Now that so many years have passed, now that I remember with the benefit of an understanding I didn’t have then, I think of that conversation and it seems implausible that its importance didn’t hit me in the face. (And I tell myself at the same time that we’re terrible judges of the present moment, maybe because the present doesn’t actually exist: all is memory, this sentence that I just wrote is already a memory, this word is a memory that you, reader, just read.) The year was coming to an end; it was exam time and classes were finished; the routine of billiards had settled into my days, and somehow given them shape and purpose. ‘Ah,’ Ricardo Laverde said each time he saw me arrive, ‘you almost missed me, Yammara. I was just about to leave.’ Something in our encounters was changing: I knew it the afternoon Laverde didn’t say goodbye the way he always did, from the other side of the table, bringing his hand up to his forehead like a soldier and leaving me with my cue in my hand, but waited for me, watched me pay for both our drinks – four coffees with brandy and a Coca-Cola at the end – and walked out of the place beside me. He walked with me as far as the Plazoleta del Rosario, through exhaust fumes and the smell of fried arepas and open sewers; then, where a ramp descends into the dark mouth of an underground car park, he gave me a pat on the back, a fragile little pat from his fragile hand, closer to a caress than a farewell, and said, ‘OK, see you tomorrow. I’ve got an errand to run.’
I saw him dodge the huddles of emerald sellers and head down a pedestrian alley that leads into 7th Avenue, then turn the corner, and then I couldn’t see him any more. The streets were starting to be adorned with Christmas lights: Nordic wreaths and candy canes, English words, silhouettes of snowflakes in this city where it’s never snowed and where December, in particular, is the sunniest time of year. But in the daytime unlit lights do not adorn: they obstruct, sully and contaminate the view. The wires, suspended over our heads, crisscrossing the road from one side to the other, were like hanging bridges and in Bolívar Plaza they climbed the posts, the Ionic columns of the Capitol and the walls of the cathedral like ivy. The pigeons did have more wires to rest on, it’s true, and the corn vendors couldn’t keep up with the tourists who wanted to feed them, and the street photographers couldn’t keep up with demand for their services either: old men in ponchos and felt hats who seized their clients as if they were driving cattle and then, at the moment of the photo, ducked under a black cloth, not because the machine demanded it, but because their clients expected it. These photographers were also throwbacks to other times, before everybody could take their own portraits and the idea of buying a photo in the street that someone else had taken (often without them noticing) wasn’t completely absurd. Every Bogotá resident of a certain age has a street photo, most of them taken on 7th Avenue, formerly calle Real del Comercio, or Royal Commerce Street, queen of all Bogotá streets; my generation grew up looking at those photos in family albums, those men in three-piece suits, those women with gloves and umbrellas, people from another time when Bogotá was colder and rainier and tamer, but no easier. I have among my papers the photo my grandfather bought in the 1950s and the one my father bought fifteen or so years later. I don’t have, however, the one Ricardo Laverde bought that afternoon, although the image remains so clearly in my memory that I could draw every line of it if I had any talent for drawing. But I don’t. That’s one of the talents I don’t have.
So that was the errand Laverde had to run. After leaving me he walked to Bolívar Plaza and had one of those deliberately anachronistic portraits taken, and the next day he arrived at the billiard club with the result in his hand: a sepia-toned piece of paper, signed by the photographer, on which appeared a less sad or taciturn man than usual, a man of whom it might be said, if the evidence of the past few months didn’t convert the appraisal into an impudence, that he was content. The black plastic cover was still on the table, and Laverde put the image on top of it, his own image, and stared at it in fascination: his hair was combed, not a wrinkle in his suit, his right hand extended and two doves pecking at his palm; behind him you could almost make out the gaze of a couple of passers-by, both in sandals with rucksacks, and in the background, beside a corn cart enlarged by the perspective, the Palace of Justice.
‘It’s really good,’ I told him. ‘Was it taken yesterday?’
‘Yeah, just yesterday,’ he said. And then, out of the blue, he told me: ‘The thing is, my wife’s coming.’
