Martina (but it’s a tennis player’s name)
Carlota (but it’s an empress’s name)
We were on the highway, driving north, under the 100th Street bridge. There was an accident up ahead and the traffic was almost completely stopped. None of that seemed to matter to Aura, involved as she was in considerations about the name of our daughter. Somewhere I could hear the ambulance’s siren; I checked the rear-view mirror, trying to find the swirling red lights demanding a way through, making its way, but I couldn’t see anything.
That was when Aura said, ‘What about Leticia? I think one of my great-grandmothers or somebody was called Leticia.’
I repeated the name once or twice, its long vowels, its consonants that mixed vulnerability and strength.
‘Leticia,’ I said. ‘Yes, sounds right.’
So I was a changed man the first working day of the year, when I arrived at the 14th Street billiard club and bumped into Ricardo Laverde, and I remember very well feeling surprised by my own emotions: sympathy for him and his wife, Señora Elena Fritts, and an intense desire, more intense than I ever would have expected, for their encounter during the holidays to have had the best possible consequences. He’d already started his game, on another table, and I started to play on my own. Laverde didn’t look at me; he was treating me as if we’d just seen each other the previous night. At some point in the afternoon, I thought, the rest of the customers would start leaving, and the usual ones would end up finishing off the evening like in musical chairs. Ricardo Laverde and I would meet, play a little and then, with any luck, we’d resume the conversation we’d started before Christmas. But that didn’t happen. When he finished his game I saw him return his cue to the rack, saw him start walking towards the door, saw him change his mind, and saw him walking over to the table where I had just finished my shot. In spite of the profuse sweat on his forehead, in spite of the tiredness bathing his face, there was nothing in his greeting that worried me. ‘Happy New Year,’ he said from a distance, ‘how were your holidays?’ But he didn’t let me answer, or rather he interrupted my answer somehow, or there was something in his tone of voice or in his gestures that let me know the question was rhetorical, one of those vacuous courtesies always exchanged by bogotanos, with no expectation of a sincere or considered response. Laverde took an old-fashioned black cassette tape out of his pocket, with an orange sticker on it and on the sticker the letters BASF. He showed it to me without moving his arm very far from his body, like someone offering some illegal merchandise, emeralds in the plaza, a folded paper of drugs beside the criminal court.
‘Hey, Yammara, I have to listen to this,’ he told me. ‘You wouldn’t know anybody who could lend me a cassette player?’
‘Doesn’t Don José have one?’
‘No, he hasn’t got anything,’ he said. ‘And this is urgent.’ He rapped on the plastic case a couple of times. ‘And it’s private as well.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘there is a place a couple of blocks away, couldn’t hurt to ask.’
I was thinking of the Casa de Poesía, the only plausible option in the neighbourhood at that time of day. It was the former residence of the poet José Asunción Silva, now converted into a cultural centre where they hold readings and workshops. I used to go there quite often all through my degree. One of its rooms was a unique place in Bogotá: there, all sorts of word-struck people would go to sit on soft leather sofas, near fairly modern stereo equipment, and listen to now legendary recordings: Borges reading Borges, García Márquez reading García Márquez, León de Greiff reading León de Greiff. Silva and his work were on everybody’s lips those days, for in that barely begun 1996 the centenary of his suicide was going to be commemorated. ‘This year,’ I’d read in an opinion piece by a well-known journalist, ‘statues will be raised to him all over the city, and all the politicians will mention his name, and everyone will wander around reciting his “Nocturne”, and everybody will take him flowers at the Casa de Poesía. And Silva, wherever he might be, will find this curious: this prudish society that humiliated him, that pointed their fingers at him every chance they got, paying homage to him now as if he were a head of state. The ruling class of our country, haughty charlatans, have always liked to appropriate culture. And that’s what’s going to happen with Silva: they are going to appropriate his memory. And his real readers are going to spend the whole year wondering why the hell they don’t leave him alone.’ It’s not impossible that I had that column in mind (in some dark part of my mind, deep down, very deep, in the archive of useless things) at the moment I chose that place to take Laverde.
