The Sound of Things Falling

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  ‘Who killed him?’

  ‘Oh, if only I knew. I don’t know, I don’t know who killed him, when he was so nice. One of the nicest people I’ve known, I swear. Even if he might have done bad things.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘That I don’t know,’ said Consu. ‘He must’ve done something.’

  ‘He must’ve done something,’ I repeated.

  ‘Anyway, what does it matter now,’ said Consu. ‘Or is finding out going to bring him back?’

  ‘Well, no,’ I said. ‘Where is he buried?’

  ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘I don’t know. To pay a visit. Take him flowers. What was the funeral like?’

  ‘Small. I organized it, of course. I was the closest thing Ricardo had to a relative.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘His wife had just been killed.’

  ‘Ah,’ Consu said. ‘You know a few things too, who would have thought.’

  ‘She was coming to spend Christmas with him. He’d had this absurd picture taken to give to her.’

  ‘Absurd? Why absurd? I thought it was sweet.’

  ‘It was an absurd picture.’

  ‘The picture with the pigeons,’ said Consu.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The picture with the pigeons.’ And then, ‘It must have had to do with that.’

  ‘What did?’

  ‘What he was listening to. I’ve always thought that what he was listening to had something to do with her, with his wife. I imagine maybe a recorded letter, I don’t know, a poem she liked.’

  For the first time, Consu smiled. ‘You imagined that?’

  ‘I don’t know, something like that.’ And then, I don’t know why, I lied or exaggerated. ‘I’ve spent two and a half years thinking about that, it’s funny how a dead person can take up so much space even when we didn’t even know them. Two and a half years thinking about Elena de Laverde. Or Elena Fritts, or whatever her name was. Two and a half years,’ I said. I felt good saying it.

  I don’t know what Consu saw in my face, but her expression changed, and even her way of sitting changed.

  ‘Tell me one thing,’ she said, ‘but tell me the truth. Did you like him?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Were you fond of him?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I was very fond of him.’

  That wasn’t true either, of course. Life hadn’t given us the time for affection, and what was driving me was neither sentiment nor emotion, but the intuition we sometimes have that some events have shaped our lives more than they should or appear to have. But I’ve learned very well that these subtleties don’t cut any ice in the real world, and must often be sacrificed, tell the other person what the other person wants to hear, don’t get too honest (honesty is inefficient, it gets you nowhere). I looked at Consu and I saw a lonely woman, as lonely as I am. ‘Very much,’ I repeated. ‘I was very fond of him.’

  ‘OK,’ she said, standing up. ‘Wait here, I’m going to show you something.’

  She disappeared for a few moments. I could follow her movements by their sounds, the shuffling of her flip-flops, the brief exchange with her tenant – ‘It’s late, papito’; ‘Ay, Doña Consu, don’t stick your nose into what’s none of your business’ – and for a moment I thought our chat had finished and the next thing would be the boy with the sparse moustache asking me to leave with some affected phrase, I’ll see you to the door or Thank you for your visit, señor. But then I saw her coming back looking distracted, glancing at the nails of her left hand: once again the little girl I’d seen at the door to her house. In the other hand (her fingers made themselves delicate to hold it, as if it were a sick pet) she was carrying a football too small to be a football and that very soon revealed itself to be an old radio in the shape of a football. Two of the black hexagons were speakers; in the top part was a little window showing the cassette player; in the cassette player was a black cassette. A black cassette with an orange label. On the label, a single word: BASF.

  ‘It’s just side A,’ Consu told me. ‘When you finish listening to it, leave it all beside the stove. There where the matches are. And make sure the door’s closed properly when you leave.’

  ‘Just a moment, one moment,’ I said. Questions were flooding my mouth. ‘You have this?’

  ‘I have this.’

  ‘How did you get it? Aren’t you going to listen to it with me?’

