The Sound of Things Falling

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  With time I have found out more about black boxes. I know, for example, that they’re not black, but orange. I know that aeroplanes carry them in the empennage – the structure we profane people call the tail – because they have a better chance of surviving an accident there. And yes, I know that black boxes survive: they can withstand 2,250 kilograms of pressure and temperatures of 1,100 degrees Celsius. When they fall into the sea, a transmitter is activated; the black box then begins to pulsate for thirty days. That’s how long the authorities have to find it, to discover the reasons for an accident, to ensure that nothing similar happens again, but I don’t think anyone considers that a black box might have other fates, to fall into hands that were not part of its plan. However, that’s what happened to me with Flight 965’s black box, which, having survived the accident, was magically transformed into a black cassette with an orange label and went through two owners before coming to form part of my memories. And that’s how this apparatus, invented to be the electronic memory of planes, has ended up turning into a definitive part of my memory. There it is, and there’s nothing I can do. Forgetting it is not possible.

  I waited quite a while before leaving the house in La Candelaria, not just to listen to the recording again (which I did, not once, but twice more), but also because seeing Consu again had suddenly become urgent for me. What else did she know about Ricardo Laverde? Perhaps it had been in order not to find herself obliged to make revelations, not to be suddenly at the mercy of my interrogations, that she had left me alone in her house with her most precious possession. It was starting to get dark. I looked outside: the streetlights were already on, the white walls of the houses were changing colour. It was cold. I looked down the street to the corner, then to the other one. Consu was not around, I couldn’t see her anywhere, so I went back into the kitchen and inside a bigger bag I found a small paper bag the size of a half-bottle of aguardiente. My pen didn’t write very well on its surface, but I would have to make do.

  Dear Consu,

  I waited for almost an hour. Thank you for letting me hear the recording. I wanted to tell you in person, but it just wasn’t possible.

  Beneath these scribbled lines I wrote my complete name, that surname that’s so unusual in Colombia and that still provokes a certain timidity when I write it depending on the people, for there are many who distrust a person in my country if it’s necessary to spell out their surname. Then I smoothed out the bag with my hands and left it on top of the tape recorder, with one of its corners trapped by the cassette door. And I went out into the city with a mixture of sensations in my chest and a single certainty: I didn’t want to go home; I wanted to keep to myself what had just happened to me, the secret and its revelation that I’d just witnessed. I thought that I was never going to be as close to Ricardo Laverde’s life as I had been there, in his house, during the minutes the black box recording had lasted, and I didn’t want that curious exaltation to dissipate, so I went down 7th Avenue and began to walk around downtown Bogotá, passing through Bolivár Plaza and continuing north, mingling with the people on the always packed pavement and letting myself be pushed by those in the most hurry and bumping into those coming towards me, and looking for less busy smaller streets and even going into the craft market on 10th Street, I think it’s 10th, and during all that time thinking that I didn’t want to go home, that Aura and Leticia were part of a different world from the world inhabited by the memory of Ricardo Laverde and of course different from the world in which Flight 965 had crashed. No, I couldn’t go home yet. That’s what I was thinking as I arrived at 22nd Street, how to delay my arrival home in order to keep living in the black box, with the black box, and then my body made the decision for me and I ended up going into a porn cinema where a naked woman with long, very fair hair in the middle of a fully equipped kitchen lifted up her leg until the heel of her shoe got caught in the burners on top of the stove, and maintained this delicate balancing act while a fully dressed man penetrated her and gave her incomprehensible orders at the same time, the movements of his mouth never corresponding to the words his mouth was pronouncing.

  The Thursday before Easter in 1999, nine months after my encounter with Ricardo Laverde’s landlady and eight before the end of the millennium, I arrived at my apartment and found a woman’s voice and a phone number on the answering machine. ‘This is a message for Antonio Yammara,’ said the voice, a young but melancholy voice, a voice that was both tired and sensual, the voice of one of those women who has had to grow up prematurely. ‘Señora Consuelo Sandoval gave me your name. I looked up your number. I hope I’m not bothering you, but you’re in the phone book. Please call me. I need to speak with you.’ I dialled the number immediately. ‘I was waiting for your call,’ said the woman.

