High Treason by Alberto Ambard

Author:Alberto Ambard [Mondragon, Alberto Ambard and Amelia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Virtualbookworm.com Publishing
Published: 2012-06-11T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 18

MARCH 13, 2005

At 7 o’clock in the morning, when a gust of wind filtered through the dense clouds from the west, the only palm tree planted in the Piruggi garden shook its large leaves to disperse the intense heat that had been so oppressive during the night.

Its light movements did not distract Alfredo, who lying down wearing shorts, was reading a newspaper article about El Charcote. That was the name of a 12,000-hectare cattle ranch located in the heart of the Venezuelan plains. Until recently, it had belonged to a British group represented in Venezuela by Andrew Stone, or simply “Andrés” to his friends at the Country Club. Alfredo felt sad about how president Chávez was expropriating the ranch from its British owners. He had visited it as a child with his uncle from his mother’s side, Arturo Bocay, who had been a tough dairy cow breeder until a bad investment and Parkinson’s disease brought his business dealings to an end.

He folded the large newspaper sheet and held it closer to his eyes to look at the photos with the article. There were four pictures in total, showing some farm workers to whom Chávez had given the El Charcote land so that it could be cultivated. Alfredo resettled his head on the cushions to study the fourth picture, whose ironic and lazy humor had escaped censure.

It was a photo of a man in front of some plots of land where a few bean plants were sprouting. The inscription at the foot of the image said: “Colombian peasant protecting his crop from cattle.” And effectively, the man was standing between the plants and a small calf that was sniffing the ground, perhaps wondering what had happened to its pastureland. “Shit!” said Alfredo out loud, unable to resist laughing as he looked at the calf. “That thing’s the only Venezuelan here,” he thought.

He left the newspaper on the bed to take refuge in the tranquility of the palm tree but once again, his glance met the Zeta magazines, compulsively organized in sequence and spread in three columns. He had gone through them by chance, taking a few issues from each year out of the pile, only to realize that since 2002, when he had started his job at the Chicago Hospital, most of the characters were unknown to him, all involved in turbulent business and political scandals. More disheartened by the new faces than by the country’s never-ending corruption, he left the Zeta magazines and began to read the newspaper that had been placed on his bedside table. El Charcote and its pastures were refreshing to him, because although they were gone, they represented a fluorescent buoy in a sea of news he had been swimming in for five days.

The Zeta magazines were a gift from his father, Roberto Piruggi, who had decided to collect them on June 23, 1997, just when Alfredo flew over to Illinois to become a notable neurosurgeon.

“I should have asked him to mail them over to

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