My father wakes every morning by six-thirty. Every morning, regardless of how much he has slept, he dons a navy cotton robe and walks to his study, where a tray is neatly laid out on a small table. Every weekday by six thirty-five a.m., with the dark thorny green leaves from the bromeliads coming through the cast-iron bars of the window, he is sitting on the edge of the daybed to eat half a grapefruit and read a newspaper. He pours a third of a sachet of sweetener into a small cup of black coffee and drinks it in one gulp. He showers, opens his mirrored cupboard, picks one from his dozens of suits, straightens his tie, grabs a perfectly pressed handkerchief, chooses his wristwatch, and is headed to the office by seven a.m. sharp.
At the end of the day, the drive home from the office takes him between nine and thirteen minutes, depending on the day of the week. He times his departure accordingly and arrives at the house promptly at six-thirty every night. If he is not going out, he leaves his briefcase in his study, mixes himself a Campari and soda stirred with a long, curled silver spoon, and sits in an armchair on the terrace. Every night that my father is home, the curled spoon leaves a pink mark on the crisp white linen napkin on the drinks cabinet. Dinner is at exactly seven-thirty p.m.
If the Campari spoon is untouched when I walk past the library after my piano practice, I know that my parents are dressing to go out. Then I rush to my mother’s room and watch her put on her makeup in front of the illuminated swivel mirror. I sit on the floor and chat about my day as she carefully applies makeup, puts on a gown, and chooses her jewelry. My father usually walks in wearing immaculate black tie or a crisp dark suit and says impatiently that they are going to be late. They kiss me good night and head down the long corridor, my father straight and tall in his suit, my mother mesmerizing in her flowing gown, with her fiery-speckled brown hair dancing as they disappear from view.
2.
Unlike most houses in our neighborhood, ours did not have a name. There was, however, a sign on the green metal gates with two words printed in copperplate: Perros Furibundos. There is no precise English word for furibundo. Roughly translated, the sign meant frenziedly furious dogs. To our visitors, the house was known as the House of the Frenziedly Furious Dogs. The dogs spent more time lazing in the sunshine than they did in frenzied fury, but the name stuck. Perros Furibundos was an oasis protected from the bustle and chaos of 1970s Caracas by tall mango trees, high white walls, and two guards who, though placid, were methodical in their alternating patrol of the perimeter.
The garden of my childhood had an imposing ceiba tree, dozens of different palms, mango, guava, acacia, and eucalyptus trees, and bushes covered in orchids, flores de mayo, frangipanis, all surrounding a sky-blue pool. My mother had played in the house as a small girl, when it had belonged to family friends. When my parents started their life together, my father bought it for them to live in.
A bright and sprawling single-story house, it was full of high-ceilinged rooms and airy terraces. It had been designed in 1944 by Clifford Wendehack, an American architect who built grand houses and designed the colonial villa that forms the main building of the Caracas Country Club. Our single-story home stood amid the seemingly boundless sea of garden in the neighborhood of Los Chorros in the eastern part of Caracas. It was close to El Avila, the regal mountain that towers above the city and separates the capital from the coast.
The country that I grew up in was filled with promise. There were serious problems—social disparity, corruption, and poverty—but there was also a sense that such issues were being addressed. Social and educational programs were being implemented; government housing, schools, and hospitals were being built. The Venezuela of the 1970s and ’80s was seen as a model for Latin America. It had a stable democracy, a rising literacy rate, a flourishing art scene, and thanks to oil, a well-funded government intent on developing further industries, infrastructure, and education. It was alive with potential. Businesses, both local and international, were keen to invest. Migrants were attracted by the quality of life, relative safety, climate, and opportunities. Most of the country benefited from clement weather and fertile land, and the nature that surrounded the cities, the beaches, the jungles, the biodiversity, was without equal in variety and beauty. As I was growing up, new buildings, museums, and theaters were being constructed all around the capital. It was a hustling, modern metropolis. There were daily flights from Caracas to New York, Miami, London, Frankfurt, Rome, and Madrid. Even the Concorde made regular flights from Paris to the Maiquetía airport.
The tremendous energy of the place was the harvest of a crop sown several decades before. In 1946 Venezuela decided to welcome and support displaced Europeans who could not return to their homes after the war. Tens of thousands of refugees, mostly from southern and central Europe, arrived in Venezuela, to be followed in later decades by many more escaping the political turmoil of countries on the continent.
As a child, I was aware that my father, together with his older brother, Lotar, had migrated to Venezuela because their country had been broken by war. I am not sure how I knew this, as it was certainly not something my father discussed. His focus was always on life now, not that which had gone before. By the time I came along over two decades later, any vestige of refugee hardship had entirely vanished. On the surface, all that was incongruous about him was his pale skin, his heavy Eastern European accent, and his obsession with timekeeping and punctuality.
On arrival in Venezuela, he had started a paint factory with Lotar. My father had prospered in Venezuela. His drive, knowledge of chemicals, and wide-spanning interests had led him to seize the opportunities that the country offered. By the time I was born, he was a leading industrialist and intellectual. Billboards around the city advertised his businesses: paints, building supplies, juices, yogurts. People read his newspapers. Every hardware shop bore the logo of his paint factory, Montana. He also headed charitable institutions, spearheaded educational programs and was a patron of the arts. My mother came from a European family who had migrated to Venezuela in 1611, and their marriage firmly ensconced my father in Venezuelan society. In 1965 a writer named Bernard Taper wrote a lengthy article entitled “Dispatches from Caracas” in The New Yorker:
The Neumanns are considered prime examples of a breed of industrialist new to the Venezuelan scene for they simultaneously exhibit technical competence, entrepreneurial drive and a sense of social responsibility—an almost unknown combination here.
He then described my father:
A vigorous, well-built man of forty-three, Hans has close cropped gray hair, alert green eyes, a bent nose (it was broken in a youthful boxing match), and a mouth rather more sensitive and expressive than one might expect to accompany a broken nose and a decisive personality. He is a lover of art and has a splendid collection of modern paintings and sculpture. In addition, he is the president of the Museo de Bellas Artes, and has done much to foster the development of Art in this country…
Hans Neumann and Maria Cristina Anzola in Caracas, c. 1980
My father had filled every part of our house with art. Every wall in every room opened up his collection to visitors; even the large garden was dotted with sculptures. There were beautiful artworks by well-known European masters alongside some lesser-known young Latin American artists. Peppered among the gentler pieces was disturbing surrealist and expressionist art, pictures of fragmented bodies, deconstructed landscapes, and even one of warring body parts. There were sculptures, small and huge, of naked women. I remember the shocked silence of a particularly pious mother of a friend from my Catholic school who had come to my birthday party. She shielded her daughter’s eyes with a blue balloon as she led her toward the door, past an immense bronze of a nude woman with legs apart that leaned against a hammock in the entrance hall. I do not remember that girl ever coming to play at my house again.