  ‘With whom am I speaking?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m sorry to trouble you,’ the woman said. ‘My name is Maya Fritts. I’m not sure if my surname means anything to you. Well, it’s not my original surname, it’s my mother’s, my real one is Laverde.’ And since I remained silent, the woman added what was by then unnecessary: ‘I’m the daughter of Ricardo Laverde. I need to ask you some things.’ I think I said something then, but it’s possible I simply repeated the name, the two names, her name and that of her father. Maya Fritts, Ricardo Laverde’s daughter, kept talking. ‘But listen, I live far away and I can’t go to Bogotá. It’s a long story. So the favour is a double favour, because I want to invite you to spend the day here, at my house, with me. I want you to come and talk to me about my father, to tell me everything you know. It’s a big favour, I know, but it’s warm here and the food’s good, I promise you won’t regret coming. So, it’s up to you, Señor Yammara. If you have a pencil and paper, I’ll tell you right now how to get here.’

  3

  The Gaze of Absent Ones

  At seven the next morning I found myself driving down 80th Street, having had nothing but a black coffee for breakfast, heading for the city’s western exit routes. It was an overcast and cold morning, and the traffic at that hour was already dense and even aggressive; but it didn’t take me too long to get to the outskirts of the city, where the urban landscapes change and the lungs perceive a sudden absence of contamination. The exit had changed over the years, wide, recently paved roads flaunting the brilliant white of their signposts, zebra crossings and intermittent lines on the tarmac. I don’t know how many times I made similar trips as a child, how many times I went up the mountains that surround the city to then make that precipitous descent, and thus pass in a matter of three hours from our cold and rainy 2,600 metres down into the Magdalena Valley, where the temperatures can approach 40 degrees Celsius in some ill-fated spots. That was the case in La Dorada, the city that marks the halfway point between Bogotá and Medellín and that often serves as a stop or meeting point for those who make that trip, or occasionally even as a place for a swim. On the outskirts of La Dorada, somewhere that sounded quite separate from the city, from the hustle and bustle of its roads and heavy traffic, lived Maya Fritts. But now, instead of thinking of her and the strange circumstances that had brought us together, I spent the four hours of the trip thinking of Aura or, more specifically, about what had happened with Aura the previous night.

  After taking down Maya Fritts’s directions and ending up with a badly drawn map on the back of a piece of paper (on the other side were notes for one of my upcoming classes: we would discuss what right Antigone had to break the law in order to bury her brother), I had gone through the evening routine with Aura in the most peaceable way possible, the two of us making dinner while Leticia watched a movie, telling each other about our respective days, laughing, touching as we crossed paths in the narrow kitchen. Peter Pan, Leticia was very fond of that movie, and also The Jungle Book, and Aura had bought her two or three videos of The Muppets, less for our little girl’s pleasure than to satisfy her own private nostalgia, her affection for Count von Count, her glib contempt for Miss Piggy. But no, it wasn’t the Muppets that we could hea
r that evening from the television in our room, but one of those films. Peter Pan, yes: it was Peter Pan that was playing – ‘All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again,’ said the anonymous narrator – when Aura, wrapped in a red apron with an anachronistic image of Santa Claus, said without looking me in the eye, ‘I bought something. Remind me to show you later.’

  ‘What kind of something?’

  ‘Something,’ said Aura.