He didn’t say the photo is a gift. He didn’t explain why such a strange gift would interest his wife. He didn’t refer to his years in prison, although it was obvious to me that this is what loomed over the whole situation, like a vulture over a dead dog. Anyway, Ricardo Laverde acted as if nobody in the billiard club knew anything about his past; I felt at that moment that this fiction preserved a delicate balance between us, and I preferred to keep it that way.
‘What do you mean coming?’ I asked. ‘Coming from where?’
‘She’s from the United States, her family lives there. My wife is, well, we could say coming to visit.’ And then, ‘Is the picture OK? Do you think it’s good?’
‘I think it’s really good,’ I told him with a bit of involuntary condescension. ‘You look very elegant, Ricardo.’
‘Very elegant,’ he said.
‘So you’re married to a gringa,’ I said.
‘Yeah. Imagine that.’
‘And she’s coming for Christmas?’
‘Hope so,’ said Laverde. ‘I hope so.’
‘Why do you hope so? It’s not for sure?’
‘Well, I have to convince her first. It’s a long story. Don’t ask me to explain.’
Laverde took the black cover off the table, not all at once, like other players do, but folding it in sections, meticulously, almost fondly, the way they fold a flag at a state funeral. We began to play. During one of his breaks he bent down over the table, stood up again, looked for the best angle, but then, after all the ceremony, shot at the wrong ball. ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’ He went over to the board, asked how many cannons he’d made, marked them using the tip of his cue (and accidentally touched the white wall, leaving an oblong blue smudge among other blue smudges accumulated over the years). ‘Sorry,’ he said again. His head was suddenly elsewhere: his movements, his gaze fixed on the ivory balls that slowly took up their new positions on the cloth, were those of someone who’d already left, a ghost of sorts. I began to consider the possibility that Laverde and his wife were divorced, and then, like an epiphany, another harsher and therefore more interesting possibility occurred to me: his wife didn’t know that Laverde was out of prison. In a brief second, between cannon and cannon, I imagined a man coming out of a Bogotá prison – the scene in my imagination took place at Distrital, the last prison I’d seen as a student of Criminology – who keeps his release secret in order to surprise someone, like Hawthorne’s Wakefield in reverse, interested in seeing on the face of his only relative that expression of surprised love we’ve all wanted to see, or have even provoked with elaborate ruses, at some time in our lives.
‘And what’s your wife’s name?’ I asked.
‘Elena,’ he said.
‘Elena de Laverde,’ I said, trying out the name and attributing that little possessive preposition that almost all people of his generation were still using in Colombia.
‘No,’ Ricardo Laverde corrected me. ‘Elena Fritts. We never wanted her to take my surname. A modern woman, you know.’
‘That’s modern?’
‘Well, at that time it was modern. Not changing your name. And since she was American people forgave her.’ Then, with a rapid or recovered light-heartedness, ‘So, are we having a drink?’
Our afternoon dwindled away in drink after drink of cheap white rum that left an aftertaste of surgical spirit in the back of the throat. By about five, billiards had stopped mattering to us, so we left the cues on the table, put the three balls in the cardboard rectangle of their box and sat down in the wooden chairs, like spectators or escorts or tir
ed players, each of us with his tall glass of rum in hand, swirling it around every once in a while so the fresh ice would mix in, smearing them more and more, our fingers dirty with sweat and chalk dust. From there we overlooked the bar, the entrance to the washrooms and the corner where the television was mounted, and we could even comment on the play on a couple of tables. At one of them four players we’d never seen before, with silk gloves and their own cues, bet more on one game than the two of us spent in a month. It was there, sitting side by side, that Ricardo Laverde told me he never looked anyone in the eye. It was also there that something began to trouble me about Ricardo Laverde: a deep discrepancy between his diction and his manners, which were never less than elegant, and his dishevelled appearance, his precarious finances, his very presence in these places where people look for a bit of stability when their lives, for whatever reason, are unstable.
‘How strange, Ricardo,’ I said. ‘I’ve never asked you what you do.’
