Entrapment

Floating in a sea of slow walkers: this is the Caracas sidewalk. I glance around tensely and see only relaxed arms, slow gaits and drawn out conversations. I find my leader—a random stranger. But he is brave, and probably really late for work; he understands my frustration. I nearly latch onto him, a sweet freedom in this sea of oppressively slow movers. His haste creates a path of liberation as we glide through the dawdling crowd.

We arrive at the stoplight. I am silently grateful, while he is still oblivious to his role as my sidewalk leader. I smell autonomy, seconds away—the light reaches its final yellow moments. Red will come and I will launch myself onto the temporarily open road. Prepárate.

But the Chavistas smell that open road first: I am quickly enveloped by red shirts and signs instructing stopped cars to vote SI. A monstrously large poster, a horn, two jumping ralliers, five men rushing into the streeet carrying a banner: SI SI SI SI! two students with red hair shouting UH!AH!

I reach the other side, defeated and entangled once more in the languid crowd.

A stroll down Dios lane

Today Giulio suggested we go to the MACCSI (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas Sofía Imber). While I was excited to see a new part of Caracas, contemplating the meaning of a big black circle on a white canvas doesn’t really turn me on.

But damn, was I pleased with our visit. They had a photography exhibit on mythology from various Latin American countries. I looked at each photo and tried to place myself in that moment—standing alongside, for example, an elderly Quechua tribe leader with a perfectly proportioned feather headdress, gazing at the dreamlike mountainous terrain before him.

Or beside Kalakshé, dueño of the impenetrable jungle of the mountain that provides infinite resources for his tribe. Or next to Awishame, Colombian dueña of the the coca plant, valued for the energy and clarity it provides while engaging in cultural traditions.

I liked the photo they associated with the Mawari, evil spirits of the table-top mountains in Canaima. They are the enemy of man, responsible for the deaths and disappearances of those who dare climb.

.

The visit put a little painting seed in my head. So when I got home, I went up to the roof, put on Gustavo Santoalla's Montaña, gazed at my lovely Avila, and made this:

The return of the goat

Vero likes to say things that she knows I don’t understand. Today we had this convo en español:

Me: Matt’s party will be fun.

Vero: Yeah totally. There will be mostly guys there.

Me: Are you gonna bring your new man?

Vero: I'm not going to bring a goat to Coro.

Me: Umm.

Vero: You don’t bring a goat to Coro.

At first I thought: FINALLY! I understand this one. She’s talking about how she doesn’t bring a goat, meaning, higher up fancy man, to Coro.

Coro must be a low-brow bar, where one would not bring a fancy man. Like Matt's party.

No, not at all.

Coro is a place in Venezuela where there are lots of goats. So it’s like saying “you don’t bring sand to the beach.”

Her point: Time for Vero to meet a new man.

Plata

Yesterday, my boss sent me an excerpt from a book written in 1963 by historian AJ Toynbee. He shared it because he believes much of what Toynbee said about Venezuela in 1963 is still true. This part was the most interesting to me:

Venezuela has the makings of an earthly paradise. It would, in fact, be one if a paradise could be stocked solely with minerals and plants, without needing any complement of human inhabitants. Venezuelan human nature is probably no better and no worse than the general run of the mill. Venezuelan wealth, however, is something quite out of the ordinary, and extra-ordinary wealth puts human nature to one of its hardest tests. Can human nature stand this? That is the critical question for Venezuela.

Caracas in 1963

The excerpt got me thinking about what it would have been like to live in Venezuela before the "golden rain from the oil-fields and the iron mountains began to descend on the capital." There is so much wealth here and it's interesting to think about the effect it has on the human psyche.

Toynbee briefly discusses that idea:

In present-day Venezuela, as in the present-day World as a whole, one is conscious of a tension in the air. Was the atmosphere as tense, I wonder, in the days--still not so long ago--when poverty was the Venezuelan people's common lot, and when even the largest landowners were no millionaires?

A tale of two presidents

Today I got the front-seat view of a little movie I like to call "National leaders are absurdly influential on the psychology of individuals."