  She was stirring a saucepan on the stove, the extractor fan was on full blast and forced us to raise our voices, and the light from the hood bathed her face in a coppery tone. ‘You’re so lovely,’ I said. ‘I’ll never get used to it.’ She smiled, was about to say something, but at that moment Leticia appeared at the door, silent and discreet, with her chestnut hair still wet from her bath up in a ponytail. I picked her up from the floor, asked her if she was hungry, and the same coppery light shone on her face: her features were mine, not Aura’s, and that had always moved and disappointed me at the same time. That idea was strangely stuck in my head while we ate: that Leticia should be able to resemble Aura, she should have been able to inherit Aura’s beauty, and instead had inherited my rough features, my thick bones, my prominent ears. Maybe that’s why I was looking at her so closely as I took her to bed. I stayed with her a while in the darkness of her room, broken only by the small round nightlight that gives off a weak pastel-coloured light that changes its tone over the course of the night, so Leticia’s room is blue when she calls me because she’s had a nightmare, and can quite easily be pink or pale green when she calls me because she’s run out of water in her little bottle. Anyway: there in the coloured shadows, while Leticia fell asleep and the whisper of her breathing changed, I spied on her features and the genetic games in her face, all those proteins moving mysteriously to imprint my chin on hers, my hair colour in my little girl’s hair colour. And that’s what I was doing when the door opened a little and a sliver of light appeared and then Aura’s silhouette and her hand calling me.

  ‘Is she asleep?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She pulled me by the hand to the living room and we sat on the sofa. The table was already cleared and the dishwasher running in the kitchen, sounding like an old dying pigeon. (We didn’t usually spend time in the living room after dinner: we preferred to get into bed and watch some old American sitcom, something light and cheerful and soothing. Aura had got used to missing the evening news, and could joke about my boycott, but understood how seriously I took it. I didn’t watch the news, it was as simple as that. It would take me a long time to be able to endure it again, to allow my country’s news to invade my life again.) ‘Well, look,’ Aura said. Her hands disappeared behind the edge of the sofa and reappeared with a small package wrapped up in a sheet of newspaper. ‘For me?’ I said. ‘No, it’s not a present,’ she said. ‘Or it is, but for both of us. Shit, I don’t know, I don’t know how to do things like this.’ Embarrassment was not a feeling that often bothered Aura, but that’s what this was, embarrassment, that’s what her gestures were full of. The next thing was her voice (her nervous voice) explaining where she had bought the vibrator, how much it had cost, how she’d paid cash for it so there would be no record of this purchase anywhere, how she’d despised at that moment her many years of religious education that had made her feel, as she entered the shop on 19th Avenue, that very bad things were going to happen to her as punishment, that with this purchase she would end up earning a permanent place in hell. It was a purple apparatus with a creased texture, with more buttons and possibilities than I would have imagined, but it wasn’t the shape I’d assigned it in my overly literal imagination. I looked at it (there, sleeping in my hand) and Aura looked at me looking at it. I couldn’t keep the word consolador, which is also sometimes used for this object, from appearing in my mind: Aura as a woman in need of consoling, or Aura as a disconsolate woman. ‘What is it?’ I said. A question as stupid as questions get.

  ‘Well, it is what it is,’ said Aura. ‘It’s for us.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s not for us.’

  I stood up and dropped it on the glass-topped table and the apparatus bounced slightly (after all, it was made out of something springy). At another moment I would probably have been amused by the sound, but not there, not then. Aura grabbed my arm.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with it, Antonio, it’s for us.’

  ‘It’s not for us.’

  ‘You had an accident, that’s all, I love you,’ said Aura. ‘There’s nothing wrong, we’re together.’

  The purple vibrator sat there half lost among the ashtrays and coasters and coffee-table books, all chosen by Aura: Colombia from the Air, a big book on José Celestino Mutis and another recent one by an Argentine photographer about Paris (that one Aura hadn’t chosen, but had been given). I felt embarrassed, an absurd and childish embarrassment. ‘Do you need consoling?’ I said to Aura. My tone even surprised me.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s a consolador. Do you need consoling?’

  ‘Don’t do this, Antonio. We’re together. You had an accident and we’re together.’

  ‘The accident happened to me, don’t be an idiot,’ I said. ‘I was the one who was shot.’ I calmed down a little. ‘Sorry,’ I said. And then, ‘The doctor told me.’

  ‘But it was three years ago.’

  ‘That I shouldn’t worry, that the body knows how to do its things.’

  ‘Three years ago, Antonio. What’s happening now is something else. I love you and we’re together.’

