Carola looks through the windshield of her golden Corolla. There is a green Chevy pick-up staring straight at her. My mother Carola, my husband, and I are on one end; our green-car opponent is on the other. We are at a standstill, facing each other like revving bulls. This Caracas morning, 30-foot walls topped with electric wiring from the surrounding houses outline our asphalt arena. A crowd of mango trees ogles, wondering who’ll cave first. El Ávila Mountain observes dispassionately, a mother refereeing her children’s squabbles.

Contraflow driving down a one-way street is a common occurrence in a country where laws only apply to those not entitled enough to enact their own. My mother could’ve done what she’d always done on these one-way streets: step aside and let her opponent comerse la flecha–continue with their wrong-way driving, eating the big white arrow pointing at the front of their car. When you turn a corner of a narrow, tree-lined road in our neighborhood of Los Chorros, you have to be ready to confront a car driving the wrong direction. 

My family is orderly, but not submissive. I saw my grandmother give the middle finger through the windows of her emerald Mercedes coming home from Mass. My father cuts with his words. He looks at culprits dead in the eye and tells them they’re like our government: men without morals. Other days, he’s less lyrical and lunges at them with his silver Camry, grunting guevón!

I never saw Carola put up a fight; she always let her opponents through. For years, she drove me everywhere. She’d rather be inconvenienced than have me alone on those roads. We learned caving is sensible in Caracas. Fear your opponents when you can’t tell who’s armed. Carola and I have seen it get ugly. The kind of ugly that stays with you. 

It was Carola, taking me to an after-school activity when I was not yet a teenager, who told me to duck and cover as men ran in front of her mom van with guns. It was Carola that told me to look away when she was driving me to high school as a stabbed man flailed across the road. It was Carola who asked me to mourn as we cornered the end of this specific Los Chorros block, where she had some weeks ago found burning a body.

I still tense when my foreign husband becomes a traffic vigilante on our law-abiding California streets. I fear he’ll get shot for his righteous indignation when he yells at someone for running a stop sign. I still avoid driving, even decades after leaving Venezuela. I feel defenseless behind a wheel, like I’m still that little girl being driven around by her mom. This fear lives in my jaw, radiating when I clench my molars as I stop when someone switches lanes without indicating.  Mine is not defensive but submissive driving.

Today in Los Chorros, our green-car opponent asks Carola to step aside. This man tells Carola in his low-pitch growl that it’s his right to keep driving. My calves clench against my pants hearing his voice. Carola’s head straightens when she hears this request. I can tell something inside her has shifted. I swear I hear something click from within her body. For years, she’s held her anger in the back of her throat. A hard thing she holds, but doesn’t digest. But on this cool Caracas morning, opposing this man’s entitlement driving the wrong way down this one-way street, my mother does something I’ve never seen her do before. She escalates.

Carola turns the car off. The Corolla’s chassis slumps as the engine dies. She doesn’t turn to look at any of us passengers. This confrontation isn’t about us. Our tension and our driving history bear no weight in Carola’s actions. Like the trees and the mountain, my husband and I are spectators. Even if we have chosen a side, this is Carola’s confrontation.

Our opponent meets her escalation with his own. He exits his car, still running, and marches towards us, insulting us through his yellowing teeth every step of the way. I tense further in my co-pilot seat, my shoulders now rubbing the bottom of my gold hoop earrings. It doesn’t matter that this man is skinny and middle-aged and we could easily run him down if Carola floors it. Size and speed don’t matter if he has a gun.

I look back at my foreign husband with eyebrows arched. The ginger hairs on his arms stand at attention. I try to communicate to him through the tension in the air, like cups connected with a taut rope. This is not part of his scheduled lesson on Venezuela. Today’s lesson was that there is also beauty and light in this place. We’re on our way to hike these mountains that make my birthplace a valley. I’ve been dreaming of him marveling at this land, hoping el Ávila welcomes him as one of her own.

I turn to my mother, her hands still firmly on the wheel. She has spent a lifetime driving me everywhere out of fear these streets would hurt me. Decades transmitting verbally and aurally a fear about a country disintegrating beneath and around her. But fear does not drive her today. She is grounded by the truth that she is not in the wrong. Today, she sits still. Today, she is at peace.

The man between the cars gets louder. He continues pursuing his illegal request like a toddler with a tantrum: Señora, déjeme pasar, he snarls at us through his unkept beard, es mi derecho.

Carola crosses her arms and says nothing. The middle-aged man between the cars that may or may not have a gun finally gets it: Carola won’t move. He gets quiet. His black bushy brows furrow as he leers into the Corolla through his glasses.  

The trees, the cars, the mountain, the passengers; we all know this silence is when tension can break into violence. My husband and I hold our breaths. Carola holds the line. 

I watch as the Carola I know dissipates. Burned in her anger, she is born anew. 

So be it that Carola would die on this hill with a big white arrow pointing towards el Ávila. So be it if she would be martyred as one of Caracas’s law-abiding citizens. She is a woman wrought threadbare by these minor injustices and beaten bloody by the major ones. Let her daughter and son-in-law retell the heroism of a woman who had enough. Let her be the patron saint to those who revolt against the credo that those with more firepower dictate what is done. Anoint her Santa Carola: nuestra señora de la justa indignación.

Santa Carola, halo radiating over her head, eventually breaks the stillness. She rolls the driver’s window down and pops her head out. The breeze hushes through her soft auburn hair. She glares at her opponent through her oversized sunglasses. Her stare unwavering, she responds with authority. Her voice lands like a commandment:

  Señor, mire al piso.

The man steps back, as if shoved by her words. He looks at the asphalt beneath his feet. He’s greeted by the big white arrow pointing straight at his green Chevy. His arms deflate. His chest caves under his tattered, button-down shirt. He decides he can’t win against this woman’s righteous indignation. He sulks back to his vehicle. He loudly revs his engine as one final act of annoyance. He reverses to face el Ávila, and drives away. 

My husband and I sigh. The mango trees jiggle, amused by the whole incident. Victorious Santa Carola keeps her gaze towards the mother mountain. She revives her golden Corolla and drives on.