Israel Centeno: “Venezuela hoy espanta” / Daniel Fermín

Israel Centeno: “Venezuela today is frightening”

Israel Centeno (Caracas, 1958) recreated a post-apocalyptic Venezuela in his new novel. Jinete a pie (Caracas: Lector Cómplice, 2014) is a fragmented love story that takes place in a world dominated by motorcycle riders. There are pedestrians who must survive the hunts imposed by the hordes that wield power, there are voices trying to reconstruct their past, to provide continuity for their memory.

“We are incapable of remembering things that happened just two years ago. The dynamics of Venezuela make us forget what came before. It’s a very toxic atmosphere where everything gets distorted. I see my characters as if they were licing a nightmare within a mirror where they’re reflected in multiple ways. When I look at my country, that’s the type of story that comes out, that’s the discourse I capture.”

Jinete a pie [Rider On Foot] is the beginning of a trilogy in which Centeno proposes a deconstruction of modernity in Venezuela, amid an atmosphere of Gothic realism. It takes place in the Altamira district of Caracas that, according to one of its characters, was at one point the last holdout of the resistance. “Because the country,” Centeno assures us, “is like a mystery, or a horror story.”

“Today in Venezuela rationality is being broken, fractured. We even celebrate death when it takes away an enemy. We witness the apparition of figures that blend into each other, they could be vampires, witches, politicians. The country’s reality is frightening. Much more than the tales of Gothic horror from the 18th and 19th centuries. You see rituals linked to politics. The fact that Simón Bolívar was disinterred, that Chávez and others shouted “Fatherland, Socialism or Death!” at his bones, this is all somewhat chilling. If you place all that in a different scenario it would fill anyone with fear. Imagine that all the powers in France appear and worship the ashes of Napoleon Bonaparte. That would make everyone panic. Hugo Chávez walked to his death surrounded by a bizarre mysticism. Nicolás Maduro slept in Chávez’s tomb. I haven’t seen anything more Gothic than that. There’s a castle at the foot of the mountain, a tomb in a castle. We’ve got enough elements to exploit Gothic literature for 200 years.”

Israel Centeno tries to understand the country through fiction. No one who writes about Venezuela can avoid reflecting our reality, of interpreting it, analyzing it. Because during moments of crisis, of violence, of social confrontation, of deaths, there’s not much else a writer can do.

“Literature can’t assume the role of political parties nor that of their leaders. Literature can only do what it tends to do: establish a connection and links between reality, fiction and the truth. Writing in any field is a means of resistance, it’s a political position. There’s nothing else I can do. Literature can’t save anyone, but I can keep writing. Any publication that appears in this context is a political gesture that won’t free us. I won’t land in Caracas with books, nor will I try to tell people that the more they read the freer they’ll be. You can’t expect the writer to be more intelligent than everyone else, that he construct a truth for the rest to follow. I think it’s been a curse for Venezuelans to believe in Messiahs. I don’t want that type of heroism.”

One of the protagonists of Jinete a pie says that without rights we’re all equal, that this is the only possible equality. There are many voices in the novel that pretend to own the truth. Israel Centeno believes that Venezuela today points in that direction.

“Everyone is equal in a concentration camp; everyone is equal when you’re in a supermarket with no food. When equality is imposed on you in such a manner that your rights are taken away. When you can’t have access to dollars on the exchange market they equalize you. When they kill all of us, we’re equal. Venezuelans are suffering from a flood of violence that is State policy. It’s a way of equalizing. Impunity strips the citizen of his right to enjoy public spaces. No one can enjoy those places without fearing he’ll be killed in a horrible manner.”

In Jinete a pie there was a pact between pedestrians and motorcycle riders. After multiple safaris in which they would kill pedestrians, they arrived at a pact of non-aggression against the weak. Until the rules are broken (including a curfew). And the truce, or dialogue, imposed by those in power is over.

“It’s like those acts of justice that exist in Venezuela. The Supreme Court judges dictate in favor of the murderer, which is the government. Power has become an element that persecutes, that tortures, that hunts, that lays blame on others. The Supreme Court decides when that hunt should be augmented or not. Maduro calls out for dialogue but he breaks it. That’s the reality, the suspension of the safaris is the alleged plan for peace in which they keep killing us.”

Israel Centeno finished writing this novel in 2011. It wasn’t made in response to the recent acts of violence involving collective paramilitary groups at the service of the government. The author, who once watched a group of motorcycle riders in Caracas beat up an elderly man for crashing into one of their motorcycles on the highway, isn’t trying to demonize them.

“It’s not that motorcycle riders are evil. It’s that when Maduro calls them his “gentlemen of steel” he’s giving them blank check. If I give them immunity, I turn them into a criminal arm. It’s not a possible reality to think of a world dominated by them, it’s a reality that already exists. Now the problem is to revert the situation without taking away all their rights.”

The protagonists of Jinete a pie can’t leave the zone, that destroyed Altamira that became one of the cantons into which the country has been divided. Centeno doesn’t want to sell an epic of urbanization. It is merely a vision that comes after a conflict that is suggested. There is also a love that is unable to find itself, that suffers from distrust, from paranoia, from the fracture itself that reigns over society; a pathological love that looks like hate, that alters people and tries to cure itself.

“The reading I would give is to ask, up to what point was the city made parochial to an extreme. Up to what point did each place in Caracas become divorced from the other, up to what point did it cease to be a whole and become small cantons, fragments with no connection. In the story there’s a defeated Altamira, in the shadows, in darkness, in uncertainty, as if they were mere zombies.”


More Books

• Israel Centeno has already completed the other two parts of the trilogy that begins with Jinete a pie. El cruce de los vientos [The Crossroads of the Winds] and La torre invertida [The Inverted Tower] complete the saga of a post-apocalyptic Caracas.

• The Venezuelan writer also has another trilogy waiting to be published. It is a story about Sherlock Holmes that takes place between the United States and Venezuela right during the time period when Arthur Conan Doyle made his character disappear for three years. Centeno has him solving cases in both countries.

• The Caracas-born writer has also just completed two other novels: one about a love affair and another one about social networks and the impossibility of writing. He is also giving shape to a third one about the guerrilla fighters in Venezuela during the 1970s. “I’ve written more than ever during the last few years,” said the novelist.

• Just recently a publishing house in the United States released a translation of his 2002 novel El complot. The process of bringing the book from Spanish into English was under the care of Guillermo Parra. [Israel Centeno, The Conspiracy, Pittsburgh: Sampsonia Way, 2014]




{ Daniel Fermín, El Universal, 25 May 2014 }

El complot para matar al Presidente / Manuel Caballero

The Conspiracy to Kill the President

The conspiracy to assassinate the President exists, it’s in progress and taking place at least in the fears of the men in the Palace.


