separated the road and the eatery. With a four-wheel-drive
truck he didn’t have to worry very much about getting stuck
in the sand.
Juan shouted his name as soon as he walked in.
“How’s my boy?”
“Not very well,” replied Marcello, wondering how he
was going to kick-start the deepest conversation he would
ever share with anybody in this country. “Not very well at
all,” he repeated, seeing that Juan was paying more
attention to adding up a tab for table number two.
Marcello thought it quite odd that Juan had
numbered his two tables, since his customers sat at either
one or the other. Maybe that came from his hidden desire
to own a full-scale restaurant one day, or maybe too many
years at the beach had affected his head.
Marcello had a foldable chair, his towel, and a book
that he had bought called The Sexth Sense. He thought it
would be a good idea to read about neurotic women from a
man’s perspective and perhaps get a chuckle or two out of
it. He was also still suffering from a hangover, so he wanted
to rest his body and mind in a comfortable chair with an
easy-to-read book. He found a good spot in the shade and
settled down for some reading. His eyelids became heavy
after only a few pages, though, and soon he dozed off.
The first thing that came to him in the dream was
the mouth-watering aroma of hot empanadas. Then
Alejandra materialized from the steam over a sizzling pot in
a food stand.
“Alejandra!” Marcello cried. “I’m so glad to see you!”
“What kind of empanadas do you have today?”
“Oh, hi, Marcello! I have the usual—cheese, chicken,
baby shark . . .”
“What kind is this?” he said, pointing at one sitting
in the plastic strainer. “It has a very strange shape.”
“It’s a fortune empanada, Marcello. Haven’t you ever
opened one? They’re just like Chinese fortune cookies, but
the message is written on a waterproof plastic inside the
157
empanada instead of on a little piece of paper. Do you want
to know your future, Marcello?” she added with a
mysterious, Cheshire-cat grin.
“I’m not sure. What if my future is not good?”
“Oh, my dear! Your future is beautiful. Trust me.
Let’s see how it comes out of the frying pan. Yes, your
future is golden. Here, take this empanada and open it.
Don’t tell me what it says inside. I just know it will be
something good.”
“Thank you. Did I ever tell you that you’re very
pretty when you smile? Let me open the empanada and
see.” Then he handed it back to Alejandra. “Would you read
it for me, please? I want to hear its message from your lips.”
“Okay, Marcello.” Her eyes went wide when she read
the words. Wow! I told you it would be wonderful. Your
fortune says—”
“Ragazzo, wake up!” Juan shouted.
Marcello flinched, tipped over his folding chair, and
fell facefirst into the sand.
“You were talking in your sleep.” Juan stood over
him, looking unfashionable in his soiled apron.
Marcello blinked at him, trying to refocus.
“Do you want some lunch?”
Marcello got to his feet and brushed the sand from
his face and clothes. “I guess so. Grazie. What’s on the
menu?”
“We have fried shrimp, and—”
“Fried shrimp is fine. And to drink?”
“What do you mean? You know, the usual. But today
I’m not going to serve you anything with an alcohol content
higher than soda. That breath of yours tells me I would only
be aiding your self-destructive process.”
Marcello tried to nod his agreement, but that made
his head hurt too much.
Juan chuckled and said, “You really do look like shit.
Better eat something. I’ll give you a friend’s price today.”
158
Marcello snorted. “I know all about your friend’s
pricing, but that’s okay. Your food is good. Give me a
minute, and I’ll be there.”
As Marcello scuffed down the beach toward the surf
he passed an empanada vendor. That gave him an eerie
sensation of dèjá vu. No big deal, he thought. Happens all
the time. Then he collapsed into the refreshing water.
“Luisa!” Marcello called as he approached the little
restaurant. He felt better now, and he was more than glad
to see her again. “How’s business?”
“Marcello! Where’ve you been?” the attractive fortysomething replied. “My necklaces are all the rage on the
beach today. I can’t keep up with the demand. How’s the
cowboy life?”
“How did you know about—”
“A little bird told me that you were tending cattle in
the Cojedes state. Tinaco, he said.”
“Those birds fly very far.”
Luisa gave him a quick grin, but then she turned
away and busied herself with something behind the
counter. He still wanted to unburden himself of his sad
story, but how could he get into that unless he found the
right opening? She had replied to his last comment only
with a perfunctory smile, and now she seemed preoccupied.
Even so, he decided not to give up. After all, wasn’t she a
member of one of the nosiest nationalities on Earth? He
waited for her curiosity to get the better of her.
Finally Luisa looked up and said, “So you’re a fullblown cowboy now.”
“More like the lone ranger.”
No answer.
She’s better at this waiting game than I am, Marcello
thought. Oh, what the hell. I’ll just tell her. “Alessia married
Francesco,” he announced.
For the first time he heard a voice declaring the end
of the plans that had kept him calm during his travels in
this foreign land. It shocked him again to hear the words
159
Alessia, marriage and a name that wasn’t his in the same
sentence.
Luisa carried her backpack full of necklaces to
Marcello’s table and sat down. “Who’s Francesco?”
“A man I saw only a couple of times. To be honest, I
thought he was a nice guy.” Marcello tried to remember
more about his ex-fiancée’s brand-new husband, but he
came up empty. “I guess he was a nice guy with a wellplanned future.”
“A future that Alessia bought into.”
Marcello thought this sounded like a cookie-cutter
explanation for what had happened, but he knew that Luisa
spoke from more than twenty years of experience with men.
Juan joined them and said, “Yeah, a future that
someone who collects cow dung for a living in a third-world
country can’t provide.” Marcello wanted to knock the smirk
off Juan’s face with his fist, but he controlled himself. “You
don’t understand. Alessia was always there for me. Her
feelings weren’t just in what she said or wrote. They were in
her eyes and in her . . . desperation. I was like the drug she
needed to get by. When I wasn’t around, she would break
down. Everybody knew that.”
Luisa patted Marcello’s hand. “I could have waited
for the right man forever,” she said, looking at Juan.
“Yeah, right,” said Juan with a laugh. “You kept
yourself busy until I came along. The waiting line had kingsized beds and mirrors on the ceiling.”
Luisa scowled at him and delivered a sharp punch to
his shoulder. “You know nothing about that, so shut your
mouth.” She turned back to Marcello and seized his hand.
“When I was in my early twenties, I saw this war movie,
and I imagined how it must be to wait for years for my man
to return—me standing on a pier wearing a long dress and
hoping desperately that the next ship would bring my lover
back.”
She turned her gaze toward the sea and the small
islands that were visible from El Agua beach.
160
Juan looked down and shook his head slowly.
Apparently he had heard this story before. .
Luisa turned back to Marcello and said, “I really
don’t know your Alexandra—”
“Alessia,” Marcello said.
“Yes, of course. I don’t know if she could be as
patient as I was.”
“Patient?” Juan said. “You married the first guy you
met who owned a car.”
“I did not!” Luisa replied, looking offended. “It’s just
that the distances in Caracas make it hard for people
without a car to get around. Besides, his family had a lot in
common with mine.”
Marcello thumped his fist on the table. “You know
what I think? I think Alessia married the first guy she met
so she could forget about me. I’m sure that she believed we
were meant to be together in the end, but she probably
became desperate—so upset that she had to find something
to calm her and that something was a wedding.”
Marcello’s only consolation was the thought of
Alessia’s suffering the loss of her one-and-only true love
like the lovers in those passionate books and movies that
usually involved medieval castles and princesses with
extremely long hair. His heart ached to think that the only
way Alessia could find to relieve her pain was to walk down
the aisle with a man—any man. Somehow that made him
feel better. Maybe the priest who swore them to their
sacred, eternal union cast the spell that banished Marcello
from her mind. When Alessia returned from her
honeymoon, she would be an incredibly happy married
woman who had never met a man named Marcello. The
wedding would be the milestone that marked the beginning
of her new life.
Luisa nodded as Marcello laid out his theory, while
Juan drummed his fingers on the wooden table and rolled
his eyes.
161
“That’s complete nonsense,” said Juan. “People don’t
get married just because they’re lonely. They get married
because they want to.”
“You don’t understand how a woman thinks,” replied
Luisa without looking at Juan.
“Sorry, Marcello, to tell you this,” Juan said, “but
Luisa is just trying to give you false hopes. “She thinks
you’re a nice guy, so she wants to make you smile. Believe
me, jefe, nobody waits for anybody in this day and age. Not
in Venezuela. And not in Europe.”
Marcello could only stare at him.
“Yes, I know,” Juan said. “It feels good to hear that
this girl can still be yours—eventually. You can try to think
that there’s some hidden meaning in what she did, but that
just makes things harder for you. You’re just whipping
yourself like a flagellant. In the long run it will make you
crazy. Vas a parar en loco, mi pana.”
“I’m not being cruel,” Luisa said.
“Forget that girl in Italy, I say. It’s for your own
good.”
This time Luisa didn’t protest.
Juan jabbed a finger at Marcello and said, “She’s
with somebody else now, so you have to accept that failure.
But remember that failing is not such a bad thing.” He
turned away and motioned to the waiter, who was standing
outside smoking a cigarette. “Ernesto! How many times
have we lost playing dominos?”
The middle-aged waiter frowned, then raised his
right hand and shook it once, as if brushing dust from a
shelf. In Venezuelan sign language that meant “Que jode,”
which is slang for “many, many times.”
Juan turned back to Marcello with a smile. “Ernesto
and I are not that lousy. It’s just that the others cheat
without us catching them.”
Marcello put his head in his hands.
Juan said, “Maybe if you pick up all the good things
and move on, you’ll be happy again, you know? We have a
162
saying here—‘Nadie me quita lo bailao’—which is like
saying ‘Nobody can take from me what I have danced.’”
“What the hell does that mean?” Marcello said
without looking up. “Is that another idiotic Venezuelan
riddle?”
“Call it what you wish. I’m not going to stand
between you and the cliff you will jump off, but I can tell
you this”—Juan took a drink from Marcello’s glass of cola.
“Whatever is in your past, it’s all yours, and nobody can
take that away from you. If you have loved and someone
has loved you in return, then it’s a part of your history that
can only make you stronger.”
“Whoa!” Luisa said. “Listen to my Juan, the great
philosopher!” She gave him a big smooch on his stubbly
cheek and giggled. “Hearing you two talk this way is funny.
Juan, you were concentrating so hard that you didn’t know
whose glass you were drinking from.”
Marcello looked up at Juan and said, “Sorry, but that
only makes me feel worse. If I make an inventory of the
‘good times,’ I’ll just remember each one in vivid detail, and
I don’t want to do that. But thanks for the advice, anyway.”
The smell of seafood cooking, the fresh breeze, the sound of
children laughing, and the whole sunny spectacle on Playa
El Agua beach weren’t enough to lift Marcello’s mood and
show him that his life could be as beautiful as the panorama
he was supposed to be enjoying.
“Questo . . . É un paradiso,” he said to himself. “I’m
the only fool crying in paradise.”
Juan and Luisa gazed at him but said nothing. “You
can both try to pick the best words possible,” Marcello told
them, “and you can dig from a big trunk a lot of old sayings
to make me feel better, but I can think of only one
word—regret. I regret running over those people. I regret
running away when I could of faced my problem directly.
Even gone to jail, if I had to. And I regret leaving Alessia.”
Luisa squeezed his hand. “Marcello, you can’t—”
163
“I’m sorry, but I really do regret leaving her. I regret
thinking that she would wait for me. I regret being wrong. I
regret . . .”
The drone of an ultralight airplane flying by caught
his attention. “I was like Icarus, thinking that I could fly
straight to the sun. I wanted everything, and I almost had it
all. Then I fell from the sky, just like him.”
Juan shook his head slowly with Marcello’s words,
then stopped and grinned. “Bueno, ‘Icaro,’ ten cuidado y no
me vayas a botar las plumas,” quipped Juan tongue-incheek. “Don’t go out scattering your feathers.”
Nobody said anything. Marcello was only vaguely
aware of the distant beach sounds—the steady wash of the
waves, people’s voices. Then Ernesto, the waiter, burst into
laughter. Juan looked at him and began to laugh, too.
Luisa, who was still petting Marcello’s hand, turned red and
loosed a flood of tears. But soon she joined in the laughter.
“It’s slang,” she told Marcello. ‘Botar las plumas,’ or
‘lose your feathers,’ means—”
“I know, I know.” Marcello frowned. Normally he
would have tolerated a gay joke on him, but not now.
“I’m really sorry about laughing,” Luisa said, swiping
tears from her face. “But I really can’t imagine Icarus
shrieking like a girl when his wax melted. ‘Hi, Daddy! Hi,
everybody. Look at me! I’m a bird. I can flyyyy!’” Luisa
flapped her imaginary wings. “I’m going to touch the
suuuunnnnn! Oh, no! Oh, my God! Nooooo! I’m falling! I’m
going to dieeeeee!”
Juan clapped his hands in appreciation.
Marcello understood the joke. Too bad that it was on
him, though. Luisa got up and followed Juan into the
kitchen, still giggling and wiping her face. The sound of
their laughter floated into the dining area, along with
comments like “Ciao, Io sono Marcellina!” “How do you
say ‘throw your feathers’ in Italian?” “Perdre vos plumes,”
and “No, you idiot, that’s French.”
Marcello felt like a complete imbecile. There he was,
sitting alone at a wooden table in a restaurant by the beach,
164
unable to express how miserable he felt about his beloved
Alessia’s marrying another man, all because he was trapped
in another country and had lost contact with her. And what
did he get? Mockery, that’s what. Plain mockery. Somehow
it had ended up with his being compared with a
homosexual person, who, according to Greek mythology,
was definitely not homosexual. He didn’t have anything
against gay people, but he didn’t like being compared to
them. Avoiding that type of joke was a hetero male’s
imperative.
If he had begged Luisa, she probably would have
listened to him for hours. But listening was one thing, and
providing a solution was another. And the best solution, he
thought, could be delivered only by some magical being or
superhero who would turn back time to a point before he
ran over the Japanese couple in the Spanish islands and
had to flee the country. If he could be granted one wish, it
would be for such a genie or magician to give him back his
life.
But he figured that all time travel, even in its
theoretical form, must be very complicated. If he hadn’t
come to South America, he wouldn’t have worked with
Angelo, met Leonora the cigarette girl, become lost in the
jungle, worked as a cowboy with rubber boots, or met the
sumptuous Alejandra. That tradeoff had been bouncing
around in Marcello’s head ever since he received the
wedding news from Filippo. But still, if he put both sides of
his decision on a scale, keeping Alessia would still outweigh
the rest. That’s what he had tried to explain to his beach
friends.
He didn’t blame Juan, Luisa, and the waiter for the
way they dealt with the problems of life—by laughing them
off. If Luisa regretted leaving her ex-husbands in Caracas
and found a way to reverse her actions (with the time
machine, perhaps), then she wouldn’t have met Juan. If
Juan regretted not studying to be a doctor or some other
high-paying professional, he wouldn’t be working at the
beach. And spending most of your days on a sunny beach
165
didn’t seem like such a bad proposition. As for the “poor”
waiter, he probably never even learned a trade, but that
didn’t stop him from having a good time at Marcello’s
expense.
Searching for a guiding light, Marcello kept thinking
about the plusses on the South American side of the scale.
He could have made those trips to the beach and to the
Gran Sabana with Alessia, but he knew that the experience
of living in a particular place out of necessity was quite
different from the experience of a week on vacation.
Nobody on vacation has to ride a bus, especially the kind of
bus that takes to their work the people who can’t afford
their own car. Few vacations allow you to repair a diesel
engine below decks under a blistering sun. And, most
important, few vacations can change a person the way that
the past eight months in Venezuela had changed Marcello.
The other tangible benefits on one side of the scale
were the women he had met since he arrived here. A quick
account of the cigarette girl proved to be what her name
implied: she was somebody to “promote’ and a lovely
companion for him to showcase. She was funny, too, and
very self-confident. But for some reason she hadn’t been all
that into Marcello, although she seemed to enjoy their brief
affair as much as he did. The final element on the scale
plate was Alejandra, a girl he had met one day at noon,
talked with for the rest of the afternoon, and shared a
memorable night of lovemaking. That unusual relationship
vanished almost as quickly as it had arrived.
But even all those fond memories couldn’t erase
those of Alessia. He started to carve her name on the
tabletop with a butter knife, but he stopped at the letter E.
Too many questions teased his mind. Why would the
daughter of an empanada vendor play her cello at dawn and
weep? Why wouldn’t such a sweet, secure, and
unconventionally attractive young woman have a steady
boyfriend or a man who kept her under lock and key?
