A few minutes’ train ride takes you to Maiquitia, where there is a popular shrine and a more popular brewery. At the other end of the town lies Macuto, where, if lucky, you may “clean up” yourself in a sea-bath, or a pile of filthy lucre at the roulette table.
As our vessel steamed away from La Guayra, I thought what a magnificent city it was—from the stern of a ship.
In Valencia I read a placard in a church admonishing the men not to wink at the girls during service. The town had just been ravaged by a fever called “Economica,” because it was said the people caught it in the morning, languished in the afternoon and died at night.
At the Hotel Los Baños, Puerto Cabello, one goes in swimming au naturel. Many modest maidens are only clad in a blush, making a tableau vivant. Verily, as the guide-book saith, “The natural beauties of the place are charming.” The harbor is deep; so is the despair of the political prisoners who I saw working in rags. One poor fellow was toiling away stark naked among the breakers and sharp rocks. It is reported that the victims are beaten in the early morning, during the call of the reveille, to cover up their cries.
Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, lies at a 3,000-foot “hell”evation above the sea. It is the “Paris of South America” with its churches, parks, public buildings, Pantheon, palace and promenades. The nerve-center of the city is Plaza Bolivar, with an equestrian statue of the hero who stood for liberty, and around which congregate people who stand for everything. Certain “Carac”teristics make this a viva “city” and lubri “city.” The climate is cool, but tempered by the “melting” glance of the bonita muchachas, whose smiles would ripen peaches on a wall.
The dapper younkers of Caracas pursue their studies at the University, and the señoritas on the highway. Their “curriculum” also includes the race-track, bull-ring, roulette-wheel (as omnipresent as the Victoria coach-wheel), and art works, imported from Paris and Barcelona, as vile and vivid as the paintings of Parrhasius. Even picture portraits of Beethoven and Wagner are made by grouping together nude portions of female figures.
Lottery-tickets are not the only things sold in town. Mothers come to the Plaza with their daughters for sale. Wantons from the suburb lupanars solicit under shadows of the trees, and their “Hist! hist!” is as familiar as the sibilant call of the filles publiques in Paris, who figure so frequently in the tales of De Kock, Sue and Maupassant.
At “Madame Gaby’s” mansion of shame I found a girl scarcely 12 years old. How shocking! But one expects to be shocked in a city that is subject to earthquakes. Not only pedestrians, but pederasts, i. e., “maricos” or “fairies,” haunt the streets and parks of Caracas. Powdered and painted, they promenade with mincing gait and ogling glance, marching to the music of the band and making “overtures” to the bystanders. The police know of this disgusting depravity, and of the hordel resorts “for men only,” but wink at it. This is as rank and rotten as anything I ever saw in Algiers, or the Cairo “fish-market,” where men were dressed as women.
In old Egypt the Temples of Isis were centers of disgusting filth. In ancient Greece, even among her greatest orators and philosophers, “Socratic love” was proverbial and portrayed on the stage in the plays of Aristophanes, although the Athenians officially punished it with death. Livy, in his History of Rome, castigates this heresy of love. The Ganymed pervert, Geiton, is the hero of Petronius’ sinister novel, “Satyricon.” Martial’s epigrams and Juvenal’s satires flay this moral decadence. Out from Naples I visited the island of Capri, where the Roman goat Emperor, Tiberius, hired companies of catamites for his entertainment. Domitan forbade the practice while Christianity did much to suppress it. The student of history knows the infamous lives of Russian rulers and of Henry III, of France, in the seventeenth century. St. Paul scored the Romans for this sin—what an epistle could he indite against the Caracas “maricos” who amuse, instead of disgust, the Caraquenians, who seem to believe with Baudelaire that “La Débauche et la Mort sont deux amiables filles” (Debauch and Death are two amiable girls).