Why is this novel by Israel Centeno (El complot, Alfadil, 2002) so disconcerting? In order to explain this to ourselves, we begin with what’s always easier for the lazy: its classification. It is a uchronia; what the dictionary defines as a logical construction adapted to the story of something that hasn’t happened, but could have or might in the future.

The conspiracy to assassinate the President isn’t something that has occurred in reality, but if we pay attention to the warnings, to the fears, to the terrors, to the escapes, to the bullet-proof vests, to the security circles and other such nonsense, it exists, it’s in progress and taking place at least in the fears of the men in the Palace.

A scene. Which is to say, those who suffer these fears could label this novel with another classification: it’s a simple intelligence report, the base for what the pedants and other political scientists would call “a scene.”

We could also say, with all the bad intentions in the world, that it’s a novel of anticipation, an immediate anticipation. Finally, one could, maximizing the mania for classification, say that this is a realist novel.

Israel Centeno’s text impresses us with its masterful ability to immerse itself in reality without being conquered by it. There is, throughout the text, not the least concession to the present such as it might be conceived, for example, by a reporter: the author knows how to establish here the indispensable distance between his fiction and reality, which makes this a novel and not merely an imaginary report. But neither does it distance itself from that reality (or perhaps it’s best to say, from this present) so that the novel becomes a simple game around something that hasn’t happened and will never happen.

My disorganized eagerness. By saying that El complot is a disconcerting novel, I should add that it would be much more if my disorganized reader’s eagerness hadn’t taken me years ago to a series of Irish writers, among them playwrights (The Undertaker, whose author’s name escapes me). Those texts describe the unending spiral of violence in which the characters find themselves immersed.

Of course, and this is seen still in a great part of the Irish situation, violence is a bull that once it’s released is nearly impossible to reign it back in, and sometimes it’s never achieved. The characters in Israel Centeno’s novel don’t just live with violence, they live for violence. There’s no way of escaping it, because they only know one way of life, and thus only one way out: death, given or received.

But it’s not just that, but that the worst hatred isn’t against the evident enemy, but rather against one’s own comrades and friends, always suspected of being actual or potential traitors. This is how Sergio and Gloria don’t escape by shooting their way out from the presence of the identified and hated enemy, but rather shooting against their own friends who are no longer useful to the cause, or who are simply in the way.

They remind us of Chesterton. The problem is that it’s a process that never concludes, and deep down, these tragic characters remind us of those described in a loose tone by Chesterton in his The Man Who Was Thursday; a group of revolutionaries who weren’t that at all, but undercover policemen. In the end, they weren’t spying on anyone but themselves, and if Chesterton had been of a different disposition, they would have eventually, like these Centeno characters, killed one another. Ultimately, as well, and without wanting to laugh on a stage where so much blood has been shed, there is something else that joins Centeno to Chesterton’s tradition: his entire text employs a subtle irony, mocks the frightened and mocks the obsessed, it mocks the ambition for absolute power.

Relatedly, Centeno’s novel takes us to Orwell, to the Vargas Llosa of The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, because it too is, in his own very personal manner and with a nervous but clear style of writing, a bitter reflection on maximalist utopias. The serpent biting its own tail that they all become.

Do these characters have a destination? Yes: Centeno has reserved for them a refuge in that type of valley of the shadows where they will never know whether they’re living on this or that side of dreaming, on this or that side of death; where they will live maybe forever the life they’ve always lived: in the provisional, in the no-tomorrow.

I must conclude pointing out something that’s also impressed me in this novel by Centeno: the transparency of his prose, that continues to astonish in a text that, because of its topic and we might say its currentness, must have been written in a very short time and very recently.




Translator’s note: El complot has recently been translated into English and published as Israel Centeno, The Conspiracy, translated by Guillermo Parra (Pittsburgh: Sampsonia Way, 2014).




{ Manuel Caballero, El Universal, 28 July 2002 }

A una desposada / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

To A Bride

     Any invention from my infirm numen would tarnish the pages of this album. It would offend them with the discord of an accidental spiderweb in a regal mansion. The tale of venturous nuptials is more alluring.
     I dream that I hear it from a pleasant virgin in a region of improbable Asia; that it was nighttime, and I was intoxicated by the placid expiration of murmurs, songs and perfumes; that the exotic landscape was crowned by the moon and with the retinue of the major stars, because the minor ones couldn’t manage to shine amidst the irradiation of they, their sisters; and I dream that, above the earth and in front of my eyes, a fantastic city of cupolas and towers was sleeping beside the mirror of a fabulous river; and I remember the virgin recounted for me this pleasant fable: I met a princes promised in marriage to the sultan of a remote country. She saw the nuptials as the start of a captivity, because she was discreet and easily frightened, she imitated the jungle gazelles. She sought out my company and later wanted to contemplate herself in the mirror of an ornamental fountain. She was thin, firm and with thick hair that fell down to tough with the water in the shaded marble bowl. A certain errant poet came here one afternoon, a precursor to the nuptial courtship that was closer day by day. He spoke of himself as having departed from his friends so he might entertain the princess during her journey to the fiancé’s capital city. They all gather the next day and depart, when the princess finally accepts the poet’s attention and loves him without manifesting it. The retinue travels through jungles and deserts, amid the murmuring rain and the slow summer, when the sun prefers its cart with white oxen. The poet wields, in his way, a sense of bravery, of being a good conversationalist and of piety. He offends the tiger of regal lineage; he mocks the shameless monkey; he takes to the bland butterfly, made of silk and wool; he reveres the absorbed ascetic. He proves to be a friendly courtesan and a hardened rider. She approaches the end of the journey and glimpses the palaces disposed to welcome her, and notices that she’d rather stay in the desert with the wonderfully nice bard. Meanwhile, he’s disappeared from her side, and she is presented, with her face looking down, to the presence of her owner; but a hidden and very well-known voice exhorts her to happiness. The princess looks up and notices the courteous poet was the promised husband, who had left his monarch’s regalia in order to affectionately win the hand of the beloved, omitting the prestige of his high position.
     This is what the pleasant virgin told me in a distant country, beneath a musical tree; and her tale and my one fortunate dream ended when dawn called, enamored, at my window.




