A doctor came to explain the uses of the trigger I had in my hand: when I felt too much pain, he told me, I could press the button, and a spurt of intravenous morphine would soothe me immediately. But there were limits. The first day I used up my daily dose in a third of the time (I pressed the button like a child with a new video game), and the hours that followed are, in my memory, the closest I’ve been to hell. I’m telling this because that’s how, between the hallucinations of the pain and those of the morphine, the days of my recovery went by. I fell asleep at any moment, without any apparent routine, like prisoners in stories; I opened my eyes to a landscape that was always strange, the most curious characteristic of which was that it never became familiar, I always seemed to be seeing it for the first time. At some moment I can’t manage to pinpoint, Aura appeared in that landscape, sitting there on the brown sofa when I opened my eyes, looking at me with genuine pity. It was a new sensation (or it was new to be looked at and cared for by a woman who was expecting my child), but I don’t recall having thought so at the time.
The nights. I remember the nights. The fear of the darkness began in those last days of my hospitalization, and only disappeared a year later: at six thirty in the evening, when night falls suddenly in Bogotá, my heart began to beat furiously, and at first it took the dialectic efforts of several doctors to convince me that I wasn’t about to die of a heart attack. The long Bogotá night – it always lasts more than eleven hours, no matter the time of year and much less the mental state of those who suffer it – seemed almost unendurable to me in the hospital, with its nocturnal life marked by the permanently illuminated white corridors, by the neon gloom of the white rooms; but in the bedroom of my apartment the darkness was total, for the streetlights didn’t reach my tenth floor, and the terror I felt at just imagining myself waking up in the dark obliged me to sleep with the light on, as I did when I was little. Aura put up with the illuminated nights better than I would have expected, sometimes resorting to those masks they give you on planes to create a personal darkness, sometimes giving up and turning on the television to watch an infomercial and amuse herself with machines that chop all kinds of fruit and lotions that dissolve all body fat. Her own body, of course, was transforming; a little girl called Leticia was growing in there, but I wasn’t capable of giving her the attention she deserved. I was woken up on several nights by an absurd nightmare: I’d gone back to live at my parents’ house, but with Aura, and suddenly the gas stove blew up and the whole family was dying and I realized there was nothing I could do. And, no matter what time it was, I ended up phoning my old house, just to make sure nothing had happened in reality and that the dream was just a dream. Aura tried to calm me down. She stared at me, I could feel her looking at me. ‘It’s nothing,’ I told her. And only at the end of the night would I manage to sleep for a few hours, coiled up like a dog frightened by fireworks, wondering why Leticia wasn’t in the dream, what had Leticia done to be banished from the dream.
In my memory, the months that followed were a time of large fears and small discomforts. On the street I was assailed by the unmistakable certainty I was being watched; the internal injuries caused by the bullet wound forced me to use crutches for several months. A pain I’d never felt before appeared in my left leg, similar to what people feel when they’re about to have an appendicitis attack. The doctors told me how slowly nerves grow and the time it takes to recover a certain degree of autonomy, and I listened to them without understanding, or without understanding that they were talking about me; somewhere else, far from where I was, Aura listened to explanations from other doctors on very different subjects, and took folic acid tablets and received cortisone injections to help the baby’s lungs mature (in Aura’s family there was a history of premature deliveries). Her body was changing, but I didn’t notice. Aura put my hand on one side of her prominent belly button. ‘There, there she is. Did you feel?’ ‘But what does it feel like?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know, like a butterfly, like tiny wings brushing against your skin. I don’t know if you understand.’ And I told her I did, that I understood perfectly, although it was a lie.
