It was a friday night and it was raining. I thought that it was raining hard, but then again, I thought that it always rained hard in Venezuela. Few years had passed since we arrived from Argentina, and I had not yet get accustomed to the torrenciality of the tropical rains, to those curtains of water falling down again and again. But then, again, they didn’t quite scare us. We lived in Caracas, city of new bricks and newer asfalt. Already churned in the trucks that brought it, the grey concrete became red houses and white buildings and green shopping malls in the blink of an eye, even before we could start to appreciate the black and skin-smooth highways, or the shiny new cars rushing on them. Caracas in the early eighties was at the peak of an oil-driven bonanza, in a frency of growth, of marvels to be reach tomorrow or the next week at the latest. We, newcomers, looked on admiringly. Who would fear the rain, if such portents were being build in front of our eyes?
So, just like any other friday evening, a hired cab picked us up and brought us to Camuri Grande, a sea side resort about an hour away from the capital, where my parents taught sports the weekends. The driver did offer to return us home, when the rain almost got us stuck in one or another traffic jam. But my parents insisted, and we plodded on. We did arrive to the club at night already, the car stopping at the known parking lot, closer to the small house that was given to us in the premises. But I don’t think that I made it out. At opening the doors we could hear the river, even above the din of the storm, and my mother refused to step out of the car. “the river” was a small creek, that run at the bottom of a deep ravine, perhaps twenty meters away from the house and surely ten under. Me and my sister had play there, in a course of water that was perhaps half a meter broad and twenty centimeters depth. Not this night. That night, we learned later, the water grew up to the house, soaking the few books that we left behind, staining clothes, mangling beds and chairs and a little table, everything bended and swollen after being underwater. We did not see that, not really. All what was to be seen in the night was a dark surface of water moving fast downhill, too irreal to make any sense. And we could hear it. A deep sound of boulders and stones and trunks churning in the angry water rushing out to the sea. A sound that was louder than any other voice, actually an old voice saying go away, go away NOW!
Of course, this country where I live now, this lowlands of old, has many centuries fighting the water, with the accumulated experience of generations and generations of people shaping the landscape, winning land from the sea meter by meter. Of course, The Netherlands does not live through anything like an economical bonanza based on the unstable exploitation of a finite natural resource. The dutch pride themselves of their bonhomie and their no-nonsense attitude, everybody relaxed and friendly because they work hard and pragmatically. So hard, and so pragmatic, that actually we can prevent all the effects that this change of climate can throw at us. No nonsense of explosive growth, here in The Netherlands, no hubris of building houses at the sides of rivers coming down the mountains, as if it would never come a bigger rain. Nothing like that in here. Besides, if we gained all this land to the mighty sea, we can also keep it from this global warming. No hubris there, nobody will have to evacuate their house in the middle of the night no more.
It has to be my silly migrant memory that keep doing this nonsensical connections.
Los recuerdos se agolpan como un río, como un río con el lomo crecido que llevaba palmeras y lianas arrancadas al monte en camino hacia el mar...gracias Inti por abrir ese portal...