The Sound of Things Falling

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  But maybe the strangest thing that afternoon was that everything we saw we saw in silence. We looked at each other frequently, but we never spoke anything more than an interjection or an expletive, perhaps because all that we were seeing was evoking different memories and different fears for each of us, and it seemed imprudent or perhaps rash to go rummaging around in each other’s pasts. Because it was that, our common past, that was there without being there, like the unseen rust that was right in front of us eating away at the car doors and rims and fenders and dashboards and steering wheels. As for the property’s past, we weren’t overly interested: the things that had happened there, the deals that were made and the lives that were extinguished and the parties that were held and the violence that was planned, all that was a backdrop, scenery. Without a word we agreed we’d seen enough and began to walk towards the Nissan. And this I remember: Maya took my arm, or slipped her arm in mine like women used to do in times gone by, and in the anachronism of her gesture there was an intimacy I could not have predicted, that nothing had foretold.

  Then it began to rain.

  It was just drizzle at first, although with fat drops, but in a matter of seconds the sky turned as black as a donkey’s belly and a downpour drenched our shirts before we had time to seek shelter anywhere. ‘Shit, that’s the end of our stroll,’ said Maya. By the time we got to the Nissan, we were soaked to the skin; since we’d run (shoulders raised, one arm up to shield our eyes), the fronts of our trousers were wet through, while the back, almost dry, seemed made of a different fabric. The windows of the jeep fogged up immediately with the heat of our breathing, and Maya had to get a box of tissues out of the glove compartment to clean the windscreen so we wouldn’t crash. She opened the vents, a black grille in the middle of the dashboard, and we began to move cautiously forward. But we had only gone about 100 metres when Maya stopped suddenly, rolled down the window as fast as she could so I, from the passenger seat, could see what she was looking at: thirty steps away from us, halfway between the Nissan and the pond, a hippopotamus was studying us gravely.

  ‘What a beauty,’ said Maya.

  ‘Beauty?’ I said. ‘That’s the ugliest animal in the world.’

  But Maya paid me no attention. ‘I don’t think it’s an adult,’ she went on. ‘She’s too little, just a baby. I wonder if she’s lost.’

  ‘And how do you know it’s female?’

  But Maya was already out of the jeep, in spite of the downpour that was still falling and in spite of a wooden fence between us and the piece of land where the creature was. Its hide was dark iridescent grey, or that’s how it looked to me in the diminished afternoon light. The raindrops hit and bounced off as if they were falling against a pane of glass. The hippopotamus, male or female, juvenile or full-grown, didn’t bat an eyelid: it looked at us, or looked at Maya who was leaning over the wooden fence and looking at it in turn. I don’t know how much time went by: one minute, two, which in such circumstances is a long time. Water dripped off Maya’s hair and all her clothes were a different colour now. Then the hippopotamus began a heavy movement, a ship trying to turn around in the sea, and I was surprised to see such a long animal in profile. And then I didn’t any more, or rather I saw its powerful arse and thought I saw streams of water sliding over its smooth, shiny skin. It wandered away through the tall grass, with its legs hidden by the weeds in such a way that it seemed not to make any progress, but just to get smaller. When it reached the pond and got into the water, Maya returned to the jeep.

  ‘How long are those creatures going to last, that’s what I wonder,’ she said. ‘There’s no one to feed them, no one to take care of them. They must be so expensive.’

  She wasn’t talking to me, that was clear: she was thinking out loud. And I couldn’t help but remember another comment identical in spirit and even in form that I had heard a long time ago, when the world, or at least my world, was a very different one, when I still felt in charge of my life.

  ‘Ricardo said the same thing,’ I told Maya. ‘That’s how I met him, when he commented how sorry he felt for the animals from the zoo.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ said Maya. ‘He worried about animals.’

  ‘He said they weren’t to blame for anything.’

  ‘And it’s true,’ said Maya. ‘It’s one of the few, very few, real memories I have. My dad looking after the horses. My dad stroking my mom’s dog. My dad telling me off for not feeding my armadillo. The only real memories. The rest are invented, Antonio, false memories, made-up memories. The saddest thing that can happen to a person is to find out their memories are lies.’