I didn’t feel anything: I was distracted: the fear distracted me. I imagined the faces of the murderers, hidden behind the visors; the blast of the shots and the continuous whistle in my throbbing eardrums, the sudden apparition of blood. Not even now, as I write, can I manage to remember those details without the same cold fear easing into my body. The fear, in the fantastic language of the therapist who treated me after the first problems, was called post-traumatic stress, and according to him had a lot to do with the era of bombs that had ravaged us a few years earlier. ‘So don’t worry if you have problems of an intimate nature,’ the man told me (he spoke those words, intimate nature). I didn’t say anything to that. ‘Your body is fighting something serious,’ the doctor continued. ‘It has to concentrate on this and eliminate what isn’t strictly necessary. The libido is the first to go, you see? So don’t worry. Any dysfunction is normal.’ I didn’t respond this time either. Dysfunction: the word seemed ugly to me, its sounds seemed to clash, disfiguring the atmosphere, and I thought I wouldn’t talk about the matter with Aura. The doctor kept talking, there was no way to make him stop talking. Fear was the main ailment of bogotanos of my generation, he told me. My situation, he told me, was not at all unusual: it would eventually pass, as it had passed for all the others who had visited his office. All this he told me. He never managed to comprehend that I wasn’t interested in the rational explanation or much less the statistical aspect of these violent palpitations, or the instantaneous sweating that in another context would have been comical, but in the magic words that would make the sweating and palpitations disappear, the mantra that would allow me to sleep through the night.
I got used to my nocturnal routines: after a noise or the illusion of a noise had frightened me out of sleep (and left me at the mercy of the pain in my leg), I reached for my crutches, went to the living room, sat in the recliner and stayed there, watching the movements of the night on the hills around Bogotá, the green and red lights of planes that could be seen when the sky was clear, the dew accumulating on the windows like a white shadow when the temperature dropped in the early hours. It wasn’t only my nights that were disturbed but my waking hours as well. Months after what happened to Laverde, a backfiring exhaust pipe, a slamming door, or even a heavy book falling in a certain way onto a certain surface would be enough to set me off on an attack of anxiety and paranoia. At any moment, for no discernible reason, I might start to weep inconsolably. The tears would come upon me with no warning: at the dining-room table, in front of my parents or Aura, or with friends, and the feeling of being ill was joined by embarrassment. At first there was always someone who leapt up to hug me, there were the words one uses to comfort a child: ‘It’s all over now, Antonio, there there.’ With time people, my people, got used to these bursts of tears, and the consoling words stopped, and the hugs disappeared, and the embarrassment was then greater, because it was obvious that I, rather than moving them to pity, seemed ridiculous. With strangers, who owed me no loyalty or compassion whatsoever, it was worse. During one of the first classes I taught after going back to work, a student asked me a question about Von Ihering’s theories. ‘Justice,’ I began to say, ‘has a double evolutionary base: the struggle of the individual to have his rights respected and that of the State to impose, among its associates, the necessary order.’ ‘So,’ the student asked me, ‘could we say that the man who reacts, feeling himself threatened or infringed, is the true creator of the law?’ and I was going to tell him of the time when all law was incorporated within religion, those remote times when distinctions between morals and hygiene, public and private, were still non-existent, but I didn’t manage to do so. I covered my eyes with my tie and burst into tears. The class was adjourned. On the way out, I heard the student say, ‘Poor guy. He’s not going to make it.’
It wasn’t the last time I heard that diagnosis. One night Aura
came home late from a get-together with her girlfriends that in my city is called by its English name, a baby shower, in which gifts rain down on the future mother. She slipped in quietly, undoubtedly hoping not to wake me, but I was still up and writing notes on Von Ihering’s ideas, which had thrown me into crisis. ‘Why don’t you try to sleep,’ she said, but it wasn’t a question. ‘I’m working,’ I told her, ‘I’ll go to bed as soon as I finish.’ I remember her then taking off her thin overcoat (no, it wasn’t an overcoat, more like a trench coat), putting it over the back of the wicker chair, leaning on the doorframe with a hand resting on her enormous belly and running the other one through her hair, all a sort of elaborate prelude people enact when they don’t want to say what they’re going to say, when they hope some miracle is going to free them of that obligation. ‘They’re talking about us,’ said Aura.
‘Who?’
‘At the university. I don’t know, people, students.’
‘Professors?’
‘I don’t know. The students at least. Come to bed and I’ll tell you.’
‘Not now,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow. I have to work now.’
‘It’s after midnight,’ said Aura. ‘We’re both tired. You’re tired.’
‘I have work to do. I have to prepare this class.’
‘But you’re tired. And you don’t sleep, and not sleeping is not a good way to prepare for class either.’ She paused, looked at me in the yellow dining-room light and said, ‘You didn’t go out today, did you?’
I didn’t answer.
