‘I’m going where you’re going, sir.’
‘I’m going to Las Acacias,’ I said. ‘If you know where it is, I’ll take you that far.’
‘Oh well, that’s no good to me then, sir,’ the boy said without his smile disappearing for a second. ‘It’s just down there, you see. That dog’s from there. He doesn’t bite, don’t worry.’
It was a black, tired-looking German shepherd with a white mark on his tail. He noticed my presence, raised his ears and looked at me without interest; then he walked a couple of times around a mango tree, his nose to the ground and tail stuck to his ribs like a feather duster, and finally lay down beside the trunk and began licking a paw. I felt sorry for him: his fur was not designed for this climate. I drove a bit further, beneath the trees whose dense foliage didn’t let any light through, until I arrived in front of a gate of solid columns and a wooden crossbeam from which hung a board that looked recently rubbed with furniture oil, and on the board appeared, etched and singed, the graceless and bland name of the property. I had to get out to open the gate, the original bolt of which seemed to have been stuck in its place since the beginning of time; I continued on quite a way along a track across an open field made simply by driving across it, two strips of earth separated by a crest of stiff grass; and finally, beyond a post where a small vulture perched, I arrived in front of a one-storey white house.
I called out but nobody appeared. The door was open: a glass-topped dining table and a living room with light-coloured armchairs, all dominated by ceiling fans whose blades seemed animated by a sort of inner life of their own, a private mission against high temperatures. On the terrace hung three brightly coloured hammocks, and under one of them someone had left a half-eaten guava that was now being devoured by ants. I was about to ask at the top of my lungs if there was anybody at home when I heard a whistle, and then another, and it took me a couple of seconds to discover, beyond the bougainvillea bushes that flanked the house, beyond the guanábana trees that grew behind the bougainvilleas, the silhouette moving its arms as if asking for help. There was something monstrous in that overly white figure with too big a head and legs too thick; but I couldn’t look closely as I walked towards her, because all my attention was concentrated on not breaking my ankle on the stones or uneven ground, on not getting my face scratched by the low branches of the trees. Behind the house sparkled the rectangle of a swimming pool that didn’t look well cared for: a blue slide with the paint bleached by the sun, a round table with its parasol folded down, the skimmer net leaning against a tree as if it had never been used. That’s what I was thinking when I arrived beside the white monster, but by that time the head had turned into a veiled mask, and the hand into a glove with thick fingers. The woman took off the mask, passed a hand quickly through her hair (light brown, cut with intentional clumsiness, styled with genuine carelessness), greeted me without smiling and explained that she’d had to interrupt the inspection of her hives to come and receive me. Now she had to get back to work. ‘It’s stupid for you to have to go get bored in the house waiting for me,’ she said, pronouncing every letter, almost one at a time, as if her life depended on it. ‘Have you ever seen a honeycomb up close?’
I immediately realized she was about the same age as me, more or less, although I couldn’t say what secret generational communication there was between the two of us, or if such a thing really exists: an ensemble of gestures or words or a certain tone of voice, a way of saying hello or thanks or of moving or crossing our legs when we sit down, that we share with other members of our litter. She had the palest green eyes I’d ever seen and on her face a girl’s skin met a mature and careworn woman’s expression: her face was like a party that everyone had left. There were no adornments, except for two sparks of diamonds (I think they were diamonds) barely visible on her slender earlobes. Dressed in her beekeeper’s suit that hid her shape, Maya Fritts took me to a shed that might once have been a manger: a room that smelled of manure with two masks and a pair of white overalls hanging on the wall.
‘Put these on,’ she ordered me. ‘My bees don’t like bright colours.’
I wouldn’t have called the blue of my shirt a bright blue, but I didn’t argue. ‘I didn’t know bees saw in colour,’ I said, but she was already putting a white hat on my head and explaining how to secure the nylon veil of the mask. As she passed the cords under my armpits to tie them behind my back, she hugged me like a passenger on a motorbike; I liked the proximity of her body (I thought I felt the phantom pressure of her breasts against my back) but also the sureness with which her hands acted, the firmness or lack of embarrassment as they touched my body. From somewhere she took out another pair of white shoelaces, went down on one knee, used them to tie closed the bottom of the trouser legs and said, looking me in the eye without the least embarrassment, ‘So they don’t go stinging you in sensitive places.’ Then she grabbed a kind of metal bottle with golden bellows and asked me to carry it, and she stuck a red brush and a steel crowbar in her pockets.
I asked her how long she’d had this hobby.
‘It’s not a hobby,’ she told me. ‘I make my living from this, my dear. The best honey in the region, if I do say so myself.’
‘Well, congratulations. And how long have you been producing the best honey in the region?’
