The Sound of Things Falling

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  The letter goes on:

  Well, let me tell you a bit about where I am and where I’m going to be for the next two weeks. There are three mountain ranges in Colombia: the Eastern Cordillera, the Central and (you guessed it) the Western Cordillera. Bogotá is 8,500 feet up in the first. What my train did was descend the mountain down to the Magdalena River, the largest in the country. The river runs through a beautiful valley, one of the prettiest landscapes I’ve ever seen in my life, a real paradise. The journey here was also impressive. I’ve never before seen so many birds and so many flowers. How I envied Uncle Philip! I envied his knowledge, of course, but also his binoculars. He’d love it here! Tell him I send my best regards.

  So, let me tell you about the river. In times gone by passenger steamships would come down from the Mississippi and even from London, that’s how important the river was. And there are still ships here that look straight out of Huckleberry Finn, I’m not exaggerating. My train arrived in a town called La Dorada, which is where I’m going to be stationed permanently. But according to the Peace Corps’ arrangements the volunteers have to do three weeks of field training in a different place from our permanent site, in the company of another volunteer. Theoretically the other volunteer should have more experience, but that’s not always the case. I’ve been lucky. They placed me in a municipality a few miles from the river, in the foothills of the Cordillera. It’s called Caparrapí, a name that seems designed to make me look ridiculous trying to pronounce it. It’s hot and very humid, but liveable. And the volunteer I’ve been assigned to is a terribly nice guy and knows a lot of things, particularly things I’m entirely ignorant of. His name’s Mike Barbieri, he’s a University of Chicago drop-out. One of those guys who makes you feel at ease immediately, two seconds and you feel like you’ve known him your whole life. There are some people who are just naturally charismatic. Life in other countries is easier for them, I’ve noticed. These are the people who eat up the world, who aren’t going to have any problems surviving. If only I could be more like that.

  Barbieri had already been in the Peace Corps in Colombia for two years, but before that he’d spent another two in Mexico, working with campesinos between Ixtapa and Puerto Vallarta and before Mexico he’d spent several months in the poor neighbourhoods of Managua. He was tall, wiry, fair but tanned, and it wasn’t unusual to find him shirtless (a wooden crucifix hanging invariably round his neck), wearing Bermuda shorts and leather sandals and nothing else. He’d welcomed Elaine with a beer in one hand and in the other a plate of small arepas of a texture that was new to her. Elaine had never met anyone so talkative and at the same time so sincere, and in a few minutes she found out he was about to turn twenty-seven, his team was the Cubs, he hated aguardiente and that that was a problem here, that he was afraid, no, absolutely terrified of scorpions and he advised Elaine to buy open shoes and check them carefully every morning before putting them on. ‘Are there a lot of scorpions here?’ asked Elaine. ‘There can be, Elaine,’ said Barbieri in the voice of a fortune-teller. ‘There can be.’

  The apartment had two bedrooms, a living room and hardly any furniture, and was on the second floor of a house with sky-blue walls. On the first floor there was a shop with two aluminium tables and a counter – caramel candies, corn cakes, Pielroja cigarettes – and behind the shop, where as if by magic the world became a domestic one, lived the couple who ran it. Their surname was Villamil; their age was somewhere above sixty. ‘My señores,’ said Barbieri when he introduced them to Elaine, and, realizing that his señores hadn’t understood the name of the new tenant, he told them in good Spanish: ‘She’s a gringa, like me, but she’s called Elena.’ And that’s how the Villamils referred to her: that’s what they called her to ask if she had enough water, or to get her to come and say hello to the drunks. Elaine put up with it stoically, missed the Laverdes’ house, was ashamed of her spoilt little girl thoughts. In any case, she avoided the Villamils whenever possible. A concrete stairway on the exterior wall of the building allowed her to leave without being seen. Barbieri, affable to the point of impertinence, never used it: there was never a day he didn’t stop in at the shop to tell them about his day, his achievements and failures, to hear the anecdotes the Villamils and even their customers had to tell, and to try to explain to those old campesinos the situation of the blacks in the United States or the theme of a song by The Mamas & the Papas. Elaine, in spite of herself, watched him do this and admired him. She took longer than she should have to discover why: in a way, this extroverted and curious man, who looked at her brazenly and talked as if the world owed him something, reminded her of Ricardo Laverde.