La torre de Timón (1925)




{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }

Crónica subterránea / Antonio López Ortega

Subterranean Chronicle

I hear two similar pieces of news in less than an hour. The first arrives via the phone from Mérida and concerns a student in intensive care; the second one I read in a morning newspaper and has to do with the unconscious state of another student. These two clinical cases are supplemented by news of torture, jailings, the faceless wounded, the disappearances. This is our harvest: extermination. Except it seems to be lived on a second plane, hidden from the reality of the surface. In other words, we pump gas while someone tortures; we buy what little there is to be found while someone assaults someone else’s body; we jog in a park while someone shoots to kill. There are two circles that never touch: normality, which shrinks each day, and abnormality, which we start to see as just another habit.

But make no mistake: it’s not just another habit; it’s the negation of life itself, of coexistence; it’s the death of the minimal requirement needed to call ourselves a country, because when it comes to the term republic, we fall into academic depths.

In the second circle, that pulses while we go to the bakery and can’t find any milk, there are mothers who cry, there are families in mourning, there is weeping that finds no consolation, there are victims without killers. Who talks about that chronicle, who brings it to the surface? Who’s keeping count of the abuses, who writes about the pure pain that will never know about the soulless beings who have provoked it? Mothers say they have to be close to their children; students ask to not be left alone; passersby say there’s nothing they can do. Meanwhile, the country bleeds to death, particularly the country of young people, which is like imagining the future and only seeing a blind old man. Everything in Venezuela becomes landscape, daily habit, conversation in the hall. Nothing transcends; nothing moves us. The murders are like trees: obstacles in the road; the deaths are like old news: they repeat our tedium. How can someone smile, how can someone go to the barber shop, how can someone swim in the sea?

Beneath appearances, themselves incomplete, there is a subterranean chronicle (that no one sees, that no one wants to see) that is only shared by mourners. Tales travel from one trench to another, as though carried by anonymous soldiers: the news of a death, the anxious search for a particular medicine, the cure that never comes, the beings that don’t wake up, the girlfriends that won’t see their boyfriends anymore, the mothers that suffer like titans, the fathers left with only tears of stone. The most understanding will ask themselves: What have we become? The most skeptical will tell themselves: To what country of oblivion have we travelled?

The death of feeling, the word, consciousness, of a reason to be. All we are is impulses, compliments, inconsistencies. All we are is servile beings, dead in life, carrying our heart in a wheel chair.

At least the subterranean chronicle brings us proof of life, news about people who are moved, faces of people who have reasons to suffer, suspicions of impulses that might be human. These lines are for them, these empty impulses that would rather be closer to their death than to our own are for them.




{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 8 May 2014 }

Nunca he sabido de palabras / Rafael Cadenas

I’ve Never Known About Words

I’ve never known about words
as much as I’ve wanted to.

Relegated to a time,
they don’t look for me.

I too, Auden, have
the best dictionaries that money can buy.

Pieces that line up
with distress.

Our life is arduous,
back there,
boiling.

I don’t want style,
but honesty.




Gestiones (1992)




{ Rafael Cadenas | Venezuela, 1930 }

Las paces / Rafael Cadenas

Peace

Let’s make an agreement, poem.
I won’t force you to say what you don’t want to
and you won’t resist my desires so much.
We’ve struggled for a while now.
Why this effort to make yourself in my image
when you know things I don’t even suspect?
Get rid of me already.
Save yourself before it’s too late.
Well, you always pass me by,
you know how to speak what moves you
and I don’t,
because you’re more than yourself,
and I’m just the one trying
to recognize himself in you.
I’ve got the extent of my desire
and you have none at all,
you advance to wherever you’re going
without looking at the hand you move
that thinks it possesses you when it feels you spring from it
like a substance erecting itself.
Impose your course on the one writing, he
only knows how to hide,
cover the novelty, grow impoverished.
He’s displaying a tired
reiteration.

Poem,
take me away from you.




{ Rafael Cadenas, Sobre abierto, Valencia, España: Editorial Pre-Textos, 2012 }

Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez: “Los libros representan todo lo que el gobierno no es” / José G. Márquez

Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez: “Books represent everything the government isn’t”

(Photo: Alexandra Blanco)

Méndez Guédez is back in Venezuela to present his prize-winning novel Arena negra

Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez spends quite a bit of time on airplanes, having moved to Spain nearly two decades ago and returning to Venezuela periodically. His childhood was spent between his native Barquisimeto and Caracas. This fragmented him, as he says, and is reflected in the characters of his books. Even in the promotion of his books, because while he baptizes Arena negra (Caracas: Lugar Común, 2013), back in Spain he presents Los maletines (Madrid: Siruela, 2014).

The first one was named Book of the Year in 2013 by Venezuelan booksellers and its protagonist is a Spaniard, while the second one —whose main character is a Venezuelan— is considered by some to be his best novel yet. Without actually pulling it off, he’s always in two places at once. “That’s only possible in writing and in dreams; this is why I’m interested in both, because you can easily move from one place to another,” the writer expresses, during his visit to Caracas recently.

Méndez Guédez says life has become an endless goodbye but also a constant reencounter. His stories are filled with dismayed characters, who abandon or are abandoned, within a background of political events and remnants of humor. “I try to create something positive out of that devastating feeling by transforming it into writing. Each time I travel I take back with me all types of images, situations, words, in order to keep writing about this city,” he adds.

Arena negra, for example, centers on the life of a family forced to accept a father’s departure, a Spaniard who arrives in Venezuela in the late 1940s with the hope of making some money. It’s told in three time periods and presents an atypical structure.

In Los maletines the main voice belongs to a Venezuelan who works for the government today and carries suitcases full of cash to various parts of the world. Since he lives in an extremely violent nation, he’s on a constant search for happiness, and this is why he eventually plans a conspiracy with a friend that may or may not work.

“From a dramatic point of view, social convulsions work quite well for talking about certain characters in that manner,” the author reflects.


Prodigal Son

Although Méndez Guédez lives in Europe, he reads the Venezuelan press every day on the Internet.

Regarding the crisis of the last few months, he thinks there are still plenty of reasons to protest, among them the difficult situation of the book industry in the country.

“Books are dangerous: they make people think, they provide beauty. They represent everything the government isn’t. That’s how I understand why the government is trying to sabotage their free circulation. There’s fertile ground here for the imagination to flourish,” he assures.




{ José G. Márquez, El Nacional, 3 May 2014 }

La búsqueda / Rafael Cadenas

The Search

We never found the Grail.
The tales weren’t veridical.
Only the fatigue of the roads accompanied
those who ventured out,
but we were expecting stories,
what would our living be
without them?

Nothing was resolved,
we could have stayed home.
But we’re so restless.
And yet, once the journey ended
we felt that within us
—no longer hostages
to expectation—
another temper
had been born.




