Life of Us: They still haven’t bought the ticket

How much he had longed for that day! That noise, the aromas, the Sunday liveliness of the house where he grew up and from which he had had to leave some time ago. There he was again. It was as if time had not passed. He left Germany on July 2 and, after stops in Cuba and Turkey, landed in Venezuela on the 3rd: it was a 16-hour flight. He had returned to reconnect with his city but above all to vote. That is why he felt that Sunday was a crucial, solemn, decisive day. Finally he got up and had breakfast while watching the news. Around noon, he left for his polling station.

He walked upright, as if sticking out his chest. He checked the list of voters in front of his polling station, located the table where he had to exercise his right, and began to stand in line. It was long; it went around the corner. There were people who had arrived very early and were still there because one of the machines, according to the Plan República officials, was not working. Apparently they were repairing it. It didn’t matter that it was moving slowly. It would be there as long as necessary. Neither the burning sun nor anything else was going to move it from there.

Nine years is almost a decade. You could say that nine years is almost half a lifetime. Nine years is the time that Roberto had spent without walking through its streets. Like someone fleeing, he left Venezuela in June 2015, a few months after graduating as a filmmaker from the National Film School. At that time he was 24 years old and felt hopeless and tired of injustice, politics, and the lack of solutions. So he took advantage of a cousin who offered to take him in in Jena, a town in central-eastern Germany, and he left.

He had not even been able to pursue his career. As a student, together with his classmates, they had created independent films, but when they tried to find funding from state institutions to produce them, they were told that if they were not about Chavismo, the Bolivarian movement, they could not approve a cent. They managed to execute two projects because they turned the tables to focus on issues that did not bother anyone. But they did not want to keep silencing themselves, stopping telling what they wanted to tell. A country, its wounds. And they all went looking for their way.

Roberto did not stay long in Jena. It was an isolated town with few job opportunities. He moved to a small room in Berlin and got a job at a McDonalds. It was the first job of his life. He was uncomfortable with the uniform and, above all, he found it difficult to serve the public. He was unable to take orders because he had not yet fully mastered the language. Even his colleagues made fun of him.

But one day, they invited him to a party. That night, Roberto heard the rhythm of salsa, and he asked someone to dance, and he became a real brash kid. He was the life of the party. Everyone began to see him as a very funny guy. And they started to be nicer to him. He made friends at that McDonalds and ended up staying there for two years.

He left to focus on his career. During all this time, he had not stopped dreaming of writing, producing and directing audiovisual productions. He then became a nomad who jumped from country to country. He went to Argentina: first to Salta (where his mother had migrated and stayed with her for a long time); then to Buenos Aires. But there he had the same problems as in Venezuela (inflation, exchange controls, etc.) so he crossed the Atlantic again. He moved to Parma, Italy, and then to Madrid. He could not find a permanent job in any destination, but he was grateful for some opportunities. He participated as a TV actor, and managed to produce and propose ideas to independent production companies. He ended up returning to Berlin, where he focused on working as a barista, making pizzas (and, in his free time, the occasional script).

In that back and forth, while I was finding my place in the world, I tried not to think about Venezuela. Sometimes it is better to forget those scars.

One of them was her grandmother. Her name was Aida Lamus and she was the president of the National Securities Commission in Caracas. She worked with the government of Rafael Caldera and also during the presidential period of Hugo Chávez. Since she was opposed to the so-called Bolivarian revolution, she was retired. She became sad, very sad.

Before or after that – Roberto can’t remember because he was a small child – there was an oil strike. They were happy months in which he played a lot with his little cousins ​​because he didn’t have to go to school, but afterwards he saw many adults with long faces. His uncle, who worked at PDVSA, was fired and had to leave Venezuela.

And so the family home began to empty out. Four bedrooms, two living rooms and a large garden were too much space for a child, an only son, to whom his cousins ​​were like brothers. They started leaving. Until the family photos were reduced to a minimum: him, his grandmother, his mother and Uncle Julio. Oh, and the dog.

The emptiness of the house was followed by the insecurity that surrounded it. And the fear, the fear of walking. Friends and classmates from school were kidnapped in their own homes, or were assaulted at gunpoint. Roberto was the victim in 2010: they put a gun to his face to rob him.

Despite everything, his family, his home, remained a bubble. Roberto was someone surrounded by privileges. He lacked nothing. He rode horses, he had a club membership, he traveled. But when he entered university he realized that the country was on the brink. And, in fact, that bubble that isolated him burst and left him out in the open.

It was becoming increasingly difficult to get food, because there was no food in the supermarkets. The walls of the house began to deteriorate due to humidity and they could not paint as often because they did not have enough money. Basic services were unstable. The electricity went out, as did the water. Their friends began to leave the country one after another. Until he packed his bags that day in 2015 and landed in Germany.

