The Last Friday in Caracas

Abstract

The Last Friday in Caracas Alejandro Puyana (bio) The morning after the first night my friend Coco slept over, Anita, our maid—and my nanny since I was four years old—put a hand over her mouth and gasped from behind the kitchen island. The night before had been a band night, and Coco had asked for a ride to his apartment all the way west to La Pastora, and everyone he asked made a face as if he’d asked to go to the moon and not a few miles west on Avenida Urdaneta. To be fair, space travel was significantly safer than going to La Pastora at 3:00 am, so I told him, “Just stay over at my place tonight.” And he shrugged and said, “Fino.” And that was the beginning. Anita stood there with her face as flat as a corncake until I walked over and kissed her on the cheek and said, “Buenos días, biutiful,” like I did every morning except Sundays, when she had her day off. In that time, all those years ago, it was one of the ways I kept track of the days of the week. Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays were a blur: interchangeable rum and cokes, guitar riffs, dented and chipped mic stands, busted sound equipment. On Sundays there was no one walking around the house picking up after me and my sisters and my dad (my mom never gave Anita any work to do, except the work to clean after the rest of us, which was plenty, I guess). A kiss on the cheek was enough to hit the reset button. Anita smiled wide and blushed and snapped the kitchen rag at me, shooing me away, “Sale pa ‘lla! Go. Go sit. Arepas are almost ready,” she said. “This is Coco, Anita. A friend,” I told her. And Anita immediately turned cold again. “Good morning, joven,” is all she said before turning back to the griddle. “I didn’t make enough for two,” she said. But I knew Anita would make more dough for him. I didn’t even have to ask. “No worries, ma’am, I’m okay,” Coco said. His voice was guttural as always, and still scratchy from a night of screaming into the microphone, and cheering for the other bands (mine included), and talking loudly over the music so we could hear each other, and flirting with Lucía. Coco had a big crush on Lucía, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him yet that he might as well have been flirting with a wall because she would have never—ever—done more than politely chat with him. Lucía was the type of Caracas sifrina that only went to those house parties and listened to those bands because it was the cool thing to do and not because she liked the music, or even the people, except for a few that she would run into [End Page 164] at church or at Le Club or at the pool at El Country. I mean, imagining Tamara Vicentini, Lucía’s mom, seeing her daughter hold the hand of a guy like Coco was enough to send me into a fit of delight. There were not enough pearls in the Caribbean to clutch. The only Black people the Vicentinis routinely spoke to were their chauffeur and the folks at the Aruba Hilton where they stayed three weeks every summer since Lucía turned five. Coco was big, had a nose ring, and wore Pantera T-shirts. Two Pantera T-shirts, to be exact, and he cycled through them ad infinitum. People assumed he was a metalhead—I mean, he loved metal, but that’s not the music his band played. It was garage rock with electronic beats he arranged in a beat-up IBM laptop that weighed as much as a compact car. That thing could have stopped a bullet and kept churning out beats. He worked through obsolete FL Studio software that he had bought, pirated of course, from a place close to his house that would burn anything and everything, from the latest video game to the raunchiest...