Venezuela Terminal

I’ve been here for hours, sitting on a cement bench of the Venezuela Terminal, waiting for my brother’s help which must arrive some day from somewhere. The people who are here hoping to receive something from someone who is somewhere, like me, get up constantly to stretch their dumb legs because it has rained recently and if we stay sitting for too long on these concrete seats we feel an intense cold in the ass. There are also some old wooden benches but when one sits on them the planks creak and sometimes break apart on their own out of so much weathering for so long, out of so much abandonment and so much corruption they’ve endured. Lately, recently, it’s rained cats and dogs on us, a shitload. I arrived here at five in the morning and at this time of mid day my stomach growls. I want to have at least a sip of coffee. I’m sleepy, so sleepy. I’m hungry. I feel nauseous.

An effluvium of rotten guts emanates from everywhere. My stomach is on tenterhooks. I am not sure now if it is me or the world that stinks so bad. It is a corrosive smell, like rancid vinegar, that hurts even my eyes. I cannot assure it in any way, but if I had to relate it with something, I’d say that it is like the stench of fear, of forced resignation. The sewage waters that bubble in the streets force themselves under your skin, tear your inner balance, and annul your will to do anything. Here grows the green sludge of indolence, it is rottenness that strips everything away from you, that subjects you to nothingness.

Bautista is my eldest brother. Of the nine siblings I had, he was the lucky one. Maybe he was the most cunning one, or simply "the most Venezuelan". The others left this barren land. I am the only one left alone with my seventy-two-year old broken hopes. Here only my bare bones are left. Long time ago he sent me a message with doña Alicia, saying yes, he would send what he had promised, that I had to wait, that he was now en route to inspecting the country’s checkpoints doing his work for the security and defense of the nation, which, by the way, is in great shape, that he was sending on a bus a bag with diabetes pills, flour, beans, and salted fish. Yes. He is a national guard, he knows a lot about survival and commissions.

I can see exiled pieces of sky in the pools that are taking shape, in the ponds of mud, or on the asphalt. There is a permanent stench of manure in the air and now I cannot understand whether the world is and always was like that, if it is me, or it is people mistaking my mind for their breath. Every time the neighbors say a word near me, I get the pestilence of swollen oozing dog. The flies lay their eggs between the words. I, too, smell like enclosed humidity. I fume dung, monkey tantrum. In this skinny town of treacherous shadows everything stinks like the scorpion’s cursed blood.

My brother’s box is taking too long; I have been sitting in this terminal for months from five in the morning because, I want to be here when the parcel arrives, and only leave when it is getting dark. Although, right now it is dark, the black clouds, fat, more than fat, chubby, cover the whole firmament challenging the sun who would not dare to come out for the world. I’m numbed by hunger and sickness. Every so often I fall in a hole of sleep. I ginger up to see if there is something around that I can eat, but just then a mortal chill runs down my back. I look at my feet, shoeless. I scream scared Hey, my shoes; where are my shoes. I’ve been robbed; give me back my shoes. They are some old worn out mended dirty shoes, but they are the only shoes I have. I stand up and see some feet away that one of my shoes is rolling like some improvised ball; hundreds of neighbors are passing it from one foot to the next, as in a choreography, until they stop when I get to see it.

Those semi-leather shoes were the only thing I could hardly buy with my retirement payment, after twenty-seven years teaching education at a Venezuelan university. I get closer, pick it up, raise it over my head so everyone can see it and say with a shaking voice, half fearful, half angry, this is one, but get me the other one, give me back my other shoe. Nobody looks up from their pouch, nobody looks at me, nobody, nobody, nobody seems to listen to me. Everybody plays the fool and my temples sting. I breathe again the stench of the plague. I feel pricks as of red spears inside my head. My other shoe, I scream, My other shoe, I fall on my knees with painful gags, I break, I throw up my guts on the mud and after so many years, I finally cry.

<sub>Mi profundo agradecimiento al profesor Henrry Lezama (@hlezama)
por la gentileza que tuvo de traducir al inglés este relato
con el propósito de que llegue a los lectores en ese idioma.

My deepest thanks to Professor Henrry Lezama (@hlezama)
for the courtesy of translating this story into English
for the purpose of reaching readers in this language.</sub>