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Venezuela, Alicia's Favorite Place on Earth

     Desiccated as a dog with his tongue hanging out, panting and parched, or wet as a pile of laundry just out the washing machine with a broken spin dry cycle; that’s how I feel most days here in Porlamar on the Island of Margarita. I can’t drink enough Coca Cola or Hit Naranja (Orange Soda) to quench my thirst. I can’t take enough showers to wash all the sweat away completely. A walk around this city is a perspiring proposition in which clammy conditions conspire to render the coolest pedestrian hot and bothered as a bumblebee buzzing in a blocked bag.

     It’s been a while since I’ve experienced this covered-in-sweat discomfort, not uncommon during triple-digit, humid summers in New York, where I grew up. Sticky summers were a given, rendering cooling showers useless within minutes should you venture out into any non-air-conditioned spaces, which was basically everywhere for me since my parents couldn’t afford central air and my father felt that a fan was sufficient for cooling down interior spaces. A nemesis I could not escape, Summer was a blistering blowhard who delivered his/her hellish harangue 3-4 months out of the year. Like an ill-tempered parent who’d been disobeyed, you simply had to suffer your appointed punishment without a whimper

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     Here in Venezuela, where I sometimes whine about things like the heat (Ask my wife about that!), I haven’t had to resort to sticking my head inside the freezer for relief like I did as a boy, since the apartment we’ve rented comes with two, count them, two air-conditioning units. One is for the living room and another is in the bedroom. I’m thankful for this, but you can’t take them with you! I miss their cool breezes whenever we venture outside our door. A simple trip into the humid hallway, to take the trash out, is done quickly so that I can return to our apartment’s cool confines.

 

      There are some days here on the island when I don’t even want to leave the apartment because I know that the heat outside will be oppressively hot and however clean I felt before leaving, I’ll feel dirty within minutes of walking on the city streets.

     Am I saying I’m scared of the heat? Not exactly, but like a schoolyard bully who demands “Your lunch money or else?” at recess, I’d rather give him my money, but in this case the “or else” is going to happen anyway, so I might as well keep my money and  just grin and bear the inevitable assault.

 

     With all our technology today, where’s the genius who invents the air-conditioned suit that’s battery operated and good to go all day long? We can send a man to the moon, but we can’t keep him cool 24/7. It’s the great equalizer, for rich and poor. Sooner or later, the heat wave will wilt us all, no matter how much money we have.

     Sure, if you’re Bill Gates, you can drive around in air-conditioned limousines (I haven’t seen one of those on the island yet!) and be ensconced in climate-controlled spaces all day, while some paid lackey can do all your sweat-producing errands, running from cool to hot and back again. But how many of us have that luxury?

 

     As I sit in our cool apartment and Alicia is putting on her makeup, getting ready for a trip to CM, one of the cheaper supermarkets here in Porlamar, I’m enjoying the flow of air conditioned air coming out of the machine on the wall above the couch where I’m sitting. It has an oscillating panel on it that sends the cool air up and down the living room. Sometimes, especially when we’ve just returned from being outside, I stand right underneath it and go, “Ahhhh!”

 

      A day hasn’t gone by that we didn’t go out for something. Because we’re late sleepers and also like to linger over our coffee in the morning, sometimes we don’t make it out the door until around noon, which is fine by me. The only problem is that the sun is at it’s hottest then and it’s retribution for our daily dilly-dallying is something fierce.

     “Are you ready?” I ask Alicia.

     “Yeah, let’s go.”

     “It looks like a hot one out there today,” she says, looking out the windows at the bay and the boats. A thick haze hangs in the air and obscures most of the Venezuelan mainland across the expanse of rippled blue/green Caribbean. On a clear day we can see from our apartment all the way to the mainland, but not today.

     “A regular scorcher,” I agree and amplify, thinking of myself as a wilted daisy.

     Suddenly I wish we were back in Seattle where summers are never as hot as New York or Venezuela is. I left New York years before to escape the dreaded doldrums of searing summers and only returned for short visits, usually in the fall or winter.

     On leaving our place, we’re hit with heat in the hallway of the Bahia del Sol. That’s not so bad as the sun isn’t shining in this space and there’s a slight breeze passing through open windows. But as soon as my wife and I step outside the front gates, it’s very warm (mucho calor), and as the day progresses it is very hot (hace calor). Already our clothes (t-shirts, shorts, skirts) are damp, but we try and think cool thoughts.