  ‘It’s what they call personal effects,’ she said. ‘The police brought me everything Ricardo had in his pockets. And no, I’m not going to listen to it. I know it off by heart, and I don’t want to hear it any more, this cassette has nothing to do with Ricardo. And really it has nothing to do with me either. Strange, isn’t it? One of my most cherished possessions, and it’s got nothing to do with my life.’

  ‘One of your most cherished possessions,’ I repeated.

  ‘You know how people get asked what they’d take from their house if it was on fire. Well, I’d take this cassette. It must be because I never had children, and there aren’t any photo albums here or anything like that.’

  ‘The boy I met at the door?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘He’s not family?’

  ‘He’s a tenant,’ said Consu, ‘like any other.’ She thought for a moment and added, ‘My tenants are my family.’

  With those words (and with a perfect sense of melodrama) she went out the front door and left me alone.

  What was on the recording was a dialogue in English between two men: talking about weather conditions, which were good, and then talking about work. One of the men explained to the other the regulation about the number of hours they were allowed to fly before their obligatory rest. The microphone (if it was a microphone) picked up a constant buzzing and, over the white noise of the buzzing, a shuffling of papers.

  ‘I got this chart,’ said the first man.

  ‘Well, you see what you come up with,’ said the second. I’ll watch the plane and the radio. OK?’

  ‘OK. All I see on this little chart they handed out is duty-on time, but it doesn’t say anything about rest period.’

  ‘That’s another very confusing thing.’

  I remember very well having listened to the conversation for several minutes – all my attention focused on finding a reference to Laverde – before establishing, half disconcerted and half perturbed, that the people talking had nothing at all to do with Ricardo Laverde’s death, and, what’s more, that Ricardo Laverde wasn’t mentioned there at any moment. One of the men started to talk about the 136 miles to go to the VOR, of the 32,000 feet they had to descend, and they had to slow down as well, so they might as well get started. At that moment the other man says the words that change everything: ‘Bogotá, American nine six five request descent.’ And it seemed unbelievable that it had taken me so long to comprehend that in a few minutes this flight would crash into El Diluvio, and that among the dead would be the woman who was coming to spend the holidays with Ricardo Laverde.

  ‘American Airlines operations at Cali, this is American nine six five, do you read?’

  ‘Go ahead, American nine six five, this is Cali ops.’

  ‘All right, Cali. We will be there in just about twenty-five minutes from now.’

  This was what Ricardo Laverde had been listening to shortly before being murdered: the black box recording of the flight on which his wife had died. I suffered the revelation like a punch, with the same loss of balance, the same upheaval of my immediate world. But how had he got hold of it? I then wondered. Was that possible, requesting the recording of a crashed flight and obtaining it like you might obtain, I don’t know, a document from the Land Registry? Did Laverde speak English, or at least did he understand enough to listen to and understand and regret – yes, especially regret – that conversation? Or maybe it wasn’t necessary to understand any of it to regret it, because nothing in the conversation referred to Laverde’s wife: was not the awareness, the terrible awareness, of the proximity
between these two pilots speaking and one of their passengers regrettable enough? Two and a half years later, those questions remained unanswered. Now the captain asked about the arrival gate (it was number two), and now the runway (it was zero one), now he put on the headlights because there was a lot of visual traffic in the area, now they were talking about a position 47 miles north of Rio Negro and looking for it on the flight plan . . . And now, finally, came the announcement over the loudspeaker: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have begun our descent.’

  They’ve begun the descent. One of those ladies is Elena Fritts, who’s coming from seeing her sick mother in Miami, or from her grandmother’s funeral, or simply from visiting her friends (from spending Thanksgiving with them). No, it’s her mother, her sick mother. Elena Fritts is perhaps thinking of her sick mother, worrying about having left her, wondering if leaving had been the right thing to do. She’s also thinking about Ricardo Laverde, her husband. Is she thinking about her husband? She’s thinking about her husband, who’s been released from prison. ‘I’d like to wish everyone a very, very happy holiday and a healthy and prosperous 1996. Thank you for flying with us.’ Elena Fritts thinks about Ricardo Laverde. She thinks that now they can pick up their life where they left off. Meanwhile, in the cabin, the captain offers the first officer some peanuts. ‘No thank you,’ says the first officer. The captain says, ‘Pretty night, huh?’ And the first officer, ‘Yeah it is, looking nice out here.’ Then they address the control tower, request permission to descend to a lower altitude, the tower tells them to descend to flight level two zero zero, and then the captain says, with a heavy American accent, ‘Feliz Navidad, señorita.’

