When I moved from Venezuela to Austin, in 2006, my childhood was so near my life still smelled of it. Of the plentiful clams my cousin Juan Fri and I would gather in Playa Guacuco while his two Dobermans yipped and hollered around us. Of the baby tapir my family visited at the banks of the Carrao River, in Canaima National Park, surrounded by jungle and overseen by the majestic Auyán Tepui. Of the loaded arepas my friends and I would eat after dancing at Caracas’s Elmo bar—reinas pepiadas, pelúas, catiras. We were drunk and hungry as only teenagers could be. Ravenous. Sweaty. Happy.
But not all my Venezuelan memories were as fond. There were years of protests, a coup d’état, the hardening of Hugo Chávez’s presidency into authoritarian rule. The country was consumed by politics, and people were defined by who they voted for, or against. A crack had begun to form that cleaved the country in two. Families fought. Partnerships dissolved. I remember when a famous celebrity, recently outed as a Chávez supporter, was spotted at a Caracas Lions baseball game. The whole stadium, me included, booed and jeered, and he had to be escorted out under a rain of beer cans.
I was 26 years old when I decided to leave, and I thought Venezuela had gone through the worst of it. In my mind we were hitting bottom, ready for some turn to happen. I had just married a rocker-biologist who loved PJ Harvey, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and hunting for lizards. Years before we met, while I was at the backs of protests, waving flags, chanting, and having a beer with my friends, Patricia was on the front lines, a rock in her hand and a vinegar-soaked handkerchief around her mouth and nose to counteract the effects of tear gas.
Though we were excited for what Austin had in store, neither of us wanted to stay away from Venezuela for long. We planned to raise our family in the Caracas valley, the Ávila mountain casting its green shade over us as salsa blared from speeding taxicabs and the enticing chants of chicha vendors called us to drink.
I was getting a master’s degree in advertising at the University of Texas. Patricia had found a job at a UT biology lab. The plan was clear: Austin for five, ten years max. We would hone ourselves, get experience, and then go back. By then, we thought, things would surely be better, as if Chávez was nothing more than a hangover to endure.
Six years later, I was still in Austin. Patricia (now a PhD student) and I remained friends, but we were no longer married, and in Venezuela things had gotten worse, not better. Protests in the country’s largest universities had turned violent, with students hurt, taken by security forces, or killed. Violent crime was affecting more and more people. I was writing political mailers and radio and TV ads for progressive candidates in the U.S. But even in the thick of election season, I would still spend one or two hours each day glued to my computer screen looking for news about home.
Guilt festered. Here I was, living a cushy life—discovering bands at SXSW, playing softball at Krieg Fields every Tuesday night, shooting pool at the Grand—while my loved ones were working to try to make Venezuela better. My brother worked for La Fuerza Joven, an organization getting out the youth vote. My dad had founded an opposition newspaper with Teodoro Petkoff, one of the country’s leading intellectual figures, criticizing the Chávez regime from the ideological left. My friends back home participated in every protest and march.
And then, on a balmy Austin evening, I got a call from my father saying that my brother had been kidnapped. It wasn’t the first time.
When I was 24, my brother Manuel, then 16, had asked me to borrow Dad’s SUV. Our parents were out of the country, scheduled to arrive home late that night. Manu wanted to go down to the grocery store and buy some snacks. I said sure. On his way back, as he was entering our building, he was flanked by two other vehicles. Men with guns forced him into the back seat and took him, along with my father’s car. The building’s security guard couldn’t do anything except tell me it had happened. The next few hours were a blur. I don’t remember much except that many of my dad’s friends came to help. They had already contacted the police, and we were waiting to hear from the kidnappers about a ransom.
Then a taxi showed up. Out of the cab stepped my brother, bruised in a few spots but otherwise intact. The men had gotten spooked when they discovered he was so young and had given him money for a cab ride home. They kept the SUV.
I will never forget when Manu and I hugged. It felt like a draining, as if my body was a bucket full of water and suddenly had been turned over.
I felt it again, when my dad called me in Austin—“Your brother is okay,” he said. Manuel was 24 and had survived his second kidnapping.
When I talked to him later that night, he told me the story: While leaving his friend’s home to go to a soccer match, three men with guns forced the friends back inside the house to rob them. A pizza delivery guy happened to see it and raced to the nearest police station, just a block away. In a few minutes the house was surrounded by police, and what would have probably been just a quick robbery became an hours-long hostage situation.
It was full of twists and turns. Early on, the men were trying to convince the police it was all a misunderstanding, a prank gone wrong. When that didn’t work, the threats started: “We don’t want to hurt anyone, but we will.” The police were able to contact some of the kidnappers’ family members, who called the men’s cellphones, pleading with them to surrender. Inside, my brother did the same. One of the men surprised him by apologizing. The man felt ashamed and insisted that he wasn’t a criminal, that this was his first time doing this. He was the only one of his friends with access to a car, and he owed his friend a favor. Eventually the gunmen turned themselves in.
My brother’s story was gutting, and it compounded how alone I felt, so far from my family. Mostly, though, I became angry—at the criminals, yes, but it went deeper than that. My resentment surprised me. I hated that life went on so easily there, that it shocked no one when things like these happened. I hated the government for allowing misdeeds like these to become so commonplace. In Venezuela crime was, too often, the only opportunity afforded to young men, and Chávez’s revolution, with all its grand promises, had done nothing to change that. The government had started to keep crime rates secret by then, but everyone I knew had stories like my brother’s. In fact, we had been lucky. He was fine.
