The Sound of Things Falling

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t. It must be very strange, having kids. I can’t imagine it either.’

  I don’t know why I did that. Maybe because it was too late to start talking about the family that was waiting for me in Bogotá; those are things you mention in the first moments of a friendship, when you introduce yourself and hand over two or three pieces of information to give the illusion of intimacy. One introduces oneself: the word must come from that, not pronouncing one’s own name and hearing the other’s name and shaking hands, not from kissing a cheek or two or bowing, but from those first minutes in which certain insubstantial pieces of information are exchanged, certain unimportant generalities, to give the other the sensation they know us, that we’re no longer strangers. We speak of our nationality; we speak of our profession, what we do to make a living, because the way we make our living is eloquent, it defines us, structures us; we talk about our family. Well anyway, that moment was already long past with Maya, and to start talking about the woman I lived with and our daughter two days after having arrived at Las Acacias would have raised unnecessary suspicions or required long explanations or stupid justifications, or simply seemed odd, and after all it wouldn’t be without consequences: Maya would lose the trust she’d felt until now, or I would lose the ground I’d gained so far, and she would stop talking and Ricardo Laverde’s past would go back to being the past, would go back to hiding in other people’s memories. I couldn’t allow that.

  Or perhaps there was another reason.

  Because keeping Aura and Leticia out of Las Acacias, remote from Maya Fritts and her tale and her documents, distant therefore from the truth about Ricardo Laverde, was to protect their purity, or rather avoid their contamination, the contamination that I’d suffered one afternoon in 1996 the causes of which I’d barely begun to understand now, the unsuspected intensity of which was just now beginning to emerge like an object falling from the sky. My contaminated life was mine alone: my family was still safe: safe from the plague of my country, from its afflicted recent history: safe from what had hunted me down along with so many of my generation (and others, too, yes, but most of all mine, the generation that was born with planes, with the flights full of bags of marijuana, the generation that was born with the War on Drugs and later experienced the consequences). This world that had come back to life in the words and documents of Maya Fritts could stay there, I thought, could stay there in Las Acacias, could stay in La Dorada, could stay in the Magdalena Valley, could stay a four-hour drive from Bogotá, far from the apartment where my wife and daughter were waiting for me, perhaps with some concern, yes, perhaps with worried expressions on their faces, but pure, uncontaminated, free of our particular Colombian story, and I wouldn’t be a good father or a good husband if I brought this story to them, or allowed them to enter this story, enter Las Acacias and the life of Maya Fritts in any way, enter into contact with Ricardo Laverde. Aura had had the strange luck to be absent during the difficult years, to have grown up in Santo Domingo and Mexico and Santiago de Chile: was it not my obligation to preserve that luck, to be vigilant to keep anything from ruining that sort of exemption that the eventful life of her parents had granted her? I was going to protect her, I thought, her and my little girl, I was protecting them. This was the right thing to do, I thought, and I did so with real conviction, with almost religious zeal.

  ‘It’s true, isn’t it?’ Maya said. ‘It’s one of those things that can’t be shared, so everyone tells me. Anyway. The thing is she did it for me. She invented my dad, invented him entirely.’

  ‘For example?’

  ‘Well,’ said Maya, ‘for example, his death.’

  And so, with the white light of the Magdalena Valley shining in my face, I learned about the day that Elaine or Elena Fritts explained to her daughter what had happened to her father. During the previous year, father and daughter had talked a lot about death: one afternoon, Maya had come upon the slaughter of a Cebú cow, and almost immediately began to ask questions. Ricardo had resolved the matter in four words: ‘Her years were up.’ Everyone and everything runs out of years eventually, he explained: animals, people, everyone. Armadillos? asked Maya. Yes, Ricardo told her, armadillos too. Grandpa Julio? asked Maya. Yes, Grandpa Julio too, Ricardo told her. So, one afternoon towards the end of 1976, when the girl’s questions about her father’s absence were starting to get unbearable, Elaine Fritts sat Maya on her lap and told her, ‘Daddy’s years were up.’

