For José Roberto Duque

The law is born of innocents breathing their last in the rising dawn.
Michel Foucault

Stranger:

The night is so dark I can barely make out your face in the bushes. No doubt your forehead will be scrunched and your eyes shut tight to protect against this swarm of flies, mosquitoes, and low-flying beetles licking the sweat off your neck and back. If there weren’t so many of them, and if they didn’t fly so blindly into the light, I’d turn on the searchlights to show you everything. It’d be worth it just to see her again, to study her in detail one last time. Not that I’ll ever forget her. No sir, I have every moment of her life recorded up here that I replay in my head like a movie on a loop. And anyway, she doesn’t even look like herself anymore. She’s a dirty, broken doll. A mannequin that someone raped and then dumped in the bushes. It’s impossible to tell just how hot she was. Or to imagine a woman like that, riding you with abandon. Where you come from, stranger, the women don’t have that kind of swing in their hips.

Her name was Elisa. It was her grandmother’s name and her mother’s middle name as well. She was always so silent, like a piece of jewelry in a shop window or a painting on a museum wall, like all delicate objects kept behind thick glass. There is something in that static remoteness, in that ghostly stillness, that brings her to life in my mind. I see her in that uniform the pretty girls in banks wear, standing silently at her teller’s window, with eyes always lowered. Probably feeling self-conscious about handling all that money that belongs to other people the whole day long. How many men do you think would pass by each day, ogling her, paying her a compliment to try to make her smile? Dozens and dozens. But we’re only interested in one. One who has no name, who was in his thirties, and who was good for only one thing: being a National Guardsman. Knowing how to deliver blows while keeping a straight face, you know how it goes. And that’s how this story begins, stranger. He sees her. He goes up to her and casually straightens his uniform. A man can get anything wearing khakis and iron-tipped boots. Standing less than three feet away from her, he slides his deposit slip under the teller window, accompanied by a “Good morning, honey.” She reacts by casting her small dark eyes down on the slip of paper. She types something on her keyboard for a second, and without looking at him, quietly says that he has forgotten to sign the slip. She passes it back to him with a black pen. He writes down his name as legibly as he can and asks if a phone number is also required. Maybe even winking at her as he says this. Without responding, she holds out her hand to take back the deposit slip and pen, a slight tremble in her fingers betraying her concentration. He hesitates a second before releasing his grip on the paper, a microscopic moment, enough so as not to raise suspicions, but also to draw her gaze to him. And that look between them, stranger, upends everything. It leaves her with a tingling feeling for the rest of the day and him with her dark eyes etched permanently on his mind.

From that day on, he starts visiting the same branch regularly, even though it’s far away and always crowded. Sometimes he goes there without a real reason, using his savings passbook to withdraw cash instead of going to an ATM, or repeatedly requesting an application form for a credit card, one that will never be approved. She catches on to everything right away but nonetheless allows this routine to develop between them. If their glances linger too long, she turns back to the computer and starts typing intently, as if wanting to avoid her own thoughts, focusing instead on “our valued savings customers.” Day after day, they play a cat-and-mouse game of pursuit, like the guardsmen at the border towns, who terrify the peasants with accounts of what the guerillas do. You could never say that our man gave up on the first try. After two weeks, he receives a response to his “good morning.” After a month, a gesture of recognition and a hint of a smile. Then a few days later, he finally coaxes a name out of her. A name that seemed strange to him: he’d never met an Elisa before.

Not much time passed between that first victory and the afternoon in which, seduced by his particular way of looking at her, she let him slowly remove her uniform, with the care and patience with which one undresses a child, as if every inch of her skin was sensitive to the light in the room. She smelled like window cleaner. The same one they use on the tellers’ windows at the bank. But there was a deep scent hidden in the crevice between her tits. A strong aroma that curled up around her neck and slid down over her brown skin like a snake in autumn leaves. Her body had the smell of smoked beer, of a sunbaked wheat field, of dry sweat from long hours of work mixed with a sickly sweet perfume that some old boyfriend must have given her as a Christmas gift. When having sex, Elisa came without much effort, as if by accident. She would then stare into space, maybe afraid of having traversed a boundary she never knew existed. One might even have thought she was a virgin.