  Her voice was twanging, but that could have been due to the change in temperature. There were tears in her eyes, or maybe it was rainwater running down her cheeks, around her lips. ‘Maya,’ I asked then, ‘why was he killed? I know this piece of the puzzle is missing, but what do you think?’ The Nissan was on the move again and we were travelling the kilometres that separated us from the entrance gate, Maya’s hand closed over the black knob of the gear lever, water ran down her face and neck. I insisted: ‘Why, Maya?’ Without looking at me, without taking her eyes off the drenched panorama, Maya said those five words I’d heard from so many mouths, ‘He must have done something.’ But this time they seemed unworthy of what Maya knew. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but what? Maybe you don’t want to know.’ Maya looked at me with pity. I tried to add something but she cut me off. ‘Look, I don’t want to talk any more.’ The black blades moved across the windscreen and swept the water and leaves away. ‘I want us to stay quiet for a while, I’m tired of talking. Do you understand, Antonio? We’ve talked too much. I’m sick of talking. I want to be silent for a while.’

  So in silence we arrived at the gate and passed beneath the white and blue Piper, and in silence we turned left and headed for La Dorada. In silence we drove along the part where the trees met over the top of the road, keeping the light from passing through and on rainy days lessening the difficulties drivers faced. In silence we came back out into the bad weather, in silence we saw the yellow railings of the bridge over the Magdalena, in silence we crossed it. The surface of the river bristled under the downpour, it wasn’t smooth like the hippopotamus’s hide but rough like that of a gigantic sleeping alligator, and on one of the little islands a white boat was getting wet with its motor pulled up. Maya was sad: her sadness filled the Nissan like the smell of our wet clothes, and I could have said something to her, but I didn’t. I kept silent: she wanted to be in silence. And so, in the middle of that obliging silence, accompanied only by the thundering of the rain on the jeep’s metal roof, we went through the toll booth and headed south through the cattle ranches. Two long hours in which the sky gradually darkened, not due to the dense rain clouds but because night fell halfway there. By the time the Nissan lit up the white façade of the house, it was completely dark. The last thing we saw were the eyes of the German shepherd gleaming in the beam of the headlights.

  ‘Nobody’s home,’ I said.

  ‘Of course not,’ said Maya. ‘It’s Sunday.’

  ‘Thanks for the outing.’

  But Maya didn’t say anything. She walked in and took off her wet clothes as she went, skirting around the furniture without turning on any lights, voluntarily blind. I followed her, or followed her shadow, and realized that she wanted me to follow her. The world was blue and black, made not of figures but of outlines; one of them was Maya’s silhouette. In my memory it was her hand that reached for mine, not the other way around, and then Maya said these words: I’m tired of sleeping alone. I think she also said something simple and very understandable: Tonight I don’t want to be so alone. I don’t remember having walked to Maya’s bed, but I see myself perfectly sitting on the edge of it, beside a bedside table with three drawers. Maya turned down the sheets and her spectral silhouette stood out against the wall, in front of the mirror on the wardrobe, and it seemed like she was looking in the mirror and as she did so her reflection was looking at me. While I
was attending to this parallel reality, that fleeting scene that elapsed in my absence, I got into her bed, and I didn’t resist when Maya got in beside me and her hands undid my clothes, her hands tainted by the sun acted as naturally and deftly as my own hands. She kissed me and I felt her breath at once fresh and fatigued, an end-of-the-day breath, and I thought (a ridiculous thought and also indemonstrable) that this woman hadn’t kissed anyone for a long time. And then she stopped kissing me. Maya touched me futilely, took me futilely in her mouth, her futile tongue ran over my body without a sound, and then her resigned mouth returned to my mouth and only then did I realize she was naked. In the semi-darkness her nipples were a violet tone, a dark violet like the red scuba divers see at the bottom of the sea. Have you been underwater in the sea, Maya? I asked her or think I asked her. Way down deep in the sea, deep enough for colours to change? She lay down beside me, face up, and at that moment I was overcome by the absurd idea that Maya was cold. Are you cold? I asked. But she didn’t answer. Do you want me to go? She didn’t answer this question either, but it was a pointless question, because Maya didn’t want to be alone and she’d already settled that. I didn’t want to be alone at that moment either: Maya’s company had become indispensable to me, just as the disappearance of her sadness had become urgent. I thought how the two of us were alone in this room and in this house, but alone with a shared solitude, each of us alone with our own pain deep in our flesh but mitigating it at the same time by the strange arts of nakedness. And then Maya did something that only one person in the world had ever done before: her hand rested on my belly and found my scar and caressed it as if she were painting with one finger, as if she’d dipped her finger in tempera and were trying to make a strange and symmetrical design on my skin. I kissed her, in order to close my eyes more than to kiss her, and then my hand moved over her breasts and Maya took it in hers, took my hand in hers and put it between her legs and my hand touched her smooth straight hair, and then her soft inner thighs, and then her sex. My fingers under her fingers penetrated her and her body tensed and her legs opened like wings. I’m tired of sleeping alone, she’d told me, this woman who was now looking at me with wide-open eyes in the darkness of her room, wrinkling her brow like someone who’s on the verge of understanding something.

