Was this a parcel of fibs or mere self-delusion? How can paths cross if you don’t want them to? The Altamira park they had visited near the house smelled of urine, was defaced by obscene graffiti and boasted vandalized benches. Paul was perplexed. Savagely, he channeled his hurt at the daughter’s rejection into anger at the father’s wilful blindness. Beneath the falseness of the man’s optimism and the face-saving understatement in “not an easy life” must lie a mountain of unpalatable truth. Fantasy, self-deception, wishful thinking, all lay like leaf-mould fertilizing a suggestible imagination. It was the well-meaning liberal talk of a glib foreign interloper unable or unwilling to see this half-made society for what it was: one full of kleptocratic politicians, profound social inequality, and an elite of dreamy academics sitting on a volcano of smouldering unrest.
But perhaps, he reflected more charitably later, one could never really know the heartache of another, maybe not even the distress of one’s own daughter, a woman who had exchanged privilege for penury, herself the unhappy victim of divided loyalty, confused cultural identity, and the bourgeois shame of a single parent immured in a forlorn city in a nation whose way of life was under threat from an enemy within.
Tired of unfulfilled government promises and the shortages, inflation, filthy hospitals, and increasing violence from the troops and secret police loyal to Chavez’s successor Maduro, those who could afford to do so eventually left for Miami, as Mr. and Mrs. Beck did, but a revolution’s real victims, those without resources, cannot fly away. What “libertad” was there for slum dwellers without electricity, running water, sanitation, or, more importantly, lawful responsible government? They, the least able to bear the brunt of enforced violent change, are always left behind. The country is now an impoverished failed state at the bottom of the alphabet like its partners in grime, Yemen, Zaire and Zimbabwe. As the world knows, millions of impoverished migrants have since tried to flee starvation and economic mismanagement by walking to Colombia. Was Esmeralda among them? Alas, no one no longer knows.
Caracas, Venezuela