Juan served Marcello his shrimp personally, patted
his shoulder, grinned at him, and returned to the kitchen.
166
Marcello thought of a Venezuelan Icarus. When he fell into
the water, instead of drowning, his pals would pick him up
in a wooden peñero, and they’d spend the next hour making
fun of his wings and the feathers, too, of course. The
Minotaur, a couple of centaurs, and even Medusa—the
mother of all cuaimas—would have a laugh at Icarus’s
undoing. But then Medusa would collar Icarus and tell him:
“Look at me. Sorry, no, don’t look at me. Listen to me,
Icarus. We’re really proud of what you attempted.” After
that, the Venezuelan Icarus would decide that instead of
trying to reach the sun, a trip to La Feria del Sol would be a
much better use of his time. Of course the Minotaur would
skip that trip.
Marcello had heard about the “Sun Fair” in the
Merida state from a student in one of the buses that he took
to Playa El Agua. The guy said it was a full week of partying
and general mayhem. But Merida was sixteen to twenty
hours from Margarita, including the ferry ride. Puerto
Cabello was much closer, he thought. Puerto Cabello?
Wasn’t that where Alejandra worked?
Marcello turned around and looked at his truck
hunkering there in the hot sun, its front wheels on the sand
and its rear wheels on asphalt.
“Amico,” he whispered, as if the Land Cruiser could
understand what he was saying, especially if speaking in
Italian to a Japanese vehicle. “Abbiamo un lavoro
importantissimo.”
He knew that this “important job” could be
understood only through the rush of a sorrow that flows
from your head to your heart and back up to the decisionmaking room. It would all make sense if, and only if,
somebody was waiting for him.
Marcello put that rush on display as soon as the four
wheels of his SUV touched mainland concrete in Puerto La
Cruz. He had taken the quicker ferry, but he couldn’t sleep
during the two-hour-and-a-half crossing, thinking
constantly about the first words he would say when he saw
167
Alejandra. That is, if he saw her. Marcello had never been to
Puerto Cabello, and he didn’t know where to look for her.
But for him, just knowing that she worked in a shipyard in
the city was good enough.
Now it was ten o’clock on Sunday night, and the road
was dark. His excitement kept him from falling asleep at
the wheel. His foot pressed the gas pedal with enough force
to keep the truck moving at its maximum cruising speed.
He distracted himself by thinking about how the gas pedal
pulled a wire that punched through the metal firewall that
separates the engine from the cockpit. That cable was
connected to a lever on the carburetor that opened a
butterfly valve that let enough air flow into the engine
breathers to suck in droplets of gasoline. He could visualize
the drops atomizing into a spray and mixing with the
incoming air.
And what was all of this for? To bring a young and
desperate man closer to the one person who could take his
spent body and fill it up with enough hope to reach the next
morning, and the next and the next.
Marcello wasn’t looking for a metaphor that could
connect the 2F engine of the Land Cruiser with his present
state of affairs. Thinking about all the mechanical
connections was just a way to keep himself awake through
the wee hours of the night.
It was 2 a.m. when he reached Caracas. This time he
encountered no traffic at all. The city was sound asleep.
Marcello pulled into a gas station next to a convenience
store with several attendants moving about. He knew that
they were alert not so much because of the fumes they
inhaled but to detect any suspicious stranger who might
turn out to be a thief. Marcello climbed stiffly from the
truck and asked one of the grease monkeys for a fill-up. A
security guard sat in front of the store with a shotgun across
his lap, a transistor radio blaring salsa music next to him.
Marcello kept an eye on the flickering numbers on the
pump. For his own amusement he liked to figure the value
168
of gasoline in terms of cups of espresso. This time the gas
tank needed only two cups’ worth. That’s how cheap
gasoline was here.
Instead of asking the attendant for directions to
Puerto Cabello, Marcello decided to head to Valencia and
follow the signs on the freeway. The only problem was that
now he was feeling very sleepy.
The lights on the road to Valencia soon became
blurry. The oncoming vehicles blinded him, and the
taillights of the cars in front of him took on weird shapes.
Once, his mind reassembled what his eyes saw into the
form of a docking ferry. The boat cruised onto the freeway
on the rightmost lane on the opposite side of the
roadway—to his far left—and chugged across the road in
front of him. He had to bang his head against the steering
wheel to reboot his brain and start interpreting the signals
from his eyes more or less correctly again.
Marcello even tried to masturbate to stay awake, as
shocking as that might seem to the passengers in the buses
he passed, assuming they weren’t sound asleep. Unzipping
his pants while he was driving wasn’t easy, though, and
neither was becoming aroused with all the bright, colorful
lights in his face. Perhaps that’s why the Cojedes
whorehouses’ lights were dim, after all.
That experiment kept him occupied until he rolled
into the city of Valencia at about 4 a.m. There the
uncertainty of navigating his way through unfamiliar
territory kept him awake.
An hour later he finally arrived in Puerto Cabello,
where he was greeted by a big, green sign that said
“MORON.” He had to think about that for a minute before
he realized that the sign referred to a town with that name,
not to him and his decision to drive all night without sleep,
all alone on unfamiliar Venezuelan roads, without knowing
where the hell he was going. But now he was here. Problem
was, he had hit town at five-thirty in the morning, when
nobody was around to ask for directions. So he kept driving
east through the city, following the coastline. The sun
169
peeked over the mountains that descended abruptly into
the sea. The dawn made a silhouette of a large ship that had
been dry-docked for repairs at a shipyard. He hadn’t seen
any other shipyards, so he thought that this might be the
one where Alejandra worked. But it was still too early to
find out.
Then Marcello finally realized that he could use
some sleep. The face he saw in the rearview mirror
reminded him that his head hadn’t touched a pillow in
almost twenty-four hours. He thought that only someone
who had pushed his car across the country could have
looked worse.
Marcello found the same type of inexpensive hotels
in Puerto Cabello as those he had seen in downtown
Porlamar—the kind that aren’t listed in most tourist
guidebooks. He had learned that hotels like these mainly
served people who were on foot and those who couldn’t
afford a three- or four-star hotel. Some of these hotels, he
thought, could be awarded a whole star plus three or four
points of a second star. To his way of thinking, the problem
with awarding only two points for the second star is that
you need at least three points to define an area. Anything
less is just a line from point A to point B. Perhaps that was
the real reason for the nickname of a group of hotels in
Valencia. One of Alejandra’s cousins had told him that the
area they occupy is called the “Bermuda Triangle,” or two
points short of a star. But he said the name meant that
female virginity disappeared there, never to return.
They were that type of hotel.
170
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
In his small room at the hotel in Puerto Cabello
Marcello picked up the almost translucent excuse for a
towel from the top of the toilet and grabbed his own soap,
then headed for the shower. The last thing he wanted was
to smell like cheap hotel soap. He hadn’t risked his life
driving all night to show up at Alejandra’s door looking like
a man who had just dropped off Miss Plan B an hour
before.
Marcello didn’t expect warm water, so he was
pleasantly surprised when that’s what came out of the
showerhead. The shower looked like the bottom of a coffee
pot, but maybe that was just his will to stay awake. The type
of steel used here was probably the same, but obviously an
espresso coffee maker can’t have holes, so Marcello moved
his gaze and his thoughts to the small gecko that clung to
the part of the wall that had been recently painted white,
just above the tiles. The gecko just stared at him with a look
that said it wanted Marcello to finish his shower quickly so
it could drink from a puddle, preferably one with no soap or
human hairs in it. Or maybe this was a female gecko
admiring his masculine anatomy and wondering if
Marcello’s tail would ever grow back.
Whatever the case, it kept him distracted until he left
the bathroom, dried himself, and collapsed onto the lumpy
bed, hoping that he could restore his energy in the next few
hours until 9:30, the exact time he expected to visit the girl
he had more than met in Tucacas.
The dreamscape was a sunny, empty beach. Only the
woman selling empanadas, Marcello, and his fiancée were
there. He was walking back to the place where Alejandra
171
waited for him, sitting prettily on a yellow, blue, and red
towel, her hands resting on her knees and the onshore
breeze ruffling her black and reddish hair. If the wind blew
from the sea, he thought, this had to be Playa El Agua. But
an empty Playa El Agua? That didn’t make much sense,
especially in the daytime.
Marcello carried four meat-and-cheese empanadas
and a soft drink to his beloved soul mate across about a
hundred meters of warm sand. When he had taken another
ten steps, the chant began. At first he thought the beautiful
melody came from a beachgoer’s boom box, but he didn’t
see anybody. The melody was a mixture of instrumental
music and opera, the kind that keeps you awake long
enough to enjoy it. He stopped and looked back to see if the
empanada lady moonlighted as a cabaret singer: nope.
He turned again and looked seaward. And there she
was, in a stunning, R-rated version of herself, with her
dark, wet locks pasted to her bare chest but not placed
strategically to hide her brown nipples, standing erect from
the cool water. Her honeyed skin flowed perfectly into the
waist-level fish scales that such heavenly creatures are
entitled to.
As soon as she noted Marcello’s attention she ended
her song on a high note, both figuratively and musically.
Then she turned and dived cleanly into the water and swam
off using butterfly strokes and a sinuous, eel-like motion,
which, he thought, must be the only practical swimming
styles when your legs have been replaced with a huge
aquatic mammal tail.
Marcello was flabbergasted. His mind had lost
control of his body’s actions, which were summoned now by
the lingering notes of the siren’s call. With every step he
took he moved farther to the left, away from Alejandra,
toward the deep water where the beautiful mermaid waited
for her land-bound man. As he sleepwalked closer to her,
the crashing waves sprayed the paper bags filled with
empanadas and soaked him from head to toe. Then,
suddenly, the spell evaporated.
172
“This is not possible,” Marcello told himself. “I need
to make an urgent decision.”
When the mermaid stopped swimming and peered
at him, Marcello had already made up his mind. He would
consume all four empanadas and the soft drink and then
take the plunge. After all, as they say in this land, “Love
with hunger doesn’t last.” He spent the rest of the afternoon
making incredible love to the sun-warmed—and two-legged
version—of a gorgeous and mythical nymphomaniac in
hidden coastal caves. Whenever they needed to rest or
wanted to explore different caves, she regained her
powerful tail and helped him swim tirelessly around the
Margarita coast. Dreamy hours filled with nothing but pure
lust and uninhibited sex. Obviously, time flew, and
eventually Marcello remembered that someone was waiting
for him at the beach. When they finally said their goodbyes, both lovers promised to sea each other again.
A tired, wet Marcello dragged himself on to the
moonlit beach where he had left Alejandra. But neither she
nor the empanada lady nor anyone else was there. Where
Alejandra’s towel had been was a half-buried body-board
with its rounded end pointing at the sky. On the board was
an inscription made with zinc-based sun block: “Here lies
Alejandra Aponte. People say she died of love; others think
that an empanada could have saved her. Her father holds
Marcello Carosio responsible for her death.”
Marcello was shocked. The grin that he had been
trying to wipe from his face since he left the sexy mermaid
quickly turned into a frown and then into a trembling jaw.
He dropped to his knees and wailed, “No, no, noooooo!
Alejandra!”
“Marcello,” whispered a voice that seemed to come
from the palm trees near the road. “Marcello . . .”
He swept the tears from his eyes, forgetting that he
had sand on his hands. He couldn’t see anybody there, but
his ears were sure that it was Alejandra’s voice. He stood up
and started walking.
173
The stand of coconut palms that separated Playa El
Agua from the road were dark and much more dense than
what he recalled from his previous trips to the beach.
Alejandra’s darker silhouette seemed to appear in the
moon-made shadows until he got closer, and then it
dissolved. The pain of his guilt pierced his will when he
stepped on the occasional bottle cap or piece of broken
glass.
“Marcello . . . Marcello . . .” The whisper was louder
now.
And then he saw something ahead of him under one
of the palm trees—a shimmer of little lights. Alejandra
appeared and caught his hand. She walked him silently to a
beach club, complete with a board floor, a bar with colored
lamps, a barman—of course—and three very fair-skinned
women, who sat very ladylike on their bar stool with their
legs crossed, sipping passion-fruit cocktails. When he was
close to them, one of them said, “Care to dance?” She had
the ethereal voice of an angel.
Marcello turned to Alejandra, who smiled silently
and nudged him toward the beautiful, pale woman. They
began with merengue, which was the only Latin American
dance style he had learned. The first songs went by through
spins, waist grabs, and shuffling steps back and forth. Then
came the next dance, and the next, and the next. Marcello
could feel his bilirubin levels increasing, and more
important, his bare feet felt the pain of sliding across a
wooden surface that was too rough for that. But his dance
partner wasn’t tired; she seemed to hover otherworldly over
the boards, smiling encouragingly at him. After the
fourteenth song he managed to persuade her to go back to
the bar, where Alejandra and her two friends sat watching
them.
When he had limped to the bar, the man working
there—who bore a strong resemblance to Juan—smiled and
said, “A ponerse alpargatas, que lo que viene es Joropo.”
Marcello knew that expression: “Grab your sandals,
because what’s coming is Joropo23,” an expression meaning
174
that he had to prepare himself for tough times. But he
thought that this was simply a saying and not that he
actually had to dance Joropo with the second woman at the
bar. Marcello had seen others do the dance at a state fair
near Tinaco, so he decided that he wouldn’t let the lady
down.
He clasped his hands behind his back and stomped
his feet on the wooden floor, which hurt more and more as
he continued the dance. Somehow he remembered all the
moves he had seen before, and over the course of about
thirty different songs he repeated them all a gazillion times.
He thought that he must have danced every song ever
written about horses, men with cowboy hats, and women
who reminded them of white cranes, roses and orchids. All
but exhausted, Marcello asked for a break, surprised that
his dancing partner looked as fresh as just-squeezed milk,
with a color to match.
He crawled to the bar and begged the bartender:
“Please bring me my rum.”
The barman lifted his brow and stopped wiping the
counter. Then he turned and quickly surveyed all the
bottles on the shelves. He looked at Marcello and said, “We
haven’t had that spirit here since two thousand and one.”
“I’m next!” piped the youngest of the three fairywomen. She was dressed in the party finery of a typical
Venezuelan city girl in her early twenties.
The party crowd was all about his barely visible
friends and dancing to tunes from any purveyor of pop
music. If Marcello had brought any cyanide candies with
him, he surely would have downed one to end his suffering.
How could he possibly dance another step? But then he was
on the dance floor again, bending, twisting, and tilting his
body and trying to copy her moves. Up and down, up and
down, slowly up and rapidly down, down but not up. Soon
Marcello was about to drop, but his youthful partner hadn’t
even broken a sweat. Just then the first collapse of the night
appeared. He sat on the wooden floor, panting, with no
strength to climb to his feet.
175
The beautiful woman sashayed up to him and said,
“Come on lover boy, you can’t quit now.” Her smile took
even more of his breath away.
Marcello tried to stand up, but he couldn’t make it.
Finally, the woman and another dancing queen managed to
drag him to the bar, where he clung to an empty stool like
an exhausted boxer hanging on the ropes. He knew that he
was still alive, and that meant everything to him. The
bartender gave Marcello a grave look and then pointed
silently down the bar. On a stool sat a translucent
Alejandra, legs crossed and wearing the most determined
expression he could expect from her.
Smiling, she left her drink on the counter, stood up,
approached him and said, “Ever danced tambores?”
Marcello knew that Alejandra was referring to an
African rhythm that had been seeded in the culture of the
Venezuelan coast. As the drums, or tambores, play rapidly,
the dancers squat and shake their hips at the same
drumming speed. Other participants form a circle around
them so couples can take their turn dancing in the middle.
Often a couple starts to dance and moments later someone
from the circle shoves aside a dancer of the same sex.
You’re allowed to rest if somebody pushes you away. The
problem now was the shortage of men, other than Marcello
and the bartender, who was busily making Bloody Mary’s at
about the same rate that the real thing was leaking from
Marcello’s swollen and blistering feet.
The three fairies formed a triangle around Marcello
and Alejandra. He could barely stand, but Alejandra forced
him to get moving. Before he could complete the first turn
around her, leaning forward with his arms spread wide, he
tripped on his own feet and fell onto his face. Alejandra and
another woman hauled him to his feet and made him dance
again. He was spinning with his hands behind his back
when he fell again. This time he banged his head hard on
the floor. They lifted him like a bloodied fighting rooster for
another round. He drifted in a state of limbo now. When he
176
tried to bend his body so he could shuffle under a stick held
by two fairies, he collapsed onto his back.