‘You haven’t showered,’ she continued. ‘You didn’t get dressed all day. You’ve spent the whole day stuck in here. People say the accident changed you, Antonio, and I tell them of course it did, not to be idiots, how could it not change you. But I don’t like what I’m seeing, if you want me to tell you the truth.’
‘Well don’t,’ I barked at her. ‘Nobody’s asked you to.’
The conversation could have ended there, but Aura noticed something, I saw on her face all the movements of someone just realizing something, and asked me one question, ‘Were you waiting for me?’
I didn’t answer this time either. ‘Were you waiting for me to get home?’ she insisted. ‘Were you worried?’
‘I was preparing my class,’ I said, looking her in the eye. ‘It seems I can’t even do that now.’
‘You were worried,’ she said. ‘That’s why you stayed up.’ And then, ‘Antonio, Bogotá is not a war zone. There aren’t bullets floating around out there, the same thing’s not going to happen to all of us.’
You know nothing, I wanted to tell her, you grew up elsewhere. There is no common ground between us, I wanted to tell her as well, there’s no way for you to understand, nobody’s going to explain it to you, I can’t explain it to you. But those words didn’t come out of my mouth.
‘Nobody thinks anything’s going to happen to all of us,’ I told her instead. I was surprised that it sounded so loud when it hadn’t been my intention to raise my voice. ‘Nobody was worried because you weren’t home yet. Nobody thinks you’re going to get blown up by a bomb like the one at Tres Elefantes, or the bomb at DAS, because you don’t work at DAS, or the bomb at Centro 93, because you never shop at Centro 93. Besides, that era is over, isn’t it? So nobody thinks that’s going to happen to you, Aura, we’d be very unlucky, wouldn’t we? And we’re not unlucky, are we?’
‘Don’t be like that,’ said Aura. ‘I . . .’
‘I am preparing my class,’ I cut her off, ‘is it too much to ask you to respect that? Instead of talking bollocks at two in the morning, is it too much to ask that you go to bed and stop pissing me off and let me finish this fucking thing?’
As far as I remember, she didn’t start to move towards my bedroom at that moment, but went first to the kitchen, and I heard the fridge opening and closing and then a door, the door of one of those cupboards that close almost by themselves if you give them a tiny nudge. And in this series of domestic sounds (in which I could follow Aura’s movements, imagine them one by one) there was an annoying familiarity, a sort of irritating intimacy, as if Aura, instead of having taken care of me for weeks and supervised my recovery, had invaded my space without any authorization whatsoever. I saw her leave the kitchen with a glass in her hand: it was some intensely coloured liquid, one of those fizzy drinks that she liked and I didn’t. ‘Do you know how much she weighs?’ she asked me.
‘Who?’
‘Leticia,’ she said. ‘I got the test results, the baby’s enormous. If she hasn’t been born in a week, we’re going to schedule a Caesarean.’
‘In a week,’ I said.
‘The tests were all positive,’ said Aura.
‘Good,’ I said.
‘Don’t you want to know how much she weighs?’ she asked.
‘Who?’ I asked.
I remember her standing still in the middle of the living room, the same distance from the kitchen door as from the threshold to the hallway, in a sort of no man’s land. ‘Antonio,’ she said, ‘there’s nothing wrong with worry. But yours is beginning to be unhealthy. You’re sick with worry. And that makes me worry.’ She left the drink she’d just poured herself on the dining-room table and locked herself in the bathroom. I heard her turn on the tap to fill the bathtub; I imagined her crying as she did so, covering her sobs with the sound of running water. When I got into bed, quite a while later, Aura was still in the tub, that place where her belly was not a burden, that happy, weightless world. I fell asleep straight away and the next morning left while she was still sleeping. I thought, I confess, that Aura wasn’t really asleep, but pretending to be so she wouldn’t have to say goodbye to me. I thought she was hating me at that moment. I thought, with something very closely resembling fear, that her hatred was justified.