‘It’s true, never,’ said Laverde. ‘And I’ve never asked you either. But that’s because I imagine you’re a professor, like everybody else around here. There’re too many universities downtown. Are you a professor, Yammara?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I teach Law.’
‘Oh great,’ said Laverde with a sideways smile. ‘More lawyers is just what this country needs.’
It seemed like he was going to say something else. He didn’t say anything.
‘But you haven’t answered me,’ I then insisted. ‘What do you do?’
There was a silence. What must have passed through his head in those two seconds: now, with time, I can understand. What calculations, what denials, what reticence.
‘I’m a pilot,’ said Laverde in a voice I’d never heard. ‘I was a pilot, I should say. What I am is a retired pilot.’
‘What kind of pilot?’
‘A pilot of things that need piloting.’
‘Well, yeah, but what things? Passenger planes? Surveillance helicopters? The thing about this is I . . .’
‘Look, Yammara,’ he cut me off in a deliberate, firm tone of voice, ‘I don’t tell my life story to just anyone. Do me a favour and don’t confuse billiards with friendship.’
He might have offended me, but he didn’t: in his words, behind the sudden and rather gratuitous aggressiveness, there was a plea. After the rude reply came those gestures of repentance and reconciliation, a child seeking attention in desperate ways, and I forgave the rudeness the way one forgives a child. Every once in a while Don José, the manager of the place, came over: a heavy-set, bald man in a butcher’s apron, who topped up our glasses with rum and with ice and then went back to his aluminium stool beside the bar, to tackle El Espacio’s crossword puzzle. I was thinking of his wife, Elena Fritts de Laverde. One day of some year, Ricardo left her life and went to jail. But what had he done to deserve it? And hadn’t his wife visited him in all those years? And how did a pilot end up spending his days in a downtown billiard club and his money on bets? Maybe that was the first time the idea, though intuitive and rudimentary in form, passed through my head, the same idea that would later reiterate itself, embodied in different words or sometimes without any need for words: This man has not always been this man. This man used to be another man.
It was already dark when we left. I don’t know exactly how much we drank at the billiard club, but I know that the rum had gone to our heads, and the pavements of La Candelaria had become even narrower. They were barely passable: people were flowing out of the thousands of downtown offices on their way home, or into the department stores to buy Christmas presents, or coagulating at the corners, while waiting for a bus. The first thing Ricardo Laverde did on the way out was to bump into a woman in an orange suit (or a suit that looked orange there, under the yellow lights). ‘Watch where you’re going, idiot,’ the woman said, and then it seemed obvious to me that letting him find his own way home in that state would be irresponsible or even risky. I offered to walk with him and he accepted, or at least didn’t refuse in any perceptible way. In a matter of minutes we were passing in front of the big closed front door of La Bordadita Church, and then we began to leave the crowds behind, as if we’d entered another city, a city under curfew. Deepest Candelaria is a place out of time: in all of Bogotá, only on certain streets in this part of town is it possible to imagine what life was like a century ago. And it was during this walk that Laverde talked to me for the first time the way one talks to a friend. At first I thought he was trying to ingratiate himself with me after the gratuitous discourtesy (alcohol tends to provoke this kind of repentance, this kind of private guilt); then it seemed to me there was something more, an urgent task the motivations of which I couldn’t quite understand, a pressing duty. I humoured him, of course, the way one humours all the drunks in the world when they start to tell their drunken stories. ‘That woman is all I have,’ he said.
‘Elena?’ I said. ‘Your wife?’
