Patricia's Story

I know I have been sharing a number of stories about my roommate Patricia that tease or criticize her a bit, so I thought it only fair to share with everyone what is actually a remarkable tale of her life and who she is. So here goes, and I apologize in advance for its length.

Patricia was born in 1958 in Zipaquirá, Colombia to a family of fabric makers. Her grandparents would buy wool from local shepherds, gather plants and berries, and spin and dye the wool to make cloths and other materials to sell. Zipaquirá at the time was a rural town just outside of Bogotá, but as the capital city has grown it has since been absorbed into the greater metropolitan area. Her mother was deaf and mute, and her father was a malandro (a bad apple) and never around. She has two sisters (two and four years younger, respectively) by her mother and two brothers and two sisters by her father. Because her mother suffered from ill health in addition to her disabilities she was essentially unable to care for her own children. Patricia was thus raised primarily by her aunt and grandmother, but as soon as she reached adolescence (or even a little before) she became the primary caretaker of her sisters.

When she was 13 or 14, Patricia made a rare excursion to the Magdalena River to spend the day swimming with some friends. They took a bus to make the trip. On the way back Patricia was standing and partially hanging out of the side of the bus, as is common throughout many parts of the world. She began to feel hungry and pulled out a cheese sandwich that she had brought with her. Not wishing to have to share it with her friends, she snuck over to the other side of the bus, found a seat that was unoccupied, and huddled over with her head down between her arms so as to hide the sandwich. Seconds later a truck barreled into the bus in almost the exact place where she had just been standing. Patricia said she felt a crash like she’s never felt in her life, and was then soaked the blood of her fellow passengers. More than a dozen people were killed instantly, including the boy with whom she had just been talking. Patricia miraculously escaped without injury, though she said she trembled for hours.

As a teenager Patricia was a diligent student, and she focused her studies on accounting. When she turned 17 she made the decision to leave Colombia. She had an aunt who lived in Washington, DC who offered to help her fill out the necessary paperwork and find a job there. On the cusp of agreeing to the arrangement, her aunt who had helped raise her decided to move to Caracas, and Patricia decided to join her instead. So off she went to Venezuela in the summer of 1975.

Upon arrival in Caracas she quickly found a job as a nanny to a Jewish family whose grandparents had escaped Europe during World War II. She lived and worked with them for the next five years, and continued to take accounting classes every Saturday. At that point she decided that she was ready for her independence, found an administrative job with a local business, and moved into her own apartment.

Sometime in the next year or so she spent the day at a beach and came home sunburned and overheated. She went to bed and had the most extraordinary dream of her life. She said that in her dream she was walking through a tunnel. At its end was the most brilliant light she had ever seen. She continued toward the light and heard a voice behind her say, “If you reach the light at the end of the tunnel, you will meet the Virgin Mary.” She began to feel an indescribable happiness, something that she could not begin to put into words. Before she reached the light, however, she woke up to find both the pillows on her bed soaked with blood that was streaming from her nose. Had she continued to sleep she most likely would have drowned in her own blood. Patricia said that she felt utter anger for having to wake up from the bliss, and that if death is anything like the dream then it is a truly wonderful thing.

By the mid 1980’s Patricia had found a job with a medical supplies company that provided surgical equipment to cardiologists. Her office was located in a distant part of Caracas from her apartment, and her daily commute averaged 45 minutes to an hour each way. On February 27 and 28, 1989 one of the most significant events in Venezuelan history took place, the Caracazo. President Carlos Andrés Pérez had been elected in 1988 on an anti-imperialist, anti-Washington Consensus populist platform. Nevertheless, shortly after taking office he quickly adopted orthodox free market policies including privatizations, decentralizations, and (most importantly) the lifting of subsidies. When a subsidy on gasoline was removed, prices quickly rose as much as 100%, and protests erupted spontaneously throughout the country, beginning in Guarenas, about 30 km from Caracas. When the protests reached the capital, tens of thousands of people took to the streets. What happened next is still subject to great controversy. Mobs formed, shops were looted, buses and cars were overturned and burned. The police was overwhelmed. In response, President Pérez suspended parts of the Constitution and sent the army into the streets. Snipers, troops, and police began to fire indiscriminately (according to most) into the crowds, killing an untold number of innocent people. No Venezuelan investigation into the incident has ever been conducted, and officially the number of dead was around 300. But most estimates put the number far higher, closer to 3,000.

Patricia herself believes the figure to be 10,000-20,000. That day is undoubtedly the defining event in her life the way that September 11, 2001 is for so many Americans. Because buses came under attack and were burned, the public transportation system shut down for those days. She was forced to walk the miles from her apartment to her office and back. She has recalled for me many times the sounds and feeling as she waded her way with the masses, hearing bullets zip through the air and seeing people shot. Several of the shopkeepers where she purchased groceries and other goods were killed. She heard stories from friends of parents who had their children disappear and vice versa. The terror she felt during those days stays with her now, and she has not attended a protest march or demonstration since. She is beyond livid that no official inquest was ever performed, and I would say that a great deal of her support for the Chávez administration comes from the blame she assigns the previous government for its role in and cover up of the Caracazo. She has heard that airplanes carried bodies from the street out to the ocean and dumped them there so as to hide the true number of casualties. And she laments that no group has arisen in Venezuela such as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina to demand accountability.