  For twenty days, the twenty hot days that her rural apprenticeship lasted, Elaine worked shoulder to shoulder with Mike Barbieri, but also beside the local leader of Acción Comunal, a short, quiet man whose moustache covered his harelip. He had a simple name, for a change: he was called Carlos, just Carlos, and there was something hermetic or menacing in that simplicity, in that lack of a surname, in the phantasmal way he’d appear to collect them in the mornings and disappear again in the afternoons, after dropping them off. Elaine and Barbieri, out of some sort of previous agreement, had lunch at Carlos’s house, an interregnum between two intensive work sessions with the campesinos in the surrounding villages, interviews with local politicians, ever fruitless negotiations with landowners. Elaine discovered that all the work in the countryside was done by talking: to teach the campesinos to raise chickens with tender flesh (keeping them in enclosures instead of letting them run around wild), to convince the politicians to build a school using local resources (since nobody expected anything of the central government) or to try to get the rich to see them as more than simply anticommunist crusaders, they first had to sit round a table and drink, drink until they didn’t understand the words any more. ‘So I spend my days on the backs of decrepit horses or talking to half-drunk people,’ Elaine wrote to her grandparents. ‘But I think I’m learning, although without really noticing. Mike explained that in Colombian Spanish this is called cogerle el tiro of something. Understanding how things work, knowing how to get them done, all that. Getting the hang of things, we might say. That’s what I’m doing. Oh, one little thing: don’t write to me here any more, send the next letter to Bogotá. I’m going back to Bogotá soon and will spend a month there on the final details of my training. Then to La Dorada. There I start the serious stuff.’

  Her last weekend there Ricardo Laverde arrived. He came by surprise, arranging it all himself, taking the train to La Dorada on his own and from there getting to Caparrapí by bus and then asking around for directions, describing the gringos whose existence, of course, everybody for miles around knew about. It didn’t strike Elaine as at all strange that Ricardo Laverde and Mike Barbieri should get along so well: Barbieri gave Elaine the afternoon off to show her bogotano boyfriend around (that’s what he called him, her novio bogotano) and said he’d see them in the evening, for dinner. And that night, in a matter of hours – hours spent, truth be told, in the middle of a field, around a campfire and in the presence of a jug of guarapo – Ricardo and Barbieri discovered how much they had in common, because Barbieri’s father was an airmail pilot and Ricardo didn’t like aguardiente, and they hugged and talked about planes and Ricardo opened his eyes wide as he talked about his courses and his instructors, and then Elaine interrupted to praise Ricardo and repeat the praise others had offered of his talent as a pilot, and then Ricardo and Mike talked about Elaine right in front of her, what a nice girl she was and how pretty, yes, pretty too, with those eyes, said Mike, yes, especially the eyes, said Ricardo and told secrets as if instead of having just met they’d roomed together in a frat house, and sang For she’s a jolly good fellow and regretted in tandem that Elaine had to go to another site, this site should be your site, fuck La Dorada, fuck The Golden One, fuck it all the way, and they drank a toast to Elaine and to the Peace Corps, for we’re all jolly good fellows, which nobody can deny. And the next day,
in spite of the hangovers, Mike Barbieri accompanied them in person to catch the bus. The three of them arrived in the village plaza on horseback, like colonialists of times gone by (although theirs were squalid old nags, which would never have served colonialists of times gone by), and on Ricardo’s face, as he politely carried her luggage, Elaine saw something she’d never seen before: admiration. Admiration for herself, for the ease with which she moved through the village, for the affection she’d earned from the people in three short weeks, for the natural and yet undeniably authoritative way she made herself understood by the locals. Elaine saw that admiration in his face and felt that she loved him, that she’d unexpectedly started to feel new and more intense things for this man who also seemed to love her, and at the same time felt that she’d arrived at a happy point: when this place could no longer surprise her too much. True, there would always be contingencies, in Colombia people always managed to be unpredictable (in their behaviour, in their manners: one never knew what they were actually thinking). But Elaine felt in charge of the situation. ‘Ask me if I’ve got the hang of things here,’ she said to Ricardo as they climbed aboard the bus. ‘Have you cogido el tiro a la vaina, Elena Fritts?’ he asked. And she answered, ‘Yeah. I’ve got the hang of things here.’

  She had no way of knowing just how mistaken she was.

  5

  What’s There to Live For?

