Venezuela: Through Memory Lane

A girl wears a Venezuelan flag as Venezuelan security forces block access to opposition supporters and mourners of rogue ex-policeman Oscar Perez to the main morgue of the city, in Caracas, Venezuela January 20, 2018. REUTERS/Marco Bello – RC19FB077080

Countries are more than just body parts carved out of the earth. We have gone to wars over them and what lies below them, slaughtered thousands to name it after our kings and queens, conquering them in their name, defended them from barbarians, and used them as homes against the crowns of imperialists and monarchists.

Throughout my life, I rebelled against my ancestry, against my own nationality, through my own imagination. I secretly wished to be something else: Spanish, French, Russian, but above all else, I wanted to be anything except for what I was. I felt disillusionment and shame for where I was from.

My country is a nation that goes by the name of Venezuela, much well known today, but not for the reasons I wanted it to be, at least most of them. A country that is synonymous with inflation, crime, and draconian tyranny, a country that used to be a beacon of stability and economic progress in Latin America and, even after everything, still my home.

I am not writing this blog to lecture others about suffering or to compare misfortune, neither have I done this for imaginary internet points, or pity, or popularity. I have written this blog because I feel like I owe it to myself because I need to address these confusing feelings inside of me, that even a year after leaving the country, I still feel lingering traces of.

I want to come out and lay them all bare. My name is Ernesto Ignacio Gomez Belloso, and this is the first installment in a series of blogs about my country and me.

I was born on the 3rd of November in the year 2000, in Maracaibo, in the Zulian state, to two wonderful parents, Ernesto Jose Gomez Roo and Maria Cristina Belloso, so I assume you all can guess where my first name comes from. For the longest time, I had a blast, being born in an advantageous position, with a family that was well-off economically, gave me plenty of things to do, we went to parks, had big birthday parties, and had as many toys as any kid could want, most of those toys would be passed down to my energetic little brother Camilo, who was born after the middle child of the family, my extravagant sister, Fabiana.

I was never made aware of the more tragic events of the 2000s during my childhood. All that captivated my interest was the next episode of Tommy & Jerry or Samurai Jack and whatever was going on in the Grim Adventures Of Billy & Mandy. I never opened my eyes to any of that, it wasn’t until much later that I saw the rot, the decay, but that comes later.

Another place that I really loved was this club, in English one would call is The Nautical Club, which is what it was called in my country, El Club Nàutico. Imagine a wide expanse of grass with paved concrete paths, a pool for Olympic-styled swimming competitions, a small little park where the children would play without a care, painted white and brown and red and green and blue. A gym downstairs, places for the old ladies to play poker in peace away from their grandchildren, and food that was never fancy, never pretty, but always made you come back for more.

Do you see this? You will never taste anything as homely and heavenly as what you see here, it’s like an embrace from a grandmother, kinda crunchy but satisfying…. Wait-

Even after just starting to know the mixed feelings inside of me, I know one thing for certain: I may have spurned many things from that country, but I could never forsake El Club Nàutico. Maybe it was because those memories were of a simpler time, maybe it was because that place was my safe haven, a safe haven that ended up desecrated and besieged by that same rot eventually.

My father had told me that we needed to start going to swimming classes, that’s where I met Paco and many people from school I never wanted to see again. Good times.

We would swim like madmen as if we were trying to escape from something. There was also the odd headbutt here and there because some of us accidentally moved to the wrong track, but fighting in water isn’t exactly ideal, especially because you are already so tired from moving, so we would just keep going and going until we finished. I will admit that I did skip a few laps, don’t tell anybody of course.

That was where one of my first great achievements would come. It was in the summer I think, was it on a weekend after days of no school because of fleeing teachers? The point was that all the children there were given a herculean task to accomplish: make one lap through the pool, underwater and without breathing.

I was honestly scared, many people were watching us, from parents to photographers on stands and on the floor, cheering on their cherry children to chaw off the chains of water resistance and reach first place and win an award they can proudly take home.

When the shot was fired and we all let go of the wall of the pool and our limbs started moving on their own, I sincerely thought that I wasn’t going to make it. I just forced myself to swim deeper below into the pool, my lungs compressed like a soda can, but my eyes never lost sight of the end of the pool. I crossed to the other edge and walked out of the pool, wet, scared, and excited, and rushed to hug my mom and dad, and when I went to get my award, I got the glorious award of….

A coupon for a children’s meal at Mcdonald’s. A coupon that I never cashed in and was lost to time.

Yeah.

But that event made me learn something, that our willpower was the only thing God knew we would ever need to reach the top or fall to the bottom, and to this day I haven’t forgotten that lesson.

The final achievement that those beautiful grounds of concrete and grass would see was during a fishing competition, we would sit near the docks and we would use our makeshift fishing rods (which weren’t actually rods but more like rolls) into the lake. This is where the rot started to set in.

The first-ever catch of that day was a decomposed car tire. You should have seen the excitement in the eyes of every child and supervisor there, and how quickly it flickered out when that thing escaped the surface of the water. The smell was quite terrible too, a miasma or sulfur, cleaning products, and trash, so let’s just say that seeing other kids fishing pufferfish or needlefish didn’t exactly lift up my spirits, but even after complaining, I still went on, mainly because I saw that many other kids hadn’t fished up anything, that and some encouragement from the instructors watching over us.

After a couple of hours under the sun I felt a gigantic weight being caught on my hook and what do you know, I had caught a disk-shaped fish, with its face on the bottom, a fierce look in its eyes, and a sting waving back and forth. Needless to say, a kid like me couldn’t have pulled that thing on his own, so the instructors helped, but I still felt proud of my catch. I also got an actual award for it, for “an outstanding, remarkable catch.”

This was mainly to show that not all the memories of my country were terrible or filled with grief and despair. Though if I had to say what was the highlight of my time in those days, every single morning would come to mind, no matter how early, or the context of the day, the mornings were always the best part.

I would wake up in the morning and be welcomed either at the dining table or small tables set up in the living room. We would eat these things called Arepas more often than anything, those were our pancakes for the longest time, they were these discs of ground maize dough which you then opened with a knife and could fill up with anything you wanted; meat, eggs, butter, cheese of any kind, anything that suits your taste, feeling it meld and mix inside of your mouth, savoring the taste and enjoying every bit of it. Then we would watch the old episodes of Tom & Jerry over and over, mainly because it was the only show that we all liked.

Those types of mornings are something I miss, maybe it is because they took place in an old house that I will never see again, or because those memories were deep parts of my childhood and the innocence that accompanied it. I miss those times, because at least back then I could pretend that there was nothing wrong with my country, or my home life, that my parents weren’t going through a divorce, or the fact that my country, much like a tower, crumbled around me bit by bloody bit.

This is where it started, that was when the wound became infected with rot. That was when the tower in my mind began to fall.

Thank you so much for reading my first installment in the Venezuela series, and thank you for your time.

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