  ‘I don’t know why she chose that moment, I don’t know if she got tired of waiting for something, I don’t know anything,’ Maya told me. ‘Maybe some news arrived from the United States. From the lawyers or from my dad.’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘There aren’t any letters from that time, my mother burnt them all. What I’m telling you is what I imagine happened: she got some news. From my dad. From the lawyers. And decided to change her life, or that her life with my dad was over and she was going to start another different one.’

  She explained that Ricardo had got lost in the sky. Sometimes that happened to pilots, she explained: it’s rare, but it happened. The sky was very big and the sea was very big too and a plane was a very small thing and the planes that Daddy flew were the smallest ones of all, and the world was full of planes like those, little white planes that took off and flew over the land and then went out and flew over the sea, and went far, very far away, far from everything, completely alone, without anyone to tell them how to get back to land again. And sometimes something happened, and they got lost. They forgot where ahead was and where was back, or they got confused and started flying in circles without knowing which way was ahead and which was back, where the left was and where the right, until the plane ran out of gasoline and fell into the sea, fell out of the sky like a little girl diving into a pool. And it sank without a sound or a noise, sank unseen because out in those places there isn’t anyone to see, and out there, at the bottom of the sea, pilots ran out of years. ‘Why don’t they swim?’ asked Maya. And Elena Fritts said, ‘Because the sea is very deep.’ And Maya, ‘But Daddy’s out there?’ And Elena Fritts, ‘Yes, Daddy’s there. At the bottom of the sea. His plane fell, Daddy fell asleep and his years ran out.’

  Maya Fritts never questioned that version of events. That was the last Christmas they spent at Villa Elena, the last time Elaine had them cut down a yellowing shrub to decorate with the fragile coloured balls the little girl loved, with reindeer and sleighs and fake candy canes that bent the branches with their weight. In January 1977 several things happened: Elaine received a letter from her grandparents telling her that it had snowed in Miami for the first time in history; President Jimmy Carter pardoned the Vietnam draft dodgers; and Mike Barbieri – who Elaine had always secretly considered a draft dodger – showed up dead in La Miel River, shot in the back of the neck, his naked body thrown face down on the riverbank, the water playing with his long hair, his beard wet and reddened with blood. The campesinos who found him went in search of Elaine even before they went to the authorities: she was the other gringa in the region. Elaine had to be present at the first judicial proceedings, had to go to a municipal court with open windows and fans that messed up the records to say that yes, she knew him, and that no, she didn’t know who might have killed him. The next day she packed up the Nissan with everything she could fit in it, her clothes and her daughter’s, the suitcases full of money and an armadillo with the name of a murdered gringo, and went to Bogotá.

  ‘Twelve years, Antonio,’ Maya Fritts said to me, ‘twelve years I lived with my mother, just the two of us, practically in hiding. She didn’t just take my dad away from me, but my grandparents too. We didn’t see them again. They just came to visit a couple of times, and it would always end in a fight, I didn’t understand why. But other people came. It was a tiny little apartment, in La Perseverancia. Lots of people came to visit us, the house was always full of gringos, people from the Peace Corps, people from the Embassy. Did Mom talk to them abo
ut drugs, about what was happening with drugs? I don’t know, I wouldn’t have been aware of something like that. It’s perfectly possible they talked about cocaine. Or about the volunteers who had taught the campesinos to process the coca paste just as they’d taught them techniques for growing better marijuana before. But the business wasn’t yet what it became later. How would I have known? A child doesn’t catch things like that.’

  ‘And no one asked about Ricardo? None of those visitors spoke of him?’

  ‘No, nobody. Incredible, isn’t it? Mom constructed a world in which Ricardo Laverde didn’t exist, that takes talent. As difficult as it is to maintain a little tiny lie, she built up something huge, an actual pyramid. I imagine her giving instructions to all her visitors: in this house we don’t speak of the dead. What dead? Well, the dead. The dead who are dead.’

