The Sound of Things Falling

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  So I wasn’t too surprised to hear myself say, ‘No really, Ricardo. It’ll have to be another time.’

  He remained quiet for an instant.

  ‘OK then,’ he said. If he was greatly disappointed, he didn’t show it. He just turned his back and, closing the door behind him, muttered, ‘Another time it’ll have to be.’

  Of course if I’d known then what I know now, if I could have foreseen the way that Ricardo Laverde would mark my life, I wouldn’t have thought twice about it. Since then I’ve often wondered what would have happened if I’d accepted the invitation, what Laverde would have told me if I’d gone in for one last drink, which is never only just one, how that might have changed what came later.

  But they’re all useless questions. There is no more disastrous mania, no more dangerous whim, than the speculation over roads not taken.

  It was a long while before I saw him again. I stopped in at the billiard club a couple of times over the following days, but my routines didn’t coincide with his. Then, just when it occurred to me that I could go and visit him at his house, I found out that he’d gone away on a trip. I didn’t know where, or with whom; but one afternoon Laverde had paid his tab of drinks and games, had announced he was going on vacation and the next day had vanished like a gambler’s winning streak. So I also stopped frequenting the place, which, in the absence of Laverde, suddenly lost all interest. The university closed for the holidays, and the whole routine that spins around the department and exams was adjourned, and its spaces deserted (the voiceless halls, the offices without any hustle and bustle). It was during that interlude that Aura Rodríguez, a former student with whom I’d been going out more or less secretly, or at least cautiously, for a few months, told me she was pregnant.

  Aura Rodríguez. Among her surnames were an Aljure and a Hadad, and that Lebanese blood showed in her deep eyes and in the bridge of her thick eyebrows and the narrowness of her forehead, a combination that might have given the impression of seriousness or even bad temper in someone less extroverted and affable. Her quick smile, eyes attentive to the point of impertinence, disarmed or neutralized features that, as beautiful as they might be (and yes, they were beautiful, they were very beautiful), could turn hard or even hostile with a slight knitting of her brow, with a certain way of parting her lips to breathe through her mouth at moments of greatest tension or anger. I liked Aura, at least in part, because her biography had so little in common with mine, beginning with the uprootedness of her childhood: Aura’s parents, both from the Caribbean coast, had arrived in Bogotá with her a babe in arms, but they never managed to feel at home in this city of sly, shrewd people, and as the years went by ended up accepting an opportunity to work in Santo Domingo and then another in Mexico and then another very brief one in Santiago de Chile, so Aura left Bogotá when she was still very young and her adolescence was a sort of itinerant circus and, at the same time, a permanently inconclusive symphony. Aura’s family returned to Bogotá at the beginning of 1994, weeks after Pablo Escobar was killed; the difficult decade had just ended, and Aura would always be ignorant of what we who lived through it had seen and heard. Later, when the rootless young woman showed up at the university for her admissions interview, the dean of the faculty asked her the same question he asked all the applicants: why Law? Aura’s answer swerved back and forth, but eventually arrived at a reason less related to the future than to the recent past: ‘To be able to stay in a single place.’ Lawyers can only practise where they’ve studied, said Aura, and she no longer felt able to postpone that kind of stability. She didn’t say so at the time, but her parents had already begun to plan the next trip and Aura had decided she wouldn’t be part of it.

  So she stayed in Bogotá on her own, living with two girls from Barranquilla in an apartment with a few pieces of cheap furniture where everything, starting with the tenants, had a transitory quality. And she began to study Law. She was a student of mine in my first year as a professor, when I too was a novice; and we didn’t really talk again after the course finished, in spite of sharing the same corridors, in spite of frequenting the same student cafés downtown, in spite of having said hello in the Legis or the Temis, the legal bookshops with their public-office air and bureaucratic white tiles smelling of detergent. One evening in March we met at a cinema on 24th Street; it struck us as funny that we were both going to see black-and-white movies on our own (there was a series of Buñuel films, that day they were showing Simon of the Desert, and I fell asleep fifteen minutes in). We exchanged phone numbers to meet for a coffee the next day, and the next day we left our coffees half finished when we realized, in the middle of a banal conversation, that we weren’t interested in telling each other about our lives, but just wanted to be somewhere we could go to bed and spend the rest of the afternoon looking at the body we’d each been imagining since our paths had first crossed in the cold space of the classroom. I already knew the husky voice and the prominent collarbones; the freckles between her breasts surprised me (I’d imagined clear and smooth skin like that of her face) and her mouth surprised me too, as it was, for scientifically inexplicable reasons, always cold.