Shortly after, the little dog died.

And at the same time, Grandma Aida passed away. She had to mourn her from a distance.

In the house where he grew up, only Uncle Julio remained. It was he who welcomed him at the airport with hugs when he returned to vote on July 3, 2024. The passage of time is noticeable in Uncle Julio: he found him full of wrinkles and a little tired. On the way to Caracas, he talked to him about the changes in the city and showed him the new buildings in Las Mercedes and the restaurants. When he set foot in his house, he had a strange feeling: things were different but at the same time the same. His uncle had cleaned, had painted, but the house looked empty. He had not been able to hide his loneliness.

Why, if he left so weary; why if he had tried to ignore his past, had Roberto decided to come back?

It was not an easy decision to look inward again. At first he refused. In May, in one of the many casual conversations with his mother, she told him that she wanted to return to Venezuela to vote in the elections on July 28.

—This time I feel it will be different.

—Are we really going to play democracy, Mom?

She gave him reasons. “Yes, Roberto, of course it is worth it. Roberto, every vote counts. Roberto, we must take advantage of this opportunity. Roberto, we must rescue the country.”. He thought about it. And in the end, his mother convinced him. Roberto even came up with the idea of ​​making a documentary about his return almost 10 years later, to tell how Venezuelans experienced the electoral process. On social media, he saw María Corina Machado touring towns and villages with great excitement. He himself was infected by that energy.

He went from apathy to saying that he would come to Venezuela for himself and for many of the 10,000 Venezuelans in Germany who would not be able to vote because they were unable to change their residence, since the National Electoral Council put obstacles in their way: they had to have a valid passport or be in the process of renewing it, which is difficult.

Weeks before arriving in the country, Roberto spoke via WhatsApp with the few friends he still had here. He asked them how they saw the political situation, if they were going to vote, and almost all of them answered:

—No, it’s clear that they’re going to steal that thing from us, they’re going to screw us.

But when he arrived, he saw them full of enthusiasm. He noticed the same spirit in the streets of Caracas when he began to walk them. He visited the city center, spoke to people, and recorded many people. Some asked him to cover their faces for fear of political persecution; others only gave him testimonies through voice notes; many refused to do so. In their eyes, in their words, he perceived fear, but also a willingness to participate.

He noticed the hustle and bustle, the deterioration of public transport, the high cost of life, but he was still moved. Listening to the people, waking up again in his house, in a home, seeing the colours of this city, made him think about something that had never crossed his mind: What if he stayed? What if he came back to live here to witness the rebirth?

The idea of ​​staying in Caracas also resonated with her mother. She had also come to vote. She did so a few days after Roberto. She went to Maiquetía to greet her and hugged her. Candy, a dog they adopted in Salta, was also older.

At his polling station, time passed quickly as he listened to the conversations around him and played video games. Until the moment arrived, he stood in front of the machine, pressed his choice, took the ballot, looked at it — several times — and deposited it in the box.

When he went out, he saw his mother:

“Now we have to wait and see what the hell these guys do,” he told him.

They returned home together, accompanied by their mother and a friend who was in charge of documenting the scenes at the polling station. They kept talking about the elections and the possible scenarios. While they ate pasticho accompanied by a cold glass of Pepsi, they watched the news on YouTube.

—I think we will achieve it.

After lunch, Roberto’s mother went to vote. The line had thinned. She returned soon after. The internet began to fail during the night and Uncle Julio had to adjust an antenna to watch the results on a national television channel. After 12:00 a.m. on July 29, they heard Elvis Amoroso, head of the National Electoral Council, announce the first bulletin. That the system had been hacked, he said; that Nicolás Maduro had gotten 5.15 million votes and Edmundo González 4.45 million.

Roberto and his family were furious. “Fraud, fraud, fraud!” they shouted. Roberto turned on the camera and recorded the silence in the streets. No one was celebrating. That night he couldn’t sleep either. He did nothing but look for news, reactions from the opposition. He thought he had to do something concrete and that people wouldn’t move, but a few hours later he saw videos of residents of Petare, Catia and other areas demonstrating in the streets. He tried to go and record them.

The next day, he wanted to stop watching the news, but he couldn’t. He focused on nothing but social media. He read all of Maduro’s statements and watched excerpts of the immediate proclamation made by the CNE: he couldn’t leave that scene out of the documentary.

She also learned that flights to Panama and the Dominican Republic were cancelled and was grateful that her return ticket was with a Turkish airline. She was worried about her mother, because she must stop in one of these countries if she decides to return to Argentina. They still haven’t bought the ticket. They still don’t know what they will do. In silence, they continue to wait to see what will happen.

“You’re welcome to Berlin if you don’t want to put up with it for another six years,” he tells his friends from Venezuela.