{ Rafael Cadenas, Sobre abierto, Valencia, España: Editorial Pre-Textos, 2012 }

Rafael Cadenas, contestaciones: Entrevista / Daniel Fermín

Rafael Cadenas, Replies: An Interview


(Photo: Venancio Alcázares)


Before the Interview:

Rafael Cadenas (Barquisimeto, 1930) listens to the anecdote about Mario Vargas Llosa’s arrival at Simón Bolívar International Airport in Maiquetía, Venezuela.

The journalist speaks:

There were so many journalists at the airport that a bystander approached to ask:
“Dude, who’s coming?”
“Vargas Llosa.”
“The basketball player?”

Rafael Cadenas smiles. He tells his own anecdote:

“You made me recall the Spanish essayist Juan Marichal, who always received letters from people asking him to sign a ball. They confused him with the pitcher.”

The journalist smiles.

Two examples of how a writer will never be as famous as any professional athlete, that any singer or actor can have a greater impact on people than an intellectual, even if he’s won the Nobel Prize in Literature or if he has been honored for his work (Rafael Cadenas was recognized this week by the mayor’s office in the Caracas district of El Hatillo).


Interview (Cadenas reads the answers to a questionnaire sent beforehand by mail):

Years ago, you spoke of the uselessness of literature (1969), and also of the null influence of writers in a society that no longer listens to them (1981). Now I ask you: Is it worth it to write to today? Does it make sense to insist on the value of literature if it can’t prevent the world from falling apart?

It’s not useless. Writers do have an influence even if it’s a minority that reads them, but not quite for preventing events that are beyond what human beings are able to do.

Last month, a group of artists (including you) gathered at the Chacao Cultural Center in Caracas to demand the liberation of political prisoners. Leopoldo López is still in jail. Can a writer, artist or intellectual (not the work itself, but the person, the author) do something in the face of the abuse of power beyond raising his voice, establishing a position?

He can write, speak, say what he thinks, as on that occasion, when I read phrases and sayings in defense of the prisoners, the students and of Teodoro Petkoff, a fundamental figure in Venezuela, whose great contributions have been the political party Movimiento al Socialismo, his books and his newspaper Tal Cual.

I cite one of your sayings: “When the State becomes a giant in a country, its inhabitants become dwarves.” Do you think that power today, in Venezuela, steps on the people?

It’s clear that it represses brutally, even peaceful demonstrations. It already has blood on its hands, but it blames the victims for being assaulted with bullets, buckshot and tear gas. It doesn’t blame those who shoot, and it maintains armed groups that exist beyond the law. And yet, dialogue is indispensable, though the government has to depose its arrogance, because it doesn’t possess the truth. It’s actually possessed by ideas whose results we all suffer, including that part of the people that supported it and deserves respect, just like the opposition.

A phrase you read in Chacao, attributed to a dictator, says that when he engages in dialogue he doesn’t like to be interrupted. In the present context: Do you think there can be an agreement or a negotiation between the government and the opposition?

What the opposition is asking for is fair, but the government makes no concession maybe because it considers that a sign of weakness, when it’s actually an opportunity for a shift toward democracy that can save us. Because everything we’re seeing today denies democracy. The regime violates the Constitution even though it waves it around deceitfully, the public powers are at its service, the National Assembly doesn’t live up to its name. It has taken over TV and radio stations to produce propaganda day and night, it threatens the press and plans to impose on the country a way of not thinking. It also attacks the universities, particularly the Central University of Venezuela. The hatred they feel toward them could lead to the destruction of the universities, which would be a tragedy. That’s why all Venezuelans should defend the universities, however they can, always peacefully.

A phrase in your book Anotaciones says: “Poets don’t convince / nor do they conquer. / Their role is elsewhere, alien to power: to be a contrast.” What happens when a writer becomes an ally to power?

He loses the critical function, which is one of his main characteristics, and he joins his fate to that of the government. Neither of them knows how history will treat them.

And isn’t receiving a prize from a mayor’s office, to a certain degree, accepting something from power? Does a tribute in the career of an author who is already consecrated serve a purpose?

Accepting a distinction doesn’t mean allying oneself to power, because you maintain your independence (...). The recognition has a personal significance: I’ve spent half my life in this municipality, that’s why I accepted it.

In a conversation with Marco Rodríguez in 1978 you said that if you had to interview someone whose opinion you considered important you’d ask him what it means, for him, to live. I’ll take your word: What does it mean, for you, to live?

If I knew I’d say it. I can only tell you that for me it’s tied to the unreachable mystery, the one that surpasses the entirety of the enormous, important and worthy body of knowledge achieved by humanity. I’m referring to the absolute unknown that we vainly hope to know. Daily life is inserted there, in that dimension, even though most people don’t notice it.


Post Interview:

Send Mario Vargas Llosa my gratitude, as a Venezuelan, for everything he’s doing for the country.

*

Related Note: The Poet Who Wrote About Sports

Rafael Cadenas was a sports journalist in the 1950s. He worked for the daily Récord, run by Carlos Luis Barrera (“a great democratic fighter”), alongside the poet Ida Gramcko and her husband José Benavides. He was just a university student who read Marx and watched baseball. His experience only lasted a few months before the newspaper was closed.

The Venezuelan poet used to write articles and reviews, always with the help or advice of Segundo Cazalis. “The veteran journalists were those who covered baseball. They’d send me to write pieces about basketball or tennis, sports I didn’t know very well,” recalled Cadenas, who is a fan of the Cardenales of Lara baseball team.

Rafael Cadenas still enjoys watching the Big Leagues. Also the final days of the Venezuelan season. The writer played baseball when he was young in his native city. “I remember there was an enormous stadium in which the home runs never left the field because no one could get the ball past the fence.”

Back then, the writer from the state of Lara didn’t enjoy basketball. He preferred baseball along with literature. “The passion for soccer in Venezuela is very recent. When I was a kid you rarely saw someone playing it. It wasn’t practiced much in schools,” he added. Journalism today would enjoy his writing.




{ Daniel Fermín, El Universal, 27 April 2014 }

Cacería / Ednodio Quintero

Hunt

He remains stretched out on his back, on the narrow wooden bed. With his eyes barely open he searches the strange lines on the ceiling for the beginning of a path that might lead him away from his pursuer. For nights on end he’s endured the harassment, crossing plains full of venomous weeds, wading through rivers of crushed glass, crossing bridges as fragile as crackers. When the pursuer is about to reach him, when he feels him so that close his breath burns the nape of his neck, he thrashes around in bed like a rooster slashed with a spur to his heart. This is when the pursuer stops and leans against a tree to rest, patiently waiting for the victim to close his eyes so he can resume the hunt.