  But then the surprises and explorations and discoveries gave way to another situation, perhaps more surprising, because it was so unexpected. Over the following days we went on seeing each other constantly and realizing that our respective worlds didn’t change much after our clandestine encounters, that our relationship didn’t affect the practical side of our lives for good or ill, but coexisted with it, like a parallel highway, like a story seen in the episodes of a television series. We realized how little we knew each other; I spent a long time discovering Aura, that peculiar woman who went to bed with me at night and came out with anecdotes about herself or others, and as she did so created for me an absolutely novel world where a friend’s house smelled of headache, for example, or where a headache could quite easily taste of guanábana ice cream. ‘It’s like living with synaesthesia,’ I told her. I’d never seen someone hold a gift to her nose before opening it, even though it was obviously a pair of shoes, or a stuffed animal, or a poor innocent ring. ‘What does a ring smell like?’ I said to Aura. ‘It doesn’t smell of anything, that’s the truth. But there’s no way to explain that to you.’

  And so, I suspect, we could have gone on all our lives. But five days before Christmas Aura appeared dragging a red suitcase with tiny wheels, with pockets in every part of it. ‘I’m six weeks pregnant,’ she told me. ‘I want us to spend the holidays together, and then we’ll see what we do.’ In one of those pockets there was a digital alarm clock and a case that didn’t contain pencils, as I thought it did, but make-up; in another, a photo of Aura’s parents, who by then were well settled in Buenos Aires. She took out the photo and placed it face down on one of the nightstands, and only turned it over when I said yes, we should spend the holidays together, that’s a good idea. Then – the image is very much alive in my memory – she lay down on my bed, on top of my made bed, and closed her eyes and began to talk. ‘People don’t believe me,’ she said. I thought she meant about her pregnancy and said, ‘Who? Who’ve you told?’ ‘When I talk about my parents,’ said Aura. ‘They don’t believe me.’ I lay down beside her and crossed my arms behind my head and listened. ‘They don’t believe me, for example, when I say I don’t understand why they had me, when they already had enough in each other. They still have enough. They’re enough for each other, that’s how it is. Have you ever felt that? Have you ever been with your parents and all of a sudden you feel superfluous? It happens to me a lot, or at least since I’ve been old enough to live alone, and it’s weird, being with your folks and they start looking at each other with that look that you’ve already identified and they’re laughing over something that’s just between them and you have no idea what they’re laughing at, and worse, you feel you have no right to ask. It’s a look I learned by heart a long time ago, not complicity, it’s something way beyond that, Antonio. More than once it happened to me as a li
ttle girl, in Mexico or in Chile, more than once. At a meal, with guests they didn’t like much but invited anyway, or in the street when they met someone who said stupid things, suddenly I could fast forward five seconds and think: here comes the look, and sure enough, five seconds later their eyebrows moved, their eyes met, and I’d see on their faces that smile that no one else saw and that they used to make fun of people the way I’ve never seen anyone else make fun of other people. How do you smile without people seeing you smile? They could, Antonio, I swear I’m not exaggerating, I grew up with those smiles. Why did it bother me so much? It still bothers me. Why so much?’

  There wasn’t sadness in her words, but irritation or rather anger, the anger of someone who has suffered a deceit through inattention or neglect, yes, that was it, the anger of someone who’s been led up the garden path. ‘I’ve been remembering something,’ she said then. ‘I would have been about fourteen or fifteen, and we were just about to leave Mexico. It was a Friday, a school day, and I decided to go along with some friends who weren’t really in the mood for geography or mathematics. We were walking across a park, it was San Lorenzo Park, but that doesn’t matter. And then I saw a man who looked a lot like my dad, but in a car that wasn’t my dad’s. He stopped at the corner, looking down the avenue, and then a woman got into the car who looked a lot like my mother, but dressed in clothes that my mother wouldn’t wear and with red hair, which my mother didn’t have. That happened on the far side of the park, their only option was to turn the car around very slowly and drive right past us. I don’t know what I was thinking when I signalled for them to stop, but the resemblance was too striking. So they stopped, me on the pavement and the car on the street, and up close I realized immediately that it was them, it was my parents. And I smiled at them, asked them what was going on, and that’s when the fear started: they looked at me and spoke to me as if they didn’t know me, as if they’d never seen me before. As if I was one of my friends. I later understood they were playing. A husband who picks up a pricey hooker on the street. They were playing and they couldn’t let me ruin the game. And that night, everything was normal: we had dinner as a family, watched television, everything. They didn’t say anything. And I spent a few days wondering what had happened, wondering without understanding and feeling something I’d never felt, feeling afraid, but afraid of what, isn’t it absurd?’ She took a gulp of air (her lips pressed against her teeth) and whispered, ‘And now I’m going to have a child. And I don’t know if I’m ready, Antonio. I don’t know if I’m ready.’

  ‘I think you are,’ I told her.

  Mine was also a whisper, as far as I remember. And then came another: ‘Bring everything,’ I told her. ‘We’re ready.’ In reply, Aura began to weep with a silent but sustained crying that only ended when she fell asleep.

