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. He gave it back after a few minutes, a faint, all-too-familiar grimace on his face.
“I don’t think you’re going to come to any ‘understanding’ by reading about painting and poetry.” He spoke in that very quiet way he had, which was like a dog whistle that only our ears were attuned to.
“Why not?”
“This gentleman was a customer of mine. I made him two suits in ’47. He was an ambassador both under Betancourt and, in Bogotá, under Gallegos.”
“Rómulo Betancourt? And Maestro Gallegos? Seriously?”
“And believe me when I say, he didn’t have the first idea about this country. He spent the entire afternoon talking about what the ‘Maestro’ was going to do when he became president. And how long did Gallegos last in power? Not even nine months.”
Among my regrets about the time I spent in New York was the fact of having missed out on those three magical years, between ’45 and ’48, which everybody already talked about with such nostalgia.
My father admired Gallegos. And yet he had looked on in horror at the unfolding of the revolution of October 18, 1945. To him it seemed an irreparable aberration that democracy’s first steps in this country should be as a “civil-military union.”
“It’s like a man’s jacket with linen on the outside and burlap for the lining,” he said. One of his textile metaphors. Followed up by his favorite refrain: “Dress the monkey in silk, it doesn’t change its ilk.”
My father, as I would only understand much later on, hated the miliary. And I always felt like his reasons went beyond the fact that he and my mother had been forced to flee Italy by the rise of fascism, or the particular dislike he had towards certain men who, when it was quite possible for them to dress as gentlemen, opted for a uniform instead.
Why, in that case, send me to a military academy, far away from the family? Why only me and not the twins, my older brothers?
I’ve spent a good amount of my life trying to work it out.
The car, for example. It was me, and not my brothers, whom my father first taught to drive. Yes, he later bought them a station wagon, but I was the only one he let drive his ’52 Chevrolet Styleline.
I was at Café El Pampán one night when a man came up to me.
“Is the Chevy yours?”
He was maybe forty years old, and very well dressed. He was with Casimiro Mirabal, who was Democratic Action’s second-in-command and a friend of mine from childhood.
“That’s right,” I said.
“But it’s only just come out. It’s got to be one of a handful in the entire country. You’re a lucky young man.”
Since Casimiro was there, I decided to just be honest.
“It’s my father’s, really.”
“I see. In any case, lucky you. Mind if I take a seat?”
And it was true. Since the age of eighteen, I’d always had a car to drive. And I was the only one among my friends for whom that was the case.
The man introduced himself as Alfredo Natera and he was, unsurprisingly, a car salesman.
“In fact, it’s just about the second Styleline I’ve seen in Caracas. Want to know who the first belongs to?”
Before I could answer, he leaned his body into the center of the small table. Casimiro and I followed suit.
“Don Pedro,” he said in a low voice.
He meant Pedro Estrada, of course. Also known as the Güiria Jackal—because that was where he was from, Güiria. You don’t know who Pedro Estrada was, either? Young man, if you’re really planning on bringing this government down, you ought to know that these murderers—the ones out there hunting down students right now—are the offspring of murderers before them.
Pedro Estrada was the director of the security forces. He was responsible for all the people who were thrown in jail, and tortured, and disappeared during the worst years of Pérez Jiménez’s dictatorship.
“And how do you know it isn’t the same car?” I quipped to Natera.
“Pardon?”
The blood drained from his face. He turned to Casimiro for an explanation.
“He’s joking. This is Mr. Monti’s son—the tailor.”
“As in, Monti’s Tailors? No!” Natera was smiling now.
Opening his jacket, he showed me the label: it was one of my father’s. Nestled in there too, I saw a gun.
Two burly men in very sharp suits soon came over and whispered something to him.
“We’ve got to go,” he said to Casimiro. And then, to me: “You have to promise me a ride in your car one day.”
“My pleasure,” I said.
Casimiro, looking pleased, gave me a wink.
El Pampán was on the corner of Gradillas and Sociedad. My father didn’t really like me going there. The security forces were turning the country upside down trying to find Leonardo Ruiz Pineda, the Democratic Action leader at the time. A friend of mine at the State Department put it perfectly: at that moment in ’52, “Ruiz Pineda represented freedom, or the hope for freedom.” And, particularly when there was a concert on, El Pampán was a place where, using the noise and the press of bodies as cover, AD members and communists—who were also wanted—would often have fleeting rendezvous.
Meaning that the joke I’d made about Pedro Estrada being my father—and cracking it in that particular place—wasn’t the smartest thing I could’ve done.