They saw each other for a while longer, savoring those occasions when their uniforms would end up in a tangle on the floor. Afterward, she would put on his camouflage jacket and scurry off into the bathroom, saying, “Quick, I have to leave right away.” Illicit encounters that ended with brief and restrained goodbyes, especially on her part, as if she wanted to leave and stay locked in his arms at the same time. He would then grab her and pull her close, and give her a slow aching kiss that burned on her lips the whole way home. Although he rarely asked her any questions, Elisa never told him where she lived, or said anything about her family. Often she let him accompany her only as far as the nearest subway station or taxi rank. Sometimes she didn’t even wait for him to leave the hotel together. That air of mystery about her, which at first bothered him, taught him to always observe her from afar. Like you and I are doing right now.

You don’t have to be a genius to figure out that Elisa had a husband. Our women are like that, stranger. They would kill to have a man around the house, even if it means putting up with his drinking and having to cheat on him later on. It’s no wonder Elisa and our guy were so careful about how and when they arranged to meet up. He would show up at the bank and she would just tell him if it was possible to meet him that day or not. If it was, he would wait for her outside and they would go straight to the hotel. They wrote down messages on deposit slips and passed them to each other. When they finished, he would throw them in the trash bin by the bank’s exit door. They almost never spoke to each other. Neither of them was adept with words. That’s why it was impossible to make sense of Elisa’s sudden absence for almost a full week, in which there were no notes or messages, or anything to explain why there was a replacement teller working at her window. Had she been fired all of a sudden? Had she been transferred to another branch? Had she been hit by a truck when crossing the street? After waiting a few days, he finally dared to withdraw some money from the ATM and deposit it into his own account, just so he could ask the other teller about Elisa. The reply he got was accompanied by a gesture of resignation, a shrug of the shoulders: Elisa was sick, in the hospital as far as she knew, and she would be back at work soon. He nodded, with nothing more to say, and waited a few days before asking after her again.

When in the end he resumes his regular visits to the bank, the person he sees standing behind the teller’s window looks like a caricature of the old Elisa: scrawny, emaciated, with a flushed face, and unable to mask her discomfort at seeing him in line. If she could have sunk into a hole, she would have. But she can’t, and so the sphinx turns into a scarecrow. He waits impatiently for his turn, crumpling a deposit slip in his fist. And when he’s finally standing in front of her, after letting two customers go ahead of him to avoid having to go to another teller’s window, Elisa tries in vain to cover her eyes with her hair. But neither that, nor the heavy makeup she’s wearing, stops our hero from noticing the details of her face: a green shadow that extends from her right cheek to her eye, where it explodes into a heap of tiny red lines against a white background; the painted mouth, much redder than usual, hiding the swelling on the upper lip, torn open as if it were made of cloth; the long flowing hair obscuring the marks on the neck. But not quite. Our hero knows what those marks are from. He sees them every day in the barracks: on the bruised faces of rebellious recruits and cocky cadets. Except on Elisa’s body they signify something else. Something similar to the cracks left behind by tremors in the building he once lived in as a kid. Those marks aren’t meant just for her, so she doesn’t forget the lesson. They’re meant for him too. A bit like someone putting graffiti on the walls of his own house, or a sign erected on trespassed land: “private property, you son of a bitch.” He stares straight at her and does not take his eyes off her. He’s not sure whether to reproach her for this rejection, to show indifference, or to perhaps show concern. He grabs a fresh deposit slip from the counter and furiously writes “what the fuck happened to you?” on it, in a way that matches the blows landed on her battered face. Deep, deep inside, Elisa falls apart. The “nothing, don’t ask” she scribbles in the blank “amount in words” section of the slip does nothing but fuel his rage. You can guess his response, stranger. Deposit amount: “Tell me the bastard’s name and I’ll fuck him up.” Signature: “It was my fault. Just stay out of it.” And how could he not get involved? In one corner of the slip: “Did he find out about us?” He is filled with despair at the thought that this could actually be his fault. She averts her gaze. “You’re leaving that bastard today and coming with me,” he says, breaking their protocol of silence. She replies, “It’s better you don’t come looking for me anymore,” and then signs and stamps the receipt and pushes it across to him. That concludes the transaction between them. Elisa puts up the blue “Teller Closed” sign and hurriedly disappears into the bowels of the bank.

