"Adolescents
suffer" [Los adolescentes adolecen].
A true masterpiece of technocratic Caracas poetics. If not for inventiveness,
at least for its diffusion. And yet, it can't surpass in splendor the more
popular
"the armadillo
works for the guinea pig" [cachicamo
trabaja para lapa]
It doesn't even
compare due to a matter of perception. The second one turns out to be more
fascinating because the association is destined to remain in darkness. My lack
of referents is absolute. I've never seen an armadillo or a guinea pig. Except
in photographs, videos or zoos and petting stations. I don't know anything
about their habits, the places the live. I don't know about the relationship
between these animals. The mere association leaves me perplexed. Now is the
time of Venezuelans who don't understand Venezuelan phrases.
The enthusiastic
nationalists inscribed in a purely no-worries vision propose that
"Venezuelanness" is nothing more than cultural artifacts like the
dance of the guarandol bird, arepas, joropo music and even the
industrially-produced beer of the Polar company. This is a mystification that
attempts to delineate us as though we were completely westernized beings facing
a display of postcards and souvenirs. It is a reification. It creates
artifacts. No one thinks of culture as something that is breathed. It's turned
into a corpse and from it surge, as though superimposed on a puddle of mud,
those fragile mummies-testimonies that ceaselessly wave their fingers in the
air trying to touch you. The cadaverous doesn't move nor does it move us.
Relatedly,
there's also that
tendency to always think of mestizaje as being of a whitening nature. I've
witnessed how the sanitizing vision of mestizaje defends the purely Spanish
origin of the joropo to the very end and then I've been left astonished when I
see how they read authors like Winthrop R. Wright, who argues that the joropo
is an ensemble of European songs and forms inscribed in the polyphonic rhythms
of African music. If we add the pair of shamanic maracas that accompany any
self-respecting joropero, we find ourselves in the presence of an all-out
interracial super-production. This would represent a more interesting reading,
and also a more
realistic one
of the frenzied beat
of the zapateo dance.
Even
when it comes to that
meticulous, compulsive stamping that takes place in the joropo style from the
Tuy Valleys —and if you don't believe me, watch the videos of El Gabán
Tacateño.
Personally, and I'm speculating here, I think that
Venezuelanness is to be found somewhere between a fragment from A Short Account of the Destruction of the
Indies
by Bartolomé de las Casas
published in 1552
and the episode
about Tebaldi in search of the perfect yogurt that occurs in the novel El
bonche by Renato Rodríguez
published in 1976.
The fragment by De Las
Casas constitutes a truly brief aside in A
Short Account. Set in a page with too many blank spaces, located between an
aside dedicated to the Pearl Coast and to Paria and the island of Trinidad, and
the aside dedicated to the Kingdom of Venezuela, we find this short paragraph
flowing under the title "Regarding the Yuyapari River."
And the Dominican
begins,
"Through the
province of Paria climbs a river called the Yurapari, more than two hundred
leagues heading inland..."
And the crystalline
peninsula, its luminosity and mangroves all come to mind... "A sad tyrant
followed its course for many leagues during the year 1529 with four hundred or
more men, and he committed great massacres, burning people alive and wielding
swords against an infinity of innocent natives who were in their lands and
homes without harming anyone, not paying attention, and he left much of the
land in ashes and astonished and fearful..."
The initial beauty
plunges toward the territories of the abject. Everything has become a story summarized
by a pair of images, flames and ruins...
"And
finally..."
De Las Casas continues
resigned,
"... he died a
horrible death and his armada fell apart. And afterwards, other tyrants
succeeded in those evils and tyrannies, and today we see them destroying and
killing and damning the souls that the son of God redeemed with his
blood..." in this manner outlining it like a never-ending story, destined
to be repeated for eternity. I focus on that unknown verb in Spanish, to damn,
[infernar]
"to damn the
souls."