We walked the two blocks without saying a word, with our eyes on the broken paving stones or on the dark green hills that rose in the distance, bristling with eucalyptus and telephone poles like the scales on a Gila monster. When we got to the entrance and walked up the stone steps, Laverde let me go in first: he’d never been in such a place, and he acted with the misgivings, the suspicions, of an animal in a dangerous situation. There were two high-school students in the room with the sofas, a couple of teenagers listening to the same recording and every once in a while looking at each other and laughing indecently, and a man in a suit and tie, with a faded leather briefcase on his lap, snoring shamelessly. I explained the situation to the woman at the desk, who was no doubt used to exotic requests, and she looked me over through squinting eyes, seemed to recognize me or identify me as a person who’d been there many times before, and held out her hand.
‘Let’s see, then,’ she said unenthusiastically. ‘What is it you want to play?’
Laverde handed her the cassette like a soldier surrendering his weapon, with fingers visibly smudged with blue billiard chalk. He went to sit down, submissive as I’d never seen him before, in the armchair the woman pointed him to; he put on the headphones, leaned back and closed his eyes. Meanwhile, I was looking for something to occupy my time while I waited, and my hand picked up Silva’s poems as it might have chosen any other recording (I must have given in to the superstition of anniversaries). I sat down in my chair, picked up the corresponding headphones, adjusted them over my ears with that feeling of putting myself beyond or closer to real life, of starting to live in another dimension. And when the ‘Nocturne’ began to play, when a voice I couldn’t identify – a baritone that verged on melodrama – read that first line that every Colombian has pronounced aloud at least once, I noticed that Ricardo Laverde was crying. One night all heavy with perfume, said the baritone over a piano accompaniment, and a few steps away from me Ricardo Laverde, who wasn’t listening to the lines I was listening to, wiped the back of his hand across his eyes, then his whole sleeve, with murmurs and music of wings. Ricardo Laverde’s shoulders began to shake; he hung his head, brought his hands together like someone praying. And your shadow, lean and languid, said Silva in the voice of the melodramatic baritone, And my shadow, cast by the moonbeams. I didn’t know whether to look at Laverde or not, whether to leave him alone in his sorrow or go and ask him what was wrong. I remember having thought that I could at least take off my headphones, a way like any other of opening a space between Laverde and me, of inviting him to speak to me; and I remember deciding against it, having chosen the safety and silence of my recording, where the melancholy of Silva’s poem would sadden me without putting me at risk. I guessed that Laverde’s sadness was full of risks, I was afraid of what that sadness might contain, but my intuition didn’t go far enough to understand what had happened. I didn’t remember the woman Laverde had been waiting for, I didn’t remember her name, I didn’t associate him with the accident at El Diluvio, but I stayed where I was, in my chair and with the headphones on, trying not to interrupt Ricardo Laverde’s sadness, and I even closed my eyes so I wouldn’t bother him with my indiscreet gaze, to allow him a certain privacy in the middle of that public place. In my head, and only in my head, Silva said: And they were one single long shadow. In my self-contained world, where all was full of the baritone voice and Silva’s words an
d the decadent piano music that enveloped them, a time went by that lengthens in my memory. Those who listen to poetry know how this can happen, time kept by the lines of verse like a metronome and at the same time stretching and dispersing and confusing us like dreamtime.
When I opened my eyes Laverde was no longer there.
‘Where did he go?’ I said with the headphones still on. My voice reached me from afar, and my absurd reaction was to remove the headphones and repeat the question, as if the woman behind the desk wouldn’t have heard it properly the first time.
‘Who?’ she asked.
‘My friend,’ I said. It was the first time I described him as such, and I suddenly felt ridiculous: no, Laverde was not my friend. ‘The guy who was sitting there.’
‘Oh, I don’t know, he didn’t say,’ she replied. Then she turned away, checked the sound equipment; mistrustfully, as if I were complaining about something she’d done, she added, ‘And I gave the cassette back to him, OK? You can ask him.’