{ Ednodio Quintero, Ceremonias, Barcelona, España: Editorial Candaya, 2013 }

Tatuaje / Ednodio Quintero

Tattoo

When her fiancé came back from the sea, they got married. On his trip to the eastern islands the husband had carefully learned the art of the tattoo. On the very night of the wedding, and to his wife’s surprise, he put his abilities to use: armed with needles, Chinese ink and food coloring he drew on the woman’s belly a beautiful, enigmatic and sharpened dagger.

The couple’s happiness was intense, and as usually happens in these cases: brief. A strange illness revived in the man’s body, contracted on the muddy islands of the East. And one afternoon, facing the sea, the sailor began the longed-for trip to eternity.

In the solitude of her room, the woman let loose her wails, and occasionally, as though finding some consolation there, she would caress her belly adorned with the precious dagger.

The pain was intense, and also brief. The other one, a terra firma man, started to circle her. She, at first elusive and cautious, eventually gave ground. They agreed on a date; and on the set night she waited for him naked in the room’s darkness. And in the clamor of combat, the lover, strong and impetuous, fell dead on her, cut through by the dagger.




{ Ednodio Quintero, Ceremonias, Barcelona, España: Editorial Candaya, 2013 }

Cada / Guillermo Sucre

Each

Each word displaces another we never manage to say




La Vastedad (1988)




{ Guillermo Sucre, Conversación con la intemperie. Seis poetas venezolanos, selección y prólogo de Gustavo Guerrero, Barcelona, España: Galaxia Gutenberg/Círculo de Lectores, 2008 }

Escribir / Guillermo Sucre

To Write

To write not the order but the rhythm of life
a rhythm we know don’t know again and recognize
only by the breathing of the writing




La Vastedad (1988)




{ Guillermo Sucre, Conversación con la intemperie. Seis poetas venezolanos, selección y prólogo de Gustavo Guerrero, Barcelona, España: Galaxia Gutenberg/Círculo de Lectores, 2008 }

Misterio / Rafael Cadenas

Mystery

I have asylum in you, daily room. You aren’t
a supernatural edge in chosen flesh. You bore through everyone
like an imminence. You intersperse your texture between your
thoughts. You make speech vulnerable. You correct the eyes.
You suspend the projected owner.
You’re a hidden prompter.




{ Rafael Cadenas, Sobre abierto, Valencia, España: Editorial Pre-Textos, 2012 }

Las palabras / Rafael Cadenas

The Words

They seem to sustain us
but they don’t lean on anything.

What an honor to say them
with silences.

Do we inhabit?

We float by acting.




{ Rafael Cadenas, Sobre abierto, Valencia, España: Editorial Pre-Textos, 2012 }

Agradecimiento / Rafael Cadenas

Gratitude

Hills behind the buildings,
unscathed bamboo trees,
mountain next to the parking lot,
pine trees clinging, roots in the air, miraculous,
birds that I hear as if they were singing in the book I read,
thank you for being there still.

One lives saying goodbye to things
that men don’t want to keep.




{ Rafael Cadenas, Sobre abierto, Valencia, España: Editorial Pre-Textos, 2012 }

Políticas paralelas / Oswaldo Barreto

Parallel Politics

At this point no one, neither inside or outside our borders, ignores the fact that Venezuela’s situation represents, when considered from an internal perspective, one of the most difficult our society has ever lived through and, from an international perspective, one of the national crises with the greatest repercussions on other countries, other societies. And this representation from within and from abroad assumes as a fundamental symptom of our situation the prolonged and diversified protests that shake the country. And in appearance, what are these protests today but the expression of two antagonistic behaviors. On one side, the behavior of a large portion of society that demands the rights and liberties that the government systematically infringes upon or denies them. And on the other, the behavior of the government facing the form and content these protests enact.

And it’s in relation to this appreciation of the different behaviors in the face of the protests, and not in relation to the protests themselves, that our visible political activity orbits. Every day we hear declarations, pronouncements and decisions based on what has been done or is being done by the government in the face of complaints and demands; we speak of the viability or impossibility of “dialogue,” of the effectiveness of the peace conferences or the groups of notables commenting on the forms the protests take, or on the biased attitudes of the opposition toward them.

But if this is the apparent reading of our crisis that’s barely interrupted by daily reports of those who fall in them or are brought down by them, of those who’ve ended up in jail or in darkness, there is another reading that the force of these events imposes on us. I’m referring to other parallel politics, that no declaration or political or rhetorical subterfuge can hide.

On the one hand, what the regime (the president and his apparatus of power) hasn’t known how to or hasn’t been able to do to resolve the difficulties, calamities and penuries that all of us as Venezuelans endure. And on the other, the continuous growth and diversification of the repression. And one of those lines, expressed by the each day more obvious lines of customers at stores, unavoidably gives rise to the other. The inefficiency in the production and fair distribution of goods is immediately transmuted into raids by the police and army, into prisons, tortures and deaths. And this is why the protests grow.

{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 21 March 2014 }

¿Duerme usted, señor Presidente? / Capoulicán Ovalles

Are You Sleeping, Mr. President?

If instead of sleeping

you danced the tango

with your ministers

and your chief of loves

we would be able to

hear

from night to night

your heels

clacking

like an archduke

or duchess.

We could just laugh

by watching you,

ridiculous as you are,

waiting for the applause

of all the frenetic

gendarmerie.

Of course we're all tired

and want a little entertainment,

monstrous,

like this one

watching you

with a lyre hanging

around your neck,

like a Roman,

or like a blind Roman

woman with absurd optimistic beliefs.

If instead of promising

the discovery of the philosopher's

stone

that might produce bread

and twenty dollar bills

you'd spend more time,

because of how arrogant you are,

selling rotten potatoes

or rancid corn,

the Indians of this nation

might call you

Chief Eye of Pearl.

If instead of crying

you'd die one of these days,

like an elegant pig with its grease

imported from the North,

we,

who are tired

of so many stupid confessions,

would make the stones dance

and the trees would provide manufactured fruit.

With your old and putrid skeleton,

food for rats,

we will fill a single place on this earth

and we will call it

the Cursed Cave

and people will be proscribed from seeing

and approaching it

for fear of awakening hysterical

tenderness.

They call you

José of the dreams,

the one with the sacred cows,

the owner of the skinniest cows

and President of the "Condal Society of Dreams."

Your friends call you

Barbiturate.

How late do you sleep, Mr. President?

If you adore the cow,

sleep!

If you adore the calf,

sleep!

And if the General gives you lunch,

you sleep like a log

or you have a seizure of drowsiness.