As life drained from his body, the last thing that
Marcello saw was the astonished look on the blanched faces
of the four women looking down at him.
Isabel poked her head through the door of the
Purchasing Department in the main building of the
shipyard and told Alejandra, “Un hombre te busca. I just
passed the entrance, and the guard told me that a fellow
with an Italian name was looking for you.”
“Must be one of the maintenance guys,” Alejandra
replied to her colleague “Didn’t the guard tell him that we
pay on Thursdays?”
“The man said it was personal,” Isabel said, and then
scooted off. “Oh.”
Then a familiar voice in the hallway said, “I’m
looking for Alejandra Aponte.” “She’s in there,” Isabel told
him.
Isabel marched into their shared office with Marcello
in tow.
Alejandra stopped breathing. She didn’t know how
to react to seeing this one-night-stand. A couple of weeks
had gone by, but the memory of him was still fresh. Was he
returning for an encore? If that’s what he wanted, he’d be
surprised to know that he would have to work ten times
harder this time but wouldn’t necessarily get ten times the
satisfaction. She tried to arrange her face into an expression
of a formal diplomatic greeting. “Marcello? Hola, cómo has
estado?” She lengthened the vowels to affect surprise and to
try to indicate that he was unexpected but welcome.
“I . . . I . . .” he stammered. “Sorry to drop in on you
like this, but I forgot to ask you for your phone number.”
“Need something to write it down? Or do you have a
cell phone?” Alejandra said, wondering why Isabel was still
standing there as if she had nothing better to do with her
time.
177
“You know, so maybe we can go out for a coffee or
something,” he added quickly, as if she had interrupted a
prepared speech.
Alejandra hoped she hadn’t sounded too cold to the
poor guy. Marcello fumbled a cell phone from his pocket
with trembling hands. When she recited her number to
him, his case of the jitters grew worse. He had to start over
again twice. “Where did you come from?” she asked.
“Milan,” Marcello replied, still punching buttons on
his phone.
“No, I know that,” she said, giving Isabel a look. “I
mean, you’re not living in Puerto Cabello, are you?”
Marcello finally looked up, smiled, and said, “No,” a
look of relief on his face. “I’m living on a farm near Tinaco,
in the Cojedes state.”
“Oh, that’s nice.”
“But I just came here from Margarita.”
“Did you fly to Valencia?” Alejandra’s curiosity
increased with the unlikeliness of this Italian tourist’s
showing up here, so far from the city where they had met.
“No. I took the ferry to Puerto La Cruz and drove
here last night.”
“And why did you come to Puerto Cabello?”
Alejandra said, still clinging to the idea that Marcello was
just passing by.
“Oh, I’m on vacation, and they told me that the
beaches here were nice.”
“Not as nice as Tucacas and Morrocoy.”
“Very nice and beautiful people in Tucacas, you can
meet” Marcello added, which sounded to her like a line that
was half Casanova, half Yoda.
Alejandra’s face felt hot. Isabel shuffled the papers in
her hands and pretended to study them. Alejandra
wondered why she hadn’t left yet.
“Sorry for interrupting your work,” Marcello said.
“I’m sure you must be busy.” Then he turned to Isabel and
shook her hand. “Pleased to meet you.”
178
Alejandra was next. He approached her and bid her
farewell with a kiss on her cheek, the type Venezuelans use
as a formal greeting whenever a woman or a child is
involved.
Then he left.
Alejandra stepped into the hallway just in time to see
Marcello disappear into the elevator. She stared at the
empty hallway for a while, expecting a comment from
Isabel.
But Isabel looked preoccupied when Alejandra
turned back to the office. “Want to go for coffee?” she
asked.
They walked to the break room and sat on an
overstuffed couch where they could share a coffee table. A
large, cylindrical, electric coffee urn that held coffee, hot
water, and warm milk was the centerpiece of the small,
windowless room. It had a water cooler, too, but they
preferred to bring their own reusable plastic bottles from
home, the ones with fancy handles and colors. The cork
bulletin boards on the wall were cluttered with internal
memos and ads for vehicles being sold by employees.
Alejandra got up and headed to the coffee machine.
“You having coffee today?” Alejandra asked when Isabel
joined her.
“Nope. I brought a teabag. It’s decaffeinated herbal.”
“What’s the point of taking a break to drink
something without caffeine?”
“So I can listen to women coffee drinkers spill all the
gory details of their sex life.”
Alejandra laughed.
“His name is Marcello, but you say it ‘Marchelo.’ His
last name is something like curioso or cariñoso. Carosio,
that’s it.”
“Ohhhhh. A mixture of curious and kind?”
Alejandra giggled, feeling glad that a friend was
inquiring about her love life for a change. They returned to
the couch.
179
“I met him in Tucacas,” Alejandra explained. “I was
at the beach helping my mom with the empanadas, and he
was there.”
“He doesn’t look too bad.”
“Yes, you could say that.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Well, he’s okay, and he tries hard to please.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“I’m not looking for somebody now.”
“You’re never looking for somebody, but the
somebodies always find you. This one looks like a nice guy.
He even drove from Margarita, ferry included.”
“Yes, Marcello’s okay. He . . .”
“What?”
“I was just remembering him trying to learn to dance
the merengue. Poor guy, he really thought he was doing
fine.”
“Did you go out?”
“Yes, and . . . more than that.”
“Aha!”
“Where’s he from? Argentina? I heard the men there
are really good-looking. I might move there someday if I
don’t find—”
“No. He’s Italian. That was an Italian speaking
Spanish, not a someone speaking Argentinean.”
“Mieerrr . . . Marica! You got yourself a ticket! What
are you complaining about?”
“Ticket?”
“If you marry a guy from Italy, you can get your
European passport!” Isabel said with obvious excitement.
“What’s wrong? Why that face?”
“Do I look Italian to you?”
“Well, you aren’t Monica Bellucci or Laura Pausini,
but I bet they have a lot of coffee-colored women there.”
“Yeah, and they’re all immigrants from Morocco or
elsewhere,” Alejandra said. “They’re stuck between here
and there. Their looks and speech and mannerisms give
them away, but their work and social activities tie them to
180
the other country. They’re sort of like guests there, and they
wonder if they’ve overstayed their welcome.”
“That’s stupid. Besides, I don’t think all Italians are
as ridiculous as Luciano’s dad.”
“Luciano from Engineering?” Alejandra asked.
“Yeah, that guy. I dated him for a while, and on one
of the first dates he invited me to have lunch with his
parents on a Sunday. First, we arrived about at ten in the
morning, and his dad was watching the Lazio-Juventus
soccer game. See, I even remember the team names. He
was wearing a Juventus scarf. Can you believe that? A
scarf? With this heat? Then he wouldn’t move from the sofa
until the game was over. I like to watch a little football, but
not for two damn hours. During the meal, Luciano’s dad
talked with him the whole time in Italian, as if the man
didn’t know Spanish, and I felt like a dummy asking
Luciano what he had just said. And everything was Italy
this, Turin that, Fiat this, Ferrari that, like he didn’t live
here.”
“See?”
“See what?”
“You just answered yourself,” Alejandra said. “I bet
there’s an Isabel in Italy saying the same thing.”
“That’s different. I was just really bugged that day.”
“Same thing.”
“No, it’s not,” Isabel said. “They can be more polite
or less Italian or more Venezuelan.”
“Huh?”
“You know. Oh, never mind.” She took a sip of her
tea. “It wouldn’t be that bad for you to leave. Really. You
should give it a try.”
“No way. I’m not going to be somebody’s exotic
ornament and the main topic of conversation at cocktail
parties. “‘Oh, where are you from?’” Alejandra said,
mimicking a fine Italian lady. ‘Oh, like the small Venice?
And why did you come? Oh, I see. You’re lucky to be here,
no? I heard that the situation is not so nice over there.’”
Isabel frowned at her.
181
Isabel shook her head. “The idea has crossed your
mind, hasn’t it? Is that why you’re angry? You really have
considered it.”
Alejandra returned to the coffee urn and topped off
her cup.
Isabel said, “At least he’s somebody else for you to
think about, and make you forget— Oops! I’m sorry,
Alejandra. I didn’t mean to say that.”
Alejandra sat down again and said, “You know
something, Isabel?”
“What?”
“Alfredo’s grandfather was from Spain.”
“Yes, I know.”
“He could have easily asked for his European
passport and left like so many of his friends.”
Isabel agreed.
“But he didn’t. He told me once, ‘Alejandra, if we’re
the last ones here, I’ll build that boat for you, and I’ll take
you wherever you want to go.’”
Isabel stared at her, perhaps attentive to the lecture.
“He said, ‘I’ll tie some logs together with rope. I’ll find some
supplies. We can leave through the jungle. Wherever you
go, I’ll go. But now I want you here. I like seeing your face
shining in the sun, seeing you in your bathing suit, sitting
on a towel, on a beach. Where will we find beaches like this
in Spain? Go there once a year maybe? I would die.’”
Isabel stared at Alejandra. “Yes, Alfredo was very
sensitive.”
Alejandra’s eyes remained dry. She wouldn’t cry in
front of others. She could talk about Alfredo Romero now
and all the times they had together without shedding a tear.
“Marcello isn’t a bad person,” Alejandra said.
“What if he stayed here? Then you wouldn’t have to
leave. El chivo y el mecate24.”
“Ver para creer,” Alejandra said with a smirk.
“Seeing is believing.”
182
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Anywhere but Patanemo”, Isabel told Marcello as
he placed her bag in the back of a relatively new FZJ70
Land Cruiser—a short loading process away from traveling
from their reunion point in Puerto Cabello to a sea
destination on the central Venezuelan coast.
Marcello had called Alejandra two days after visiting
her at the shipyard to invite her “just to go the beach”.
Alejandra in turn set the “appointment” for the following
Saturday and suggested to bring Isabel along. Whatever
changes, as long as they moved his plan forward, were okay
with Marcello.
“What’s wrong with that beach?” He asked.
“Hush,” Isabel replied as she stepped farther from
the SUV and from Alejandra, who was sitting in the front
seat. “She just doesn’t like it.”
“Because . . ?”
“It’s okay as a beach, but it brings back old
memories.”
“Oh, I see. Like an old boyfriend.”
Isabel nodded.
Marcello grabbed one handle on the cooler and was
reaching for the other one when the dark hand of another
man clasped that handle. Marcello looked up to find a big,
dusky man with African features and a belly that had been
filled with too many beers. But he had a jolly face that
seemed to want to tell all the tales of many a lifetime of
merry parties and celebrations.
“Let me help you,” he said. “Must be heavy with all
that ice in it.”
183
“Thanks,” Marcello replied with a smile as they
hefted the cooler into the back of the truck.
“This is Manuel,” said Isabel as she stepped close
enough for him to put his arm around her waist.
“Epa!” Manuel said as he shook Marcello’s hand
firmly. “Mucho gusto mi pana.25“
Manuel put his bag on top of the cooler. Marcello
added a couple of folding chairs and an umbrella, slammed
the door, and secured the spare tire, ready to drive them to
“any beach but Patanemo.”
That meant driving out of Puerto Cabello until
somebody suggested a destination. Tucacas and Morrocoy
weren’t far, but he wanted somebody to suggest a new
place.
Alejandra sat next to him, but did not speak for the
first fifteen minutes of the trip. Finally, she said, “So,
Marcello, where’s Musetta?”
“Musetta?” he replied.
“That’s what I said.”
“I don’t know any Musetta.”
Alejandra laughed. “Yes, you do. You’re a bohemian
painter, aren’t you?” After a couple of seconds he said, “Oh.
Right. Puccini.”
“She’s off with a richer man.” Marcello continued.
“But she’ll come back, you know.”
“No, she won’t. She’s fine where she is. Her husband
is completely in love with her and will do whatever she asks
him.”
“Sometimes that’s not enough for a woman, all the
money, ski trips, and jewelry he can shower on her. She’ll
come back. That’s how the story goes.”
“Not a chance,” he insisted, assuming that Alejandra
had already figured out that he was referring to a real
person and not to a character from Puccini’s famous opera.
“She won’t come back, because she never left. I did.”
“You left a girl in Italy?”
“Yes, kind of.”
184
Alejandra turned to Marcello and said, “Was she
pretty?”
“She had black hair that fell below her shoulders.
Her skin was very white, and she would laugh when—Hey,
wait a minute!”
Alejandra burst into laughter. He was glad that he
hadn’t told her too much. For all she knew, he had come
here for a few months and decided to find a girlfriend to
keep him company. And for the other two passengers, the
expression Latin lover could just refer to the original Latin
people, the ones who created the language and the culture
and the first people who thought it was an excellent idea to
conquer the world. Carpe diem, they would have said, or in
plain English, seize the day. And while you’re at it, seize the
girl, too.
Marcello said, “You’re not playing fair, you know? I
think you’re judging me without hearing my story.”
“Okay,” Alejandra said. “Let’s hear your story. We
have plenty of time, because this trip will take at least two
more hours.”
“Oh, yeah? Where are we going?”
“Choroní.”
“Choroní?” Manuel said. “There and back in one
day?”
“Oh, Marcello has driven farther in a day. Isn’t that
true, Marcello?” Alejandra gave him a wicked smile.
“Yes, that’s true. So where should I start my story?”
“Start when you bought the ticket to fly here. You
can stop before you arrived in Tucacas.”
“Well… I ran over some people in Spain, and—”
“Ole!” Isabel cried.
“The Japanese tourists I hit weren’t that thrilled
about it, Isabel.”
“Did you kill them?” Alejandra asked. “Am I riding
with a murderer?”
“No, they survived.”
Manuel leaned forward between the seats. “Was this
a hit-and-run? Did you come here to escape the police?”
185
Marcello nodded gravely, looking straight ahead.
“You must be out of your mind!” Alejandra said.
“I guess I was, at the time. The thing is, we freaked
out, me and my friend Filippo, and we thought it was a
good idea for me to leave Europe. That is, until…”
“Until what?” Alejandra said.
“Probably found somebody to help them cover it up,”
Manuel said. “I heard the police in Italy are just as corrupt
as they are here.”
“That’s not true,” Isabel said. “They couldn’t be as
bad as the cops here.”
“Oh, yeah? Where do you think the mafia came
from?”
Si,
“ huevón. You bet.” Alejandra replied
sarcastically. “There’s a lot more corruption here, only
nobody as famous as Al Capone.”
“Al Capone was from Chicago,” Marcello added, not
really wanting to get into a debate about politics and
corruption.
Alejandra said, “And you’re still running from the
law?” Her voice sounded more concerned.
“No, thank God. Filippo finally sent me an e-mail
just the other day saying that they weren’t even going to
press charges and that I was free to return home.”
“Wow!” said Isabel.
“Ah”, Alejandra added in an impromptu exhale.
“I was using my cell phone while driving, and I
didn’t see those tourists crossing the street.”
“Boom!” Isabel said.
“La tortilla de sushi,” Alejandra added, smiling
again.
“La crepa de arroz,” said Isabel with a giggle.
“Pâté de foie du Japon,” Alejandra said. “Oops,
sorry, that’s French.”
“They were run over by an Italian, so it would have
to be a pizza,” Isabel said.
“Cut it out, you two,” Marcello said. I’m trying to tell
a story here.” He told them how he and Filippo had put the
186
injured couple in their car and raced to the hospital. Then
he had hopped on a plane to Rome and another one to
Caracas, all within a few hours.
“Why did you pick Caracas?” Alejandra asked.
“Haven’t you heard the stories?”
“We had no idea. But if I hadn’t come here, I would
have missed all this.”
“All what?” Manuel asked.
“Um, this.” Marcello gestured toward the freeway
that connected Puerto Cabello with Valencia.
“What?” Isabel asked, grasping his seatback. “The
trees? Don’t you have trees over there? Gli alberi?”
“Ah, parli italiano,” Marcello replied.
“Non parlo niente. Just knew how to say trees. What
are you talking about?”
“I mean, I would have missed meeting people like
you guys.”
“You really don’t know us,” Alejandra said.
“Especially me,” Manuel added.
Marcello wanted to tell them that they didn’t know
anything, because they probably hadn’t been out of
Venezuela long enough. He wanted to say that in spite of
“not knowing them” they had been talking like friends.
They had asked him tons of questions, which showed how
interested they were in his life and his way of thinking. That
had to count for something. Some foreigners he met in
Venezuela called it nosiness. Marcello was very grateful that
strangers in a foreign land could actually give a damn.
An hour and a half later, Marcello stopped the truck
at a street corner near a newspaper kiosk.