What else can these
visions of hell be but prophecies. Eternal damnations. I imagine that to damn
means precisely the act of making the soul pass through a bit of hell. As
though passing through eggs and flour. Becoming inferno, a macabre product of
the technology of the spirit. Ever since then, perhaps, we have lived as damned.
Irremediably contaminated by inferno. That's how those fleeting tyrants end up
elaborating a version of the story about the bald rooster. That story from
Venezuelan folklore that consists of an opening phrase that's repeated forever;
when someone says,
"Do you want to
hear the story about the bald rooster?"
"Yes,"
someone else replies.
"I already told
it to you," the first one says,
and then again
"Do you want to
hear the story about the bald rooster?"
And so on
forever
until the other person
gets angry or annoyed.
Or they both do.
I was a child the
first time I encountered the story of the bald rooster. Dad repeated it to me
until he managed to make me feel like I was at the edge of desperation.
Yes.
I.
Wanted.
To hear the story.
But the story doesn't
exist. It's nothing more than that prefiguration, a hook to catch your lips. A
matter for tricksters.
Changing the subject,
the fragment by
Rodríguez introduces the "energetic man" in the landscape. An image
that circulates, that lives inside a fucked up loop, like the petty tyrant in
the boat. But it represents a notable improvement because it comes from the
same creators of the "1975 Petroleum Nationalization." The avatar of
the "energetic man," the political prototype of the oil boom in the
seventies, the millions of photos of the presidential candidate Carlos Andrés
Pérez leaping over a puddle in an Olympic pose is incarnated in Tebaldi, who
like the Wandering Jew seeks the utopia of the perfect yogurt after seeing the
movie "The Man on the Eiffel Tower" and discovering Franchot Tone's
satisfied expression when "he shoots a yogurt between his chest and
back." Tebaldi understands that this is "the thing," by which he
means, "beatitude, peace, a balanced relationship with the cosmos, the
harmonious life" and he gives himself over insatiably to trying all the
types of yogurt to be found in Caracas. After buying a cow and producing his
own yogurt, he ends up robbing money from the cash register of the company
where he works so he can flee to Europe and throw himself into the delirium of
travelling on foot throughout the entire continent trying millions of portions
of yogurt. However, he never manages to feel what he yearned for, "that
beatitude and peace on Franchot Tone's face."
Is it the search for
El Dorado in reverse?
Venezuelans mount
themselves in the libidinal energy of petroleum in order to pursue the fetish
of modernity.
We are
the eternal Latin
American
positivists.
Caracas was the city
of utopia, and that's why today it seems retro-futuristic to us, with all those
beautiful buildings in the modernist architectural style. The streets of Los
Chaguaramos, Colinas de Bello Monte and Las Mercedes are an architectural
museum from that belle epoque. Even though the streets are sometimes sprinkled
with soulless glass buildings in corporate Palm Beach style, the city maintains
an atmosphere of a classic cyberpunk story.
Caracas is still the
city of utopia.
But the "infernal"
utopia of Bartolomé de las Casas.
The city of the
reversible utopia. The city of the executive crystal skyscrapers occupied by
the impoverished masses always pushed to the limit. The extreme precariousness
of cardboard disintegrating in the tropical humidity. The modernity of Caracas
is as fragmented, broken, as the windows of those skyscrapers.
Now,
what we know about
Tebaldi we know thanks to José, the best carpenter in Galilee. They often run
into each other in extremely improbable ways on the roads of Northern Europe.
On one occasion when José is getting ready to spend the night around a campfire
hidden amidst the trees, he catches a glimpse of a man walking quite decidedly
as though he were being dragged by a mirage. Each time he grabs a new portion
of yogurt, he fails. The revelation doesn't materialize and it's hard not to
imagine him falling incessantly toward the lower right hand corner of the
screen. The petty tyrant from De Las Casas and Tebaldi coincide in the video
game recurrence of the story about the bald rooster. Both of them always return
from the upper left-hand corner as if they were our telluric versions of the
Mario Bros. It wouldn't be much of an exaggeration to speak of the story about
the bald rooster as a philosophical concept that belongs to us. The truncated
story. Very truncated. The very new story
that
unleashes desire,
the utopia of
progress.