For the next couple of years, a coldness set in. It was painful to even think about Venezuela. My friends had started to leave: to Bogotá, Colombia; Panama City, Panama; Santiago, Chile; Miami. With each of them, another bit of hope dislodged and drained away. I began to wonder: Is your country still your country if no one you love remains there?
I stopped looking for news about home and retreated into my life in Austin. Maybe I didn’t have the Ávila mountain looking like a giant, green cutout on a crisp December morning, but I had the feeling of jumping into Barton Springs after a three-mile run. I couldn’t smell my dad’s parrilla on a Sunday afternoon—punta trasera, chorizo, and blood sausage on the grill—but the smell of onions and bratwurst called to me after dancing at Barbarella until two in the morning, my right jean leg stained with bike grease and cuffed to the calf. Maybe Austin could be my city, I thought.
But no matter how hard I squinted, I couldn’t make a titanic mountain range appear north of the UT Tower. I couldn’t make live oaks hang heavy with mangoes. I couldn’t make grackles sprout red and yellow feathers and werewolf themselves into majestic macaws. Though a lot of my friends had fled Caracas, my family had stayed. My brother, after his kidnapping, had doubled down on his activism. He was at every march, political gathering, and protest. I admired his courage. But it also made me feel small. Guilty. I could go back, I often told myself. Should go back.
In college I had written a few short stories, mostly bad imitations of the Argentine author Julio Cortázar. And during my master’s degree at UT, I had enrolled in a creative writing class. It was my first time in a writing workshop, and it was exhilarating. None of my stories, which all mimicked American fiction I had recently read, were particularly successful, but I wanted to keep doing it. I found a neighborhood writing group in Hyde Park that met in a Craftsman-style house on an oak-shaded street. A rotating cast of aspiring writers met once a week. Sometimes, our host’s son, a pimpled teenager in a bathrobe, would play us something on his violin.
My father was by then in trouble with the government. The newspaper he had cofounded had run a story alleging ties between the powerful Cartel de los Soles and Diosdado Cabello, the second-in-command inside the Chávez regime. Cabello sued the paper for defamation, and my father was prohibited from leaving the country and forced to appear in court every Tuesday, indefinitely. I feared that the regime’s intelligence agency would show up at our house, take my father, and deposit him in some basement in El Helicoide, the regime’s infamous detention center–torture hub. It was another hook that pulled me home. But instead of returning, I worked on a short story about a tiger escaping the New Orleans zoo after Hurricane Katrina.
In 2014, I joined a workshop offered by Michael Noll, a local writer. We met in the small office of A Strange Object, an Austin indie publisher. The space was just big enough for a table, ten or so chairs, and stacks and stacks of books and literary journals. Michael encouraged us to explore the best vehicle for whatever story we were trying to tell. “It’s fairly common,” he wrote to me once, “for writers to want to say something, and they choose a story to say it when they should really be choosing the essay form.”
So I wrote an essay about my brother’s two kidnappings. It felt urgent in a way no other writing ever had. And all of a sudden, I found myself with this thing that seemed . . . good? I had never written about Venezuela before, and now I dreamed up a story about a young baseball player in the coastal town of La Sabana who declares his love for a girl the night before he leaves to play minor league ball in the U.S. Writing about Venezuela, I found, was like getting into a rowboat and setting off on a journey. Almost without realizing it, I had started paddling back home.
I joined another workshop, this one more rigorous. In S. Kirk Walsh, our instructor, I found a kindred spirit: quiet, introspective, interested in digging into the emotions of character. Through her instruction I found the courage to explore some harder questions: Had I truly left Venezuela behind? How could I contribute to the struggle of my homeland from so far away?
I revisited my brother’s kidnapping story but this time wrote a fictionalized scene of it, from a kidnapper’s perspective. I wanted to imagine who this person was and the shame he felt as he faced years in a Venezuelan prison. I didn’t know it yet, but that scene became the seed for my first novel, Freedom Is a Feast.
I traveled back to Venezuela for a visit, not as numb now as I had been before. The country was in a crisis unlike any I’d seen. Oil prices had plummeted, leading to an economic downturn that, paired with the mismanagement and corruption of the Maduro regime, had created the perfect storm. People were starving, locals started calling it the Maduro diet. Families turned to trash heaps as a source of food. I remember seeing groups of street children, dirty and hungry but still kids, joking around—they were both joyful and dangerous, and in danger themselves.
I was in my third year at the Kirkshop when “Hands of Dirty Children,” my short story about street children in Caracas, was awarded the Halifax Ranch Fiction Prize by American Short Fiction. It was later reprinted in Best American Short Stories and got me admitted to UT’s Michener Center for Writers, where for three life-changing years I was allowed to focus intensely on the novel I’d long aspired to write. It follows three generations of a single Venezuelan family: the young kidnapper, his mother, and his grandparents, who fell in love during the country’s guerilla movement in the sixties. I finished the first draft of Freedom Is a Feast one afternoon deep into the coronavirus pandemic. Putting in that final period made me feel as Venezuelan as I had ever felt. It no longer mattered that I had left my country. I’ll always be a Venezuelan writer, I realized, no matter where my feet are planted.
I had also met someone by then, another writer without a home. Her whole life she had moved from place to place. Our shared search for belonging had brought us together. We fell in love. Brittani and I now have a daughter, and while I sometimes wish she could venture outside and hear the squeaks of macaws rather than grackles, she will not be raised under the shade of El Ávila. I’m okay with that. I’ll teach her that she’s Venezuelan, too.
If home is where the heart is, half of mine will always be in Caracas. But the other half swims in the cold undercurrent of Barton Springs, sweats among the bodies dancing at Sam’s Town Point, and thrills in the click-clack of billiard balls at the Grand.
One home, then no home, then two.
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