The Tower of David
In season three, episode three of Homeland, Agent Brody is lying in the back of a flatbed truck, blood spilling out from two gunshot wounds to the stomach, eyes rolling to the back of his head. He is taken to a covered car park with flickering lights and plonked onto a makeshift operating table before being injected with enough heroin to pacify a hippo. Some time later, he wakes up in a ramshackle room with breezeblock walls, rusty pipes, and a beautiful woman, who wants to help him escape but is conflicted between this desire and her loyalty to her father, who happens to be Brody’s captor. It’s gripping stuff.
I remember this episode specifically because it was the first time I had heard of the Tower of David (Torre de David). The Tower of David, where Agent Brody was being held, was a large vertical slum in Caracas, Venezuela. Initially intended to be a premier financial skyscraper complex, it was never complete, and in 2007, due to a housing crisis, thousands of people began to occupy it and make it their home. Up until Operation Zamora in 2014, when the government relocated all of its residents, the tower was an example of a resilient, organised society, with elected floor representatives and communal spaces such as shops, barbers, dentists, and even libraries. This, I thought, was cool.
Despite what I know now, in this particular episode of Homeland, the Tower of David, Caracas, Venezuela, is portrayed as being the most random and God-awful shithole you could ever imagine finding yourself waking up drugged, kidnapped, and full of bullet holes. At the time, I lapped this up. So manly. So dangerous. So gritty. What’s Brody going to do now? I would hate to be in that situation. Where are my Pringles? I was so glad I was watching this safely in my little bed in Bristol.
If you had told me there and then that, fast forward a few years, I would find myself lying in a hospital bed in Caracas, eyes rolling, brain scrambled, I probably would have burst into tears and catastrophised myself into a coma.
Luckily nobody did tell me, and so when I visited Venezuela several years later with my girlfriend, Alma, everything that happened came as a lovely surprise. Alma is from Venezuela, and we were visiting for the first time since she had emigrated nine years previously. It’s a wonderful country, full of good food and extremely friendly and generous people. Yes, it’s not the safest place in the world (the UK government website advises ‘against all but essential travel’), but I never felt in any danger personally. Things have improved massively in recent years.
Having said this, being in any foreign hospital is never the most fun experience. I speak Spanish perfectly well, but it’s always more comforting to hear ‘You’re not going to die, señor’ in your own language.
For the first few days of our trip, I felt fine, if a little jetlagged. We were staying with Alma’s dad and stepmum in La Guaira and spent our time eating arepas, drinking extremely light beer, and sleeping at odd hours of the day. The first Friday was when things took a turn, for me at least. I woke up with a dastardly head cold, complete with a gungy nose, blocked sinuses, and a pounding headache. I also had what we found out later to be amoebiasis, a tropical parasitic infection with symptoms that include abdominal pain, blood in stool, liver abscesses, and shitting yourself silly for days on end.
It was horrific and exhausting. When you feel like that, all you want is to fester in your own filth, not someone else’s guest room. As this wasn’t an option that was available to me, I just had to deal with it. Besides, this trip was a huge deal for Alma and I was determined not to let my illness spoil things. We spent a few more days in La Guaira and then drove down to Caracas so she could show me all her old haunts and catch up with some friends. We visited her old school, saw where she had lived growing up, and ate cachitos at a panadería where she used to hang out as a teenager. I even managed to drag myself through a couple of evenings out with her friends, chatting and nodding along at the appropriate moments, trying not to betray the quite literal shitstorm that was occurring within.
However, in the end, the persistent diarrhoea had its way with me. I was eventually left so dehydrated that my brain dropped to about twenty per cent capacity and I could no longer form a sentence. Naturally, as a man, I resisted any of Alma’s attempts to help me. I rebutted her constant pleas for me to go to the hospital with the verbal dexterity of a lump of driftwood.
‘You need to go to the hospital.’
‘Mmmph nay.’
‘You can barely talk.’
‘Ayem spek fain.’
‘We got insurance specifically for when something like this happens. You’re going.’
‘Fuksayek.’
I could fight it no more. Alma contacted the insurance company, put my lifeless body into a taxi, and off we went.
My visit to the hospital seemed to attract a fair amount of attention. I don’t think they typically had too many gringos coming through the doors and, being especially pale with bright ginger stubble around my chops, I stuck out like a sore thumb.
Alma described my symptoms to the staff and they seemed to agree pretty instantly that it was amoebiasis that I had. It’s not uncommon at all in tropical or subtropical regions where the water quality is questionable. I had assumed it was the twenty-one warm oysters I had eaten on the beach a few days earlier that had sent my body into meltdown. But apparently, the more likely culprit was the bed of lettuce our order of patacones had come on (same beach, though).
To make sure, however, they required a stool sample. A nurse handed me an unhelpfully small cup, and I slowly wobbled my way from my bed to the toilet, past an annoyingly curious crowd of onlookers. I wasn’t wholly comfortable with the amount of anticipation that seemed to surround my impending poo, but I trudged on, head down, stoical. The level of attention was such that I was genuinely relieved when nobody followed me into the toilet itself.
Door locked securely behind me, I sat down for what I expected to be a fairly routine task. They want a cup full of shit? Well, I’ve got a truckful. No problemo.
Get Cameron J Nightingale’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Only, problemo there was. The tap had run dry. After a week of living as a human sprinkler system, it seemed I had finally emptied the well. I had nothing more to give. Having said this, I was embarrassed to leave the toilet without having produced anything. I felt it was somehow infantilising not to be able to poo when I wanted. I just needed to relax. There’s got to be something in there. There are always reserves; you just have to dig deeper. I tried to concentrate, and a couple of minutes later, after reaching a meditative state of zen only possible when your brain is running on fumes, I sensed the slightest hint of movement.