  What is Elena Fritts thinking about back in her seat? I imagine her, I don’t know why, sitting in a window seat. I’ve imagined that moment a thousand times, a thousand times I’ve reconstructed it like a stage designer constructs a scene, and I’ve filled it with speculations about everything: from what Elena Fritts might be wearing – a pale blue light blouse and shoes without stockings – to her opinions and prejudices. In the image I’ve formed and that’s imposed itself on me, the window is on her left; to her right, a sleeping passenger (hairy arms, jagged snoring). The seatback table is open; Elena Fritts had wanted to put it up when the captain announced the descent, but no one’s come past yet to collect her little plastic glass. Elena Fritts looks out the window and sees a clear sky; she doesn’t know her plane is going down to 20,000 feet; it doesn’t matter that she doesn’t know. She’s tired: it’s past nine at night, and Elena Fritts has been travelling since early morning, because her mother’s house is not in Miami itself, but in a suburb. Or even in some completely other place, Fort Lauderdale, for example, or Coral Springs, one of those small cities in Florida that are more like gigantic geriatric homes, where the old people from all across the country move to spend their final years far from the cold and the stress and the resentful eyes of their children. So Elena Fritts had to get up early this morning; a neighbour who had to go to Miami anyway has given her a lift to the airport, and Elena has had to cover one or two or three hours with him on those straight highways famous the world over for their anaesthetic powers. Now she’s only thinking about getting to Cali, catching her connection on time, getting to Bogotá as tired as passengers who take this flight to catch this connection have always arrived, but happier than the other passengers, because a man who loves her is waiting for her there. She thinks of that and then of taking a nice shower and going to bed. Down below, in Cali, a voice says, ‘American nine six five, distance now?’

  ‘Uh, what did you want, sir?’

  ‘Distance DME.’

  ‘OK,’ says the captain, ‘the distance from, uh, Cali is, uh, 38.’

  ‘Where are we?’ asks the first officer. ‘We’re going out to . . .’

  ‘Let’s go right to, uh, Tuluá first of all, OK?’

  ‘Yeah. Where we headed?’

  ‘I don’t know. What’s this? What happened here?’

  The Boeing 757 had descended 3,000 feet turning to the right first and then to the left, but Elena Fritts doesn’t notice. It’s night-time, a dark though clear night, and below the contours of the mountains can already be seen. In the little plastic window Elena sees the reflection of her face, wonders what she’s doing here, if it had been a mistake to come to Colombia, if her marriage can really be repaired or if what her mother said in her tone of an apocalyptic fortune-teller was true, ‘Going back to him will be the last of your idealisms.’ Elena Fritts is prepared to accept her idealistic character, but that, she thinks, is no reason to condemn an entire life of mistaken decisions: idealists also get it right occasionally. The lights go out, the face in the window disappears, and Elena Fritts thinks that she doesn’t care what her mother says: not for anything in the world would she have forced Ricardo to spend his first Christmas Eve in freedom on his own.

  ‘Just doesn’t look right on mine,’ says the captain. ‘I don’t know why.’

  ‘Left turn. So you want a left turn back around?’

  ‘Naw . . . Hell no, let’s press on to . . .’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Tuluá.’

  ‘That’s a right.’

  ‘Where’re we going? Come to the right now. Let’s go to Cali first of all. We got fucked up here, didn’t we?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘How did we get fucked up here? Come to the right, right now, to the right, right now.’