     We pass Venezuelans who are dressed in long pants and long sleeve shirts.  Some even have sweaters on and it’s in the high 80’s. (It never seems to rise into the high 90’s or even triple digit temps here, but the island’s proximity, 11 degrees, to the equator makes for a more intense heat.) Do they know something we don’t?

 

     Today’s trip is just to the supermarket, so our time in the direct sun will be more limited. A few days before, we spent the whole day outside, walking down to the Central District and picking up a bus to go out to La Fuente for a job interview at a private bilingual school. By the time we’d gotten to the interview our clothes were soaked and stayed that way through the rest of the day, leaving us more than a little uncomfortable. It didn’t help that I was wearing long, heavy khaki pants and socks with suede shoes. We were both walking wet rags. When we got home later in the early evening, after the day gave way to night and the temperature dropped a few degrees, but the humidity seemed to stay the same, I made a beeline for the shower and if I was a cartoon character, I swear there’d be steam coming off my seemingly cooked carcass as the cold water came out of the shower head and cooled my burning body.

 

     On this day we’re dressed causally in shorts and t-shirts, but as we wait for the bus across the street from our apartment, we can’t help but sweat instantly. When we get to the supermarket, the air-conditioning is a welcome relief. I follow Alicia around the supermarket like a kid, sometimes throwing things in the cart that she picks out later and says, “You want to buy this?” She’s a more practical shopper than me. I look for the cookies and junk food. I always get the Oreos (tipo Americano) with the black cookies, not the cocoa-colored ones that’s the Venezuelan version. And there’s only two brands of Doritos here (Cheese and Plain). I’m not sure why. We linger in the freezer section.

     Our shopping done for the day, we head back out into the heat of late afternoon. The plants that grow along the highway outside the store are very hardy and seem to exist with very little water as it hasn’t rained in Porlamar for almost all of September.

     When the crowded bus comes, Alicia says, “Let’s wait for the next one.”

     The next one is almost just as crowded, so I say, “Let’s get on or we’ll be waiting for another half hour.”

     We sweatily stand in the aisle with our grocery bags of goodies. It’s the beginning of October and in both New York and Seattle I’m sure there’s a chill in the evening air. I wish I was in either place, if only for a few minutes.

     There’s no air-conditioning on this bus or any of the busses here in Porlamar, so the best you can hope for is a fetid puff of air coming through the bus’s always-open windows and doors, where someone is forever hanging out the door, perhaps to catch a breeze.

     Even the locals look hot and are waving various objects at their faces to cool off.

     I think about the German who I met the previous week. He’s vacationing in Margarita and informed me that he never uses the air-conditioning in his apartment at Bahia del Sol. “Air-conditioning isn’t healthy for you,” he told me. I just shook my head, not believing it for a minute. I’m glad I don’t live with him.

      We have friends who are locals, like Yoleida or Renee, who when they come to visit, we turn the air conditioning off in the apartment and open the windows because we know they’re not used to it and are uncomfortable if they’re in it too long.

     "When we get back to the apartment from the store, the first thing we do, before even putting groceries away, is turn on the air-conditioning units. Alicia and I temporarily stand under the one in the living room and share a collective sigh of relief.

     Now don’t get me wrong. Alicia loves the heat here in Porlamar and on the rest of Margarita. “I never have any aches or pains anymore,” she tells people, which isn’t completely true. She woke up the other morning and asked me to massage her neck and back which were aching. But that was the mattress that did that and not the climate. When she’s feeling pain an hour outside in the sun and she’s cured.

     I think my favorite time in Porlamar is the night. I love looking out at the city lights below our air-conditioned apartment. Most nights we’re not outside because we’re plum tired from heat exhaustion during the day.  We’re content to stay in our apartment.

     “What if we didn’t have any air-conditioning?” I’ve asked Alicia more than once as we sit watching a movie on her laptop with the sound of cool air filling the space we’re relaxing in.

     “I couldn’t take it,” she replies. “We’d have been looking for another place.”

     This is a woman who loves the heat (for her bones), but couldn’t imaging sleeping without the air-conditioner on in the bedroom at night.

     Sometimes when we crawl into bed in our air-conditioned room and I pull the covers up to ward off the welcome chill, I think this is almost as good as sex. We cocoon ourselves in this chilly, cozy closet-like sanctuary, thankful that the blistering blowhard outside can’t reach us here or in our dreams of places like Alaska or Frosty the Snowman.

 

Written by Joe Haviland

Edited by Alicia Haviland

Copyright 2012