Mud Face,

Eye to see the Serpents

and call them,

Eye to keep company

and burn you

with humble Kerosene,

Eye to have at your service

like a cheap bellhop.

Are you sleeping, Mr. President?

I ask you because I'm a smart young man

unlike you, gentleman of the siesta.

1962

Caupolicán Ovalles (Venezuela, 1936-2001)

Venezuela from Overseas. Open Letter from Venezuelan writers, artists, journalists, intellectuals in support of the students.

Due to the grave situation in Venezuela today, where Nicolás Maduro’s government and his military leaders have unleashed a ferocious assault on students, journalists and citizens in general, submitting them to attacks with live ammunition and savage corporal and psychological punishment, leaving in its wake a trail of death, torture, arrests, and media outlets silenced in their work as sources of information; we Venezuelan writers, intellectuals, journalists and artists who live abroad, exhort the international community to demand the following from the government of Nicolás Maduro:

1. Respect the human rights of all Venezuelan citizens.
2. Free the participants in protests that have been detained.
3. Disarm the paramilitary groups (“colectivos”).
4. Restore freedom of the press.
5. Order the immediate opening of an investigation, with the presence of international organisms that can guarantee impartiality, to determine the responsibility of the crimes committed during the protests.

Venezuela, a country that was once a democratic alternative in the midst of the dictatorships of all types that afflicted the American continent, a country that in the past supported victims of similar repressions in other countries of the world, deserves to live in freedom.

Signed,

Carolina Acosta-Alzuru (USA)
Mónica Amor (USA)
Alexander Apóstol (Spain)
Miriam Ardizzone (Spain)
Aymara Arreaza (Spain)
Ophir Alviarez (USA)
Victor Azuaje (USA)
Betina Barrios Ayala (USA)
Gustavo Balza Gamez (Spain)
María Lorena Bello (USA)
Cecilia Bellorín (Spain)
Loriel Beltrán (USA)
Anadeli Bencomo (Mexico)
Lisa Blackmore (UK)
Adriana Boersner Herrera (USA)
Leonardo Bonett (USA)
Irene Bou (Spain)
Lorena Bou (Spain)
Julio Tupac Cabello (USA)
Silvia Cabrera (Germany)
Margarita Cadenas (France)
Paula Cadenas (France)
Celia Calcaño (France)
María Cecilia Camacho Capodiferro (Austria)
Pedro Camacho (Argentina)
Alessandra Caputo (Spain)
Amalia Caputo (USA)
Marian Castillo(Spain)
Nayarí Castillo (Austria)
Beatriz Castro Cortiñas (Spain)
Juan Cristóbal Castro (Colombia)
Jeffrey Cedeño (Colombia)
Silvia Celi-Borges (Francia)
Daniel Centeno (USA)
Israel Centeno (USA)
Juan Carlos Chirinos (Spain
Doménico Chiappe (Spain)
Hecsil Coello (Uruguay)
Fernando Conde (USA)
Francesca Cordido (Spain)
Juan Ignacio Cortiñas (Spain)
Alejandra Cubero González (Spain)
Elena de La Ville (USA)
Linda D´Ambrosio (Spain)
Ana Lucía De Bastos (Spain)
Elian E. Degen Canelón (USA)
Dina Di Donato (USA)
Fanny Díaz (Israel)
Carla Duarte Vidal (Brazil)
Andrés Duque (Spain)
Juan Carlos Durán Canal (Spain)
Antonio Fernández Nays (Spain)
Carlos Fernández de Larrea (Spain)
Carmen Leonor Ferro (Italy)
Víctor Galarraga-Oropeza (France)
Elvira García (France)
Pedro José Garcia Sanchez (France)
Marina Gasparini Lagrange (Italy)
Miguel Gomes (USA)
Eleana Gómez (USA)
Elizabeth González (Germany)
Guaritoto González (France)
Manuel González Ruiz (Spain)
Ricardo González Coll (France)
Jacquelyn Grifith (USA)
Gustavo Guerrero (France)
María Alexandra Guerrero (Germany)
Leroy Gutierrez (Uruguay)
Claudia Hernández (Germany)
Diana Hernández Aldana (Spain)
Karlinda Hernández (USA)
Manuel Hernández Silva (Spain)
Sonia Hernández (USA)
Verónica Jaffe (Germany)
Blas Kisik (USA)
Liliana Lara (Israel)
Indira Leal (USA)
Adriana Loaiza-Tennenbaum (USA)
Andrea López López (Mexico)
Antonio López (Spain)
Fabiola López Durán (USA)
Margarita López (Spain)
Magdalena López López (Portugal)
Rubén Machaen (Argentina)
Eva Márquez Velandria (USA)
Wladimir Márquez (USA)
Claudia Martín Carmassi (Spain)
Denise Martinez Breto (Italy)
Juan Manuel Matos (Spain)
Diana Medina (Spain)
Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez (Spain)
Manuel Antonio Mendoza (USA)
Andrés Michelena (USA)
Corina Michelena (Russia)
Mariela Michelena (Spain)
José Javier Míguez Rego (Spain)
Rossana Miranda (Italy)
Juan Pablo Mojica (Colombia)
Valentina Monagas Tovar (France)
Gabriela Montero (USA)
Marco Montiel Soto (Germany)
Patsy Montiel Moronta (Spain)
Luz Ainai Morales Pino (USA)
Andreína Mujica (France)
Boris Muñoz (USA)
Moisés Naim (USA)
Nela Ochoa
Linda Ontiveros (Spain)
Liseth Ortega (Singapore)
Adriana Ortiz (Canada)
Eduardo Ortiz Viso (USA)
Indira Páez (USA)
Tomás Páez (Spain)
Guillermo Parra (USA)
Amalia Pereira (Spain)
Luz Pérez Ojeda (France)
Xavier Padilla (France)
María Gracia Pardo (USA)
María Carolina Pina (France)
Camilo Pino (USA)
Alexandra Poleo (Francia)
Sandra Portillo Lafuente (Spain)
Carlos Pulido (France)
Juan Rafael Pulido (France)
Carol Prunhuber (France)
Marieli Quiaro Maggiorani (Germany)
Gabriela Rangel (USA)
Cheryl Riera Rivera (Canada)
Cinzia Ricciuti (Italy)
Raquel Rivas Rojas (Scotland)
Maday Margarita Rivero (Spain)
Patricia Roncayolo (Denmark)
Carlos Rondón (Spain)
Paola Romero (UK)
Esther Roperti (Spain)
Magdalena Rosello (Spain)
Karina Sáinz Borgo (Spain)
Adalber Salas (USA)
Lisbeth Salas (Spain)
Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles (Spain)
Elvia Sánchez (Spain)
Ervin “Wincho” Schafer (Brazil)
Claudia Sierich Georgi (Germany)
Leonora Simonovis (USA)
Manuel Silva-Ferrer (Germany)
Marco Tulio Socorro (Spain)
Mónica Socorro (France)
Andy Solé (Spain)
Blanca Strepponi (Argentina)
Gonzalo Tovar (Peru)
Alina Tufani Díaz (Italy)
José Urriola (Mexico)
Vicente Ulive-Schnell (France)
Keila Vall De la Ville (USA)
Patricia Valladares (USA)
Gustavo Valle (Argentina)
Pedro Varguillas (USA)
Paula Vázquez (France)
María Teresa Vera Rojas (Spain)
Ruth Villalonga (USA)
Carmen Victoria Vivas Lacour (France)
Vitier Vivas (France)
Vivian Watson Molina (Spain)
Lena Yau (Spain)
Gregory Zambrano (Japan)
Leonardo Zelig (USA)
Slavko Zupcic (Spain)

