In times like these men turn to desperate measures. Can you blame them?
Tomorrow was another day. No doubt the streets would be filled with rage. Pablo would make coffee in the morning. Perhaps he would tend his small garden.
UNA TRAGEDIA DOBLE BY JARED BERBERABE 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 68
The paleros had come in the night bearing shovels and spades and dressed in dark rags. They wore the rags, Pablo figured, not just to hide themselves but also to hide their shame. Shame that things had come to this.
They had come first to the Cementerio del Este on the eastern side of Caracas, and they had gone to work noiselessly. The way Pablo’s buddy Armando described it, you would think they had not been paleros, but vultures in human form, lopping up the dirt, digging and cutting their way through the hard soil. Armando’s neighbor, the elderly Señora Cruz, had woken up the next morning to see that her husband of 76 years had been dumped next to the empty hole where his coffin had been buried. He had been stripped naked and the golden ring and tooth which he had acquired in the same year and had been buried with were both missing. He had died only a month before.
“Is nothing sacred in this godforsaken country?” Armando said over the distorted wails that Señora Cruz made. “Poor Esteban.”
“Poor Señora Cruz,” Pablo replied.
“Poor the both of them,” Armando said. “And poor us for having to watch.”
The volunteer media—which managed to survive through Maduro’s centralizing of all media platforms—had sent over one of their representatives to see what was happening. He wanted to talk to Señora Cruz but, seeing how she was unable to speak at that moment, chose instead to speak with Armando and Pablo.
“What is there to say?” Armando said to the reporter, waving an arm over the Cementerio del Este. “She has been robbed, and Señor Cruz—he has been robbed of his last dignity.”
Pablo had known Armando since he was a boy, and though his body had aged—he had lost his hair, for one, and whatever specks remained had migrated down from his head to form a gray, bushy mustache of impressive proportions across the length of his upper lip—he still spoke with the same voice of ferocity and indignation as he had the first time he had stood up to their teacher, the esteemed Sadoval.
“Does this happen a lot?” the reporter asked.
“Most certainly,” Armando said with a vehement nod. “But it’s been getting worse ever since Maduro consolidated everything.” That began a lengthy rant about the state of politics in Venezuela, which the reporter was all too happy to record, no doubt sharing many of Armando’s sentiments.
Pablo shared similar sentiments, though not all, and was not as vocal as his friend. What was at the center of his attention always were the necessities of life. Getting food and clean water, for example—though, he had to admit, those things and current politics felt dangerously connected. So while the reporter and Armando went back and forth with the details, Pablo decided to walk away.
He went to where Señora Cruz was lying on the ground, her yellowing, wrinkled face washed in wet tears. “Venga, Señora Cruz,” Pablo said, offering a hand. “Come. We must help your husband and move him.”
Señora Cruz took the hand, sobbing. Already some of the cemetery workers were preparing to take her husband to a morgue while they organized another coffin. But Pablo knew that would be an expensive endeavor, even for someone as affluent as Señora Cruz. A coffin today would cost much more than a coffin a month ago. That would come as another blow to Señora Cruz as her husband’s death had been.
Some might say Señor Cruz was lucky not to have been buried with anything more precious than a ring and a tooth, but, in looking at his cold, naked form laid bare and molested before an open sky, Pablo wondered if there was really any luck in that.