I arrived at the university a few minutes before seven. On my shoulders and in my eyes I could feel the weight of the night, the few hours of sleep. I was in the habit of waiting outside the lecture hall until the students arrived, leaning on the stone banisters of the former cloister, and going in only when it was obvious that the majority of the students were already present; that morning, perhaps due to the weariness I felt in my abdomen, perhaps because when I was seated the crutches were less noticeable, I decided to wait for them sitting down. But I didn’t even manage to get close to my chair: a drawing caught my attention from the blackboard, and turning my head I found myself in front of two stick figures in obscene positions. His penis was as long as his arm; her face had no features, it was just a chalk circle with long hair. Beneath the drawing was a printed caption:
Professor Yammara introduces her to law.
I felt faint, but I don’t think anyone noticed. ‘Who did this?’ I said out loud, but I don’t remember my voice coming out as loud as I’d intended. My students’ faces were blank: they’d been emptied of all content; they were chalk circles like the woman on the blackboard. I began to walk towards the steps, as fast as my hobbled gait would allow, and as I started down them, just as I was passing the drawing of Francisco José de Caldas, I completely lost control. Legend has it that Caldas, one of the precursors of Colombian independence, was descending those stairs on his way to the scaffold when he bent down to pick up a piece of charcoal, and his executioners saw him draw on the whitewashed wall an oval crossed by a line: a long black bisected O, which patriots like to interpret as Oh, long and dark departure. Beside this implausible and absurd and undoubtedly apocryphal hieroglyphic I passed with my heart pounding and my hands, pale and sweaty, closed tightly around the grips of my crutches. My tie was torturing my neck. I left the university and kept walking, paying little attention to what streets I was crossing or the people I brushed past, until my arms started to ache. At the north corner of Santander Park, the mime who’s always there began to follow me, to imitate my awkward gait and my clumsy movements, and even my panting. He wore a one-piece black suit covered in buttons, his face painted white but no other make-up of any other colour, and he
moved his arms in the air with such talent that even I seemed to suddenly see his fictitious crutches. There, while that failed good actor made fun of me and provoked the laughter of passers-by, I thought for the first time that my life was falling apart, and that Leticia, ignorant little girl, could not have chosen a worse moment to come into the world.
Leticia was born one August morning. We had spent the night at the clinic, preparing for the surgery, and in the atmosphere of the room – Aura in the bed, me on the companion’s sofa – there was a sort of macabre inversion of another room, of another time. When the nurses came to take her, Aura was already giddy with anaesthetic, and the last thing she said to me was, ‘I think it was O. J. Simpson’s glove.’ I would have liked to hold her hand, not to have crutches and be able to hold her hand, and I told her so, but she was already unconscious. I went along beside her down corridors and in lifts while the nurses told me to relax, Papá, that everything was going to be fine, and I wondered what right these women had to call me Papá, much less to give me their opinion on the future. Later, in front of the huge swinging doors of the operating theatre, they showed me to a waiting room that was more like a way station with three chairs and a table with magazines on it. I left my crutches leaning in a corner, by the photograph or rather the poster of a pink baby smiling toothlessly, hugging a giant sunflower, against a blue sky in the background. I opened an old magazine, tried to distract myself with a crossword puzzle: Threshing place. Brother of Onan. People slow to act, especially by pretence. But I could only think of the woman who was sleeping inside there while a scalpel opened her skin and her flesh, of the gloved hands that were going to reach inside her body and take my daughter out. May those hands be careful ones, I thought, let them move with dexterity, and not touch what they shouldn’t touch. Let them not hurt you, Leticia, and don’t be scared, because there’s nothing to fear. I was on my feet when a young man came out and, without taking his mask off, told me, ‘Both your princesses are perfectly fine.’ I didn’t know when I had stood up, and my leg had started to ache, so I sat back down. I held my hands to my face out of shame, nobody likes to make a show of his tears. People slow to act, I thought, especially by pretence. And later, when I saw Leticia in a sort of bluish, translucent pool, when I saw her finally asleep and well wrapped up in little white blankets that even from a distance looked warm, I thought again of that ridiculous phrase. I concentrated on Leticia. From too far away I saw her eyes without lashes, I saw the tiniest mouth I’d ever seen, and regretted that they’d put her down with her hands hidden, because nothing seemed more urgent to me at that moment than seeing my daughter’s hands. I knew I’d never love anyone like I loved Leticia in that instant, that nobody would ever be what, there and then, that new arrival, that complete stranger was to me.
The Sound of Things Falling Page 5