But it seems to be
doomed from the very first phrase to the poverty of progress.
Paria-story-metaphor of the earthly paradise in the diaries of Columbus.
Liberating and seeking independence in the 19th century, Venezuela-unstoppable-magma,
the absolute fantasy of republican emergence.
But all of them,
unleavened bread.
They flatten
in the oven.
Nationalism as a
political concept is not important to me since it can turn out to be
misleading. Nationalism isn't something unitary that can be considered a
solution. It can't be considered positive or negative by simply speaking in the
abstract without analyzing each particular manifestation and I,
understand-that-the-country-is-truly-fucked
but frankly: I don't
like the anti-nationalist diatribes that many Venezuelans are willing to share
each time they have the chance. Now it turns out that it's in style to be
anti-nationalist...
Evidently,
it's a reaction to the
saturation of Chavismo's discursive manipulation, which has kidnapped the
referents, the meaning of the spirit of our imagined
community. Some in the opposition have made the mistake of waving a flag in
response under the figure of a supposed individualism that denies the existence
of something as imperishable and nebulous as Venezuelanness. I think it's a
mistake because we should situate ourselves in a thought scheme that takes into
consideration our reality, our particularities.
I don't know if
thinking about Venezuela from
Love
is being a
nationalist.
But I can't help it: I
like love. So I think about that shack I glimpsed on the road between Puerto La
Cruz and Arapito beach in the state of Sucre. A fragile shack made of odds and
ends prolifically adorned with pieces of blue glass. It was evident that these
were pieces of Solera Light beer bottles. Broken. Crushed against the ground. I
think of that radiant shack on the hot road. With all that blue glass filtering
the light in a kaleidoscopic manner. The landscape transfigured by the rays of
the sun that were pounding its humble walls.
What else did Armando Reverón
and the artists of Geometric Abstraction do but play with light? Reverón with
his humid, impressionist landscapes, elaborated expressive devices inspired by
the light of the tropics. The abstract artists with their kinetic art, marked
by optical illusions, assembled the movement of a space that was necessarily
crossed and modified by light. The fragments of the "Orange Sphere" by
Jesús Soto distributed along the Caracas horizon reach the plenitude of
an artificial sun.
So I like to think
Venezuelanness has more to do with collections of contingencies such as these,
circumstances that provide us with contours. The tendency to play with light.
The tendency to transform the tendency of playing with light into a form of
artistic expression. Venezuelanness as a way of thinking and being in the
world. Not like a concretist corpse. Venezuelanness is not the "Orange
Sphere," it is all the contingencies that limit its creation and the
creation of the kaleidoscope-shack on the road to the beach because it never
ceases to amaze me that a Venezuelan living in the middle of nowhere, who has
probably never seen the works of Reverón or the Geometric Abstraction painters,
can share the same instinct, a similar sensibility accompanied by its
respective correlative of know-how, because it never ceases to amaze me that a
man living in the middle of nowhere, using waste materials and a rudimentary
knowledge, arrives at the same results, reaches the same aesthetic.
So that,
the furious masses
that are trying to construct themselves as the extreme opposite of Chavismo are
a virus of the system.
"Venezuelan music
is horrible, man... Arepas don't nourish you, they just make you fat as hell,
man... Venezuelan writers have always been shit and that's why no one knows who
they are, man."
They're mistaken when
they think that Venezuelanness is disposable, as if it were merely a possible
option that can be taken or rejected. In actuality, it's simpler because it's
an organic matter. It is merely features.
For example,
in my case it involves
not being accustomed to animals because I grew up in a fishing village that was
improvised into a oil-producing city. A fishing village with a single street
that in the forties began to transform itself into a zone that would eventually
have one of the largest oil refineries in the country. Houses built on top of
salt mines. Yellowish sand. Sterile. Tenuous
breeze facing the sea. Everything flat. A few sand cliffs here and there.