I opened my office window to a sunny day and felt a movie-like euphoria (complete with birds chirping and babies laughing): Bush is gone and, more importantly, Obama is President.

We'd just watched his speech dubbed in Spanish. Some of his key WOW lines came out more like yonoentiendoniuncoño, but nevertheless I gazed starry-eyed at the screen, still in disbelief that he is President. It’s like a national dream from which we'll wake up next month. (Maybe the wakeup will happen when, three weeks into his term, Fox News demands, “WHERE’S THE CHANGE?”)

I’m reading articles about “getting used to the new president,” as if our national senses have been numbed by two Bush terms and must be reawakened to adjust to positive feelings towards our leader.

While I don’t yet burst with pride every time I explain, soy de Estados Unidos, I can see a light at the end of the awkwardness-as-a-result-of-my-nationality tunnel. And watching his speech from Venezuela made me yearn for the chance to be in Washington and feel the energy of his symbolic triumph.

.

Below my office window, though, student marches are starting. Next month, there will be another constitutional referendum to eliminate term limits here. I had the impression that Venezuelans are tired of being bombarded with this kind of thing (what my friend calls crisis fatigue), until I blindly stuck my camera out the window and caught this girl:

They’re mockingly wearing red shirts that say “NO” on the back. Red is Chavez’s color, so when Vero spotted them on the street below, she groaned and got all, ay coño aqui vienen los revolucionarios (“oh f*ck here come the revolutionaries again...”)

Despite the idea that afuera todo es más arrecho (“everything is much better outside of Venezuela”… read that link if you are a Spanish speaker--it is hilarious), Venezuelans I know are way more proud to be from here than gringos are to be from the U.S. At the same time, there is far more political strife here and often, things don’t work the way people want them to (like when you're sitting in traffic for 30 minutes to turn a corner, or when the water dies for five days during your 20-person Thanksgiving dinner and you can’t wash any dishes so the chiripas—mini cockroaches—step up to the task). But in general Venezuelans seem pleased with themselves when they talk about where they are from. This is especially true for some when they completely separate their national identity from their nation's highest representative, as if the two were totally irreconcilable.

I, on the other hand, get more of a “alrighty well, let’s change the subject!” feeling when I have to talk about my home country in general. But I didn’t get that feeling today.

Geduld

I decided on a vegetarian trial run two weeks ago. It’s going OK. I don’t miss meat (aside from the crushing realization upon suggesting we visit the Colonia Tovar because it "has great German sausages!”)

Vero believes this switch means I'm loca, as the food chain is a natural part of life—lions eat deer (or whatever the hell they want), birds eat fish, and so on. But I'm doing it because of what I’ve been reading about Buddhism. The views on meat eating vary from school to school, and I’m not enough knowledgeable to know which makes the most sense to me personally. Mahayana Buddhism, for example, argues that if one pursues the path of the Bodhisattva for enlightenment, one should avoid meat eating to cultivate compassion for all living beings. Reading that line (thank you, Wikipedia) made me want to let go of meat right away, and now I think of it whenever I see meat dishes.

The best part of my switch was the dog that Brit and I fed last night. He (who we later learned was indeed a she, then continued to refer to her as a he) got the best of my freezer’s parilla leftovers. She was sleeping in the garden in front of my building and emerged to greet us, escorted by her nose. One look at her sad eyes and round goofy ears gave me the impulse to do something--anything--give her my spare change? It left me sad and unsatisfied. So we raced upstairs, nuked some frozen pork, and mixed it with corn flakes and a raw egg.

She seemed hesitant towards her meal, circling it and then backing away as if it were still alive and she’d forgotten how to kill. We felt relief when she pulled the pork out of the bag and ate the whole thing. But she left the rest. Sensing my disappointment, and still a little disgusted by my decision to give her a raw egg, Brit reassured me: “Don’t worry--it just means she has good taste.”

We sat on the stoop and chatted while the dog finished eating, content that at least for tonight, she was well-fed. Upon finishing, she climbed to our eye level and looked at us: Do you think you could maybe pet me for a while? So of course we did, before leading her to a fount of fresh water and deciding to purchase a bag of dog chow.

I think I will name her Geduld, which babelfish tells me is German for patience.