  Elena Fritts, sitting in her economy-class seat, doesn’t know that something’s going wrong. If she had any aeronautical knowledge she might find the changes in the route suspicious, she could have recognized that the pilots have deviated from the established course. But no: Elena Fritts does not know anything about aeronautics, and doesn’t imagine that descending to less than 10,000 feet in mountainous terrain can entail risks if one doesn’t know the zone. What is she thinking about then?

  What is Elena Fritts thinking about a minute before her death?

  The cockpit alarm sounds: ‘Terrain, terrain,’ says an electronic voice. But Elena Fritts doesn’t hear it: the alarms don’t sound where she is seated, nor does she sense the dangerous proximity of the mountain. The crew turns up the power, but doesn’t disengage the brakes. The plane lifts its nose briefly. None of this is enough.

  ‘Oh shit,’ says the pilot. ‘Pull up, baby.’

  What is Elena Fritts thinking about? Is she thinking about Ricardo Laverde? Is she thinking about the looming holiday season? Is she thinking about her children? ‘Shit,’ says the captain in the cockpit, but Elena Fritts can’t hear him. Do Elena Fritts and Ricardo Laverde have children? Where are those children, if they exist, and how had their lives been changed after their father’s absence? Do they know the reasons for that absence, have they grown up wrapped in a web of family lies, sophisticated myths, scrambled chronologies?

  ‘Up,’ says the captain.

  ‘It’s OK,’ says the first officer.

  ‘Pull up,’ says the captain. ‘Easy does it, easy.’ The automatic pilot has been disconnected. The stick shift begins to shake in the hands of the pilot, a sign that the plane’s speed is not enough to keep it up in the air. ‘More, more,’ says the captain.

  ‘OK,’ says the first officer.

  And the captain, ‘Up, up, up.’

  The siren sounds again.

  ‘Pull up,’ says the electronic voice.

  There is a faltering scream, or something that sounds like a scream. There is a sound that I cannot or have never been able to identify: a sound that’s not human or is more than human, the sound of lives being extinguished but also the sound of material things breaking. It’s the sound of things falling from on high, an interrupted and somehow also eternal sound, a sound that didn’t ever end, that kept ringing in my head from that very afternoon and still shows no sign of wanting to leave it, that is forever suspended in my memory, hanging in it like a towel on a hook.

  That sound is the last thi
ng heard in the cockpit of Flight 965.

  The noise sounds, and then the recording stops.

  It took me a long time to recover. There’s nothing as obscene as spying on a man’s last seconds: they should be secret, inviolable, they should die with the man who dies, and nevertheless, there in that kitchen in that old house in La Candelaria, the final words of the dead pilots came to form part of my experience, in spite of the fact that I didn’t know and still don’t know who those unfortunate men were, what they were called, what they saw when they looked in the mirror; those men, for their part, never knew of me, and yet their final moments now belong to me and will continue to belong to me. What right do I have? Their wives, their mothers, fathers and children haven’t heard these words that I’ve heard, and have perhaps lived through the last two and a half years wondering what their husband, or father or son had said before crashing into El Diluvio Mountain. I, who had no right to know, now know; they, to whom those voices belong by right, do not know. And I thought that I, deep down, had no right to listen to that death, because those men who died in the plane are strangers to me, and the woman who was travelling behind them is not, will never be, one of my dead.

  However, those sounds now form part of my auditory memory. Once the tape fell silent, once the noises of the tragedy gave way to static, I knew I would have preferred not to have listened to it, and I knew at the same moment that in my memory I would go on hearing it for ever. No, those are not my dead, I had no right to hear those words ( just as I probably have no right to reproduce them in this story, undoubtedly with some inaccuracies), but the words and the voices of the dead had already swallowed me like a whirlpool in a river swallows a tired animal. The recording also had the power to modify the past, for now Laverde’s tears were not the same, couldn’t be the same ones I’d witnessed in the Casa de Poesía: now they had a density they’d previously lacked, owing to the simple fact that I’d heard what he, sitting in that soft leather armchair, heard that afternoon. Experience, or what we call experience, is not the inventory of our pains, but rather the learned sympathy towards the pain of others.