The Sound of Things Falling

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  I did not set foot on 14th Street again, much less in the billiard club (I stopped playing entirely: standing up for too long exacerbated the pain in my leg to the point of making it unbearable). So I lost one part of the city; or, to put it a better way, a part of my city was stolen from me. I imagined a city in which the streets, the pavements gradually closed themselves off to us, like the rooms of the house in Julio Cortázar’s story, until eventually expelling us. ‘We were fine, and little by little we began to live unthinkingly,’ says the brother in that story after a mysterious presence has taken over another part of the house. And he adds, ‘You can live without thinking.’ It’s true: you can. After 14th Street was stolen from me – and after months of physiotherapy, of enduring light-headedness and my stomach destroyed by medication – I began to despise the city, to fear it, to feel threatened by it. The world seemed to me a closed place, or my life a walled-in life; the doctor talked to me about my fear of going out on the street, he proffered the word agoraphobia as if it were a delicate object that mustn’t be allowed to fall, and it was hard for me to explain that it was just the opposite, a violent claustrophobia was what was tormenting me. One day, during a session I don’t remember anything else about, that doctor recommended I try a kind of personal therapy that, according to him, had worked well for several of his patients.

  ‘Do you keep a diary, Antonio?’

  I said no, that diaries had always seemed ridiculous to me, a vanity or an anachronism: the fiction that our life matters.

  He replied, ‘Well start one. I’m not suggesting a diary-diary, but a notebook to ask yourself questions.’

  ‘Questions,’ I repeated. ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like, for example: what dangers are real in Bogotá? What are the chances of what happened to you happening again? If you want I could pass you some statistics. Questions, Antonio, questions. Why what happened to you happened to you, and whose fault it was, if it was yours or not. If this would have happened to you in another country. If this would have happened to you in another time. If these questions have any pertinence. It’s important to distinguish the pertinent questions from the ones that are not, Antonio, and one way to do that is to put them down in writing. When you’ve decided which ones are pertinent and which are silly attempts to find an explanation for what can’t be explained, ask yourself other questions: how to get better, how to forget without kidding yourself, how to go back to having a life, to be good to the people who love you. What to do to not be afraid, or to have a reasonable amount of fear, like everyone has. What to do to carry on, Antonio. Lots of them will be things that have occurred to you before, sure, but a person sees the questions on paper and it’s quite different. A diary. Keep one for the next two weeks and then we’ll talk.’

  It seemed an inane recommendation to me, more suited to a self-help book than to a professional with grey hair at his temples, headed notepaper on his desk and diplomas in several languages on his wall. I didn’t say so to him, of course, nor was it necessary, because I soon saw him stand up and walk over to his bookshelves (the books leather-bound and homogeneous, the family photos, a childish drawing framed and signed illegibly). ‘You’re not going to do any such thing, I can see that,’ he said as he opened a drawer. ‘You think all these things I’m saying are stupid. Well, I suppose they might be. But do me a favour, take this.’ He pulled a spiral notebook out of the drawer, like the ones I’d used in college, with those ridiculous covers that looked like denim; he tore four, five or six pages out of the front and looked at the last page, to make sure there weren’t any notes there; he handed it to me, or rather he put it on the desk, in front of me. I picked it up and, for something to do, opened it and flipped through it as if it were a novel. The paper in the notebook was squared: I always hated grid-ruled notebooks. On the first page I could make out the pressure of the writing from the torn-out page, those phantom words. A date, an underlined word, the letter Y. ‘Thanks,’ I said, and left. That very night, in spite of my initial scepticism at the strategy, I locked the door to my room (an absurd security measure), opened the notebook and wrote: Dear diary. My sarcasm fell into the void. I turned the page and tried to begin:

  What

  Why

  But that was it. And so, with my pen in mid-air and my gaze sunk in the isolated words, I remained for a few long seconds. Aura, who had been suffering from a slight but annoying cold all week, was sleeping with her mouth open. I looked at her, tried to make a sketch of her features and failed. I ran through a mental inventory of the next day’s obligations, which included a vaccination for Leticia, who was sleeping quietly beside us in her cot. Then I closed the notebook, put it away in the nightstand and turned off the light.

  Outside, in the depths of the night, a dog barked.

  One day in 1998, shortly after the World Cup finished in France and shortly before Leticia’s second birthday, I was waiting for a taxi somewhere around Parque Nacional. I don’t remember where I was coming from but I know I was heading north, to one of those endless check-ups with which the doctors tried to reassure me, to tell me that my recovery was proceeding at a normal pace, that soon my leg would be what it used to be. No northbound taxis went by, but lots went by heading for the city centre. I had nothing to do in the centre, I thought absurdly, I hadn’t lost anything down there. And then I thought: I’d lost everything there. So, without thinking too much about it, as an act of private courage that no one not in my situation would understand, I crossed the street and got into the first taxi that came by. A few minutes later I found myself, more than two years after the event, walking towards Plaza Rosario, entering the Café Pasaje, finding a free table and from there looking towards the corner where the attack happened, like a little boy peeking with as much fascination as prudence into the dark field where a bull is grazing at night.

