Letters | Let’s light up the sewer | By Juancho Barreto

The bus driver shouts passionately, “We must annihilate Macario.” I immediately think of Juan Rulfo’s character, stunned in his cold, calculating silence. These real-life characters, up and down, with their sharp, penetrating needle, pierce the warm heart of midday. The driver is very angry, he jumps in his everyday seat shouting, “I can’t have three women anymore.” One of the passengers, dreaming, says: “I’m sitting next to the sewer waiting for the frogs to come out. Last night, while we were having dinner, they started making a big fuss and didn’t stop singing until dawn. My godmother also says that: that the frogs’ shouting scared her out of sleep. And now she really wants to sleep. That’s why she told me to sit here, next to the sewer, and to stand with a board in my hand so that every frog that jumps out, I can beat it with boards…”

So, Macario slowly unscrews the large board of the desk while patiently chewing a bubble gum. The teacher incessantly repeats that the bridge has fallen, those in front run a lot and those in the back will stay behind. Competition in the school of life is one of its properties (and priorities). The frogs are everywhere, they don’t stop the racket. They swarm in every conversation and shout things once morest Macario.

“I have no place to fall dead, I look at my brothers and they are worse off than me, scattered everywhere too, we have caught a disease that kills the spirit and the spirit is not a noisy frog but is the good medicine for the heart.” Those at the university accumulate papers and resentments, and those in the countryside reap storms. Those on one side and those on the other side are similar in the guargüero, in the neck, then.

In this house, the frogs that keep us awake cannot decide. They spend all their time trying to save us, they get involved in everything and they know everything. They are all-rounders, they know everything, they raise everything and lower everything.

Let’s go one way, such a thing, such a thing. Let’s go the other way, such a thing, such a thing.

At the end of the storm, one face asks the other face, “What are we going to do?” Face-to-face conversation is the most difficult, the most valuable. That must be why frogs don’t look at each other’s faces, and why, in the darkness of the sewer, no one can even see their own faces. This country has gone dark, and you can only hear the cries of the frogs on one side of the sewer, which are answered by the cries of the frogs on the other side. When one screams, my grandmother used to say, it’s because the ears are far from the heart, oh the heart…

“Oh, my heart is sad.” We all want to kill each other. It is a critical moment of what I have called the prolonged civil war between Venezuelans. I will not stop saying it, I demand a meeting, I demand conversation, the anointing of historical truth because we are running out of a republic.

My uncle Rosalino slept with a lantern lit so that death would not find him. That is to say, death does not see in the light, it becomes blind.

I persuade Macario not to finish unscrewing the large board from the desk. Instead, we look for ink and pen to write. After the storm comes clarity, were our first words. We will never lose the right for our human homeland. You have humiliated us with your insults and today we want to see your faces.

Our demand is for fair coexistence, not war between us. From the ideologization of social relations we move to hatred as a premise once morest the other. Let us also turn on the flashlight in our sewer.

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