  Elaine would remember those last three weeks in Bogotá and in Ricardo Laverde’s company the way one remembers the days of one’s childhood, a cloud of images distorted by emotions, a promiscuous mixture of key dates without a well-established chronology. The return to the routine of classes at the CEUCA – there were very few left now, just a matter of refining certain bits of knowledge or perhaps justifying certain bits of bureaucracy – was broken by the disorder of her encounters with Ricardo, who might perfectly well be waiting for her behind a eucalyptus when she was on her way home or might have slipped a note into her book telling her to meet him at a dingy café at the corner of 17th and 8th. Elaine always showed up for these dates, and in the relative solitude of downtown cafés the two of them cast more or less lascivious glances at each other and then went into a cinema to sit in the back row and touch each other under a long black coat that had belonged to Ricardo’s grandfather, the aviator hero of the war with Peru. Indoors, in the narrow house in Chapinero, in Don Julio and Doña Gloria’s territory, they carried on the fiction that he was the son of the host family and she, the innocent apprentice of the moment; the son’s nocturnal visits to the apprentice carried on as well, of course, with their silent nocturnal orgasms. So they began to live a double life, a life of clandestine lovers who didn’t arouse anyone’s suspicion, a life in which Ricardo Laverde was Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate and Miss Fritts was Mrs Robinson and her daughter at the same time, who was also called Elaine: that must mean something, wasn’t it too much of a coincidence? During those few days in Bogotá, Elaine and Ricardo protested against the Vietnam War whenever a demonstration was called, and also attended parties organized by the American community in Bogotá, social events that seemed arranged deliberately so the volunteers could go back to talking their own language, ask out loud how the Mets or the Vikings were doing or take out a guitar and sing, all together and around a fireplace while passing a joint that was finished in two rounds, Frank Zappa’s song:

  What’s there to live for?

  Who needs the Peace Corps?

  The three weeks ended on 1 November, when, at eight thirty in the morning, a new litter of apprentices swore loyalty to the statutes of the Peace Corps, after more promises and a vague declaration of intentions, and received their official appointment as volunteers. It was a rainy cold morning, and Ricardo was wearing a leather jacket that, upon contact with the rain, began to give off an intense smell. ‘They were all there,’ Elaine wrote to her grandparents. ‘Among those graduating were Dale Cartwright and the son of the Wallaces (the elder one, you remember). Among the audience were the Ambassador’s wife and a tall man in a tie who, I seem to have understood, is an important Democrat from Boston.’ Elaine also mentioned the deputy director of Peace Corps Colombia (his Kissinger glasses, his knitted tie), the directors of the CEUCA and even a bored municipal functionary, but at no point in the letter did Ricardo Laverde appear. Which, seen with years’ worth of distance, is nothing short of ironic, for on that very night, under the pretext of congratulating her and at the same time saying farewell in the name of the whole Laverde family, Ricardo invited her to dinner at the Gato Negro restaurant, and by the light of some precarious candles that threatened to topple into the plates of food, taking advantage of a silence when the string trio finished singing ‘Pueblito Viejo’, knelt in the middle of the aisle where the bow-tied waiters kept walking up and down and in more sentences than strictly necessary asked her to marry him. In a flash, Elaine thought of her grandparents, regretted that they were so far away and that at their age and in their states of health even considering the trip would be impossible, felt the kind of sadness we tolerate because it appears at happy moments and, once the sadness passed, bent down to kiss Ricardo hard. As she did so she inhaled the wet leather smell of his jacket and tasted meunière sauce. ‘Does that mean yes?’ said Ricardo after the kiss, still kneeling and still in the waiters’ way. Elaine burst into tears in reply, but smiling and crying at the same time. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘What a stupid question.’

  So Elaine had to delay her departure for La Dorada by fifteen days, and in this cruelly short time organized, with the help of her future mother-in-law (after convincing her that no, she wasn’t pregnant), a small and almost clandestine wedding in San Francisco Church. Elaine had liked this church since the beginning of her life in Bogotá. She liked its thick, damp stone walls, and she also liked going in off the street and coming out onto the avenue, that violent clash of light with darkness and noise with silence. The day before her wedding, Elaine went for a walk through the centre (a reconnaissance mission, Ricardo would say); as she crossed the threshold of the church, she thought of the silence and noise and the darkness and light, and the illuminated altar caught her eye. The place seemed familiar to her that day, not as if she’d been there before, but in a more profound or private way, as if she’d read a description of it in a novel. She stared at the timid flames of the candles, at the weak yellow lamps fastened like torches to the columns. The light of the stained-glass windows lit up two beggars who were sleeping with legs crossed and hands together on top of their bellies like marble tombs of popes. To her right, a life-sized Christ on all fours, as if he were crawling; the day pouring in through the other door struck him full in the face, and the thorns of his crown and the drops of emerald green that the Christ was crying or perspiring glistened in the light. Elaine went on, walked along the left aisle towards the set-in altar at the far end, and then she saw the cage. In it, enclosed like an animal on show, there was a second Christ, with longer hair, yellower skin, darker blood. ‘It’s the best in Bogotá,’ Ricardo had told her once. ‘I swear, Monserrate’s got nothing on this.’ Elaine bent down, read the little plaque: Señor de la agonía. She took two more steps towards the pulpit, found the tin box and another inscription: Deposit your offering here and the image will be illuminated. She put her hand in her pocket, found a coin and lifted it in two fingers, as if it were a host, to let there be light: it was one peso, the coat of arms blackened as if the coin had been through fire. She dropped it into the slot. The Christ figure came to life beneath the brief blast of the spotlights. Elaine felt, or rather knew, that she was going to be happy all her life.