Isabel climbed over Alejandra, pulled herself halfway
out the window, and called, “Disculpe, Señor!26“
The middle-aged man who was buying a Meridiano
sports paper at the kiosk turned around and stared at the
green-eyed girl, slack-jawed. Marcello understood why any
man would ogle her. He couldn’t take his eyes off her,
either, as she stretched across Alejandra, with her perfect
187
butt practically in his face. A fine specimen, indeed, he
thought.
“Do you know where the exit to Choroní is?” she
asked the man.
Their expedition had already reached Maracay, a city
between Valencia and Caracas that connected to the coastal
towns of the Aragua state, mainly Choroní by one road and
Ocumare by the other one.
“You’re not from around here, are you?” The man
finally replied.
“Of course not, you idiot,” Manuel muttered to
himself. “Por qué coño crees que te estamos
preguntando?27”
Marcello and Alejandra tried to stifle their laughter.
The man said, “Sorry, but asking about access to the
entrance to Choroní is a classic question of out-of-towners.”
“Si, viejo’el coño28,” Manuel whispered. “Solo dinos
donde queda la puta entrada.29“
Alejandra giggled, and Marcello snorted into his
hand.
A minute later, armed with accurate directions, they
continued to Choroní. The curvy road provided Marcello
with an excellent way for him to see if his stomach and the
food he had just eaten were compatible. It was also a test
for learning whether his driving skills were adapted only to
normal city driving or if he had some ESP to detect the type
of vehicle that was coming around the next blind curve. He
decided to award his sixth sense extra points if he could
detect that the next tree-crowded mountain curve hid not
just one but two small buses, each one traveling in a
different lane. But he hoped he wouldn’t have to pass that
test.
The “Henry Pittier Park” road, as it was called, was
also a good place for a foreigner to hear for the nth time
about how the best cocoa in the world came from Chuao, a
town nearby. His impromptu tour guides told him that the
tall jungle trees in the park shaded the shorter cacao
Criollo trees. These trees bore the cocoa seeds that were
188
dried on large patios before further processing and
shipment abroad for the delight of chocolate lovers around
the world.
They stopped for a restroom break in the small town
of Uraca, where Marcello received another lecture about
cocoa that took longer than all of their calls of nature
combined.
Returning to the SUV, Isabel said to Marcello, “Have
you tasted the chocolate made from Venezuelan cocoa? I
mean, over there in Italy?”
“Not sure. Maybe. I’ve tasted the rum, though. Really
good.”
Her eyes lit up. “We brought some of that in the
cooler, and Manuel brought some guarapita30 from his
job.”
“What does he do?”
“He works special events for the company that
makes the stuff. That means he travels from party to party
and from promotora to promotora to market their rum.”
“Tough job,” Marcello said.
“Yeah, but somebody has to do it,” Isabel said with a
laugh.
“Más respeto,” Manuel said, rejoining them. “A little
more respect, if you don’t mind. The job is harder than you
think.”
Isabel hiked one perfect eyebrow and said, “I hope
you’re being careful with all those promotora girls.”
Manuel looked away and smiled crookedly.
Marcello wondered about Isabel’s and Manuel’s
relationship. They definitely seemed to be a regular couple,
but they looked like a pair that was coming to the end of the
road. Seeing that, some people said, is like watching a train
wreck in slow motion. Isabel was a beautiful young woman.
Manuel wasn’t all that good-looking, but he seemed to have
enough wit and charm to attract the ladies, including many
of those marketing babes, who probably all looked a lot like
Leonora, the cigarette girl Marcello had met in Margarita.
Hanging around with girls like that all day would be a great
189
temptation to any man, Marcello thought, even if he were
used to it. He was a smooth talker, too, which may have
attracted Isabel to him in the first place. She probably
should have known better than to get involved with
someone like him. But for practical purposes Marcello
decided to give Manuel the benefit of the doubt. Not that it
was his business, anyway.
An hour later, the classic colonial Venezuelan homes
of Choroní welcomed Marcello and company to town. They
dropped most of their stuff at a local posada and walked to
where they could hire a small boat to take them to a nearby
beach called Cepe.
On the way to the beach Marcello sang, “Choroní,
chocolate, Cepe, Chuao, cioè, Cioroní, ciuao, cioccolato,
Ciepe, cioè. Chubasco, Achaguas, Chuspa, Chacao.31” His
amusement with the Spanish pronunciation of the letter C,
alone or combined with the letter H, never waned.
“Chito32,” Manuel shouted as he walked alongside
Marcello, holding the other handle of the cooler.
“Qué chimbo!33“ Marcello replied with a laugh.
Fishermen’s boats were moored along the mouth of
the river that had accompanied them on their mountain
descent to the coastal town. At least six of the boats were
tied together, rocking gently on the incoming swells,
waiting for weekend tourists to request trips to nearby
beaches, which were inaccessible by land. Marcello looked
over his shoulder at the two girls, who were lagging behind.
They also seemed to be arguing about something, but he
couldn’t hear what they were saying. “Alejandra doesn’t
want to get into the boat,” Manuel explained. “And Isabel is
trying to convince her.”
“Why?”
“I think she’s scared of the water.”
“That’s kind of ironic, since she’s from the coast. It’s
like me working on a cattle ranch and being a vegetarian.”
Manuel leered at him. “You don’t know what that’s
all about, do you?”
190
Isabel trotted up to them before Marcello could
question him. She looked hot and frustrated. “Marcello,
would you please talk to Alejandra? She doesn’t want to get
on the boat. I don’t want to stay on the beach here. It’s
okay, but I’d rather go to Cepe or Chuao or—”
“Or something that has a ch in it,” Marcello said,
trying to ease the tension.
Manuel said, “Choroní has a ch in it, but she’s right.
We don’t want to stay here.” He dropped his end of the
cooler. “Isa, do you want a beer while Alejandra makes up
her mind?”
Marcello said, “Okay, I’ll see what I can do.” He
walked to the nearest boat and borrowed a life preserver
from one of the captains.
Isabel and Manuel remained near the boat, drinking
beer, while Marcello walked back to Alejandra. After ten
minutes of encouragement and reassurances, Marcello got
the life jacket on her, and a few minutes later they all
climbed into the outboard-powered peñero.
Alejandra didn’t say a word during the trip along the
coast. She kept her hands clamped on to the seat and
looked straight ahead. Marcello felt sorry for her and
proud of her at the same time.
He found that the beach in Cepe was similar to all
the other on the west-central coast of Venezuela—not very
big and backed by mountains. Palm trees provided shade
for those who weren’t too eager to fight the low but
powerful waves. The day passed easily with rounds of rum
drinks and stories about parties, happy days, and
unfortunate fellows who fell victim to Manuel’s practical
jokes. Marcello wanted Alejandra to take a swim with him,
despite her fears, so he invited her to come along and jump
into the water. Only then did he realize that “Lanzarse al
agua,” “jump into the water,” is also a slang expression for
getting married. He covered that with a little laugh and
said, “You know, just take a quick dip to cool off.” She
agreed, with obvious reluctance. He lead her to the surf,
thinking that this process was a lot like teaching someone
191
how to ice-skate. The hardest part was getting her to the
water. When she put her feet in, she wobbled like a
beginner on the skates. Marcello held her hand and kept
her moving with one arm around her back until they were
in waist-deep water with the waves slapping against them.
The waves weren’t strong or tall enough to knock her down,
but their relentless assault made her nervous. She squeezed
Marcello’s hand tighter and tighter until he realized that
she was not enjoying herself.
“Estás bien?” he asked. “You okay?”
Alejandra jumped as high as she could with each
wave and gasped for air, as if she needed to have half of her
body out of the water to breathe. Her pulse raced beneath
his fingers. He wanted to comfort her with a hug, but nails
dug into the back of his hand so hard that he bled.
“No, I’m not okay. Sorry.” And with that she twisted
free of him and bee-lined for the shore, foaming the water.
He could only follow her, feeling disappointed.
She sat on the sand and hugged her knees, shaking
in the hot sun, and looking about as happy as a halfdrowned cat.
Marcello threw a dry towel over her shoulders,
retreated to the cooler, and quickly made a Cuba Libre,
without the lime but heavy on the rum. When he handed
the drink to her, he said, “I’m not sure I want to know why
you’re afraid of the water, but it doesn’t make much sense,
considering you grew up near the ocean.”
Alejandra hung her head and didn’t say a word. At
least she was breathing normally again.
“But it doesn’t matter, you know?” Marcello said.
“Because at least one of us is not afraid.”
Alejandra remained silent.
“Besides, you don't have to be afraid anymore. What
happened to you isn’t something to be sad about. It was
beautiful. Manuel told me about it.”
Alejandra looked at him with surprise.
“You lived something that few people ever
experience. You got to know somebody deeply. You felt the
192
magic and the myth. For a moment you were a queen,
second to none. You were given the ultimate royal
treatment.”
She goggled at him but still said nothing.
“There are millions of women back in Italy who
would envy you. Even if you're bound to live with mere
mortals for the rest of your days, you will always know that
your God, your king, and your former master are under the
water, looking at you from afar. He will be happy with any
decision you make or with anyone you choose to share your
life.”
Alejandra knitted her brows and bit her lip like a
student trying to figure out an algebra problem. She finally
said, “What exactly did Manuel tell you?”
“He told me that you had been abducted by
Neptune.”
Alejandra stared at Marcello for a couple of beats
and then burst into laughter. She turned and tried to shout
something to Manuel, who was sitting twenty feet away, but
couldn’t. She laughed and cried, laughed and cried, and
laughed and cried some more. Marcello recalled an article
he had read someplace that said crying and laughing were
closely related.
Eventually she regained her composure and wiped
the tears from her eyes. “And who do you think you are?
Zeus?”
“No, I'm Bacchus, but instead of wine, I drink rum.”
“Okay, so tell me, Bacchus, does this rum of yours
have any mystical effects?”
“Like the stuff your mom sells?”
“My mom's seafood doesn't work.” She scooted
closer to him and held up her drink. “This is much faster.”
She rested her head on his shoulder and slipped a cool hand
up one leg of his baggy swim trunks until it hurt him.
He imagined: The banana sled that had been stored
in a damp shed among tangled ropes was trying to inflate
quickly, but the ropes held it back, causing the pain. Only
after he managed to untangle the lines was he able to enjoy
193
the arousal in all its glory. He say “Day-O” when the banana
boat was free of its moorings.
“Ritorno a la vita? Eh?” Marcello whispered as he
admired Alejandra's fine bikini-line shaving job. “Do you
get goose bumps if I do this?” He let his fingers do the
walking down from the summit of her right knee.
Alejandra arched her back and sighed. Marcello
vacuum-locked his lips with hers. Her tongue and mouth
were notably warmer than his, and they reacted like a
Venus’s-flytrap to an incoming fly. But Alejandra was much
more Venus than flytrap, and her teeth weren't as sharp.
And what a Venus rising from the sea she was!
Instead of her water-hardened nipples being covered by her
arm, they were only partially obscured by the thin, blue
material of a bikini bra. The full breasts that Marcello
recalled didn’t need even this stiff wrapping to hold them in
place, but he ached to see proof of that again.
Marcello and Alejandra fondled each other within
the limits of propriety on a public beach until an
authoritative male voice shouted, “Ciudadanos, busquen
lugar! Cédula contra la pared!34”
Marcello jumped at the words, which were typical of
a policeman when he interrupted a pair of lovers.
Isabel laughed in the distance.
Marcello looked up to see Manuel standing over
them, an empty bottle of rum in one hand, grinning like a
fool. “El coño de tu madre!” Alejandra shouted at him.
Marcello had never heard foul language enunciated
so beautifully. He scooped up a handful of sand and flung it
at Manuel. And then all four of them laughed together.
“Rata…” Marcello concluded.
At 5 p.m. the same peñero that had brought them to
the Cepe beach returned to ferry them back to Choroní. The
boat nosed in close to the shoreline, next to the mouth of a
small creek.
As they cruised along the Aragua rainforest coast,
Marcello gazed at Alejandra. On the way to Cepe she had
194
sat stiffly in the center of the boat with a firm grip on the
wooden seat, looking only toward the bow and not talking
to anybody. Now she seemed like a completely different
person. She would look at the rolling blue waves and smile,
and then she’d turn her face into the wind and close her
eyes, her drying hair whipping behind her head.
When Alejandra covered her mouth and giggled,
Marcello asked her what was so funny. She pointed to the
outboard motor, which bore a trident logo.
“Oh, I see. Neptune,” Marcello replied with a laugh,
wondering if Maserati was making marine engines now.
Maybe they were two-liter engines. Or maybe a South
American company had borrowed the logo.
When they reached Choroní, they were greeted with
a group of Swedish women dancing tambores amid an
overwhelming majority of 73.5 percent cocoa townspeople,
Marcello estimated. To create a better mental map of the
different skin colors in Venezuela, he had decided on the
more practical method of categorizing people according to
their cocoa level, just like the superb chocolate bars they
sold at the supermarket. The higher the number, the darker
the skin. The only problem with this system, he thought,
was that seventy-percent cocoa people were not bitter at all.
Manuel, for example, was a sixty to seventy percenter, and
he spent his days making double-entendres and assembling
practical jokes. Marcello liked that his metrics allowed him
to call himself a white chocolate and therefore—he chuckled
at the thought—blend in.
The pale-faced Swedish women here were something
else, perhaps white chocolate with a liqueur center. Too
much caña for their own good? Perhaps. But Marcello
didn’t think so. Whatever they drank helped them to
perform the miracle of extracting what little rhythm their
Nordic DNA contained.
They kept dancing wildly as the music blasted—If
your donkey’s good, I’ll be back from Choroní. The sound
followed them all the way back to the Land Cruiser. And as
they drove away, the I’ll be back part of the song’s lyrics
195
played over and over in his mind. Yo vuelvo a venir, burra!
Yo vuelvo a venir burra!
196
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“Marcello! Marcello!” a man shouted outside
Marcello’s Puerto Cabello hotel room.
Who the hell’s pounding on my door at eleven
o’clock on Sunday morning?
Marcello had rented the room here for one night
instead of taking Alejandra to some sleazy, hot-sheet motel.
It was inexpensive, but too clean to be called cheap. Earlier
he had driven Alejandra to the apartment she shared with
Isabel, and now he was packing his bag and about to check
out. So far, this weekend had been just as delightful as the
previous ones.
The trips Marcello had made between Tinaco and
Puerto Cabello in the past month had become much more
bearable because Marcello had something to look forward
to. When he was here, he and Alejandra usually went to the
beach—any beach but Patanemo. One weekend he had
taken her to the Los Naranjos farm to meet the cowhands.
When the men saw her, they just stared in silent
admiration, using too much of their energy doing that to be
able to say something at the same time. That just made
Marcello feel better. He knew that their heads were full of
lewd thoughts and spicy comments, but they wouldn’t say
anything to their boss’s girl. While Marcello was away
during the week, he scouted out the best places to find
inexpensive greeting cards and sent one to Alejandra at
least once a week. Writing in Spanish instead of Italian
made him feel a completely different person.
Marcello had no particular plans for today, so he
wondered who was shouting and banging on his door now.
197
His unexpected visitor turned out to be Manuel, who
had another man with him. Manuel looked upset or excited
about something.
“Caracas is playing at Magallanes this afternoon!”
Manuel said with a wide grin, holding out three tickets. “It’s
in Valencia.”
Marcello looked at the tickets and then at the other
man. “Oh, this is Jesús,” Manuel said. “My cousin.”
Marcello said hello and extended his hand. “Got any
miracles planned today?”
Jesús smiled good-naturedly and said, “This
game—you must come. It will be like nothing you’ve seen
before.”
“I don’t mean to sound like a jerk,” Marcello replied,
“but is it like a Milan versus Inter game?” Manuel shook his
head and waved his hands. “No, no, Marcello. It’s not
fútbol. It’s baseball.”
“No, I mean with the fans. Are there fights and lots
of police to control the riots and all that?”
“Something like that, maybe,” Jesús said. “You’ll see
when we get there. Manuel will explain everything about
the game so you know what’s going on.”
“I know baseball. Not how to play it but the rules,
pretty much. How about Alejandra? Can she go?”
The Venezuelan men looked at each other and
laughed. Jesús said, “No, no se llevan chivos a Coro,”
which, literally translated, meant “You don’t take goats to
Coro.” Manuel explained that Coro was a city in northwest
Venezuela that was full of—of all things—goats. You didn’t
have to be a genius to understand what he was talking
about35.
“Well…” Marcello said, scratching his head. Then he
threw is hands into the air and said, “Oh, what the hell.