  Maya Fritts did not sleep alone that night, I wouldn’t have let her. I don’t know when her well-being began to matter so much to me, I don’t know when I began to regret that there could be no possible life together for us, that our common past did not necessarily imply a common future. We’d had the same life and nevertheless had very different lives, or at least I did, a life with people who were waiting for me on the other side of the Cordillera, four hours from Las Acacias, 2,600 metres above sea level . . . In the darkness of the bedroom I thought of that, although thinking in the darkness is not advisable: things seem bigger or more serious in the darkness, illnesses more destructive, the presence of evil closer, indifference more intense, solitude more profound. That’s why we like to have someone to sleep with, and that’s why I wouldn’t have left her alone that night for anything in the world. I could have got dressed and left in silence, carrying my shoes and leaving the doors ajar, like a thief. But I didn’t: I saw her fall into a deep sleep, undoubtedly because she was so tired both from all the driving and from all the emotions. Remembering tires a person out, this is something they don’t teach us, exercising one’s memory is an exhausting activity, it drains our energy and wears down our muscles. So I watched Maya sleep on her side, facing me, and I watched her hand slide under her pillow once she was asleep and hug it or cling to it, and it happened again: I saw her as she’d been as a girl. I didn’t have the slightest doubt that this gesture contained or embodied the little girl she’d once been, and I loved her in some imprecise and absurd way. And then I fell asleep too.

  When I woke up, it was still dark. I didn’t know how much time had passed. I hadn’t been woken by the light, or the sounds of the tropical dawn, rather by the distant murmur of voices. I followed the sounds to the living room and was not surprised to find her as I did, sitting on the sofa with her head in her hands and a recording playing from her tiny stereo. I didn’t have to hear more than a few seconds, only a couple of those phrases spoken by strangers in English had to reach me to recognize the recording, for deep down I’d never stopped hearing that dialogue that spoke of weather conditions and then of work and of how many hours pilots could fly before they were obliged to rest, deep down I recognized it as if I’d heard it yesterday. ‘Well, let’s see,’ said the first officer just as he’d done some time ago, in Consu’s house. ‘We’ve got 136 miles to the VOR, and 32,000 feet to lose, and slow down to boot so we might as well get started.’ And the captain said, ‘Bogotá, American nine six five request descent.’ And Operations said, ‘Go ahead, American nine six five, this is Cali ops.’ And the captain said, ‘All right, Cali. We will be there in just about twenty-five minutes from now.’ And I thought, just as I’d thought before: No you won’t. You won’t be there in twenty-five minutes. You’ll be dead, and that will change my life.

  Maya didn’t look at me when I sat down beside her, but she lifted her face as if she’d been waiting for me, and on her cheeks I saw the trail of her tears and I stupidly wanted to protect her from what was going to happen at the end of the tape. They’d be parking at gate two and landing on runway zero one, the plane’s headlights were on because there was a lot of visual traffic in the area, and I sat beside Maya on the sofa and put my arm around her back and hugged her and held her close to me, and the two of us sank into the sofa like a couple of old insomniacs, that’s what we were, an old married couple who can’t sleep and meet like ghosts in the early hours to share their insomnia. ‘I’m going to talk to the people,’ said the voice, and then, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain. We have begun our descent.’ And then I felt her sob. ‘There goes my mom,’ she said. I thought she wouldn’t say anything else. ‘She’s going to be killed,’ she said then, ‘she’s going to leave me all alone. And I can’t do anything, Antonio. Why did she have to be on that flight? Why didn’t she get a direct flight? How much bad luck can one person have?’ and I held her, what else could I do but hold her tight, I couldn’t change what had happened or stop the flow of time on the tape, time that advanced towards what had already happened, towards the definitive. ‘I’d like to wish everyone a very, very happy holiday and a healthy and prosperous 1996,’ the captain said from the tape. ‘Thank you for flying with us.’