‘She’s everything, all I have. Don’t ask me to give you details, Yammara, it’s not easy for anyone to talk about his mistakes. I’ve made some, like everyone has. I’ve fucked up, yeah. I really fucked up. You’re very young, Yammara, so young that maybe you’re still a virgin of these kinds of mistakes. I don’t mean fooling around on your girlfriend, not that, I don’t mean having fucked your best friend’s girlfriend, that’s kids’ stuff. I’m talking about real mistakes, Yammara, this is something you don’t know about yet. And a good thing too. Enjoy it, Yammara, enjoy it while you can: a person’s happy until they fuck it up somehow, then there’s no way to get back to what you used to be. Well, that’s what I’m going to find out in the next couple of days. Elena’s going to come and I’m going to try to get back what there used to be. Elena was the love of my life. And we separated, we didn’t want to separate, but we separated. Life separated us, life does that kind of thing. I fucked up. I fucked up and we were separated. But the important thing isn’t fucking it all up, Yammara, listen carefully, the important thing isn’t fucking up, but knowing how to fix the fuck-up. Even though time has passed, however many years, it’s never too late to fix what you’ve broken. And that’s what I’m going to do. Elena’s coming now and that’s what I’m going to do, no mistake can last for ever. All this was a long time ago, a long, long time ago. You hadn’t even been born yet, I don’t think. Let’s say 1970, more or less. When were you born?’
‘In 1970,’ I said. ‘Exactly.’
‘You sure?’
‘Sure.’
‘You weren’t born in ’71?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘In ’70.’
‘Well, anyway. Lots of things happened that year. In the following years too, of course, but mostly that year. That year our life changed. I let us be separated, but that’s not the important thing, Yammara, listen up, the important thing isn’t that, but what’s going to happen now. Elena’s coming now and that’s what I’m going to do, fix things. It can’t be that hard, can it? How many people do you know who’ve made up for going the wrong way halfway down the road? Lots, no? Well, that’s what I’m going to do. It can’t be that hard.’
Ricardo Laverde told me all that. We were alone by the time we got to his street, so alone that we’d obliviously started to walk down the middle of the road. A cart overflowing with old newspapers and pulled by a famished-looking mule passed us, and the man holding the reins (the knotted rope that served as reins) had to whistle loudly at us to get out of his way. I remember the smell of the animal’s shit, though I don’t remember it shitting at that precise moment, and I also remember the staring eyes of a child who was in the back, sitting on the wooden planks with his feet hanging down over the edge. And then I remember stretching out a hand to say goodbye to Laverde and being left with my hand in mid-air, more or less like that other hand covered in pigeons in the photo from Bolívar Plaza, because Laverde turned his back on me and, opening a big door with a key from another era, said to me, ‘Don’t tell me you’re going to go now. Come in and we’ll have
a nightcap, young man, since we’re having such a good talk.’
‘I really have got to go, Ricardo.’
‘A person doesn’t have to do anything but die,’ he said, his tongue a little thick. ‘One drink, no more, I swear. Since you’ve already come as far as this godforsaken place.’
We’d arrived in front of an old, colonial, one-storey house, not carefully preserved like a cultural or historical site, but sad and dilapidated, one of those properties that pass from generation to generation as the families get poorer, until the last one of the line sells it to pay off a debt or puts it to work as a boarding house or brothel. Laverde was standing on the threshold and holding the door open with his foot, in one of those precarious balances that only a good drunk can pull off. Behind him I could see a brick-floored corridor and then the smallest colonial patio I’d ever seen. In the centre of the patio, instead of the traditional fountain, there was a clothes line, and the whitewashed walls of the corridor had been decorated with calendars of naked women. I had been in similar houses before, so I could imagine what was beyond the dark corridor: I imagined rooms with green wooden doors that close with a padlock like a shed, and I imagined that in one of those 3- by 2-metre sheds, rented by the week, lived Ricardo Laverde. But it was late, I had to hand in my marks the next day (to meet the unbearable, bureaucratic demands of the university, which gave no respite), and walking through that neighbourhood, after a certain time of night, was too much like tempting fate. Laverde was drunk and he’d embarked on a series of confidences I hadn’t foreseen, and I realized at this moment that it was one thing to ask the guy what kind of planes he flew and something else entirely to go into his tiny room with him while he wept over his lost loves. Emotional intimacy has never been easy for me, much less with other men. Everything Laverde was going to tell me then, I thought, he could tell me the next day in the open air or in public places, without any vacuous camaraderie or tears on my shoulder, without any superficial masculine solidarity. The world’s not going to end tomorrow, I thought. Nor is Laverde going to forget his life story.
The Sound of Things Falling Page 2