Why not?”
The road was clogged with so much traffic that
getting to Valencia would take forever, Marcello figured.
Manuel had told him that this was typical of a Sunday
198
afternoon, because everyone who went to the beach in
Puerto Cabello and Tucacas drive back to Valencia then.
This is just great, he thought. At this rate they could miss
half of the game.
“Why didn’t you guys decide to drive up earlier?”
Marcello he said, gazing disconsolately at the bumper-tobumper traffic.
“Because Jesús was at Isabel’s house,” Manuel
replied.
“Your Isabel?” “Yes. We split last week, and Jesús
here is giving it a shot, with my blessing, of course.”
“What happened?” Marcello asked, figuring that he
could be as nosy as Manuel was.
“I decided to call it quits before she became bored
with me. It’s bad when that happens.”
“Oh, I see,” Marcello replied. “Isabel is incredibly
beautiful,” he added as he looked at Jesús in the rearview
mirror. “Good luck, but I think you’d be better off having a
European or American passport.”
“I don’t care about that,” Jesús said. “If she likes me,
that doesn’t matter.”
“Well, maybe you can stop her from talking about
moving to Spain, Australia, Canada, or Belgium. Alejandra
says it’s driving her nuts.”
“Any girl would want to move away from here if she
had a boyfriend like my cousin,” Jesús replied, patting
Manuel’s shoulder.
“Be careful, cousin,” Manuel told him with a serious
face, “or you won’t get all that insider information I
promised you.”
Marcello thought that Manuel preferred teasing to
being teased and that breaking up with Isabel, even if it was
his idea, hadn’t been that easy. He decided to change the
subject.
“Hey, Jesús, can you part the traffic like you parted
the Black Sea?”
“That was the Red Sea. You lived next to the Vatican,
and you don’t even know the basics.”
199
Apparently, Jesús couldn’t take a joke, either,
Marcello thought. “Whatever. But would you please move
all these Toyotas, Chevrolets, and Fords out of the way so
we can get to the promised land of beer in plastic cups,
potato chips, and sexy cheerleaders?”
Manuel chuckled, but Jesús just grunted in disgust
and looked out the window. This was going to be a long
afternoon, Marcello thought.
They finally arrived at 5:00 pm to the Valencia
ballpark, which was underwhelming to Marcello, who had
visited the San Siro and Giuseppe Meazza stadiums in
Milan. But unlike those places, the parade of people
entering the park here included a disproportionately high
number of young beauties wearing tight shirts in their team
colors—black and white for Caracas and yellow and blue for
Magallanes. It was a remarkable cornucopia of feminine
abundance, something that Marcello never thought he’d see
concentrated in the same place.
Manuel gave him a playful nudge in the ribs and
said, “You see? This is why it’s better to come alone.”
Marcello congratulated him on his wisdom and
foresight.
“This stadium can hold about twenty thousand
souls,” Manuel said as the gatekeepers ripped their tickets
in half and let them in. “But they make noise like they were
forty thousand.”
They found their section and started counting rows.
“Here it is,” Manuel said. “Row sixteen. Seat four—that’s
yours, Marcello.”
Marcello was glad that he could finally sit down and
rest. The one-hour trip had turned into a three-hour ordeal.
Baseball wasn’t his favorite sport, but he looked forward to
relaxing for the next three hours. Although he knew the
basics of the game, he wouldn’t know whether one manager
was using his players better than the other one or whether a
player was a good base-runner or not. He was so thirsty
200
that he offered to pay for the first round of beer,
conveniently served in plastic cups that could not be hurled
at the players by disgruntled fans. In all his years of reading
the Gazzetta dello Sport and other sports papers, he had
never read the words sports fans and good behavior in the
same sentence.
The seat next to Marcello was empty, but the seat
after that one held a beautiful young woman who clutched a
neatly folded medical coat in one hand. She glanced at
Marcello, smiled, and punched the keys of her cell phone to
send a text message. The slim phone looked quite modern
and feminine, too, if that term could be applied to an
electronic device. But Marcello was more interested in her
hands—quite feminine, of course, but with her fingernails
clipped short and lacking polish. Her delicate, light-skinned
fingers danced as she typed her mysterious note to some
lucky someone, probably a boyfriend, Marcello thought.
He leaned toward her and said, “Are you a doctor?”
“Yes,” she replied with a smile, but she didn’t look at
him. Then she thumbed what must have been the “Send”
button and snapped the phone shut. “I’m an intern.”
“An intern?” Maybe she got those nimble fingers
from stitching up people’s wounds.
“Yes, that’s the year that new doctors have to work in
a public hospital after they graduate. I’m doing my
internship in Puerto Cabello.”
“Really? We came here from Puerto Cabello. How
long is that internship?”
“One year. Then I have to study a specialization and
probably a sub-specialization, too.”
“Wow, how long does that take?”
“About three years more to be a specialist and
another two or three years after that.”
“How long did it take you to graduate?”
“Six years. That’s the normal length of time.”
Marcello made a quick calculation. “Wow! That’s
thirteen years studying! Boy, I admire you.”
“Oh, thanks . . I think.”
201
Manuel elbowed him in the ribs and said, “Hey,
Italiano! Where are your manners? Introduce us to your
new friend.” He didn’t wink, but he didn’t have to, because
the attitude was the same.
“Oh, yeah, this is. . .”
“Oriana. Pleased to meet you guys.”
“I’m Manuel. The fellow over here is Jesús, and the
tipo buenmozo36 you’ve just met is Marcello Carosio,
imported directly from the land of pasta, pickup lines, and
Joe DiMaggio.”
“Joe DiMaggio was from the U.S.,” Jesús said. “Get
your facts right, huevón.”
“Be quiet,” Marcello whispered, leaning close to
Manuel. “You don’t need to advertise me. Anyway, I think
she has a boyfriend.”
“How do you know? Did she tell you that?”
“No, but I saw her sending him a text message on her
phone.”
“How do you know it was to her boyfriend? Did you
read it?”
“No.”
“So you don’t know shit. Besides, even if she has a
boyfriend, you could still—”
“Shut up. I think this empty seat is his.”
“How do you know?”
“You want to bet on it?”
“Okay. Today’s beers.”
“All of them?”
“Yes, all of them.”
“Okay, you’re on.” They shook hands.
“Hey, Oriana!” Manuel called. “Marcello here just
bet me that you’d go out with him after the game.”
“Shut up!” Marcello hissed at him. He turned back to
the girl, shook his head, and shrugged, hoping that would
tell her that his friend was only joking.
Oriana just glanced at her phone, giggled a bit and
called out the chips vendor. She bought a small bag of
plantain chips and a pack of Cocosette crackers. Back in
202
Marcello, Manuel and Jesus’ pockets, numerous
independence heroes missed their chance to pay for the
young woman’s treats. “This generation is not as brave nor
assertive as us”, they probably thought.
The game started with what could be sounded as the
Venezuelan national anthem. The music sure sounded like
the anthem but the words were unintelligible. The players
took to the field and held their cap over their heart as they
raised the yellow, blue, and red flag with stars and a coat of
arms that featured a horse that could probably care less if
the painter that made his portrait stood to his left or to his
right. Unfortunately, the quality of the sound system was
terrible. If a foreigner wanted to learn the lyrics that talked
about heroism, battles won, and all the usual proud words
that make up most anthems, he was out of luck. You could
barely hear the melody.
But as he tried his best to block the lower sound
wave frequencies by fine-tuning his eardrum –or so he
though, Marcello was able to distinguish part of the anthem
lyrics coming from Oriana. It probably meant more to her
than to him, especially the part of “Seguid el ejemplo que
Caracas dió” which was “follow the example that Caracas
gave”. After hearing scary stories about Caracas, Marcello
wondered what type of example was that city setting. Then
again, the anthem could be talking about the Caracas team,
who had won more championships than the rest. Whatever,
he thought. She had a good soprano voice, though.
Then came the part that Marcello feared the
most—the game itself. This competition had no air-filled
ball rolling around a green field to follow. No “Whoaaaa!”
when an opportunity to score appeared or ‘“Aaaahhh!”
when a player missed the goal. Some of the fans chanted,
but their general reaction was closer to that of tennis
spectators than a soccer crowd. As it is in tennis, when the
crowd is silent between serves and volleys, relative silence
prevailed when the small, leather ball flew from the
pitcher’s hand to the catcher’s mitt. When the catcher
203
caught the ball or when the batter swatted it, the crowd
would react with a great shout, making the stadium a great
place to lose your hearing. Between innings, a squad of
female soft drink promoters dressed in tight clothes danced
in front of the center field bleachers.
Even though Marcello had been born in a country
where so many things came in multiples of ten, he took
some time to figure out why you need three outs to finish
an inning and nine innings to complete a game, unless the
game ended in a tie. Then they’d play more innings until
one of the teams scored a run, which was getting a player to
run from one rubber plate to the next one and the next and
then to the “home” rubber plate, often done by running at it
in full stride and then sliding feet-first in a way that seemed
to be designed to injure people. At one point in the first
inning none of the players on the field moved at all. They
were all waiting for the pitcher to decide what he wanted to
do next. Marcello was glad that he had brought his
stopwatch. He used it to calculate that the right fielder
spent exactly forty-three minutes and twelve seconds there
without touching the ball. And when he eventually did so,
he just picked it up and threw it to the man playing second
base. The crowd cheered, because it was a “base hit,” or so
Manuel told him.
After four scoreless innings, Marcello’s main worry
was whether the game would remain tied at zero at the
bottom of the ninth. At the rate he was drinking beer, he
figured that he’d be too drunk by then to know who won
and who didn’t. Moments like this made him sorely miss
the joy of watching players kicking an inflated ball back and
forth, with no consequences to any of the goals. In that
lively game at least twenty people (goalkeepers not
included) on the football/soccer field kept exercising by
running around meaninglessly. In the game on the field
today Marcello was afraid that the right fielder would
develop arthritis or die of boredom and that the game
would be delayed even more while they buried him.
204
To compensate for his poor understanding and scant
interest in the game of baseball, Marcello had Manuel to
explain the admittedly interesting strategy underlying all
the decisions made by the players and their managers. For
example, Marcello learned that if the pitcher was righthanded, he would have a certain disadvantage if the batter
was a lefty—and vice versa. That’s why the manager of the
defending team put in a left-handed pitcher—what Manuel
called a zurdo or “southpaw”—at one point, because a lefthanded batter was coming up. But then the manager of the
team at bat substituted a righty for the left-handed batter.
The other manager countered that move by replacing the
pitcher again.
“This is ridiculous!” Marcello said.
“No, it’s not,” Manuel replied.
“Oh, yeah? They’ve just wasted ten minutes of my
valuable time while the new pitcher warmed up, and then
they changed pitchers again. What difference does it
make?”
“Plenty.”
“Oh, sure. Like they can sell a lot more beer in those
ten minutes.”
Laughing, Manuel slapped Marcello on the back.
In the fifth inning the young doctor jumped to her
feet, squealed, and waved her hands. Nothing important
was happening on the ball field then, so Marcello wondered
why she looked so excited. Then he showed up—the
boyfriend she was expecting. He was dressed in a gleaming
white uniform, of all things, complete with gold bars on his
black shoulder straps and some undistinguishable
decorations on his chest. Although Marcello lacked
knowledge of all things military, at least he knew that
Oriana’s boyfriend was some kind of naval officer—and that
Manuel would have to pay for all of his beer. As for the
medals, he had no idea and he supposed that Oriana’s
boyfriend spent most of his time talking about their
significance when meeting a stranger. Perhaps one of them
was for “bravery” and one day Oriana met him with his
205
uniform and asked what the medal was all about. When he
told her it was like if she had received an arrow straight
from Cupid. Only that Cupid was not armed with a silly
arrow, but firing an intercontinental ballistic missile from
the deck of a destroyer. “Well”, Marcello told himself as he
forced a grin towards Manuel, “at least nobody forces me to
clean my shoes”.
The two lovers embraced almost formally, looking
like a photo in a magazine—a bridal magazine, Marcello
thought. Then Oriana turned her gallant swain, beamed at
Marcello, and said, “This is Ivan.” She sounded as if she had
just run up the bleachers from home plate.
He clamped Marcello’s hand briefly and sat down
next to him.
The guy sported a deep-water tan, hands and all.
Maybe sun block wasn’t part of the military budget these
days, Marcello thought.
“Admiral” Ivan crossed his legs, smoothed the front
of his tunic, and said, “So how’s the game going?”
“Zero to zero,” Marcello and Oriana replied in
chorus. She captured Ivan’s hand and giggled.
That was it, Marcello figured. He was out of that
game now. He took refuge in his cup of beer. Considering
the circumstances, he thought of the cup as being half
empty instead of half full.
“Hey, look at this,” Ivan said.
Marcello was surprised to see that the officer had
turned to him and placed a sunburned hand on his forearm,
but it didn’t stay there for long. Behind him, Oriana was
talking with the potato chip vendor.
“Quick. Don’t let her see this.” He flipped open a
small box, the kind used to hold an expensive ring.
Marcello bent to take a closer look. A diamond
winked in the light. It sure looked like an engagement ring.
“Very nice,” he said. “Congratulations.”
“I applied for a loan directly to the vice-admiral. It
cost me a lot, but she’s worth it, don’t you think?”
206
Marcello was about to explain his utmost
disappointment when he found out that Oriana was
engaged, not because he wanted to replace Alejandra but
because he admired the type of woman that Oriana seemed
to be. Marcello thought that his explanation was a good
idea because it would make the officer feel proud of what he
had. But considering his still lacking Spanish vocabulary,
he decided to keep things simple.
“You’re a lucky man,” he said with a smile.
“ I know. I plan to give her the ring if the Caracas
team wins.”
“What if Magallanes wins?”
“Caracas will win tonight, I know.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” said Marcello, not having the
slightest idea about which team was more likely to come
out on top.
During the next two or three innings Marcello
noticed that more interesting activities occurred in the
stands than on the field. First, a fight broke out in the
distant right-field bleachers, also known as the cheap seats.
He was amused to see a small crowd of people moving away
from the brawl to avoid being struck by a stray uppercut or
left hook. The performance of the cheerleaders was
interesting, too. All of them were incredibly good-looking in
their tight pants and shirts, but their lack of organization
indicated that their first rehearsal may have taken place
only that morning. The beer-loaded men near the first-base
seats didn’t seem to mind, though.
Manuel grabbed Marcello’s arm and said, “Here
comes the good part.”
“What?”
“Caracas has a man on third with no outs. Can’t you
see? They have a good chance to score a run.”
“Look at Jesús’ face,” Marcello said with a laugh,
enjoying the worried look of a fan whose mood depended a
lot more on the outcome than his did.
207
“Yeah, he’s a real Magallanes fan,” Manuel replied.
“I’m a Tigers fan, but they don’t play in Valencia. They play
in Maracay, so I have a hard time seeing their games.”
“Why do you like the Tigers if you live near
Valencia?”
“Because I’ve always been a Tigers fan. I’m from a
city that doesn’t have a baseball team.”
“Oh, I see.”
Marcello was glad that he didn’t have to worry about
the man on third, the one who was batting, or the one who
was pitching. Although he missed sharing the victories of
the Squadra Azzurra with his friends in Italy, he was also
glad that he had put all that fanaticism on hold for a few
months while he took the time to do more interesting
things, like feeling schadenfreude for the plight of the
baseball fans around him.
The next two batters failed to bring the man on third
base home.
Now, at the top of the ninth inning, the scoreboard
shows two outs—or so it appears with one of its light bulbs
burned out—and the next batter has the chance to change
this scoreless affair. Marcello had learned how terrible an
affair without scoring can be.
“C’mon, c’mon!” shouts Ivan, clutching his fiancée
with one hand and holding the engagement ring in the
other one. “Vamooooosssss!”
Marcello looks at Ivan and wonders if he’s having
second thoughts about making his pledge depend on the
game results.
The visiting fans chant, “Un hit!” (clap, clap, clap).
“Uuuuunnnn hit!” (thump, thump, thump), stamping their
feet.
Marcello expects the home crowd to reply with their
own chant, but they don’t. While they try to decide what to
shout, the batter steps up to the plate.
Marcello considers this is one good thing about
soccer—the game doesn’t offer a thousand different
208
situations for which to pick a chant. The ball either rolls up
the field or down.
Batter up. The first pitch crosses the plate at a speed
that renders the ball invisible, especially to spectators who
have been drinking for the past eight innings. Strike one.
