Caracas Chronicles

It’s another day in the 1960s, the dark days of urban guerrilla in Caracas, we don’t know if during the Betancourt administration or Leoni’s, and Andrés Barazarte, the member of a communist guerrilla cell whose name is unknown to us, fears the worst at the “kitchen” (the last seats of a bus) he jumped in at Petare, the easternmost tip of Caracas. Between his legs, he’s holding a briefcase with dangerous contents, and the traffic jam in that city where the Metro hasn’t been built yet—that Caracas trapped in the nightmare of sudden growth—is making him crazy. He may be late to his mission, or even worse, be caught by DIGEPOL, the CICPC of those times. While Barazarte travels across the valley to his destination in Catia, one sees and hears and smells with him, throughout the bus windows, the Venezuela that melted into its capital, a destination of domestic and foreign mass migration. The crowd speaks, screams, sells, buys, catcalls, aggresses, mingles in the sidewalks, between the carbon monoxide, the music from the stores and the visual palimpsest of commercial streets.

Barazarte sweats, observes and dreads, while he remembers. How he came to that point, how he ended up in such a mess, and above all, where he comes from. His memory is a chorus: full of the voices of ancestors in the Trujillo mountains, of their wounds, grievances and ghosts, the remains of a disappearing universe that he left behind to come to live (and probably die) in the metropolis. Like many men in his family, he’s overwhelmed by the need to fight to death against the powers to be, to show his value, but is a blind, irrational passion that he can’t understand and, even less, control. As if he was cannon fodder of a violence that he thought he had escaped, but that moved along with him—a violence synonymous with a country that travels with those who were born in it.

País portátil, from 1968, is very much a typical novel of those years of experimentation, in terms of form and structure. As James Joyce did with Leopold Bloom and Dublin in Ulysses, it tells the story of a day in the life of a man and a city, with techniques like stream of consciousness, time jumps and a polyphony of oral speech, political and legal discourse, archaic Spanish and Marxist jargon from the sixties. But País portátil is way more readable than its Irish model, and has no connection with the Odyssey: Andrés Barazarte is not trying to go back home, is not precisely resourceful, and it’s clear that no deity will descend to help him.

It’s always been said, and with good reason, that País portátil is the Venezuelan representative among the canon novels of the Boom, that explosion of creativity, prestige and sales of the Latin American narrative from the 1960s to the 1980s, starring Gabriel García Márquez from Colombia, Mario Vargas Llosa from Peru, Julio Cortázar from Argentina and Carlos Fuentes from Mexico. There are other novels and short story collections with experimental ambition in the Venezuelan literature of those years, but this novel by Adriano González León (Valera, 1931 – Caracas, 2008) had more reach, by winning the then very prestigious Biblioteca Breve prize and being launched by Seix Barral, in Barcelona, when it was one of the leading publishing houses of our language.

“Maybe he was sure he wouldn’t surpass something like País portátil. He was happy with what he did. After being in the same league of Vargas Llosa and García Marquez, he didn’t try to be like them, he didn’t like that kind of exposure.”

Contrary to many other books of the moment, including some by the champions of the Boom, País portátil is still magnificent at technique, with its rich soundscape, with the way it invokes so many worlds in that trip between the two extremes of Caracas. González León gave life to several voices to go across centuries and places, from that clumsy guerrillero trapped in a bus to his grandfather confined to a rocking chair in an ancient house in Trujillo, crying on the force and the land he lost to the Church and the government, because of his brothers and sons.

From El Miedo and Altamira, to Petare and Catia

País portátil is the inverse reflection of Doña Bárbara, and not only in terms of style. Here, the hostile landscape is not the plains but the city, and the main character doesn’t want to impose order according to a very clear program, but to subvert it, without knowing exactly why. Barazarte has been thrown into the “armed struggle” with no solid training, almost to be accepted by the urban society. He’s as confused with his surroundings as the Italian, Croatian or Spanish immigrants he stumbles upon, people who showed their backs to their destroyed lands to cross the ocean towards a destination they knew nothing about.

Doña Bárbara is optimism, certainty, the package of a solution for a slow, overwhelming past; it was written almost as a theory of the future, several years before the first democratic experiments in Venezuela. In País portátil, though, democracy already started, but it’s repression, chaos, noise; not only far from the civilian utopia that Romulo Gallegos envisioned, but from the image that many of us have about that Venezuela where the Tamanaco hotel shone above the fancy neighborhood of Las Mercedes and the national airline Viasa was preparing to take off, the long lost country we admire in our sad nostalgic rites in YouTube with that grainy footage of malls and highways, with old TIME magazine covers, from the years “when we had a country”, that we love to share in WhatsApp. 

As happened with Doña Bárbara, País portátil was turned into a movie, filmed not in Mexico but in Venezuela, in 1979. The feature by Antonio Llerandi and Iván Feo is still considered one of the most important in Venezuelan cinema. It’s interesting how its two directors diverge in the judgment of the movie, as we can see in this brief documentary by Omar Mesones. Make your own opinion on the film… but after reading or rereading the book.

Doña Bárbara and País portátil also share a crepuscular tone. Both are sketches of a world and a time that are about to die, supposedly to be soon replaced by something very different. That must have been the feeling in the 1920s, when Gallegos penned Doña Bárbara, with oil just exploding in Zulia, and during the hard 1960s before the guerrillas were “pacified”. But in 2025, with this frustration in the chest, one feels that the great changes those generations tried to implement (the generation of Gallegos, Betancourt, Uslar Pietri, Adriani; and that of Adriano González León and the other big minds of the art groups Sardio and El techo de la ballena, like Salvador Garmendia) were half baked. The feeling that rural Venezuela was left behind, and that the urban metamorphosis towards development was never finished.