  My table, a brown disc with a single metal leg, was at the front: just a hand-span separated it from the window. I couldn’t see the door of the billiard club from there, but I could see the route the murderers on the motorbike had taken. The sounds of the aluminium coffee machine blended with the traffic noise of the nearby avenue, with the clicking heels of passers-by; the aroma of the ground beans blended with the smell that emerged from the toilets every time someone pushed the swinging door. People inhabited the sad square of the plaza, crossing the avenues that framed it, skirted round the statue of the city’s founder (his dark cuirass always spattered with white pigeon shit). The shoeshiners stationed in front of the university with their wooden crates, the huddles of emerald vendors: I looked at them and marvelled that they didn’t know what had happened there, so close to that pavement where their footsteps resounded right now. It was maybe while looking at them that I thought of Laverde and realized I was doing so without anxiety or fear.

  I ordered a coffee, then I ordered another. The woman who brought my second one wiped the table with a melancholy, stinking rag and then put the new cup on top of a new saucer. ‘Anything else, sir?’ she asked. I saw her dry knuckles, crisscrossed by gritty lines; a spectre of steam rose from the blackish liquid. ‘No thanks,’ I said, and tried to find a name in my memory, unsuccessfully. All my student days coming to this café, and I was unable to remember the name of the woman who, in turn, had spent her whole life serving these tables. ‘Can I ask you something?’

  ‘If you must.’

  ‘Do you know who Ricardo Laverde was?’

  ‘That depends,’ she said, drying her hands on her apron, impatient and bored. ‘Was he a customer?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Or maybe, but I don’t think so. He was killed there, on the other side of the plaza.’

  ‘Oh,’ said the woman. ‘How long ago?’

  ‘Two years,’ I said. ‘Two and a half.’

  ‘Two and a half,’ she repeated. ‘No, I don’t remember anyone dying there two and a half years ago. I’m very sorry.’

  I thought she was lying. I didn’t have any proof of that, of course, nor did I have the meagre
imagination to invent a reason for her to lie, but it didn’t seem possible to me that someone could have forgotten such a recent crime. Or maybe Laverde had died and I had gone through agony and fever and hallucinations without the events becoming fixed in the world, in the past or in the memory of my city. This, for some reason, bothered me. I think that at that moment I decided something, or felt capable of something, although I don’t remember the words I used to formulate the decision. I left the café and turned right, taking the long way around to avoid the corner, and ended up crossing La Candelaria towards the place where Laverde had been living until the day he was shot and died.

  Bogotá, like all Latin American capitals, is a mobile and changing city, an unstable element of seven or eight million inhabitants: here you close your eyes for too long and you might very well open them to find yourself surrounded by another world (the hardware store where yesterday they sold felt hats, the alcove where a cobbler sold lottery tickets), as if the whole city was the set of one of those practical-joke shows where the victim goes to the men’s room of a restaurant and comes back and finds himself not in a restaurant but in a hotel room. But in all Latin American cities there’s one place or sometimes several places that live outside of time, that seem immutable while the rest is transformed. That’s what La Candelaria is like. On Ricardo Laverde’s street, the corner print shop was still there, with the same sign by the doorframe and even the same wedding invitations and the same visiting cards that had served as an advertisement in December 1995; the walls that in 1995 were covered in cheap paper posters were still covered, two and a half years later, with other posters on the same kind of paper and in the same format, yellowing rectangles announcing funerals or a bullfight or a Council candidate where the only difference was the proper names. Everything was still the same here. Here reality adjusted – as it doesn’t often do – to the memory we have of it.

  Laverde’s house was also identical to the memory I had of it. The line of tiles was broken in two places, like teeth missing in an old man’s mouth; the paint on the door was peeling off at foot level and the wood was splintering: the exact spot where a person kicks it when arriving overburdened so the door won’t close. But everything else was the same, or that’s how it seemed to me as I listened to my knock echo through the inside of the house. When nobody answered, I took two steps backwards and looked up, hoping for a sign of human life on the roof. I didn’t find any: I saw a cat frolicking near a television aerial and a patch of moss growing near the base of the antenna, and that was all. I had started to give up when I heard some movement from the other side of the door. A woman opened. ‘What can I do for you?’ she said. And the only thing I could find to say was a marvel of awkwardness: ‘The thing is, I was a friend of Ricardo Laverde’s.’

  I saw an expression of uncertainty or suspicion. The woman spoke to me now with hostility but not surprise, as if she’d been expecting me.

  ‘I don’t have anything to say any more,’ she said. ‘All that happened a while ago, I already told everything to the journalists.’

  ‘What journalists?’

  ‘That was back then, I already told them everything.’

  ‘But I’m not a journalist,’ I said. ‘I was a friend . . .’

