Caracas Chronicles

Elisa Lerner, the acclaimed Venezuelan writer, came into my life because of the explosion that shook Beirut in 2020. At that time, when I was barely 23 years old, I published in El Estímulo a kind of love letter to the Lebanese capital. Elisa read the article in cyberspace, she liked it and our mutual friend, biographer Diego Arroyo Gil, connected us. A few days later, Elisa and I were chatting via email.

From then on, for almost two years, Elisa Lerner became my pen pal. “Reality is like a bonfire, it burns almost all my energies, given at my age to resolve urgent matters of immediacy,” she told me on one occasion, when I was still living in Boston. “Here we only have the mountain of changing colors. Now in the north the trees will turn beautifully yellow. How happy you are to enjoy such an amazing landscape!” In fact, once I returned to Venezuela, it was impossible for me to meet Elisa in person: she was experiencing a serious medical episode, burned by her bonfire. One of several, her family always recounts, because Elisa Lerner had countless near-death experiences –according to her own doctors– from which she came back as if nothing had happened.

However, Diego sent me some of his books and essays. Elisa Lerner recounted reality through the lens of transatlantic modernity and pop culture in the oil and plastic era. In her anthology of essays “I Love Columbo,” for example, she narrated her days in Manhattan and wrote about Hollywood celebrities. And so, at Diego’s insistence, I came across that sort of essayistic magnum opus by Lerner that was “This way, let 100 years pass”: where the author narrated the Venezuelan 20th century through consumer practices and the fashions and attitudes of Venezuelans in the oil era. I was dazed by the essay.

Where a historian or economist would say “in 1982 oil prices collapsed. In a matter of six months, Venezuela’s oil revenues – its main ordinary income – fell by 20%. A drop of 1 dollar in oil prices per barrel represented an annual loss of 500 million dollars for Venezuela”, Lerner said: “Poor them, they still thought they were from Miami when the almost announced and overwhelming news of the devaluation came. A black Friday, not so black yet, dyed as it was with the blond magic of the Miami dye on the unsuspecting heads of our well-traveled and cordial mulattoes of a middle class that, with the passage of time and from here to eternity, was going to become an absolute anachronism.”

Where a historian or economist would say “between 1973 and 1983 Venezuela received 145 billion dollars. The gross national product (GNP) of Venezuela almost doubled the average of Latin America,” Lerner said “a country began with a petrodollar fair. Taxi drivers argued: ‘The money flows when the Adecos are in power.’ We felt rich. Citizens of Miami or Madrid.” Where a historian or economist would talk about the privatization of CANTV in the 90s, Lerner spoke of dogs and cats that “in addition to a veterinarian, with all certainty, like their owners, have hairdressers who dye their gray hair with elegance and for them there is a canine or feline psychologist.”

Her wonderful essay ended with Hugo Chávez’s Constituent Assembly and awaited the arrival of the new century with “the Babel-like crowd that circulates through the Sambil shopping mall” and the possibility of a Miss Venezuela with a “Chinese surname” or “Haitian grace, with the sweetness of a daughter of a man who sells ice cream.” And the fact is that Elisa Lerner was a woman of that 20th century: she was born in Valencia in 1932, into a family of Russian Jews established in Bessarabia who – due to the closeness of her father, Noich Lerner, to the court of the Tsar– had fled from Russia to Romania after the October revolution. Close to the democratic establishment in which she would reach adulthood, her sister Ruth would also be the first female minister of education in Venezuela and ambassador of Venezuela’s democracy to UNESCO.

That “daughter of the century, barely a child when the other Constituent Assembly [in 1946],” as she says in her essay, would become –in the words of the poet Eugenio Montejo– “an eye that, without being distracted from seeing, is destined above all to hear.” An eye that absorbed everything, that connected everything, that gave texture to everything: rolling around –like that mixed culture that her ancestors and mine reached– the literary and journalistic genres until, paraphrasing journalist Milagros Socorro, she transformer her writing into a genre in itself; a genre that –almost to bid farewell to the century of which Elisa was its personal pen in Venezuela– awarded her the National Prize for Literature in 1999, shortly before the political landslide swept the awards away.

More than two decades later, for completely random reasons, I ended up being a close friend of her great-niece and accompanying her two nieces on a family trip to Boston, filled with the colorful autumn trees that Elisa celebrated in one of the first emails she sent me. “Our aunt’s friend,” they christened me at that moment, knowing that I had been the pen pal of a lady –a daughter of the 20th century, yes– who sent “loving and noble emails” to a son born at the dawn of the next century. “Well, I really like that you meet, and above all that Tony reads Elisa,” Diego wrote when introducing us. “I have a feeling that a beautiful affair will happen.”

Now, having become one of her many friends that –her nieces say– she made every day of her life, I bid her farewell with her own words: “I live almost like I am in a cabin, worried about how to get the medicines for glaucoma, etc.”, she told me in her first email, “But sometimes I find that cabin miraculously illuminated by the beauty of life.”

And life miraculously illuminated her farewell on November of 2024, with rain under the sun, the chirping of a thousand parakeets and a huge rainbow that emerged over the Cemetery of the Eastin Caracas, allowing the great chronicler of the 20th century Venezuela to say goodbye like the Nordic warriors: riding the bifrost, the burning rainbow bridge that connects the world of men with Asgard, the world of the gods.