Accounts are charged on the Friday of every month and must be settled immediately. All rooms include meals. Anyone occupying a room will be charged by the hotel for the minimum stay of one day.
Then there was the date, 29 September 1970, the hour of the guest’s arrival, 3:30 p.m., and the room number, 225; above the square that followed, handwritten, the date of departure (30 September, she’d just stayed one night) and the word Paid. The guest was called Elena de Laverde – I imagined her giving her married name to avoid any potential harassment – and during her brief stay at the hotel she’d made one phone call and eaten one dinner and breakfast, but she hadn’t used the cablegram, laundry, press or car service. A paper without importance and at the same time a window into another world, I thought. And this crate was full of similar windows.
‘Proof of what?’ I asked.
‘Pardon?’
‘You said before that these papers are the proof.’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, proof of what?’
But Maya didn’t answer. Instead she kept going through documents with her hand and spoke without looking at me. ‘All this I acquired not long ago,’ she told me. ‘I found out some names, wrote to the United States telling them who I was, I negotiated by letter and by phone. And one day a package arrived with the letters Mom wrote when she first arrived in Colombia, back in ’69. That’s how it’s been with all this, a historian’s work. Many people think it’s absurd. And I don’t know, I don’t really know how to justify it. I’m not even thirty yet and I live way out here, far from everything, like an old maid, and this has become important to me. Constructing my father’s life, finding out who he was. That’s what I’m trying to do. Of course, I wouldn’t have got into anything like this if I hadn’t been left like this, alone, with nobody, and so suddenly. It all started with what happened to my mother. It was so absurd . . . The news reached me here, I was in this hammock where I am now, when I heard that the plane had crashed. I knew she was on that plane. And three weeks later, my father.’
‘How did you find out?’
‘Reading El Espacio,’ she said. ‘It came out in El Espacio, with photos and everything.’
‘Photos?’
‘Of the pool of blood. Of two or three witnesses. Of Señora Sandoval, the one who told me about you. Of his room, and that was very painful. A sensationalist tabloid I’d always despised; I’d always despised its topless women and even its crossword puzzles, which are too easy. And I have to see the most important news of my life there. Tell me it’s not ironic. That’s how it was, I went to buy something in La Dorada and there was the paper, hanging up next to the beach balls and toy masks and kites for tourists. Then, one day, I realize. It might have been a Saturday (I was having breakfast here on the terrace, and I only do that on weekends), yeah, let’s say one Saturday, I realized I was all alone. Months had passed and I had grieved a lot and I didn’t know why I suffered so much, since we’d been apart for a long time, each living our own lives. We didn’t have a life in common or anything like that. And that’s what happened to me: I was alone, I’d been left alone, there was no longer anyone between me and my own death. That’s what being orphaned is: there’s no one ahead, you become next in line. It’s your turn. Nothing changed in my life, Antonio, I’d spent many years without them, but now they’re nowhere. They’re not just not with me: they’re nowhere. It was as if they’d absented themselves. And as if they were watching me, too, this is difficult to explain, but they watched me, Elaine and Ricardo were watching me. It’s tough, the gaze of absent ones. Anyway, you can imagine what happened next.’
‘It always seemed strange to me,’ I said.
‘What did?’
‘Well, that a pilot’s wife should die in a plane crash.’
‘Oh. Well, that’s not so strange when you know certain things.’
‘Like what?’
‘Have you got time?’ Maya asked me. ‘Do you want to read something that has nothing to do with my father and at the same time everything to do with him?’
From the crate she took out a copy of Cromos magazine with a design I didn’t recognize – the name in white letters in a red box – and a colour photo of a woman in a swimming costume, her hands delicately placed on a sceptre, the crown balanced on her puffed-up hair: a beauty queen. The magazine was from May 1968, and the woman, as I immediately discovered, was Margarita María Reyes Zawadzky, Miss Colombia that year. The cover had various headlines, yellow letters over the blue background of the Caribbean Sea, but I didn’t have time to read them, because Maya’s fingers were already opening the magazine to the page marked with a yellow post-it note. ‘You have to handle it gently,’ Maya told me. ‘Paper doesn’t last at all in this humidity. I don’t know how this has held together all these years. OK, here it is.’ THE SANTA ANA TRAGEDY, was the headline in block capitals. And then a few lines to claim: ‘Thirty years after the air accident that scarred Colombia, Cromos recovers the exclusive testimony of a survivor.’ The article appeared beside an ad for Club del Clan, and it struck me as funny because I remembered having heard my parents talk about that television programme on several occasions. The drawing of a young woman playing guitar above the words Televisión limitada. ‘A message to the youth of Colombia,’ boasted the ad, ‘is not complete if it doesn’t include the Clan Club.’
