Caracas Chronicles

In case you haven’t read it or don’t remember it well, here’s the plot: Apure, Venezuela, the 1920s: a young lawyer from Caracas, Santos Luzardo, travels to Altamira, the cattle farm he just inherited, with the goal of recovering it from decay but also of civilizing the region, the harsh Llanos. He wants to break his family’s curse of filial violence and stop the abuse from Doña Bárbara, the owner of neighboring ranch El Miedo, who grabs cattle and land of everyone else by using a squad of assassins, an unlimited provision of gold coins to bribe weak local authorities, and the strong reputation of being a sorceress who pacted with the Devil.

Luzardo is the main character, in reality. It’s he who has the agency and drives everything, not Doña Bárbara, who begins to feel, the second she meets him, the desire to leave behind his career as a killing queen, in the name of a lost love. Yes, a Skywalker-style redemption, but Rómulo Gallegos (1884-1969) built Doña Bárbara out of Aphrodite, the Venezuelan folktale of the crying ghost La Sayona, the Queen of Amazon and The Odyssey’s Circe. Gallegos speaks about Doña Bárbara as a “trágica guaricha” (a tragic indigenous woman), a “mujerona” or a “marimacho” (a tomboy), a “man eater”: a woman who is not a woman. He writes many times that she is not feminine; actually, she discovers her femininity thanks to Luzardo’s presence. She is so evil that she had a daughter out of marriage and abandoned her, Marisela, who isn’t feminine either, until Luzardo comes to show her how beautiful she really is, by making her wash her face at a lagoon like a Disney princess, and by teaching things to her, with such efficiency that the girl is soon talking like a scholar.

Marisela and Doña Bárbara barely think about anything other than what Luzardo might feel for them, while he is absorbed by the task of proving the llaneros that he is a real man like them (that is, capable of speaking loudly and being violent), of saving the alcoholic Lorenzo Barquero (the only guy in the area who is somehow similar to him), and in making profit from the land he inherited.

When novels had some power

Santos Luzardo, Marisela and Doña Bárbara are archetypes, like everyone else in this story. Luzardo takes out a spearpoint from a wall to break the family’s curse, just like the future King Arthur removes Excalibur from a rock to break the curse of ancient England. He speaks like the actors in Mexican movies, while the rest sound too folkloric sometimes, or too urban. Marisela, a fifteen-year-old girl—according to Gallegos’ rendering she is already sexually attractive—is a fantasy: a piece of wild nature that can be turned, with some small doses of paternalism, into a peaceful paradise. And Doña Bárbara, 100% barbaric as her name announces, is a force of rather blind destruction who rules with beauty, violence and witchcraft, practically the same thing that the conquistadors perceived from the American landscape and its inhabitants. We can’t forget Mister Danger, in English in the original: the brutal but pragmatic American who is there only to predate, the obvious reference to that new colonizer who just arrived, in the decade the novel was written, during the early days of the Venezuelan oil industry, in cahoots with the dictator’s circle.

Some of its questions are still vibrating in the air. Is it possible to eradicate that endemic violence that overcomes all rules and leave common Venezuelans so vulnerable to illness, hunger, tragedy and injustice?

There’s no doubt that Gallegos did a fine fieldwork documenting life in the ranches of Apure, but when designing his characters he seemed to want, more than anything else, to make them incarnate the components of the reality he needed to describe, denounce and change. Just like his models, the European realists of the 19th century, Gallegos wanted his novel to impact society, an idea impossible to buy for us who live in the 21st century. But that wasn’t absurd in that moment, even if most Venezuelans in the 1920s were illiterate—there were very few schools and universities, and the bookstores where the kids in the 1980s went to buy Doña Bárbara in order to read it for an exam, would exist five or six decades after the novel was out.

Gallegos believed in the genre’s power to move us, to evocative places, with the purpose of not only entertaining but educating. He wanted to show a part of the country to the rest, in that disconnected Venezuela with no roads and no TV channels, where people could know how the other regions were by watching every night the videoclip of the national anthem. Gallegos wanted, one can assume, to call out the rural autocrats, from José Antonio Páez, el centauro de los llanos (Barquero says “we gotta kill the centaur al men from the plains have within us”), to the one who ruled Venezuela in 1929 and could send the novelist to prison or exile: Juan Vicente Gómez.    

In this book you’ll find the binary morals and the relentless vengeance of the novels of men who dominated cultural life in France or England in the 19th century, the authors Gallegos might have tried to emulate: Dickens, Hugo, Dumas, Zola. Of course, what is more evident is the subjects of what was called “the Latin American novel of the land”: bad guys against good guys, civilization against barbarism, countryside against city. Doña Bárbara is contemporary with the literary vanguards that by then were just sprouting in Europe, but lacks all contagion from them. The influence of Proust, Joyce and Kafka was still in the future of culture, as well as anthropology and social science. Gallegos mentions here “inferior races” and seems to be a prisoner of geographic and ethnic determinism.