She explained on the way to the hives. She explained other things too. And so I learned how she had come to set up home on this property, which was her only inheritance. ‘My parents bought the land when I was born, more or less,’ she said. So, I commented, this was all that was left of them. ‘There was money left too,’ said Maya, ‘but I spent it on lawyers.’ ‘Lawyers are expensive,’ I said. ‘No,’ she said, ‘they’re like dogs: they smell fear and attack. I was very inexpert when it all started. I should say that someone less honest could have taken everything.’ As soon as she came of age and could take charge of her own life, she started planning a way of leaving Bogotá, and she hadn’t turned twenty when she did so definitively, dropping out of university and falling out with her mother over it. When the final inheritance settlement came down, Maya had already been settled here for a good decade. ‘And I’ve never regretted having left Bogotá,’ she told me. ‘I couldn’t take it any more. I detest that city. I’ve never been back. I wouldn’t know what it’s like now, maybe you can tell me. You live in Bogotá?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’ve never left?’
‘Never,’ I said. ‘Not even during the worst years.’
‘Me neither. I was there for all of it.’
‘Who did you live with?’
‘With my mother, of course,’ said Maya. ‘A strange life, now that I think of it, the two of us alone. Then each of us chose her own path, you know how those things go.’
In 1992 she set up the first rustic hives at Las Acacias, a curious decision at the very least in a person who, according to her own confession, didn’t know any more about apiculture at that moment than I do now. But those hives barely lasted a few months: Maya couldn’t stand having to destroy the combs and kill the bees every time she collected the honey and wax, and in secret she imagined the surviving bees were escaping with a message to the whole region and one day, when she was taking her siesta in the hammock by the pool, a cloud of vengeful stingers would fall upon her. She exchanged the four rustic hives for three with removable honeycombs and never had to kill another bee.
‘But that was seven years ago,’ I said. ‘You haven’t been back to Bogotá in all those years?’
‘Well, yes. To see the lawyers. To look for that woman, Consuelo Sandoval. But I’ve never stayed overnight in Bogotá, or even till sundown. I can’t stand it, I can’t endure more than a few hours there.’
‘And that’s why you prefer the rest of us to come and see you.’
‘No one comes to see me. But yes, that’s it. That’s why I preferred you to come here.’
‘I understand.’
Maya looked up.
‘Yes, I
think you do understand,’ she said. ‘People our age usually do. We have an abnormal relationship to Bogotá. Being there through the ’80s will do that to you.’
The last syllables of her sentence were drowned out by a strident buzzing. We were a few steps from the apiary. The terrain was slightly sloping, and through the veil it wasn’t easy to see where I was placing my feet, but even so I was able to witness the best spectacle in the world: a person doing their job well. Maya Fritts took me by the arm so we would approach the hives from the side, not the front, and signalled for me to give her the bottle that I’d been carrying the whole time. She lifted it up as high as her face and squeezed the bellows once, to check the mechanism, and a ghost of white smoke came out of the spout and dissolved in the air. Maya stuck the spout into an opening in the first hive and squeezed the golden bellows again, once, twice, three times, filling the hive with smoke, and then took the lid off to spray the whole interior at once. I stepped back and brought my arm up to my face out of pure instinct; but where I’d thought I’d find a swarm of hysterical bees coming out to sting anything in their path, I saw the exact opposite: the bees were quiet and calm, and their bodies were overlapping. The buzzing died down then: it was almost possible to see the wings stopping, the black and yellow rings ceasing to vibrate as if their batteries had run out.
‘What did you spray on them?’ I asked. ‘What’s in that bottle?’
‘Dry wood and cow dung,’ said Maya.
‘And the smoke puts them to sleep? What does it do to them?’
She didn’t answer. With both hands she lifted the first frame and gave it a brisk shake, and the drugged or sleeping or stunned bees fell back into the hive. ‘Pass me the brush,’ said Maya Fritts, and she used it to delicately sweep off the few stubborn ones who stayed stuck to the honey. Some bees climbed up her fingers, wandered through the soft bristles of the brush, a bit curious or perhaps drunk, and Maya pushed them off her with a smooth gesture, the stroke of a paintbrush. ‘No, sweetie,’ she said to one, ‘you’re staying home.’ Or, to another, ‘Down you get, we’re not playing today.’ The same procedure – the extraction of the combs, sweeping off the bees, the affectionate chitchat – was repeated at the rest of the hives, and Maya Fritts watched everything with her eyes wide open and was probably making mental notes of things that I, in my ignorance, was incapable of seeing. She turned over the wooden frames, looked at them straight on and from the back, a couple of times she used the smoke from the bottle again, as if she feared some unruly bee would wake up at the wrong moment, and I took the opportunity to take off one glove and stick my hand in the cloud, just to find out a little more about that cold smelly smoke. The smell, more wood than manure, stayed on my skin until well into the night. And it would remain forever associated with my long conversation with Maya Fritts.
After checking all the hives, after returning smokers and brushes and little crowbars to their places in the shed, Maya took me back to the house and surprised me with a suckling pig that her staff had been cooking all morning for us. Having acclimatized to the midday heat unawares, the first thing I felt on entering was instant relief, and as I received that sudden hit of shade and cool air I finally realized how much I’d been suffering inside the overall, gloves and mask. My back was drenched with sweat and my shirt stuck to my chest, and my body was screaming for any sort of comfort. Two fans, one over the living room and the other over the dining table, were spinning furiously. Before we sat down to eat, Maya Fritts got a box from somewhere and brought it into the dining-room. It was made of woven wicker, the size of a small suitcase, with a stiff lid and reinforced bottom, and on each end was a handle or a woven grip to make it easier to pick up and carry. Maya put it at the head of the table, like a guest, and sat opposite it. Then, while she served the salad from a wooden bowl, she asked me what I had come to know about Ricardo Laverde, if I had got to know him well.