I was about to ask what the article was about when my eyes fell on the surname Laverde, scattered across the page like a dog’s dirty paw prints.
‘Who is this Julio?’
‘My grandfather,’ said Maya. ‘Who at the time of those events wasn’t my grandfather yet. Nowhere near being my grandfather, he was fifteen years old.’
‘Nineteen thirty eight,’ I said.
‘Yes.’
‘Ricardo isn’t in this piece.’
‘No.’
‘He hadn’t been born yet.’
‘Not for a good few years,’ said Maya.
‘So then?’
‘So, that’s why I asked you: have you got time? Because if you’re in a hurry I’d understand. But if you really want to know who Ricardo Laverde was, start there.’
‘Who wrote it?’
‘That doesn’t matter. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.’
‘What do you mean it doesn’t matter?’
‘The staff,’ said Maya impatiently. ‘Someone on the editorial staff wrote it, some journalist, a reporter, I don’t know. Some nameless guy who showed up at my grandparents’ house one day and started asking questions. And then sold the article and then wrote others. What does it matter, Antonio? What does it matter who wrote it?’
‘But I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘What is this?’
Maya sighed: it was a ridiculous sigh, like that of a bad actor, but in her it seemed genuine, just as genuine as her impatience. ‘This is the story of one day,’ she said. ‘My great-grandfather takes my grandfather to an exhibition of planes. Captain Laverde takes his son Julio to see planes. His son Julio is fifteen. Later he will grow up and get married and have a son he’ll name Ricardo. And Ricardo will grow up and then he’ll have me. I don’t know what’s so hard to understand. This is the first gift my father gave my mother, a long time before they were married. I read it now and I understand perfectly well.’
‘What?’
‘Why he gave this to her. To her it seemed a brazen gesture and even a little pretentious: look what they wrote about my family, my family’s in the press, and so on. But later she started to realize. She was a stray gringa who was going out with a Colombian without understanding very much about Colombia or that Colombian. When a person is new in a city, the first thing to find is a guide, right? Well, that’s what this 1968 magazine article about a day of thirty years earlier was. My father was offering my mother a guide. Yes, a guide, why not think of it like that. A guide to Ricardo Laverde. A guide to his emotions with all the routes well marked, and everything.’
I left a silence and she added, ‘Well, see for y
ourself. Shall I get you a beer?’
I said yes please, a beer, thanks. And I started to read. There was a short section title: A Holiday in Bogotá. And then the story began:
That Sunday of 1938 they were commemorating four hundred years since its founding, and the city was full of flags. The anniversary was not that exact day, but a little later; but the flags were already up all over the city, for the people of Bogotá back then liked to do things in good time. Many years later, remembering that ill-fated day, Julio Laverde would talk about the flags more than anything else. He remembered walking with his father from their family home to the Campo de Marte, in the neighbourhood of Santa Ana, which at that time was less a neighbourhood than an area of empty ground and was quite separate from the city. But with Captain Laverde there was not the slightest possibility of catching a bus or accepting a lift; walking was a noble and honourable activity and moving on wheels was something for the nouveau riche. According to Julio, Captain Laverde spent the entire walk talking about the flags, repeating that a true bogotano needed to know the significance of the city’s flag and constantly testing his son on civic history.
‘Don’t they teach you these things at school?’ he’d say. ‘It’s a disgrace. Where is this city headed in the hands of such citizens?’
And then he’d force him to recite that the red was a symbol of liberty, charity and health, and the yellow of justice, virtue and clemency. And Julio repeated uncomplainingly, ‘Justice, virtue and clemency. Liberty, charity and health.’