  And with those false words – the year 1996 would not exist for Elaine Fritts – Maya went back to remembering, back to the exhausting work of memory. Was it for my benefit, Maya Fritts, or maybe you’d discovered you could use me, that nobody else would allow you this return to the past, that nobody but me would invite those memories, listen to them with the discipline and dedication I listened to them? And so she told me of the December afternoon she came back into the house, after a long day of work in the apiary, ready to take a shower. She’d had an outbreak of acariasis in the beehives and had spent the week trying to minimize the damage and preparing concoctions of anemone and coltsfoot; she still had the intense odour of the mixture on her hands and was desperate for a wash. ‘Then the phone rang,’ she said. ‘I almost didn’t answer it. But I thought: what if it’s important? I heard Mom’s voice and actually thought, well, at least it’s not that. It’s nothing important. Mom always called at Christmas, that’s one thing we hadn’t lost in spite of the years. We talked five times a year: on her birthday, on mine, at Christmas, on New Year’s Day and on Dad’s birthday. The birthday of the deceased, you understand, that the living mark because he’s not here to celebrate it. That time we were talking for quite a while, telling each other unimportant things, and at some point my mother said look, we have to talk.’ And that’s how Maya found out, during a long-distance telephone call, down the line from Jacksonville, Florida, the truth about her father. ‘He hadn’t died when I was five. He was al
ive. He’d been in prison, and now he was out. He was alive, Antonio. And not only that, but he was in Bogotá. And not only that but he’d tracked down my mother, who knows how. And he wanted us all to get together.’ ‘Pretty night, huh?’ says the captain from the black box. And the first officer, ‘Yeah, it is. Looking nice out here.’ ‘For us to get together, Antonio, get that,’ said Maya. ‘As if he’d gone out for a couple of hours to pick up some groceries.’ And the captain, ‘Feliz Navidad, señorita.’

  I don’t know if there are any studies of people’s reactions to revelations such as that one, how a person behaves in the face of such a brutal change in circumstances, in the face of the disappearance of the world as they’d known it. One might think that in many cases a gradual readjustment would follow, the search for a new place in the elaborate system of our lives, a re-evaluation of our relationships and of what we call the past. Perhaps that might be the most difficult and least acceptable aspect, the change to the past, which we used to believe was fixed. In Maya Fritts’s case the first thing was incredulity, but that didn’t last long: in a matter of seconds she had yielded to the evidence. This was followed by a sort of contained fury, partially caused by the vulnerability of this life in which a mere phone call can topple everything in such a brief space of time: all you have to do is pick up the receiver and a new fact comes through it into the house, something we’ve neither sought nor requested and that sweeps us along like an avalanche. And the contained fury was followed by open fury, the shouts down the telephone, and the insults. And the open fury was followed by hatred and hateful words: ‘I don’t want to see anybody,’ Maya said to her mother. ‘Whether he believes it or not, I’m warning you. If he shows up here, I’ll shoot him.’ Maya spoke with a broken voice, very different from what it must have been then, what I was now seeing on the sofa, the soft even serene sobbing. ‘Uh, where are we?’ asked the first officer on the black box, and in his voice there is some alarm, the anticipation of what’s to come. ‘This is where it starts,’ Maya said to me. And she was right, it was starting there. ‘Where we headed?’ said the first officer. ‘I don’t know,’ said the captain. ‘What’s this? What happened here?’ And there, with the first disoriented lurches of the Boeing 757, with its movements of a lost bird at 13,000 feet in the Andean night, Elaine Fritts’s death was beginning. There were those voices again that have now realized something, those voices that feign serenity and control when they’ve lost all control and serenity is a façade. ‘Left turn. So you want a left turn back around?’ ‘Naw . . . Hell no, let’s press on to . . .’ ‘Press on to where, though?’ ‘Tuluá.’ ‘That’s a right.’ ‘Where we going? Come to the right. Let’s go to Cali. We got fucked up here, didn’t we?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘How did we get fucked up here? Come to the right, right now. Come to the right, right now.’