Avena sobre Kafka / Lena Yau

Oatmeal On Kafka

To all the students.
To Bassil and Robert who will always remain.


The whole wide world lives beside the handkerchief world. Two phrases chasing each other. They leap on each other’s back to disprove themselves, which at the same time, is a way of confirming themselves. A type of linguistic ball game: trap me so you won’t trap me.
These days the countries of the globe start to paint themselves in tricolor with stars. The maps light up with little yellowbluered points that say: a Venezuelan lives here, you’re important to this Venezuelan, we are your voice.

I write this from 6,000 kilometers that aren’t a distance. It’s enough to turn on the computer to make it my balcony to the country. I open the curtain and see María Eugenia, Carlos, Gabriela, Pepe, Johnny, Gladys, Venancio, Lucía, Felipe, Coromoto, Joao, Jessica, Franklin, Pili, Gorka, Fátima, Paolo. When they sing you can see their white teeth, some of them have nose piercings, on their tongues, their lips. They’ve been on the pavement for days but they seem fresh. I click on the button, they run and hide from the tear gas. I think: yesterday they were children playing hide and go seek. I click on a link and they wrap their t-shirt over their nose fighting against the gas. I think: they should be in class avoiding paper airplanes.

I start my day with them early on and I finish it with them too. They’re all in my house. I want to march with them. I do it typing.

Like now. Each key pressed is a step accompanying them. It’s time for school. I come back to my here. I leave my march of letters and rush Adrian along:

“Hurry up and eat, the bus is gonna leave, you have tests today, eat well.”

His milk mustache inquires about the kids “over there.”
“They’re around,” I tell him. “They’re still going.”

I leave him at the bus and come back to continue my march facing the plasma. I look at my desk. On top of a book by Kafka sits my breakfast: a bowl of oatmeal.

Oatmeal on Kafka

It’s a good title for so many things: for a short story, for a paradox, for a love letter. For a uchronia: What does student Kafka think about everything that’s happening in Venezuela. Or for one more anxiety: Have these kids been eating breakfast? Today my typed steps keep talking poetry and food, words and groceries. The students nourish us with a literature they write on the street.

We Venezuelans who live outside those nearly one million square kilometers vibrate alongside them. We applaud them, we embrace the air to make them ours. We admire their gracefulness, we bow to the example, we learn as we watch them. To feel them is to recover a hope for rebuilding Venezuela. Our gratitude covers all the colored forms of the mapamundi. All the skies. All the water. There are no kilometers separating us from them.




{ Lena Yau, El Nacional, 18 February 2014 }

La taberna / Rubi Guerra

The Tavern

     The two men —one old and the other young— arrive at the tavern. Like many other travelers in this corner of the country, they seem like they’re running from something, this is what the tavern keeper thinks. The majority of them come from the south and are heading north, toward the ports. The desert is in the east. The tavern is the last human establishment before the sands and the yellow stones that no one has crossed in centuries. The cities of the west, it is said, are cursed and have vanished from the memories of men.
     The old man and the young man get drunk every day with the liquor that is distilled in town. Some people affirm this drink brings on hallucinations.
     One night the tavern keeper stays at the table with them. There’s no one else around and he’s bored, so he’s willing to listen to a story. The youngest of the travelers affirms that the old man has been to one of the lost cities. The tavern keeper laughs. He’s already heard too many similar stories. “This one’s true,” the young man affirms. After a painful trip in which his companions and the animals for transporting their goods died, the old man —who wasn’t old at the time— arrived at a city of iron doors and stone walls. The doors were rusted and open, the temples had been decayed by time and by the grains of sand dragged along by the wind. In one building he found a fountain from which a cold and crystalline water was bubbling. During the day he would explore buildings in which no utensil was left, no tool, no tapestry or jewel, not even a pottery fragment, as though its inhabitants had left taking everything with them, or as if the thieves had visited the place for a thousand years taking even the slightest vestige. At night, he was visited by the specters of the city’s inhabitants, who came before him to give their complaints as though he were a magistrate from the beyond. The translucent apparitions had terrible, sad faces.
     The tavern-keeper smiles reluctantly. Another absurd story.
     Just before dawn he wakes up and gets out of bed with careful movements. He’s been married for forty years and he’s still careful not to wake her when it’s still early. He goes outside. In the sky, the stars fade one by one. A cold and fast breeze coming from the desert shakes his wool clothing. He contemplates the infinite amplitude that extends before his sight as though it were an extinct planet. He too dreamed of one day crossing the great sands and conquering a forgotten kingdom.
     He puts on his clothing and blows on his hands before heading out to the corral to feed the chickens.
     His insipid days anticipate the indifferent sleep of eternity.




Translator’s note: This text is included in an appendix of a novella by Guerra about the final days of the Venezuelan poet José Antonio Ramos Sucre in Europe in 1930. This is the second of Guerra’s three imitations of Ramos Sucre.