Captain Laverde was a decorated hero of the war against Peru. He’d flown with Gómez Niño and Herbert Boy, among other legends, and had been commended for his conduct in the Tarapacá operation and in the taking of Güepí. Gómez, Boy and Laverde, those were the three names that were always mentioned later when people talked about the Colombian Air Force’s role in the victory. The three musketeers of the air: one for all and all for one. Although they weren’t always the same musketeers. Sometimes it was Boy, Laverde and Andrés Díaz; or Laverde, Gil and Van Oertzen. It depended on who was telling the story. But Captain Laverde was always one of them.
Going to See a Hero
On that Sunday morning, at the Campo de Marte, there was to be a military fly-past to celebrate the anniversary of the founding of Bogotá. It was as lavish an event as a Roman emperor might have organized. Captain Laverde had arranged to meet three veterans there, friends he hadn’t seen since the armistice because none of them lived in Bogotá, but he had other reasons for attending the review as well. On the one hand, he’d been invited to the presidential grandstand by President López Pumarejo himself. Or almost: General Alfredo De León, who was very close to the president, had told him that the president would be very pleased to count on his illustrious presence.
‘Imagine,’ he’d said to him, ‘a figure like yourself who has defended our colours against the enemy aggressor, a man like you to whom we owe the liberty of our nation and the integrity of our borders.’
The honour of the presidential invitation was one of the other reasons. But there was an added reason, less honourable but more urgent. Among the pilots who were going to be flying was Captain Abadía.
César Abadía was not yet thirty, but Captain Laverde had already predicted that this young man from the provinces, skinny and smiling who had already clocked up fifteen hundred flying hours despite his youth, was going to become the best pilot of light aircraft in Colombian history. Laverde had seen him fly during the war with Peru, when the captain was not a captain but a lieutenant, a young man from Tunja who gave lessons in bravery and control to the most experienced German pilots. And Laverde admired him from a position of sympathy and experience: the sympathy of knowing that one is also admired and the experience of knowing that one has what the other lacks.
But what mattered to Laverde was not to see Captain Abadía’s reputed aerial feats himself. What he sought and desired was that his son should see them. That was why he was taking Julio to the Campo de Marte. That was why he had made him cross Bogotá on foot, through the flags. That was why he had explained they were going to see three types of plane, the Junkers, the Falcons of the observation squadron and the Hawks of the attack squadron. Captain Abadía would be flying a Hawk 812, one of the most agile and fastest machines ever invented by man for the tough and cruel tasks of warfare.
‘Hawk means halcón in English,’ the captain told young Julio, as he mussed the boy’s short hair. ‘You know what a hawk is, right?’
Julio said that he knew very well, and politely thanked his father for the explanation. But he spoke without enthusiasm. He was looking down at the ground as he walked, or maybe looking at the shoes of the people in the crowd, the fifty thousand people among whom they were now mingling. The coats brushing against him, wooden walking sticks and closed umbrellas banging into each other or getting tangled up, ponchos leaving a smell of wool in their wake, dress uniforms of soldiers, their chests covered in medals, police on duty strolling slowly among the crowd or observing from above, astride tall, ill-fed horses leaving a hazardous trail of stinking excrement in unpredictable places . . . Julio had never seen so many people in one place together for the same purpose.
An Uncomfortable Foreboding
Suddenly he wasn’t feeling well. Maybe it was the noise the people made, their enthusiastic greetings, their shouted conversations, or maybe the mixture of smells coming off their clothes and their breath. Whatever the case, Julio suddenly felt as if he were stuck on a merry-go-round that was spinning too fast.
‘I feel woozy,’ he said to Captain Laverde.
But Laverde didn’t pay any attention to him. Or rather, he did pay attention, but not to worry about how he was feeling but to introduce him to a man who was now approaching. He was tall, had a Rudolph Valentino-style moustache and was wearing a military uniform.
‘General De León, this is my son,’ said the captain. And then he spoke to Julio. ‘The general is the General Prefect of Security.’
‘General Prefect General,’ said the general. ‘I wish they’d change the name of the rank. Captain Laverde, the president has sent me to see you to your place. It’s so easy to get lost in this throng.’