  The end of 1995 was typical of that time of year for Bogotá, with that intense blue sky of the Andean highlands, with those early mornings when the temperature goes down to zero and the dry air ruins the potato or cauliflower crops, and then the rest of the day is sunny and warm and the light is so clear that you end up with sunburn on your cheeks and the nape of your neck. I devoted that time to Aura with the constancy – no: the obsession – of a teenager. We spent the days walking at the doctor’s recommendation and taking naps (her), reading deplorable research projects (me) or watching pirated films several days before they premiered in the meagre Bogotá listings (both of us). At night Aura accompanied me to novenas at the homes of my relatives or friends, and we danced and drank non-alcoholic beer and lit Catherine wheels and powder-keg volcanoes and launched rockets that exploded into rackets of colour in the yellowish night sky of the city, that darkness that’s never really dark. And never, never did I wonder what Ricardo Laverde might be doing at that same instant, if he was praying the novenas too, if there were fireworks and if he was setting off rockets or lighting Catherine wheels, and if he was doing so on his own or in company.

  The morning that followed one of those novenas, a cloudy, dark morning, Aura and I had our first ultrasound. Aura had been on the verge of cancelling it, and I would have done if that hadn’t meant waiting another twenty days to find out about the child, with the risks that might entail. It wasn’t just any old morning, it wasn’t a 21 December like any other 21 December of any other year: since the early hours of the morning the radio and television and newspaper had been telling us that American Airlines Flight 965, which departed from Miami for Alfonso Bonilla Aragón International Airport in the city of Cali, had crashed into the west side of El Diluvio Mountain the previous night. It was carrying one hundred and fifty-five passengers, many of whom weren’t even going to Cali, but were expecting to catch the last flight of the evening to Bogotá. At the time the news came out they’d found only four survivors, all with serious injuries, and the figure would not go any higher. I knew the inevitable details – that the plane was a 757, that the night was clear and starry, that they were starting to talk about human error – from the news broadcasts on all stations. I regretted the accident, felt all the sympathy I’m capable of for the people waiting for their relatives, and for those who, in their seats on the plane, understood from one moment to the next that they would not arrive, that they were living their last seconds. But it was an ephemeral and distracted sympathy, and I’m sure it had died out by the time we entered the narrow cubicle where Aura, lying down and half undressed, and I, standing by the screen, received the news that our little girl (Aura was magically sure it was a girl), who at that moment measured 7 millimetres, was in perfect health. On the screen was a sort of luminous universe, a confusing constellation in movement where, the woman in the white coat told us, our little girl was: that island in the sea – every one of her 7 millimetres – was her. Beneath the electric brightness of the screen I saw Aura smile, and I’m very afraid I won’t forget that smile as long as I live. Then I saw her put a finger on her belly to smear it with the blue gel the nurse had used. And then I saw her put her finger to her nose, to smell it and classify it according to the rules of her world, and seeing that was absurdly satisfying, like finding a coin in the street.

  I don’t remember having thought of Ricardo Laverde there, during the ultrasound, while Aura and I, perfectly astonished, listened to the sound of an accelerated little heartbeat. I don’t remember having thought of Ricardo Laverde later, while Aura and I listed girls’ names on the same white envelope in which the hospital had given us the written report of the ultrasound. I don’t remember having thought of Ricardo Laverde while reading this report out loud, discovering that our little girl was in a fundal intrauterine position and she was a normal oval shape, words that made Aura erupt into violent fits of laughter in the middle of the restaurant. I don’t remember having thought of Ricardo Laverde even when I made a mental inventory of all the fathers of daughters that I knew, a little to see if the birth of a daughter had a predictable effect on people, or to start looking for sources of advice or possible support, as if I guessed that what I was heading into was the most intense, most mysterious, most unpredictable experience I’d ever live through. Actually, I don’t remember with any certainty what thoughts passed through my head that day or the days that followed – while the world went through its slow and lazy passage from one year to the next – other than those of my impending paternity. I was expecting a daughter, at the age of twenty-six I was expecting a daughter, and faced with the vertigo of my youth the only thing that occurred to me was to think of my father, who at my age had already had me and my sister, and that was after my mother and he had already lost their first baby. I didn’t yet know that an old Polish novelist had spoken a long time before of the shadow-line, that moment when a young man becomes the proprietor of his own life, but that was what I was feeling while my little girl was growing inside Aura’s womb: I felt that I was about to become a new and unknown creature whose face I couldn’t manage to see, whose powers I could not measure, and I also felt that after the metamorphosis there would be no
turning back. To put it in other words and without so much mythology: I felt that something very important and also very fragile had become my responsibility, and I felt, improbably, that my abilities were equal to the challenge. It doesn’t surprise me that I barely have any vague notion of living in the real world during those days, for my fickle memory has drained them of all meaning or relevance other than that related to Aura’s pregnancy.

  On 31 December, on our way to a New Year’s Eve party, Aura was going through the list of names, a yellow sheet of paper with red horizontal lines and a green double margin, covered in underlinings and crossings-out and marginal comments, that we’d started carrying with us everywhere and would take out at those dead times – in bank queues, waiting rooms, Bogotá’s famous traffic jams – when other people read magazines or imagine other people’s lives or imagine improved versions of their own lives. Few names had survived from the long column of candidates, along with the future mother’s corresponding note or prejudice.