Everything scorching. Blue sky like a mirage. A handful of palm trees. Some sea
grapes. The purple, sour fruit, spreading like stains on the pavement.
Everything so full of space. The grass planted by the mayor's office
languishing and faded to brown on the traffic islands that separate the streets
and highways. A life emptied of animals. Some tiny bird, a black shadow on the
sidewalk. A pelican on the beach. A macaw at some tourist inn. No chickens. No
goats. No cows. No horses. No roosters. No dogs. No cats. Not many trees.
Hardly any trees. Only salt water. Small stones. The sand putting pressure on
red skin under the shiny edge of the day. Being blinded by the excessive sun.
The industrial chimneys expelling black smoke. Ashes. The industrial gas
burners.
When I watch people in
Pittsburgh
hugging chickens
I'm immediately
overcome by a premonition that I can't do that. I can't hug chickens. But
paradoxically, I fondly remember the stories of my dad eating impossible
animals during the survival training he received when he was in the army. Dad
emerges in my memories in some thicket on the Colombian border, eating grilled
long-tailed monkeys and serpents. Or
climbing onto a boat and beating the water with a stick to disperse the deadly
piranhas. Or riding grey horses that for some reason I imagined being purple.
Then,
the image of dad
sitting in Ciudad Bolívar in front of a plate of turtle pie.
The horror.
Then,
the image of the
macaws at the Central University of Venezuela in Caracas balancing themselves
on the campus palm trees in the green spaces known as No Man's Land. The man
who kidnaps the incredibly beautiful yellow-blue macaw that crashes into the
paranoid, tall gates of an apartment building in Los Chaguaramos. The bus on the
street's horizon. The electric fences. A dry blow and a blue shadow cracking
the pavement. The man who runs and hides the bruised body of the bird beneath
his shirt.
The horror.
And yet
I
can't
hug chickens.
So being Venezuelan
involves a collection of contingencies,
like having a certain
predisposition to playing with light or having certain probabilities of not
knowing how to relate to animals and, perhaps, it might also be that repressed
smile at the gynecologist's office when she looks for suspicious bumps in my
breasts and starts to recommend that I use sunscreen whenever I leave the house
each day and I'm suddenly struck, like never before, by the vision of the
tenuous paleness of Pittsburgh, kingdom of ice, because I fully remember
the utter intensity of
the light in the city where I was born.
So the gynecologist
recommends I use sunscreen every day and I,
I immediately think
there's no possibility of me getting skin cancer. If I survived the light in
Puerto La Cruz there's no chance the light of Pittsburgh will defeat me. The
majority of us don't even suspect such an atrocity could be possible: to become
ill because of the sun.
Impossible, impossible
to not see it as an eccentricity on the part of the gynecologist, especially
when I recall having spent entire weeks sitting on the sand uninterruptedly,
swallowing salt water. Without paying the least bit of attention to sunscreen
or moisturizing lotion. The inclement sun of the tropics assaulting the strips
of my dry and peeling skin. Charred. And then the salt water floods my
mouth and nose while I'm lying on the bed with my legs open as the gynecologist
holds a metal pincer and I think of how pleasant it is to be dragged by the
currents of the sea while my body floats, overcoming any future sinking. I
don't need any sunscreen. I have an understanding with the light. I leave her
office holding a piece of paper with information about the services I received.
I note that the doctor has written in the box at the top of the page, even
though I told her I'm from Venezuela, despite my accent:
Age: 29
Race: white
Ethnicity: not
Hispanic or Latino.
It's impossible to not
think that being Venezuelan is also that. Your racial identity is an
indecipherable enigma for any foreigner. They project what they know onto you.
They dare to guess and are sometimes mistaken. But not always.
In contrast, each day I understand less the
meaning of tha