  I didn’t say anything.

  ‘We can find a way,’ said Aura.

  I didn’t say anything.

  ‘There are so many couples,’ said Aura. ‘We’re not the only ones.’

  But I didn’t say anything. A light bulb somewhere must have blown at that moment, because the living room was suddenly a little darker, the sofa and the two chairs and the only painting – a couple of billiard players by Saturnino Ramírez who are playing, for reasons I’ve never managed to discover, in dark glasses – had lost their contours. I felt tired and in need of a painkiller. Aura had sat back down on the sofa and was now holding her face in her hands, but I don’t think she was crying. ‘I thought you would be pleased,’ she said. ‘I thought I was doing a good thing.’ I turned around and left her alone, maybe even mid-sentence, and I locked myself in our bathroom. In the narrow blue cupboard I looked for my pills, the little white plastic bottle and its red lid that Leticia had once chewed on till it broke, to our great alarm (it turned out she hadn’t found the pills hidden under the cotton, but a two- or three-year-old child is at risk all the time, the whole world is a danger to her). With water straight from the tap I took three pills, a bigger dose than recommended or advisable, but my size and weight allow me these excesses when the pain is very bad. Then I took a long shower, which always makes me feel better; by the time I returned to our room Aura was asleep or pretending to be asleep, and I endeavoured not to wake her or to maintain the convenient fiction. I undressed, lay down beside her but with my back to her, and then I don’t know anything else: I fell asleep immediately.

  It was very early, especially for a Good Friday, when I left the next morning. The light was not yet filling the air of the apartment. I wanted to think that was why, because of the general somnolence floating in the world, I didn’t wake anyone up to say goodbye. The vibrator was still on the table in the living room, coloured and plastic like a toy Leticia had lost there.

  Up by the Alto del Trigo a thick fog descended over the road, unexpectedly as if a cloud had lost its way, and the almost complete lack of visibility forced me to slow down so much that farmworkers on bicycles were overtaking me. The fog accumulated on the glass like dew, making it necessary to turn on the windscreen wipers even though it wasn’t raining, and shapes – the car in front, a couple of soldiers flanking the roadway with machine guns across their chests, a cargo mule
– emerged gradually from that milky soup that let no light through. I thought of low-flying planes: ‘Up, up, up.’ I thought of the fog and remembered the famous accident at El Tablazo, way back in the 1940s, but I didn’t remember whether the visibility at these treacherous altitudes had been to blame. ‘Up, up, up,’ I said to myself. And then, as I descended towards Guaduas, the fog lifted the same way it had fallen, and the sky suddenly opened and a wave of heat transformed the day: there was a burst of vegetation, a burst of fragrances, fruit stalls appeared at the side of the road. I began to sweat. When I opened the window at some point, to buy one of the cans of beer slowly warming up on top of a crate full of ice, my sunglasses misted up from the blast of heat. But the sweat was what bothered me most. My body’s pores were, suddenly, at the centre of my consciousness.

  I didn’t arrive in the area until past midday. After a traffic jam of almost an hour and a half near Guarinocito (a truck with a broken axle can be lethal on a two-lane highway with no hard shoulder), after the headlands arose on the horizon and my car entered the region of cattle ranches, I saw the rudimentary little school I was supposed to see, continued for the distance indicated beside a big white pipe bordering the road and turned right, towards the Magdalena River. I passed a metallic structure where once there had been a billboard, but that now, seen from far away, resembled a sort of giant abandoned corset (a few turkey vultures, perched on the struts, guarded the plot of land); I passed a trough where two cows were drinking, their bodies very close together, pushing and getting in each other’s way, their heads protected from the sun by a squalid aluminium roof. At the end of 300 metres of unpaved road, I found myself passing several groups of boys in shorts who shouted and laughed and raised a great cloud of dust as they ran. One of them stuck out a small brown hand with his thumb extended. I stopped, pulled the car onto the shoulder; now still, I felt again on my face and body the violent slap of the midday heat. I felt the humidity again; I sensed the smells. The child spoke first.