That was Laverde: a captain who generals came to look for on behalf of the president. And that’s how the captain and his son found themselves walking towards the presidential grandstand a couple of steps behind General De León, trying to follow him, not to lose sight of him and to pay attention to the extraordinary world of the celebrations at the same time. It had rained the previous night and there were still puddles here and there, and if there wasn’t a puddle there were patches of mud where the heels of the women’s shoes were getting stuck. This happened to a young lady with a pink scarf: she lost a shoe, a cream-coloured one, and Julio bent down to retrieve it while she stood smiling, paralysed like a flamingo. Julio recognized her. He was sure he’d seen her in the society pages: she was a foreigner, he thought, the daughter of a businessman or an industrialist. He tried to find the name in his memory, but he didn’t have time, because Captain Laverde was now grabbing him by the arm and making him climb the creaking wooden steps that led up to the presidential grandstand, and over his shoulder Julio managed to see how the pink scarf and cream-coloured shoes were starting to climb another set of steps, those up to the diplomatic grandstand. They were two identical structures and they were separated by a strip of land as wide as an avenue, like two-tiered cabins constructed on thick piles, placed side by side but both facing the empty ground above which the planes would pass. Identical, yes, except for one detail: in the middle of the presidential grandstand stood an 18-metre-tall pole from which waved the Colombian flag. Years later, talking about what happened that day, Julio would say that the flag, placed in that precise space, had made him wary from the start. But it’s easy to say such things after it’s all over.
The Show Begins
The atmosphere was festive. The air smelled of fried food. People carried drinks in their
hands that they were finishing before going up. Every plank of the two sets of steps was filled with people who hadn’t fitted into the grandstands, and so was the strip of ground in between the two sets of steps. Julio felt queasy and he said so, but Captain Laverde didn’t hear him. Walking between the guests was difficult: he had to greet his acquaintances at the same time as spurning social climbers, to be very careful not to snub somebody who was due a greeting while being equally careful not to honour someone who wasn’t. Making their way through the people, without getting separated for a moment, the captain and his son reached the railing. From there Julio saw two men with receding hairlines speaking with a circumspect air a few metres from the flagpole, and those he did recognize immediately: it was President López, wearing a light-coloured suit, dark tie and round-framed glasses, and President-elect Santos, wearing a dark suit, light waistcoat and round-framed glasses as well. The man on his way out and the man on his way in: the country’s destiny settled on two square metres of carpentry. A small crowd of distinguished people – the Lozanos, the Turbays, the Pastranas – divided the presidents’ box from the back part of the grandstand, the upper level, where the Laverdes were. From the distance, the captain saluted López, López returned the greeting with a smile that didn’t show his teeth, and the two of them made mute signals to each other about meeting later because the thing was starting now. Santos turned to see to whom López was gesturing; recognized Laverde, nodded slightly, and at that moment the triple-engine Junkers appeared in the sky and dragged everyone’s gaze in their slipstream.
Julio was absorbed. He had never seen such complex manoeuvres up so close. The Junkers were heavy, and their streaky bodies made them look like big prehistoric fish, but they moved with dignity. Each time they passed, the air they displaced arrived at the stand in waves, ruining the hairdos of the women not wearing hats. The cloudy Bogotá sky, that dirty sheet that seemed to have covered the city since its foundation, was the perfect screen for the projection of this film. Against a background of clouds the triple-engine planes flew past and now the six Falcons, as if from one side to the other of a giant theatre. The formation was perfectly symmetrical. Julio forgot the bitter taste in his mouth for a moment and his dizziness disappeared. His attention wandered over to the hills east of the city, their misty silhouette that extended back, long and dark like a sleeping lizard. It was raining over the hills: the rain, he thought, would soon be here. The Falcons flew past again and again he felt the tremor in the air. The thunder of the engines didn’t manage to drown out the shouts of admiration from the stands. The translucent discs of the spinning propellers threw off brief sparkles of light when the plane banked to turn. Then the fighter planes appeared. They came out of nowhere, immediately assuming a V-formation, and it was suddenly difficult to remember that they weren’t living creatures, that there was someone in command. ‘There’s Abadía,’ said a woman’s voice. Julio turned to see who had spoken, but then the same words were being repeated from another side of the stand: the star pilot’s name moved among the people like a nasty rumour. President López raised a martial arm and pointed at the sky.
The Sound of Things Falling Page 10
