The first time I walked El Boulevard de Sabana Grande I was about eight years old, an argentinian kid just arrived to Venezuela. I remember a freshly set pavement, made of interlocked pieces of cement loose from each other. To my surprise first and amusement later, there was water under, and depending on which piece one would land in, a squirt of water will come out. The jumping water mattered, because we had our best clothes on and my father, who went to Venezuela before, was giving us a tour of the fancy promenade of the city. There was happiness in the air, I remember. My mother was admired and admiring, the shops flanking the long walk looked new and promising, and my father was beaming at and from his reunited family. The staining water was, actually, amusing.
This happened somewhere in 1978. I left Caracas in 1997, and in all the years after I went again and again to El Boulevard, as it is called. There were the family outings first, that headed to the museums in the park beyond El Boulevard. Later came going to the films houses at the start in Chacaito or at the end, in the weird shaped building La Previsora. Later on I learned to sit in El Gran Cafe, order a capuchino and enjoy reading and seeing people pass by. El Boulevard was a good place in Caracas. At the end of a very hard year I went to the mountain that flanks Caracas in the night of the 31 december, and I walked and walked and walked, to end up, somehow relieved and without knowing how, at sunrise in El Boulevard.
Caracas also had, and for all I know still has, hectic places. I can’t remember a time that I did not step out of the bus in la Plaza La Candelaria, that I did not feel the need to get somewhere else, fast. It is not even an ugly place, I am talking about a square of open space in a crowded part of the city, with trees and some more green. For all I know that could have been a resting place, a green oasis pretty much in the middle of the fast moving Caracas. But no. Caracas has other oasis in the middle of the rush, but not that plaza. To step in la plaza La Candelaria, at least for me, was to feel the pace and the rush of the whole city. If I would manage to sneak a look at the others passing by, I will see happiness and sadness, suffering and enjoyment without doubt. But rushed. The whole palette of the moods of the caraqueños was there, perhaps is still there, to be displayed. But in a film that is playing in fast forward, that is going on and onwards, rushing to the future in the making… and coming at us fast!
And the night will fall and the city will change. People need no more to rush home or to their work or to their lovers. La Plaza Candelaria rested, breathed in and exhaled slowly. I like to believe that the day and the night moderated the moods of the city places, but did not change them. People would still go out from the buses to go somewhere else right there. With less of a rush. In El Boulevard, even later, there were the many bars in streets close by, the long nights of drinks and jokes and political argument, always intense, and always happy. We shared bars with our political opponents, and we never had a fight. It was still a good place, even if a place to confront yourself or your demons.
I left Caracas, yet this lives with me. And I have brought it to Utrecht, where the Central Station connects half of the country with the other half, where inside everywhere there is a rush, perhaps of greatness. A rush that late at night softens but remains. Were the Juliana park gave my baby son the first sight of a deer eating from his hand, where I walked and talked and walked again and talked again politics with so many people, where I still today sharpen my kendo. A good place too, the Juliana Park… probably the last sleeping place to many homeless, who crawl inside after closing time and hide and sleep in the bushes, a home of sorts, a last refugee.
And so I wonder how those places, that we ourselves have created, also have created us, or our moods and our ways to understand ourselves.
Which perhaps is not that different.