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"What time will Adelaida be buried?"
"At two thirty."
"Okay," she murmured. "Where?"
"In La Guarita cemetery, the old part. My mother bought a plot a long time ago. It has a nice view."
"Okay ..." Ana seemed to be making an effort, as if processing my words were a titanic task. "Do you want to stay with us today, until the worst of it is over?"
"I'm leaving for Ocumare early tomorrow to go see my aunts. I've got to give them a few things," I lied. "But thank you. This is a difficult time for you too, I know."
"Okay." Ana gave me a kiss on the cheek and left. Who wants to attend a funeral when you can sense your own brother's fast approaching?
Next to arrive were María Jesús and Florencia, retired teachers my mother had kept in touch with over the years. They expressed their condolences and left quickly, conscious that nothing they could say or do would make up for the death of a woman too young to be taken from us. They left at a clip, as if trying to get a head start on the reaper, before he came for them too. Not a single wreath of flowers arrived at the funeral parlor except my own, an arrangement of white carnations that barely covered the upper half of the casket.
My mother's two sisters, my twin aunts Amelia and Clara, weren't present either. One was rotund, and the other was painfully thin. One ate without stopping, while all the other had for breakfast was a small portion of black beans, while she sucked on a roll-your-own cigarette. They lived in Ocumare de la Costa, a town in the state of Aragua, near Bahía de Cata and Choroní. A place where azure waters lapped at white sand, cut off from Caracas by crumbling roads that were becoming impassable.
At 80 years of age, my aunts had made at most a single trip to Caracas. They didn't leave their sleepy backwater even to attend my mother's graduation, and she'd been the first university graduate in the Falcón family. She looked stunning in the photos, standing in the Aula Magna of the Central University of Venezuela: heavy makeup around her eyes, her teased hair squashed flat beneath the mortarboard, the certificate in her rigid hands, and a smile that looked lonely, like she was quietly furious. My mother kept that photograph alongside her Bachelor of Education academic transcript and the notice that my aunts had placed in El Aragüeño, the regional newspaper, so that everyone would know that the Falcóns now had a professional in the family. We didn't see my aunts often, only once or twice a year.
We traveled to the small town where they lived in July and August, sometimes during Carnaval or Semana Santa. We would give them a hand with the guesthouse and help lighten their financial load. My mother always left them a little money, pestering them while she was at it: one to stop eating, the other to eat. They lavished us with breakfasts that turned my stomach: shredded beef, crispy pork rind, tomato, avocado, and guarapo, a beverage made of cinnamon and unrefined sugar strained through a cloth. They often followed me around the house brandishing the brew, which more than a few times made me faint; I would regain consciousness to the sounds of their fussing.
"Adelaida, if our mother saw this girl of yours, puny as she is and with no meat on her bones, she'd dish her up three arepas smothered in lard," my aunt Amelia, the rotund one, would say. "What do you do to the poor creature? She's no bigger than a fried herring. Wait here, m'hija. I'll be right back Don't you move a muscle, muchachita!"
"Leave the girl in peace, Amelia. Just because you're hungry all the time doesn't mean everyone else is," my aunt Clara would sing out from the patio, keeping an eye on her mango trees and smoking a cigarette.
"Aunt Clara, what are you doing out there? Come inside, we're about to eat."
"Hold on, I want to make sure those scoundrels from next door don't come knock down any of my mangoes with a rod. The other day they took three bags' worth."
From It Would Be Night In Caracas by Karina Sainz Borgo, translated by Elizabeth Bryer. Used with permission of the publisher, HarperVia, an imprint of Harper Collins. Copyright © 2019 Karina Sainz Borgo. English translation copyright © 2019 Elizabeth Bryer.
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