Violating orders to return to barracks that same day, our hero instead wanders around for hours, killing time as the afternoon fades. He has the metallic taste of rage in his mouth and his heart is pounding furiously in his chest, beating out the waiting time. He’s not surprised by the abuse Elisa suffers, or the fear she must be feeling that made her react the way she did. Hostages never dare to negotiate, even if their only chance of freedom depends on it, even if it means avoiding a violent death. How else to explain her emphatic desire to end things with him. Whether she’s doing it to protect him, to protect herself, or just to keep everyone out of trouble is something he’s determined to find out. That’s why he waits until closing time. He watches as the employees start coming out of the bank. Elisa finally appears. And suddenly everything makes sense. It all fits together when he sees her get into a Metropolitan Police patrol car and greet the driver with a quick peck. A quick peck either because she knows she’s being watched, because she feels obliged to, or because her lips are too sore. It’s impossible to see much more than this, but our hero memorizes the license plate number and repeats it to himself. “So that’s why,” he mutters to himself as he watches the car speed off. “So that’s why.” Elisa knows her days are numbered.

Once curfew at the barracks has been breached, it makes no difference what time you get back. The punishment is always the same. As the afternoon passes, he decides to walk around and seek refuge at a place familiar to him. He can’t just wander around in uniform and slip into any old brothel. But there is always one place where they don’t care about the uniform and where they’re happy to offer “a drink on the house for our young private.” The rest you can imagine for yourself, stranger. With rage still burning inside him, our man downs three or four beers. With his teeth almost biting into the neck of the bottle, he gulps down the liquid in an effort to douse the flames of anger. Instead, this just sparks his determination to do something, but not quite yet. That night he decides to nestle between the thighs of a dark-skinned whore, one who looks quite young, maybe even underage. She calls him “my hero, my soldier” the whole time while he takes her from behind and pulls hard on her dyed-blonde curls. I can just imagine him returning to the barracks at dawn, smelling of whores and cheap hotel soap, and being sentenced to nine days of lockup. He accepts the punishment almost with relief. He needs time to be alone and think.

Nine days is nothing, anyway. Some people have been put away in there for months. Our hero emerges from lockup with a heavy weight inside him, something dense like concrete under his skin. Something that’s crying out for justice, revenge, or both. But it’s not a pang of jealousy, or a feeling of having lost a battle without even having fought it. Rather, it’s the desire to erase Elisa’s face from his mind, to wipe her from his memory, to rip out something from deep within him, without knowing how or why. At last, he’s back out on the streets again and he knows what he has to do. He makes dozens of calls, dialing up people he never dreamed he’d ever call. He contacts colonels and sergeants, asks for their help, licks boots, and makes promises without considering the cost. All so that one day he can turn that license plate number into a first and last name: “Asdrúbal Rivero.” And then that name into a phone number and that phone number into an address. That was all he needed. But it’s not so easy to kill a cop in the open and get away with it, unless you have the resources to cover your tracks or keep the deed under wraps. In other words, loads of money or influential friends. And it goes without saying our friend had neither. But God smiles at revenge, stranger, and our hero’s began one afternoon in the outlying suburb of Guarenas.

Nobody knew what the protests were about; nor did it matter much. In less than a few hours, what had been a preemptive call to barracks turned into a full deployment, as those sent to control the mob were overwhelmed by what would come to be known as the Caracazo. When news of the protests, riots, and looting in Guarenas reached Caracas, the National Guard was on alert to receive instructions. They were told that the streets were ablaze and their task was to “maintain public order” at any cost. In short, they were being given free rein. They climbed into their vehicles-turned-killing-machines. Before they strapped on their gas masks, you could tell that some were anxious while others were beaming with delight. Over the roar of the engines, the sergeant announced the name of the neighborhood where the riots would be first quelled. And you’re not gonna believe it, stranger, but it was right where Elisa lived.

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‘For Elisa’ is taken from the collection The Irreparable, out now with Spurl Editions. You can order a copy here.

Gabriel Payares is a Venezuelan writer living in Buenos Aires. He is the author of multiple short-story collections, and he has won several national literary awards in Venezuela. English translations of his stories have appeared in Latin American Literature Today, Asymptote, and The Southern Review.

Paul Filev lives in Melbourne and translates from Macedonian and Spanish into English. His translations include The Lisbon Syndrome by Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles, which was named one of World Literature Today’s 75 Notable Translations of 2022, and Figures of Wood by María Pérez-Talavera.