JW Marriott Hotel Caracas (Avenida Venezuela, Con Calle Mohedano, Caracas 1060, Distrito Capital, Venezuela)
On the seventh floor of a luxury, modernist condo, I come to value theft while simultaneously being indoctrinated with fear. “Cuidado, te van a matar.” Ellos, the ones that aren’t us. Let’s start in the middle. The split begins where shards of glass glued to cement walls protect property from the poor. Us and them, me and you. Stories linger in the mind and grow thick like skin, a membrane of touch and division. Ideally, we should not remember anything. As if all the language we’ve acquired only serves one purpose: to name what is both constitutive and most foreign to us.
My mother and my grandmother have died by the time I reach the 5th floor of the Marriott Hotel. I’m wearing teal boots, my t-shirt knotted high above my stomach. I sit in the middle for hours, on a luxurious lobby couch facing a stone table adorned with fresh birds of paradise flowers replaced at the first sign of wilting. The jam served for breakfast is lumpy with real fruit. The film crew lingers in the gym room, speaking English, lifting weights, writing a script.
Paracotos (address unknown, a series of large rectangular structures with metal roofs, cement floors, and no walls)
Midpoint. Teenage bodies trace the enneagram on the floor. Constitutive and foreign. When the piano sounds our feet mark in place, then step, arms outstretched, head left, all our parts in a separate rhythm. This isn’t symbolic. It’s 6am and then at 7am we walk down the cement steps and along the path to another structure. How can I tell you about my indoctrination? We walked in dry riverbeds for hours blindfolded but that’s not it. I prefer to do things in the dark but that’s not it. I work the fields in silence, carry jugs of cold lemonade with panela, forgive me remembering, clean toilets, mop, cook for two hundred people, sit in the middle of the circle and be a praying mantis, not look like one, not illustrate one, really be one, dig while feeling the surface of my face. Act like there is no use in a center. The script for all this is somewhere on a large white board leaning at the back of the dining hall. It’s where the adults write the task of the day. “Do you want to be like a donkey?” I knew the answer was supposed to be no because of the adult’s intonation. Now, my answer is yes.
Willing this to be the bulb of a Brecht learning play performed in the basement of a church. The play begins in the 1870s with my mother’s guru’s father. In this circular system, a singer-poet and bard (ashugh) sings while playing a long-necked lute after spending the long day shepherding herds of cattle and sheep. In the opening song I find a way to ask you xxxxxxx Is consent something only an individual can give?
Avenida Principal de la Castellana (direction olvidada)
As she walks in the modernist apartment, our mother slams the door open, her red, flowery dress billowing as she dashes in and out of various rooms, crying, “Me robaron! ¡Me robaron!” as if someone were still yanking gold from her neck.
I’m so confused by autonomy. Is it a desirable illusion? Isn’t a parent necessarily violent? Isn’t the person snatching your purse consenting to recognize that what you have belongs to you only if it belongs to them too?
In 2002, the opposition marches towards the presidential palace. “Armed gangs,” etc. “Fuera Carmona.” What a dinky coup. Think about the past Hugo Chavez, your grandmother is right behind you and, action! I text you on whatsapp, “meet me for a cigarette, in the lobby, by the flowers.” “Good and bad are only the products of an active and temporary selection, which must be renewed.” Do you Agree? I don’t.
Simón Bolívar International Airport (Maiquetía)
April, 2002. Opening rounds. Opening cans of condensed milk. Aren’t violets delicate? In movement, yanking at the gold, was he desperate for the value, the mark on skin, power, humiliation, something ungraspable. The glass shards already stuck into the wet cement lining the top of the walls lining the outskirts of a private project.
Putsch (knock) palace coup soft coup (silent) (bloodless) self-coup autocoup autogolpe (bang) blow of state seizure xxxxx We brushed past guards casually leaning, machine guns slung over their shoulders. Our plumpness and caution. Always a middle xxxxx a stage of spiritual theater, a failed coup, an undeveloped robbery.
apis mellifera scutellata lepeletier xxxx (parasocial)
Do you yearn for your mother or just a mother or just the mother or none of that. I yearn to be mediated.
Isla Margarita (1986 or 1987)
I’m very connected with those who died that day, those who died here. The scent of this expired tanning oil pervades an entire stretch of white sand where children, including myself, are chasing each other. I dread equivocation yet I’m annoyed by how descriptive I think I should be. Little friends traveling from the North to the South join me on this tropical vacation. In this memory, my mother teaches me about the different ways a wave can break. I can’t visualize the patterns on our bathing suits, but this is what I’ve learned: the necessity of revolution trumps the platitudes of its narrative style, or, injustice periodically reinvigorates truisms, resuscitating them from dead meaning, which means that el pueblo unido jamás será vencido is absolutely beautiful and very avant-garde because what is the avant-garde but a truth whose function is to advance our lives? Oliver Stone wears an oxygen mask in La Paz where he has trouble breathing. Morales gifts him coca leaves. Che Guevara was captured and killed on CIA orders in 1967, you hear me?