  ‘I already told everything,’ the woman said. ‘You people already got all that filth out of me, don’t think I’ve forgotten.’

  At that moment, a boy appeared behind her, a boy who looked a bit old to have such a dirty face. ‘What’s up, Consu? Is this gentleman bothering you?’ He leaned a little closer to the door and into the daylight: it wasn’t dirt around his mouth, but the shadow of incipient fuzz. ‘Says he was a friend of Ricardo’s,’ said Consu in a low voice. She looked me up and down, and I did the same to her: she was short and fat, had her hair up in a bun that didn’t look grey but rather divided into black and white locks like a board game, and was covered in a black dress of some elasticized material that clung to her bulges so that the knitted woollen belt was devoured by the loose flesh of her abdomen, and what one saw was a sort of thick white worm coming out of her belly button. She remembered something, or looked like she remembered something, and on her face – in the folds of her face, pink and sweaty as if Consu had just done some physical labour – a pout formed. The woman in her sixties then turned into an immense little girl who someone has refused a sweet. ‘Excuse me, señor,’ said Consu, and began to close the door.

  ‘Don’t close the door,’ I begged. ‘Let me explain.’

  ‘Get lost, brother,’ said the young man. ‘You’ve got no business here.’

  ‘I knew him,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ said Consu.

  ‘I was with him when he was killed,’ I said then. I lifted up my shirt and showed the woman the scar on my belly. ‘One of the bullets hit me,’ I said.

  Scars can be eloquent.

  For the next few hours I talked to Consu about that day, about meeting Laverde at the billiard club, about the Casa de Poesía and about what happened afterwards. I told her what Laverde had told me and that I still didn’t understand why he’d told me that. I also told her about the recording, about the distress that had swept over Laverde while he listened to it, about the speculations that crossed my mind at that moment about its possible contents, about what could be said to produce that effect on a more or less hardened adult. ‘I can’t imagine,’ I told her. ‘And I’ve tried, I swear, but I can’t figure it out. I just can’t.’ ‘You can’t, can you?’ she said. ‘No,’ I said. By this point we were in the kitchen, Consu sitting in a white plastic chair and me on a wooden stool with a broken rung, so close to the gas cylinder that we could have touched it by simply stretching out an arm. The inside of the house was just as I’d imagined it: the patio, the wooden beams visible on the ceiling, the green doors of the rented rooms. Consu listened to me and nodded, put her hands between her knees and clamped her legs together as if she didn’t want her hands to escape. After a while, she offered me a black coffee, which she made by putting the ground coffee beans into a piece of a nylon stocking and then putting the stocking into a little brass pot covered in grey dents, and when I finished it she offered me another and repeated the procedure, and each time the air became impregnated with the smell of gas and then of the burnt match. I asked Consu which was Laverde’s room, and she pursed her lips and pointed with them, moving her head like an uncomfortable colt. ‘That one there,’ she said. ‘Now it’s occupied by a musician, such a nice guy, you should see him, he plays guitar at the Camarín del Carmen.’ She fell quiet, looking at her hands, and eventually said, ‘He had a combination lock, because Ricardo didn’t like carrying keychains around with him. I had to break it when he was killed.’

  The police had arrived, by chance, at the same time Ricardo Laverde usually came home, and Consu, thinking it was him, opened the door before they knocked. She found herself facing two officers, one with grey hair who lisped when he spoke and another who stayed two steps behind and didn’t say a single word. ‘You could see the grey hair was premature, who knows what that man had seen,’ said Consu. ‘They showed me an ID card and asked me if I recognized the individual, that’s how he put it, the individual, what a strange word for a dead man. And the truth is, I didn’t recognize him,’ said Consu, crossing herself. ‘The thing is he’d really changed. I had to read the card to tell them yes, the man was called Ricardo Laverde and he’d been living here since whatever month. First I thought: he’s got himself into trouble. They’re going to put him away again. I felt sorry for him, because Ricardo complied with all that stuff since he got out.’

  ‘What stuff?’

  ‘Things convicts have to do. When they get out of prison.’

  ‘So you knew,’ I said.

  ‘Of course, dear. Everybody knew.’

  ‘And did you know what he’d done, too?’

  ‘No, not that,’ said Consu. ‘Well, I never tried to find out. That would have messed up our relationship, don’t you think? W
hat the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over, that’s what I say.’

  The police followed her to Laverde’s room. Using a hammer as a lever, Consu shattered the aluminium semicircle, and the lock landed in one of the little ditches in the central patio. When she opened the door she found a monk’s cell: the perfect rectangle of the mattress, the impeccable sheet, the pillow in its unwrinkled pillowcase, without the curves and avenues that a head leaves over the course of the nights. Beside the mattress, an untreated wooden board on top of two bricks; on the board a glass of water that looked cloudy. The next day that image, that of the mattress and the improvised bedside table, came out in the tabloids beside the smear of blood on the pavement of 14th Street. ‘Since that day no journalist sets foot in this house,’ said Consu. ‘Those people have no respect.’