I left the room and looked quickly through the building. The house where José Asunción Silva had spent his final days had a bright patio in the middle, separated from the corridors that framed it in narrow glass windows that wouldn’t have existed in the poet’s time and now protected the visitors from the rain: my footsteps, in those silent corridors, resounded without echoes. Laverde was not in the library, or sitting on the wooden benches, or in the conference room. He must have left. I walked towards the narrow front door to the house, past a security guard in a brown uniform (he wore a tilted cap, like a thug in a movie), past the room where the poet had shot himself in the chest a hundred years earlier, and as I came out onto 14th Street I saw that the sun was now hidden behind the buildings of 7th Avenue, saw that the yellow streetlights were timidly starting to come on, and saw Ricardo Laverde, in his long coat, his head down, walking two blocks from where I was, already almost at the billiard club. I thought: And they were one single long shadow, absurdly the line came back to mind; and in that same instant I saw a motorbike that had been still until now on the pavement. Maybe I saw it because its two riders had made a barely perceptible movement: the feet of the one on the back rising up onto the stirrups, his hand disappearing inside his jacket. Both of them were wearing helmets, of course; and the visors of both, of course, were dark, a large rectangular eye in the middle of the large head.
I shouted to Laverde, but not because I already knew what was going to happen to him, not because I wanted to warn him of anything: at that moment my only ambition was to catch up to him, ask him if he was all right, perhaps offer my help. But Laverde didn’t hear me. I started to take bigger steps, avoiding people walking along the narrow pavement, which at that point is almost knee-high, stepping down onto the road if necessary to walk faster, and thinking unthinkingly: And they were one single long shadow, or rather tolerating the line like a jingle we can’t get out of our head. At the corner of 4th Avenue, the dense afternoon traffic progressed slowly in a single lane, towards the exit onto Jiménez. I found a space to cross the street in front of a green bus, whose headlights, just turned on, had brought to life the dust of the street, the fumes from an exhaust pipe, an incipient drizzle. That’s what I was thinking about, the rain I’d have to protect myself from in a little while, when I caught up to Laverde, or rather I got so close to him I could see how the rain was darkening the shoulders of his overcoat. ‘Everything’s going to be all right,’ I said: a stupid thing to say, because I didn’t know what everything was, much less whether or not it was going to be all right. Ricardo looked at me with his face contorted in pain. ‘Elena was there,’ he told me. ‘Was where?’ I asked. ‘On the plane,’ he answered. I think in a brief moment of confusion Aura had the name Elena, or I imagined Elena with Aura’s face and pregnant body, and I think at that moment I experienced a new feeling that couldn’t have been fear, not yet, but was quite similar to it. Then I saw the motorbike dropping down onto the road like a bucking horse, saw it accelerate to approach like a tourist looking for an address, and at the precise moment when I grabbed Laverde’s arm, when my hand clutched at the sleeve of his coat by his left elbow, I saw the faceless heads looking at us and the pistol pointed towards us as naturally as a metal prosthesis, and saw two shots, and heard the explosions and felt the sudden tremor in the air. I remember having raised my arm to protect myself just before feeling the sudden weight of my body. My legs no longer held me up. Laverde fell to the ground and I fell with him, two bodies falling without a sound, and people started to shout and a continuous buzzing appeared in my ears. A man came over to Laverde’s body to try to lift him up, and I remember the surprise I felt when another came over to help me. I’m fine, I said or remember having said, there’s nothing wrong with me. From the ground I saw someone else jump out into the road waving his arms like a castaway and standing in front of a white pick-up truck that was turning the corner. I said Ricardo’s name a couple of times; I noticed a warmth in my belly; the possibility occurred to me fleetingly that I’d wet myself, and I immediately discovered that it wasn’t piss soaking through my grey T-shirt. A short while later I lost consciousness, but the last image that I have is still quite clear in my memory: it’s that of my body lifted into the air and the effort of the men who put me into the back of the truck, who put me down beside Laverde like one shadow next to another, leaving on the bodywork a bloodstain, which at that hour, with so little light, was as black as the night sky.
