Purple Ink

I can’t vote tomorrow. I can tell you what to watch.

The last time I voted in Venezuela, they painted my little finger purple. Indelible ink, they said. It lasted three days. So I didn’t wash it off. I let the stain go on its own. Tomorrow they’ll give you a sticker. It says I Voted and peels off on its own before dinner.

We lost many times. Losing had its choreography: the slow count, the speech in the small hours, the silence on Monday. The danger came afterward, a little at a time and as expected. You learned to live with it, or you moved to another neighborhood, another city, another country. You learned not to say on the phone what you wouldn’t shout in a plaza. Losing is slow. It leaves time to work out what to let go of first, and how to sell fast whatever won’t be worth anything tomorrow. My cousin Enrique had a cruel comparison (it wasn’t his, but he said it as if it were): “Put the frogs in warm water and heat it slowly, and you eat them. Drop them in boiling water, and they jump.” “I follow you, cousin. Disgusting. I don’t eat frogs.”

Until one Sunday we won, and we jumped for joy. That was the worst night.

Not because we doubted the result. We had the tally sheets, one by one, printed and signed. We could prove what happened. We said it. We keep saying it. It didn’t matter. They let us talk. Talking costs nothing, and while you talk, they take note of where you are and where your people sleep. When it suits them, they let you talk. When it doesn’t, they come looking. That time the danger didn’t come a little at a time. For some, the colectivos arrived on motorcycles that same night, list in hand. Others they hunted down one here, one there, after they thought the storm had passed.

Tomorrow I don’t vote. I can’t. I rent in a building in Maryland where the rules forbid staking signs in the grass, and I’m a tenant of this republic too. Cicero was called a tenant of Rome. They threw it in his face. He took it as a job.

I’m not here to tell you whom to vote for. Nobody converts on the eve. You’ve already decided, even those who decided to stay home. I’m here to tell you what to watch tomorrow night. Don’t watch who wins. Watch what the losing side does with the keys. If they hand them over slowly and with bad grace, you still have a republic. If they don’t let go, the rest is already written. I’ve read it.

The sticker will peel off before dinner. The ink came off my finger in three days. The other doesn’t come out.

EDITOR’s NOTE: This article was copyedited with the assistance of Grammarly, a language tool supported by AI.