País portátil is a novel about disappointment. One can remember many other stories and novels that came after, in Venezuela and across the Americas, imbued by that same awe, that mesmerized resignation in face of the chaos of cities and the impossibility to cure the nation’s illnesses. This books even mocks Doña Bárbara, Bolívar, prefab national pride:

“¡Esta es Venezuela, compadre! dicen, me tomo un whisky campaneado y después una arepita, sustancias del llanerazo, hombre cuatriboleao, más criollo que el pan de hallaquita y el valor y el sudor y el patrimonio y el olor y la herencia y la dignidad y el fruto esparcido de los libertadores por los anchos caminos de la patria toda horizontes como la esperanza toda caminos como la libertad, llanura venezolana, donde una raza buena se jode hasta decir ya pero no importa porque la gran nación del caribe, la más septentrional de América del Sur, lo único que le hace falta es aprender y aprovechar sus riquezas naturales y dejar la pereza, llamada manguareo, porque la verdadera gloria consiste en ser buenos y en ser útiles”. 

The republic of disappointment

One connects with that despair and with the moments in País portátil that, conceived in 1968, look like involuntary prophecies. The guerrilleros try to make it to Tacoa to leave Caracas in the dark, with no success; but that thermoelectric power plant did burn 14 years after. The sequences of repression in downtown Caracas and the slums makes you think of the Caracazo, but also about FAES. The novel’s title, of course, rings a more immediate bell: the experience of mass migration that impacts all of us, inside Venezuela or abroad. But when reading it in 2025, what stands out the most is the way it exposes that democracy we love to idealize (or to demonize, within chavismo). However, this is not a chavista novel, at all; it doesn’t subscribe to the myths with which chavismo has tried to rewrite our history.

As their kids, Georgiana González y Andrés González Camino, tell me, Adriano was never a chavista. He did belong to that leftist intelligentsia that joined the resistance and the parties in the 1950s and 1960s, but that broke with the Soviet dogma with the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and in Cuba with the defenestration of poet Heberto Padilla in 1971, and went their own way.

“My dad and my mom traveled to Cuba in the late 1960s and went back very disappointed,” Georgiana says.

“After that, my dad helped to found the (center left) party Movimiento Al Socialismo, but in the following years he ceased to take part in politics. As many people in that intellectual left, he cut ties soon with communism, but continued to be a socialist for some time before he disconnected from that as well. What he never ceased to be was a critic of whoever was in power, from AD or Copei.” 

Now, this jewel of Venezuelan culture might live again. Alliteration, an independent publishing house in Miami, is planning to publish the first English translation of portátil, by Guillermo Parra.

Like many artists and writers that ended up following Chávez, Adriano was part of the state-owned cultural industry. For many years he had a TV show in public stations, Contratema, and was published by Monte Ávila Editores. In fact, Adriano was the culture attache in the Venezuelan embassy in Spain in the 1990s, with the second Caldera administration. But he saw Chávez as bad news from the first moment.

“He was always totally aware of that”, Georgiana says. Andrés remembers how his father was appalled with the Chávez coup in 1992, and even more when the same man won the presidential election just after they moved back from Madrid in 1998. “My mom and dad saw nothing of the left in Chávez”. 

I remember the old debate around why País portátil was a one-time hit. Because Adriano González León did not publish another novel until 1994’s Viejo; the rest of his work is short stories, poetry and essays. Georgiana remembers that “the Seix Barral prize was like a rocket that threw him to the international stage, and since the late 1960s, for some years, my dad went through considerable change. It was a very bohemian phase for him, with the fame, the TV, the university where he used to teach. All that filled his time, and I think he didn’t feel forced to deliver another book of that level. I honestly think he was satisfied.”

According to Andrés, “maybe he was sure he wouldn’t surpass something like País portátil. He was happy with what he did. After being in the same league of Vargas Llosa and García Marquez, he didn’t try to be like them, he didn’t like that kind of exposure. He used to say he wasn’t a factory of novels, and he was annoyed by people insisting on that. Because there were people that said that Venezuela missed the Boom wave because my dad didn’t keep writing novels like that one. My old man was as afraid of becoming a commercial author, as he was of being an ideological writer, which I think he avoided being in País portátil. He was rather focused on being a public figure, in speaking his mind, in his TV show and his teaching. He preferred to speak to the Venezuelan public with his words, written or spoken at the counter of a bar.”

Because it wasn’t a secret that the easiest way to find the great writer was in some of the restaurants or bars in Sabana Grande, along with poet Caupolicán Ovalles and the other fellows of La República del Este, an informal but famous groups of elders who spread their wisdom inspired by Scotch. “Maybe República del Este”, Andrés says, “was more thrilling than going around signing copies in conferences.”

A story that Adriano González León must have told many times in those bars was the one of how he lost the manuscript of País portátil, and he spent days and nights looking for it in the bars and restaurants he used to visit, until one day he stopped at a German pastry shop, Frisco, on Libertador Avenue, and they said to him: “professor, you left this package here some days ago.” They saved his masterpiece, for him and for us.

Now, this jewel of Venezuelan culture might live again. Alliteration, an independent publishing house in Miami, is planning to publish the first English translation of portátil, by Guillermo Parra. I hope that brings back attention to this book. For Andrés, “perhaps País Portátil is about the great lyrical adventure of being a rebel for decades and never getting nothing out of it.” There’s something of that, yes, and of its melee of times and places that today is a national syndrome, and of that aftertaste the novel leaves in you: the sense that historical change in Venezuela always brings a great deal of absurd violence.The same vibe of another classic: Las lanzas coloradas, by Arturo Uslar Pietri.