Luis explained that public transportation had become almost nonexistent, because there was a recent fuel shortage and because it was almost impossible to find spare parts to repair old buses.
Brodie remarked, “I thought this place was swimming in oil.”
Luis shook his head. “The refineries don’t work, so the crude oil is shipped out and the government has to import most of the gasoline and diesel.” He added, “PDVSA is full of morons and thieves.”
Brodie thought back to the PDVSA propaganda he’d seen on the drive into the city. It seemed that “the weapon of the revolution against capitalism” was running on empty.
As they drove down the street, Luis pointed out a five-story concrete apartment building. “My apartment is here.” He felt the need to add, “It is nicer on the inside.”
The building’s façade looked pockmarked and grimy, and metal bars covered every window, even on the upper floors. The place was surroundedby a cinder-block wall with a corrugated metal door. All along the top of the wall were cemented shards of broken glass: a low-cost—and perhaps recently added—extra level of security.
They turned onto a wider boulevard and drove past a seemingly endless line of people standing along the shoulder, snaking up a sloping hillside and out of view in both directions.
Taylor asked, “Luis, what are they waiting for?”
“Food.” They rounded a curve and saw a slab-concrete building with a red plastic sign above barred windows:SUPERMERCADO. “Every day the government offers different price-controlled items. Today maybe it is cooking oil and bread. Maybe yesterday it was rice and milk. Sometimes people don’t know what they are getting until they are inside. You must present your Cédula de Identidad—your national ID card—in order to receive these goods, and the last number on your ID card determines what day you can buy things. Every Tuesday my wife is in this line.”
Neither Taylor nor Brodie knew what to say to that.
Their car rolled up the hill and Brodie stared at this unending stream of humanity—young and old, large families with strollers, solitary men and women. A little girl in a yellow dress held on to her mother with one hand, and in the other she dragged a raggedy doll through the roadside overgrowth. A middle-aged man sat on an old motorbike with the engine turned off, slowly inching the bike forward with his feet to keep pace with the glacial movement toward the supermarket. Brodie recalled how annoyed he got when there was a line at the checkout in the post commissary at Quantico, and he was sure Taylor was thinking the same thing.
The people at the supermercado looked mostly patient and orderly, but with a sunken look about them that was partly hunger but partly the humiliation, perhaps, of people who were used to being able to support themselves, now waiting for whatever goods the bureaucrats had decided to offer. All reduced to beggars, to this mass of people who, in their congregation, showed all that was broken about their country.
Taylor said, “I have never seen anything like this… not even in Afghanistan.”
Luis said, “I did not grow up like this.”
As they crested the hill and approached the supermarket, they saw azigzag walkway that ran from the bottom of a multilevel parking garage up to the supermarket entrance. In more prosperous times, it must have functioned as a ramp for exiting shoppers to roll their grocery carts down to their cars. Now it held crowds of people pressed against the wire-mesh walls lining the walkway, holding on to the walls for support as they waited for a brief respite from hunger.
“How can you put up with this?” asked Taylor.
Luis shrugged. And really, what more was there to say? Protest required energy. And energy required food.
Brodie checked his watch. It was six-twenty. They still had forty minutes to kill before their rendezvous with Raúl. He said, “Let’s head downtown.”
Downtown Caracas maintained some aspects of its colonial flavor, though for every pastel-colored Spanish church or palace, there were ten glass office towers and dull concrete apartment blocks that had sprung up during the building boom of the Seventies when oil was king.
Luis turned into a narrow street and pointed out a single-story stone house. “The birthplace of Simón Bolívar.” He added, “Our George Washington.”
“He was a great man,” said Brodie, leaving it unclear if he was referring to Washington or Bolívar.
Luis smiled and said, “Sí. The Great Liberator.”
“Right.”
Taylor said, “They were both great men.”
A few minutes later, Luis pointed out a handsome white and yellow neoclassical church. “This is where Bolívar was declared the Liberator of Venezuela, in 1813, when the Spanish were driven out.”
Brodie remarked, “You could use another Simón Bolívar.”
“Sí,” agreed Luis.
They drove through an intersection where one of the roads was blocked off by steel security gates, beyond which was a huge pink palatial building.
Luis said, “That is our White House.”
“It’s pink,” Brodie pointed out.