  It was around that time that she killed the armadillo. Maya didn’t remember the absence of her father upsetting her too much: she didn’t remember any bad feelings, any aggression, any desire for revenge, but one day (she would have been about eight) she grabbed the armadillo and took him to the laundry patio. ‘It was one of those old-fashioned patios apartments used to have, you know, uncomfortable and tiny, with a stone sink and clothes lines and a window. Do you remember those laundry sinks? On one side was where you scrubbed the clothes against the ridged surface, on the other was a sort of tank, for a child it was like a deep well of cold water. I brought a bench over from the kitchen, leaned over the water and pushed Mike down with both hands, without letting go of him, and I put both my hands on his back so he wouldn’t move. I’d been told that armadillos could spend a long time under water. I wanted to see how long. The armadillo started struggling, but I held him down there, pressed against the bottom of the sink with my whole body weight, an armadillo is strong, but not that strong, I was already a good-sized girl. I wanted to see how long he could stay under water, that was all, it seemed to me that’s all it was. I remember the roughness of his body very well, my hands hurt from the pressure and then they went on hurting, it was like holding a knotty tree trunk in place so the current wouldn’t carry it off. What a struggle the creature put up, I remember perfectly. Until he stopped struggling. The maid found him later, you should have heard her scream. I was punished. Mom slapped me hard and cut my lip with her ring. Later she asked me why I’d done it and I said, To see how many minutes he could stay under. And Mom answered, Then why didn’t you have a watch? I didn’t know what to say. And that question hasn’t completely gone away, Antonio, it still runs around my head every once in a while, always at the worst moments, when life isn’t working out for me. This question appears to me and I’ve never been able to answer it.’

  She thought for a moment and said, ‘Anyway, what was an armadillo doing in an apartment in La Perseverancia? How absurd, the house smelled like shit.’

  ‘And did you never have any suspicions?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘That Ricardo was alive. About him being in jail.’

  ‘Never, no. I’ve since discovered that I wasn’t the only one, that my story wasn’t unique. In those years they were legion those who arrived in the United States and stayed there, I don’t know if you know what I mean. Those who arrived, not with shipments like my dad, though there were those as well, but as simple passengers of a commercial plane, an Avianca or American Airlines plane. And the families who were left behind in Colombia had to tell the children something, didn’t they? So they killed the father, never better said. The guy, stuck in jail in the United States, died all of a sudden without anyone ever knowing he was there. It was the easiest thing to do, easier than struggling with the shame, the humiliation of having a mule in the family. Hundreds of cases like this one. Hundreds of fictitious orphans, I was just one. That’s the great thing about Colombia, nobody’s ever alone with their fate. Shit, is it ever hot. It’s incredible. Aren’t you hot, Antonio, being from a cool climate?’

  ‘A little, yes. But I can take it.’

  ‘Here you feel every pore open. I like the early mornings, first thing. But then it gets unbearable. No matter how used to it you get.’

  ‘You must be pretty used to it by now.’

  ‘Yes, it’s true. Maybe I just like to complain.’

  ‘How did you end up living here?’ I asked. ‘I mean, after all that time.’

  ‘Oh, well,’ said Maya. ‘That’s a long story.’

  Maya had just turned eleven when a classmate told her about the Hacienda Nápoles for the first time. This was the vast property, more than 3,000 hectares, that Pablo Escobar had bought towards the end of the 1970s on which to build his personal paradise, a paradise that was an empire at the same time: a tropical lowland Xanadu, with animals instead of sculptures and armed thugs instead of a No Trespassing sign. The hacienda’s land stretched over two departments; a river crossed it from one side to the other. Of course that wasn’t the information Maya’s classmate gave her, for in 1982 the name Pablo Escobar was not yet on the lips of eleven-year-old children, nor did eleven-year-old children know the characteristics of the gigantic territory or the collection of antique cars that would soon be growing in special carports or the existence of several runways designed for the business (for the taking off and landing of planes like the one Ricardo Laverde had piloted), much less had they seen Citizen Kane. No, eleven-year-old children didn’t know about those things. But they did know about the zoo: in a matter of months the zoo became a legend on a national scale, and it was the zoo that Maya’s classmate told her about one day in 1982. She told her about giraffes, elephants, rhinoceroses, huge birds of every colour; she told her about a kangaroo that kicked a football. For Maya it was a revelation so extraordinary, and it turned into a desire so important, that she had the good sense to wait until Christmas to ask to be taken to the Hacienda Nápoles as a Christmas present.