We can’t read this book unaware that it was published in 1929. Doña Bárbara was innovative in some sense but a 19th century novel in its views, form and structure. You won’t find here the stream of consciousness or intertextual play that will come with the 1960s Boom of the Latin American novel of Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa et al; not even the oniric ambiance of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo or Ernesto Sabato’s El túnel. This an old school romance, with short chapters told by an omniscient voice that knows and explains everything, expecting from the reader nothing else than a naive passivity. While Ernest Hemingway was writing sharp-edged novels like A Farewell to Arms, Gallegos flooded his prose with adjectives and adverbs, just like the rains of July do with the savannas he described.

There’s also this curious connection to Heart of Darkness, which Gallegos could hardly have read before 1929. Joseph Conrad’s novel also begins on a river, but looking at the past and to another river, while in Doña Bárbara, the bongo struggling against the current of the Arauca represents the beginning. Heart of Darkness is a bitter novel about failure, while Doña Bárbara seems animated by an optimistic—or naif?—program. Luzardo travels not to rescue a lost officer, but a place and a life purpose. Lorenzo Barquero, however, the urban guy destroyed by booze who awaits death in a jungle hut, reminds of Kurtz. “In reality, more than because of the seduction of the infamous Doña Bárbara,” Luzardo says about him, “this disgraced man has succumbed to the maddening influence of the dessert.” In both novels, the surroundings’ nature corrupts things and people.

A classic is born

Doña Bárbara dit not change the Llanos, and of course did not change Venezuela, although it provided names for bridges and national parks in Apure. Nor Gallegos changed the country, as he wanted, in the few months he had as President before General Marcos Pérez Jiménez toppled him in November 1948 to start his military regime. That coup seems to prove the thesis implied in Doña Bárbara: the country can’t progress because violent men don’t allow it. The irony is that Pérez Jiménez and his movement saw themselves as modern.

A Venezuelan or Colombian woman of the border, on the edge of everything, who comes out of darkness and ends up dissolved back in it, to leave behind, if anything, a myth that anyone can reinterpret and use.

Bar historian Ramón J. Velásquez—who became interim president during part of 1993, when he was a senator—Gallegos is the only professional of Venezuelan culture, more a writer than a politician and not the other way around, who has been elected president. How that happened deserves another article, but it’s still a very rare case in the world; in this continent, that achievement escaped the Venezuelan Arturo Uslar Pietri, Peruvian Nobel Mario Vargas Llosa, and Panamanian musician Rubén Blades. 

Nowever, Gallegos’ most famous novel was a triumph as a literary work and a cultural force since the start. The first 1929 edition in Barcelona’s Araluce, which kept publishing Gallegos’ main works, was followed by the edition of Caracas’ Élite in 1930. The first translation was to English, by R. Malloy, and was published in 1931 by Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith in New York. In the following years, Doña Bárbara was translated to Czech, Portuguese (by the great Brazilian writer Jorge Amado), German, Norwegian, French, Swedish and Italian. And in 1943, Gallegos wrote the script for the movie filmed in Mexico, starring the biggest Latin American actress of the time, María Félix.

There are hundreds of studies on Doña Bárbara, and the AD-COPEI democracy from 1959 to 1998 made of the masterpiece of the former AD president, the official novel of Venezuelanness. 

No matter how archaic it sounds today, this book remains impressive in the evocative power of its famous first chapter, its more plausible scenes (the ranch works, the dialogues with village bureaucrat Mujiquita, the lonely night of Doña Bárbara in San Fernando) and the vitality of several of its characters, even when they are made out of the times progressive thinking of those times rather than through the direct observation of real people. Some of its questions are still vibrating in the air. Is it possible to eradicate that endemic violence that overcomes all rules and leave common Venezuelans so vulnerable to illness, hunger, tragedy and injustice? What if we haven’t ever applied enough tenacity, enough “love” in Santos Luzardo’s fashion, to deactivate the extractivist and authoritarian relationship with our land and its inhabitants?

Doña Bárbara started its path before the great modernizing reforms of mid-century Venezuela, which would produce the little we ever had of welfare state and civilian democracy. Six years after it was first published in Spain, dictator Gómez died and General Eleazar López Contreras started to open up the country sketched in Altamira and El Miedo. How much of what Gallegos proposed in the novel, through his Santos Luzardo alter ego, would be done? How much remains of that “civilizing work”?

Re-reading Doña Bárbara in 2025 is like spending a holiday in an Apure ranch, but with ghosts as your guides. Ghosts that tell you things you don’t want to hear. Because what might shock you the most in this book is the resemblance with present-day Venezuela. And I’m not talking about the most obvious subject—the evil nature of power—but about the fragility of its victims. In particular, that woman whose name is on the book cover. Subjected to slavery from childhood by river pirates who tried to sell her to mobsters in the mines of Guayana. Gang-raped by her captors after they kill the young gold digger she was in love with. De-humanized by the violence she spreads in order to survive, by the corruption of the only context she knows. A woman whose origin is as unknown as her next destination. With no family, no ties, no profession, no help from no one. A Venezuelan or Colombian woman of the border, on the edge of everything, who comes out of darkness and ends up dissolved back in it, to leave behind, if anything, a myth that anyone can reinterpret and use.

Maybe that was the prophecy Gallegos was writing, unaware of his clairvoyance: Doña Bárbara did not represent the country of the past, but that of the future.

Let’s see if the same happens with another classic novel from a very different time and author: País portátil, by Adriano González León.