Caracas: The fear

El equipo de "Hearts on Venezuela" me sorprendió con la traducción al inglés de mi relato "Caracas, el miedo". Acá el texto:


“Man is wolf to man.”

Thomas Hobbes
1. The city is a rabid dog. I write to immunize myself.

2. I fell asleep and missed the half hour of water. The Internet is down. I leave a paragraph halfway and go out to look for food. The Street Chief and Popular and Communal Spokesperson of the Quadrant of Peace and Revolutionary Guerrilla of the Civic Revolutionary and Combatant Military Zone – a poor devil – places me at the end of a long line of people piled up like dung.

3. Today I will write a little less. All for nothing. We all waste time. Says the whiplash of my bleeding ulcer that is my new oracle.

4. Hours of damp sun, militia requisition, triumphant entrance of hyenas scavenging empty shelves.

5. Sometimes I feel stuck in a landfill.

6. I advance. A guy behind me dares to check his cellphone out in the street. Fool. Soon the rat children, the empty-headed, crouch behind the garbage bags. They grab the phone and they run. Someone shouts: “Get him!” And they arrest one in his gallop. The other flees, brandishing a pistol larger than himself. And the line disarms like a Lego whose pieces fall, heavy, on the rat child. They’re going to lynch him, no doubt.

7. Fear is fought with hate. Frustration is the executioner. Evil is a gorilla in the guise of a president.

8. There he is again, airing live, talking about love while foaming at the mouth. Spit on his face, spit on the television.

9. The clothes of the rat child fly torn like strips of paper. Vomit blood. Good neighbors, children of good neighbors, educated, kind, jump over the bony body turned wrestling champions… where did the baseball bat come from?

10. The government is a killer whale stuck in a fish tank; the opposition a dolphin without fins. 11. Kill him! No! Let him go! Kill him! Murderer!

12. I take advantage of the mess and I crash the ghost of a supermarket. I overcome the horror of the armed military that prevents the passage, cannot find what I am looking for, the card will not go through because a salary is smoke.

13. A group of ant women complain loudly. From the olive-green column that guards the premises, a female National Guard breaks the line, goes to the front and confronts them. The group screams, and the Guard pushes them with an expression of fury and pleasure. I imagine her going back to the barracks, taking off her uniform, taking her AK-47 rifle with her legs open and sticking the long tip of cold metal while her finger caresses the trigger, trembling, making her orgasm like no man ever could.

14. I came for milk and rice, but I found flour and coffee.

15. There is no toilet paper. The regime is not afraid of walking around with a dirty ass.

16. The rat child is no longer naked. He is covered by a white sheet with red spots in the middle of the street. You can barely see a part of his face which resembles a rotten tomato. I hurry, it’s late. Only the mad go out at night.

17. Cerberus and his three heads: hunger, repression and death. Their jaws grip your neck, the fangs pierce the flesh and you cannot move, just pray it will loosen its jaw and leave.

18. Home is the den of the innocent.

19. I am a lucky man: my family never gets sick.

20. I resigned to leave and do not ask me for a damn explanation.

21. I do not want to argue, woman, that’s a luxury of developed countries. We have to fuck, fuck like flies, like panthers, like pigs. Let’s fuck before the electricity goes out and the children wake up.

22. In the candle light, I write to survive.


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