There’s a scene in It Would Be Night in Caracas, the debut work of fiction by journalist Karina Sainz Borgo, in which the protagonist visits a medical clinic in search of a missing acquaintance. The patient backlog is overwhelming in both the sheer number of broken, listless patients and the depth of their despair: men, women, and children are “shut down, like broken appliances” as they wait to be seen. It’s not simply a sad state of affairs in which this determined, devastating novel takes place: it’s a humanitarian crisis.
As the title suggests, the story takes place in contemporary Venezuela: once a shining star of the continent’s future, it is now collapsing into a black hole of social and economic unrest. This is a country where “life has become a matter of venturing out to hunt and returning home alive.” Hugo Chávez isn’t mentioned by name, but when the author refers to “the commander-president, the name of the leader of the Revolution was known by after his fourth electoral victory,” we know exactly to whom Borgo is referring.
The novel begins with a young woman, Adelaida, burying her mother and trying to survive, entirely on her own, as the world around her is crumbling to pieces. If the setting is despondent, the protagonist sees it and raises it with her attitude of utter stoicism. This produces a double-layered effect in the narrative: Adelaida’s personal despair is woven into the cloth of the country’s greater agony and disintegration. Violence and desperation are everywhere, and this is reflected in Borgo’s decidedly blunt, affectless style of writing. When Adelaida goes out to buy sanitary napkins on the black market, she casually notes, “It cost me even to bleed.”
After the burial, Adelaida begins going through her mother’s belongings, which precipitates a flood of memories. It’s a useful tool that Borgo uses to give form to her novel: throughout the narrative, current events are tied to and traced back through times past. Flashbacks recall a more prosperous Venezuela, one to which immigrants flocked from Madrid, Naples, and Berlin, among other European cities. Closer to home, in other parts of Latin America, people fleeing military dictatorships in Chile and Argentina found refuge in Caracas. There are precious childhood recollections of climbing trees to pick the hard-to-eat stone plums, along with more devastating pubescent ones, like falling in love with the image of a dead soldier splashed across the front page of the newspaper:
“I peered closer, examining his face. He seemed perfect, handsome. His head fallen and lolling on the road’s shoulder. Poor, slim, almost adolescent. His helmet was askew, which meant that his head, shattered by a bullet from a FAL rifle, was visible. There he was: split open like a fruit. A prince charming, his eyes flooded with blood. A few days later I got my first period. I was already a woman: beholden to a sleeping beauty who was killing me out of love and grief. My first boyfriend and my last childhood doll, covered in bits of his own brain, which one shot to the forehead had blown apart. Yes, at ten years old, I was a widow. At ten, I was already in love with ghosts.”
What Borgo is able to do in this fragment of a paragraph is impressive: in the time it takes to read her words, Adelaida grows up, falls in love, experiences loss, and is introduced to death. All alone, all by herself. At times it feels as if there is more solitude here in these 223 pages than in the entirety of Cien años de soledad. If Hollywood has more stars than there are in heaven, Borgo exudes more solitude per page than Gabriel García Márquez. At least the Buendías had a family; Adelaida, after all, has just buried her only relative: her mother. A neighbor tosses out a thought that’s as harsh as it is unhelpful: “solitude does nobody any good.” There is no magic in the bleak, unforgiving reality of 21st century Latin America. The levitating priests have long since flown the coop.
One afternoon, when Adelaida returned from visiting her acquaintance in the hospital, she finds her apartment has been occupied by an all-female militia group. Literally pissing herself out of fear, she knocks on the door; the woman who answers is already wearing Adelaida’s mother’s favorite blouse. She attempts to reason with La Mariscala, the ringleader, who bashes her in the head with the butt of her pistol. As Adelaida staggers around, reeling from the blow, she notices her neighbor Aurora’s door is ajar. She enters to find her corpse lying there on the floor.
This presents her with an opportunity for keeping a roof over her head, but if she is to stay in her dead neighbor’s apartment, she’ll have to dispose of the body, and do so without attracting undue attention. Fortunately, and rather ironically, the skirmishes in the streets between the Sons of the Revolution (“Bastards of the Revolution,” as she prefers to call them) and the protesters now involve real bullets, driving everyone else behind closed doors. As Adelaida tells herself, “I couldn’t pass up the opportunity that everyone else’s confusion and desperation had afforded me.” Unable to fit the body, stiff with rigor, into the elevator, she decides that the best alternative is to shove it out a window. How strange could that possibly look in a society where violence and chaos have become the norm? “Many bodies rain down,” she thinks, quite frankly. “Just that, no metaphors.” Next, Adelaida begins rifling through some of Aurora’s paperwork, finding a red binder containing a birth certificate and three bank accounts: two in Venezuela and one in Spain with a balance of €40,000 Euros.