2
Never One of My Dead
I know, although I don’t remember, that the bullet passed through my gut without touching any organs but burning nerves and tendons and finally lodging itself in my hip bone a few inches from my spinal column. I know I lost a lot of blood and that, in spite of the supposed universality of my blood type, the stocks of it were low in the San José Hospital at the time, or its demand on the part of Bogotá’s afflicted society was too high, and my father and my sister had to donate some to save my life. I know I was lucky. Everyone told me so as soon as it was possible, and besides, I know, I know in an instinctive way. The notion of my luck, this I remember, was one of the first manifestations of my recovered consciousness. I don’t remember, however, the three days of surgery: they have disappeared completely, obliterated by the intermittent anaesthesia. I don’t remember the hallucinations, but I do remember that I had them; I don’t remember having fallen out of bed due to the abrupt movements that one of them provoked, and, although I don’t remember that they tied me down in the bed to prevent that from happening again, I do remember quite well the violent claustrophobia, the terrible awareness of my vulnerability. I remember the fever, the sweat that soaked my whole body at night and obliged the nurses to change the sheets, the damage I did to my throat and the corners of my very dry lips when I tried to yank out the respirator tube; I remember the sound of my own voice when I screamed and I know, although I don’t remember this either, that my screams disturbed the rest of the patients on the floor. The patients or their relatives complained, the nurses ended up moving me to another room, and in this new room, during a brief moment of lucidity, I asked about Ricardo Laverde and found out (I don’t remember from whom) that he had died. I don’t think I felt sad, or maybe I’m confusing, and always confused, the sadness at the news with the tears produced by pain, and anyway I know that there, busy as I was with the task of surviving, seeing the gravity of my own situation in the tattered expressions of those around me, I couldn’t have thought much about the dead man. I don’t remember, in any case, having blamed him for what had happened to me.
I did later. I cursed Ricardo Laverde, cursed the moment we met, and didn’t for a second even consider that Laverde might not have been directly responsible for my misfortune. I was glad he’d died: I hoped, as compensation for my own pain, that he’d had a painful death. Between the mists of my faltering consciousness I responded in monosyllables to my parents’ questions. You met him at the billiard club? Yes. You never knew what he did, if he was up to so
mething fishy? No. Why was he killed? Don’t know. Why was he killed, Antonio? I don’t know, I don’t know. Antonio, why was he killed? I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know. The question was repeated insistently and my answer was always the same, and it soon became obvious that the question didn’t require an answer: it was more like a lament. The same night Ricardo Laverde was gunned down another sixteen murders were committed in diverse parts of the city and using diverse methods, and the ones that have stuck in my mind are that of Neftalí Gutiérrez, a taxi driver, beaten to death with a wheel wrench, and that of Jairo Alejandro Niño, an automotive mechanic, who received nine machete blows in a vacant lot on the west side. The Laverde crime was one of many, and it was almost arrogant or pretentious to believe that we were due the luxury of an answer.
‘But what had he done to get himself killed?’ my father asked me.
‘I don’t know,’ I told him. ‘He hadn’t done anything.’
‘He must’ve done something,’ he’d say.
‘But what does it matter now,’ my mother would say.
‘Well, yes,’ said my father. ‘What does it matter now.’
As I began surfacing, my hatred for Laverde gave way to a hatred for my own body and what my body was feeling. And that hatred that had myself as its object transformed into a hatred for everyone else, and one day I decided I didn’t want to see anybody, and I expelled my family from the hospital and forbade them from coming back to see me until my situation improved. ‘But we worry,’ said my mother, ‘we want to take care of you.’ ‘But I don’t. I don’t want you to take care of me. I don’t want anyone taking care of me. I want you all to go.’ ‘What if you need something? What if we can help you and we’re not here?’ ‘I don’t need anything. I need to be alone. I want to be alone.’ I want to sample silence, I thought then: a line from León de Greiff, another of the poets I used to listen to at Silva’s house (poetry accosts us at the most unexpected moments). Quiero catar silencio, non curo de compaña, I want to sample silence, I won’t be cured by companionship. Leave me alone. Yes, that’s what I said to my parents. Leave me alone.
The Sound of Things Falling Page 4