But one “expert” disagrees loudly, obviously thinking that
he knows better than the sober umpire, who stands only a
foot away from the catcher. He shakes a fist and yells,
“Arbitro! Hijo e’ puta!”
Now the count is two strikes and two balls, and the
crowd is on its feet, some of them standing on their seat.
The security guards are too busy watching for the next pitch
to scold them. The beer pourer stops pouring. The chip
vendor stops selling. The scalpers stop scalping. The agesold question of how much wood can a woodchuck chuck
remains unanswered. Sweat trickles down the batter’s
forehead. The pitcher dries his throwing hand with a small
bag of talc. The umpire and the catcher are each in such an
uncomfortable position that they can’t wipe the sweat from
their hands. The collective sweat of the crowd fails to
produce a palpable odor. Marcello is grateful that this is
Venezuela in November, after all, and not Milan in
Ferragosto.
Manuel hands Marcello a small transistor radio and
shouts, “You want to feel the excitement? Listen to this.” He
pops an ear bud into Marcello’s right ear.
The announcers voice is scratchy but loud. “The
count is two and two. Henry, the batter, steps up to the
plate. Jeremy, the pitcher, prepares his musket. And . . he
throws. . Henry swings . . and it’s a high fly ball into center
field! The center fielder races back . . back . . back . . And . .
Ohhhhhhhhhh!” Beer and empty cups fly into the air.
“Ohhhhhhhhhh!” More cups and beer flying. A seat
breaks under a man’s feet, and he swan dives into the
crowd two rows down.
“Ohhhhhhhhhh!” the announcer moans.
Potato chips fly.
“Ohhhhhhhhhh!”
209
Peanuts fly.
“Ohhhhhhhhhh!” Fried plantains sail through the
air.
Forty thousand voices fill the stadium with thunder.
Ivan roars next to Marcello as he bounces and pumps a fist
in the air.
Unfortunately, he forgets that he is holding his
fiancée.
Oriana goes down hard between the rows of seats
and screaming fans. She holds one arm and grimaces with
pain. Marcello makes a move toward her, but then
remembers that she’s in good hands with Ivan the
Wonderful.
“And it’s over the fence! Olvidenlo! Henry’s first
home run of the season!”
Marcello grabs Manuel and shouts, “Why do they say
‘olvidenlo’? What are people supposed to forget?”
“It’s from sandlot baseball—just forget about that
ball, it’s lost!” The roar of the crowd increases as the runner
from the visiting team trots around the bases, waving to the
fans. His teammates storm onto the field and crowd around
him when he reaches home plate, jumping up and down
and waving their hands.
Marcello is happy that someone finally scored,
thinking, “Just four more outs, and I can go
home”—”home” being whatever place he was staying that
night.
Another ten minutes passes while the officials
restore order on the field, finishing when the clock marks
8:30 pm.
It’s the bottom of the ninth, Caracas leading by two
runs, when play resumes.
A new pitcher strides nonchalantly onto the field to
close the show. He’s a tall, imposing figure, with a dark
beard-shadow on the heavy jaws of his mulato face. The
crowd is still on its feet, half of them because they’re excited
about the outcome of the game and the other half because
they’re so drunk that sitting down might cause them to fall
210
asleep, leave the stadium late, and get stuck in the usual
traffic jam in the parking lot. Eventually some people sit
down anyway, probably because getting stuck in traffic is
inevitable and because those who have already sat down
behind them are shouting for them to do so.
Oriana is back in her seat, too, smiling at a solicitous
Ivan and looking none the worse for her fall.
Whack! Goes the first warm-up pitch.
An excited Manuel points to the radar gun aimed at
the pitcher’s mound from the expensive seats. “That was
ninety-three miles per hour!”
“What was?”
“The speed of the ball.”
“Why do they measure the speed in miles per hour?
Aren’t we in Venezuela?”
“It’s a game from the United States, remember?”
“Oh.” Marcello slumps in his seat and looks at his
leaning tower of plastic beer cups, which are as off-balance
as the man two rows away, who may have imbibed more
than his fair share of alcohol.
Still listening to the game on the radio, Marcello
smiles at the baseball terminology spouted by the
announcer. It’s all completely foreign to him, even if it’s in a
language that he has learned. He chuckles when he
translates El bateador le va a tocar la bola as “The batter is
going to touch his ball.” Who would have thought that
baseball could be this much fun?
“Batter up!” the announcer shouts. “It’s number
thirteen, first-baseman Alfonzo!” Then he adds, “Arriba,
Maaaaagggggaaaaalllllllaaaannneesssss!” Marcello shakes
his head. The guy is obviously being paid by the home club.
Half of the crowd cheers automatically, but the other
half doesn’t, of course. The security guards don’t cheer,
because they’re too busy making sure that the alcohol that
has been consumed is used for peaceful purposes, such as
going to the bathroom.
The first pitch is a ball. The second one is clearly a
strike, but the ump declares it a ball. The player hits a foul
211
ball on the third pitch and acts upset about not doing
better. Half of the crowd boos and curses in agreement.
Two strikes on the batter now. One more, and he’s out. He
swings at the next pitch and gets a two-base hit. The home
crowd goes wild.
The next batter seems to be in a trance as he watches
three straight strikes zip by.
“You’re out!” cries the umpire.
The player flings his bat and stalks away, his mouth
working furiously, no doubt offering some choice
comments about the umpire’s mother, father, and extended
family.
That’s the first out.
The closing pitcher walks the next batter, and the
one after that gets a base hit that drives in a run. Now it’s a
two-to-one game, with a man on third base and another on
first. The uproar from the home crowd swells.
“Eeeeehhhhh, Magallanes, ooh!” they shout. “Eeeeehhh,
Magallanes, ooh!” The next batter, Manuel explains, is
supposed to hit the ball so that the man on first base can
get to second. But he strikes out, but the man on first steals
second. Marcello’s lame joke about whether a player has to
go to jail if he steals a base had grown stale by the seventh
inning, so he decides not to repeat it.
Instead, he stands up and shouts, “Leo! Leeooooh!”— finally choosing sides in this game.
“So now you’re a Caracas fan?” Manuel says. “Listen,
they’re going to walk this batter intentionally. It’s two outs,
with runners on second and third and nobody on first. If
the batting team is down by one, and the man on second is
the winning run, it doesn’t matter if they put a man on first.
With the bases loaded the advantage for the pitching team
is they can make an out on any base. The disadvantage is
that with a walk, the runner scores.”
“I guess that makes sense,” Marcello says.
Actually, that didn’t make any sense at all. He can’t
think of a soccer equivalent, so he figures that it wasn’t
worth understanding, at least for now. Still listening to the
212
radio, he takes another swig of beer and suddenly feels
isolated from the chanting crowd and his friends. During a
commercial for talcum powder on the radio he gazes at
Oriana and her boyfriend. They seem to be having a good
time. Occasionally the naval officer says something into her
ear that makes her smile. After the seventh inning, he had
followed them outside and watched him buy a cheese pastry
and feed it to her as if she were a baby.
The radio announcer shouts, “Batter up! It’s Tomás
the third baseman.
The whole shouting, hooting, cheering, whistling
crowd is on its feet and shaking the stands with their
concerted foot-stomping. The din rouses Marcello from his
daydream. It really was a daydream at night, which is as
contradictory as the two girls swaying arm in arm just
below him, singing the chants of the opposing teams.
The first pitch is a strike. The second, third, and
fourth pitches are balls that could have been called strikes if
the umpire had been bribed by the Caracas team or if he
had downed half the beer that Marcello had put away.
“Tomas! Tomas! Tomas! Tomás!” The crowd goes
crazy at the three-one count. “Un hit! Un hit! Un hit!” The
next throw could walk the batter and tie the game with a
forced run. “Tomás! Tomás!” And if he gets a base hit, the
man on second could score and complete the walk-off
victory.
Now the two girls in front of him are dancing wildly,
the taller one in an open Magallanes shirt and a tight, white
bra and the other girl in an even more bursting bra, her
Caracas shirt flying. The young guy next to them is actually
paying attention to the game despite the display of
bouncing bosoms, unquestionably a dedicated fan. An
older man a few seats away from them is eating his Caracas
hat. The navy man still clasps Oriana tightly, as if she is his
assault rifle and he’s slogging through miles of mud during
basic training.
“Tomás! Tomás! Tomás!” the crowd chants on and
on.
213
When Jesús returns from the bathroom, Marcello
says, “This is so bizarre. This is the ninth inning, number
nine is batting, and the clock has just struck nine.”
“Aha!” Jesús replies. “So what?”
“Well,” says Marcello tongue-in-cheek, “that’s ninenine-nine, the anti-antichrist. Mathematically, that’s Christ,
isn’t it? It’s obviously a sign from heaven.”
“I think it’s a sign that you’re shit-faced, man.”
Marcello looks at his ticket stub and decides to keep
it as a souvenir, no matter what Manuel thinks.
The crowd is in such an uproar now that the words
are indistinct. The pitcher winds up and throws.
Strike!
Those who were on their feet are now on their toes,
and the ones who were already on their toes are hopping.
The visiting crowd doesn’t make more noise, knowing that
if this last pitch is a strike or an out, their team wins.
Number nine asks for a time out. He’s a seasoned
hitter, according to Manuel, a player who knows how to
keep his cool. He steps out of the batter’s box, fiddles with
his gloves, and inspects his bat carefully. Then he takes a
couple of practice swings.
The closing pitcher takes a good look at the man on
third base and then eyes the one on first, as if doing that
would make any difference. Neither of them can go
anywhere until the batter hits the ball. When the batter is
finally ready, the pitcher starts his windup, then pauses
with both hands in front of him, glances toward first base,
and—Manuel had explained this part—grips the ball in his
glove so that the batter can’t see what type of finger hold
he’s using. He turns, hikes one leg, and hurls the ball.
The ball flashes past the batter and his motionless
bat and into the catcher’s mitt. Within microseconds the
catcher moves his glove more into the strike zone—another
trick Manuel had told Marcello about—and the umpire
jerks back, his final judgment of the night already made. A
few more microseconds and the visiting crowd begin to
214
flood from the stands, assuming that it’s a strike. The home
crowd, thinking otherwise, raises a great cheer.
The suspended moment ticks off the clock as the
umpire steps back, raises one arm and shouts in English,
“Steeeeee-riiiiiike!”
Half of the crowd goes berserk, while the other half
freezes into a stunned silence. Marcello turns to see
Ivan—the otherwise terrible—presenting his fiancée with
the engagement ring. Oriana looks as excited as he does
about the victory of their team until she sees that he has
something for her in his hand. When she opens the little
box, her jaw drops, and her eyes dilate to the size of
baseballs. She beams at him and nods emphatically, then
lunges into his arms, looking nothing like the proper young
woman Marcello had met before the game started. The
navy man holds her away for a moment, says something
that is probably Will you marry me? and kisses her
passionately.
In spite of the raucous crowd and his beer buzz,
Marcello thinks this is an incredibly romantic and
heartwarming scene. Foreheads touching, the novios speak
unheard words to each other, oblivious to the deafening
mayhem around them, Oriana’s slender, surgeon’s ring
finger sporting a flashy diamond. How sweet, Marcello
thinks. They should have some privacy now.
Or maybe not.
Marcello stands on his seat and shouts, “Los
Novios!” at the top of his lungs. He flails his arms and
points to the happy couple. “Los Novios! Los Novios!”
Manuel and Jesús catch on first, and then the news
spreads through the crowd like wildfire. Before long, scores
and then hundreds of people are hollering in unison, “Los
novios! Los novios!” Soon even the substitute players still
on the field take up the chant, and then thousands more,
friends and former foes alike, join in one great voice that
thunders, “Que se besen! Que se besen! A kiss! A kiss!”
Ivan and Oriana look shocked and embarrassed at
first, and then they’re all smiles. Like a Roman emperor
215
standing among his people in the coliseum, Ivan thrusts
one hand into the air, thumb up triumphantly. The raucous
crowd cheers him on. Then he plants on her expectant lips
the hearty kiss that twenty thousand souls have demanded
with the power of their lungs.
Feeling some of their happiness, Marcello smiles at
them, thinking, Mission accomplished, sir!
216
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“Here’s your change. Thirty thousand bolívares37.”,
the taxi driver from Valencia told Alejandra as he opened
the door for her on that sunny Sunday morning.
She glanced quickly at the two bills in her hand and
thought about how much the fares had increased since the
last time she took a cab. Driving her car was cheaper, if it
hadn’t spent the last four weeks in the body shop.
As she stood on the sidewalk, staring at the gate,
Alejandra tried to forget all the years she had anticipated
this trip and the fear she would feel just ringing the
doorbell.
Alfredo Romero’s parents lived in a house in the
peaceful Naguanagua neighborhood in the northern part of
the city. Alejandra had met Alfredo during her
undergraduate studies at the Universidad of Carabobo, not
too far away from there. He hadn’t moved from his parents’
house while he was in school, because it didn’t make much
sense to pay rent to live somewhere that was only a few
blocks away from his house.
It did make sense, however, for Alejandra to share a
small apartment with a couple of female roommates, since
she was from Tucacas. Once in a while she would stay
overnight at his place when his parents weren’t at home or
when they had extended an invitation to her. Even though
Alejandra was the girlfriend of the family’s only son,
Alfredo’s mother didn’t harbor any type of jealousy toward
her. As a matter of fact, she was very protective of
Alejandra and provided the type of advice that Alejandra’s
distant mother could hardly offer. As Alfredo’s and
Alejandra’s relationship matured during their college years,
217
both his parents and hers knew that they had their life all
laid out for them.
She would never forget the day when Alfredo went
on a trip with some friends to a beach called Patanemo.
They left at noon on a Friday. Alejandra couldn’t
accompany him, because she had just landed a job at the
Puerto Cabello shipyard. Alfredo was still doing job
interviews, so he had more free time than she did. The sea
at Patanemo was well known on the central Venezuelan
coast for its tricky currents and undertow. But that wasn’t
on Alejandra’s mind when she and Alfredo spoke for the
last time. She was just worried about him and his friends
not driving safely and perhaps being robbed while they
were at the beach. So the phone call that she received from
one of the friends came as a bitter shock to her.
Alejandra wasn’t able to catch a lot of what the boy
told her, and she couldn’t manage to say that Alfredo was
an excellent swimmer, so how could he have drowned? She
couldn’t ask him whether Alfredo was drunk or if he had
injured himself somehow. She just heard the initial words
Something happened to Alfredo, and the next sentence,
which would haunt her for years to come.
After the funeral, Alejandra couldn’t go back to
work. Her daily commute to the shipyard took her past the
signs that indicated the road to Patanemo and within sight
of the ocean that had taken her future away. That was too
much for her to bear. Isabel, whom she had just met, came
to her rescue by suggesting that she take postgraduate
courses in Caracas, a city surrounded with mountains and
full of people who wouldn’t remind her of life in Valencia or
Puerto Cabello. Although she managed to concentrate on
her studies, one side effect of her academic therapy was the
early failure of every relationship that managed to blossom.
In those days she knew that she had a clearer picture of the
number of postgraduate courses she needed to take than of
the kind of man she wanted in her life—or if she wanted one
at all. All she had to do, she thought, was to keep her eyes
on her academic goals to make the rest of her life bearable.
218
She turned off a whole genre of music that reminded her of
Alfredo, and she cringed whenever she encountered
someone—real or fictitious—by that name.
By the time she completed her studies at the
university, she had transformed herself. She realized that
when she saw herself in a mirror as she dressed for the
graduation ceremonies. Alejandra the poised young woman
with the Master’s degree in Administration was a
completely different person from the bewildered girl who
had arrived in Caracas two years before. She had her hair
done in a classy salon now, and her makeup harmonized
perfectly with her morena38 skin color. That, along with her
large, slightly tilted eyes and full lips, was enough to
compensate for the sexless cap and gown. That night she
accepted the blank paper tube that private universities give
to graduates until they issue their real diploma, stamped by
the Ministry of Education. As she descended the steps from
the stage and stepped onto the green carpet in the right
aisle, the Romeros clapped and waved at her. They had
driven all the way from Valencia to pay their respects.
She had spent two years holding everything in and
trying to forget, but now all those emotions exploded, and
she broke down in tears. One of her classmates helped her
to a nearby restroom. Ten minutes later, water and fresh
makeup had almost erased her reaction to seeing those
people from her past. She didn’t see them when she
returned to her seat in the auditorium. Neither she nor her
friends mentioned the incident during the cocktail party
that followed.