  Then came the reception, which Elaine went through in a fog, as if it were all happening to someone else. The Laverde family held it in their house: Doña Gloria explained to Elaine that it had been impossible, at such short notice, to rent the hall of a social club or some other decent place, but Ricardo, who listened to the laborious explanation in silence, nodding, waited until his mother had gone to tell Ela
ine the truth. ‘They’re fucked for money,’ he said. ‘The Laverdes have pawned their whole lives.’ The revelation shocked Elaine less than she might have expected: a thousand different signals over the last few months had prepared her for it. But she was struck by Ricardo referring to his family in the third person, as if their bankruptcy didn’t affect him. ‘And us?’ asked Elaine. ‘What about us?’ ‘What are we going to do?’ said Elaine. ‘My work doesn’t pay very much.’ Ricardo looked her in the eye, put a hand on her forehead as if she might have a temperature. ‘It’s enough for a little while,’ he said, ‘and then we’ll see. If I were you I wouldn’t worry.’ Elaine thought for a second, and found she wasn’t worried. And she wondered why not. And then she asked him, ‘Why wouldn’t you be worried if you were me?’ ‘Because a pilot like me is never going to be short of work, Elena Fritts. It’s a fact and that’s just how it is.’

  Later, when all the guests had gone, Ricardo led her up to the room where they’d slept together for the first time, sat her down on the bed (swept aside the few wedding presents) and then Elaine thought he was going to talk to her about money, that he was going to tell her they couldn’t go anywhere on a honeymoon. He didn’t though. He tied a blindfold over her eyes, a thick cloth that smelled of mothballs that might have been an old scarf, and said, ‘From here on you don’t see anything.’ And so, blindly, Elaine let herself be led downstairs, and blindly heard the family’s goodbyes (she thought Doña Gloria was crying), and blindly went out into the cold night air and got into a car someone else was driving, and thought it was a taxi, and on the way to who knows where asked what all this was and Ricardo told her to be quiet, not to spoil her surprise. Elaine blindly felt the taxi coming to a stop and a window opening and Ricardo identifying himself and being greeted with respect and a big gate opening with a metallic sound. As she got out of the taxi, seconds later, she felt a rough surface under her feet and a gust of cold wind messed up her hair. ‘There are some stairs,’ said Ricardo. ‘Careful, take it slow, we don’t want you falling.’ Ricardo pressed her head as one does to keep someone from banging their head on a low roof, like the police do so their prisoners won’t bang their heads on the doorframes of the patrol cars. Elaine let herself be led, her hand touched something new that soon turned into a seat and she felt something rigid against her knee, and as she sat down an image came into her head, the first clear idea of where she was and what was about to happen. And it was confirmed when Ricardo started to talk to the control tower and the light aircraft began to taxi down the runway, but Ricardo only gave her permission to take off the blindfold later, after take-off, and when she did so Elaine found herself facing the horizon, a world she’d never seen before bathed in a light she’d never seen before, and that same light was bathing Ricardo’s face, whose hands moved over the panel and who looked at instruments (needles that were spinning, coloured lights) she didn’t understand. They were going to the Palanquero base, in Puerto Salgar, a few kilometres from La Dorada: this was his wedding gift to her, these minutes spent on board a borrowed plane, a Cessna Skylark that the groom’s grandfather had obtained in order to impress his bride. Elaine thought it was the best gift imaginable and that no other Peace Corps volunteer had ever arrived at their workplace in a light aircraft. A gust of wind shook them. Then they touched down. This is my new life, thought Elaine. I’ve just landed in my new life.