Sometime during the early 1990’s Patricia began to live with a Chilean man, Roberto. In 1995 they had a daughter, Katherine (pronounced kah-ted-EEN), though they still did not marry. Sometime around 1998 Patricia got into a dispute with her boss at the medical supplies company and was fired, after 12 years on the job. She was able to get several odd jobs over the next years, mostly doing administrative work, and helped out Roberto with his business that provided supplies (mostly uniforms) to the Venezuelan army. After the turn of the century she started her own business importing nail products from the U.S. and selling them to local shops. She had a good bit of success at it and planned to expand into perfumes and other beauty products. In 2002, however, there was a failed coup attempt against President Chávez. Once again Caracas was paralyzed by demonstrations and violence. In its aftermath Chávez cracked down. In 2003, he imposed currency controls that meant small business owners, including Patricia, could no longer pay in dollars for imports, quickly ruining her business along with thousands of others. Shortly thereafter the army simply stopped paying its bills to Roberto for his supplies, which forced him to shut down as well. Patricia took a class to learn how to bake cakes (where have those been during all of my tuna meals?!), and for a time was able to make money selling them on the street. But as the price of sugar and other food products rose and inflation crept ever higher, people stopped buying such luxuries and she was left once again without work. Her relationship with Roberto had already been under stress, which combined with the loss of income for both of them led him to decide to move back to Chile.

Patricia once again tried to find more work, and managed on several occasions to secure short term positions. She also received monthly checks from Roberto to help pay for Katherine’s upbringing. Finally one day in 2007 she got a job in the accounting department of a local business. She arrived at the office for her first day of work and burst into uncontrollable tears. Her entire lower body from her waist down turned ice cold and she began to feel as though she were dying. Her boss suggested that it would be best if she simply returned home, which she did. She put her feet in a tub of hot water and salt, but it did no good. Her daughter went and got her a carton of milk, which she heated and served, also to no avail. Eventually Patricia went to bed. The next morning she got a call from one of her sisters in Bogotá saying that her mother had died the morning before.

In the aftermath of that incident, which took her several more days to recover from, Patricia was never able to recover her new job, and she has not worked since. She tried for a while to find more, but in this day and age in Venezuela it is simply impossible for a woman of her age to find new employment. In two years she will turn 55 and begin receiving her pension (men can do so at 60). Until December she continued to receive her checks from Roberto, but at that point Katherine graduated from high school and decided to move to Santiago, hopefully to enroll in college, because there are simply no opportunities for her here. Thus Patricia found herself alone for a couple of weeks until I moved in. She is certain that we knew each other in a past life.

When Patricia does begin to receive her pension, there are two things that she plans on doing immediately. First she is going to purchase a camera. She has always wanted to pursue photography as a hobby but has been unable to afford it (she is only interested in “real” photography and refuses to consider a digital). And then she is going to travel to Bolivia, which has always fascinated her, and to Lake Titicaca, to which her soul is drawn. Lake Titicaca, which straddles the border between Bolivia and Peru, was and is a mystical place for the Incas and many other peoples who have lived in the area then and since, including Patricia. She grew up near another mystical lake in Colombia, Lake Fúquene, which was said by the local indigenous peoples to have been the site where long ago creatures sent down in a beam of light from the gods taught the local people how to farm and hunt. Patricia believes those visitors to have been extraterrestrials, and she is a firm believer in life outside of our solar system.

In the meantime she spends her days in Caracas mostly holed up in her apartment. She clearly misses her daughter dearly, and seemed to expect that Katherine would return to Venezuela after giving Chile a brief try. Alas Katherine has already said that she plans on staying in Santiago. Patricia talks on the phone regularly with her sisters, though she only travels to Colombia about twice a decade, and with some friends, though she does not seem to socialize much otherwise. She leaves the apartment most days to run an errand or two, but otherwise does not get out. She fended off a robber who tried to steal her purse from a motorcycle about 25 years ago because it contained her passport before she had Venezuelan citizenship, drawing shouts of amazement from onlookers who were impressed by her courage. But twice in the past five years she has been on local buses when groups of malandros with pistols entered them (at 9 am and 2 pm, respectively) and passed around a hat demanding everyone’s valuables. She is thus understandably reluctant to make such voyages now.

So although her cooking may not always be up to my exacting standards, Patricia is actually a pretty impressive woman (plus now I have developed a system where I only eat about one meal a day in the apartment, of which I cook half, so even that problem has mostly been solved). We tend to talk mostly about the news (when not sharing her life story anyway), since she does not really have too many developments to discuss in her life, other than lamenting that she is not twenty years younger so that she could be my novia. We do discuss politics, and I try to broaden her perspective a little without trying to dissuade her of anything. She seems torn between realizing that Chávez does have his faults and that it is not healthy for anyone to be a head of state for more than 13 years, and her mistrust of the opposition and previous governments. She laments the fact that the country is headed for ever increasing polarization and possibly more violence regardless of the result of the election in October. But at the end of the day I am sure that she will vote for Chávez. She once told me that only twice in her life has she seen someone and have the experience give her absolute chills: in 1996 when Pope John Paul II came to Caracas and in 1999 when Hugo Chávez gave a speech in El Parque Los Caobos, my very own dinosaur park, back when it was safe to hang out there in the evening. Oh well, nobody is perfect.

In the end, I suppose I can say nothing more other than I am lucky to have found a living situation as fine as I have.