When Alejandra arrived at the Romeros house that
morning, Alfredo’s father was sanding the rusty metal legs
of a Ping-Pong table. Their home was your average brickand-mortar structure with a small, rectangle of lawn in the
front with a gated fence to keep the cars and dogs inside. It
was identical to the rest of the buildings on that block and
perhaps built by the same company. Alfredo’s Sr. busied
219
himself in the covered section that connected the garage
and the washroom of his workshop.
The game table looked like something that he had
pulled from the trash. She knew that he had taken to
puttering around in his shop like this after Alfredo Jr.’s
death. He had begun by building bird feeders and simple
tables and shelves and then moved on to more complicated
projects like chairs and beds. The longtime accountant
obviously enjoyed working with his hands for a change.
When he spotted Alejandra he stopped working,
wiped his hands, and hurried to the gate.
Smiling at her, he said, “Señorita39 Aponte,” and let
her in. “Long time no see.”
“Hello, Alfredo,” she replied, suddenly feeling shy.
“Are you busy?”
“Never too busy to see you, my dear.” She gave him a
quick, awkward hug and thanked him. “I came to ask you
for a small favor.”
“You know that Morella and I are always happy to
see you, for any reason. Estás en tu casa.40“
She thanked him again and looked around the
familiar patio area, recalling all the images that she had
pasted into her text-based memory. “This is new, isn’t it?”
she said, pointing at his workshop.
“Oh, yes,” he replied with a satisfied grin. “You want
to see some of the things I’ve made?”
He started by showing her the small wooden
sculptures he had carved with his new micro-milling and
drill set. The prettiest one was a small palm tree he had
crafted by joining wooden rings and carving the fronds
individually to place them on top.
“It’s made from oak. The wood is harder to carve,
but the result is nicer,” he said proudly.
Alejandra said, “What’s this?” as she pointed to a
tool with three legs, each one with a bolt and nut in the
joint and a large bolt with a cone tip in its center. “It looks
like a three-legged spider with a very big—Ahem. Sorry.”
Her face grew hot.
220
The old man grinned at her, his eyes twinkling, and
said, “That’s a gear extractor.”
“What’s it for?”
“For extracting gears, of course—from axles.”
“Huh?”
“If you have a gear on an axle, like in a car, you use
this tool to grab the edge of the gear with the legs while you
use the center screw to pull it out. It’s a very elegant
design.”
“But you don’t work with cars here, do you?”
“No, I don’t. I bought it because I liked how it
worked.”
“So you haven’t used it—”
“No. I just keep it here because it looks so good
sitting among all the other tools, who are less elegant and
sophisticated but are used more frequently.”
“Like the good old hammer.”
“Yes. Which doesn’t have any moving parts at all, but
I use it a lot.” He chuckled.
“So what are you going to do with the extractor?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Probably give it away to
somebody who needs it. It’s kind of sad to have such a
specialized tool that never gets used.” He picked up the
extractor and toyed with its legs. “Have you played the cello
lately?”
“Yes, I have. A lot.”
“I’m very glad to hear that, Alejandra.” He looked at
her seriously and placed a fatherly hand on her shoulder.
“Why don’t you go to the house now? I know that Morella
will be delighted to see you.”
Alfredo’s mother opened the side door slowly for
her. Although four years had passed since they had spoken
at the funeral and less than two since their encounter at
Alejandra’s graduation, the woman still wore the same look
as she did on the day when they lowered her son into the
rectangular hole where he would rest indefinitely. She had
221
not wept and moaned as loudly then as Alfredo’s sisters did.
She just had the blank face of someone who can’t believe
that life has taken away something that was so valuable to
her. Alejandra believed in the stages of grief. If that theory
applied to Morella, she was still stalled in the initial phase
of shock. Even so, the woman managed to give her a warm
hug and croon softly, “My sweet Alejandra. Come in,
please.”
Alejandra sat down at the kitchen table. Alfredo’s
mother offered her coffee with milk, a Cocosette and a glass
of water. After they had played questions and answers for a
while, Alejandra said that she wanted to ask a small favor.
Morella told her that she would be happy to do anything
she could for her.
After Alejandra made her request, Alfredo’s mother
led her to his bedroom. It looked as if nothing had been
touched. She wouldn’t have been surprised to find Alfredo’s
clothes in his closet and dresser drawers, just as he had left
them. The whole room was spotless, as if he was still
sleeping there every night.
Alejandra had been holding up well through this visit
so far. Putting her mind on taxi fare inflation was a good
idea to avoid thinking too much about Alfredo. She also
pictured herself as a woman on a mission. Memories could
wait.
The only new item she noticed here was a painting of
a seascape by a Margarita-based artist that Marcello had
mentioned. The artist’s typical motifs were beaches and
rocky shorelines. He was especially talented at capturing
the solitary mood of things like a lone peñero anchored
near the beach at sunset, just waiting silently for the wee
hours of the morning, when men would come with their
fishing nets. The painting reminded her of her cousin in
Tucacas and his boat and his trips to Curacao. Somehow
this artist was able to capture subtle feelings with some
colorful strokes of oil on canvas.
222
Alejandra stepped closer to read the words that
someone had hand-printed on the wall beside the framed
painting. She read:
I brought you to this life.
Or so told me my eyes,
But then I realized,
you brought the life to me.
You asked me for my help
to secure your shoes and belt
but you learned by yourself
much quicker that I could see.
You kept from me so long
the right to prove it wrong
that a man can be so strong
and love her like you did.
Now my boy is not in town,
and I can’t help but frown
when it comes around,
you’re not here for she.
That’s so beautiful, Alejandra thought. She looked at
Morella and smiled. This painting could have been the
Guernica she was looking at, with a plaque to the left
explaining all about the town in Spain and why in the world
the horse was screaming at the bombs thrown by Franco’s
Teutonic guests from the north. Then the meaning hit her.
Morella had written the poem for her son, of course. But
now she saw a reference to somebody else, hidden between
the lines of each verse, someone outside the Romero
family—a she. That person had to be Alejandra herself. The
mother who had lost her only son wasn’t grieving just for
herself and all the other mothers like her but also for those
like Alejandra who were denied sharing his future.
223
The poem, she realized, wasn’t meant only for a dead
person; it was meant for the surviving girlfriend—the one
who would eventually return to her former lover’s house,
for whatever reason.
Alejandra suddenly felt as if she were standing in the
vacuum created by an exploding grenade, and now she was
deaf to her surroundings. She whirled away from Morella,
avoiding her eyes. Seeing the grief-stricken mother at her
graduation had been bad enough. After that she had
promised herself that one day she would be able to
remember everything that had happened without shedding
a tear. But being included in the Romero family like this
threatened to cancel that vow.
Morella came to her and placed an arm gently
around her shoulders. “I’m very glad about you and
Marcello,” she said, almost in a whisper. “He’s quite lucky
to have you.”
Alejandra turned into the mother’s arms and allowed
her tears to flow. “Alfredo was a very lucky person, too,”
Morella said. “I always wanted to tell you that. You are very
strong and determined. And independent.”
“I don’t feel very strong now.”
“This hasn’t been easy for any of us, but probably
worse for you. My husband and I are well beyond our active
years. But you’re practically just starting out. I want you to
know, my dear Alejandra, that if there’s anything we can do
for you . . . But you are so independent. Maybe you don’t
need our help.”
“Please don’t keep saying that. You shouldn’t put me
on a pedestal. The fall is too painful.”
“Pardon me for being a foolish old woman who
repeats herself. But I can see that you’re a fine human being
and a strong one, too. You will survive this, and you must
go on living.” She hugged Alejandra with surprising
strength.
They clung to each other there in the dim, silent
bedroom and spoke in whispers for what seemed like a long
time to Alejandra, until she had soaked her handkerchief
224
and one of Morella’s, as well. When the tears finally
subsided, Alejandra completed her mission to the Romero
home—finding Alfredo’s national identification card, which
she wanted for a keepsake.
Before she left, she found the senior Alfredo still
laboring over the discarded Ping-Pong table and pulled him
into a tight hug. He kissed her on the forehead and gave her
the little palm tree that he had carved. She wished him
good luck with his newest project and waved at him as she
left through the gate. One day, she thought, maybe I’ll come
back with the ever-competitive Marcello and challenge him
to a game.
225
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“Chacaíto, Sabana Grande, Plaza Venezuela, Colegio
de Ingenieros, Parque Carabobo, and La Hoyada,”
Alejandra recited to Marcello as they stood on the platform
at the Chacao stop of the Caracas Metro. “Those are
stations you will need to pass before getting off in
Capitolio.”
“‘Gran Sabana’? Just like the jungle?” Marcello
asked.
“No, it’s ‘Sabana Grande.’ I’ll explain the difference
later.”
“Wow! You know the stations by heart!”
“Nope,” she said with a smile. “They’re listed on the
board behind you.”
He glanced over his shoulder. “Oh . . .”
“You sure you don’t want me to come along,
Marcello?”
“No, thanks. I hear that downtown Caracas is quite
dangerous. Besides, it’s a surprise.”
“Okay, cello from the sea. I’ll be here at the mall. Call
me when you get back.”
Alejandra kissed him and left the Metro station.
Outside, he knew that she would join the crowd of
pedestrians that was surging like a flock of checkbookbearing sheep toward the largest and busiest mall in the
country. She had told him that she wasn’t going to buy
anything—just wanted to see what the fuss was all about.
Manuel gave Marcello some very simple directions.
Very simple and very Venezuelan: Go to the Plaza Bolivar
and visit any of the jewelry stores on one of the corners of
226
the adjacent block. No street name or number, no phone
number—just landmark references. Thank God that at least
the store was in the most central plaza of Caracas.
He caught the next train and took it to the Capitolio
stop, as Alejandra had instructed him.
The sunny downtown streets were crowded with
vendors hawking almost anything you could think of, from
lottery tickets to cheap toys to jewelry and appliances.
Although Marcello was used to the beach scene and the
street vendors in Margarita, he had never seen so many of
these people in one place before.
He came to a market called the “New Circus,” or
something like that, where he and everyone else practically
had to step over one another to navigate the maze.
Although he enjoyed the stimulation of a little chaos once in
a while, this bustling marketplace challenged his level of
tolerance in no time. He wouldn’t have to travel to India or
Turkey to see what a third-world market looked like. He
had everything here.
He found the corner jewelry store with no trouble a
few minutes later. It was protected by double doors of the
kind that he had seen only in places where the weather is
very cold. That way people could come and go without
letting the warm air out. In this case, however, he knew that
the arrangement was used to delay a potential thief in a
small space where he could be checked with a metal
detector. The doors also allowed only a few people to enter
the store at the same time.
He walked into the subdued, air-conditioned store
and asked the middle-aged lady behind the counter if he
could see some gold necklaces. He asked her to put them on
herself, one by one, but he couldn’t make up his mind. Then
another piece of jewelry caught his eye. He leaned over the
glass case to take a closer look.”Ti piace?” said a male voice
in perfect Italian.
Marcello looked up to see that a dapper young man
had joined them. “Do you like it?”
227
“Yes, I like it a lot,” he replied in his native tongue.
“È bello. But I’m still not sure.”
The young jeweler laughed and said, “Nobody’s ever
sure.”
Marcello thought he could be the woman’s son,
because of the shape of his generous mouth. “Where are
you from? “I can’t quite identify your accent.” “L a
Boggiera,” he replied.
“Is that near Treviso?”
“Yes, in Veneto. Il piccolo Veneto. “
“Veneto?” Marcello stared at him for a few
seconds—a guy about his own age—wondering why he was
biting his lips and holding his breath. He said, “I think
you’re making fun of me.” The young man barked a laugh.
“I’m sorry, my friend. ‘La Boyera’ is a Caracas
neighborhood. I just like to have fun with Italians who try
to figure out where I’m from.”
The woman put a hand to her mouth and tittered,
then left to help another customer.
“Oh, okay,” Marcello replied, not quite catching the
humor of the joke.
“So . . . Are you here on vacation, or do you live here
now?”
“Don’t know yet.”
“Ah, decisions, decisions,” the young man replied.
“My father came here a long time ago and made that
decision for me. He was an immigrant. Life is much easier
for me.”
“Haven’t you thought about leaving?”
“And go where?”
“I don’t know. Italy? Spain? The U.S.? You have a
European passport, don’t you?”
“Yes. And so does my son. Maybe I will leave
someday. Who knows?” He leaned across the counter and
added, “But I’m useful here.”
“Useful?” Marcello glanced around the store. “You
have noticed that you sell jewelry, haven’t you? No offense,
but how useful is that?”
228
The man inhaled sharply, looking offended for a
moment, and then drummed a finger on the heavy security
glass “You see this gold pendant here? It’s from Ciudad
Bolivar, in southern Venezuela.”
Marcello took a good look at the obviously expensive
item. “Yes, I’ve been there. I went to the Gran Sabana.”
“Okay. Workers pan for gold in the rivers there.
That’s all they do all day—squat over the water and sift
through gravel with a sieve. With luck, they’ll find one tiny
nugget and be able to sell it for enough money to buy food
for their family that day or week. My father once took me to
a river where they search for gold. It wasn’t a nice place.”
Marcello kept his mouth shut and listened politely,
but he wondered what all this had to do with running a
fancy jewelry store in Caracas.
“These people are poor as hell. They live in little
shacks next to a dirt road through the jungle, in the middle
of nowhere. Their children get sick with all kinds of
diseases that could be prevented with the proper vaccines.
But still they work the rivers, because if they didn’t they
would be worse off.”
“And that’s where you come in, I suppose.” “Yes!” he
said, punctuating the word by jabbing a finger at Marcello’s
face. “Maybe we’re well off, and we have cars and we can
travel abroad, but we’re doing something to help, as trivial
as that may sound.”
“You’re right about that. It doesn’t sound like much.
Couldn’t you do a lot more if you went down there and
helped them—”
“Who would pay me? You? I’m not Mother Luisa,
and whatever I did would be like a grain of sand on the
beach. But I’ll tell you this, my friend. Those people would
be even worse off without us.” He took a deep breath and
shook his head. “I’m sorry. I think about this a lot when
people criticize me for living better than ninety percent of
the population.”
“It’s hard to live with guilt, isn’t it?”
229
“If it helps you get someplace, then it’s fine. If it
stops you from doing what you want, then you should
reconsider everything.”
Marcello laughed. “I come here for jewelry, and I get
advice on life.”
“Don’t worry,” the young man replied with a sly grin.
“It’s included in the markup.”
Fifteen minutes later, Marcello had made his
decision, paid the jeweler, and assured him that he had
enjoyed their talk. The young man told Marcello the same
thing and thanked him for his business. “Whoever you
bought that for is a lucky girl,” he said. “She’ll love it, I
promise you.”
Marcello left the store and practically skipped down
the sidewalk, feeling like whistling or shouting or dancing,
anxious to give his present to Alejandra. Yes, he thought,
she will love it. Half a block from the store an older man
with a kid leaned against a parked car, darting looks at him.
Marcello thought he had seen them before, hanging out on
the street near a T-shirt vendor. Wasn’t the teenager
wearing the same blue-and-black baseball cap? Or was this
just a coincidence, another kid with the same hat? No, he
thought, it’s the same pair, all right. Father and son, maybe,
ogling all the pretty girls. Or—
Marcello wasn’t blind to the dangers of downtown
Caracas, but he felt no immediate threat. Too many people
jammed the streets. Anybody who wanted to mug him had
to contend with all these witnesses. Even so, he picked up
his pace as he passed them.
Half a block farther along Marcello found himself
stalled by a huddle of browsers at a refreshment stand.
Somebody bumped into him hard. He turned to see the kid
in the baseball cap, almost as tall as he was, maybe sixteen
years old, pressed against him..
230
“Don’t look at me,” the kid said close to Marcello’s
ear. “I have a gun.” He poked something hard into
Marcello’s ribs. Suddenly the older man appeared on his
other side, completing the sandwich. “Keep your mouth
shut,” he said in a raspy voice.
Marcello’s head buzzed as his thoughts raced at two
hundred kilometers an hour. This is ridiculous, he thought.
And humiliating, too. All these people right here, and
nobody’s doing a damned thing. Don’t they see what’s
happening? Maybe they do. May even know these
hoodlums. But they’re afraid. Don’t want to get involved.
They knew that current Venezuelan law would be just as
tough on them if they attacked the attackers.
Then Marcello’s anger flared. He had just bought
something special and valuable, and damned if was going to
let these mama guevos41 take what had cost him weeks of
work tending cattle.
They bumped him through the crowd and hustled
him into the mouth of an alleyway. The hell with this,
Marcello thought. When he had more room, he spun out of
the older man’s grip and launched a right hook at his fat
face. But the bastard was quicker than he looked. Marcello’s
fist caught him high on the temple and then went numb.