Nonetheless, Casimiro got in touch with me the following week. He wanted to know whether it would be okay to take Natera out the following day.
I had no idea what he was talking about.
“In the Chevy,” he added.
“Are you working for that guy?” I said.
Casimiro seemed not to understand. He waved his hand impatiently.
“Can you, or can’t you?”
This was all pretty strange, but for some reason I felt I couldn’t say no.
“Very good. I’m going to give you the address to memorize. You mustn’t write it down anywhere.”
And after telling me it, he made me repeat it various times.
I can still remember the route we took, because there wasn’t much to it. We went from El Rosal to Los Rosales and back. On the outward journey, we had to go round the block a few times, because the towel was out; a large yellow towel, hung on the balcony of the apartment where Natera was meeting his contact. That was their signal, he said, that the coast wasn’t clear. So, after circling the block a few times, and seeing the towel still there, we turned around and went back.
His face was barely visible, what with the lack of lighting inside the car and the hat he was wearing, but Natera seemed neither annoyed nor perturbed.
In fact, I don’t know what he enjoyed more—that night sortie without a bodyguard, or the furtive immunity afforded by people thinking he was Pedro Estrada, out with his chauffeur for one of his habitual insomniac drives.
“And you,” he asked, “do you work with your father?”
I told him that I didn’t.
“Mr. Monti is the best tailor in the whole country. I imagine you’ll have heard that said a few times.”
“Yes, that’s what everybody says.”
“There’s nothing like wearing a Monti suit. It’s kind of like getting to drive this car, but with all of your body, don’t you think?”
“I’m sure you’re right, but I don’t actually know.”
I then told Natera about my father’s practice of only making a suit for his sons at the moment they decided what they were going to do with their lives.
“My brothers, the twins, knew from age sixteen. They’ve gone into fabric importing. They supply my father, and many of the finest tailors in the country.”
I had been studying law for a year at that point, but I wasn’t sure that it was the career path I wanted to pursue. I didn’t dare confess to Natera that over the preceding months I’d been dabbling in poetry.
“Which means,” I said, “I have to give it some serious thought before putting it to my father.”
“But why so worried? If you decide to make a career change later on, I don’t see why it would be such a big deal.”
“It would be a big deal, but that’s not the problem.”
I told him that this particular rite was connected with a mysterious ability of my father’s. That of being able to foresee the fate of his clients. Or the fates of some of them, at least. And I told him about the premonitions he’d had regarding Isaías Medina Angarita, Carlos Delgado Chalbaud, and Rómulo Gallegos himself.
Natera was impressed.
“He’s like one of the Moirai,” he said.
“The what?”
“The Moirai, don’t you know about them? In Greek mythology, the Moirai handled the threads of destiny. They were three sisters. There was the spinner, who spun the thread of life, there was the allotter, who measured the thread of life allotted to every person, and there was the cutter, who chose the way people died.”
“So which would my father be?”
“I don’t know. There’s also the belief that there was only a single Moira, rather than three separate ones. I don’t mean it literally though. It’s just an image that came into my head.”
We drove on in silence for a short time, until he asked me the question I knew was coming. Or almost. Natera had been one of my father’s clients. What he wanted to know, however, was whether my father had ever made a suit for Leonardo Ruiz Pineda.
“Difficult to say,” I said. “Ruiz Pineda’s been in hiding for so long.”
That brief car journey was as far as my participation in the resistance against Marcos Pérez Jiménez’s dictatorship went.
It was the last I heard of Alfredo Natera. The same couldn’t be said for Leonardo Ruiz Pineda: there soon came the unforgettable front-page piece in El Nacional, on October 22, 1952, which I read over my father’s shoulder. The previous night, Ruiz Pineda had been gunned down in clashes with the security forces.
It had been coming, hadn’t it? But I didn’t find out until the very last moment. Tears came to my eyes when I saw, in the portrait accompanying the article, Alfredo Natera’s face. I wouldn’t have been able to hide what I was thinking from my father, but he never asked. He was crying too.
In the months that followed I gorged myself on poetry. I read all of the so-called Children of the Mist, that strange family of Venezuelan poets who, in the words of Mariano Picón Salas, “were more capable of undertones than raised voices.”
When I told my father that I wanted to be a poet, he just said that wasn’t happening.
“You are going to be an ambassador,” he said.
Not long after that, he made me my suit.
“How’s the fit?” he asked me.
“Perfect,” I said.
I was lying. And we both knew it.