{Rubi Guerra, La tarea del testigo, Caracas: Lugar Común, 2012 / Fondo Editorial El perro y la rana, 2007 }

En la barca / Rubi Guerra

On the Boat

     We row along the river’s slow current. Standing on the flat bottom of the boat we pushed ourselves along with poles made slippery by the sweat and humidity. My two companions leave the last of their energy in the struggle against the viscous and absorbent riverbed. A yellow sky, unprotected by clouds, hangs over our heads like a threat. A tenuous cloud of vapor rises from the surface of the water. Shadows move amidst the palm trees on the far shore, we don’t know if they belong to animals or to the inhabitants of the devastated region.
     A wide estuary opens to our efforts. The waters of the river seem to spin around themselves, they form whirlpools of unhealthy colors, as though they couldn’t find an escape toward an impossible sea. The heat becomes less crippling.
     We advance toward a line of big mansions with wooden doors. As we drawn near, we notice that the iridescent water reaches the lowest windows. The fire has consumed the rooftops, the doors have fallen off the hinges and there are gunpowder and blood stains on the walls. We direct the boat toward one of them, more elevated than the rest, protected from the waters by a marble staircase.
     We agree to spend the night there. Hunger torments us. Even in that condition we manage to sleep, aided by exhaustion and the will to annul the world.
     I wake up with the first light of the sun. I shake my companions and we’re soon on our feet, ready to continue our journey, to reach the sea, to move as far away as possible and forget this region that’s been forgotten by the gods. The golden reflections of the newborn sun on the water and the facades of the mansions make the horror of the destruction disappear for an instant and allow a fugitive beauty to prevail.
     We search amid the underbrush and palm trees for the way out of the estuary. Slow spirals disorient us, but we eventually find it, hidden between scrubs and fallen trunks. The jungle surrounds us once again and accompanies us for hours.
     After unprecedented efforts one of my companions manages to catch a large fish. Three little horns stand out on its head. We gut it and lay its meat to dry on the planks of the boat. Hours later we devour it, sating the hunger that threatens to bring us down.
     Long stretches of jungle have disappeared, consumed by the fires. From the dead and blackened earth rises the smoke of the charred trees and animals. Further ahead, standing in the mud of the shore that stains her dress, a woman makes signs at us. We manage to drawn near and she climbs onto the boat. She stretches out on the floor with her eyes closed, her hands over her mouth in a gesture of stopping some words that she will never pronounce. We look at her and then back at each other; she’s a beautiful young woman despite her pale face that seems to announce death. I touch her on the shoulder; I offer her the remnants of the raw fish.
     At night we’re stunned by the icy glimmer of the stars. The constellations spin while we take turns rowing.
     The presence of the woman, who remains apart and silent, has made my companions stern and between them they’re plotting some type of violence. I decide to keep one step ahead of their designs: I wait for my turn in charge of the vessel; when I see them sleeping I toss the one closest to me into the thick water, where he sinks without even screaming. I hit the other one behind his ear with the pole. He tries to stand up; blood runs down his neck. I unleash a second, terrible blow to his skull. The sound of broken bones wakes up the woman, who begins to shriek as though she were crazy. The whiteness of her thighs awakens my drowsy senses.




Translator’s note: This text is included in an appendix of a novella by Guerra about the final days of the Venezuelan poet José Antonio Ramos Sucre in Europe in 1930. This is the first of Guerra’s three imitations of Ramos Sucre.




{Rubi Guerra, La tarea del testigo, Caracas: Lugar Común, 2012 / Fondo Editorial El perro y la rana, 2007 }

Ráfagas: Sobre Los impresentables, de Raymond Nedeljkovic / Carlos Ávila

Bursts: On Los impresentables, by Raymond Nedeljkovic

Raymond Nedeljkovic, Los impresentables (Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores Latinoamericana, 2011)


Twenty years later, a woman in a wheelchair remembers what she lived through during the disturbances of 1989 in Caracas: she sees a neighbor carrying two bags of ice —“Ice, what for?”—, she sees a woman with a refrigerator on her back and she watches her own husband trying to calm down a group that’s trying to loot a neighbor’s business. In the background of her story we can hear gunshots, desperate steps and the murmuring of a crowd of people crossing the avenue. The woman holds in her tears and evokes the bullet that wounded her and the one that killed her companion: both of them shot by the neighbor they were trying to protect. That’s the story told in “Disfraz de zombie,” a text that makes use of two central marks of this book: the very subtle insinuation regarding an era’s “mood” and a particularly careful treatment that’s given to the topic of violence.

There are eighteen very short stories: each one a burst that doesn’t reach two pages. And while several of them respond to a linear and perhaps more conventional form of the story, many of them are built out of fragments and leaps in time. The author also turns to resources such as italicized letters or the trio of asterisks in between paragraphs to highlight a change in tone or a transition; or to more technical dexterities like the flashback, the ellipsis and the deliriums that are unique to oneiric fiction. The language is diaphanous and simple and with the bare minimum it manages to register intimate experiences, though the prose doesn’t ever close itself off to poetic gleams. At the same time, there’s a reflexive handling of the narrative as a practice, that is, several of the voices possess a clear awareness of what they’re telling and how they’re doing it: some question themselves about the nature and form of the story and others about the impossibility of writing. In general, the stories follow the path of realist tradition, but each eventual denouement brings us back to the knot where they would seem to resolve themselves, as if the story’s “exit” were hidden between two or three lines that have been left behind. The effect is a degree of uncertainty: each clarification is barely suggested and found mid-way between the fantastic tale and a type of metaphysical determination. One of the narrators, for instance, tells her story from her own death and another one announces in the opening sentence that he himself is a ghost. The most significant aspect of these stories might just be that: the possibility always exists that the words will surprise us with a final explosion or they’ll force us to surprisingly reinterpret the tale on unexpected grounds.

First thing: the atmosphere in which the majority of these stories occur tends to be that of a newsroom; almost all the narrators and characters are tied to the world of journalism (correspondents, reporters, photographers). Second thing: the book can be read as a collection of snapshots, not just because of their brevity but also because each story seems to be trying to outline a static image. It’s as if the exercise of photography constituted a restlessness that the prose tries to liquidate: as though among the author’s purposes was the notion of telling the story of a photo. Third thing: most of the stories revolve around a certain trembling of solitude and the form that love takes in the middle of a crisis. Nearly all of them are told by meditative and solitary men; many of them find themselves facing an abyss, sustained by an identical paradox: a woman’s love as the cause of their ruin and at the same time their possible salvation. Fourth thing: among the plots and storyline of each text moves the frequent presence of the social theme that has gained so much importance in the current Venezuelan discussion. A clear demonstration of this is found in “Coleccionista de ventanas,” where beginning with a phrase enunciated by an important leader at the end of the nineteen nineties —an apparently imperceptible detail—, we’re able to configure a certain apathy that’s characteristic of the era faced with political dissertation and reasoning. Fifth thing: the urban theme is recurrent, along with a violence figured in a repeated rumor of gunshots. Despite the fact that the image of Caracas is displayed throughout various time periods —the late sixties, late eighties and “the present day”—, it becomes a matter of representations that share an identical violent assault in common. That’s it. The final effect is of an unmistakeable but curious sensation: of producing amid the book’s pages the precision of a single echo of bursts and detonations.




{ Carlos Ávila, Facebook, 7 February 2014 }