The mugger swung back, but Marcello ducked the blow and
wrestled him to the littered ground. He smelled like weeks
without a bath and stale beer.
The pudgy man wasn’t much of a fighter. Soon
Marcello had him pinned on his back, and he cocked his
arm to throw another punch. Before he could do that, the
back of his head exploded with a sharp pain. He clenched
his teeth, trying to block the haze rapidly covering his eyes.
To no avail.
The last thing Marcello wanted to see before losing
consciousness was the older mugger’s smiling face.
231
The bright light made Marcello blink and squeeze his
eyes shut again, but that didn’t stop the raging pain inside
his skull, now resting on what seemed to be the cushion of a
hospital stretcher. Unfamiliar voices drifted nearby.
“Why is this bed in the hallway?” a female voice said.
“We’re waiting for somebody to claim him,” another
woman replied.
“What about a room?”
“No rooms left. In what planet do you live in? You
know how it is here on Friday and Saturday nights. This guy
only has a cachazo42 on his head. You should see what just
came in from a car accident and the two gang members that
got sliced up like lunch meat. ER looks like a
slaughterhouse. At least this guy won’t end up in the
morgue.”
Nurses . . . hospital . . . not the morgue. That
sounded encouraging to Marcello.
“What’s his story?”
“Picked up on the street. Bump on the head, not too
bad. Knife wound on his back. Superficial. Stitched up
already.”
“Get this man out of the way!” a harried male voice
demanded. “Get this hallway cleared!”
“But we don’t—”
“Take him to Pediatrics, there’s space there.”
Marcello kept his eyes closed, thinking, Don’t want
to get involved, just like all those bystanders who saw me
being attacked and did nothing. He knew when they were
under way, though, with someone spinning his gurney in
the hallway and rolling him down the hallway at a good
clip. He tried to relax and think pleasant thoughts. His deep
breathing and Zen meditation. Then suddenly a loud
banging noise forced Marcello to reconsider Zen and be
glad that he wasn’t at the morgue.
“Ay, no, not again!” a nurse’s voice cried.
Marcello slitted his eyes to take a peek. They were at
a bank of elevator doors. The nurse that was moving him to
Pediatrics was hitting the elevator door with her closed fist.
232
“Six elevators we have in this hospital,” she said with
disgust, “and not one is working right!” She didn’t look like
a happy camper. Finally a bell dinged, and a pair of shiny
metal doors slid open.
Marcello closed his eyes again for the ride upstairs.
The motion of the elevator increased his queasiness. Maybe
if he just tried to relax, he thought, and focus on how tired
he felt . . .
The heavy weariness remained in Marcello’s body
when he opened his eyes the next time and looked around.
Pale sunshine lighted the tall windows, looking like sunset
or sunrise, but he didn’t know which. The images that
confronted him made him feel disoriented. The walls of the
large room were almost a blinding white, with cartoon
figures painted on them. He recognized one of them as
Topolino43—a favorite with the kids.
That’s right, Marcello thought. Pediatrics. Where
they said they would take me.
“Hi,” a female voice said.
Marcello rolled his head to the left, paying a painful
price for moving it too quickly. Another nurse—one he
hadn’t seen before.
“Don’t talk,” she said with a kind smile. “Just rest
now. We’ll leave you in the hallway for a while near the
waiting room. If you need something, tell the nurse here
and she’ll call us. I’ll be back in about an hour to collect
your info.”
Marcello let his eyelids drop and drifted toward
sleep.
Faint beeping sounds made him turn his aching head
to the right. A boy of about nine sat on the bed next to him,
furiously working the video game player in his hands. He
was too focused to notice that Marcello was an adult.
Perhaps he was familiar with public hospitals and felt that a
bed in the middle of the waiting room was something much
too normal. Most likely, he didn’t care. He didn’t notice
when Marcello turned around and spoke to him.
233
“I said ‘Hey’!” Marcello repeated.
“Oh, hi”, the boy answered as he looked up for a
second and then went back to finish killing any enemy he
had to kill.
“What are you playing?” Marcello asked, trying to be
nice.
“A video game”
“What game? I meant.”
“Moon Fight: BurnFire Attacks”, the boy answered
without looking up.
“Are you winning?”
“Hush”, he said as the muscles on his small arms
contracted, a sign that he was reaching the climax of the
level or of the game itself. “I won!” he shouted, seconds
later.
“Congratulations”, Marcello said with a smile.
The handheld game console started blurting the
Moon Fight theme song: “From the galaxy upper and the
galaxy under / Here comes Moon Fight roaring like
thunder”. Marcello wished for a second that thunder really
zapped the toy and muted the heinous song.
‘Wow! I won”, the kid repeated as he stood up from
his plastic seat in the hospital waiting room, walked around
and tried to find anybody else that would feel how
important it was to having beaten “BurnFire”. The lady next
to him didn’t seem to mind, as she was too concerned
breast-feeding her baby.
“Congratulations”, Marcello repeated, with the
whisper of a man still feeling the pain from the stitches on
his back.
“It wasn’t that hard”, the boy said, perhaps
considering that in Marcello he had found somebody to
brag with. “You just had to know the Burn-Fire secret.”
“Burn-Fire? The one with the burning head?”
“A-ha. You have to attack him quick.” The boy added
as he explained to Marcello how the videogame evildoer
didn’t burn and that the fire that surrounded him was fake.
Burn-Fire would scare your soldiers and his own and that
234
only by replicating his tactics, you could be successful.
“When you scare his soldiers, he runs out of soldiers. Then
you enter the room where ‘Burn-Fire’ is and he goes crazy
because he doesn’t have any more soldiers.”
“Do you fight against Burn-Fire?” Marcello asked,
surprised at his own interest in the story.
“Noooooo”, the kid said with a laugh. “Burn-Fire
can’t fight! He just scares the soldiers. My cousin had told
me the secret. I didn’t believe him, but it’s true.”
“Good” “So you enter the room, Burn-Fire sees you
and then sees he doesn’t have any soldiers. His fire turns off
and he starts crying. Ha-ha, that’s really funny.”
Marcello enjoyed the kid’s face of absolute
satisfaction. The traditional video game was one of brute
force, gaining enough ammunition to come slamming into
the final door and destroying everything in sight. Some
others were subtler and asked the player to hide, duck and
sneak in before killing their opponent. This one was slightly
different; the main opponent didn’t have to be killed. He
was a coward and surrendered under pressure.
With that ingenious and relatively innocent thought,
he laid his head on the stretcher once more.
“Marcello, Marcello”, whispered the female voice to
his right. “Marcello, are you okay?”
The sun shone through the windows of the Pediatrics
ward and the coldness of dawn was ebbing. The waiting
room was now bustling with visitors. If Alejandra’s voice
hadn’t awoken Marcello, the sound of the rest of the people
would of. Or maybe he would have been moved again to
another place with less noise.
“Alejandra”, he said without opening his eyes
completely. “Alejandra”.
“How are you feeling, sweetie?” she asked. “Sorry for
coming so late but I didn’t know in which hospital you
were. This is the third one I’ve visited. Besides, they don’t
even have your name. Do you carry your passport?”
235
“Passport? Passport… I think I left it in the parking
lot where we left the car”, he replied. “Oh boy! The keys...”
“I have them”, she said. “If you remember the keys,
then you haven’t suffered brain damage”. As she petted his
bloody head, she added with a comforting smile “although
I’m not sure if there was much to damage in the first place”.
“Alejandra”, he said with a hint of pain in his back. “I
have something for you.” Then Marcello grabbed his crotch.
Alejandra blushed and then she turned firm.
“Marcello Carosio! Don’t do anything silly here. There are
too many people. Leave that for later. I think the blow on
your head affected you,” she added wryly.
“You want me to show it you?” he added tongue-incheek.
“Stop that, Marcello”, she insisted.
“Turn around”, he asked.
“Please...”
“Just turn around”, he asked once more.
Alejandra obliged and turned towards the nurse
behind the Pediatrics reception, who was minding her own
business. The nurse was attending a young woman carrying
a baby in one arm and holding a toddler with the other
hand. When she turned back to face Marcello, a small circle
with a bright gem was shining back at her. In Marcello’s
bloody hands, a ring.
“I hope you cleaned it”, she said with a gentle laugh.
“Yes, I did”, he answered. “And no, it obviously
didn’t fit my 21st finger. That’s an urban legend”, he added
while trying to simulate the action of a thick finger making
its way through the ring. Marcello couldn’t laugh at the
thought as the rigid thread of the stitches held his skin.
“Tell me signore, what does that ring mean?”
Marcello’s recovering head could only repeat what
he felt, not what he reasoned. With eyes wide open, he
stood up and sat on the stretcher. He grasped the border of
where he had sat for the past hours and began his speech.
“Boticelli… It was Boticelli who told me to look for
the girl on the oyster shell. He told me that she would
236
appear in front of me on a beach. ‘Be present when it
happens and do not let her go’ he said. He was right. And
here you are, in front of me… my goddess, my divinity.”
Marcello swallowed and lacking an interruption,
continued.
“Of course he was right. Now that I have dreamed
you, I do not want to let you go. Do you want to know what
this ring means? This simple present is me asking you to be
your consort, the one that will keep you safe. And if time
proves otherwise, the one you will never forget.”
Alejandra looked at him and put her hand on his
forehead. “No fever”, she said. She grabbed Marcello and
gave him a big hug near the stitches, making him wonder
whether her love would always hurt. She didn’t say a word
for the next fifteen minutes while the doctor came to see
that Marcello was fine to go. As they were leaving the
Pediatrics ward, hand in hand, she approached the nurse at
the reception and whispered, “He just proposed.” Without
give the nurse time to response, she followed her words
with a wide grin and a wink.
Early on a Wednesday morning in a Caracas suburb
Marcello walks into a gymnasium where a makeshift
operation is processing identification cards. He learned that
the government had set up offsite centers like these to
expedite the process and reduce the crowded conditions at
government administration buildings. The less formal
atmosphere suited Marcello just fine.
Only a few other applicants are here now. He
approaches a long table where four people sit facing
computer terminals. At the far end of the table a tripodmounted digital camera wired to the last computer faces an
empty chair in front of a blue screen, where they will shoot
his new official ID photo—if all goes well.
While Marcello waits for the next free clerk, he takes
another look at the printed paper in his hand. It’s a
photocopy of an old ID card—the only requirement for
getting a new one. Or so he has been told. He reads: Alfredo
237
José Romero Muñoz, ID Number 12-338-095. His own face
gazes from the page.
Alejandra had urged him to do this, and he could
hardly object. She had surprised him when she returned
from Alfredo’s house and showed him the old card. She told
Marcello that he really should have a Venezuelan ID but
that going through the Italian embassy would be a huge
hassle and very time-consuming, too. She promised him
that this would be a temporary solution only.
“Alfredo Romero!” a girl calls from the third
computer station. “Alfredo José Romero Muñoz?”
Marcello needs a moment to respond to the
unfamiliar name. Then he steps forward and hands his
paper to the attractive young clerk. Her red-tipped fingers
fly over the keyboard when she types the information from
the old ID into the computer. Then she props her pretty
chin on one hand and stares at the monitor for seconds that
seemed like minutes.
Anxiety tickles Marcello’s stomach like a flock of
butterflies while he waits.
Then the girl sits back suddenly and looks up at him.
“It says here that you’re deceased.”
Marcello’s mind goes numb. When he can produce
speech again he says, “No, I’m not dead. . . I mean, I wasn’t
dead. They hit me over the head and stabbed me, and I was
almost dead, but then I came back to life.” He continued
while trying his best not to babble.
The girl smirks at him and says, “No kidding?”
“Yes, of course,” he replies, panic tightening his
throat. “I was in the hospital, but they let me go, and then I
ate these oysters, and—”
“Oysters?”
“Yes,” he says. “You know, vuelve a la vida, vuelve a
la vida…” he added, mimicking the oyster salesmen’s pitch.
The girl gives him a suspicious look and says, “Now
I’ve heard everything.” She shakes her head and returns her
attention to the keyboard, taps a few more keys, and stares
238
at the monitor and then at Marcello. “It must be a database
error, you look alive to me.”
Marcello releases a whoosh of air and tries to take
another breath.
The girl gives him an apologetic smile and says, “I’m
sorry, Señor Romero. It happens, you know?”
Marcello’s whole body defrosts with relief at that
good news. “Oh, okay. No problem.”
“I’ll get this all fixed, and you can go have a seat in
front of the camera. We’ll have you out of here in no time.”
He thanks her and turns away, feeling elated. Then
he stops and returns to the girl’s station. In his search for a
conversation topic, he rests his eyes on her nametag. “Now
that you know my name,” he says with a smile, “what’s
yours?”
“María Matilde.”
“What?” he said, with a smile in crescendo. “I didn’t
catch your middle name.”
“Matilde”, she replied once more. “You’re not pulling
my leg are you?”
“Huh? Didn’t hear it.” Marcello answered. He put his
weight on one foot, performed a quick pirouette and landed
in front of the table, pointing at her with his finger. “Once
again now!”
She sighs; perhaps letting Marcello in on the old
news that it’s the umpteenth time somebody sings that tune
after learning her middle name. Nevertheless, she plays
along.
“Ma-TIL-da, Ma-TIL-da, Ma-TIL-da...”
239
Round corn bread that can be served fried or toasted and filled with
cheese, chicken, shredded meat, pork, chicken salad, etc. It’s the
quintessential Venezuelan food, even for those who don’t know what
quintessential means.
2 “Dear Filippo, I’m in Margarita. Hopefully, everything’s working out
fine with your father. I would appreciate it if you contacted me as soon
as you have any news.”
3 Eleanor, my love.
4 How are the women in Venezuela?
5 “Giallo” is Italian for “yellow” although “giallo” movies are somewhat
similar to “noir” movies. But “noir” is French for “black”, which is
somewhat confusing. Whatever. Just think Humphrey Bogart speaking
Italian over a large black phone with a cigarette smoldering nearby.
6 Come here.
7 The translation for Gran Sabana is “Great Savanna” or “Great Plains.”
8 Angelo is a good person. He is a hard-working and honest man. You
should have been open with him from the beginning. He was upset
about having to let you go, but he thought it would be a good way for
you to learn.
9 You could say that I have friends in Rome.
10 Hands clean
11 Pronounced “Crees-tow foo-ay”
12 “Distant love”
13 Great pleasure.
14
“Has tirado?” can mean “have you shot a gun” and is also slang for
“have you had sex?”
15 This shit.
16 This thing has been paid and worked by myself.
17 That’s the thing with the Venezuelans. They’re good people, and they
work hard, but when they see somebody who is successful, they try to
screw him.
18 Corral.
19 Quite far.
20 “Oh, boy.”
21 v “Old Horse.”
22 Pancakes made from fresh corn.
23 A type of Venezuelan music.
24 [Both] the goat and the rope.
25 “Pleased to meet you, my friend.” The word “Pana” is an Anglicism
for “partner”.
1
26 “Excuse me, Sir.”
27 “Why in the [expletive] do you think we’re asking you?”
240
28 “Yes, old [expletive]”
29 “Just tell us where the [expletive] entrance is.”
Drink made from fruit juices and liquor, which can be white rum/caña clara,
vodka or gin. Delicious and deceiving.
31 All except cioè (which means “whatever” in Italian) are names of Venezuelan
towns, cities or neighborhoods.
32 “Be quiet.”.
33 “Crap.”
34 Literally: “Citizens, look for a place. Your ID [and] against the wall.”
30
35
The British equivalent is “Carrying coals to Newcastle”.
Handsome fellow.
37 Don’t remember having told you that the Bolívar is the official
Venezuelan currency. Sorry if you already knew that.
38 Tan.
39 Miss.
40 You are in your home.
41 Yes, eggs in Spanish are spelled “huevos”. Expletives don’t require
good spelling.
42 Slang for blow with a gun handle.
43 “Little mouse”, in Italian but used to refer to Mickey Mouse.
36
241

Oyster_Cocktail_Fina..

Transcription

Similar documents

Marcello Malpighi (1628-1694) - Journal of the Association of

Bike Across Italy - New Mexico Touring Society

MARCELLO MALPIGHI

Celebrity Guests

The Cocktail Handbook: Cool Drinks from

Understanding people on the move in London Charles Buckingham

Innovations in London`s transport: Big Data for a better customer

view in pdf format - Hazelnut New Orleans

COCKTAIL HOUR