Come on. Come on. Stay relaxed. I was desperate not to spook it. But then there was a knock at the door.
‘Everything okay in there?’ a squeaky voice called through the door in Spanish.
‘Yes, all good!’ I replied, managing to utter my first full sentence of the day.
This was very distracting. I tried to refocus, but another knock followed a minute later.
‘Everything okay, guapo? Have you finished?’
‘All good, thank you! Just give me cinco minutos!’
I could hear them discussing my situation just the other side of the door. What were they playing at? Had they no concept of privacy? I was starting to get seriously hacked off. Every time they knocked, my anus flinched timidly, and any progress I had made retreated straight back up the drainpipe.
After this continued for about ten minutes, I was forced to concede defeat. I shuffled out of the toilet, ashamed that I wasn’t able to go on command. I handed the cup back to the nurse — I guess someone else can use it — and returned to my bed, dejected.
A nurse with a smirking face came in and hooked me up to a liquid IV in order to rehydrate me, while Alma battled a peculiar sudden onset of the giggles. I was not in the mood for this, but as the lovely saline solution entered my veins, I began to see the funny side too. After about half an hour, I had perked up remarkably and we were both starting to enjoy our little day out.
After the liquid IV had emptied, a different nurse turned up. His job seemed to be that of removing the stent from my arm, a job he was extremely bad at. If you’re a nurse out there who’s paving their way in the medical world, here’s a top tip: try pulling the bloody thing out straight. Or let me insert you with a two-inch needle and start wiggling it around while I discuss what I’m going to have for dinner tonight.
The useless nurse wandered off as I cursed him and his entire family under my breath. Immediately after, yet another nurse popped out from around the corner, this one pushing a wheelchair. At this point, I was feeling a lot better and thought the wheelchair was overkill. The nurse, however, had a very kind face and an air of calm that was lacking in the others, and I decided I wouldn’t mind being pushed around by her for a while.
I didn’t understand where it was she was taking me. At first, I thought I was simply being given a special tour of the hospital and so I adopted a regal demeanour and waved, statesmanlike, at all the staff and patients as we passed. It transpired that she was just taking me up to the fifth floor for an ultrasound to check my organs weren’t abscess-y. The ultrasounds were done by a cheerful man, who lubed me up and rubbed my tummy with his little gizmo. He had studied at Cambridge and was very good at English, so he read out the status of all my organs in my mother tongue, which I appreciated.
‘Liver, all good. Kidneys, all good. Pancreas, all good. Bladder, all good. Spleen, all good. Anus, destroyed.’
Thanks, doc.
I popped my shirt back on, said cheerio to everyone, and we set off back to the apartment quite chuffed in the knowledge that the majority of my organs were in decent nick.
The next morning, I was still not feeling amazing, but keen to make the most of our trip, Alma and I set off to El Ávila, a mountain range that looms over the northern side of Caracas. At the top sits the famous Hotel Humboldt, which has a bar with great views that Alma wanted to show me. Unless you drive, to get up there you need to take a cable car. Alma is completely terrified of such things but did a good job keeping calm as we ascended with four or five other people present in the gondola. The hotel, frustratingly, was closed due to a political event — Nicolás Maduro was there to discuss the Israel–Palestine conflict — so we pivoted and instead travelled to a nearby village called Galipán, a charming little place where we enjoyed a delicious lunch.
On the way back down, Alma and I were the only ones in our particular gondola. Before we stepped on, the cable car attendant told us that because there were only two of us, it was a good idea that we both sat opposite each other in the middle of our respective benches in order to keep the gondola balanced. What Alma heard when he said this was ‘If you move at all from this position, you will fall from the sky and die immediately.’
She kept her cool for the first thirty seconds, sniffling a bit, lip wobbling slightly, but otherwise staying composed. But then fear completely engulfed her and she began to panic and cry hysterically. It’s actually quite heartbreaking to see someone you love so scared that they genuinely think they’re going to die, and I felt helplessly unable to comfort her. I did try, but supportive words weren’t having any impact, and if I moved to touch her knee in a gesture of solidarity, she would scream. At one point, I tried to slowly move my hand back to fetch a tissue from my pocket to help stem the steady flow of snot that was pouring from her nose, but this only resulted in me getting an absolute mid-air bollocking.
When we eventually arrived back on terra firma, Alma was in the middle of a full-on panic attack. She flopped out of the gondola and was propping herself up against a concrete pillar trying to regain control of her breathing. Some guy, with presumably an incredibly small penis, shouted, ‘Hey, you can’t stand there!’ before his colleague told him to shut up and then snapped her fingers at another colleague who immediately produced a wheelchair from nowhere with the sleight of hand of a street magician. In one swift movement, he then scooped Alma up into the seat and ran off with her. I followed in hot pursuit, trying not to lose sight of my hyperventilating girlfriend and the insanely quick wheelchair conjurer. Heads turned to watch the sight of the pale foreigner running along panicking, but a few helpful strangers pointed me in the right direction.
I managed to track them down to a tight side alley where there was a small prefab medical room. The man dropped Alma off and sprinted away again. I wondered whether he was a superhero. A kindly nurse popped Alma on a bed and stuck an oxygen mask on her face. She calmed down after a while, and, once the strength had returned to her legs, we left.
Two hospital beds in sixteen hours wasn’t what we had planned for our week in Caracas. As we sat, humbled, in the taxi back to our apartment, the Tower of David was just about visible in the distance. I wondered what Agent Brody would have thought if he had been watching our last couple of days on TV. If he’d ever had any temptation to revisit Venezuela (he died at the end of season three, publicly hanged in Tehran, so a moot point really), I wondered whether it would have discouraged him.
It didn’t discourage me. I would love to go back again. It really is a wonderful country.
