Sacrifices: Stories by Rodrigo Blanco Calderón

Author:Rodrigo Blanco Calderón
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: venezuelan literature;surrealism;literary short fiction;fiction in translation;contemporary fiction;latin american literature;latin america;translation;literature in translation;literary fiction;latinx literature;latino literature;hispanic literature;short stories;short story anthology;realistic fiction books;fiction;novels;fiction books;short story collections;long story short;short stories collections;literature;books fiction;hispanic;hispanic books;hispanic american fiction;latino
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2022-08-19T16:19:44+00:00

CHILDREN OF THE MIST

In memory of Eduardo Morreo

So, you want to bring down the government, do you, young man . . .

Don’t worry, we’ve already lowered the shutters. They won’t get in here. Plus, bookstores are invisible to those brutes. But we do need to wait for everything to calm down. Meanwhile, we can talk.

It was my father who taught me to know when something’s fitting. And I don’t just mean that proverbially; he was a tailor. The best in all Caracas. This was in the forties and fifties, too, which were like the twilight of people dressing well.

As a young boy I even got to see General Medina Angarita in his underclothes. You don’t know who Isaías Medina Angarita was? Only the first career soldier to become president of Venezuela. He was toppled by a combination of the Democratic Action Party and an army faction, in October 1945. My father had finished making a suit for him the week before the putsch and, when he saw how bad the general looked in it, he knew that the rumors were true: he was on his way out.

He told me about that later on. On the evening of November 13, 1950, to be precise—when the news of Carlos Delgado Chalbaud’s assassination broke. Another man dressed by my father, and another whose fate he glimpsed amidst needles and fabrics.

At the time of the October Revolution, in ’45, I was out of the country. At the beginning of that year, I’d been sent to the US, without a word of why. First, to do a preparatory course at Fordham, then to Peekskill, which was among the best military academies at the time.

I stayed until 1950, when I had to come back to Venezuela semi-covertly. People could already tell that war with Korea was in the cards, and my father was worried I’d be called up. And he was right to be; I was about to turn eighteen and doubtless wouldn’t have survived the opening skirmishes.

The gringos declared me a deserter. And because of that, though I went on to have a career as a diplomat, I was never able to set foot on North American soil again.

I rose quickly in the State Department, but I got postings in places like the USSR, Poland, Czechoslovakia—and this was with the Cold War at its height. The difficult moments always felt to me like part of a badly fitting jacket that my father, for some unknown reason, had tailored specifically for me.

In time, I’ve come to understand certain things. But when I arrived back from the north in ’50, it was all a complete mystery. On one of my first recons of Caracas (the part of the city people call “downtown” nowadays), I went into a bookstore, had a browse of the new arrivals table, and came upon a book that felt like a sign to me: Understanding Venezuela by Mariano Picón Salas.

I showed it to my father, but he barely batted an eyelid. It wasn’t until he saw the author photo that he stopped and took a look.

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