‘Not really,’ I said. ‘It was just a few months.’
‘Do you mind remembering those things? Because of your accident, I mean?’
‘Not any more,’ I said. ‘But, like I said, I don’t know much. I know he loved your mother very much. I know about the flight from Miami. But I didn’t know about you.’
‘Nothing? He never talked about me?’
‘Never. Only about your mother. Elena, wasn’t it?’
‘Elaine. Her name was Elaine, the Colombians changed it to Elena and she let them. Or she got used to it.’
‘But Elena doesn’t mean Elaine.’
‘If you only knew,’ she said, ‘how many times I’d heard her explain that.’
‘Elaine Fritts,’ I said. ‘She should be a stranger to me, but she isn’t. It’s odd. Do you know about the black box?’
‘The cassette?’
‘Yes. I had no way of knowing I’d be here today, Maya. I would have tried to keep that tape. I don’t think it would have been so difficult.’
‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ said Maya. ‘I’ve got it.’
‘What?’
‘Of course, what did you expect? It’s the plane my mother died on, Antonio. It took me a little longer than you. To find the tape, I mean, Ricardo’s house and the tape. You had an advantage, you were with him at the end, but anyway, I looked and finally got there. It’s not my fault either.’
‘And Consu gave you the tape.’
‘Yes, she gave it to me. And I’ve got it. The first time I heard it I was devastated. I had to let whole days go by before listening to it again, and in spite of that I think I’ve been very brave, most other people would have put it away and never listened to it again. But I did, I listened to it again and since then I haven’t stopped. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard it now, twenty or thirty. At first I thought I played it again to find something in it. Then I realized that I keep playing it precisely because I know I’m not going to find anything. Dad just heard it the once, right?’
‘As far as I know.’
‘I can’t even imagine what he felt.’ Maya paused. ‘He adored her. He adored my mother. Like any good couple, of course, but with him it was special. Because of what happened.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Well, because he went away and she stayed the same as before. She remained sort of paralysed in his memory, in a way.’
She took off her glasses, and pinched her tear ducts: the universal gesture of those who do not want to cry. I wondered where in our genetic code these things are imprinted, these gestures repeated in all parts of the world, in all races, in all cultures, or almost all of them. Or maybe it wasn’t like that, but cinema had made us think so. Yes, that was possible too. ‘Sorry,’ said Maya Fritts. ‘It still happens.’ On the pale skin of her nose a blush appeared, a sudden cold.
‘Maya,’ I said, ‘can I ask you something?’
‘Maybe.’
‘What’s in there?’
I didn’t have to clarify what I was talking about. I didn’t look at the wicker box, I didn’t point at it in any way (not even with my mouth, as some do: pursing the lips and moving one’s head like a horse). Maya Fritts, however, looked across the table and answered me while staring at the empty place.
‘Well, that’s what I asked you to come for,’ she said. ‘Let’s see if I can explain it properly.’ She paused, encircled her glass of beer with her fingers but didn’t go so far as to take a sip. ‘I want you to talk to me about my father.’ Another pause. ‘Sorry, I already told you that.’ Yet another pause. ‘Look, I didn’t ever . . . I was very young when he . . . The thing is, I want you to tell me about his final days, you lived through them with him, and I want you to tell me in as much detail as possible.’
Then she stood up and brought the wicker crate, which must have weighed quite a lot because Maya had to lean it against her belly and hold it with both handles like a washerwoman from another century. ‘Look, Antonio, it’s like this,’ she said. ‘This box is full of things about my father. Photos, letters written to him, le
tters he wrote and that I’ve collected. All this material I’ve acquired, it’s not like I’ve found it in the street, it’s cost me a lot of effort. Señora Sandoval had a lot of things, for example. She had this photo, see.’ I recognized it immediately, of course, and I would have recognized it even if someone had cropped it or removed the figure of Ricardo Laverde. There were the pigeons of Bolívar Plaza, there was the corn cart, there was the Capitolio, there was the grey background of my grey city. ‘It was for your mother,’ I said. ‘It was for Elaine Fritts.’
‘I know,’ said Maya. ‘Had you seen it before?’
‘He showed it to me. The day after he’d had it taken.’
‘And did he show you other things? Did he ever give you anything, a letter, a document?’
I thought of the night I refused to go into Laverde’s boarding house. ‘No, nothing,’ I said. ‘What else have you got?’
‘Stuff,’ said Maya, ‘unimportant stuff, stuff that doesn’t mean anything. But having them makes me feel calmer. They’re the proof. Look,’ she said, and she showed me a stamped piece of paper. It was a bill: at the top, on the left, was a hotel logo, a circle of some undefined or indefinable colour (time had taken its toll on the paper) above which were distributed the words Hotel, Escorial and Manizales. To the right of the logo, the following inscrutable text:
The Sound of Things Falling Page 9