This is a novel in which memory is often more alive than the present day. The walls of Aurora’s lifeless apartment are “bone-white,” but the descriptions in her letters, delicately written on onionskin paper, “were brimming with details, such as the color and smell of the fruit.” The late Aurora herself is, through her silent notes and photographs, more vivid than La Mariscala, who is blasting Reggaeton music in the apartment she now occupies. As such, It Would Be Night in Caracas harkens back to previous works where reminiscence is so powerful, so prominent, that it takes on a nature of its own, becoming a veritable character in and of itself. One is reminded of Welles’ Citizen Kane and Fuentes’ The Death of Artemio Cruz; however, in Borgo’s iteration, it is not a dying man recalling the decisive events of his life, it is a solitary woman using only her wits to survive in a nation on the brink of collapse. The flashbacks we see are of friends and family, yes, but they are also recollections of a country, once vibrant, now condemned to desolation.
How might Adelaida escape this inevitability? By assuming her neighbor Aurora’s identity: “I had to do something with the wild card that Aurora Peralta’s death had dealt me. I could — why not? — pass as her. I could try. In that dark room, I made my decision. There was no going back.” As Faulkner wrote in Requiem for a Nun, “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” In fact, as Adelaida sees it, taking on the identity of another is akin to giving birth to a new self. She manages to gain access to Aurora’s phone and computer, which allows her to transfer some money to a credit card. At the Spanish consulate, she pays cash for a new passport; a black market travel agent delivers her the fake Venezuelan paperwork needed to leave the country as a newly minted dual citizen. She buys a one-way plane ticket to Madrid online using Aurora’s credit card.
She visits her mother’s grave, which has been robbed of some of its accoutrements. Adelaida-cum-Aurora helps herself to a vase from a nearby headstone “so that the white carnations won’t wither in the heat of my own shame.” There, they engage in the longest conversation the two of them have ever had, during which one last memory is shared: a young Adelaida is sent by her mother to the market to buy two kilos of tomatoes for a family dinner. She delays her return because the menu included tortoise pie, and she did not want to be there to hear the screams of poor Pancho as he was being boiled alive like a lobster. Instead, she goes off to explore a forbidden, abandoned mansion that evokes the aspirations of Venezuela as a nation on the rise before its ultimate fall. Their final goodbyes having been said, Adelaida leaves her mother’s grave to visit one more: that of Julia Peralta, mother of Aurora, to apologize.
Adelaida-cum-Aurora arrives at the airport. After an intense scene with an airport security officer, who fails to uncover the Euros that she’s smuggling in her back brace, she boards the flight to Madrid. As she contemplates the city lights from her window seat, she has a smallish yet significant revelation: “Only a small difference in sound separates ‘leave’ from ‘live,’” she thinks to herself… or does she? As Bryer points out in her translator’s note, the original Spanish sentence is “Tan solo una letra separa ‘partir’ de ‘parir;’” literally, “Just a single letter separates ‘to leave’ from ‘to give birth.’” There is a lovely consonance there in the Spanish, and a word-for-word rendering would not only reek of translationese, it would be entirely wrong: in English there’s a lot more separating “to leave” from “to give birth” than a single letter. Bryer’s solution—to replace “to give birth” with “live” — shows the sort of creative dexterity that is required at the highest levels of literary translation… not to mention the fact that it’s also true: in order to live, to be reborn, Adelaida must leave Venezuela. She arrives in Madrid at 10:30 local time. It would still be night in Caracas.
One of the most challenging things for an author to do is write beautifully about ugly things. Karina Sainz Borgo succeeds admirably. It Would Be Night in Caracas is a delicate, heartrending portrait of a woman devastated by loss — first of her mother, then of her apartment, then of her identity, and finally her homeland— and the resolution it takes to keep on living though the aftershocks.
[Published by HarperVia on October 15, 2019, 240 pages, $23.99]