  Her mother’s reply was emphatic: ‘Don’t even dream about going to see that place.’

  ‘But everyone in my class has been,’ said Maya.

  ‘Well you’re not going,’ said Elaine Fritts. ‘Don’t even think of mentioning it again.’

  ‘And so I went on the sly,’ Maya told me. ‘What else could I do? A friend invited me and I said yes. My mom thought I was going to spend the weekend in Villa de Leyva.’

  ‘You’re kidding,’ I said. ‘You sneaked off to the Hacienda Nápoles too? How many of us must have done the same thing?’

  ‘Oh, so you . . .’

  ‘Yeah, I did too,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t allowed to go, so I made up some lie too, and went to see what was forbidden. A taboo place, Hacienda Nápoles.’

  ‘And when did you go there?’

  I made some calculations in my head, summoning up certain memories, and the conclusion made a shiver of pleasure run up my spine. ‘I was twelve. I’m a year older than you. We went there around the same time, Maya.’

  ‘You went in December?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘December 1982?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We were there at the same time,’ she said. ‘Incredible. Isn’t it incredible?’

  ‘Well, yeah, but I’m not sure . . .’

  ‘We went on the same day, Antonio,’ said Maya. ‘I’m sure of it.’

  ‘But it might have been any day.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. It was before Christmas, right?’

  ‘Right. But . . .’

  ‘And after school broke up, right?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘Well, it had to be a weekend, otherwise there wouldn’t have been adults to take us. People work. And how many weekends are there before Christmas? Let’s say three. And what day was it, a Saturday or a Sunday? It was a Saturday, because Bogotá people always went to the zoo on Saturdays, grown-ups don’t like to make a trip like that and then have to go to the office the next day.’

  ‘Well, there are still three days,’ I said, ‘three possible Saturdays. Nothing guarantees we chose the same
one.’

  ‘I know we did.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I just do. Don’t bug me any more. Do you want me to keep telling you?’ But Maya didn’t wait for my answer. ‘OK,’ she said, ‘so, I went to see the zoo and then I went home, and the first thing I did when I walked in was to ask my mother exactly where our house was in La Dorada. I think I recognized something along the way, the landscape, I recognized a mountain or a curve in the road, or the turn-off onto the main road to Villa Elena, because to get to the Hacienda Nápoles you pass right by that road. I must have recognized something, and when I saw my mother I wouldn’t stop asking her questions. It was the first time I’d talked about it since we left, Mom was quite shocked. And as the years went by I kept asking questions, saying I wanted to go back, asking when we could go back. The house in La Dorada turned into a sort of Promised Land for me, you see? And I began little by little to do everything necessary to go back. And it all began with that visit to the zoo at the Hacienda Nápoles. And now you tell me that maybe we saw each other there, at the zoo. Without knowing you were you and I was me, without knowing we’d meet one day.’

  Something happened in that instant in her gaze, her green eyes opened slightly wider, her narrow eyebrows arched as if they’d been drawn on again, and her mouth, her mouth with blood-red lips, gestured in a way I’d not seen before. I had no way of proving it, and commenting on it would have been imprudent or stupid, but at that moment I thought: That’s a little girl’s expression. That’s what you were like when you were little.

  And then I heard her say, ‘And have you been back since then? Because I haven’t, I’ve never been back. The place is falling to pieces, from what I’ve heard. But we could go anyway, see what’s there, see what we remember. How’s that sound?’